Test Pattern

In days of old, when there wasn't much to show us on the tele, they'd show a test pattern and play endless loops of Richard Clayderman music which made one feel for all the world as though one's living room had somehow become an elevator.

Summer radio on the ABC is a bit like that, endless repeats of interviews held during the year, music that was never quite in vogue but repeated for good measure anyway yet I dare not find another station for fear that I would be deserting an old friend very much in need of company. Occasionally something interesting and new and fresh arrives for my listening pleasure, but it always coincides with the exact point in time when some massively noisy machine needs using or I am called away beyond listening range and therefore the good bits always go unheard.

The projects are something of a test pattern themselves, perpetually comprising little sticks that never actually move or multiply.  No matter how much work goes on, they never seem to form any completed or useful object.

Even the frangipani outside the workshop seems to run in sort of half-cycles, never quite deciduous in our presence, always flowering, yet never in full bloom.   

Perhaps we are part of a test pattern called life.

Or maybe the Matrix is real!