Kangaroos and Cars don't Mix

This is the story of something that happened to me a couple of months ago. I had lunch yesterday with Mme Benaut, dear friend and inspirational blogger, and she suggested I should recount this for the edification of others. And to serve as a cautionary tale.

It was, as they say in the classics, a dark and stormy night. In fact it was the night before I was to leave for a weekend in Sydney to celebrate my friend Nina's birthday. Being away from home of course necessitates putting my canine children (Fergus and Scully) up in a boarding kennel, much to their disgust. We've become accustomed to using a very good one at Mylor, (Top Spot Kennels) which although some distance away in the wilds of the Adelaide hills, looks after the dogs really well.

This particular night saw the onset of the autumn rain, with a vengeance. It had been raining steadily all afternoon and by the time I'd dropped the dogs off and turned back towards home, it was already pitch dark at six o'clock or thereabouts and absolutely teeming. While the rain was like manna from heaven to this driest of dry cities, it made driving conditions hazardous in the extreme. This wasn't helped by the fact that the stretch of road between Mylor and Aldgate, the next hills town, is very narrow, winding and dark.

My night-time eyesight is not all it could be, along with all the other failing faculties, so I was peering myopically through the windscreen and feeling fairly anxious already when a huge greyish white apparition loomed up out of the blackness to my left. With an enormous thud it smacked straight into the passenger side of the car knocking it off course and then seemed to disappear. There was nowhere to turn off the road and cars were right behind me so somehow I managed to keep driving, but very hesitantly as I didn't know how badly the car was damaged. I was also in a state of panic because I didn't know what I'd hit. For all I knew at that stage it could have been a person or a child. Visions of being convicted as a hit-run driver flashed before me. A bit further down the road there was a muddy turn-off to the left so I managed to pull in off the road and stop, very shaken. The drivers of two other cars behind me both stopped also to see if I was alright, which was kind of them.

One of them, a young girl, came over and I tried to open the passenger side door but it was stuck. She told me I'd hit a kangaroo as she'd seen it bounce off my bonnet and disappear over the other side of the road. The other driver who stopped was a young man who was really kind and thoughtful and had a very close look at the car for me to see whether it was driveable. He was soaked to the skin, it was raining so hard, but he still got down in the mud and looked under the car to see whether any oil or fluid was leaking out. He then offered to drive in front of me until we got to Aldgate, as by now I only had one headlight. I don't know who he was but I am very grateful for his help. It seemed like the car was alright to drive, in that it had no mechanical problems. Just the slight problem of a busted headlight and missing rear view window on one side, which had apparently been sheared off by the kangaroo.

I felt pretty bad about the kangaroo and was afraid that I might have killed it or at least seriously injured it, but there wasn't much I could do. Subsequently quite a few people told me they are actually pretty tough and unless you hit them full on with a vehicle with a roo bar attached, they often survive without too much ill effect. So I hope that was the case with this one.

It was a hair raising drive home as although I'd negotiated the rest of the narrow, winding hills road I was on, the remainder of the route was not much better and of course it was still raining heavily. Visibility with only one headlight was appalling so I had to keep the working one on high beam, which the approaching drivers probably didn't appreciate.

Finally I got home in one piece, which is more than I can say for the car. I still went away for the weekend and left the disaster locked up in the garage to deal with on my return. It needed quite extensive repairs as it turned out, although fortunately the insurance paid for them, all except the unavoidable excess.

Running into a kangaroo was the last thing I would have expected to happen so close to the metropolitan area, thinking they would only be a concern out in the middle of the outback. But apparently they are not uncommon in that area, and of course there are also lots of koalas. It made me realise that wherever you drive where there are trees and bushland, it's important to be aware of the wildlife that may be around and keep alert to the possibility of an animal getting onto the road. Of course in the case of this one, as it seemed to literally launch itself out of the bush on the side of the road straight into my car, there was little I could have done to avoid it. But I will be a lot more wary driving through those parts in future.

Nieces

On Friday my sister Rosemary and I had a girls' lunch with my two nieces, Renee and Melissa, ostensibly for Renee's birthday but also just to get together, the four of us, for a gossip and a catch up. We do this all too rarely and it was great fun.

Both girls have grown up into lovely young women and although they're both currently single, I'm sure some lucky bloke will be smart enough to snap them up some day.

They take after their aunt slightly I think in that they were a bit unsure of what direction to take in their lives when younger (in their aunt's case she was completely all over the place!). But they've now both found their way and are doing really well. Renee (in the middle) is a very dedicated primary school teacher and Melissa after quite a few years working, decided this year to take on a science degree at Flinders. She's done very well in her first exams and is enjoying learning again. Although it's a big challenge, I know the family attitude of persistence and industriousness will ensure she gets there and will then be able to look forward to an exciting and rewarding career.

