Annie's Treasure Troves

There’s a cry goes up every morning in the Lollipop house – “Muuuuum! Where’s my socks?” The answer used to be easy. Either they were in the top drawer (where they have always been kept, but only Mum remembers) or, if they’ve been worn for five minutes and then taken off again, they were in the same place they’d left them (but, of course, that’s a mystery as well).

These days, though, there’s another possibility. Out in the garden there are three piles of miscellaneous rubbish. One is under the clothes line, one is by the swing and the other is in a hole under the bottlebrush tree. Now when socks (or shoes or undies or favourite soft toys) go missing, the first place we look is in the three piles of miscellaneous rubbish. For these are where Annie keeps her ‘treasures’.

No one ever sees her snaffle them from the house, but she’s got a lovely big mouth and she keeps her head down as she sneaks out. The other day, she came running to me at the car with a stick in her mouth. As we walked back to the house, she found a bone. Rather than drop the stick, she pushed it further back into her mouth and picked up the bone up as well. Then she found a piece of pipe about two inches in diameter. Aha, I thought, you’ll have to make a choice now. But no, with a bit of manoeuvring she managed to lift that as well. She carried them to one of her favourite spots and dropped them in, then looked at me as if to say ‘Says who?’

We’re beginning to wonder if she’s a Retriever or a ‘Pincher’ (Pinscher).

Prizes

It was a big night at school last night – the yearly ‘Presentation Night’ when hard work is rewarded, the next year’s captains are named and the Year Sevens and Year Tens graduate. Since I started work in the library, these nights have held no surprises. The library assistants (all two of us) are in charge of putting book plates into all the prizes, sorting them into the right order and making sure everything runs without a hitch. It’s exhausting and terrifying...but nothing went wrong, I'm glad to say.

For the Year Ones, it’s the first time they've had to attend. It’s a long night for 6-7 year-olds, but they are all given a book prize for their great efforts, so they at least have something to come away with. Last night Sausage came away with two books – she also won the prize for ‘Christian Fellowship’. She got a Children’s Bible and she loves it.

Dynamo, unfortunately, missed out, though he tells me that he should have won the Christian Fellowship prize for his class because when one of his classmates complained that he would never get a prize because he was the dumbest kid in the class, Dynamo had replied, “No you’re not. I am.” At least he has a sense of humour about it (though he definitely isn’t dumb).

I really feel sorry for the kids who miss out. They might be really clever, but not quite the top. They might be really good at sport, but not always win. They might be really kind and friendly to their classmates, but not get noticed. Then they don’t win anything. I hope their parents don’t let them feel they’re not good enough. They’ve all got something special and I wish we could have given them all a prize.

At the same time, I have to say, I did enjoy the look on Sausage’s face when her name was called. Is that hypocritical?

Old faces

The other day, while I was wasting time on Facebook, I decided to see if I could find any of my old University classmates. I plugged in the name of my University and the year I started there and came up with about one hundred and fifty names. I knew only one of them and my acquaintance with him was very brief. But seeing him again brought back some good memories.

I met him at a camp for a Christian group I’d joined. I’m not sure why he was there, because I’d never seen him at any of the meetings and I never saw him at any afterwards, but he seemed to be fairly keen on a pretty little redhead, so I guess she was the attraction. What I do know about him, though, was that he played classical guitar and the moment I heard him play, I fell in love ( – with the guitar folks, with the guitar. What chance did I have against a pretty little redhead anyway?)

The thing is, though, that he was the one who showed me how to play classical guitar. He must have spent a whole hour, that Saturday afternoon, showing me how to hold it properly, how to do the fingering and explaining what the strange letters on classical guitar music meant. My one and only guitar lesson, completely free, from a charming Englishman with the bluest, blue eyes you ever saw.

I wouldn’t have recognised him from his photo. His blond hair (what’s left of it) is now snow white and he has a beard, which he didn’t have before, and rather more wrinkles than in those days. But those gorgeous, blue eyes are still the same.

I wonder if he ever got anywhere with the pretty little redhead?

Lost art?

Someone asked me the other day if any of my art would be featured in the local Arts Society calendar? When I replied no, because I hadn’t done anything much in the way of art this year, she looked quite taken aback. I told her I’d been writing instead. If I’d said I’d taken up smoking or belly dancing, I don’t think she could have looked any more surprised.

