Seven Random Things That Annoy Me (an occasional series)

1) Water on the floor.

2) The constant promotion of the 'Underbelly' minor criminals as if they are remotely interesting, glamorous or worthwhile human beings.

3) Michael leaving the kitchen compost bin outside after he's emptied it. (I am grateful that he empties it though.)

4) Children who insist on holding your hand and then walk e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y  s-l-o-w-l-y.

5) The new format of the Saturday Age. Oh, pardon me, I mean The Saturday Age. Actually, any form of pointless "rebranding."

6) Sand or dirt in my shoes. This drives me CRAZY. I don't know if there's a word for pathological hatred for sand in one's shoes, but if there is, I've got it. Oddly, sand under my bare feet doesn't bother me at all.

7) Children who push their food around their plates and then demand "dessert!"

Peace Descends

It's 9.20am, Friday morning, and for the first time in almost seven weeks, I'm alone in a silent house.

School starts today. There is the usual mad scramble to get ready -- lunchboxes to fill with delicious (but also healthy!) treats, drink bottles to find and label, hats to scrape free of bird poo (don't ask), frocks to discard because they've mysteriously grown too short (if only I was one of those mothers who organises these things before the last minute), breakfasts to reject, shoes to buckle, hair to plait, teeth to brush, school bags to pack. In between I shower and dress myself, gulp down a coffee, put on a load of washing, unpack the dishwasher, help Evie to find a "special thing" to bring in for the first day, reassure Alice that her beloved teacher will probably be there, even if it is a Friday...

So we set off. Through the rain. Of course, it's raining.

And now I'm home, and all the work that I've been putting off for the last six weeks looms before me. A manuscript, mid-copy edit, lies beside my bed. A list of unanswered emails from before Christmas (gulp) sits in my inbox. Ideas about Independence jostle in my head, imploring to be jotted down before I forget them. And there are still floors to vacuum, washing to be dried, a lizard to be fed, beds to make, a dolls-clothes factory to be tidied away, and I need to write something for the school newsletter about the library... and I really want to get some yoga in...

In fact, the very last thing I should be doing, the one thing that doesn't need to be done, is blogging!

Frugal February

The holidays are about to end, and the new year will begin in earnest. Time to knuckle down, time to start work. Back to the routines and disciplines* of normal life.

This year, our family** has decided to take FebFast one step further, and institute something we're calling Frugal February. After the excesses of Christmas and January (too much alcohol, too much junk food, too much money spent), it's time to pare back and simplify. We have vowed to foreswear, not only alcohol, but unnecessary expenditure. No impulse buys at the Myer sales; no midweek takeaway just because I'm feeling lazy; no buying alcohol, or chips, or new clothes, or books, or Littlest Pet Shops, or wood to build dolls-houses. Just the essentials.

Making do with, and being grateful for, what we already have. Not restlessly reaching out for the next thing, grasping for shiny bright new stuff. Being content with what we've got.

I wonder how long it'll last.

* And, hopefully, bedtimes.
** Well, actually just me and Michael. The girls think it's a terrible idea.

Singleton

I was single for a long time before I married. When I say a long time, I mean pretty much my whole adult life. From eighteen to thirty-two, I didn't have a boyfriend (or a girlfriend). (I didn't have a boy/girlfriend before that either, but it didn't seem to matter as much before eighteen.)

Oh, there was the odd adventure; a couple of brief dalliances; one or two amicable liaisons; some thrilling flirtations. But for various reasons, none of these ever quite managed to cross the divide into a full-blown "relationship." Why, why, why? I tortured myself, back in my angsty early twenties; I wept and yearned; I thought I must be too plain, too short, too shy, too bad at dancing, despite the fact that none of these handicaps seemed to stop other people from finding partners.

