The Third "Continental" Bookshelf
Booker Prizes, Pulitzer Prize winning journalism, Webby Awards and, closer to home, school achievement prizes. And of course the ultimate recognition and status symbol in the world of knowledge and education the elusive PhD.
This is Troisième Little Girl’s Third Continental Shelf on The Touchwood Bookshelf in the Kitchen at NASA at Big Tree Harare
The Beginning
the “middle child” book and the memoir of a lost childhood
Growing Up
Growing up and unfinished books and business.
Borrowdale School. My Grade 7 School Prize: Great Figures of Mythology. I occasionally have a browse.
Avondale Plaza second-hand booksellers: Meetings with Remarkable Men. Picked up this gem a couple of years ago and am yet to read it.
Gifts from friends: Man and His Symbols. I’ve read a quarter of it and now have a copy on my iPad to finish it at my leisure.
Danny's Years
Danny’s Years
St. Johns College: I’ll never forget how annoyed Dan was at my choice of subjects at O Level and that I would not be joining him in Computer Science but instead chose to take History. It’s a longer story than I care to imagine folks.
ILSA College: My subject choices at A level are even more uncanny in hindsight. English Literature, Maths and Biology.
The PNI Empowerment Trust: I never sat my A Levels but instead teamed up with the PNI crew and the rest as they say is history. PNI – how thoughts and emotions affect the human body’s immunity to illness – is a long word and a tall order. Psychoneuroimmunology. Somewhere between Medical Hypnosis and the inevitable doctor’s appointment.
Covid-19/coronavirus? Cambridge Exams and Cambridge Analytica?
PNI
a pop psychology translation
PNI and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)
a resource
PNI, Diet, Herbs and Supplements
being inclusive
PNI, Mental Health, Addiction and Suicide
a higher power
PNI
a pop psychology recap
PNI, Spirituality and Religion 1:
the power of storytelling and a mentor
PNI, Spirituality and Religion 2:
our global family
PNI, Spirituality and Religion 3:
Buddhism in Harare - the strength of community
PNI, Spirituality and Religion 4:
Exercise - Tai Chi in Harare - it's a gamble I Ching
PNI: Health – Out of Thin Air – the takeaway
The Middle
a storybook
Reality Check: Going Solo
The death (and rebirth?) of PNI and the whole wide world awaits...
This is where the story really begins and what the cover of the book really looks like – if I were to have a private chat with you beyond the veil Dan my dear.
I haven’t left Africa since I was about fourteen years old and haven’t travelled much further north than Lusaka since then either.
However, that said, I still recall Calgary and Vancouver in Canada and London in the United Kingdom as if it were yesterday though the years betwixt Queen Elizabeth II, rest your dear soul.
In addition the Africa I know I know well.
Turning Back the Clock
I grew up reading The Birds of Southern Africa again and again whether in the form of Robert’s or Newman’s Birds. Sasol is a more recent addition to the bookshelf.
They also proved an invaluable introduction to the arts and comparison with the many works on the walls at home growing up.
Zimbabalooba and a True Rhodie
To help fill in the gaps in the vast tome that is The Touchwood Bookshelf…
The L.J. Mullin was a gift from a girl in more recent personal history and I treasure it and the memory of us together.
Rhodesia and the Rhodies? My age group was born in 1980 and thus, if we were born after the 18th of April that year, we could qualify as born-free. As for myself, being a January baby, I wasn’t so lucky. Even simply because of being born in the same year as Independence, I grew up with a tricky psychological relationship with family and state alike.
The title of this “shelf” is Zimbabalooba a popular brand of clothing in Zimbabwe. Is it still?
As for Rhodies…they are on the opposite side of the historical divide from Zimbabwe’s Freedom Fighters – now War Veterans
Problems with the Neighbours and My Favourite Teenage Read: Mandela
What can I say? At the tender age of about sixteen – a year or so after the end of apartheid – I read Long Walk to Freedom from cover to cover. It’s due for a second read!
As for the others on this “shelf”… I am yet to read them. However I watched the film adaptation of Cry, The Beloved Country and will also see the movie of Out of Africa in due course.
