Paul Geoffrey Neuendorff, 25 Nov 1968 to 11 Feb 2011

Beloved husband, brave protector, good and gentle soul. I will love you always.

After 9 months of fighting, cancer beat us in the end. I’ll keep the promises I’ve made you. I’ll make you proud.

All my love,

Megs xxx

Are you a calm person? Have people told you you're just too mellow, man? Then you need 'Frenzy', the drink for today's modern lifestyle. 'Frenzy'; have one today.

I appreciate there must be an ever-diminishing pool of names available for softdrinks these days, but calling a bottle of carbonated water ‘Frenzy’ seems pretty odd to me. Sure, ‘frenzy’ shares some of the letters found in ‘fizzy’, ‘friendly’ and ‘why?; doesn’t mean I don’t get an instant mental image of the activities this drink might inspire. ‘Frenzy’ is the go-to word when describing the manner in which sharks, piranha, zombies and small children descend on food (usually human flesh, and I’m not excluding the kiddies here). It’s the word you see in headlines when someone does something unspeakable to someone else with a knife. We have shopping frenzies and drug-fuelled frenzies and greed-inspired frenzies.

‘Frenzy’ is not a friendly word.

I’m thinking now of other inappropriate names for foodstuffs. How about ‘Savage’ for the really sharp biscuit that bites back, or ‘Fury’ for the decaffeinated morning brew that fails to soothe?

Not yesterday.

Yesterday, we found a car park instantly and next to the entrance. We found the items we needed in the shop where we expected to find them. It was all too easy. Where was the aggravation, the run-around? Where, I wondered, was the catch? As we stood in the queue waiting to pay, TB joked that we’d be hit by a meteorite on the way home.

Well, I did bang my knee, but that’s all.

Now, the trials of a shopping trip aren’t exactly the hell-on-earth most humans endure on a daily basis, but I’m a city-born softy who gets cranky when an advertised special on a menu is no longer available (‘Take it off the menu if you’ve sold out! Don’t tempt me with it, then tell me it’s all gone! Gargh!’). TB’s promise of astral comeuppance didn’t flatten my good mood; I was just happy to have things go smoothly, to be reminded that it’s not always a disaster or a pain in the arse.

For one, the cerebrescript and I are together again. Like any relationship resumed after a break, it was a bit shaky at first.  I had a few days of empty panic, then forced myself to just read until I started liking what I saw. Having weathered the insanely busy time at my day job, I’m now able to make a few long weekends like today. Quality time for me and the c/s. It’s even shaping up to be a permanent arrangement. An opportunity to cut back my day job hours has come my way and, I have to say, it’s very exciting. It wasn’t something I thought would come up so soon, but it has and TB is, as usual, completely supportive. It’s time I’ll be devoting to my writing, precious, much sought-after time that lets me set higher but still realistic goals in words written per week.

It’s fantastic.

So, it’s true that, sometimes, things fall into place and they’re not always meteorites come to destroy civilisation as we know it.

Impressions of the National Capital - Wet

1. When travelling by road from Brisbane to Canberra or vice versa, the longer way is both quicker and more beautiful. According to various maps, the shortest distance is via our National Highway, route 1. Pros: you’re probably less likely to be involved in a head-on collision; the speed limits are higher; the route is shorter. Cons: you may still be at higher risk of having a collision due to the higher number of vehicles sharing the road with you; the 110 speed limit is all very well when you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Sydney; you don’t see so much (unless motorway walls are your thing). The inland route via the Newell Highway may be longer, with a lower average speed limit but it’s a lot quicker, quieter and more interesting (you can see the landscape, wildlife – you know, stuff other than concrete walls and traffic).

2. Canberra isn’t used to being popular. We could not get a car park at any major venue, or even nearby. We ended up taking a taxi from our hotel to the Gallery. Given Canberra is a pretty flat town, we could have walked, but our capital was experiencing unusually torrential rain that day. We could see it was heavier than Canberra was used to – gutters overflowed, gardens dissolved and chaos ensued – but when one local described it as being akin to the monsoon rains seen in Darwin, we had to smile. We weren’t standing in ankle deep water for a start.

We did walk back to our hotel in the afternoon along streets lined with very un-Australian trees. It’s all very romantic to shuffle through drifts of fallen maple and oak leaves, but not so fun when you’re stumbling over vast quantities of uncollected acorns. I commented that Canberra was in need of a good squirrel analog; TB suggested a city employee armed with a broom might be a better long-term solution. Meh.

3. Australians like art. We stood in a queue for 3 hours; others who arrived later in the day waited longer. We did see some people arrive, see the queue and decide van Gogh et al were not worth waiting for. Can’t say if they’re right or wrong; we’d already driven all the way to Canberra and bought our tickets beforehand, so we’d committed ourselves to seeing the damn paintings no matter what, but if we’d strolled up on the day thinking we’d pop in to see a Monet or two, then realised we’d have to stand in line for hours first, we might have opted out.

