Lying there, afraid to move, I honestly believed that was just the stupidest thing I’d ever done.
Aside from the fact I could see we were about to be blown to kingdom come by a rocket, I had that split second to decide if I wanted to be incinerated, or in possession of 206 broken bones.
I guess I was assuming I’d survive the landing.
After all the helicopter was only about twenty to thirty feet above the ground and not moving very fast, in fact, it was slowing, and turning away, when the pilot saw the rocket launcher.
I could hear the crackling of fire not far from me, a result of the helicopter hitting the ground. It wasn’t a large explosion, and certainly not accompanied by a hail of red-hot metal parts.
Not yet.
I moved and it hurt. Understandable. But there didn’t seem to be any broken bones, which was nothing short of a miracle. I did try to affect a roll when landing as we were trained in parachute jumping, and maybe that had helped.
Enough time to recover, I rolled over and got to my knees. Ok, that hurt, twinges in my lower back, and a slight sprain in my right ankle. No running then.
Then I heard the gears crunching, so sort an old Toyota pickup would make, followed by an over-revving engine. A novice driver. Or a man in a hurry.
Damn.
The pickup was coming back to check the wreckage.
And if there were any survivors.
No gun, lost that in the jump. But, as luck would have it, an AK47 was lying on the ground between me and the burning wreckage.
Only one problem. The pickup would be on me before I could get to it.
Is this the very definition of being between a rock and a hard place?
This story has been ongoing since I was seventeen, and just to let you know, I’m 72 this year.
Yes, it’s taken a long time to get it done.
Why, you might ask.
Well, I never gave it much interest because I started writing it after a small incident when I was 17, and working as a book packer for a book distributor in Melbourne
At the end of my first year, at Christmas, the employer had a Christmas party, and that year, it was at a venue in St Kilda.
I wasn’t going to go because at that age, I was an ordinary boy who was very introverted and basically scared of his own shadow and terrified by girls.
Back then, I would cross the street to avoid them
Also, other members of the staff in the shipping department were rough and ready types who were not backwards in telling me what happened, and being naive, perhaps they knew I’d be either shocked or intrigued.
I was both adamant I wasn’t coming and then got roped in on a dare.
Damn!
So, back then, in the early 70s, people looked the other way when it came to drinking, and of course, Dutch courage always takes away the concerns, especially when normally you wouldn’t do half the stuff you wouldn’t in a million years
I made it to the end, not as drunk and stupid as I thought I might be, and St Kilda being a salacious place if you knew where to look, my new friends decided to give me a surprise.
It didn’t take long to realise these men were ‘men about town’ as they kept saying, and we went on an odyssey. Yes, those backstreet brothels where one could, I was told, have anything they could imagine.
Let me tell you, large quantities of alcohol and imagination were a very bad mix.
So, the odyssey in ‘The things we do’ was based on that, and then the encounter with Diana. Well, let’s just say I learned a great deal about girls that night.
Firstly, not all girls are nasty and spiteful, which seemed to be the case whenever I met one. There was a way to approach, greet, talk to, and behave.
It was also true that I could have had anything I wanted, but I decided what was in my imagination could stay there. She was amused that all I wanted was to talk, but it was my money, and I could spend it how I liked.
And like any 17-year-old naive fool, I fell in love with her and had all these foolish notions. Months later, I went back, but she had moved on, to where no one was saying or knew.
Needless to say, I was heartbroken and had to get over that first loss, which, like any 17-year-old, was like the end of the world.
But it was the best hour I’d ever spent in my life and would remain so until I met the woman I have been married to for the last 48 years.
As Henry, he was in part based on a rebel, the son of rich parents who despised them and their wealth, and he used to regale anyone who would listen about how they had messed up his life
If only I’d come from such a background!
And yes, I was only a run away from climbing up the stairs to get on board a ship, acting as a purser.
I worked for a shipping company and they gave their junior staff members an opportunity to spend a year at sea working as a purser on a cargo ship that sailed between Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart in Australia.
One of the other junior staff members’ turn came, and I would visit him on board when he would tell me stories about life on board, the officers, the crew, and other events. These stories, which sounded incredible to someone so impressionable, were a delight to hear.
