Reminising On The 7:31 From Armadale

Ever had one of those moments when a scent, song or sound suddenly propels you backwards into your past? To a long forgotten memory that is suddenly recrystalised into clear, precise images, sounds, tastes and aromas.

The scent had hints of vanilla and jasmine and although it wafted to me on the train on a particularly wet and cold winters morning, I found myself sitting on the lawn in a caravan park, near the beach at the height of summer in 1969. '69 the year the 747 made its first flight, Nixon took office and of course man landed on the moon (yes they did!) and the fifty first year the mighty Subiaco Lions Football Club went without a Premiership! I was six years old and sporting a very short crew cut that inspired my father to run his hand across it and dub me "Prickle Head", a sobriquet that survives to this day. A name that when Dad uses it I know he is being drawn back also to a place of good memories.

It was my Uncle's, Dad's brother, caravan that we were all seated outside of in a circle. There were ten or eleven of us, if memory serves me correctly, perhaps more. My sister, Joanne and I, Bruno and Graham, the sons of my "Auntie" Clara, the aboriginal boy Alistair she fostered each summer, the three Chadwick boys from up the road, Wayne, Stephen and Ashley and my cousins Peter, Gordon and Bruce. All of us in our swimsuits, no shirts, no hats, no sunscreen. They were the days when we lived dangerously! Most of us were driven to the beach in cars, with no seat belts, rode bikes at home without helmets, threw rocks, ate dirt. It's a wonder I made it to this age!

We had spent the morning swimming and skylarking around and had danced, barefoot across the burning bitumen road to the cool, tree dotted caravan park for lunch. Which I suspect had consisted mainly of chicken and salad sandwiches as they tended to be the staple summer lunch time fare in the Blackburn household over summer. There was nothing better than that, being out and about, riding my bike, playing with my mates or just mucking around with dear old "Duke" (our dog) and coming home to a cold drink (or hot during winter) and something to eat, while Mum listened patiently to the stories of great adventure.

Then my mother, dressed in a white pleated dress with flowers, hibisucs I think, placed a large plate of cut up watermelon in front of us. She lent between Joanne and I to place the plate down and I can remember the smell of her perfume. Clean, clear and fresh, vanilla with a hint of jasmine. A scent that lodged in my olfactory memory bank that was triggered some thirty-nine years later on the 7:31 from Armadale.

Oprah

Oprah Gail Winfrey drives me nuts!

Oh the heresy!

Well not so much Oprah (although I do find her whole style to be ingratiating and condescending) but more those people that hang on every word of the Great O! The thing that irks me most noticeably is what has become known as the Oprah Effect in publishing. On the word of the Great O a book will rush to the top of the best seller list, all because Oprah enjoyed it???

Come on people think for yourselves!

The list of books in themselves is not bad. Also anything that gets people reading is wonderful. I am concerned that if those people who simply rely on Oprah telling them to go out and read this or that book, have the nous to understand Anna Karenina or Love in the Time of Cholera. Is this purely endemic of our continuing fascination with celebrity and our willingness to devolve our thinking process to others who are "smarter" than us?

It also begets the bigger and slightly more frightening question; Could Oprah turn the election in Obama's favour just on her word?

The power of the O can be seen in the message boards on her Book Club Website. "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle is Oprah's latest offering, has 25,669 seperate discussions which have been viewed 4,596,900 times, being run on the web boards!

I have to admit that I am now loath to buy a book that carries Oprah's Book Club sticker, simply as my own private protest against this kind of celebrity endorsement.

meticulous \muh-TIK-yuh-luhs

meticulous \muh-TIK-yuh-luhs\adjective: Extremely or excessively careful about details.

Meticulous is the word of the day on dictionary.com. I am one of those nerdy types that subscribes to such lists and on first look today I never considered that muh-TIK-yuh-luhs applied to me. Ask anyone, my wife, my kids, my boss!

Thats not to say I'm sloppy with details or dont care. What I mean is that I'm NOT extremely or excessively careful about details, which I have to admit, does lead to my downfall at times.

