More phrases of life

Thanks to some of my devoted readers, and some more excavations of my memory, I have some more lovely sayings of great mystery.

For example, a small space might be described as “no room to swing a cat”. Why a cat, and why the image of holding a cat by its tail and swinging it around your head. Who would do that? However, I think it might be a reference to a “cat-o-nine-tails”, that vicious whip used notoriously on ships. It was a collection of individual leather strips bound together at one end but left loose at the other, used as punishment in the Royal Navy and elsewhere including on convicts in Australia. The loose thongs were knotted for maximum hurt. It was “swung” – lifted up by the perpetrator – and then lashed onto the miscreant’s back. A more plausible explanation I think.

A saying with an obvious meaning is that something has as much likelihood of happening as “a snowball’s chance in Hell”. Isn’t this wonderfully colourful? Another easily understood but colourful phrase is “I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole”. It comes, one imagines, from the image of a barge sailing along a canal being propelled – poled -- along by the boatman. Another version of this phrase is: “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.” Would ten feet be the length of a barge pole?

Then there’s “I’d take that with a grain of salt” (or “pinch of salt”). The meaning is to be sceptical of what’s being presented to you. But I can’t make the connection between a grain of salt and a sceptical opinion. All correspondence entered into!

In Australia there are some delightful phrases for a far distance. We say something’s at” the back of beyond”, or “the back o’ Bourke” or “beyond the black stump”. And if you’re going a far distance, you’re going “out to woop woop!”

My lovely friend Janet in London has contributed “kicked the bucket” which is a curious way of saying someone has “snuffed it” and presumably is the source for a “bucket list”, those things you want to do before you go. Janet said she loathes “passed away” or even worse, “passed”. When her time comes she wants to just plain die!

Another lovely friend, Denise in Lennox Head, has contributed what she calls “a ripper”: “Cutting off your nose to spite your face”. We all know how to use it but what on earth does in mean? And where does it come from? According to a quick dip into Google, the phrase has been around since the 17^th Century. It means not to be self-destructive when seeking revenge.

“So far, so good!” Obvious meaning but how was it crafted? Apparently its first recorded use was in 1721, but why did it catch on, so to speak?

Another interesting phrase is “by the skin of your teeth” to describe a very narrow victory. Teeth don’t actually have skin, so who cooked up the metaphor. In fact it’s found in the Bible, in the book of Job who says: “My bones cling to my skin and to my flesh and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.” (New RSV translation). It might possibly have meant the enamel on one’s teeth but who knows?

This phrase is in the same category as seeing something “in the corner of my eye”. We know what it means but eyes don’t actually have corners.

And while we’re talking words and grammar, I was reflecting the other day on the cavalier way we used to say the most awful things in the Olden Days.

I’m sure you all remember often-naughty Golliwog, the black character in Enid Blyton’s Noddy stories for small children. Apparently Golly was removed from more modern editions of Noddy on the grounds that at various levels the character was a stereotype for people of colour being bad.

If you gave someone something and then took it back, you were called an “Indian giver”. A certain long handled brush used to remove spiderwebs from the ceiling was called a
“Turk’s Head brush”.

Children did a selecting game which started: “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo, catch a Nigger by the toe …”  And we had boot polish coloured “Nigger Brown”. There was also another children’s rhyme or game which I barely remember but somewhere it had the words: “Ching, chong chinaman …” Early explorers, surveyors and geographers thought nothing of naming features Chinaman’s Beach or Chinaman’s Creek and occasionally Jew’s Hill or the like. When I sat on the Geographical Names Board of NSW we discussed this issue and whether or not these names should be changed. At the time, we left them alone because they emanated from a specific time in Australian history when these appellations were non-controversial. I’m not sure whether they’re still there.

Another phrase which is firmly fixed in time was the expression the Australian troops in New Guinea during WWII called the native New Guineans who helped them navigate the Kokoda Track: “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”. It was meant well but really, how insulting …

And a last linguistic note … I’ve only found out very recently the meaning of Aborigine. It comes from the Latin ab origine which means “from the beginning”.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations”:

The American writer Dorothy Parker when told that Calvin Coolidge had died: “How can they tell?”

 

 Phrases of life

After telling someone that I’d “dodged another bullet” – some test results came back negative – I started musing on the various interesting phrases we use in everyday speech without thinking too much about them.

