Thoughts E-Book

George Manus

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"Thoughts" was written in only 51 days, during which the author sat down at his computer every morning, with just one idea in mind, to get the thought written down, edited and corrected. He also reaches far and wide, writing about China, the building activities taking place in Spain, a Ford Fiesta and the snow in Norway. We thus understand very well that he after 51 days felt that enough was enough and proudly declared that that was that, had a glass of red wine and went for a long walk through the magnificent landscape surrounding him.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

The Diversity of Dashes

Tradition

CD carousel

Favorite Dream

Concience

Bomberos

Physition Control

Stopping smoking

Tennis Tournament

Hyundai Coupe

Rebajas

Reflexology

“Villages”

La Envia

Lucainena

The fire

Ford Fiesta

Birthday

Birdwatcher

Junta de Compensacion

The Presidents

Nature picture

Speeding ticket

Detour

China

Prostitution

The Architect

Blood pressure

Snowfilled Norway

Rotary Club

Golf Academy

Daily planning

Surviver

Cigar

Electricity

Evening paper

Snowboard course

UNICEF

Mr. No

Lucky Number

Wild animals

Icon

Pocket Memo

The Nectie

Design

St. Valentine

Autumn

Buying House

ID number

Green fee

Short Stories

The Skilift

Foreword

These “THOUGHTS”, from the first 51 days of 2001, are dedicated to my daughter, Anne-Marie.

It might just as well have been only a few days and why it ended up being 51 and didn’t continue, was probably because no plans were ever made for anything more than just putting a few “THOUGHTS” on paper.

I think it must have been other engagements which made them stop where they did. My writing was replaced by other activities such as putting ideas into inventions and subsequent production.

Anyway, it was not always easy to find time to write, for even though the “THOUGHTS” themselves were short and spontaneous, they were written on the actual day they happened.

The “THOUGHTS” were written in Cabrera in the South of Spain where we lived at the time, apart from the ones made when I was in Norway in connection with business.

I had, when these “THOUGHTS” were written, long since completed my “REFLECTIONS I” which had just been laid aside.

Now, some sixteen years later, the time has come to tidy up my writings with the idea in mind that perhaps some friends, acquaintances and others might like to have a look at them.

“THOUGHTS” were at the time written in English, and is now being published with the title “THOUGHTS - and Dashes”, together with my other books.

I thank Anne Schild for her help with the language, Morten Løfberg for his vignettes, Jan Arnt for his Dashes and front page and my friend Ole Praud for his invaluable consultancy work.

The South of Spain,

2017

George Manus

[email protected]

The Diversity of Dashes

For years – ever since I was a little boy – I have been drawing simple little dashes whenever I’m sitting about doing nothing. Early on I discovered that one’s thoughts flourish when one draws dashes – and the other way around. Early on I also discovered that a line can be drawn in many different ways and that a thin little line immediately comes to life, if one ends it with a little dip or a little jump. Two jumps makes one think of hills or perhaps of a woman’s breasts. One line and two dots make a face which, by the way, one can vary ad infinitum.

You yourself can try drawing a line and two dots ten times in a row, and you’ll see that no two are the same and, not least, that you’ve had a lot of new thoughts going through your mind in the process.

A short line is the simplest form of drawing. If one adds one wavy line, however, it reminds one of water, and seven wavy lines can make one think of an entire ocean.

If one draws lines in different directions like, for example, in a spider-web, then one’s mind starts thinking thoughts – or thought-spinning, as I call it.

The web is a work of art but also a predator’s trap, which holds on tight to the prey, making it suffer a long slow death until the spider takes pity on it and eats it – skin and all.

If one puts pencil to paper and starts drawing in a criss-cross pattern, structures often appear. Sometimes it’s just a mess, but other times one can see crooked or geometric structures and creatures: HEY, isn’t that a woman, a man, a clown, an animal or something completely different.

Then one’s thoughts follow the movement of the pencil or the brush and suddenly the lines turn into a VISUAL THOUGHT. Too fancy a word, which is why we in everyday speech only call it an illustration.

Sometimes we give the dash a title, which supports what the eye can see. Other times we play around with the title and give the work itself a name, so that one as viewer asks: HEY … why that title? And after some afterthought the viewer starts asking, if that’s what he really means, and then often sees new things in the motif.

Most often the little dash end up in a drawer somewhere and the best ones perhaps on a wall under glass and with a pretty frame around them.

Or in a book about THOUGHTS, where they provide the opportunity for pauses and afterthoughts.

Happy viewing.

Jan Arnt Architect MAA – Denmark 2017

Waves Fantasy Weave

Jan Arnt 2017

A short a long

A triangle, and a rod,

A bell that says Ding-Dang

A clock, a wall, a man

That is angry

A man who is angry

A wall, a clock

a short a long

A triangle, and a rod

A bell that says Ding-Dang.

Tradition

The fact that it is the first of January, meaning the first day of a new year, is always a bit special, providing of course that you have a good feeling about the ending of the old year. Or is that necessarily so? For many it may also be a relief to leave the past year behind and to start a new one from scratch.

