I was reading about writing today. Several writers were talking about when they’d started and most of them said they’d been writing for as long as they could remember. One of them said he started when he was 5 or 6 years old, another one was doing novels by the time he was 15 and all that made me think.

I never wrote anything before I was 12 and then I hardly ever wrote fiction. I started writing my first diary the year I left primary school. I can’t remember why exactly but I can only suppose in retrospect that it must have had something to do with peer pressure. It was a time when all the girls got those pastel coloured diaries with little locks and keys to write all your secrets in.

Although I had the good fortune to grow up in a household where there were plenty of books at hand (my mother was an avid reader), I don’t think writing was considered the right thing to do yourself. The sentence often heard in our family was: “Behave normally, that’s good enough for you”, by which was meant more or less that you had to work hard, refrain from frivolous things and then die or something equally depressing.

 

Fancy stuff like going out to dinner or to the theatre were not for our kind of people. Not even when there was a bit of money to spend. The only thing my parents considered all right was going on holiday.

Of course nobody thought of giving me one of those diaries as a present for a birthday or “Sinterklaas”, the two occasions when you were given presents, because that just didn’t occur to anyone.

“That´s not something we do”, was typically something my mother would have said, or even worse: “You won’t do anything with it anyway”.  She meant well and it was a time when money was scarce, life was hard and waste of any kind was abhorred.

Going out to dinner in a restaurant would have been a waste of both time and money. “You can have a perfectly good meal at home and it won’t take up so much valuable time.” The problem was of course the bleak Calvinistic background my mum came from and which she never got rid of completely. In later years we sometimes did go out to dinner and I could sometimes persuade her to come with me to the cinema if there was a really special movie on, but some things were very hard to do when I was still living at home.

My sister wanted to study music and she later became a music teacher, but it took a lot of arguing before she got her way, because music wasn’t something that got you a steady job or made you money. My father tried to persuade her to learn a proper job first and then do the music thing as a kind of hobby, but my sister was always the headstrong one and when someone told her NOT to do something, it was all the more incentive for her to go on.

I was the one who usually did as I was told. I found out at a young age that that was what made life easier. I had no idea that my parents were doing my thinking for me (“we don’t do that”) either from choice or because they themselves had grown up in an environment where children were supposed to do as they were told and shut up. And even when nothing was said, I knew the expressions of disapproval, so when I grew older it was a lot easier to keep things that could be in any way controversial, to myself.

Of course it got a lot easier when I left home and got my own place, but as I wasn’t married there was often some reason or other to tell me what I should do. As I said, I usually complied, especially when things were not all that important in my opinion, but the time my parents found someone they thought would be prospective husband material for me, I drew the line.

I had no feelings at all for the guy in question other than that I didn’t like him. We had absolutely nothing in common. We didn’t share the same sense of humour, we didn’t like the same movies, he didn’t like reading and he was a whiner. When there once was an electricity failure he complained about his Coke not being cold. Thinking back about it now, I think I was mostly disappointed by the fact that my parents apparently didn’t know me well enough to understand what was my type of guy. Of course they knew my friends, both male and female, and this guy didn’t fit in at all. He was just not my type, neither physically nor emotionally.

Where I come from, anything to do with emotion was hidden or people totally denied there existed something like emotions. You don’t cry and you don’t tell anyone you love them. “Don’t be silly” was one of the things you heard a lot. And of course, never waste time or money. Now and again I like just sitting and doing nothing. Watching the birds, thinking about things. One of my mum’s sayings used to be: “Go and do something useful”. Fortunately she loved reading and so do I, so to avoid any arguments I could always put a book on my lap and pretend to be reading or doing my homework.

From the time I was 12 I kept a diary. Not one of those fancy ones, but one of those grey notebooks you use for schoolwork. When I was writing in it I could pretend I was doing homework and that way I was giving the impression of doing something useful.

Now, what did I write in my diary? Just ordinary things, of course. Nothing about emotions or anything like that, because I was always afraid that someone would find it, so I kept everything I wrote to ordinary daily things. I once wrote about my first real boyfriend, pages full of stuff which I put in an envelope which I stuck in my diary. However, even stuck shut like that, it still worried me so much, that later I tore it out again and threw it away. I would never have survived my mum’s look of disapproval if she had ever found out about it.

