Paying Ready Attention

‘Where are you from?’ is a question I am often asked.  The thing that makes people ask this does not stand out like a sore thumb, it’s more like it stands out like a sore ear.   (I have often been asked ‘What planet are you from?’ but the reasons for that is entirely different.) I don’t sound like I come from here, and people, used only to the limited accents they hear on TV, have difficulty placing me.   Lacking the nasal inflection of more long-term residence of this continent marks me out as different.   Now, it’s as plain as the nose on my face that I have no real deficiency when it comes to the organ needed for ‘nasal inflection’, but I still can’t get it right.   But as time pass I find it harder and harder to answer that simple, repetitive question.   By the end of this year I will have lived longer in Australia than in the county that gave me my accent – Somerset.   Does 19 years of dwelling, over 35 years ago, still define...

As a kid at school a Welsh music teacher told me that a good story was like a fish, with a distinct head, middle and tail.   At the time I thought it was clear that he had never seen an eel, but in a rare moment of student restraint I said nothing.    Like many other teachers of his generation, he mistook his ability to declaim without challenge for an access to the truth.     And for all that the prophets of Post-Modernism would have fainted at such a simple notion of narrative, the vision of that idea has stuck with me. The idea of the story as a fish is too simple to apply widely, but if ever there was a single place that held the head, body and tail of my story it is the Lake District – The Lakes – in the north western corner of England, just below Scotland.   But even then it’s not that simple.   Some of my stories came to an end in the Lakes, some began and some found the full expression of the middle.   I first arrived in Th...