Begin­ning of discussion.

It is only nat­ural for humans to want to fly. The human desire to move beyond the laws of grav­ity and take to the skies is the busi­ness of all pilots, astro­nauts and moti­va­tional speak­ers who talk in metaphors. And there are many more of us who would like to make it our busi­ness. Most of us have, at point or another, wished for the abil­ity to fly with­out the use of planes, rock­ets or super-strength spider-webbing. As chil­dren you may have actu­ally tried to fly, run­ning around the back­yard and attempt­ing to ‘take off’. And, unless you were Peter Parker, you would have frus­trat­ingly remained grounded. Nev­er­the­less, many of us con­tinue to dream about fly­ing and still wish for the power to zoom about in the air.

But I don’t believe that fly­ing would be such a fan­tas­tic thing. Sure, you would get that instant feel­ing of free­dom as your feet left the ground and you watched the world shrink under your shoes; but things would get bad pretty quickly after that.

For one, it would be cold. Really cold. The first layer of the Earth’s atmos­phere is called the Tro­pos­phere and it stretches from the ground up to around ten kilo­me­tres above sea level. So assum­ing you did sud­denly one day acquire the abil­ity to fly, you would find your­self soar­ing around in the Tro­pos­phere – which might sound like a mid-air amuse­ment park, but is actu­ally a place that gets 6.5° Cel­sius colder for every kilo­me­tre higher you go. Plus the faster you flew the more the wind chill fac­tor would increase and you’d prob­a­bly have to put a wind­cheater on. And you would soon encounter clouds, which are the bitu­men of heaven in car­toons but in real­ity would prob­a­bly be more like walk­ing into a meat locker wear­ing noth­ing but eat­able ice-cream undies. You would very soon be miss­ing your warm bed blan­kets. And pos­si­bly your toes, should frost­bite set in.

Then there would be the issue of fly­ing posi­tions. Fly­ing in itself is a glam­orous thing and you could expect to gain extra ‘cool’ once air­borne (unless you are wear­ing that wind­cheater, of course). The fly­ing process would involve you shoot­ing up into the air ‘ele­va­tor style’ (i.e. head first) and then mov­ing your­self into the ‘super­man posi­tion’ (i.e. par­al­lel to the ground with fists out in front). Except that it prob­a­bly wouldn’t work out that way. You would still be bound by the laws of grav­ity in the Tro­pos­phere and get­ting into the ‘super­man posi­tion’ – let alone main­tain­ing it – would be almost impos­si­ble. Most likely you’d end up fly­ing in a posi­tion that resem­bled a child hang­ing over a fence on its stom­ach, except with­out the fence.

As I demon­strate here…

…this would not be a glam­orous way to fly.

How­ever, the most com­pelling rea­son not to go fly­ing is that it is – in fact – ille­gal for a per­son to go fly­ing.  All things that fly – planes, bal­loons, blimps, even hang glid­ers – need licences to do so. The Civil Avi­a­tion Safety Author­ity (CASA) rules the skies in Aus­tralia and they basi­cally ensure that no one goes up into the sky with­out the CASA know­ing about it. Since radars are already capa­ble of show­ing birds in flight, detect­ing a human in the sky would be sim­ple enough. Espe­cially if said human was fly­ing in the shape of a child hang­ing over a fence.

And so you see the dan­gers, dis­com­forts and fash­ion per­ils of human-only flight. It is not my inten­tion to ruin child­hood dreams, but we must let go of that desire to fly. Move on.There are other things that need now to be con­sid­ered. Like how can we make our­selves invis­i­ble? Or how can we imbue our­selves with X-Ray vision? And do peo­ple who sell trench coats on the black mar­ket keep their ille­gal trench coats on the insides of their trench coats?

End of dis­cus­sion (unless you would like to leave your own thoughts On Fly­ing below).

