Change for the better: Part I

 

COVID has seen a radical change in the way we work, probably the greatest change since the introduction of the eight-hour working day. Almost everyone I have spoken to or heard from now intends to spend most of the week working from home with just a day or so physically present at the workplace. Inevitably this will assist young parents manage their households with less strain; a short trip to the shops for example can be fitted in to the working day because the time can be made up before or after normal working hours. That’s the way it now works in our household. So, working from home is A Great Thing!

Civilisation has evolved to be radically different from the way it was a century or so ago. We have gone from the penny-farthing bicycle to the lunar landing module, from rampant tuberculosis to virtually none (at least in the west), smallpox has been eradicated and so has polio (again in the west), open heart surgery has become commonplace, space tourism has been introduced at least for the very rich, and an American President has communicated with his citizens largely through Twitter which didn’t exist five minutes ago. Indeed five minutes ago there were none of the communication devices used today; no Facebook, no Instagram, no Spotify, no all the other things which I don’t use but most people do.

Computers are another major change to our civilisation. I’m old enough to remember the ‘80s when we did our work on typewriters and how the newspaper of which I was the editor brought in computers both for writing and for printing. This wasn’t all that long ago. In 1981 I worked completely on a typewriter to prepare a report for the then Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (now the Powerhouse) on the historical archaeology project I was engaged in. Actually, there was in fact one computer in Sydney when I was growing up; it was called SILLIAC, lived at Sydney University and weighed five tons

I also remember the introduction of electronic banking and watching fascinated as other people extracted their money from a hole in the bank wall. What a huge change that was. This banking revolution meant I would no longer have to spend half my lunch hour waiting in a queue at the bank to cash my salary cheque. And then there was EFTPOS, an acronym for Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale. We have moved now to a virtually cashless society, unthinkable just a few years ago.

I grew up with pounds, shillings and pence, a peculiar British-based currency of great and boring complexity where there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. There was also a sixpence and a threepence, pronounced I recall as “thruppence” or “throopence”. Until the early ‘70s we also had temperature in Fahrenheit, weight in stones, pounds and ounces (16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone), height in feet and inches (12 inches to a foot) and distance in feet, yards and miles (3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile). And to manage all of this complexity we had no calculators; we just had to do the sums. In the olden days there was no harbour tunnel or cross city tunnel. And to cross the bridge by car one paid threepence for each adult, one penny for children and sixpence for the car.

In my childhood we celebrated Empire Day which became Commonwealth Day and then just Cracker Night. For this event each family purchased fireworks and set them up at home: Catherine Wheels pinned to trees, rockets to the back fence and sparklers for the kiddies to wave around (the good ones) or bungers to set off (the naughty ones). Once Dad (and it was always Dad with possible assistance from older, male children) had everything prepared, he would light them all and come inside to join the rest of the family to watch the display. Our nanny state of today couldn’t possibly let this continue as each year there were one or two nasty accidents. The nanny state has also seen barriers go up around swimming  pools (an altogether good thing) and the abolition of small x-ray machines in shops selling children’s shoes; they were used to check the fit of the shoes until it was discovered that x-rays could be harmful.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta: Originally the Africans had the land and the English had the Bible. Then the missionaries came to Africa and got the Africans to close their eyes and fold their hands and pray. And when they opened their eyes , the English had the land and the Africans had the Bible.

 

Doing nothing

I am phenomenally bad at doing nothing; always have been and no doubt always will be.

I usually have a book surgically attached, either electronic (thank you Kindle) or hard copy, and I have shelves full of craft projects, each one in its own tin which I collect (the tins) from everyone and everywhere.

Almost always I have a half-finished quilting project on the go, producing waves of guilt for its incomplete status, and every few months pull out my collection of card-stock, papers and images to make gift cards.

Watching shows on my Kindle or laptop is a grey area; I am doing something, but it’s so close to doing nothing that it also incites guilt.

Ahhh guilt! SO Jewish! I don’t know why guilt is as Jewish as latkes and matzah-balls but it just is, at least in my generation and the one before. I’m not sure that the younger ones feel the same which of course is A Good Thing.

Sensible people are able to sit down with a cup of tea and admire the view. I sit down with a cup of tea and a book, and only glance occasionally view-wise. Or sometimes it’s a cup of tea and Solitaire on my Kindle. I can play dozens of mind-numbing games of Solitaire while I’m drinking my early morning wake-up tea and snarling at any small person who interrupts. There is nothing creative about Solitaire but it passes the time.

I dislike intensely spending time on being pampered. While other women – most of them I suspect – are delighted to have facials or massages, I loathe every minute, so I don’t indulge; well, for me it’s not an indulgence, it’s purgatory! (By the way, have you come across beauty products which “enhance” or “boost” your skin radiance; that pre-supposes you have some radiance to begin with, a dodgy conclusion in my case.)

