Fleeting

Steam is rising from the poo that Milly has just laid in the Parc de Trembly. Autumn is now well and truly here with the tiniest hint of snow on the distant Jura mountains and dew drops like diamonds on my dog’s nose. She’s already scurried off to sniff for squirrels as I bend down with the obligatory black bag and pick up her produce. I can feel the warmth in my hand before it gets flung into the bin.

I’ve just sent off two girls to school this morning. My own: dear Sapphire, still suffering from a cold and asking if I’d drive them there ‘because it’s windy.’ She knew the answer before I needed to say it and grinned. “It’s always worth a try, Mum.”

And Nafeesa: on her first sleepover ever if you don’t count school camps.

She rang Sapphire two days ago. “My Mum has had a stroke. Can I stay with you?”

Sapph was home with me, sick with a cold, still in her dressing gown when she rushed out onto the balcony where I was sipping coffee. “Can she stay?” I nodded, getting up to find out more. Sapphire was already striding towards her bedroom, the annoyances of a sore throat and raw nose forgotten. “We must help and I know where you keep the guest sheets and towels....”

Nafeesa’s mother, Yasmin, rang her friend at midnight. The words were all clear but jumbled into nonsensical sentences. John thought it was a joke until there was silence for a while and she moaned, “Help me.”

He rushed over to her house, arranged an ambulance, woke up a frightened Nafeesa and spent the day at her hospital bed, telephoning everyone whose name he recognised on Yasmin’s blackberry.

Nafeesa’s father died of cancer six years earlier and their family are scattered outwards from Lebanon, Netherlands, UK and Brazil. As an only child, poor Nafeesa must have felt so alone, so tiny and helpless as doctors bustled around her mother, now paralysed down one side and unable to speak.

A friend was contacted and arranged to move into Yasmin’s house and take Nafeesa to school every day. “That’s when I rang you,” she told Sapphire later. “I knew that I wanted to stay with you.”

And so she is. She and I travelled in the rain to the hospital yesterday, passing through a dozen smoking nurses up towards the intensive care unit. The ward also held five men, all several decades older than Yasmin.

This proud and beautiful woman who I’ve always envied for her style and youthful looks banged her left hand – encumbered by several wires and catheters - against the metal bed rail when she saw her daughter. Nafeesa buried her head into her mother’s chest, whispering I love you I love you I love you over and over. Yasmin’s eyes filled with tears and she cried. It wasn’t a sniffle or a sob but a loud wail that made all of us – the nurse, the best friend, the work colleague visiting during lunch hour, Nafeesa and me, look down, unsure of what we could do to help.

I dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, awkwardly. As nominated guardian I was required to be there - if only to transport her child to the bedside - but my relationship was with Nafeesa who I saw often, whereas Yasmin and I mostly traded pleasantries during drop offs and pick-ups. With one side of her face dragging downwards and puffy eyes without their customary eyeliner I felt as though I was intruding, seeing her at her most vulnerable.

Patting her hand gently, I explained that Nafeesa was staying with us for as long as was needed and that she wasn’t to worry. As I pulled back to leave and sit outside to wait for Nafeesa, Yasmin grabbed my hand. She tried several times to tell me something but the words were incoherent and each one took a lot of effort to produce. Her eyes blazed and it was clear that being trapped inside a currently-useless body was isolating and frustrating.

It was one of those key moments in life when you know that you need to – must do – say the right thing and yet, as a self-deluded writer, nothing emerged but a faint “It’s okay, it’s okay. You have such a lovely daughter and we feel honoured to have her. It’s okay.” Her fingers clanged the three gold bangles along my arm in response. The eyes glittered: the message was understood.

I left Nafeesa with her mother and stepped outside to speak with Yasmin’s best friend, an AIDS specialist from the World Health Org. “She’ll be here for weeks and then....” she put her hands to her lips, as if to stop them from saying the next few words, “......it could be months. And months.”

We’d only met each other fifteen minutes beforehand but found ourselves hugging each other. This was the woman who emailed all the key players involved in Nafeesa’s care – who was dropping off, who was picking up and who was hosting her where and when; even during the upcoming week of mid-term break when Sapph and I were heading off to Basel. She also provided a list of emails and contact numbers and the evenings since have been full of conversations between people I’ve not yet met as we discuss some very intimate and important subjects.

And Nafeesa......? She’s a painfully skinny kid who barely eats anything beyond chicken nuggets and spaghetti adorned only with grated cheese. We’ve cuddled a few times and Milly has done her utmost to trot over and lean up against her legs, offering her own furry version of comfort. LC has been away at a conference in Germany, kept updated with SMS messages from Sapphire and on his return last night did the manly thing of repairing the sagging blow up mattress. Nafeesa knows that her mother will recover and the relief is evident. She sleeps on the now acceptably air-filled bed on the floor in Sapphire’s room and they both whisper and giggle into the wee hours.

