The End is nigh, the Clock is ticking. I won’t go as far as carrying a sandwich board around Australian capitals decrying that the end is getting closer. I am more about a much closer and more intimate closure of being near ‘nigh’. In fact, as I am writing my right eye is closed already. This has been happening over the last couple of months or so. Perhaps my left eye will follow soon. In any case I am getting the eye operated on by an expert Eye surgeon; the op is called ‘epiretinal macula membrane removal’. I was gob smacked watching the procedure and can’t wait.

Oh, for the music of Carl Orff. Heavenly!

My legs are alright and I can lift my arms upwards as well as sideways and around and around as well. I was practicing rotating my arms near the letterbox but stopped when I noticed a lady opposite our street staring at me.

When you think about Richard Branson’s ultimate dream to be shot into space, how modest most of us remain. Personally I would not mind just a continuation getting readers logging onto my blog. I can’t get too excited by space journeys. I experienced them more than sixty years ago reading Jules Verne. I read many of Jules V. underneath the blankets with rigged up torch and battery.

When I get a push on the ‘like’ of my blog button, my ambitions are fulfilled.

Just last night I watched a biographical movie on Paul Cox, a Dutch born Australian filmmaker to my heart. He resides in making movies his own way and blithely ignores critique, either good or bad.  He never wavered.

http://www.paulcox.com.au/site/blog.cfm

Now, personally (again) I would have liked someone to have picked my little blog of “Oosterman Treats” word-order, resulting in receiving  a nice  little buff coloured A4 note (with matching envelope) from HarperCollins or Hachette Livre, or indeed Random House with:

Dear Gerard,

We really are taken in with your work. Would you like us to edit the best of your Oosterman snippets and pick perhaps the best of those you have written so far and produce a small edition of perhaps…let us say… about 100.000 copies? The reason we are offering running this print is a result of a couple of our editors and manuscript scouts having read your blog and bringing it to our attention. We are intending to also offer the book on-line as well. Depending on your acceptance we will send you our contract and will forward you an upfront payment for $5000. –after your signature and contract arrives back to us.

Kind regards, (let’s have a cup of tea over this)

Tim Hely Hutchinson CEO-Hachette UK.

This is just a pipe-dream. Even so, since my foray into writing words in a certain order I am surprised to have written so many of them. It is not easy but the only way out of escaping from the cursed leaden blanket weighing me down. After many years trying to make it into a spineless feather dooner, mostly in vain, the getting out of words is the perfect answer. I wished I would have discovered this sooner. Even so, ‘better late than never’ my Aunty Agnes used to say.

Aunt Agnes was my mother’s sister. She remained a spinster and never ever thought she missed out on marital bliss (or conjugals.) She really was our second mother and spoiled us with Ice creams from Benjamin shops. Benjamin’s in Holland was the equivalent of Darryl Lea in Australia, a paradise for kids with Aunts who wanted to spoil kids. It wasn’t so much a visit from our Aunt, more what she would take out of her bag or out of her wallet that we kids looked forward to. Not unlike our Jack Russell “Milo”, who looks for goodies coming from our hands or out of the fridge rather than a look at his owner. Kids can be so cruel.

The leaden blanket came much later for no reason at all, at least not one that I can explain. It was just there! Why I hadn’t discovered the magical remedy of putting words down earlier is rather a useless form of introspection, a bit like regretting it rained last Saturday.

As my Aunt previously said, “better late than never.” Putting words down remains always a happy event and hobby. Still, I would not mind a modest print run of a 100.000 books. An interview on TV with, “we welcome today a newly discovered writer Gerard”; “where do you normally find the inspiration for the words Gerard?”   “I dunno”, I just start with a single word such as ‘The’ followed by ‘end’ or ‘is’ and take it from there. Perhaps a hesitant ‘nigh’! Who knows?

Here are another 800 words.