Now, of course, I know that at age 15 I should have been allowed some privacy and it would have been wrong of anyone to read my journals. I don’t suppose my mum would have read them even if she had found them.

I never thought that my thoughts and feelings were good or at least as good as anyone else’s, and I thought that everything I wrote down was very silly, just something to be ashamed of really. I had no idea that it was perfectly fine to write things down in a diary and that it helped me to make sense of the world around me, or even that if a diary is sitting on a desk for anyone to see, that it would be absolutely wrong for someone else to open and read it.

After I left home I started writing more. Not about terrible things, just things that were important to me, things about situations and people. I still have all those diaries and now that I’m getting older I sometimes worry that something will happen to me and that the people who are going to clean up my house after I’m gone will find them and maybe read them and I’m sure there are things in there some people wouldn’t really like. Still, I can’t find it in myself to throw them away just yet. It’s not as if I read them, it’s just that I know they’re there. I know that there’s a lot of things in there that I have forgotten about and I don’t WANT to get rid of them. I know of someone who destroyed everything before she died. I don’t know if that’s something I would want to do. As for now, I’ve told my cousin to destroy all my papers after I’m gone. If she doesn’t and reads something she doesn’t like, so be it.

I started this blog by thinking about writing. I did write a bit of fiction when I was in my teens, but I usually destroyed it again after I wrote it. I was so afraid that people would read what I’d written and would look at me disapprovingly or worse, just tell me it was nice and forget about it the moment they put it down. Now, I don’t care about that so much anymore. It took a long time before I ever asked someone to read anything I wrote and it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. These blogs are helping too. I know there are some of you out there who read them and I even get some comments now and again, which I like. I sometimes submit something to writing contests too, and I know I will never stop writing. I also know it’s not really important what people think about it and that what I’m writing is not any more stupid than what some other people are doing.

I do know, however, I have a problem making things interesting. There are people out there who have plenty of ideas but never write, with me it’s the other way round.

I love reading, I love a good story, but I’m afraid I’ve now grown up too much to ever write something really interesting or worthwhile. Some people want to be 18 again, but I want to be 4 again, when a thunderstorm was the end of the world and there was a huge fish in the pond at the back of our house which could take your leg off in one giant bite; when there were still monsters under the bed and woods were filled with green men. When did I lose all that? I can’t remember, but one day I will read those diaries again and maybe the answers will be in there.

 

I am watching the cat catching a fly, one of those shiny green bluebottles. You can see his whole body quivering in anticipation. His pupils dilate to focus on the insect and I know that from now on he won’t notice anything else. His front paws are slowly clawing into the rug to get a better grip and his backside jiggles from left to right in anticipation of the jump.

The fly has no idea what’s going on. It’s doing what flies do all the time: flying around and being a nuisance and leaving dirty fingerprints on everything, especially on the food. Its buzzing sounds loud in the silent sunny room.

The cat jumps.

In one fluid movement his body changes into a flash of red fur and his front paws vainly grab empty air. The fly lazily buzzes on its way. Did it ever really notice how close to death it has been?

The cat sits perfectly still now. Only the tip of his tail moves slowly, as if it has a life of its own. He still watches the fly.

Then he suddenly flops down on the rug, excitement over. He knows when he’s defeated and when it’s time to cut his losses. He looks at me and blinks. It’s time for a wash and a little nap.

I sometimes envy him the simplicity of his life.

I swore I was never going to do this. Never ever was I going to say ‘when I was young ....’, followed by something that showed some youngster how much better it was in the olden days.

I lied. I’m doing it now. My only defence is, that I have a very good reason to do it, I think, although, come to think of it, I’m also pretty sure that every old-timer in the history of mankind has thought the same thing.

 I absolutely hate it when people break into a conversation. One moment you’re in the middle of a conversation, the other there’s someone standing between you and the person you were talking with and this person just interrupts you. When that happens to me, I always say something like ‘I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of something, I’ll be with you in a sec’ which shuts most of them up quick smart usually, but hardly anybody seems to do that nowadays. They just seem to think it’s normal for someone to break in on a conversation and leave the person you were talking to standing there in mid-sentence.

