(And can we read more of these stories of your childhood some time? Outstanding! The boy quite clearly makes the man as they say…)

Jaitra Gillespies last blog post..Howard Jones: Best-selling Buddhist Pop Star

1. My first school was next to a graveyard in Malaya. Nothing the teacher had could match the passing funeral corteges.

2. My first teenage school was a Catholic College in Belize. My RE teacher was the Head of the College. He had me down to burn in hell for not being a Catholic, as I was allowed to skip Mass. Later he ran off with the school secretary and a large chunk of school funds. Interpol caught up with them living the high life in Hawaii.

3. The Catholic College was next to a small busy airport. Ask me anything about Cessnas or Pipers or Dakotas – the best plane that ever flew. Bar none. Nothing the College had could match that!

4. My next school was a Methodist School in Belize. I got beaten for getting into an argument with a teacher as I said Australia was not the same thing as Australasia, she said there was no difference, I disagreed.

5. I got thrown off my bike by a skull on the way home from school. Riding high speed across the mud-flats I hit a bump – the top of the skull embedded in the hard mud – and went flying. I dug it up and took it home; t’was a miraculous thing, I contemplated it for so long, put flowers and a candle by it, and gave it a name. I planned a burial with some wise words by Geronimo from my Niehardt book of Great Indian Chiefs, but my dad found the skull and it was taken for forensics. I never saw it again. I guess that first school in Malaya got me thinking early about stuff.

6. Even Dakotas have their limits. One crashed into a river bank five minutes after take off, overloaded with a massive cargo of cucumbers. The pilot vanished. They thought he had survived and run off, as some suspicious plant substances were also found in the wreckage. A few months later a farmer killed a big alligator up-river. The pilot’s watch was found inside the alligator.

I was a cheerful fellow, for all that. Still am.

hahahaha….

A truly enjoyable image you weave!

On the topic of Librans, all I can say is we are fully entitled to see both sides of an issue, as inconsistent as that often may seem.

Continuing the topic of first albums, I remember acquiring several Canadian artists during my stay there whom I am sure would now be eminently cringe-worthy. There’s no accounting for the taste of the young…

Yes, if my birth is anything to go by, it seems I have a little spirit, or the pedigree for such. It is said that as I languished in an incubator for those initial, touch and go weeks, the nurses would keep on turning me over, as they were unnerved by a pair of small, keen eyes, following their every move.