Bags of rags

 

When I win the lottery – which will be a trifle difficult as I’ve never bought a lottery ticket – I intend to throw the household’s collection of towels away and buy a completely new set which all match.

I might then move on to sheets, pillowcases, quilt covers and the like. Then I’ll start on tablecloths, napkins and place-mats. I’ll buy some new cutlery – it’s extraordinary how cutlery disappears, just like single socks. We use a lovely set of George Jensen stainless steel cutlery from the ‘70s but mysteriously there are missing forks and spoons but not knives.

Then I might go to various home-wear shops and buy lots and lots of things I’ve never thought of before.

I can justify this farrago of spending by reflecting on my current status as queen of recycling.

I have bags for odd socks, paper rubbish, glass, bottles and cans, hangers, soft plastics and bags of rags. Which reminds me that when newly married I answered the door of our flat to an elderly lady who was collecting rags for charity; I had to admit that at that stage of my life I hadn’t any.

All our unusable clothing (items among them which fitted when I wasn’t fat) goes to Vinnies or the Red Cross shop. Also consigned to re-sale are the buying mistakes – rather too many of those.

Used A4 paper gets torn across twice to make scribble notelets which sit in a container on my desk. Batteries are collected and eventually taken to the store which provides for their recycling.

Shoe boxes are used for storing various collections of children’s bits and pieces and the firm plastic covering of new sheets and the like is used in various ways including storing handbags on an open shelf. I also use them as storage in my sewing room. I collect tins, the sort that hold yummy biscuits or Christmas cake. These I use to store individual projects of embroidery or patchworking. It’s just as well I have them as rather too often I start an embroidery or other project and just don’t get around to finishing it.

And about boxes, and the rigid plastic containers which once held delicious chocolates … I have a number in my laundry cupboards for storing various things. One box has our world class collection of computer, phone and other cables which I have neatly wound up and tied (yes, I know I’m obnoxiously anal!). Another has electrical bits and bobs including plugs and cords of various dimensions while one of the smaller boxes holds silver and brass cleaner and their rags. Somewhat bigger boxes – purchased and not re-purposed – house collections of household cleaning sprays and the like. On top of the washing machine is one container with laundry powder and another with de-staining spray, soaker and fabric softener (probably unnecessary but it smells nice).

All in all I think I deserve that lottery win but I’m reminded of the old joke: Moishe prays to God: “God, you know I’m a good man, I’m charitable, I go to the synagogue every week, I volunteer at the homeless shelter … would it be so hard to let me win the lottery.” God replies: “Moishe, I know you’re a good man, you’re charitable, you come faithfully to shule each week, you volunteer at the homeless shelter. But Moishe, meet me half way. Buy a ticket!”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

“Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the complete opposite.”

Described by Laurence J. Peter as a “Polish proverb”.

My couturier of choice 

These days my couturier of choice is K-Mart; if I lived closer to Warringah Mall I might add Target and Best and Less.

I’ve worn a skirt once in four years as the life I now lead leans towards trousers. The trousers are topped by very large shirts as there is rather more of me than there used to be. Often the net worth of my entire outfit, shoes included, is less than the cost of the scarf I might be wearing.

Sometimes I think back to the Olden Days and what was required then in the clothes department. For example, there was never a time when I didn’t have at least three long dresses in the wardrobe because they were worn to weddings and other formal parties. They often had a stole (Olden Days speak for a wrap) or a bolero (Olden Days speak for short jacket} which only covered the back and arms. This was because the Olden Days rules said you had to have your arms covered while dining; the stole or bolero came off at the end of the meal ready for dancing. We also had cocktail dresses – short dresses in some evening-ish material often also with jackets of varying sorts. Other styles of dress were for other occasions and woe betide if you wore the wrong type of garment for the occasion – utter humiliation!

In my young teenage, we wore very full skirts held out by several petticoats, some of them ribbed. You can see them in videos of the Rock ‘n Roll era. Then there was a vogue for very tight trousers made of flowered furnishing material. I was thin in those days but I still had to lie on the floor to zip these trousers up. The same happened with the advent of jeans which in the Olden Days were not made of stretch material.

The era of short skirts was ushered in by the appearance of British model Jean Shrimpton at the 1956 Melbourne Cup with a dress a modest few inches above the knee. It was considered scandalous but inevitably ushered in the mini skirt era, followed inexorably by the maxi skirt and somewhere in there were the midi skirts. I still have somewhere packed away the outfit I wore for my 21^st; the skirt was so short I’m surprised I didn’t have matching undies. And there were hot pants, the shortest of short shorts.

Shoes at sometime in my late teenage were corked heel wedges which curiously have woven in and out of fashion since the 1930s. As I grew older and a tad more elegant, I began to wear stilettos which got higher and higher over the decades. Regrettably, because they make your posture look nice and your legs shapely, I can’t go above a two-inch heel these days, if that. Mostly it’s sneakers or sandals.

