Learning, always learning ...

It has been an interesting, busy couple of weeks getting started at university doing my post-grad studies (in writing, editing and publishing) and really getting my freelance work underway. I have put up a website for my new venture at http://www.write-now.com.au/ and it already seems to be paying dividends. Hooray for that!

I have been doing some very different editing to that which I am used to, with different style guides and different audiences in mind. I have learned so much already and I am really loving it.

One of my courses this semester is an elective. For this I have managed to get myself an internship helping out with the SHARP conference that will be running in Brisbane in April. SHARP stands for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. The conference site is here: http://uqsharp2011.squarespace.com/.

At the moment I am working my way through the abstracts and giving them a bit of a tidy up prior to going to publication. I must admit to just about salivating at the papers that are going to be delivered: some of the material is simply fascinating. I shall have a problem deciding which one to pick to write an essay on at the end!

I have been using the Chicago Manual of Style for this which is online: I have signed up for a 30-day free trial and it is a brilliant resource. I must have half-a-dozen style guides on my book shelves at least but not this particular one. I had better subscribe I think! And I do like using it online instead of dragging dusty tomes down from the shelf every five minutes.

Other than that I have a new book coming in this week to edit - economics!

Better get organised and head off to class!

Camaraderie among the wordsmiths

Yesterday I had my first lecture as part of the Writing, Editing and Publishing course I am undertaking at the University of Queensland. I have enrolled to do a Graduate Diploma but depending on the time and tides I may well carry on and complete my Masters.

I decided to do this because I felt my writing had become much neglected in the last few years as an editor of an online political journal. I felt I had become “pigeon-holed”. Admittedly I do have a formidable range of contacts among Australia’s commentariat now but I wanted to reach out and do more with the written word.

After our first lecture last night many of us decamped to West End for the first WEP dinner of the semester. One of the really good things about this course, and one of the main reasons it appealed to me, was the networking and camaraderie among the course participants. Just talking to the course convenor, Ros Petelin, before Christmas made me realise that she is the lynch pin in a tightly knit group of like-minded and passionate people.

And camaraderie there definitely was. I sat chatting and listening to other editors and writers and realised that we have many things in common: a passion for the language; a passion for communication; for story telling; and for the minutiae (which I touched on in my previous blog post, “The mind of an editor”).

“I love manuals” said the lady next to me. She just happens to be the lecturer for one of my courses. “I get so much pleasure from seeing a well rounded, complete, beautiful looking manual, well titled and organised …” (or words to that effect).

Yeh, I got that. I understood.

So did the lady on the other side of me. She reckoned she was going to re-write the manual for the new Kenwood steam mop she just bought recently because it was so appalling. And send it to them to show it how it should be done.

And I have to admit I have been in the habit of sending emails to real estate companies correcting their “newslatters”. I know, I know. But I just can’t help myself!

Of course all this studying is a wonderful luxury and if I manage to find a job that is permanent before the uni census date then I won’t be able to indulge myself. Bills must be paid. But in the meantime I have found a group of like-minded individuals out there and it is most refreshing.

As an aside I have set up my own freelance writing and editing business called Write-now! You can find the website here: http://www.write-now.com.au/. Do contact me if you need some work done. I am happy to quote.

The mind of an editor

Or, "An insight into the pedantry of the perforations"

Yesterday I was visiting my parents and while we were sat having a cuppa we starting talking about the various monikers for the generations: Gen Ys, Gen Xs, Baby Boomers etc.

We established that I am a boomer, but I was interested to hear my father describe his generation as the “frugal generation”. I had heard them referred to as the silent generation but not as frugal.

But it made sense. Because as a generation they were certainly frugal.

Our conversation turned to childhood memories of saving lengths of string and brown paper to reuse, because “brown paper was made to last back then …” I certainly remember the bottom kitchen drawer being stuffed full of all sorts of useful paraphernalia.

The chat then segued into a discussion about the quality of consumables today. Mum said “have you noticed how the perforations on toilet paper are now no longer as good as they used to be – now you don’t get the clean [no pun intended] tear that you used to.”

Well no I hadn’t. But it gave me an opportunity to chime in with my own little perforation peeve.

