You would think it is a relatively simple thing to get to the snow.
Of course, there are a few necessities like skis, boots, poles, and warm dry clothing, but that can all be bought or rented when you get there, or if you are an enthusiast, you already have the gear.
So, you get in the car, set the navigator, and off you go. Till you get within 20 k of the ski field, it’s all plain sailing, everyone is excited, and mentally preparing.
Then it all starts to go sideways.
Those last few kilometers to the top are going to be arduous particularly if it’s been snowing and the roads are icy, but the weather is fine with blue skies and no recent snow falls. Were expecting a slow drive and a parking spot.
The road is open.
But…
So late in the morning, a sign at the bottom of the mountain warns all the car parks at the ski field are full, but we venture on anyway.
As you can see, the cars are parked so far away from the ski fields, the prospective skiers have to almost run a marathon before they get there!
And for some odd reason, we picked the very day everyone in New Zealand also wanted to go up to the ski fields so parking, even near the Chateau Tongariro was gone and there were endless cars looking for parking spots and traffic wardens had their hands full trying to keep traffic moving So, for us and everyone else, everything stops at Chateau Tongariro, and from there the only vehicles allowed up are buses.
It’s about 10:30 and we are advised the only way we were getting to see snow was to take a bus
Now, there are two types of busses. You can go up on a local bus, from Whakapapa Village that costs $20 a person which in the context of the cost of skiing not very much, but if you’re not, it’s quite expensive.
The second, one we were advised to use, operates from a place called National Park, about 9 km away, a snow shuttle that costs $6 each. The trouble is by the time we were ready to go there, to catch a shuttle, there were no more shuttles.
We did not know what to expect when we got to ‘National Park’, but being a railway station makes sense. It’s the only place with a very large carpark!
It sounds like the title of a book and maybe I should write it. Along with the twenty other story ideas that are currently running around in my head.
Is it any wonder I can’t sleep at night.
I’m working on the latest book and it is not going well. I don’t have writer’s block, I think it is more a case of self-doubt.
This leads me to be over critical of what I have written and much pressing of the delete key. Only to realize that an action taken in haste can be regrettable, and makes me feel even more depressed.
I think I’d be happier in a garret somewhere channeling van Gogh’s rage.
Lesson learned – don’t delete, save it to a text file so it can be retrieved when sanity returns.
I was not happy with the previous start. Funny about that, because until a few weeks ago I thought the start was perfect.
What a difference a week makes or is that politics?
Perhaps I should consider adding some political satire.
But I digress…
It seems it’s been like that for a few weeks now, not being able to stick to the job in hand, doing anything but what I’m supposed to be doing. I recognize the restlessness, I’m not happy with the story as it is, so rather than getting on with it, I find myself writing words just for the sake of writing words.
Any words are better than none, right?
So I rewrote the start, added about a hundred pages and now I have to do a mass of rewriting of what was basically the whole book.
But here’s the thing.
This morning I woke up and looked at the new start, and it has inspired me.
Perhaps all I needed was several weeks of teeth gnashing, and self-doubt to get myself back on track.
This story is now on the list to be finished so over the new few weeks, expect a new episode every few days.
The reason why new episodes have been sporadic, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Things are about to get complicated…
I was straight back to the scenario where O’Connell was expendable after performing his role, and that Anna was cleaning up before leaving, or she had already gone.
O’Connell had no doubt told her about the Peasdale address, and the fact he’d told me, and she might have assumed that there would be a window of opportunity to get some belongings at her flat.
Would she be there?
I switched off the light, backtracked to the door, and then went back outside into the passage. Jennifer appeared beside me.
“O’Connell’s in there, dead. Shot in the head.”
“Your friend?”
I’m not sure how she came up with the designation, ‘Your Friend’, but after the shortened version of my time with Josephine, and the fact we had a hotel room together, could have inspired such a thought.
I went to her flat and listened at the door.
Nothing. There was no light showing under the door, so this could be a fruitless exercise. The same operation as before, Jennifer waited outside, and I would go in. It didn’t take as long to pick her lock. Practise.
I opened the door, the gun in hand, and went slowly into the room.
There was a glow from what might be a night light coming from the end of the passage where the bedroom was.
She was in, or she forgot to turn off the light.
It was also not so dark in this flat, with several pilot lights casting red, blue or green hues over the furniture and floor. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust.
“Drop the gun, Sam.”
Josephine, now just discernible across the room, a gun of her own aimed at me.
I shot her. Without hesitation.
She was taken utterly by surprise, dropping her own weapon and spinning sideways into the arm of the chair, lost balance and crashed down to the floor.
Jennifer was in the door and had it closed behind her, and switched on the light. We were both blinded for a second, enough time for Josephine to reach for her weapon which hadn’t fallen very far from her and for Jennifer to shoot her gun hand.
I remembered in that instant, that Jennifer scored the highest in gun training. She would be ‘deadly’ Maury had said.
“OK, enough, what the hell was that for?” Jo said, stretching out on the floor and holding the hand that Jennifer shot.
“You played me, Anna.”
