It's been long time since I posted here. My apologies, dear reader; I ran out of time, energy and inspiration for a while.

Not too much is the old family motto for the McKinlays.

I like Libenter excipe for my own motto. It's from the Prologue of the Rule of St Benedict and means "Freely receive".

I've used it as the name of my new site.

"Here is liberty, all I have to do is be quiet, sit still." — Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain. (1955), p. 20.

The 90th Birthday of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh was celebrated recently. He and HM the Queen are rightly applauded for their life-long work and service.

Yes, these folks are no longer young. But to me, their lives of activity and work are examples of what could and should be normal.

By all accounts, the Queen and her husband eat and drink well but in moderation. They exercise, and don't smoke. They have good health care and housing.

With a determination to be active and engaged with the world around us, most of us who enjoy reasonable circumstances can look forward to long and productive life.

New Yorkers are a driven, over-busy people, opines the New York Times ("Editorial: On the Art of Puttering", 24 Jun 11). So too are Canberrans.

But every now and then there comes a day for puttering. You can't put it in your book ahead of time because who knows when it will come? No one intends to putter. You simply discover, in a brief moment of self-awareness, that you have been puttering, or, as the English [and Australians] would say, pottering. [. . .] You move through the morning with a calm, oblivious focus, taking on tasks — incidental ones — in the order they present themselves, which is to say no order at all. Puttering is small-scale, stream-of-consciousness problem-solving. It is setting sail on a sea of random course changes. The day passes, and you have long since forgotten what you were looking for — or that you were looking for anything at all. You feel as though you've accomplished a lot, though you have no idea what. It has been a holiday from purpose.

On 28 April 1986, the Soviet Union announced in a brief statement that there had been an accident at a place called Chernobyl in the nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. This first ever official disclosure of a nuclear accident ever by the Soviet Union, came hard on the heels of reports by Scandanavian countries of abnormally high radioactivity levels.

That was just 33 days after I had moved from Melbourne to be the science specialist librarian in the Australian Parliamentary Library in Canberra.

Many people were worried. MPs and Senators needed to know what was happening. So my new job began in earnest. We answered many questions and rushed out a reading list with a collection of articles from leading sources such as the New Scientist, Science, etc. But there was precious little to go on—we had to wait.

Eventually the true extent of the tragedy became apparent. "Chernobyl" was to be a grim marker at the begining of what was a most reward period in my career.