It wasn't until my late twenties that I fully embraced, and relaxed into, my spinsterhood. So what, I decided. I liked my life. Yes, my single status probably was my own fault, but not in the way I'd thought. I was fussy. I was hanging out for a life partner; I couldn't be bothered with Not Quite Right. I didn't meet that many people that I really liked (and sometimes, when I did, there were complications, like they were already going out with someone else). I could never really understand those people who jumped from one relationship, gasping, straight into another one, without even a pause for breath in between. I was happy being single. I'm a naturally solitary person, I need time and space to myself. My life was full and interesting. I could live like this, I realised, for the rest of my life, and be content. Even after I met Michael, it took a loooong time for us to get it together, so it wasn't like I took the first chance I could get to jump ship from HMAS Bachelor Girl.

In some ways I still feel like a single girl inside. All those years on my own gave me something valuable - a sense of myself as separate and distinct, a kind of inner self-reliance (though I don't know how to pay bills any more!), the ability to go to a movie or eat a meal in a restaurant or just enjoy a night at home alone, an unwillingness to compromise on important things, and the strength to let the unimportant things slide.

They say that everyone ought to live alone, at least for a while, to learn independence. I think it wouldn't hurt for everyone to be single for a few years, too.

A Migratory Bird*

We've all been happy and excited at our house for the last few days, because our friend Jo is visiting.

Jo lives in Scotland, but she makes a (usually) annual journey to the Antipodes, staying with friends she met while backpacking in Australia and New Zealand. Way back in the late 80s I shared a tiny house with Elizabeth, Jo and Alyson; a year or so later, I did my own big European backpacking trek and stayed (probably for way too long!) with Jo and Al in Edinburgh. Those times are a blur of bicycles jostling in the narrow hallway, beers in the backyard, secondhand frocks and Doc Martens, chocolate pudding and silly hats.

It never feels like a year between visits; we always pick up just where we left off, though the children are taller, and there might be a new room on the house. And Jo has her own news to report: developments at work, romance, family. In a way, the endless cups of tea and catching up is like an annual review - what's been achieved, what's planned, how does the land lie? The subjects of Michael Apted's 7 Up documentaries have made a similar observation, that the director's regular visits have forced them to reflect on the direction of their life journeys in ways that they might not have managed otherwise.

But the real reason we're happy to see Jo is just because... she's Jo, and we love her!

* I hope Jo doesn't mind me referring to her as a bird. In a strictly symbolic sense, of course.

Time On Our Hands

Alice's bedroom has had a makeover. Let's just say, the apple don't fall far from the tree.
I'm happy that all those Fifth Doctor videotapes have finally found a home.

Alice also lost a tooth yesterday. Evie left the above note for the Tooth Fairy.

"Dear Tooth Ferry, So I know you are real please wake me up! Thx. Room One. Evie TC."

Sadly, the Tooth Fairy did not oblige.

The Intimate Reader

I've always been secretive about my writing. I used to hide my private stories (not for school) in a box beneath the bed, protected with elaborate safeguards, and buried under layers of decoy material in case of accidental discovery.
I'm not a writer who likes to share the process.* The thought of a writing workshop, where you read out your latest work and lay it bare to the spontaneous critiques of your listeners, fills me with a cold horror. I don't show my nearest and dearest my work in progress. I don't discuss my plot lines with my husband (I did this once, and it killed the project stone dead on the spot). I like to polish and revise in private, and when the manuscript is in the best shape I think I can make it, I'll send it off into the ether and try to forget about it until the verdict returns, in the shape of the reject letter (and I've had plenty of those) or the encouraging email.
But now Michael is reading the draft version of Crow Country. This makes me edgy. Generally, he is very positive, but he's also excellent at spotting mistakes, and he's not afraid to ask questions if something doesn't make sense. He doesn't read much fiction, and he's impatient. He wants to know why, and he's not used to waiting for the text to reveal the answer further on. I suppose if I was lying in bed next to Hilary Mantel as I was reading Wolf Hall,** I'd probably ask her questions about too, but I must say I find it unnerving***.
Perhaps I wouldn't be so nervous if I couldn't see him reading it; half a dozen other people have read it by now. On the other hand, I'm not married to any of them.
I don't mind people reading what I've written once it's all bound up and printed as a book. (This is lucky, considering my choice of profession.) It's as if, once it gets to that stage, it's received some kind of official approval: it's been stamped READY FOR THE WORLD. A book has its own independent existence. But before it's published (born?), it's raw and vulnerable and helpless; it's not quite separate from me, still living in my imagination and supported by it, alterable, not quite existing in its own right. I hesitate to say, like a foetus in the womb, but it is a little like that.
This particular half-formed baby is due in September. There's plenty of time to fix the mistakes, to feed it and make it stronger, so it can face the world with confidence. And I know I can't do all that on my own; I need the help of expert, trusted readers. And Michael, though he would never say so himself, is one of them.

