I started this blog late 2015, and planned to keep up a commentary during our derring-do adventure caravanning up and down to Cairns over a 10-week interval from mid–July until the end of September, 2016. But, as you will see if you glance back, I ran into fatigue barriers I’ve never struck before, and was unable to keep up with my intended pace and standard. I found that a bit shattering, because I tend to set myself too high a standard sometimes.
I tried to write too much, and also try to include too many images. That’s all well and good, but by the time we settled in each night, either from driving on a leg of the journey, or from doing tourist or sight-seeing activities during the day, I was overwhelmed by sleep, and just not up to the task I has set myself.
So I finally apologized to my probably all too few readers, and said “barley”! Do kids even say that these days, or is it just one more cultural fragment that has been crowded out? In my childhood in the 1940s and 50s, one could call out that word during a chasing or tigging game, to call it off if one had the stitch, and untied shoelace, or some other legitimate excuse to call off the chase. A quick search showed that it was a word that was common in Australian states, and maybe came from Scotland. Often it became Barley Charlie, and during the 50s there was an early TV show (in B &W) with that name.
Well, here I go again with this missive. I recently suffered a shatteringly serious dose of viral pneumonia which stunned me into delirium for a couple of days in the ICU unit and I shall have to make it known initially through my face book page (Bill Leithhead), and perhaps if it’s sufficiently interesting, become self-sustaining. Not that I’m that desperate for friends, but it was nice for an earlier version of this blog, from 2005 onwards to be reasonably Googled.
That included a spectacular image of an attack of ‘hives’ (urticaria), of unknown origin, which apparently turned out to be one of the best images of that condition on the internet. In fact, I received a request from one nurse educator for permission to use it in a course she was running!
For the sake of history, I’ve decided to show it here – in a form suitable for the family, of course.