Not only the younger people do that (I can see a lot of it at the school where I work), but also people my age. I see colleagues having a talk and when a pupil breaks in, they go on talking to the pupil.

I do not and never will understand why people are doing that or letting it happen do them. It’s impolite, to say the least, and it certainly doesn’t set a very good example to our pupils. Yes, it was better when I was young. You waited until it was your turn and you didn’t have to hurry through a conversation when you saw someone coming for fear he would break in. And yes, that’s something I really liked about then as opposed to now.

Okay, I’m saying it now: When I was young, people were more polite, and I liked it!

Today they cut down a tree. One of the three trees there are close to my kitchen window. I don’t know what kind of tree it was. Just an ordinary tree. When there was wind you could hear it whispering in the leaves. When it was hot, it gave plenty of cool shade. It’s colours where spectacular in the autumn. It gave me a lot of pleasure ever since I came to live here.

Was it diseased? Was it too big? I have no idea. It looked fine to me. The wood seemed healthy enough and there didn’t seem to be any dead branches.

It could be they chopped it down because it took away someone’s light, but as it was on the shady side of the house, the side where there are no gardens, that is hardly likely.

I once heard someone say that here in the city they sometimes chop down trees because someone high in the city council needs some firewood and I can well imagine it. I don’t have a very high opinion of most people that are in charge of things. Either they get their positions by kicking someone else arse or they were just plain lucky. I never had the illusion they are there for us, ordinary mortals.

Cynical, moi? Maybe, but then I really don’t have much faith in people anymore. Although there are of course always exceptions to the rule.

The tree is gone. I don’t see any sign of the council planting another one, because that is what they are supposed to do. Chop one down, plant a new one.  The only thing I can do is keep my fingers crossed and hope they won’t chop down the other trees as well. Those trees were a major reason I found this place agreeable to live in and I would really hate it if they turned the whole area into a parking lot.

I know it’s easy for me to say that, because I have rented my own personal parking space, but then again, as far as I know, there has never been anyone who has complained that there aren’t enough parking spaces around and even at the best (or worst) of times, there is always some space one or two streets further away.

I’m going to miss that tree, I really am.

Sergeant Harper looked up from the fire in amazement. In all the years he’d known him he’d never heard Sharpe say anything like that before. He put some more wood on the fire.

“Go shoot some Frogs,” he suggested.

Sharpe lifted an eyebrow. “We saw them off our territory remember? There aren’t any left. At least not ‘ere.”

“Maybe you should find yourself a new woman then,” Harper told him.

Sharpe lifted his other eyebrow.

“No more women fer me, Pat! Ah’ve ‘ad it with women! They always wont yer te do summat else than what yer doin’ and when ye do what they wanted yer te do in the first place, yer always doin’ it wrong.”

It took a few seconds for Harper to get his head around that one.

“Surely you just haven’t met the right woman yet,” he said. “I’ve always told you, you shouldn’t go gallivanting about with those hoity-toity, so-called well-bred ‘ladies’. Find a good soldier’s woman. That’ll get you sorted!”

“It’s not a matter of jest pickin’ one, Pat.” Sharpe told him. “There ‘as te be a kind ‘o feelin’ te go with it.”

Harper shrugged.

“Them high-bred women have put too many fancy ideas into your head. Look at me. Do I ever tell Ramona I love her? Of course not, she just knows I do. Love is something for drawing rooms and not for the likes of us. You’re better off without silly ideas like that.”

Sharpe stared into the fire for so long that there were little white dots dancing in front of his eyes when he looked at Harper again.

“I sometimes wonder ‘ow Ramona puts up with yer,” he finally said.

“I’m a grand lover,” Harper grinned.

Sharpe look at him unsmilingly for a few seconds and then burst out laughing too. He got up and stretched his back.

“Anyroad, ahm off ter check out that tavern in the village,” he said. “That’s at least one advantage of ‘avin’ chased those Frenchies off. No need te worry about them anymore. Comin’?”

“If you’re paying.”

