We stand in the shade and smoke, because no one told us we could sit.    Exhausted Duffy comes plodding back and leans on my shoulder.
    “Arrrr, he’s a bastard of a man.”
    “Keep your voice down, he’ll hear you.”
    “Alright, three ranks out on the road. Let’s go. MOVE! “
    He is endless, just endless.
    Down to the obstacle course you run, and straight into it. Duffy leads off, you are following. It is a race against time.
    There are two obstacle courses at Canungra; this one is the individual one and the last man loses his leave time. The other is a team course, where at least three men are needed to co-operate to get them all over each obstacle. But here we are on the one man course, and running for our very sanity.

Ivan Southall is noted as a writer of books for the teenage market, especially his Simon Black series in which I have never indulged, but it was not always so. In the WWII, he flew Sunderland Flying Boats with an Australian unit, doing rescues and hunting U-boats over the Atlantic, and he wrote a terrific book of his experiences called They Shall Not Pass Unseen. At least, I thought it was terrific, although you have to allow for the fact that I have always been fascinated by these graceful hybrid machines. The book seems to have dropped almost out of existence, never reprinted, no second-hand copies to be had anywhere, but I have a fine copy with many photographs and so if everyone else has forgotten it, bad luck.
    For me, the best part of reading it was that at the rear there were ten pages listing the missions, the consequences and the names of the crew on each. Sunderlands lost, or; U-boats sunk, or: destroyers directed to survivors of M/46 (whatever that was). You could trace the history of each crew-member as you read it, including Southall, I.F. Most of them, of course, end up dead in the drink. Look, I would have loved it for the picture of the Sutherland on the cover, but I will be careful not to reread it again, just in case. I have enough shattered illusions for one lifetime.

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The Gordons—Mildred Gordon and Gordon Gordon (two of them, not three) held the FBI as sacred and wrote flag-wavers in their cause. Power Play speculates that a fictional character plainly based on J Edgar Hoover dies and a power struggle follows to prevent the agency from falling into evil and perverse hands. A serious thriller in its time, it is now a pathetic parody. I remember at the time that I smelled a rat. No organisation could be as honest and saintly as the FBI is presented here. This might be the silliest book in my collection.
    But they also wrote the rather charming Disney movie That Darn Cat about DC, a mischievious cat that foils a gang of thieves. The film was mostly notable for the fashion police complaining about Hayley Mills’ double chin, which spun the poor girl onto anorexic diets for the rest of her life.