Sapphire has come into her own. Helpful, funny and good at finding things for them to do after dinner. She’s very tired and not happy that Nafeesa will take Friday off school so that I can take her to meet her uncle at the airport while she sits in beginner French class. However this is just a momentary huff as she's quickly accepting and showing a maturity mixed with a wicked sense of twelve-year-old humour that is just what her friend needs. I’m in awe.

I lay in bed with LC last night, telling him all this. He reached out his arm to provide what he thought was a comforting pat to my shoulder but in the darkness it ended up as a vague grope of my chest and then a slight whack to my nose as he withdrew. “Gee thanks for that love – I knew that there was something I needed – a fondle and a punch!” We laughed louder and longer than was really necessary.

And so I find myself earlier this morning holding a still-warm bag of dog poo while the beast who made it is in the wet grass, front paw lifted as she freezes for a moment, locks in a new scent and runs in a different direction.

It’s hard not to smile at these tiny observations and yet at the same time realise how fleeting they are. Life is so damn short and can alter in an instant. I run to catch up with her and kiss her nose, even though it’s wet with dew drops and has a stray blade of grass plastered on it.

Snappy September - Day Twelve - Playing with Camera

Last year Love Chunks and Sapphire gave me an SLR camera for my birthday. It replaced my twenty one year old Canon 'sure shot' that I won on 'Wheel of Fortune' back in 1988 when my hair was big, my waist was small and Love Chunks was merely some friend of my brothers' he was sharing a rather ramshackle, testosteroney house with in Mile End.

As for the magnificent new camera, yet it's approaching a year and I haven't read the 'big' manual yet, just the pocket-sized one and no, the big hard-cover book titled 'Fundamentals of Modern Photography' by Tom Ang is resting unobtrusively in the shelf where it is likely to remain undisturbed for a longer time still.

Instead, I like to play.

I'll never be a gardener but I'll always love the stuff I find in them.

Luck Sucks















Despite considering myself reasonably intelligent, I still buy a ticket for the Saturday night tatts-lotto draw every few weeks or so.

Australia's population is approaching twenty-two million and any mathematician (ie Love Chunks) will tell you that the chances of selecting the winning six numbers from a combination of 45, is well, about 123,456,789 to one. Most of us would have either created a program or seen a friend create one that compares the success of choosing the same six numbers every week to varying them each week - with the same six winning by the mere skin of a cooling custard.

To complicate things further (at least for a numerically-challenged meathead like me) is that most people tend to select their 'regular six' using birthdates which means that numbers above 31 are unlikely to feature on their tickets. Whether any boffin has bothered to work out the odds of selecting numbers 32 to 45 to increase the chances of winning is probably still being undertaken by science undergrads seeking a wild and crazy change from spending their Saturday nights translating the Old Testament into Klingon.

















Yet, as admitted to earlier, I avoid logic and willingly buy a ticket and, before I've even left the newsagent, idly waste about ten minutes of my life indulging in the 'What if I Won Lotto' fantasy. Yes, the most unoriginal, unrewarding and unrealistic daydream that every person above the age of seven has entertained at least once in their lives. It is sadly pathetic and even though I'd like to think I am above all that, I still do it. It's a bit like believing that an orange eaten after a Kit-Kat cancels out the wickedness of the chocolate, and I still do that too.

On Sunday mornings I flick to page two of the newspaper, write down the winning lotto numbers (and the two supps - any money is good money) and then meticulously check my ticket. Nope, not even a division six prize, dammit. But do I throw the ticket away? Of course not.

It stays in my purse until Friday morning. On my way to the supermarket for the weekly shop I'll pop into the newsagent, flash a hopeful smile and ask them to run the now-slightly-tattered ticket through their computer, vainly hoping that I've mis-checked and the numbers will tell a better story.

The bored shop assistant slips it into the slot, counts to three and hands me back my ticket and a slip and tells me, "Sorry, not this time love."

And here's the killer: the slip says 'Not A Winner,' as if to rub salt in my already pus-infected wound of disappointment.

Why don't they just go all out and say 'YOU'RE A TOTAL LOSER' instead? Perhaps they could also get a bit creative with the rejection slips and have a different one each time: 'You're still poor. And ugly'. Or: 'You should be happy that you even had the guts to turn up here today and not frighten any of our customers'; 'Hell, a face like yours would be able to sand down a log,'; or 'Trust me, you didn't win last time, didn't win this time and will never win. Rack off.'

This would be the one I'd get: 'You lost. Now get out of here; you make the place look untidy.'

I blame the work lotto club for introducing me to this world of unrealistic hope and crushing reality. We would all chip in our $2 for the week and get a group ticket. However, as soon as I joined up, we didn't win a brass razoo. (What is a 'razoo' exactly? Well whatever it was, we never won it).

Our statistical analyst suggested that the odds would be far more favourable if we tried putting our money on the gee-gees, taking it in turns to select the race and whichever horse's name appealed to us. Twelve months of that and still no pot of gold.

How about the greyhounds? Zilcho. Our other stats guy helpfully pointed out that if we'd invested our weekly contributions instead we'd have fully paid for our christmas lunch, endless drinks and taxi fares. He was promptly shoved into the photocopier room and ignored until the deadline rush for the unit's monthly finance reports.