Alas, by that time, I had tired of office work and moved on to be a tradesman at the place where my father worked.
It proved to be the right move, as that is where I met my wife. Diana had been right; love would find me when I least expected it.
I had hoped never to see Rodby again, and yet here I was in that oppressively warm wood polish-smelling office of his, sitting uncomfortably opposite him, a very large and clear desk between us.
In all the time I’d known him, and those visits to his office, there had never been anything on it. Not even a phone.
The last time I was in this position, to inform him of my retirement, I’d been reluctant to put the resignation envelope on the pristine surface.
Significantly, it was a month to the day after I left Larry’s mother’s house in Sorrento.
The day after I went with Cecilia to her audition, and she smashed it, getting the role from a rather astonished casting director, and director. He was calling it a possible break-out performance, in a whole different language that I didn’t understand.
That same night I found Juliet dining alone in the hotel restaurant and told her the good news, but her brother had already called her. We had dinner, and it could have been more, but there was that Cecilia thing in the back of her mind so we parted as friends.
And at a loose end, Venice no longer hold any significance for me, I moved back to London.
I should have gone to Paris. There, it would have been harder for Alfie to find me.
He had been giving me the ‘come back’ look, one that I had taken a long time to learn how to ignore.
Seeing he wasn’t making any impact, he said, “They found Larry.”
An enigmatic statement. Who found Larry?
“The Italian police recovered the body, in a little-used area of Lake Como. No signs of physical damage, not shot or stabbed, but apparently, he died of natural causes. We’re still waiting for a definitive coroner’s report. You never really elaborated on what happened at his mother’s house.”
My report was short and lacked detail, more notable for what I didn’t say rather than what I did.
“Nothing to tell. Brenda just told him his days of running the organization were over, she and Jaime Meyers had collaboratively taken over, and things would be different. I notice several other hard-line criminals have been taken off the streets since, so Inspector Crowley’s arrangement with her is working. A win-win situation. And you don’t have to deal with Larry anymore.”
“That’s the problem. If something is too good to be true, it generally is. I have to wonder what has replaced him.”
“I’m retired sir. No longer interested. Why am I here?”
I could see he had more, possibly to pique my interest, but just shrugged.
“Nothing of any importance. I thought you might want to know what happened to Larry. And Martha wants me to go to the opera tonight and she specifically asked me to ask you, and as you know she does not take no for an answer.”
I shrugged. He was right about his wife, a force of nature to be reckoned with. I had met her several times, and she had been intrigued with Violetta and had been devastated when she learned of her death.
“Then I guess I’d better dust off the monkey suit.”
“Good. I’ll text you where and when and send a driver to pick you up.”
Given that they were written in a different time, with different people, and far different circumstances, the logical answer would be no.
But the real question is, has the human condition changed at all?
Could we believe that people are still the same people, the same feelings, the same hatreds, the same biases, there’s still poor and rich, and probably somewhere a comfortable middle class?
The rich people still rule the world.
Politicians are still the same greedy, insensitive, uncaring, self-serving asses they always have been and always will. Who wants to be a politician? No man or woman in his or her right mind would want, no decent man or woman that is.
Men still covet their neighbour’s wife, or anyone else’s for that matter, we still get jealous, and a certain group still murder other people for sometimes the stupidest of reasons.
Whether it is 1720, 1830, or 1940, it doesn’t matter. We might have moved from horse and cart to automobiles, from stagecoaches to Concord SSTs, thatch cottages to mansions, tinkers to supermarkets, and a life span that used to be 40, to now somewhere in our 80s, but people, the actual human beings, have not changed.
Not one iota.
So, go and read a few of those classic novels, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Laurence Sterne, just to name a few.
Check out what people were doing 200, 300 years ago, and if you read between the lines, you’re going to find they are no different to us. They just dress funny and talk funny, but then so do we, these days.
Day 110 – To write is to sit in judgement on oneself
…
The Mirror on the Page: Why Writing is the Ultimate Act of Self-Judgment
“To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.” — Henrik Ibsen
We often romanticise the act of writing. We talk about the “flow state,” the “muse,” and the catharsis of putting pen to paper. We view writing as an act of creation—a way to birth new worlds, build arguments, or express the deepest chambers of our souls.
