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?

 

 

Cluckingham Palace

Love is a funny thing. Who would have ever thought that the Country Mouse would’ve fallen in love with four new females? Yet as 2012 draws to a close the mouse house’s new inhabitants, four Isa Brown chickens, have captured his heart and his imagination.

But this chicken love dance almost ended before it began when we hit a stumbling block – what were we going to call our feathery fowls? Yes, naming our new friends proved an interesting exercise in compromise. For weeks I was on high rotation with the same simple question, “We get to name two each. What do you want to call yours?”

The Country Mouse was adamant, “K and F-n-C”

My vision of the CM calling across the backyard “F-n-C!”, “F-n-C!” to some poor bird was enough for the Court (me) to immediately dismiss his suggestion. I figured he’d been having a Rake-ish moment, given that he is a recent and enthusiastic convert to the antics of ABC’S wicked criminal defence barrister Cleaver Greene.

After a series of other unsuitable names were proposed by him - Henny Penny and Chicken Nugget anyone? - I threatened to withdraw his naming rights altogether, so he took the position that he would have to see them in the feather so to speak before he could do any naming. Soon after they arrived, he dutifully watched them for signs of individuality and personality and he settled on ‘Shaker’ (shake a tail feather) and ‘Windy’ (wind beneath her wings) who soon morphed into Wendy.

Of course my naming suggestions were completely brilliant, just not to him. ‘Crosby’, ‘Stills’, ‘Nash’ and ‘Young’ was dismissed with a dry “they are girls”. My other suggestion, that they be called after girls immortalised in song titles: Peggy Sue, Sweet Caroline, Barbara Ann and Sharona (I fancied picking up a lovely hen and serenading her with “My, my, myyyyy Sharona!”) was also vetoed. He supported ‘Dixie’ (the obvious Dixie Chicks) and given that I love the name ‘Clementine’, (which he doesn’t) he generously agreed to this, although she’s now developed the classic Aussie moniker ‘Clemmy’.

The local Council advised we could have up to ten chooks, but no roosters and we were to promise to consult our neighbours in advance. One set of neighbours provided an eye-popping response to the news that chickens were moving in with Mrs Next Door announcing with a cheerful big smile, “Oh I hope our dog doesn’t kill your chickens!” Right on cue their snarling little terrier looked up and gave its distinctive teeth-baring growl. I scowled back giving it my best death-stare look.

The Country Mouse created a wonderful chook motel, with an adjoining weather and vermin-proof run complete with a proper roof, a range of perches and four separate laying boxes, so that the hens could feel very cosmopolitan while doing their egg laying in their own private studio apartments.

The backyard now echoes to ‘chooook ,chooook ,chooook’ (that’s us, not the chooks) and they answer back with the same call, with a quirky variation if we are slow letting them out in the  morning to do their daily free ranging. Lining up at the gate they announce their displeasure with ‘oooo-uuuu-tttt!’

‘The girls’, as we call them, are more formally known as Gallus gallus domesticus and they are no slackers; one week after arriving in their new home we got our first tiny egg and on 3 December we had our first two-egg day - our hen pen has now become an egg shed.

Public transport tales

Frustrated at the non-appearance of my Newcastle dream job (fabulous new Hunter-based career where are you??) I’ve been thinking laterally and decided that I am now perfectly placed to move sideways and take on a new professional life as a public transport consultant.

Never in my life did I contemplate that I would spend so much time in transit, but now that I do I am the keenest observer of what is right and wrong with the buses and trains of Sydney and the Hunter. I am the consumer who needs to sit on the boards of Cityrail and Sydney Buses.

Spending so much time travelling has also allowed me to develop a new fashion-related game I call ‘Defy the Weather’; it’s somewhat like the children’s lookout game ‘I Spy’. It started last year when I started noticing people who, to my fascination, had totally thumbed their nose at the weather.

There were men in shorts on the coldest days of winter, women in July wearing summer dresses and grasping thin cardigans around them with a frigid desperation, their bare legs shivering. At what point did these people not notice it was mid-winter?

In the last couple of weeks my favourite ‘Defy the Weather’ contestant was a woman I spotted on one of Sydney’s rare scorchers, a day when the temperature soared past 30 degrees. Throw in dripping humidity and you get the picture. But there she was denim shorts (check), singlet top (check) and knee-high grey ugg boots (say what?) I felt anxious just looking at her calves and feet encased in all that sheepskin.