Harper grabbed his gun and followed Sharpe. When in doubt, especially about women, what better way to set things right again then a few mugs of ale? And tomorrow everything would be back to normal.

Someone thought up the idea of lightening the burden of the last schoolweek by thinking up some special projects for the children. That was the moment me and my colleagues realised it was going to be a really hard haul up to the holidays. At the moment I'm sitting in on a guest lesson, held by some people from an organisation that wants to make the children aware of racial discrimination.

I am sitting here listening to two people teaching a group of ten and not managing very well. I'm cringing at what I see happening. One of the ladies is sporting a worker's cleavage when she bends over and I can't blame the children for giggling and not being able to stop. They want out and so do I. It's hot again and the sun is shining.

The object of the day is making the children realise how they treat one another and people of other colours or cultures. I have never heard so many offensive remarks in my life. I swear if it goes on like this, I will start screaming. Loud!!! Very loud!!!

The Chinese say beware of what you wish for, and I never wish for much, but right now at this moment I wish I were at home sitting behind my computer and doing exactly what I am doing now, but without the distraction of two people in my classroom, teaching in a way I would never do it.

Is it criticism? Can't I just admire someone else's handiwork? I don't think so. Those children are getting away with things I would never let them get away with. I'm really getting too old for this s**t!

We are in the middle of an official heat wave, the weather bureau told us. It's official when for five days in a row the temperature gets above 25C and three of those days are above 30C.

Now for me, that is terrible. I hate the heat. I actually can't stand it. For me it's a heat wave when the temperature rises above 20C. I feel sweaty and ill all day when it gets as hot as it does now.

What I hate most is those annoyingly cheerful weather people on telly who tell us that this is what we have ALL been waiting for.

No, I haven't, thank you very much. I'm waiting for rain, and wind and lovely LOW temperatures. People always call me mad, but I actually LIKE rain and wind. Always have. That is weather you can experience and don't have to undergo like this incessant heat, which gets everywhere and which you can't get any release from, not even at night when you can't open the window because the mosquitoes will get in. And when they do the cat will start chasing them, which is a moderately good thing I suppose, as they won''t get a chance to bite me that way, but when he starts stamping on my stomach to catch them, it doesn't do for a nice quiet night's sleep either.

Of course, because of the heat, the cat is also shedding like mad. I swear he loses about a complete cat's worth of hair every day. And no amount of hoovering will get rid of it. Ever had a shedding cat problem when you're sweating like mad? The hairs stick to anything and I so hate that!

They say it's going to last at least another five days. FIVE! And I have to work four of those. I'm going to have a shower. A long one. And be a grumpy old woman the rest of the week.

Thanks to the person who created this picture. I have no idea who made it, but it was very appropriate so I decided to use it anyway. Should you be that person, let me know if I can keep it on my blog. I hope you will.

“What did you lose?” Richard, the military advisor, exclaimed.

“Me sash,” Sean answered. “Ahm sorry, it just seems to ‘ave disappeared. I know I still ‘ad it last night, though.”

Richard was looking more angry by the minute.

“You know we can’t shoot that scene if you’re not wearing your sash,” he said, “and not shooting that scene means a day’s work lost. So, what happened last night?”

Sean shrugged. “It were cold,” he said. “Blood-eh cold. An’ me an’ the lads decided te go fer a drink.”

“In your uniforms?” Richard was looking really annoyed now. “You know you’re not allowed to take any props or costumes from the set. What on earth possessed you to do that anyway?”

“Ah told ye,” Sean said, “it were cold. And that caravan they gave us were blood-eh cold as well. So we decided to ‘ave a drink first to get warm. Besides, that pub is only just cross ‘t road. We were goin’ te be back in no time anyway.”

“So what happened?” Richard was getting more irritated by the minute. How could anyone be so stupid? Bloody actors. They always thought they owned the world. Besides, he knew why they had been wearing their costumes. Those uniforms were a great hit with the ladies of the town and he knew there were several hanging around there every night hoping to score a green jacket.

“Nought at first,” said Sean. “We had a beer. Or two. Can’t remember proper. The only think ah know fer sure is that I was still wearin’ me sash at that time.”

