Tag: Creative Writing

The 2 a.m. Rant: When you know you’re getting old

You know that you are getting old when sitting at a table where only one person is less than 65.

There were just over a dozen of us, meeting up a few years back for my older brother’s 70th birthday.

I have to say, from the outset, that I never expected him to live that long, but when you take into consideration the longevity of our parents, my father reached 99 and my mother 96, it’s no longer a surprise.

As for me, I’m 73 this year, and there are three years between us.

Something else I hadn’t realised, but what possibly seems coincidental is the age difference between our granddaughters, which is also three years. One is 23, another is 19 and the youngest 16.

But…

It was interesting to finally meet a number of the guests, as, for many, many years, I’d only heard of them in passing conversation. This is because we very rarely manage to get down from Brisbane to Melbourne to catch up, and almost never when my brother has had one of these rare get-togethers.

Of course, these people had known him for years, and there was a thread that bound them together.

Stamps.

They were all stamp collectors.

I remember a long, long time ago, I used to collect stamps, but I did not have the same passion for collecting as my brother did, and if truth be told, I was a little jealous.

And he had a Stanley Gibbons catalogue that could put a value on every stamp. That, to me, showed dedication.

I just bought stamps that were big and colourful from obscure countries no one had ever heard of. But, in another sense, it was where I learned a lot about the British Commonwealth. Some of those African member countries were those same obscure places I had stamps for.

Then, when I could no longer be bothered, I just handed the lot to him and said he could do with them what he would.

Naturally, at this gathering, we didn’t talk about stamps.

In fact, after describing myself as the black sheep, well, grey sheep on account of the hair, it seemed we became the centre of attention.

To be honest, I expected the lunch to last an hour, but who knew there was so much to talk about, even though I really can’t remember much of it other than it lasted almost three hours. That’s a lot of time talking about nothing.

But I guess when you reach that golden age, time ceases to have any real meaning.

We now have a standing invitation to return, and since time is running out for all of us, it’s probably wise to not take so long to return.

The 2 a.m. Rant: The march of progress inevitably destroys the past.

There is this thing called the march of progress.

It can be good, or it can be bad.

But the inevitability of it means that we have to destroy our past in order to build for the future.  It’s a pity no one around a hundred years ago worked out that a certain amount of land needed to be set aside for future infrastructure, and then built around it.

The pity of it is that those same practices are with us now, and unfortunately, either the infrastructure is too costly to build because of the necessity to buy back, or it will never change.  No one, sadly, is thinking of the future.

So, all I have of my childhood years, some fifty to sixty years ago, is memories, and when I go, they will be lost forever.

I remember, a long time ago now, the many holidays I spent at my grandmother’s place in the ‘country’.  Back then, it was.

Now it is just another suburb of Melbourne.

I remember the drive, and it used to take about half an hour, perhaps longer, and as we travelled, it was mostly the countryside we saw.  Little towns like Beaconsfield, Officer, and Berwick are oases in the middle of farming land.

The last time I went for that same drive, there were endless houses.

My grandmother’s house was very large, and the land it was built on was extensive.  There used to be gardens, several garages, several old cars, and a huge workshop.

My brother and I used to spend our Christmases exploring, and on a particular one, we found some tools and decided to recover some of them.

We found a huge fountain buried beneath the overgrowth, the centrepiece a statue, part of what must have been a remarkable display.

It was like we had our own secret garden.

There was also a fernery, also overgrown.

Now, sadly, all of it is gone, and in its place is a multilane highway that follows an alternate coastal route between Melbourne and Sydney.

All I have left are the memories of a time that will never return.

Perhaps it’s time to write it all down and preserve it for future generations.

The story behind the story – Echoes from the Past

The novel ‘Echoes from the Past’ started out as a short story I wrote about 30 years ago, titled ‘The Birthday’.

My idea was to take a normal person out of their comfort zone and led on a short but very frightening journey to a place where a surprise birthday party had been arranged.

Thus, the very large man with a scar and a red tie was created.

So was the friend with the limousine who worked as a pilot.

So were the two women, Wendy and Angelina, who were Flight Attendants that the pilot friend asked to join the conspiracy.

I was going to rework the short story, then about ten pages long, into something a little more.

And like all rewrites, especially those I have anything to do with, it turned into a novel.