Scratchies were our last resort. Again it was two bucks each and we'd buy a whole toilet roll of them and take it in turns each week to scratch them all. It was absolutely tragic - our biggest windfall was $3 and we'd only spent $28 to 'win' it.

Is there a message in all of this? Well obviously it's to keep your money in your wallet or the bank, but we don't do we? We all like to wish, hope and fantasise. My naive little gambling bug also extends to entering competitions. Thankfully I'm not like my friend Bill's sister who ended up buying 16 jars of mustard for the entry tokens, but I am prepared to pay for a 55c stamp to enter a competition on the back of a packet that I'd ordinarily buy.

And what have I won? Well, I wanted to win the First Class around-the-world tickets on offer, but got the consolation prize of a Deeko paper serviette holder instead. It's actually rather useful and is a quite attractive wrought iron design that can withstand most windy days when we're having lunch outside.....
















I also wanted to win the Cadbury $250,000 cash promotion, but got a blue plastic 'Time Out' watch instead. To be fair, it proved handy for gardening and swimming in the three-month life span it provided and getting some facial cleanser and toner from Jurlique was OK but I felt a bit shortchanged when what I really wanted was all-expenses paid fortnight's health and beauty retreat at the Golden Door in Queensland....

At the time of typing this, I'm still hoping to come up trumps for the Schweppes 'Magic Moments' win two-grand per week for a year competition; the Woolworths/Safeway Honda Odyssey/Fiji holiday/free groceries for one year in the 'Read it - Win it' magazine promotion; Home Beautiful 'Aussie Home' photography awards; Epilepsy Association BMW raffle; Flemington Traders' local calendar shots, the Grand Angus $50,000 cash first prize...... Oh, wait. I actually have to buy - and possibly eat - one of those to be in the running, don't I...?

Overly optimistic and pathetic, yes. But the day I stop hoping is the day I'll stop living; regardless of the mathematical logic. And I ain't a logical gal, as Love Chunks and the general population will readily tell you.

Never shag a gift horse when it’s down

The only books I ever saw in my younger brother Dave’s hands were Asterix comics or novels he was forced to endure for year twelve English.

Twenty years on still sees him cautiously ask if there’s a movie available whenever any discussions about books arise. Despite this, he’s forged a successful career as a town planner and seminar speaker. He is required to attend and actively participate in more than his fair share of council meetings, committees, objection hearings and conferences and throughout his adult life he has discovered that his lack of reading means that he is living a parallel life when it comes to using common phrases and old sayings.














Unusually however, this has not made him an object of scorn but as someone who has breathed new life into these hackneyed cliches and nuggets of so-called advice. For instance he’s recently worked out that Faye Acrumbly is not a malevolent committee member always mentioned but never seen but is instead someone who is actually working under the official title of ‘Fait Accompli’ and already done what she set out to do. She’s organised, is Faye.

Dave often feels as though his good project proposals and ideas get ‘Nipped in the butt.’ One’s backside may not be quite as delicate a descriptor as ‘bud’ but is certainly a deviation that most of his colleagues can understand and empathise with, especially during annual performance review time. Admitting to being caught ‘butt naked’ during a quick change by his car after an early morning surf during a week-long seminar on the coast makes a fair bit more sense as well.

We have a lively discussion over his use of the phrase ‘Six of one, a dozen of the other’. When told by his know-it-all sister that it’s meant to be ‘Six of one, half a dozen of the other,’ he merely rolls his eyes, shrugs and shoots back with, “Not where I work or live. Since when have things proved to be even-handed or consistent?” Fair point.

Doing something ‘on the spare of the moment’ makes him seem well-planned and organised rather than impetuous: a boon, apparently, in the local council planning domain. ‘Spurs’ would be far too aggressive and less team-oriented when it comes to trying to educate and cajole greedy property developers or overly-ambitious architects about the importance of considering environmental sustainability, preservation of streetscapes and planning laws. He thinks quickly on his feet, does Dave.

Neither of us know the origin of ‘Never the twain shall meet’, and he prefers using ‘Never the train shall tweet.’ He doesn’t have time for Twitter or SMS and prefers to spend his time commuting doing other stuff like stare out of the window, chatting to his mates or working on his laptop if he gets a seat – anything other than get a good novel out and start reading it.

















Like a fool in a china shop, he rarely beats around the buses when getting to the point is concerned. "Why can’t I toot my own horn?” he asks, “For all intensive purposes, if you don’t toot your horn these days, you’ll never get let into the traffic flow, and as for not being able to have my cake and eat it too, that’s just pointless and cruel.” Being gracious in defeat is all very noble, he admits, but being gracious in the sheets ensures that he continues to have a happy and lasting marriage.

He starts warming up to his clashing cliches. ‘Don’t count your chickens by their cover,’ is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in his view. “Don’t remember my year eight agriculture class? I chose the white chooks for my project and they ended up pecking each other’s feathers off.”

