Being Cryptic About Crypto

The neighbours across the park finally moved in, after three long years of construction noise, dust and loud rock music across the park from tradies’ radios. The old man was thankful all that would be in the past. The early morning disruptions to his sleep would surely end, he thought. He had a mind to complain to the local council about their builder who broke the law by starting the works in the dark and before seven in the morning. One morning, he stormed out of his house and raced across the park to demand they put a stop to the illegal activity. But, the supervisor explained the project was running late and over-budget. He was a burly bloke with short curly hair who used his good looks and good manners to ask the old man for his kind understanding. Reasoning with a reasonable man worked – a delay that morning would have spoiled a few truckloads of cement. Had they started pouring after seven, they would not have finished laying the foundations that day. The old man acquiesced and nodded his head in agreement to let it slide one more time. He tightened the belt of his knee-length dressing gown in a vain attempt to ward off the morning chill. Looking up towards the tops of the gum trees, he cursed the laughing kookaburras he felt were looking down at his sparrow-like legs.

It was a massive stately house. Facing westerly, the windows were protected with white wooden venetian slats. Oversized and therefore overbearing, it was situated in the best corner of the neighbourhood, overlooking a sizable private park. Behind it was a well-lit tennis court and adjacent to that was a rather ugly concrete water slide that led to a gleaming pool quite a few steps below.

The old man was walking his dog at the perimeter of the property when the new neighbour walked out of his black 4WD. All three cars parked on the massive forecourt of the mansion were black. The bullet-proof windows and the many CCTV cameras that scanned the property gave the impression that the people inside prized their security and wellbeing to a degree not befitting the people who lived along the street.

A monstrosity in the street

“G’day there, neighbour,” the old man hollered from a few yards outside the driveway.

The neighbour looked at the old man and gave a hint of a smile and nothing else. Not even a nod or wave. Maybe he’s deaf, the old man thought to himself. The old man, led by his dog, walked closer to the tall iron gates. The neighbour gave him a furtive look as his eyes examined the credentials of the old man. Physically, he was judged a poor man in his ragged clothes and well-worn sneakers but he could not decide if the old man was intellectual or moral. So, when in doubt, avoid strangers, the neighbour reminded himself.

The man looked Japanese, perhaps a German hybrid, because of his towering presence and accent. He had long black hair, well-oiled and always tied up in a bun. His movements were quick and decisive, and hinted at having been trained in some martial arts. The number of cars he owned suggested he was a married man with adult children but they remained unseen and unheard. It took many walks with his dog and many distant sightings of the neighbour before they finally struck up a conversation.

“Hi, my name is Nakamoto,” the neighbour introduced himself as he extended his hand to greet the old man.

“Murray, it’s ok, settle down,” the old man replied, and reined back his dog before shaking the neighbour’s hand.

Their handshake was strong and the grip was firm, more so than normal. The old man flexed his biceps so as to show no weakness.

“Nakamoto? don’t tell me your first name is Satoshi?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, some say that’s my name!” the neighbour said, “or that is who people normally associate me with,” he added, showing for the first time that he was cryptic in everything he said or did.

He didn’t invite the old man to his house but instead, he gestured that they sat on the bench in the middle of the park. There the two men sat, for almost the whole afternoon, and chatted non-stop, oblivious of the orange sun that was descending to the treetops, its orange-reddish rays piercing through the gum leaves to give them warmth and a comfortable hue of light. The two men were also unaware of the advancing grey clouds that eventually won the battle against the sun to rule the sky, so engrossed were they on the topic they were discussing.

“Satoshi Nakamoto,” the old man had repeated.

“Is that your real name?” he asked.

The neighbour did not confirm or deny. He merely asked why.

“Is that not a strange thing to ask?” he posed the question to the old man.

“Well….. Satoshi Nakamoto is famous!” the old man replied.

The old man rattled on profusely. The whole world does not know the true identity of the founder of Bitcoin. In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the white paper to explain how Bitcoin works, and after he gave it to the world for free after ensuring it worked, he simply disappeared. To this day, no one knows his identity or gender. Perhaps, it’s a group of people. Perhaps, it is the CIA, some say. All we know is that after the Global Financial Crisis hit, the financial world was in crisis. The fiat monetary system was broken. Money itself was broken. Since then, it has gotten worse, the loose money printing has not only continued but accelerated and money is further debased. Inflation is daylight robbery. This is how governments steal from us, our money is worth a lot less. For decades, I used to think the rising stock market and growth in property prices are indicators of a healthy economy. It used to baffle me why the price earnings ratios of businesses can be in many multiples. It was clear the fundamentals were broken. It did not make sense that a company’s share price could have a PE ratio of 100, as that meant it would take a hundred years to recoup the cost of the share, assuming the same profitability of the business. Bitcoin is the answer to our problems for it solves the broken money that is fiat money. The challenge has been that too many people are sceptical of this new money and also, they deny that Bitcoin has the best properties of money, better or harder than that of gold. Too may say it is a Ponzi, backed by nothing and cannot be touched. The one who holds it last will end up with nothing.

He was so deep in his trance about Bitcoin that he did not notice Garry had just said hello to them. Garry lived just three doors away from the old man and he was doing his daily QiGong behind a bushy knoll when he noticed the two men on the bench. Garry owned a beautiful crop of hair on his head; it was all white and neatly brushed, the epitome of what the old man should keep, so said His Mrs the first time they met.

“Hi there, guys,” Garry greeted.

Satoshi was his usual furtive self but relaxed after the old man introduced Garry as a longtime friend.

“Garry’s alright,” the old man said. “He’s into Bitcoin too.”

So, all three men were deeply engrossed in the cryptocurrency. These days, people differentiate Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies.

Old Man: Bitcoin is the only truly decentralised money, not controlled by any body or government. Trustless, non-seizable and totally egalitarian, i.e. anyone in the world has the right to own it, it is the only peer-to-peer auditable, verifiable public ledger of monetary transactions the ‘proof of work’ of which is done by powerful computers or miners located all over the world and the algorithms and computer codes are protected or secured by tens of thousands of independent nodes. The miners earn a Bitcoin when they solve a complex mathematical riddle to close a block of data and add it to the blockchain every ten minutes or so. Every four years, the reward to the miner is halved, thereby ensuring the supply is deflationary. In fact, the total supply is capped at 21 million coins, the last coin will be mined in the year 2140, making Bitcoin the most scarce commodity in the world. As the saying goes, there are more millionaires in the world than Bitcoin.

Satoshi: I just found a way of answering those who say Bitcoin is not real, can’t be touched or held, and therefore has no value.

Garry: BTC has been doing a sideways dance for the last two months. Question is has the halving been fully priced in by the market?

Old Man: Historical data shows that the price will jump post-halving.

Garry: That’s historical, I agree. But this time may be different. The price jumped up two months before halving, unlike before.

Satoshi: Historically, nine to twelve months after the halving is when we see parabolic growth in its price. I see you still have not grasped the concept of scarcity. Understandable, since we never had something that is truly scarce before. Something whose supply is absolutely price inelastic. Since the halving on Saturday, Bitcoin now has a lesser inflation rate than gold – the first commodity to have less than 1% growth in annual supply.

Old Man: The biggest threat to BTC before 2024 was whether the US government would ban it. Since Jan 2024, the answer is clear. The SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs and that means no US President or any jurisdiction in the West can ban it now, and as you know, like it or not, the rest of the world follows what the US does in financial regulations.

Satoshi: It is commonly said that Bitcoin is not real, it can’t be touched or held, therefore it has no value. So, I used the argument that similarly, Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp also cannot be touched or held yet they are worth billions of dollars. Why? Because, their algorithms generate advertising income.

Old Man: Yet, somehow, this got me little traction.

Satoshi: So, now I argue that virtue and morals too are not physical yet humans attribute great value to being virtuous and moral. What is not physical does not mean it is not real. Suddenly, I discovered there is a spiritual realm to Bitcoin! It is pure, untainted and perfectly created and will prove to be the greatest store of value both in terms of money and in philosophical concepts like freedom and morality.

Garry: The question here is not whether it’s real or not. Cryptocurrency is as real as Fiat money, human laws, corporate entities, marriage etc. They are all made up by humankind. So that means crypto will follow the forces of collective human behaviour. It’s no different.

Old Man: Yup, following the ‘forces of collective human behaviour’ – that is what money is.

Satoshi: BTC is a lot different though. First thing to do is to understand what money is and then look up the best properties of money – you will end up comparing gold vs other commodities vs Bitcoin.

Garry: Like currency, as long as people believe in it, it will have value. Sea shells were once currency. Until people say, hang on, if I go to the beach I can harvest shells and be rich and do nothing else. Simplistic but probable.

Satoshi: Precisely! Please carry on. What happened to the money for people to lose confidence and trust? Great discussion so far. So, what came next after discovering their shells, beads and marks were abundant and hardly scarce?

Garry: For shells, they replaced them with an imperial guaranteed currency. For German marks, Hitler created a huge demand for it to fund his wars.

Satoshi: Right! They replaced them with better money. Why were they better? Your answer will address properties of hard money.

Old Man: Actually it wasn’t so much imperial guaranteed – that’s fiat money which didn’t come till after 1971, but rather they were imperial gold coins, right? And the Indians and Chinese used silver instead.

Garry: Actually, a long ago in ancient times, emperors issued coins. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Sapiens explored this.

Old Man: Yes that’s right but not guaranteed per se by the emperors but the coins were made of gold and therefore regarded as valuable.

Satoshi: Now we are getting somewhere. Why did these gold coins fail?

Garry: These are many factors. Wars, government intervention, supply vs demand imbalance, interest rates etc. Please feel free to fill in the blanks.

Satoshi: Precisely. It was the costly wars that empires embarked on that in the end broke them. The Romans started chipping edges of their gold coins to create more money. The devaluation of their money ultimately wrecked their economy. This is one of the strongest arguments for Bitcoin in that it will discourage long wars since it is so scarce and therefore of great value. Wars will become unaffordable in the future. It’s the property of scarcity. History shows this very clearly. People belatedly realised shells and beads were not scarce and when the Weimar Republic, saddled with unfair war reparation demands, needed to furiously print money to compensate the victors for the destruction they caused, the debasement of its currency soon made it worthless, again the issue of scarcity or lack of, destroyed the economy and faith in the money and monetary system.

Garry: There is nothing to stop Satoshi from changing the formula and increasing the supply of Bitcoin, right? Just like gold, the more expensive it is, the more they mined it, right?

Satoshi failed to respond, fidgeted and rested the weight of his body on the left side of his bum instead. So, the old man, sensing his new neighbour would find them an irritant and leave, quickly replied.

“No. I have said many times that BTC is the only decentralised money. No one entity or state can control it. But let’s leave this for another day. Let’s just focus on the properties of money today.”

Garry: I too wish as hell cryptocurrency becomes a universal currency so that no country holds the trump card like US dollars.

The old man, again sensing that Satoshi would soon regard them as foolish, quickly defended the creation. “No, it won’t be cryptocurrency because the others are centralised and will be no better than fiat money. It has to be Bitcoin, the only open-sourced, permissionless and decentralised money.

Garry: Ok, either way, it won’t be in my lifetime that it becomes universally accepted unless I live to a hundred.

Old Man: You have enough. What we leave behind is for our progeny. We cannot time it so perfectly that we use up all our savings at precisely the last breath we take, so forget the hype about what’s not spent isn’t ours. Of course, it won’t be all ours but some if not most, will belong to our descendants.

Satoshi: So, let’s continue. Gold coins failed. Why?

Garry: Gold didn’t fail, just morphed.

Satoshi: Gold coins failed and in 1971, even the Gold Standard failed. Why? Your answers will reveal the hardness of money.

Garry: Gold never failed as money. It’s Fiat currency that failed. 

Satoshi: If your premise is true, then where are all the gold coins in circulation? Try sending gold coins via the internet lately? How about buying goods and services online using gold? Not only did gold fail as money during Roman times, it failed during the Renaissance period too. Where are the Florins today? The question is why did it fail, not whether it failed. Not only did gold fail as money, the gold standard failed too. Why? When you know the answers to both of these, then you will know the hard properties of Bitcoin and why BTC is the purest of all money today.

Garry, ignorant of annoying their new neighbour, continued arguing. “If you claim that gold has failed, please try to convince China, India and Singapore that they are making a grave mistake by not putting their money in Bitcoin instead,” he said in a voice rising in decibels.

