Tag: Story

Whatever happened to free websites?

There’s nothing more certain that a favourite web site you go to and use often, sooner or later starts charging a subscription ‘fee’.

I remember when the NANOWRIMO site had been updated, and the changes look good.  At that moment the site was free, but you do get a lot of emails and requests to purchase products, which I think is a reasonable way to raise money for keeping the site free.

But, how long is this going to last before a ‘fee’ is introduced, and then a ‘fee’ to enter your book?

It’s the airline principle, once it was a flat charge for the ticket, now you pay for this tax, that tax, fuel tax, baggage tax, tax on the tax, and then if that’s not enough, a charge for the food and water.  Soon it will be a charge for toilets, and then the air you breathe.

It’s inevitable, and once these charges start they don’t stop and only get higher with each passing year.

A lot of the sites I use are free.  Some have since started to charge and have put up a firewall to stop you getting any free information.

I’m not a rich author, so sadly I have to discontinue using these sites.

Perhaps the problem is that the owner of the site has come up with a good idea, thousands of people sign up, and suddenly a small web site becomes a big one, and hosting costs suddenly go through the roof.

Like airlines, it’s the user that pays.

Often I see or get an email from, various people with what looks to be a useful site.  Some start out by giving you a month free to have a look and use the facilities.  In some cases they are quite good, in other, well, there’s a dozen others like it that are still free.

But, after a month, you have to pay.  What gets me with some of them, they are asking somewhere between 50 and 100 US dollars a month, you heard that right, a month, which you can basically double that for me after the exchange rate and a dozen bank fees.

Sometimes there are different levels, but basically, if you look at the fine print, the lowest level set, which gives you very little, is set low deliberately.  Say it’s 10 dollars a month.  It’s no different to the free version except they probably don’t have annoying ads and advertise, what for many, is non-existent 24/7 help (via an email, no guarantee they look at it more than once a week, if at all).  Money for jam for the site owner, as the saying goes.

Why can’t there be a more reasonable option?

But I get it.  Everyone wants to get rich quick, it’s an objective that’s built into all of us, but it seems I missed the inoculation given the day after you’re born.

I also get it that these people worked hard on coming up with the web sites and facilities, and they deserve a reward for that hard work, but to me it would make more sense if they sold the service for 10 dollars or even 20 dollars a month if the systems were available and they worked.  And flowing from that wouldn’t 20,000 sales at 20 dollars, be better than 2000 at a 100 dollars?

The same seems to go for the so-called decent web site hosts, like WordPress, Wix and GoDaddy.  The free option is good but just for show and tell, but I’m sure they deliberately nobble it so it’s slow and kludgy just the sort of attributes that turn potential visitors off.

I thought if I paid a monthly charge for Wix, and reading the inclusions for what my site could do over the free one was very persuasive, so I signed up.  The site was no better than it was before and half the options that were on the list weren’t available, and still aren’t.  But I suspect if I paid them 100 plus dollars a month or more for their premium package I’d get it.

But, to pay for it I would have to be selling a million books a month, and I doubt, no matter how good my web site is, it wouldn’t attract that kind of business.

Not one of the basic packages, read affordable for me, has the ability to allow downloads after sales.  You can’t even have a sales page where you can actually sell books to people like you were a bookshop.  That’s in all of the premium packages, so they say, and that costs far too much.

GoDaddy were by far the worst, telling me if I signed up to the 60 dollars a month package I could have sales and downloads.  I tried to add it to the web page, which I might add was as difficult to create as all hell, and when it didn’t work, rang up to ask why I couldn’t have downloading after sales and was met with silence.

No, that’s not available at the moment, I was told, and not likely in the future.  What am I paying all this money for?  I don’t have a GoDaddy site any more.  I had a Wix site that I paid for, and I don’t have that any more.  They don’t offer anything useful, and they too, make it virtually impossible to create a useful site, so it sits out there in the ether with disappointment written all over it.

Perhaps others have had better luck, or things have changed in the last few years but I won’t be going back.

Maybe one day someone might understand the needs of the majority who can afford to pay exorbitant monthly charges but just not as much as we are expected to, for very little in return.

What’s that saying, hope springs eternal.

PS Sorry about the rant!

The cinema of my dreams – I always wanted to write a war story – Episode 34

For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.

Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.

And, so, it continues…

 

We gathered up what food there was to take with us.  There were no weapons left behind.  Leonardo had assumed correctly we would have used them if they’d been left there.

