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 been written for some time and the manuscript was 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…
…
Coping without technology
…
There are no more surprises at least for today.
We have no internet, the power company came along and removed an old pole and that was the end of it.
It’s amazing what you can’t do when there’s no internet and then all the things you said you would do one day if only you had the time.
This morning’s word count accumulates quickly without the distractions so I had the afternoon to finally clean up my workspace.
Have you ever heard of someone rabbiting on, you know, endlessly rattling on about nothing?
That’s just one use of the word rabbit.
The most obvious is the animal, a rabbit. You know, that burrowing, plant-eating, long-eared, short-tailed animal that goes by the name of Bugs Bunny, maybe.
Nearly every child has a stuffed, cuddly one.
Of course, it’s of some significance at the moment because it’s Easter, and there are countless chocolate versions of the so-called Easter bunny.
Then there is that 6-foot-high invisible rabbit called Harvey, or not necessarily a rabbit, but a pookah.
We use the expression rabbit ears to describe those old interior television antennas.
There’s rabbit stew, rabbit pie, and white rabbit beer.
But my favorite is when the magician pulls the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. It’s an expression we also use for someone who pulls off an impossible task.
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.
It’s time to go back to working on Bill’s backstory now that we’ve filled in some of the gaps.
Like some TV shows and books, some of the action sometimes takes the form of flashbacks.
In Starburst, Bill has a complete backstory, of a time that he had mainly forced into the deep dark part of his memory, waiting for something or someone to trigger it.
This whole back story, from the moment he entered the war zone, to the moment his war ended, and those that participated throughout that time, will be in the form of flashbacks, the first of which is triggered by the painkiller Bill is given after being shot in the Aitcheson incident.
These flashbacks will not necessarily be in any sort of order, but I have been thinking about this part of the story and produced an outline of the sequences I will require, give or take. There may be more, or less, depending on how the story progresses.
…
Part 1 – From arrival in the war zone to being assigned to Davenport’s squad
Being sent to, and the first patrol in Vietnam
Death and mayhem some months after sent to Vietnam
First meeting Barry in army mobile hospital
R and R in Saigon, with the first of the Vietnamese girls
Psychiatric help, time in the stockade
No soldier who trains for war, nor can they have a real idea what war is like, and certainly a war in the jungle, on the enemy’s terms. Bill is like any other soldier, happy to go into service, but soon the reality, and death becomes apparent.
Endless rain, endless heat, endless and sometimes needless death, and a deep mistrust of those whom you are supposed to protect, start to work on the mind of a person young enough not to understand what is going on.
Then, when trying to blot out the memories of death, enemy and friend alike, something has to give. Of course, the last place you want to end up in the stockade.
…
Part 2 – A lifeline, and a pass into the so-called Davenport Operation
Training as a spy?
Colonel, calling Bill into a briefing on the Davenport operation
Talking to the Commanding officer in Stockade, as a preliminary to Davenport service
…
Was Bill sent to the stockade because he committed an act of folly, or his incarceration a part of a much larger plan, a plan to have an inside man to report on Davenport?
It’s not the first time someone higher up the chain of command has had ideas of trying to find out what Davenport is doing, and where only rumors abound of his ‘interests’. Agents had been sent in before, and those agents had disappeared.
Was Bill about to be the next, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
It’s quite remarkable to discover that your children are not unique.
For years I thought that we had spawned monsters that had quite likely come from another planet because the other children in the family seemed so different.
I didn’t realise that the parents had issued death threats if they so much as looked sideways while out.
It was where I suddenly realised that parents of children if taken at their word, could be mass murderers, or at the very best, the worst kind of bullies.
The threats of violence that they used, in any other circumstances would elicit a rather lengthy jail sentence.
I was guilty of it myself, and such threats had come to roll off the tongue so easily that you didn’t really know you were doing it.
If you don’t do this, I’ll kill you. There’s no thought to the significance of this statement, or the consequences if you were to actually do it.
No wonder the children just look at you like you’re deranged.
Of course, there are fewer murderous ways of dealing with the problem, but the sad fact is they have probably driven you into a blind rage and just past into that zone where you really have no idea what you’re saying.
Been there too.
But the revelation that all the other parents are the same, that you see them threatening their children with death or worse.
