Living the flashdance dream

My sister is like the Jennifer Beals of Christchurch. No, she isn’t trying to get into dance school, and she doesn’t have leg warmers and her boyfriend isn’t an American with a Porsche, he’s a pom with a Subaru. BUT, she is doing a welding course.

Welding is a great skill to have. I would love to learn to weld at night school like her but my current night school class in drinking beer and sitting on my arse doesn’t finish till 2018.

When the apocalypse happens people with skills like welding, fishing, building, first aid and skinning dogs are going to be the valuable members of society. People like me, ‘writers’ will be kicked out of the small fortified villages that spring up along with the car salesmen, parking wardens, Venetian blind installers and IT experts will be forced to wander the ‘dead zone’ where, against all odds, some of us will survive and form an unlikely alliance then hundreds of years later our mutant offspring will attack the fortified villages looking for food and some kind of obscure metal ore or oil that will have become the most coveted thing on the planet……

But back to sis. So yeah welding. I guess the family will be getting welded picture frames and welded nameplates and chunky welded jewelry for birthdays and xmas for a few years. That’s cool, there’s always some sucker on the net that will buy that junk. The other weird link with Flashdance I wanted to mention ties back to the 6 degrees story I wrote a while back. The guy in the film who was Jennifer Beal’s boyfriend and drove the Porsche was the dad of my brother’s flat mate back in the mid 90’s. Freaky eh. So in closing I just wanna say Take your passion and make it happen.’