Yes, it’s that simple word that we use to call someone affectionately.
Or sometimes, with a little accent on the word; yes, dear and no, dear.
In other words, it’s a person regarded with deep affection.
It can also mean expensive, by saying, that’s a bit dear, isn’t it, when we’re really saying it’s way overpriced.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve said something is ‘too dear’ to the children.
Grannies tend to use the expression, ‘be a dear and…’, to get you do do something for them.
Friends, sometimes tongue in cheek, will say, ‘oh dear, I’ve upset you’, when that was exactly what they meant to do. Friends you say? Yes, friends indeed.
And then we always start a letter (always? Who writes letters any more?) with
Dear John (oops, not one of THOSE letters)
Dear Sir/Madam
Of course, instead of swearing, you could simply say ‘Oh dear, you’ve let us down again!’.
And when you lose your job, which is happening a lot at the moment, it is said it would cost you dear, though sometimes it would be more appropriate to use the adverb, dearly.
It is not to be confused with the word deer which is an animal, the males of which have antlers.
There are a number of different types of deer, such as reindeer and elk. In Canada, they are called caribou.
In Robin Hood’s day, killing deer brought you very harsh punishment.
And one of my favourite meats is venison, meat from a deer, which are farmed in New Zealand along with sheep.
Everyone knows that if you are on the last flight out on a Friday night the chances of you getting away on time are remote.
Yep.
We’re on the last flight out.
Yep.
There’s no way in hell we’re leaving on time.
But, here’s the thing.
Our incoming plane arrives 6 minutes late, so there’s every hope of getting away on time.
We are, of course, delusional.
Planes can’t fly without a crew, and part of our crew on another incoming plane, which is, yep, delayed.
In fact, the whole arrivals board is lit up with the word “delayed” for every flight but our incoming plane and one other from Sydney.
And, no, our missing crew members are not on either.
So, it becomes a waiting game and placating messages from the gate crew first to tell us we’re waiting for crew and two more times to tell us we will be boarding soon.
The look on some faces says they’ve been through all this before.
Then, one of the gate staff, communicator in hand goes out to see if the errant crew members are coming. She waits a few minutes but it probably takes longer than that for them to finalize their duties on the incoming plane and get to our gate.
She returns to the gate counter just as an electric car comes towards us from one of the satellites.
Crew found.
Boarding starts.
We leave 35 minutes late. About the average time all the delayed planes were, well, delayed.
Sydney to Beijing – Qantas A330-200 Boarding 11:45, everyone on board by 12:02, for a 12:10 departure. Pushing back 12:12 Take off 12:27
Lunch Airline food is getting better but the fact they serve it up to you in a metal tray with a thick aluminum lid does nothing for the quality of the food inside. I get what the chef is trying to do but often there is too little of one thing and too much of another and what you finish up with is slop in a tray. Sometimes it’s edible sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the meat is tender and other times it’s like boot leather. As it is today. I think it’s pork, I should have had the chicken. Or perhaps it was chicken. I hate it when you can’t tell what it is that you’re eating. But, the drinks were good.
Rest or Sleep, maybe It’s going to take 11 hours and 20 minutes from Sydney to Beijing, a long time to sit in a plane with nothing much to do other than crosswords, read a book or newspaper or magazine, listen to music on your own device, or the in-flight entertainment, watch a movie again by the in-flight entertainment – if it works – or try to get some sleep. I started with the crosswords but got bored quickly. I fiddled with the in-flight entertainment, looked at the movies and tv shows but none really interested me, not then at least, so I set it to the flight path. Not exactly stellar entertainment, but it’s always interesting to know where the plane is. Or is it? If we crash, what good would it do me to know it’s somewhere over the ocean, not far from Manila, or somewhere else. It’s not as if I could phone someone up, on the way down, to let them know where we are. But, just after dinner, we still haven’t left Australia
However, by the time I’ve finished fiddling with and dismissing all of the entertainment alternatives, it’s back to the flight path and now we are…
Somewhere approaching the Sulu Sea, which I’ve never heard of before, so it looks like I’ll have to study up on my geography when I get home.
OK, Manila looks like somewhere I’ve heard of, so we have to be flying over the Philippines. Not far left of that is Vietnam. Neither of those places is on my travel bucket list, so I’ll just look from up here and be satisfied with that.
Working, or not Chronic boredom is setting in by the time we are just past halfway to our destination. We are over 6 hours into the flight and there no possible way I’m going to get any sleep. I brought my Galaxy Tab loaded with a few of my novel outlines, and planning for missing chapters, thinking I might get a little thinking time in. Plane rides, I find, are excellent for getting an opportunity to write virtually unhindered by outside interruptions, if, of course, you discount the number of times people brush past, knocking your seat, the person in front lowering the seat into your face, or people around you continually asking you to turn off your light because they’re trying to sleep. Sorry, I say, but you can suffer my pain with me. It’s one of the joys of flying with over two hundred others in a claustrophobic environment. Besides, aren’t the lights supposed to be slanted so only I get the rays of light? Except, I guess when the fixed light doesn’t line up with where the airline has fixed the seat (usually so they can squash more people in).So, sorry, not sorry, take it up with the airline.
