November 17th, 2011
Well, this is nice, said Clarity.
We’re in the tropics. We’ve moved. We’ve upped sticks and gone 2,500 kilometers.
Irony is sipping a mango cocktail and scrunching her toes in the sand. Weather’s certainly better, she chirps.
Clarity peers out from under the brim of her sunhat. Um, she falters, what are we going to do up here?
I’m not sure. I’m not entirely sure at all what we’re going to do up here. There are some things I know. I’m closer to the sea than I’ve been in years and I’ve always loved the sea. There is something about the movement and the mood of the sea that soothes me. Its beauty, its connectedness and the feeling that it can take literally anything I would ever choose to throw at it – all of these things draw me to the sea and I am happiest near it. Even on days when I feel too lazy and unmotivated to go to the beach, I know if I drag myself there I will come home wth unruly hair and the taste of salt on my lips and a sense of peace from having made the visit.
I peer over at Irony. What are you doing here anyway? I ask her. She sucks noisily at the end of her mango alco-slurpie and says Because you didn’t manage to get to anywhere decent in Australia until after your father died. A year ago the observation would have felt like a slap, now I just feel the mild irritation that comes with listening to the tactless. Fuck off, you, I tell her, just for the look of it. She shrugs and gets up to get another cocktail.
Now it’s just Clarity and me. For a while, I say to her, I never thought I’d get here. If you’d asked me three years ago if I could see myself in the tropics I would have stared at you in amused disbelief. The tropics? With the sun and the mosquitoes? Ho ho ho, not this little black duck. Clarity smirks. Are we happy we’re here? she asks. Yes, I reply, yes I think so.
But I still have no idea what we’re going to do.
Are you worried about it? asks Clarity, with a note of uncertainty in her voice that’s really disconcerting, given what she’s the living embodiment of. I grimace at her. She looks sheepish.
After a time, and some thought, I say No, I’m not worried about it. I’m not worried about not knowing precisely what I’m going to do.
I’ll get a job, because I can always get a job.
I’ll live my life, because I can always live my life.
And I’ll take care of myself, because nobody else will, and the notion that nobody else is going to take care of me is actually not a bad thing. When people say ‘I have to look after myself, because nobody else will’ they tend to deliver it as a line of resentment in a harsh, hard-done-by voice. But really, what is so wrong with that? What is wrong with taking care of yourself? Of course it’s glorious if someone else does something magnificent for you, but should that be the only magnificence in your life?
We spend our lives making partnerships and friendships and bonds and agreements with other people, but even within those connections the fact remains that we are all self-contained, individual units. When you are well, fit and able, taking care of yourself can be the most gloriously indulgent thing. You have endless choices. You can sit at home and wait for your partner to return so you can do something together – or you can go out, and do something for yourself. Eat something delightful, in a delightful place, and watch people pass. Drink something gorgeous, in a gorgeous spot, and read something you love. Pay someone expert to deliver care and attention to your hands, or your feet, or your skin, or your hair, and enjoy every moment of the service they provide.
Find the bloke who makes the mango cocktails that Irony loves so much, and get him to make you one. (There’s cream, and rum, and mangoes, and some sort of flavoured liqueur which probably, in all fairness, tastes of mangoes. I doubt he’s the only person who knows how to make them, but I think Irony quite fancies him. Which is funny because Clarity thinks he’s gay.)
A friend and wise counsellor tried to explain the concept of ’self care’ to me a while ago, and because things were ever so jumbled in my head, there was nowhere for the idea to go, and it ended up left on a side table and ignored. I could remember the examples she gave – nice food, a bath, good wine – but at the time they all felt like work. Nice food? That’s too much effort – I’ll have easymac and cheese. (Both Irony and Clarity detest easymac and cheese, and at its mere mention they freeze and give me a look of pure disgust.) Good wine? Naturally, but I’ll drink the bottle and feel rough tomorrow. A bath? Sounds like work. And anyway the dog panics if I’m submerged and tries to get in with me, which is precisely zero fun.
But then Clarity stepped in and pointed out that self care isn’t about anything other than you doing nice things for yourself, and if the suggested pastimes don’t strike you as nice things, then do something else that you think is nice. How obvious that seems, but how difficult when perspective is lacking! To reinforce the point, Irony waved my payslip at me and pointed to the box of easymac and then laughed herself sick. She’s an unhelpful bitch, sometimes, Irony.
