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12 November 2020

Happiness is a red plastic chair


Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website

 

Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.

 

... because, Roy, an electrical engineer, forgot to plug it in!
Photo courtesy of Roy Goldsworthy, now residing in Malaysia

 

It was on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. Almost fifty years later, I put this old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Please put me out of my misery!)

Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion), I sit on it often and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river.

 

 

These days, happiness is a bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty!

 

P.S. A certain expat, originally from Sunshine Vic. but now residing in Trump's America (and officially designated on the internet as a Republican voter), emailed this photo of himself and three fellow-donga dwellers (presumably not all in the same donga) at Camp 6 in Loloho, suggesting that happiness is FOUR red plastic chairs.