‘Defy the Weather’ can be played anywhere, but public transport gives you such a large number of potential game winners it’s the games natural home. The rules are simple:

1. Assess the weather
2. Define the worst thing(s) to be wearing for those conditions
3. Go find the person wearing it

Another form of can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it public transport entertainment is watching the people who use the trains as their own personal bathroom. This is for some reason doesn’t seem to happen on buses, or not that I have observed. I am guilty of using my Sydney-Hunter-Sydney train time to pluck my eyebrows, do a manicure (and a pedicure if the train carriage is almost empty), but some people go the whole hog.

I see lots of women expertly doing makeup despite the rocking of the train, but my favourite ‘train as personal bathroom’ moment was a male one. A businessman, who carefully unpacked his battery-packed electric razor from his briefcase, had his morning shave and calmly folded up his shaving gear and packed it away. Getting out a moist towel to wipe his face, he finished with a splash of cologne and was perfectly poised to leave the train just as it pulled into his station. Now there is someone who knows about time management.

Another great thing about public transport is the opportunity it gives you to blatantly listen in to other people’s conversations; it’s the supreme snoop fest.

My overheard conversations have ranged from hair-raising horror stories to dialogue which would slay any stand-up comedian. It has included the world’s worst parenting threat (on the 428 bus), mother to little girl: “You’ve been so bad that when we get home the police are going to take you away”. On hearing this news the small child started screaming, bringing a new round of extraordinary threats from her mother.

Eastern Suburbs buses provide an international demographic for this snoop fest. Recently a Canadian was explaining to his compatriots that “right here” (i.e. at the five ways intersection at Paddington) was where “all the homosexuals of Sydney live”. “Ooooohhhh” sighed the Canadians pressing their faces to the bus window only to observe, no doubt to their disappointment, the mostly heterosexual upper middle class of Paddo going about their deli shopping and heading into the decidedly straight Royal Oak Hotel for a drink.

International backpackers regularly re-enforce racial stereotypes, which is disconcerting but undeniable. European males flirt and charm like it’s their birthright. Recently I watched as a young Italian train traveller slid up to a group of girls, sitting himself down in the middle of them and laying it on til they were soon giggling and cooing. A group of young Anglo males watched with undisguised irritation. For well over an hour they had been eyeing off the girls, daring each other to make the first move, yet the solo Italian backpacker with his expert eye came, saw and conquered making himself the centre of their attention within two stops of getting on the train.  

This year’s favourite overheard public transport conversation (so far) goes to a trio I’ll call Sean, Sean’s friend and Miss Finland.  Sean was an Irish backpacker, accompanied by an unnamed male friend (also Irish) and Miss Finland was the pretty Nordic princess in Sean’s sights on the 380 bus. Sean’s friend was uncomplicated, he was hungry - really hungry - and his sole focus was when, where and how quickly they were going to eat.

They were sitting behind me and first caught my attention when Miss Finland was asking Sean what sports he played. He eagerly explained ‘hurling’ which Wikipedia defines deftly as ‘an outdoor team game of Gaelic prehistoric origins and played for at least 3,000 years and thought to be the world’s fastest field team game and one of Ireland’s native games.’

Miss Finland heard ‘curling’ and nodded enthusiastically. “Yar! Curling!” Helpfully Wikipedia defines this as ‘a sport in which players slide stones across a sheet of ice towards a target area. It is related to bowls. Two teams take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones across the ice toward a target.’

There was a ‘Hurling? No…curling’ and ‘Curling? No…hurling’ misunderstanding which I could completely understand. To my English language only ears Finnish is a fiendishly impenetrable language and Finnish-accented English is really something to hear. Between Sean’s Irish brogue and Miss Finland’s limited English they were really doing it tough, but chemistry knows no linguistic boundaries and I admired their dogged persistence to find some common ground.

But Sean’s friend wanted none of it. “Sean” he pleaded “When are we going to get something to eat?” Sean ignored him. And so the bus ride, and Sean’s budding romanced, was punctuated by his friend’s increasingly desperate hunger pains. “Sean, look that pub has a bistro”. “Can we get off here Sean? That pizza place is still open”. “Sean, I’m dying of hunger”. But Sean remained unmoved; he was focused on Miss Finland.

Sean’s friend could stand it no more and wailed my favourite overheard line of 2012.

“Awww Sean……..I’m so hungry I could eat a toddler!”

Bug world

Being in the country means being close to nature and that ‘closeness’ is an undiscriminating place. As the day turns to dusk I rejoice at the sound of kookaburras, but curse the bugs which buzz, bite and generally interact with me without my consent.