But Henrik Ibsen, the master of the modern realistic drama, offers a colder, more clinical take. For Ibsen, writing isn’t just an act of creation; it is an act of interrogation. To write, he suggests, is to sit in judgment on oneself.
The Inescapable Reflection
When you stare at a blank page, you are not merely filling space. You are deciding what matters, what is true, and what is worth preserving.
Every word we commit to the page is a micro-decision. We choose our adjectives, our syntax, and our silences. In doing so, we inevitably reveal our biases, our insecurities, our logic, and our moral compass. You cannot hide from a finished manuscript. When you read back what you have written, you are reading the architecture of your own mind.
If you write with honesty, you are forced to confront the gaps between who you think you are and what you are actually capable of articulating. It is a mirror that doesn’t just show your face; it shows your thoughts in their raw, unvarnished state.
The Courtroom of the Conscience
Why did Ibsen view this as a form of “judgment”?
Because writing forces a separation between the thinker and the thought. When a thought is just floating in the ether of your brain, it feels fluid and safe. Once you write it down, it becomes an object—a specimen on a slide.
In that moment of scrutiny, the internal judge wakes up:
Is this thought coherent, or am I deceiving myself?
Is this argument kind, or is it defensive?
Does this character reflect my own failings, or am I trying to look like a hero?
Writing is the process of putting our own consciousness on trial. We act as both the prosecutor, hunting for inconsistencies and falsehoods, and the judge, deciding whether these ideas hold up to the light of day.
The Burden (and Gift) of Clarity
This is why so many people find writing painful. It is an unnerving experience to realise that your “deep insights” might actually be clichés, or that your “logical stance” is rooted in fear.
But this judgment is also the greatest gift a writer can receive.
If we never write—if we never force ourselves to sit in judgment of our own ideas—we remain trapped in the echo chambers of our own internal narratives. We keep repeating the same habits, holding the same prejudices, and floating in the same murky waters of half-formed intentions.
By writing, we force ourselves to stand before the bench. We demand evidence. We call our own bluff.
Final Thoughts
Next time you find yourself struggling to find the right word, remember Ibsen. You aren’t just battling with vocabulary; you are engaged in a high-stakes trial. You are evaluating your own worldview.
Writing is not for the faint of heart because it requires the courage to judge oneself—and the even greater courage to accept the verdict, learn from it, and write the next sentence anyway.
So, what is your writing telling you about yourself today? Are you ready to hear the verdict?
Williams’ Restaurant, East 65th Street, New York, Saturday, 8:00 p.m.
We met the Blaines at Williams’, a rather upmarket restaurant that the Blaines frequently visited and had recommended.
Of course, during the taxi ride there, Alison reminded me that with my new job, we would be able to go to many more places like Williams’. It was, at worst, more emotional blackmail, because as far as Alison was concerned, we were well on our way to posh restaurants, the Trump Tower Apartments, and the trappings of the ‘executive set’.
It would be a miracle if I didn’t strangle Elaine before the night was over. It was she who had filled Alison’s head with all this stuff and nonsense.
Aside from the half-frown, half-smile, Alison was looking stunning. It had been months since she had last dressed up, and she was especially wearing the dress I’d bought her for our 5th anniversary that cost a month’s salary. On her, it was worth it, and I would have paid more if I had to. She had adored it and me, for a week or so after.
For tonight, I think I was close to getting back on that pedestal.
She had the looks and figure to draw attention, the sort movie stars get on the red carpet, and when we walked into the restaurant, I swear there were at least five seconds of silence, and many more gasps.
I even had a sudden loss of breath earlier in the evening when she came out of the dressing room. Once more, I was reminded of how lucky I was that she had agreed to marry me. Amid all those self-doubts, I couldn’t believe she had loved me when there were so many others out there who were more appealing.
Elaine was out of her seat and came over just as the Head Waiter hovered into sight. She personally escorted Alison to the table, allowing me to follow like the Queen’s consort, while she and Alison basked in the admiring glances of the other patrons.