I’ve been using “dodging bullets” as a metaphor for not having whatever ghastly disease I thought I was in for, given my symptoms on a given doctor’s visit. Despite having a degree of heart disease and rotten breathing, despite the fact I use a space-alien’s mask at night to help, you’ll be pleased to know that I don’t have a lot of other diseases which kept me up at night worrying.

Another of the commonplace phrases we use without thinking is I/we/he/she has/have “bitten off more than I/we/he/she can chew”. Does it come from an animal exemplar? Who knows?

Many other phrases are actually quite odd yet we use them regardless. For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Why those animals? Couldn’t it be raining lizards and bees, or raining elephants and monkeys? Who knows?

How about: “I haven’t seen (he/she/it etc) for donkeys’ years?” Why donkeys? Where did the phrase come from?

Then there’s the idea that something could be “between Hell and high water”. I get Hell as the low point but why not Heaven as the upper limit.

Have you ever said that something or another had “the ring of truth”? Is that ring as in something on your finger or ring as in bell? And either way, what’s the connection with truth?

We often use the phrase that something or another “looked for all the world like …”. “Looked like” is obvious so why throw in “world”?

How about commenting that something has “given up the ghost”? I suppose it has a connection to something no longer alive but the more I say it the more opaque it seems.

And speaking of opacity, how is it that something is said to be “dead straight”? Really, how did these two words connect? When did “dead” become a synonym for completely, or absolutely or really?

Saying that you might have caught your “death of cold” is also a little weird. I guess it may have come from the Very Olden Days when catching cold might have seemed a precursor to pneumonia when death was not unlikely. But these days?

“Cool as a cucumber” is another beauty. Why not “cool as a lettuce” or “cool as a capsicum”?

Then there’s “as right as rain”? Unless this was coined by drought-stricken Australian farmers I’m not sure what is it about rain that makes it right.

How about “the crack of time” or “the nick of time”? I believe there’s modern cultural usage of the first phrase but I’m thinking about the way we often say these two as casual throwaways. What cracks, or what gets nicked?

I looked up the phrase “mad as a hatter” thinking it came from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  and Through the Looking Glass where the Mad Hatter was a significant character. But in fact this the phrase had an existence before the mid-19^th Century when these books were published. According to Wikipedia, mercury was used in the manufacturing of felt hats during the 19th century, causing a high rate of mercury poisoning among those working in the hat industry. Mercury poisoning causes neurological damage, including slurred speech, memory loss, and tremors, which led to the phrase “mad as a hatter”. Isn’t it nice to have an explanation?

Of course worrying about the meaning of phrases could have you “at your wit’s (or possibly “wits’) end” meaning you tried everything you could think of but failed. That actually makes some sense.

Which cannot be said for the phrase “time out of mind”! Any explanations appreciated …

I’ve also wondered about “a stitch in time saves nine”. Why not ten, or twenty-seven? I suspect it’s just because of the time/nine rhyme (no pun intended).

One phrase which definitely makes sense is “once in a blue moon”. There is such a phenomenon as a blue moon when there’s an additional moon at certain times in a year. I was going to tell you the precise definition but frankly, I couldn’t understand it!

And just before I close, a nod to Cockney rhyming slang. Your “china” is your mate … “mate/china plate/china”. And a hat is a titfer as in “hat/titfertat/titfer”. Stairs are “apples and pears” and wife is “trouble and strife”. There’s also “telling porkies” which comes from “pork pies/lies! I didn’t come from a cockney speaking family but I recall that we did us the term “titfer” for hat and I still use the term “porkies” for my grandchildrens’ untruths!

So let me know any more strange phrases which come to your mind. And a special callout to my friend Ester who is a highly accomplished Interpreter and Translator. Just imagine what she has to cope with if any of these phrases crop up in her work!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Richard Nixon on welcoming the moon-landing astronauts back to Earth: “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.”

 Calming effect

 

I live in a disorderly house. Not, I hasten to say, a house of ill-repute or brothel (in the way the two ideas were linked in the Very Olden Days). Just a house riddled with children and mess, the two being rather synonymous. I don’t think our house is much worse than any other house in which children lurk but the one thing it conspicuously lacks is an atmosphere of calm. And calm is something I frequently need.

So I’ve developed calming strategies. None of them involve stuffing myself into tight clothes and running on a machine. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and running in the street. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and spending most of my income at a gym.