Rosemary can be very proud of her girls, which she is of course!!

To Plot or Not

I've recently been reading quite a few books on writing by writers of varying degrees of accomplishment. These are not so much "how to" books as advice from those who may be expected to know, in so far as they have had books published. As an aspiring writer, I am eager for all the advice I can get, although as with any field of learning you must take some and leave some.

There is a common theme among a lot of such material that emphasises the indispensability of plot. This premise is based on the notion that in today's world of instant gratification, audiences have limited attention spans. As well, because film and television have become the entertainment of choice for the masses, being accessible, cheap and undemanding, people have become accustomed to a fast pace, quickly unfolding events and a speedy resolution to the drama. They are therefore not willing to hang around waiting for something to happen. Writers who hope to engage their readers are as a result encouraged to hit them between the eyes within the first couple of pages, or risk having their book unceremoniously consigned to the dustbin, or worse put back on the shelf.

I don't necessarily disagree with this. An exciting unputdownable book is a great way to while away the time, hence the popularity of airport paperback outlets. But the corollary to this, propounded by at least some of these advice givers, is that fiction that is not plot focused and escapist in nature, that is instead too much like "real life" is boring, tedious and not worth the time spent in writing it. Why, this school of thought suggests, would we want to read about something that could happen to us, who cares, yawn yawn? Most people's lives considered in this way are I suppose predictable and humdrum. And if one was to catalogue in detail the minutiae and trivia of day to day existence, no-one would be terribly interested least of all the writer.

But life is not all about that. There are highlights, lowlights and moments of great drama within the ordinary. People I am convinced like to identify. They like to find their own experiences in the lives and words of others. They like to know that others have felt the same emotions; frustrations, anger, joy, sorrow, whatever as they have. We can even find solace in reading about how someone has handled a tragedy in life that we have faced or may face. There is a place for this stuff.

As the writer Anne Tyler said in a recent interview, "the whole purpose of my books is to sink into other lives .... I would love it if the readers sank along with me." And plenty of readers have, considering her hugely successful body of work, recognised by the Pulitzer Prize no less. Possibly it's a way of portraying our shared humanity.

So there's no place really for an extremist view about plot driven fiction. There's room for both kinds. Some people love Harry Potter and anything by J.R. Tolkien, some love Virginia Woolf. Some just love anything that keeps them awake or helps them to nod off, whatever.

I like books of all kinds but I especially love books where I can relate to the protagonists and what happens to them, and they're the kinds of stories and books I hope to write. Equally there is great skill in writing good science fiction, suspenseful cliff-hangers, blood curdling thrillers or passionate bodice rippers. Horses for courses, as they say and anyone who is reckless enough to issue imperatives about what should and should not be written, deserves not to be read!

Dodgy (and other) gates

It seems Marty and Mal haven't learnt anything from the fate of the quintessential Artful Dodger*, immortalised by Dickens in the following description:


He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. ..... He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the bluchers.


(Nothing personal guys).


He of course ended up being caught red handed with a stolen silver snuff box and was ignominiously despatched to the penal colony at Port Arthur.

No such fate is likely to befall either of these protagonists however, whether or not they deserve it. Not that any of the players in either saga comes off unsullied, even the pair most self-righteously proclaiming their indignation at the aspersions cast upon them - Prime Minister Rudd and Premier Rann respectively. Of course it's all in the game as they say, politics being almost as laughable a game as that of love and we have learnt to have fairly low expectations of the integrity of the main players in both the Federal and State ball games. You'd think though they would have learned by now that casting aspersions is rather like casting stones. Let he who is without sin cast the first one. Or beware the fate of being hoist by one's own petard (or one's own ute or dodgy documents as the case may be).

Red faced they may be and deservedly so, but repentant, probably not. Whether the sting in the tail as these events have proven to be for the Libs at both Federal and State levels is venomous enough to do them lasting damage, either in a leadership spill (as seems imminent for the State crowd) or at some future ballot box, remains to be seen. It is however a pretty shabby display in both houses and one wishes they'd for once just get on with what they were elected to do, rather than wasting our time, trying our patience and clogging up the newsprint with this childish puerile nonsense. If I hadn't already lost faith in politics, this would have been the straw that did it.

*Colloquially - someone who tries to avoid taking responsibility for his (usually nefarious) actions.

