Pen Hanley

  • New Beginnings and New Year Muffins

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    I’m a stationery junkie. I love notebooks of every kind, from school exercise books to hand-made, leather-bound journals. Once I bought a very small hand-made notebook in a Knightsbridge stationers in London. Its cover was soft suede of the palest green and the smooth, creamy-textured pages inside were exactly the same shade. The endpapers were of marbled paper in delicate pastels. It was so pure and pale and perfect that it was ages before I could bring myself to sully its perfection with my dark blue scrawl. It was years actually. This probably had something to do with my having…

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  • Technological ineptitude but all things seem possible

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    First, an apology. I was taught how to blog by a not very good teacher who has gone on to something else and can’t be contacted. I didn’t realise until just the other day that in order to edit one’s blog, presumably one doesn’t have to press ‘Publish’ and then press the Edit to make changes but that there is a ‘Save’ and if I press that and then ‘Edit’ I get a chance to correct mistakes before I ‘Publish’. All this is guess work. I’ve just realised that it’s my more or less 1st drafts that must fly into…

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  • Lost in the corridors of time

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    I’m back. Because finally I sent in my draft of Chapter 2 of the Churchill Trust book. I’d been working on it for ages, getting up at 5.00 am and writing before work and it was a hard one plus had been very busy at my other job, my real job, and the day I finished the chapter I was so tired that I came home from work and slept 14 hours in a row. Now I am half-way through This Is Not the End of the Book (London, Vintage, 2012) which is a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude…

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  • It will be like doing a PhD in one year…

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      It is very hard for me to narrow myself down to focus on only one thing. I have two jobs, I do Argentine tango dancing, I’m a film fanatic and I love theatre. I swim and do tai chi and yoga. And I always want to read as widely as I want. This week in my spare time after work and after my second job (the commissioned book, of which more anon) I read Leslie Kenton’s Skin Revolution (London, Vermilion, 2003). Leslie Kenton is a gorgeous guru for health and beauty. She is a wonderful writer and I love…

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  • “Mad with joy”

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    ‘The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tyres.’ American writer Dorothy Parker said that. I was lucky to get four stepchildren, three of whom – the three boys – lived with us for about half the time. Lucky because it had become too late for me to have children (that drought of men remotely possible that happens to women about mid-way through their 30s) and lucky because the stepchildren themselves were wonderful. The only down-side was more housework, but their dad was pretty good at…

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  • A kinder way to treat a potato

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    ‘Don’t get your food from the same place your car does.’ This is the advice of writer Michael Pollan. American petrol stations make more money from food and cigarettes than from petrol. It’s very probably the same here in Australia. And the food is all ‘Highly process non-perishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks…’ Pollan writes that petrol stations ‘have become processed-corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside you.’ (In Defense of Food, 2008, p. 192) I don’t know that Australia uses as many corn products as the US but the principle remains the…

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  • Good person goes bad …

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    Óleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, regarded by many as one of the most beneficent agents in the history of espionage, was tried and sentenced to death in Moscow in 1963. Having only by a near miracle escaped that fate myself in 1985, I naturally have a close personal interest in the subject of this monograph.’  Now, that’s a great opening to a book review! You’ve just got to read on. It was written by Oleg Gordievsky in September’s Literary Review p. 6.  I used to write a ton of book reviews – mainly for The Canberra Times. I learnt a lot from…

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  • How to write violently and live peacefully

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    ‘Be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.’ Gustav Flaubert said that. So I make my house clean and tidy and lay the fire and fill two blue vases with bunches of my yellow jonquils, and I write my commissioned Churchill book. Not that the Churchill Trust necessarily wants a ‘violent and original’ book! It will be original but perhaps I will leave the violence to my novel writing. I brush the white cat who is so pretty he looks like a girl and I do my tai chi in the…

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  • Beyond all rights and wrongs…

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    ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ Rumi said that. I found it in Richard Brennan’s Alexander Technique: Change your posture, change your life. It’s in the Canberra public library system and fairly recent. It’s a good book with some wonderful quotations in it. Who was Rumi? Sounds a bit Sufi. I almost don’t want to do the research because I want to retain the mystery for myself. The quotation sounds like someone promising to meet one after death. Even though I don’t understand that quotation I keep coming back to the…

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  • Happiness and the What if…? questions

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    ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ Ghandi said that. It makes me happy just thinking about it. Although for most of us it is more an ideal to strive towards as we flounder our way through life trying to earn a living. In our society almost totally geared to maximising financial profits for the few (someone called our system Totalitarian Capitalism) it is extremely hard to find worthwhile work. I’m lucky enough to have two worthwhile jobs I believe in: writing for the National Rural Health Alliance and writing a…

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