First, a bit on surfing:
The ecstasy can be distilled to a moment: when you rise from your chest onto your feet and you see before you the face of the wave, slanting cleanly across you, reaching out ahead; it’s when you know that you are on a good one, forming a wall for you to draw your lines across. Surfing can present the thrill of survival--when the waves are big, and you hold on to escape the churn of the wave breaking behind you, heading for an escape hatch of clean green water--or it can be a thrill of artistry--in smaller waves, you can scribble a graffiti of foam, literally writing on water. The great surfers can write this script even on the big, heavy, frightening ones.
The proximity of surf and city is unique, I think, to Sydney. Perhaps Durban has it, but Durban is nowhere near as big as Sydney and its breaks are neither as plentiful nor as diverse. Honolulu? Don’t start. Los Angeles, San Diego? They have the surfers, but not really the surf. Sydney is a large, for the most part ugly, suburban city based on finance, trade and services; but it also has 30 distinct surf breaks within half an hour of the Opera House.
Apparently we missed National Handwriting Day:
After all, we live in the digital age, and the digits of most of us are working overtime as we keyboard our way through the day. I began writing books back in the late 1970s, pen in hand, notebook on my knee, typewriter at the ready to receive my completed manuscript in its various incarnations. (Somewhere in a box I have 13 typed revisions of my first novel, which probably should have been called "The Death of the Forest".) But when the computer came along and made cutting and pasting virtual instead of messy, I saw it as the compulsive reviser’s dream machine. My last eight books are children of Microsoft Word, and virtually everything I write, from a long book to a short email, is done on the computer. The only person I know whose life doesn’t revolve around the infernal machine is my artist husband, and lately even he is showing signs of e-mail addiction.