So here in the tropics, with the blue sky and the blue sea, awaiting the monsoon, I will get a job, because I can always get a job; I will live my life, because I can always live my life; and I will take care of myself, because I am blessed enough to always be able to take care of myself.
Now, I’m going out, because we need more mangoes. And more rum.
Categories: Uncategorized
July 24th, 2011
They say grief comes in waves.
I never understood what that meant. I had never had to grieve anything, and it seemed peculiar to me to liken grief to some sort of recurring tide. I had a fair idea of how I thought grief would feel. I thought it meant aching and mourning the loss of what you had lost. I thought it would be bad at first, and then less (because you know time heals all wounds).
The single biggest aspect that I never understood, and which I feel I have begun to undertand now, is that grief is like a fog, with tentacles of mist that creep in everywhere, regardless of how tightly you thought your doors and windows were sealed. It is not a stand alone entity, a solitary thing in your life that occasionally rears its head again. It is an all encompassing skin, an oil that travels across every strand in the web of your life. It creeps in from the edges, from all of the edges and you don’t even see it coming until you realise that you’re at the centre and it’s coming at you from all angles and you cannot get away, cannot get off the web of your life without wading through your grief.
An undercurrent of grief changes your point of view on everything, and you cannot fight it. You don’t have to wallow in it, but you need to acknowledge it. It has infinite patience, and no matter how long you ignore your grief, it will outwait you, and then it will ambush you.
Clarity has saved me from that ambush. Having tucked my grief away, and dreading the impending anniversary of my father’s death, I found Clarity, having taken that box out from under the bed and she sorting through the memorabilia as though she was planning a garage sale.
What are you doing? I asked her.
She picked up an object and waved it at me. This, she said, THIS is why you feel like THAT. She sifted through old photographs and letters and moments and memories and she sorted them, and catalogued some of them.
I don’t want to do this now, I wailed. Clarity waved me away. Go and get a beer, she said.
But next weekend is the anniversary, I sniffled.
Clarity stopped what she was doing and stared at me. Are you kidding? she asked. Were you really going to store all this up and open it next weekend for a day? She indicated the things I’d been hoarding. This lot, she said, were planning your demise. The memorabilia looked guilty and shuffled behind the box lid to hide from further scrutiny. If you’d opened that lid without me, she said, they’d have hit you like a wrecking ball. You’d have been near catatonic on the earth with the spiders again.
Piece by piece, Clarity ferreted out the memorabilia – the physical things, the memories, the dreams, the feelings, and she held them up. She shone a light on them. Some of them squirmed under that light, like things that live under a rock and have been pulled out squealing. Others – other things, in Clarity’s light, sparkled like waves in sunlight.
I sat and drank beer and felt washed out.
Clarity patted me gently. You will make sense of this, she said. You will piece it together and it will make sense. Just don’t wait for an anniversary. Don’t store it all up and dive into it like a giant vat of wine once a year. The outcome of that sort of thing risks being identical to you actually diving into a giant vat of wine. Whenever you feel up to it, take something out of this box and we’ll look at it together, she said. I’ll provide the light.
I thought for a bit, and then nodded. I can manage that.
You spin a life for yourself, and you sit in the middle of that life. Every so often that life web comes under attack. Things that fly into it and get stuck for a while can struggle so hard to get free they make huge holes and tear the place apart before they’re gone. Grief coats the strands until you feel as helpless as something that flew into your web – unable to move in your own life, stuck in it, trapped in it.
When a spider’s web is past saving, sometimes she moves on. Other times, she eats it, she eats her web and she starts over spinning a new one.
Breathe. Eat it. Start over.
Categories: Uncategorized
July 14th, 2011
Once upon a time, there was a girl.
She was very good at some things, reasonable at most things, not so good at other things and pretty awful at a few things. Things she was very good at included cooking, writing, pets and spinning multiple plates in every aspect of her life. Things she was pretty awful at included small children, other people, patience and drama. But that’s okay, because she got great pleasure out of the things she was very good at, and that filled any gap left by the things she was pretty awful at.
Life goes on for all of us, and the girl decided to move to the other side of the planet to pursue dreams of having more things she could be very good at. She moved to the sort of country that promises to give you the opportunity to be very good at things. A fresh country. A hot country. A young country. But the girl wasn’t prepared for some of the other things that come with a fresh, hot, young country. She wasn’t prepared for it to be a wild country, a vast country and sometimes a savage country.
