A Little Gathering

By Pat Moore

For the five years that I have been on the writers' site Gather.com, I have posted a multitude of articles. I figured that perhaps it was time to give some of them a wider audience, and so A Little Gathering was born.

Within you will find a variety of little gems, from my exploits as a Dumb Tourist, some Conversations With My Daughter (a look into the mind of a three-year-old), a variety of Rants and Rambles, some exercises in 100-word fiction (otherwise known as drabbles), and a few short stories.

So please, sit back, relax and browse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pat Moore
• Release date: Sep 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301490387

Pat Moore

Lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Is married, and a father. Has a day job in information systems, and writes for fun. Is currently writing silly stories for his two young girls.Has an email address, othallan at orcon dot net dot nz, which he checks occasionally, and a Faceboook page which he has forgotten the login for. Doesn't tweet, as he feels that anything worth saying in 140 characters or fewer has probably already been said.Yup, that's pretty much it.

Book preview

A Little Gathering

By Pat Moore

Copyright 2012 Pat Moore

Smashwords Edition

Cover image Puddles, courtesy of Gillian Moore

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Dumb Tourism

How Not to Leave Florence

Chilling in San Gimignano

Bangkok Special

Doing Nothing in Bali

Koh Samui

Conversations With My Daughter

Shopping

Questions

Naughtiness

Avocado

Negotiating

Pee

Puddles

Goodness

Rants and Random Rambling

Men Shouldn’t Cook

The Manwich

Dyslexics Rlue!

Deer Ser

There’s Something About Mary

The Black Art of the Job Interview

Baby’s First Swear Word

Dear Mr Abernathy

Apologies

An Alternate Reading of the Treaty of Waitangi

A Tourist’s Guide to Auckland

One Hundred Word Challenges

Poetry... Well, Sort Of

Short Stories

You Knew

A Holiday, Somewhere in the World

Resident Ghost

Michael and Titania

The Last Cinderella

~~

Foreword

This is a vanity project. I don’t think I’m shocking anybody by saying that.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a published author. Actually back then nothing less than worldwide fame of the likes of David Eddings and Anne McCaffrey, both of whom I was reading at the time, would do. So, I wrote my first novel. Five years and two rewrites later - all in longhand, too - it was finished. It was the first of a fantasy-slash-science fiction series that would take the world by storm; an epic battle of good and evil that spanned worlds and generations, and the perfect showcase for my writing talents.

It was also quite terrible. Not mildly awful but completely, spectacularly and utterly terrible.

So, I hid it in the back of a cupboard and never spoke of it again. My writing was reduced to a jumble of plot outlines, notes and scraps kept in the back of the same cupboard, a handful of letters to the editor, a couple of competition entries, and various other ephemera. I never lost the dream of seeing my name in print but as the years progressed, I realised that it was less and less likely to become a reality.

Then five years ago, I was introduced to Gather.com. To explain, the Gather website is to writers what Terra Magica was to Pinocchio... well, except for that whole turning into donkeys bit. Gather is a place where one can indulge in every literary fetish one can think of: poetry or prose, satire or tragedy, reportage or fiction, stylised or rambling. It is a place full of people dedicated to sharing their own work, and to challenging, collaborating and critiquing the work of others. Gather.com is a writer’s paradise.

I am having a ball there, but I am no closer to creating my magnum opus.

Life has a habit of getting in the way of such plans. I am no longer a teenager with the time to commit to writing another terrible novel. In any case, I have written more for Gather in the last five years than I have for anything else in the fifteen years before that -- the fact that none of it is contiguous is beside the point. And when fellow Gatherer and guest editor Pam Brittain embarked upon a project to e-publish Twisted Shorties, an anthology of Gather members’ works (an anthology she graciously allowed me to submit some articles to) it occurred to me that I may have the volume of Gather work to do the same. So here we are, a selection of my posts on Gather, neatly compiled into an e-book for the benefit of non-Gatherers.

I fully expect it to sit on a metaphorical shelf, accumulating metaphorical dust, from now until forever. But that doesn’t matter because now I can finally say, albeit with a degree of exaggeration, that I am a published author.

Yay, me.

