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My bank balance permanently bumps along the bottom - from the underneath, mostly - but I don't care. I'm rich. Rich in the things that really count.
A parcel has just arrived in the mail from one of my BookCrossing friends on the other side of the world from my Canberra home. He calls himself ResQgeek as a nom-de-web, and he lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He's sent me a copy of a book he knows I'll like. Just a gift, free and clear, out of the blue. A happy surprise for me, checking the morning mail and the monthly gloom from the bank.
BookCrossing is the act of leaving a book in a public place for a stranger to find, who then does likewise. It's an odd notion, but one that works through a computer numbering system to bind the world up in links of random generosity and books. And an expanding network of friends who share the lunacy.
Such wonderful people I've met through BookCrossing. I share their books, I share their blogs and web forum entries and sometimes I share their lives. Meeting one of my online friends is a special joy. Here is the person, warm and living and smiling, who has previously just been letters and words and pixels on a computer screen. We feel as if we know each other already.
I first met ResQgeek - he's an emergency rescue worker, hence the screen name - on my first big overseas trip in 2005. I'd never been further than New Zealand before, and New Zealand for an Australian is like crossing a state border where they have a different accent, but here I was in Dulles airport in Washington DC, where my Australian summer of t-shirt and shorts had been suddenly switched to a cold winter with snow in the air, heavy coats and gloves. It was like walking into a freezer. I had been processed by dozens of impersonal airline, security, customs and immigration officials over the past twenty-four hours, told where to stand, where to sit, what to eat. I'd had very little sleep and I was highly excited and bewildered, struggling to process the new experiences in this strange foreign land, where everything was different.
And here was ResQgeek, waiting at the baggage carousel, watching my big yellow BookCrossing.com tote bag go around and around to see who would step up to claim it. I almost hugged him, I was so glad to see a friendly face. He told me where to go, where to sit - I was sitting in the driver's seat of a car, except they'd moved the steering wheel across to the other side - and then overloaded me even further by giving me a tour of all the famous Washington landmarks, floodlit and grand in the frozen night. I loved him for his kindness and generosity to a bewildered traveller.
We swapped more books then and in the following years, met each other again a couple of times on different continents, and I'm always charmed to read online of his life and his home and his family. We'll catch up again, I'm sure, and have another book-related adventure together.
I open the parcel and here's the book: "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society". My heart beats extra fast, and though it's a cold Canberra winter, with snow on the hills, it's a sudden summer glow for me. I love Guernsey.
Guernsey is an island in the Channel, tucked away closer to Normandy than England. Just a tiny place, one small town, a few villages, and farmhouses sprinkled over the green land between. Cliffs in the south and shingle beaches in the north. Ridiculously bosky and a postcard view at every corner.
There was a flurry on the forum one evening. Tune into BBC Radio Guernsey on the internet radio and they'll be talking about BookCrossing. So around the world we went to the website, opened up the streaming radio player, and listened as a leading British BookCrosser was interviewed by Jenny Kendall-Tobias, who presented a local talk show. She had a happy on-air personality, and one of those voices with a smile in it, and she grew ever more enthusiastic as she learnt about BookCrossing and the strange and wonderful journeys of some of the books registered on the site. Around the world we listened, and we sent her emails, and she read them out, astonished to find her talkback show on island life a sudden focus of global attention.
I was charmed, and kept listening even after the interview was over. She couldn't stop talking about BookCrossing, and quizzed following studio guests about their books, where they might leave them if they joined BookCrossing and wasn't it a great idea?
I tuned in the next night, and the next and soon I was happily absorbed in Guernsey life, this ancient community where the laws are written in a variant of French, and the head of state is the Duke of Normandy, in the guise of the Queen, descendant of William the Conqueror.
I exchanged emails during the shows with Jenny. She found some of the things I had to say amusing, and she read them out on air. I'd laugh at her jokes and look up things on the web, learning about the island and its history, the language, the culture, the occupation by the Germans in WW2, the local cooking.
ResQgeek in Washington also tuned in. In his early morning and my late evening, we'd listen to Jenny's show, two men enthralled by a tall blonde with a smile in her voice.
So, I guess that when I visited Paris and London, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd travel via Guernsey. You cannot believe how broad my smile was when I tuned the radio in my Normandy hire car to BBC Radio Guernsey and could listen in real life. I took the ferry from St Malo, arrived in St Peter Port late in the evening, and the next morning I was at the studio, where I met Jenny, a few minutes before her show.