Whatever way you look at it, there is something very fascinating about a book with 365 unprinted pages. One thing is for sure, the past year is already history, and what the new one will bring, no one can foresee. A number of assumptions can be made, but with very doubtful accuracy. It is 15 degrees Celsius in the air and the sun is shining from a blue sky.

This in itself is nothing very special, as most of the days here are sunny throughout the year.

Southern Spain, of course, about half an hour’s drive from the Mediterranean sea into the mountains of Cabrera.

If you want to find this place don’t ask for the hot, posh places, but seek information from people who have already decided that this is the place to live.

No two houses alike, small ones or big ones, they all fit beautifully into the landscape wherever they are placed, or rather designed.

The architectural blend is a mixture of Andalucian and Moorish style, and to avoid making them “stick out”, they are all painted different shades of terracotta.

When you have been away for a while, like we have for the last week which we spent in the western part of Andalucia, and you drive up the mountain side to your Shangri-La, it really gives you peace of mind to think about the fact that you have chosen the right place to live.

I am, however, very pleased that people have different tastes and desires.

Our strategy, at least as things look today, is to build between ten and twenty houses per year in the Urbanization.

These daily “thoughts“ should not generally refer so much to places as events, they should be short and just concentrate on those happenings which will be worth remembering when a new day starts and the past one becomes history.

It is already a tradition that we play golf on January the first, and so also this year.

A couple of birdies, or not to mention a hole in one, would more than qualify for making the day’s “up”, while playing badly would not qualify for a “down” unless it was a total disaster.

The reason for not making a “down” out of my bad play is, of course, because it happens rather too often and therefore would become too much of a repetition.

Nothing in the vicinity of birdies or a hole in one happened, nor was my play disastrous, so no qualification was achieved.

Apart from that we had a wonderful day on the course.

It is always important to find an excuse for your imprecise playing, but normally it would just remain an excuse, and seldom be related to facts.

O.K., my back is hurting more than it has for a long time, and that is where the “up” comes in.

Back home, the Jacuzzi, which takes a good half an hour to fill, was prepared while the fire in the lounge was lit.

My wife prepared a couple of glasses of champagne and some crackers with foie gras, leftover from the early days of Christmas.

With only my head above the water and its circulation gently hammering my body, a wonderful peace and good feeling comes to me on this first day of the new year.

With peace in my soul, I grab my Pocket Memo, the words of which I will convert into this text, knowing that I later, when reading it, will be able to bring back the wonderful feeling of the “ups” on this, the first day of the year 2001.

CD carousel

I have always believed that when things go wrong they really do. I will not here touch on the subject of how I at times get a feeling that my own mood can influence the stability of my computer. Surely there will come a day when I will write about that. Nothing is wrong with the computer, but with a much more down-to-earth couple of machines.

I have a lovely wife who serves me a cup of tea in bed every morning.

She could today, when returning with the cups, tell me that the dishwasher had been running all night without responding to the program. It is not more than three weeks since it was repaired for the same fault, so this was, of course, bad news at the beginning of the day.

The technicians normally come once a week to this area if they have got enough jobs to justify the trip from the town of Almeria about ninety kilometres from where we live.

Now it is only a matter of calling them and hoping for the best.

The positive thing is that the wind, which has been blowing all night, has stopped and that we have another sunny day ahead of us.

One of the fist things I do in the morning is to switch on a carousel with a hundred CD’s, which throughout the day will provide us with soft background music from a number of loudspeakers spread all over the house and terraces.

My wife is not always as happy as I am to have this music on, particularly when Maria Callas is giving it her best, and her mood is not prepared for it.

Mind you, she has nothing against Maria Callas but the timing must be right.

I press the remote control which, if I do not choose a particular CD, will automatically begin with Pavarotti’s beautiful voice, but there is no response.

After having read the instructions for use and tried all the tricks at hand, I had to give in and give up, as there was nothing I could do.

Unbelievable, what kind of statistics would tell you that something like this could happen on the same day.

Like winning in the lottery I believe.

This was definitely not our day and we felt far from winning in the lottery.

The CD player which now has served us for two years has been put aside to be brought to the repair shop for these types of instruments.

Now it remains to be seen if they can repair it at all, or if a new one will have to be bought on a later visit to Gibraltar.

I have not seen them for sale anywhere in Spain.

Black on white Jan Arnt 2017

Favorite Dream

I have heard that it is very important to have dreams when sleeping. Why that should be I don’t know. Everybody dreams it is said, even if one at times doesn’t remember the content of one’s dreams. There have been periods in my life when I have slept very little, an average maybe 4 hours a night. Normally I would say that a good night for me in this respect would be about five hours.

As my wife is a heavy sleeper, this means that I am awake about three hours more than her every night. So what do I do about it?

At more difficult times of my life I tried to write instead of just lying in bed doing nothing.

That helped me get through, as reading at night never gave me pleasure.

I suppose most of us have some favourite dreams and some we hate.

