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Monday, February 29, 2016

Margaret and the Dali

Salvador Dali: Christ of St. John of the Cross
First draft completed. Three thousand, five hundred words. I have no idea if it's any good but it's a start.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Doom ...

... and gloom. My team loses overnight. Our Mascot Kingsley is not happy.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

No-service with a smile

We'll be staying somewhere else then ...
Dear Mr/Ms. Herd,

Greetings from Novotel Singapore Clarke Quay!

Thank you for your email.

We regret to inform you that we do not have a wheelchair bound room in the hotel.

In the interim, should you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact or email us.

Thank you and have an exceptional day!

Friday, February 26, 2016

Even I'm beginning to feel a little nervous

The Donald ... Sorry, I meant Freddy
I may be letting my worst fears cloud my judgement. I still hold to the view that Trump will crash and burn but this nightmarish thought came when I was in the shower this Australian morning ...

What if?

What if a runaway train is crashing through the Republican Party? What if they don't know how to stop it? Maybe the GOP establishment will try to minimise the train wreck by doing deals. Trump goes on to win the nomination. Marco holds back on outright criticism of the presumptive nominee and lets Cruz - who seems to hate everyone except Ted Cruz - be the loser attack dog.

Trump, Rubio and the GOP establishment cut a deal. Rubio is selected as the VP candidate on a ticket with Trump. GOP brokers this deal because it can't stop Trump but thinks this would minimise harm and give it a chance of beating the Democrats. Rubio accepts the deal because - if they were to win - he think his 'Apprentice' years make him unbeatable as Presidential candidate in the future. Trump accepts the deal because it solves his 'Hispanics problem', means he could pass all the day to day grind of politics to his side-kick Marco , and he gets to drive around in the big Presidential limo being Mr. President - not building walls, not banning Muslims - just being a motor mouth constrained by the realities of governing in the real world.

As I said. One's nightmare.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Today's assignment for HUMN1001 - Digital Culture

Asked to respond to a series of articles orbiting around the question, "is the Internet making us dumber?" I offered these thoughts in advance of tomorrow's tutorial discussion:
Reading Carr’s article in the Wall Street Journal and his comments about detrimental changes to human memory in Genevieve Roberts’ article ("We're missing the real danger, that human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer”) or re-reading Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cassandra-lite’ narcissist hyperbole (“As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of the, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning” … you may have Mr R but the rest of us got on with lives with their usual share of value and meaning, successes and failures, etc.,) it’s hard not to think of Monty Python Flying Circus’s sketch, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ 
Apart from the world wide web, smart phones, Massive Open Online Courses everywhere, 160 million mobile Internet-users in a country like India where not so very long ago (most of the 20th Century) almost no one had access to a telephone), readily accessible information on almost everything (from Google and Wiki to peer-reviewing networks of Professors in Astrophysics and everything in between), 24-hour banking, instant hotel reservations, pizza delivery real-time tracking and the ubiquitous cat videos … what have the new technologists ever done for us? 
I do not mean to sound like some starry-eyed Pollyanna salivating at the prospect of the next ‘latest thing’ from the Apple Corporation (what can I say, I’m an Android man). Nor am I ignorant of the underpinning social, political and economic realities of this supposedly post-industrial, information age – control and ownership of the worlds means of production, distribution and exchange is more concentrated today in proportionately fewer hands than at any time in modern history since the world was run by Kings, Emperors and Popes. 
But … 
I am genuinely intellectually shocked by what I would describe as the naïve, ahistorical, un-analytical, almost intensely personalised reflections of (debatable) loss by commentators such as Carr, Rushkoff and (in week 2) Lanier, whose “Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century” seems to be built on a personal disappointment that MIDI doesn’t do the sounds of sax with the flair of John Coltraine or the violin with as much invention as Yehudi Menuhin.  The ‘glass half empty’ gang need better arguments than those I’ve read so far.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Just say NO

4 times in 2 weeks . Am I becoming an addict? Or is IKEA simply poor at organising its supply chain?

Monday, February 22, 2016

Bonnie and Clyde - cinematography of America's lost innocence

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker
I'm halfway through preparing my first class presentation for my university courses this semester. Specifically I'm laying out my power point slides for FILM1002 - Introduction to Film Studies. I'm asked to talk on cinematography with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde as the reference movie.