Given his lack of love for literature, it makes sense that chickens are going to be selected and judged far more frequently than book covers in his unique world. Still, he refuses to ‘give up the goat,’ says he’s proud of being a ‘country bunkum’ and hopes he can remain analogous when it comes to being able to criticise his profession and the people he works with. “I’m all for following my dreams but only if they involve supermodels and beer and not the one where I turn up nude to my nanna’s house.”

To be fair to my lovely young brother, he’s invented a pretty effective one of his own. No holes barred, it perfectly summarises the ridiculous amount of stress we place on ourselves and sanctimoniously say to others: ‘Put your best foot forward, nose to the grindstone, head down-bum up, back to the wall, shoulder to the wheel and keep your eyes on the prize.’ If you can manage that, every stitch in time won’t gather any pesky moss or spoil your broth.

No Franzy, Noooooo!

One of my favourite bloggers-with-brawn-and-brains, the inimitable Franzy, said the words that no ex-banker ever wants to hear from anyone they admire. ~Shudder~ Franzy said.... he said....he..... OK. I can do this! I'll be brave and just do a copy and paste. He said: I wish I had bank job.

Sure, we've all been discussing the profanity of an article describing how some South Yarra wankers only getting a million for their five bedroom houses are doing it tough in this current economic downturn and maybe even have to sell their Mornington Peninsula hobby farms or the iconic post-modern beach house at Portsea, and how insultingly offensive it is to a Gen Y professional student who has both a HECS debt and rent that's too high to save for a deposit, let alone a reasonably-manageable mortgage.

I feel Franzy's pain. And fear. And envy. I've felt all of them too. Still do in fact. But now, I want to address the most horrific sentence I've had the misfortune to see him write: I wish I had bank job and share my own experience of having such arse-puckeringly awful employment with you all. It is a tale of heartache, terror, rubber bands, endless signatures and hopefully one of caution for you all.

Way, waaaay back into the deep mists of time at the end of 1988 when 1927 were going to dominate the airwaves forever, spiral perms ruled and raging was a social past-time and not a personality affliction I was in my third and final year of uni, fully aware that I belonged to a group of students who were the last to receive a HECS-free tertiary education.*** From term two onwards I dutifully borrowed my Mum's sensible black power suit and scrunched my perm into a sleek French braid and sat through lots of group interviews held on campus, to be informed just before Christmas that the ANZ Bank wanted to employ me in 1989 as a Graduate Trainee.

I was thrilled - as a lowly Arts Graduate who endured seeing 'Arts Degrees - please take one' scrawled oh-so-wittily underneath the loo sheet dispenser in the Uni Bar loos, the thought of either doing honours or teaching were not happy ones and thus to land a real job outside of those areas was a big feat. Twenty two thousand dollars per year seemed like a fortune to someone who received $9 Austudy a fortnight, $20 per week from Mum and Dad and worked all holidays doing truly craptastic stuff like apricot cutting, garlic picking, waitressing, babysitting, cucumber polishing, capsicum weeding and leaflet folding to pay my rent, food and cider bills.

Despite being told by the recruiting bloke that they wanted to place me in Human Resources, when the January starting day arrived, I was lumped with a dozen other newbies - aloofish maths graduates and nervous school leavers, all ready to do a week's induction training and, in my case, become a Lending Officer, not an HR henchwoman. Oh, was my first little twinge; so somehow my Roman Art & Archaelogy and Major English Texts studies were deemed to be more suited to mortgages than staff issues.

Sadly, my twinge became a fully-fledged thorn in my side about a month later when I was stationed to their North Adelaide branch, helping out their Commercial Lending side hand out money to the already wealthy and already snobby customers. My day entailed smiling at the sleazy male lending managers pretending I was interested in what they had to say instead of loathing them and finding little else to occupy me amongst the reams of paper work, numbered dockets and certificates of title that were still typed via a manual typewriter. Freezing cold air conditioning, paper cuts and viewing too many yellow sweat stains under the Gordon Gecko-style striped shirt worn by the young yuppie jerk alongside of me. Yep, five o'clock couldn't come soon enough.

Later that year, I was posted to my permanent position as Assistant Bank Manager, Gawler Place (corner North Terrace, when Henry Buck's now is). Most of my day was spent running credit checks, processing card applications, approving mortgages, personal loans and high yielding term deposits. I was very firmly 'encouraged' to sign up to study Accounting in the evenings but lasted only three lectures: I had barely scraped through year eleven maths, so surely they could have seen that I would have studied economics and spreadsheets at uni if I was remotely inclined? My boss shook his head in disappointment and told me he'd ordered the Financial Review for us every day, and it was my job to read, note anything relevant and report it to him. My first thoughts were, 'Oh bugger, there aren't any pictures in here.'

This first foray into real paid professional work was boring, dispiriting and energy sapping. My Manager disliked me because I was a jumped-up young lady who went to uni and didn't join the bank at fifteen years of age in 1950 and move up, step by step whenever somebody older than him died or was found slumped over some carbon paper. Plus, I towered over him by seven inches (he was five feet tall with conspicious lifts inserted in the back heels of his brogues) and he insisted I call him "Mr" every time we spoke.