There was motivation.  I had told some colleagues at the place where I worked at the time that I liked writing, and they wanted a sample.  I was going to give them the re-worked short story.  Instead, I gave them ‘Echoes from the past’

Originally, it was not set anywhere in particular.

But when considering a location, I had, at the time, recently been to New York in December, and visited Brooklyn and Queens, as well as a lot of New York itself.  We were there for New Year’s, and it was an experience I’ll never forget.

One evening, we were out late and finished up in Brooklyn Heights, near the waterfront, and there was rain and snow; it was cold and wet, and apartment buildings were shimmering in the street light, and I thought, “This is the place where my main character will live”.

It had a very spooky atmosphere, the sort where ghosts would not be unexpected.  I felt more than one shiver go up and down my spine in the few minutes I was there.

I had taken notes, as I always do, of everywhere we went, so I had a ready supply of locations I could use, changing the names in some cases.

Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller Centre is amazing at first light, and late at night with the Seasonal decorations and lights.

The original main character was a shy man with few friends, hence not expecting the surprise party.  I enhanced that shyness into purposely lonely because of an issue from his past that leaves him always looking over his shoulder and ready to move on at the slightest hint of trouble.  No friends, no relationships, just a very low profile.

Then I thought, what if he breaks the cardinal rule and begins a relationship?

But it is also as much an exploration of a damaged soul as it is the search for a normal life, without having any idea what normal was, and how the understanding of one person can sometimes make all the difference in what we may think or feel.

And, of course, I wanted a happy ending.

Except for the bad guys.

…

Get it here:  https://amzn.to/2CYKxu4

newechocover5rs

I scored a window seat – it’s like winning the lottery

20200218_152808

So, what do you do when you finally win the lottery?

Well, not the monetary one, the aeroplane one, where you get a window seat, and a window seat you can actually see out of?

Because most of them are not aligned with the windows.  I remember drawing a window seat a while back, but …. you guessed it, there wasn’t a window.

I mean, really!

But now you have one, what do you do?

I’ve seen a lot of window seat travellers pull down the blinds to block out the view.  Seriously?  It’s obvious they travel a lot and have seen everything there is to see.  Why they would want a window seat is beyond me.

Like would they be looking for a lightning bolt to hit the wing tip?  An engine falling off?  Another plane flying too close alongside, like a menacing jet fighter?

Not today.  Not flying near a restricted airspace or a foreign border.  Just going from one state to another, out of Melbourne, on our way to Brisbane.

I look at clouds, check every so often that the engine is still there, watch the wings flex, or the flaps move.

The last time I had a window seat, we arrived in Brisbane from the ocean, and the plane got awfully close to the water on its final run to the runway.

This time it was over the bridges after flying past the city, and over the Brisbane River.

20200218_154104

Sometimes you can see cruise ships.  There might not be another one of those for a long time to come.

And, yes, the engine is still there.

It was an uneventful flight, but I took a lot of photos anyway.  The grandchildren like looking at oddly shaped clouds.

 

The 2 am Rant: Life’s little experiences seem to have disappeared

I’m on a riverboat, sailing slowly down the Nile, ahead of us the Pyramids, a sight, I’m told, to behold despite the ravages of time.

There are others, a curious bunch of people, drawn from all over the globe, and from different classes, in a time when that seemed to matter.

Of course, it’s 1935.

And it’s all in my head.  Something I’d seen somewhere, or read perhaps, and now that I come to think of it, it was an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Even now, nearly a hundred years later, it may have been possible to replicate it; only a world war, British Empire aspirations and later abandonment, and civil strife made it difficult, but not impossible.

And then, closing off travel anywhere, COVID-19 finished the job.

For someone who likes to travel the world, looking for locations and inspiration for my stories, that had made life far more unbearable than just having to remain locked up for fear of catching it. And, even though it is gone, we now seem to have was popping up everywhere, closing off things that we just took for granted would be there forever.

Not any more. Nationalism, greed, and in some cases, utter stupidity, are closing off countries that are no longer safe to visit. Even the United States was once thought to be the safest place on earth.

Gone are those treasured moments…

Like sitting at an outside cafe overlooking the main piazza in San Gimignano, having a pizza, an authentic pizza, and a bottle of Moretti beer.

Like wandering the narrow cobbled streets of Florence, staying in what was once a 12th-century monastery, having wild boar pasta, and just a short distance away, a gelato.

