Tag: Non Fiction

The Perils of Travelling: Every plane trip is, well, different

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.

Searching for locations: Castello di Monterinaldi, Tuscany, Italy

As part of a day tour by Very Tuscany Tours, we came to this quiet corner of Tuscany to have a look at an Italian winery, especially the Sangiovese grapes, and the Chianti produced here.

And what better way to sample the wine than to have a long leisurely lunch with matched wines.  A very, very long lunch.

But first, a wander through the gardens to hone the appetite:

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And a photo I recognize from many taken of the same building:

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Then a tour of the wine cellar:

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Then on to the most incredible and exquisite lunch and wine we have had.  It was the highlight of our stay in Tuscany.  Of course, we had our own private dining room:

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And time to study the paintings and prints on the walls while we finished with coffee and a dessert wine.

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And of course, more wine, just so we could remember the occasion.

My grandchildren have just started working

It’s hard to believe that both the 17 year old and the 14 year old have just both got jobs and started on their path of working for the next 50 to 60 years.

They seem quite amused at the thought, and not without reason, and are not really considering the idea. Not yet, anyway.

The novelty is still quite new, and it has a sense of excitement, but this will no doubt wear off in the coming months. After all, as new workers, they only have to do between 3 and 5 hour shifts.

I guess the fact they have decided to work at such a young age reminded me of my experience, way back when I was 15.

Unhlike them, who will be afforded to opportunity to remain in school to the end, Year 12, and possibly the chance to go to University, in my case we did not have the money to continue education beyond Year 10, and there was no question of ever going to University. Only the rich could afford that, and we were anything but rich.

Instead, I guess hating school helped facilitate my departure, and the notion that I would have to pay my own way, forced me into working.

Of course, it helped living in a small country town, and my father having a job that brought him in contact with everyone who was an anyone, and thus got offers to work in whatever profession I chose.

I ended up in the Post Office, what I considered as the easiest of jobs, originally employed as a telegram delivery boy, and mail collector from the post boxes scatted about the town. As you can imagine, there were not many telegrams to deliver, so other duties included sorting mail, and then mail delivery. Yes I because a postman!

Then, after a few months, I became the night switchboard operator, and with a host of other operators, had some of the most interesting and varied conversations imaginable.

It was a bit of a wrench when we finally moved from the country town back to the city.

When we did, my father bought a small business, and for a year of so, I became a shop assistant.

That lasted for a year or two, until I was 17. Realising that a lack of education was going to make it difficult to ever get a good paying job, I took the opportunity to go back to night school while I had the chance, and it necessitated finding another job to help pay for it.

That was packing books for a wholesale bookseller, part of a small team hidden away in the basement of a very old building. It might not be the best paying job, or the best working conditions, but I suspect it was the universe telling me something.

That job, and being surrounded by books started me off on a journey of reading, and eventually writing.

Sayings: Flogging a dead horse

This wouldn’t be so apt if it didn’t bring back a raft of bad memories, those days I used to go to the races, and back all of the wrong horses.

I had a knack, you see, of picking horses that fell over, or came dead last.

Perhaps that’s another of those sayings, dead last, with a very obvious meaning.  Dead!  Last!

But…

In the modern vernacular, flogging a dead horse is like spending further time on something in which the outcome is already classed as a complete waste of time.

However…

Back in the old days, the dead horse referred to the first month’s wages when working aboard a ship, usually paid for before you stepped on board the ship.  At the end of the first month, the theoretical dead horse was tossed overboard symbolically, and thereafter you were paid.

It still didn’t make sense to me that someone would tell me I was flogging a dead horse, until I realized, one day, the lesson to be learned was never to get paid in advance.

 

I’m not perfect…

I was told a long time ago I wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t bother me. Then.

But it’s true. I don’t always get it right, sometimes I get annoyed and say things in the heat of the moment that perhaps shouldn’t be said, and sometimes I can be ‘difficult’.

I’ll be the first in line to say my blog isn’t perfect, in fact sometimes it bothers me some of the bits and pieces that go up because I doubt if they’re interesting, at the time, to anyone but me.

Perhaps it’s because I chose to be a writer.

It’s a hard slog at the best of times. Getting ideas, carving out time to write, having to live a normal life as distinct from that of living in a garret, on your own, writing that next great Nobel prize for literature, or is it a Pulitzer?