I didn't hold back. I hugged her. Hard. She was kind enough to take me into the studio with her, and I was interviewed, and then sat in as a special guest as she talked to local lawyers, dance competition winners, a visiting archaeologist and took calls from around the island. And around the world, because ResQgeek and a few other BookCrossing friends were tuned in, sending emails.
And then she showed me around. We visited government offices, the old centre of town where the Romans had lived, scenic lookouts, narrow twisting roads up to a village high over the bay, France a smudge on the eastern horizon. We had a late lunch and then she sat me down in the town concert hall while she ran through a dress rehearsal of "Singin' in the Rain", where she played dual roles of a showgirl and a radio journalist.
I hugged her again when she dropped me off at my hotel, and as I waited in the tiny air terminal the next morning, I resolved to return.
Which I did earlier this year, my wife and I spending a marvellous few days exploring the island, cliff-top walks, the old Castle guarding the harbour, the ugly grey cement fortifications built by the Germans on every headland, the cobblestoned streets, the restaurants. I bought a genuine fisherman's guernsey, a heavy blue oiled wool pullover that is now my constant overgarment in cold weather.
And I sighed in mixed satisfaction and sadness as our ferry pulled away and the cottages on the hillside faded into the distance.
I've had many adventures in my BookCrossing life, and I've met any number of wonderful people, but there is a special place in my heart for ResQgeek in Washington, and Jenny in Guernsey. Very different people and places, but I love them both.
So it was a thrill for me to find a book about Guernsey, sent by ResQgeek. Money can't buy the happiness I felt on opening the package. Just glancing at the blurb on the back cover, and opening pages at random, I'm sure I'll love it. It's a story of a secret society during the German Occupation. Plotting against the Nazis, the locals disguised their activities by meeting to discuss books and local cooking.
I can't wait to begin. So, for the next few days, I'll be the guy with a goofy grin, greedily reading of an enchanted island, and dreaming of the times I've had and the people I've met.
My bank card might have been scraped empty, and maybe I'll find Potato Peel Pie all I can afford, but in the things that really matter, I'm a millionaire.
A parcel has just arrived in the mail from one of my BookCrossing friends on the other side of the world from my Canberra home. He calls himself ResQgeek as a nom-de-web, and he lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He's sent me a copy of a book he knows I'll like. Just a gift, free and clear, out of the blue. A happy surprise for me, checking the morning mail and the monthly gloom from the bank.
BookCrossing is the act of leaving a book in a public place for a stranger to find, who then does likewise. It's an odd notion, but one that works through a computer numbering system to bind the world up in links of random generosity and books. And an expanding network of friends who share the lunacy.
Such wonderful people I've met through BookCrossing. I share their books, I share their blogs and web forum entries and sometimes I share their lives. Meeting one of my online friends is a special joy. Here is the person, warm and living and smiling, who has previously just been letters and words and pixels on a computer screen. We feel as if we know each other already.
I first met ResQgeek - he's an emergency rescue worker, hence the screen name - on my first big overseas trip in 2005. I'd never been further than New Zealand before, and New Zealand for an Australian is like crossing a state border where they have a different accent, but here I was in Dulles airport in Washington DC, where my Australian summer of t-shirt and shorts had been suddenly switched to a cold winter with snow in the air, heavy coats and gloves. It was like walking into a freezer. I had been processed by dozens of impersonal airline, security, customs and immigration officials over the past twenty-four hours, told where to stand, where to sit, what to eat. I'd had very little sleep and I was highly excited and bewildered, struggling to process the new experiences in this strange foreign land, where everything was different.
And here was ResQgeek, waiting at the baggage carousel, watching my big yellow BookCrossing.com tote bag go around and around to see who would step up to claim it. I almost hugged him, I was so glad to see a friendly face. He told me where to go, where to sit - I was sitting in the driver's seat of a car, except they'd moved the steering wheel across to the other side - and then overloaded me even further by giving me a tour of all the famous Washington landmarks, floodlit and grand in the frozen night. I loved him for his kindness and generosity to a bewildered traveller.
We swapped more books then and in the following years, met each other again a couple of times on different continents, and I'm always charmed to read online of his life and his home and his family. We'll catch up again, I'm sure, and have another book-related adventure together.