Satoshi: Well, we are getting really close to understanding what money is. Gold as money failed as a payment system, and but as a store of value, gold is still highly valued today. There are recent charts that show gold barely keeping up with inflation whereas BTC is reaching “dizzying heights” relatively. The question is why gold failed as a payment system and why money backed by gold or the Gold Standard also failed.

Garry: China’s CBDC is now backed by gold. They have been buying tonnes of gold lately.

Old Man, supporting Satoshi’s line of argument, interjected. “The gold standard failed, why do they think it won’t fail again?” Gold scams are rising as people try to ditch fiat money, even in China,” he added.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3257437/gold-scams-rising-china-middle-class-investors-seek-safe-haven-assets-amid-weak-stock-market

Garry: In Malaysia, we had our scam years ago also.

Old Man: It is ongoing, and that is one of the flaws of gold as a store of value. We can’t audit Fort Knox and we won’t know if their gold is real, fake, contaminated or imaginary.

Garry: The USD is the biggest scam of all and that will fail as well. America is trying to hold on to this scam by now wanting to sanction Chinese banks which are doing trade with Iran and Russia. With ETFs it’s another scam too, same as Bitcoin ETFs.

Old Man: The USD is the biggest ponzi of all. Last week, both the PMs of South Korea and Japan went there begging Uncle Sam to save their currencies which have devalued by 6% and 8% respectively in recent weeks. Yup, the BTC held by the ETFs can be seized by the US government.

Satoshi: Not your keys, not your coins. Be warned!

Garry: Gold is a good money but not a good currency. There’s a difference between money and currency. Gold is too bulky to be a currency. So in history, paper currency was backed by gold or silver. In 1944 the Bretton Woods accord officially pegged USD to gold and most other currencies pegged to USD. It was one happy family. Then in 1971, Nixon divorced USD from gold “temporarily”, and fiat money was introduced to the world by government pronouncements. The US has continuously and recklessly printed paper to support the Vietnam war, Apollo programmes, funded regime changes and opened, maintained military bases around the world, and of course, lately splurged like drunken sailors to fight the pandemic and fund wars against Russia in Ukraine and unconditionally support Israel in their zionist ambitions to wipe out the Palestinians in the genocide of Gaza. USD has become a Ponzi scheme. All other currencies pegged to it will sink with it. Today, we are stuffed as the Ponzi scheme starts unravelling, as we witness the acceleration of de-dollarisation efforts by BRICS.

Satoshi: Bravo! Now that you have confirmed that gold has its drawbacks as money, can you sum up what are the hard properties of money? You have mentioned it is too bulky, i.e. it is not easily transportable and therefore also costly to store. What else?

The old man volunteered to provide the answers that Garry had withheld all afternoon. He did not want to give the wrong impression that they were ignorant of the properties of hard money.

“Well, Bitcoin is the most scarce of all, as we pointed out earlier. This is the exact opposite of fiat money which can be freely created with no limit, and as Garry said, gold is bulky and costly to transport and store. Bitcoin has no such flaws. It can be transferred at the speed of light and stored in a cold wallet at a fraction of the cost. One Bitcoin is divisible into a hundred million satoshis. It is durable, stored permanently in digital form that cannot perish or debase in a public ledger in independent computers all over the world, its public ledger is immutable and cannot be changed, reversed or tampered with. It is permissionless, anyone can mine it, protect it as a node, own it by paying the same price as anyone else on the market, without counterparty risks if you keep it safe offline in a cold wallet. It is peer-to-peer, offering total decentralisation without a central power with no single point of failure or control. The transactions, although visible and verifiable on the blockchain, are not identifiable to any personal identity, offering pseudonymity and security to the owner.

Satoshi: Absolutely right! But, Bitcoin is not only just money. It is a storage of the value of time and energy across time without debasement of its value in the long run. We work hard and spend our time and energy to earn money. So, it is so wrong for central banks to devalue the value of the time and energy that we have stored away for future exchange of goods and services that we want or need.

“Fiat money is the only asset I know that people are happy to hold despite knowing that its value is dropping day by day,” the old man said, unaware he was really just parroting Satoshi’s comments.

Garry: I heard someone suggested it could be the creation of the CIA.

Old Man: Oh, this is dark, getting into the realms of conspiracy theories that Satoshi Nakamoto was the CIA. But the US govt has been sellers of BTC – thank goodness for that – selling a large portion of their haul from the now defunct Silk Road website.

Garry: It’s a fact the US and the UK sold gold to depress the price. This is so the demand to peg USD back to gold is not possible, as there won’t be enough gold with lower gold price.

Old Man: I didn’t know there had been a serious call by authorities to return to the gold standard after the Nixon Shock. Any serious attempt to peg money to gold would simply increase the value of gold. So, this idea to manipulate and lower the price of gold to prevent a return to the gold standard is flawed in my opinion. Supply and demand, my friend. There is always enough, the price simply reflects that. The more scarce the commodity is, the higher its price will be.

Garry: I’m no financial advisor, but keep your gold!

Old Man: I bought gold for my first born in 1982 for AUD650. It has only gone up just over 5X, not so impressive, is it? Current Prices: Gold USD 2376.71/oz (AUD 3633.66).

Garry: Gold price is suppressed by the US. Not a conspiracy. The inventor of BTC is a genius. They simulate the scarcity of gold by putting in the halving events. It’ll become more and more expensive to mine BTC. This preserves its scarcity like gold and as long as we have the internet it doesn’t deteriorate. Kudos to Satoshi Nakamoto whoever he/she is.

Garry remained ignorant of the fact that he was sitting next to Satoshi.

Satoshi: Bravo! Yes, since last weekend, BTC is less inflationary than gold, at 0.8% growth p.a. for the next 4 years whereas gold supply remains at about 1.2% growth p.a.

Garry: So far, I believe governments have not focused yet on BTCs but they can, if they want to, manipulate Bitcoin using BTC futures. That’s why BTCs have had a great run so far.

Satoshi: Manipulating prices using shorts and longs are inherently risky and can bankrupt the trader. Not a long term solution to manipulate BTC when it becomes universally accepted. That it has no other commercial or industrial use is actually the pristine property of BTC over all other commodities, serving it as the best store of value and the perfect measure of the value of money in the global economy. The world needs that to perfectly price its resources and thus price correctly its goods and services.

Garry: The world is pretty much based on sensory evidence – physical sight, touch and feel. With gold, you can touch, feel, lick. I am not denigrating Bitcoin. With BTCs, however, there’s no sensory evidence. This makes traditional investors wary.

Old Man: For a religious person, you must appreciate the spiritual realms that aren’t physical yet real and therefore true, to the believer. This is why BTC will also lead many people to a spiritual journey, not necessarily to God. Sensory evidence does not need to be physical, such as the sense of love, longing and all ‘things’ virtual.

Satoshi: Bitcoin halving happened last weekend. The algorithm is deflationary. Central banks print money without hesitation, devaluing our money. Gold miners find more gold when the gold price goes up. Both are inflationary. But Bitcoin is the opposite. Every four years roughly, after every 210,000 blocks are created, the reward to the miners is halved. Now after the halving, only 450 coins will be rewarded on a daily basis to the miners, irrespective of the price or demand. Price of BTC at the time of the previous halving was $8,740, so that’s 6.4X against the USD. Price of this halving was $62,013, which is another 7 times increase over the four years.

https://stormgain.com/blog/bitcoin-halving-dates-history#nav_head_7

Old Man: Bitcoin at $16,500 feels like it was years ago! But, it was only fifteen months ago. Can you imagine what it will be in another fifteen months? Baby boomers own over $75 trillion in wealth around the world. In another decade, most of the baby boomers will have expired. Guess where some of these $75 trillion will be channelled to by Gen X and Y?

“Bitcoin of course!” Satoshi exclaimed with a satisfied look on his face.

With those last words, he bid Garry and the old man good evening and walked back to his mansion. He had not been seen again since.

The real Garry and his old friend in Melbourne recently.

There is no power over you, if you desire nothing.

Seneca, Thyestes, 440

The Sister and the Visitor

The weather changed without a warning. It would have been around the time when the possums were out fossicking for fruits in the garden. The old man was not awakened by the stinging cold air that had enveloped his bedroom. He was already wide awake, checking on the Bitcoin price when he noticed the sudden chill in the room. The thin, ragged blanket, which just a week earlier was so warm that he had to kick it away from his sweaty legs was proving to be as useless as a bedsheet to ward off the cold. He grabbed his fat pillow that had rolled to the side of his inflatable mattress and hugged it like it was a fat woman. For extra heat, he started to gyrate his hips slowly and at a constant tempo. He would be up the next morning doing his rounds in the garden rueing his moment of laziness to pluck the ripening persimmons the day before. Let them ripen a bit more, he had told his Mrs who absolutely loved the crunchiness and astringency of half-ripen persimmons. He, on the other hand, didn’t fancy persimmons; whether they were soft and sweet or crunchy and dry, he tended to leave them in the fruit basket.

“Was that perhaps the true reason why you left them on the tree?” his neighbour asked.

The weather had changed but there were plenty of signs the garden had signalled to the old man, except he wasn’t paying attention. The days were getting shorter and he ought to have registered in his mind that it was just the previous week that he had reset the timer to shut the chicken coop’s door an hour earlier to 7 pm. The sakura sapling next door had already started to drop its dead brown leaves leaving a casual observation that it was a casualty of summer neglect. The Japanese maple trees were so sickly-looking that they lost their grand moment in autumn to flash their red and golden colours; one had actually withered and died leaving a grey and haunting shadow of its former glory. When an old chook died of diarrhoea, the old man dug up the dead tree after having decided it was the perfect spot to bury the chook. Replace the dead with the dead. Parched by the fierce Adelaide sun, the Santa Barbara daisies, so fecund and aggressive with their white to pinkish petals in spring and summer, had turned brown and scraggly, their once-green thick undergrowth now dry and wiry, too noisy to be useful hiding places for the blue-tongued lizard and brown snakes.

As the daisies withered, so did the grape vines and the grafted jujube sapling. Bought for $90 in mid 2019 with a promise of sweet and succulent jujube within three years, it was obviously a brash sales pitch by the vivacious blonde chick at the nursery that fooled the old man. All she did was smile and after sampling a handful of the dried fruit, he nodded to accept the deal. Throughout spring and summer, it sprouted only seven leaves and grew an inch taller. It was still fighting to survive the final days of summer when the old man’s sister and her hubby arrived from the U.K. Fair-skinned and tall, her once permanently black hair had turned hoary. A roundish tummy that her loose black pants worn high above her bellybutton could not hide provided evidence of her life-long love for puddings and cakes. The long trip to Adelaide would be her last, she had announced. It made no sense to the old man but all he said to himself was that she had become too westernised for him to understand. After living in the U.K. for all her seventy years bar the first seventeen, perhaps she had already replayed many many times in her mind the inevitable moment of receiving news of her mother’s demise. Many scenarios had been played out. What would she be doing? Where would she be? Would she be awoken by a phone call? The dreaded phone call in the middle of the night about a parent’s death was a scenario that plagued a lot of overseas students who left home in their teens. Now that their mother had turned a hundred, that inevitable day could come anytime, she reasoned silently.

The old man threw a welcome dinner for his U.K. sister and her hubby on the day they arrived. It was a thirty-hour journey they took to reach Adelaide and by the time they arrived, they were jet-lagged and in desperate need of a good rest. But, rest would not be availed to them yet. They quickly refreshed themselves and swapped their thick winter clothes for tee shirts and shorts. An hour later, they were seated in a restaurant, waiting for their matriarch to arrive. They yawned frequently and apologised frequently. The frail old mother refused to leave the car despite having already considerably delayed the dinner party. The old man suggested that she who must be obeyed must be personally welcomed into the restaurant by the daughter whose homecoming was delayed by three years due to Covid. When the restaurant manager asked if they could begin to serve the Yin Yang seafood soup, it was obvious to all at the table that the daughter who had failed to coax the old mother inside needed help.

“C’mon, Mike. Let’s go out and welcome her inside,” the old man said to his brother-in-law whom he had not seen for many years.

