Following on from my last blog, I’m back to that dust covered box of tricks that I discovered hidden in a corner of my garage. You know, that box of whatever that keeps being pushed to the back as more “I just may need that again at some time in the future” stuff keeps being stacked on top of it or in front of it.
Or both.
It seems the longer keepsakes are stored the more we forget about them, and the more irrelevant and useless they become.
Well, that’s what usually happens. Except this time I opened up a Pandora’s box and a whole bunch of “I vaguely remember that” goodies miraculously appeared, like long-lost friends from another time. So not only did I find the yellowing pages of my first not-so-interesting ventures into creative writing that I’ve already talked about in another blog, that had an age stamp that had to be at least twenty years ago, but I also stumbled across my equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Except they weren’t etched in stone or recorded on crumbling papyrus. Nope, they were written in a diary that had a gold date stamp on the front of a dark blue cover that took me back to when I was thirteen!
Now that’s prehistoric. Certainly it was way back in the last century. And did it make me feel my current years? Yep, it was like a voice from the past that suddenly was front and center in my consciousness. My mind was dragged back through too many decades to mention here, but rest assured it was pre-computers. Rather, it was a time when the hand written word was king, and the typed word was done on a manual typewriter. Printers had yet to be invented!
So what, you may say. Get with the twenty first century!
Yes, I totally agree. But inside the pages of this museum piece were tomes of wisdom from a thirteen-year-old. It was my first venture into writing. A hidden diary recording what was then life in the pre-adolescent fast lane. And it certainly made riveting reading. LOL. Such entries as “today I conned onto a girl called Melice” and “I did judo, sailing and all that stuff today” dominated the pages.
I was actually travelling overseas for eight months with my parents for some of the time when I compiled my daily record of event around me. And no, I didn’t skip school; rather, I completed a correspondence distant learning year whilst my parents travelled the world as ship’s doctors on a cargo trader. So I had plenty of stimulus to fire my imagination, and lots of out of the way foreign ports to write about.
But it seems all I could come up with was “it was raining all day and the sky was overcast.” Not all that creative, eh? In fact, I’ve included a copy of one of the pages.
Boy, maybe I should have this published.
NOT!!!
So it seems that I can actually say I have been putting pen to paper since I was thirteen. It’s just that at that tender age I couldn’t write, and then there was a bit of a hiatus in the middle whilst I was married, had kids, settled into suburbia . . . and basically got on with life.
And travelled. Then my wife and I travelled some more. The wanderlust was in our blood.
In fact, as at today I have travelled to, lived in and worked in 67 countries around the world, and I’m still adding more places to the list. There’s always somewhere to visit, another experience to live, and a waiting plane to catch to some destination that draws me in like a magnet.
And another book to write!
You’ll quickly see this in the Cait Lennox: femme fatale series. She’s always off on another adventure to a world hot spot, where more often than not I’ve actually been to and experienced, so there’s a realism there that simply can’t be achieved by Googling the destination. I hope that I take you there and you live the moment like you’re a bystander looking in.
So if you, my loyal audience keep reading my books, I’ll keep travelling to far flung destinations to research where Cait ends up around the world, and then drop her in the deep end and make her fight her way out.