Disappointment. Sitting in a lump in my stomach like a heavy, undigested meal. That was the very last thing I had expected to feel, especially as this was an inspiring and motivating writing masterclass. But there it was – disappointment, sitting there and refusing to move.

The first thing I noticed when I came into the room was the crisp, white tablecloth – spotless in its whiteness – its brilliance providing the perfect backdrop. There it sat, like a promise. The deep purple and red tin of Cadbury Roses chocolates – “a delicious assortment of milk and dark chocolate”.

Yes, I thought. Someone who knows how to run a perfect workshop! Reward and encourage participants with regular injections of chocolate.

The six-hour workshop was filled with wonderful advice, anecdotes and strategies for the aspiring writer. But I could not get my eyes, or my mind, off that purple and red tin.
When was Catherine going to open the chocolates?

I started to drift off with my chocolate-covered thoughts. I recalled one of my favourite movies – Chocolat starring Johnny Depp and Juliet Binoche. I love the sensuality that the movie evoked, both implied and actual, of the taste of chocolate on your lips, your tongue and in your throat as the chocolate slides gently down. I love the way the chocolate changed the lives of the characters, from pedestrian to lives of fulfilment and purpose. I love the way that the chocolate was enhanced with a pinch of chilli and secret spices, which in turn added much needed spice to the lives of the small-town people.
Once, in a flash of brilliance, I bought the DVD of Chocolat for my best friend and I combined it with a tin of Roses chocolates, just like the one that sat temptingly before me.

The morning session of the workshop passed quickly, but Catherine neither touched nor referred to tantalising treasure in the purple and red tin.

Aaah, I thought. I know her plan! This is her secret weapon – the much-needed sugar rush in the afternoon when fatigue, both mental and physical, threaten to hijack the workshop. This is how she will keep us all on task!

Sure enough, when the afternoon session began Catherine rearranged the items in front of her, putting some to the side, others to the forefront. There in prime position sat the purple and red treasure chest.
Catherine moved as if in slow motion, and when she reached for the tin, I held my breath.

What would I choose?
I like dark chocolate best of all. Milk chocolate is fine, and white chocolate is better than no chocolate.
Caramel centre? No, strawberry I think. Perhaps a hard centre. Even a mint. It is the chocolate that is important.
Catherine seemed to struggle a little with the lid – naturally, I thought, because this was the first time the tin had been opened.

I allowed myself to breathe again as she removed the lid. I knew what I would choose. I knew that I would savour that chocolate, to its very last remnant.

I slid my tongue gently over my lips in anticipation, and I noticed an increase in saliva as my mouth prepared itself for the pleasure it was about to receive. Then my eyes widened in disbelief as Catherine reached into the tin and began to remove all manner of objects – a bangle, scissors, paper money of various currencies and denominations, key rings, a corkscrew, a screwdriver, nutcrackers, bottle tops, a pack of cards and other miscellany.

NO CHOCOLATES!
I felt my body droop in disappointment. My shoulders sagged, and my mouth instantly went dry. A loud groan of disappointment escaped my lips – much louder that I meant it to be. Catherine looked up at me quizzically.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Mmm” I murmured, not trusting myself to give utterance to anything more than this.
Inside my head I was screaming at her – “THERE ARE NO BLOODY CHOCOLATES! HOW COULD YOU DO THAT?”

For the rest of the day, that disappointment sat there, festering and eating away at my insides.
The workshop itself was brilliant, but the no-chocolates disappointment threatened to overwhelm me.

On my way home, I had to stop at the supermarket to buy a tin – a purple and red tin.
Then all was right with my world.

Wow! What an inspiring, eye-opening, fun-filled workshop with interesting people bringing their diverse stories to the table, along with a hilarious, raw facilitator in Dev – and not to forget the divine food served all day long!

So happy I crossed that country bridge to travel to the big smoke today. Excuses? What are they? This word ceases to align with me. So many tools, suggestions, prompts and associations to put pen to paper and to keep it flowing.

