How can something so simple become so complicated and complex?
In New York, it seemed impossible to get exactly what you would like. The coffee there is driven by what the machine interprets you want, aside from the language constraints due to the fact that English (or American) comes in a zillion different flavours.
So, what do I like (you notice I don’t say ‘want’)
A double shot Latte with two sugars and half a shot of vanilla. That’s in a large cup.
As we all know coffee can come in a regular, large, or extra-large cup, but, hang on, these cup sizes sometimes have names, and you need to know what these names are.
My efforts of pointing to the cup size in New York often had horrendous consequences, when the cup piles were close together. Sometimes it was a double shot in a regular, and a single shot in an extra-large cup.
One even had the name benti, or bento, or something like that.
Being old and decrepit, my memory for cup sizes isn’t all that great, so using a name in one shop that doesn’t have that size, well, you get it.
It seems not only coffee makers in New York have a problem producing consistent coffee.
Perhaps, then that’s half the charm of drinking it, the fact that no cup is ever the same.
And, when an outlet gets it right, finally, they go and change the coffee bean supplier, and all of a sudden, it’s bitter, or it’s lighter, as coffee shops try to reduce their costs and maximise profits.
Six dollars is a lot of money for a cup of coffee unless of course, you have to feed that addiction in which case, you’ll have a cup at whatever the cost.
I need coffee right now, so its off te the cupboard to see what’s available.
Maccona instant, which is not bad
A Nespresso long black – ok, don’t get me started with Nespresso because they have numbers from 1 to 12, possibly more, recognising strengths, and I usually have a double shot using a 10 and a 12.
And, yes, they fool around with the type of beans they use because there seem to be inconsistencies in potency from time to time.
Then there’s coffee bags, much the same as tea bags, which produces and interestingly flavoured brew which I’m still trying to figure out. It tastes like coffee, but there’s something else there, like … paper?
This is an inlet near Port Macquarie in northern New South Wales. It is adjacent to a caravan and camping park, close to the ocean and parklands.
But, for our purposes, this scene is going to have a few more interesting connotations than just a few campers going for a jog along the beach, fishing in the estuary, or further out to sea on the other side of the wall in the background.
Firstly, to my favorite kind of story, a spy story…
It’s basically the evil billionaire’s backyard to his island hideaway, and our hero intends to come ashore at night and do battle with the guards, break into the underground holding cells and save the girl.
As always, saving the world comes second!
Or, it’s a place like Fantasy Island, without the landing strip on the beach, where people come to have their fantasies fulfilled. OK, to start there are no robots that are going to go berserk, that’s so ten years ago.
And, no, the hosts won’t be dressed in white safari suits. They went out in the 70s.
Then, I suppose, a story that I like, about people who have secrets, people who are broken, people who just want to get away from everyone else, come to this island where they can live in anonymity, without having to interact with anyone unless they want to.
Which, unfortunately, I do not have a lot of in my step.
At last, we have reached the end of the alphabet because I’m running out of zip to write these blogs.
So…
Zip is the sing, the energy, the spring we have in our step, that usually gets us from a to b quickly. Without this zest, we would need to take a bus, train, or cab.
Then comes the variations like …
Zip code, we all have one of these, though in some countries it is called a postcode.
Zip it up, meaning do not speak, especially if you’re about to spill a secret.
A zip, which is a part of some types of clothing, usually in trousers, jeans, and skirts to name a few. Some dresses have long zips, some short, all seem to get tangled at one time or another, or, in the most embarrassing of situations, split.
Then there is a colloquial use of the word zip, meaning nothing, zilch, zero, in other words, a basis for of z words.
And that’s about as much zeal I’m going to show for writing this blog, and I’m going to close the book on it.
Stranger’s We’ve Become, a sequel to What Sets Us Apart.
The blurb:
Is she or isn’t she, that is the question!
Susan has returned to David, but he is having difficulty dealing with the changes. Her time in captivity has changed her markedly, so much so that David decides to give her some time and space to re-adjust back into normal life.
But doubts about whether he chose the real Susan remain.
