A few of my favourite things

I thought I’d start the New Year with an ultra positive post – what I love. Most of all this is the handsome Country Mouse (of course) but I’m currently also going warm and fuzzy over a few other things.

Waves and wireless

This summer Bondi Beach becomes the first beach in Australia to offer free Wi-Fi. Stunning! Listen up Newcastle City Council – let’s make one of our beaches the second.

Roitfeld rocks

My fashion hero, Carine Roitfeld, took the book on ‘mature dressing’ and ripped it up. Forget comfy shoes and elastic-waist pants, this feisty 58 y.o. French vixen breaks every rule for so-called ‘mid-age’ fashion. She wears stilettos, she wears black next to her face, and she still looks like a rock chick. Carine is two years older than me, so I kind of feel she’s lighting the path ahead for me – the one less travelled that is. Carine - lead on!

She is not only a stunning style maven, but also displays a healthy dose of scepticism for her chosen milieu, the fashion industry. Who else, after being Editor of Paris Vogue for a decade where she was famous for her smouldering eye make-up, declares she spends no more than five minutes creating her signature smoky eyes “I like it when makeup looks like you have more important things to do than to look at yourself”?

Stylish fuel

The Coles Express petrol station on Frenchmans Road, Clovelly must be one of the most genteel in Sydney. Not only is it scrupulously clean it provides moistened towlettes so that one can wipe one’s fingers and not have any nasty petrol odour on a fresh manicure. Classy!
 
Blogs I love

My two favourite blogs of 2012 were both based on a tight sense of place. One is Sydney based, the other set in Newcastle.

http://hamiltonnorth.wordpress.com

Mark MacLean’s blog Hamilton North is everything I love. It displays an intense local focus that really brings a blog alive and then goes on to tick all the boxes: quirky, unpredictable and idiosyncratic.

Its basis is simple: Mark walks his dog Jambo daily along the drain-like Styx Creek which is, of course, in Hamilton North. Their adventures have been self-published in a tiny, delightful book, A Year Down the Drain, which you can order from his website.

I felt in love with this blog because it flooded me with nearly forgotten memories of roaming for hours across Sydney’s Inner West in the 1980s and 1990s with my dog Arrow. In those days I was in my 20s and my dog was a cross-Kelpie, so combined we had a potent energy cocktail: my youth and her part working breed genes. On our exploratory roaming we would find culverts, hidden drains, abandoned factories and unnamed stone-paved lanes and old rights-of-way. We pushed past lots of ‘Do Not Enter’ signs, just going where we wanted to go and as the seasons changed and years went by we just kept walking. We found magic in the grottiest parts of the Inner West just as a Darlinghurst blogger did in the Inner East.

http://mydarlingdarlinghurst.blogspot.com.au

My Darling Darlinghurst was created by Violet Tingle who surely has the most delicious and aromatic name in the blogosphere. She is in love with a suburb, Darlinghurst, and welcomes you to her blog with: ‘I'm so glad you found my love letter to the suburb I call home. I hope my Darlinghurst blog will inspire you to visit. Or if you are from the neighbourhood but were forced to leave for whatever reason and are now homesick, I hope my little blog can provide you with some small comfort on the cold nights away’.

Her ability to look past Darlo’s human tragedy and urban grime to find wonder in the tiniest detail, kindness and humanity in the tough residents and the extraordinary in the ordinary makes this blog like a letter from a friend. Being a history tragic I also look forward to her posts on Darlo’s heritage and the beautiful black and white photos she finds in the City of Sydney Archives collection.  

An early Christmas miracle

Our feathered fowls continue to delight us with their antics and on 14 December we had our first 4-egg day, meaning that we are now in full 100% egg production. I am sure this is delighting the Country Mouse who looks at the chooks like a true economic rationalist with a sceptical “These chooks are going to be a long-time paying for themselves”.

 

That we still have four chooks, rather than three, is due in no small measure to a miracle last December. It all centered on Dixie, once the smallest and meekest of the chickens, who stunned us by her audacious flight over the fence into the land of ‘Next Door’ - home of the terrorist terrier.

She must have twigged at some stage that she was named after those gutsy musical chicks; maybe she even had Wide Open Spaces on high rotation after hours in the chook pen. Unfortunately she seems to have been inspired by the chorus ‘She needs wide open spaces/Room to make her big mistakes/She needs new faces/ She knows the highest stakes’.  

While the Country Mouse was distracted on an international phone call she struck out, ‘to find a dream and a life of her own’. Over the fence she went. Onto the lawn next door. And up the back steps. And into the house. Mrs Next Door was in the kitchen when Dixie calmly strutted past. I’ll be forever grateful that she quickly scooped up the terrier before a violent end and a bundle of feathers was all that we had to remind us of our once docile bird.

Dixie was duly returned home by one of the twinnies, an 11 y.o. brother and sister duo, who despite all their high-tech gadgetry and abundant toys are absolutely fixated on our chickens and visit them daily. They are so fierce in their devotion that the Country Mouse has had to devise a roster system to stop them physically fighting each other to get to the laying boxes to see who will be the first to discover the day’s bounty of fresh eggs. Their excitement at finding an egg, while their bikes and iPads are thrown discarded on our lawn, is a thing to behold. Who would have thought?