Normal service has resumed

 Well, we seem to have escaped the bushfires for now.

While I blithely tell people that the town hasn't burned since European settlement at the start of the gold rush, we are surrounded by pine forest and historic park reserves, and I'm well aware that one spark could start a serious incident.

As it was there were no grassfires or bushfires locally, and none of the fires in the hills came close, unlike in 2020.

Our major problem was smoke, and we found ourselves running the air purifier every day until Thursday evening when a storm brought a decent dump of rain. Fortunately the lightning didn't start a fire anywhere, or if it did, the rain was heavy enough to put it out.

As always we're well aware that we got off lightly compared to those affected by the Harcourt, Longwood and Walwa fires and our thoughts are with them.

Otherwise, now that the smoke has cleared, its back to normal. The freeway south reopened a few days ago and the trains are running again.

We went over to Bright on the last day of smoke to have a look at the Bright Art show. J has some paintings in the show and as always we were curious to see how they have been hung, and to see what has sold.

Strangely, not a lot seemed to have been sold, perhaps because there was not a lot of 'fireplace art' in the show - large paintings to go on the chimney breast in your restored cottage or 1900's villa.

On the way back we stopped at the Moroccan themed cafe in Myrtleford for lunch and had a look at the attached architectural salvage and tile shop. 

We didn't buy anything, but we did find that they had a selection of little 20mm x20mm mosaic tiles as well as some clipped bits - ideal for our planned hall table restoration.

Otherwise, it's been much as before. No early morning bike rides because of the smoke, and I did feel my chest getting quite tight after I walked back after dropping off my (very) old green Subaru for a oil change and safety check. (Old enough that the garage asked if I was thinking of getting heritage plates for it.)

However, by Friday the air was clear again and we were back to normal when I drove up to Stanley for a bit of cataloguing at the Athenaeum. The project's going well, even if we're over the initial discovery phase of finding that they had been buying second hand books both from Mullen's in Melbourne, and an as yet unknown importer of second hand books from England.

It's also quite clear that during and immediately after the second world war a lot of British publishers were having separate Australian editions of books printed locally - something similar to what I found when documenting Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust - during the second world war when Australia was cut off from the UK, the traditional source of imported items, there was a lot of import substitution with local equivalent products being manufactured.

Besides this, not much, the smoke stopped any gardening so I've been reading Richard Holmes' Tommy, ostensibly a history of the ordinary British soldier's experience of the western front, but actually has a marked bias towards officers drawn from the middle and upper classes, perhaps simply because they were simply more likely to leave material behind in the form of diaries and letters that the ordinary conscript.

And I also found time to blog about an Albanian 1 Lek coin I've acquired as part of my collection of ephemera connected with World War One and its aftermath ...