My Life as a Paper Lion

Posted: 22 Oct 2011 | 6:00 am

I forget what madness ever drove me to start writing this column in the first place. Our lifelines are so often blurred between what really happened and the auto adjust of reality.

Even witnesses to the crazed act are hard to put my finger on, in order to tap into their sense of recollection. Those Ancient Egyptians had court reporters taking notes for prosperity, or was that the Greeks?

Obviously animal scrolls couldn't fit into my nifty HP ink jet printer. Or trying to erect a pyramid to house the library of the ill-advised moments of my life would mimic the same insane thinking I undertook in trying to construct my own home here in paradise. Hah! The gods of fortune all are still laughing over the misadventures on that particular journey with no end.

Never mind, what's past is gone like the air from the tires on my dormant bicycle.

Note to disparaging readers, if you have gotten this far and think I am about to somehow throw in the towel and wind up Property Watch, please stop reading now - you won't be getting rid of me that easy.

Friends, acquaintances and strangers who sometimes email or strike up a conversation at the counter when I'm ordering my latte often get glassy eyed and say "how hard it must be to think of ideas for new columns..."

In reality, the truth be known, it's not hard at all. There are literally thousands of untold stories on this island, ranging from the mundane to the riveting, but most of them occupying the area of no man's land, in the large space of gray that lies between the black and the white lines.

I've always respected great writing be it Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Paul Theroux or the dean of 'gonzo journalism' himself who is so sadly missing from our presence - Hunter S. Thompson.

It remains incomprehensible and astonishing to me that they possessed such craft, vocabulary, wit, insight and the ability to tell stories. But in life we work with what we have, and I muddle through as best I can, to the angst of more editors than I can remember, with typos, grammatical blunders and more moving violations than a repeat offender.

My excuse, if in fact there is one, remains that I am a columnist and not a writer. Rules do not therefore apply and the urban-staccato, train-of-thought writing is indeed a little appreciated craft or customary style.

This of course is a very lame excuse. I lay no claim to being a journalist and, as so many have pointed out, the columns often resemble a protracted drunken sprawl of late night SMS-ing from a prison. Alone with my thoughts, I am free to rant, opine and hold court.

There have of course been some attempts at property features, thoughtfully researched and put into form. More losers than winners here, I am afraid, but some points have been scored.

I have always had a lot going on in my head and the journey my own consulting business has taken - in hotels, property and tourism - allows for many unique opportunities and access to data and information.

The quest to somehow put something back into the island that I have called home for nearly a decade remains important. Perhaps I'm being naive here but at least let me wallow in this passionate pursuit.

So that's it, in what appears to be like a marriage on the rocks we seem to be stuck together, waiting for the kids to grow up and move out, until we can pursue separate lives and a broken union of columnist and reader.

Tomorrow I will wake up and some strange idea will crop up as I batter the keys on my PC, dodging typos like water buffaloes on an expressway. It won't always be pretty but hopefully some small points of interest will keep you coming back for more.

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