In the meantime, David has to deal with Susan’s new security chief, the discovery of her rebuilding a palace in Russia, evidence of an affair, and several attempts on his life. And, once again, David is drawn into another of Predergast’s games, one that could ultimately prove fatal.
From being reunited with the enigmatic Alisha, a strange visit to Susan’s country estate, to Russia and back, to a rescue mission in Nigeria, David soon discovers those whom he thought he could trust each has their own agenda, one that apparently doesn’t include him.
It’s still a battle of wits, but our hero knows he’s in serious trouble.
The problem is, there are familiar faces and a question of who is a friend and who is foe made all the more difficult because the enemy if it is the enemy, doesn’t look or sound or act like the enemy.
If at first, you don’t succeed, try a few threats, or leverage
He took a deep breath, gave me a look a parent would give a miscreant child, and started again.
“What’s the deal with you and Commander Breeman?”
Yes, he does know about her proclivities, but he was hardly in a position to condemn her. He, too, had a ‘thing’ for the female trainees under his command, and one in particular.
“She has to eat, I have to eat, in the same mess as it happens.”
He gave me another of his penetrating glares.
“Nothing else?”
“That would be against regulations, as I think you are fully aware.” I returned his glare but with more intensity.
“What did you discuss over the dinner table?”
Odd question. Not operational matters, if that was what he wanted to hear. But what we spoke about had little relevance to work.
“Cars.”
It was true. She liked restoring old cars from the mid-war period, some of which had been used as props in period movies. I had an old Cadillac, the sort that would fail any fuel economy test.
I could see it was not the answer he was looking for. He would have to ask a specific question in order to get a specific answer one way or the other.
“Did she mention the no-fly zone?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then said, “No, there are no cars out there to speak of.”
“Flippancy doesn’t become you, Alan.”
Perhaps not, but it was all he was going to get.
And for added emphasis, I said, “Like I said to your predecessor, I don’t know how or why you would have to ask the pilot.”
He stood abruptly, nearly knocking the chair over. Angry.
“You know something, Alan, otherwise you would not have been on that helo. She threw you under the bus, and the quicker you realize that the better.”
There’s something to be said for a story that starts like a James Bond movie, throwing you straight in the deep end, a perfect way of getting to know the main character, David, or is that Alistair?
A retired spy, well not so much a spy as a retired errand boy, David’s rather wry description of his talents, and a woman that most men would give their left arm for, not exactly the ideal couple, but there is a spark in a meeting that may or may not have been a setup.
But as the story progressed, the question I kept asking myself was why he’d bother.
And, page after unrelenting page, you find out.
Susan is exactly the sort of woman that piqued his interest. Then, inexplicably, she disappears. That might have been the end to it, but Prendergast, that shadowy enigma, David’s ex-boss who loves playing games with real people, gives him an ultimatum, find her or come back to work.
Nothing like an offer that’s a double-edged sword!
A dragon for a mother, a sister he didn’t know about, Susan’s BFF who is not what she seems or a friend indeed, and Susan’s father who, up till David meets her, couldn’t be less interested, his nemesis proves to be the impossible dream, and he’s always just that one step behind.
When the rollercoaster finally came to a halt, and I could start breathing again, it was an ending that was completely unexpected.
The simulation of nighttime on board the ship was as realistic as I remembered it when back on earth.
I was on my usual rounds after midnight, with the 2IC of security, Nancy Woolmer, who had been a NY detective until a better offer came along.
This ship.
Like me, she had little to keep her back home, her husband who had also been a detective, had been killed on the job, and that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Not blessed, or as she put it, cursed, with children, her parents had passed on, and any family left were not enough to keep her home. This ship, she had said, would be her savior.
But she had the look of a person running away, and that, one day, would come back to bite her. In the meantime, if we ever needed a detective, she was it.
“They’ve really got this night thing going, haven’t they. You could almost imagine you’re in a leafy suburb out for a walk at night.”
“I doubt the streets would be as safe.”