She went to the other side of the world to find herself. She wasn’t prepared to get completely and utterly lost.
For four years, the girl wandered, first from month to month, then week to week, then from day to day until finally it was hour to hour and she was not quite sure where she was, or when it was, or what was supposed to happen next. She used to always know where she was, and when it was. She used to always be able to say ‘I’m here. I’m here, and it’s now.’ She was never all that certain who she was, which is part of the reason she travelled so far, to find herself. Imagine, then, the surprise to find out that instead of having complete knowledge, her knowledge ran through her fingers like sand until she didn’t know anything about anything any more. Great knowledge of great things and a joy in the present trickled away, and became frustration, and resentment, and exhaustion. Then life took some very important things away from her, and joy left, and she no longer found pleasure in the things she used to be very good at.
For a while then, the girl lay down on the earth and did nothing. She didn’t crash to the ground in a blaze of glory. She simply lowered herself quietly, placing first her palms to the earth, then knees, hip, chest and finally bringing her cheek to rest against the cool dirt in a moment of stillness. Then she breathed out, and stayed there for a time. The seasons about her changed, from the green of spring to the high, burnt blue of summer, with the heat and the breathlessness, on to the rustle of autumn dissolving into mist and a chill with the promise of coming winter. Life did what it does when you lie down and do nothing. It went on. Grass grew up over the girl, and spiders spun webs over her as she did nothing. The leaves blustered up against her in autumn and in the winter, the rain washed them away.
One day in the depths of winter, without drama or preamble, the girl got back up again. She was stiff, having lain so long, and it was cold. Where am I? she said.
Eventually she answered herself: I am here.
But I don’t want to be here. I can’t remember how I came to be here. I don’t know why I’m here. There is no time here. These were the clearest thoughts, but in the background there was a whisper. For a long time, the girl had been chasing a new life, calling out to a new life, briefly interacting with a new life, but always she in pursuit and it just out of reach. When she came to rest, life went on past her. But at some point it realised it had left her behind, and for once it came back, came back and briefly knelt beside her on the earth and whispered in her ear.
The girl tilted her head to one side, to better hear the susurrus, and when she tilted her head it became a roar. The roar of all of the writing for years past. The roar of the plans unravelled, the wishes no longer dreamt, the dreams distracted, and the distractions slinking in as the primary focus of all things, when in fact they should always have been nothing. The crash of it was huge and it filled her ears and her head until her eyes were like saucers and her knees shook and for a moment, just for a moment she thought she would drop back to the earth, to the cocoon of grass and spiderwebs and leaves.
I am here again. I got lost again. I allowed this to happen again.
But then the noise faded, and the first thing to return was clarity. Clarity made soothing noises, and stroked the girl, and then pushed her forward a step, so she had to gain her balance and not fall. Do what you said you would if it didn’t work out, said Clarity. Move. Leave. Relocate. If it isn’t working, change it.
The girl looked at Clarity and blinked. She told Clarity that she looked a bit like her sister, Irony. Clarity grinned, and told the girl that Irony had moved on long ago because it was no fun shooting fish in a barrel.
Then Clarity reached out a hand. The girl took it.
Come on, said Clarity, as they began to walk. Let’s cook dinner and get a beer. By the way – you look like shit.
Categories: Uncategorized
March 21st, 2011
For a long time I didn’t blog. I didn’t write much of anything at all. I used to get a lot of inspiration from thinking about the choices I was making in my life, the things I wanted to do, for me, about me. Changing jobs, changing careers, changing focus; moving country, life, the universe, etc. Then for a long time I sort of lost the reins and things weren’t in my control, and I lost the will to write about it. I stopped wanting to write about the stuff I couldn’t control, because there was no end to the posting. I wasn’t writing to find the path, or writing to see the light. I was writing to whinge. And whinging is boring.
But time has passed, and stuff has changed, and that thing, that thing I always worried about and thought about and mulled over, that thing has happened.
My father is dead.
My father is dead, and even though I knew it would happen and I had prepared myself in every way you can, I was still unprepared, and now there’s a hole in me the size of the Atlantic Ocean and all I can do is fill it up with writing.
Australia has been biblical. Drought. Fire. Floods. Death. And now locusts.