Back to work, and I put in some quality time on a part of the story that had been eluding me for a while. I knew what I wanted to write, but not how I was going to approach it, so that blissfully quiet and intense time worked in my favor, something that would not have happened back hope. I won’t bore you with the synopsis, just suffice to say it’s finally down on paper, digitally that is, and it’s a huge step forward towards finishing it. There is, of course, the end play, the reading of the will but not before there’s a few thrusts and parry’s by some of the players, but all in all the objective was to showcase a group of people with their strengths and weaknesses pushing their characters in various directions, some at odds with what is expected of them. But enough of that. A quick check of our position shows we’re still over water but closer to our destination, so much so, we might start the pre-landing rituals, starting with food.
Dinner 7:00 – Dinner is served, well, the lights go on and a lot of tired people try to shake the sleep, and sleeplessness, out of their systems. Then flight attendants that are far too cheerful, and must have beamed in from somewhere else, serve another interesting concoction that says what’s in it but you can’t really be sure of the ingredients. It comes and it goes.
9:10 – We begin our descent into Beijing, you know, that moment when the engines almost stop and there’s a sickening lurch and the plane heads downward. 9:56 – We touch down on the runway, in the dark and apparently it has been raining though from inside the plane you’d never know. 10:10 – the plane arrives at the gate, the usual few minutes to open the door, and, being closer to the front of the plane this time, it doesn’t take that long before the queue is moving.
Early or late, it doesn’t matter. After clearing customs and immigration, we have to go in search of our tour guide, waiting for us somewhere outside the arrivals terminal.
It has any number of names, from Leave of Absence to Vacation, but it is meant to be a time where you can rest and relax.
And by the time you finally get to go away, preferably somewhere as far from home as possible, you are sure ready for it.
Those long days at the office, the decisions, the deadlines, the endless pressure of having to achieve the impossible all melt away when you walk out the door, and what a feeling it is when you tell everyone, ‘I’m off on holidays, see you when I get back.’
As anyone will tell you, it’s not wise to travel the next day if at all possible, because you need some time to decompress before tackling what sometimes can be an arduous getting to the final destination, especially if it is at a peak holiday period, or on planes where anything and everything can go wrong very quickly.
Been there done that.
We traveled the next day, nothing went wrong, and all is fine.
Except …
As a writer and having spent the last few months finishing off my last novel, I was looking forward to some down time. The editor has the final draft, and I’m happy.
Then, as it always does, the best laid plans of mice and men …
It all comes unstuck.
Inspiration often comes out of left field; something happens, a piece in a newspaper, an item on TV, or just lying down staring at the ceiling, when ‘bang’ it hits you.
The start of a story, a theme that you can run with.
Damn.
I’ve been away for four days now and written seven chapters and the words will not stop.
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 it.
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!
The course of plane travel can run like clockwork, or rapidly come apart at the seems.
Every time you go to the airport, it can become an adventure. Checking in, battling the airline’s kiosk, printing and attaching bag labels, going to bag drop, remembering that every airline does it differently.
Hong Kong airport is huge and there are endless boarding gates. Being dropped off in the zone that belongs to the airline you’re flying is simple. The next step is to find the aisle letter where your flight is checking in and then do the automated boarding pass and baggage label.
If it’s international travel which it is today, there’s the added stress of negotiating immigration and the duty-free stores. We followed the rules, got there early, had the usual problems at the kiosk requiring the assistance of two Cathay Pacific staff, and finally made it to the initial departure concourse.
Next, there’s the temptation of overpriced airport food if you’re hungry which we are not. But we have a McCafe coffee to satisfy a caffeine fix before the flight.
The shops are all expensive at the initial departure concourse, so we decide to see if there are other shops near our departure gate. To get to our particular departure gate we descend to the train and get off at the 40-80 station. It’s a short journey, and once back up on the concourse level we find a collection of more affordable shops where we buy every man and his dog a selection of sweets.
From there it’s a couple of travellators, which sounds rediculously short, but are, in reality, very, very long, to our gate and we get there ten minutes before boarding is supposed to commence. Today we are traveling on an Airbus A350-900, a relatively new plane so you would think there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. We had the same plane coming to Hong Kong and was, literally, plain sailing.
We find a seat in the gate lounge and wait along with everyone else. I’m still surprised at the number of able-bodied people who take the disabled seats for the sake of being closer to the start of the line and worse was a woman who not only took up one of the seats but also another for her cabin baggage which was extensive.