The general staff - the tellers - also resented me because I didn't have to serve customers all day every day except at lunchtimes and was on at least eight grand a year more than they were. This was in spite of the fact that I had to arrive before they did to unlock the strong room and office, go to evening classes (paid only by the bank if I passed them), take my four weeks' annual leave all in one go ('What do you mean you don't know anyone else who has the entire month of June off?') and not be permitted to have a cup of tea on my desk 'because the customers can see over the counter and your desk is visible.'

However it was the two hour lunch rush I dreaded even more than the boring old 'War with Westpac' stories from Mr C or the 'she-thinks-her-shit-doesn't-stink-just-because-she-went-to-uni-but-look-at-her-she-still-has-to-wear-navy-blue-and-grey-uniforms-like-we-do' glares of the tellers because I had to open up a booth, get the cash out and serve customers for two hours so that the tellers could take their lunch breaks.

I had to take my 45 minute break at either 11:15am or 2pm - no less and no more. The other tellers used to make sure they'd take their time serving someone, drop their pens or have a phone call to answer every single bloody time a drunken, piss-soaked wino would stagger in with his coffee jar full of coins, the doddery pensioners would rush in on every second Thursday with their outdated bank books and endless questions or the insane, 1000 year-old biddy who had several millions dollars with us but thought she could fling off her fox fur and flick spittle in my eyes for half an hour during her passionate rant about how much she hated us each time she came in to collect her statements.

Some of the staff I worked with were great, but some were questionable and borderline retarded, not to be too delicate about things. One woman - let's just call her Deb for reasons of me not wanting to be sued - could barely put the letters A, N and Z together in the same order, but had a relative higher up in personnel who ensured that she was a 'relief' staff (the irony of that word doesn't escape me) member who could stuff up and leave before any ramifications were felt. Anyhoo, she was one of many such blocks of dead wood who were hanging around because they had mortgages at a reduced rate that would automatically increase to 17.5% if they left. Not me, unfortunately. The days of cheap staff rates ended about a month before I got there, as did the Christmas cash bonus - I got a mini-Christmas pudding and a cinema ticket instead.

At the end of the day, we'd all have to balance our cash and it was very rare that I ever did on the first try. I ain't a fine details gal; never was, never will be. Counting and recounting fives, tens, twenties, fifties and wrapping them in groups of ten in rubber bands, bagging the gold, silver and bronze coins and entering and re-entering the figures was humiliating and mindless. I'd eventually manage it and have to hang around for Mr C to climb back into his stacked heels, find his key and lock up with him - he and I had the only sets that would lock up the pitiful little branch 100% securely every night. I'd walk dejectedly home through the beautiful old grounds of Adelaide uni, through the Botanic gardens to my Hackney sharehouse, feeling like a right twit in my daggy bank uniform when Jo was having a wonderful time searching for rocks and jocks via her geology PhD, and Charlotte was still studying piano at the Elder conservatorium and moonlighting in a techno jazz band.

Worse still was the recession that Paul Keating said "we had to have." Interest rates for mortgages climbed to 17.5% and in my second year at the bank ('Don't leave before two years or it will look really bad on your CV, I was told over and over again by my concerned parents, my friends and myself), I was doing more collecting work than loan approvals. It is hard to describe just how horrible it was to be given an armful of files and be told, at the ripe old age of 22 with a personal credit card with a $500 limit and a 1971 Renault bought for $1600, that I had to ring up working couples and parents and hassle them about missed payments, bounced cheques or negative bank balances. I did it coolly, professionally and efficiently and got results. Mr C and head office loved me for it, but I'd go home and wonder just why I felt like hiding and crying. Meeting anyone at a party at that time wasn't fun either - I'd invariably end up in a corner, cowering, listening to someone rant about the Bastard Banks and pointing angrily at me. "Nice talking with you, er, Dennis, isn't it, but I'd like to go and get drunk now....."

On the other hand, those who had already paid off their mortgages (Baby Boomers, I'm looking at you), could invest their considerable savings in term deposits with interest rates that hit 15.5%. "Yeehah" one particularly obnoxious customer yelled when I opened up such an account for him. "This'll pay for our Europe trip and hopefully allow me to lease a newer Beamer at the end of the year." How nice for you, I remember thinking, and noticed that the person behind him in the queue was coming in every week - with cash earned from a second labouring job - to pay off some arrears that had accrued when he'd got sick and had his overtime cut.

You'll be relieved to read, if you're still here, that I did a nannying course in the evenings and on the 730th day, handed in my notice, bought a plane ticket to London and left the country the week after. I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders and still, to this day, haven't been able to wear anything navy or grey ever again.

So Franzy? Dear, sweet Franzy. Make coffee, make books, make blogs, make wild monkey love to M, but don't DON'T ever make a bank job your wish. I beg you!

*** I paid HECS later when I returned to Adelaide Uni to do my Grad Dip Ed. I lasted a year, but the repayments took me four!