I can only just manage to stay still long enough to have my nails done but I hate every minute, especially as you can’t easily read while being manicured and the whole process is phenomenally, extraordinarily, fantastically boring. The only piece of pampering I actually like is the head massage over the hairdresser’s basin.

I’ve always disliked looking at myself in a mirror, which probably explains why I make so many clothing mistakes. I close my eyes when I clean my teeth and squint when I brush my hair or attach earings. In the olden days when I wore lots of eye makeup I would resolutely gaze at the eye I was working on and ignore the other. Incidentally, when my eyesight began to give me problems and I needed to wear glasses most of the time I found it difficult to put on eye makeup at all. My daughter solved that problem by buying me dinky glasses which allowed me to fold down one lens to make up that eye while being able to see through the other. Brilliant!

I’m not particularly fond of “going out”. Generally speaking, I’m a home body and despite the fun and the intellectual stimulation of being with my friends, there’s always a small part of me which wants to be home with a good book – and chocolate. I was never a “party girl” even at the age when it was common to party.

Those who know me only in my older and noisier days may not credit it but as a young woman I was extremely shy, so going to parties was truly a penance. I think that’s part of the reason I became a locked-in smoker; it gave me something to do with my hands and allowed me to feel a trifle sophisticated. In fact, the reason I took up smoking in the first place was in my first year of university. Only 17, I was tremendously uneasy sitting by myself at the Union or elsewhere and the smoking gave me a slight edge, allowed me to feel just a little bit more “grown up”.

I used to hug the wall at parties and in those days didn’t drink (although I made up for that later) so I didn’t do much hanging around in the kitchen with the drinkers. My parents drank whiskey (or whisky) as an aperitif but it took me years to get used to it myself. The wine of choice in my early uni days was Red Ned, extremely rough red wine in a flagon. As I suffered from migraine, this wine was a bad choice for me and even white wine was problematic. Eventually, of course, I came a little out of my non-drinking shell, and then more out of it and then even more out of it to the point that a working lunch had to be in a licensed restaurant. I’m not the slightest bit proud of the hard-drinking me and gave it all up some 25 years ago. Cigarettes lasted longer; I only gave them up under 10 years ago which is just as well as I understand that these days a packet of cigarettes is around $50.

 

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

John F Kennedy at a dinner for Nobel Prize winners: “I think it’s the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White house – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

 Loathing lieder

 

All of us have things in life which we don’t like. Working’s a good one; most of us do it because we have to, rather than loving our job or profession. Exercise is another. Really, is there anyone who actually likes it rather than feels the need to do it? Do all those sweaty, flushed people go to the gym or for long runs because it’s the peak of their week or because it’s exercise or die!

But there are some things which go beyond dislike into the realm of hatred and loathing. Take custard, for instance, the slimy sweetness of it and of its first cousin, crème patisserie which goes under the fruit in a tart. My food loathing is various. Up there near the top are mangoes; I can’t even bear to smell them let alone eat them. Or eggplant – tasteless mush with a bitter flavour, or humous or tahini, equally bitter. Along with most people I loathe the skin which forms on hot milk. This hatred began in my pre-school days when my brother and I attended the early 1950s equivalent of kindie. It was run by Matron – really, she was called Matron – who fed us inter alia cocoa which always had scum on the top. I developed many more food loathings as I grew. Cold cooked veg was one, probably because of one occasion when I refused to eat my string beans and my mother made me stay at the table until I did, when they were cold, soggy and congealed.

I’m not sure where I picked up my loathing of tomatoes with eggs or for poached eggs or soft-boiled eggs or fried eggs cooked by someone else. I also loathe seafood, not just because I’m Jewish and seafood other than fish is forbidden but just because they’re awful – to look at or to eat.

My mother, bless her, was not an enthusiastic cook and my father had an extremely limited range of foods he would eat. There was a suite of maybe 10 meals which rotated, accompanied by a very restricted list of veg: potatoes, onions, carrots, occasional cabbage, peas and the aforementioned beans were more or less it, except for exotic vegetables like parsnips and turnips which were only used to make soup. Salads were iceberg lettuce, cucumber, celery and tomatoes. The absolute pits in my teenage lexicon of food loathing were twofold: my mother’s fish soup (made by boiling up fish in milk – aargh!) and my grandmother’s kasha, cooked buckwheat which stank so badly it forced me to the garden. Until I met my spouse, I had never eaten a mushroom or a capsicum. I’ve adapted to mushrooms but capsicums don’t like me much as I don’t like them; not loathing precisely but serious avoidance.