Life is a Picture

In my quest to become a writer, I attended a writing workshop last weekend at the SA Writer's Centre. It was entitled "Writing from the Inside Out". Although only three hours in duration, it was a very rewarding experience. As it was a practical workshop, we got to write (what else!) and read the fruits of our labours to the class. Although potentially exposing one's vulnerabilities, this is an invaluable task for a writer, aspiring or experienced. Writing, although an engaging and at times satisfying activity, is essentially a very isolated one. One labours away, waging a war with the blank page and hopes that what emerges from the intellectual wrestling match is something half way reasonable. You never really know though, at least not until you get to the stage of submitting work to a publisher I suppose. The capacity for self-delusion is alive and well in every one of us, and there is always the nagging fear that what may seem flights of rhetorical brilliance at the time, will be little more than self indulgent drivel on re-reading, or worse on reading by someone else.

Be that as it may, it's not really what I meant to say. The theory behind the topic of the workshop was that to write well, we should be able to draw upon images and develop the ability to translate them as settings for our stories. In other words, it's not enough merely to create believable characters, a compelling plot and a well structured account of something (piece of cake though all that is!!), it needs a setting. It is in the setting that we have the opportunity to use what we know as well as what we can imagine. As an exercise, we were asked to bring along photos or images of a scene that meant something to us. Using this as inspiration , we then had to write a short piece in or around or somehow related to this scene.

What I found intriguing about this was how similar it was to painting. It was creating a landscape through words, rather than through the medium of paint. The method practically of course is different, but the creative process is remarkably, uncannily similar. So, for me because I have done some painting, this was an exciting and invigorating challenge.

I don't think you have to be particularly artistic in any medium to appreciate this. The human mind is naturally creative and imaginative and if you just sit and look at a scene, a picture, an image, whether it be a beautiful landscape, a person or a still life, I think you will find it speaks to you. This is of course the great joy of art, our eyes and ears and senses are captured by a skilful writer, painter or musician and transported to another world. It's nothing less than magic.

Sisterhood

In thinking over the past week which has been quite a stressful one for me with Scully's problems, I felt so grateful for having a sister who is always a rock of strength and support whenever life gets a bit difficult for me. I haven't written anything previously about my dear sister, Rosemary but I would like her to know she is loved and very precious to me.

We are different in many ways, however I like to think those differences complement each other. We also share many traits, in particular our devotion to animals, especially our precious dogs. Rosemary and her husband Len have three, all of which are thoroughly doted on. Of course as fanatical pet lovers, she and I have both had our share of heartbreaking times, when a beloved pet gets ill or passes on and it is at these times that because we understand so well the grief that this entails, we are able to support each other.

Rosemary is brilliant at this. Last week when Scully got sick, she came to visit all the way from Murray Bridge just to see if I was ok as well as phoning and emailing regularly to check on things. There's not a lot of tangible things one can do to help when life's downs come along, but just to know there's someone you can talk to about anything is wonderful. God knows I've moaned and whinged to her endlessly over the years but she never complains, never judges and is just there to lend an understanding ear, whatever the problem. Things were different when we were kids of course and as we shared a bedroom familiarity bred not only contempt but some raging rows from memory. But that's all part of the family experience and it certainly hasn't marred our relationship as adults.

I look forward to us growing into old ladies together grumbling about the indignities of age and infirmity, the intransigence of men and children, the frustrations of work and trying to make ends meet, the parlous state of the world and where will it all end and so on. It's really good to know that whatever befalls me, there's someone who'll always be in my corner, backing me all the way. Thanks to you dear sister.

A little girl in trouble

My little dog Scully has had some very worrying health problems just recently. She has suffered several convulsive attacks, which although fortunately short lived are alarming and distressing, both to her and to me. She has been thoroughly examined by the vet and had a full set of blood tests done. There don't at this stage appear to be any specific causes for the seizures and she doesn't have any other symptoms. One possibility is a brain tumour or similar neurological problem, but until further investigations are done, if they prove necessary, we won't know. In between these episodes she has been perfectly well, and as far as can be seen, her normal self. Her normal self is a sweet, quiet and serene natured little dog, so the thought of anything serious being wrong with her fills me with dread. At the moment we just have to wait and see if further problems occur, and take whatever action is recommended then.

Scully is 12 years old, so not in the first flush of youth and health problems therefore don't come as a surprise. But whenever they come with a loved pet, they are never welcome. One desperately wants to spare them pain and suffering of any kind, and to protect them at whatever cost, but it's such a difficult experience. Although inevitable, it's virtually impossible to prepare oneself to deal philosophically with the concept of their illness, incapacity and eventual death.

Fergus is worried about her too and senses something is wrong I think. He's giving her a comforting kiss in the above picture.

I am hoping this doesn't mean I'm going to lose her just yet, but if I do I must just hope to deal with it in the best way possible, for her sake and for mine. In the meantime she is getting lots of hugs and love to make sure she knows she is a special girl.