21 May 2013
It started off quite innocently as these things often do. An older man. A much younger girl.
But it was okay in the beginning. His long hair, strutting gait and piercing blue eyes were popular.
His words were quoted endlessly by not only me but my friends. We loved him.
He had friends of all nationalities, was cool in a crisis and his tragedies made him seem somehow vulnerable.
He could quote Shakespeare and once did it for the best part of three hours.
He was all about family but yet could party with the best of them. He was fun. Manly.
He was married of course. My mother didn’t like him. Not even when I pointed out that he was Catholic with six children and therefore an excellent role model for a girl such as me. She thought I was delusional.
But I stayed committed, I endured his good times and his bad times. In the 1980s, a devoted teenager, I scrapbooked his every mention but by the time he stood his drunken ground and poured vitriol upon the already over-demonised Jewish nation and the diligent police officers of America – I knew it was over.
I haven’t seen The Beaver or Apocalypto. Me, who owned every single one of his videos – even the ones that terrified me; and I even found something positive to say about Bird on a Wire. I sided with Robin in the divorce and felt for his children. I didn’t like the Russian and I wanted the recorded tirade to be untrue – and so stopped following the stories. I was pleased for him that Jodie stood by him. We all need friends.
Since his fall from grace, my Braveheart cardboard cutout from VideoEzy 1995 has stayed folded through several moves and an opportunity has come to pass him on to somebody that will appreciate him. Even though only in jest, he’ll have his moment in the sun again.
Never again will I be able to set him up by the front door so that a house mate or husband coming in late will be scared half to death by the man with the sword. Never will he be the nostalgic ironic party centrepiece. He will be gone.
Mel Gibson. If only you’d turned out to be the man I thought you were.
19 May 2013
Last week I had the opportunity to meet with four people aged 94,84, 94 and 103. We were all at the same Line Dancing evening in Hobart and I think that you can just make up your own version of how we all come to be at such an event. Or even that I could start a blog with this scenario and it be true.
For our purposes – let’s call them Doug, Liz, Thelma and Alice.
Liz used to be a GP and was pretty sure she was only there because there was free booze. And she was fairly cranky about missing out on a ticket for the door prize. She called it a conspiracy but then acknowledged that she didn’t come in through the door so maybe they’d just missed her. She thought this might be logical but wasn’t really inclined to be generous, so was determined to drink as much of the free booze as possible.
Alice used to be a pianist and had had an early bath to get herself relaxed and ready for the party. She loves to dance apparently so had a little snooze in her bath to be ready for the late night and then had a glass of wine and slept in her chair the whole way through the dance. If you’re 103 though this isn’t bad manners – it’s the freedom of saying ‘fuck it’ because you’re old and don’t have to behave ‘appropriately’ if you aren’t inclined to do so. She still won a door prize so considered the night a big success.
Thelma was up and dancing with a young blonde Welshman and rocking a flannelette shirt and an Akubra with the best of them. She might be 94 but has her own Facebook page and was learning about Twitter this week. She loves the Internet, hates country music but always enjoys a party. She thinks that people who say they are too old to learn things or get a grasp of technology are idiots. She also thinks there is no excuse for poor grammar in texts. She and I were basically the same person 60ish years apart. Mainly because I used to rock a flannelette shirt and Akubra pretty well. Oh and I’m a grammar bore. Even in texts.
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| Thanks to radioplanet.tv for themed image |
Ed was wearing a bow tie. He is the child of travelling performers. Plays the piano and some other instruments. Tap dances. Hence the bow tie. He’s not a fan of the ‘western’ style of music or even the ‘Australian country’ but he loves free beer and a chance to wear his bow tie. So he’s at the party. He thinks Thelma, Liz and Alice are ‘champion dames’. He asks if he can tell me a story that contains a swear word. I encourage him to proceed. He tells me he read it in the Reader’s Digest so its probably true. He says this a few times while telling the story.
So you know the lingerie brand Hestia? Well apparently back in the day they were looking for a brand name for their new lingerie. They’d brainstormed all day and had nothing, so they were sent home and told not to come back to work if they didn’t have a name. In the morning they went around the table and all the names were rubbish. They got to this final fellow and he suggested ‘Hestia’. They asked ‘Why?’
‘Holds every sized tittie in Australia’
And there you go. Hestia. And his swear word was ‘tittie’.
He chortled extensively in the way the very deaf and very old do and I almost called for oxygen. He apologised for swearing and blamed the Reader’s Digest. And then laughed and called for his second beer. Loved him.
Loved them all.
They were not going quietly into the good night. Not one of them. And for that – I salute them.
18 May 2013
To be honest, they had me at hello!
I’d scored a place on the Voices of 2013 Masterclass and when I sit down ten minutes late and find I’m being gifted a notebook that looks like a typewriter just for turning up I kind of thank the gods for loving me – I love funky notebooks. They’re a ‘thing’.
And it was going to make up for any speeding tickets I’d incurred on the way.
