Lara and I, and other bag-totting lookalikes, stepped off the water taxi at Venezia Lucia Station. All eyes lifted to the arrivals screen. What! The sleeper train to Paris had been cancelled. “Information Office,” I shouted and a mob ran with us the length of the platform.
“It says cancelled. But it’s not,” the official snorted, making a shooing action as if we were flies. “Keep watching the screen.” And thank you too, I muttered.
Try holding two shoulder bags, nailing a big case with a foot while nibbling pizza from a paper bag and holding your eyes on a screen. “It’s arriving,” a backpacker yelled an hour later, and we stampeded down the platform like fleeing refugees.
Writing hands by Karen [CC-BY 2.0]
‘Forget any story, and just draw,’ I was told. A character could be animal, not sure about
Books, books, books. My home is filled with them and so is my head, especially when it comes to writing about my dad. He was surrounded by books; not because he was a scholar, but because he had ingenuity in bucketloads when it came to earning his family’s keep. It was post war; his army service done. So what does a man do for a living, with no job, little education, with a wife and four children to look after? Why, he sets up a lending library service of course. He started small, with a stationary library in Gloucester Street, Silverstream (north of Wellington). And being the entrepreneur he was, the idea of a travelling library soon followed.
December. On finishing, I passed it onto another friend and regretted doing so, as I had liked the book Charlotte very much indeed.
I just happened to see an advertisement in a literary magazine I subscribe to, Narrative, where one of the editors was calling for applications to his forth-coming writing workshops in New York and San Francisco. ‘How exciting’ I thought, and then squashed that frivolity with the prosaic ‘don’t be stupid’.
I have been working on a piece of writing (the same piece I have been struggling to finish for months), which I shall call a ‘fictionalised memoir’. It all came about following a conversation with my eldest daughter, who voiced that she would like me to tell her more of her grandfather (my father), as she had never known him, my dad having died before her birth. I started by jotting down things about his character; talents, hobbies etc., when I stopped writing and began chewing the end of my pen instead. My father was worth more than a few facts; he was a very kind, interesting, hard-working entrepreneurial type, with a cracking sense of humour and a passion for music and art. His friends loved him, as did I. He deserved a story. 
ARTISTRY 