The world we had left behind was in crisis, where there were deep divides between those in work and those who were not, and those with wealth and those without, and a bigger fight between countries over the space program. It had started out with good intentions, but people being people, it didn’t stay that way.
We had an international crew, but there was always the lingering doubt of what some people’s intentions were. Out in space where everyone depended on everyone else, a small problem could become a big one very quickly.
“No, perhaps not. But it’s good to hear the breeze rustling in the trees.”
Though the simulation lacked real trees, the projection on the passage walls of what either side of a street. With pavements, trees and houses, and for the night, the eerie glow of street lamps, was close enough.
The once around the perimeter passage on each deck took about two hours at a leisurely pace, considering there were ten decks.
I could have passed the job onto one of the watch officers, but it was about the only time I got to see the crew, those that were basically out of sight, keeping the ship running.
I had set the lofty goal of meeting every one of the over 2,000 crew members within the first year, but a few months in, that was looking unlikely.
There was a sudden vibration emanating from the deck, followed by the sort of movement I would have associated with the ship coming off speed, like the jerk in a car when taking the foot off the accelerator. The dampeners were designed to handle that and make increases and decreases in speed unnoticeable, but there was still an indication it had happened.
Ten seconds later my communicator vibrated. I didn’t like the ring tone built-in, but it was more likely because most calls were bad news.
“What happened,” I asked, knowing it would be the duty officer of the watch
“Engineering are reporting a glitch, sir.”
There’s a word I hadn’t heard for a long time. My father used to refer to anything that went wrong around the house as a glitch.
“Serious?”
“Don’t know, but you’re within a stone’s throw, so I thought you might want to pay them a visit.”
He was right, I was on that deck, and not far from the central control room. The bridge must be tracking me, even though I’d asked them not to. Standing orders dictated all officers and important personnel whereabouts were known at all times, I’d been told.
“I will.”
To Nancy, “You might want to continue on without me, and I’ll try to catch up later.”
She smiled. “Tell them they should have bought the premium quality rubber bands.”
Previous conversations had highlighted a certain cynicism towards the fixtures and fittings, some of which were quite shoddy, which was disappointing but there was no doubt corners were cut in order to get the ship into service.
We all just hoped that cost-cutting didn’t extend to the main items, and if there were, it had been picked up in the trials.
As I stepped into the control room, a brightly lit room with banks of control panels and engineers sitting at them, there were a number of people huddled around one in particular, including the chief engineer.
The conversation was quite lively, and one voice stood out above the others, “… and had the builders rep actually listen to someone who knows what they’re talking about, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
It was the same voice I’d heard in the captain’s day room my first day aboard, pontificating, as the captain put it, over a list of problems he was having with the shipbuilders representative.
“We’re in this situation,” the Chief Engineer said, “because everything we have here is new, and some of it untried. If you’re going to push boundaries, then sometimes there’s a problem. Rather than complain, find a resolution.”
The group broke up, and the Chief saw me coming over. He met me halfway.
“Half this new breed they’ve sent me and more teaches rather than hands-on, always on about the code or some such. Good, maybe, for diagnostics, but not for problem-solving. I suspect it’s tainted coolant, seems the original batch wasn’t cleaned out after the first run, and it’s overwhelmed the filters. It’s down to the bowels I’m afraid, and we’ll be up and running before those nincompoops work out the real problem.”
“Good. Just let the bridge know when you’re done.”
One last look at the nincompoops, and I headed back out to resume rounds.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply just fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, i came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level, that she, the youngest of the group would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing down of her for the last three months, and if noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one, no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And, then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact she had to entertain more, and frankly I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked where who, and when.
A world-class newspaper, in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember I just shrugged and asked if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost that intimacy we used to have when she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior and instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position he had not taken advantage of a situation like some men would. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me, you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her, that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. On the beginning, it’s a slow easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships, they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, follows by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come or of the final turn and we were braking so that it stops at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in t the new job the last thing shed want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends new life.