But as visionary nature writer Rachel Carson explained exactly 50 years ago bugs are the food of birds, so no bugs = no birds. Given this equation I try to maintain my equilibrium as I am bothered by these flying, swarming and slithering pests. But there’s a limit to tolerance and my forbearance in the face of incessant creepy-crawlies has now come to an end.

The Country Mouse’s house is a breeding centre for Daddy Longlegs spiders. I muse…is this because the CM is a daddy with long legs? Their webs decorate every corner of every room and no matter how determinedly I vacuum them away a replacement spider in a replacement web quickly arrives mocking “We’re baaaack!” Is there some inexhaustible well of these creatures in the lower Hunter Valley?

Last weekend spread-eagled in the hallway was the Elle Macpherson of Daddy Longlegs, a creature with impossibly lengthy appendages. I made the CM come and inspect it, but the CM was his usual unflappable self, simply squashing the supermodel spider between two fingers (in unison: “Eeewww”) and depositing its dead body in the front garden.

At the Mouse House I’ve had mozzies the size of magpies land on me and watched in a kind of warped fascination as clouds of insects descend at dusk. “Why are there so many bugs?” I regularly squeal to which the Country Mouse replies with the self-evident “You’re in the country”.

In my relentless war on these pests I have armed myself with citronella anti-bug candles, plug-in mozzie zappers and an environmentally-friendly insect catching jar. I pleaded for the CM to buy a great bug system I found at Bunnings, but despite this device having two things going for it – one, that it was a practical present and two, that it was in the CM’s favourite shopping destination he balked at spending so much money purely on insect eradication.

All these encounters have now paled into nothingness after my recent insect encounter, my own horror Room 101 moment. (For those who are not Orwell fans Room 101 is a torture chamber in George Orwell’s novel 1984, a place where The Party subjects a prisoner to whatever is their own worst nightmare, fear or phobia)

Having a shower last weekend and I casually picked up an old shampoo bottle on the floor. To my horror a huge Huntsman spider had taken up residence on the other side and, being disturbed, quickly scuttled up the bottle, its eight thick black hairy legs and huge body speeding toward my hand and forearm. I was naked and vulnerable, trapped in a glass box and it was coming closer, soon it hideous legs would be in contact with my bare hand, then up my arm and heading toward my face. I was in Room 101.

I felt the scream start in my diaphragm and travel through my body. Ripping open the shower screen, I threw the shampoo bottle, as it flew through the air the spider held firm riding the spinning bottle like some kind of evil skateboarder. In a blur of movement the CM arrived just as I started a hyperventilating chant:

“SPIDER-SPIDER-SPIDER-KILL-IT-KILL-IT-KILL-IT!!”

From my glass cubicle I watched as the CM jumped around the room chasing the monster Huntsman (are there any other kind?) armed only with an empty shampoo bottle. My hero! Soon there was a satisfying thump, thump as the CM beat the Huntsman’s sorry arse into the tiled bathroom floor:

 
“IS-IT-DEAD-IS-IT-DEAD-IS-IT-DEAD??”

“Yes” he replied “and deaf”.

The great beach search: a winner!

It’s almost the official end of summer, a seasonal designation the Country Mouse and I refuse to acknowledge, so much so that we are going north for Easter, anything to prolong our sun exposure. As a couple with sand in our souls we go screaming and kicking into winter.

But before this summer is wrapped there has been a big job to put to bed. For the past 18 months I have been conducting a beach search of the Hunter, knowing that I couldn’t settle into my new home until I had a short list of beaches to call my own and a secret wish to find that special one above all others.

Despite this sad La Nina summer the CM and I have remained upbeat, heading ocean ward whenever it was possible. In my quest we have travelled north to Nelson Bays’ beaches, with my sister swearing by Zenith Beach and the CM raving over an old favourite Berubi Point. We went south to Caves Beach and I oohhed and aahhed over its sea caves promising pirates and smuggled treasure.

Nearer to Newcastle we had a dramatic visit to Redhead, our planned beach walk coinciding with a shark attack on a local surfer. I was fascinated by the beach’s rust-coloured cliffs and one of its most identifiable features, the old wooden lifeguard tower – ironically also the shark lookout – perched on a rock shelf.

So I am going to take this (wet, unbeachy) Leap Day in this Leap Year to announce that the verdict is in and frankly I’m relieved. Although I’ve loved the chase it’s good to be settled, to find The One and breathe a salty sigh of relief.

With the summer sun setting behind the winner’s dais the sash has been handed to… Dudley Beach for its unspoiled beauty, its surfing doggies, undesignated nudity and its air of a remote, almost private, paradise. Which it is.