I don’t get that, I don’t have that, and I don’t want that.

For those of us living on that ‘edge’ of finding time to write, maintain a blog, keep up with social media, do the daily chores and watch some television, something has to give.

So, I’m not getting any writing done if I’m working on the blog, or I’m on social media. If I’m doing the blog, something else has to be sacrificed.

Mostly it’s my blog. My blog is about writing stuff, visiting places that have been or will be used in stories, and once, a recalcitrant cat who sadly has passed on. It also has running episodic stories, usually four different at a time.

It also had about 2,000 past posts. When I don’t get the time to do my blog, which has been mostly for the last three months off and on, I sometimes repackage or repeat past posts, just to keep it ticking over, much like a scoreboard.

It is also a tool for advertising my books and stories, and what’s coming (if only I stopped using social media) and these are repeated every four or five days. It’d the equivalent of advertising because I can’t afford other advertising. If this is an annoyance, I’m sorry.

And just so everyone knows, I will always keep writing, not because I want to become the next James Patterson, though it would be nice, I write because I want to, and it pleases me when someone reads something I write, and they like it. It is the greatest compliment of all, and I believe in encouragement. It’s why I spend a lot of that social media time highlighting other writers so they can build a following.

After all, we are all in the same boat, it would just be nice if we were all rowing in the same direction.

Searching for locations: Windsor Castle, London, England

A fine day, on this trip a rarity, we decided to take the train to Windsor and see the castle.

This is a real castle, and still in one piece, unlike a lot of castles.

Were we hoping to see the Queen, no, it was highly unlikely.

But there were a lot of planes flying overhead into Heathrow.  The wind must have been blowing the wrong day, and I’m sure, with one passing over every few minutes, it must annoy the Queen if she was looking for peace and quiet.

Good thing then, when it was built, it was an ideal spot, and not under the landing path.  I guess it was hard to predict what would happen 500 years in the future!

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I’m not sure if this was the front gate or back gate, but I was wary of any stray arrows coming out of those slits either side of the entrance.

You just never know!

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An excellent lawn for croquet.  This, I think, is the doorway, on the left, where dignitaries arrive by car.  The private apartments are across the back.

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The visitor’s apartments.  Not sure who that is on the horse.

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St George’s Chapel.  It’s a magnificent church for a private castle.  It’s been very busy the last few months with Royal weddings.

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The Round Tower, or the Keep.  It is the castle’s centerpiece.  Below it is the gardens.

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Those stairs are not for the faint-hearted, nor the Queen I suspect.  But I think quite a few royal children and their friends have been up and down them a few times.

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And well worth the effort to reach the bottom.

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Any faces peering out through the windows?

Searching for locations: Mount Ngauruhoe, New Zealand

Mount Ngauruhoe is apparently still an active volcano, has been for 2,500 years or so, and last erupted on 19th February 1975, and reportedly has erupted around 70 times since 1839.

The mountain is usually climbed from the western side, from the Mangatepopo track.

This photo was taken in summer from the Chateau Tongariro carpark.

In late autumn, on one of our many visits to the area, the mountain was covered with a light sprinkling of snow and ice.

On our most recent visit, this year, in winter, it was fully covered in snow.

It can be a breathtaking sight from the distance.

An unfortunate side-effect of a pandemic

As writers, we put ourselves in the shoes of many different people.

We have extraordinary lives, sometimes more than one, but never more than the regulatory nine.

We get shot at, manage to run into cars and miraculously bounce off with only a few scratches, fall off three-story balconies, and sometimes get in the way of stray, and almost perfectly aimed bullets.

Near-death, almost dead, mostly dead, but always, somehow, we come back to life.

But, in reality, this rarely happens.  You get shot; you often die.  You get hit by a car, or, worse, a bus, you quite often die.

You certainly do not get back up again, leap out of hospital beds, and chase after bad guys.

So, what does any or all of these things feel like in reality?

In my case, I have no idea, other than what I have read, and what I’ve been told by experts it might be like.

But what if…

…you are facing what might be certain death?

It’s not a realistic statement, is it?  You can’t possibly know when and how you’re going to die.

So, let’s factor in a possibility, and let’s call it Covid-19.

What do we know about it?  It is a killer if you have respiratory problems, heart problems, in fact, any sort of problem with organs, and, if you have a weakened immune system.

