The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

  Our town of Eagle Bay in the southwest corner of WA can get pretty crowded with blow-ins from the big city up north, so we, in our desperate drive to be able to surf uncrowded waves, have cultivated the art of surfing at night.    Preferably by the light of the moon.   The moon comes up about 45 minutes later every day, so that a half moon, a gibbous moon, appears around lunch time and stays in the night sky for the first part of the night, setting around midnight, leaving the second half of the night moonless and dark. The moon times shift through the cycle until eventually the full moon comes up when the sun goes down. Therefore, by the same token, the moon goes down when the sun comes up the next day. If you time it right you get an abundant amount of light between the moon and the stars, and when the surf is cranking it is pure magic.    If you time it wrong you don’t.    Not satisfied with merely surfing by moonlight, we thought we’...

We staggered out of the surf, frozen near-solid, clutching our boards under stiff arms. As we walked cross the wet sand flats of the low tide a group of three people passed down the beach in front of us, heading the other way. What we had initially taken for boards turned out to be flattened cardboard from boxes they were clutching under their arms. They also appeared to be carrying items implying an intention to party, like bottles of booze. So, not surfers then.    When we made it back to the car park the conversation turned to the enigmatic beach walkers. One of our mates had talked to them. It turned out they were heading down to have a fire on the beach, hence the cardboard. When he told them that wasn’t allowed on this particular stretch of beach, owing to its high visitation and useage, and the issues associated with, for instance, kids walking barefoot over abandoned smouldering coals and getting third degree burns, as has happened in the past, they shrugged it off, ...

In the mythology of the Scandinavian countries, and more specifically that associated with the ever-popular Viking era, people commonly believed that, provided they died on the battlefield, preferably with sword in hand, and, potentially, with an adversary’s ear between their teeth, they would receive a hero’s welcome into the afterlife. Valhalla, where, for ever after, they would sit at a banquet and feast, quaff, wench, fight, and, at a stretch, barf their brains out. Only, presumably, to wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands and start all over again. What a life. Or, rather, what a death. It is obvious that, in the great scheme of things, where the development of religion and philosophy was concerned, wishful thinking played absolutely no role at all.    In order to make it to that afterlife, the fallen fighters would be picked up from the battlefield by Valkyries, great big strapping voluptuous women riding flying horses, who would then whisk them away, while s...

I went to high school at the age of eleven. I had long hair, past my shoulders, because I was Feral. I enjoyed being feral.    The school had a problem with that. I found out on Day One that Being Feral was strongly disapproved of and severely frowned upon. To my everlasting surprise this was not only the case with The Management, of whom these things could potentially be expected, because it was virtually in their job description (“thou must hate kids”), but, almost even more so, with what can only be called, for want of a better word , my “fellow students”. If Frodo had had a fellowship like that he never would have gotten out of The Shire, and Sauron would be ruling the entire world from Mordor as we speak.    Everywhere I went the other kids were hissing at me, spitting and slurring insults and abuse: “feral”. That was a strange one, because I thought that was a compliment. “hippy” and “scum” were two other ones. Sometimes, in accidental fits of soaring insp...