Category: General: What’s Going On

I’ve always found that watching a really great band live on stage is inspirational: it makes me want to rush home and start writing in a way that few other things do.

One of my friends happens to lead the world’s top Rod Stewart tribute band, so inspiration is available almost on tap (they’re continually touring all around the country and beyond). If you fancy a quick jolt of inspiration, click on the link to find where they’re playing next and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

https://www.someguyshavealltheluck.com

Right, plug over, why does that method of inspiring ourselves work so reliably? It can’t be just the effect of experiencing great art because I don’t get the same impact from looking at a Renoir, for example. In fact I don’t always get it even from reading great literature (although I’m more likely to do so if it’s in a similar genre to my own work, or the kind of thing that I would like to write).

I guess it must be due to getting a simultaneous hit of adrenalin and endorphins, creating both a high and a buzz of energy. Perhaps it’s also because human beings respond most enthusiastically to other human beings who are performing right in front of them. That goes all the way back to the cave men and the earliest forms of music. We now know that music is rooted in the earliest rhythms that we experience, in our mother’s wombs. So music must be the original art form, before even cave painting: and it speaks to us at a subliminal level that nothing else can.

Play on, Rod.

They say that anyone who knows two cultures lives two lives. One of the oddities of being an Anglo-Australian family is living with the constant awareness of what’s happening on the opposite side of the world – which is opposite in so many ways.

The most obvious contrast right now is the weather, where Britain is revelling in “Snowmaggedon” while Oz is suffering the most extreme heatwave ever recorded. January stayed above 30 degrees every day in NSW and there have been temperatures in the mid-40s for days on end, as a hellish culmination of years of drought (unless you are in north Queensland, in which case you’re probably under water).

As if this needed emphasising, we held an Australia Day party on 26th January where the inside of our house was filled with reminders of the heat and sunshine Down Under, while outside it was pissing down with rain and freezing cold.

I’ve also just finished reading Jane Harper’s great debut novel, “The Dry”, which perfectly captures the feeling of the heat and drought in rural, inland Australia over the last few years.

Probably as a result of all this, we started going through old photographs and found some from this time of year a dozen years back, when a bunch of us went to the races in rural Australia. That trip inspired the story “Last Race at Dederang”, which you can find under the “Awards” tab above. If you want to know what the current heat wave feels like, the picture I’ve posted there gives a taste of it.

So, which do I prefer – England or Oz, too hot or too cold? It’s an impossible choice: each has it’s own upsides and downsides and they are both equal and different. The only good answer is that it’s a wonderful blessing, to be able to keep going back and forth and living two different lives.