I have seen this television program once or twice, where a television personality digs into their past and sometimes they discover they had famous, or sometimes infamous, relatives.
I don’t think I would be so lucky, or unlucky as the case may be.
But, to be honest I haven’t really been interested in digging into the past.
On the other hand, my older brother has a keen interest in genealogy in general, borne from a desire to find out more about our family tree.
And he has gone back to the 1600s, for the relatives who came out from England, and no, they have no transported convicts, or at least he’s not saying.
Genealogy is a rather fascinating subject, and, I’ve discovered, is taught in university as a degree. My brother has one now.
What I didn’t realize is that I’ve been playing with it for years because in writing what might be called sagas you need to create your own set of mythical families, and then trace to forebears back in time.
I have one novel I’m writing that has required a family tree, and recently another for a story that required starting with a character who participated in the Eureka Stockade. We had to create parents, a migration from England to Australia, and then construct a family tree through to today so we could write a story from the perspective of a fourth-generation girl at school doing a school project.
If that sounds complicated, believe me, it is. But from my granddaughter who came up with the idea, she is very excited about it.
Much better than sitting in front of a computer playing games or a tv watching cartoons.
But once again I digress…
I have found a lot of genealogy stuff that my mother had been working on, and I’m taking it to my brother, and at the same time, l will get the latest installment on our family.
So far I’ve learned that I come from a combination of British relatives on both my mother and father’s side, the most recent my father’s mother who was born in England, and German from my mother’s side, her surname being Auhl.
No doubt, and with a great deal of irony, my relatives probably fought against each other in two world wars.
I’m sure more will be revealed on Wednesday.
But, the more I learn the more I feel inclined to create a fictionalized history with my family members as characters in the story. At the moment a biographical account of the family would be reasonably boring since as yet no one notorious had been discovered.
Category: Autobiography
Who do you think you are?
I have seen this television program once or twice, where a television personality digs into their past and sometimes they discover they had famous, or sometimes infamous, relatives.
I don’t think I would be so lucky, or unlucky as the case may be.
But, to be honest I haven’t really been interested in digging into the past.
On the other hand, my older brother has a keen interest in genealogy in general, borne from a desire to find out more about our family tree.
And he has gone back to the 1600s, for the relatives who came out from England, and no, they have no transported convicts, or at least he’s not saying.
Genealogy is a rather fascinating subject, and, I’ve discovered, is taught in university as a degree. My brother has one now.
What I didn’t realize is that I’ve been playing with it for years because in writing what might be called sagas you need to create your own set of mythical families, and then trace to forebears back in time.
I have one novel I’m writing that has required a family tree, and recently another for a story that required starting with a character who participated in the Eureka Stockade. We had to create parents, a migration from England to Australia, and then construct a family tree through to today so we could write a story from the perspective of a fourth-generation girl at school doing a school project.
If that sounds complicated, believe me, it is. But from my granddaughter who came up with the idea, she is very excited about it.
Much better than sitting in front of a computer playing games or a tv watching cartoons.
But once again I digress…
I have found a lot of genealogy stuff that my mother had been working on, and I’m taking it to my brother, and at the same time, l will get the latest installment on our family.
So far I’ve learned that I come from a combination of British relatives on both my mother and father’s side, the most recent my father’s mother who was born in England, and German from my mother’s side, her surname being Auhl.
No doubt, and with a great deal of irony, my relatives probably fought against each other in two world wars.
I’m sure more will be revealed on Wednesday.
But, the more I learn the more I feel inclined to create a fictionalized history with my family members as characters in the story. At the moment a biographical account of the family would be reasonably boring since as yet no one notorious had been discovered.
A twitter biography
Every year I come back to revisit this, and each year it becomes a harder issue to deal with. All that’s recently changed is the number of characters you can use
I’ve been trawling the endless collection of twitter descriptions provided by their users, noting that there is a restriction of 280 characters.
How do you sum yourself up in 280 characters?
I don’t think I can, so we tend to put down a few catchphrases, something that will draw followers. I’m thinking the word ‘aspiring’ will be my catchword.
I’m aspiring to be a writer, or is that author? Is there a difference, like for instance, one publishes ebooks on Amazon, one publishes hard copies in the traditional manner?
Is there a guide to what I can call myself?
Quite simply put, but in more than 140 characters, married happily, two wonderful children, three amazing grandchildren, and a wealth of experience acquired over the years.
Actually, that sounds rather boring, doesn’t it?
