Sunday Scribbles II.

... as seen from Monday's perspective.

I have been almost at the point of admitting the brick wall that's in front of me is a little too high to climb, too thick to punch through, and far too wide to walk around.

In other words, I've been snivelling, and on the verge of giving up. No more.
This weekend has been one of various people caring enough tokick me in the arse. We had a visitor on Friday - the excellent PK - who reminded me once again that I'm a writer, and therefore am capable of ideas.

Last night, Chris and Lyndsay perfomed the encore: it was a bravura performance, and with their encouragement I resurrected an idea that just may work. All I need now is the necessary half-million dollars, but hey: why not?

So, I spent a relatively sleepless night, coming up with astonishingly good lines for a short TV programme "Around New Zealand in 80 Taonga". The stuff I was thinking up was blisteringly funny - of course, in the cold hard light of day I find all memory of these rib-splitting lines has gone. However, I have the germ of a workable idea, so will spend some time on it.

A short blog this morning -more of a diary entry, I suppose. I'll be back tomorrow with Some Thoughts.

NEW READING:

Ted Dekker, "Adam". I read the odd Dean Koontz book: good, well-constructed, but mindless stuff. Ted Dekker belongs in the same brigade...

Robert Ryan, "Early One Morning". Very easily read adventure yarn, with some nice human interaction: a better class of potboiler. The man knows how to write about machinery.

MUSIC:
I'm listening to Janis Ian's "Billy's Bones". Sweet heartache.

WORD OF THE DAY:
Scrofulous. Rough, untidy... a skin-diseased person, flakey and leprous, without any of the pleasant side-effects.

Here's more from Henry:


There are sirens now, and Henry’s feeling quite dizzy and detached. Six months. He notices James getting up and staggering away, but can’t focus on stopping him. His leg now hurts, sharp knives of pain razoring red-hot through the muscle and up into his back. I’m shot. How stupid.

Six months.

He could have killed me, and it would have been two minutes. Two seconds! And I didn’t tell Mary this morning. I didn’t tell her I love her. Well, she went out before I got a chance to. She told me, though. She told me she loves me, and I didn’t tell her, and six months. Why is everything happening so slowly? Blacked out. Yes. Six months. That little bugger just shot me, it could have been now, not six months, what are all these people doing here, who’s that, is that Wally? Yes, by gum. Wally. What are you saying, Wally?
“Mr Talbot, oh please Mr Talbot, we need to get you to hospital.”
Things clarify, crystallise, come into focus. Six months! Henry wets his lips, looks young Wally in the eye, licks his lips again, and says “Fuck off!”
Hell, that felt good. Charlie! Charlie, good of you to come. I think someone’s committed a crime. Right. Get the head together, I’ve got something that needs doing. I don’t have time for lollygagging, for wool-gathering, I mean look at this it’s no worse than a cut. Six months. I’ve got something to do, yes, and it’s got to start right now.

Chapter Four.
Love Songs of Old Girlfriends.1

At seventeen years of age, Henry went to the capital city, to partake of life at Victoria University. He would probably have preferred to go up north to Auckland’s fine centre of learning, but Henry’s Dad Henry went to Vic, and Henry’s Dad’s Dad, who was also a Henry, went to Vic, and sometimes the weight of the family’s history falls on reluctant shoulders. So it was that Henry the last hopped onto the overnight express and chugged off, with the hopes and dreams and aspirations of his family following him, and a fine New Zealand Railways meat pie and cuppa tea under his belt.
Well, that would be the romantic way of telling the tale, but in fact what happened was the entire family were shoe-horned into the Holden Kingswood, watch that paint Charlotte or by gum you’ll be washing her for a year, and drove Henry down. A bed-sit cum flat was found on Upland Road, we’ll not have you in those dormitories lad, hotbeds of sin they are, and a rather large amount of money was spent on making sure Henry would want for nothing. He had the stereo, the TV, the bed (single, of course), the desk, the bookshelves, Mum made sure the phone was connected “no, I want the phone connected here at 147 Upland Road by tomorrow, and the bill’s to come to me at 22 Talbot Terrace, that’s T-A-L-B-O-T, the same as my name, no not Augustine, young man: Talbot, at Northridge.” and Dad surprised him by giving him the model of the Mark VI Spitfire they’d made together when he was twelve, and a half-dozen bottles of beer as well. Mum wept copiously, the girls shrieked and giggled, baby John bellowed, and Henry put a photograph of Mary on the desk, and so they left him there, fiddling with the little dip-pen with the ivory handle with a little lens through which you could see a picture of the 1940 Exhibition.

Of course, the one thing that Henry would want for, he couldn’t have.