The ideas treading water in the back of my mind are itching to escape the confinement, and after today, even more eager to creatively unleash. Am I clear now? Do I know what I’m doing? Not at all, however from now on I’ll focus on the process, not the project itself (whatever that is), and I’ll trust I move in the right direction – unbeknown to me.

The first time I heard about “the rain event” was on the TV, sprouting nothing but disaster, never in a 100 year flood, 3 months rainfall in 2 days etc, so everyone went home early from work so they wouldn’t be caught in it. Everyone wanted to be safe and sound in the comfort of their own homes when it hit and it was my day to pick up my 4 year old nephew Riley.

So we got home as the rain drizzled down and he headed straight to the toy box. He pulled out an old wooden toy frog, that had seen better days and it was one of those toys where you pushed the button on the bottom and the frog collapsed then stood up straight as soon as you released the button. He also pulled out a plaster mound of a set of teeth, ‘ahh my old dental nursing days’ I thought to myself as he quickly tossed it back in the box completely uninterested in that.

He then wanted to go out in the back yard and make a pond to put the frog in. I suspect he also just wanted to get wet, like you do when you are 4. As with most negotiations with a 4 year old, it was swift as he simply walked to the sliding door, opened it and stepped off the deck and into the rain. I had no chance of stopping him being completely on the other side of the room.

So he stood in the rain, which was the most disappointing ‘rain event’ ever, the best I could do was resign myself to the fact we were both going to get wet, so I downed my coffee, grabbed an empty tupperware container and the box of chocolates from the bench and headed to the sliding door.

I left the box of chocolates just inside the door but in plain sight so that I could use them later to bribe him to go back inside when I’d had enough. Let’s be honest, it was really going to be about me, as kids don’t care about getting wet. As I stood on the deck before I stepped into the rain, I wondered at what point do we start caring about getting wet and cold. When in our lives did we start caring about wet hair, ruined makeup, soaked shoes and cold hands.

Clearly with an active 4 year old there isn’t much time to ponder, only time to join in and seize the moment and put the old wooden toy frog, now called “Froggy” into the pond and play a game of froggy swimming in the rain.

Just at the point when I was sick of being cold and went, the lightening flashed and the thunder struck, it looked like the rain event was about to arrive.

The thunder was so loud, it felt like it was in the house next door and both of us jumped out of our skins and Riley was so startled he started to cry so I took him in my arms and suggested we go inside, pointing out the well placed box of chocolates to give him extra motivation to head in that direction.

We stepped up onto the deck just in time to see a dog come leaping over the fence, obviously scared by the thunder and lightning as well. Riley looked up at me as the rain drops kept running down his face and said with an accusing tone, “You never told me you had a dog Aunty!”

“This is not my dog, I said, ‘he must have gotten frightened by the thunder as well and wants to be looked after till his family come home”.

So Riley, the dog and I went into the house, leaving ‘Froggy’ in the makeshift pond, bobbing up and down until the rain stopped.

Riley’s dad took him home, the rain event didn’t happen and I now own a dog because no one came to claim him.

It just goes to show you just never know how any day is going to pan out and naturally, you guessed it, the dog is called ‘Froggy’.

I first heard about it on the Swedish evening radio news while I was in this godforsaken  place in Norway supposedly going to do my high school certificate.
As I heard the news I was devastated . I asked my landlady to use her phone to call my Mother. “Yes” she said reluctantly “but make it short”.
I wanted to return to Stockholm to be there for my Mother, for my Father’s funeral and for me.
“No there is nothing to be achieved by you coming here. Stay where too are and in two months we will spend Christmas together in Lillehammer’

The time came to travel to Lillehammer, it was snowing very heavily when I got on the train and six hours later I was I Lillehammer being met by…

This was the 1st 5 minute writing, not edited but needs to be!

The first time Alvin received birthday money from his granny in Singapore he dismissed it flippantly and with all the arrogance of youth.

“Get real Granny…5 bucks won’t even buy me a beer after work on Friday” he said with his newly acquired Aussie accent, to no one in particular.