I needed to open a new box of tissues the other day. I very carefully ran my finger nail around the perforations, because one thing I REALLY loathe and detest is when you tear off the little opening flap and it isn’t a clean tear, and (quelle horreur) you get a rip across the box. OK, I appreciate that this may not be a big thing to many, but to me it offends my sensibilities and, what is more, as I get very few sniffles I have to put up with a torn box for what could be a couple of months.

Dad completely understood where I was coming from and nodded sympathetically, because, like me, he is an editor. Pedant is our shared middle name.

Mum found it all a bit strange: she just suggested I put a tissue box cover over the box to hide the offensive tear. I retorted that she “just didn’t get it”!

It struck me that this gives an interesting insight into the mind of an editor. Each working day we sweat over full stops (periods if you like), fonts, spelling and grammar. We are often dealing in minutiae. And, let’s face it, a full stop is about the same size as a perforation on a tissue box (give or take).

There are other things Dad and I do that demonstrate our keen interest in attention to detail. Dad has the herb and spice rack in strict alphabetical order. I love nothing more than to swap oregano for allspice when no one is looking. And when the ironed tea towels go back in the kitchen drawer the newly ironed ones go at the bottom of the stack and the clean replacement gets taken off the top so they all get used equally in rotation. I won’t give you any more examples because then he will sound weird – and he isn’t at all really!

I remember making a set of six cushions with a large cabbage rose pattern repeat. Each cushion was made with that cabbage rose exactly in the same spot, front and back. And when they were lined up on the sofa they were all lined up with the rose in exactly the same place. I must have wasted heaps of fabric in my quest for cushiony perfection! My (now ex) husband used to come along and rotate one cushion by 45 degrees – and he thought I wouldn’t notice!

I have moved on since then - I am no longer that keen on cabbage roses for a start. And so has my ex husband. Now none of my cushions match because they are all my one-off tapestry designs. But every stitch is in its place, exactly where it should be!

I suppose it isn’t completely normal to be so pedantic but Dad and I can have a good laugh about our idiosyncrasies so I reckon if we can do that then it makes it all OK. And I don’t think we are completely unbearable to live with. I can cope with a bit of dust and I certainly don’t have a showroom house. But I do like attending to the small details.

I bought my husband a book for Christmas as stocking filler: Don’t sweat the small stuff. I didn’t see the supreme irony at the time but I guess it takes one to know one!

Meanwhile, while Dad and I were laughing about our pedantry, Mum went off to hunt out a tissue box cover. “White or cream” she said triumphantly when she came back.

She just doesn’t get it!

A tale of two eateries

As readers of this blog will know I like to give a bit of a critique when I go out for lunch or coffee.

Recently I have been travelling up to Noosa fairly frequently as my father is quite sick. I like to go out with Mum to get her out of the house and give her a bit of a break. This review is a tale of two eateries: one on the expensive Hastings Street beach front strip and the other at Noosa Marina in Tewantin.

Let’s start with the not so good one. Situated in Hastings Street is Berardo’s Bistro on the Beach. We had been there a couple of times previously and both times had enjoyed the food but had left feeling that the service was less than brilliant. The prices seemed reasonable considering the location – which it must be said is fantastic, right on the board walk of Noosa’s main beach.

But coming back to the service. If you look the deal you will be attentively served by the young restaurant manager. But if you are like Mum and me – pretty ordinary, run of the mill – maybe wearing a Target tee and Birkenstocks (because you have to wear comfy shoes because you have a bunion – we are talking about Mum here!) and order tap water and a diet coke, then you may as well be invisible.

The first couple of times we put the restaurant manager’s lack of service down to a temporary aberration. OK, they were busy.

But when we returned a week ago with my youngest daughter and hubbie in tow it was really too much.

We had phoned and booked ahead, it being a Saturday in peak tourist season. We left a message on their answering machine that morning at, I am guessing here, about 10am for a 12pm booking. Unfortunately they omitted to check their machine so when we arrived, albeit a little early at 11.45am they weren't expecting us. Although the restaurant was only moderately busy and there were free tables we were asked to go away and return in 15 minutes. No problem. So off we trotted for a walk along the boardwalk.