So we dive straight in to the birth of the 'American New Wave' with the movie that got there a year before Bullitt, two years before Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy, five years before Badlands. My line of argument will be that it's the first - at least one of the earliest - mainstream Hollywood films to tear down the icons of the 'golden era' of movie myth-making. It's an outlaw movie rather than a gangster film, owing much of its aesthetic interest to the classic Western tradition. Except this is a film premised on the death of the all-American Hero and the rejection of a national mythology of innocence. It is cynical - although perhaps I mean ironic - disrespectful of authority, comical, violent, deeply invested in the (hetero)sexual crisis of identity emerging in 1960's America and it cleverly exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture and the alienation of spectating or viewing.
Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

All things considered it's a marvellous film. I hope my presentation does it justice.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

The darkest hour is just before dawn ... in politics as much as anywhere else

Image result for jeb bush
Was this man's heart ever truly in it?
Mr. Bush goes home but the money lined up behind him stays in the game. Mr. Rubio floats higher. Mr. Cruz sinks a little and will be entirely sunk soon enough. Mr. Carson may hang around for a while, although not even he is sure why. Mr. Kasich will battle on in delusional self-belief until the money runs out.

And when it boils down to GOP make your mind up time it will choose Mr. Rubio over Mr. Trump because America is not insane.

Mr. Trump, however, does not know how to lose even though he has experienced it already in this nomination round. His megalomaniac tendency will refuse to accept the decision of the Party he claims he wants to lead. Mr. Trump will throw a very expensive, billionaire's hissy fit and seek to stand for the Presidency anyway because Mr. Trump truly does believe that if you have enough money you ought to be able to buy anything you want and can afford. Even a country.

Towards the end of March it should all be a lot uglier than it looks now.

Whatever the outcome of the GOP three-ring circus, please America, Vote Democrat.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

To the Ring of Brodgar

Ring of Brodgar

We spent weeks in December/January trying to figure out how we could get me and my wheelchair from Glasgow to Stornoway in the Western Isles when we visit Scotland in June. I was beginning to give up hope but said to Spike this morning I would get back on to finding solutions this week coming. Spike said, 'ok but we could try Orkney too'. 

Skara Brae
This evening I started searching the web for information about Orkney. I wrote 4 e.mails to not very promising-looking hotels. Within an hour three indicated they have rooms with easy access showers. Checked train times between Glasgow and Aberdeen. Checked ferry times between Aberdeen and Kirkwall. Began to find evidence of wheelchair accessible buses and taxis on the main island. Less than three hours after starting our search it looks as if we have a week on the Orkney Islands more or less established. I'm a very happy man and these are just a couple of the Neolithic sites we shall now visit.

Friday, February 19, 2016

Why this man writes

Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely
Orhan Pamuk. Pic by Columbia University Press
An extract from the speech made by Orhan Pamuk when he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature on December 7th 2006.
As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
The whole speech is here: My Father's Suitcase

Thursday, February 18, 2016

The last Billy

This must be the place ...
What could be more difficult than following the assembly instructions of an IKEA Billy bookcase? Tab A into Slot B - as the excellent movie review team at BBC Radio Five Lives 'Wittertainment' programme often reminds us for no particularly solid reason. (It is the best two hours of informed discussion and reviews you are ever likely to come across by the way. Download the podcast. It has spellbinding extra features).

Buying a Billy bookcase from IKEA in Canberra. 

That's what could be more difficult. Although I confess, for the sake of dramatic effect I have exaggerated the degree of construction difficulty. You don't even need to be able to read - look at the drawings, screw in the screws, locate all the noodly bits you've lost on the floor, insert the shelves, slide the completed bookcase into its place. Easy. Mind you, I'm paralysed from the chest down so Spike does assembly. I observe and resist the temptation to mansplain how simple it is or give advice.

But Jeez - buying the last unit we needed to complete our book nook? It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

This is a sad, short tale of not very much human suffering. We were in the store last Friday. The App insisted there were 40cm-wide cases in the 'market hall'. Nope. A helpful IKEA person said they were likely to be on a pallet somewhere back of house. They would be on the shelves from 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning. We'd already lost four hours of our lives wandering the IKEA road to Hell - following their illuminated arrows pointing to corporate good intentions. So we left.

We returned on Tuesday because the App insisted there were 40cm-wide Billy bookcases on the shelves in the market hall. Another hour wandering the pilgrim's way to the slough of despond. Nope. Sold out over the weekend apparently. We ran screaming from the building... bearing an IVER unit we had not been looking to purchase for the kitchen . But you can't leave empty handed, can you?

We returned today because the App and a human being said, 'yep - on the shelves in the market hall'. I elected to stay in the car because - to be frank - dying of heat exhaustion in a sun-baked IKEA car park was preferable to another hike around IKEA's path to the underworld. Spike, fortunately, is more clever than I am. She took the short cut via the canteen with its infinite supply of Swedish meatballs before returning, some hours later ... OK forty minutes ... with the slim bookcase to complete our set.

