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?”

 The hair of the yak

 

Everyone has their own stories of life in lockdown. Around our house it mainly focusses on “grandma school”. As the spare adult in our household, I get to teach the 7-year-old; the 12-year-old fortunately takes care of himself. Thankfully the teachers prepare well-devised learning segments because too much of what the children learn these days is unfamiliar. For instance, do any of my fellow oldies know what “turnaround facts” are? Easy, peasy … 2+3=5 and 3+2=5; wasn’t that obvious! Then there’s “Friends of Ten” and “Juicy Words” (otherwise known as adjectives). This afternoon we’re going to do Olympic work like paper plate discus and marshmallow shot-put; that should be fun. We’re also working on writing stories with adjectives, capital letters and adequate punctuation.

Another aspect of life-in-lockdown concerns the fact that hairdressers are closed. As a result of this, my fringe has grown so long that I resemble a yak. There’s something about hair which is vital to one’s appearance; if your hair looks right, then you look right – well, right-er if you know what I mean.

I had very long and very thick hair for all of my childhood. It was usually in one or two very long and very thick plaits which I couldn’t manage so I had to wait for my mother to plait my hair each morning before I did anything. Hair washing was an agonising process as this was in the days before conditioner. After the washing, my very long and very thick hair became a very large bird’s nest of knots which took at least two adults to comb and reduced me always to tears. Eventually at the age of 13 I rebelled; the only rebellion I recall in my childhood. Off the hair came, at my mother’s hairdresser. She was crying, I was crying, the hairdresser was crying and when we got home, my father was crying.

Throughout my teenage years, hair became other sorts of problems. At one point it was fashionable to have very straight hair. We addressed this in two ways. One was pinning wet hair around our heads in a spiral until it dried; the other was to iron it on the ironing board! When the fashion reversed, as fashions usually do, and I needed curly hair, I would go to bed with my hair wound round curlers held in place by very uncomfortable sticks. I once had a perm (short for permanent wave) which in my case made me look like a visitor from darkest Oblovia. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and visited my mother’s talented hairdresser that I discovered I actually had curly hair which waved into delicious loose ringlets. I had a good hair day for a decade! In my late 40s, however, I was concerned, as I’ve said before, not to look like a geriatric Shirley Temple and reluctantly cut the ringlets off.

Of course hair is not confined to one’s head. My friends and I were deeply troubled in teenage by dark hair on our arms. The remedy was to coat the arms with a paste of peroxide and ammonia which lightened the hair when it didn’t turn it orange. Hair on our legs was easily solved by shaving which was thought of as faintly dashing. In later years waxing was the go. Hair under the arms was not talked about but dealt with in the same way as legs.

Which leaves the final hair problem – hair on the face!

Fortunately, the natural down on my cheeks was very light, which considering the darkness of all my other hair was a blessing. But the dark hair on my upper lip was a big problem. It was dealt with either by the peroxide and ammonia treatment or waxed completely off, a painful but effective solution. In later life I broke all the rules and shaved it off which was supposed to lead to it coming back thicker than ever. I can confidently assert this is not true.

And then, in Germaine Greer’s immortal words: “You know you’re getting old when your hair migrates from your legs to your chin.” I anticipate having a deep and personal relationship with a beautician to the end of my life.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Clarence Darrow: “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.”

 

 

 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.”