Yesterday was our Probus meeting so I didn't get around to posting anything on the blog. Now that I've given up the Writing and Poetry groups, Probus is one of the few regular activities I have and you'd think that I would look forward to going each month. The other men are all pleasant and friendly, the guest speakers are usually interesting and the morning tea provided by the Bowls Club ladies is great. But, I'd be just as happy to stay home instead. I know that everybody needs to have some sort of social life if they want to stay functioning but I find enough at home to stimulate me and I often feel resentful if I have to interrupt what I had planned for the day just to attend a, sometimes, meaningless meeting.
I hope nobody from the Probus Club is reading this but my excuse is that I've always been anti-social and am happiest when I am engrossed in some solitary activity.
Four Strong Winds is about a lighthouse-keeper. Now that's a job I might have enjoyed, being isolated in a remote location with no chance of anyone knocking on the door to interrupt me. Bliss!
FOUR STRONG WINDS 2023
Lester came from a long line of lighthouse keepers but he was the first to have such an exotic name. His father and grandfather were both called Jack and, if he had taken the trouble to check, he might have found several more Jacks in his family tree. However, his mother was a fan of horse-racing and he was named in honour of Lester Piggott, the famous UK jockey. It could have been worse, he often said. He might have been born the year that Michelle Payne won the Melbourne Cup and who knows what his Mum would have made of that.
Even though more and more Australian lighthouses were being converted to automatic operation, Lester was confident there was still a future for him. Currently he was stationed at the famous lighthouse on Maatsuyker Island. It was a blowy place and Lester used to say that the wind came from four directions. Four strong winds, each with its own identity. The north wind brought hints of the dust and dryness of the Australian Outback, the east wind had a whisper of frangipani and the tang of sauvignon blanc grapes in the New Zealand vineyards. The south wind blew off Antarctica and brought the icy golf-ball size hailstones which pock-marked the dome of the lantern house. Finally, the west wind, the strongest of all had the edge of salt air, and the faint memory of the tar in the rigging of the sailing ships which harnessed the Roaring Forties to bring explorers and adventurers to the lands of the south seas.
It was all nonsense of course. A wind is a wind and, in fact, the prevailing wind was the west wind which blew unrelentingly day and night. Lester, though, was quite impressed with the images he had conjured up in describing the wind and he wondered whether he might put that undoubted talent to good use by becoming a writer.
Although Lighthouse Keepers had regular tasks to be caried out, there were many hours to fill in. The station had good internet access but Lester soon became tired of Netflix. There was one other lighthouse keeper stationed there too but he was an odd fellow and kept very much to himself and seemed content to sit in his room reading or filling in one of the countless puzzle books he had brought with him.
Where do you start if you want to become a writer? A perfunctory search of the internet gave Lester some good ideas about what he might think about. He knew he should start off with shorter pieces and followed the advice he found somewhere that 800 words was a reasonable target. He wrote pieces of fiction and of non-fiction. He wrote letters and exotic recipes, he attempted poems and even sermons and speeches of thanks in the unlikely event that he won a prestigious award.
All went well for a while but Lester craved some feedback. He, again, searched the internet until he found an on-line Writing Group which welcomed him as a member; the moderator and other members were seemingly delighted to have in their midst someone from such an exotic location. The participants were presented with a weekly task to write on a particular topic or using a particular style, and then would present them to the group as a whole at a regular Zoom meeting.
It worked very well for Lester, at first, but he gradually became aware that a small group of predominantly middle-aged women in the group were showing signs of being shocked at some of the things he wrote. He accepted it was his own fault as he enjoyed surprising people and he enjoyed their reaction. He began to call them the Four Strong Winds because they attacked him from different directions and in different ways.
Lester was unsure whether they were genuinely upset at some of his subject matter and, of course, he had no one to ask for advice, isolated as he was in this god-forsaken rock in the Southern Ocean. He managed to send a surreptitious note to the moderator who advised him to shrug it off and keep focusing on his writing. In fact, he was told, good writing has to be memorable and authors have to use whatever tricks they can devise to keep their readers’ attention. Shocking the readers into some reaction is as valid a way of making his writing memorable as any other.
Life went on for Lester. His stories probably didn’t improve as much as he had hoped. The couple of stories he entered into various competitions sank without a trace, others he offered to obscure publications were politely rejected. However, his fellow-lighthouse keeper picked up one story by chance one day, pronounced that he liked it and asked Lester to make sure he was allowed to read everything he wrote in the future.
You have to start small.
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