We returned just after 12 and stood in the doorway. And stood, and waited. And stood some more. And we beheld the, by now, nearly empty restaurant as the late morning crowd left and the early lunchers had not yet arrived. Eventually at 12.20 we were seated. We weren’t really sure why we had had to wait quite so long, no explanation or apology was proffered.

And then we sat at our table and waited. People who came in after us ordered. And we sat and waited. People who came in after us got their food. And we sat. And waited.

You get the picture.

Anyway we gave up on desserts and coffees and headed across the road to Aromas. Got served almost instantly at the counter there. Sat down and breathed a sigh of relief.

Mum and I recall that the last couple of times we ate at Berardos we did the same thing. Shot across the road for our coffees.

Then this Saturday I was back in Noosa, and we decide to go to an old favourite of my parents. Admittedly they are regulars there so they get greeted very warmly on their arrival. Café VinCino’s at the Noosa Harbour jetty.

This is a café. It makes no pretensions about being anything else. Nicole and Mark, the owners, do a brisk trade. Nicole greets everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, as if they were a long lost friend. Her attentiveness is fantastic. When you are ordering and talking to her, she is yours: there are no sideways glances to see who has arrived at the next table.

Nothing is too much trouble. A variation to the menu? No problem!

As I said my Dad has been sick, he has cancer and struggles to eat much at all. Nicole will make him a special smoothie with everything she can think of in it, just for him.

He wasn’t up to going on Saturday. He is very weak now; so Mum and I sat on a table overlooking the Noosa River. The atmosphere is relaxed. We lingered after our main meal and had a coffee and one of the freshly baked treats.

Somehow I can’t see Berardo’s going out of their way to accommodate my father’s dietary requirements. Maybe that is unfair, but to be honest I wouldn’t even dare ask to find out!

The cost of the meal was quite a bit cheaper. Yes, it is a café and not an up-market bistro. But for my money I know where I would much rather go. I don’t feel as if I have to move on to make way for other diners the minute I have finished. The atmosphere is friendly. The staff are always fabulous – Nicole always picks them well.

Yep, VinCino’s wins hands down.

Moral of the story? Well I guess we are not comparing apples with apples here, but when it isn’t fine dining you are after, when price is not too big an issue, when the quality of the food is compatible (albeit VinCino’s has a simpler café style menu, but the quality is really excellent) and when the location is as pleasant, then the service and quality of the staff can make such a HUGE difference.

We won’t be going back to Berardos. We have really had enough.

Quick, quick and slow ...

After all the flooding we were gradually getting back to normal at home and were doing a little maintenance about the place. The sort that requires a trip to a somewhat large, soulless barn of a hardware chainstore.

In our house, trips to this particular store are a dreaded event, so I decided to tag along with my husband to provide moral support, guidance and a hand written list so we didn’t deviate from our intended purchases.

I guess we should have expected it, because when we arrived the place was shut up having been inundated by flood waters a few days prior. So we decided to try a small local hardware store, one that we usually prefer to go to anyway but had expected would be closed this Saturday afternoon as was the owner’s normal habit.

But, bless him, he was capitalising on his rival’s bad luck and in true entrepreneurial spirit was doing a roaring trade in mops, buckets and rubber gloves. I left hubbie to it and ducked into the second-hand book store next door. Much more my cup of tea! Inside, almost buried among the stacks of dusty volumes was an elderly gentleman tapping painstakingly away on his computer. He must have been late seventies or even into his eighties.

“Are you still open?” It was 4pm on a Saturday afternoon.

“Yes, but normally I would be closed by now; I just have a bit more work to do and then I am going home. But come in and take a look.”

I asked him if he had any old knitting books, particularly those from the 40s and 50s. It’s a bit of a hobby of mine hunting out old patterns. Anyway we got chatting. He didn’t have any books for me but that was OK. Then he asked me, “Are you from a big city - like London?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he said, “you talk very quickly and I thought you must come from somewhere like that”.

I had heard that people from cities talked faster; and that they also required smaller personal spaces (the area immediately around a person that they regard psychologically as being their own): both traits arising from the fact they were used to being jammed into crowded spaces and having to talk quickly to get their message across in a tight time frame where everyone is so harried and hurried.