As my working life extended to outrageous hours and required lots of bits and bobs to carry around, the size of my handbags increased and I now have quite a collection of bags-which-are-never-used but I can’t bear to throw out. As I now don’t have to carry packets of cigarettes and lighters around, a set of makeup and all the debris of a working mother’s life my bags have become smaller and smaller.

In the Olden Days, you wore a slip (petticoat) under your dress and had to be certain your Sunday wasn’t longer than your Monday – or your slip was showing below your dress hem. We were admonished by our mothers never to leave the house with a safety pin holding the elastic of our knickers (undies) together, just in case we got run over and the ambulance men would see. We also wore “step-ins”, extremely tight elasticised tummy squashers which I think had gizmos hanging down in four places to attach your stockings, long before stocking-tights.

When I see the pregnant women these days stuffing their bumps into tight dresses or t-shirts I recall the maternity clothes of the 1970s, large shapeless sacks with blouses or jumpers underneath.

And a word about hats. I’ve always adored hats and in my teenage years this was on the shopping list for going to synagogue on the High Holydays. However I always wanted a great big wheel of a straw hat which I was never permitted to buy; as I was/am fairly short, my mother said I would look like a mushroom. Happily the last decade-plus of my working life was spent at The Great Synagogues so hats became de rigueur and I was at last able to build up a collection.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British novelist Anita Brookner in a letter to The Times: “I am forty six and have been for some years past”.

 

 

 

The words that were

The names of things evolve through time. Take sneakers, for example. They were once sports shoes, sandshoes and plimsolls, named after the plimsoll line, a reference mark located on a ship's hull which indicates the maximum depth to which the vessel may be safely immersed when loaded with cargo (explanation courtesy of Google). Presumably plimsolls were invented for wearing aboard ship, possibly on those interminable journeys between England and India. Speaking of which, one of the explanations for the origins of the word “posh” comes from the same slice of history. Apparently, the upper-class types who peopled the British raj had “POSH” stencilled on their luggage meaning “Port Out, Starboard Home” so their cabins would always face the shore.

Another word with older iterations is bedspread which was coverlet which was counterpane; doona was originally duvet and eiderdown (named for the down of eider ducks). Knitwear was jumpers was jerseys was guernseys. Nail polish was nail varnish. Then for Australians, movie was cinema was flicks was filums was pitchers. Servo was service station was garage; garages had real people in them who came out to fill up your car and put pressure in your tires.

Then there are sayings which are falling into disuse like “out at woop woop”, meaning very far away or “back o’ Bourke”, even further away. The dog might still be on the tucker box somewhere near Gundagai, but the word tucker has almost disappeared. In an effort to support the continued use of Aussie slang, tucker is what I provide to our cockatoo flock, the dog and occasionally the grandchildren.

There are also habits which possibly should die but haven’t. For example, when forced to a sudden stop when driving, my left hand lashes out and thumps the person sitting in the passenger seat across the chest. Or the car seat itself when unoccupied. Obviously this habit came from the days without seat-belts but it is so hard-wired I simply can’t stop. What I have thankfully grown out of is being sick on car trips. As a small child I vomited my way to a holiday in Surfers Paradise, as a result of which my brother and I were sent up by plane the next Christmas.

People in my family held fast to some pieces of folk wisdom. If you spilled salt, you had to throw a pinch over your shoulder; I think the devil came into this somehow. You were never to walk under ladders but only around them, a relatively sensible dictum. It was bad luck to open an umbrella inside the house, possibly because it would be bad luck to have a spoke in your eye.

 

If someone sneezed, someone else would say “God bless” or “bless you”. One explanation also refers to the devil that you sneezed out! Triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13, was not marked in my family but I just thought I’d show off by knowing the word for it!

 

What was very common in my family and indeed among everyone I knew was the need to knock on wood, or say knock on wood, whenever you spoke about something positive or hoped for good luck to continue. Frequently my family and those Jewish people around us, used another phrase, in Yiddish/Hebrew: Kein ayin hara. Run together in the way in was by English Yiddish-speakers, it came out as keneinahora (k’nayn a hora). Kein means no or without in German and Yiddish, whilst ayin hara refers to the evil eye in Hebrew. So conversation would go like this: she’s got a real talent for the piano, keneinahora; he’s growing up to be a real mensh (a good man in Yiddish), keneinahora. My English-born grandmother, who lived with us, used this phrase all the time. According to British rabbi, Rabbi Julian Sinclair, the evil eye is an ancient Jewish superstition. Good fortune should not be celebrated too loudly and ostentatiously, lest it draw the attention of the evil eye, a spiritual force that would snatch away our blessings.