Middle-earth: a big word for a kid
for Dan in memoriam
Middle-earth is actually a big word for anyone of any age J.R.R. Tolkien.
This peculiar piece or “shelf” is of interest for many reasons. To start at the end I borrowed Dissection of the Cockroach from the ILSA College library and never returned it. Perhaps ILSA will receipt this virtual copy. Anyway, it, along with the French Dictionary are damaged goods. This highlight a very important point with The Touchwood Bookshelf: that is, they are all real books in my possession, or those I’ve temporarily borrowed – they come how they are. And thanks to careful care over the years they are mostly in good nick.
Dissection suffers from a burnt corner and the French Dictionary suffers from a rat eaten corner.
And so lastly the Silmarillion…I borrowed the book from the Prince Edward School library while my dear mother was the Librarian there in my youth. Along with Mandela, on the previous “shelf”, I read Lord of the Rings from cover to cover as a teenager and my entire existence was consumed by Middle-earth mythology and history. I read the first few chapters of the Silmarillion at the time and am yet to finish it. I also read The Hobbit then too.
Booker: Pulitzer or not...
The English Patient
Midnight’s Children. As it’s author recovers from injuries from a ‘brutal attack’ while he was giving a talk. We pray for his speedy recovery.
Midnight’s Children. I chanced upon this tome, which I am yet to read, on the bookshelf at home when I was about twelve. However I recall the passage I read from it all these years later: Methwold.
I receipt it here for posterity as it remains one of my favourite quotes.
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Methwold
The fishermen were here first. Before Mountbatten’s ticktock, before monsters and public announcements; when underworld marriages were still unimagined and spittoons were unknown; earlier than Mercurochrome; longer ago than lady wrestlers who held up perfor-ated sheets; and back and back, beyond Dalhousie and Elphinstone, before the East India Company built its Fort, before the first William Methwold; at the dawn of time, when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in Asia, when Mazagaon and Worli, Matunga and Mahim, Salsette and Colaba were islands, too-in short, before reclamation, before tetrapods and sunken piles turned the Seven Isles into a long peninsula like an outstretched, grasping hand, reaching westward into the Arabian Sea; in this primeval world before clocktowers, the fishermen-who were called Kolis-sailed in Arab dhows, spreading red sails against the setting sun. They caught pomfret and crabs, and made fish-lovers of us all.
(Or most of us. Padma has succumbed to their piscine sorceries; but in our house, we were infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri sky, and remained meateaters to a man.) There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name-Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai-may well have become the city’s. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbour, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk… the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbour to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in 1633, and East Indian Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision-a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India’s West against all comers-was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza-that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation-that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold’s vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn’t long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island… and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:
Prima in Indis,
Gateway to India,
Star of the East
With her face to the West.”
~Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
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As for the other authors on this “shelf”, I note they both won the Booker Prize a year apart in 1992-3 and so joined Rushdie in this esteemed accolade.
And the Pulitzer? The question there is as to whether the documents on this site count as journalism worthy of the prize and secondly whether I’m accepted as a US Citizen (needed to qualify – I think??) The fishermen were here first Mr. Barack.
Dan the Poet: a giant among men
"Come in Dark Horse this is Red"
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;”
~ William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us
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“But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”
~Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
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“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
~ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Bleep
Bleep
“This is Horse;
Dark Horse.”
“Hello this is Star Control,
Red Fox has just warped himself.”
“I’m right on his tail!”
Owt!
Hum
Bleep
Swoon
Bang!
“Space Hounds?
Heel boys!
Heel!”
Arr, arr
“Commander, Horse, Reddy is in our sights.”
Red looked behind him
“Dang that equine bugger’s after me.”
Red flicked the dreaded SUPER-SPEED™ switch
Suddenly
Reddy vanished from Horse’s radar
“He’s warped
AGAIN!”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, sir, he has
He’s gone into
SUPER-SPEED™
~Daniel Eastwood with Jonathan N. Wakeling, Space Hounds
...of coffee cups
and cigarettes
This “shelf” must be the most difficult for me to get any perspective of. Bart Wolffe, formally a Harare based poet, says it better than anyone on the cover.