Supercilious Self Righteousness


There I was yesterday, at Coles Supermarket in Firle, shopping list in my hand and eagerly checking out the blueberries and strawberries. They looked great, were in abundance and most importantly, were on special.

After grabbing my share (punnets of blueys can be frozen - yee hah - that's the kind of excitement I'm into these days), I finished wandering through the vege section which peters out into the bakery and deli areas.

Idly eyeing off the Cherry Bakewells, pink iced donuts and peanut butter cookies, I was full of internal self congratulation when I elected not to put any of them in my trolley and reached for the wholemeal pitta, multigrain sliced and crumpets instead.

Next to me, a woman as wide as she was tall was chatting happily to her husband as she eagerly seized a 12-pack of day-old cinnamon donuts, marked down in black texta to $1. "I can have these you know, because I've been good all week and eating my Weight Watchers stuff, and I've designated Fridays as my sugar days."

Her husband, taller but no less wide, considered this logic for a moment. He stopped pushing the trolley towards the onions and potatoes and looked at her face; so happy with her badness bargain. "Um, but won't you undo a lot of your hard work if you eat that?"

It was then that her inner Nigel Tufnel came through. "But this speaker goes up to eleven," she said. Actually she didn't say that. What she did say was, "But for six days I've been really good, so today I can eat whatever I want."

He remained puzzled but unsure how to tackle this. Perhaps more than one thought was swirling inside his head at that moment - Do I discourage her efforts so far; Will she share those sugary buggers with me; Isn't she now talking about those cheese-n-bacon scrolls over there; Perhaps she's right- one out of seven isn't such a bad risk after all. In the end, he took the packet from her, and placed it gently on top of the four 2-litre bottles of coke that were already in their trolley.

I smiled at them vaguely, to let them know I might have heard some of their discussion but wasn't judging them for it in any way and wheeled on towards the tinned tomatoes.

My smugness at my own trolley's contents stayed with me, increasing exponentially as I noted that I'd finally remembered to bring in the green shopping bags and had already been for a run that morning and eaten an orange. I was David St Hubbins - not quite as dim as Nigel and at least trying to develop a new stage show (Stone 'enge) and try hard.

That is, until I got home, put the fresh stuff in the fridge and remembered, in the third-to-last aisle just before the dairy but after the dry dog food - that I'd snatched up these little beauties:

....because they were on special. It was then I realised that I was but two stone and ten years away from having the exact same conversation - albeit in the confectionery aisle and not the bakery section - with Love Chunks. Or the doctor monitoring my glucose and cholesterol levels.

Day Twenty Five - Appreciative August

Needing Knots

Marriage is outdated these days. That's something that has been said by older generations for decades, so I'll rip off my numbered paper slip and wait patiently in the ever-increasing queue.

I've been married to Love Chunks for over thirteen years now, but have been 'with' him for nearly sixteen. Perhaps the opening sentence needs to be more clearly explained: the need for marriage and the way we traditionally go about preparing for it is out of date and unnecessary but having a loving and binding relationship certainly isn't. Most of us want that one person with whom we can be our complete selves without ridicule, fear or anxiety.

Love Chunks didn't ask me to marry him and nor was I waiting for the moment to ask him either. Instead it happened as a round-about conversation together when we were both poor teaching students. Somehow we wound up by a jewellery store in Rundle mall. There was a small sapphire ring in the window that we both really liked, so we bought it. End of story. No staged 'romantic' scenes and no exciting story when people ask, "So how did Love Chunks ask to marry you" - just a really wonderful sense of it all being right and that this bloke was 'it' as far as I was concerned.

In February 1995 we married in my folks' back garden in Murray Bridge. My 'dress' (a skirt and jacket) cost $12 in materials and the hat and shoes were $100 apiece. LC and I were based in Darwin at that stage, so we had about as much interest in planning an costly catastrophe that focussed on the colours of napkins, flowers and attendants as Bryce Courteney has in writing decent novels.

Mum and Dad were supportive of our low key plans too, for what I can only guess are the following reasons:

* They wanted to pay and we insisted on having a small celebration in their garden;

* Dad didn't have to wear a suit, write a speech or do anything other than ensure that there was enough shade and his back lawn was green and lush;

* Mum could finally flex her green muscled thumbs and show newcomers just what a sixty-something superstar can do with milo-brown Murray water, ingenuity and hard work;

* None of us had to endure prickly and pointless conversations about hired cars, who was going to be the best man, maid of honour, bridesmaid, flowergirl or the social perils of signing up for a gift registry.

At 2pm on Sunday 5th February, Love Chunks had more to endure than I, standing there on his own, facing the 60-strong crowd trying not to appear too nervous as Dad walked me out of the front door, down the drive and through our back garden. The summer day was windy and not hot at all, so my hat blew off halfway during the ceremony. Dad caught it and plonked it on his own much larger noggin, ensuring a snug fit and a decent photo opp. Mum and my sister-in-law sobbed throughout, as did RB, Love Chunks' father. Love Chunks and I nervously grabbed for and kissed each other as soon as the minister said, "I now pronounce you...." and endured a few rounds of happy laughter when he pointed out that there were a few other bits and pieces to say yet.