Carlo had changed slowly into an automaton, and I guess if I could read his mind, I’d know exactly what he was thinking.  Enrico had attached himself to Carlo, and I knew Carlo would look after him.

When I said that the burials would have to wait, Carlo agreed.

We had a short discussion on what we would be doing next, and in the first instance, we would be going back to the other soldiers and the church.  There, with both of our knowledge of the castle, its entrances, secret or otherwise, and the internal passageways which I knew Wallace and the others there were not too familiar with, we would formulate a plan to go in and pick them off one by one.

It seemed a good plan when we first talked about it, but on the way back to the church, and I had time to consider how it would work, it seemed we would only get an advantage once, and we would have to kill or capture as many as we could in the first raid.

Then it was going to be difficult.

Unless Carlo knew of more places we could enter the castle without being seen or heard.

I only knew of three.

And the first post we had to hit, and silence, the radio room.



My war had not been as start or as terrifying as most of those whom I’d known or worked with.  My part was more selective, finding and eliminating spies, informers, and enemy cells on home territory.  

Sometimes that would extend into enemy territory, particularly France where, as one who could speak French fluently, I found myself working with the resistance, using intelligence gathered by a network of spies we had, not only in France but in all parts of enemy territory.  That also meant, sometimes, accompanying weapons and other supplies into enemy territory.

It hadn’t included anything like what I’d just seen back at the underground cavern.

I’d been told, often, about the enemy executing whole villages, and large groups as retaliation for resistance operations that killed German soldiers, and particularly officers, but I’d not seen it first-hand.

Now I had.

I’d been told, along with the others who had been at the training camp way back at the start of the war, that we would inevitably see atrocities.  Those instructors, men who had survived the first war, were speaking from experience.  We were told it would make us angry.  It had.  I had this immediate thought of doing as much damage as I could to the perpetrators of that massacre.

But we had also been told that we had to harness that anger, and use it to drive our actions, bot in a reckless manner, but with a measured calm and with planning.  Blind rage, which had been predicted, would only get us killed.

I had left the cavern at the blind rage stage, but the walk to the church wore some of that off, and I began to piece together the seeds of a plan to get our revenge.  We were only a small group, but even so, we could work more efficiently than those at the castle. 

Leonardo was not going to tell Wallace that he hadn’t captured or killed me in his ambush, but it might make Wallace think that my ability to retaliate would be weakened.  Leonardo would know that Carlo and I were still alive.  He would not know about Blinky and his men.

It would be interesting to see if Wallace would commit any of his men to hunt us down, send Leonardo back out to finish the job, or just wait until Meyer turned up.  His contact in Gaole would know about the castle’s change of allegiance, but he would not know that Martina was not going to be there to greet them when they arrived in the village.

That was several days away.  We would have to be there, but it was going to be dangerous unless we found a way to neutralize the castle.  So far, in my head, we’d neutralized the radio and got as far as the dungeons before meeting enemy resistance.

The same had happened in the next six scenarios, after playing out the last we had arrived back at the church.



Chiara was resting as comfortably as the Sergeant could make her.

He had made a more thorough assessment of her injuries, and aside for the severe beating, she had sustained a few cracked ribs and several broken fingers.  The broken fingers were a surprise.  The sergeant had reset them as best he could.

Other than that, she would recover physically.  Mentally, he said, would be something else.  She was lucky, he said, her torturer was an amateur, and Italian.  Had it been the German Gestapo, she would be dead.

She was lucid and I told her we would make Leonardo pay for what he’d done.  I thought it best not to tell her about what had happened back at the cavern.  She had enough on her conscience without adding the senseless deaths of the villagers.

Then we had a meeting, where I asked Carlo to draw a plan of the castle and the places where we could breach their defenses and give us an element of surprise.

He had one that I hadn’t known about, one that might give us a fighting chance.

© Charles Heath 2020

Searching for locations: From Zhengzhou to Suzhou by train, and the Snowy Sea Hotel, Suzhou, China

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.

Waiting rooms, a great source of material to write about

Watching the doors that lead to the consulting rooms is about as exciting as watching pigeons standing on a window ledge.

But…

When you have little else to do while waiting to see the doctor, it can take on new meaning, especially if you don’t want to be like 95% of the others waiting and be on their mobile phones.

What you basically have is a cross-section of people right in front of you, a virtual cornucopia of characters just waiting to stay in your next novel, of course with some minor adjustments.  It’s the actions and traits I’m looking for, and since it is a hospital, there’s bound to be some good ones.