Since my retirement from the paid workforce I no longer need to awake with the dawn. However, I still get up relatively early so I can perform my morning calming rituals in peace without small people buzzing around. These rituals involve multiple cups of tea and multiple games of Solitaire. If there are no grandchildren up, I may read a book but I have worked out that you need more calm to read than to play monotonous games of Solitaire.

Another calming ritual is cleaning or clearing out. Someone once said that you should make use “of the chinks of time”. I’ve interpreted this to mean those few minutes when you wait for the kettle to boil or wait for someone else to do something else (“go and clean your teeth and brush your hair”) or you’ve got ten minutes before you have to leave the house.

In these chinks of time you can, for instance, tidy a kitchen draw; this is a very satisfying activity and in not very much time, particularly if you drink as much tea as I do and multiply that with the number of minutes you have the kettle on the boil, you can have the whole kitchen drawer problem sorted in no time.

Other kitchen activity which can be “chinked” (I hope you love my neologism) includes sweeping the floor, a quick clean of the microwave, wiping out one kitchen shelf at a time and wiping down the cupboard fronts in sequence. A little pause here for a Grumpy Grandma gripe. The cupboard faces in our kitchen are not only white, the paint is slightly textured and there is double beading on all four sides of each cupboard face which attracts a great deal of dirt and dust. What could have possessed the builders of this house to condemn the kitchen cleaner to constantly having to clean the cupboard faces? Given that most kitchen cleaning is done by women and most builders are men, then our builders must have hated their wives.

The key to all this kitchen activity is that you set a goal which is easily achievable. By the time you finish the task you feel fine.

There is, however, another calming thing to do in the kitchen which takes a long time but is even more satisfying. You book a date with your grocery store cupboard/s to clean and rearrange. This is extraordinarily soothing in process and you feel so satisfied when it’s done. No really, take my word for it. I once spent a blissful hour or so re-arranging my cousin’s store cupboard which, I might add, became a family joke.

Really, really good smells can have a calming effect. Like the smell of frying onions or newly mown grass and of course, the smell of a wood fire. In fact everything about a wood fire is calming including just watching the flames dance. Then there’s gardenias or frangipani and other delicious flower smells – lavender, old-fashioned roses, freesias and even carnations.

As a young person, I soothed my soul when troubled by going into the garden with a large basket and some secateurs. I would cut many flowers, take them into the laundry and arrange them in a variety of vases. The process of arranging the flowers created in my mood a kind of restful serenity which took me out of my miseries.

I suppose, though, that the ultimate in calming activity is listening to calming music. This type of music includes almost anything Baroque and the marvels of Gregorian chant (or as my children used to call it: “Mum’s Church music”). But maybe the pinnacle of musical calm is the huge opus of the extraordinary polymath, Hildegard of Bingen. Her music, sacred and secular, has become so well known in recent years that ABC Classic devotes a whole evening to Hildegard close to International Women’s Day which it calls its Hilda-thon and which is utterly glorious.

So between my kitchen and my music and all the other strategies, I think I’ve finally got calm covered, which for a card-carrying Depressive is a decidedly Good Thing!

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Actor David Niven: “You know where you are with Errol Flynn. He always lets you down.”

 Suffering for beauty

 My father once told me that you had to suffer for beauty. This in response to my complaints about the rollers I had to put in my hair overnight, secured with stiff plastic pins. Evidently it was a time when large curls were required. This was the day after hair had to be dead straight. To solve that problem was less painful but much more awkward. Hair had to be either ironed (long hair that is – I doubt the iron treatment worked with short) or wrapped round the head and secured with bobby pins.

Ah, fashion. Even in our suburban fastness we yearned to be up to date.

In the 1950s – and maybe into the very early ‘60s – we wore flared or dirndl skirts held up by layers of petticoats some of which had rope sewn into them to keep them stiff-ish. This was usually topped by a twin-set and pearls. Twin-sets, for the uninitiated, were tight little short sleeved, crew necked jumpers topped by cardigans in the same colour. While pearls finished the outfit, I suspect that was only for our mothers; we may have worn a string of beads but memory doesn’t serve me here. These flaring skirts were just the ticket for rock and roll; in any movie or tv show of the period you’ll see expanses of white petticoats as the girls were thrown back over the boy’s arm. I can’t quite remember if the Bodgies and the Widgies preceded the Rock ‘n’ Roll culture but the flared skirts were in there somewhere.