“Operation necessity. I had to know what you were up to. O’Connell said you were going to be a problem.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Me? No. He was dead when I got here. We were here just to get our away bags. How did you guess?”
“Lucky. I was going to the other flat, but I figured it was too new for O’Connell to probably tell you. He may have been planning to double-cross you too. It seems the way of things in this op. Where are the USBs?”
“What makes you think I have them?”
“The fact you just said them, when all we knew for sure was there was only one. I assume you have one each for safety’s sake, and coming back here, one or other of you was going to pull a double cross.”
“Until someone else got another idea. Right now, you have a window of opportunity, Sam. A big payday, for the two of you.”
“Tempting, but no. I’m not in this for the money.”
“Then you’re a fool. No one does anything except line their own pockets. If you give the USBs to your chief, what do you think they’re going to do? O’Connell got five million, the person who gave him the money will get ten at the very least. They’re not interested in saving the world, Sam.”
She was probably right.
I looked at Jennifer. “Are you in this for the money, Jennifer?”
“I just want my old life back.”
“Then keep an eye on the door, we’ll be having visitors very soon. Anyone who comes through it using a key, disarm them. Don’t hesitate.”
Back to Anna. “Where are they? Bear in mind I have no qualms about shooting you until you do tell me, so make it easy on yourself, because the next thing I shoot at is your knees.”
A moment’s thought, and a shot into the wall that just missed her head, decided the matter.
“In the backpack pocket.”
She nodded her head in the direction of the backpack sitting on the kitchen bench.
I went over and in the third pocket I opened there were two USBs in a plastic bag.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Destroy them. The world doesn’t need any more pandemics any time soon.” I went over to the microwave oven and put them in and set it running.
“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.
When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.
From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.
There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.
Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.
Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?
Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?
Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?
Mount Ngauruhoe is apparently still an active volcano, has been for 2,500 years or so, and last erupted on 19th February 1975, and reportedly has erupted around 70 times since 1839.
The mountain is usually climbed from the western side, from the Mangatepopo track.
This photo was taken in summer from the Chateau Tongariro carpark.
In late autumn, on one of our many visits to the area, the mountain was covered with a light sprinkling of snow and ice.
On our most recent visit, this year, in winter, it was fully covered in snow.
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 to pique 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.
This book has also been written for some time, like The Document, and the manuscript was also sitting in a box with half a dozen others gathering dust and not quite as complete, so this month it is going to get the makeover, a first draft for the editor.
And so it begins…
…
Going back and forth, fixing the timeline
…
That’s what editing is all about.
Reading that first rough draft and deciding it’s all crap. Then, after a good night’s sleep, deciding that it’s not half bad, just need to weed out the crap.
I’ve decided to add some more after the agent and target are gunned down and our protagonist shoots the sniper. One of them at least. There’s another out there, waiting.
There’s more to the target’s story that wasn’t conveyed to the planners and comes to light in that apartment. There’s going to be a twist in that tale.
The funeral is interesting, not only for the aftermath, but who attends, and as it is for the mentor, our protagonist is there to see what shakes out of the trees.
Meanwhile, our planner is now being interrogated as if she were a foreign spy, the last thing she expected from her own organisation.
What happens when your past finally catches up with you?
…
Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.
Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment Will’s life slowly starts to unravel and it’s obvious to him it’s time to move on.
This time, however, there is more at stake.
Will has broken his number one rule, don’t get involved.
With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.
But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.
There’s more than one way … er, perhaps it’s better to say, there are many ways to use the word bar, which is not bad for a three letter word.
Bar, the one you associate with drinks, in hotels, restaurants and we’ll, just bars.
Probably the best type of bar you might find me in is a Sports Bar, where you can snack on buffalo wings a tall glass of beer and watch with ice hockey in winter or baseball in summer.
It’s one I use from time to time when asked, what will we do, and the reply is often let’s go to a bar. The best bars are underground, dark and dingy, full of eclectic people, with a band playing almost passable music or better still jazz
Bar, as in the legal variety
There are so many legal references to using bar, that the one that I am most familiar with is being admitted to the bar which means that you can now practice law.
Raising the bar, if that’s possible, where the bar is that imaginary level which offers sinks very low. When someone says they’re going to try and raise the bar, you may be assured there will be a long battle ahead, simply because people generally find it hard to change.
Bar, as in we are not going to let you in here. Yes, this is the irksome one where you find yourself, often for reasons unknown, barred from somewhere or something. This may also be referred to by saying everyone may enter bar you.
Bar, as in an iron bar, the sort that is sometimes used as a blunt force object by villains to remind the victim they owe any one of a loan shark, bookie or the mafia. God help you if it is all three.
There are also iron bars of a different sort, those that are set in concrete outside a window most likely in a prison where the objective is to prevent escape.
It gives rise to an old expression, that person should be behind bars.
Then there is just a bar, such as a bar of gold, which I’m sure we’d all like to have stashed away, but not necessarily in the mattress, or the more common variety, a chocolate bar, which I have one now. What’s your favorite?
And just to add to the list of meanings you can always refer to sashes or stripes as bars.
Confused? Well, there’s still music, and the bane of yachtsmen, sand bars but I think we’ll leave it there.
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.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 