But then I had an epiphany (another word I need to add to my list of favourites). Cleaning out the bag I take to and from work I came across a number of computer discs I had forgotten about. So I loaded them up and checked out what files were there. Most of them were work files but a large number were snippets of or actual stories I had written over the past three years. Not to blow my own trumpet (but I will) a lot of it was not actual crap!

Here is the epiphany in regards to being meticulous. I am meticulous when I write. Wow big deal you say. You should be you say. But what I realised is that I espect my writing to be perfect on the first run through. I am meticulous in my draft writing. I never thought I was. I thought I had heeded all the advice from my writing teachers, fellow scribes and the literature. The simple fact is that I spend hours agonising, sweating blood on the perfect opening line, making sure all the punctuation and grammar is meticulous on the first run through!

So I have not been suffering writers block at all. I have been suffering from being too damn meticulous! So bring on the sloppy first draft! I'm back in the writing game!

WASPS, Fifnella and the ATA

Now I'm a bit of a military and aviation history buff but every once in a while I come across something that makes me go WOW, I did not know that!



Well last night I had one of those moments.

It all had to do with women pilots. I was perusing Wikipedia (I love that site although I do tend to check other sources) for information about air racing in the 30's, and in particular the Bendix Trophy the American transcontinental race, and an interesting fact popped up. Jacqueline (Jackie) Cochran was the only woman to win the race. So I decided to check Ms Cochran out.

Now I'm sure most Americans reading this would probably know a bit more about Ms Cochran than I did, to my ever lasting shame! If you don't, read up about her, a truly amazing woman. She started out ferrying aircraft from the US to Britain at the start of the war, becoming the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic. One in Britain she volunteered for the Air Transport Auxillary (ATA). 166 women flew for the ATA during the second world war and transported every kind of aircraft from trainers to the four engined heavy bomber the Lancaster. Even more suprisingly, for the time, the women held the same rank and were paid the same as the men! Fifeteen of these women lost their lives during the war, including Amy Johnson one of Britains great early aviatrix.

The US, under Cochran's and Nancy Harkness Love (a female test pilot) set up the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1942. The WASP's achievments were mind blowing to me. They numbered in their thousands, carried out such missions as ferrying aircraft to towing drones/aerial targets. Between September 1942 and December 1944 the WASPs delivered 12,650 aircraft of 78 different types. Thirty-eight WASPs died in the course of their duties.

The sad part about the WASPs is that as they were considered to be only undertaking civilian not military duties, those who died were returned home at the expense of their families, without military honours or any note of their having died in the service of their country. They were paid 35% of what their male counterparts received. General Hap Arnold, commander of the US Airforce at the time said "The Air Forces will long remember their service and their final sacrifice." Their records were immediately classified and sealed and it took 35 years before they were released. President Carter in 1977 finally signed legislation to give full military recognition to the WASPs for their military service. Too late for a number of them.

The cute lil Walt Disney picture above is Fifnella, a character from Roald Dahl's The Gremlins, who became the WASPs official mascot and appeared on their shoulder patch.

If you have made it this far through my little history tour, I thank you.

I do find it incredibly sad and remiss that so much has been written in non-fiction and fiction about WWII and this bit has been overlooked.

I think there is a story in there. Don't you?

CURSING

I hate, hate, hate...yes hate that stupid, asinine, worthless flashing cursor that mocks a writer with writers block!

For the past several weeks it has sat there just winking away at me, taunting me in its own form of satanic morse code. It makes no difference if its doing its evil work on my Compaq laptop, the family HP or the no name piece of crap that work supplies me with. It sits there just flashing on and off, on and off, on and off. Poking me, metaphorically speaking, in the ribs, like the school bully "Come on, write something, make me move! You can't can you! Yah bloody useless!"

Guy De Maupassant once said "Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare." Well Monsieur De Maupassant a white page with a flashing cursor will drive a man to drink.

The ironic thing is that cursor, in latin, means runner. I can't even get mine to jog!