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

The Gardener Revealed

“He’s out there again,” said Janet, barely hiding her irritation.

Gary put down his coffee and gazed appreciatively at his wife standing at the kitchen window. She’s doing alright, he thought. Her figure hadn’t changed much in thirty years. He stroked his stomach that bulged accusingly over his belt and gave a quiet, latte-flavoured belch. Puffmuffin, their Persian cat, gave him a disapproving stare.

“Who?”

“The new neighbour. Bruce.”

“He’s allowed to walk around his garden, Love. There’s no law against it.”

“Sure, but why naked?”

“It’s a beautiful day. Perhaps he’s after a bit of sun. You know, get the vitamin D levels up. Fight off Covid.”

“But it's obscene! And anyway, he does it whether it’s a nice day or not. He was even out there last Wednesday when it was raining.”

“Are you keeping a diary?” asked Gary mildly.

Suddenly, Janet turned and brought her dark green eyes to bear on him. “Why are you not appalled? It’s not like he’s a svelte blonde with big boobs.”

“I don’t like big boobs,” retorted Gary. “You know that. Give me small and…”

Janet interrupted just as Gary was demonstrating with his cupped hands his preferred breast size. “That’s not the point! There’s a man next door, wandering around his garden sans underwear, dangling his wares at all and sundry and you don’t care.”

“Honestly, I don’t care. It’s his garden.”

“He’s probably gay,” mused Janet. “Keeping his tan up like a Tom of Finland hunk.”

“Just because a man walks around his garden starkers does not make him gay and who cares if he is anyway?” said Gary. “A man’s garden is his castle. Anyway, he’s balding, his abs have gone to flab and he walks with a stoop. Hardly a pin-up for the mardi-gras. You’re stereotyping him.”

“That sounds like a contradiction,” said Janet with a smile. “Anyway, gay or not, I don’t want to have to avert my eyes every time I am washing up my breakfast bowl.”

“Don’t avert your eyes then. Give him a grin and a thumbs up. Take his photo.”

“Oh Gaz, why do you blokes think that your one-eyed trouser-snake excites us women so much? Honestly, have you ever considered how absurd it looks most of the time?”

“Just most? Not all?” asked Gary with a hopeful smile.

“Just most,” said Janet. “I shall say no more in case it incriminates me.”

“I can live with that but…”

“No more buts Gary. I don’t want to see Bruce dishabille anymore.”

“Disabeel?”

“Starkers! Unclad! Naked! Without a stitch! Nude. Wearing only a smile! Sometimes your lack of French education surprises me.”

“Oh. You should have said.” Gary considered an appropriate riposte, but felt that anything he said would be l’esprit d'escalier. Instead, he took a contemplative sip of his latte. “If it concerns you so much, why don’t you go and speak with him?”

“Me? I can’t do that,” she said, sidling over to stand behind his chair.

“You’re a grown woman. It’s not that you don’t know what a man looks like. You’re not a twelve-year-old.”

“Don’t get mean. I just thought that my darling, handsome and chivalrous husband would protect his beloved,” she crooned, while leaning down and nibbling his ear.

Gary was a sucker for ear nibbling. He could feel his resistance falter and then collapse as Janet’s tongue gave him a little lick on his right ear lobe.

“Righto!” he said briskly, leaping to his feet just a little too quickly, toppling the chair onto the cat bowl, barely missing Puffmuffin who was, until her world exploded, making the difficult decision whether to start with the milk or the pilchard course of her breakfast. The collision of the top of the chair with the edge of the bowl guaranteed that the ensuing fish milkshake catapulted onto Janet’s freshly coiffured fringe, and slimed slowly down her nose.

Janet gave a visceral scream.

Under normal circumstances, Gary would be doubled over with laughter but one look at Janet’s pilchard bespattered countenance persuaded him that this would not achieve what the ear-nibbling had promised. Quickly, he grabbed the kitchen towel and enveloped Janet’s head in it.

Her muffled complaints at this new humiliation were stifled not just by the towel but by Puffmuffin’s caterwaul, who not only was not suddenly starved of her meal but had a clothheaded woman dance on her tail. Oh, the indignity!

But that was yesterday…

“He’s out there again,” said Janet, completely failing to hide her irritation.

