Many writers have shared their thoughts with the public:

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." - Beatrix Potter

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." - Anaïs Nin

"Sharing your writing, being enlarged by others' writing, is what makes you feel famous." - Gretchen Bernabei

"Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth." - Edna Ferber

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Ben Franklin

"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones to form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment." - Hart Crane

"There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are." - W. Somerset Maugham

Ancient Chinese Wisdom With Spag Bol Sauce

Mum had been on at me for years to "bring one of your friends from school home for tea and to play, Harry." When I was fourteen, I thought of all the girls in my class who I wouldn’t mind having round to 'play' but I knew Mum’s idea of play and mine were understandably different since I had moved on from those distant days of Thomas the Tank Engine and Spiderman where she seemed to think I still lived.

I did actually have friends, despite Mum’s evident suspicion that because she hadn’t yet seen one, no such creature existed. I could have invited one of the boys in my class or from soccer. It’s just that if, for instance, at the age of fourteen I had to choose between running naked through school assembly and introducing any of my friends to my family, I would have started serious sprint training.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, well you do, don’t you? It’s just that mine is a family which derides co-operation. It was a miracle and a testament to the tensile will of my mother that once every day she managed to marshal her unwilling troops into sitting at the same table together to share a meal.

It was with deep reservations that I finally gave in to Mum’s increasingly suspicious questions as to why I didn’t want to bring one of my friends home. I must have been coming down with something at the time making me vulnerable to being coerced into agreeing to invite a friend over.

I picked a Tuesday night, cunningly calculating that it was a school night and anyone I invited would obviously have to go home early and what could possibly go wrong if we got to my place at 5.00 pm and I shuffled my 'friend' out at 7.30 pm? Two and a half hours. What could go wrong in such a short space of time?

For my 'friend' I decided to ask Jake who, though someone I played soccer with on a Saturday, was not one of my mates from school. Before Mum could make a great fuss of Jake, as I knew she would, I dragged him out into the backyard where we kicked a ball around, pretended we scored amazing goals then pulled our t-shirts over our heads and ran around like lunatics pumping our fists in the air. It’s unfortunate that I ran into the side of the garage because I couldn’t actually see with my t-shirt over my head when I scored that "Unbelievable, Harry Jones, the import from Australia, has just scored the goal of the century for Cheltenham.” Sounds of crowd roaring, ”Har-ry, Har-ry.” But I bravely wobbled straight back up to my feet in case Mum was watching. I think I remember muttering to myself “See Mum, not only do I have an actual, real friend but running around with your t-shirt over your head isn’t as dangerous as you try to make out” but I think I had actually given myself a mild concussion and that part of the story is a bit blurry.

Eventually I heard Mum’s dreaded call “Tea’s ready everyone.” I would put in an exclamation mark after the word 'everyone' but just take it as read that Mum always speaks in sentences that seem to end so forcefully that there is always at least one exclamation mark bristling after the last word of most of them. I hurried Jake in through the back door, made him wash his hands thoroughly at the laundry tub and sat him next to me at the kitchen table.

There were six of us that night. Three to each side of the table which was covered, it being Tuesday, with the starched blue tablecloth with the white daisies. Each night had its own tablecloth and its own meal which rotated unfailingly through the weeks. Tuesday was the blue tablecloth with white daisies and spaghetti bolognaise with rissoles. Each place setting had its own matching starched cloth napkin. Everyone, apart from Mum, tried never to use their napkin as they were so stiff you were in danger of removing skin from your lips if you forgot and accidentally wiped your mouth.

Mum was once given a packet of paper serviettes by a well-meaning relative at the family Christmas party at Grandma’s house. It was ceremoniously burned in our backyard barbecue the next day, Mum feeding each offending piece into the flames individually and poking at it with a long stick muttering about paper napkins and thin edges of wedges.