 

Other sayings and habits were much more domestic along the lines of “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Did this, I wonder, emanate from some early apple marketing board? We didn’t eat watermelon after swimming (or possibly swam after eating watermelon), we were “happy little Vegemites” from the advertising slogan, a watched pot didn’t boil, our Sunday shouldn’t be longer than our Monday (your slip/petticoat shouldn’t hang below your skirt) and as you grew older, if you were female, you shouldn’t look like “mutton dressed up like lamb”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

US Comedian George Burns: “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

 

 

Friday Funnies No. 2

 

Well you’ve all been good, so here’s the second round of student bloopers in our Friday Funnies list.

“In the Middle Ages, King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the age of Shivery, King Harlot mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was canonized by George Bernard Shaw and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offence. In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

“The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello’s interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of the blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

“The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. As a Queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah”. Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

“The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors … Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear ‘was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote ‘Donkey Hote’. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost”. Then his wife dies and he wrote ‘Paradise Regained”.

“During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic … Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean and this was called the Pilgrim’s Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock they were greeted by Indians who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. The Indian squabs carries porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all of this.

One of the causes of the revolutionary war was that the English put tacks in the tea … Finally the colonist won the war and no longer had to pay for taxis.”

And a little science and culture …

“Meanwhile in Europe the Enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity … gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in autumn when the apples are flaling off the trees.

“Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel …Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music.

“The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts … Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the ‘Organ of the Species’. Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Leonid Brezhnev: “The trouble with free elections is you never know who is going to win.”      

 

Friday Funnies No.1

In the olden days when my children were teenagers, we were always together on Friday nights for Shabbat (Friday night) dinner. After the food was the time for Friday funnies, which any of us had picked up through the week. For some reason, I kept some of them and now I can share them with you.

First is a list of Staff Development Courses allegedly run by the University of Queensland. Under the heading of Self-Improvement Courses come: “Creative Suffering, Overcoming Peace of Mind, Guilt Without Sex, Moulding your child’s behaviour through Guilt and Fear, Whine your way to Alienation and How to overcome Self-Doubt through Pretence and Ostentation.”

There were Craft Courses including “Self-actualisation through Macrame” and “Bonsai your pet”. Health and Fitness courses include: “Creative tooth decay, The joy of Hypochondria, Bio-feedback and how to stop it, Tap Dance your way to social ridicule and Optional Body functions.”

And under the list of Interdisciplinary Courses there are: “Money can make you rich, Packaging and selling your child, Career opportunities in El Salvador, Looters’ guide to American cities, Sinus drainage at home, Basic kitchen taxidermy and 1001 other uses for your vacuum cleaner.”

Another funnies list required a knowledge of the Greek alphabet which I had at the time. It used words written in Greek which had an English meaning. For example “klepto” for I take, “omo” for I wash, “oderono” for I smell sweet, “bloto” for I forget, “so so” for I am average, “no no” for I must not, “dodo” for I am extinct, “pillo” for I sleep, “limbo” for I am lost, “kompos” for garden, “dedloss” for dropout, “dragon” for mother-in-law, “gorgon” for wife 1^st thing in the morning, “akordion” for musician, “dismay” for exam results and “holiday” for students’ dream, “organ” for church music, “bigbos” for fearless leader, “hotair” for political speech and “failia” for Greek test.

And then there was the world according to student bloopers. There were various iterations of this idea, but the one I have was put together by Richard Lederer from student bloopers collected by teachers from US high school through to university level.

“The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irrigation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.”

And there’s this: “The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked “Am I my brother’s son?”. God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma, Jacob, son of Issac stole his brother’s birthmark” and so on.

Another offering dealt with Greek history: “Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth”. It goes on to talk about myths, including the one about Achilles, whose mother dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Socrates, according to the students, was a famous Greek teacher who died from an overdose of wedlock. In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits and threw the java. The reward to the victor was “a coral wreath”.

That’s it for this week but if you’re really good I’ll give you more next time.

 

Quote for the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Creations.

US humourist Robert Benchley allegedly sent this telegram to The New Yorker on arriving in Venice: “Streets full of water. Please advise.”

 

Age and how to show it 

You look down one day and find your arms and hands are peppered with age-spots;
Thea Astley called these the “mildew of time”. The next day you find them on your face. Your fervent hope is that they may eventually join up and give you an all-over tan.

You have your hair cut short to avoid looking like a geriatric Shirley Temple but instead you look like a parrot when you wake up. And annoyingly your hair, which was supposed to be crisply white by now, is pepper-and-salt-ish with only a few white swooshes.

Putting lipstick on your now lop-sided lips takes great precision to avoid looking like a clown, not helped by what I believe are called “smoker’s lines” above the top lip.