I will bet you good money the Library at Alexandria took less time to construct than our suburban idyll. Next time, we'll just leave the damn books piled on the floor where they do no one harm.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Heroism in The Iliad

Ajax carries the body of Achilles
There's a reading group discussion underway on The Guardian web site looking at Homer's Iliad.  Today's topic is considering the heroism or otherwise of Achilles. One of the contributors noted that the literal translation is 'warrior' rather than 'hero' - a modern appellation, which the Greeks of classical times would not have understood as we do today. Here's my two-bob's worth of a response to 'emilyhauserauthor's post.


"the ancient Greek word ἥρως ('heros', usually translated as hero), actually means just a 'warrior'. It doesn't have any of the additional connotations we've come to expect of moral worth, valour, and so on. In a sense, then, expecting 'heroism' of Achilles - to expect him to conform to any of our ideas of what a 'hero' is - is an anachronism." 
This is a persuasive observation / reminder. The modern / romanticised notion of the hero (not just an effective warrior but just, righteous, dare one say almost invariably Christian in English Lit.) simply doesn't fit with either of Homer's works (Odysseus, it seems to me, similarly exhibits none of the attributes of the modern hero when he conspires with Telemachus to ambush the suitors). 
Achilles is a demi-god warrior par excellence who has - like all the invaders around him - been away from home and family for a decade. Three thousand years before the John Wayne caricature of 'the good soldier' fighting 'a just war' stepped on to our screens. What should we expect of such men at such a time in those circumstances? 
As I think someone else suggested too, anyone looking for an Homeric character coming closest to our modern idea of heroic (perhaps I mean courageous) should look to Priam - an old, broken man who at great personal risk sets out to recover his son's body so that the honour and respect due to the rites set out by Gods may be observed and Hector's eternal position secured. 
Is Hector a hero? Reluctant perhaps, possessed of questionable judgement and a problematic war time leader of a doomed nation. One may feel sorrow at his fate and admit his bravery in stepping out to meet Achilles but ... I'm not sure those are either modernity's heroism or the classical warrior.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

First day back at school

Lectures began today with the first (of two this week) of my Film Studies course. Following the lecture we viewed two movies from 1919 / 1920 - Buster Keaton's The Scarecrow and Robert Weine's Das Cabinet des Dr. Cligari - German Expressionism at its most insistent. Both are excellent works in their different ways. The course certainly started well.

We viewed the restored version of Dr Caligari posted below. Clearly the soundtrack is a contemporary piece of music which, I guess, was commissioned especially for the restored film. It is, I think, perfectly matched; more an interpretation through music of the emotional core of the film than accompaniment. Together they work a treat.

Monday, February 15, 2016

The latest learning challenge ...

... and the last new start for the moment
We are travelling to Tokyo for four days at the end of May. We'll be celebrating Spike's birthday among other (hopefully) exciting moments. I would like to be able to say at least a few words to the locals. There are three months to go. The clock is ticking.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

It was seven years ago today ...

... or thereabouts. This photo appeared in my Facebook feed this morning telling me it was a post from seven years ago. Really? ... I thought. Did we see Leonard Cohen on St. Valentine's Day? No, a Google search quickly confirmed. It was the 31st January.

This is true nevertheless. That was the best concert I've attended in my life. Quite brilliant be a singer, song-writer, poet, performer at the peak of his powers. I have been listening to Leonard Cohen singing since my older brother bought Songs of Leonard Cohen in maybe 1968 or 1969. I was eleven or twelve years old. 


When he started with "Come over to the window, my little darling ..." there may have been a welling-up in my Scottish Presbyterian old-man's eyes. A good night to be out and about with Spike.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Dickensian

Television at its very best. Flawless in every department.

Friday, February 12, 2016

When in Rome ..

The Eternal City

Not quite the eternal city but an approximation of what it might once have been. Spike and I visited the delightful, leafy campus of the Australian National University so I could buy the core text book for my film studies course: The Film Experience by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White.  It's $79 by the way. Not cheap, I say, for a slim volume. I wonder how students with less disposable income than untypical yours truly find the cash for books like this and more. Maybe they don't.