Note: you can still just pop in and see a Monet or two without waiting and without having to pay; the gallery has a small collection of Impressionist and Post-impressionist works that includes one of Monet’s waterlilly series and one of his Haystacks.

4. A painting can thrill me. The exhibition had over 100 works on display of which only three captivated me. The first was a Monet (surprise, surprise), and I wanted to sit and look at it for hours but couldn’t due to the procession of people queueing past it. The second caught my eye across a crowded room, made me gasp and gave me goosebumps (I kid you not). van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone is a glorious painting made dull by every photo and print ever made of it; had we decided the drive to Canberra wasn’t worth it, I would never have seen how amazing the work really is. The last also thrilled, but not just for the execution of the painting itself. Every self-portrait van Gogh made has a quality to it that makes you stare, and the one owned by the Musée d’Orsay is no exception. It’s the face of a man looking for answers, a man wondering if he’s incapable of contentment, if life is hard or if he just makes it hard on himself.

Left: Monet’s Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Covered by Clouds, c. 1904; Centre: van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone (September 1888); Right: van Gogh, self-portrait, 1887.

5. Emus may be seen in pairs at this time of year. They also eat ants.

6. Junk food is exciting at first, but soon has less attraction than a simple cup of tea.

Now I’m tired, I have aches and pains, and I have a sore throat and a sniffle, but I have seen inspiration as well emus running wild in the rain.

But I don’t write my novels by hand (anymore). I’m a new-fangled e-writer. ‘Computerscript’ sounds like something quite different, so that won’t do. More importantly, I’m not sure the device used to create the work is what’s important. Whether it be by hand, ‘puter, voice recorder or [insert other method if you can think of one here], the book is written first in the mind, yes?

So, what’s the Latin for ‘mind’ then? Well, I think it’s mens or mentis or something similar. Hmmm – ‘menscript’? No; that won’t do at all. ‘Mentiscript’? Has a familiar ring to it.

Wait; I have it; ‘cerebrescript’, from the Latin cerebrum, meaning ‘brain’. That is, ‘brain-written’.

Yeah!

OK, let’s use it in a sentence:

One day in the not-too distant future, I hope to return to my cerebrescript, because I miss it very much and hope it will still be my friend after all this time.

Note: I have no idea how Latin works and don’t care; I like my new word.

Too quiet.

It’s…creepy.

I’m at school, just six or seven years old, and I’m standing in line at the tuckshop. The lady behind the counter gives me a brown paper bag and I hold it close to my face, breathing in the smells of paper, bread and cheese. That smell makes me smile. I’m suddenly hungry and I join my friends on a nearby bench, each of us chattering with full mouths, crumbs drifting down onto our blue uniforms. We sit in the sun because it’s a little too cool to sit in the shade of the big trees. The sunshine is as warm and welcome as a soft blanket on a cold morning, an invigorating change after the darker, colder air of our classroom. I can see the faces of my friends, the Indian Myna birds chasing after our crumbs, the bitumen of the parade ground at our backs and the short, green grass of the schoolyard where we will play when our sandwiches are just a lingering taste of cheese and soft crust in our mouths.

I see my Mum’s handwriting on the paper bag, letting the tuckshop know what to give me for lunch and that a little change should be left over for me to buy a Slippery Sam – a long tube of frozen orange cordial – as a dessert. My Mum has signed her name with big, beautiful loops that I love; I wish I could write that well. I hear the jingle of the left-over coins in the bag and decide I will get my cold, sweet treat; the sun is just warm enough to make it perfect.

I haven’t a care in the world except how to keep orange cordial from spilling down the front of my school uniform.

It’s a nice feeling, remembering that innocent moment; Proust had his cake and tea, but a cheese sandwich wrapped in paper is all it takes for me. The memory is all the more powerful and tangible for having been triggered by smell. It sort of works in reverse too. The first book of Stephen King’s I ever read was The Dead Zone. In the opening chapter, the main character – John Smith – takes a knock to the head playing hockey on a frozen lake. As he’s recovering, he’s sat down next to a fire – two rubber tires burn[ing] sootily – and that smell will be with John for the rest of his life. The smell of melting rubber was strong and pungent, making him feel a little sick to his stomach. For some reason, that description reached out and dragged me into the book and I’ve never forgotten it. I’m a sucker for descriptions of smells, odours, scents, perfumes, fragrances, reeks and stinks; they’re just so incredibly evocative, genuinely bringing a scene to life. It’s something I try to remember when I’m writing, to think beyond the visual and find something more, something visceral.

Something smelly.