One of the girls at work wandered down the corridor past my cubicle with a punnet of hot chips with gravy on them. It has been a 'bad' week weatherwise here in Briz Vegas (don't ask me why, but that is one of the nicknames the locals give the city), raining or overcast about five days out of the seven, although with the city council and state government on drought alert, rain has been good - if only we got enough to get rid of the water restrictions, would be excellent.
Anyways, with the rain outside and the punnet of chips in the office, was suddenly taken back to primary school in New Zealand, where fish and chips was on the menu from the takeaway shop across the road, and thinking of having them in the middle of winter, with the cold rain pouring down outside, curled up in the school library reading a book.
Which gets me to thinking what sort of book it would be, either Tintin or learning to play chess - and then I remember that I got the learn to play chess books from the council library. Which leads me to thinking of walking to the library, about a half hour walk, with my mother, again on those dark winter nights.
Thinking on how quiet the library was, and how quaint the whole putting a big date stamp on a card process seems now, in the age of internet newspapers and publishing. Fast forwarding a few years, researching high school projects in the reference area, or forward a few more years, and it seems that the library has turned into an internet cafe or music and video store - yes, you can still only loan the CDs and videos, but you are charged for it.
I think back to my times in the library as a young child, and am sure it I only saw the altruistic, not the profit driven. Surely the council was making money off side ventures then as well? Surely it wasn't that the entire 1990s were a penny pinching, mean decade?
Curling up in bed to read a book - good memories.
Or sitting around the table, listening to the classic hits station on a Saturday night. Or towards the holiday season, hearing Snoopy's Christmas. Or, again in the kitchen, my first seizure, when I was nine or ten - my limbs just went to jelly, and I collapsed. I remember feeling such a klutz for needing an ambulance crew to come out - they didn't take me in to hospital, but advised my parents on what had happened. It was completely out of the blue.
Or having fish and chips or hamburgers on a Saturday, curling up in front of the fireplace, watching the Monkees or Flintstones. Or playing chess against myself - I never developed into any sort of prodigy or great player. Or reading Roald Dahl's The Witches.
Or if we were sick, we were allowed the treat of transporting ourselves during the daytime to the parents' room. The luxury of a double, or was it queen, bed. I think I always took a book or two with me - obviously, in the time before I watched too much TV.
Outside, the vegetable patch, Dad's ham radio antenna, the garage where he pottered away, soldering bits of metal onto each other - I was never quite sure what he did out there, but his work bench always seemed exciting - the picnic table and the swings.
Back to school, to fifth grade (they called it Standard Four in New Zealand, but it was equivalent), and the rich cadenced voice of my teacher as he told us the tale of Bilbo Baggins, the thirteen dwarves and Gandalf. JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, of course. I was hooked on the heroic fantasy genre immediately. Up until then, my main reading material had been safe, mid Americana book club fare, about kids being locked in the library after hours, or pre-teens battling ghosts, or Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl. I think even Biggles made an early appearance in my reading columns - the World War One stories were always better than the post war detective pieces of course.
From heroic fantasy, my taste easily morphed into sci-fi, and I read Asimov's Foundation and Robot sagas in early high school. Whether I understood them or not is still open to debate - I open the series up now, in the book stores and the writing almost seems inpenetrable. I read a massive amount of sci-fi and fantasy, but for some reason never got into Anne McCaffrey. I think I was all burned out on new authors by that stage.
But before I became a fiction reader, I was hugely into non fiction. The first non fiction I remember reading were the magazine series History Of The Second World War and History Of The Twentieth Century. At that stage war was an abstraction for me, but the graphs showing how many combatants on each side were awesome. Iconic images, such as the dancing children statue in Stalingrad, or raising the Red Flag over Berlin, or the bravery with which the British faced the Blitz (which now, in a more cynical mind, I see as fatalism) burned into me at such an early age. Somehow Dresden, Auschwitz and Hiroshima didn't make as strong an impression on me.
I don't think it was until I saw coverage of the Iran Iraq war in the mid to late 1980s that I had an inkling of how destructive war was. Or maybe it was earthquake coverage I was watching - it is hard to pin down when I first began to understand war. Not having been in one myself, I can only say I have begun to understand it. Peter Jennings with breaking news of the bombing of Baghdad in 1991 - a swell of excitement even then, and war was made to look like a video game.