Mike, a Welshman, twitched his button nose and chortled. He appeared shorter or smaller this time, either from age-related shrinkage or from losing pounds due to a regimented diet. But, he had lost none of his jovial demeanour and dry sense of humour. His hair, once upon a time brownish and thick, had turned mostly white and sparse and showed a failed struggle to fight back the receding hairline. His right eye, dragged down by heavy wrinkles on the side of it, looked smaller than the other as he squinted in the afternoon sun. Most of his double chin had disappeared, and he was once again, a man with a neck. For a white man with a pinkish hue in his late sixties, he was blessed with a face without dark age spots. In recent years, he had become a champion in lawn bowls and had busied himself in the presidency of their club in Reading. The white shortish man waddled busily to the carpark, the smile on his face permanent and bright. It did not fade away despite the caustic words that greeted him as he swung the car door open wider.

“You bad man! You stole my daughter,” his wife’s mother said to him, thrusting her pointy finger into the air in front of her.

“You stole my daughter,” she repeated and let her anger hang in the dry air.

The old man, alarmed that Mike might feel aggrieved at the accusations, softly rubbed his mother’s arm to calm her down. This was the one time that he wished his mother was illiterate in the English language.

“She was still so young and she didn’t return home after she graduated,” she said, but this time in her native Ningbo dialect. She rambled on about how young her daughter was; still a teenager, she mistakenly remembered, when she sent an aerogramme to tell them she had decided to marry Mike and move to Glasgow where a job awaited her. And that she had a close Indian friend from Penang and how they helped each other cope in that faraway land.

“She’s happy, ma. She has her own family now, two sons, remember, ma? And her two lovely grand-daughters,” the old man said but failed to placate his old mother who pushed him aside to look at the white man. Her voice still full and resonating, there was no hint of her being etiolated like a plant without sunlight and water. Her one hundred years on earth had slowed her actions and rendered her unsteady on her feet, but she still had a vigour for dinner parties and fine wine and the strength to berate her son-in-law.

“You bad man!” she said again, before allowing Mike to ease her out of the car.

Remembering Ahpa who left us 14 years ago.

Pronounce the Pronouns

The old man was busy in the kitchen when I dropped by his house. It was already lunchtime and my stomach was growling. So, my face lit up when he said he was about to make himself a small bite to eat. But, like the grumpy host that he was, he did not offer me anything except tea or coffee.

“Coffee ,thanks,” I replied, but did not bother to tell him whether it was black or white, long or short. He ought to know, I informed myself.

It turned out he was preparing just a meagre bowl of rolled oats and Greek yoghurt laced with fruits, seeds and nuts. That was breakfast for him at lunchtime. People who practise intermittent fasting have a boring existence, I decided.

As he was waiting for his oats to cook in the milk, he showed me the Twitter message by Elon Musk that he was reading on his phone. He appeared dull and sleepy, as if he had another sleepless night. His bad breath was over-powering, forcing me to take two steps back. It was his Mrs who taught him brushing his teeth first thing in the morning was a waste of time and effort, since he hadn’t eaten anything since cleaning them the night before. He seemed foolish or maybe it was weakness to just do whatever she said. I remember thinking of him as uxorious in his younger years.

Leave him be, there’s no need to judge him, I reminded myself. Instead, I told him his late night discussions with his friends about the merits and properties of Bitcoin ought to stop. Anyone with a busy mind during bedtime only lend themselves a bad sleep.

“And we all know the lack of restorative sleep will only lead to memory loss and bad health,” I said, judging the old man poorly for his foolishness.

He ignored me and continued to look at the milk boil. He groaned at the tub of Farmers Union Greek yohurt as he took it out of the fridge. The lightness of the tub meant it was near empty, so he was soon scraping away at its sides and bottom for the last blobs of the white stuff. I did not dare tell him he had forgotten to make my coffee.

So, I returned to Elon Musk’s message.

“Whether or not you agree with using someone’s preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws. I should note that I do personally use someone’s preferred pronouns, just as I use someone’s preferred name, simply from the standpoint of good manners. However, for the same reason, I object to rude behavior, ostracism or threats of violence if the wrong pronoun or name is used.”

“I feel like having a cup of coffee, so I’ll make myself one, ok?” I asked the old man as I watched him shovel a spoonful of oats into his mouth. His body was there in the room but his mind wasn’t, or maybe he didn’t hear me. His mouth reminded me of my old grandma’s. Seemingly edentulous, sunken and wrinkled and therefore deformed, his mouth moved slowly like a brown mollusc missing its shell as he laboured to chew and swallow the food.

When I returned to the table with my coffee, his bowl was still almost full. A slow eater like his hundred-year-old mother, he appeared wasteful of the morning that had just turned into an afternoon.

He looked up at me with a frown and said he had mulled over the issue of misgendering a person for quite a long while and when he was reading Elon Musk’s pronouncement about pronouns the day before, his attention had perked up enough to awaken him from the state of stupor the extreme summer heat had reduced him to. Adelaide’s notorious hot spell had lingered for too many days and the smaller than normal crowds at the WOMADelaide festival 2024 was probably the outcome of it. The old man bristled at the suggestion that final numbers would prove the festival to be another big success.

“Expecting hordes of people enjoying music, arts and dance outdoors would be expecting people to enjoy being roasted in a hot oven,” he said.

“The other reason for the smaller crowds was due to a boycott for cancelling the concert of a Palestinian dance group,” he told me. Event organisers had become too political, and much too often, sided with the woke narratives spun by the west. Anti-genocide or anti-zionist protests and anti-war movements were too conveniently labeled as antisemitism or Pro-Russian stooges. Traditional understanding of biology had been thrown out the window. A girl born with a uterus could become a man if she said so. “Sorry, I meant if he said so,” he continued, but his apology was not genuine. A boy born with a penis could demand that it be cut off, no, not just the foreskin, the whole long thing. A boy with balls in his scrotum could become a woman if he said so.

“Sorry, I meant in her scrotum and if she said so,” he said sarcastically, the venom in his voice deterred me from arguing.

WOMADelaide, wo, so mad.

“So, be careful and pronounce your pronouns carefully,” he said. I knew he was deeply serious about this issue and was disturbed by this new movement that had government support to carry it to all levels of education including primary schools.

“The world has gone topsy-turvy,” I surmised. “Why should we care what people say anyway, right?” I asked.

If the person has a womb but wants to call herself a man and demands that we use ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘himself’ when talking about her, then why argue with the woman? Just go with the flow. But, the old man would not have that. “It’s English and it’s biology!” he protested. Many are now so afraid of being accused of misgendering a person that they are using ‘them’, ‘they’ ‘it’ to address a single person.

“Being gender neutral isn’t being neutral,” he said.

I kept silent hoping the dark cloud above him would blow away. But, he kept ranting but I refused to become my truculent self that moment.

“You’ve already taken the side of the ridiculous when you use ‘he’ on a person born with a vagina and uterus.”

I fidgeted and switched my weight to my left bum instead. Sipping the last drop of coffee from my cup, I suggested it was all a waste of energy to discuss something of no importance.

“Who cares?” I asked. If they want to be called whatever, leave them to it.

“So, if the dickhead has a dick, why should we call him ‘she’ just because he says so?” the old man persisted, behaving like a mad dog biting on a bone and would not let go. His arms akimbo, he appeared ready for a long debate.

“And then, there are those who claim to be ‘non-binary’. What’s non-binary? I had to ask Google,” he raged.

I gnashed a reluctant smile but had to agree with him on this one. How can a person be neither male or female? So mixed-up that they feel they have mixed genders or no gender at all, and then there are those so obese that they lack a neck to speak of, yet if described as fat, they would be quick to be offended.

“Never mind, a rotting piece of wood cannot be carved,” I said, hoping he would be pacified.

“Would you like tea or coffee?” he absent-mindedly asked.

Nothing is more hostile to a firm grasp of knowledge than self-deception.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.23

As Loud as a Lout

It was on the first day of Chinese New Year that the old man reminded himself to be anodyne. The year of the wood dragon, was according to his Mrs, going to be a bad year for those of the dog sign. The old man grunted and growled under his breath when he heard it. Nothing new, he thought to himself. When was it ever a good year? For the dragon, it was always prosperous and fortuitous. For the dog, predictably, difficulties and threats would be the norm again. Life had a way of making it unequal for people who supposedly were all born equal. Another year of troubles and challenges? His life had been set in aspic for decades, it felt to him. Nothing ever changed, the sun would rise but it would also set. Good luck didn’t visit much and even if it did, it turned bad pretty quickly, at times even before the sun called it quits for the day. Maybe it was his imprudence that got him in trouble with people around him. Never one to care for what people thought of him, he felt free to speak his mind about virtually anything. Unrestrained, provoking and somewhat gung-ho, a friend a long time ago said of him. He had read about Cato The Younger’s wise words but he told himself he wasn’t Cato.

Speak only when you are certain what you’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.

Cato The Younger

In a chat group, a chap tried to stop him from sharing his views about cryptocurrency. Someone had taken exception to his constant pontification about Bitcoin being the superior money, so the friend reached out and advised him to quieten down. When Bitcoin news became quotidian from one person, it meant people had already switched off and returned to their siloed world.

“Okay, okay. I shall be anodyne,” said the old man who grimaced at being told the truth that he had been soporific about the topic. His face turned cold and marmoreally stiff until an itch in his throat made him cough out the bitterness that had darkened his mood. His past troubles had left him in the dark abyss but he felt comforted in the knowledge that he had survived and that nothing more could destroy him.

“You’re as deflating to my mood as the Bitcoin price,” he added, after seeing that BTC had again dropped in value.

He was not heard of again for the rest of that day; the first day of Chinese New Year had been uneventful and less auspicious than he had hoped, despite wearing a pair of red undies to placate his Mrs who read in a magazine that dogs should be low key on the day, to wear red for good luck but not to attract unwanted attention from the gods.

Stoics emphasise the importance of prohairesis – it is reasoned choice that makes a rational action. Anything outside our prohairesis should not be met with emotional reaction, because anything outside our reasoned choice is not within our control.

So, the following day, the old man was at it again. He wrote to his friends:

Thinking aloud allowed. Bitcoin is going through what the internet went through in its early years. Back then, the internet was a place for pornography and scams, most websites were not interactive and there was no social media. Even when online retail was introduced, most of us were sceptical, scared of being scammed or have our credit card details stolen. The internet would never work, people would not adopt it, right? Yet, Metcalfe’s Law proved people wrong. Technological adoption takes time, it happens slowly, then suddenly.

Is the adage, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ outdated? Having played poker and losing badly, isn’t it the decision to go all-in right if you are holding the best cards? What can be better money than Bitcoin today? Every asset class pales in their performance vis-a-vis Bitcoin in the last 15 years. The big risks are actually holding your wealth in fiat money and assets that can be seized by powerful governments and corporations. If they can do it to Russia, a superpower with nuclear weapons, they can do it to all of us.

In South Australia if you own more than one property you’ll be paying land tax at about 9% every year. That’s daylight robbery. There are also repairs and maintenance expenses and council rates and taxes, further robbing the landowner of their wealth in broad daylight. In the UK and many other countries, there is death duties – governments robbing the dead, one may say.

When Apple was 15 years old, its share price was $0.28. When Nvidia was 14 years old, its share price was $3.93. BTC just turned 15 this month and people reckon it’s too late to invest in it? I know, I know. Maybe, I am wrong to trust myself.

If some regard you as knowledgeable, then it’s time to distrust yourself.

Epictetus

After the old man’s loud outbursts, a longtime friend in Melbourne thought to share the serenity prayer to calm their fellow friends.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

The old man replied, “That’s something I don’t get. To accept things we cannot change. Why? Can we not simply ignore them?”

Why accept mockery when it’s easier to ignore it?

He asked himself, remembering the times he was mocked by people around him for talking about Bitcoin. He thought it strange that people would be antagonistic about the new money, a digital money for the digital world made perfect sense.

His friend replied, “Yes, I agree it is hard to accept initially. Look at it in the context of personal growth, acceptance and resilience. To recognise the limits of our control and to focus on what we can change. Then, there could be serenity in us. It’s not only spiritual, it’s also a concept of psychology.”

Someone else added, “It’s all in one’s mind. To each one’s own. The extremes of acceptance, rejection and questioning can only be self determined based on one’s own reasoned choice. Hence the phrase, choose wisely.”

The old man thought otherwise but bit his tongue until he could taste blood to stop himself from speaking up. It is quite impossible to be happy when there’s a yearning for something we do not possess. Wish not, want not. If we have to choose, then there is always going to be something else that we miss out on. His Mrs had just finished her breakfast that comprised of two rather thick slices of home-made bread generously painted with rich coatings of butter and home-made plum jam. He licked his lips and felt his stomach complain but he had another hour and a half to go before he would eat again. His choice to abstain from food made him unhappy.