Two lovely CWA ladies from Coomandook did the catering - we wanted genuinely yummy finger foods and lots of it. The 22C weather and strong Murray gusts meant that the tea and coffee was more eagerly sought than the champers, beer and wine, so we had a nice head-start to establishing our now pretty substantial wine collection. We wanted no speeches and no gifts and the only cake was a nice mud jobby passed around in generous slices with clotted cream and forks. Total cost for the day including booze, food, catering staff and clothing was $2,ooo.

The rest of the day was a blur of talking, saying nothing of value, laughing, posing for photos, trying to spend at least two minutes with every person who was there before leaving around 8pm for Adelaide. It was only in our car tootling past Callington that LC and I realised that neither of us had been to the toilet in over eight hours, nor eaten or drunk anything; it was like our physical needs were in freeze-mode during a momentous event, yet, neither of us could remember a damn thing that was said to us the entire time. We arrived at the decadence that still is the Flag Inn on Anzac Highway, being conveniently-ish close to the airport where we were leaving on a red-arsed flight to Perth the next morning.

Our first meal as Mr and Mrs was in Glenelg, eating the oilest, gluggiest and most satisfying bowls of spaghetti carbonara from Fasta Pasta, laughing as we did so at the sheer lack of luxury of it all.

Yes, I'll go as far as to say we 'consummated' the day later on that evening, but again, much more laughter and snorting ensued as we tried to imagine what kind of horrors and disappointment faced nervous and exhausted couples in stricter and more innocent times.

The honeymoon was in Perth for the first week. It was the only city in Australia that neither of us had visited before and it was a pretty damn nice spot to recuperate from everything, plus see Australia destroy the Poms for the season at the WACA. Then we flew up to Darwin to meet up with our English mates John, Rebs, Richard and Tracey who had specifically timed their big trip Down Under to attend our wedding. Love Chunks had never met them before, but heard enough about them to suggest, "If they've made the effort to get down here, let's not just speak to them for a few minutes during THE BIG DAY, but do some travelling with them as well."

So we did. A week or so in a six-berth rented campervan doing Kakadu, Litchfield and the wilds of the Northern Territory. In February, the heart of the wet and stormy season. Best decision ever.

Since then, we've been part of, or attended, weddings that have cost more than a house deposit and wondered just why they thought that the money was well spent. We've caught drunk uncles falling off balconies; politely eaten partly boiled chicken that was raw on the inside; seen bridesmaid's dresses so bad that I thought my friend the bride was having a joke at first; seen a couple marry each other for the third time (!); two women at a posh Yarra do deciding to have a smack-down cat fight on the dance floor; chased stingy waiters in order to get a mouthful of food and wondered just why a bridal march done by a loopy cousin on a 1980s Casio keyboard was considered a good idea.

But......... But the couple at each event were sublimely happy and oblivious to problems relating to back fat rolling over strapless bodices, the noisy whirring of video recorders, the table full of bored 'odd' folk that are shoved together merely because they're single and the younger fourteen year old brother of the groom who sneakily sculls a jug of coke-and-bundy and throws up in the ladies toilets. At every one of them, we applauded each best man's speech, willingly got up to do the Chicken Dance after the cake was cut and told the bride she was the most beautiful example of love and light we'd even seen in our lives.

..... yes, marriage is outdated and getting married is tacky, wasteful and often very silly. Maybe that's because it's too tiring trying to work out how to tie that sublime Knot in a slightly more personal or creative way.

It doesn't really matter though, as long as you've found the person you want to get knotted with. And I have.

Day Twenty Three - Appreciative August

Resolution and Redemption



















When I was seven and my older brother was nine, he had two-and-a-half extra years of physical strength and the mental agility to tease with more effective results, mercilessly thrash me at Monopoly and invent better and more hurtful insults than I ever could. Perhaps he was annoyed that, as a three year old, I'd get up and eat his school lunch that Mum had made the night before, or pointed out that he always stuck his tongue out when he was batting at the crease or concentrating during a particularly challenging game of back-yard brandy.

The two year game of catch up didn't seem to end until we were in our late teens and one day I realised that we were friends rather than enemies. We could laugh at Blackadder and drove out to the orchards together in the summer holidays to endure the heat, the mindless work, the bogans and the boredom in order to earn the book, beer and bond money for the upcoming university year. We raved about the Midnight Oil concert at Memorial Drive in 1985, played endless games of tennis where he showed me how to run-like-my-very-life-depended-on-it for every single shot like a real bloke would; and he'd make wisecracks at the dinner table that would not only make me laugh but marvel at his quick cleverness.

It was me he came to see when he first felt the stirrings of real connection for a girl he'd met. What should he do, what if he'd got the signals wrong, what if she said no, what if......? Outwardly I listened intently, and assured him that it was worth the risk; she would say yes and that life would continue if it backfired. Inwardly I was so honoured that he chose me to confide these things to: was this the same person who made me cry so many times as a child?