Another loathsome activity in our house was the process of making chicken soup. It began, naturally enough, with the raw chickens but in those days kosher chickens were absolutely dirty, still half covered with feathers and feather stumps. So job number one was lighting a candle, letting wax drip onto the draining board near the sink and sticking on the candle. The chicken carcass was then waved over the candle flame until the feathers were seared off and then the base bits were plucked. Next task was excavating the innards of the fowl where all sorts of disgusting things were found. Boiling water was used at this stage. Finally chicken shears were used to cut up the bird and it was put into a big chicken-cooking-pot, covered with cold water which was brought to the boil and skimmed. When relatively clear, parsnips, turnips, tomato, carrot, onion, parsley and celery were put in and the soup simmered for hours. When judged to be cooked, the chicken pieces were removed and the veg pressed through a sieve, The boiled chicken was so absolutely flavourless that only one uncle in our extended family would eat it, but the soup … ambrosial!

Moving away from food (as I wish I did more often) I have developed a loathing for lieder, mournful-sounding German language songs in the classical repertoire often delivered by very low-voiced chaps or mezzo sopranos. The genre developed principally through the efforts of Franz Schubert who wrote 600 of them including two well-known cycles: Die Winterreise (The Winter’s Journey) and Die Schöne Müllerin (The Miller’s Lovely Daughter) but the pits, the absolutely most awful of the genre, are Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs; to these I can only say Goodbye and Good Riddance. I also loathe counter-tenors; I think they’re creepy and now that women are allowed to sing in pubic there’s surely no need for them at all! I used to loathe any and all opera but over the decades I’ve come to love Baroque and other early opera, and I can tolerate most others; I reserve loathing just for most modern operas. The problem with loathing certain types of music is that I listen to classical music all day and part of the night. In my lovely upstairs quarters, I have stereophonic sound: two radios, each in different rooms. If lieder come on, or some modern opera, I’m forced to switch channels to ABC News Radio which finds me occasionally listening to the AFL – remarkably tolerable.

Other loathsome things include horror movies, my grandson’s choice of music, watching films with any combination of grandchildren who talk all the way through, being tickled and the back view of almost all women who show that they evidently do not possess mirrors.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Noel Coward writing to T.E. Lawrence in the RAF: “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338)”.

And of course: “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”

 

  

Lost socks and dinosaurs 

When my children were small, I often wondered where the single socks went after they got lost in the washing machine.

As a resident grandmother for more than six years, I found some time ago that the same mystery surrounded lost dummies. My then three-year-old had sufficient dummies purchased for him to have cornered the dummy market but inevitably at any one time there were only two to be found. Sometimes we had a dummy crisis and couldn't find even one. So where are they? They were not under the various beds or behind the various couches, they were not with the bath toy collection or the box of animal figures. A mystery, up there with crop circles.

Of course life being in some sort of balance most of the time, there are other things which accumulated in their place.

Like dinosaurs – lots and lots and lots of dinosaurs, large and small. Dinosaurs with unpronounceable names like pachycephalosaurus although the youngest could manage that with ease when he was not much more than three. And books and books about dinosaurs including an encyclopaedia which was almost too heavy for him to lift. For a long time this was the favoured night time reading and he insisted on paging through the entire book.

The older boy began collecting other books (cue grandma's soppy smile) and was happy to regale us with facts about the biggest, highest, largest, fastest and so on things in the known universe – when he was not playing Minecraft of course. He now plays Minecraft full time and the facts-person is now the seven-year-old; when he needs to sit on the toot he calls out to me to come for “fact time”.

In terms of kitchen paraphernalia, we have a substantial collection of less than useful household gadgets like an orange press which doesn't have the strength to press, a slow cooker which burns the stew, a scent burner of unspeakable ugliness and a very small electric nut chopper which can't.

We also have collections of other things like water bottles, lunch boxes, broken toys, puzzles with bits missing (lots of these) and “crystals” imagined from garden stones.

I used to collect 2L milk bottle screw tops for the kindie's art supplies and still round up dead batteries to deposit in an eco-friendly store's battery collection box.

And then there are screws, washers and nails which accumulate in small numbers here and there leaving us to wonder what will fall off for the want of a nail …

We also have several collections of screwdrivers, Phillip’s head and regular, littered throughout the house including the kitchen where frying pan handles need regular tightening.

And this is to say nothing about the clothing mistakes, collected in bags to go to Vinnies or the Red Cross.

I have many collections in my sewing room. Let’s start with patchwork fabric. I have two large bookcases packed with hundreds of folded swatches of fabric in a kaleidoscope of colours. As I’ve said before, in my next life I’m picking a cheaper hobby. As someone observed when I began to patchwork, you take largish pieces of fabric, cut them up, then sew them back together again. Put that way …

I also have a world class, gold medal winning collection of coloured threads – wools and cottons and exotic threads spun from second-hand saris. I have a lovely collection of beads, another of wools and a small collection of raffia and string from my brief foray into basket making.

