Rise of the Gomeral

Author's Commentary

CAUTION - Spoilers ahead!

Do not proceed if you haven't yet read the book.

One thing you might have noticed with this book is the illustrations. I'd thought a number of times that it would've been nice having pictures on the title page of each part, perhaps sketches of the narrators in Barefoot Times and something related to each part's theme in the later books, but my sketching skills weren't up to the task and I'd believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the publisher could only do black on white with no greyscale in between. It was only when they added the cover illustrations of the earlier books at the end of Plight of the Tivinel that I realised their printing process handled greyscales quite well, so I set about finding suitable images for Rise of the Gomeral. My only regret is that I couldn't use colour in these, so here's what it might have looked like if I'd been able to:

Back to the story, two years on from when I started and with only three chapters written, I was beginning to think foreshadowing this book at the end of Plight of the Tivinel was a seriously bad idea, even though I knew Plight was really only the first half of the greater tale I wanted to tell. But procrastination doesn't increase the word count and I knew the only way the book would progress would be to keep on writing. It was tough getting back into it, though. I had many ideas of how it might play out; too many in fact and none with any real merit. Finally, as 2016 drew to a close, I pushed my way forward, setting Joel off on his quest to decode the message hidden in his genes. The approaching storm and the face glimpsed in the window provided the inspiration I needed and within a month Part One was finished! I won't say the rest was plain sailing, as I struck more doldrums early in Part Three, but once through those it was full speed ahead to the finish line.

My original thought for Pedro and Elsa was that they'd lead the Gomeral uprising, with much fighting and burning of villages, eventually fleeing with them and beginning a new life on Meridian. I'd envisaged at least several chapters on their early life in the new settlements there and wondered if they might ultimately become Peter's and the modern-day Elsa's ancestors. All that changed, though, when I realised that, by happy coincidence, they were both three million light years from the Milky Way galaxy and some three million years in the past, so I began to wonder if, in the heat of the battle, they might flee Huntress through real space and make that incredible journey across space and time, either frozen in suspended animation or, as it turned out, using extreme relativistic time dilation to compress their journey into just a few days. The latter would require their speed to be extremely close to the speed of light, something which I thought could be achieved by exiting the galaxy's subspace shell at precisely the right subspace velocity. Of course the immense kinetic energy they'd need would have to come from somewhere; perhaps the black hole at the centre of the galaxy might be its source (and sink when they enter the Milky Way's subspace shell) – the interaction of black holes with subspace has yet to be explored. Even though the physics of this makes it rather implausible, I really liked the concept of their flight and the idea that, upon arrival on the fringes of the Milky Way, Pedro would face the daunting task of trying to identify which of its hundred billion stars is Earth's sun. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe indeed!

Coupled with this was the idea that Pedro himself would be responsible for sabotaging the star dimmer. Ever since hinting in The Mind of the Dolphins that it might have been sabotage rather than a malfunction, I'd always imagined that Drago was the saboteur, but with Pedro having both opportunity and motive, his doing it fitted the evolving story so much better. Did he do it in revenge for Elsa's injury or, as he said much later, to make the future come true? A bit of both, I expect. It also comes full circle from Pedro's arrival in ancient Huntress to stop the future being changed to his being the instrument that created that future, and gave me that delightful moment in his confrontation with Glamming near the end of the book: Do you know how many Tivinel you killed? One fewer than I should have, it seems.

All this then raised the possibility that the Elsa Peter introduced as his fiancée at the end of Plight of the Tivinel might be the same Elsa as Pedro's fiancée, even though I said in my commentary on that book that she wasn't. Peter's Elsa is described as elderly, most likely of similar age to him, so this meant Elsa and Pedro had to arrive on Earth in the late nineties. This tied in nicely for Pedro since he was originally created in the 1997 time cusp, so his arrival at that time completed his cycle. But what to do with him then?

One possibility was that he'd merge with the Pedro created at that time, beginning his Groundhog Day life all over again, but that seemed a bit of a sad ending for a character I'd become increasingly fond of. I suppose I could have let him go off rattling chains in some haunted Scottish castle to frighten American tourists (I'm not sure why that image keeps coming into my head), but in the end it was easiest for him to just slip into a long deep sleep until he was needed again in the story's present day of 2072. Since it had already been established in The Mind of the Dolphins that time could be stretched inside Sheol, this seemed reasonable on that count. So what then?