More than once, I heard the muted question, “Who is she?”
Jimmy stood, we shook hands, and then we sat together. It was not the usual boy, girl, boy, girl seating arrangement. Jimmy and I on one side and Elaine and Alison on the other.
The battle lines were drawn.
Jimmy was looking fashionable, with a permanent blade one beard, unkempt hair, and a designer dinner suit that looked like he’d slept in it. Alison insisted I wear a tuxedo, and I looked like the proverbial penguin or just a thinner version of Alfred Hitchcock.
The bow tie had been slightly crooked, but just before we stepped out, she had straightened it. And took the moment to look deeply into my soul. It was one of those moments when words were not necessary.
Then it was gone.
I relived it briefly as I sat and she looked at me. A penetrating look that told me to ‘behave’.
When we were settled, Elaine said, in that breathless, enthusiastic manner of hers when she was excited, “So, Harry, you are finally moving up.” It was not a question, but a statement.
I was not sure what she meant by ‘finally’, but I accepted it with good grace. Sometimes, Elaine was prone to using figures of speech I didn’t understand. I guessed she was talking about the new job. “It was supposed to be a secret.”
She smiled widely. “There are no secrets between Al and me, are there, Al?”
I looked at ‘Al’ and saw a brief look of consternation.
I was not sure Alison liked the idea of being called Al. I tried it once and was admonished. But it was interesting that her ‘best friend forever’ was allowed that distinction when I was not. It was, perhaps, another indicator of how far I’d slipped in her estimation.
Perhaps, I thought, it was a necessary evil. As I understood it, the Blaines were our mentors at the Trump Tower, because they didn’t just let ‘anyone’ in. I didn’t ask if the Blaines thought we were just ‘anyone’ before I got the job offer.
And then there was that look between Alison and Elaine, quickly stolen before Alison realised I was looking at both of them. I was out of my depth, in a place I didn’t belong, with people I didn’t understand. And yet, apparently, Alison did. I must have missed the memo.
“No,” Alison said softly, stealing a glance in my direction, “No secrets between friends.”
No secrets. Her look conveyed something else entirely.
The waiter brought champagne, Krug, and poured glasses for each of us. It was not the cheap stuff, and I was glad I brought a couple of thousand dollars with me. We were going to need it.
Then, a toast.
To a new job and a new life.
“When did you decide?” Elaine was effusive at the best of times, but with the champagne, it was worse.
Alison had a strange expression on her face. It was obvious she had told Elaine it was a done deal, even before I’d made up my mind. Perhaps she’d assumed I might be ‘refreshingly honest’ in front of Elaine, but it could also mean she didn’t really care what I might say or do.
Instead of consternation, she looked happy, and I realised it would be churlish, even silly, if I made a scene. I knew what I wanted to say. I also knew that it would serve little purpose provoking Elaine or upsetting Alison. This was not the time or the place. Alison had been looking forward to coming here, and I was not going to spoil it.
Instead, I said, smiling, “When I woke up this morning and found Alison missing. If she had been there, I would not have noticed the water stain on the roof above our bed, and decided there and then how much I hated the place.” I used my reassuring smile, the one I used with the customers when all hell was breaking loose, and the forest fire was out of control. “It’s the little things. They all add up until one day …” I shrugged. “I guess that one day was today.”
I saw an incredulous look pass between Elaine and Alison, a non-verbal question; perhaps, is he for real? Or, I told you he’d come around.
I had no idea the two were so close.
“How quaint,” Elaine said, which just about summed up her feelings towards me. I think, at that moment, I lost some brownie points. It was all I could come up with at short notice.
“Yes,” I added, with a little more emphasis than I wanted. “Alison was off to get some studying in with one of her friends.”
“Weren’t the two of you off to the Hamptons, a weekend with some friends?” Jimmy piped up and immediately got the ‘shut up, you fool’ look that cut that line of conversation dead. Someone forgot to feed Jimmy his lines.
It was followed by the condescending smile from Elaine, and “I need to powder my nose. Care to join me, Al?”
