Commas are important people!

 

 

Did you know that Australian author Peter Carey won the 2001 Booker Prize for "True History of the Kelly Gang" – a work that contained not a single comma? Amazing, huh? Of course, one might wonder why he bothered, but still.

I agree that commas are not condiments and you shouldn't pepper your sentences with them unnecessarily. Even so, a well-placed comma is the difference between “what is this thing called love?” and “what is this thing called, love?” And between “let’s eat, Grandma!” and ... well, you know the rest. (My favourite book on this subject is "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"; I believe an earlier Australian edition was called "Eats, Roots and Leaves".)

 

 

A misplaced comma might even be damaging to your health. Compare "Do not administer any liquids which are diuretic" (some liquids are permissible) and "Do not administer any liquids, which are diuretic" (all liquids are forbidden). And don't even get me started on the Oxford comma: "I love my parents, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel." Donald Trump and Angela Merkel are not my parents; a comma after Donald Trump would've made this clear - and, for the record, I don't love either.

What I do love are early mornings on the jetty! Shingles or no shingles, the sun is out and so am I! And I've chosen to reread "The Old Man and the Sea". It's a short book, written in Hemingway's typical sharp and muscular style, which was eventually named the "Iceberg Theory", as it used simple language on the surface with a wealth of meaning hidden below. And it has short sentences with very little need for punctuation.

Still, commas are important people! (please insert a comma as you see fit)

 

A tale with a sting in the tail

 

 

Burg Thurston works at Batemans Bay's Innes Boatshed which has been a local landmark since 1955. There he made friends with a giant black stingray called "Nobby".

“Over time, the stingray got more confident”, Burg says. “Now I jump in, he shoos the other stingrays off and comes in and glides up my belly.”

"I loved to surf in the mornings and when I started working the morning shift I was often a bit anxious when I knew I was missing the waves. Then I realised, if my mind was always in the surf while I was working, I was going to miss what is right in front of me, which was the stingrays and how beautiful the boatshed was, and how good my job actually was.”

Did you yell 'Encore'? Well then, here it is:

 

 

Wherever you are and whatever you do, this film may inspire you to take your focus off what you haven't got and turn it to what's right in front of you.

 

Arabian Sands

 

I recently found a beautiful hardback copy still in mint condition of Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands", the book about Arabia to end all books about Arabia. I've only just now found a beautifully made doco-movie by the same name which follows Wilfred Thesiger's crossing of the Rub Al-Khali, Arabia's "Empty Quarter".

Sprawling over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the Empty Quarter—or Rub' al Khali—is the world's largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. It is one of the most arid regions on the planet, and stretches over twelve hundred kilometers from west to east, and is up to six hundred kilometers wide.

 

 

It had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward and, although Wilfred Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As Sam. He crossed it with Bedu companions twice, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

 

Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands" in his own voice with subtitles

 

It all began when, in 1945, an entomologist, O.B. Lean, acting on behalf of the Middle East Anti Locust Unit (MEALU), hired Thesiger to search for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia. Feeling least at home in his own culture and with his own kind, Thesiger resented the juggernaut of western "civilisation" and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth's peoples.

His sympathies were with the indigenes, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys. Few other explorers of recent times have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these foreign peoples.

 

 

His best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of south Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, now a greybeard in his 60s, remembers him. "He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with," he said. Thesiger could have asked for no better epitaph. He died in 2003.

 

 

It's been almost four decades since I walked the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. I'm left with my memories as I read "Arabian Sands" while sitting close to a burning fireplace with a painting above it of a "modern" Saudi camel being driven across the burning sands in a TOYOTA pick-up truck.

 

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P.S. Are you drawn in by the desert as I was all those many years ago? Don't let the spell go to waste; come and watch "Lawrence of Arabia".