Today I went to turn on the hot tap in the bathroom and gave myself and electric shock. I did not expect this to happen. I would never expect that to happen. Only in India. Anyway it was a unique experience worth recording for the sake of a evoking a smile on my lips in the distant future, but now, onto the main piece.

Five hundred words, eh? Apparently that’s the size of the average piece of travel writing. I’ve been doing that thing again where I give thought to the future. Since I’ve been telling myself that I’ll do a update sometime soon, and since I am travelling it made sense to do some research onto travel writing. Doesn’t look like it’s for me. Apparently it’s 10% writing and 90% marketing. One individual described it as writing about 80 towns in 90 days. However there is something about it that grabs me. Not the money (which i hear is rubbish) or the glory (can you name more than a fist full of travel writers?) but the experience itself. The thought that you would get paid, no matter how little, to make an observation on something, anything, along an angle that no one has previously viewed it. Making a career in developing new eyes that see the world different to everyone else. Well. That’s an intriguing prospect.

                However glorious dreams aside the my brief research delivered to me an insight about my own writing. This writing, these words that you read right now and all the posts before them arn’t for you. They’re not for my friends and family, (barring Aunty Joyce and Uncle Joe, for who I can honestly say are the only audience I desire beyond my future self) you just happen to be my mental editors who ensure that I keep the writing upto something resembling a legible manner. These pieces are not even for me. After all I’m living the experience firsthand and barring the pleasure of the composition there’s no real reason for me to spend my time typing away. All these updates are for future me. Could you describe in detail what happened to you on the 7^th of last month? Moving beyond the fact that on the 7^th of last month I was probably not even aware of the date, I know that I couldn’t do it. I’m living my youth in the manner that I choose, living experience that would simply have been beyond my comprehension 10 years ago. Who knows where I’ll be in 10 years time. Or who I’ll be for that matter. A father probably. So it seems important to me to make sure that i record the things that I’m likely going to want to remember. And why post it on line at all then, i ask myself. Well, it makes sure that I actually write and don’t just have the intention to write and it allows myself to curb the guilt that builds up when I fail to contact everyone that I should, and everyone that I want to. At least these way anyone concerned can satisfy themselves that I’m still alive and happy.

                I’v actually been writing quite a lot in this last month. Actually a wrote a heap around 3 weeks ago, and haven’t done much since. I had the desire to write a novel sized story (I won’t say ‘a novel’ because even in my own head that’s beyond pretentious.) before my 22^nd birthday passed me by. By that I mean i wished to write a complex story spanning an extended time period involving numrious different character totalling around 80-100,000 words. I got just under 13,000 down. Which I recon is the same as attempting a 5 hour marathon, and then stopping after 30 min. It’s not that i don’t have the desire to write, it’s that i didn’t realise it would be so hard! I could wing it for the first chunk, but then it went beyond the realms of my imagination into our world once more. This week excuse for existence that i so studiously try and escape. Alas it turns out that in order to write an alternative history, you’re knowledge of the original thing has to be up to scratch. My knowledge of common life in 16^th century India, unfortunately, leaves a lot to be desired. None the less I did try to write what I know, and write it honestly. Or at least I would have done if I had in fact gotten to the meat of the matter. But as you have heard, this failed to occur. Surprised anyone?

                I did however put two and two together and get 26. If the average travel article is around 500 words, this apparently being the attention span of your casual reader, then those 13,000 words represent 26 different articles. So I’m a thinking maybe it would have been better to have written 26 different small articles, rather than one big flop. And by better i should point out that I simply mean more interesting. Have I mentioned the day I got hit with a stomach bug, altitude sickness and potentially heat stroke? It wasn’t an enjoyable experience by conventional standard’s, but none the less that it was intensely interesting. I’m not too fussed as to whether conventional wisdom holds the experience to be positive or negative, as long as its new. So the thought is that for each of these different experiences I partake, I’ll try and write a lively piece under 1000 words (because let’s be realistic, I do tend to use an unnecessary amount of words.) that’s both centred around something other than myself and is in some way informative. These will go parallel to my usual dribbling meanderings which I’m convinced I’ll truly appreciate in years to come. Verbal snapshots with a the flavour of my current personality. Tastier than any lollipop.

                Also this means that not only will I try and keep my updates to sizable portions, I’ll actually try and upload them with some regularity. I should start now really, but I’m tired, I’m getting up early and quite frankly I can think of nothing interesting enough to conjure from my memory. So instead I’ll sleep on it and invert the old Chinese proverb. I’ll do tomorrow what i should do now. Although i will very briefly leave you with this. It took me a couple of hours to figure out. But of much greater importance, I encountered it on the same day that I lost my ring so it can act as a memory trigger.

                The Cathedral.

Your trapped inside a gigantic cathedral and in order to escape you need to accumulate 100 meters of rope. (You shouldn’t ask why, such is the nature of riddles.) At each end of the building there is a rope tied to the ceiling. For all intents and purposes these ropes are infinitely long, since you only need 100 meters from them and they are very long. They are not long enough, however, to reach each other (or meet in the middle ext.) They go from the ceiling to the floor. You have the ability to cut the rope, just as you have the ability to climb and other rudimentary knowledge. You also have the ability to fall 20 meters, but not one meter more. The rope can not be unpicked and re-platted to make, for instance, 10 meters into 20.

How do you acquire your hundred meters?

To the Moon and back, Paul

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