Again my words come back to haunt me; in my commentary on Plight of the Tivinel, I said I'd dismissed the idea of Pedro merging with Peter as “lame”, yet here I was doing precisely that. Oh well. It did work in well with Elsa's head injury causing her memory loss, with those memories returning after she meets Peter and then his coming close to death for his merger with Pedro to occur. In many respects this is similar to the Vulcan ritual of fal-tor-pan where the katra or soul is returned to the not-quite-dead body. In Star Trek's Search for Spock, this required a eunuch with a large gong, an old woman wearing too much lipstick and a lot of simultaneous thunder and lightning, but I thought just a sharing of memories using Clem as the conduit might be more in keeping with my universe. The only special effect I put in was the red glow from Clem's amulet, in keeping with the similar glow mentioned in The Mind of the Dolphins when he cured Pip of his head injury after rescuing him from Charon's ferry.

And speaking of Charon, here was another large loose end I wanted to deal with. In that same scene from The Mind of the Dolphins, he rejects Clem's offer of the amulet, saying, “I don't want your cursed trinket. Get off my boat and take him with you if you must, but you're not doing him any favours, believe me!” From that, I saw an antagonism from Charon towards the Black Delphinidae and, with Hamati revealed as the one-time steward of that creed in Plight of the Tivinel, I felt there had to be some ancient feud between these two characters that had embittered their friendship. What could have caused such a rift? Why, Esmeralda of course, with Hamati's romantic involvement distracting him from his duties leading to Matera's death and the assumed death of Elsa and Pedro. Perfect!

Matera, yes; that's Hamati's sister, Charon's wife and Elsa's mother. A Barungi woman, she wasn't graced with a name until late in my writing of Rise of the Gomeral, with references to her earlier in the book then edited to identify her properly. I suspect she's the only named character in the whole series we never actually meet, an oversight I'd thought of correcting but really there wasn't much for her to do that would've added to the story. I see her now as a woman who made many sacrifices in her life, putting up with the at-times abrasive or intoxicated Charon while trying to provide the best upbringing for their daughter, and ultimately sacrificing her life in her failed rescue attempt on the eve of the apocalypse. Rest in peace and honour, Matera.

Esmeralda, being Barungi, is telepathic and senses something odd about Pedro. So you're from the future, Pedro, but what are you? Why do I sense just mist and dust? My thinking here was that Pedro perhaps wasn't a real person, rather a spirit that's become so powerful he's been unknowingly able to create a body around himself that to all outward appearances is human flesh and blood, but in reality is just mist and dust. That thinking never really led anywhere as the story unfolded, except perhaps Pedro's dissolution when he passes through the portal into Elko's home at the beginning of Part Four, but I left that in there as just a hint of unreality about him. It also ties in with an observation Peter made in Plight of the Tivinel when Pedro's apparition tried picking up a spoon but couldn't. Your powers are growing, Pedro. I suspect that soon you'll be able to do that.

With Esmeralda revealed to be Caleb's mother, a whole lot of other loose threads fell neatly into place. In one fell swoop, I could bring the tension between Charon and Hamati to a head with Esmeralda's death, at the same time orphaning Caleb and setting the stage for Joel and Loraine to adopt him, providing a fresh and happy reboot for their at-times strained marriage. I still wanted Charon's and Hamati's friendship to ultimately be rekindled, though, so I had to make Esmeralda's death a provoked accident, with the broken wine bottle serving nicely as the instrument of death, the source of her intoxication and something slippery for her to step on and fall. With Charon imprisoned, this incident provided an opportunity for Hamati's rage to spill over into the Barungi's secession from the galactic union, allowing Gallagher to play his final card.