Deleted Scenes. They’re bonus mate­r­ial used to pad out the spe­cial fea­tures of a DVD. We’re always very inter­ested to watch them and they almost always let us down. ‘Oh, I see why they didn’t use that,’ we say. ‘But it’s nice the pro­duc­ers put it on the DVD for us.’

Keep­ing this in mind I now present a deleted scene from my first, only and best­selling (in Per­sonal Best terms, any­way) novel The Great­est Blog­ger in the World. This ‘deleted scene’ was orig­i­nally a char­ac­ter sketch that I wrote dur­ing the writ­ing of Great­est Blog­ger to flesh out the rela­tion­ship between protagonist-blogger Char­lie and his best friend Phat­tius Beats.

I have given it a light copy edit for rea­sons of style and gram­mar, but it is oth­er­wise untouched since I first wrote it. It wouldn’t have worked in the con­text of the rest of the book, but I did end up using a cou­ple of lines in the final text.

So, enjoy. In an, ‘Oh, I see why he didn’t pub­lish that, but it’s nice he put it on his blog for us’ kind of way.

DELETED SCENE

Fea­tur­ing Char­lie Ridge and Phat­tius Beats

I looked down at the address that Phat­tius had writ­ten on the back of a busi­ness card. I was just around the cor­ner from the des­ti­na­tion – the Splishy Café. I flipped the card and realised that it was Phattius’s own busi­ness card. Phat­tius Beats – Busi­ness­man and Pro­fes­sional Opin­ion Con­sul­tant. So these were what Phat­tius had been mak­ing in art class that day when he said he’d ‘thought of noth­ing good to make’, despite work­ing hard for hours.

    I turned the cor­ner and there was the Splishy Café, right next to the Mr Sploshy’s Hair­dressers. Phat­tius was already seated at a metal­lic table in the sun out the front of the Splishy Café. I sat down oppo­site him and put my school­bag at my feet.‘Good morn­ing,’ I said.

    Phat­tius was sip­ping at a half-drunk cap­puc­cino. ‘Morn­ing, brother! I hope you don’t mind meet­ing me here before school?’

    ‘No, it’s fine.’

    ‘I would have met you at school but I just had a meet­ing with my accountant.’

    ‘Phat­tius, you have an accountant?’

    ‘Well, no. He was my dad’s accoun­tant. I was sell­ing him cal­cu­la­tors. I got a whole bunch cheap the other day. You want one? Half-price for friends. Plus you don’t have to buy bat­ter­ies because they work when you stand in the sun or near a microwave.’

    ‘No, no thanks. What did you want to talk about? I had to leave Joshua to feed Bar­code this morn­ing and to be hon­est I don’t know which of them will end up eat­ing the most duck food.’

    ‘Well, I appre­ci­ate you com­ing this morn­ing, brother. It’s not every bestie who would come to a meet­ing before school.’

    ‘Every bestie? You have others?’

    ‘I have a new prod­uct that I think I can start sell­ing to the kids at school.’

    ‘Really? Is it more excit­ing than calculators?’

    ‘It is, but it’s a bit more abstract. I want to sell Childhood.’

    ‘Childhood?’

    ‘Childhood.’

    ‘Maybe you should stick to calculators?’

    ‘How often to do you hear adults say­ing, “Child­hood was the best time of my life” or “Youth is wasted on the young”?’

    ‘Well, Grandma does say that a lot. She’s for­ever curs­ing Joshua’s soft, soft skin.’

    ‘His face is like a rub­ber mask.’

    ‘So elasticy.’

    ‘The point is that us kids are being forced to grow up really fast these days.’

    It was true. Lots of kids from school already had jobs. Cathy Old­beck did a few hours every week behind the counter of her aunty’s car­pet shop, Brent Looter worked at the Trunk Fast Food Restau­rant and Rory Corey filled in for his dad some­times as a secu­rity guard at the Schlock Pub of Excel­lence. That place is the worst. Its slo­gan is Get Schlocked at the Schlock.

