It’s tee time on the golf course

By SAMANTHA ELLEY

It is that time of year again where golfers dust off big Bertha, collect their woods and try to remember where they left that packet of tees.

The Mid Richmond Education Fund Charity

3 Person Ambrose Golf Day is on again this Sunday May 7th, 2023.

For $30 per person you can enjoy a hot breakfast and lunch, a day of golf with friends and the chance to win some great prizes.

On top of all that you can be happy in the knowledge that you are helping young people to further their careers and reach their dream goals. Breakfast is at 9.30am with a shotgun start at 10.30am.

Call the Evans HeadWoodburn Golf Club to register your team on 6682 2385.

I think any of us who have been working these past 14 months to get our homes fixed after the floods have encountered delays with tradespeople.

It is incredibly frustrating when you know it’s going to take longer to get things done.

There is a difference, however, when a tradesperson manages your expectations. My painter and my electrician have both told me they aren’t available until such and such time.

Because they have been honest with me, I can accept the delay as I know I won’t see them until then.

In fact, the electrician told me he couldn’t get to see us until after Anzac Day and he actually got here a week earlier.

Made me a very happy customer.

There are, however, those tradies that need to learn how to handle their customers.

I have a large company who has been doing some internal work for us, and due to a mistake they have made, we haven’t had all of it completed.

After many phone calls they have promised to get in touch, ‘tomorrow at 8.30am’, or ‘in the next 20 minutes after I’ve checked where the order is at’.

Nothing.

I have sent an official complaint but don’t really expect too much. This is a company whose phones seem to disconnect at times with no one answering them. Then there is also the problem of not knowing who can take care of the work you need done.

I’ve mentioned before that our pool needs to be either torn down or rusted panels replaced to fix it.

I have put a call out a few times to different trades, but it is not really the biggest priority.

Never mind, we plod along and are still very thankful that we have been able to live in our home since last September, regardless of all the fixing going on around us. Little steps.

Till

Over25-years ago I took a subject at uni (back when earning a degree had nothing to do with online research and everything to do with hitting the books) but the subject was called Death and Culture; and it blew my mind in terms of how death was considered, albeit celebrated and dealt with so differently throughout the world.

In western culture, the dreaded word death, let alone the actual phenomenon itself, is overwhelmingly avoided – to the point of being viewed as the ultimate of taboos. And yet it is something that none of us will avoid at some point in our lives. Relatedly, Octavio Paz once said, “Fear makes us turn our backs on death, and by refusing to contemplate it we shut ourselves off from life, which is a totality that includes it.”

Without being morbid or intending to be anything but factual, apparently every minute 110 people die throughout the world (as a result of many things), but it equates to roughly 60 million deaths per year. To say we are never far from the reaches of death is not an understatement, nor is it an overly alarmist thing to proclaim. In some cultures, it is even considered the most natural and nonthreatening of notions.

As such, India’s greatest cultural figure, and the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore once confided, “Death’s stamp gives value to the coin of life; making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious.”

Which is one of the most