On our way back to the car from the pleasant Co-op Bookshop we called into the Classics Museum of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics to have a look at its small collection of glass artefacts, mostly from the first and second Centuries A.D. Adjacent to the cabinet of oil vials, bowls, dishes and a tumbler in glass there sits the large model of ancient Rome above.. Veni, vidi, vici ... after a fashion.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Buster Keaton - The Scarecrow (1920)


This the first screening on my film studies course at the ANU next week. Almost 100 years old and still it looks fresh. I think comedy may be the only genre that has travelled well over the intervening years. Modern Horror, the Western, Romantic Comedy retain many of the components, tropes and structural underpinnings of their predecessors but the original silent productions have dated - in technique, story-telling and dramatic effect - in ways that Comedy has not. Buster Keaton was a genius, of course. That much is obvious from the movie. But even allowing for his extraordinary talent it's interesting to watch the film simply to note how many of its elements remain with us today. It still makes me laugh and more than much of what passes for film and television comedy these days. But the early period of cinema looks so naive, so innocent reflected through the viewing prism of genres other than comedy, let's say, of The Exorcist, The Unforgiven or Trainwreck. 

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

What is plot?

I returned to my MOOC this afternoon; Start Writing Fiction with the Open University. Today's exercise asked us to consider the question, what is plot? This is how the question was framed.
How do you get from making notes for a story in your journal to thinking up a suitable plot line? The novelist E.M. Forster (1927) explains this very clearly. 
Image result for e m forster 1927He describes a story as ‘a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence’ and a plot as ‘also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.’ (Forster, E. (1927) Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth: Pelican. p. 87.) 
For example, ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. 
This is because there is a reason given for the queen dying. In a story, someone dying is not in itself interesting. It is the reason for the death that fascinates the reader, especially if the reason is connected with something that has happened to, or been done by, another character. 
Readers are well tuned to guessing and imagining causes just from the details they perceive in the story. With this in mind, even the smallest recorded observations can be relevant.
For example: ‘A woman on a bus today carried her Pekinese dog inside her handbag. It had a red bow on its head that matched her sweater.’ 
This short description of a real person could be the starting point for a fictional character. Imagine:

  • Who might she have been?
  • Where was she going?
  • What did her appearance suggest about her mood or state of mind?
  • How old was she?
  • How did she live?
In answering these questions you are starting to build a concrete sense of character. You are starting to get a story.
I read the contributions of some of my fellow students. A few of them were very good; well-written, imaginative, precisely drawn portraits of a woman - almost invariably older rather than younger - and her toy dog. One of the responses (from the highly talented Andrew Dobson, retired Professor of Politics) was quite brilliant; original, witty, with an almost Poe-like sense of the macabre, I sat for a while puzzling over ways to approach the exercise from a different angle. Then I landed on an idea, which I worked at for a couple of hours. Three hundred and eighty-five words later I submitted this piece. I hope it works.
We make this trip once a week you know. Old Patsy there and me. Dressed to the nines we are for a special day out. Splash of red this morning … makes bit of a statement, don't you think? 
You can tell we get noticed when we sit ourselves down. Mind you, there’s those as says, it’s not becoming of ladies of a certain age. But I say, hang ‘em Duchess. If you can’t put on a spot of red when you’re 69, when can you put on a spot of red? 
We caught the Number 10 again. Latymer Court to Kensington High Street in eighteen minutes. Five more minutes’ walk to Kensington Gardens for a bit of grass and a stroll. The truth is, though, her legs aint what they was once. Sometimes takes us nearly fifteen to reach her favourite bench. Next to that chestnut tree she likes so much. 
But I cannot lie. This is a come down for a lady like me. Riding on a bus. 
My family was born to higher ranks. I know folks don’t think it so to look at us but I’m used to limousines and drivers and the very finest of sorts visiting the houses here in London, the Hampshire Estate. Why ... my great-great-grandparents were actually born in Apsely House. I kid you not. There’s not so many that can lay claim to those bona fides.
Although … between you, me and the doorpost … even the apartments of an English Duke are a bit of a decline for a lineage with our distinction. Dare I say it? With our pedigree. 
You’ll think I’m a little snob when I say this. But when one of your family has served as lapdog to the aunt of the Xienfeng Emperor himself – a Lion Dog in the Imperial Palace no less – it’s a fall from grace to be presented as a gift … even to the wife of the 3rd Duke of Wellington. 
And now? 
eyes pekingese photo picsAll those generations gone and me being carried in the handbag of sweet old Patsy there. She’s a retired short hand secretary and typist from Chiswick, you know. And here the two of us are … riding on a double-decked bus in West London. 
What can I tell you? 
It’s a dog’s life.

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

John Gray o' Middleholm

James Hogg, 'the Ettrick Shepherd'
painted by Sir John Watson Gordon
Appropriately enough, I admit - dare one write confess? - I have never read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. I know that I should have done before now but ... no excuse ... I just have not. I shall add it to the list.