Gary looked at his freshly made latte, inhaled its velvet overtones, and sighed as he put down the steaming mug on the bench top. He had so been looking forward to his caffeine hit. He rubbed his lower back. The couch was always uncomfortable, and it had clearly become lumpier since he last slept on it. That had been two years ago when he failed to notice that Janet had permed her hair. He had learnt that lesson and now was firmly alert to how she looked whenever she returned from an outing. So much so, that he often got into trouble for making a comment about her hair when nothing had changed.

But now he had a bigger problem. The naked neighbour was not only affecting his sleep but it was clear that his earlobes would not receive any attention until he did something.

“Is he displaying?” The word came out before his brain fully engaged.

“What?” came the disgusted reply.

“Umm,” back pedalled Gary, “I meant is he nude again?”

“Would I bother commenting if he were dressed in a tuxedo?”

“Well, in all fairness, Dear, if he were dressed in a tuxedo, I reckon you would comment.”

Janet turned towards her husband and glared icily.

Shit, thought Gary, I’m for it now. But Janet had turned from him and was staring down at their neighbour again. “He’s watering the dahlias.”

“Sensible,” said Gary, relieved that the conversation had changed direction to something more prosaic. Gary enjoyed gardening and knew a considerable amount about dahlias for a fifty-six-year-old quantity surveyor. “It’s not rained for a week or so and …”

“Not watering, Gary!”

“But you just said he was.” Sometimes Gary wondered if Janet really was the head of marketing at Dobson’s Cakes and Confectionary. For someone who took pride in communication her sentence structures were often confusing. Yes meant no and now watering means not watering. He was about to ask for clarification when it was loudly provided.

“He’s fucking peeing on the dahlias.”

“Excellent!”

“Excellent? Gary! For God’s sake…”

“Hang on, Jan. Urine has a pH of 6.2 to 7 and dahlias love a slightly acidic soil, say 6.5 pH and so…”

Gary found himself speaking only to the still-affronted Puffmuffin and jumping slightly as the kitchen door slammed.

The day had not improved and Gary’s back still ached.

Gary placed his latte in the microwave and gave it thirty seconds on high. He needed a hot latte so he could think. Janet’s icy glare needed melting. It was clear that Bruce’s proclivity for watering dahlias with a council un-approved irrigation method was not only upsetting Janet but clearly delaying the onset of a good earlobe nibble.

He couldn’t care less how Bruce wandered or watered his garden. A hairy bloke, nudders or not, was of no interest to him. It was an early night with earlobe play with his delightful lass that was filling his head.

Gary was never one for conflict. If given a choice between fight and flight, a small puff of dust and a figure in the distance demonstrated his preference every time. His mind wandered to strange and arcane solutions to the Bruce problem. The answers mostly focussed on radarguided super-soakers or rocket-propelled distress flares. As delicious as each idea was it was clear that none of his ideas were worthy of actual implementation.

“What to do? What to do?” he said to Puffmuffin, who was curling herself around his feet in the hope of another dollop of cream in her bowl.

“Perhaps I could visit him.”

Puffmuffin miaowed her assent.

“I thought you would side with Janet,” said Gary giving her a scratch on her head and failing completely to put any cream in Puffmuffin’s bowl.

Gary contemplated the thought of knocking on Bruce’s door and arguing the case for clothed gardening. “It’s sun smart. Clothes will protect you from European Wasp stings. You won’t get your irrigation equipment caught in a rose bush.” Gary had to admit that the arguments were reasonably compelling, especially the last point. He crossed his legs at the thought. “I’ll do it,” he declared to Puffmuffin and turned on his heel and marched towards his study, a gleam of an idea in his eye. Five minutes later he returned and purposely strode out the door, letting the fly screen door crash behind him.

“We got the Woolies contract,” said Janet that night, beaming and holding her glass of chardonnay high in a toast to herself. “Seven hundred and eighty-three million iced doughnuts to be supplied to all of Greater Sydney over the next three years.”

Gary looked up in astonishment from his snags and mash. “But that assumes that everybody in Sydney eats one iced doughnut per week. That’s not possible.” As a quantity surveyor, he was proud of how quick he was at calculating things. “Old or young, sick or fit, that’s a doughnut a week without fail.”