A frown, then a forced smile for her new best friend. “Yes.”
I watched them leave the table and head in the direction of the restroom, looking like they were in earnest conversation. I thought ‘Al’ looked annoyed, but I could be wrong.
I had to say Jimmy looked more surprised than I did.
There was that odd moment of silence between us, Jimmy still smarting from his death stare, and for me, the Alison and Elaine show. I was quite literally gob-smacked.
I drained my champagne glass, gathering some courage and turned to him. “By the way, we were going to have a weekend away, but this legal tutorial thing came up. You know Alison is doing her law degree.”
He looked startled when he realised I had spoken. He was looking intently at a woman several tables over from us, one who’d obviously forgotten some basic garments when getting dressed. Or perhaps it was deliberate. She’d definitely had some enhancements done.
He dragged his eyes back to me. “Yes. Elaine said something or other about it. But I thought she said the tutor was out of town and it had been postponed until next week. Perhaps I got it wrong. I usually do.”
“Perhaps I’ve got it wrong.” I shrugged as the dark thoughts started swirling in my head again. “This week or next, what does it matter?”
Of course, it mattered to me, and I digested what he said with a sinking heart. It showed there was another problem between Alison and me; she might have been telling me lies. If what he said was true and I had no reason to doubt him, where was she going tomorrow morning, and had she really been with a friend studying today?
We poured some more champagne, had a drink, then he asked, “This promotion thing, what’s it worth?”
“Trouble, I suspect. Definitely more money, but less time at home.”
“Oh,” raised eyebrows. Obviously, the women had not talked about the job in front of him, or, at least, not all the details. “You sure you want to do that?”
At last, the voice of reason. “Me? No.”
“Yet you accepted the job.”
I sucked in a breath or two while I considered whether I could trust him. Even if I couldn’t, I could see my ship was sinking, so it wouldn’t matter what I told him, or what Elaine might find out from him. “Jimmy, between you and me, I haven’t as yet decided one way or another. To be honest, I won’t know until I go up to Barclay’s office and he asks me the question.”
“Barclay?”
“My boss.”
“Elaine’s doing a job for a Barclay who recently moved into the tower a block down from us. I thought I recognised the name.”
“How did Elaine get the job?”
“Oh, Alison put him onto her.”
“When?”
“A couple of months ago. Why?”
I shrugged and tried to keep a straight face, while my insides were churning up like the wake of a supertanker. I felt sick, faint, and wanted to die all at the same moment. “Perhaps she said something about it, but it didn’t connect at the time. Too busy with work, I expect. I think I seriously need to get away for a while.”
I could hardly breathe, my throat was constricted, and I knew I had to keep it together. I could see Elaine and Alison coming back, so I had to calm down. I sucked in some deep breaths and put my ‘manage a complete and utter disaster’ look on my face.
And I had to change the subject, quickly, so I said, “Jimmy, Elaine told Alison, who told me, you were something of a guru of the cause and effects of the global economic meltdown. Now, I have a couple of friends who have been expounding this theory …”
Like flicking a switch, I launched into the well-worn practice of ‘running a distraction’, like at work when we needed to keep the customer from discovering the truth. It was one of the things I was good at, taking over a conversation and pushing it in a different direction. It was salvaging a good result from an utter disaster, and if ever there was a time that it was required, it was right here, right now.
When Alison sat down and looked at me, she knew something had happened between Jimmy and me. I might have looked pale or red-faced, or angry or disappointed, but it didn’t matter. If that didn’t seal the deal for her, the fact that I took over the dining engagement did. She knew well enough that the only time I did that was when everything was about to go to hell in a handbasket. She’d seen me in action before and had been suitably astonished.
But I got into gear, kept the champagne flowing and steered the conversation, as much as one could from a seasoned professional like Elaine, and, I think, in Jimmy’s eyes, he saw the battle lines and knew who took the crown on points. Neither Elaine nor Jimmy suspected anything, and if the truth be told, I had improved my stocks with Elaine. She was at times both surprised and interested, even willing to take a back seat.
