Not home yet?

Staying in Toowoomba to have a couple of nights with my little girl who is at boarding school here in her first year, as Harriet & I have not seen much of each other over the last four months.

Pec & I didn?t have long in the Sydney airport to wait around as our connector to Brisbane was due to fly out about twenty minutes after we got through customs (which was ?hitch? free) and made our way to the right gate.

This could have been my last flight for quite a while, and at number 35 over the previous 10 months I won?t be planning on going anywhere till at least the next Nuffield conference in April ?09.

It was fantastic to walk off the plane in Brisbane & out the gate to see Cathy and Harriet waiting there for me. Especially as my little girl isn?t so little anymore and almost as big as her mum?.not that that?s so big!

Great to be back onto Australian soil once more and really looking to get back out to home turf at Bokhara Plains tomorrow to check out how Cathy?s management has handled the situation. Probably better than me, & as soon as I started to think about what was happening out there I got a call from Leah to tell me that the pump at the Swag Rooms had run dry and people were without a shower?..Not a lot I could do from 900 klms away as I could barely remember how the ridiculously complex water & pump set up is configured. However, Leah had it under control, turning the pump off and sending all the guests to another area of our setup to where there was water. Also thankfully I could get my brother to go across from Carcool to change pipes over for me & get the shower block operational again.

With five separate electric high pressure water pumps, a back up over head tank & three separate sources of water that are all interconnected it was always a better option to get him just to fix the one not working & leave the confusing taps alone.

It?s not just the great hospitality & Nuffield (especially my sponsors ?Landmark?) that I have to be thankful for after this trip, as plenty of others have also been a terrific help in stepping up to the plate for me in my absence.

Just got up here again?.at 3.30am, after laying in bed wide awake for about an hour with my head whirling around and too many thoughts due to the excitement of getting back home, and the effects of jet lag which always seems to be worse flying from West to East. I felt really tired yesterday even though the flight out from Jo-Burg to Sydney was one of the only ones that I managed to get any sleep on at all, in all my travels.

Boy, hasn?t the world?s share markets been a volatile place to be over the last six months & particularly in this previous week. I?ve been expecting a correction of some magnitude now for over four years, so I?ve been a little out in my timing you could say, although the dramatic rise of that period has been more than wiped out for a lot of stocks. I don?t want to seem pessimistic or some sort of ?doomsayer? but I feel very nervous about world events as they currently evolve and the latest round of ?heroic & dramatic decisions? by various political leaders of all persuasions to supposedly address the situation is the biggest ?band aid? to fix a hemorrhage ever seen. The huge disparity between ?paper money? & true wealth based on the use of natural resources & services such as labour is quite alarming. When governments can print billions to feed into greedy banks that have no social or moral accountability and other governments can let go of all previous claims of fiscal responsibility (and concerns of interest rate hikes) to generate more spending for the ?God of Consumerism? than I get very nervous indeed. It seems we have a world financial system that is based purely on the continued, consistent exponential growth for western economies, at the expense of sustainability & equality inside a reality that has proven throughout history that in nature exponential growth eventually leads to vicious corrections. Paper money, originally developed as an easier & reliable way to extend the barter system and linked directly to real wealth such as gold, is now an entity in itself, based on nothing more than confidence, & capable of becoming absolutely worthless.

Could the Zimbabwe example be a lesson for this ?credit crazy? world??

Hmmm, getting a bit deep here early in the morning & no wonder I can?t sleep! The thought of spending more than we?ve earned over the last few years (for business investment & drought proofing reasons) has me continually questioning the wisdom of that strategy as current events unfold.

As always I guess, whatever happens will create plenty of pain for some??and fantastic opportunities for others that are on the look out.