Alvin had come to Australia in the 90s to study engineering at RMIT and found the freedom of life in Australia irresistible. He never left. He rarely visited or talked about his family in Singapore and the very different life he had left there.

There is Japanese saying “Study the face on the bank note and all humanity will be revealed”. Alvin, although not Japanese, was very familiar with this expression but chose to ignore its sage advice and equally ignored the birthday money his granny sent. He considered it a trivial amount and being such a big shot he could do without it. Each year he stuffed the new note into an envelope he bought when he first arrived in Australia to write home…but he never did and now it was full of unused $5 notes.

Friends visiting Alvin’s very smart inner city apartment were often amused by the gaudy red and gold cat with the waving hand that his mother had sent him. Embarrassed by its crassness his constant dismissal was always “This does not belong to me”…with a laugh which implied that his superior Western education gave him the right to ridicule this silly superstition.

Alvin always enjoyed the best of everything – summers in Noosa, winters in Thredbo. When suddenly it was very cold Alvin bristled with anticipation at strapping his fancy skis to his new Audi.

A wave of happiness would overcome him as he was admired by fellow travellers as they wound their way up the mountain. Until finally they found themselves posed Norman Rockwell-like around a roaring open fire with a very fine Shiraz in hand, laughing over work stories and wondering what the poor people were doing.

Alvin new what the poor people were doing. His granny was sweeping the floors of a dingy shopping mall in Katong where she was ignored by haughty young beauticians with diamante fingernails and attitude to match.

But every week she put money aside and once a year she sent Alvin, her beloved grandson who was so far away, a crisp new $5 note.

The first time I saw the snake charmer was in a bazaar in the part of the city they warned us to avoid at all costs. He played his hypnotic melody and the python rose and swayed in time.

The sun was fierce, it was nearly noon and the smell of meat about to turn permeated the marketplace.

There is a Japanese saying that awareness is the key to survival.

I was acutely aware that my money was about to run out and that I had not made any plans other than wanting to be in this place at this time.

I felt for the note in my pocket, recalling the many warnings of pickpockets targeting tourists, and I knew I stood out by my dress and the colour of my skin. The three zeros that followed the number five may have looked promising at first glance, as did the lucky elephant motif on the mauve background, but I knew it was not enough to get me by for much longer.

I couldn’t afford to buy anything, as this was all I had left for food until I could meet up with my travelling companions, who had stayed in the relative safety of the town.

I stopped at a hut where a man was spruiking drinks, which may or may not have been alcoholic. I didn’t care, I just needed something to quench my thirst. As I turned to enter, I felt something brush against my leg and I spun around. Although I couldn’t see anyone, I felt a shiver; suddenly it was cold.

I put my hand into my pocket and the note was gone! In its place was something metallic. I pulled it out and gazed at a red sequined hair scrunchie.

This did not belong to me, my hair is cropped short and spikey.

I began to panic, but as I felt the tiny spheres and marveled at their ruby colour a wave of happiness spread over me. I looked around for the donor-thief, but the bustling crowd made seeking him out as impossible as paying for a drink.

I rejoined the throng, until finally I reached a space where the stalls blended into shanty-studded laneways.

The sun blazed and my shirt was dripping with sweat. I could hear the vague lilt of the snake charmer’s spell, then time seemed to stand still and the only sound was the ringing in my ears, as the sky exploded and the sun was nothing but a dirty orange splodge behind the clouds of smoke, ash and debris that filled the air.

There were people lying prone and bleeding in the dust, and others were running in my direction, away from the bazaar. They were screaming, I could tell by their open mouths and anguished faces, but I could hear nothing. It was almost impossible to breathe. I was aware of a tugging on my sleeve and a child of about ten beckoning me to follow her.

She wove in and out of the sea of panic, all the time turning to make sure I was still in sight. Eventually she stopped and waited in front of a ragged, tent-like building. Taking my hand, she led me inside. The last thing I can remember was the array of coloured sequins, which hung from the beams like rainbows.