Choose it or your happiness – the two are not compatible

Epictetus, Discourses

He settled on a glass of water instead and continued to write to his friends. Outside in the garden, the stillness of the crisp air warned him autumn was arriving early. Skeletons of leaves left from many seasons ago would soon be joined by fresh red and brown ones. He wished they would take their one chance to fly and soar high before they fall.

In 2019, one US dollar bought 0.00013888 BTC. In February 2023, a dollar bought 0.00002114 BTC, i.e. it devalued by 85% in just four years. The old man laughed at his own intransigence. He rejected the merits of Bitcoin for three years and argued convincingly that the governments would never allow it to be legal tender or as a legal form of investment. The price of Bitcoin was around $4,000 when his son broached the idea of adding Bitcoin to their company’s treasury in 2019. Had he agreed with the younger man, his first-born, they would have seen a twelve-fold increase to their balance sheet.

We laugh when we are alone because we alone know how much we suffer.

Nietzsche

All the assets in the world i.e. share markets, real estate, gold, commodities, bonds, etc totalled over $900 trillion. Since Bitcoin is the best store of wealth, then individuals, sovereign states and institutions that spread their investments across the markets would eventually send big inflows into Bitcoin. Over time, if these investors allocate just 1% of their assets into Bitcoin, how much will BTC become? There are only ever going to be 21 million coins mined, with the last one million coins to be issued by the year 2140. 1% of $900 trillion divided by 21 million. Actually, in the early days, people did not know how to store their coins safely and some 5 million coins were lost forever. So, 1% of 900 trillion divided by say, 15 million coins. I’ll let you do the maths. We are still early, guys. But only get in if you can hold during the volatility. The price of BTC can only go but up in the next few years.

Fiat money is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever! Introduced in 1971, it is in its death throes in America. $34 trillion in debt at ever increasing speed. The more they print the less value their money become. Bitcoin is backed by tens of thousands of super computers all over the world, keeping the blockchain verified and secure. It reached an all-time high rate of 545 exahashes per second recently. In history, monies eventually fail when people lose their belief in the system. Fiat money will eventually fail. Governments have been reckless especially since 2008, merrily printing money thereby raising debt for the next generations to pay off. The mighty US dollar lost its shine once the world witnessed it was used to sanction another country with nuclear power. The Malaysian ringgit, depreciating rapidly against many currencies will eventually fail also, following the trend of other weak currencies.

A Bitcoin is mined every ten minutes approximately when a block of transactions reaches 550 Gb of data. The Bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger of global Bitcoin transactions. The computer that solves a complex mathematical problem set by an algorithm wins the Bitcoin for that block. For the first time in history, money is therefore totally decentralised and cannot be manipulated, seized or simply increased by an authority. For the first time in history, we have a commodity that is absolutely scarce, capped at 21 million. Every four years the reward to miners for securing the network is halved. The daily number of Bitcoins will reduce to 450 from around April 20 2024. Bitcoin is digital money, not physical, therefore it is easily divisible, fungible and cheaply stored, and can be transported at the speed of light – features that outshine gold, pardon the pun. It is valued in any currency, currently it is worth about MYR250,000 per BTC. The cost to mine one Bitcoin has been reducing gradually as they move to renewables, hydro and volcanic energy and gas flares that would otherwise be burned off and wasted. The last time I checked, quite many months ago, the unit cost of a BTC to a mining company with the most powerful computers was around USD17,000.

“It’s all good until there is no internet or electricity,” the friend argued.

“No electricity in the world? No internet? The world will not run out of energy. It never has. The day we run out of energy is the day the world is destroyed in which case nothing matters,” the old man replied before he continued spreading his theory about Bitcoin.

Here is my summary of the Malaysian median house price in MYR and BTC showing how Bitcoin protects our wealth from the debasement of fiat money through irresponsible money printing. It will take just a few more years before we can buy a median-priced house in Malaysia with just one Bitcoin.

Year Index @MYR @BTC (Feb of each year)
2014 153.2 327,266 175
2015 164.5 351,405 408
2016 176.1 376,185 213
2017 187.6 400,751 100
2018 193.7 413,782 10
2019 198.0 422,968 26
2020 200.3 427,882 10.6
2021 202.7 433,000 3
2022 208.4 449,000 2.9
2023 210.5 453,632 3.5
2/2024 approx. 455,000 1.8

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1440092/malaysia-house-price-index

His friend said people who risk their savings to buy Bitcoin are greedy.

“Why accumulate more at our age?” he asked.

“Sure, for some, it is due to greed. For many others, it’s a migration to a better, more secure, hard money that will protect their savings. It is not that we want to accumulate more, the goal is to swap to a better money so we don’t sit on a pile that devalues by 10-15% every year,” the old man countered.

“It is not greed. People who are blessed with financial security should not denigrate those less fortunate ones who need to protect their assets the best way they can.”

Another friend disagreed.

“I am a fundamentalist and a long term investor most of the time. It requires a lot of patience and discipline. Not only do I look at the performance of an investment using the various valuation methods, quality of management and strength of the sponsors but also the macroeconomics that may have future impact on the investment.
E.g. with the US stock markets hitting an all-time high, it’s time to be fearful when others are greedy – Warren Buffett. The valuations are simply too ludicrous right now. If I do get into the market, it’ll be with a trader’s mentality to buy when there’s a correction and sell when prices rise but never intend to hold it long term unless its valuation is dirt cheap and business fundamentals are still strong despite minor setbacks. By the time the Feds pivot on interest rate cuts, the US economy will be in a recession and there’ll be a major correction, perhaps a crash. As ex-PM Najib said, “Cash is king!” If one expects a recession is imminent, wait for the crash to come, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to pick up quality investments at low valuations. Also I am an advocate for risk diversification. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

“I don’t follow the diversification strategy. I prefer conviction. For instance, in my business, all I do is sell X. We do not suddenly choose to sell X, Y, and Z. Spreading our risks is reducing our profitability, diversifying into categories we are weak in or unsure about is lunacy,” the old man replied.

“All I’m doing here is to highlight to my friends that there is a much better way to protect our wealth. The CEO for Blackrock, Larry Fink, for years, was saying Bitcoin’s use is for scams and criminal activities. Blackrock is accumulating a billion dollars of Bitcoin daily since they got their ETF approved three weeks ago. When priced in fiat dollars, the S&P 500 gained 24% over the last year and we thought we had a bumper year. When priced in BTC ,  it lost almost 40%. That’s how we ought to protect our assets.”

In time to come, Bitcoin adoption will mean merchants will stop accepting Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards. Why would they want to pay 2-3% in fees, wait 5-7 days for the funds to settle and accept merchant chargebacks without recourse when Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and the fees negligible?

My BTC topic maybe soporific but I’m still agog that its absolute scarcity and its finite supply do not seem to resonate with many here. It is the first time in history that we have money that has both such features, yet it doesn’t dawn on people and the general response is just a big yawn.

“That’s because money can’t buy happiness,” his friend said.

“Money can buy happiness actually, it’s just that happiness isn’t a permanent state, nothing is. Like money in my bank account, it is never there permanently,” said the old man.

“We can’t even buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin here,” said the friend who was starting to annoy the old man.

“Try buying bread with gold or marbles,” the old man retorted after deciding his friend was thick as a brick. He was not giving financial advice and neither was he saying he owned any Bitcoin. It was a phenomenon that piqued his interest and he simply wanted to learn more about the new technology, especially about a new form of money that could change the world for the better. Some said Bitcoin could even stop wars, since wars are very costly to fight for long spells.

But, his disbelieving friend had the last say.

“You’re just as loud as a lout.”

It’s Offal, Isn’t It Awful?

She was off to Darwin for a six-month stint in a Darwin hospital. In another life, she would have been a professional violinist but it was medicine she chose or perhaps it was her mother who chose it for her. And so, they held a farewell party for her, to celebrate another milestone, another small step to a big career as an anaesthetist, a word that many at the party had trouble saying and one that The Mrs could never spell.

“Wah! Congrats, Corinne! You’ll rake in the money soon! My analsthetitcian friend just bought a condo worth millions!” one of her aunties said.

“Well done, Corinne. An anaesthesist soon, we are so proud of you!” The Mrs said.

“Here’s an ang pow for you, luv. Congrats for getting into anahhssthetihhss,” Corinne’s eldest aunty said, without her new dentures.

Corinne did not correct anyone; she was going to be an anaesthesiologist, not an anaesthetist. She didn’t think it was necessary to explain the difference to her elders. She smiled sweetly and snuggled up closer to her boyfriend next to her. Tall and gangly, he had never been seen in a smart shirt but the smile that he wore on his face more than made up for his slovenly appearance. His ruffled brown hair, somewhat knotted, was proof he did not own a comb. They make a contented couple, with mutual admiration for each other. Both soft-spoken, they whispered to each other when they talked, maybe as a tactic to be physically close. Her uncle, the old man, wondered out loud to me if they could even hear themselves when they quarrel.  

The party was held at the Urumqi Restaurant in Gouger Street, the main street in Adelaide’s Chinatown. The old man had not even heard of the restaurant that was remarkably popular for their Uyghur food. Not wanting to miss the AO’s men’s final, they booked a table for 5.30 pm which was just as well, as the usual dinner time slots were all booked out.

“Wow, they must be good,” the old man said when told that, cynically discarding his normal distaste for lamb and mutton. He was pulling at the obstreperous string algae in the pond when he looked up to listen to The Mrs speak. The glare of the sun caught his clouded eyes and as he frowned, she mistakenly assumed he did not welcome her sudden presence.

“I know you find me annoying, but must you frown every time I talk to you?” she asked in her most icy tone.

“No, it’s the sun,” he said defensively.

“Don’t bring our son into this,” she began to argue before changing her mind and instead told him to hurry home to change for the party.

They arrived at Gouger Street early. The sun was still violent on their skin, imparting oxidative properties with its UV rays. The old man had implored his wife to apply some cream on herself the night before after being horrified at seeing his own wrinkles in the shower cubicle. Adelaide, being near the desert, had been harsh to them over the years. The difficulties of their youth had piled deep wrinkles on their faces. The scaly condition of their limbs and the gnarled fingers of gardeners only exacerbated their ageing. The excess skin and fat hanging off his arms and the sunken biceps, once bulging and hard, spoke volumes about his poor exercise regime.

Unusually, there were many vacant parking bays along the main street. The old man did not have to circle a few rounds along the back streets to fight for a space to park. He eased his white Golf GTi into a bay but failed to park it straight even after a few tries. Once upon a time, he used to enjoy praises from The Mrs for his driving and parking skills. Not any more. He blamed it on the pandemic and then blamed it on his deteriorating eyesight. They hardly got out of their house once the lockdown was imposed in early 2020.

He got out of his car and checked the parking sign again and again as he pretended not to see that the front tyre of his car was straddling the painted line on the road. It’s a Sunday, he reminded himself, assured that the traffic inspectors would have better things to do.

“Yes, we can park here,” The Mrs said it twice, the second time a little bit more forcefully, and the old man quickly agreed before her impatience got the better of her. He had stopped committing himself to negative emotions from statements of opinion and cynicisms dished out by people around him. As Epictetus said all those years ago, anxiety is caused by people wanting things that are outside their control. The old man finally saw the light and learned not to sacrifice his peace of mind by listening to errant comments or hoping for wishes to come true. None of them were within his control – it was as foolish as staying up in the wee hours of the night, wanting his football team to win the game.

Their idea to have an early dinner failed miserably in its implementation. Their one-hundred-year-old mother was nowhere to be seen. Of course, they should have expected that. It had not yet dawn on them to expect a different outcome. There was a saying about people persisting on the same action but expecting a different result. Even President Biden of the US was guilty of that – bombing the Houthis and when asked if that would be successful, he replied ‘No”, but he would keep bombing them anyway.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

attributed to Albert Einstein

“A stint at relieving her bladder had led to other distractions,” Corinne’s mother apologetically said on the phone.

“Don’t wait for us, you guys start without us,” she added.

But, of course, everyone waited for their matriarch to arrive.

The restaurant timed it perfectly. As soon as their matriarch was seated at the table, the food started to arrive. Lamb, mutton, dapanji (a big plate of chicken and noodles) and even lamb kidney. Sheep yoghurt milk was the only drink on offer unless highly chlorinated tap water was preferred.

