A mixed bag

When you open a mixed bag you cannot be too sure what you will find. That may be good or it may be bad. Good, if you like surprises and the unexpected but bad, if you insist on order and tidiness. Even statisticians and watchmakers are sometimes in danger of slipping up on a banana skin. Life is not always predictable, especially in the cases when remarkable coincidences come to our notice in daily life as also in the great events of history. If there is a common thread running through this book it must be the demonstration of the interplay between chance and design, project and outcome, the precision of prose and the vagaries of poetry, between travelling and wandering. We note odd coincidences in history as in the case of two United States Presidents who died on the same day and there are strange prophecies by the writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells whose works uncannily foretold events that would occur in the world of factual reality. Any author who has conceived a plan for a story or poem coordinates narrated events in a manner that leads to an appointed end and possibly for this reason the avowed atheist Somerset Maugham expressed great understanding for God's position on the Day of Judgment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau even wrote his "Confessions" as an "apologia" to be presented in his defence on that extreme occasion. My stories, poems and dramatic scenes may well reflect the interest of writers from the Romantic period onwards with the absurd, the seemingly arbitrary nature of things, words and life's outcomes. Therefore readers should not be altogether surprised to encounter rhinoceroses in the first chapter and a scientist who becomes a chicken at a later stage in the progress of this book, which all goes to show: you never can tell.