A lot of cynicism gained in the near fifteen years that have passed since then.
Okies, I will stop this stream of consciousness type writing for now - as I hear everyone breath a sigh of relief :)
Pauly
Anyways, with the rain outside and the punnet of chips in the office, was suddenly taken back to primary school in New Zealand, where fish and chips was on the menu from the takeaway shop across the road, and thinking of having them in the middle of winter, with the cold rain pouring down outside, curled up in the school library reading a book.
Which gets me to thinking what sort of book it would be, either Tintin or learning to play chess - and then I remember that I got the learn to play chess books from the council library. Which leads me to thinking of walking to the library, about a half hour walk, with my mother, again on those dark winter nights.
Thinking on how quiet the library was, and how quaint the whole putting a big date stamp on a card process seems now, in the age of internet newspapers and publishing. Fast forwarding a few years, researching high school projects in the reference area, or forward a few more years, and it seems that the library has turned into an internet cafe or music and video store - yes, you can still only loan the CDs and videos, but you are charged for it.
I think back to my times in the library as a young child, and am sure it I only saw the altruistic, not the profit driven. Surely the council was making money off side ventures then as well? Surely it wasn't that the entire 1990s were a penny pinching, mean decade?
Curling up in bed to read a book - good memories.
Or sitting around the table, listening to the classic hits station on a Saturday night. Or towards the holiday season, hearing Snoopy's Christmas. Or, again in the kitchen, my first seizure, when I was nine or ten - my limbs just went to jelly, and I collapsed. I remember feeling such a klutz for needing an ambulance crew to come out - they didn't take me in to hospital, but advised my parents on what had happened. It was completely out of the blue.
Or having fish and chips or hamburgers on a Saturday, curling up in front of the fireplace, watching the Monkees or Flintstones. Or playing chess against myself - I never developed into any sort of prodigy or great player. Or reading Roald Dahl's The Witches.
Or if we were sick, we were allowed the treat of transporting ourselves during the daytime to the parents' room. The luxury of a double, or was it queen, bed. I think I always took a book or two with me - obviously, in the time before I watched too much TV.
Outside, the vegetable patch, Dad's ham radio antenna, the garage where he pottered away, soldering bits of metal onto each other - I was never quite sure what he did out there, but his work bench always seemed exciting - the picnic table and the swings.
Back to school, to fifth grade (they called it Standard Four in New Zealand, but it was equivalent), and the rich cadenced voice of my teacher as he told us the tale of Bilbo Baggins, the thirteen dwarves and Gandalf. JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, of course. I was hooked on the heroic fantasy genre immediately. Up until then, my main reading material had been safe, mid Americana book club fare, about kids being locked in the library after hours, or pre-teens battling ghosts, or Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl. I think even Biggles made an early appearance in my reading columns - the World War One stories were always better than the post war detective pieces of course.
From heroic fantasy, my taste easily morphed into sci-fi, and I read Asimov's Foundation and Robot sagas in early high school. Whether I understood them or not is still open to debate - I open the series up now, in the book stores and the writing almost seems inpenetrable. I read a massive amount of sci-fi and fantasy, but for some reason never got into Anne McCaffrey. I think I was all burned out on new authors by that stage.
But before I became a fiction reader, I was hugely into non fiction. The first non fiction I remember reading were the magazine series History Of The Second World War and History Of The Twentieth Century. At that stage war was an abstraction for me, but the graphs showing how many combatants on each side were awesome. Iconic images, such as the dancing children statue in Stalingrad, or raising the Red Flag over Berlin, or the bravery with which the British faced the Blitz (which now, in a more cynical mind, I see as fatalism) burned into me at such an early age. Somehow Dresden, Auschwitz and Hiroshima didn't make as strong an impression on me.
I don't think it was until I saw coverage of the Iran Iraq war in the mid to late 1980s that I had an inkling of how destructive war was. Or maybe it was earthquake coverage I was watching - it is hard to pin down when I first began to understand war. Not having been in one myself, I can only say I have begun to understand it. Peter Jennings with breaking news of the bombing of Baghdad in 1991 - a swell of excitement even then, and war was made to look like a video game.
A lot of cynicism gained in the near fifteen years that have passed since then.
Okies, I will stop this stream of consciousness type writing for now - as I hear everyone breath a sigh of relief :)
Pauly
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