As Germaine Greer once said, you know you’re getting old when your hair migrates from your legs to your chin. Facial hair is the hidden secret of ageing.

Then there's your neck: tortoise wrinkles and a turkey gobbler dewlap. Your upper arms wobble underneath and your torso is blubbery. Your legs are covered in varicose and spider veins and your feet swell.

You need glasses for living not just for reading, your hearing is slowly failing, your teeth are disappearing so you already wear a small denture. You have regularly appearing aches and pains and you see your doctors more often than you do your best friends.

There's really not much about getting old that's appealing unless it's a certain feeling of empowerment.

You can get away with not knowing people's names by calling everyone darling.

You can have your nails painted with electric blue varnish and not care if other people who still use the word varnish keep theirs pale.

You can contemplate having a bracelet tattoo (but probably never have it done because it apparently hurts) but in my case you brave another hurt and have your ears pierced for the first time at 72.

Where once you wouldn't leave the house without face-make-up, eye-make-up, lipstick, earrings, perfume, stockings, heels, you've now got it down to lipstick, earings and occasionally perfume.

You know that you will probably come out on top in any conversation with, say, the police, the local council or the grand-children's school's administration, because you can flex your very authoritative voice to get you there.

And a corollary: you can exercise your considerable charm on wait-persons, shop assistants and the like to leave positive feelings behind like the waft of perfume as an elegant woman walks by.

You may, in fact, be that elegant woman because now you dress down but do it well. You cover the wobbly arms and the pudgy midriff, you distract from the age-spotted hands by delicious nail colour and you find a very good hairdresser.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Princess Anne on pregnancy: “It’s a very boring time. I’m not particularly maternal – it’s an occupational hazard of being a wife.”

---

 

In the springtime of my dotage

 

I am now in the springtime of my dotage, ageing and retired.

If I’d considered it at all, I doubtless thought this would lead me to a quieter life with lots of reading, craft, seeing friends and pursuing hobbies. Instead, it’s turned out to be Housewife Mark II.

I am blessed to be living with my daughter, her partner and two grandsons, with my son, daughter-in-law and three more grandchildren close by. Between us, we three women manage the day-to-day activities which begin by getting the children ready for school and end by getting the children ready for bed. Taking four of them to school and one to kindie requires constant fine tuning, as does the afternoon pickup. Not only is there the plain “pick up and go home”, but the older four have activities after school – gymnastics for the girls, swimming for one of the girls and the boys, speech pathology for two of them, and art for one. In summer there’s tennis and Nippers on the weekends. School holidays bring code camp, sports camp, gym camp, surfing lessons and I’m sure there’s more but I just need to sit down and rest a bit after thinking about them all.

My principle job is driving the boys to school and picking them up in the afternoon. Or is it doing the washing. The two boys generate a lot of washing, especially the elder who’s idea of tidying his room is to put every piece of clothing hanging about into the dirty wash basket, worn or most often not worn. At the end of the week there’s at least three wash loads just for them, to say nothing of towels and adult clothes. The sheets, thank goodness, now go to the laundry.

I have reinstated myself as queen of the kitchen but on the cleaning side. My daughter is the cook. I pride myself in creating a sparkling clean stovetop and taking a soapy cloth to the white cupboard and drawer fronts. The house we now live in has a huge walk-in pantry; I salivate just thinking about it! Putting away the shopping which I have had delivered and keeping the pantry tidy, is a wonderment, as I think Yul Brunner said in The King and I. I’m also the queen of watering the large number of plants we have on a triangular wooden frame in the living room and creating attractive live mixed-flower-pots on the outside table. Unfortunately, the cockatoos think they’re attractive too; one aggressive fellow (well, who knows if he was a he) stared me straight in the eye and pulled out one whole flowering viola. I shooed him away but, inevitably, he (or she) came back while I was out and took care of the other three. In a triumph of hope over experience, I tried hand feeding the cockatoos a few times only to be bitten, badly. Eventually I gave up and we now throw seeds over the balcony so they can forage on the ground as when we fed them on the balcony they were eating the wooden table.

As the possessor of a sewing machine and an entire room in which to use it, I’m continuing my life as a mender for both families; hems up or down a specialty. I do a reasonably good line in mending holes and rips but only on clothes which don’t leave the house. Anything too fancy must go to the alteration lady. The room with the sewing machine also has bookcases full of fabric acquired over 30 years of visiting the quilt and craft show, and more bookcases full of other hobbies: embroidery, card making and more recently creating art with fabric, threads, beads and other notions.

So when I think about it, despite the housework and kid chauffeuring, I still make time for craft, for reading and listening to music, so my dotage is looking fine.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations

America diplomat Warren R. Austin in a debate on the Middle East: “Jews and Arabs should settle their differences like good Christians.”