~~

Dumb Tourism

I love reading travel writing. Not just the likes of Intrepid Travellers such as Paul Theroux and Michael Palin and PJ O’Rourke - although Holidays in Hell remains one of my best reads ever - but also the sort of article that gets slipped into the Saturday edition of the local newspaper and pads out local tourism magazines. These do not advance the art of great writing, nor do they contain the deep insight and unvarnished viewpoint of the Intrepid Traveller. They are puff pieces designed to entice Dumb Tourists into parting with their money. They come with disclaimers that read something like John Smith flew on XYZ Airlines and stayed courtesy of ABC Hotels, disclaimers that announce to the reader that John Smith very probably has the best job in the world.

I read these articles because, unlike the works of the great writers, they describe experiences I can most aspire to. I am not an Intrepid Traveller. Intrepid Travellers revel in their environment: they roll in the dirt and sniff the locals’ bottoms and eat stuff off the side of the road. I am a Dumb Tourist, one of the worst, in fact. I do not travel; I go on holiday. I will fly halfway across the world but will not venture even a few kilometres from my hotel. I like to eat recognisable food while seated in a restaurant rather than something char-grilled on a skewer from a roadside stall. I like to lie next to a pool rather than trek up a mountain or over a jungle path, and I like locals to wear uniforms and bring me drinks rather than try to hustle me or pick my pocket.

This is why I am never going to make my living in the manner of Paul Theroux, Michael Palin, PJ O’Rourke or even John Smith. Dumb Tourism is too cosseted, safe, and anodyne to make riveting travel writing, and I am too narrow-minded a tourist to make a good travel writer. But, sometimes, Dumb Tourists can still manage to stuff it up.

I am living proof of that.

~~

How Not to Leave Florence

My wife works in the travel industry. She is organised. She makes lists and timetables and she keeps to them. She anticipates everything that can go wrong and she makes sure she can avoid or fix each one. She plans our holidays.

I do not work in the travel industry. I lose lists and ignore timetables. I see no need to review my plans and am constantly surprised when something goes wrong. I have never planned any of our trips except one. If you can see where this is going, raise your hand now.

It was 1998. My wife was finishing an extended stay with her cousin in Germany. She called me to say she was missing me. "Why don’t you come over? We could go to Italy together. You’ve always wanted to do that haven’t you? I just want to see you again. I miss you… Oh, and by the way, bring lots of money. I’ve run out." I booked the lot from New Zealand, and joined her for the last couple of weeks of her stay.

We flew down to Rome, which in September is eerily devoid of Romans. My wife found out the meaning of the word Saldi within about five seconds of arriving. Fortunately, I had brought lots of money. Then we caught the train to Florence and hired a car to see if this whole Tuscany thing lived up to its reputation. It did. So did the Italian driving. "Did you even see that scooter? You know the insurance won’t cover you if you kill him, don’t you? They drive on the right over here, Pat!"

We marvelled at the towers in San Gimignano, at the beaches at Viareggio and at the sunflowers everywhere else. We toured the Duomo, took rude photographs of Michelangelo’s David and ate ice cream in the evening on the Ponte Vecchio. All in all, we had a great holiday.

Then came the time to return to Frankfurt.

Now in my defence I must say that the official Florentine travel literature expressly said that Florence airport was regional only. All international flights depart from Pisa, and you can even book your baggage onto your flight ex Pisa straight from Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence. Great, I thought. We’ll catch a train up there in the morning, go check out the Leaning Tower, grab something to eat and still have plenty of time for our one o’clock flight. Which is what we did.

When we arrived at the airport, I could not locate our flight number on the board. Never mind. I figured I would just sort it out at check-in.

The woman at the counter looked at me quizzically. What do you want me to do with this? she asked, holding our tickets between her fingertips as though I’d given her a used tissue.

I want to check in. I replied.

But this ticket is from Florence.

Yes... I started to feel a little apprehensive. My wife was staring daggers into my back. I didn’t need to turn around to know this: I could feel it.

This is Pisa. Your flight leaves from Florence. You are at the wrong airport.

Oh.

Bugger.

I tried without success disguise my panic. "I thought that all international flights from Florence left from Pisa. That’s what it said in the brochure.