And, it is far more dangerous if you have any of these conditions and are over the age of 60.

I’m 69.

I have psoriatic arthritis and use methotrexate which is an immunosuppressive medicine

It means, in not so many words, I have a compromised immune system.  That’s the doctor’s polite way of saying I’m in deep trouble if I get Covid-19.

So…

I now have to face what is most like man’s worst fear: death.

I fit into a category where I have a 40% chance of survival.

There is no cure, there are vaccines but they might also kill me even though the odds are very slim, so really it is simply a matter of the body fighting off the virus itself, and, more or less, wait and see.

To say I’m scared of what might happen is an understatement.

In this country, up till now, we have managed to avoid a disaster, but with the new variant, everyone is all but saying that in a short time that will change … for the worse.

I hope not.

I do not want to have a first-hand experience of what it like to die.

A photograph from the inspirational bin – 5

I found this:

The innocuous explanation for this photo is that I took it at my grand daughter’s little athletics competition, now most sensibly being held on Friday evenings.

For those who don’t know how the weather can be in Brisbane, Queensland, it is generally hot, particularly from November when temperatures are between 35 and 40 degrees centigrade.

But not only is it hot but humidity, the real problem, is around 100 percent.

So at the moment we have reasonably cool evenings, ideal conditions for the young athletes.

But, where a photo could be innocuous there can a more interesting, if not sinister description.

Lurking in the back of my mind, and perhaps a lot of others, that there might be an unidentified flying object somewhere in the sky.

Of course, there might not be any, but it doesn’t mean that we stop looking, or assume, sometimes that a moving light in the sky isn’t a UFO.

And its been said that humans are quite arrogant in thinking that we are the only people in the universe.

Personally, I don’t think we are, and I keep an eye on the sky every time I’m out at night, perhaps the most likely time we might see one.

The only issue I might have is that if I am that lucky to see one, or that it lands nearby, what I would do when confronted by an alien.

And, yes, there’s definitely a story in that.

A new way of doing things

Well, welcome to the new world.  Covid, we’re told, is never going away and we now have to live with it.  Even when people are still dying in numbers.

Perhaps in a lot of things, we should have been there a long time ago, but I suspect complacency and laziness has a lot to do with some of the issues.

Like washing your hands. It’s usually hell on earth to get a child to do anything and you have to be at them and at them to do anything.

I’m not sure about social distancing, but I’ve long wanted people in the supermarket to stop leaning over me to get stuff off the shelves when they could wait one minute longer.

Or being crowded into a restaurant where you can practically eat off the plate of the person at the next table. I like the distance, and the privacy it brings.

I’m also a fan of the new click-and-collect phenomenon where I don’t have to go out to get something I want; just get it delivered.

Of course, there’s still the necessity to go to a shop and physically see an item before you buy it, in my case clothes and shoes, but online sales for a lot of things are so much better, especially books and magazines.

I guess future traffic jams won’t be cars but delivery trucks.

I like the idea of working from home. Aside from having to face time with colleagues every now and then, if you don’t have to be in an office, then give it up. It will reduce pressure on roads, public transport, and reduce the concentration of the population in one place. You might even get to work on time, and get something to eat before you arrive!

As long as they get the internet right, which in this country is a pretty big if.

And perhaps now people will stop blaming 5g for the COVID virus.

Perhaps this homeschooling thing might work as well, having seen it in action, and in most cases it works.  Of course, the isolation of students could be a problem, and there is always a need for face time for teachers and other students for interaction with contemporaries, but perhaps a compromise could be found, especially since Covid spread in schools is high, even after finding a vaccine.

Among the negatives in a time like this is the fear of using public transport, a fear no one is taking lightly, leading to children having to be taken to and brought home from school, and the fact there are potentially 800 cars needed to do it.

I used to leave home 30 mins before school end and was first in the pickup queue. Now I leave 45 minutes before and the closest I can get in nearly a mile from the school. And the traffic is a dangerous hazard in the main street, blocking driveways, bus stops, and lanes. It’s basically a mess, and it cannot continue without more organization.

But there’s another problem. The anti-vaxxers. Everywhere in the world, it seems, not more than 50% of the population will get vaccinated, so it means that we may NEVER get past where we are now.

And the very worst problem that this new world has sprung on us, we may never travel safely again. Anywhere.

Perhaps we really do need a miracle.