Into the '60s we suffered for beauty another way. I recall wearing very, very tight trousers made from furnishing fabric with zero stretch, decorated with large florals. They were so tight that you had to stretch out on the floor to pull the zipper up. I rather think the same solution was required for the earliest denim jeans.

As the ‘60s progressed skirts suddenly became shorter and shorter. By the time I turned 21 in 1967 the skirts were so short they should have come with matching undies. There was a parallel fashion called “hot pants” which were shorts of extreme shortness. I still possess somewhere the outfit I wore for my 21^st (a party, by the way, which I absolutely hated as I loathed being the centre of attention). This outfit was a ridiculously short skirt with a little sleeveless top. The fabric was beautiful but honestly, I can’t imagine that I ever wore this. I have also kept a pair of hot pants with beaded turnups, shorter than some swimmers!

Australia’s short skirt history was ushered in by the scandalous appearance at the Melbourne Cup in 1965 of English model Jean Shrimpton in a dress daringly cut to four inches above the knee. This garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity. And while talking British models, do you remember Twiggy of the waif-like stature and the black-ringed eyes who looked for all the world like a famine victim.

Needless to say, short skirts eventually gave way to long skirts; if they reached mid-calf they were midi-skirts or maxi-skirts if they reached the ankle.

And a moment’s reflection on undergarments. After the dirndl petticoats left the fashion stage we went to the slim fitting “slip” as they were called, made of silk or synthetic with very narrow straps. Interestingly, girls’ school uniforms – sleeveless with box pleats usually – were called gymslips; as Americans might say: “go figure!” Your underwear drawer always contained full slips and half-slips just for skirts and I rather think the occasional long slip to wear under evening clothes.

Evening clothes in the ‘60s and probably into the ‘70s always included several long dresses. These were de rigueur for events like weddings or balls. Custom had it in those long-ago days that you needed to have your arms covered for dining, then you could be sleeveless for dancing. So evening dresses often had a small jacket or bolero made to match. I recall also having cocktail dresses; not sure how they were defined but they were always short. If you turned up to a function in the wrong length clothes you were utterly humiliated.

Although I was extremely thin in the Olden Days, I along with all other women in the ‘50s and ‘60s wore “step-ins”, very thick elasticated fabric which trimmed down your hips and tummy and had four hanging tabs to which you attached your stockings. (“Panty hose” came in with increasingly short skirts.) A garter belt which held up stockings without the horridly tight step-in became a sexy alternative, paired with loose French knickers.

From stockings we can segue to shoes. In the ‘60s we had appalling wedgies, shoes with a very thick cork sole. But then narrow, elegant high heels became the vogue and have stayed so ever since. Suffering for beauty certainly applies to wearing shoes with anything from three to four-inch heels, perhaps even higher. Yes, they make your legs look slim and shapely but oh, the agony of wearing and walking in them. In my latter years, alas, my heels have headed south and I have none more than one and a half inches.

And a postscript for a discussion of fashion. A raglan sleeve with a seam which runs from under the arm to the collarbone was named after Lord Raglan, the 1^st Baron Raglan who is said to have devised this style because he’d lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo. Cardigans were also named after a military man, in this case the 7^th Earl of Cardigan, a British army major-general who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Apparently British officers wore knitted wool waistcoats during the war which morphed into the cardigan as we know it.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on politician Anthony Eden, once Britain’s Foreign Secretary: “He was not only a bore; he bored for England.”

 

New pet and food musings

The house has a new pet, a Pineapple Conure called Chico. It’s a species of small parrot, very friendly and endearing. It climbs up my daughter’s arm to perch on her shoulder and happily walks around the place when he (or possibly she) is let out of his (or her) cage, which is most of the time. It doesn’t yet fly but apparently will do some day. Chico loves walking around on the floor and yesterday walked into the shower where he tossed his head back in apparent bliss while the water ran on him. Remarkably, our large dog Yogi is not interested in Chico at all, and considering he could swallow the bird in two gulps this is a Good Thing.