When my share house was broken into in my third year of study, my two girlfriends and I came home stunned. We were all dirt poor, struggling on Austudy and holiday jobs and wondering just how in the hell we were going to replace our one and only bar heater, colour TV and tape player. The robbers must have been so disappointed to break into our place to reveal that it housed the poorest tenants of Hackney inside - no microwave, CD collections, stereo system, art work, computers or gadgets; which is why they found the time to smoke and butt out their cigarettes in my bedroom, go through my wardrobe to remove anything with a recognisable label and select whichever cassette tapes appealed to their ear.

Rob himself was also still a penniless student, but he cycled over from Mile End an hour later, somehow carrying his own double-tape stereo deck, a black-n-white television and an ancient Vulcan reflective heater. "Ah, no worries," he said, brushing off my thanks, "I'm at Libby's (his girlfriend's) place most of the time, and she's got better stuff than I have."

He moved in with us for a few months when Jo was working overseas for a few months towards her geology PhD. We needed the rent, he was in between jobs and houses and I wondered how he'd fare with Charlotte, a fairly straight, classical piano student who'd come from a family of five daughters. I shouldn't have worried - she loved his quirky outlook on life, loved him calling her 'Chuck' and he asked her endless questions about boarding school, life raising horses and exactly what piece of music she was practising and why.

We had a few interesting meals when he'd visit the Central Market just on closing time, buy an entire box of one vegetable and try and make something different with it for dinner for the following week. Avocados, parsnips and even on-the-turn tomatoes were particularly challenging. He'd chop up onions wearing his swimming goggles and, after we'd finished and enjoyed his seafood Hokkien noodle stir fry, he'd say, "Oh I'm glad you didn't notice that I also put the beaks and eyes of the octopus in as well; it makes it go further."

One time he, Love Chunks, my best mate Jill, a few others and myself were at Boomer Beach. God I loved the waves there and used to love jumping up, over and then let myself get swallowed up in the white foam and unceremoniously shoved into the sand at the shore. Inevitably the day came when I misjudged the timing of a huge wave spectacularly badly. Jill recalls that it looked brilliantly funny from the shore, but for me it was like being flung and and then dunked further into a wading pool by an angry ogre,over and over again.

The power of the rushing water, sand and waves still breaking overhead - or was it overhead, because I could not tell which way was up and was being thrown about manically and could not do anything to find the bottom of the seabed or stand up - seemed to go on forever. I had sucked in too much seawater and wondered if, maybe, this was it for me. Or was my head going to smack on some rocks that I saw some distance over, but might now be right under me for all I knew? Were my friends on the shore just assuming I was goofing off and having a wonderful time? Could they even see me out here?

Smack, tumble, gasp, tumble, smack. All my eyes saw was sand, foam and darkness, even though it was a 30C summer day. Why couldn't I, a strong swimmer and fit young woman, stand up? Why couldn't I breathe?

Rob found me, grabbed my shoulders and hoiked me up. I was coughing and sobbing, "I thought I was going to die, Rob, I really thought that this was it for me...."
"Ah come on now, it's OK, you're fine. That's a fair old codpiece of sand you've got dangling between your legs now, Kath." He laughed at me, but his eyes looked worried and relieved.

And yet this year, the two-year difference re-emerged. We were living in two separate states of the country, in two different households, two different spouses and with two different sets of issues and problems to deal with. We fell out. He blamed me for something I hadn't done; I fought back without trying to see why he might have done so; he snapped back defensively; and I told him a few other 'truths' I thought he needed to hear.

Such is the nature of cliches that it is only when you live through one that you realise why they're cliches. They're true. My words, spoken in anger and frustration and aimed to wound, felt impossible to take back, especially when left to hang for a long time.

Five months went by. I was fuming over the unfairness, the hypocrisy and the lack of truth I'd received. I cried many times into Love Chunks' shoulders in confusion and pain. Coming only two months after the Bulldog fiasco at work, I had sworn to myself that I was no longer going to accept being treated badly without fighting back and insisting on my rights, yet having to assert these with my brother was heartbreaking.

We didn't speak or email each other. We didn't respond with even a polite, "Oh, really, that's nice," when our parents, or little brother David, tried to pass on news of each other. We didn't take action even though our parents urged us to. And yet, I continued to grieve. Wasn't I worth respecting? Why did he do this to me? Why didn't he understand how damaging it would be?

At the urging of Love Chunks, my younger brother Dave, sister-in-law Sonia, I wrote to Rob, asking for what I wanted. An apology.

An email shot back: "Can I fly over to see you?"

I was on the blower the second after reading it.
We both cried. "I am so sorry---"
"Thanks, Rob---"
"Don't thank me---"

That night, after a long conversation and the luxury of time to fully explain, to listen and to finally understand, we hung up. I chatted jubilantly to Love Chunks who said, "I'm so glad, Kath, I'm really glad," and I ran the fastest, strongest and best session on the treadmill ever, singing out as loud as I could, without giving a flying fig what any of the neighbours thought.














I love you Rob.