Funny really. I never thought of myself as being a fast talker at all. I had always assumed I came across in reasonably measured tones. Maybe we talk faster when it is something we are passionate about?

Anyway, I was out walking this morning and thinking, as one does, contemplating the world at large, and this man’s question about where I hailed from came back to me and it made me think about two friends of mine and how they communicated.

One is a woman from New York. We’ll call her Cindy. Cindy is stick thin, allergic to peanuts consequently watching everything she eats, and is of a nervy disposition. When you listen to Cindy talk it is like being on the receiving end of machine gun fire. Her mouth moves at extraordinary speeds in a rapid express torrent of verbiage. She briskly relates her story giving verbal asides as she digresses without any break in proceedings or hiatus on to some explanatory point before coming back to the main story without any punctuation or pause for breath as she fires out volley after volley.

Cindy is at the prestissimo end of verbal communication: she leaves allegro for dead.

Cindy, trained as a barrister, has so obviously come from a fast-paced city environment. Her words are clearly enunciated, you can follow every one, but you are left feeling out of breath as you watch her, fascinated by the momentum she accomplishes.

Then there is my other friend. We’ll call him Stan. Stan hails from Norfolk Island, a small remote dot in the South Pacific inhabited by a community of some 2,000 souls, many descended from The Bounty mutineers. Stan has for many years been a man of the soil, tending his small dairy herd, hand rearing his free-range pigs and chooks. Since his marriage break up he has moved to Australia to work in the mines. Stan is a solid, intelligent and, dare I say it, a somewhat mischievous man in his 60s. He wouldn’t know what an allergy was if it hit him and if he did ever have one he would tell himself to get over it.

When you talk to Stan, you talk slowly. Stan responds in carefully measured tones, each word searched for, deliberated upon, double checked to make sure it can’t be misconstrued and tasted and rolled around his mouth before eventually being uttered in an unhurried drawl.

Stan is the epitome of larghissimo.

Stan places pauses for effect throughout his prose. Stan will roll his eyes back in his head as he searches for what he wants to say. It is all that I can do not to finish his sentences for him, because that would be rude. I used to love my long conversations with Stan not that we said that much to each other. Silence wasn’t something to be feared. Silence was something to be revered. It meant that he was reflecting on what he had or wanted to say. And whatever Stan said was very important - and he only ever said it once. If Stan could say in three words what he wanted to say then why on earth would he use thirty?

Two very different people from very different environments.

This article was first publised in Eureka Street on January 27, 2010.

Australia Day 2011 - “We are one” leaves out a lot of people

This article was published yesterday in On Line Opinion. It is by Brian Holden. I have edited many of his articles over the years and this one I particularly enjoyed. It provided a great topic of discussion in our house-hold and gives a new perspective to Australia Day and Australians' place in this world. I can highly recommend reading it.

---

“We are one” leaves out a lot of people

The Apollo 11 astronauts stood on the moon and looked back at the blue ball in the sky. They knew that there was only one intelligent species and it lived on just one planet. But they really did not comprehend that knowing until they saw the whole planet in the one gaze. It was a transcendental experience unique in human history.

Over on that blue ball within the vision of one man, there were billions of people who were playing and working, loving and hating - and all were assuming that they had a fair idea of what the truth was. Nobody at that moment knew the truth as those astronauts knew the truth.

Now to return to the world of you and I

I must have been aged about five. I can remember my mother’s reaction when she saw me sucking a penny: “Spit it out. A Chow may have handled it!” All through my childhood we referred to the owners of our local greengrocery as “the Dagos”. And yet, my parents were naturally kindly people. We were trapped in the same group-think as almost all Anglo-Celtics were at the time.

We were predominately of Irish stock. We did not know our history well enough to be aware that in the latter half of the 19th century, English newspaper cartoonists caricatured Irishmen as monkeys. If we saw our ancestors as victims of derogatory labeling, we would more likely to have concluded that breaking-up the family of man to put into various pigeon holes was stupid.

Fortunately, ethnicity is nothing like the problem it once was in this country. But we still have a problem. What are these words saying?

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian.