We never worked out what wedge she meant unless it was the cheese that Mum’s sister, Aunty Marlene, brought along as her contribution to the Christmas festivities. She said it was Stilton though it turned out to be a wedge of mouldy cheddar she’d found at the back of her fridge. Shortly after Aunty Marlene recovered in hospital from food poisoning Mum marched her into the local optometrist and made her get a pair of glasses.

The sisters didn’t speak for six months after that because as soon as Aunty Marlene visited us after she picked up her glasses she demanded to know when Mum’s face had got so wrinkly and old.

Jake and I sat on one side of the table with my little brother, Gary, who for most of his life has walked about in a cloud of Araldite and secrecy. At meals he would be fiddling with some half-constructed invention with one hand under the table as he forked whatever was put in front of him into his mouth. It was amazing, he never looked at his plate but he never missed his mouth. It certainly seemed to impress Jake.

My older brother, Barry sat across from us on the other side of the table. I bet you can see some sort of repetition happening here and yes, that’s entirely Mum’s doing. Everything in our house matched, even our names. Barry was going to be a musician. He was at a stage where he tapped tunes on the table and scribbled snatches of songs he was writing onto pieces of paper, the backs of cereal packets or at a pinch the inside of his arm.

He was once sent home from school with a note informing Mum and Dad that tattoos were not allowed. Barry hadn’t actually got a tattoo. He’d used permanent ink marker up the insides of both his arms for a song he was inspired to write while on the bus going to school so that they read 'I di’dnt wanna love ya butcha made me anyway and now yo’uve stole my heart awayyyyyy'.

No one was sure whether it was his inability to correctly place an apostrophe, his minimal attachment to the correct form of the English language or the fact that it took her two hours of scrubbing to get the words off his arms that caused Mum the most pain. Dad had to forcibly prevent her from soaking Barry’s arms in a laundry tub full of bleach.

Next to Barry sat my Mum, Carrie, then Dad who had had the audacity to be christened Jim but was referred to, for some reason known only to Mum and possibly himself, as Larry within the confines of our home. Whether Dad led a double life as Jim outside our home I never did find out.

In front of us our heaped plates of spaghetti and meatballs steamed aromatically. Give Mum her due, she was as mad as a rat in a microwave but boy could she cook. Jake was just about to reach for his fork when Mum barked “Hands” and five pairs of hands and a set of front paws dutifully shot up to show their pink palmed cleanliness.

Jake was a quick study and whipped his hands up into the air which won him a big smile from Mum as she plopped an extra meatball on his plate. If you’re wondering about the paws I probably should mention that our Pekingese rescue dog, Clarrie, who always sat on the floor at the end of the kitchen table at meal times had caught on early that sitting on his haunches and waving his paws in the air along with the rest of his pack on the command word 'Hands' always resulted in a little something extra coming his way. He was particularly fond of rissoles.

The hands of the kitchen clock showed 6.45 so I was pleased things were going well so far. Then of course, it happened.

Barry had obviously come to the table in the midst of one of his bouts of musical genius. These came at the oddest times but most notably when everyone was trying to get into the toilet in the morning. When you did manage to make it inside you sometimes had to make do with a pile of scrunched up loo paper covered in scribbles.

This just had to be the night where he lost all sense and reason and just couldn’t help himself from scribbling surreptitiously on his napkin. Unfortunately, the biro he used suddenly belched spots of black ink over Mum’s pristine tablecloth. Thinking back on the episode I suspect he may have accidentally picked up a biro that my younger brother had been 'experimenting' with. The oddest things in our house sometimes exploded for no apparent reason though the benefits to mankind of a biro that exploded ink remains a mystery to us all. None of us were surprised when Gary was recruited by ASIO when he grew up.

A fight began between Mum and Barry as she attempted to remove the ink stains from her pristine napkin and tablecloth by pouring a large bottle of soda water indiscriminately over them, my brother and any other nearby person. The dog wisely nipped under the table out of the way. Clarrie had a strong belief that water belonged only in muddy puddles or at a pinch in his water bowl.

