Haveachat with Les Shipp

by Les Shipp

and ushered the women through. Taken out to dinner the women were never expected to contribute to the cost of the evening that would be unheard of. In return the women held their men in very high esteem and wouldn’t even consider that their men folk should help in the household duties and heaven preserve from the man ever entering the kitchen. Women never had to worry about money, men took care of all that as women weren’t expected to be capable of doing so.

  What changed the way it had worked for hundreds of years? To start with the women became dissatisfied with just being ornaments and not having any say, especially in regards to their status in the scheme of things. Their moment came during the war years when the men went off to fight and the input from the women was really needed. The First World War gave them a start and they found how different life could be but it was the Second World War that finally gave them their freedom. They really did a great job of replacing the missing men with girls joining the land army, tilling the soil and growing crops just as efficiently as their men folk had done. They became factory workers and kept up the supply of ammunition for the war effort. Once they had the vote there wasn’t anything they couldn’t achieve.

  The result of this was that men no longer had the defined role that they once had. Women then shouted for equality and in their eagerness to achieve this they didn’t mind trampling their men into submission and some men became aware of their female side and took on the role of house husbands. (not all women, just the more vocal ones). Now that equality is more or less a done deal many women are wondering what happened to their gentlemen of years ago who used to treat them with such respect and had such wonderful manners. Well to put it bluntly there isn’t time for all that nonsense and if men do revert back to their old world manners and give their seat in the bus to a woman she will probably sit without even a nod of thanks. This is generalising and certainly doesn’t include everyone.

  We are now in a position to walk together with equal respect for one another and that is how it should be from now on as we can never go back to how it was.

  HOW CAN I LIVE WITHOUT GOOGLE?

  Having spent the greater part of my life without google I know I can do without it, but now that I live in a more enlightened world do I want to? In days gone by I would spend hours trawling through dictionaries and thesaurus’s trying to find an answer to my problem which would often elude me especially as I was a hopeless speller to start with.

  Without google I would have to rely on my own ideas which often weren’t forthcoming. It is hard to leap off a platform into creativity if you don’t know which is up or down. When writing my story I had to rely on my own thoughts as google didn’t have any ideas on inputs except to help me with my spelling which in itself was a great help.

  If google was taken away from me now I know I could manage better than I did before I became a google user. It’s not a drug and I could well do without it but it does help when our illustrious leader from the writers group comes up with a subject or a word for us to write about and I have no idea what it means. With google I can find the most way out subjects and write about them when I have no idea what I am talking about. Google to the rescue.

  Blessed are the days when I could pick up a book and read it without analysing any hidden agenda or have any idea how I would go about doing so. I look back on those days with pleasure and when I again learn to live without google I will return to my old habits or has google wrecked my thoughts process? I hope not.

  When you think about it and how easy it is to draw on the knowledge that google has to offer, I think I will stick with it for the time being. Long live google.

  IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so much like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities on being received, for good or fore evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”.

  This is the first paragraph of Dickens novel, the tale of Two Cities, all written in the one sentence. If this didn’t mess up my struggling brain, what was to follow didn’t make it any easier to comprehend. Not the kind of book I would settle down with in the evening for a relaxed read. A bit like looking at a painting by Picasso struggling to make it into something beautiful when I know in my heart that a four year old child would be expected to come up with something like that.

  There has been three of Dickens novels in my library for a long time but I have never read any of them. Imagine my surprise when I found that I am not likely to ever read them if they are all written in the same vein. I feel I have better things to do with my time than sort out his dilemma on where he is coming from or going to. Perhaps it is a shortcoming in my underdeveloped, uneducated brain. But even if this is the case I am happier where I am at right now than where he was when he wrote this novel.

  The opening statement I can understand but after that I get lost in the jumble of his thoughts. Is he trying to confuse his readers or is he trying to stretch his reader’s minds to take in all his goblygook? He is known to be one of the all-time greats in classical writing but please preserve me from having to deal with such intellect as his. At this stage of life I don’t need my brain stretched to that extent.

  MY ONE REGRET.

  Is it strange that I could consider it a regret that I spent all those years as a stockman out on those western properties, even though I became the manager of an eleven thousand acre station? Looking back at all those unpaid hours given to the rich owners. I now know that the rewards never did add up to all those extra hours.

  When I returned to work on those large properties after my year traveling around Europe it was a bad move as I then had the ability to do better in a more settled area. With a baby on the way and no house I felt at the time that I didn’t have an option but to return to the land where a house would be provided. My regret is that I didn’t rent a house and stay put as I had a reasonable well paid job, but with my country background I didn’t think about the possibility of renting as I knew nothing about it and it never entered my mind. It was a safe move to return to the land as a house would go with the job and I was good at what I did without having to think too much about it. There was no challenge except the extreme physical effort needed for the job and I didn’t have to worry about my shortcomings in the education department. Even though my peers were college trained I never had any trouble holding my own with them because of my travels and extensive reading. Sometimes weeks would go by without being in contact with anyone other than family and at that time there was no television, but thanks for the books I had, they kept me content. I became a very heavy smoker, two packets a day, and I would become uptight if I was running low on them.

  It wasn’t until I had had enough of living out west, and changing circumstances, we moved to a more civilised area that my life changed and I realised I could do a lot better for myself and family and there was only one person who could bring this about and that was me. Having set myself a task of study and gaining a graduate diploma my regret was that I had missed out on all those years and should have done it sooner. Having achieved what I had previously thought impossible my life spiralled upwards from that time onwards. I had also given the cigarettes away which would have enhanced my well-being.

  Should I regret all those years working in isolation on properties, I don’t know, perhaps that is what made me what I am? I certainly don’t regret what my life has been since and my advice to anyone who wanted it would be, if you are not happy with where you are at, then change it to a degree you can manage, no matter what it takes.

  A CONTENTED MAN CAN BE HAPPY WITH WHAT APPEARS TO BE USELESS.

  The business was thriving and
all was going well, I had a brand new Pajero station wagon and a brand new Nissan four-wheel drive utility that had everything that opened and shut on it including aircon, an inbuilt phone, long range fuel tanks and power drive. These two vehicles were part of the business and were leased.

  All went well until our son, who was a partner in the business decided he wanted to sell up. On our part this was easy enough except for the two vehicles which would have been too big an expense for the business to cover. I had the choice of buying one out and sending the other back to the lessors. I chose to keep the Pajero and send the utility back.

  This decision had one problem, I really needed a work vehicle for jobs around the property. A friend who was a second hand car dealer said he could get me a utility that was a going concern for a reasonable price. I needed it badly so I said yes, but when I collected it I found it was a dirty smelly Toyota tabletop utility that ran on diesel and a good part of the paintwork had faded away and had been replaced by a rust colour.

  It was a great joke among friends and customers and it became formally known as the embarrassing truck. It was fun to drive especially on the main road where you would have to