It’s true that I used to be quite prolific in art and, in fact, I used to get quite miserable if I didn’t get time to paint, but these days it’s writing that fills my time and keeps me sane. I even knocked back illustrating work this year to get my book ready for publishing (still waiting for news on that one). I know I’ll go back to it one day and I’m not afraid my skills will get rusty. I recently did a pastel painting on commission and as soon as I picked up the chalk, I knew what to do with it. But for now, writing is the pill I need.

There’s a thrill in getting words out of my head, creating characters that are completely imaginary and making them real, inventing entirely new worlds and making them believable. Actually I get the same thrill drawing fantasy pictures too, but people are so used to my naturalistic painting style, that they seem to look askance at my drawings of dragons, castles and strange little creatures. That’s not the sort of thing women my age do.

Ha! Wait till they read my stories.

The eyes have it.

I went to the optician today, my two-yearly check up. Only apparently it was four and a half years since I last went. Oops. Where did that time go? They were running behind, so I had to wait for a while. I sat watching the shoppers go by in the shopping centre. Well, I sat watching the blurs go by in the shopping centre. I wear glasses for distances, but I tend to only wear them in the car or at the movies or theatre, so everyone was a little out of focus.

After telling me off for being so slack and not coming for four years, the optician wanted to know how I’d got on wearing my reading glasses? Another oops. I haven’t been wearing them. I hate the things. They’re all right while I have my head down reading, but as soon as I look up I feel sick. It’s like being underwater. I can’t see that they make any difference to my close sight anyway.

All the usual checks followed – reading eye charts, deciding what’s clearer, having my eyeballs blown with some awful machine to check pressures. We discussed night driving (I can’t see much at all at night without my glasses) and special coatings that can be put on the lenses to stop glare. Then we discussed prescription sunglasses and how important they were.

Into the shop then to order frames – a nice gold frame for everyday use (and night driving), soon to have anti-flare coated lenses. Then some fashion sunnies, which will have their lenses replaced with layered, polarised, prescription lenses. A little bit off the price here for the voucher I brought in, a little bit more off out of the goodness of their hearts, a little bit more off with the private health cover. And that comes to…eeeeeeek!

The irony is that, despite getting in trouble for not coming for check-ups and for not using my reading glasses, I didn’t actually need new glasses at all. My eyes have not changed in four and a half years. But the frames I have at the moment are awful (they bend if you give them a hard look) and I really did need the sunnies. So P can’t complain too much, can he?

Uses for a notebook

Our local newsagent had a sale recently, ready to move into smaller premises. They had notebooks (as in paper ones, not computers) for half price. I would have bought a whole stack if I’d known earlier. I love hard-backed notebooks. There’s something mysterious about them that makes you wonder what interesting things might be inside. Unfortunately they only had three left, so I gave one each to Eldest, Dynamo and Sausage and waited to see what they would do with them.

Eldest seems to be using it the same way he uses any exercise book. It will soon be filled with mathematical equations I have no chance of understanding. That’s what he loves to do. Maths. Strange young man. (You know I don’t mean that, don't you, M!)

Dynamo is totally ignoring the lines and using it to draw machines – real and imaginary. Each is carefully labelled and some pages even have the same machine drawn from different angles. Of course, being Dynamo, most of the machines are for the farm, but there are a few that would blow the entire world up, if only he could make them work.

Sausage is using it for writing stories. She loves writing stories. The first one in the notebook was about a magic carpet, full of imagination and phrases I didn’t even know she knew. It takes me back to the day when she told me her first story. It was her third birthday and she sat me down on her bed and said, “Now I’m three, it’s my turn to tell you a story.” The story went like this –

Today I sawed a beeaufitul snail.
It was in Grandad’s garden.
I standed on it.
It was a little bit dead.

I’m going to have it printed up and framed for her twenty-first birthday. When she’s a famous writer, it will be worth a fortune.

Nursery madness

The BBC have been in trouble lately for being silly enough to rewrite the nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’ to wipe out any reference to his demise. In fact, far from being left a pile of shell fragments on the ground, Humpty was ‘made happy’ again. http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/no-rhyme-or-reason-in-humpty-rewrite-20091023-hddq.html
Ludicrous as this idea seems, I’ve been having some fun of my own, rewriting a few classics. I can’t make my new endings rhyme. I’m not that clever. But it’s fun. Why don’t you try it?

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
To get her poor doggy a bone,
But when she got there, the cupboard was bare,
And so she phoned out for a pizza.