I’ve had a personal struggle with addiction, including cigarettes, with I am currently struggling to quit.
Coffee is no doubt my favourite non-alcoholic beverage.
One of my regrets is not sharing my marijuana habit with friends at school, Danny among then. Who knows he might still be alive today.
Dan never had a tombstone – his ashes were scattered in a private ceremony years after his passing in the Botanical Gardens in Harare. May this “shelf” be his epitaph.
Jung, Freud and the Playwright
suicide and the darker side of the creative person - 2 out of 3
The Liquid Centre and other schoolboy attempts at drama:
“I dare you to stick this whole aubergine in your earhole”
To be continued at a later date…The Singing Spice Gardens of TBA, to be announced at a later date
For all the years between us and all the friends and family who are still with us
Dickens: A Christmas Carol
music and a read for the young reader
Music, addressed elsewhere, was a fundamental part of both our upbringings. A Christmas Carol for Daniel.
These three titles which arrived in my archetypal lap from vastly different places in the space-time continuum have been put on the back-burner of my reading list for a rainy day. That reminds me: music I refused to listen to in my youth which I have recently fallen in love with: The Carpenters. In particular a song called Rainy Days and Mondays. We all have our moments.
Anyway they are included on this “shelf” for youngsters to get their footing in the world of reading and literature. And I almost read The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid and look forward to it immensely. Book 7 – my numerological Life Path Number is also interesting coincidently.
For the girls, women and ladies:
two peas in a pod H.E. Bates, and the two sides of a coin Esther Freud
Kate Winslet remains one of my all time favourite actresses. I’ll leave it at that Janet Evanovich.
P.S. Thoroughly enjoy my H.E. Bates Esther Freud, should you by chance get this message.
Milan Kundera: My Martyr of the Revolution
a favourite author and books that caught my eye but I'm yet to read
Milan Kundera has the honour of my favourite opening line in a book:
“The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?”
~Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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And as I reread it here in hindsight of the advent of The Touchwood Bookshelf it holds dear and precious new meaning.
Other notes on this important “shelf” – A Walk Across the Sun and Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.
sci-fi: a voice for the voiceless
from Carl Sagan to Isaac Asimov and more recently Emily St. John Mandel
sci-fi – what if the entire world was in lowercase letters? Arthur C. Clarke?
Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was my first read of 2023 – and my first book by the author – a recent gem of a writer. Recognised in Barack Obama’s 2022 End of Year Lists and winner of The Goodreads Choice Award 2022 for Best Science Fiction.
To fill you in: I’m not in a hurry scf-fi and fantasy – I have the entirety of Asimov’s Foundation under my reader’s belt.
These Audrey Niffenegger I picked up in a book swap at Avondale Plaza. And I enjoyed the film of The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Lastly, our much loved family cat died a few years back. Dear Prudence named after the song on the Beatles’ White Album – FYI Taylor Swift.
The World According to Daniel:
body language and handshakes - a new bible
"Extremely funny" - Daily Telegraph
and The End
apocrypha, (from Greek apokryptein, “to hide away”): Big Tree Harare, grown up and still at home
Milton the poet and Milton the father of modern hypnosis
siblings
Self-hypnosis patter: “I shall use all my conscious and unconscious resources to find out everything there is to know about Life, The Universe and Everything Douglas Adams”
Remembering Milton H. Erickson, M.D.
Games were a kind of ritual in our household – from Monopoly to Bridge, from Chess to Backgammon. This “shelf” is for my siblings who have stood by me though it all. Just so you know I pay attention to the game.
If there’s one thing I’ve failed at it’s leaving home. I got as far as Jay Haley’s excellent book Ordeal Therapy and mopping the kitchen floor in the wee hours of the morning. And if there’s ever been an ordeal Danny is out there with the best of them.
My voice shall go with you Milton.
