I’ve been sitting at the desk staring at the screen thinking of what to write that might interest other people.
Seems I’m not too good at it.
So, I moved seats, to sit opposite the writer’s chair and took a good long hard look at the person, the so-called writer, conjuring up in my mind, if I was someone I’d just dragged in off the street, what would I ask?
Would I bother?
I mean most of of walk down the street trying to avoid everyone else, and anything bad that might happen.
But I’m here now, so for a free cup of tea and a Doubletree cookie, I consider myself bribed.
Question 1: Why on earth would you want to write when there’s a billion other books out there? Seems a complete waste of time to me.
[Answer] Good point, most days when I get out of bed, or rather stare at the ceiling from under the covers, I wonder why I bother to get up.
OK that’s the borderline manic depressive speaking, and most likely suffering from a hangover, trying to get those last 1,000 words for the day done.
Question 2: You write when you’re drunk? That must make a lot of sense, not!
This person has found me out in two questions.
[Answer] No, a little Scotch helps oil the wheels on the mind.
Question 3: What do you do for inspiration?
[Answer] Thinking up new and novel ways of killing off people I drag in off the street to ask me questions about myself. No, sorry, didn’t mean that. I haven’t a mean bone in my body. Inspiration you say?
Look around.
The inquisitor does. There are seven floor to ceiling bookcases full of my favorite authors, about 4,000 or so books, aside from the reference library that is mostly in e-book format which run to about 10,000.
Question 4: You read all of these?
[Picks up a copy of ‘Kill Me If You Can’ by James Patterson] This one.
I nod yes. I have read most of them. I tell him writers must read. Someone told me that a long time ago. Not only thrillers and crime, but the classics. I found War and Peace heavy going, but not so much as Madame Bovary, or Vanity Fair.
You can ask one more question.
Question 5: Can I borrow this book [James Patterson]
As always the answer is yes. I encourage people to read. It doesn’t have to be my work. It would be nice but I;m realistic enough to know there’s a billion other books out there I have to compete with.
Ever hear someone say it was better in the old days?
I have.
I’ve been guilty of saying it myself.
But, was it?
When I was a child there was no such thing as personal computers and calculators. Everything came out of books, and maths had to be done in your head.
Holidays were about joining up with other neighbourhood children and making your own entertainment. I remember for a long time, as a child, we didn’t have television.
It was down to the meadows near the creek to pick blackberries, swim in the water, or raiding new housing estates for offcuts to build a cubby house.
Not like today with television, video players, movies-on-demand, personal computers, game boys, and a plethora of other entertainment choices.
Were we better off back in the old days?
We were in the sun with no idea that sunburn led to cancer and death. Sunscreen was unheard of, so in that regard maybe not.
In the old days, the only telephones were in the house and were expensive to use. You could have a coloured phone so long as it was black and made of Bakelite.
It was a long time before we had plastic coloured phones or even wall phones. Those were also the days of telephone boxes, the only way they make a call when away from home.
Now every man and his dog has a mobile phone/computer while on the move. I know, their dogs keep crashing into me on the street.
And then I also remember my father saying it’s not like the old days, so I had to wonder what he meant.
Perhaps it is an oft-used but less understood lament for a time when we remember we were happy and carefree, those days before mortgages, children, maxed out credit cards, and the children’s mobile phone bills.
There’s nothing more I like to do at the end of a day than sit down and have a drink, usually Scotch and Soda or Bacardi and Coke.
But that’s the problem.
What is your definition of the end of the day?
No doubt for most it is probably that time when they get home from work, and take some time between then and dinner. From my memories of American sitcoms of the 1950s, it was over Sherry and included a summary from every one of their day.
It was a time when women, apparently, preferred to stay home than go to work. Odd, for some reason, that Hollywood would ignore the hard-won rights of women to have jobs, though some might argue out of necessity because of the war.
There were no computer games, contrary children, and that period, for the children was between coming home from school (doing homework) and going outside to play.
Yes, none of this disappearing into dark rooms for secret conversations on mobile phones or playing games on computers, or, dare I say it, being stuck in front of a television, pigging out on snack foods.
