Those Old stories

I am reading a book, that is quite interesting. It is actually about detective work and more probably in the times of my grandmothers and stuff like that. You know Agatha Christies? Yes something like that. Years ago, more like decades ago, I used to carry around novels of Agatha Christie and Peter Cheney novels. I read about the French revolution first from the famous book Scarlet Pimpernel. Then there was the Tale of Two cities. They gave me an old fashioned look at the crimes scenes of London in the days of the writers.

I think that was what I found very interesting. The way the writers then added bits of their environment to what they wrote. I always thought , it will be hard to get lost writing the locality as Peter Cheney then made London quite alive and interesting. I knew the smog, the steam trains from their descriptions. We had not arrived at the pre-occupation these days with action, blood and grit but you read a good story that was beautifully written.

Somerset Maugham showed me the frailties of the human nature through his stories of the Malays, the tension of war, the loneliness of the soldiers. I learnt about Gauguin the artist from his stories about the early life of that great French artist. Maybe, you now know how I came to be such an addict on writing and writers.

From my earliest years, I fed on Enid Blyton. I would compare the adventures of the Famous Five with Tales under the Baobab tree of my grandmother. It was a heady mix and I had quite a lot of fun. I could understand the vivacity of children remembering mine and how those books ever so subtly shaped my moral compass and helped me to have a fairly balanced outlook.

I did not have a yearning to cross oceans to bring home a golden fleece. I simply enjoyed their magic, the remoteness and lived through the characters accepting from my grandma that the human emotion was colourless.

Chivalry, steadfastness, honesty and dignity are emotions of the human being in any part of the Universe the human being happens to have been incarnated. 

His responsibility has always been to search for a luminous goal and do his very best to achieve that goal no matter the challenges.

Man was not permitted to be here simply to eat, sleep, and procreate . He was also not meant to discover ingenious ways to make life more uncomfortable for his fellow man.

I had not planned on writing that, you know, I generally write when I feel unhappy, excited, angry ..what? angry? Yes of course. It is the cheapest way out. I think when I write, I manage to dissipate my anger over an issue or a person. I find that after I had written furiously, I feel a calmness come into me and I am in a more rational mood.

I do write too when the creative bug hits and this can be very frustration like yesterday when I needed to put a poem down.  Like some loose ball, the poem detached itself from some part of the Muse factory and headed straight for my head. Wham. I searched in my bag for that pen I have never been able to get when I needed it, no paper, the only thing in my bag was a bank receipt. I turned it over and asked my girl to get me a pen.

Suddenly I felt better and this is what I wrote:

She was the wrong colour

too light skinned

very pretty

winning smile

and the wrong family.

She infected his dreams

with her soft voice

like silk running down his spine

created gasps in

his breathing

the insistent hiss of his passion

kept him chained

to the farm

for the dowry.

Mission accomplished

he returned to the village

her wedding

was already underway,

to another.