Boarding starts late, and routinely for the first and business, and disabled passengers. The rest now start to line up in the economy line. Some people haven’t moved, perhaps they know something we don’t.
We eventually join the line and go through initial formalities while waiting. And waiting. As the minute’s tick by nothing is happening other than what appears to be growing consternation by the gate staff. The tipping point for immediate concern is when the previously boarded passengers begin to come back through the boarding gate.
One of those who had been on board came our way and said there was a problem with the plane. They were told it was due to technical difficulties the official non-scary description for your plane Is broken. Because of consternation among the queued economy passengers, there was an official announcement that advised of the technical difficulties, and boarding would be delayed.
We all sit back down, but this time there were a number of disabled and elderly people who needed seats, and our able-bodied lady and her baggage didn’t move. Shame on her. We are lucky that where we were in the waiting line it was adjacent to nearby seats putting us closer to the head of the line when it reformed.
Now we were able to watch the other passengers jockeying for position to race to be first in the economy class boarding queue the second time around. I think they realize they have the same seat if they are at the front of the line or the back. Because we were all asked to sit down, those at the front of the queue would now find themselves at the end if they’d decided to sit and wait.
After a delay of about an hour and a half, we are finally boarding. The worst aspect of this delay is losing our slot in the departures and I’m guessing this was going to have an effect on our actual takeoff time. It appears to be the case. Boarding does not take very long and shortly after the doors are closed we’re pushing back from the gate.
From there, it becomes a chess game when we get a slot. We are in a queue of planes waiting their turn, and before the main runway planes are separated into two queues, and we are in the second. Since we are the only one, I suspect we’re in the delayed take-off queue, and sit watching four or so other planes take off before we finally get on the runway.
All around us, planes seem to be going by and taking off while we wait, and wait, and wait…
On the plane, we discover one of the toilets is out of action so perhaps that was the technical difficulty. It’s not full so one toilet down will have little effect.
Leaving in the early afternoon will get us into Brisbane late at night. It was meant to be around 11 pm, but with the delays, and possibly making up time in flight, it will now be after midnight when we arrive. Fortunately, we have a 24-hour airport.
The flight from HongKong to Brisbane is without event. Lunch after takeoff, then a few hours later, an hour or so before landing, we have dinner. Both of us are not hungry.
We land after midnight, tired but glad to be home. I guess it could have been worse.
Everyone knows that if you are on the last flight out on a Friday night the chances of you getting away on time are remote.
Yep.
We’re on the last flight out.
Yep.
There’s no way in hell we’re leaving on time.
But, here’s the thing.
Our incoming plane arrives 6 minutes late, so there’s every hope of getting away on time.
We are, of course, delusional.
Planes can’t fly without a crew, and part of our crew on another incoming plane, which is, yep, delayed.
In fact, the whole arrivals board is lit up with the word “delayed” for every flight but our incoming plane and one other from Sydney.
And, no, our missing crew members are not on either.
So, it becomes a waiting game and placating messages from the gate crew first to tell us we’re waiting for crew and two more times to tell us we will be boarding soon.
The look on some faces says they’ve been through all this before.
Then, one of the gate staff, communicator in hand goes out to see if the errant crew members are coming. She waits a few minutes but it probably takes longer than that for them to finalize their duties on the incoming plane and get to our gate.
She returns to the gate counter just as an electric car comes towards us from one of the satellites.
Crew found.
Boarding starts.
We leave 35 minutes late. About the average time all the delayed planes were, well, delayed.
And probably would be, if I was away on holidays in Europe, simply because I’ve always wanted to be in Belgium on a Tuesday just so I could use that line. Not going to happen in the immediate future, but maybe next year some time.
By the way, that line is out of a movie, but I’m not sure which one. Obviously, it wasn’t that great if I can’t remember it.
But…
Searching for locations for my stories takes a lot of time and effort, using Google Earth and other means like street view. Finding houses, or apartments required a great deal of real estate research, almost to the point of buying a property.
Is there any better way to see the street it’s in, the neighbors, the neighborhood, and inside the house and gardens. Almost as if you lived there, which of course you do in the story.
In reality, I’m in Canada on the trans-Canada highway heading towards Banff, on icy roads in winter. Yes, that’s where we were a few years ago in early January, getting a feel for the place, the roads, the weather, the people, and the places.
Cold, yes. Atmospheric, yes, exciting, double yes. Sometimes research is really fun, well, I don’t call it that, otherwise everyone else will think it was not the birthday treat that it was meant to be.
And was.
My wife’s 65th birthday was one she certainly will never forget.
So..,
Writing is proceeding better now that I’ve knuckled down. The Trans-Canada experience has been translated into a story attached to a photo and has been posted. It will also become a new episodic story, and will start now the helicopter crash story has ended.