Then, after they’ve grown up and moved on as all children do, they return on odd occasions for Sunday lunch and there you begin to learn the stuff they did when younger that you never knew about
It’s seeming a rite of passage for all children, and it’s odd to hear others discussing it, especially when you hear someone else referring to their children the same as you do.
Did they come from the same planet too?
That’s when a friend told me the truth of the matter. All children are the same, they just live in different houses.
I’d been on the starship for almost three hours when…
…
The captain was coming up from the earth station by transport, not wanting to trust the transporters, and I’d just finished the orientation of the ship by the second officer, and had arrived on the bridge to see various crew members hunched over their consoles.
The captain had told me, before stepping onto the transport, that we would be leaving the dock shortly after he arrived.
Nothing I’d seen so far had led me to believe it would be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the crew briefing had run smoothly, the second officer assigned to correlate the complaints/problems list, and everyone else had taken their assigned positions.
I was waiting for the captain, standing beside the ‘chair’, ready to hand over. In any other situation, we would be off to an illustrious start.
Until the dulcet tones of the Chief Engineer rang through the bridge, uttering those fateful words, “the warp coil has had a catastrophic failure”.
This was at odds with another statement he had made earlier when I was in Engineering, and given I was told the Chief Engineer was prone to hyperbole; his statement ‘they just don’t make warp coils like they used to’ hadn’t exactly filled me with confidence, but I had been expecting we would be ready to depart.
I had been looking at the screen, an overlay of the window that looked out over space, or at this moment, the space dock, where there was a representation of the planets that were ‘out there’.
I had been curious about M75, but the helmsman, a rather taciturn chap who seemed to resent the fact he was assigned to this ship, just shrugged and said, “it’s something, somewhere, but not of much interest,” then went back to his console.
If this was Star Trek, we’d be ejecting the warp coil by now, but in the space dock, that didn’t seem to me to be a viable option.
“How long before we can get this bucket of bolts moving,” I ask the Chief.
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
Yes, words ripped right out of the script of a Star Trek episode, I thought. A sad case of life imitating art.
A strange whistling sound emanated from the speakers, then the whoosh of the elevator just before the doors opened. OK, new ship, squeaky doors, another item to be put on the ‘look at’ list after the shakedown cruise.
The Captain had arrived.
“Why are dock workers still on the ship, Number One.”
For a moment there, I thought I was talking to John Luc Picard.
“Faulty warp coil. You know how it goes, save a billion by outsourcing to the cheapest supplier.”
The captain didn’t appreciate my sardonic humour, or my apparent disdain in outsourcing what we had once built ourselves.
He gave me a frown, a slight shake of his head, then said, “I’ll be in my quarters. Let me know when we’re about to leave.”
He didn’t wait for acknowledgement and disappeared through another squeaky door. More repairs.
The Chief’s voice then came over the speaker. “I can give you impulse speed, warp speed will take a little longer.”
“Doesn’t that refer to miracles over the impossible,” I ask.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I need a specific spanner and the replicators are down. So, now we have to fix them first, before moving on. Might take a while.”
I look around the crew, seeing their expectant faces drop with disappointment.
Outer space was going to have to wait a little longer.
This book has been written for some time and the manuscript was 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…
…
Finally, we’ve got the internet back
…
After two days in the technological wilderness, we are back, which must say something about the human condition.
I’m sure, one day, the internet will collapse and billions of us will go through the same withdrawal symptoms I just did, and there’ll be a lot of clean rooms around.
Even so, there are those two items that were very prevalent when I went to school, pencils. HB or 2B, or coloured, and lined paper in what was called an exercise book, 48 pages, 64 pages, 96 pages or 128 pages.
I am yet to equate words to an exercise book page, but that’s the least of my problems.
Still working on the new killer, and a perfect match for the hero. Yes, I’m hoping we can have a happy ending for at least two characters.
After leaving the hotel in Zhengzhou, which was once one of the eight ancient capitals of China, we are going to Dengfeng city, the home of China’s most famous martial art – Shaolin Kung Fu.
The Shaolin Temple nearby is the origin of Chinese Zen Buddhism, and the Songyang Academy, called “the Centre of Heaven and Earth” is located 87 Km from Zhengzhou, or, as we were advised, a 2-hour drive. It will be scenic because we are heading towards the mountains.
As one of the four ancient Song Dynasty Academies, Songyang Academy is one of many schools in the province. It is both on a large scale, is quite spectacular, and is a comprehensive Wushu training base where students are trained to spread the Shaolin Wushu Kung fu style at home and abroad.