Any man these days who thought the 1950s sitcom scenario might be a social norm would be vilified by all and sundry. His children would be in a permanent battle to be left alone, his wife would divorce him if he even remotely suggested she stay home or have dinner on the table when he got home, and that peaceful hour or so before the expected dinner, well, that disappeared a long time ago.
If it ever existed in any era.
So much for American sitcom stereotypes.
Now, in similar sitcoms these days, the children are obnoxious to their parent, yes, every family it seems in the USA is broken, and the mother is the long-suffering one stuck with the children and having to work, whilst the ex is out having a great time with his new girlfriend/trophy wife.
Hollywood is still stereotyping, but it’s much more dark and gloomy.
This is added to the continual threat of online predators, online pornography further reducing women’s hard-won right to be seen as more than just a sex object, bullying, not only at school and online but in the workplace, and above all that it seems men still treat women as second class citizens, not the least of which are corporate entities, and government.
Oh, and the mention of having a drink before dinner in this day and age would be associated with alcoholism, or a drinking problem, caused by excessive stress, and almost always added to an apparent addiction to painkillers or antidepressants.
What might also be worse is the alarming statistics of the number of women now drinking wine by the gallon rather than a few drinks in that period between picking up the children from school and dinner, driven by, take your choice of, obnoxious children or absent-minded or chauvinistic husband.
Damn, have I stirred up a hornet’s nest?
Sorry, I think I’d better cancel the notion of having after-work drinks, and since I do the cooking, so there’s no expectation for someone else getting dinner on the table.
At least we are still married, and the children never had to deal with a broken marriage and two warring parents, but if any of the reports on why children are the way they are, I guess mine missed out on playing one parent off against the other, or get to live in different houses, or tolerate parents other boy or girlfriends, and live on junk food, well not all of the time.
Are they normal?
Perhaps when someone defines normal I will probably tell you.
I ceased being so-called chauvinistic a long time ago, and I had to have an attitude readjustment along with it, because, I’m told, we live in a different world now.
Perhaps I will have that drink or three; it’s certainly a necessity in order to watch the increasingly bad news, the antics of our politicians, and to watch the world gradually go to hell in a handbasket.
It’s odd how art sometimes imitates life, but it’s much, much worse when life imitates art.
I mean, in a sense, it’s good that life imitates Star Trek because we need lasers to ward off unfriendly aliens when they finally arrive, as well as having intergalactic warp speed vessels.
But it’s very, very bad when a contagion like COVID 19 pops up, and the scenario that follows is right out of the script for the movie Contagion.
Or Outbreak, not that any President would ever nuke a US City, which was the premise in that film.
Or follow along the lines of The Omega Man, where a virus turns everyone into a zombie-like creature, with the last surviving human finally running out of luck.
There’s been quite a few doomsday scenario films, the most interesting one involving walking plants (The Day of the Triffids) but scary as they might be, what’s happening now is equally scary.
And it had been predicted.
But, that’s not the worst of it. Half the population wants to believe its no worse than a cold, that despite the ease in which it is transmitted, they will get it, and then it will magically disappear.
You know the drill, you get the disease once, you beat it, and you don’t get it again.
Maybe. There are factual accounts of people getting it again, but they don’t know they have it, and of course, those people happily transmit it to a new group of people. It doesn’t go away, you don’t beat it, it just lurks in cold dark corners, waiting to pounce.
It’s an insidious virus.
And if you recover, you might think you’ve recovered, but…
Lung scarring, loss of smell, migraines, memory loss, blood clots are just a few of the side effects. Doctors are only just discovering this because someone is finally getting down to charting the course of the disease, and what happens after recovery.
Up till now, there hasn’t been time, everyone is too busy fighting it.
Perhaps, when I apply my thriller writing mind to all that I have read over the last few months, the real aim of the virus hasn’t materialized yet, that the aim of whoever invented it, if indeed it was invented, was not to seriously affect the 15 to 40-year-olds in this iteration, but the devil is in the future, say 30 years from now when a whole generation that had been consistently bombarded with conflicting information about the virus not being dangerous and that young people had no worries about getting it, suddenly find themselves dying of lung-related respiratory problems, blood clot induced heart attacks and aneurysms, or just forgotten who they are.