* Which, paradoxically, is why co-writing Dear Swoosie was an exhilarating, liberating experience, but one which I could never have undertaken except with such a trusted friend and colleague (and brilliant writer) as Penni.
** Jeez, it's good. 600 pages of solid, nourishing meat and not one word too long.
*** No doubt Hilary Mantel would be unnerved to find herself in bed with me too, but never mind.

The Doctor (And Another Doctor)

So it's a year since Stephen Moffat took over the reins as executive producer and chief writer at Doctor Who, and it's time to consider what kind of a fist he's making of the job. In my opinion: a pretty damn good one.


In the new version of Who, I've always loved Stephen Moffat's episodes the best. His writing is simply breath-taking, and he understands the possibilities of time travel for clever, puzzling, deeply satisfying stories in a way that I don't think Russell T. Davies was ever really interested in. It seemed to me that RTD was so caught up in the mythology of the Doctor's character (a near-immortal, deeply lonely, almost god-like figure, stalking the wastes of time and space with the fate of worlds weighing oh-so-heavily on his shoulders, etc etc) that he rather neglected the sheer fun you can have with a time machine, zooming back and forth to five minutes ago with a silly fez on your head and contradicting what you're just about to say, if only you hadn't already said it.

I was quite prepared to not warm to Matt Smith's Doctor (too young, not serious enough) but he's won me over. It's been a wrench to part from David Tennant's No. 10, who did seem to me the perfect embodiment of the Doctor, but I think I've come to terms with it now. And I must admit, at times, RTD's Doctors were so freighted with all that history, all that meaning, that it sometimes became a bit... a bit much. A bit pompous, a bit earnest, a little bit too much staring soulfully into the middle distance with flames in the background. The Eleventh Doctor, Stephen Moffat's Doctor, is playful and merry and clever, and most of the time, he's having fun.

Having said all that, I do have reservations. I don't like the new Daleks. The cartoonish, clunky, brightly-coloured versions just aren't scary to me; I prefer the rough, industrial, ruthless originals. I'm not sure about all this business about being married to River Song; the Doctor doesn't do "married."Moffat doesn't seem to have the same reverence for the Doctor's mythos as RTD; he chucks stuff around a smidge too carelessly, perhaps.

But I can go with it. We all have our own visions of the Doctor. I was around when John Nathan-Turner reinvented the Fifth Doctor as a youthful action hero; there were gasps of dismay from fandom, but we all survived. And the Doctor and his TARDIS keep on spinning, through eternity.

Down To The River

I was in charge of four little girls yesterday and we all went down to the creek. The girls found two more friends from school already playing in their special hideout, so I left the kids to free-range while I sat nearby, but out of sight, by the water's edge.

From time to time the girls would appear. Once they brought long willow switches to "fish" in the creek; they'd run back to me to get drinks of water and fetch biscuits to bring back to their cubby; they'd come to report their injuries - a cut finger, a near-miss falling out of a tree. I could hear them playing, mostly peacefully.

For nearly two hours I sat and watched the creek. The air was full of thistledown, swirling like summer snowflakes. Cyclists whizzed by along the path at my back, dog walkers brought their pets to the water on the far side of the creek. The sun shone on the brown water and turned it the colour of milky tea. A family of nine ducklings and a mother duck bobbed and skittered downstream, followed a little later by the father duck, gliding just along the surface. Just before we went home, they returned, the ducklings scrabbling and waddling and hopping up the rocks to negotiate the little waterfall.

I remembered my long train trips to and from high school, when I would make myself really look at what I was seeing and describe it in my head, searching for exactly the right words.