My mother must have been 24 when she married. I know this because the date is inscribed in her wedding ring, which later became mine. She was barely 30 when her husband, her four-year-old son, her baby daughter, father and brother were killed in a head-on accident near Barham, on a straight stretch of road on a fine afternoon. My mother was holding the baby girl. It was the 1950s in the days of bench seats in cars and no seatbelts. They were returning from an Anzac Day picnic. Her father was driving when they hit a drunk driver coming the other way. My mother woke up in hospital and asked where her family were. The nurse said they were all dead.

I think of that scene sometimes. The nervous nurse. My sedated mother. Coming out of her shock and with barely a scratch. Her mother had also been in the accident and was in another part of the country hospital, quietly fighting for life with half the top of her head missing.

Months later, my mother and grandmother finally out of hospital, they holed up at home. Friends and neighbours delivered food. They couldn’t face seeing anyone else. Eventually the town GP came to visit and insisted that my grandmother go back to playing golf, and that my mother go back to work. She’d given up working in the bank when she got married. My mother said she never forgot the first time they walked down the street. Everyone that saw them stopped to stare.

Years went by and my mother eventually met my father. He was a farmer, a kind and empathetic man who said he didn’t mind when my mother said she couldn’t face having children again. He understood. He was happy to have her. But a few years later my sister came along, and then me. Every Anzac Day, on the anniversary, my mother would take to her bed and wouldn’t come out. My father shooed us away and said she had a migraine, but my sister and I knew it was the day of mourning and didn’t complain. We had known the story of the accident for as long as we could remember. A framed portrait of the curly haired boy, a cherub named Andrew, hung on my parent’s bedroom wall. There were no photos to frame of the baby girl, Merrilee. I tried not to think of my mother’s sadness. Without the death of these children, my sister and I would not have lived.

Years later my mother died from cancer, after a life long with laughter and friendship and sadness and regret, a divorce from my father, hard years on the farm and then illness that scared her and made her weak and thin. I was in her country town, visiting the graves of the people I’d never known but felt like I had, going through council records and microfiche at the library, reading about the accident, trying to bring closure. I was taking a while on the microfiche, and could see an old man waiting to use it. I apologised and said I wouldn’t be long. He asked what I was doing and I told him a little. He probed further and then revealed that he had been best friends with my mother’s brother, the nine-year-old who had died in the accident. He had been in scouts with John.

This man had been at the funeral, a service for all five, held in a local church. He was with all the other scouts, dressed in uniform. It was the biggest funeral the town had ever seen. Over 1000 attended, spilling outside the church. There were 350 floral tributes. More than 200 cars followed the five coffins to the cemetery. John’s teachers and headmaster carried his coffin. The old man remembered the day of the accident, when every ambulance in town had gone screaming down the main street and he knew something terrible had happened. He said John was very smart and an excellent swimmer. I realised it was the first I knew anything about him. He still had a bracelet that John won in a swimming competition. He said he would post it to me. Six weeks later the package arrived. There was the bracelet worn by my uncle, my mother’s brother. I held onto it like a sacred item.

It’s been almost 12 years since my mother died and I think about her every day. I always remember her smiling. Despite everything that happened in her life, she always smiled. I remember that about her most of all.

            The first time I turned into a horse it was only from the waist down. I still had arms, then. But my bottom half was unmistakably horse: stippled silver and cream, smooth and glossy. When I was annoyed, my tail – a white-blonde, though I was dark as a pirate – flicked back and forth.

My husband saw what had happened. He looked over the top of his paper while I brewed the tea, circling the leaves in the fat pretty pot, and said: ‘a lady walks with a light step.’

Something his mother says, I’m sure of it.

It was true that my tread was heavier; when I walked down the corridor, the people downstairs hit the ceiling with brooms. There is a Japanese saying: a heavy step means a heavy heart. I do not know that this is true. I never liked my thighs, my calves, when they were slender and quiet. To be honest, I was sorry they came back.

The second time I turned into a horse, only my head remained human. Later that day, I was making dinner for my husband and his friends. They were playing dice around our kitchen table, smoking and throwing down two dollar and five dollar bills as if they were nothing.

‘You are clumsy,’ my husband said, as I tried to bring the food to the table using my teeth. ‘A woman should be graceful.’

