I coulda bin a contender!

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday Jun4 25, 2015

Do you have a neglected, half-forgotten skill littering the attic of your mind, long ago discarded but still there? Perhaps once you were a hot shot at the bowling alley, or a crowd-stopper on the dance floor? Maybe there were a couple of summers when no-one in the family could beat you at table tennis or you held all the top scores in the beach cafe's Space Invaders machine. That brief time when you were the king or the queen in one ability.

Then life and studies and home building got in the way and those skills passed into neglect. But you look back and think: "Gee, I coulda bin a contender!"

I was reminded of this while I was trawling the internet and came across a Pitman's Shorthand site. I struggled to read the first few lines written in the dashes and curves and squiggles, but quickly it came back to me and I started to read it fairly easily. Some of the short forms and contractions slowed things down, but even those I began to remember.

So I should. I have certificates in it from the time when you couldn't do your journalism cadetship till you'd achieved at least 80 words a minute shorthand. For several years I covered courts and lord help you if you ever miss-quoted a statement. But where did it go?

Perhaps you spent years trudging through all weathers to piano lessons, or ballet classes. Perhaps you developed a passion for photography and spent hours in darkened rooms processing and printing film. That knowledge is still within you, just jammed into a trunk and covered in dust.

Like my shorthand. I've always used scrappy bits of it when in meetings or taking notes at a client's table but I could never cover a full court case as I used to do easily when I was 20.

Your skill is an old love that has faded away, and maybe it's a symptom of the things that aren't going right in your life. Have you lost touch with the basics that used to make you happy?

Tell you what I've done. Followed it up on the internet - all the answers are somewhere there - to bring myself up to date with the shorthand world. I haven't seen my stenographer's pen for 30 years so I bought a new one, and am delighting in fiddling with it. The internet sites have hours of dictation practice and an on-line Pitman's dictionary. So with any spare minutes I'll put in a bit of practice.

What about you? It might be too late for break-dancing but how about zumba? Or visit Allens and find some modern pieces of piano music you'd like to learn and could impress the kids. Visit some of the thousands of photography sites on the web and learn how to shoot great portraits, or sports, with the thousand-dollar camera you never really leaned how to use.

Maybe in the back of a wardrobe there's a half-finished Spanish galleon that never got completed or painted. Probably the tiny paint pots, half of them never opened. Or the forgotten sewing machine and that bag of fabric that was the start of a new dress. The skill's still there in the back of your head and depth of your fingers - why not revisit them to pass the long winter nights?