It’s a steady drip of patients getting called, and it seems like more are arriving than being seen, and those that are being called have arrived and barely got to sit down, whilst a steady core has been waiting, and waiting, and waiting…

Everyone reacts differently to waiting.

A lady arrives, walking tentatively into the waiting area.  It’s reasonably full so the first thing she does is look for a spot where she doesn’t have to sit next to anyone else.  I’m the same, nothing worse if you sit next to a talker, and getting their life history.

Or they are reading a broadsheet newspaper.  It’s not the aroma of the ink that is annoying you.

Another sits, looking like they’re going to read; they brought a book with them but it sits on her lap.  Is she far too worried to be able to concentrate?  Or is there something else in the room that compels her attention?

The phone comes out, a quick scan, then it remains in hand.  Is she expecting a call or text wishing her luck?  It’s not the oncology clinic so she doesn’t have cancer.  Hopefully.  The fact she brought a book tells me she’s been here before and knows a 9:00 appointment is rarely on time.

As we are discovering.

A couple arrives, maybe a mother and daughter, maybe a patient and her support person.  Both of them don’t look very well do it’s a toss-up who is there to see the doctor.

Next is a man who could easily pass as living on the street.  It’s probably an injustice to say so, but his appearance is compelling, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

He sits and the person next to him gets up, apparently looking for something, then moves subtly to another seat.  Someone else nearby wrinkles her nose.  Two others look in his direction and then whisper to each other.  No guesses what the subject is.

More arrive, fewer seats, some are called, but everyone notices, and avoids, the man.

The sign of the door where the stream of patients are going, says no entry staff only, and periodically a staff member comes striding out either purposely or sedately, clutching a piece of all-important paper, the sign of someone who knows where they’re going, on an important mission.  Names are being called from this door and various other sections of the room, requiring you to keep one ear open in all directions.

And, to be sure, if you have to go to the restroom, that’s when your name will be called.

It seems all hospitals are branches of the United Nations, medical staff, and particularly doctors, are recruited from all over the world, and it seems to be able to speak understandable English is not one of the mandatory requirements, and sometimes the person calling out the name has a little difficulty with the pronunciation.

Perhaps like the UN, we need interpreters.  No, most of the names are recognizable until there is a foreign name that’s unpronounceable, or a person with English as a second language calls an English name.  It makes what could be an interminable wait into something more interesting.

And then there are the people who have names that are completely at odds with their nationality.  They are lucky enough to have the best of a number of cultures, and perhaps a deeper level of understanding where others do not.  I’m reminded never to judge a book by it’s cover.

I start trying to figure out those indecipherable names and then move on to trying to match a name with its owner.  I’m zero out fo four so far.

When there is a lull in arrivals and call-ups, there’s the doctor in consult room 2.  He’s apparently the doctor with no patients and periodically he comes out to look in his pigeonhole, or just look over the patients waiting, and more importantly checking the door handle when not delivering printouts to the consulting room next door.

He’s a doctor with no patients, get my drift.  Well, that joke fell very flat, so, fortunately, he comes out, a piece of paper in hand, and calls a name.  His quiet period is over.  Someone else will have to look at the door handle.

But we’re still waiting, waiting.

It’s been an hour and four minutes, and a little frustrating.  Surely when you check-in they should give you an estimated waiting time, or better still how many patients there are before you.

I guess its time to join the rest and pick up the mobile phone.

The good news, I only got to type one word before my name was called.  By a person who could pronounce it correctly.

The doctor, well that’s another story.

A new way of doing things

Well, welcome to the new world.

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, as over the last few weeks I’ve 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.

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.

Or we find a cure, or at the very least, a vaccine.

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 again. Anywhere.

Perhaps we really do need a miracle.

A story inspired by Castello di Brolio – Episode 33

For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.

Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.

And, so, it continues…

Neither of us knew what to expect, and I had tried to steel myself for the worst. It was war, and I’d seen some awful things, but when it had happened to people you knew, and to a certain extent civilians that were nothing to do with the war, it was all that much harder to both understand why, and see.

There were dead, I counted at least ten, villagers who were innocent of any crime other than the fact they didn’t like Leonardo. They had no chance, shot and left to die in almost the same positions I’d seen them when I’d left earlier.

But, after checking everywhere, I could not find Martina.

