Anyway the weekend looms tantalisingly near, a little free time to play.

Last weekend, as has happened previously Kate Shrewsday had her post ready and posted it almost as soon as the theme was posted. I think she has some control over my tiny mind.  That is impressive because you have to dig through many layers of protective cotton wool to find it.

So this weekend the theme is Synchronicity.

Before Colonialist digs through all the previous themes (and before that challenges) back to 2007 I believe it is a repeat of one some time back.

As usual, post your contribution to the theme, leave a message here with a link, so that others can visit all of the posts and enjoy the variety.

And of course the rule. Have fun with it.

A tap on the door, so quiet she almost missed it. “Are you ready?” he whispered. There he stood, her brother Aldo, looking like a nobleman in his sleek black suit and cape. His height and build suddenly seeming both more and less.  More authority, less of the builder. As he moved the dark wine-red lining of his cape showed briefly, like a memory of colour against the black.

Tia nodded and picked up the mask with her gloved hand as he held his mask. They looked at each other and put them on. As the masks touched their skin they moulded on. 12 hours the man had promised. Enough time to get there and back with no-one able to tell who they were at a glance.

Out into the street, leaving the modest hotel behind. Along the walkway and suddenly they were in the main street, filled with people all dressed in costumes, some fanciful, some gross, and some who seemed to just be themselves. Although maybe like her they had taken on another persona for the night.

The music, dancing lights along the canal, the jostling people, and the entertainers, each with a small space around them as people watched and some threw them coins. She felt entranced, in a magic world.

Carnivale! An alternate reality, for one night only in the year, all rules suspended. Although any major crimes would be followed up as well as possible. This was her first time. Aldo, her brother came every year, and last year met a woman who, he said, had stolen his heart away. They had agreed to meet this year, and at her request in their normal clothes. Her brother explained he was sure she was a great lady, and to win her he would have to appear as a noble, the accompanying page a necessity for any of them. So Aldo had persuaded a friend to ‘borrow’ the clothes from where he worked.

On they wandered, Aldo sometimes pushing ahead faster than she would have liked. So much to see, hear, smell, guess. Then at last they came to the public gardens. Laid out in squares for dancing, tables between with scurrying waiters.

Aldo merged with the crowd, seemingly at home with their manners and behaviour. This was not the brother she knew, he really seemed to be a nobleman. Now and then some woman would touch his arm, and they would dance off for a while. She hadn’t know he could dance so well.

Aldo moved easily through the crowd, she found it easiest to be right behind him, like a small vehicle, using the wind of his passing to pull her along in close attendance and faster than she would have managed alone. Suddenly he stopped. Tia walked right into him, making him take an inadvertent step forward. She peeped round past his shoulder and saw not one young woman but two. Both wearing the pale blue the mysterious woman had promised to wear. One lavishly dressed as befitted a noblewoman, the other very plain, an attendant. Both also wearing cling-masks so that no-one would recognise them.

He walked up to them and bowed, as would a nobleman to the lavishly dressed woman. “My lady, I have come as promised” he began. The woman took a step forward and put out her hand. A slender hand, obviously unused to work of any kind.  He took it in his big hand, the gloved one, bowed over and kissed her hand.

Then they moved off to the dance floor, leaving the ‘page’ and attendant alone. Tia looked at the woman and felt a sense of comfort. Here was a woman of their own kind. She smiled, then realised smiles looked forced under the masks. The woman looked at her and said “What a pity he did not recognise me. But then as he is noble I can’t really expect him to be in love with me.”

Tia felt thunderstruck. Who was the woman Ado was dancing with if this was the woman he met the previous year? “Who is that woman?” she whispered, leaning closer so that the femaleness of her voice did not betray her.

“That is Lady Eida, my mistress. The only way I could be free to come this evening was with her. Unfortunately she wanted us both to wear the same colour. Now he will be in love with her, and my heart will never recover.”

Tia looked at her brother dancing stiffly with the woman in blue, and back to her companion. A tear trickled down the cheek of her companion.  “What is your  name” Tia asked. “Juli”, replied the woman. The name on her brothers lips for a year! No mistaking it, and here he was whisking the wrong woman off to dance, and maybe to elope as was not unknown on this night.