    Phat­tius con­tin­ued. ‘So how would you feel if I said to you, “Char­lie, I have the solu­tion to being a kid”?’

    ‘I would say, “I’m already a kid, I don’t have any­thing to worry about – least of all NOT being a kid.”’

    ‘Yes, but you’re more than just a kid. I mean, how often do your par­ents get you to wash the dishes, sweep the floors, take your lit­tle brother to kinder?’

    ‘All the time,’ I said, which wasn’t exactly true because some­times I tell Dad I don’t want to walk Joshua to kinder and he sends Bar­code off with Joshua instead. Bar­code doesn’t mind – in fact he loves going to kinder with Joshua. Bar­code is good at beak paint­ing, he loves going down the slide and he takes to the lawn sprin­kler like a duck takes to water.

    ‘You see,’ said Phat­tius, ‘apart from school a real kid’s time should be spent play­ing video games, drink­ing from the noz­zles of slurpee machines and rid­ing around on the biggest dogs in the dog park. You know – kid stuff.’

    ‘I hear you Phat­tius, but how exactly are you going to sell this Child­hood thing?’

    Phat­tius reached down to his school­bag and brought back a big pile of papers. He passed the bun­dle over to me. There were about 100 pages all sta­pled together. The first page read You Can’t Be Young At Heart If Your Aorta Is Old: 10 Steps for Kids to Reclaim Their Own Child­hoods by Phat­tius Beats. It was a book. Phat­tius had writ­ten some kind of self-help book for kids.

    ‘So what do you think, Char­lie?’ Phat­tius asked. ‘Do you think it’ll sell? I wrote it myself. Last night.’

    ‘I’m not sure if this will sell as well as red cor­dial,’ I said, leaf­ing through the pages.

    ‘You don’t think it’s a good idea?’

    ‘No, no, it’s a good idea,’ I said, and it was. But books are a has­sle to get printed and annoy­ing to get into bookshops.

    ‘But…?’

    ‘But maybe it’s not a book,’ I said, look­ing up and smil­ing at Phat­tius. ‘Maybe it would be bet­ter as a blog?’

Copy­right  Andrew McDon­ald 2009

I had the great hon­our of being the sec­ond per­son EVA to speak at Melbourne’s Wheeler Cen­tre for Books, Writ­ing and Ideas in Feb­ru­ary this year. And whilst the highly-literate staff at the cen­tre were all very lovely to me on the night, who knows how they’d treat me now if they saw me using ‘words’ like EVA.

The night was suc­cess­ful, nobody heck­led me and a cou­ple of peo­ple even gig­gled. Or maybe they were sneez­ing. Any­way, you can decide for your­self — gig­gling or sneez­ing — by watch­ing the video of the ten-minute read­ing I did from The Great­est Blog­ger in the World below.

Wheeler Cen­tre 4 EVA!

These days if we want answers to ques­tions we turn to the inter­net. You can find the answer to almost any ques­tion online. But what is the most asked ‘how?’ ques­tion asked online? What set of instruc­tions do we as a race of peo­ple look to Google for the most? Allow me to spell it out for you. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

If you go to Google and search for some­thing that begins with ‘how to…’ you will be offered the most com­monly searched  ‘how to…’ phrases.

‘How to lose weight fast’ is pop­u­lar and ‘how to tie a tie’ is up there too. But at the top of the list is ‘how to kiss’. I myself remem­ber googling a sim­i­lar thing a few years back, once the girl germ rumours were proved to be noth­ing more than rumours. And with Valentine’s Day sched­uled for this Sun­day it sud­denly seems impor­tant to look at the hows and tos and fros of kissing.

Kiss­ing can­not be sat­is­fac­to­rily achieved by sim­ply run­ning to first base on a base­ball field or by sit­ting up in a tree and spelling out verbs with another per­son. There is no fail-safe plan of attack that can lead to kiss­ing nor ensure that said kiss­ing is enjoy­able for all.