So basically, the Masterclass could have been complete rubbish and I’d have been happy with the outcome. I came with low expectations and by low, I mean none.
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| Examples of early blogging |
Nobody I know is a blogger. Bloggers are fictional creatures that live on the computer and occasionally feature in newspaper articles. Going to a blogging Masterclass was like believing that going to New Zealand meant I was going to meet a Hobbit.
But there you go – you take a little bit of the dream and say ‘Fuck it’, lets see where we end up and three hours later you’re entertained, you’ve got some great ideas and only one presenter has set off your ‘Really? REALLY? (Tosser)’ alarm. The others have made sense, been human and everybody at your table has been quite delightful.
And even the others not at your table, the ones with awesome shoes, they’ve been fabulous too.
I liked that the panels’ read my mind and asked the questions that will occur to me later on in the journey, and that some of them asked the questions I should be asking now. I like that people were collectively keen to learn which made for a fantastically positive vibe. I like that people were keen to share and I liked that some parts were funny. I felt the relaxing happen then.
But I also liked that ultimately, the people that were really, really good at blogging, actually liked doing it. Like a lot.
And that is probably my favourite learning of the day. I blog because I enjoy it. And so do they.
11 May 2013
So it’s Mother’s Day here in Australia and as I am a mother myself now of two perfect children, I better appreciate how my mother secretly high fives herself every single day for having borne six perfect ones.
And I have five things I’d like to say to my mother this year.
1. I am really sorry that I bought you so much 4711 perfume when I was younger. You got stacks of it for Mother’s days, Birthdays and Christmases . I thought it was the height of sophistication at the time, in the same way I went through a stage of being attracted to boys that wore Brut. I have no defence bar hormones.
2. I really think you have to concede that I was right about the bubble skirt. You said I couldn’t have one because it was only going to be in fashion for a season. By my reckoning, it’s come back at least twice since 1987 and your argument was never that it was only going to be ‘in fashion for one season that you are young enough to wear it without looking like an idiot’. Just saying.
3. I am still very proud of you for standing up to that truck driver that tried to kill us when we drove to Brisbane for Uncle Jim’s funeral. I wouldn’t have wound the window down at all when he bailed us up at the petrol station, let alone wind it down far enough to basically tell him he was an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed on the roads. And then wish him good day. It still makes me smile when I think on it.
4. I know you don’t understand why with the extensive vocabulary I have at my disposal I profane as much as I do. Let’s assume it’s nature not nuture and rest easy. There is nobody but nobody that thinks for a minute my affinity for the profane utterance is a legacy of the maternal influence
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5. We love you. Having a mother that cared might have been an albatross when we were teenagers but is a blessing for a lifetime.
Happy Mother’s Day. xoxo
11 May 2013
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| Me today (no really!) |
Today courtesy of the desk magic that is Scoopon in January, I tried paddle boarding for the first time. Now for those of you not acquainted with this water sport, you basically balance on a board that is like a surfboard, with an oar like you dragon boat with but longer, and push yourself across the surface of water in a relaxed stance. Amazing for your core strength and mostly you see the likes of Jennifer Aniston or Matthew McConaughey* snapped pushing themselves around blue oceans in sunlit locales.
And that was exactly my experience.
The end
Ha. No really. My loving husband and daughters came to watch to be supportive of my urge to try new things two days before the voucher expires and I am very lucky that two weeks short of winter, Sydney was still rocking temperatures in the mid-twenties.
There were five of us in this little class (all using up their vouchers at the last minute) and we were being taught by Ricardo from Brazil who sized us all up in the same way that a comedian sizes up his punchline. We had a quick demo on land – paddle like this, turn like this, this is the front of the board, this is the back of the board, start on your knees and then boom! stand up straight, right lets go.
All five of us chortled insanely while shuffling towards the water thinking “No problems, I’m sure it really is that easy”. Actually I may have said it out loud but Ricardo doesn’t get sarcasm so he just kind of just glided along, smiling his white teeth at us over his shoulder which caused me to pause and go back for my sunglasses.
So off we go, the whole on your knees thing was nice and simple and while wobbly I watched as the four in front of me stood up and started after Ricardo (now so far in the distance it was just the yellow spots on his shorts that were still visible).
So up I get on the board, well aware that all those on shore are getting to view my considerable backside lurching upwards in a way that was probably very traumatic. But I was up. I was wobbling, but I was up! A few tentative strokes and thinking “relax, oh! I can do this” when my right leg spasmed like a Rick Astley tribute dancer and I plunged off the board into the water much like a whale being returned to the ocean.
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| Actual footage taken of my dismount |
The water was so cold it knocked the wind out of me and my board went one way, my oar another, my hat another and I thought I was going to drown ten metres from the water’s edge. In full view of my children. Though I did have the semi-conscious thought that I hoped Nick wouldn’t attempt to save me because god only knows Cassidy would be straight in the water drowning herself if he took his eyes off her for even a second.