Rock-a-bye baby
On the tree top,
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock
When the bough breaks,
The cradle won’t fall,
Because of the U-Beaut Super-Safe straps
Mum’s used to harness it to the trunk.

London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
But maintenance crews are onto it
And there’ll be only a slight delay in travel time.

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And caught all the flies that had been bothering her.

On this day...

On this day, forty years ago, I stepped off an aeroplane at Perth Airport, wondering what on earth this new place would be like. It was 3am and I was 9 years old, so I was more than a little tired, but I can still remember the first thing that hit me – the smell of eucalyptus. The airport was surrounded by bushland and the eucalyptus scent hung in the warm air like a blanket.

We were driven from the airport to our accommodation – an old house owned by the Anglican Church. It was so different from the houses I was used to, with its wide verandahs and massive rooms and it had a musty smell I’ll never forget.

I slept until 11am the next morning and awoke to the brightest sunshine I’d ever seen. The colours of this place were so much brighter, too. The sky was bluer, the whites dazzling. The trees were a strange olive colour, not the dark green of English trees. Out in the garden, the nasturtiums that ran rampant all over the back yard were a more vivid yellow and orange than any English flowers.

In the garden was a tree, a huge tree with easy to climb branches. In the first few weeks, I spent a lot of time in that tree, though I didn’t like sharing it the crusader bugs, large beetles with crosses on their backs that moved with jerky little movements like badly animated puppets. Then one day I encountered another creature I definitely didn’t want to come to close to – a giant black spider. Well, by English standards it was a giant. By Australian standards it was probably quite your average arachnid, but in my haste to get away from it, I fell out of the tree, squashing quite a few of those bright nasturtiums in the process. Nasturtiums smell quite bad when you squash them.

Food in Australia was strange too. Neapolitan icecream came in all sorts of colours, including white, green and orange, each with its own distinct and, to my palate, not particularly pleasant taste. Then there were ‘Skippy’ cornflakes that had all the flavour and consistency of wet cardboard. Of course, after forty years, I enjoy Aussie tucker now, but those things stick in my brain.

Having said all that, I’ve only been back to England once since we came, when I was in my twenties. Admittedly it was the middle of winter and it was freezing cold and miserable, but I found myself feeling grateful to my parents for emigrating. Everything seemed so dark and crowded. The only time I felt I could really breathe was when I was on the moors in the north. Then I could see for miles and that’s how I like it. I regret the lack of history here. I could have spent a whole month in York alone, just looking at the history. I’m sure I would have stuck to my Archaeology if I’d been in England. But Australia is definitely the land I think of as home.

Sunshine on wheels

As I came out of the bakery in town this morning, a group of ‘bikers’ was just setting off from the other side of the street. I won’t pretend to know what sort of motorbikes they rode, except that they definitely weren’t Harleys, but the riders were all fitted out in their leather pants and jackets and their black helmets. They were quite a sight and got a lot of attention when they started up their machines. The most noticeable thing about them though, was that every single one of them had a lot more grey hair than me.

Their bikes were laden with packs and sleeping bags, so I can only presume that they were travelling quite a distance and had been in town overnight (not the most exciting place to stop in, but I guess they just stop where they have to). As they rode along the street, their eyes were intent on the road ahead. Next stop, Perth.

Then the last biker set off. He must have been in his sixties, with a white beard and white hair flowing out of the back of his helmet. He could have played the part of Santa Clause without any trouble. His sleeping bag had an Australian flag design and he looked a bit lost amongst all his gear. But the biggest thing on the bike was his smile. He rode along, waving at everyone he passed, his face so full of joy at what he was doing that it was impossible to not feel happier at having seen him. It added just a little more sunshine to the day.

I don’t know who he was, but I’d like to thank him for letting his love of life leak out into a quiet country street. It’s the sort of thing that should happen more often.

Remembering Seoul

This time ten years ago, P, Eldest and I were in Seoul to meet our beautiful new son and brother. It’s a lovely time of year to visit Korea and every year as the spring begins to warm up here, I feel very nostalgic. Even more so because we also went to meet Sausage in October (six years ago), bringing her home only six days after Dynamo’s anniversary.

To celebrate, I thought I’d post some photos of Seoul and its surrounds. I find it really hard to believe that the city only covers the same area as Perth, but has seven or eight times as many people living in it. Yet we never once felt unsafe there, even walking in the streets at night.

We really must go back.