The treasure hunt has taken shape, and there’s lots of twists and turns, with people yet to show their true colours. It always seems that way when there’s a fortune at stake. Evil lurks behind and under every rock, and people who were thought to be untrustworthy suddenly change for the better, and those whom you thought you could depend on, well, you know what happens when a fortune is involved.
And as for the helicopter crash and its aftermath, this finally has been brought to a conclusion, but not without a bit of heart stopping terror involved.
My other story, in war time Germany and Italy, is humming along, but it is about to hot up in the castle. Our defector is yet to get there, but, by the time he does, our hero is going to have to clean up both the rogue resistance, and treasonous soldiers. Sounds easy, but in reality, it’s going to be a lot tougher.
We shall see.
And the Being Inspired series just got to 140, and is nearly ready to be published.
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 it.
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!
The course of plane travel can run like clockwork, or rapidly come apart at the seems.
Every time you go to the airport, it can become an adventure. Checking in, battling the airline’s kiosk, printing and attaching bag labels, going to bag drop, remembering that every airline does it differently.
Hong Kong airport is huge and there are endless boarding gates. Being dropped off in the zone that belongs to the airline you’re flying is simple. The next step is to find the aisle letter where your flight is checking in and then do the automated boarding pass and baggage label.
If it’s international travel which it is today, there’s the added stress of negotiating immigration and the duty-free stores. We followed the rules, got there early, had the usual problems at the kiosk requiring the assistance of two Cathay Pacific staff, and finally made it to the initial departure concourse.
Next, there’s the temptation of overpriced airport food if you’re hungry which we are not. But we have a McCafe coffee to satisfy a caffeine fix before the flight.
The shops are all expensive at the initial departure concourse, so we decide to see if there are other shops near our departure gate. To get to our particular departure gate we descend to the train and get off at the 40-80 station. It’s a short journey, and once back up on the concourse level we find a collection of more affordable shops where we buy every man and his dog a selection of sweets.
From there it’s a couple of travellators, which sounds rediculously short, but are, in reality, very, very long, to our gate and we get there ten minutes before boarding is supposed to commence. Today we are traveling on an Airbus A350-900, a relatively new plane so you would think there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. We had the same plane coming to Hong Kong and was, literally, plain sailing.
We find a seat in the gate lounge and wait along with everyone else. I’m still surprised at the number of able-bodied people who take the disabled seats for the sake of being closer to the start of the line and worse was a woman who not only took up one of the seats but also another for her cabin baggage which was extensive.
Boarding starts late, and routinely for the first and business, and disabled passengers. The rest now start to line up in the economy line. Some people haven’t moved, perhaps they know something we don’t.
We eventually join the line and go through initial formalities while waiting. And waiting. As the minute’s tick by nothing is happening other than what appears to be growing consternation by the gate staff. The tipping point for immediate concern is when the previously boarded passengers begin to come back through the boarding gate.
One of those who had been on board came our way and said there was a problem with the plane. They were told it was due to technical difficulties the official non-scary description for your plane Is broken. Because of consternation among the queued economy passengers, there was an official announcement that advised of the technical difficulties, and boarding would be delayed.
We all sit back down, but this time there were a number of disabled and elderly people who needed seats, and our able-bodied lady and her baggage didn’t move. Shame on her. We are lucky that where we were in the waiting line it was adjacent to nearby seats putting us closer to the head of the line when it reformed.
Now we were able to watch the other passengers jockeying for position to race to be first in the economy class boarding queue the second time around. I think they realize they have the same seat if they are at the front of the line or the back. Because we were all asked to sit down, those at the front of the queue would now find themselves at the end if they’d decided to sit and wait.
After a delay of about an hour and a half, we are finally boarding. The worst aspect of this delay is losing our slot in the departures and I’m guessing this was going to have an effect on our actual takeoff time. It appears to be the case. Boarding does not take very long and shortly after the doors are closed we’re pushing back from the gate.
From there, it becomes a chess game when we get a slot. We are in a queue of planes waiting their turn, and before the main runway planes are separated into two queues, and we are in the second. Since we are the only one, I suspect we’re in the delayed take-off queue, and sit watching four or so other planes take off before we finally get on the runway.
All around us, planes seem to be going by and taking off while we wait, and wait, and wait…
On the plane, we discover one of the toilets is out of action so perhaps that was the technical difficulty. It’s not full so one toilet down will have little effect.
Leaving in the early afternoon will get us into Brisbane late at night. It was meant to be around 11 pm, but with the delays, and possibly making up time in flight, it will now be after midnight when we arrive. Fortunately, we have a 24-hour airport.
The flight from HongKong to Brisbane is without event. Lunch after takeoff, then a few hours later, an hour or so before landing, we have dinner. Both of us are not hungry.
We land after midnight, tired but glad to be home. I guess it could have been worse.