Chico pecks, but is marginally less vicious than the cockatoos. These, by the way, have gone to eat the balcony rails and wooden tables of someone else’s house. We were rather fed up with their destructiveness and stopped feeding them. They kept coming back, but in fewer numbers and eventually stopped coming altogether. Unfortunately stopping feeding the cockatoos meant we lost the beautiful crested pigeons who also came for the feed. However, the bush/brush turkeys which came to feed on the cockatoo seeds as well are no loss; they are really ugly birds.

Because I like to keep you all up to date on the household pets, I should record that the extraordinarily boring lizard which took up space in the back room has gone to another home. I can’t imagine a more useless pet. The only way you knew it was alive was its occasional blinking and the fact that you’d find it in a new position every day in its cage.

The lovely big dog, Yogi, is still doing well in his own quiet way and suffers without complaint the attention of the children who all love cuddling and kissing him and climbing all over him. The Church Point mob now have a spaniel puppy which is as cute as the proverbial button. That’s along with their cat which needs a personality transplant; all it ever does when it sees you is run away.

Something was niggling my memory when I described the Pineapple Conure and it’s now come to the fore of my elderly brain. It’s the memory of a delicacy which my mother made if they had guests over and thus absolutely nothing to do with pets. Some segue, eh!

First you cut a pineapple lengthwise so the leaves of the crown lay flat. You then carve the pineapple flesh into cubes along the length of the core. Next step is to apply jelly crystals to the surface of each cube, alternating green with red and with yellow so the flattened pineapple looks like a multicoloured chequerboard. Toothpicks went into each cube so you could pick it up. I guess it was a delicacy because of the amount of time spent on getting it prepared.

Two other “cocktail” offerings which I recall are short lengths of celery with peanut butter along the length and skewers with a cube of hard cheese and an inch or so of pepperoni. These two were not in my mother’s repertoire but tended to appear at any party held by young people. Ah, parties … not my favourite activity. This was largely because in my teens and early 20s I was a little shy. No-one who has known me only in my noisy and ubiquitous days would believe this, but it is true. I was also not much of a drinker and certainly not of Red Ned, the rough red wine in flagons, common at university parties of the time. Again, those of you who only knew me in my whiskey drinking days would find this hard to accept but thus it was.

While I can’t blame university for turning me into an alcohol abuser, it certainly set me on a lifetime of smoking. I was only 17 when I arrived at university and desperately needed a strategy for when I was alone. The finding, lighting and smoking of cigarettes became a piece of theatre which made me feel occupied – and grandly sophisticated! I now know that there is a genetic element in smoking addiction and certainly both my parents smoked as I grew up. And, for that matter, drank, not much but always a whiskey before dinner. My father was somewhat of a wine connoisseur and tried to teach my brother and I about wines. It may have stuck with my brother but didn’t with me. Even in my drinking days I preferred “hard likker” to wine, which may have had something to do with the histamines in wine which tended to trigger very severe headache even up to migraines.

I suffered from migraines for all my life from the age of 11 to the end of menopause (one thing the menopause rubbish was good for!). They arrived each month with a ferocity which left me in a terrible state, needing injections of pain killers to allow me to sleep and let the migraine pass. It was hard to manage when I was out, or at home with the children. If I was Christian I suppose I would say it was a cross I had to bear. I have been migraine-free for some decades now but the memories of those migraine days are still there.

I’ve been in relatively good health most of my life although now the various aches and pains, swellings and sores and very compromised breathing, make me realise how very old I am today. I’ve purchased a few t-shirts to mark my ageing. The slogans are “It’s weird being the same age as old people”, “I don’t know how to act my age; I’ve never been this old before”, “I haven’t lost my mind … half of it just wandered off and the other half went looking for it” and “Grandma knows everything. If she doesn’t know, she makes things up really fast.”.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

The Hungarian-born British writer and humourist George Mikes: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.”

 Off on a holiday

Well, last Sunday morning I clambered aboard a mini-bus which picked up lots of others and deposited us to North Sydney where we did some more clambering, this time aboard a big coach.

There were 34 people and a very endearing driver/guide who filled us with information as we drove from place to place. For example, that the M5 tunnel is five and a half kilometres long, which incidentally correlates to five and a half kilometres of boredom. The whole trip was in fact stretches of boredom interspersed with food, eaten at various exotic beachside resorts. (At least the area around the airport didn’t stink as it did in the ‘50s because then you drove to the airport via a number of tanneries.)

