I watched 'Ellen' the other day. It was 9 months after the New Orleans devestation, and I was stunned to see that not enough had been done.

This is a major USA disaster, and one has to ask: are there too many resources going to the Iraq war (a war with seemingly no end) and not enough to New Orleans? Has New Orleans rapidly become the forgotten city?

What would happen if the troops were pulled out of Iraq and brought back to USA to rebuild New Orleans?

New Orleans needs to be healed, and all people need to be reminded that the devestation is still there.

To rebuild New Orleans will show that the US government cares as much about its own people as it does about Iraq's oil.

Last month I was invited to test drive and MG TF 160 sports car. Since I happen to LOVE sports cars this was a gift from the Gods (or rather 'Avenues Magazine)!

The review was published in this month's issue.

I have loved cars all my life, but this was only the third time I had put that passion to work. Avenues are publishing another car article of mine later in the year.

Writing is all about: moving forward. Write, and submit and keep writing. Even when you are being rejected again and again and again, keep writing and keep submitting. All the time you are working on your craft, honing your skills. It is an art, it's like learning carpentry, wood turning, pottery, painting, your skills develop as you use them. And I am doing my best to continually refine my talents.

I am working on another novel (still hope the previous three will be accepeted for publication!), and I am really enjoying weaving new skills through the plot, standing back and judging what I have written, sitting and wondering 'what is wrong with this?'

It doesn't matter how many 'write a book in 14 days' ebooks you read or how many 'produce articles the easy way' articles you read, it all comes down to puting your own voice into the writing, to develop your own skill. Readers do not want all books or articles to sound exactly the same, any more than art dealers want the same paintings hanging on all of their walls.

The MG TF 160 was a fabulous car and took me back to the days when I owned a Triumph Spitfire MkII. And it has inspired in me the dream to one day own another sports car, though I think I will go for an old MG BGT or a Midget…dreams are free.

Paris and Stavros have split. So? Please don’t tell me that is a headline I am supposed to care about?

Tom Cruise’s illegitimate baby has been born? So? He got a nice, single Catholic girl pregant, that’s not something I am supposed to be impressed by surely?

I just don’t care.

Now, two miners who have been trapped underground, in an Australian mine, for 7 days and are still alive? That interests me. The desperate rescue effort underway? That interests me.

Give me news, not gossip.

Give me stuff that is important.

I went to my first ANZAC Day memorial service on the 25th April.

I went because my daughter is now a member of Sea Cadets and had to attend. I felt that if she had to get up well before dawn then the least I could do was also get up early and be there to see her.

It was a cold, rainy morning. I froze. I was wet. My boots leaked.

And the only thought that ran through my mind was 'this is nothing compared to what the soldiers went through in each of the world wars'.

These men fought in terrible conditions. They slept in mud, fought in mud, died in mud. Or they fought in deserts and died with sand in their mouths. Or they fought in the jungle, only to perish amid the tangled roots. Or they fought in a field, onto to fall, dead, onto land that would feed hundreds in the future.

Or, if they were lucky, like my grandfather, Frederick Charles Speed was, they survived the war and returned home to their families.

The war was hard. It changed people.

Today, we think we have problems, we think we know what it is to live a tough life and to be strong. But we are wrong. Our lives are pampered, compared to what these men went through.
War taught these men what was truly important, and when they came back they never forgot those who had died. Many of these men became the greatest characters you could ever hope to meet.

One man spoke at the memorial service, (for the Heathcote area of Christchurch), and he read out the names of those who had died in WWII. Then he told us that he knew every man on that list, that he was either friends with them or went to school with them. He knew them all, and after all these years he still felt the anguish of their deaths.

Men fought for something they believed in, they fought to protect their homelands and their families.

We may not all agree on wars. We may think the Korean war, the Vietnam war and now the Iraq war, are wrong, and should never have happened. But, let us keep at the foremost of our mind that men, real men, died in these wars and are still dying.

There have been many deaths in wars. There have been many wars. There are many wars still going on.

If we want to honor ALL soldiers, we have to honor life. When a soldier falls, a mother, father, sisters, brother, grieves. That as what war is: grief.

New Zealand, being firmly a part of the Commonwealth (though wealth is seldom common), I have enjoyed watching the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.

I especially enjoyed the gold medal netball match. Stunning! Inspiring! On the edge of  my seat!