The music stopped briefly, Ado and Lady Eida were returning to them, Ado holding her hand high as was the custom of the nobles. When they returned to Tia and the attendant, Ado bent over Lady Eida’s hand, kissed it and said “My Lady I thank you for the dance, but I fear my heart is not what it was last year. I cannot lie to you.”

Tia was about to speak when Ado suddenly jerked sideways, falling into her. As he fell she could see the knife sticking into his chest, still quivering from the blow.

Tia called out “Ado”, but Juli was even faster, catching him and cushioning his fall with her own body. Lady Eida shrieked, and was suddenly surrounded by three men in noble dress, not wearing masks. They hastened her away, leaving no time for explanations.

Tia and Juli sat on the ground with Ado, who was already dying, frothy blood trickling from his mouth and nose as he tried unsuccessfully to breathe.

Each of them holding his hand they sat, as his struggles to breathe stopped. No one would offer much help, it had been too obvious who the attackers were.  No one in the city dared to talk about Lord Watten, the ruler, and his family who had become so powerful no one dared to resist them.

Juli had tears running down her face, the mask wrinkling a little. “My poor lady, she said, only one dance of freedom ever, they are forcing her to marry to support their political needs. And now I’ll be thrown out, for helping her, when really she was helping me come to meet Ado. Obviously when he realised I was only a maid he would not have wanted me, but I did love him.”

Tia took her hand sadly, across Ado’s body and said “Juli, we too are not noble, but Ado so wanted you he was prepared to do anything, even pretend to be who he was not to gain you.”

Juli, confused by the words of a page, stood and looked down at the two of them in their rich fabrics and said “If he’d really loved me then he would have come dressed as himself, as I did.”

And then, after all those weeks of at least 1 day off, the real work-a-day world returns with all its demands. No wonder the first full working week seems so extremely long.

However I should be over that now, and my mental clock re-stabilised into routine.

Of course as its Friday I should be posting the weekend theme.

This week I thought we should go into the realms of the possible, impossible or maybe just improbable. So the theme is “an alternate reality”.

As usual, create your post, and leave a message here and / or here so others can read all of the entries; and of course as usual the rule is “Have fun with it.”

The first part of the huge-on-going monster that I joined late last summer had had minor progress for a lot of effort. My first stage was for a big “shop-window”, I pushed hard, and got it delivered in world-record time for the product. But an offshoot of making specific people responsible and ‘owning’ the shop-front they are now so involved and motivated that although they have had job offers elsewhere in the organisation they want to be exactly where they are, being pushed by the old bat but having the fun of seeing results HAPPEN!

Their big boss is delighted.

Even the person who reluctantly joined to do admin on the project is now so involved in the outcomes she wants to go round the country to do training on it. She thinks it’s the best thing ever!

I had a few months off from the project, and NOTHING HAPPENED. So I’m back. It’s again taken a while to get everyone into the swing of working fast and creating results, but I seem to be breaking through again.

Work can be so satisfying.

About 10 years ago I started along a route of working from home, of even more erratic working hours.  For some time I worked on a contract basis ad-hoc travelling to Asia and the USA and then I had a most unusual routine. Checking e-mail at 3-4am and late at night, as the work offers came through during daytime in the USA. Travelling every week or two, LONG flights. Living in hotels and driving rented cars on the wrong side of the road, or walking through such busy areas in Beijing. Flipping from summer to winter in a day. Routine at home was living on the e-mail, gym early in the morning, extra sleep during the day. Most friends busy with work when I was free, and then wanting to do things when I was leaving for the next flight.

Then the change to working locally, with only a few in-country trips. Even that wasn’t REGULAR. Never the same thing day after day.

When I had to settle back into routine, same place every day, I found it rather irksome. But then I think that may have had to do with some women who were dreadful. Juniors who didn’t really want to deliver and a senior who resented and retrenched anyone competent as they were a threat to her.

Now I have had nearly 2 years back in the ‘many-places’ mode of work. Finally after more than 6 months I have an office at the major client (and should be there most of the time till year-end). I find it difficult to go to the same office daily.

Is it just me, or does everyone resent the feeling of being tied down?