The Circle Game

As my life heads off on another circuitous path, I’m watching with intrigue those people who live lives of regularity, routine and order.

One of the Country Mouse’s musical companions eats dinner in the same place, at the same time every night. The CM raises his eyebrows at this, seeing it as a sign of his rigidity and I agree, but secretly I am fascinated. How did he create such a tidy, ordered world? I barely know where I will be eating my next meal; let alone what it will be.

My life has never followed a straight line, or a gently curving arc, not even the predictability of a zigzag. It’s been more like a series of crazy spirals which careered off at right angles; circled back on themselves and either crashed in a spectacular blaze or shot off into the sky as a series of multi-coloured fireworks.

Well one of those wild curve balls is has just been thrown my way (again).

After living at Dulwich Hill since late 1997 I’ve said goodbye to the Inner West. I cried that my next move wasn’t north to the Mouse House (as I had planned), but the consolation is the utter absurdity that, despite my precarious financial situation, I am now a denizen of the Eastern Suburbs. And not just anywhere in the East, but the suburb which in 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald deemed to be the city’s best and which beat the other 640 contenders - Bronte.

It was given the gong by the paper’s judges for its great beach, vibrant cafes, good primary school, proximity to the city and all-round ‘liveability’. Soon after a local real estate agent praised the SMH competition and Bronte’s win because “it put another zero on the end of the suburb’s property prices”.

I am now living with The Swimmers, and they are family no less. The glory of the nearby ocean and my new fitness regime involving the possibility of early morning or late afternoon swims (or both), beach walks and seaside yoga classes is insane. This morning as I sat on a headland before work drinking coffee and watching the Tamarama surfers I had to laugh – my life, is anyone else’s this mad?

A month ago I was doing the hideous housing rounds, a situation so grim and joyless that my only relief from the horror of it all was my mate Mark who lives in a matchbox apartment with walls so thin he can hear his neighbour relieving himself in the bathroom next door.

He recently did Saturday real estate hell, i.e. viewing properties to rent in Sydney, and he had me whooping out loud with his description of viewing an apartment so small, with a hallway so narrow, that he confronted the agent with “If I had an erection I couldn’t turn sideways in this place”.

Shortly afterward I read a report confirming that it is official, Australia, and specifically Sydney’s, housing is ‘severely unaffordable’, indeed, second only to Hong Kong in the severity of its unaffordability. This grim statistic gave me dark comfort in some black hours - it wasn’t just me facing a housing nightmare.

And then out of left field came Bronte; and I’m back from the edge. The next chapter of my life is looking like an epic firework and I’m spinning, Catherine Wheeling, heading for the stars.

The other side

What do you do when life is too difficult, when so much has been thrown at you that your resources are exhausted and the only way out is to see your misfortune as part of some greater (at least benign, hopefully meaningful) plan?

One of my strategies is to opt out and consult the other side, much to the Country Mouse’s incredulity. Yep, off I go to my clairvoyant, an angel-eyed English woman whose spookily accurate predictions have given me so much comfort since my first visit in late 2009 I make seeing her an annual present to myself.
At my first reading The Clairvoyant looked me straight in the eye, smiled broadly and said “a big love is coming your way”. Whoa! Three months later the Country Mouse, that Big Love, came crashing into my world. I was converted; so converted that I started converting others.

Last year it was the turn of the Culinary Goddess to get ‘psyched’. You might remember her from a post almost a year ago, she is the Good Samaritan who took me in when I needed it most, the circumstances of which were so traumatic I choose to forget them, and in whose Inner West home I roost during my Sydney working week.

On the Culinary Goddess’s last birthday she might have been anticipating a dinner out, or a movie, a book or a gift voucher – nooooooo – I knew what she really needed was The Clairvoyant. The CG had been on a cosmic see-saw of loss and love the previous 12 months and I’d watched sadly from the sidelines as she dealt with huge grief and cheered loudly when she was blessed with great love. The Clairvoyant came through for her delivering messages which were precise, emotionally confronting, but balanced. Her future was looking good.

I decided to piggy-back on her birthday reading and get an early annual one of my own; I needed a fix from the other side. My reading was full of Hunter hope, clear descriptions of the great job I was going to get and of the future happiness I was going to have. And the timeframe for all this was… summer. I left elated. Now in the final stretch of this pseudo summer my mood is as grey and wet as the skies. The job hasn’t eventuated. And I’m about to move sideways in Sydney instead of north to the Promised Land. Has The Clairvoyant lost her touch? I’m done for.