On the windowsill

 

At the It Shall Be Nameless department store in Warriewood Square there are aisles after aisles of the most attractive household goods designed to entice you into stylish tidiness by having remarkably low prices.

As I wander, trolley and credit card in hand, I dream of how charming I could make my shelves, tables and windowsills with small expenditure.

But I have a long way to go.

Take my kitchen windowsill for instance. Although my current windowsill is cluttered, it is nothing compared to the very long windowsill in our Mona Vale house. One morning I noted down that it held: a humorous card from an ancient birthday, a paper napkin holder with a few stray napkins, a large thermometer, a small scented candle, a very small button, a handmade cloth mouse, a pot full of drooping rosemary, one large elastic band, assorted screws, nails and washers, an empty bottle of vanilla extract, a pretty bottle of hand cream relatively unused (if you saw my hands this would become clear), several sizes of coinage for undoing bits of my vacuum cleaner, a recipe cut from a packet and a lovely box decorated by an Aboriginal artist and used for keeping baby teeth. And I forgot – two crystals and a baby nappy pin. Considering we didn’t use cloth nappies in the house, this last is most mysterious.

I recall that my open pantry shelves in Mona Vale presented a problem when my then one-year-old youngest grandchild came to be looked after by grandma. He barrelled around the house training for the crawler Olympics and if I didn’t race around in front of him shutting doors he would have rows of books on the floor together with the objects d'art I thoughtfully placed here and there when we moved in.

The just seven-year-old who lives here and the almost eight-year-old who came (pre Covid) some weekday afternoons are also talented mess-makers. The older two – nine and 12 respectively, with the 12-year-old in residence – are happy playing chess, Scrabble and Monopoly after school all at once and all on the floor, so clearing up after them is a major exercise. To be fair, their principle after-school pleasure is jumping on the trampoline or playing inside my car; equally frequently they climb onto the roof of the car and chat away up there. I recall the now seven-year-old decided when he was three to climb up also; he had somehow made it up to the bonnet and was attempting the Everest of the car's roof when discovered.

But I digress. I fear that tidy, elegant, stylish and such like words will never be applied to my place while five grandchildren wander at will. And that's just fine with me.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

“Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.” Anon.

 The Night of the Space Alien

 

A space alien has made land-fall – or should that be planet-fall – at our house on the hill and she is not a pretty sight. She used to be a grumpy grandma but now she’s condemned to a breathing mask at night she looks, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Just as the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, so is the breathing mask connected to a hose which is connected to a machine which is connected to a water reservoir and the whole box and dice helps me to breathe properly in the wee small hours.

As is frequently the case, when you’re diagnosed with some ailment or disease or the like, you immediately hear about lots of others who’d been suffering from the disease for years. Thus many of you out there will have correctly diagnosed Sleep Apnoea– in my case Severe Sleep Apnoea. It’s so new in my life I had to double-check how to spell it. Should the breathing apparatus work – and there’s every chance it will – I may regain some of my rapidly depleting memory as well as my good humour; the grandchildren will be happy about that. It may also help me lose weight (some chemical does something or another when you’re not getting enough oxygen overnight which leads to accumulating avoirdupois).

Back to grumpiness and the grandchildren for a moment. Most of you know that the schools in Sydney are closed. For I think it’s been five weeks now, I’ve been the principal of “Grandma School”; pupil numbers – one seven-year-old with ants in his pants. The more wriggly he gets the grumpier I am. There’s also, as I’ve mentioned before, the new words and ways in which children these days are taught. So when I write additions in the old-fashioned way with one number underneath another and a dear little plus sign to one side, I feel like I’m being very naughty. However, this too shall pass, although I think there’s a good chance there will be no more school this term.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. For close to 50 years, I measured my life in speeding bullets. Now I've retired into full-time grandmotherhood, I still can't measure my life in slow, small spoonfulls. In some ways it's still hectic, but it is measured differently. For instance, my day could be broken up into the time between kitchen duties, largely washing up, the need for which occurs as regularly as a metronome's tick. Then there's the time, in happier days, between taking grandchildren to school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon.

When some of the five grandchildren were still at kindie, these trips need to be planned with my daughter and daughter-in-law with military precision. For example, on Mondays I took one grandchild to school in the morning but picked up two in the afternoon. I took one small fellow to kindie in the morning, but most days he was picked up by mum. Alternatively, that mum sometimes picked up the middle child of the other mum (my daughter-in-law) as she passed HER kindie on the way back from work (before the era of work-from-home). Some days I looked after the smallest fellow and other days his older sister. Now with just one of the five not yet at school the permutations and combinations are likely to be endless if school and after-school activities ever return.