Barry furiously shouted that if Elton John’s mother had dared to erase the words of 'Candle in the Wind' with a bottle of soda water who knows what would have been played at Princess Diana’s funeral. While no great fan of Elton himself, Barry knew just which of Mum’s buttons to press.

Our Mum is a flag-waving royalist to this very day as evidenced by the huge collection of plates, teaspoons and china mugs, with every mug of every royal personage ever born adorning her souvenirs packed tightly onto the floor to ceiling shelves Dad had made to line both sides of the front hall. The only time Mum has ever been outvoted on anything in our family, and I do mean anything, was when she saw an advertisement for a doorbell shaped like a bulldog’s head which played 'Rule Britannia'. It was a step too far.

The conversation became so spirited that all around the table hands travelling to mouths stopped midway at the unexpected entertainment of my brother doing his very loud interpretation of a sopping wet Elton John playing piano on the table while Mum hit him about the head with her starched napkin. I can tell you from experience that those sharp, starched corners could really hurt.

At this point I should probably explain that Mum starched everything in our household. My Dad’s, mine and my brothers’ boxer shorts could have stood up and walked by themselves. This resulted in a household of males who were constantly scratching at what Mum referred to as 'your downstairs areas'. “Stop scratching your downstairs areas” was a common and very loud cry in our household. None of the neighbours, who must have heard this cry several times a day, was ever game to ask Mum what the exact problem was. Presumably they thought that everyone in our house suffered from either crabs, worms, piles or all three.

Everything in our house, curtains, shirts, underwear, tablecloths were all subject to being starched. She bought the stuff by the carton load. I once came into the laundry as Mum was eying off our long-haired cat, Ari, who was snoozing at the time on the windowsill. She had a packet of starch in one hand and a most peculiar look on her face. I did the only thing possible and pushed the sleeping Ari out the open window out of harm’s way. It was a single-story house and cats can always land on their feet, right? It was unfortunate that Mum had just planted a bed of spiny roses under that window and Ari to this day hisses at me whenever I walk near him. Ungrateful beast.

We believe Mum suffers from a unique disorder which we call, strictly within the confines of our immediate family, Occupational Starching Disorder or OSD. She says this is balderdash, a word we had to look up in the dictionary as we all thought she was referring to something very rude that takes place in rock quarries which led to general confusion. Although general confusion in our family is not really all that unusual.

But back to what is recalled in our private family history as The Incident of the Elton John Tablecloth. As Barry was fending off Mum’s pointy-edged napkin, while those gathered around the table sat damply enthralled, Mum suddenly realized that most of the food we had had on our forks had now slid onto the already ink stained tablecloth. The rich, redness of the spaghetti sauce splattered all over her tablecloth mirrored the colour mounting in Mum’s face.

This was a sign to the assembled family that Krakatoa was about to blow causing the commencement of a mass and undignified exodus along the lines of every man for himself. What ensued was exacerbated by the fact that my youngest brother had somehow managed to glue the edge of the tablecloth to his shirt. As we all fled in our own chosen directions, colliding with each other and bouncing off furniture, Gary trailed the tablecloth behind him, crashing crockery and strands of spaghetti spreading behind him.

Even Jake made a run for it along with the rest of us. He exhibited hitherto unknown skills in escapology and comedic appreciation by diving through the kitchen window, rolling to his feet and then falling down again laughing so hard I thought he might possibly explode.

Fortunately, he didn’t as we became good mates and he was Best Man at my wedding. Barry’s band played at the Reception. Gary was doing something secret and couldn’t come to the wedding which was a general relief to all.

Clarrie the dog, perhaps channelling his Chinese genetic ancestry, wisely exemplified the saying from Sun Tzu’s Art of War that, 'In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.' He lay happily on the kitchen floor, his coat decorated with bolognaise sauce and delicately picked rissole after rissole out of the broken crockery on the floor.