Then Jack appeared. He came up to me and tugged on my trouser leg. “So this is where you got to?” I said. Why had he come back, though?

He headed back further into the cavern near where we had been earlier, a doorway I had not seen. It was ajar. Jack simply stood still, looking at it.

I pulled out my service pistol, not wanting to be caught unaware, and moved quietly towards the door, then slowly pulled it open.

At first, I saw nothing, then, looking down, I saw a figure on the floor. I knelt down to see who it was. The boy, Enrico. I’d seen his parents earlier, both dead. He must have escaped and hidden in the room, and, luckily, no one had followed him.

Except for Jack. Or had Jack come back, having sensed something awful had happened?

I checked him but there didn’t seem to be any wounds, and, when I shook his shoulder, he jolted, and jumped up ready to attack me, until he saw who it was, then grabbed hold of me. He was shaking, and suddenly sobbing. He had seen what had happened, and it was not something he was going to forget.

And he was going to want to exact revenge.

He was not the only one.

It took ten minutes before he had calmed, and managed to sit, leaning back against the wall. The room was where empty bottles were stored on wooden boxes, and he must have hidden among the crates. Anyone searching quickly wouldn’t venture much past the doorway.

It had saved his life.

Then, when I asked, he related what happened.

It was over very quickly. There had been a pounding on the door, and Martina had assumed it was Chiara returning. Chiara, he said, had said she had a small errand to run before locking herself in with the others.

When Martina opened the door, Leonardo was there, and they captured her, then set about killing everyone else. Enrico had been in the rear of the cavern looking for extra places for the others to camp when he heard the shots being fired.

Instead of going back to see what was happening, he hid in the bottle room, afraid for his life. Afraid for his parents and the others, but he had quickly realized there was nothing he could do. Leonardo had used the act of surprise.

One of Leonardo’s men had come back to where he was hiding, and just as he put his head in the door, Leonardo had called him back. They had to leave before Carlo and I returned. One of his men suggested they remain and capture us when we came back, but Leonardo said we’d come to him as soon as we saw what had happened.

He was right.

Carlo had made up a list of the dead and found that not only Martina was missing, so was Giuseppe and Francesco.

I told him Chiara was still alive, but barely, that Leonardo and his men had almost killed her, extracting the other’s whereabouts.

Martina and the others were most likely receiving the same punishment Chiara had received, up at the castle in one of the dungeons.

We were going to have to rescue them if they were still alive.

In fact, now that Thompson had sent reinforcements, the fight was going to be a little more in our favor with six of us, instead of two. Perhaps seven, if I could not persuade Enrico not to come, but that was going to be difficult. In his place, I would feel exactly the same.

When Enrico was ready, we went back out to the main cavern where Carlo was sitting, head in hands. It was probably the only time he would get to mourn his fellow villagers/

Jack was seeking forgiveness for deserting me, but I was not mad at him. That he was able to give some form of companionship to Enrico probably saved him from making a mistake thinking he could exact revenge on his own.

I told him Leonardo would pay for this, and, predictably, he told me that he would be coming with us. I promised myself that I would find some way of keeping him safe.
© Charles Heath 2020

The cinema of my dreams – I always wanted to write a war story – Episode 33

For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.

Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.

And, so, it continues…

Neither of us knew what to expect, and I had tried to steel myself for the worst. It was war, and I’d seen some awful things, but when it had happened to people you knew, and to a certain extent civilians that were nothing to do with the war, it was all that much harder to both understand why, and see.

There were dead, I counted at least ten, villagers who were innocent of any crime other than the fact they didn’t like Leonardo. They had no chance, shot and left to die in almost the same positions I’d seen them when I’d left earlier.

But, after checking everywhere, I could not find Martina.

Then Jack appeared. He came up to me and tugged on my trouser leg. “So this is where you got to?” I said. Why had he come back, though?

He headed back further into the cavern near where we had been earlier, a doorway I had not seen. It was ajar. Jack simply stood still, looking at it.

I pulled out my service pistol, not wanting to be caught unaware, and moved quietly towards the door, then slowly pulled it open.

At first, I saw nothing, then, looking down, I saw a figure on the floor. I knelt down to see who it was. The boy, Enrico. I’d seen his parents earlier, both dead. He must have escaped and hidden in the room, and, luckily, no one had followed him.

Except for Jack. Or had Jack come back, having sensed something awful had happened?