Another way my time is measured is the time between laundry loads. As most of you know, I live with my daughter, her partner and two of the grandchildren and the two boys generate an enormous amount of washing. But as Parkinson's Law has it, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. In these retirement days – well, retirement from paid employment – I have more time, so inevitably my washload increased. Pre COVID, I soaked the filthy school white shirts while pondering why schools insist on white shirts; black would surely be more reasonable. I spend a great deal of time folding the washing for both boys as they tend to put everything in the dirty washing basket including clothes they took from their wardrobes, changed their minds about wearing and threw into the basket.

However I’ve recently decided that the time between my current state of occasional forgetfulness and the final curtain is not going to be just housework. I’ve decided to write this blog, learn Italian, achieve an MPhil or a PhD and have a local gallery fancy my artwork. All of which has made me finally understand the marvellous words of the poet Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Aristocratic old lady to police officer inquiring into the murder of Lord Lucan’s nanny, 1974.

“Oh dear, what a pity. Nannies are so hard to come by these days.”

 

 Snail mail

 

We have a new resident in our house on the plateau, a bearded dragon called Haku. As my daughter’s partner’s mum (you’ll be able to work it out) owns a large snake, I suppose I can count myself lucky that our reptile is only a lizard. It’s about a foot and a half long, most of it tail, and coloured tan and whitish; its beard is not very noticeable. Apart from its overall reptile creepiness, the oddest thing about it is two holes, one on each side of its head, which are apparently how it hears. But as I got this information from a five-year-old I’m not entirely sure of its veracity.

I have had a loathing for reptiles, particularly snakes, since childhood. In those days, I spent a lot of time roaming through a wonderful 1947 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which devoted an entire page to coloured pictures of world snakes. I would turn this page by holding it by the tiniest bit of its edge, as if the images might wake up and see me off. And I’ve told you before about the blue-tongued lizard in our garden in Pymble with its hateful flickering blue tongue which kept me in the house for weeks.

The closest I ever came to real live snakes in the wild was the archaeological dig I went on at the end of my first year at university. Our dig was at a large rock shelter in the national park south of Sydney and we established a campsite there living in eight-person army tents. (I became completely adept at dressing and undressing inside a sleeping bag, a skill I have regrettably not needed again!) We were surrounded by bush which was quite dense in the height of summer. Our route from the tents to the rock shelter up the hill was reasonably clear, but there was bush around us elsewhere so trips to the latrine, which we dug ourselves, were somewhat fraught with danger. These trips, by the way, included our carrying with us massive containers, one full of creosote and other of lavender water, to sanitise the trenches. But it was trips through rather dense bush to other smaller rock shelters around us that was the most fraught with potential danger. Fortunately one of the blokes on the dig reassured me that the snakes were more afraid of me than I was of them and as long as I trampled loudly as I progressed and always stepped onto logs and not over them (snakes liked sunning themselves on the tracks) I would be safe. He was right. While I never conquered my fear I was at least able to march through the bush without screeching.

My other confrontation with reptiles occurred in New Guinea where I had gone in the 1960s with a university group to study the elections as New Guinea hauled itself into the modern world. Our small sub-group of four from Sydney University were sent to Rabaul, a lovely town then but tragically much later destroyed by volcanic eruption. We lived in the Methodist Mission – the reason for which escapes me – and we developed a nodding relationship with rather sweet little geckoes. They would climb the walls to the ceiling at night-time and need the warmth of the morning sun to start moving again. I didn’t love them, but they were reasonably inoffensive.

The reason I’ve called this blog Snail Mail, however, is because we have snails which live in our mailbox. Ok, I know snails aren’t reptiles, but I think they have the same level of creepiness and when you put your hand in to collect the mail there’s a very good chance you’ll fish out a snail too. And the snails appear to love paper. If you don’t take out your mail every day or so then there won’t be much of it left.

So here I am in my dotage being required to live in close proximity to a reptile. Along with the snails, the dog, the cockatoos, the kookaburras, the lorikeets, the pantry moths and the granddaddy cockroaches, I’ve really got more wildlife than I care for.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

General Charles De Gaulle: “How can you govern a country which produces 246 different kinds of cheese?”