Categories: Uncategorized
November 18th, 2010
Do you know, I can only write when I’ve got the reins.
I haven’t posted to this blog for a long – a *VERY* long time. I couldn’t figure out why. Thought I just had writer’s block. Or nothing to talk about. In fact, I wasn’t in control of my life, and when I’m not in control of my life I find the last thing I want to do is talk about it. Let’s face it, that’s what blogging is – talking about your own life. (Remember, blogging: never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.’
We moved to Australia. It all got a bit biblical. It all got a bit political. It all got a bit too hard. And then I dropped the reins.
Jesus, I’m angry.
I moved to this country, my fucking in-laws took over my life, butted into it, conducted themselves like the bunch of mentally ill, judgmental nutters that they are, chewed me up and spat me out. Unsatisfied wiht that, when I withdrew to get away from them, they started to make up shit to fill the gaps where I was no longer interacting with them. I spent a long time being upset about that.
Now I’m just angry.
This, my 33rd year, my Jesus year. I’ve long held the superstition that something life-changing happens to you in your 33rd year. I got through the first part of my Jesus year with not much happening except the same old bullshit – in-laws have a dramatic spaz attack, we all rally around to resolve it, we get about as much reward as you generally tend to get resolving the problems of a bunch of sociopaths, then there’s a lull, then another dramatic spaz attack.
So six months into my Jesus year, I’d had enough and I simply withdrew. I put himself between me and his family, and said plainly: keep them away from me. They upset me. They stress me out. They are ruining my life and bleeding my spirit dry, for absolutely nothing in return, so keep them away from me. I never told him he couldn’t have whatever relationship he wanted to have with them – he can do what he likes, he’s an individual person. However at the initial suggestion of giving me some space, the in-laws had a dramatic spaz attack (who could have foreseen that eh?) and we haven’t spoken since.
The lack of weekly injections of drama have left me in a quiet space and given me a chance to take a breather. I had two months, and then my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly.
So I took time out for a month and returned to the motherland, where I delivered his eulogy and gave him the send off I owed him. On my return, I met the in-laws briefly in the street and in passing, and if nothing else, their behaviour was reminder of what I had lost that was similar to a punch in the mouth. I never understood what the term ‘grief comes in waves’ actually meant, until about eight weeks after my father had died when I ran into a relative of my husband’s in the shops. ‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Still pretty crappy’ I replied, honestly. ‘Why, were you sick?’
Was I sick?
Was I sick, you stupid bitch? No I wasn’t sick. My father died. I’m still pretty crappy because my father is dead. But you knew that, oh yes you knew that. And you have to pause and wonder why I don’t want anything to do with you? I’d rather stab myself in the fucking eye with a fork than have anything else to do with any of them. If I want to feel like I’ve been punched in the gut, I’ll rig up some sort of home torture device with a pulley, a fencing log and a trigger switch and inflict it on myself any time I feel a little too chipper for my own good.
A couple of weeks after that, himself enlisted in the army. I’m sure his family probably have lots to say about the state of my marriage and how I drove him to it. No, no I think you’ll find the lack of any family in his life except me is what drove him into the army, in some sort of attempt to fulfil his sense of civic duty and his eternal hunger for comradeship and a sense of belonging.
So that left me on my own, with a dead father and no family around me to speak of.
Two choices from there. Curl up and die, or pick up and move on. So I picked up, and got myself a better job, full time, which starts next week. I was further reminded of how little you can rely on people by the reaction of one of my workmates, who appears to think I have ideas above my station because I’ve finally taken a job I’m actually qualified to do.
Hell is, truly, other people.
So now I’m about to start a new job, and while I’m happy about the impending challenge, I can’t help feeling like there’s a whole pile of poorly dammed rage and grief and general wreckage, and it’s seething away there behind the concrete walls, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice if and when those walls start to crack. And I’m wondering, if they do crack, will I care? Or am I just going to gleefully surf the wave into some pit of destruction when the dam breaks?
As it stands at the moment I think I’ll hold it together. I’m not dying of loneliness with himself in the army. I’m not climbing the walls looking after the house and the animals on my own. Yes, I’ve just spent my birthday doing laundry and not speaking to another human being, but I have birthday plans tomorrow which makes up for that. I could have had a day of sociability today if I had wanted it – I just didn’t want it much.