Ah yes, Gallagher. He's been one of my most enigmatic characters, going from the villain in The Mind of the Dolphins, although perhaps redeemed in that book's final reveal that the military were working in cohorts with the Black Delphinidae, through his role in Cry of the Bunyips as part-villain part-victim, to good guy as Piper's underling in Plight of the Tivinel. I'd initially been happy for him to continue in that role, until Walker caught up with him on Ignus and I realised this was too good an opportunity for him to switch sides in return for his restoration of rank to general. But, while wondering if he might yet play the role of a double agent, pretending to have sided with Walker but ultimately turning the tables on him in what I was imaging would be a full-on battle between Walker's and Piper's forces, I remembered something I'd written early in Cry of the Bunyips in Owen's ponderings: did Gallagher just have his own agenda, using that ancient struggle as a smokescreen to hide his true purpose? His reconnaissance walk from the Black Delphindae seminary out along the ridgeline and down to Kurramurra allowed me to reflect on how much things had changed since exploring that landscape some twenty years earlier in The Mind of the Dolphins when Mark and then Frank had escaped from the prison colony's quartz mine. While doing that, Gallagher's true purpose started to become apparent: by the time the dust had settled on these lands, there'd be no-one in the military he'd need address as sir. As my thoughts on how he could kill Walker while framing Piper for it began to coalesce, I remembered something from The Mind of the Dolphins when, in the stand-off between Drago and Damien, Drago tells Clem to implode their stars. I didn't really give it much thought at the time, but looking back, I saw that it implied the star dimmers could do more than just dim. So was born Gallagher's plot to implode Huntress's sun, disposing of the boy Pasha, any Barungi who might parent another and, as a bonus, Pip Ingle and his Black Delphinidae who'd been a constant thorn in his side. Then, as the final step, he could use the threat of similar implosions on all the other worlds fitted with star dimmers to achieve his ultimate goal of totalitarian military rule of the galaxy. But it all comes unstuck thanks to a small child he let slip through his grasp, and at his moment of triumph, his goose is cooked. I'd thought of perhaps following through with his trial, execution and possible new role in Sheol as pilot of Charon's ferry, but it would've been a distraction from the main thrust of the story so I took the easy way out with a reported guilty plea and his choice of firing squad as his method of exiting the tale.

As for that child, Caleb took a lot of time for me to get my head around, which is why it took me so long to finish Part One. Back in the 1980s, I read a book called The House in November, in which the hero wakes to discover that an alien spore has taken over Earth, with everyone psychically subdued to do its bidding. I'd initially envisaged something similar with the new Pasha, with Joel and Willy going off in search of him, following the coordinates in his DNA, only to come under his spell in a zombie-like village. But such a scenario didn't offer much in the way of story development – there's not a whole lot a village of zombies can really do – so there it languished until I realised that the new Pasha should be the antithesis of everything known about Pashas. Instead of a stoic Roly or conniving Drago, here was a playful child whose only desire was to grow vegetables, catch fish and splash about in the surf. A little of my original idea survived, in that Joel is completely enrapt by this child, but his love comes from within, not forced from without. In my early thinking, I had Loraine taking a dim view of this, with Joel spending most of the book convincing her that Caleb wasn't evil, but as Part Three unfolded that line of thinking evaporated, with Loraine willingly becoming Caleb's de-facto mother after he's separated from Esmeralda. The relationship between Joel and Caleb took another twist with the revelation that a Pasha needs a singleton (his seneschal) in order to see into the future; this evolved as I was looking for ways to explain why Joel had to be a singleton. Through that connection, Caleb sees his destiny's path, something which came about oddly enough from a photo I saw on Facebook of a boy walking barefoot along a gritty track, tying in with Caleb's trek through the forest after fleeing Gallagher as well as being the metaphor for the tasks he had to perform unaided along the way.

I was tempted use that image on the title page of Part Four, as it really set the mood for Caleb's barefoot hike along the creek to the fringe-dwellers' village, but given that he's always described as wearing shorts, the jeans didn't fit so I ended up using a photo of my own feet. Although it's been a long time since they belonged to an eight-year-old, and I'm sure it shows, it's really just symbolic of his destiny's path so I hope they'll do.

Ray Foret pointed out to me early in the piece that Caleb's greatest strength should be his weakness, something I tried to hold true to right through to the final scene when his panic at being out of his depth almost cost him his life. Allied with that was the desire that, in order for him to succeed, he must turn the tables on the Pasha's adversarial nature and instead collaborate with his “rival” Pasha David, having them work together to pass the warning message to Walker, rescue Peter and ultimately switch off their Pasha genes.

Which brings me to David and Cam. Initially triggered by that quip early in Plight of the Tivinel where Mark tells David that he might meet someone nice at university and David replies, “I'd rather someone naughty”, this was a relationship I wanted to develop but found out early in the piece that I had to tread very carefully. It started becoming clear towards the end of Plight of the Tivinel that it was going beyond just friendship but, as I said in my commentary, I wasn't really sure then how it might pan out. The inspiration came in Stephen Fry's documentary Out There in which he pointed out that being gay didn't necessarily imply sodomy, opening up, in my mind at least, possibilities. This tied in nicely with David since, as revealed in The Mind of the Dolphins, Pashas were always infertile so any relationship he might have had could never be a physical one. For Cam, the lonely black sheep of his family with no desire to contribute to Hazler's gene pool, this is perfect.

