I remember once, when I was about 30 years old, adding the number of houses or apartments I had lived in to that point. My father had been a mechanical engineer, working on power plant construction and rising to the level of site manager. When a project was finished, we would move as a family to a new location. This was my life in the UK, eastern Canada, Rhodesia, central and western Canada, before I set off on my own travels. So it was 30 homes in as many years, a 1 to 1 ratio. I added several more countries of “residence for 6 months or longer” to the original three, then finally got married in Georgia and began to settle down. Now, thankfully, the frequency of our moves has decreased drastically. Enough was enough, especially with my no longer being single or as young.
While moving has been a part of my whole life, and thus not a huge stress for me, some things do emerge for scrutiny. One is that I’m a hoarder, a collector by nature, perhaps in attempts to add continuity to my life across whole continents. I do also throw things away which have served their purpose or become technically redundant, such as those bags and bags of old computer cables which no longer connect anything to anything else. Old clothes I haven’t worn for some years. Even physical books (at least those which I am able to replace with electronic versions!). Eventually, the detritus adds up, and my wife urges a purge. I concur.
One of the things I have succeeded in gathering, even now into one place, is most of my writings. These go back to two short stories I wrote when I was 7 and 9 years old, in Rhodesia, heavily leaning on what I had read to that point, but also somehow my own to some degree. I brought these back with me from my last trip to Canada, a couple of months ago. Also, there are decades of notebooks of various size, because I will always be scribbling something down on paper with pen or pencil. Newspaper articles for the Stony Plain Reporter and, later, copies of my first set of pieces for Georgia Today.
There’s one notebook I will always treasure, from my late father: a tiny little clip-open binder to which you can add pages of hole-punched paper, the cover made by him and my stepmother of leather after the original one wore out. A slightly larger crocodile-leather blank book I picked up 2nd hand here in Georgia, intending to fill with something valuable or special and as yet waiting its turn. This is the only one which has any real monetary value at this point, little though that may be. Lots of A5 or pocket notebooks, so I’m always ready when inspiration strikes. Notes from my travels, especially the many trips to Svaneti before I moved there in late 2007. Photographic, story idea and fractal programming notes. Phone numbers, shopping lists, to-do lists. A bookmark-flat titanium pen (a Kickstarter project I supported) for convenience, inserted into the current notebook.
I do also make occasional notes in my iPhone, but still prefer the current pocket-size paper notebook, its inside cover always inscribed with my name and email address in case it gets lost. Writer’s block seldom seems to affect me, for which I am most glad.
No less prolific and successful a writer than Stephen King, who, in “On Writing”, states that there are only two things necessary to become a writer, or to improve as much as one can if one is already a writer of whatever caliber: 1) Read a lot. 2) Write a lot. That’s it, the whole list. Since I have been doing these since my early schooldays, I hope that something will come of my scribblings, my jottings-down. In any case, while I have brains for the task, it’s a big part of my life.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
