Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Slow writers

A longer review of The Disenchanted Wizard - from Lorraine Orman - is now on KidsBooksNZ. She finishes the review by noting: Non-stop action and a strong focus on the child protagonists are combined to create a satisfying fantasy for readers (probably girls) of about 9 to 12. I was pleased to tell her that I know of two very enthusiastic boys who've also read the book, so we can take 'probably girls' with a grain of salt. It didn't seem to bother either of the boys that the main protagonist is a girl; anyway there are plenty of males in the book as well!

I've begun writing a fourth book, but it's in the extremely early stages so far, finding its way with some difficulty. And if the last book is anything to go by, what I've written so far is just as likely to be ditched by the time the book reaches its final form. 

I was pleased to read a long blog post by Anne Allen today called Slow Writers: Are they Doomed to Failure in the Digital Age? Having taken some two years to complete The Disenchanted Wizard, which by any standards is a relatively short book, I think I would call myself a slow writer. And yet two other books that appeared in 2014: Diary of a Prostate Wimp and The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret were each written in a few months. So maybe it depends on the book as to whether slowness is an element or not. 

Still, a book of 30,000 words should, you'd think, take a good deal less time than some of the books running to 600 pages or more that I've been asked to review in the last two or three years. But when a book requires constant rewriting and revision and rethinking, then any book of any length will take time. And a dose of procrastination doesn't go amiss either, when it comes to dragging out the time involved. 

I'm currently reading through an old journal I kept. At the moment I'm in the section written during 1990, when I was really finding my feet as a writer. Again and again I write of the struggles of trying to write with so many other calls on my time (I was working full-time and had five children), but also dealing with procrastination and with the difficulties of revising. So nothing much has changed it seems!



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Gifts

One of my daughters does a lot of sewing; it's just something she loves doing, especially cute clothes for little kids. Her own son gets a lot of well-made clothes, with interesting design features (though his mother was a bit dubious about him choosing a High School Musical design on his latest shirt. )

Recently she's been making clothes for the latest grandchild - he's very small because he arrived six weeks early, and so shop-bought clothes look like they belong on a giant. But my daughter really enjoys making clothes for girls, and so birthdays are a great opportunity for her to go a bit wild and produce skirts and tops and other girly delights.

I really admire people with gifts that just seem to come out of nowhere. They have an enthusiasm for a particular skill, and learning it comes easily, and keeping on learning is never a trouble. My wife is like that: she's picked up a bunch of skills during her lifetime, in each case because something got her enthused to give the thing a try. The skills I've got, on the other hand, I've had since I was a child, pretty much: playing the piano and writing, primarily. I suppose you could add learning how to use a computer to those, something that I only picked up in the 80s, but other skills that require eye-hand coordination don't come at all easily to me.

One of my sons taught himself programming in a matter of a few weeks, and each new programming language that he learns come even more easily than the last.

A colleague of mine went for an assessment for a further stage in her career recently, and part of the weekend she spent away (along with a bunch of other candidates) was being seen by a psychologist. One of the questions he asked was something I found interesting: what gifts did you get in your mother's womb? At first you think: nothing. Every gift I've got I've had to acquire. But in fact some of the gifts we have come with the package; they were there from the time we were. They're part of who we are, and we probably couldn't live without using them in some way. These aren't just skills, or talents; they cover the whole range of ways of relating to people and the like.

And sometimes you wonder if these gifts don't go unrealised. I heard last night about a young man who discovered that he had nose. Hardly unusual, you'd think, except that what perfumers mean by a 'nose' and what you and I mean by it are two different things. Without a 'nose' you could never work in the perfume industry. With one, you're an absolute find.

But would you come out of school thinking: I have a nose. I must find a job in a perfume factory? Nope, having a nose (just as having a palate for food or wine) is something you either discover or don't. Sadly, there are probably a lot of people who never discover what they've brought into this world.

Louis Sachar

In our trips around op shops (charity shops) in the British Isles, we’ve come across heaps of books, but most of them are the same small group of authors, Grisham, Maeve Binchey, you name it.

Just once in a while you pick up something that’s different, and the other day I found a book by Louis Sachar. Okay, who’s he?

He’s the writer of the book, Holes - and also the screenwriter of the movie that was made from the book. He has an odd sense of the world, writes about kids and their worldview, and how they take things in their stride even though to adults they may be outlandish. Holes is a delightful story that has several interlinking threads running through it, and the movie is fairly faithful to the book (no doubt because of Sachar’s influence on the screenplay).

The book I found the other day isn’t about teenagers, as Holes is, but about kids who are more like nine or ten. It concerns a very strange young man who can’t get with the world, who’s angry at everyone and everything, and yet longs for someone to befriend him. It’s full of delightful characters, of wonderful lines, has a great sense of humour (as Holes does) and even has some extracts from another book part way through which is written by an author whose name happens to be an anagram of Louis Sachar.

The title is: There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom. If you can find a copy, read it.