I checked him but there didn’t seem to be any wounds, and, when I shook his shoulder, he jolted, and jumped up ready to attack me, until he saw who it was, then grabbed hold of me. He was shaking, and suddenly sobbing. He had seen what had happened, and it was not something he was going to forget.

And he was going to want to exact revenge.

He was not the only one.

It took ten minutes before he had calmed, and managed to sit, leaning back against the wall. The room was where empty bottles were stored on wooden boxes, and he must have hidden among the crates. Anyone searching quickly wouldn’t venture much past the doorway.

It had saved his life.

Then, when I asked, he related what happened.

It was over very quickly. There had been a pounding on the door, and Martina had assumed it was Chiara returning. Chiara, he said, had said she had a small errand to run before locking herself in with the others.

When Martina opened the door, Leonardo was there, and they captured her, then set about killing everyone else. Enrico had been in the rear of the cavern looking for extra places for the others to camp when he heard the shots being fired.

Instead of going back to see what was happening, he hid in the bottle room, afraid for his life. Afraid for his parents and the others, but he had quickly realized there was nothing he could do. Leonardo had used the act of surprise.

One of Leonardo’s men had come back to where he was hiding, and just as he put his head in the door, Leonardo had called him back. They had to leave before Carlo and I returned. One of his men suggested they remain and capture us when we came back, but Leonardo said we’d come to him as soon as we saw what had happened.

He was right.

Carlo had made up a list of the dead and found that not only Martina was missing, so was Giuseppe and Francesco.

I told him Chiara was still alive, but barely, that Leonardo and his men had almost killed her, extracting the other’s whereabouts.

Martina and the others were most likely receiving the same punishment Chiara had received, up at the castle in one of the dungeons.

We were going to have to rescue them if they were still alive.

In fact, now that Thompson had sent reinforcements, the fight was going to be a little more in our favor with six of us, instead of two. Perhaps seven, if I could not persuade Enrico not to come, but that was going to be difficult. In his place, I would feel exactly the same.

When Enrico was ready, we went back out to the main cavern where Carlo was sitting, head in hands. It was probably the only time he would get to mourn his fellow villagers/

Jack was seeking forgiveness for deserting me, but I was not mad at him. That he was able to give some form of companionship to Enrico probably saved him from making a mistake thinking he could exact revenge on his own.

I told him Leonardo would pay for this, and, predictably, he told me that he would be coming with us. I promised myself that I would find some way of keeping him safe.
© Charles Heath 2020

Searching for locations: The Erqi Memorial Tower, Zhengzhou, China

A convoluted explanation on the reasons for this memorial came down to it being about the deaths of those involved in the 1923 Erqi strike, though we’re not really sure what the strike was about.

So, after a little research, this is what I found:

The current Erqi Tower was built in 1971 and was, historically, the tallest building in the city. It is a memorial to the Erqi strike and in memory of Lin Xiangqian and other railway workers who went on strike for their rights, which happened on February 7, 1923.

It has 14 floors and is 63 meters high. One of the features of this building is the view from the top, accessed by a spiral staircase, or an elevator, when it’s working (it was not at the time of our visit).

There seems to be an affinity with the number 27 with this building, in that

  • It’s the 27th memorial to be built
  • to commemorate the 27th workers’ strike
  • located in the 27th plaza of Zhengzhou City.

We drive to the middle of the city where we once again find traveling in kamikaze traffic more entertaining than the tourist points

When we get to the drop-off spot, it’s a 10-minute walk to the center square where the tower is located on one side. Getting there we had to pass a choke point of blaring music and people hawking goods, each echoing off the opposite wall to the point where it was deafening. Too much of it would be torture.

But, back to the tower…

It has 14 levels, but no one seemed interested in climbing the 14 or 16 levels to get to the top. The elevator was broken, and after the great wall episode, most of us are heartily sick of stairs.

The center square was quite large but paved in places with white tiles that oddly reflected the heat rather than absorb it. In the sun it was very warm.

Around the outside of two-thirds of the square, and crossing the roads, was an elevated walkway, which if you go from the first shops and around to the other end, you finish up, on the ground level, at Starbucks.

This is the Chinese version and once you get past the language barrier, the mixology range of cold fruity drinks are to die for, especially after all that walking. Mine was a predominantly peach flavor, with some jelly and apricot at the bottom. I was expecting sliced peaches but I prefer and liked the apricot half.

A drink and fruit together was a surprise.

Then it was the walk back to the meeting point and then into the hotel to use the happy house before rejoining the kamikaze traffic.

