I should have blogged all night

I defy any mother of two teenagers who’s hosting Christmas, has dogs to walk and a full-time job to blog regularly during this season. About 3 weeks ago I did in fact write a whole post on the suave Richard E. Grant as Henry Higgins and the delightful Taryn Fiebig as Liza Doolittle then promptly ‘lost’ it. Now that I realise my blog creation software doesn’t have an ‘undo’ function when you inadvertently highlight and delete 3 paragraphs I am writing this in Word first!

The urge to blog, and the ideas for postings, remain as strong as ever, it is getting the time to sit at the keyboard. As usual I am writing this piece at the office where I can persuade myself that writing for an e-medium is good practice for our imminent electronic learning system!

I bought a little note book intending to jot down ideas but so far it only contains 3 days’ worth of expenditure records - the entire fruit of my partner's and my decision that we need to itemise what we spend and analyse it to be able to budget properly. Those 3 days alone included $150 on theatre tickets and $30 on wine. When I started the Christmas shopping the amount coming out of the ATMs and going into the cash registers of shops became so large I was embarrassed to record it. I convinced myself that December is atypical so I should start AFTER Christmas! I think I see a trend emerging...

It is a truism that Christmas is a stressful time and I find more than usual to feel panicked and guilty about at this time of year. I should have an immaculate house with a scintillatingly decorated tree already in situ. We should have coloured lights up like our neighbours do. I should have bought someone in the developing world a goat. I should have written and posted all my Christmas cards by now. I should be saying ‘Holidays’ more often and ‘Christmas’ less often etc! All these feelings of underachievement and inadequacy are no doubt fuel for the New Year Resolutions to come!

Any way I believe I could/should have posted more to my blog than I have done recently. All the above only took me 15 minutes and I am thinking it wouldn’t be the hugest leap to turn it into an article on procrastinating about learning and development for the blog here at work!

Bird of Limbo

I've just worked out how to add images. Check out this and Joan Didon and the dusty Mirrorball below! I wonder how I managed to add Alice herself? Curiouser & curiouser!

Any way this is the Bird of Paradise or Strelitzia flower. They're amongst my favourites. I planted a strelitzia (or what I thought was one) in my garden about 11 years ago and while it has grown to a towering height, it didn't flower at all until quite recently when some greyish spikes started to push their way through the 7 foot tall foliage! The variety I bought seems to be an albino giant! Not a skerrick of the conventional gorgeous colours and 4 times taller than any strelitzia I've ever seen anywhere else!

I'll post a picture and see if I've bred a freak of nature or if it is just some seldom cultivated variety. It certainly wouldn't be grown for its looks!
'
STOP PRESS; It's a stelitzia nicola and it may reach 25 feet!

The Book Group

My sister and I and our dog walking friends have started a book group. We had our first meeting last Sunday and all agree it was a raging success. This is despite choosing a book that 3 out of the 6 of us hated and only 2 really felt pleased they'd read. It was Joan Didion's (left) The Year of Magical Thinking which is not the jolliest text you will ever encounter, dwelling as it does on the aftermath of her husband's sudden death from a massive heart attack right on Christmas and when their adopted daughter lay critically ill in hospital. You can't fault the authenticity of the way Didion renders her experience. You FEEL each tremor of pain, doubt and delusion. So powerful a writer is she that she replicates grief and its accompanying disorientation. It does your head in. It was a brave first choice especially as our group includes women who have suffered sudden and catastrophic bereavement. Turned out to be a book we could admire though maybe not like. It does succeed as a great monument to John Gregory Dunne (her partner of 40 years) as her portrait of him and her quotes from his work have inspired me to seek out his books! Our next choice is safer, fiction by David Malouf, the novella Child's Play I am already romping through it and enjoying every phrase and image. If the others feel like I do it should be a joyous December meeting.

Mirrorball Epiphany

Dust is, according to Marjory Dawes, a good low cal snack! It is also an apparently endlessly renewable resource! It certainly replenishes itself very promptly chez moi. Scudding over surfaces with a piece of fluffy acrylic stuff on a stick and flourishing my poor battered vacuum cleaner once a week diminishes it only fleetingly. I should have heeded Quentin Crisp, who said it doesn't get any worse after the first 12 years, and never started the sisyphean labour at all. Any way, thankfully actually noticing it's there is only sporadic - like when you're obliged to sit in a dentist's waiting room or outside the principal's office and you fixate on details like a bit the painters missed or a crooked picture frame!

So it is that I only recently noticed dusty surfaces at work. The area behind my computer, the parts of the floor at the furthest reaches under the desk etc. Most significantly though, there is dust on the mirrorball! No, I don't work in a disco. I'm in HR and the lime green faceted bauble hangs over the Recruitment section. At first I thought it was a Christmas decoration but I've been here 3 years and it's been hanging there all that time and presumably longer!