Perhaps it would be better if I was a retired policeman, a retired lawyer, a retired sheriff, a retired private investigator, a retired doctor, someone who had an occupation that was a rich mine of information from which to draw upon.
Retired computer programmers, supermarket shelf stackers, night cleaners, accounts clerks and general dogsbody s don’t quite cut the mustard.
I have also become fascinated with the expression ‘killer biography’. Does it mean that I have to be a ‘killer’?
Better than the self-confession above. Should we try to embellish our personal history in order to make it more appealing?
It’s much the same as writing about daily life. No one wants to read about it, people want to be taken out of the humdrum of normalcy and be taken into a world where they can become the character in the book.
And there you have it, in a nutshell, why I write.
A twitter biography
Every year I come back to revisit this, and each year it becomes a harder issue to deal with. All that’s recently changed is the number of characters you can use
I’ve been trawling the endless collection of twitter descriptions provided by their users, noting that there is a restriction of 280 characters.
How do you sum yourself up in 280 characters?
I don’t think I can, so we tend to put down a few catchphrases, something that will draw followers. I’m thinking the word ‘aspiring’ will be my catchword.
I’m aspiring to be a writer, or is that author? Is there a difference, like for instance, one publishes ebooks on Amazon, one publishes hard copies in the traditional manner?
Is there a guide to what I can call myself?
Quite simply put, but in more than 140 characters, married happily, two wonderful children, three amazing grandchildren, and a wealth of experience acquired over the years.
Actually, that sounds rather boring, doesn’t it?
Perhaps it would be better if I was a retired policeman, a retired lawyer, a retired sheriff, a retired private investigator, a retired doctor, someone who had an occupation that was a rich mine of information from which to draw upon.
Retired computer programmers, supermarket shelf stackers, night cleaners, accounts clerks and general dogsbody s don’t quite cut the mustard.
I have also become fascinated with the expression ‘killer biography’. Does it mean that I have to be a ‘killer’?
Better than the self-confession above. Should we try to embellish our personal history in order to make it more appealing?
It’s much the same as writing about daily life. No one wants to read about it, people want to be taken out of the humdrum of normalcy and be taken into a world where they can become the character in the book.
And there you have it, in a nutshell, why I write.
I have to stop thinking…
Have you ever wondered what you might have been back in the 1700s, or the 1800s in England, or whatever country you reside.
I live in Australia, so I suspect I would be a convict or the descendant of a convict. Certainly, in those past years, there is nothing to suggest that I would have been much else, based on the fact I used to be a tradesman, and later a computer programmer, only one of which existed back then.
In England I have often imagined what it would be like for the underclasses, and very definitely where I;pd finish up. A servant maybe, like a stable boy or footman, or an agricultural worker before the industrial resolution, or a coal miner after it. Poor people it seemed had no prospects.
In the 1900s, my time on earth, and before the computer era, I trained in a trade school, doing woodwork, machine shop practise, and sheet metal. There was also farming. For the select few there was Accounting and business studies, but to be a clerk you had to go to a different school.
My family couldn’t afford it.
When I left school, as soon as I could, and therefore without the benefit of a good education, my prospects for work didn’t amount to much, and among my first jobs was mail sorter, telegram delivery boy, a packer for a book wholesaler, an odd job boy in an abattoir, and later a clerk.
Perhaps then I formed an idea that one day I might be a writer. I certainly had a go, but never did anything with it. I guess, even then, I knew my limitations borne from what I perceived was my station in life.
What did I want to do though? It didn’t matter. People from our social strata couldn’t afford university fees so I was never going to get a tertiary education. That just about ruled out everything.
So what happpened to change all that?
Reading.
From as young as I could, I read. Not only stories about people who lived so very different lives to me, but reference books about everything. It gave me an understanding of what it might be like to be something else, then gave me the impetus to actually apply for what I would call ‘a real job’.
Whether I could do it or not was irrelevant. I just wanted the chance.
It took a wile but then someone gave me that chance. That door was prised open just a little, enugh for me to get a foot in.
I had several tenets to abide by, don’t speak unless your spoken to, respect your elders, and don’t say anything unless it’s relevant.
First job was mail boy under a very crotchety old man who thought I was a waste of space. I learned everything he knew, listened to everything he said, and did everything I was told, better than everyone else.
I moved up to shipping clerk, creating manifests for ships cargo. It was the golden age just before computers, the days of the mainframes that had the computing power of an IBM XT.
They fascinated me.