I couldn't believe how quickly the time passed when I wasn't consciously trying to make it pass. The minutes and hours slipped by as effortlessly as the water of the creek. I listened to the breeze rustling the leaves and whispering in the grasses, and slowly the sun travelled across the sky, and then it was time to go home.

I wish you all a very Zen Christmas (if there is such a thing) and the happiest of New Years. See you in 2011.

School's Out For The Summer!*

It seems like only yesterday that Evie was crying because it was the first day of school, and this morning she was crying because it's her last day as a Prep. Ah me.

It's been an eventful year in our household. For the first time, both girls are going to school, which took more adjusting to (for me!) than I expected. We did our big renovation, which has transformed our house from a poky, cramped living-space to a glorious place to hang out. One of the best things we did was get a great big tank; it might not save us massive amounts of money, but oh! the smug is priceless.

The Western Bulldogs came fourth - beaten in the prelim again! - but we had a bad run with injuries, and with Bob Murphy at the helm (maybe??! nah, probably Boyd), 2011 will be our year. Fingers crossed.

I've kept up my record of a book a year (just) with Dear Swoosie coming out in January - the funnest book I've ever written, thanks to the divine Penelope (who also had a big year) - and definitely the fastest. Cicada Summer was short-listed for the PM's Literary Award, which was a huge thrill, and even better, I've had lots of wonderful feedback from readers who love it.

In same ways I've felt as if I was treading water this year, but it's not really true. Behind the scenes, a lot of work went into Crow Country, and I'm really excited about it being published next year, the most excited I've been about any of my books since The Singer Of All Songs. And Independence has also been chugging along quietly, slowly taking shape, being pruned and moulded and fertilised. Yesterday I had one of those eureka moments when a veil falls and suddenly a whole lot of things become clear...

... just in time for school holidays.




* Or at least it will be at 1.30pm today. Not that I'm counting the minutes or anything.

Queens of Shops

We watch too much television. One show that the whole family enjoys is Mary, Queen of Shops, one of a seemingly endless string of programmes where a bossy Englishwoman strides in and instructs people how to reorganise their lives (think Trinny and Susannah, Kirsty Allsop etc). In this case the bossy Englishwoman is called Mary Portas and we have all relished watching her cruel-to-be-kind efforts to revitalise sagging retail businesses.

It became obvious that Alice and Evie had been paying a little too much attention last weekend when they played shops at their grandparents' house. Alice set up a homewares business at the foot of the stairs, ransacking the kitchen cupboards for her stock of tea towels and lemon squeezers, produced a catalogue, and embarked on a marketing campaign that warned us to "Get in now, as prices are set to skyrocket!" A series of rapid calculations on the back of an envelope produced the reassuring information that she had made several hundred dollars in invisible profit.

Meanwhile Evie had set up her own business in the junk room and issued all of us, her employees, with phonetically spelled identity labels. I was "Kathren Cook", Nana became "Janes Canseltunt" while Papa was "Wellyum Inspekta." An emergency staff meeting was called to brainstorm ideas to improve turnover, which wasn't easy since none of us were exactly certain what the business actually did.

I learned that window-dressing is really not my forte, and that a freebie hotel soap can retail for up to twenty dollars. It was all very exhausting, but I must say it was educational.

Reading Aloud

There's a lot of reading aloud done in our house. Mostly it's me reading to the girls, though there should probably be rather more of it done the other way round. Listening is the main way that Alice, for reasons previously discussed, feeds her book addiction, and lately Evie has been asking for longer books too. They both like to be read to in the bath, for some reason... Currently I'm reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Alice (she's finally getting into the Narnia books, after a couple of over-eager, too-early attempts on my part to introduce them), while Evie is listening to The Starlight Barking, the sequel to 101 Dalmatians (anything with dogs is good for Evie).

I've been reading to Alice since she was very small, a babe in arms in fact. Evie's aural concentration span is not as long, so she hasn't sat and listened to quite as many books as Alice has, but she does all right. I've been trying to work out exactly how much time I've spent reading aloud in the last few years. Say I started seriously when Alice was two and a half, so make it seven years -- let's say, conservatively, half an hour an day (often it's a lot more than that, but then there are days when we don't read at all, so I'm sure it evens out). 365 x 7 (forget the leap years!) = 2555, divided by 2 = 1,277 and a half hours of reading.