Sydney is very, very big. If you add on Campbelltown which, strictly speaking, is another city, then Sydney is very, very, very big indeed. By the time you get out of greater Sydney, you would probably have driven through three European countries.

The boredom of long stretches of driving is largely because the entire flora of the NSW coast and inland is eucalypts of various descriptions, with she-oaks or casuarinas. True, past the border of gums you sometimes see rather wonderful vistas of cleared land dotted with homesteads, farm buildings, cows, sheared sheep and horses. What made these views special was the extraordinarily verdant green of the pastures because of the rain over recent months. There was also evidence from time to time of the terrible fires two-plus years ago but eucalypts are remarkable trees in their capacity to regenerate, so despite their blackened drunks, the eucalypt forests are also very green.

Another interesting fact from our bus driver is that Australia has 800 species of gum tree. We passed many with white and very straight trunks. They must have been ideal for the sawmills. But in the pastures, for windbreaks I expect, were great stands of what I think were fir trees. There’s no doubt that the Great Dividing Range, which seems to come very close to the coast as you go down south, provides spectacular vistas.

We also had two cruises, both of about two and a half hours duration: one up the Clyde River at Batemans Bay (where incidentally we had the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten) and the other at Jervis Bay to see dolphins. Perhaps I’m hard to please but I must say both these trips were about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Clyde is very wide and its shores are covered with mangroves and eucalypts (of course!) and decked with oyster beds. We sailed up to a small town called Nelingen which was closed, so we were told. Considering this was mid-afternoon we were puzzled. It turned out that one place which sold souvenirs was in fact open but by that stage I’d decided not to risk the uphill walk to the shop. The cruise in Jervis Bay showed you a lot of Jervis Bay which is something like six times larger than Sydney Harbour but has infinitely less charm. We did in fact catch up to the dolphins in the last ten minutes or so but they were not obliging and only showed us a small curve of their backs and their fins.

One of the highlights of the holiday was a visit to Mogo zoo where you could get up close and personal with meerkats, strange moustachioed monkeys and giraffes who came right up to the keepers to be fed. The zoo also has cheetahs, lions (including white lions which were hiding), hippopotami or it may have been rhinoceros (also hiding), a couple of very grumpy looking gorillas and lots of zebras.

On this holiday, I observed again what I’d noticed in driving holidays many decades ago; the propensity of country people to build their homes right on the roadside or, if further away, at least facing the road. It’s extremely odd that they don’t find a spot off in the pastures which would give some privacy. Ah, well … a mystery not to be solved. I also noticed shipping containers in many of the gardens of the more run-down houses. Were they for storage or living? Another mystery not to be solved.

By contrast, at many places on this trip we drove through or into flyspeck towns packed with huge, modern and attractive homes, some with a holiday feel and others very suburban. In other, bigger, towns there were mixtures of these modern buildings and old-fashioned fibro houses or weatherboard, sometimes gussied up with smart paint. The tour organisers took pains to take us to attractive towns to have morning or afternoon tea and lunch. We’d pull up to a park (universally well kept) at a beach with covered benches and tables where our driver set out the goodies. And one very important fact: there was always a toilet block. Given that the average age of the people on tour was probably 80, access to a clean toilet is the sine qua non of a driving holiday. These small coastal towns down south could teach our Northern Beaches parks a thing or two. The only negative in some of the parks was the need to dodge kangaroo poop; in one park we saw a large group (troop?) of kangaroos snoozing in the shade of a large tree.

And speaking of coastal communities, on the way back via Wollongong, we actually avoided Wollongong itself and took the coastal road past a series of small beach-side towns like Thirroul, Austinmer, Coledale, Wombarra and more. They were delightful and many boasted houses of great charm. I’d say they would be a perfect place to go for a beach holiday except that I live in a beach holiday!

(Our driver, as I’ve said was full of facts. He told us not only that wombats and koalas have a common ancestor but that koalas poop olive-shaped poos but wombat poop is cubed.)

As I said earlier, this trip – and perhaps all coach tours – caters for an older tourist. If you live on your own, as many of my companions did, it was a nice way to have company on a holiday. At least one third to one half of the whole 34 was English. Most of the group were very hale and hearty and seemed to have no trouble keeping up the pace. I imagine, however, that this sort of trip with its long driving stretches and multiple stops (and loos) was just right for the energies of the slightly older. For the remainder of the passengers, some spoke such broad ocker that I wished I brought Let Stalk Strine with me. All, thankfully, were nice people, easy to please and appreciative of the company they found themselves in.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Sir Robert Menzies, when accused by a Member of Parliament of harbouring a superiority complex: “Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising.”