It is - appropriately, considering this is a public service department - attached to the ceiling with red tape! I noticed neither the mirrorball nor its ironic tether until some weeks after I started here, when, as I said, the season led me to think it was a festive adornment.

Those were my salad days (well I certainly ate more salad and fewer cakes than I do now) and all was rosy, or in this case shiny and chartreuse! Now familiarity has led to dust-noticing and I am tempted to create hugely mixed metaphors to express how my early enthusiasm for my job and the organisation has given way to my current disaffection and fatigue.

A mirror ball is meant to spin. It needs vibration and light and dark to distribute its glitter. It borders on cruel to keep it static and dust accruing. It can not be true to it's dance floor enhancing function. I think there's a message there!

Generation Ex

Did you know that Jerry Lewis is still ALIVE and about to tour Australia? Well I'm assuming he's alive, the ad didn't say. If there's one thing more confronting than realising that some old bastards never die it's watching the seminal figures of your youth drop off the twig one by one. It makes you feel sooo old (and mortal). Of course the biggie of this past fortnight was Paul Newman universally regarded as a decent bloke and with the bluest eyes in the business (I guess Robson Green may inherit that title now). On the local front there was the demise of Rob Guest (I must admit I thought 'Rob who?' when I heard but apparently he had a bit of a following). And I am still trying to get through my Saturday afternoons without the distinctive voice of John Cargher introducing and gossiping about those performers on scratchy 78s!

Perhaps attaining a certain age makes you take more notice of death. Isn't there a story about some eccentric aged Englishman/woman who used to read the Death Notices in the paper each morning to check they weren't in them? It seems clear that the subjects of "Who Do You Think You Are?", the celebrity genealogy program on SBS on Sunday nights, find the tug of discovering their roots irresistible. There's a reassurance in seeing yourself as part of an evolving and continuous chain of family. And discerning traits shared with great aunt Mabel (however spurious) adds some meaning, makes a sort of pattern out of our essential alone-ness and finite-ness.

So Vale Paul, Rob, Aunty Mabel and the countless departed who have touched our lives. I think it is not, as the absurd title of a spiritualist book I saw in Dymocks this week suggests, that 'We Are Their Heaven' more that the memories and associations they've left with us act to enrich our own existence.

Brideshead Revisited Revisited

A sacred entity has been interfered with. Someone has re-made "Brideshead Revisited"! The ultimate televisual indulgence of my youth has had it's epic-ness cut to feature film length and someone has decided they can match or better its impeccable casting! The film has not been released in Australia so I have not yet had to make the decision of whether to go and see it and risk piercing my gloriously intact sense of nostalgia for Evelyn Waugh's own monument to nostalgia. (I recently had to make a judgement call about the latest iteration of "Sleuth" - another delight of my young adult cinema going life - and let the reviewers persuade me to preserve a fond memory).

What the news DID prompt me to do however was to pick up a very well thumbed second hand paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel with luverly pix from the telly series on back and front covers and start to read it. I realised I hadn't before despite being quite a Waugh fan. 'Loving' doesn't do justice to John Mortimer's TV adaptation. Next to nothing of the book's wistful narrative, pithy conversations and exquisite description is omitted! It will be interesting to see what is done to the work for consumption by a post MTV audience.

A clever friend has pointed out to me that John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier who appeared in the Granada series were virtually contemporaries of Waugh's and would probably have known or certainly have known of the originals of some of the book's characters. Gielgud's performance as Charles Ryder's eccentric and sinisterly mocking father is so apt - it is one of the most delightful experiences ever provided on the small screen. I wonder who plays that role in the film. I also find it hard to imagine a more perfect Anthony Blanche than Nikolas Grace.

It may still be a couple of weeks before crunch time comes and in the mean time I am relishing Waugh's prose and reliving the Granada series all over again in my head!

I'm Back!

It's been awful. I locked myself out of my blog. Forgot my password and then the security email enabling me to re-set it came to my work email address while I was on a week's leave! I have been suffering withdrawal symptoms!

Where to start? World Youth Day (the longest 'day' on record)? Saint Kevin PM's disappointing grasp of art vs. pedophilia? Recent filmic and televisual treats? A hymn to Annie Proulx who has made me read texts about cowboys BY CHOICE!!! She does the BEST imagery: a radio announcer who 'pronounced his own name as though he had just discovered a diamond in his nostril', 'a few final rain drops (that) fell, hard as dice', 'clean arcs divided the windscreen into a diptych, and their faces flared through the glass' - all on consecutive pages of a short story in 'Close Range'. And her vocabulary - I always mean to hold a dictionary in my other hand when I read her!

Well this will be a brief posting because lunch - and to a lesser extent - work calls! I've written my password down this time so watch this space!