Torpedo dive
Monday, September 27th, 2010
By Chris Flynn, founder and editor of Torpedo
Torpedo No 5
In the introduction to Torpedo Greatest Hits, I describe how in 2002 a friend and I flew into Prague airport on a ten-pound Easyjet flight and were picked up by an elderly man with no English who proceeded to drive his ancient Eastern bloc car at a terrifying speed along darkened back roads into the city. Whilst I was attempting to communicate with him that he needed to slow down, the car struck an enormous wild turkey that was out for a leisurely evening stroll. Like some cartoon, the turkey’s wide eyes slammed into the windscreen right in front of me before disappearing over the roof. It was a traumatic and later hilarious moment my companion and I recalled once we had reached the guesthouse, cradling our giant beers whilst watching the Czech version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? We marveled at the fact one million Czech zlotys was equivalent to about sixty thousand Australian dollars, our sense that we had landed somewhere very strange indeed amplified by the news that several animals had escaped from the zoo during the recent floods and that a gorilla was still unaccounted for.
I compared the car journey to the experience of starting a literary journal. The metaphor of speeding down an unknown road, unsure of where you are going, giddy with excitement and completely unprepared for that sudden turkey in the face seemed all too apt. (more…)