My next job was for a new company, working for a mining and shipping company, as a distribution clerk maintaining a shipping timetable. That led to a role in communications, the days of telexes and internal couriers and memos, and memorandums for board meetings.
It wasn’t heady stuff, but I was in management, learned communications, and understood accounting.
When I left there, I became a computer programmers. It was dumb luck, my brother in law was an insurance salesman, created listings of investment outcomes using insurance products, and his individualised reports used to take in a week or so, restricting the number of clients he had.
This was the days of the first Apples, and IBM’s. I had a small personal computer, and told him I could create a program to work out his calculations in seconds not days, and he gave me the opportunity.
The rest is history.
So, it makes me wonder had I been back in those 1700s and 1800s, whether or not I may have started small, and made something of myself. A lord of the manor I would not be, but perhaps something more comfortable than a coal miner maybe.
I guess I’ll never know.
I have to stop thinking…
Have you ever wondered what you might have been back in the 1700s, or the 1800s in England, or whatever country you reside.
I live in Australia, so I suspect I would be a convict or the descendant of a convict. Certainly, in those past years, there is nothing to suggest that I would have been much else, based on the fact I used to be a tradesman, and later a computer programmer, only one of which existed back then.
In England I have often imagined what it would be like for the underclasses, and very definitely where I;pd finish up. A servant maybe, like a stable boy or footman, or an agricultural worker before the industrial resolution, or a coal miner after it. Poor people it seemed had no prospects.
In the 1900s, my time on earth, and before the computer era, I trained in a trade school, doing woodwork, machine shop practise, and sheet metal. There was also farming. For the select few there was Accounting and business studies, but to be a clerk you had to go to a different school.
My family couldn’t afford it.
When I left school, as soon as I could, and therefore without the benefit of a good education, my prospects for work didn’t amount to much, and among my first jobs was mail sorter, telegram delivery boy, a packer for a book wholesaler, an odd job boy in an abattoir, and later a clerk.
Perhaps then I formed an idea that one day I might be a writer. I certainly had a go, but never did anything with it. I guess, even then, I knew my limitations borne from what I perceived was my station in life.
What did I want to do though? It didn’t matter. People from our social strata couldn’t afford university fees so I was never going to get a tertiary education. That just about ruled out everything.
So what happpened to change all that?
Reading.
From as young as I could, I read. Not only stories about people who lived so very different lives to me, but reference books about everything. It gave me an understanding of what it might be like to be something else, then gave me the impetus to actually apply for what I would call ‘a real job’.
Whether I could do it or not was irrelevant. I just wanted the chance.
It took a wile but then someone gave me that chance. That door was prised open just a little, enugh for me to get a foot in.
I had several tenets to abide by, don’t speak unless your spoken to, respect your elders, and don’t say anything unless it’s relevant.
First job was mail boy under a very crotchety old man who thought I was a waste of space. I learned everything he knew, listened to everything he said, and did everything I was told, better than everyone else.
I moved up to shipping clerk, creating manifests for ships cargo. It was the golden age just before computers, the days of the mainframes that had the computing power of an IBM XT.
They fascinated me.
My next job was for a new company, working for a mining and shipping company, as a distribution clerk maintaining a shipping timetable. That led to a role in communications, the days of telexes and internal couriers and memos, and memorandums for board meetings.
It wasn’t heady stuff, but I was in management, learned communications, and understood accounting.
When I left there, I became a computer programmers. It was dumb luck, my brother in law was an insurance salesman, created listings of investment outcomes using insurance products, and his individualised reports used to take in a week or so, restricting the number of clients he had.
This was the days of the first Apples, and IBM’s. I had a small personal computer, and told him I could create a program to work out his calculations in seconds not days, and he gave me the opportunity.
The rest is history.
So, it makes me wonder had I been back in those 1700s and 1800s, whether or not I may have started small, and made something of myself. A lord of the manor I would not be, but perhaps something more comfortable than a coal miner maybe.
I guess I’ll never know.
It must be the (almost) seasonal change
Earlier today, or yesterday now since the clock has ticked over to a new day, I was writing a post about the weather.
Boring as hell, except it gradually turned into a rant about greed, both corporate and government,
There has to be better stuff to talk about than that.
Like father’s day.
It’s possibly the most interesting aspect of my life, having never expected as a teenager that I would ever become a father. No, back in those dark and gloomy days I had neither the confidence nor the wherewithal to be or do anything.