“It’s offal, isn’t it awful?” the old man asked, as he pointed to the sticks of lamb kidney. It took him over four decades to learn how to eat lamb. The last time he had roast lamb was in New Zealand where his good friend, John Law and his wife, Karen, served it for dinner in their sprawling Christchurch home.

“Just try it, ba,” the old man’s son said. “It’s nice,” he said but his opinion was met by his disbelieving father.

“I bet it is as ‘nice’ as Heggis,” the old man said with sarcasm, before retelling his story about tasting his first Heggis in Edinburgh two months ago. Heggis, made of sheep’s heart, liver, suet and lungs, did not leave a nice memory for him.

Maybe, the Scottish and Uyghurs lacked the right recipe for offal. The old man remembered fondly the chicken entrails rice broth he had in Hong Kong and the small and large intestines that were unmissable ingredients in olden day sar hor fun that his dad occasionally brought home after a late night movie in the 60s.

The old man and The Mrs were amongst the last to leave. The younger members had said their goodbyes to Corinne some fifteen minutes earlier, hugged her and wished her luck in her new life in Darwin. They did not linger and make small talk as the older folks waited for their matriarch to finish her cold piece of lamb kidney, the fat of which had started to coagulate and turn whitish. By the time she was gently eased into the front passenger seat of the Tesla, Medvedev had already won his first game at the tennis final. The old man detected the whiff of lamb fat on his hair as he hurried to his own car. Skeins of offal scent unwound themselves and blended with the heavy staleness of long trapped pungent smells in his car, forcing him to open the windows. Cool evening air rushed in and injected the smell of deep fried fish from a nearby restaurant. A group of young revellers shouted and shrieked at one another as the old man pressed down on the foot pedal to accelerate away from the city.

“Make sure you wash your hair tonight,” The Mrs said.

Why Reason With One Who Can’t Reason?

All week, the old man was in a liminal state between quitting his violin and practising for his orchestra’s first rehearsal for the year. He had sprained his wrist from lugging their travel bags on the streets of Venice and Rome. There, he discovered that cobbled stones were romantic to walk on but presented real risks for someone of advanced age to trip or slip and fall. The castor wheels of his bags groaned loudly on the uneven surface and transmitted the bumps onto his wrist, he reckoned as he clenched his fist and winced. His Mrs said he played badly and that was the reason why he felt like quitting. True, his attempt to express the pain he felt for the misery and death in Gaza through John William’s music in Schindler’s List was dour and sour, a pale version of the depths of despair he felt and heard inside his mind.

“Don’t play in front of baby Bach,” she said and warned that his scratching sounds would turn her seven-month-old nephew off classical music.

“Don’t play when Murray is around,” she said and pitied the family’s dog who would hide his ears under a pile of blankets.

His feeling of liminality had spread to his love for writing also. New ideas of topics to write were still seeding in his mind but the inclination to sit down and type the first word had simply vanished. There was the urge to write about Truman and Eisenhower, how both men warned against the CIA and the military industrial complex in America. The former created the CIA whose aim was for it to be the eyes and ears of the state but later warned against its second function as the private army for the President. The old man had the idea to write about the revelation that the Ukraine war could have ended in April 2022 with peace talks so advanced that both warring party delegations were pleased with the outcome in Turkey. The US, displeased with the concession by Ukraine to end NATO expansion, sent their British stooge, Boris the Bozo Johnson to cull the peace talks. Joe Biden had turned out to be the worst President of the US ever, presiding over conflicts in so many countries in a mere three years. Why reason with someone who can’t reason? What was the reason behind that?

Meanwhile, in Davos, the WEF had gathered together in January 2024 with the theme ‘Rebuilding Trust’. They had a shaman on stage who rubbed her hands as if with glee to make certain invocations before blowing bad breath, presumably, onto the heads of the dignitaries who were seated in a line like school students; was that a way to appease all the different religions and their factions and to instil trust in these billionaires and power-hungry elites by looking at the past and what our ancestors wished for in order to look to the future? Trust once lost will take a long time to be regained.

The world had been under sustained attack since the pandemic, with trust of our governments being the main casualty. The world had become a place where misinformation was really disinformation, conspiracy theories were proven correct, gender had become a major issue when for the past millennia it was just a simple matter of man or woman, Emmy awards and Oscars were not won based on quality of performance but on meeting DEI criteria of diversity, equity and inclusion. Can there be trust when mRNA vaccines don’t stop the spread of a virus and don’t offer immunity? In a world where excess fatality rates exceed 30% and the authorities do not address the reasons why? Where young and healthy individuals are dropping dead suddenly and highly respected oncologists are reporting the high incidence of turbo cancers? Turbo cancers sounded like a disease equipped with a super fast gas turbine engine. Where people cannot reason with their government leaders who cannot reason? Where Canadian protesters end up with their money being seized by their government? How do they rebuild trust when they steal our money in broad daylight through taxation, debasing our money through reckless printing and inflation?

It was precisely the realisation that our governments are stealing our money that the old man started reading up about Bitcoin. Over the many millennia, humans had valued rocks, glass beads and seashells as money. Fiat money, comparatively, is a young form of money. Introduced by President Nixon in 1971, money was no longer backed by gold but by government decree or fiat. In the last quarter of 2023, the US Federal Reserve printed two trillion dollars out of thin air. Yet, it would be the same people who claimed Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. The most vocal in recent times was Jaime Dimond of JPMorgan Chase, a bank that benefited greatly from government handouts during the 2008 global financial crisis. Dimond said Bitcoin was “a pet rock that does nothing”, that lacks economic intrinsic value. Dimond could say the same about diamond, I suppose. The old man was angry. He said a successful banker such as Dimond would lead many people astray with his bad advice. Why reason with someone who can’t reason? What was undeniable however was many central banks that distrust the USD had reverted to investing in gold in their treasuries. Gold, like many other rocks, have regained favour amongst shrewd investors who prefer to store their wealth in commodities found in rocks such as lithium, oil and copper.

For the first time in history, we ordinary people have the opportunity to front-run the institutions and wealthy individuals and invest in a rare commodity whilst the price is still low. The old man, demonstrating a heightened level of caring for his friends, had been orange-pilling them, sharing his knowledge of Bitcoin’s special properties and benefits and the idea that it would one day be the global reserve asset. His Mrs had warned him not to behave like a fool. The wise woman advised him no good would come from it – if they lost money, they would blame him, and if they made money, they would only credit themselves with their investment decision. Besides, the woman had long argued against Bitcoin, believing all the FUD reported in the news ever so often. The fake news, uncertainty and doubt dished out by his siblings had also convinced her it would be a disaster to put any of their savings in it. The recent weakness in its price had further galvanised her opposition to Bitcoin as a safe form of investment.

“You said the institutions are coming!”

“You said it’s basic maths, supply and demand. Price will surely go up,” the maddening woman said, putting on her most cynical voice.

“You have rocks in your head!” she shrieked, in a shouting match with the old man. The old man had yet to win one of their shouting matches. His raspy sandy voice, a perpetual liability many decibels lower than hers, and his slowness in forming ideas, always detrimental, often unconvincing, ensured he lost the debate that afternoon.

The Bitcoin price went down two days after the ETFs were approved. The old man lost his argument. It was as simple as that.

“Here, go read the Bitcoin Standard,” was all he said to her as she strutted out of his study after yet another victory.

She had not read any books about Bitcoin, nor had she come across the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. She plugged her ears with her pointy fingers when he talked about Bitcoin ETFs and Gary Gensler’s SEC admission he only approved the ETFs because the federal appeals court forced him to.

“What ETF and SEC? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!” she said loudly, pretending those letters meant nothing to her and believing that the one with the louder voice always wins the argument.

“Why reason with someone who can’t reason?” I asked, but the old man simply shrugged his shoulders.

Why do people try to reason with someone who can’t reason? People are high in EQ but low in IQ, that’s why.

“People are stupid?” I asked, without expecting an answer. The old man stopped to wonder out loud why people without any knowledge of the topic they were arguing about would argue strongly based on nothing but on their own uninformed opinions.

The difference between the rich and poor is that the rich have a lot more moneyErnest Hemingway

Bitcoin is the best money that humans have created. It is money that is durable, portable – digital and not physical, divisible – 100 million satoshis to a Bitcoin , unseizable and totally sovereign, does not require trust in a third party and perhaps most importantly, extremely rare and impossible to forge. It is powered by thousands of computers all over the world, having recently hit an all time high hash rate of 500 exahashes per second in January 2024 or 500 times more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer, according to Yassine Elmandjra of ARK Funds.

Discussions about money always bring out the worst in us. As Seneca said in his On Consolation to Helvia, the rich are restricted by the baggage they can carry when travelling abroad and in a hasty situation, they will abandon their entourage. That is the truth about money. No matter how much we value money, it does not solve most of the problems people without it seem to think it will.

“Money isn’t everything but everything needs money,” the old man countered.

The old man’s mother came for lunch that Saturday afternoon. It was their routine for many decades, to bring her home for the day. Not surprising that it had been decades – their mother was, after all, a hundred years old. They filled their weekends with their mum’s presence. She had been a powerhouse in their family. The matriarch dictated most things, even what they cooked and in the manner they cooked. I suppose it’s alright, since they cooked her favourite dishes for her to enjoy and when she finally lacked the strength or stamina to chew properly, they cooked soft foods such as tofu, rice broth and fish. Every weekend, if not Tuesdays which was the norm when their father was still alive, she came. Their father died in 2007. He was a beautiful man, a handsome man with a heart of gold or Bitcoin in today’s parlance, who never made them feel guilty for being his imperfect children. She, on the other hand, was always a challenge to please, often challenging them about the stuff they buy, interrogating them about where the jewellery she gave them had gone to, checking their grocery receipts for any overpayment, rummaging through their fridge like a tax auditor, checking the kitchen bin for food scraps that could be salvaged.

She looked great for her age. Hoary but not deathly white, with a nice pinkish hue on her face that was absent of a cobweb of deep wrinkles, a common trademark of old age. Refusing all offers to upgrade her wardrobe for many years, she still wore her rather worn clothes smartly and with style. Her kids were slow to understand she was losing her mind to dementia. She had become forgetful and then confusing, but all they saw was that she was wrong and unreasonable. They relished that she was wrong – she no longer was the authority who shall be obeyed. They argued against her and challenged her recollections and some of them resented her accusations. Without any understanding of dementia and how it makes a sufferer confused, delusional and angry, they allowed themselves to be injured emotionally and scarred psychologically by their own mother. And so, they argued and argued with their mother and in doing so, they hurt her and belittled her, diminished her authority and rendered her powerless.

“Why do we try to reason with someone who can no longer reason?” the old man asked.

Ahma, pleased with winning again. December 2023.

Concentrate, It’s a Concentrate

Summer arrived late. Everyone had already left – the house was once again quiet and the mood dismal, its elderly occupants dull and sullen. The garden, although still green, was becoming tatty and untidy, providing clear evidence of a recent storm. A dead branch still hung from the old oak tree, too high up and too awkward to reach and so, the old man of the house simply pretended that the cataracts that dulled his eyes had accelerated his blindness. I envisaged his impaired vision would be used again and again, as a wonderful defence against claims, if any, of laziness in the garden and poor house-keeping. He had told their visitors it was a recent storm but his definition of recent was measured in months rather than minutes or hours and so, the visitors had gone along with the idea that he had not the time yet to clean the mess up. The sun had become unforgiving again. A lapse in concentration the other day meant the near-death of a banana plant. Banana plants, fast-growing and spectacular in the tropics, needed special care in Adelaide. Earlier attempts at growing them had failed but the elderly couple was gifted a couple of plants from their Sri Lankan neighbours behind their land in early spring.

“It’s easy, just water them,” the kind wrinkled woman from Colombo said.

The old man’s Mrs simply echoed her.

“It’s easy, just water them,” she said to the old man who was unstacking dishes from the dishwasher, as she segued her way out of the new responsibility. It wasn’t many weeks later before they began arguing about who planted the banana plant near the wall.

“Of course, I did,” the old man said. He justified that with his knowledge that to survive Adelaide’s cold winters, growing next to a stone wall would give the plant a fighting chance. But, his Mrs merely bit her lips and bided her time until they were both outside in the yard the following day. She merely pointed to where the banana plant was to smugly show her victory.

“Silly woman,” the old man mumbled to himself.

Only she would be so silly to plant it away from the wall.

The days had turned hot but it was atypically humid, so much so that the old man began to wash his hair more frequently but still not daily as instructed by his wife. He began changing his clothes daily though, an instruction that was not given, since it was her role to wash their clothes.