Early in my thoughts for Part Three, I foresaw a crucial scene where they needed to be close enough to be sharing a bed and, at the end of that chapter, for Cam to be able to spot David's red roots, so a simple best mates type of friendship wouldn't suffice. That's pretty much where I drew the line, though, with just hugs, hair ruffling and the occasional holding of hands, and I hope this line finds acceptance on both sides of the fence.

At the end of Plight of the Tivinel they spent a few months holidaying together on Earth, which I later hinted at in Rise of the Gomeral as when they realised the nature and depth of their relationship and came out to David's parents. I'd been tempted to flesh this out in the book (pardon the pun) but decided it would've been too much of a distraction from what was happening in the story's present, and also I really wasn't sure what I could write beyond them each telling their life's story and coming to realise how they felt about each other, but maybe this could end up being a fun page for the website or blog. And on that note, fun, built on a foundation of deep caring for one other, is really how I wanted to portray them, as exemplified in their wedding ceremony at the end. Since Cam's parents weren't as accepting of their relationship as Mark and Lorina, I had to have them get their just desserts at the end, confirming David's earlier suspicion that their wealth was more show than substance. Oh, and in case you're wondering why Cam always calls him Davo, I really don't know as I never gave it much thought when this first appeared in Plight of the Tivinel and just carried it all the way through. I don't think it's because he can't pronounce David, more likely David just introduced himself as Davo when they first met and it stuck.

There's one pivotal yet almost sublime moment in the story that I should mention here, when Cam emerges from the shower to find David pondering Drago's dart that he'd found concealed in the back of a drawer. Here David contemplates using the dart on Caleb as a solution to their predicament, suggesting he's on the verge of turning into a Drago-like Pasha, not Drago reincarnated perhaps but something of the same ilk. Cam's shocked reaction snaps him out of it, though, the strength of his love stopping those final Drago-esque synapses from forming in David's brain, instead creating what might be for the first time a compassionate Dragon-clan Pasha. Okay, perhaps I'm reading more into that scene than I was aware of when writing it, but in hindsight it does resonate as an important turning point in the narrative, leading to the cooperation between David and Caleb that's so vital to their destiny's path.

Loraine, on the other hand, really doesn't like Cam, seeing him as thoughtless and reckless. Perhaps this goes right back to when he released Joel's recording onto the ultranet in Plight of the Tivinel, but she certainly blames him for David's strife on Hazler and pretty much everything else that goes wrong after that. Eventually there has to be a showdown, with David accusing her of being snarky and then Joel's quizzing her once they've gone to bed. After that, she does try to make an effort to see his good side, ultimately saying at the wedding that he'll make a wonderful brother-in-law. I didn't spell it out, but perhaps part of her softening was from seeing Cam's helpfulness in the boat rescue, his barbering in David's Drago impersonation, his nutting out how to switch off Pasha genes, and from witnessing his almost suicidal despair at the prospect of David's death.

David also cops his fair share of Loraine's ire, reaching a crescendo at the time he and Caleb go off on the dolphins' backs. Why did I have to get an idiot for a brother? There haven't been all that many opportunities to explore their relationship across the series, as they rarely seem to be in the same place at the same time. While I've never given much conscious thought to their characters, in the course of my writing Loraine has developed a more serious nature, one that doesn't suffer fools gladly and perhaps even borders on bossy, whereas David has become the fool, laid-back and deflecting everything with a joke. But beneath those facades I see them both as deeply caring and loyal to family and friends, and while Mark and Lorina would have been frequently exasperated by them, I'm sure they're now quite proud of the young adults they've grown into.

I should also say something about the Unity League. The idea first appeared at the time I was writing Joel's flashbacks to Tristan's alternate reality on Huntress where they'd killed Willy's parents, making him an orphan in that time line. A key player was going to be the man with the scarred face, but I soon realised he wouldn't be born for a couple of hundred years in Pedro's time line on Huntress, if he ever existed at all in that reality, and there was no easy way to bring him in anywhere else in the story. So instead my Huntress villain soon morphed into Doctor Glamming, at first portrayed as an eccentric but otherwise harmless subspace researcher but, after his unsuccessful attempt to buy Pedro, with connections to the Unity League and Drago coming to light. As he turned out to be such a fun villain to write in Part Two, I couldn't resist bringing him back into the story in Part Four as the leader of the present-day Unity League who were the former mining company overlords running the show on Ignus. As he'd been responsible for Elsa's head injury, I knew she'd have a part to play in his eventual demise, but, in the same vein as Charon, I didn't want her to be an out-and-out killer so settled on her knocking him off balance after he'd pushed her into the water. I intentionally left a question mark hanging over Hamati's attempted rescue, when he eventually resurfaces to say "Glamming entangled in weeds on bottom; can't pull him up" as I suspect Hamati may have been responsible for that tangling.