We packed her bags, three out everything she didn’t want, a free trips to the op shop with stiff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming, that moment the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning there’s been 6 different types of plane depart, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
This is sometimes how we must feel when overlooked or ignored, like a nobody.
And some people will treat you like a nobody, i.e. someone who is just not important.
That’s just one use of the word.
Another might be…
Who did that to your room?
‘Nobody’ is the plaintiff’s reply. The infamous Mr Nobody. We’ve never met him, but he’s always there. And, what’s more, he seems to be able to be in more than one place at a time.
Then there’s that time when there’s nobody in the room, nobody agreed with me, hell, that happens all the time, and when I rang your phone nobody answered.
Nobody? Was I expecting Mr Nobody to answer? Surely the response should have been, ‘and you didn’t answer’.
Of course, let’s not delve too deep here, lest we might find out something we didn’t want to know.
I went to your house last night, but nobody was home.
How is it we refer to the people whom we know live in that house as ‘nobody’. Shouldn’t we be saying, ‘none of you was at home’?
It seems nobody is one of those words we often use in vain.
With my attention elsewhere, I walked into a man who was hurrying in the opposite direction. He was a big man with a scar running down the left side of his face from eye socket to mouth, and who was also wearing a black shirt with a red tie.
That was all I remembered as my heart almost stopped.
He apologized as he stepped to one side, the same way I stepped, as I also muttered an apology.
I kept my eyes down. He was not the sort of man I wanted to recognize later in a lineup. I stepped to the other side and so did he. It was one of those situations. Finally getting out of sync, he kept going in his direction, and I towards the bus, which was now pulling away from the curb.
Getting my breath back, I just stood riveted to the spot watching it join the traffic. I looked back over my shoulder, but the man I’d run into had gone. I shrugged and looked at my watch. It would be a few minutes before the next bus arrived.
Wait, or walk? I could also go by subway, but it was a long walk to the station. What the hell, I needed the exercise.
At the first intersection, the ‘Walk’ sign had just flashed to ‘Don’t Walk’. I thought I’d save a few minutes by not waiting for the next green light. As I stepped onto the road, I heard the screeching of tires.
A yellow car stopped inches from me.
It was a high powered sports car, perhaps a Lamborghini. I knew what they looked like because Marcus Bartleby owned one, as did every other junior executive in the city with a rich father.
Everyone stopped to look at me, then the car. It was that sort of car. I could see the driver through the windscreen shaking his fist, and I could see he was yelling too, but I couldn’t hear him. I stepped back onto the sidewalk, and he drove on. The moment had passed and everyone went back to their business.
My heart rate hadn’t come down from the last encounter. Now it was approaching cardiac arrest, so I took a few minutes and several sets of lights to regain composure.
At the next intersection, I waited for the green light, and then a few seconds more, just to be sure. I was no longer in a hurry.
At the next, I heard what sounded like a gunshot. A few people looked around, worried expressions on their faces, but when it happened again, I saw it was an old car backfiring. I also saw another yellow car, much the same as the one before, stopped on the side of the road. I thought nothing of it, other than it was the second yellow car I’d seen.
At the next intersection, I realized I was subconsciously heading towards Harry’s new bar. It was somewhere on 6th Avenue, so I continued walking in what I thought was the right direction.
I don’t know why I looked behind me at the next intersection, but I did. There was another yellow car on the side of the road, not far from me. It, too, looked the same as the original Lamborghini, and I was starting to think it was not a coincidence.
Moments after crossing the road, I heard the roar of a sports car engine and saw the yellow car accelerate past me. As it passed by, I saw there were two people in it, and the blurry image of the passenger; a large man with a red tie.
Now my imagination was playing tricks.
It could not be the same man. He was going in a different direction.
In the few minutes I’d been standing on the pavement, it had started to snow; early for this time of year, and marking the start of what could be a long cold winter. I shuddered, and it was not necessarily because of the temperature.
I looked up and saw a neon light advertising a bar, coincidentally the one Harry had ‘found’ and, looking once in the direction of the departing yellow car, I decided to go in. I would have a few drinks and then leave by the back door if it had one.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 