12. Guest writer. What does your ex-partner have to say about your writing?

This isn’t my story…this is his

Jamie had me walk into this long grass so he could take a photo!

So I made him walk into the long grass too!

“Listening to Adrienne’s voice over the ’phone was for months my nightly pleasure. And then we decided to meet, it was a five-hundred-kilometre drive for me. I wanted to check that she was real.

I enjoyed her authoritative enunciation and learning about and sharing, our lives’ histories. I was living in a coastal town in NSW, Australia where nobody pronounced words correctly. It was always ‘runnin’ ‘goin’ ‘swimmin’ i.e. the typical Australian drawl. And a bit nasally. But this Adrienne spoke nicely half a tone higher than the average woman, and I could see her pause for commas as she spoke. Her pronunciation was very good except for her Queensland accent, some cheeses and delicatessen meats were local dialect. eg Some Adelaideans and Perthians have other names for some foodstuffs or use a longer vowel sound.

Over some years, we had to write to each other as I was working away with Big Oil companies, and her writing was a delight, texts and messages were by this time part of the social landscape, and photos could be sent instantly by new modern…