Clearly, they are saying that we over-here - the white, the black and the brown - are different to the white, the black and the brown over-there. So, with ethnicity no longer the driver of division it once was, nationalism (which will be jacked-up by the prime minister and governor-general into jingoism on Australia Day) is still keeping alive the most primitive of emotions - an emotion which can be traced back to the time when we marked out our territory with our own dung.

If we see ourselves as one with the planet - then we leave out nobody

Argon atoms in the air are inert. They just pass from one lung to the next unchanged. If I place my hand in front of my nose, then the next breath I exhale into my hand will contain at least one argon atom breathed out by Jesus sometime in his 33 years of life. My skin will have a material connection with Jesus! When I first learned of this, I felt as if I belonged to one great organism.

There is more to this than argon atoms. Every atom in my body has been borrowed from the one pool of atoms. Most atoms in my body I will have for no more than about four months before it is returned to the pool. Such is the extent of the recycling between soil, water, atmosphere and living organisms. What remains as “mine” over my lifetime is the organisation of those atoms. That organisation is kept from disintegrating into its constituent atoms by my DNA as it goes about building and maintaining.

The DNA molecule provides a set of instructions for every form of life. It is the arrangement of the parts of the molecule which determines if the organism is going to be a man, an ant or a eucalyptus. That one molecule connects every living organism into the one great living organism.

If we see ourselves as one with a web of lifelines - then we leave out nobody

The understanding of both DNA and the recycling between soil, water, atmosphere and living organisms requires some knowledge of chemistry. However, there is an abstract concept which can be grasped in its entirety with ease and without any technical knowledge. It describes a situation which is unseen - and yet glaringly obvious. One experiences a sobering feeling when first realising that it is there.

There is a web of cause-and-effect which binds every human alive and dead. Consider this hypothetical situation:

Say your father always caught the 7.45am tram. As he was rushing out the door his phone rang and he stopped to answer it. This caused him to miss his tram and he waited for the next one - the 8am. This was your mother’s regular tram. He sat opposite to her, and their eyes met. Let’s go back a bit.

A mate of your father was casually reading a newspaper when he saw an article on page five which made him think of your father and he spontaneously rang him. If the paper’s editor had put the article on page six, your father would have caught the 7.45am - and you would not be here. If the reader had been slowed down by an absorbing article on page four, you would not be here. If the reader took a minute longer under the shower before looking at the paper, you would not be here.

This analysis can progress forever. But as you regress from the event (which was the inspiration in the man’s head to phone), you are spreading out from the centre of a web of cause-and-effect with a near-infinite number of elements in it because no event stands in isolation of every other event. Returning to your hypothetical mother to bring home the point a bit more:

Why was the 8am her regular tram? We could regress back from that question with a never-ending series of questions. One could be; why was she even living in Melbourne?

Well, her dad once lived and worked in Adelaide, but one day he took a sickie and went to the races. He felt like having a pee and he was almost equidistant between two toilets. He took the one on the left which looked a little closer, and as he was entering, his boss was coming out. The next day he was summarily sacked. He then left for Melbourne to look for a job, and it was here that he settled down.

So, now your existence owes itself to position of a toilet at a racecourse in Adelaide! But if the man had one beer and not two, he would not have felt the need for a pee. Now your existence owes itself to a glass of beer! And, what of the second glass of beer the man’s boss drank which led him to the toilet? That also has to be part of the picture.

The lifeline of every person touches the lifelines of many others. Each one of those thousands touches the lifelines of thousands more to form a web the size of humanity itself. That revelation gives a whole new meaning to “We are one”.

A startling conclusion

It seems that the lifeline of every human on the planet can be traced back to the same woman. She is known as Mitochondrial Eve and she lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Now comes the obvious deduction which, if not enough to knock your socks off, will at least startle you; if just one of the zillions of squillions of events from Mitochondrial Eve’s reproductive life to the instant of your conception were missing, you would not be here.

How about introducing your children to this web-over-time concept after your family gets through its puerile flag-waving and anthem singing on Australia Day.

First published in On Line Opinion on January 24, 2011.

In the eye of the flood

There is no need to recount the events of the last week in Queensland. It began for Brisbane on a wet, rainy Monday as a wall of water tore through Toowoomba to the west of the capital.