I guess meeting someone, falling in love, and getting married, pulls you out of the lethargy of youth and forces you to take stock, and become someone, someone who has to have a good job that pays good money so you can get the necessities like a house and a car. You might have these before you get married, we had the cars, but not the house.
Then you realise you need more money because you never seem to earn enough until a baby comes along, and your whole life as you knew it turned upside down and inside out. Bad enough trying to sustain two, it’s now three.
More money, a larger house, a larger car, a damn good washing machine, and lots of nappies. Wow, I had thought having a baby meant more than a clothesline perpetually filled with nappies.
Until another baby comes along, the cycle repeats, then one has to go to school, and a whole new money pit opens and this costs more than the annual house payments.
Then there are sports, and extracurricular activities like dancing (though we didn’t have girls, thankfully), and then kids get to be very good at sports, so, you guessed it, another money pit. And a steadily growing grocery bill as they get larger and start eating you out of house and home.
There’s never a let-up, from the moment they’re born till the moment they leave home, and that, sometimes, can take a few more years than you expected.
Along the way you hope that your kids will respect you are their father and their mother. Sometimes that’s a forlorn hope. Other times children become a blessing and are always there. At least we don’t have to travel to either the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, to see ours, and with any luck, I will see them both later today.
I don’t expect much. My relationship with my father is strained, now, but for many years I was there for him, much more than I should according to my wife. I don’t want for them what happened to me, so I do what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen.
But the unexpected surprise, that one thing that you never expect when this lifelong journey starts, is the eventuality of grandchildren. Yes, it’s a natural progression in the circle of life, but often it doesn’t quite happen.
We have three granddaughters, and though I know as we get older we will not see them as much or if at all as they make their way out into a very large and far more accessible world than we had at the same time, but I will cherish those moments I have with them now.
I guess today, being mid-way through Autumn, and we’re just getting to the end of a very hot summer, being cooler than we’ve been experiencing, is not such a bad day after all, and it’s amazing that twelve hours later after feeling the gloom and doom of the world, that mood has changed, and that it took so little to change it.
Perhaps that’s what life is really all about.
Family.
It must be the (almost) seasonal change
Earlier today, or yesterday now since the clock has ticked over to a new day, I was writing a post about the weather.
Boring as hell, except it gradually turned into a rant about greed, both corporate and government,
There has to be better stuff to talk about than that.
Like father’s day.
It’s possibly the most interesting aspect of my life, having never expected as a teenager that I would ever become a father. No, back in those dark and gloomy days I had neither the confidence nor the wherewithal to be or do anything.
I guess meeting someone, falling in love, and getting married, pulls you out of the lethargy of youth and forces you to take stock, and become someone, someone who has to have a good job that pays good money so you can get the necessities like a house and a car. You might have these before you get married, we had the cars, but not the house.
Then you realise you need more money because you never seem to earn enough until a baby comes along, and your whole life as you knew it turned upside down and inside out. Bad enough trying to sustain two, it’s now three.
More money, a larger house, a larger car, a damn good washing machine, and lots of nappies. Wow, I had thought having a baby meant more than a clothesline perpetually filled with nappies.
Until another baby comes along, the cycle repeats, then one has to go to school, and a whole new money pit opens and this costs more than the annual house payments.
Then there are sports, and extracurricular activities like dancing (though we didn’t have girls, thankfully), and then kids get to be very good at sports, so, you guessed it, another money pit. And a steadily growing grocery bill as they get larger and start eating you out of house and home.
There’s never a let-up, from the moment they’re born till the moment they leave home, and that, sometimes, can take a few more years than you expected.
Along the way you hope that your kids will respect you are their father and their mother. Sometimes that’s a forlorn hope. Other times children become a blessing and are always there. At least we don’t have to travel to either the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, to see ours, and with any luck, I will see them both later today.
I don’t expect much. My relationship with my father is strained, now, but for many years I was there for him, much more than I should according to my wife. I don’t want for them what happened to me, so I do what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen.
But the unexpected surprise, that one thing that you never expect when this lifelong journey starts, is the eventuality of grandchildren. Yes, it’s a natural progression in the circle of life, but often it doesn’t quite happen.
We have three granddaughters, and though I know as we get older we will not see them as much or if at all as they make their way out into a very large and far more accessible world than we had at the same time, but I will cherish those moments I have with them now.
I guess today, being mid-way through Autumn, and we’re just getting to the end of a very hot summer, being cooler than we’ve been experiencing, is not such a bad day after all, and it’s amazing that twelve hours later after feeling the gloom and doom of the world, that mood has changed, and that it took so little to change it.