“Why don’t you just cut your hair?” she barged into his study and demanded for the umpteenth time. She was almost in tears, tearing and pulling stubborn long hair caught up in the rollers of their Xiaomi robot vacuum cleaner.

“They are stuck!” she cried, filling her whimpering voice with desperation and hopelessness.

“Leave it to me. I’ll fix it,” he said, reluctantly peeling his eyes from his laptop.

“I don’t want you to fix it! I want you to cut your hair!” she cried again but this time, her voice threatening and deadly serious.

The old man relieved the roller from her hand as he marched out of his room.

“I’ll vacuum the house from now on,” he muttered, as he brushed past her.

“I don’t want you to vacuum the house! I want you to cut your hair!” she shouted, as she chased his footsteps to the garden, oblivious of the mid-afternoon heat.

The days leading up to Christmas were such a happy time. It felt so long ago and belied the fact that it wasn’t quite three weeks since they were opening their presents. They had gathered at their neighbour’s on Christmas Day. Lunch would be greatly delayed that day as everyone took their sweet time to unbox their gifts, one at a time and one person at a time. The elderly couple was without their middle son who chose to remain in Glasgow to work and not risk ruffling his new employer’s mood. A bonus for him was not measurable in monetary terms but the joy of spending a really white Christmas in his new home enthralled him. Without him, their family tradition to enjoy a panettone and sip port whilst they exchanged presents stopped. Popular Christmas songs still blared from the sound system that was minus the B&O Beolab 3 speakers which had begun to play up. Mariah Carey did not fail to make her mark with ‘All I want for Christmas is You’. They had a new addition to the family though. Their Number One son formalised his relationship with his girlfriend that year having publicly acknowledged that she had moved in with him. She would be the one to masterly cook up a seafood barbeque in Thai style, with his help, of course.

The neighbours had their house full of in-laws in addition to their greatest joy, a brand-new grandson who at seven months had already collected a few names – Seb, Sebastian, Bach, Boy-boy, and Ah-boy. It would not surprise anyone if he were to inherit another nickname, Baz. Bach was already showing advanced intellectual development for his age. His bright twinkling almond eyes smiled, a gift from his mum who got it from her mum, Eva. Packed neatly below a pair of lightish brown eyebrows, the shine from his eyes suggested a level of intelligence far exceeding the average. His pink smiling lips complemented the pinkish hues of his face to advertise that he was a bundle of joy, health, contentment and happiness, a result of the uncomplaining and unconditional loving care and constant attention his mother gave. Much loved and adored by all, it did not surprise that Bach got the most presents, one of which his dad could not resist and began to play with, in front of everyone. It was, however, Eva who received the most expensive gift that morning.

Sebastian at 7 months, advertising he’s a bundle of joy, health, contentment and happiness.

Eva, whose shiny black hair in a very short span of time had turned mostly white with streaks of gold, looked more Italian than Chinese in Roma, causing the minor inconvenience for the taxi driver who was told to look out for his Asian passenger. The taxi driver would fail to pick up his passengers that day. The old man had frowned on numerous occasions in Italy during their ‘recent’ three-week family holiday together whenever people commented positively about her hair. White hair made him look much older than he felt, so he was quite displeased that the opposite was true for Eva. Their numerous holiday photos proved it time and time again that he had aged too fast and made him doubt the effectiveness of the anti-ageing nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) tablets he had been taking for many years.

Eva’s nephew from Singapore beamed a wide smile that showed off a deep dimple as he gave her a long hug and handed her a nicely wrapped gift. Intricately gift-wrapped, one would have ordinarily dismissed it as a gift with an expensive exterior but an ordinary interior, which may be the reason why he quickly explained what it was. The small bottle of La Mer’s The Concentrate is a potent barrier serum for skin coupled with extra antioxidant power.

“Wow! It’s too expensive!” Eva exclaimed, visibly pleased with the elixir of youth that will enhance the health of her skin. She had switched off her ears as her nephew rattled on its benefits like a professional skin-care specialist. He called her Yiyi or aunty from the maternal side.

“Yiyi, concentrate, it’s a concentrate,” he said.

“Yiyi already looks too young for her age,” the old man said softly, and gritted his teeth, ruing his ill-discipline in front of everyone.

“Yeah, what’s your secret, sis?” Eva’s older sibling asked.

“Concentrate, it’s the concentrate of chicken essence I have been giving her,” Eva’s husband said.

James, Eva’s hubby, was as convincing as their nephew in rattling off the benefits of chicken essence.

“It’s not just the collagen she gets; she doesn’t suffer from fatigue anymore! Look, look at the skin on her arm. Look at how it has repaired itself – the scar from the ‘scolding’ has virtually disappeared,” James said enthusiastically, unaware his Malaysian accent of the word ‘scalding’ had briefly befuddled the old man. He then proceeded to demonstrate the method of extracting the chicken concentrate from a video he took in KL of the ‘Khind’ electric double boiler in action. He was so impressed with the wonderful pot he emptied the shop of that product and ordered some more for his relatives and friends.

The old man looked bewildered at the party. The enthusiasm in the room about youthfulness juxtaposed awkwardly with his disregard for his own wellbeing. Grey and hunched, he had shocked himself the morning before when he could not even do a plank push-up properly.

“Squeeze your buttocks, ba! Tuck in your pelvic muscles,” his youngest son said.

“I can’t find them, son!” the old man yelled back.

“See, just gyrate them,” the younger man demonstrated slowly.

The old man tried to mimic the action, but badly, showing his incompetence in gyrating his lower groin area, the inability quite likely due to a prolonged lack of sexual activity.

A few days after the embarrassing episode, the old man’s eldest son suggested to his dad he should consider taking creatine monohydrate.

“Ba, concentrate, it’s a concentrate,” Number One son said.

Creatine is a natural supplement used to improve physical performance. Our muscle cells will produce more energy. During exercise, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is used up to produce energy. Creatine supplements help boost ATP levels and encourage muscle growth.

“It should also boost brain power, help blood sugar control and fight certain neurological diseases,” he added.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/creatine-exercise-performance#how-to-supplement

But, the old man’s head had turned away towards the French doors that showcased a small pond with a trickling waterfall surrounded by an array of green foliage. There was a distant look in his eyes that often were scanning to recognise every individual koi. Deep in his own thoughts, he was a world away from his son. He was not listening to, much less concentrating on what was being said about creatine. Troubled by the troubles in Gaza, he simply wished for peace. Later that day, he wrote a message to his ex-schoolmates after being told by one of them that many did not agree with his views about the ongoing conflict between the Zionist regime and the Palestinians who once represented 90% of the population in Palestine, a time before the Balfour Declaration and The Contradictory Promises. The following night, he showed me this version of his message to his friends.

“I am intrigued to witness this alternative world. A world in which my friends support an occupying force with genocidal intent on a people that the state drove away from their homes, segregated them in an open-air prison for decades and deprived most of them of a chance to leave or enjoy the simple pleasures we often take for granted, like taking a short holiday overseas or enjoying a long shower or having enough to eat.

A world in which the aggressors are deemed right to exact inhumane conditions on the populace and when the long-suffering people rise up and resist or rebel, they are accused of seeking vengeance or revenge on their oppressors. A world in which the occupying force can simply bomb the people they call ‘human animals’ and their homes, universities and hospitals to smithereens and proclaim they have the right to do so and my friends do not only agree with this heinous crime against humanity but also support the oppressors’ claim that the shocking death toll was due to the evil freedom fighters’ ploy to use their people as human shields, people that can’t or won’t, (it doesn’t matter which) leave their sanctuaries within a barbed-wire fence guarded and controlled by one of the most well-armed force in the world.

My dear friends, how can we support a regime that has proclaimed their intention to erase the people and erase all memories of them, to demolish everything and exterminate everyone? How can we agree that there is no ‘uninvolved civilian’, that every citizen of Gaza is an enemy of Israel?

There is no sympathy for the traumatised and the hungry experiencing catastrophic famine, and the diseased, deprived of medical help because most health infrastructure is destroyed and the desperate who have lost their loved ones and their homes. There is no thought of the wretched souls who willingly followed the oppressors’ command to vacate to a designated ‘safe zone’ only to be murdered by a rain of missiles. There is little or no sympathy for the wretchedness that these people have endured all their lives under this very long occupation.

What Hamas did was, of course, vile and wrong. In attacking their occupiers, they knew there would be a swift and ruthless retaliation. Their people would die by the tens of thousands. Yet, that is what they did. Out of desperation? Recklessness? Evil intent? Revenge? I do not know why but they showed stupidity and foolishness.

This world is indeed a sad world. We, urghhlings, can do better. We can at least cry for the dead and the wounded and cry out for an immediate ceasefire instead of judging and pointing fingers. We can at least speak up for the oppressed rather than support the oppressors. I feel compelled to share my thoughts here, to speak for the dead who are forever silenced.”

Peace to all mankind is as unreachable as walking to the moon.

Wu Yonggang

Loch Fyne, So Fine

They left Italy with a heavy heart. An old world with the grandeur of once being the centre of an empire, Rome promised so much but delivered even more. Every step they took, every corner they stood, every path they chose, there were unmistakable signs of ancient history – of a she-wolf suckling the infant twins, Romulus and Remus, of Etruscans and Greeks who fought for colonies, of old relics and long buried buildings stopping the construction of a new railway line or a road, of gladiators who fought for honour or freedom, of slaves who were inconsequential to those who cheered from the seats of the colosseum, of emperors and senators who wielded power and influence and who could take a life by the mere turning of a thumb.

The voices spoke and the spirits of the dead who didn’t want to die screamed and shouted but in their group, only the old man heard them. As in the movie The Haunting in Venice, Rome was as haunting as romantic Venice if you let the dead get to you. The travellers left Venice for Rome after a romantic two days of gondola rides and private boat trips and glittering nights of Venetian food and wine. They left the ancient city of desperate ghosts and the unwilling dead trapped in perpetuity. The skeletons came alive but no one else noticed them. The old man was useless, merely walking away despite their pleas to be freed. He was just a black cloud that attracted unhappy spirits. We cannot hide from our ghosts but whether they are real or not does not matter, we need to make our peace with them. There were few stories that had a good ending there. Even Shakespeare’s old story about the merchant of Venice wasn’t enchanting. Venice didn’t need a fort to protect it. The palace actually faced out to the sea, absent of cannons and towers. The treacherous water channels were enough to deter would-be conquerors and sink merchant ships; ultimately, the water will even sink Venice itself.

Perhaps it was appropriate that they attended Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion on the first night in Rome. In Italy for over two weeks, they had heard about and felt the tragedies of wars and witnessed enough ruins from the last two millennia. The old man needed his soul to reset. Omitaba. But, Tan Dun wrote about the Deer of Nine Colours. Saving a man from drowning only brought the deer its own demise after the man dobbed on its whereabouts to collect a rich reward from the King. Karma can be unforgiving. The old man did not find peace and enlightenment from Tan Dun’s work. In the final act, Nirvana, Buddha revealed he wasn’t God and he wasn’t the son of God and neither was he sent by God.

“What are you then?” his weeping disciples asked as the Buddha laid dying.

“I am awake….” he replied.

Omitaba.

Perhaps that’s the best message from Tan Dun. Be awake to the present but do not forget the past.

After the concert, the old man introduced himself and shook Tan Dun’s hand as he was leaving the stage of the concert hall at the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. It was a nice feeling; the maestro was very warm and kind to the old man.

Great music, maestro!

“Alora, look after your bags please,” Maddalena, their tour guide said. Every sentence had to start with that. Every minute needed special attention to thwart would-be pickpockets and bag snatchers. Every distraction, every nudge, every bump a possible ploy to dispossess them of their wallet or passport.

“Alora,” let me say it again,” Maddalena said to the old man when he asked a question that she had volunteered the answer to a second earlier.

“Alora. Yes, after Monti, I’ll take you to the Colosseum,” she repeated, unnecessarily louder.

The old man auditioned for the role of Gladiator, so he said.

They had been warned about Rome many weeks before they left home. Apart from the worry of losing their wallets and passports to pickpockets, the old man was busy warning them about other potential pitfalls.

“Steps!” he shouted and pointed at them almost everywhere and every day in Rome.

“Watch out, cobbledstones!” Uneven and slippery, they had caused some people who were unaware of the danger to cut short their holidays from sprained ankles.

“That old woman is a gypsy. She just scammed your money by looking toothless and old!”

