Stones and Stories

You might collect stones that caught your eye. I do and have brought many pebbles home to our garden. My favourite is from Milford Sound, favoured for its exotic nature and the likelihood that I’ll never visit New Zealand again. The 200 million year old pebble I took from Milford was likely first shaped by passing glaciers 20,000 years ago. Then again, more local beach pebbles can be interesting too. Can you imagine what they’ve experienced in 100 million year lifetimes?

If not inspired by stones, you might collect stories that caught your attention.

I can think of four stories from Argentina:

• The air hostess who fell out of the plane
• The truck driver who made garden gnomes
• The Welsh descendants that make biscuits.
• Trout fishing trips to Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego

And yet another three stories from Burma:

• The man with photographs of butchered rats for sale in China.
• The diplomat employed by the UN who shipped a Mercedes from Germany to Burma so that he could bring it to Finland without paying duty.
• The Kiwi who told me about the locals who turned a bar to firewood with a chainsaw after the barkeep excluded them.

And there are several stories ‘medical’ from my dealings with Iraqis:

• The paramedic with PTSD crying in Morocco reviewing photos of the aftermath of roadside bombings he attended in Iraq.
• PhD after PhD by TV from Open university
• ‘They’ve kidnapped the doctor. Stupid bastards, they don’t understand he’s an engineer not a medic’
• ‘I had to come all the way to London to be treated by a doctor from Bagdhad’

There is more to come.