The next day, when I woke up a woman, I waited until my husband had left for work and then made droppings in our garden. It seemed a more pleasant way of undertaking the task. Besides, by then I had become used to it. After I became a horse, I never had trouble loosening my bowels the way I once had. The aperture opened, shut, without effort or resistance.

The woman from downstairs came into the garden to put out her washing and saw me stand up.

‘This does not belong to me,’ I said, gesturing, but she turned back and hung the clean white sheets on her line, where they billowed like sails.

The last time I turned into a horse, it was the middle of the night. I woke and I felt a burning pain which began in my woman’s parts and radiated outwards. Ah yes, I thought. By then it was a familiar sensation. But suddenly, I was very cold. I shivered and my skin shirred and gooseflesh appeared and coarse horse’s hairs began sprouting.

I walked down the hallway to the mirror by the door and oh yes – there was the proof – I was all horse, from mane to fetlock to rump. I breathed hotly and loudly, and my nostrils vibrated and the fringe on the lampshade trembled.

I tried kicking my back legs, and even as the idea of a kick was forming in my mind my rear legs flew backwards and knocked a vase from the mantelpiece. It had been a gift from my mother-in-law. It shattered.

I should sweep that away, I thought. Only I couldn’t.

At that thought, a wave of happiness washed over me. I made my way to the kitchen, disturbing everything as I went. My tail swished – gone was our wedding picture. I shook my head. Down came a decorative clock. With my teeth I opened the cupboard door and found a bag of sugar and tore it open with my lips. I crunched it, spilling sugar everywhere, joyful in my big strong teeth, in the long plush tongue I had grown.

I could see out the kitchen window. The woman from downstairs was outside. She was becoming a peacock. Green and blue feathers were closing in on her face. She nodded a greeting and I nodded back.

My husband appeared in the kitchen, mussed from sleep.

‘You mustn’t do this’, he said.

I ignored him.

He stepped forward then and slapped my rump. I continued to ignore him. He slapped it again. There was a sharp sting that went through me each time but he kept slapping and slapping and down went my ears and I stamped my hooves and my skin prickled with irritation.

But my husband doesn’t know much about horses. He doesn’t know what a slap will make us do.

He slapped and slapped, and he would not stop, until finally I lifted my nose from the sugar, and obeyed him, and started to run.

The first time I saw Hong Kong was 1993. I touched down that day after 12 weeks in Thailand. A brief stopover before I returned home.

I looked down at the black band circling my wrist and smiled. It was a symbol from my past, my today and my future. A simple black band. Wound round my wrist in a juvenile attempt to claim me by the body that housed one half of the group of cells that would soon be life partner – at least for the next 18 or so years. My body flushed at the thought of the body of the man-boy and our brief inappropriate affair.

There is a Japanese saying that says “be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”. Here in another Asian country, I reflected on the power, the fear and the beauty behind that idiom.

As the bundle of cells multiplied that little bit more, no longer doubling or tripling in a matter of seconds, but rather adding the layers of details that was to become my new baby, I looked up the sun and down at the world. The daisies in the park opposite smiled. The hoi poloi sailed past.

A cloud shadowed the sun, turning the world monochrome, dulling the daisy smiles. My heart started to pound. I feared my arrogance – I do not walk the world boldly enough to deserve this.

At that thought I turned cold. I felt my womb contract, deep, too hard. The contraction wrapped itself up around my heart, clenching it so tight I thought it would smother the beat. I slithered down to the gutter, bringing my knees to my chest, hiding my contorted face from well-meaning citizens.

A wave of horror as I realised what was happening – my baby, that baby that I could never let myself believe was mine, was leaving me already, without once giving me a smile or a restless night.

Wave after wave of contractions, loss, grief and blame were my audience for my mourning walk back to the cheap hotel. I washed away promise and hope in a shared bathroom. In that scolding water, I cried and cried and cried until finally I said goodbye.

When my world turns inward after too many gins, I can admit to myself that you left because I wasn’t brave enough to hold you tight.