The Mrs taking a breather at Monti, Rome.

But, on day two, he was charmed by what he saw. The Romans may have gone but they had left a mountain of treasure for humanity. Maybe the Italians no longer considered themselves as Romans but Roma will forever be their benefactor, bringing millions of tourists to visit and witness their greatness all those years ago. Their empire lasted five hundred years till AD 476 but the eastern side continued as the Byzantine Empire, extending their greatness and influence well after the Renaissance and Mannerism periods. The Roman emperor was the people’s god until they found the Christian God. It intrigued the old man that the fall of the empire, largely due to overspending on the military and new laws that banned the use of cheap labour (slavery) was the impetus for the rise of a new religion – a new faith in a new God – which eventually heralded the Dark Ages.

In Rome, the old man met two dead heroes. Marco Aurelio, also known as Marcus Aurelius, was on a horse whereas Stephen Hawking was in a photo, celebrated as a cherished diner in a local restaurant in 2017, according to its proud owner.

In the shadow of his hero, Marcus Aurelius of Rome

“I thought he couldn’t swallow any kind of food,” the old man said but the owner of the restaurant with the best cuisine in the heart of Rome, La Taverna dei Fori Imperial, didn’t reply. He merely cupped both hands and gave a slight shrug as if to say his food wasn’t just any kind of food but the best and of course Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have dined there if he couldn’t enjoy his food!

The fashion in Rome was a worthy rival to that of Milan. The evergreen Eva Green, often shivering from the cold nights in Italy, finally succumbed to her sister’s incessant pestering from Milan to Florence and bought a fawn coloured Max Mara overcoat in Rome to prepare for the much colder nights in Scotland, their final holiday destination after Italy. When outside, she wore it like a high fashion item but in the hotel room, its dual purpose was soon apparent as a dressing gown.

Her husband, James, a double-o seven-agent kind of man, suave and confident with a swagger in his movements, had said his goodbyes and waved nonchalantly with a half salute as he stepped into a private boat in Venice two days earlier. James, although a retired merchant of some eight years, had a mission to accomplish somewhere else. Without him, Eva was even more reluctant to spend on herself. A remarkably kind woman, she never thought twice about buying any item if ever a family member needed it, but if she needed something, she would talk herself out of it.

At the Vatican, the splendour and richness of the architecture, sculptures and art were awesome and spell-bounding and while the God they follow was omnipresent, their treasures were ubiquitous. The viewing of Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel left the sexagenarians with stiff necks and a groggy Eva Green stumbled out of it quite unlike a Bond girl on the big screen due to her past episodes of vertigo. Michelangelo was just thirty three years of age when commissioned to paint the ceiling.

“It took him four years and a stiff neck to complete his masterpiece,” the old man said.

The Creation of Adam, in which God and Adam outstretched their hands to one another was the painting that moved the old man the most. He took no notice of the guard who yelled at him to move along. When in the presence of greatness, ignore pettiness.

“You were moved by God?” Eva asked.

“By Michelangelo!” the old man replied.

It surprised the old man that the Vatican chimney used to signal the white or black smoke for the election of the next Pope was not a permanent fixture of the building. It also surprised him that the devout followers of the faith were provided with a vast array of white plastic chairs at the foreground of the independent state to use when they congregate there to listen to the Pope. The plastic chairs were not only an eyesore but also offered a stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots, and contradicted the religion that taught their followers they were all born equal in the eyes of their Lord. For the faithful ordinary folk to endure the cold on flimsy furniture whilst the opulence and abundance was being enjoyed inside the building by the elites and the powerful felt wrong.

Inspired by Michelangelo, the old man posed like Adam at the Borghese Gallery.

Heathrow treated the travellers badly. Their flight to London was delayed but not late for the connecting flight to Edinburgh. They weren’t told their seats had been bumped and their flight rescheduled to the next day. It wasn’t a pretty sight to see the old folks rudely delayed by the airport staff and it was a much uglier sight to see them scrambling and running to their departure gate only to be told their boarding passes had already been cancelled. The following day, the alarm buzzed at 3:30am. The loss of their expensive hotel room at The Scotsman in Edinburgh hurt the old man as he grunted and struggled to get up from the lousy bed at the airport hotel.

“Be stoic,” Eva said later at the airport when told of his grumblings. Her sister agreed. It was easy for them to be accepting of their circumstances, since they didn’t pay for the hotel room. The old man clearly wasn’t graced with wisdom and contentment that Tan Dun had tried to impart to him in Rome. He seemed to have aged a lot faster; the deeper and darker wrinkles may have given him more character but the aggressive growth of his hideous pot-belly was a huge price being paid for the indulgences of the past three weeks.

Edinburgh was grey and wet and very young. Compared to Rome, many places on earth will feel very young. Even Edinburgh Castle looked young and uninteresting to the old man despite it being built in the 11th century. The old man’s Mrs needed a whole day to recover from their ordeal in Heathrow so it was left to Eva to decide the itinerary for their first day in Scotland. Eva wanted to walk the steps of queens and kings of Scotland, so they stopped by the castle after a breakfast of haggis and eggs.

Tracing the steps of kings and queens in Edinburgh

By late afternoon, the Mrs had fully recharged and shaken off the flu (or was it Covid?) that the taxi driver in Rome had shared with them on their way to the airport. She wasn’t going to miss the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) concert that night at Usher Hall. It was a stupendous performance by the soloist, cellist Pei Jee Ng. He gave a tremendous interpretation of Shostakovich’s cello concerto No.1. The poignant 2nd mvt was a real treat followed by a cadenza that was wonderfully executed, filled with anguish and despair that painted a dark picture of Stalin’s iron grip on Soviet Russia. Pei Jee Ng made them cry. The old man was rubbing his chest in obvious physical discomfort during the cadenza. Music indeed is the most powerful art form; musical notes on pages of paper, performed well, could affect a listener physically, spiritually and emotionally.

The RSNO concert was followed by a post-concert drink for VIPs and orchestra donors. Somehow, Eva lost her way and walked into the Intermezzo Room. She was welcomed by the CEO of the orchestra who asked her travelling companions to join them for champagne. The old man was feted like a celebrity; people had assumed he was related to the soloist.

“Never mind, just smile and enjoy being in the limelight,” he told his Mrs.

When the pleasant chit-chats and champagne had dried up, the group was invited to the following night’s concert in Glasgow.

“Sure! We will see you there!”

Glasgow was a beautiful city. Bigger and more metropolitan than Adelaide and as vibrant if not more charming than Melbourne, it was the perfect city to end their holiday. A sumptuous Thai lunch at the Chao Phraya and a light pho dinner that turned into a big meal at Little Vietnam due to their generosity was a satisfying first taste of a fine day in Glasgow. Yes, there was the highlight to come! Another tremendous performance by the soloist and the orchestra followed by more free-flowing wine and champagne at the Intermezzo Room.

Bravo! Pei Jee Ng. What a scintillating performance!

https://bachtrack.com/review-pei-jee-ng-sondergard-royal-scottish-national-edinburgh-december-2023

https://www.edinburghmusicreview.com/reviews/scheherazade-rsno-23

RSNO / Søndergård

They had a selfie with the soloist Pei Jee Ng and Betsy Taylor, principal cellist of the RSNO for that concert.

With a day to kill, Eva led the group into an antique shop the next morning. The store was packed like a bric-a-brac store, with hardly any space to walk straight and no room to walk tall and upright. A stack of old books fell off their shelves right in front of the old man as his eyes were scanning for their titles.

“It wasn’t me!” he shouted defensively.

“Aye, tae right, it wasn’t yoo, naw worries,” said the old antique-looking store owner, in heavy Lowlands accent.

“She just walked through the wall agine, she’s just showin’ awff,” he said casually, and clicked his tongue.

By ‘she’, he meant the old postmaster’s wife who died a long time ago.

“Strewth, there used to be a doorway where the wall is noe,” he explained, as if that was an adequate explanation.

Glasgow was losing its youth by the day. Ghosts have a tendency to make a place feel old and ancient. So, they had a sudden impulse to leave the street with the old shops.

“I ain’t goin’ tae the shoaps o’er aire,” the old man said, practising his Scottish accent.

Eva enjoyed their walk in the park. The white carpet of snow was a bonus.

On the penultimate day of their four-week European holiday, the group chanced upon some fantastic local oysters and smoked salmon in Loch Fyne.

“Oh, they are so fine,” the old man said.

“The finest!” Eva chimed in.

It had to be said. Barra Island scallops and Loch Fyne salmon were discoveries that were as pleasing as all the history they learned in Italy. They had visited the beautiful places they wanted to see, such as Lake Como, Bologna and the Tuscan towns of Siena and Montepulciano. They had tasted real Italian food and real gelato from Milan to Napoli and from Bologna to Roma. They had viewed from up close famous artworks such as The Last Supper and marvel at marble sculptures such as Michelangelo’s David and Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte but perhaps the finest discovery of all was the awesome landscapes that only nature can create, in Loch Fyne and its surroundings.

“It’s more beautiful than Lake Como and New Zealand’s Queenstown,” the Mrs decided verbally.

Loch Fyne, so fine indeed.

A Merchant in Venice

The boatman declined to sing a love song despite being offered more money for the gondola ride. So, the old man hummed the first tune that came into his mind. He hummed in a sonorous tone and with much emotions the romantic melody of Oh Sole Mio, because he didn’t know the Italian lyrics and didn’t know what the song was about.

But there’s no other sun
More beautiful
My sun
Is upon your face
The sun, my sun,
Is upon your face.

The sun was indeed caressing her face. Eva looked sweetly into James’ eyes and tenderly touched his face as if to check that he wasn’t just in her dream but real and strong, the masculine and heroic head of their family. The gondola ride was less romantic than she had imagined; the old man and his Mrs should not have boarded with them. A gondola shouldn’t be crammed with four people, least of all two old people who looked odd and unbalanced and liable to capsize the boat at any moment.

“Say baciami to him,” the old man said to Eva, as he snapped a few photos of her and her hero.

Tell him he’s your hero, your idol, your everything. “Kiss me. Oh, kiss me,” she implored.

The late afternoon sun bathed on them now. The old man looked at James who was tilting his head oddly, quite clearly unlike a real James Bond. Bond would never look clownish but James seemed shy and awkward to be kissed by Eva.

James Bond and Eva Green, evergreen in Venice

A retired merchant holidaying in Venice, James had allowed for no expenses to be spared. Their suites at Belleview@Canoletta Suites overlooked St Mark’s Square. The suite on the highest level, the fifth floor, had a sauna and the other, one level below, had a jacuzzi and a huge balcony that Eva and her sister practised their royal wave to the ordinary people down below.

James generously made himself responsible for all expenses during their three-week Italian holiday, including that for the old man and his Mrs. The exact opposite character of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, there was no demand for a “pound of flesh” nor was there any requirement exacted on the old man to pay for taxi fares or gratuities for the tour guides. Flights were on business class and train rides were either in club or executive coaches and boat rides were private.

A private boat ride to Venice

St Mark’s Cathedral, literally just a stone’s throw from the old man’s balcony.

“Exacto! Please let me pay for everything-ah,” he insisted, adopting the accent of their Italian tour guide.

“Perfecto! Let me look after the bill,” he told the barman.

“Free Prosecco for you and your friends today,” the barman replied.

The old man wondered if Shakespeare was describing the antisemitism sentiments of Antonio, the Venetian merchant, against Shylock the Jew in the late 16th century in The Merchant of Venice. Sadly today, the Zionist state of Israel is invoking the claim of antisemitism on anyone who is voicing their opposition to the genocide happening in Gaza. Islamophobia, Russophobia or Sinophobia does not have much impact on the public’s abhorrence of unfair treatment to the people concerned but somehow a claim of antisemitism is politically powerful to the claimant and damaging to the accused.

“Senile is the root word for senators,” the tour guide said. Venice was a maritime powerhouse for about four hundred years up to the 14th century. The seat of power laid in Venice before the Renaissance. The senators were not elected by the people but appointed by those in power. They were old men who didn’t have much time left on earth and therefore did not need to be elected for multiple terms. Perhaps the American system of electing a senile Joe Biden would not be so strange to a Venetian today.

James almost disembarked at the wrong train station on the mainland instead of Venice Santa Lucia. It would have been another debacle just like the one in Como where the old man’s Mrs had her nightmarish incident of being the only one stranded on the wrong train station. Eva didn’t ever raise her voice at James who seemed foggy with Covid. She merely placed her hand on his lap to tell him to remain seated. But, he wasn’t as fogged up as the old man who hailed a car marked ‘carabinieri’ to stop in Napoli.