Like wandering around similarly narrow and cobbled laneways in Montmartre, stopping at a corner crepe restaurant, where the crepes are to die for.

Taking that away is like taking away a hand or a leg.

How long will it be before the world returns to normal, or will it?

In my conspiracy theory mind, it seems to me there is more going on than just viruses and greed; it has overtones of world domination, or worse, watching the destruction of the world economy, and capitalism for want of a better word, at the same pace that climate change is changing the planet.

Neither occurrence is new; it’s happened time and time again over many millennia, and it’s just that we don’t seem to learn from it.   

Well, maybe not in my lifetime. 

Let’s hope generations to come do.

 

 

The story behind the story – Echoes from the Past

The novel ‘Echoes from the Past’ started out as a short story I wrote about 30 years ago, titled ‘The Birthday’.

My idea was to take a normal person out of their comfort zone and led on a short but very frightening journey to a place where a surprise birthday party had been arranged.

Thus, the very large man with a scar and a red tie was created.

So was the friend with the limousine who worked as a pilot.

So were the two women, Wendy and Angelina, who were Flight Attendants that the pilot friend asked to join the conspiracy.

I was going to rework the short story, then about ten pages long, into something a little more.

And like all rewrites, especially those I have anything to do with, it turned into a novel.

There was motivation.  I had told some colleagues at the place where I worked at the time that I liked writing, and they wanted a sample.  I was going to give them the re-worked short story.  Instead, I gave them ‘Echoes from the past’

Originally, it was not set anywhere in particular.

But when considering a location, I had, at the time, recently been to New York in December, and visited Brooklyn and Queens, as well as a lot of New York itself.  We were there for New Year’s, and it was an experience I’ll never forget.

One evening, we were out late and finished up in Brooklyn Heights, near the waterfront, and there was rain and snow; it was cold and wet, and apartment buildings were shimmering in the street light, and I thought, “This is the place where my main character will live”.

It had a very spooky atmosphere, the sort where ghosts would not be unexpected.  I felt more than one shiver go up and down my spine in the few minutes I was there.

I had taken notes, as I always do, of everywhere we went, so I had a ready supply of locations I could use, changing the names in some cases.

Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller Centre is amazing at first light, and late at night with the Seasonal decorations and lights.

The original main character was a shy man with few friends, hence not expecting the surprise party.  I enhanced that shyness into purposely lonely because of an issue from his past that leaves him always looking over his shoulder and ready to move on at the slightest hint of trouble.  No friends, no relationships, just a very low profile.

Then I thought, what if he breaks the cardinal rule and begins a relationship?

But it is also as much an exploration of a damaged soul as it is the search for a normal life, without having any idea what normal was, and how the understanding of one person can sometimes make all the difference in what we may think or feel.

And, of course, I wanted a happy ending.

Except for the bad guys.

…

Get it here:  https://amzn.to/2CYKxu4

newechocover5rs

The 2am Rant: It’s market day…

These donuts are whole with jam injected into them and are delicious.  You cannot stop at one, which is why you get five.

There are like the donuts I used to get from the Dandenong market when I was a child.  Back then, nearly 60 years ago, I used to go every Tuesday to get fruit and vegetables, and sometimes clothes, because there were other stalls selling useful household items.

Back then we used to get donuts, and for a long time, I had never managed to get back when the market was open to relive those childhood memories.

This trip we do.

The Dandenong Market had changed considerably since the last time I remember it.  The building where my eldest son used to play basketball has been turned over to meat, fish, and food stalls.

It has spread to be about ten times the size it used to be, making it seem like a difficult task to find the donut van, but we entered by the right entrance and there it was.

And the donuts?

They were exactly as I remembered.

While we’re in the area we also make a trip to the Springvale market.  When I lived in Victoria there was no such market, this had only been around since the immigrant Vietnamese have made their home in Springvale, and in places, it reminds you of similar markets in Singapore, Hong Kong, or China.

It was a fascinating half-hour of wandering around almost feeling like you are somewhere in South East Asia.

With markets like these who would really need a supermarket?  And a bonus?  The street food.

The 2am Rant: How about this for a plotline?

No matter how hard you try, how seamless, on paper, the plan is, the odds are that something will go wrong. That is not to say I am a fatalist, or a glass-half-empty kind of traveller, because most of the trips I have planned and taken have been relatively painless.

Except our good luck had to finally run out.