A whole generation!
It’s why you can speak to one person and they’ll tell you that you need masks, you need to isolate. Of course, this is true, if that person is over 60, overweight and suffering from diabetes, or another debilitating disease. These people make up a large percentage of the population.
It’s why if you speak to another person, under 50, they’ll tell you it’s nothing to worry about, and they will believe the misleading information that masks are un-necessary, if you get it, it’ll go away, some quack medicine with defeat it, even if the scientific tests say otherwise. They’ve got better things to do than to worry about a silly invisible virus, like going to COVID 19 parties to see who the first person who contracts it is.
Can you see how good a novel this would make?
You would read it, and then put it down and think it could never happen here.
When we are taught about religion, we are inevitably introduced to heaven and hell.
Heaven is the place we all aspire to go up to, though I’ve never really understood why it is up. Of course, all the pictures of heaven are in the clouds, with a set of pearly gates (just why are they called the pearly gates anyway?) and St Peter waiting to ask us the 20 questions that decides whether we pass through, or get the elevator down.
Yes, hell is down. Why? And, for that matter why is it always depicted a dark and full of fire and hot embers?
Now, just taking a step back and thinking about hell, there is a saying, “it is hell on earth’.
Was this saying coined by someone who had actually been to hell and been sent back? Imagine being a reject from hell … that would take some doing.
For those who saw ‘The Good Place’ which ended recently, the notion of hell takes on something of a different meaning.
But, we often say, when at the very bottom of despair that we are in hell. I gather this means that life couldn’t get any worse, which is quite possible on of the universal definitions of what it might be like in the ‘real’ hell.
Or was hell invented by some clergy a long time ago to frighten the parishioners into being good, because the ‘prize’ if you didn’t was a one way trip to, you guessed it, hell.
Come to think of it, a lot of the religious ‘stuff’ is to keep us penitent parishioners on the straight and narrow, though we are allowed to stray every now and then so we have a reason to go to the confessional, where, after straying, we a forgiven for the price of a few hail Mary’s.
And perhaps the unforgiving stare of the parish priest.
So, when we tell someone to ‘go to hell’, what is it we are really wishing upon that person. A fiery end? A meeting with the devil?
Let’s hope that ‘hell’ is just an invention, and that when were finally make it to the afterlife (which is a whole other question that I take issue with) our lives have been such that we know the answers to the 20 questions St Peter puts to us, and we get the magic ticket into heaven.
And hopefully there will be a Red Lobster up there.
For the first time on this trip, we encounter problems with Chinese officialdom at the railway station, though we were warned that this might occur.
We had a major problem with the security staff when they pulled everyone over with aerosols and confiscated them. We lost styling mousse, others lost hair spray, and the men, their shaving cream. But, to her credit, the tour guide did warn us they were stricter here, but her suggestion to be angry they were taking our stuff was probably not the right thing to do.
As with previous train bookings, the Chinese method of placing people in seats didn’t quite manage to keep couples traveling together, together on the train. It was an odd peculiarity which few of the passengers understood, nor did they conform, swapping seat allocations.
This train ride did not seem the same as the last two and I don’t think we had the same type of high-speed train type that we had for the last two. The carriages were different, there was only one toilet per carriage, and I don’t think we were going as fast.
But aside from that, we had 753 kilometers to travel with six stops before ours, two of which were very large cities, and then our stop, about four and a half hours later. With two minutes this time, to get the baggage off the team managed it in 40 seconds, a new record.
After slight disorientation getting off the train, we locate our guide, easily ground by looking for the Trip-A-Deal flag. From there it’s a matter of getting into our respective groups and finding the bus.
As usual, the trip to the hotel was a long one, but we were traveling through a much brighter, and well lit, city.
As for our guide, we have him from now until the end of the tour. There are no more train rides, we will be taking the bus from city to city until we reach Shanghai. Good thing then that the bus is brand new, with that new car smell. Only issue, no USB charging point.
The Snowy Sea hotel.
It is finally a joy to get a room that is nothing short of great. It has a bathroom and thus privacy.
