Bodies in a Window – Paperback

Posted on by Opher

Chapter 1 – Perspectives on a Sunny Day

Life goes on.

That’s all I know. As far as I’m concerned, right now, life is trivial, pointless and boring. It’s nothing more than a repetition of the mundane, periodically interspersed with equally nonsensical novelty. Nothing makes sense. Sadly, today, that is exactly how I’m seeing it. There is no purpose to anything.  It appears to fall into a reassuring pattern – but I think that is an illusion. Change is all there really is. You can be sure that nothing will last for long. Everything you do is doomed to be destroyed in the vagaries of time. Nothing lasts. It’s a pretty miserable state of affairs when you really get down to thinking about it.

I stood in the sanitised room, breathed the Dettol and allowed my mind to run freewheel. Well, I didn’t really allow it to run free, so much as lose control of it. I’d let go. There was no hand on the rudder. It went where it wanted and that appeared to entail a long string of gloomy observations. Right at this moment in time life was looking pretty miserable to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t always been this morbid; my brain has not always flowed in such a melancholy manner. I used to be a happy, easy-going, positive sort of guy. But that seems a long, long time ago now. I’m no longer that person. Life knocked that naïve optimism right out of me a long time before today.

It is days like this that have robbed me of my positive outlook, and I’ve had a few of these kinds of days. Though fortunately not too many on a par with this particular doozy of an example. This was in a category of its own – a kind of one-off. This truth is, for obvious reasons, you can only experience this event once.

Back when I was young ….. I could laugh at my own naivety ….. I used to postulate solutions to the world’s problems. I even used to have faith in the intrinsic goodness of human beings and believed there were things worth striving for. What a fool I was back then. That was before I realised the true nature of all those movers and shakers out there, the wealthy and powerful, greedily clawing in all they can, and willing to carve up their own grannies for self-advancement. They are a bunch of callous self-servers.

The problem is that I woke up to the reality of humankind but probably didn’t really believe. Today brought it all home with a vengeance.

It is strange what pictures play out on your eyeballs as you stand helpless in a situation like this; what horrid thoughts go through your head. I was certainly no longer in control of my own mental processes. My mind was rampaging down an extremely morbid track. A parade of dark thoughts distil out of nothing and chase each other around.

It occurred to me that, when it boils down to it, we are just glutinous sacs of chemistry; bags of minerals dissolved in water and suffused with ionised electricity. Nothing more.

Right now I had a pretty dim view of my species – not surprising, given the circumstances, I suppose.

We’re all to blame. None of us are guiltless.

Bodies in a Window – Paperback (A novel touching all life and death)

Posted on by Opher

I had this idea a long while ago about writing a novel around a telephone box. My main character is making an important phone call. As he is on the phone a variety of disparate characters go past, all intent on various aspects of their lives. The only way they touch is in happening to go past as the call was being made. This is not that.

But the idea was similar.

This was a real event. My father had just died. I was in his hospital room with his body looking out the window. Outside people were walking past, going about their business, completely unaware. This is that. All those people have a basis in reality – even the most outrageous ones. All life, sex and death.

Introduction

I had the concept for this novel in 1981. It has been festering annoyingly in the back of my mind for decades until I finally found the way of writing it.

Many of the characters in this book are embellishments and adaptations of real people, even myself.  It is the same with the events; they too are based on real situations. But this is a work of fiction.  It has come out of my imagination. Nothing is completely true. The characters I have created are often composites and much of what takes place has been altered – having said that there is a strong element of fact in nearly all of it – particularly the more unlikely part.

4.0 out of 5 stars Only Connect!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 July 2018

A very human moment of painful insight and personal crisis launches this intriguing multi-layered story. Several apparently disparate lives are examined through episodic and frankly-confessional first-person accounts which in their very different ways explore the question of how far we are free and how much we are constrained. How are we connected and what if we could see through the eyes of others? The style is fast-flowing, the language direct and uncluttered. As the old 50s cop show proclaimed: All human life is here! In this case, life and death …

I began writing this in February while on the cruise ship Magellan going up the coast of Australia. I completed the first rough draft in March while cruising around Vietnam. Opher Goodwin 25.3.2017

Poetry – Living in a Haze

Posted on by Opher

Living in a Haze

Living in a haze

Of routine,

Obliviously,

Mindlessly

Running through

Mundane existence.

Amid the wonders

Of possibility

We settle for the ordinary.

We squander

The moments

And fail

To treasure

What is around us.

Opher 26.12.2018

We live in a huge mystery and magnificent universe where colossal energies are forging new stars and galaxies of trillions of stars collide. Yet we lay the stove and cook the meals as if every day was not amazing.