A couple of things.

Thank you to all who have come visiting my table, either face-to-face or through cyberspace. For tarot, a few laughs, a lot of tears and some deep, deep excursions into consciousness. Both pleasure and honor. I’m currently residing in Northern NSW, Australia and I am unsure the duration. A very healing time realizing just how naive I can be. It just doesn’t stop, the desire to trust trust, does it? My cat almost died of tick bite, so not a great beginning to bush living, but also thanks to you I have been able to pay the vet bill.

The updated fitness book keeps being updated. It will be available early 2023, through Brumby Books or your nearest bookstore (and online). Called SAVAGE. There’s a reason. Of course. Other than me and you. No, because of you, really.

I have also begun a SPOKEN WORD channel. And the first of my audiobooks, THE CHANGELING, is available there to download.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, due to the cost of petrol and living expenses due to a poorly managed financial crisis back in ’08 that is only now being realized for its insideousness, my tarot costs have gone up a bit. Please go HERE for changes.

Here in the heart of a deep and primordial forest the irony of missing city is worthy of a raised eyebrow. I understand. Again, there’s a reason. Poetic.

THE SWEET SMELL OF BRICK

Air smells of memory. Of that I am sure you will agree. Air, in collaboration with brick or stone, now that smells of history. Do you know that the brick and stone of my current home town in rural Australia smells 100% different to the brick and stone of Sydney? Or Melbourne? Or Ireland? Or Paris? All different.

And, of course, with brick the smell depends on age and the air but with stone it’s different. Stone is earth and, and the years – no, the aeons – in which it has dwelt. Brick before the 50s had heart and you could always tell brick from King George III who shipped the convicts everywhere, through the reign of Queen Victoria, when bricks made up the primmest of schools—terrifying in their right-handedness.

After the 50s brick became crude and graceless.

Meant to co-exist with venetian blinds and twin-tub washing machines. Hand-made brick from two hundred years ago? Priceless! Because it is the brick of chimney pots and slate roofs, of poverty, but laughter, when bread was baked at home and aprons were examined in haberdasheries like Versace is today.

Of course I am momentarily romantic. I know about the famines and the revolutions and the fog and the rain but I am not talking of streets drenched in blood and disease-bearing rats biting open sores in the night when the boys and girls hide in the alleys and the sewers for safety and fucked who they had to for pennies.

Stone, on the other hand, can be intimidating but only in the wild. In the cities it is highbrow or government or cobble or fortress. I love stone that has collaborated with people for a while. It gets built into the pyramids of Egypt, and Baalbek, and the Black Fort on Inish Mór.

Old bridges smell best of all, equal only to barnacle-encrusted stone jetties that have tales to tell of seagulls and sou ’westers and hard men that left widows on the Irish west coast.

The stone of abandoned, one hundred easy year old buildings is orgasmic! There are stories in these. Romantic anxiety. Skin cells of the long dead. Ghosts of pick-pockets and refugees.

I remember when a car park in New York was razed to the ground and the bones of hundreds, buried at the slave markets, were exposed to be wept over by Africa. Bones are stone in the hearts of their descendents who never have heard the word sorry.

Smell instructs . . . ergo we must smell our architecture.