There were forecasts that Brisbane may experience flooding so immediately we went into flood preparation mode. According to the predictions based on earlier floods we were going to have an inundated ground floor, so all our worldies were brought upstairs; we filled buckets and tubs with clean drinking water; bought matches, candles, and batteries; replaced our gas cylinder … and waited.

It rained.

On Tuesday morning something interesting started to happen. People started nattering to each other and telling their stories. Down came the usual reservations and people conversed freely. I wrote the following on my Facebook page:

Camaraderie among the tinned baked beans and bottled water

I was only pontificating just yesterday to my two daughters, about a calamity bringing communities closer together. It was interesting in the supermarket this morning. I wish I had had a recording device to go around and interview everyone, because they were all chatting to their neighbours in the long queues. Swapping stories, news, gossip. Listening to all the conversations around me actually made the time in the long queue go very fast. Now why can't we all be so chatty and have so much fun normally? Hmmmmm.

People who had lived close to each other for, quite literally, years suddenly got talking and offering to help each other in preparation for the inundation ahead. It was all so refreshing.

“Have you heard?” “What are you expecting?” “Are you ready?” “Were you flooded last time?” “Are you insured?”

The power went off in anticipation of the deluge on Wednesday morning … and we waited. And while we waited we talked to our neighbours over the fence.

And it rained.

The predictions were for early flooding of the lower lying areas in the morning with a rising tide throughout Wednesday with the first peak in the late afternoon. It became apparent that if we didn’t get my oldest daughter to the airport early that day (for a midnight flight to Europe) then she could be stranded. We bundled her on to a train, bid her a hasty farewell and went back to our preparations.

The highest peak would be at 4am on Thursday we were told. Expect the worst. And we did.

And still it rained.

At 4am on Thursday a huddle of men could be seen not far from our house tentatively creeping forwards, their torches sweeping the dark ground in front of them. Where was the flood? How far had it gone? They started chatting to their neighbours. They were OK, they had avoided the worst. But those unfortunates just over there, they were gone.

We were in the eye of the flood. Surrounded by water but sitting high and dry, we awoke to a beautiful, sunny Thursday morning - the first sunshine in what felt like days - and an eerie silence. All the local dogs were silent, the birds were silent, there were no trains and there was no traffic. Just silence. Over the airwaves we heard Anna Bligh dubbing it the “blue sky flood” - very apt.

We had no real idea of what had been happening all around us other than what we could glean from local radio. It quickly became clear that we were in the calm centre in the midst of complete chaos.

In fact, at first, we didn’t believe anything much had happened: there was such a surreal atmosphere.

Then we heard our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in her monotone drone: she was sending helicopters. All of Australia was behind us. Troops were coming. Food was coming. Help was coming.

I am sure we were all relieved to hear it, but she didn’t exactly inspire us, or fill us brimful of confidence!

And we heard Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh: Anna who had been so on-the-nose with the electorate in previous weeks and months was suddenly given her moment to shine. A tired and emotional Anna outlined to Queenslanders exactly what was happening and how she and the government were going about it. There is no doubt Queenslanders at that moment rallied behind her. It could mean victory for her at the next state election, depending on how she handles the recovery post flood.

And Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman emerged from the slime smelling of roses. The next term is surely his for the taking if he wants it.

And the neighbourhood talked some more. About how Julia, Anna and Campbell were handling it all. And the straw poll was unanimous. Anna and Campbell: ten out of ten. And Julia? Julia who?

Then the phone calls started. Were we OK? Had we flooded? We got on our bikes to survey the scene. We walked the dog, and we talked to the neighbours.

With no power there was no work to be done, no housework or cooking, no computers, no TV, no games. With the roads blocked off there was nowhere to drive to. Everyone who was lucky enough to have stayed dry in our neighbourhood, or so it seemed, was out and about. And everyone was talking.

As the day wore on people lit barbeques, invited over the neighbours and drank the last of the chilled champagne that had been saved for just such a rainy day.

In those few hours an immense bank of good will, or social capital, was built up.

And it would be needed. Because the very next day all these neighbours were walking over to their new friends and offering a helping hand along with a mop and bucket.

Every scrap of this social capital is going to be spent in the big clean up ahead. But at least we all now know our neighbours!

This article was first published by Eureka Street on January 17, 2011