Alison, on the other hand, tried poking around the edges, and, once when Elaine and Jimmy had got up to have a cigarette outside, questioned me directly. I chose to ignore her and pretend nothing had happened, rather than tell her how much I was enjoying the evening.
She had her ‘secrets’. I had mine.
At the end of the evening, when I got up to go to the bathroom, I was physically sick from the pent-up tension and the implications of what Jimmy had told me. It took a while for me to pull myself together; so long, in fact, that Jimmy came looking for me. I told him I’d drunk too much champagne, and he seemed satisfied with that excuse. When I returned, both Alison and Elaine noticed how pale I was, but neither made any comment.
It was a sad way to end what was supposed to be a delightful evening, which, to a large degree, it was for the other three. But I had achieved what I set out to do: to play them at their own game, watching the deception once I knew there was one, as warily as a cat watches its prey.
I had also discovered Jimmy’s real calling; a professor of economics at the same University Alison was doing her law degree. It was no surprise in the end, on a night where surprises abounded, that the world could really be that small.
We parted in the early hours of the morning, a taxi whisking us back to the Lower East Side, another taking the Blaines back to the Upper West Side. But, in our case, as Alison reminded me, it would not be for much longer. She showed concern for my health and asked me what was wrong. It took all the courage I could muster to tell her it was most likely something I ate and the champagne, and that I would be fine in the morning.
She could see quite plainly it was anything other than what I told her, but she didn’t pursue it. Perhaps she just didn’t care what I was playing at.
And yet, after everything that had happened, once inside our ‘palace’, the events of the evening were discarded, like her clothing, and she again reminded me of what we had together in the early years before the problems had set in.
It left me confused and lost.
I couldn’t sleep because my mind had now gone down that irreversible path that told me I was losing her, that she had found someone else, and that our marriage was in its last death throes.
And now I knew it had something to do with Barclay.
How many of us have skeletons in the closet that we know nothing about? The skeletons we know about generally stay there, but those we do not, well, they have a habit of coming out of left field when we least expect them.
In this case, when you see your photo on a TV screen with the accompanying text that says you are wanted by every law enforcement agency in Europe, you’re in a state of shock, only to be compounded by those same police, armed and menacing, kicking the door down.
I’d been thinking about this premise for a while after I discovered my mother had a boyfriend before she married my father, a boyfriend who was, by all accounts, the man who was the love of her life.
Then, in terms of coming up with an idea for a story, what if she had a child by him that we didn’t know about, which might mean I had a half-brother or sister I knew nothing about. It’s not an uncommon occurrence from what I’ve been researching.
There are many ways of putting a spin on this story.
Then, in the back of my mind, I remembered a story an acquaintance at work was once telling us over morning tea, that a friend of a friend had a mother who had a twin sister and that each of the sisters had a son by the same father, without each knowing of the father’s actions, both growing up without the other having any knowledge of their half brother, only to meet by accident on the other side of the world.
It was an encounter that in the scheme of things might never have happened, and each would have remained oblivious of the other.
For one sister, the relationship was over before she discovered she was pregnant, and therefore had not told the man he was a father. It was no surprise the relationship foundered when she discovered he was also having a relationship with her sister, a discovery that caused her to cut all ties with both of them and never speak to either from that day.
It’s a story with more twists and turns than a country lane!
Day 110 – To write is to sit in judgement on oneself
…
The Mirror on the Page: Why Writing is the Ultimate Act of Self-Judgment
“To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.” — Henrik Ibsen
We often romanticise the act of writing. We talk about the “flow state,” the “muse,” and the catharsis of putting pen to paper. We view writing as an act of creation—a way to birth new worlds, build arguments, or express the deepest chambers of our souls.
But Henrik Ibsen, the master of the modern realistic drama, offers a colder, more clinical take. For Ibsen, writing isn’t just an act of creation; it is an act of interrogation. To write, he suggests, is to sit in judgment on oneself.
The Inescapable Reflection
When you stare at a blank page, you are not merely filling space. You are deciding what matters, what is true, and what is worth preserving.