“How many do you eat?” retorted Janet, pointedly looking at the little round bulge propped against the edge of the dinner table.

“Oh. Ahh. Yeah. One a day with my afternoon latte.”

“So your average is one a day — there are others who eat more than one doughnut a day. Seven-hundred and eighty-three million doughnuts is a doddle. Perhaps you should consider cutting…”

“I went over to Bruce’s today,” said Gary quickly, keen to avoid the discussion of weight and doughnuts taking over their dinner table conversation.

“You did?” said Janet with astonishment, putting her glass down with a clunk. “That’s not your normal way of solving problems. The thought of you making personal contact with another human had only occurred to me in my wildest fantasies. I’d have expected you to come up with some Rube Goldberg contraption. Perhaps a rocket powered super soaker or something. Anything that would keep you at a distance.”

Gary was quite used to his wife reading his mind but still decided not to confess that remotely launched objects had been his preferred approach. After all he was focussed on the end goal of a good lobe nibble. And nothing would distract him from that goal.

“I’m not such a mouse, you know,” said Gary feigning being hurt.

“And?”

“And?”

“Yes, and? It’s a question Gary. One of those conversational devices with a curly thing with a dot at the end, suggesting that more elucidation is warranted. How did it go?”

“I’m sure he’s not going to walk around naked in his garden any more.”

“Great! What did you say?”

Gary’s mind was whirling. He didn’t want to lie. “I’m just sure.”

“You’re not going to tell me?” asked Janet, deliberately picking up her knife and pointing it at him.

“I didn’t actually talk to him, I just went over…”

“And shouted through his letter box? Telegrammed him perhaps. Semaphore? Morse code? A paper glider wafted gently over his rooftop that miraculously flies through an open window and into his bowl of cornflakes?”

“Close. I left him a letter.”

“And?”

“And?”

“For Christsakes Gary, you can be aggravating. What the hell did your letter say?”

“Err, I just wrote that as someone who reads The Guardian I was well aware of the health risks of constantly exposing sensitive skin to ultra-violet and infra-red radiation and as I am a concerned neighbour I thought he might like to ensure that his delicate organ was not harmed because I cared. Well, that was the gist of it.”

“You said you cared?” asked Janet incredulously.

“I do care. I always care about the welfare of my fellow man.”

“Why didn’t you simply write, ‘Please don’t walk naked around your garden it upsets my wife.’”

“Because that makes you sound like a prude. And I know,” said Gary, gently touching his earlobe and raising an eyebrow in what he hoped was a sensual manner, “…that that is not true.”

“Couldn’t you have said something about a teenage daughter or something?” said Janet, studiously ignoring Gary’s overt signalling.

“We don’t have a teenage daughter. Or is there something you haven’t told me?”

“Very funny. But the Gretchens have two teenage daughters.”

“Oh come on, Janet, you’d need the Hubble telescope from where they live to see Bruce’s…”

“Don’t say it,” warned Janet.

“…house,” finished Gary.

“Be that as it may, we have a flasher for a neighbour. It’s clear he’s not doing it for his health.”

“What?”

“Oh Jesus, Gary, you’re a numpty. You’re such an innocent.”

“What do you mean,” asked Gary, puzzled.

Janet sighed and then gave him a small, enigmatic smile. “Pass the chardy.”

Janet bustled off to work leaving Gary holding his latte and contemplating whether he would go into his home office and settle down to do some tough calculations on how many tiles he would need to order for the Council’s new indoor aquatic, trampolining and childcare centre. “Probably a few less than the doughnuts Sydney consumes in a year,” he told Puffmuffin.

As he washed the dregs out of his latte mug, out of the corner of his eye he saw Bruce wandering among his bright dahlias. Gary couldn’t help himself. He stared. It was lucky that Janet had left. Gary could just hear her mocking laughter as she pointed out the little yellow sock that Bruce was now wearing, like a Borat mankini.

Gary was transfixed. Bruce gazed up and gaily waved. Gary couldn’t quite hear what Bruce was saying but it sounded horribly like “I’ll just water the dahlias and then I’ll pop over, Darl…”