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“What’s that?” I asked.

You said: “I went to a writers’ camp. It’s the booklet we made.”

Despite priding myself on my academic ability, and always looking for opportunities to prove it, I’d never heard of such an activity.

“Som-nam-bu-lists,” I read.

“That’s what we called ourselves. Sleep walkers.”

The word was new to me. Who were these kids that identified themselves by words I didn’t even know?

Then you told me about the story you’d written at the camp.

It concerned a missing person. In the end, whoever was searching for them found only traces of a strange flour around a huge old millstone.

The subtlety and sophistication boggled my mind.

I didn’t tell you how impressed I was. I probably just said, “Cool.”

And now I can’t tell you, because you’ve dropped off the radar again.

Step safely, sleep walker. Return with more tales from writers’ camp to dumbfound your old friend.

Magnification

The convex lenses we term magnifying glasses have been around since truly ancient times. They allow us to view items enlarged and to start fires by focusing sunlight on a point on combustible material.

This is the 3000-year-old rock-crystal Nimrud Lens, from an Assyrian palace dug up in Iraq.

The first m/g I owned as a child was small and made entirely of clear plastic. It came with either a stamp-collecting kit or a Bug Catcher toy. I do not remember which one.

Discovering I could use it to burn a hole in a dry brown leaf was an astounding scientific breakthrough. But I never used it to fry unsuspecting ants. Nor did I ever hit them with a cricket bat, as depicted in the background of a scene in "Reckless Kelly", a 1993 Aussie comedy on which my mate DB was an extra.

I was 20 when that movie dropped. Years earlier, though, another friend, DP, had shown me how a magnifying glass could add “battle damage” to action figures. He liked to have two copies of the same figurine, and swap in the scorched version after the character lost a gunfight.

He also crucified an Action Man high on a tree in his backyard.

Seeing an m/g makes me think of Sherlock Holmes and, by extension, a further image from my youth – the canine mascot of the MS Read-A-Thon, attempting to hunt down a cure for multiple sclerosis.

These days, it has also become the universal symbol for a computer/internet search of some description. The icon isn’t usually red, but I just happen to like this graphic. Sue me.

There’s a rumour that men with grey creeping into their goatees now need to employ a magnifying glass when reading magazine articles of a certain font size. To study the finer points of an insect or stamp, the sad bastards would probably require a microscope.

Snakes, rodents and alien technology

When I was a lad, the three aspects of popular culture that mattered most to me were, in reverse order of importance: Atari, "Star Wars" and BMX.

I rode a Cobra, a brand manufactured by the Toowoomba Bicycle Company. Here's me on my bike when I was 7 or 8. Pretty sure that was the Christmas morning when I got it.

I never thought much about the name at the time, although because I was the only kid within a few blocks who rode one (there were numerous BMX brands), it did lead to peeps calling me "Cobra" and "Cob".

In hindsight, the serpentine mascot was clearly the TBC positioning itself as an Australian alternative to top US brand Mongoose.

But don't mongeese snack on cobras? According to Wikipedia, infrequently. "The Indian gray mongoose and others are well known for their ability to fight and kill venomous snakes... However, they typically avoid the cobra and have no particular affinity for consuming its meat."

In the end, Cobra didn't survive, while Mongoose did. Today, they produce a range of modern BMXes (that I dislike), and recently released a sweet replica of Max's bike from "Stranger Things". A shop a short car trip away claims to have some of those in stock. It's tempting.

Of course, if I could hang any BMX on the wall to admire and fill me with nostalgia, there'd be no competition -

Notes:
1. Mongeese are rodent-like but not actually rodents, so my blog-entry title is technically incorrect. Yay!
2. Those badges aren't a fair comparison as the Mongoose example is decades newer. Best Cobra badge I could find, soz.
3. I made a million changes to that bike over the years - enough for a far longer post. Maybe one day :-)