The best thing a per­son can do is think the right things whilst kiss­ing. Kiss­ing is a psy­cho­log­i­cal activ­ity con­trolled 98% by the brain and 2% by excess saliva. So here are some topic sug­ges­tions for think­ing and not think­ing about dur­ing kissing.

GOOD FOR THINKING ABOUT DURING KISSING

1. But­ter­flies
2. Eye­lashes
3. Lips
4. A world with­out cold sores
5. Warm show­ers
6. Freshly-ironed pants
7. Baby horses
8. Foal
9. Sponge cakes
10. Any­thing dap­pled (exlud­ing infec­tious diseases)

NOT GOOD FOR THINKING ABOUT DURING KISSING

1. Wind­mills
2. Jack­ham­mers
3. Jack Nichol­son
4. Gums
5. Bleed­ing gums
6. Heli­copters
7. Stilt walk­ing
8. Eng­land
9. Lick­ing the spoon
10. Cir­cu­lar breathing

Keep read­ing →

It’s an excit­ing time to be liv­ing in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia, The World. Last year Mel­bourne was announced as the sec­ond UNESCO City of Lit­er­a­ture, closely beat­ing out Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago for the honour.

This meant that Mel­bourne needed to find an entity to be the cen­tre­piece of the new City of Lit­er­a­ture. After scout­ing around for peo­ple who could build such a cen­tre­piece, the engi­neers that built the Collins Class sub­marines were even­tu­ally over­looked in favour of world-renowned arts man­ager Chrissy Sharp. A shame really because book read­ings in sub­marines are da bomb. Or at least, da torpedo.

Chrissy Sharp, who was fresh from a stint at London’s Sadler’s Wells The­atre, is the kind of author­i­ta­tive inter­na­tional fig­ure who should never be described as being ‘fresh from a stint’. She is not a footballer.

Chrissy hired local pub­lish­ing guru Michael Williams to run the pro­gram, turquoise was cho­sen to be the offi­cial colour of the cen­tre and things were under­way. But there was one thing miss­ing – a name.

The cen­tre was even­tu­ally called the Wheeler Cen­tre (a name that, for me, con­jures up images of axles) after Tony and Mau­reen Wheeler, who founded Lonely Planet in Mel­bourne 30 years ago, and whom are donors to the cen­tre. And no they didn’t name the cen­tre after them­selves. Where do you think we are? Pottersville?

The Wheeler Cen­tre set up shop in the south wing of the State Library of Vic­to­ria and a num­ber of Melbourne’s small lit­er­ary organ­i­sa­tions — such as the Emerg­ing Writ­ers’ Fes­ti­val and Express Media — moved into the cen­tre, where they are free to use the pho­to­copier and cof­fee machine when­ever they want.

Now we’re but days away from the cen­tre offi­cially open­ing with its big kick-off event – A Gala Night of Sto­ry­telling. It will be the first time in Aus­tralian his­tory that the word ‘Gala’ has been used out­side of the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tional Com­edy Festival.

Just two days after the Gala is the first Debut Mon­day – a recur­ring event that sees four new writ­ers read­ing from their books on Mon­day evenings. I will be appear­ing at the debut Debut Mon­day event at 6pm on Feb­ru­ary 15th where I’ll be read­ing from The Great­est Blog­ger in the World. Bob Franklin, Sofie Laguna and Madeleine Hamil­ton will also be there read­ing from their books. It’s a free event, there will be wine on hand and I’m told that all the authors will be read­ing from their books out loud. I know, right!

If you’re in Mel­bourne or you’re going to be in Mel­bourne soon have a look at the Wheeler Cen­tre pro­gram and pop by some­time. I’m sure they’ll be glad to have to. So long as you don’t tell them their state-of-the-art lit­er­ary cen­tre reminds you of axles.

www.wheelercentre.com