I open the parcel and here's the book: "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society". My heart beats extra fast, and though it's a cold Canberra winter, with snow on the hills, it's a sudden summer glow for me. I love Guernsey.
Guernsey is an island in the Channel, tucked away closer to Normandy than England. Just a tiny place, one small town, a few villages, and farmhouses sprinkled over the green land between. Cliffs in the south and shingle beaches in the north. Ridiculously bosky and a postcard view at every corner.
There was a flurry on the forum one evening. Tune into BBC Radio Guernsey on the internet radio and they'll be talking about BookCrossing. So around the world we went to the website, opened up the streaming radio player, and listened as a leading British BookCrosser was interviewed by Jenny Kendall-Tobias, who presented a local talk show. She had a happy on-air personality, and one of those voices with a smile in it, and she grew ever more enthusiastic as she learnt about BookCrossing and the strange and wonderful journeys of some of the books registered on the site. Around the world we listened, and we sent her emails, and she read them out, astonished to find her talkback show on island life a sudden focus of global attention.
I was charmed, and kept listening even after the interview was over. She couldn't stop talking about BookCrossing, and quizzed following studio guests about their books, where they might leave them if they joined BookCrossing and wasn't it a great idea?
I tuned in the next night, and the next and soon I was happily absorbed in Guernsey life, this ancient community where the laws are written in a variant of French, and the head of state is the Duke of Normandy, in the guise of the Queen, descendant of William the Conqueror.
I exchanged emails during the shows with Jenny. She found some of the things I had to say amusing, and she read them out on air. I'd laugh at her jokes and look up things on the web, learning about the island and its history, the language, the culture, the occupation by the Germans in WW2, the local cooking.
ResQgeek in Washington also tuned in. In his early morning and my late evening, we'd listen to Jenny's show, two men enthralled by a tall blonde with a smile in her voice.
So, I guess that when I visited Paris and London, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd travel via Guernsey. You cannot believe how broad my smile was when I tuned the radio in my Normandy hire car to BBC Radio Guernsey and could listen in real life. I took the ferry from St Malo, arrived in St Peter Port late in the evening, and the next morning I was at the studio, where I met Jenny, a few minutes before her show.
I didn't hold back. I hugged her. Hard. She was kind enough to take me into the studio with her, and I was interviewed, and then sat in as a special guest as she talked to local lawyers, dance competition winners, a visiting archaeologist and took calls from around the island. And around the world, because ResQgeek and a few other BookCrossing friends were tuned in, sending emails.
And then she showed me around. We visited government offices, the old centre of town where the Romans had lived, scenic lookouts, narrow twisting roads up to a village high over the bay, France a smudge on the eastern horizon. We had a late lunch and then she sat me down in the town concert hall while she ran through a dress rehearsal of "Singin' in the Rain", where she played dual roles of a showgirl and a radio journalist.
I hugged her again when she dropped me off at my hotel, and as I waited in the tiny air terminal the next morning, I resolved to return.
Which I did earlier this year, my wife and I spending a marvellous few days exploring the island, cliff-top walks, the old Castle guarding the harbour, the ugly grey cement fortifications built by the Germans on every headland, the cobblestoned streets, the restaurants. I bought a genuine fisherman's guernsey, a heavy blue oiled wool pullover that is now my constant overgarment in cold weather.
And I sighed in mixed satisfaction and sadness as our ferry pulled away and the cottages on the hillside faded into the distance.
I've had many adventures in my BookCrossing life, and I've met any number of wonderful people, but there is a special place in my heart for ResQgeek in Washington, and Jenny in Guernsey. Very different people and places, but I love them both.
So it was a thrill for me to find a book about Guernsey, sent by ResQgeek. Money can't buy the happiness I felt on opening the package. Just glancing at the blurb on the back cover, and opening pages at random, I'm sure I'll love it. It's a story of a secret society during the German Occupation. Plotting against the Nazis, the locals disguised their activities by meeting to discuss books and local cooking.
I can't wait to begin. So, for the next few days, I'll be the guy with a goofy grin, greedily reading of an enchanted island, and dreaming of the times I've had and the people I've met.
My bank card might have been scraped empty, and maybe I'll find Potato Peel Pie all I can afford, but in the things that really matter, I'm a millionaire.