Which brings me to Drago. In a way he was an awkward character to write as his first appearance was at the very end of his life in The Mind of the Dolphins, where I portrayed him as something of a spoiled brat ("This place is in need of some repair. I must speak with the Tivinel about this when we reach them. This is simply not acceptable, not acceptable at all."). As I fleshed him out in Part Two, his conniving nature quickly became apparent, with him relishing playing one side against the other. His growing preoccupation with his dolphins was also fun to write, with his appearance becoming increasingly unkempt as he neglected all else.

The final chapter in Part Two took several attempts to sort out, as I needed to put everything in place that's revealed in The Mind of the Dolphins, including Drago's instructions to his Tivinel, his escape from the apocalypse through the dolphins' collective consciousness, Hamati's passing the Black Delphinidae amulet into the care of the half-castes living in the limestone caves, and the timing of the apocalypse itself to incinerate the west coast and Drago's island while being seen as a bright flash in the early evening sky by those in the east. I couldn't resist having Charon tell Hamati he's just a leader of ogres as, up until Pip became their hostage in The Mind of the Dolphins, the Barungi refugees in Sheol had only been known as ogres. I hope all that rang a few satisfying bells.

Speaking of dolphins, I must really say something about the black ones that have enigmatically appeared in the story since early in The Mind of the Dolphins when Clem spoke of the Fisherman legend.

Huntress is a dying world. The boiling lands on the sunlit side are poisoning our air and consuming our oxygen, while the rain storms are becoming fewer and more acidic. The pummel trees are now mostly infertile, and when they die so will we. Many here have lost all hope, and yet the legend has grown of a saviour who will come and set things right. That saviour is called the Fisherman. The Fisherman, they, say, will bring fish back to our streams and ponds, and following the fish will be the Black Dolphins who once inhabited this world in the days before the death of our sun.

This prompted Pip's recollection of a childhood encounter with a black dolphin in an aquarium. We were the oldest and now I am the last, it had said telepathically to him. You have passed beyond redemption for the stars grow dim. Remember that, Pip, in your years of sorrow ahead.

 Later in that book, when Damien is rescuing Pip from the furnace of Huntress's first new day, he's touched by an alien but benevolent presence speaking to him of sunshine, warm seas and love; of a simple life, lost long ago and yet perhaps even now still redeemable. At the conclusion of that book, when Pip is consoling Lorina, he says the Black Dolphin's not a creature, or even a spirit; it's a concept, an ideal, something greater than ourselves that we can nonetheless aspire to. It's what makes us whole, our collective sentience, perhaps. That sounded good when I wrote it back in 2007, but I'd always had it in the back of my mind that there was something more to the black dolphin back-story. What did the one who spoke to the boy Pip mean by we were the oldest and now I am the last? Some of that was answered in Plight of the Tivinel when Roly recounted his own encounter with a black dolphin, which had carried him to what became the Pasha's Island and back before dying on the beach. Mulling over everything I'd written about the black dolphins and trying to weave something coherent into it, I struck upon the notion that they'd been the original sentient species on Huntress, until the early Pashas had tapped into their telepathic powers, robbing them of their very existence in order to become the omniscient rulers of their world. With Caleb and David uniting the two Pasha clans to facilitate their Destiny's Path, they bring about the fulfilment of the Fisherman prophecy with the birth of a new black dolphin and the passing into it of everything that had been stolen. Damien, revealed in The Mind of the Dolphins to be the Fisherman, of course had to play a part too, along with representatives of the Black Delphinidae (Pip and Clem), Barefooters (Billy, Peter, Jason and Mark), mainstream Delphinidae (Lorina), Barungi (Hamati), Tivinel (Willy) and singletons (Joel) who'd all carried parts of that whole. Topping that off with the gift of love from Cam, Julia, Jenny and Cloe, the baby black dolphin heads off into the open seas with its parents as the beginning of that species' renaissance. I'd been tempted to say something more about the black dolphins in the epilogue, but decided anything I said would probably sound contrived and detract from the impact of that rebirth scene, so thought it best to just leave it, in the expectation that, over time, the black dolphins would flourish once more while living in peaceful cohabitation with the humans of Huntress.