I figured that spending the end of my Jesus year alone wasn’t a bad idea at all, given what that year was like.
Now, now is the start of my Batman year.
And you know Batman. All about the justice.
Categories: Uncategorized
February 21st, 2010
That’s it!
I’m doing it TODAY.
I’m going to sort out my online blogs and fix the text glitches, and roll the entire lot into one, manageable journal that I actually update again. And today is as good a day as any for it. Mainly because I’m doing absolutely nothing else except laundry.
I miss writing. For a long time I wrote about my personal angst about moving to Australia. Then I had all of the inspiration supplied to me by the ongoing conflicts in my life. Then those conflicts, and the writing that went with them, started to bore me – and it’s a bad sign when you’re boring yourself, the person who usually has the most patience for all of your little foibles.
Then I also pretty much stopped drinking on the weekends – drinking on my own, I mean, as part of my afternoon, as opposed to drinking socially with other people. I used to have a glass and a half of wine, and then I’d spend the afternoon being creative – cooking, mostly, or getting on with some other constructive chore. And usually at some time in the late afternoon or the evening, I’d lose the wrestling match with my emotions. Alcohol is a screwdriver, prising the lid off that pandora’s box, and the swirling maelstrom had to go somewhere, so out it would come in the form of a blog.
In the last few months, there has been a lot going on, but between trying to avoid thinking about it, and trying not to fall back on the long-serving crutch of drinking in the afternoons, I have essentially just been wasting time. Not a good look.
Today, that finishes. Today, there will be blog! (And laundry. Because life’s still not that exciting.)
Categories: Uncategorized
September 13th, 2009
Every so often in life, there comes an epiphany. For most people, that happens when your eyes finally open. In my case, I had to wait until I could no longer pretend that they were closed. That there elephant, that’s been in this room, doing a boogie away in the corner for the last few years, yep, gotta recognise him. He’s there. He ain’t going away.
So what’s all this about?
This is about Australia being a bit of a failed experiment really.
We went back to the UK and Ireland recently for 17 days for a wedding and saw a lot of people, and did a lot of things. And I discovered I don’t miss Ireland. I do miss England, but not enough to move back there. But what really hit home is that you can move to Australia, and buy the house you couldn’t afford in Europe, and make a ton of cash doing a job that doesn’t even actually exist in western Europe, but when you’re living in a town of 5,000 people and not one of the redneck bumfucks wants to talk to you outside the hours of work, or go to the pub for a pint, or kick back and talk about shit because they’re too busy cleaning their house or buying fucking horrendous jewellery in some sort of ‘Hello I made the exclusive tree change and therefore have loadsa cash’ statement, well. Well then it’s a fail.
An epic fail.
All aboard the failboat.
(Which is what I said when someone said they thought the Tiffany necklace that has MUM in big square gold letters, and in the back of each letter is a space for a picture of one of your kids, was what they wanted as their next present. You know when you’re still talking and laughing at the same time and you realise that the people around the table have adopted that disapproving pursed mouth position, like the area under their nose is a dead ringer for a cat’s arsehole? Yeah. That.)
So what now?
Well for starters, an end to working a part time job and resigning to being settled down.
While we were away, we discussed children. And I realised that the entire concept of having a child in this town makes me feel more trapped than anything else I could imagine doing, including being sold into the international sex trade or shackled into an arranged marriage. But see, I’m pushing 33 years old and need to get a move on if I want children.
If.
If I want children.
What if I don’t want children?
There’s your epiphany. See, himself can barely cope with the irritation of one of the cats going through a vocal whingy morning. And you can shut them in their room for eight hours overnight to get some peace and you don’t have to get up and feed them every three hours. Himself is a grumpy bollix at the best of times anyway, but I always knew that. But imagine that with a child? Oh no, no indeedy, “Get out early if you can, and don’t have any kids yourself” springs to mind. Where himself differs from most self-deluding clucky adults is he readily admits he’s not on for the effort of the first three years of a child’s life – you know, before you can shop them off into care and go about getting some of your own life back. Which suggests he was hoping I’d carry the can on those 1,095 days and he could play fun daddy on weekends.
At least he admits that if I don’t want to play that part, he’s not interested either, and is happy to go without, so no kids for us.