There is a 500-seat demonstration hall where you are able to observe 30 minutes of various martial arts in shows starting on the hour.
Outside there is a specific area that generally has about 600 trainees learning kung fu elements during the day but can hold 5,000 people when outdoor performances are required.
The kung fu school
The thing you notice most about the kung fu school is its size and then the number of buses which tells you that it is a popular tourist stop.
And with that size comes long distances between the car park and the venues we need to go to, the first of which is about half a km, and that’s just to get to the ticket plaza.
But, it is pleasantly set out and is quite a large number of shops for both souvenirs and food
We pass by some of the students going through their paces
From there it’s another long, long walk to the show arena, where we’re supposed to see various kung fu elements on display. We watched this for a few minutes, then headed off towards the hall for a more intense demonstration of kung fu, and because there is limited seating we have to start lining up at the head of the queue to get a seat.
But…
Everyone else has the same idea and we join the throng which then becomes a ride, and true to the Chinese they start finding ways to push in, even using the imaginary friend somewhere ahead in the queue.
The doors open and then it’s open slather, with the hoards pushing from behind and sliding up the side to get in first. We go with the tide, and manage to get in and find a seat though we were separated from three of our group.
It was an interesting show even though not one word of English was spoken, which from our point of view was a disappointment because we had no idea what was going on.
However…
It wasn’t hard to follow
What the performers were doing was relatively self-explanatory, and quite fascinating, especially the guy who broke a sword over his head, and the guy who stopped two spears penetrating the neck, both examples of very disciplined men.
Boys gave a demonstration of kung fu moves, and intensity and age increased as this progressed to the end.
Next, we were taken in hand by an instructor in Tai chi or an equivalent, I was not quite sure what it was called, and went through the twelve or maybe more moves that constituted a morning or afternoon exercise session or it could be just for relaxation. I lasted the first session but it was a little difficult to do with my sore limbs and a bad back.
Not that I could remember any of it now other than hands overhead, hands in front, bent knees, and a few gentle kung fu hand moves.
Perhaps when I get home I might seek out someone to show me the moves.
Whilst the others were following their training instructor, I wandered about, finding a large statue
And some smaller statues
Lunch in the Zen Restaurant
After all that exercise it was time to have lunch purportedly the same food as the king fu masters. It’s in the Zen restaurant, aptly named, and the food when it came, came thick and fast, but some of it wasn’t very nice, meat with bones, tofu, a tasteless soup, but some good dishes like the vegetables and noodles with meat, without bones.
The only problem was nothing to drink except a pot of hot water. No tea, no cold water, and if you wanted a cold drink you had to pay for it. After paying 550 yuan why should we have to pay more for a drink when we have not had to so far.
But no cold water? That was just not on, and when we brought this to the attention of the tour guide she just simply ignored us. We just didn’t get anything.
That basically tainted the whole experience.
After lunch, there was the Shaolin Temple and the Pogoda Forest to visit.
What I wanted to say is the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but the truth is, it’s probably just me.
If it’s possible, and seeing it’s the only time we can go away, as we live in the southern hemisphere, it seems logical to go north.
OK, that’s probably not as rational as it sounded in my head a few seconds ago, because where we’re planning to go it’s about minus 16 degrees.
Where on earth could it be that cold, other than the north pole? Lake Louise. Canada. Somewhere up in those snow-peaked mountains.
Why do we want to go there?
Because it’s there. Because we have been there before and it literally took our breath away (notwithstanding the severe cold). And, no doubt after we’ve been there in the dead of winter, we might have decided we won’t want to go back? Who knows.
But…
Oh, yes, there’s a but…
I need some good background for a story I’m writing, and if you’re going to do the winter thing, or the white Christmas thing, when your Christmases are usually 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, then Canada is the place to do it.
Aside from the fact, we might run into Detective Murdoch (from Murdoch Mysteries) in Toronto, and, definitely, the Maple Leafs, yes, I can see myself saying ‘go leafs go’, whilst sipping on a large glass of Molsen beer.
Then, perhaps we’ll go to New York for a week. Perhaps everything will be still shut down, but maybe not. Hopefully, there will be snow in Central Park, or, if not, the squirrels, and if not them, perhaps a movie star or two walking their dog.