Starting with a twelve and a half hour flight from Johannesburg to Hong Kong. Then some hours in that modern airport, full of boringly-the-same-international-most-expensive shops and nasty fast-food restaurants, and the best bookshop was no longer there. A final flight to Beijing and finally a bed to lie down flat and pretend my body and brain weren’t totally confused again. For the week, I did not see a gleam of sunlight, the clouds/smog sat on top of the skyscrapers, not budging, not letting a sliver of sunshine through.

Then the working week, classroom and the strain of keeping to the most simple language without insulting the intelligence of the attendees. A second who was too flattened by jetlag to do anything, and who made her distaste for Chinese food only too clear to all.

Friday night’s trip to a steak house (hoping to cheer her up) and discovering that Australian lamb and beef was still not acceptable to her did nothing to relieve the stress.

Saturday morning, and we were going to do some shopping at the ‘famous silk market’. We did some walking alongside those huge roads they have in Beijing, finding odd shops and then on the return trip on the other side of the road we found it. The silk (flea) market that was a bit scary. Then finally we made it to the Starbucks we had seen from the other side of the road on our way out in the morning.

No cosy little table with low chairs for us, just perching on those stupid high things that make me feel I’m going to fall off with absolutely no elegance at all.

Across the room, some young men, definitely Oriental sitting at one of those comfortable places, making me so long to join them. One with rather long and straggly hair and wearing jeans and a leather jacket stood up. Then he reached for something from the table and put on a HAT.

One of those round furry kind, with the flaps that hang down to warm your ears. Perfect! Now he was one of the Mongol hordes coming to plunder the capital. For a few seconds I wondered where his pony was tethered as he looked so much the part. He was preening, seeing his reflection in the window. I started to smile as he looked so much the real thing. He saw me smiling and posed again. The two of us kept smiling and eventually both started laughing at how absurd and wonderful he was.

We had no communication possible, but the smiles and the laugh, yet it was enough.

When we left and went back into the silk market, the first thing we saw was the stall selling the hats. They looked a bit tatty there, yet had seemed so right on him.

A few months later when I returned in January to a city whose temperature didn’t go above -2 for all of my stay, I realised how useful a hat like that would have been, but the silk market was closed. Too cold for outdoor stalls.   I wonder what I would have done with the hat had I managed to buy one…………

As usual; create your own post utilising the theme, and then leave a message here with a link, so that others can go and read all the contributions.

The only rule is to have fun with it.

This weekend the theme is

The hat

Some years ago, doing a guest lecture, in the discussions I discovered that there is a problem every year at schools. Parents do NOT register their children for school until January, or sometimes February. Because they don’t have the money after Christmas spending.

There are NO government awareness campaigns to ensure registration before the preceding school year ends. There are NO penalties for late registration, yet the schools are blamed for not ordering materials in time.  There is no feedback on how late the children are registered. Putting in a late registration fee to help do emergency ordering and delivery of school material may help.

How can you do accurate ordering in November when only 10-20% of children have registered by then?

So these same families who have always just arrived at the school and expected their child to have entry will now complain about discrimination against them by the tertiary institutions because they did NO PLANNING.

How is it that people who want something also think someone else must always do the organising for them?

As people tell me I have a quirky sense of humour I can accept I am not without humour, but I cannot find other people’s real difficulties funny.  I am fairly laid back – mostly, but watching people lose a battle over something important stresses me out.

Many years ago I remember starting a book. About someone setting up a hotel in Haiti. The problems piled in thick and fast, including at least one dead body in the empty swimming pool.

It was supposed to be amusing. I ended up one evening, sitting shaking and wanting to be ill. From imaginary stress in a book!

There is humour in the unexpected, which is why punch lines in jokes usually take one at a tangent to the story-line of the joke. It’s unexpected in context, so we find it funny. For me there is far more humour in gently poking fun at our lesser frailties and the oddities of life, than laughing at people battling real difficulties.

Whoo!

Hearing the song this morning reminded me that it was written when the Beatles were so young that 64 seemed like forever away, and that 64 year olds must be really OLD.

Poor Paul, he was in his mid 50’s when Linda died from cancer. It must have seemed that the song was not going to offer him time with her and ‘grandchildren on the knee’ at 64.

He did marry again, yet when Paul was 64 his split from Heather Mills had become apparent, even though it took some time to work out a divorce settlement, it was over.

I wonder just what I’ve said in my youth that’s coming back to bite me?