We are taken then to the train station for the 2:29 to our next destination, Suzhou, the Venice of the East.

Whatever happened to free websites?

There’s nothing more certain that a favourite web site you go to and use often, sooner or later starts charging a subscription ‘fee’.

I remember when the NANOWRIMO site had been updated, and the changes look good.  At that moment the site was free, but you do get a lot of emails and requests to purchase products, which I think is a reasonable way to raise money for keeping the site free.

But, how long is this going to last before a ‘fee’ is introduced, and then a ‘fee’ to enter your book?

It’s the airline principle, once it was a flat charge for the ticket, now you pay for this tax, that tax, fuel tax, baggage tax, tax on the tax, and then if that’s not enough, a charge for the food and water.  Soon it will be a charge for toilets, and then the air you breathe.

It’s inevitable, and once these charges start they don’t stop and only get higher with each passing year.

A lot of the sites I use are free.  Some have since started to charge and have put up a firewall to stop you getting any free information.

I’m not a rich author, so sadly I have to discontinue using these sites.

Perhaps the problem is that the owner of the site has come up with a good idea, thousands of people sign up, and suddenly a small web site becomes a big one, and hosting costs suddenly go through the roof.

Like airlines, it’s the user that pays.

Often I see or get an email from, various people with what looks to be a useful site.  Some start out by giving you a month free to have a look and use the facilities.  In some cases they are quite good, in other, well, there’s a dozen others like it that are still free.

But, after a month, you have to pay.  What gets me with some of them, they are asking somewhere between 50 and 100 US dollars a month, you heard that right, a month, which you can basically double that for me after the exchange rate and a dozen bank fees.

Sometimes there are different levels, but basically, if you look at the fine print, the lowest level set, which gives you very little, is set low deliberately.  Say it’s 10 dollars a month.  It’s no different to the free version except they probably don’t have annoying ads and advertise, what for many, is non-existent 24/7 help (via an email, no guarantee they look at it more than once a week, if at all).  Money for jam for the site owner, as the saying goes.

Why can’t there be a more reasonable option?

But I get it.  Everyone wants to get rich quick, it’s an objective that’s built into all of us, but it seems I missed the inoculation given the day after you’re born.

I also get it that these people worked hard on coming up with the web sites and facilities, and they deserve a reward for that hard work, but to me it would make more sense if they sold the service for 10 dollars or even 20 dollars a month if the systems were available and they worked.  And flowing from that wouldn’t 20,000 sales at 20 dollars, be better than 2000 at a 100 dollars?

The same seems to go for the so-called decent web site hosts, like WordPress, Wix and GoDaddy.  The free option is good but just for show and tell, but I’m sure they deliberately nobble it so it’s slow and kludgy just the sort of attributes that turn potential visitors off.

I thought if I paid a monthly charge for Wix, and reading the inclusions for what my site could do over the free one was very persuasive, so I signed up.  The site was no better than it was before and half the options that were on the list weren’t available, and still aren’t.  But I suspect if I paid them 100 plus dollars a month or more for their premium package I’d get it.

But, to pay for it I would have to be selling a million books a month, and I doubt, no matter how good my web site is, it wouldn’t attract that kind of business.

Not one of the basic packages, read affordable for me, has the ability to allow downloads after sales.  You can’t even have a sales page where you can actually sell books to people like you were a bookshop.  That’s in all of the premium packages, so they say, and that costs far too much.

GoDaddy were by far the worst, telling me if I signed up to the 60 dollars a month package I could have sales and downloads.  I tried to add it to the web page, which I might add was as difficult to create as all hell, and when it didn’t work, rang up to ask why I couldn’t have downloading after sales and was met with silence.

No, that’s not available at the moment, I was told, and not likely in the future.  What am I paying all this money for?  I don’t have a GoDaddy site any more.  I had a Wix site that I paid for, and I don’t have that any more.  They don’t offer anything useful, and they too, make it virtually impossible to create a useful site, so it sits out there in the ether with disappointment written all over it.

Perhaps others have had better luck, or things have changed in the last few years but I won’t be going back.

Maybe one day someone might understand the needs of the majority who can afford to pay exorbitant monthly charges but just not as much as we are expected to, for very little in return.

What’s that saying, hope springs eternal.

PS Sorry about the rant!