 

 

Ancient history

I was musing about my scars recently – as you do when the weather’s foul – and was thinking about how permanent they are. Well yes, of course they are – that’s in the job description for a scar. But I was particularly engaged with the scars on my forehead and down to my nose. They’re the reminders of my earliest introduction to sewing and its ancillary arts and crafts.

We lived in Eastwood when I was small and I would go next door to visit Mrs Onion (it was actually Unwin but the nick-name stuck). She was a great sewer and sat for hours at her sewing machine. I would pop up on the table facing her and presumably chatter away while I watched her work. On one inauspicious day, her sewing table collapsed sending me – and all the pins, needles and scissors – onto the floor. The scissors cut my forehead just above my nose and the pins and needles went into the rest of my forehead and my nose. I don’t recall the accident, but I do have a faint memory of our doctor dabbing at my forehead with some sort of antiseptic. Needless to say, I was extraordinarily lucky not to have been blinded and a bunch of now very faint scars was not a problem under the circumstances.

I have some scars on my arms and back where small lumps were removed – never (and again I was very fortunate) turning out to be a problem. The same applied to the moles which were taken off my front. I also have a small scar on my calf from tripping over a concrete step in the craft gallery where I worked a very long time ago. However, these scars have now almost disappeared in the forests of age spots, varicose and spider veins.

Other ancient history musings take me on the drive between our home (but I can’t remember if this was our Eastwood or Pymble home) and my grandmother’s home in Parramatta. Quite vividly, I can see a group of very large buildings on our route which I remember being told were homes for orphans. Perhaps these were Aboriginal children stolen from their families or children orphaned in other ways. I can’t remember any details other than a feeling of sorrow as we passed them by.

My grandmother came to Australia with my youngest uncle Alan after my grandfather died some time after we arrived Down Under. I remember very little of her house, which she must have chosen because we were then living also in Parramatta, except for a very ugly, dark and unwholesome goldfish pond. By the time we moved to the North Shore my uncle was married and my grandmother lived with us although she eventually moved to live with the same uncle in the Eastern Suburbs. I regret vividly not asking her much about her life in England. All I know was that she lived in a fairly large house with her husband, her four sons and two grandfathers who lived with them. Imagine how hard it must have been cooking each day for seven men. And one thing I do know was that she was taken out of school at 16 to help her own mother with her multitude of siblings. Consequently she became one of those “housewives” who only understood what the Germans called Kinder, Kirche, Kuche – children, “church” and kitchen.

I don’t remember that she did much cooking when she lived with us. The two things which stand out are the kasha she cooked for my father – disgusting buckwheat – and her legendary ginger cake which was in fact a honey cake for the Jewish New Year and any other time she decided to bake. She and my mother did not get on well. This I do remember. I was often irritable with her myself because she used to tell on me when I did something wrong. I must have missed many punishments because my mother was so cross that she “dobbed” me in.

Back to the memories which may have sparked my interest in sewing and other crafts as well as what had stuck from watching Mrs Onion sew. At one stage in her life my mother patronised a dressmaker and sometimes took me with her when she had to go for fittings. I recall walking to the sewing room through a long hallway lined on one side with shelves. These held bundles of fabric left over from each of the many, many dresses she had created and formed a kaleidoscope of colours and textures which I found breathtakingly wonderful.

When I gave birth to a girl (my second child) I determined to learn how to make her clothes. My mother was not interested in sewing but my father had worked with patterns and cloth all his adult life. So he showed me how to use a sewing machine and how to lay out the pattern pieces, pin and cut them. I became a dab hand at making delightful dresses for Jessica and eventually even clothes for the boys. This was after I took a course in sewing stretch fabric and could make a creditable go of creating t-shirts. I also sewed my own maternity clothes. In those days 50-plus years ago we actually wore special shapeless tent-like maternity dresses which were easy to sew because they didn’t have to fit. I am bemused by the young women of today who stuff their bumps into t-shirts and other “normal” clothes; I really don’t like the look but then I’m old and out of touch!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

British actor A. E. Matthews: “I always wait for The Times each morning. I look at the obituary, and if I’m not in it, I go to work.”