Richard sighed in desperation. Two beers? Richard and Daragh and some assorted actors and supporting crew members? And pigs can fly!

“And then I ‘ad this little accident.” Sean was starting to look a bit uncomfortable.

Richard sighed again. This was going to be a long, hard day. “A little accident?”

Sean looked suitably embarrassed but Richard wasn’t fooled. Sean was a pretty good actor after all.

“Ah dropped me tassel in a beer glass,” Sean said. “And then it were wet.”

“Dropped ....” Richard started.

“Well,” Sean continued, “it were reall-eh Daragh’s fault. He held the glass under the tassel.”

Richard started to develop a pounding headache just behind his right eye. That sometimes happened when he was dealing with wayward actors. He swallowed hard and bit back a nasty remark. Upsetting actors, however irritating they might be sometimes, was never very productive. Before you knew it they could throw a tantrum and that would definitely cost them shooting time.

“So what did you do?” he asked instead. He marvelled at himself how in control of the situation he remained.

“Took it off,” Sean said, “but you know, the blood-eh think is about 15 feet long, so it took a while, and then someone threw up over it.”

Richard suspected either Sean himself or Daragh had been the one to do that, but he still managed to keep his calm.

“Go on,” he just managed to utter through clenched teeth.

“Ah were just on me way to get it cleaned when that stripper came in and started doin’ ‘er ... ehm, thing .... It weren’t very polite te walk away just at the time when she started, so ah jest left the sash on the bar for a second.”

“You shouldn’t have left it there,” Richard said. What he really wanted to say was, ‘you bloody fool, you shouldn’t have left it there’ but he managed to keep that in. Just.

“Ah know,” Sean said, “but ah thought it were safe there. Anyroad, ah jest forgot abaht it fer a while and when ah came back, it were gone. Don’t ya ‘ave a spare one?”

Richard tried not to think about the beer-sodden, vomit-soiled sash lying on a bar somewhere, or, which was worse, some silly fan girl taking it home with her as a reminder of the evening she spent in a pub with a drunken actor who was infatuated by a stripper.

“No, I haven’t,” Richard said, “and it will cost us at least a day to find another one.”

“Sorry,” Sean said lamely. He was still hung-over from the night before and his head was pounding as well, although you wouldn’t have noticed because he’d just been to make-up.

At that moment they were interrupted by the arrival of a bleach blond woman in a very short skirt and extremely high stilettos. The shoes were definitely not suited for the terrain, because it had been raining in the night and the ground was sodden and very muddy, but the woman wasn’t deterred by that.

“Seanie!” she called. “Seanie baby!”

Richard thought it would be time for someone to employ some more security people. If those fan girls were managing to get on to the set, they would never get any work done. He started gesturing to one of the crew members to take her off the premises, but just at that moment the woman fumbled in the big red lacquer shoulder bag she was carrying, pulling out a red sash. She started waving with it.

“Oh my god,” Richard mumbled under his breath. The man’s taste in women was atrocious.

Sean, however, produced a dazzling smile. “Not such a problem after all,” he grinned.

The woman hobbled up to them, grabbing Sean’s arm when she arrived.

“You didn’t tell me a film set was such a muddy place, darling,” she pouted. “Anyway, you forgot something last night. Barkeep found it just after closing time and as you had already left I popped it in the washing machine for you. It’s nice and clean now, but you were a very naughty boy to get it so dirty!”

Sean grinned sheepishly. “You shouldn’t ‘ave gone to all that trouble, luv’,” he said. “But ah thank ya for it. You saved Richard ‘ere quite a bit of work.”

The woman looked at Richard and smiled a big coral smile.

“Hi, Richard,” she cooed, “hope you don’t mind it shrunk a bit. I tried to iron it, because that sometimes helps, but it wouldn’t work. I had no idea it was silk. But I’m sure you won’t see the difference once he ties it round his lovely waist.”

She handed Richard, who by that time was quite speechless, the sash and patted Sean’s stomach, before turning back to the gate.

“See you tonight, Seanie baby!” she called, giving him a fat, not very lady-like wink. “Oh, and bring your friend there. Love his sideburns!”