It was not a matter of bad planning; it was just one of those times when events didn’t quite go according to plan. It happens.

For instance, the simple objective was to get from Brisbane in Australia to Florence in Italy. There is no direct flight. Booking on an airline site is a horrendous experience; fares are ridiculously high, and there are no accommodating stopovers.

This is a trip that only a travel agent can handle.

The objective is to travel to London via Hong Kong or Singapore, or any medium-distance airport, then on to London or Paris, or wherever, then to Florence. No overnight stopover, staying in a hotel, not this time, in either Hong Kong or London.

Simple.

Not.

It was as horrendous for the agent as it was navigating the airline’s website. It was not something that could be done, sitting opposite her as she deftly navigated the highways and byways of the travel system on her computer. This was a longer, more intricate job.

Two days later, she had the solution for the Brisbane, Hong Kong, London, and thence Florence trip. It would require a stay of 10 hours in Hong Kong, the connections didn’t align according to price constraints, and then a 14-hour layover in London, as flights to Florence were not aligned either. All well and good. Cathay Pacific for the trip to London and Vueling Airlines for the Florence leg. At least we would arrive in Florence at a reasonable hour, about 6pm.

On paper, it was the most practical solution in the circumstances.

Reality proved it to be something else entirely.

At Brisbane airport, we were given boarding passes for the flights through to London, but by some quirk of fate, our baggage was checked through to Florence. How this could be done without boarding passes for the London to Florence flight was a surprise. Back in Brisbane, the check-in person told us she could not give us a boarding pass for the London to Florence leg because the system would not issue it. We could, she said, get it easy enough when we arrived in London.

The first leg went smoothly enough, though we did not realise until we got on the plane that it stopped over in Cairns for an hour or so. This was not a problem, just made the time between Brisbane and Hong Kong longer than we anticipated.

In Hong Kong, we had no trouble getting into the lounge I’d booked. The problem came with the interpretation of using the bathroom facilities, and it took several hours before we finally realised that the bathroom facilities were not part of the lounge but operated independently, and you had to book your place. By that time, there were a large number of people ahead of us (who obviously knew the problems associated with these facilities), and it annoyed me that the lounge staff did not mention it when we arrived.

The Hong Kong to London leg was as long as all long-haul flights are. We knew what to expect and arrived in London around 6 am. We arrived at Terminal Three, and the lounge we’d booked was in Terminal Three. All we needed was a boarding pass to get in.

Oops.

That was not the case.

Because we could not get back into terminal three without a forward boarding pass, we had to exit and go through customs and immigration. We were told that the only way to get a boarding pass for the Florence flight was to go to the airline counter.

The problem was that Vueling did not have an airline counter.

This is where tempers started to flare. 7:30 in the morning, no means of getting into the lounge which we had paid a lot on money for, and no one in the terminal was helpful.

The Vueling website was impossible to use.

The telephone number rang out.

At this point, I was beginning to believe the airline didn’t exist and we had been ripped off.

Only by a quirk of fate, reading the departures board, did I see a flight for Vueling leaving at 10 am, with the check-in counter displayed.

By this time, we had spent two very frustrating hours, and I was nothing short of angry.
At the gate, the head of the check-in counter, a representative of Vueling, was surprised we had any problems, particularly in Brisbane, but happily issued the boarding passes.

When we mentioned the baggage, she advised us it was lucky we did, otherwise it would have gone missing. She took the tag numbers and sorted that problem out.

The airline, it seems, is well respected, and based on the service I received, I had to say I agreed

The problem was back in Brisbane with an inexperienced check-in person.

There was only one problem in getting to the lounge, now four hours later than we had advised, the fact we had to go back through customs, and in doing so, the duty-free items that we had brought from Hong Kong were now outside the limits allowed, and the customs staff were adamant that, despite the circumstances, we could not take them with us. $400 worth of goods finished up in the bin.

It would be true to say that on that day, the customs staff at Heathrow were not the best ambassadors for their country, and one, in particular, would be best doing service elsewhere where human contact was not a requirement. As for the others, they were as helpful as they could be, but rules unfortunately, were rules.

At last, rather distressed over the duty-free and the lateness of our arrival at the lounge, there was no possibility of getting a short sleep before going to Florence. At least we did not have the same problems using the bathroom facilities, our room I’d booked had them included in the room.

We rested and figured nothing else could go wrong.

Not. Again!