There is also an embarrassment of tin boxes which once held Christmas cake or Danish butter biscuits, all of them filled with unfinished embroidery or tapestry projects. Ah well, one day their day might come …

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Of Gerald Ford in 1974. “A year ago he was unknown throughout America, now he’s unknown throughout the world.”

 

 

  

 More lost things

 

Did your mother ever give you a “cat’s lick and a promise”? This was when there wasn’t time for a bath so she washed your face and hands with a flannel (English-speak for a face washer) before pyjamas and bed. This phrase and many others seem to be drifting out of the English language although probably balanced by phrases drifting in. But as Grandma is not only grumpy but functionally illiterate in modern culture, I don’t know any of those.

As to those we are losing, how about “The pot calling the kettle black”; I haven’t heard that for many a year. And speaking of pots, one of my uncles had a mantra regarding tea making: “Take the pot to the kettle not the kettle to the pot”. Tea leaves were supposed to be covered by still boiling water to draw out the best flavour. My grandmother, incidentally, used to knit tea cosies, another lost art. They were knitted in at least two colours and the wool pulled behind each colour change, giving an inside padding to keep the tea pot warm. I received a lovely surprise at the wonderful Tumburumba Pioneer Women’s Hut, a place where the ordinary is celebrated, not the extraordinary. At this museum you are encouraged to touch the collection, so I was pulling out a draw to look at its contents and found 20 or 30 of the same tea cosies Nana knitted.

I have written a book (as yet unpublished – do any of you know anyone in the publishing industry?) which I’ve called after another vanished phrase: “A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down”. Women at home (well ok, they were called housewives) frequently led lives of quiet desperation. Despite the fact that women took jobs throughout World War II, they were back at home in the ‘50s and except for trips to the shops and to walk the children to or from school they were always at home. Many resorted to a pharmaceutical product called Bex Powders which apparently dulled the misery; along with a cup of tea and a good lie down they would help to get the woman through the day. Unfortunately it did bad things to the woman’s insides so it was eventually taken off the market.

Sometimes a product on the market today is named from a lost phrase. For example I’m guessing that the cleaning product called Jiff may have come from the phrase “just a jiffy” meaning in just a short time. And sometimes matters were reversed. So the product Vegemite gave rise to the phrase “we’re happy little Vegemites” from the advertising jingle.

The full jingle went: “We’re happy little Vegemites as bright as bright can be. We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea. Our mummies say we’re growing stronger every single week because we love our Vegemite, we all adore our Vegemite, it puts a rose in every cheek.”

Another advertising jingle, possibly written by the same musical genius, ran thus: “I love Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane Jelly for me; I have it for dinner, I have it for tea, a little a day is a good recipe. I like Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane Jelly for me. I like it for dinner, I like it for tea, a little each day is a good recipe. The quality’s high as the name will imply, it’s made from pure fruit, one more good reason why, I like Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane jelly for me.”

Sometimes a phrase utilised a similarity of sound to cover up or ameliorate another word. A perfect example is “None of your beeswax” with beeswax a substitute for the word “business” but sounding far less angry. Or how about “your Sunday is longer than your Monday” which meant that your slip (or petticoat) was showing beneath your skirt. I suppose talking about undergarments was another thing you didn’t do.

I recall an odd phrase regarding fashion: “Blue and green should never be seen” (together, implied). I recall having a “cocktail” dress made in a delicious patterned silk which used peacock blues and greens together, and thinking I was very daring. Cocktail dresses are another thing which has gone. In my late teenage and early 20s, you had to have dresses to fit the occasion and if you wore an ordinary dress to a cocktail party you felt humiliatingly out of place. I also had no fewer than three long dresses in my wardrobe as, again, there were occasions like wedding or barmitzvah celebrations where long dresses were de rigeur. If you wore your cocktail dress to a wedding, more humiliation.

And the above also reminds me of something my father used to say when I complained about having to sleep with curlers in my hair: “You have to suffer for beauty”. Where he got this maxim from is a mystery. I love the up front and personal criticism of an older woman trying to look younger: “Mutton dressed up as lamb”. It was fear of this which made me cut off my marvellous ringlets which had given me a good hair decade well into my forties. Another phrase struck home similarly: “She looks like a geriatric Shirley Temple”.

In the sixties there was “Ban the Bomb”, “nice girls don’t …” (but some of them certainly did!), a “baker’s dozen” still existed, children were supposed to be “seen and not heard”, first names were “Christian names”, “feed a cold and starve a fever” was a nostrum as was “you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die” (a peck being an old measure) and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Those whose intellect was challenged were called “not the full quid” (quid being Aust-speak for a pound which is what we had before dollars) or “a sandwich short of a picnic”. One comment which is old but I still use whenever I have to go upstairs a second time because I’ve forgotten something is: “I never use my head to save my feet”!

 

Quote for the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British publisher Michael Joseph: “Authors are easy to get on with – if you are fond of children.”