Jesus wept, the relief. Ever since that’s come out into the open, the relief feels like the weight of the world has been shifted off me. Let’s just not have kids! What does that take off the table? Lots of things. The yawning gulf that arises between two people who just decided to have kids because they thought it was what you did next. The horrendous loss of self that happens to women in their thirties who waited for years to have a first child, and in the meantime managed to create an independent adult, with needs, desires and preferences for entertainment, all of which gets put aside when you become a mum.
Let’s not have kids. Then I won’t hate you when the child is 18 months old because you’ve been a useless bollox for the last year and a half, and I’ve abandoned everything I ever knew, and even though you’ve been quite a good father, I resent you, because my perception is that you can still leave this house every day and pretend this never happened for hours on end, Monday to Friday. And at the weekends, you still get to have time to yourself because you work so hard providing for us. That, and I won’t feel like I’m disappearing further down the plughole when we decide to have a second child because you can’t just have one on their own.
Candidate for post natal depression much? Damn straight I am, and it’s a relief that I’m not signing up for that too.
I don’t hate children. (My impatience at their potentially intrusive behaviour in an adult setting is usually aimed at their useless, exhausted, disinterested parents, after all.) I just don’t feel incomplete without a child. There is no yawning gulf in me that cries to be filled by some sweet-smelling bobble-headed big-eyed child of mine. I would never interfere between someone else and their child, but to me, I don’t want a child enough for the very fact of their being to be reward enough for the initial struggle. I have friends who have kids and slightly useless blokes, and they overlook the uselessness because they’re so delighted to have a child. I don’t think I would be so easily satisfied.
So no kids, no returning to the UK or Ireland, but Kilmore’s a bum steer (who knew, eh?). What next?
Well next is to get my arse out of the cop-out that is basic administration three days a week and go back into a career. So I’m working on that at the moment (and should hopefully know within the next fortnight). What’s next is to stop waiting for something to happen (because subconsciously I’ve been waiting for the pregnancy of doom to descend upon me and steer me directly into the next phase of my life, irrespective of my plans for myself.)
It’s been refreshing, being away, and getting a perspective change. Wheels are in motion. Interviews have happened. More are due to happen. Hopefully if I get somewhere in them, there’s a life ahead of me – and even if the hours are busier, if I work smart and I work hard I have a whole heap of potential ahead of me, unconstrained by a shithawk admin salary.
The other thing – the BEST thing – about this job that I’m going for: there’s no salary.
Yeah. That’s right. There’s no salary.
Think I’m a whole metric fuckton of crazy?
Well let me give you a potted history of me. I’m an extremely quick study, but for years I would capitulate on anything rather than fighting for it because I hated the confrontation. This meant that for years, when confronted with a manager who couldn’t find their arse with both hands and a flashlight, I usually quit my job and went and did something else. And of course, anyone who’s been in employment for more than six weeks over a summer has by now discovered that most managers cannot, in fact, find their arse with both hands and a flashlight. And a map. And fucking satnav.
I didn’t realise at the time that I was doing a serious disservice to my CV by job hopping (coz I’m dumb like that.) But what happened was I got to my late 20s, and people would hire me for a grade C job, after refusing to give me the grade B job because I wasn’t qualified enough in terms of years of service. And I’d start working. Usually within six months, I was doing grade A tasks, on a grade C salary, with nothing but the prospect of promotion to the grade B spot after 12 months of doing work I wasn’t getting paid to do. It happens over and over again. All the time. It keeps happening.
I’m doing administration at the local hospital and I job share with two other people, one of whom has been there for nine years and still, people wait until I’m back on a Monday and store up all their queries for me, and my manager is training me out of the three of us to be her holiday relief cover.
Do I get paid for it?
Do I fuck.
Now seeing as I’m hopelessly overqualified for my lazy arsed administration job, I don’t really have anybody to blame for this turn of events, but it’s typical. Eventually, it breeds resentment, and lethargy, and a lack of productivity. That’s what’s so exciting about a job with no salary. Yeah, sure, it’s hard, because I only get paid for how hard I’m working and how smart I’m working. But you see, nobody can ever lump extra unpaid work on me again while the people around me sit on their arses without the extra responsibility and get paid exactly the same money.
So there you go. That’s my plan. Have no kids. Get a career. (Buy a better car. Sorry, canal barge, but you’re not going to hack the commute if I get this job, so you gotta go.) Get interested all over again, instead of sitting out here in Kilmore like some fuckin 75 year old retiree.