The cinema of my dreams – I always wanted to write a war story – Episode 32

For a story that was conceived during those long boring hours flying in a steel cocoon, striving to keep away the thoughts that the plane and everyone in it could just simply disappear as planes have in the past, it has come a long way.

Whilst I have always had a fascination with what happened during the second world war, not the battles or fighting, but in the more obscure events that took place, I decided to pen my own little sidebar to what was a long and bitter war.

And, so, it continues…

It was about a mile by foot to the old church.  Carlo was waiting for us, and then led the way because I wasn’t sure where it was, even though I’d been there once, and hadn’t really been taking any notice.

It was enough time to ask Blinky a few questions about how things were going because he would have a better overall view of the war being involved in the operational side of things.  Thompson’s group of which I was a part, only had our part in a much larger war effort involving a number of covert operations.

It wasn’t going well, not that he put it in so many words, and it looked like it was going to drag on a while longer.  Beyond that, he was not saying anything more.  Perhaps he didn’t know, or perhaps he thought the trees had ears.

I know, loose lips sink ships.

Carlo was indifferent, though I could see he was not happy about Leonardo not turning up so we could kill him and his men.  For me, I had an awfully bad feeling we had missed something, and the end result of it was not going to be good.

And that feeling of foreboding only increased the closer we got to the church ruins.

Blinky was shocked to learn that the Germans would destroy a church and kill the priest.  I guess a lot of people would be if they knew.

When we were about 50 yards from the entrance, I saw one of Blinky’s men show his face, behind a gun raised just in case we were not friends.  When he saw Blinky with us, he lowered the gun and stepped out of the shadows so we could see him.

Closer again, I could see the soldier was looking quite distraught.

“What’s the matter?” Blinky asked him.  

“When we got here, we went inside the church.  God, it was awful.  There’s a woman in there, and…” 

A woman?

I almost ran, and at the end, lying on the ground was a woman, with the Sergeant trying to do what he could.

Carlo bustled past and was first to her side.

“Chiara,” he said hoarsely.

Chiara?  What was she doing here?  How did she get here?  What had happened?

I joined Carlo on the other side.  She was awake but in a terrible state.  Whoever inflicted punishment on her had been very brutal.  The sergeant had managed to cover her broken body with the remnants of her clothes and had tried to clean away some of the blood.

She had been beaten severely and she had the sort of wounds I’d seen before, a result of both fists and weapons.  Torture used to extract information, and, with a sinking feeling, I knew exactly what information Leonardo would be after.

And equally, I knew there would be no point getting to the underground hideout.  All I could hope for was that some, if not all who had been taken there for their safety, had escaped.  But, without forewarning…

She looked from Carlo to me.

“What happened,” I asked.

“Leonardo.  I went out to collect one of the family members and ran into Leonardo and his men.  

They brought me here, and…”  It was spoken haltingly, as each breath, each word, brought on new and sharp pain.  She was having trouble breathing, and the blood coming out her mouth told me it was possible she had broken ribs and a punctured lung.

I hoped not, but it was a forlorn hope.  There was little we would be able to do for her, and moving her, and finding proper medical help was going to be almost impossible.

At the end of that first speech, I saw her shudder, and then moan as waves of pain passed through her.

The Sargent had a field medical kit and had taken out a syringe which I assumed had morphine.  She was going to need it.

“This should take away the pain,” he said to no one in particular, then administered it.

For a moment I thought it had rendered her unconscious, but a minute or so later she opened her eyes again.  Glassy, but there was a shred of relief in them.

“You’re going to have to move her to somewhere better than this.  There’s a lot of damage, and it’s going to be difficult.”  The Sargent knew he was fighting a losing battle.

I got the impression it wasn’t the worst he’d seen.

I felt her hand touch mine, and she said, softly, “Tell Martina I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’m not the brave person she thinks I am.  I couldn’t withstand the torture.  I tried, I tried very hard, but I couldn’t stop myself…”  Again, it was in dispersed with wheezing, breathlessness, and bouts of pain when she tried to breathe in.  I almost couldn’t quite understand her, because her English was not as good as Martina’s.

It confirmed my worst fear, that Leonardo knew where Martina and the others were hiding.

I jumped up.  “Blinky, stay here, do what you can for her.  Carlo…”

He was up and heading for the exit.  He heard, and he knew what it meant.

Blinky took my place, and said, “Go.  We’ll be here when you get back.”

For a big man, Carlo was fast, and it took until we’d almost reached the underground entrance before I caught up with him.

© Charles Heath 2020