First, GOES: still marching on. Slowly - what do you expect - we have a joint age 164 now! We haven't been travelling a great deal due to a problem finding affordable travel insurance, but we have a reliable team in the villages who keep an eye on what needs doing and making sure it gets done properly!
A school has been re-roofed, homemakers have been supplied with bags of cement to weather-proof their walls. School fees and teachers’ wages have been paid. GOES has covered medical expenses for several elderly people and children – and covered the wedding expenses of a couple of friends.
Funding has been sufficient; several friends have made regular contributions, Gift Aid has refunded income directly to the GS bank account, and we have tithed our income to the charity.
The Malinding Village books bring in a small (tiny?) regular income. The two ‘dark novels’, Chasing Freedom Home, and Story’s End told the story of a dystopian society so for the present work in progress I’ve chosen a more gentle word, populated by good-natured ghosts. I’ll publish a few first-draft pages later.
Here it is - provisional title is Ghost, writing?
I'm
on a boat. This friend, Karen, lent m e her boat.
'Call
me Nameless' she said. 'It's a basic boat' she said. 'Simple, like
me. The less there is means there's less to go wrong. It's a boat. A
hull, a cabin roof, furniture from Ikea, and an engine. It's a proper
boat engine, strong as a horse, never goes wrong – there's fourteen
million of them in boats all over the world – perfect piece of
design. Can't go wrong. Send me a postcard from Runcorn. Don't worry,
the boat knows the way. Bon voyage.'
What's
a postcard, I feel you asking. How should I know? There's something I
do know. The perfect engine, as used in zillions of boats all over
the world, won't start. Sorry, that's wrong too; it won't start
again. It started yesterday. Perfectly. So quiet you couldn't hear it
running. You can't hear it not running either. Silence all round.
Just like that library my dad bangs on about all the time. You’d
think silence would breed silence, wouldn't you?
Swans
breed swans. Cygnets. Swans in the future tense. Somebody said my dad
disliked swans. They attacked a canoe he was paddling across Hickling
Broad, forty years ago. I was about minus fifteen at the time,
waiting to be an egg or a cell or a seed. Perm any two of three and
you might get me. What's a Hickling anyway?
Anyway,
here I am. You might want to know where 'here' is. I'll tell you this
for free, you're not half as curious as I am. Let's look around; what
can I see? I can see water. The water is about thirty miles long and
forty feet wide, and three feet deep. I'm glad we're using Imperial
again, that metric stuff was fine for people who like counting on
their fingers and toes; there's no variety in it. There are trees,
assorted shapes and sizes. One tried to get into the boat yesterday;
big ugly thing, branches everywhere, loaded with gazillions of
imitation furry caterpillars. I hope they’re imitations. I'm not
Thomas a Kempis, what do I know? I know Nameless omitted to tell me
about invading trees. Or ignition keys; the sort of ignition keys
that get stuck in the lock and won't start the engine because really
it's the key to Nameless's house's front door. It's the master key,
switches all the computers and the washing machine and the swimming
pool filter and, oh, and everything that needs switching in her life.
Just not the boat; perhaps because it's broken in half and I don't
know where the other half is.
I
do know that we’re drifting along the canal. I do know that we’re
heading for a bridge hole and I can see that we’re going to miss
the hole and hit the bridge. The bridge should be all right, it’s
been there for two hundred years. I’m worried about the boat
because I’m on it. It’s fragile and I’m even fragiler. Look,
don’t worry, I survive. I live to think these thoughts, don’t I?
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