Today I read one of his short stories, included in Philip Hensher's Penguin anthology. 'John Gray o' Middleholm' was published around 1820 or 1821 in a collection by Hogg which was titled, Winter Evening Tales, Collected Among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland. It must have been a popular enough two-volume collection because the version "Digitized by Google" is an 1821 Second Edition printed by Oliver & Boyd in Edinburgh.

Nearly two hundred years old, describing a lost Scotland and people whose lot has fallen into history mostly - home-based weavers, cobblers, the remnants of an agricultural peasantry 'John Gray' has more common - in an odd sense - with characters out of Mark Twain or Rip Van Winkle than with urban Scots or those from the Victorian-era onwards. 

It made me laugh in places, this moderately hokey tale of a Borders' ne'er-do-well, always short of money, always hungry with a long-suffering, gossiping and not very bright wife, too many children and daft ideas of the ways he'll rise above his lowly station. Is it a ghost-tale?  Not really although there is definitely an uncanny twist. Is it a homily to thrift and the rewards of hard work? Not at all, although a prodigious annual harvest of fruit might make you think so at first. Anyway, it's an enjoyable, gentle satire. Well worth reading, it has earned its place in Mr. Hensher's review of 250 years of British short story telling.

Monday, February 08, 2016

You've got mail

The course outlines, reading lists and timetables for my return to full-time study dropped into my ANU mail box this morning. Reads quickly then takes a deep breath ... 


Image result for twelfth night
Mark Rylance in the Balasco Theater Production
- ENGL2075 - Creative Writing
- ENGL3005 - 16th, 17th and 18th Century Literature
- FILM1002 - Introduction to Film Studies
- HUMN1001 - Digital Culture: Being Human in the Information Age

There are fifteen hours of teaching / contact time plus an assumed additional study time of thirty hours. Excuse me, that's more than my contractual obligations in my last job - than in any full-time job I've had.

There are no exams, thank goodness. But there are going to be as many assessed components as there are weeks in the semester. Maybe more once you count up - by which I mean me by the way - once I count up tutorial participation, tutorial presentations, workshop projects, weekly 'quizzes', obligatory essays and a creative writing portfolio.

Then there are the reading lists. Voluminous is a word that comes to mind. The required Week One reading looks like this (with plenty of 'further suggestions' in case boredom sets in).

  • Orhan Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase”
  • Rilke's “Letters to a Young Poet”
  • Helen Garner, “I”
  • William Shakespeare, "Twelfth Night" and "Sonnets" (not all of them, obviously)
  • Corrigan, Timothy, and Patricia White."The Film Experience: An Introduction". Chapter 1 (Encountering Film) and Chapter 10 (History) plus two screenings
  • Nicholas Carr, “Does the Internet Make us Dumber?”
  • Douglas Rushkoff, “Narrative Collapse”, from Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
  • Genevieve Roberts, “Google Effect: is technology making us stupid?”
Week One!

I must hope the answer to the questions posed by Nicholas Carr and Genevieve Roberts is a resounding "no" or I'm in trouble. Actually, I'm being disingenuous there. I already know the answer: of course neither the Internet nor technology are making us dumber.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining about any of the above (no matter how much mock-horror I may suggest). This is exactly what I packed-in my job for. Scary. Challenging. Exciting.

The best decision I've made in years. 

Tally-ho.

    Sunday, February 07, 2016

    Start Writing Fiction MOOC - Week 3 done

    Image result for long and winding road
    The long and winding road ...?
    This week in our Open University MOOC has been the most valuable of the course so far, largely because of an exercise in original writing with structured feedback from fellow students. I received three responses to the exercise I submitted yesterday (there's a brief mention of that in my previous post below). After sleeping on the comments of my reviewers I posted these thoughts to the MOOC discussion board.
    I received three responses within an hour of lodging my first draft. That was both surprising and super-helpful. The guidance I received from my peers was made particularly effective because each one gave similar comments in more or less the same areas - 
    • too many numbers and nerdy facts in my opening section, bordering on the tedious. How right. 
    • Strong evocation of place. Phew. 
    • Less strong (bordering on invisible) illustration of character ... oops on a course predicated on the centrality of character. 
    • readers' interest returned when the nervous kangaroo pricked up its ears then looked north. Saved by an outback animal!
     My peers have really helped me to step back, look again at the text and ask myself what I'm attempting to do and, therefore, consider how best to pull off whatever that might be. I have asked myself if I truly have the germ of a story at all. In an earlier exercise I knew where my story would go; knew the last line. With this peer-reviewed exercise I've asked myself, 'where did you think you were going next?' 'How does it end? 
    Do we need to be able to answer such questions before we start writing? I thought, maybe not but I'm now not so sure. 
    Thank you reviewers. 
    So ... still making progress, I hope. On to week four.