Everyone had to go find a supermarket to purchase replacements for the confiscated items. Luckily there was a huge supermarket just up from the hotel that had everything but the kitchen sink.
But, unlike where we live, the carpark is more of a scooter park!
It is also a small microcosm of Chinese life for the new more capitalistic oriented Chinese.
The next morning we get some idea of the scope of high-density living, though here, the buildings are not 30 stories tall, but still just as impressive.
These look like the medium density houses, but to the right of these are much larger buildings
The remarkable thing about this is those buildings stretch as far as the eye can see.
Our airport experiences are all without incident, although from time to time the sight of police or soldiers patrolling with guns can be disconcerting.
We have also experienced the odd problem in London at Heathrow, firstly trying to get help from the designated help staff and then to find the check-in desk of an airline apparently no one available knew existed. They were not very good ‘help’ staff.
The fact we couldn’t find the airline counter left us cursing the travel agent. It existed in name, we found it in the phone book and on the internet, but …
The phone rang out – ugh!
The internet site could not be used to check in or manage the booking on the same day as the flight!
Double ugh!
Until a little footwork found the agents desk and the misunderstanding was sorted out.
By the way, the airline itself was a pleasure to fly on, the staff was very helpful and most of all we arrived just before the airport closed. It was odd to discover that some airports closed, particularly Florence. It was the second time we were the last people out and having to turn off the lights. And, because I booked the transfer to the hotel myself, he was there waiting for us!
Holiday over, the joys of visiting relatives we hadn’t seen for a long time, and an unusual but wonderful New Year’s Eve and a wedding two days later, only a flight stands between us and getting home. After days, sometimes weeks, it is that moment we all look forward to; sleeping on our own beds, making our own food and getting to the gym to work off those extra kilos put on by delicious hotel food or local fare where calorie counting is not part of the dining experience.
Of course getting to the airport from the hotel can be an experience in itself whether by taxi, perhaps the taxi driver from hell who knows only two speeds fast and stop and is also, unfortunately, color blind. Or whether you have arranged for a transfer only to discover it’s not coming because the company went out of business or you changed hotels and someone forgot to tell them. Or the travel agent made a mistake or forgot to confirm the booking. Oh yes, it happens.
We have a hire car and will be returning it t the same place. Let’s hope the signage at the airport makes it easy to find the rental place. In London we had a hell of a time trying to find it; good thing we were hours earlier than we should be. In Chicago, the car rental depot was miles from the airport.
And just because the sign says ‘rental returns’ for the lane you’re in it doesn’t necessarily follow it’s the right lane. Then as you miss the exit, and get stuck on the one-way road system, all of a sudden you have left the airport and you’re heading back to the city.
If you’re running late …
But if everything goes to plan you can get to the airport with time to spare.
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.
There is nothing worse than, when lying in bed unable to get to sleep, you hear every noise in the house and out, but none worse than a dripping tap.
Its often not because someone forgot to turn the tap off, but a washer is on its last legs.
There are taps for the fallen brave, but aside from the fact that is the name of a piece of music, I think it’s also the title of a film. But taps itself is a bugle call at dusk, and also played at military funerals.
Then there’s that income stream that you can tap into, other than your next-door neighbours power supply.
But what would be far more interesting than to tap into a phone line and listen in? Despite the fact that eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves, you could learn something you didn’t want to know.
Then we can go back to the 1930s and a series of films that starred one of my favourite actors Fred Astaire, who was, of course, a tap dancer, along with Ginger Rogers.
In fact, my middle granddaughter is quite a good tap dancer.
And, lastly, was that a tap on the door, or a tap in the window?
Instead of making a grand entrance, arriving in style and being greeted by important dignitaries, we are slinking in via an airplane, late at night. It’s hardly the entrance I’d envisaged. At 9:56 the plane touches down on the runway. Outside the plane, it is dark and gloomy and from what I could see, it had been raining. That could, of course, simply be condensation.
Once on the ground, everyone was frantically gathering together everything from seat pockets and sending pillows and blankets to the floor. A few were turning their mobile phones back on, and checking for a signal, and, perhaps, looking for messages sent to them during the last 12 hours. Or perhaps they were just suffering from mobile phone deprivation.