The plane was advertised to leave London at about 3 pm. We left the lounge expecting to get to the gate on time. We checked on the departure board for the flight to get the gate number, only to see a notice ‘delayed’. When that delay passed 5 pm, two hours later, we decided to go to the counter and find out what was happening.

Only to find there was no airline counter. Again!

We asked at least a dozen people, including the special helpers at the airport, who there is plenty of signage to say to go to if you have a problem, but not one of them knew where the counter was or who was looking after the affairs of the airline. By this time, other irate passengers of the delayed flight were massing, also seeking answers. One discovered who the agent was, and we descended on the counter as a large group.

The first person I saw at the counter was the woman who had checked us in that morning. For her, it had been a long day, and it was getting longer.

The problem, the plane had been delayed on an earlier leg; yes, it would be arriving, having just left the last airport, and we would be embarking about 7:30. For our trouble, we got a meal voucher, and at least we could have a reasonably good dinner.

The plane arrived, we embarked, the service was good, and the people on board as cheerful as they could be, given the delays and the discontented passengers.

We arrived in Florence just before midnight, our driver to take us to the hotel was waiting for us, and the hotel upgraded us to a very nice room.

All in all, a harrowing journey, but at the end, basically a six-hour delay, and two very tired, but happy people. And we were in Florence, in the summer. What more could anyone want?

The story behind the story – Echoes from the Past

The novel ‘Echoes from the Past’ started out as a short story I wrote about 30 years ago, titled ‘The Birthday’.

My idea was to take a normal person out of their comfort zone and led on a short but very frightening journey to a place where a surprise birthday party had been arranged.

Thus, the very large man with a scar and a red tie was created.

So was the friend with the limousine who worked as a pilot.

So were the two women, Wendy and Angelina, who were Flight Attendants that the pilot friend asked to join the conspiracy.

I was going to rework the short story, then about ten pages long, into something a little more.

And like all rewrites, especially those I have anything to do with, it turned into a novel.

There was motivation.  I had told some colleagues at the place where I worked at the time that I liked writing, and they wanted a sample.  I was going to give them the re-worked short story.  Instead, I gave them ‘Echoes from the past’

Originally, it was not set anywhere in particular.

But when considering a location, I had, at the time, recently been to New York in December, and visited Brooklyn and Queens, as well as a lot of New York itself.  We were there for New Year’s, and it was an experience I’ll never forget.

One evening, we were out late and finished up in Brooklyn Heights, near the waterfront, and there was rain and snow; it was cold and wet, and apartment buildings were shimmering in the street light, and I thought, “This is the place where my main character will live”.

It had a very spooky atmosphere, the sort where ghosts would not be unexpected.  I felt more than one shiver go up and down my spine in the few minutes I was there.

I had taken notes, as I always do, of everywhere we went, so I had a ready supply of locations I could use, changing the names in some cases.

Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller Centre is amazing at first light, and late at night with the Seasonal decorations and lights.

The original main character was a shy man with few friends, hence not expecting the surprise party.  I enhanced that shyness into purposely lonely because of an issue from his past that leaves him always looking over his shoulder and ready to move on at the slightest hint of trouble.  No friends, no relationships, just a very low profile.

Then I thought, what if he breaks the cardinal rule and begins a relationship?

But it is also as much an exploration of a damaged soul as it is the search for a normal life, without having any idea what normal was, and how the understanding of one person can sometimes make all the difference in what we may think or feel.

And, of course, I wanted a happy ending.

Except for the bad guys.

…

Get it here:  https://amzn.to/2CYKxu4

newechocover5rs

In a word: Good

There is a TV show on at the moment called ‘The Good Place’.

It’s really the bad place which makes you wonder if there really is a ‘good place’.

This started me thinking.

How many people do you know, when you ask them how they are, they say ‘good’?

Can we see behind the facade that is their expression and see how they really feel?

Quite often, not.  It is sometimes amazing just how good people are at hiding their true feelings.

And, thinking about that, how many of us reveal our true feelings?

It seems to me there is an acceptable level of understanding that we take people at their word and move on from there.

How many times when we suspect there is something wrong, we tend to overlook it in what is regarded as respect for that person?

What if something awful happened?

What if we could have prevented it?

What if we could have tried to gently probe deeper?

The problem is we seem to be too polite and there is nothing wrong with that.

But maybe, just maybe, the next time …

It’s just a thought.