I should also say something about Elsa's life story in the early chapters of Part Four. Initially I'd only planned for one chapter, which I'd called Elsa, but it kept growing and growing until I thought I'd never make it to that point at the end of Plight of the Tivinel where Peter introduces her as his fiancée. The first thing I needed in her new life on Earth was a romance and started looking for characters in Barefoot Times and Call of the Delphinidae who might have been at Armidale University at the right time. Matthew Hardcastle first came to mind, but he was the same age as Billy and Peter and so had finished university and was well on the way to establishing his legal career at the time of that broadcast by the Prime Minister about first contact with the Eridanians. Then I thought maybe it could be Matt's younger brother Richard, who played a small role in Part Two of Call of the Delphinidae, but he was the same age as Bobby who was celebrating his eighteenth birthday when that broadcast was made, so he was too young. That then led me to creating a middle brother, Butch, the black sheep of the family who was studying Animal Science instead of Law. Butch, through his brother Matt, provided the connection to Billy that saw him offering Elsa the job that took her to Eridani and her life's work helping with the re-emergence of the southern Eridanians, a job which would keep her well away from Peter until their ultimate meeting at the symposium. But even then I still had to keep her hidden from the other characters so that she could be properly introduced by Peter at Joel's and Loraine's reception party in Santiago de Compostela. It was a relief when I finally reached that point and could get back to telling the present-time story!

The final reveal, that Pashas beget Pashas, came more from good fortune than planning. By a stroke of luck, Caleb was born at about the time Drago took over David's body at the ceremony on Huntress, and so was activated by his proximity to that, while David himself was activated at birth by his contact with the Bluehaven Dolphins carrying Drago's spirit. Drago himself was activated by Roly, and so on down the line right back to the first Pasha, since it had already been established in The Mind of the Dolphins that, prior to the apocalypse, there was always one and only one Pasha, with the new one killing the old once he became powerful enough to challenge. The method for switching off the Pasha genes also came from The Mind of the Dolphins, firstly with Jacob's warning to Pip during his training that passing out of Sheol in spirit form would result in the body's death, and then David's genes switching off after Pip did that to Drago's spirit that had been occupying his body at the time. The thing that caused me the greatest trouble was Pedro's visualisation of it during Drago's mind probe late in Part Two. I originally had Pedro seeing something like a thick taproot with a myriad of finer roots going off to all those minds Drago had touched, and my thinking at the time was that, at the end of the story, Pedro would visualise some pruning shears and sever Caleb's roots to turn him off; I didn't even know then that David would also need turning off. Luckily that had all changed by the time I reached the point where they had to be deactivated, so I needed to go back and rewrite Pedro's vision, with the horses in the corral being the best metaphor I could come up with. The idea was that the gate is initially closed until another Pasha opens it, after which the new Pasha's unleashed powers keep it open. The corollary of this is that, with David and Caleb both deactivated, there can never be another Pasha even if the right combination of Tivinel and Barungi genes were to produce a susceptible child, so all's well that ends well and they can all live happily ever after.

With the wrapping up of so many loose ends, by the time I'd reached the midpoint of the story I knew it was going to be the final instalment in the series, so I made a conscious decision to provide happy endings for all the hero characters and an appropriate demise for Gallagher and Glamming. I enjoyed bringing Edwin, Val, Clem and Mog back in for their cameo and would really have liked to have done the same for the others like Frank, Anton, Brian, Ron, Mary, Aaron, Maleena, Chris, Sandra and their nameless daughter, but really there was nothing for them to do other than clutter the stage. None have yet died, although Brian, Ron and Mary are getting rather long in the tooth, so I wish them well in their twilight years. Frank's Barefooter heritage will no doubt keep him going for many more decades, although I'm not sure what he's up to now. Perhaps his winery is keeping him busy, or maybe there are other pies with his fingers in them.

As for me, I hope my own Barefooter heritage will keep me going for a few more decades and I have no doubt that, in due course, I'll open Word once more and begin a new story, perhaps something with a geocaching theme, or even follow in my brother's footsteps and write my memoirs. Until then, thank you for coming with me on this journey and I hope you've enjoyed the ride.

Jeff Pages
February 2018.