It took 10 minutes for the plane to arrive at the gate. That’s when everyone moves into overdrive, unbuckling belts, some before the seatbelt sign goes off, and are first out of their seats and into the overhead lockers. Most are not taking care that their luggage may have moved, but fortunately, no bags fall out onto someone’s head. The flight had been relatively turbulent free.
When as many people and bags have squeezed into that impossibly small aisle space, we wait for the door to open, and then the privileged few business and first-class passengers to depart before we can begin to leave. As we are somewhere near the middle of the plane, our wait will not be as long as it usually is. This time we avoided being at the back of the plane. Perhaps that privilege awaits us on the return trip.
Once off the plane, it is a matter of following the signs, some of which are not as clear as they could be. It’s why it took another 30 odd minutes to get through immigration, but that was not necessarily without a few hiccups along the way. We got sidetracked at the fingerprint machines, which seemed to have a problem if your fingers were not straight, not in the center of the glass, and then if it was generally cranky, which ours were, continue to tell you to try again, and again, and again, and again…That took 10 to 15 minutes before we joined an incredibly long queue of other arrivals,
A glance at the time, and suddenly it’s nearly an hour from the moment we left the plane.
And…
That’s when we got to the immigration officer, and it became apparent we were going to have to do the fingerprints yet again. Fortunately this time, it didn’t take as long. Once that done, we collected our bags, cleared customs by putting our bags through a huge x-ray machine, and it was off to find our tour guide.
We found several tour guides with their trip-a-deal flags waiting for us to come out of the arrivals hall. It wasn’t a difficult process in the end. We were in the blue group. Other people we had met on the plane were in the red group or the yellow group. The tour guide found, or as it turned out she found us, it was simply a matter of waiting for the rest of the group, of which there were eventually 28.Gathered together we were told we would be taking the bags to one place and then ourselves to the bus in another. A glance in the direction of the bus park, there were a lot of busses.
Here’s a thought, imagine being told your bus is the white one with blue writing on the side.
Yes, yours is, and 25 others because all of the tourist coaches are the same. An early reminder, so that you do not get lost, or, God forbid, get on the wrong bus, for the three days in Beijing, is to get the last five numbers of the bus registration plate and commit them to memory. It’s important. Failing that, the guide’s name is in the front passenger window.
Also, don’t be alarmed if your baggage goes in one direction, and you go in another. In a rather peculiar set up the bags are taken to the hotel by what the guide called the baggage porter. It is an opportunity to see how baggage handlers treat your luggage; much better than the airlines it appears.
That said, if you’re staying at the Beijing Friendship Hotel, be prepared for a long drive from the airport. It took us nearly an hour, and bear in mind that it was very late on a Sunday night.
Climbing out of the bus after what seemed a convoluted drive through a park with buildings, we arrive at the building that will be our hotel for the next three days. From the outside, it looks quite good, and once inside the foyer, that first impression is good. Lots of space, marble, and glass. If you are not already exhausted by the time you arrive, the next task is to get your room key, find your bags, get to your room, and try to get to be ready the next morning at a reasonable hour.
Sorry, that boat has sailed.
We were lucky, we were told, that our plane arrived on time, and we still arrived at the hotel at 12:52. Imagine if the incoming plane is late.
This was taken the following morning. It didn’t look half as bland late at night.
This is the back entrance to Building No 4 but is quite representative of the whole foyer, made completely of marble and glass. It all looked very impressive under the artificial lights, but not so much in the cold hard light of early morning.
This the foyer of the floor our room was on. Marble with interesting carpet designs. Those first impressions of it being a plush hotel were slowly dissipating as we got nearer and nearer to the room. From the elevator, it was a long, long walk.
So…Did I tell you about the bathroom in our room?
The shower and the toilet both share the same space with no divide and the shower curtain doesn’t reach to the floor. Water pressure is phenomenal. Having a shower floods the whole shower plus toilet area so when you go to the toilet you’re basically underwater.
Don’t leave your book or magazine on the floor or it will end up a watery mess.
And the water pressure is so hard that it could cut you in half. Only a small turn of the tap is required to get that tingling sensation going.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 