Category Archives: It’s all about me

Bite Size Memoir

Bite Size Memoir 11: Holiday Reads

This week’s Bite Size Memoir Prompt is: Holiday Reads
Do you read on holiday? If you do, what do you choose?

Reading isn’t high on my agenda while holidaying because I love soaking up the surroundings and just be. Light reading at a new destination is usually confined to information from the tourist centre or local newspapers.

If I do need to take ‘heavier’ reading material, I’d select Tolkien’s The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. I clearly remember my first read of The Hobbit.

hobbit

I borrowed it from the Hamilton High School library. At home, gob-smacked from the opening lines, I followed mum around the house, while she cleaned, and read beloved paragraphs to her. Mum wasn’t impressed. I reread that magic opening paragraph over and over again. My love of the fantasy genre began with this book.

I’m really taken with Smaug, the talking dragon. Although I’ve heard dragons are now considered cliché, I can’t imagine myself writing fantasy without adding my own creations: just need a difference.

This statue symbolizes my committment to finishing my novel.

This statue symbolizes my commitment to finishing my novel.

 

BITE SIZE MEMOIR
[It’s a challenge all right, keeping to 150 words! Contributed to Lisa’s Bite Size Memoir by Christine, from Victoria, Australia]

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Bite Size Memoir, It's all about me

Bite Size Memoir No.1: “School at Seven”

In 1962, when I was almost seven, I attended my third school – Warracknabeal State School – in the Wimmera district, Victoria, Australia. Shortly after, my family moved again, this time down john and bettythe road to Balmoral. I was still in the first grade, despite missing Prep because my Uncle’s girlfriend was the Prep teacher. When she visited, I’d sit on her knee and proudly read John and Betty.

playmates

At Balmoral, we lived 8km out-of-town in an old house. My teacher was Miss Wiltshire. The favourite in our class was a girl with a hole-in-her-heart. The whole class earned smacks on the backs of our legs for playing up in Religious Instructions class and I begged them not to smack her. After we practiced for a concert, I missed the bottom step when we came off the stage, earning myself another smack around the legs. I didn’t like Miss Wiltshire after that.

Main street, Warracknabeal – still much the same as 1962 Photo: Virtual Tourist

 

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It's all about me

Flashback: Me in 1971

This was me in my motorbike fantasy stage, aged 16. With white house paint, I painted “live to ride, ride to live” on the bottom of my denim jacket.

I’m looking a bit feral here. I don’t know what my sister and I were doing wandering around the paddocks with the camera. Perhaps we just moved away from the house so we could pose without our little brothers laughing at us.

christine 1971

Carapook was about halfway between Coleraine and Casterton. I was in the fourth form at the Casterton Secondary School. In September of that same year, I met my first husband at the football grand final in Coleraine. The next year I went off to Mt Gambier Hospital as a trainee State Enrolled Nurse. That was back in the days when you were paid as you learned on the job.

In between school and work, I was on the dole for a couple of months and could buy myself motorbike magazines. I settled on getting a Suzuki as my first bike. Well, I’m not dead yet, there’s still time!

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