For me the type of dream that gives me a nightmare is the one that always leaves me short of time to fulfil something.

The dreams may be very different, but the theme is that I always seem to be delayed. Either I cannot find the right way to somewhere I should be at a certain time, or I am being held up by the most incredible situations occurring.

It always ends by waking up, breathing heavily and sweating.

My favourite dream is really wonderful. It has indirectly to do with Newton and the force of gravity.

Imagine, by pure strength of will I lean slowly backwards and find myself floating in the air.

I can then, with the most incredible good feeling, control a kind of flight, either indoors or out in the open.

The flight is controlled by minor, relaxed movements. Never is there any fear that I shall fall down, as I have always landed safely back on my feet.

This type of dream, when it happens, almost always takes place late in my sleep.

The general problem is that I may have only one of my favourite dreams for every three to five of the other ones.

Last night however, something very rare happened, I had one of each.

The first one took place on a golf course which scarily had any fairways and greens, but looked more like a wood.

We were a flight of four fighting our way through the course while the next flight was crowding in from behind. I do not know why we did not let them pass like we normally would.

It was muddy and vet and I hit it the ground more than the ball. To top it off, I lost several balls.

To make a long story short, I think we also lost our way on one hole, ending up on another.

We never finished the round, and when I woke up sweating, the last thing I remember was that I was missing a four iron which I must have lost during the struggle.

Half dozing for the next few hours I went into the wonderful feeling described above.

It all happened indoors, like on a covered tennis court. There was one person watching, which I cannot remember ever having happened before.

This gave an extra good feeling, because I then had a witness to my doing the impossible.

After having been floating around the room for quite a while, I landed safely, after which I gently woke up.

To my daughter Anne-Marie on her 20th birthday:

The best thing about life is that it`s yours.

The most difficult can be to acknowledge it, to take the initiative and do something about it. GM

Concience

I suppose conscience is something we are all concerned about. Whether it be good conscience or bad, it will always be there as part of our daily life. Then there is something about suppressing a bad conscience and the pleasant feeling one gets from a good one.

It may have to do with important things or just silly little things, but it is always on our conscience.

Not much harm has been done to houses or trees during the very heavy winds we have had lately, and apart from a few heavy flowerpots tilting but not breaking, just one big one on the upper terrace with an evergreen bush, was broken into pieces.

In that condition it has been standing, or rather lying up till now.

Strangely enough, it looks as if the bush is still alive. Well, I have had a bad conscience about doing nothing with it until now.

Every day I have been looking at it saying to myself that I have to do something about it, but have not managed to pull myself together to take action.

I had a small but nagging bad conscience which finally left me this morning, as I pulled myself together and bought a new pot.

Pretty big and heavy it is, but now it has been brought up onto the terrace, ready to take the place of the broken one.

The gardener visiting us once a week, on Fridays, will do the replanting tomorrow.

While on the way to buy the new pot, I came to think about the fact that we also for almost a year now, have been talking about getting a hands-free system for our mobile phone, to be used in the car.

Again, it has given me a slightly bad conscience as we never seem to get around to doing anything about it.

Now, there is a new law in Spain totally forbidding any use of the mobile while driving.

This gave me an extra push to do something about it.

So, after having manoeuvred the big pot into the car, I passed the sales office where we once bought our mobile, and with 12,500 pesetas less in my pocket I left the shop having got rid of another tiny bad conscience.

Flying thoughts Jan Arnt 2017

Bomberos

Moods, good moods and bad moods, we all have them; it’s just a matter of how we tackle them. One thing is for sure and that is that no one is free from having his or her moods. It’s only a matter of controlling them, or isn’t it?

Is it good to be able to control your moods? Personally I don’t think it is good to control them too much, although I must admit to thinking that it’s one of my greatest weaknesses.

I think one would be much happier if one managed to express one’s moods.

Today has been one of these typical days which for one reason or other has turned out somewhat special.

What we did is of no interest and it had nothing to do with our private life, but things didn’t work out.

Coming home in the afternoon in gale force wind, we both felt that things were not as they should be.

While I was spending a good hour in the office with the wind hammering and whistling all around, my wife came to tell me that she had seen the “bomberos”, the fire engine, driving up the mountain, followed by the Guardia Civil police with their blue lights on.

They passed our house and made their way along the dirt road all the way to the top, almost a thousand meters above sea level. She was very uneasy as the wind was about the strongest we have ever felt, at least since the big fire happened here in August ninety-eight.

She admitted to being very uneasy about the situation and that she felt something was wrong.

Women’s intuition is never to be underestimated, but on the other hand, when these kinds of intuitions appear after having had what one can call a bad day, one should not necessarily pay too much attention to them.

Easy for me to say, as I myself was also made uneasy by the continued hammering and whistling of the wind.

I have to mention that the day before yesterday one of the residents of our Urbanization arrived from England in his helicopter.

We had seen him flying around both yesterday and today.

It is not very often he is here, but when it happens he normally lands in the car-park of the riding stables at the bottom of the hill.