Every word we commit to the page is a micro-decision. We choose our adjectives, our syntax, and our silences. In doing so, we inevitably reveal our biases, our insecurities, our logic, and our moral compass. You cannot hide from a finished manuscript. When you read back what you have written, you are reading the architecture of your own mind.
If you write with honesty, you are forced to confront the gaps between who you think you are and what you are actually capable of articulating. It is a mirror that doesn’t just show your face; it shows your thoughts in their raw, unvarnished state.
The Courtroom of the Conscience
Why did Ibsen view this as a form of “judgment”?
Because writing forces a separation between the thinker and the thought. When a thought is just floating in the ether of your brain, it feels fluid and safe. Once you write it down, it becomes an object—a specimen on a slide.
In that moment of scrutiny, the internal judge wakes up:
Is this thought coherent, or am I deceiving myself?
Is this argument kind, or is it defensive?
Does this character reflect my own failings, or am I trying to look like a hero?
Writing is the process of putting our own consciousness on trial. We act as both the prosecutor, hunting for inconsistencies and falsehoods, and the judge, deciding whether these ideas hold up to the light of day.
The Burden (and Gift) of Clarity
This is why so many people find writing painful. It is an unnerving experience to realise that your “deep insights” might actually be clichés, or that your “logical stance” is rooted in fear.
But this judgment is also the greatest gift a writer can receive.
If we never write—if we never force ourselves to sit in judgment of our own ideas—we remain trapped in the echo chambers of our own internal narratives. We keep repeating the same habits, holding the same prejudices, and floating in the same murky waters of half-formed intentions.
By writing, we force ourselves to stand before the bench. We demand evidence. We call our own bluff.
Final Thoughts
Next time you find yourself struggling to find the right word, remember Ibsen. You aren’t just battling with vocabulary; you are engaged in a high-stakes trial. You are evaluating your own worldview.
Writing is not for the faint of heart because it requires the courage to judge oneself—and the even greater courage to accept the verdict, learn from it, and write the next sentence anyway.
So, what is your writing telling you about yourself today? Are you ready to hear the verdict?
There’s hanging around, and there’s hanging around
…
So, there I was, hanging half out of the helicopter, shooting a handgun at a truck speeding along a dirt track.
I know, what’s the effective range of a handgun?
The sound of the rotors was still deafening even with the earphones on and as I run out of bullets and was reaching for another clip, I heard a voice crackle in my ears.
“Some fool’s got a rocket launcher.”
That fool was trying to lean out the passenger side of the truck and aim the launcher at the helicopter.
The bucking and swaying of the vehicle nearly tipped him out onto the roadside, but something managed to anchor him, and he was taking aim.
“Now would be the time to peel away,” I said, not knowing if the pilot could hear me.
Our course didn’t deviate, so perhaps he hadn’t.
I calculated the distance between the helicopter and the ground, and the speed we were traveling. Fast. Short drop. Quick landing. Very painful.
In that moment I saw the rocket leave the launcher, I let go.
There was that instant where you feel disembodied and floating on air. The same as that few seconds in free fall, just before pulling the rip cord of a parachute.
I hit the ground a rolled, not that I thought it would do much good, and the stopped, just before I lost consciousness. Somewhere in front of me, there was a huge explosion, and then nothing.
Last thought, I hope the helicopter didn’t land on me.
John Pennington’s life is in the doldrums. Looking for new opportunities, and prevaricating about getting married, the only joy on the horizon was an upcoming visit to his grandmother in Sorrento, Italy.
Suddenly he is left at the check-in counter with a message on his phone telling him the marriage is off, and the relationship is over.
If only he hadn’t promised a friend he would do a favour for him in Rome.
At the first stop, Geneva, he has a chance encounter with Zoe, an intriguing woman who captures his imagination from the moment she boards the Savoire, and his life ventures into uncharted territory in more ways than one.
That ‘favour’ for his friend suddenly becomes a life-changing event, and when Zoe, the woman who he knows is too good to be true, reappears, danger and death follow.
Shot at, lied to, seduced, and drawn into a world where nothing is what it seems, John is dragged into an adrenaline-charged undertaking, where he may have been wiser to stay with the ‘devil you know’ rather than opt for the ‘devil you don’t’.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 