Crikey. A thousand hours. How about that, eh. I think I should get a medal.

The upside is that I feel pretty confident about my reading-aloud skills now. And I'm certainly no Stephen Fry, but I may modestly say that I too have read the entire series of Harry Potter aloud, and I even sometimes did the voices. And whatever criticisms one may wish to level at the Harry Potter books (not that I do wish to level any, actually) it cannot be denied that they are a brilliant read-aloud.

Another upside is that I love doing it. I enjoy reading aloud, I relish the joy of introducing the books I love to my children, and getting the immediate feedback of their reactions. I love the cries of 'Keep reading!' when I try to put the book down. And surely, after a thousand hours, my daughters will carry with them some memory of these precious times we spent together, sharing books. For all my failings as a parent, that's one gift I'm determined to give them.

Decking The Halls

The festive season has arrived at our house! (After a bit of a slow start)

Rex has his own Christmas tree:

The dolls' house is adorned with teeny-tiny paper chains (the product of hours of painstaking work by Alice and me, involving microscopic slivers of paper and sticky-tape):

There is even a Littlest Petsmas tree:

And some slightly bigger paper chains which will go up as soon as I have time to finish making them:

Aren't they pretty?

We've decided not to have a full size tree this year. There doesn't seem much point since we always stay at Nana and Papa's house and the presents go under their tree; also most of our ornaments aren't much chop. But I felt slightly sad about having no decorations at all, and what kind of message is that sending anyway - it's only the presents that matter?

Hoping to fit some carols in at some point, too. I love carols. Though you must know by now how I feel about any form of collective singing.

What's your favourite part of Christmas?

Aiming Low

The theory behind my pitiful target of 250 words at a stretch (and they don't have to be wonderful words, they can be, and often are, utter drivel) goes back to a book that became my Bible in my depressive mid-twenties. Feeling Good by David D. Burns (otherwise known in my circle as "The Yellow Book") was one of the early texts on cognitive behavioural therapy. Essentially, it argued that your thoughts can influence your feelings, and therefore can be to some extent consciously managed; this was a bit of a revelation to me and my depressively-inclined mates.

Anyway, one of the many useful pieces of advice that I gleaned from its pages concerned the paralysing effects of perfectionism. Better to aim very, very low, and achieve, than to aim high and fail. As anyone who has been depressed knows, there are times when any activity at all seems impossibly hard, even getting out of bed. Therefore, better to write one sentence and feel good about doing it than to tell yourself, I must write 10,000 words today - a target you will inevitably fail to meet, and then beat yourself up about.

The magic trick of this technique is that almost always, you find yourself exceeding your very low aim. You say, okay, I'll write one sentence -- but before you know it, one sentence has become two, a hundred words becomes 250, and then a page, and the shot of amazed pride you feel in your achievement surfs you onward almost without you noticing it. Once you get started, it is so much easier to keep going.

Doing anything, however small, is better than doing nothing.

Discipline, Discipline, Discipline

8.59am Drop the girls at school.
Eat breakfast while browsing the internet. Feed lizard.
Write 250 words.
Break for housework - make beds, stack dishwasher, hang out washing.
Write 250 words.
Cup of tea. Check out WOOF.
Write 250 words.
Walk to shops. Plan dinner.
Write 250 words.
Lunch break. Listen to radio. Read while eating. Check WOOF.
Write 250 words.
Think about doing yoga. Have cup of tea instead.
Write 250 words.
Feel virtuous for achieving writing target. Sit in window seat and read. Reading is necessary part of working day -- stoking fires of creativity etc. Almost as vital as checking WOOF.
3.25pm Leave house to pick up girls from school. End of writing day.
Beginning of next work shift - provision of after school snacks, homework supervision, dinner preparation, post-school counselling service, dinner clean-up, after-dinner walk, baths etc. Watch TV.
Talk to husband. If possible.
Bed.