“It’s not a cab,” James shouted.

A carabinieri isn’t a cab!

James left Venice a day earlier than the others. He had a mission to attend to, somewhere in Asia. The old man sighed with relief upon the news. Now he could go back to his regime of intermittent fasting and restricted calorie control. When James was around, he made sure they ate well, too well. His taste buds went haywire from Covid in Naples and Florence. Suddenly, he had an affinity for McDonald’s and Chinese food. But the Chinese were mainly from Wenzhou. Their dishes weren’t to his liking either. Everything was either too salty or too bland. The virus transformed him into a Goldilocks.

The old man particularly liked to try the local favourites wherever they went. In Bologna, they tried Bolognese lasagne. In Venice, they went for spaghetti in squid ink and pasta vongole. But it wasn’t yet time for the dolce! Si, no desserts until the secondi is polished off with bread. One lobster? No, make it two. T-bone steak must be ordered by the kilogram. After that, it’s dolce time. Eva did not deviate from panna cotta everywhere she dined. The panna cotta was simply perfecto for her. Eva turned out to be a Goldilocks too, but the virus was not responsible for that. She loved her sweets but not too sweet and not too rich, not too cold and not too hot.

“The limoncello is on the house, sir.” the waiter said to James, who was so pleased with the service. It was to cost him a great deal more, so impressed was he with the ristorante. He tipped them more than the limoncello would have cost him. Much more! But, James had the style and class of a Bond.

They needed a bigger table everywhere they dined!

But, the old man wasn’t at all surprised. He half expected a freebie everywhere he went, such lofty expectations he had. In Rome, they were offered free Prosecco, by the man outside the restaurant whose job was to encourage passers-by to go in. Rome. Ancient, noisy, crowded, chaotic. The travellers had their first traffic accident in Italy as they approached Rome from the airport. One man decided to walk straight into the side door of the Mercedes van they were in as the taxi crossed a major intersection. The man remarkably dusted himself as he picked himself up from the road, grabbed his smashed glasses, and limped to the window of the car to apologise to the old man. Hand signals conveyed clearly what words couldn’t.

They say all roads lead to Rome but no one told the old man all roads to Rome were jammed with tourists and traffic and peppered with eardrum-breaking screeching a from wailing ambulances and loud unending sirens from the polizia escorts that flanked fleets of black limousines rushing everywhere and going nowhere it seemed.

“Alora!” Magdalena greeted them in Roma with her favourite sentence opener. She was the one who taught the old man how to tell if a marble statue was drunk. From Roman times to the Renaissance and from Mannerism to Gothic, smiling statues depicted people imbued with wine.

“Was Mona Lisa drunk too?” The old man asked Magdalena.

The old man posed with a smile after a hearty serve of squid-ink spaghetti. He would be considered drunk a few centuries ago.

He said he lost his jacket on the flight from Venice to Rome. Could he have left it with David instead?

Take a Look-ah at Lucca

Their tour guide, Francesco Conforti, looked imperial like a Roman emperor as he sat behind the wheel of his gleaming black Mercedes V-class van. The warm golden rays of the setting Tuscan sun caressed his golden curly locks as he said to the old man and his travelling companions, “Consider that you like-ah Siena so much-ah, you must take a look-ah at Lucca tomorrow, after you visit-ah Pisa.”

Francesco, suave and tall, much taller than any of the four passengers in his van, showed a muscular and towering frame, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David in Academia Gallery, an impressive physique his thick fleecy jacket failed to hide. Francesco towered over ‘James Bond’ who was looking more worse for wear than when he was in Naples. No matter that he appeared less suave in Firenze, he and ‘Eva Green’ still remained the classy couple in the group.

Michelangelo’s David, in all his glory

The demure ‘Eva’ with her sweet smiles and dazzling big eyes that out-dazzled even her big diamond ring, somehow oozed spades of class and sophistication despite appearing in all their holiday photos in the same black outfit. A very light traveller, she didn’t have to ponder on what to wear each day. They seemed to have fallen in love again, expectedly so, one may add, since under the Tuscan sun, not only do the Sangiovese vines, wheat and spelt spring out from the undulating terrain giving the land its stunning colours that change with every changing season, love springs eternal too for the couple.

“What’s the weather forecast for today?” the old man asked Francesco.

“You will see!” Francesco replied.

The Italian, who the old man’s Mrs said should be an actor, had the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius and the looks of Adonis. Never flustered by erratic drivers, he would wonder out loudly what was inside the mind of an errant driver.

“Don’t they know? Step by step-ah, everyone gets to where they need-ah to be,” he said wisely.

“In Italy, you drive by looking-ah at the other driver’s eyes-ah,” he added.

“To be hon-nest, traffic lights-ah aren’t common-ah because red-ah, green-ah, amber-ah is up to the driver’s imagination-ah,” he explained.

“Some drivers-ah don’t look at you,” he explained.

“They just go. You don’t exist-ah!”

At Siena, it became clear ‘James’ had lost the spring in his steps and the air of debonair in his normally charismatic mannerisms. The sore throat he was complaining about travelled with him all the way from Naples. He struggled with his luggage quite unlike a double-oh agent, oh, so clumsy he had become, tripping himself with a lazy right foot as he checked out of Naples’ Hotel Excelsior. Since even Sorrento didn’t appeal to him, it was understandable that he said all the places from Posillipo to Vomero were just eyesores.

His enthusiasm for the high life sparked briefly as they checked into Hotel Marina Riviera in Amalfi Coast as was his keen interest at how the rich people lived in Herculaneum. There, the ancient Romans showed how splendid life was even before Christ arrived on earth. Unlike Pompeii not so far away, Herculaneum was an ancient resort town, an idyllic wellness centre where the wealthy could simply adopt the ‘otium romanum’ way of life, a contemplative lifestyle of leisure and idleness to recharge oneself and pursue one’s interests such as philosophy or seek wisdom or simply lead an aristocratic culture in the countryside. Before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., the ancient people of Rome already knew how to enjoy the therapeutic benefits of thermal baths and spas in the seaside resort. There were separate spa centres for men and women and the earliest fast-food stores in the world were also discovered buried deep in volcanic mud.

A fast-food joint in Herculaneum pre-79 A.D. The man behind the counter looked ancient too.

‘James’ did not enjoy the Catacombs of San Gennaro. Burial sites for the religious followers of St John did not impress him. Let the dead rest in peace was what he said to the old man, a travelling companion in his party. He swore he could still smell death in the dark limestone caves deep underground.

Catacombs of San Gennaro

Massa, their black guide from the Ivory Coast who blended too well in the dark tombs, said, “Please do not dilly-dally here. You wouldn’t like to spend the night here by yourself.” Before he had finished his sentence, ‘James’ belied his physical condition and was the first to get back out into the light.

In the Amalfi Coast, The Madonna was seen holding a bouquet of flowers looking out for travellers in the sea.

At the Grand Hotel Continental in Siena, ‘James’ was no longer just complaining about his sore throat. His coughing was gaining frequency and volume, proving Einstein’s E=mc², the more he coughed, the more energy he expended. He felt so unwell, he had the urge to call for a doctor to visit him at the hotel on the following morning. Luckily, he didn’t or the doctor would have shown him two pink stripes on the testing kit, proving that Covid was not a myth and he would have had to isolate himself in the hotel.

But, what if the authorities had designed a new antigen test kit to test positive for any type of phlegm in one’s throat in order to sell more mRNA vaccines?

He failed to restrain his urge though in Firenze – a trait all James Bonds possess; but his urge wasn’t for some hot looking chick. The white stuff in his throat got the better of him, so he insisted that a doctor called on him at the plush Golden Tower and Spa Hotel. The hotel staff in Firenze discreetly suggested to ‘James’ that he masked up like Zorro, once the doctor confirmed he had Covid. It suited ‘James’ fine, since the hotel offered him free room service for the rest of his stay there including a complimentary bottle of Spumante which enhanced his role as double-oh seven. Oh, it even sparkled his mood. The white mask did cramp his style as no James Bond, living or dead was ever seen wearing one. Everywhere he went, ‘James’ stood out, not because of his handsome looks or his sophisticated sense of dressing but because the white accessory covering his face made him highly visible.

“The duomo is so close you can touch it,” said the hotel receptionist

He missed out on their visit to the Florentine luthiers, the three generations that make up the Vettori family. The old man was very keen to meet the patriarch, Paolo Vettori, whom he incredulously succeeded in getting him to commission a copy of Guaneri del Gesu’s Ole Bull violin of 1744. The sons, Dario and Lapo, generously gave a masterclass of violin-making that took up more than two hours of their time. Later, the Vettori family threw a dinner party to welcome the visitors as family members rather than as friends, such was the amazing warmth of the Vettori clan. Grazie millie!

With Dario, Paolo and Lapo Vettori

Dinner with the Vettori family. What a privilege!

The following morning, the travellers arrived in Siena. “It’s my most favourite town in Tuscany,” the old man announced to no one in particular.

He forgot no one asked and no one cared what his favourite things in life were. ‘Eva’ said she would name her next child Siena, briefly forgetting how brief a woman’s fertility was. The old man’s Mrs was the most practical. Beauty does not rank much, if at all.

“It’s a beautiful place, but the paths are too up and down, too steep for old people,” she said.

If I had a daughter, I’d name her Siena just like beautiful Siena!

In Siena their walking tour included Piazza del Campo, Tower of Mangia, Gaia Fountain and the Duomo. Every town and every city had a duomo. Duomo here, duomo there and more duomos everywhere soon confused them about where they were. Monteriggioni was a small town so small they were glad it only had a chiesa (church) but no duomo (cathedral). The old man even discovered the reason why they built baptisteries.

From Montepulciano to Montalcino, the travelling party lacked the energy and enthusiasm that they brought with them to Italy. The missing piece that spoilt their mood affected them as much as discovering a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Their energy was sapped by the lack of energy from ‘James’. He was quiet during lunch and he was absent during the wine tasting where ‘Eva’ enjoyed the Brunello di Montalcino. Lunch was a sumptuous affair at San Gimignano, at a farm close to the village with wine tastings but ‘James’ hardly had a bite of anything. The Covid patient had lost all sense of taste and was grumpy at everything that was served at the table.

A renewed vow at Pienza

The following day, the group took up Francesco’s suggestion and toured Lucca after their morning visit to Pisa. In 1506, the port city of Pisa fell to Florence but it remains famous today because of its leaning tower. The old man was reacquainted with Galileo Galilei, who was born in Pisa. It was in the cathedral there that a young Galileo observed the effects of the pendulum from a chandelier that swung from the leaning Duomo. Later, he was to earn the wrath of the church when he supported the Copernican assertion that it was the earth that evolves around the sun and not the other way, wrongly and stubbornly championed by the Catholic Church for a further 359 years before the Pope finally apologised to Galileo! To claim that the earth was not the centre of the universe was a heresy punishable by death and Galileo was ex-communicated for having that view. Under house arrest for the rest of his life, it was said that Venice came to his rescue and his head remained intact.

The chandelier in the Duomo gave a eureka moment to Galileo Galilei.

At Lucca, the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini, when Francesco was asked if he could sing any of the arias made famous by Pavarotti, he replied,” I sing like a cat crushed by a door!

“Puccini, a genius at writing operas but so arrogant,” Anna, the tour guide said.

“Take a last look-ah at Lucca,” Francesco said to his passengers as he sped towards Florence. Of all the places they had visited in Italy, nothing can beat the birthplace of the Renaissance. Finally, after over 900 years of the Dark Ages, the rebirth of great classical antiquity, arts, architecture and science took place right there in Firenze. The Medici way of banking and accounting were introduced during this period also. That was, of course, a misinformed historical report about the Renaissance. The old man was ill-informed to believe the Dark Ages lasted nine hundred years after the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century.

He only realised that upon his arrival at Venice. There, he was amazed at the architecture, science and art being practised in the so-called Middle Ages in the great Venetian city. A treasure trove of mosaic art can be readily found in the St Mark’s Cathedral and in the Doges Palace. The splendour of art incorporating gold, precious stones and mosaic tiles used to show their wealth and power was simple mind-blowing! Dark Ages may be best to describe Europe at the time but Venice was a flourishing city where the bankers and merchants were not shy to flaunt their wealth.

St Mark’s Cathedral, built in the “Dark Ages”.