If you could bring back one dinosaur, which one would it be? A I Generated Picture Apart from being one of my favourite jokes in the film Airplane, and the dinosaur I was most interested in as a child, the reasons I would bring the Pterodactyl back to life are based on science, human nature […]
A Hat, A Brooch, A Pterodactyl!
A post I loved writing and one that got a decent number of likes! Click on the link above to read it in full as it’s quite well argued.
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
There are books I have enjoyed that I don’t think ended well. There are books I would have preferred to see stay as a single book rather than setting up a sequel. However, it seems to me the height of entitlement to say that I would rewrite an ending. The author has put months or years into getting the work to a finish and they have finished the book in the way that makes sense to them. I will have spent a few hours reading the book so I have no right to change anything. If I don’t like it I just shrug my shoulders and move on.
These prompts seem to be a bit of fun, a ‘what if’ piece of revisionism that doesn’t do any harm. Actually, it does. It diminishes the craft of writing to a simple equation where the ending ‘x’ can be seamlessly replaced by ending ‘y’ at the whim of someone who, in the vast majority of cases, has no idea of the huge amount of mental effort that goes into writing a complete book. I wrote three, over a period of four years, put two on Kindle where the only comments appeared to be critical, and gave up on that form of expression. I am a decent writer, in technical terms, but I was learning my craft and I chose to do it through the wrong medium. My blog has proven to me that I have an ability to engage an audience but just in a different way. By the way, those who do have experience of writing a book have even less reason to criticise an ending because they should know how much mental energy and emotional effort goes into writing.
I did dip into writing fan fiction many years ago and that was fun, and it wasn’t doing any harm to the original author or concept, because it was just an extension to the universe that had been created. So, write your own books, without any AI help (!), and create your new ending but don’t think for a minute that you have any right or ability to change someone else’s ending.
What’s your biggest dream?
Dreaming of your future doesn’t always have the best press, and is often a waste of mental energy as it relies on the impossible or the wildly improbable. However, if you keep the vast majority of your dreams in check then I don’t think it does any harm and it may point your way forward.
My dreams are now relatively low key, and focused on the occasional big holiday along with good health and a reasonable measure of income over the next decade or so. To be honest I don’t expect a huge amount from life as I am perfectly content with my wife and family and generally focus on their needs and wants rather than my own. If our children do well in an increasingly dangerous, climate challenged and intolerant right wing world then that is the best I can hope for. My time now should be reserved for doing what I can professionally and personally. However, I do still have two holiday dreams, one probable and one very unlikely.
The probable is a trip to Japan, where we lived for three years, with brief stopovers in Hong Kong where we lived for just over a year, and Singapore where I lived for three years before the age of 5. The holiday won’t be a luxury one but it will be a big spend for us. I think that is very likely but it’s a dream for now.
The very unlikely is a dream I have had for over 50 years but which I have never been close to realising. I have always wanted to visit Antarctica on one of the guided and ecologically aware cruises that focus on educating the participants. Who knows though? If a windfall of a reasonable size fell into our laps in the next few years it would become a realisation of a dream from childhood.
What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
When I see a prompt like this I think of the words of Sunscreen, the Baz Luhrman Number 1 where the narrator says, ‘Your choices are half chance, so are everyone else’s.’ I think that speaks to the main issue with keeping a promise to yourself, namely that it pretty much always depends on circumstances. As with ideas such as fate we are very adept as human beings of retrospectively seeing both patterns and paths that led us through particular times.
Promises we make to ourselves tend to be forgotten if they don’t happen and seen as an example of our strength and determination if they do. We make many promises to ourselves, most of which are unfulfilled and erased from memory. We often congratulate ourselves on plucking the low hanging fruit which reinforces the idea of our ability to bend events to our will. When something we promise ourselves requires us to simply act in a way that is natural, that’s not keeping a promise, that’s merely following a preset path that we couldn’t move away from if we tried.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as being at the mercy of upbringing, events, financial positions or pure luck, good or bad, but we are. Most of us stumble through life doing our best and that should be enough. To retrofit our decisions as keeping a promise to ourselves is, at best, a failure to acknowledge reality and, at worst, a deliberate falsehood. We are tiny insignificant creatures in the greater scheme of things, an interesting turn of phrase for me as I don’t believe in a greater scheme. Our success or failure is simply that, not some great crusade that we have embarked on and either completed or not. Remember that when you next reflect on your ability to keep your promises. Let me finish as I started with a song lyric. ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’, as Allen Sanders said in 1957. It was popularised by John Lennon in Beautiful Boy, one of his last songs in 1980. It is still true all these years later.
If you could have dinner with any fictional character, who would it be?
David Powlett Jones is my model as a teacher and the stories of his time at Bamfylde Public School in Devon have captivated and encouraged me every time I have read them. The idea of a dinner with Pow Wow, Algy Herries, Howarth, Barnaby and the rest of the staff and their families would be brilliant. Years of experience to draw on and so many stories to learn from and a group of people I already see as real.
The dinner would take place at the school on the staff table in the main hall and I would love to explore the school itself, seeing the classrooms and walking on the cricket oval. I can already picture the people and the surroundings and, interestingly, they are not always the same as the amazing BBC production. The only problem is that I may not want to leave at the end of the dinner!