Zimbabwe: Southern Rhodesia – “Paradise Lost Private Limited”
The Qualified Schizophrenic:
a degree and the self-taught artist
“He was a man of the people. In his old age they called him the ‘old man of Giverny’. The world of conventions which paralyses the bourgeois meant nothing to Monet. Poor and without resources he had to create everything, himself first of all. He did not fail, and followed the straight line of his destiny, while Manet, after 1870, made repeated attempts to please the judges. Monet had the frankness of an open-air man. Beside that sea which was the background picture to his whole life, he breathed in the great winds from childhood onwards, and often gazed at its restless waves which were for him a symbol of the infinate.”
~ Germain Bazin, Impressionist Paintings in the Louvre
Art and the Arts drive the best of us balmy. Monet and Manet, pounds, shillings and pence.
“Can’t you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents
Pounds shillings and pence”
~Roger Waters, Perfect Sense, Part II
“We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone”
~Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall
A Healthy Intellectual Meal:
Cordon Bleu Cooking for the First Office and the poor man's staple
“Fire in the Lake”
~Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize Winner
“Miss Saigon, Tin of Baked Beans”
~Jonathan N. Wakeling, Pulitzer Prize Winner or not…
The national cooking disaster – Pulitzer
How not to read Genesis – Pulitzer
Everything that went wrong with my computer – Pulitzer
Any significant failure – the archytypal Pulitzer
Aim to succeed and maybe you will – Daniel Eastwood – Pulitzer.
To both our mothers who have slaved away tirelessly for many lifetimes to put food on the archetypal table – Good Morning Vietnam.
Stargazing (southern?) Africa and Lost in the Wilderness:
the PhD question mark
Home on the range. A well cooked book at NASA at Big Tree Harare. Time for that PhD? Zim Astro actually exists if you know where to find it.
Eight Billion People and Not A Drop to Drink:
the age-old adage "listen to your elders" - for every David a Daniel
What a Zimbabwean childhood looks like all these years later: done the time on TV BBC Natural History Unit
Africa and Australia and America:
Troisième Little Girl's Third Continental Shelf -
on the road again and the seven year itch
I sometimes have “nightmares” about hitchhiking Australia – specifically from Perth to Sydney – for no good reason. I’ve actually hitchhiked Southern Africa. So I’ve got one ‘A’ out of three in fact. A better way to “process” my emotions.
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Waltzing Matilda
by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson
Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabongs,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree;
And he sang as he looked at the old billy boiling
“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Up came the jumbuck to drink at the waterhole,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee;
And he sang as he put him away in his tucker-bag,
“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Up came the squatter a-riding his thoroughbred;
Up came the policeman – one, two, and three.
“Whose is the jumbuck you’ve got in the tucker-bag?
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with we.”
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Up sprang the swagman and jumped into the waterhole,
Drowning himself by the Coolibah tree;
And his voice can be heard as it sings in the billabongs,
“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag.
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.
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That’s all folks!
Over and out Washington.
Zulu Whiskey Zimbabwe.
P.S. I love you Cadbury's: a Hershey Bar Africa
for everybody who feels they were in anyway ignored, left out or mistreated in the telling of this impossible tale – have a Band-Aid
advice to the reader and comments on the text...
A long journey of the mind: Soozi Holbeche – where I took my first tentative steps to the stars, over two long short decades ago. And a fitting end to this sorry tale. Who’ll come walzing Matilda Roald Dahl?
Time for some peace and quiet Touchwood “Touchstone” Bookshelves of the World…
Signed and Navy Sealed
jnwakeling.com aka Jonathan
at NASA at Big Tree Harare
on this rainy day in Africa, January 22 2023
Postscript: Ancient Wisdom and the Wisdom of Taylor Swift
David Icke, Drunvalo Melchizedek, Graham Hancock and a read for the next generation
“Blank Space”
~Taylor Swift
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“‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So make the friendship bracelets
Take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraid
You’re on your own, kid
Yeah, you can face this
You’re on your own, kid
You always have been”
~Taylor Swift, You’re on Your Own, Kid
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A blank space, deep space, and room to breathe – a musical-literary friendship bracelet for Dan – an imaginary friend.