Anyway, then I took my sunglasses of my face so I could see and started treading water rather than just drowning and while cold, I was fine. Though slightly alarmed because I couldn’t reach the bottom or my board and Ricardo was long gone. I was too cold to be embarrassed and anyway – at least I’d tried right? And not died. What better parental example is there eh?
One of my fellow learners yelled out and probably sent up a flare to attract the distant Ricardo’s attention and within probably not very long he’d hightailed it back, given me my board back, retrieved the hat and crooned – “You probably did not stand straight enough”. I hauled myself back on my board so I could be closer to him when I punched him, but with a twinkle of his yellow spotted gluteus maximus he was gone again.
Faced with no other option but to follow him if I was going to punch him, I got to my knees and just concentrated on paddling while my fellow learners made lovely sympathetic noises while silently fist punching the air thinking “Thank fuck I wasn’t the first to fall off”.**
And then there I was, up on my feet and away across the lake. My feet went numb, I got bingo wing chaffing, I bumped my knee quite hard in a shallow water manoeurve because graceful is just not part of my genetic makeup but I did not fall again**. And the weather was so delightful I was lovely and warm skimming across the lake’s surface imagining myself as the paddle boarding champ of the world.
And despite the photos, that’s how I am going to think of myself from this point on****.
The end. No really, this time it is.
* I wanted to use another actor’s name because I can never spell this one but I just googled it in the end because he is the male Jennifer.
** Actually nobody else fell off at all. I’m a regular community service.
*** Yes Sarah, just the once.
**** Andy, I loved it – I’d definitely do it again.
5 May 2013
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| Four generations of Hilda |
My husband’s grandmother died last month at the age of 102. She’d lived a whole lot longer than she’d expected to live and probably longer than she would have chosen. But she lived a long time and was loved the whole time and there is no better eulogy to be had when all is said and done.
She was born in Salford, England in 1910 and I have been thinking about the world she was born into and the world she left and all that happened in between and it’s pretty freakin’ amazing even taking just a very few differences into account.
1. In 1910, she was born and named Hilda. In 2013, she would have been born and named Hyl-dah.
2. Crosswords don’t exist yet. Sudoku isn’t going to be invented for another 70 plus years and it’s not going to be a ‘global phenomenon for another 95 years.
3. Powered flight is less than ten years old. People going abroad still do it by boat. People going abroad is not all that common unless they are emigrating permanently. Fleeing oppression and poor living conditions – seeking a better life. I think you can see where this is going – yes? Some things don’t change – it’s no less acceptable because the countries of origin have changed.
4. The world wars are not history. They are the future. Like time travel is still in our future but probably inevitable because there is no way that Michael J Fox would ever lie to me.
5. Picasso is not one of the greats, in fact – people haven’t heard of him and if they have, they’re not impressed.
6. Queen Elizabeth II is not on the throne, she’s not even born and when she is she’s not part of the succession planning. In fact this is the year that Edward VII dies. In 2013, it’s hard to imagine that anybody other than dear Lizzy has ever been in charge of England.
7. Daylight saving as a concept is still most of a decade away. If people’s curtains fade or the cows don’t produce milk they have nothing to blame but poor housekeeping or witchery.
8. Traffic lights do not exist. People barely drive. Henry Ford is just putting together his first production line. Cars are not normal. They’re a rarity, an oddity, an indulgence. They definitely don’t have speed cameras.
9. There is no penicillin. It has not been invented and wont be for a while yet. In 2013, people in the first world will have been so blessed with an absence of childhood destroying diseases due to the medical advances of the last 100 years that they will become complacent and smug resulting in a surge in diseases not seen since early in the 20th century.
10. In 1910, the Old Trafford in Manchester is opened and is the largest stadium in England. In their first game they beat Liverpool by one point. In 2013, this game is, bafflingly, still really popular and more divisive than anything else in the world.
The list goes on, in 1910 the first double decker bus was built, the Scouts and Guides were founded, Westminster Cathedral was consecrated, people trotted off to the South Pole, the suffragettes were not having a great time of it, The Royal Australian Navy was created and Harry Houdini was responsible for the first powered flight in Australia. When you look at so many things that we accept as fact, as common knowledge, all are products of only 102 years of thinking.
And through all these ‘newsworthy’ items, people like Hilda are living their own lives, forging their own histories with their own highlights, their own successes, their own conundrums. And we, at whatever age we are now, we are on our own journey and whether we make it to 102, 82, 42 – we all have something to contribute and we all matter to somebody. Our significant dates will matter even if they are not documented in the history books.
And that, that is the most marvellous thing about lives like the life Hilda lived. For her it was every day, unexceptional probably most of the time. But yet she loved and was loved, she produced a child, had friends and family. Her presence lives on in memories, stories, habits and beliefs. Her imprint is indefinable, it’s inescapable. And we all, however our lives translate, leave a similar imprint.
And that is a pretty awesome concept. It’s a beautiful legacy. And for my beautiful man and my two beautiful daughters, I say thank you Hilda.