Perhaps that’s what life is really all about.
Family.
A life so ordinary – the beginning
When I was trying to think of a title for this post, and probably a lot more in the same vein, I thought of using
The Life of an Ordinary man
or
The life of an ordinary person
and realized that political correctness wasn’t going to make the title any easier to create.
The other thing is that should we have the right to say our life is ordinary?
What is ordinary life?
Is it the life the Joe and Jane Average have?
Dear God, I think I’ll just give up and go home.
Then I started thinking about school and the first girl I liked. I was five, and with absolutely no understanding of what I was feeling, I think it was great we were just friends.
It was 1958.
That was a long, long time ago.
No need to worry about politics, where the next paycheck was coming from, can I afford the car payments, and why do my children hate me so much.
Five was a great age. You go to school, sit around having fun, have an afternoon sleep, you always got a bottle of milk mid-morning (pity there was no flavoring in it) and lunchtimes you sat outside near the oval and made daisy chains in summer, or ran through the puddles in winter.
Or play on the monkey bars.
I remember the school, Dandenong State School. A large gothic, or so I thought then, building, that looked really scary from the outside, and then, when you met the teachers, really scary inside.
It had a quadrangle and a bell.
We had an assembly every morning and sang God Save the Queen.
Halcyon days indeed.
We lived in a house in Bess Court.
It was odd how our places of residence were reduced to a street name.
From my first, Valetta street, I think the first house my parents moved into.
Later in a foray into the past via genealogy we discovered my father had qualified for a war service loan and built the house himself.
We stayed there for a few years, then moved to Warren Road, for a very short time. There was no rhyme or reason for this move but it was notable for one reason, my younger brother was born while we were there.
And one single other memory I have, is that I used to go picking jonquils in a field behind the house
Then we moved to Bess Court, where we stayed for a number of years, what literally become a house of horrors, a time that consisted of only bad memories.
While there, I started grade school.
Then it was a move to Henty Street, where I spent the rest of my life before getting married and moving out.
Oh, yes, there was an exception when we spent a year in another state, in the middle of nowhere, but that’s another story.
Each had significance, and a definitive set of memories, some good, some bad, some really bad, and some that were all of the above at the same time.
As for that ordinary, perhaps we’ll explore it tomorrow.
A life so ordinary – the beginning
When I was trying to think of a title for this post, and probably a lot more in the same vein, I thought of using
The Life of an Ordinary man
or
The life of an ordinary person
and realized that political correctness wasn’t going to make the title any easier to create.
The other thing is that should we have the right to say our life is ordinary?
What is ordinary life?
Is it the life the Joe and Jane Average have?
Dear God, I think I’ll just give up and go home.
Then I started thinking about school and the first girl I liked. I was five, and with absolutely no understanding of what I was feeling, I think it was great we were just friends.
It was 1958.
That was a long, long time ago.
No need to worry about politics, where the next paycheck was coming from, can I afford the car payments, and why do my children hate me so much.
Five was a great age. You go to school, sit around having fun, have an afternoon sleep, you always got a bottle of milk mid-morning (pity there was no flavoring in it) and lunchtimes you sat outside near the oval and made daisy chains in summer, or ran through the puddles in winter.
Or play on the monkey bars.
I remember the school, Dandenong State School. A large gothic, or so I thought then, building, that looked really scary from the outside, and then, when you met the teachers, really scary inside.
It had a quadrangle and a bell.
We had an assembly every morning and sang God Save the Queen.
Halcyon days indeed.
We lived in a house in Bess Court.
It was odd how our places of residence were reduced to a street name.
From my first, Valetta street, I think the first house my parents moved into.
Later in a foray into the past via genealogy we discovered my father had qualified for a war service loan and built the house himself.
We stayed there for a few years, then moved to Warren Road, for a very short time. There was no rhyme or reason for this move but it was notable for one reason, my younger brother was born while we were there.
And one single other memory I have, is that I used to go picking jonquils in a field behind the house
Then we moved to Bess Court, where we stayed for a number of years, what literally become a house of horrors, a time that consisted of only bad memories.
While there, I started grade school.
Then it was a move to Henty Street, where I spent the rest of my life before getting married and moving out.
Oh, yes, there was an exception when we spent a year in another state, in the middle of nowhere, but that’s another story.
Each had significance, and a definitive set of memories, some good, some bad, some really bad, and some that were all of the above at the same time.
As for that ordinary, perhaps we’ll explore it tomorrow.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 