Previously I had thought netball was a bit 'weak', but after watching the mens basketball, I found the netball took a lot more skill and was a faster paced game. Netball goal shoots seldom miss, basket ball players frequently miss!

The Silver Ferns were ahead most of the match, sometimes by as much as 7 points, sometimes by as little as 3 point. We won 60-55.

The Australian team put up a great fight, and I knew that even with five minutes left to go, they still had the potential to snatch the game out from under the Silver Ferns. Fortunes can turn around so fast.

We have a great team, and needless to say, having got the last gold medals, we did indeed get the last word.

Silver Ferns reign supreme!!!!

I saw an article in the newpaper here in Christchurch NZ today. In the quest to pursuade people how bad smoking is the latest comtemplation is to target men where it hurts.

Smoking can cause impotence.

The problem with this line of argument is: smoking men have been procreating for YEARS!

Pushing our comfort boundaries

I am a writer. I have written short stories and articles that have been published. I am working on getting a novel published.

But poetry is not something I have been hugely involved in writing.

Until last week.

I wanted to do something for Uncle Ken. I wanted to write someting for him.

So I wrote a tribute to Ken. It was a poem. For some reason poetry had been bubbling away within me all week, and when I expressed myself through poetry it was as if I was tapping into a new part of myself. It flowed straight from the Soul.

As things turned out I did not get the opportunity to read the poem, but another relative did read it out. They next day, at airport farewells, they told me how beautiful the poem was, how perfect it was, and they thanked me.

It was a relief that they liked it, since I have never offered any poetry to my family to read. (I don’t think they realised how vulnerable it made me feel to offer them my work).

It was also a boost to know that the words I wrote touched their hearts.

When we write, I guess we should not allow ourselves any boundaries at all. Words come from all sorts of places within us, the inner child, the Soul, the buried fears, the laughter, the love. When we write poetry we access much that would otherwise be hard to reach.

I will continue to play with poetry, for that is what poetry is: a playground of words.

Many of us hide within comfortable boundaries. It is time to push past them.

Will we ever reach a point of accepting that our modern life is making us sick?

Look at the contents of the food we eat. Preservatives, colourings, free flow agents, and then there are those things identified only by numbers–I don’t know about you but that scares me! And for the meat eaters, look at the chemicals in meat, the antibiotics the animals are fed, the growth hormones, and the sprays off the grass they eat.

And then look at the sick people in your life, those with cancer, lupus, arthritis, leukemia, heart disease, and tell me it’s nothing to do with our dietery intake or the stress in our lives.

We look at stress as nothing. Some people even take pride in being under stress. We do not consider what stress does to our bodies.

When will be reach the point of realising that we may have made a few mistakes along the way, that it might just be time to review what we eat and drink and how we live our lives.

They say that a writer must sweat blood over every word, tearing them from somewhere deep inside.

But surely, words freely given, freely released from the depths of the heart and Soul, can cause no pain.

My Uncle Ken passed away last Friday.

He was a quiet man, handsome, with light blue eyes and grey hair (that used to be black in his youth). He was a hard man to get to know because he was such a loner, and that is what I am most regretful about. I never really knew him.

I feel cheated, because I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked to.

And yet, I have to accept that it was never my role to know him well. I was an outsider in his life, a neice who did not play a major part in his life. Kind of feel that maybe I did something wrong, that maybe there was something I could have done to become more a friend in his life.

But…there is little point in looking back with regrets. Life moves forward.

I DO see an image of him in my mind so frequently: he walks, dark haired and handsome, pain free, happy, relaxed, with his black labrador, Mick (who had died many years ago) beside him, joyful to be with him again.

Where cancer caused him pain and robbed him of his ease of movement and eventually his ability to walk, now he is pain free and happy. I am so grateful to see him this way.

Am I a believer in psychic visions? It is not a psychic vision that I see, it is a vision, a truth, a reality that Ken is sharing with me. Why? Because I asked him to. Because I apologised to him for not having done more to get to know him, to help him, I apologised for whatever led to us not really knowing each other well. And I asked, may I please get to know you now, as a Soul.

Is that possible?

Apparently it is, otherwise he would not be sharing the vision of him and Mick with me.

There is more to life than we will ever understand, but if we can begin to make a slight nudging at the veil between this world and the world of Soul, then we will gain a greater understandng in the process.

Uncle Ken, it was nice knowing you.