I have four more decades to go before I’m there. Might as well enjoy ‘em, eh?
Categories: Uncategorized
April 19th, 2009
Hello, life.
I am in Australia two years. We haven’t really spoken too closely since I got here, because with one thing or another, you and I lost touch.
(more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
February 15th, 2009
Let me tell you something about living in the country.
I have lived in a lot of places. For a long time, perhaps 10 years, I held a flat or house or room for no longer than I held a job – 12 months maximum, often closer to six; sometimes, but not often, as long as 18 months. The longest I’ve ever lived at one address, barring my parents house, is 28 months, and that truly was an anomaly. It was the last place I lived in western Europe before moving to Australia, so the goal of emigration is probably the only thing that kept me there.
I have lived in the north of England, in areas of poverty and greyness, where the temperature never seems to climb above 10 degrees no matter how hard it tries. Such times are marked by odd memories, that every time you walked somewhere it was always dark, for instance. That you could wear far too much makeup and get away with it, pretending vampishness and mystery, because nobody ever saw you in full noon sunlight. There was no full noon sunlight. Seduction was an art in such places, because it is simply too cold to be naked and uncovered, and every tryst becomes a game of pass the parcel, full of numerous unwrappings (and often a disappointing surprise at the end of it).
I have lived along the east coast of Ireland, with the sea not four minutes walk from my house, where I could walk for miles with the susurrus of the surf providing white noise that cannot quite drown out the roar of lorries on the strand road.
I have lived in and around the greater London area, where the press and clamour and colour of people provides as much of a jungle as a rainforest. Still, and perhaps always, I will remember the press and the smells of exiting Clapham Junction station at 6pm on a summer’s Friday, like walking into the noise of a carnival. The rush and heat as you head into an evening of rum and new people and shouting above the noise of the pub and trying to blow cigarette smoke at nobody, which is impossible when you’re surrounded by everybody.
And I have lived here, in the heat, and the dryness, and the quiet.
It’s a Sunday evening, and I have a rum, and all of the news-providing appliances are switched off. The house is silent, without even the ticks and creaks you associate with a wooden house in the heat. The cats are asleep. There is a whir from the ceiling fans, because circulating warm air is marginally better than stagnant warm air. I cannothear the noise of traffic from where I’m sitting. Occasionally an ice-cube in my glass will crack or slip. Otherwise there is just the noise of the keyboard, and the twittering, cheeping background of crickets, other insects and birds.
Autumn is coming. It isn’t quite just around the corner, but it’s coming. With it will come a little rain, and some cooler temperatures, and the opportunity to work in my garden, building the raised beds I want to build, preparing the soil to overwinter happily with more moisture and some clay-breaker. I have seeds in a fridge in the garage that I need to sort through, deciding what to plant where. I think I need to buy a lawnmower. I will call the landscape gardener this week, and ask for his help and his ideas and his machinery to sculpt the front and back gardens into something more than compacted dirt. For now, I will persevere, keeping my nursery-hoard of potplants alive with water saving crystals and the buckets from the shower, that fill as you wait for the water to reach the right temperature.
This blog isn’t about bushfires. I am tired of talking about bushfires. I am tired of what I have seen, and what I have heard. I am tired of the smell of smoke, and the constant ringing and texting and emailing of people who are not sure whether or not I am near a bushfire.
I was near a bushfire. I was near enough to smell smoke and see flames and take the details of burned people and feel what 50 degrees with a 100kmph wind feels like on your skin. I was near enough to be empty with the horror and the loss and the sobbing of people for whom life as they knew it ended last Saturday. I was near enough to phone relatives and have them gulp and howl on the other end of the line, and that was in response to good news. Eamon’s crumpled, smoke-stinking CFA uniform is still in a heap where he dropped it at five o’clock in the morning last Tuesday before toppling into the shower to wash soot off himself. At some time later today I might finally manage to pick it up and put it in the washing machine.
I was near a bushfire, and at the same time, I was nowhere near a bushfire.
This blog isn’t about bushfires. It’s about why bushfires make no difference.
Categories: Uncategorized
January 29th, 2009
Three years ago, on my old blog site, I posted a blog entry filled with the overwhelming awe you get when someone who fits into the tapestry of your life has worked a thread free and tugged on it so things start to unravel.
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Categories: Uncategorized
