Emma, India, and Dawn Starts

You are going to have to excuse me but I am in a rambling mood tonight.

One of the things that is nice about the work I do is that there are early starts. And no before you all say “is he mad?” I do not enjoy getting up at 5:00am any more than the next person (except of course this has the big plus that my commute time is less than half what it would be if I was going in at more normal hours).

The nice thing is the early finish and time in the afternoon and evening, this gives me the opportunity for all sorts of pursuits.

Often they are mundane, like hanging out a load of washing or mowing the lawn.
But as often as not I am able to use the time more creatively. Last week for example I went exploring with my youngest.

Yesterday, I worked on formatting my book before the house got busy in the evening.
Tonight I am in a culinary frame of mind. I am putting the time to cooking a decent curry. Oddly (or perhaps not oddly in this day and age) although I am an Aussie I also have a large chunk of Indian Heritage . My father’s family took a rather long (over 150 years) detour via India on the way to Australia.

As a total by-the-by, if you ever walk through Russell Chowk in Jabalpur a city in Madhya Pradesh India, you are close to some of my family history. If you do a Google you might discover that the Chowk (square) is named after Bertrand Russell, but in fact it isn’t. It was named for one of my ancestors considerably before Bertrand was famous. But that is another story, one I might put into a book… someday.

In the spirit of rambling I am going to jump to an entirely different topic. On Saturday as is our wont we went for a drive. This time we struck out along a road we haven’t used before though Arthur’s Creek. Up on a hill before you reach the village is an old cemetery.
I love cemeteries, they are such a vivid store of the culture of their time. Such a prompt for imagination.

This grave for example speaks of a tragedy, a young woman burying a much loved husband. Clearly at the time Emma, no doubt in love and grief stricken at the loss of her Harry could not imagine resting anywhere else. She has bought a double plot so one day she could sleep alongside her dear one.
Yet a hundred years later there is no sign that she was laid here. No headstone for Emma here.
What happened, the writer in me wonders. As her grief passed did she come to love another? Does she now rest alongside a second husband?
Who knows, but my mind races away across the valley below, thinking of other stories that perhaps one day I could write.Too many books not enough years.

Bless you Emma, I hope the rest of your years were joy filled.

Writing Lost.: A Guest Post

Now while it is still Remembrance Day, and as a slight change from my usual fare, a Guest Post!

I am privileged to host the following guest post by Canadian blogger Rebecca Emrich of Living a Life Of Writing.
Rebecca Blogs profusely about blogging and writing in general.
Rebecca has also chosen to write with a theme of Remembrance for this post. By the way the piccies are my selection Rebecca deserves no blame for them. They are from Wikimedia Commons. Without further ado take it away Rebecca...

Writing Lost

The War to End All Wars? Not really the First World War ended the golden age of literature in my line of thinking. The result in the States was the 'Lost' generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. A similar thing happened in other countries, but I'm not going to write about them but of the writing lost.

Writing Lost You Say?

In one particular battle, budding writers took bullets in the head, were blinded, maimed and countless others lost, not physically but mentally. It is impossible to even begin to count that loss. A Poet, unable to write anymore, his body broken, or dead in the mud of countless fields in France, in Russia, in Germany. It is impossible to imagine the loss of a single writer in their youth, perhaps with countless stories that they would write.

I think of The Russian Army and a young prince, Oleg Romanov, who if not for blood poisoning and death would have become a more powerful writer than his father the great Russian writer Konstantin Romanov.

Oleg Romanov

Of Two young German Princes who knew what war was about before they saw it, and still died. Hundreds of others dead or dying.

A Generation Lost, a Generation of Writers Lost.

Do we forget them or do we praise them, by continuing our writing, and recall their sacrifice to the old cry of King and Country?

To all these writers lost: We Shall Not Forget.

The Canadian War Cemetery at Dieppe.

Death and Other Minor Problems

A long, long, day at work today. I had to start early at a breakfast program for homeless people, before going over to anther program that provides emergency relief for homeless and other marginalised people. I couldn’t leave there until I supervised the cleaning this evening.
I know I sound like a real whinger but that is the space I was in when I finally got home. No research tonight, no work on the book, an early night tonight for me.

Ructions at home tonight, our eldest daughter is studying for a degree in speech therapy at Latrobe University. She realised today that her first “wet-pracs” in anatomy are coming up shortly. In other words they will be dissecting and examining human bodies. The poor thing is really struggling with the idea, back in high school she could barely cope with dissections of rats in biology classes.

She is facing a real dilemma she wants to go on with this course, she sees herself making a positive contribution to people with speech difficulties, particularly kids, down the track. Yet, she just can’t see herself getting over her (natural) queasiness. I just hope she finds a way to go on with what she wants.

Also on the subject of death a photo from a lonely graveyard.

This these are graves in the Kiandra Cemetery in the Australian Alps. Started in the 1860’s about fifty burials were recorded here. No trace remains of most graves in the cemetery. And there is even less trace of the town. A goldfields town with a population of up to 7,000 people today it is gone, leaving almost no trace other than these lonely graves near the Snowy Mountain highway.

Just to finish on a brighter note a fiery sunset.