Fickle finger of farce

I had a digital mishap this week. On Monday morning at 11 am I plunged into Roselands outdoor pool without remembering to take a ring off my right ring finger. In the chilly water it immediately started wobbling about and threatening to descend to the floor of the pool. Surrounded by approximately 700 primary school kids either learning to swim or consuming their morning tea on the bleachers, I decided not to risk putting it on the edge of the pool and quickly transferred it to my middle (or 'rude' as the kiddies are wont to say) finger. I did my aqua class with the usual verve, grace and energy and thought nothing more about jewellery, except for quickly reinstating my earrings and necklace, before meeting my spouse for lunch in the ambiance-drenched Roselands' food court.

Fast forward to that evening. Oh dear, the ring will not budge. Oh dearie dear, it is stuck. Perhaps a night's sleep will relax its hold. Faster forward to the following morning, the ring is well and truly a fixture below my bulging knuckle. Any amount of baby oil, handcream, sorbolene, soap, cooking oil, Vaseline will not work it loose. Maybe the icy airconditioning at work will deflate the offending swollen digit?

Faster forwarder to that evening, what an attractive indigo colour the middle finger of my right hand has become. Soaking it in iced water does not help loosen the ring or reduce the swelling. Emergency department of Canterbury Hospital here we come...

Main entrance of Canterbury Hospital, Emergency is just to the right.

I was lucky, triage was over in a trice and a lovely African doctor who called me 'my dear' in tones of plushest velvet was attending to me. Off he went to get the ring cutter leaving me time to take in the atmosphere of the treatment room with its wealth of useful drugs, dressings, equipment and reference material, overflowing bins and chocked open fire door.


Reference books in the treatment room. What I thought was 'The Egg Made Easy' is probably 'The ECG Made Easy' - surely a good read either way.

 

Sign says 'Smoke Door - Do Not Keep Open' - the sort of OHS compliance that instills absolute confidence!

Turns out that this initial speediness produced an undue confidence that I would be home in under an hour, or two hours, or yet two and a half. My ebony friend had a fruitless search for the ring cutter. Someone who didn't work there any more had put it somewhere. You know how that happens... My spouse checked out 2 local medical centres - no, neither had a ring cutter. I returned to the waiting room to be distracted from the final pages of Stephen Fry's memoirs by more combinations of leggings, thongs and Supre T-shirts than I realised were possible and examples of maternal behaviour that made the ethical conundrum at the centre of The Slap seem entirely redundant!

I was recalled and Nathan* the senior nurse practitioner took over my case. For the third time I outlined how the ring had come to be stuck. Nathan thought we should not delay in finding another hospital whose emergency department had, and could locate, a ring cutter. He got on the line to St Bodolph's*, got cut off while being transferred to his opposite number there, then asked to be reconnected and finally got to talk to Liz*. Liz is apparently a sarcastic bitch! I had ascertained that from hearing one side of the conversation, but Nathan confirmed it, then quickly apologised for his lack of professionalism, after he hung up. We had a hearty laugh.

Nathan did not think that removing a ring from the finger of a 55 year old woman was a particularly appropriate use of the Fire Service's resources but what choice was he left with? Dialling triple 'O' seemed like overkill. We went to Nathan's office and googled the number for Campsie Fire Station. Nathan got their voicemail. I was glad I wasn't alight.

Nathan recounted an anecdote from his wife's working week. She fills a similar role to him at another hospital. Apparently a patient who breathes using a mask and an oxygen tank snuck out for a cigarette, lit a match and virtually self immolated. His face pretty much melted. What my son would call 'natural selection in action'. We had another hearty laugh.

Nathan said he would give finding the cutter one more try and I was left to take in the atmosphere of his office with its wealth of reference materials, safe practice charts and books, including a human anatomy colouring book which, if completed authentically, would employ a monotonous four colours (so no need for the boxed set of 72 Derwents that was the pride of my childhood for the sons and daughters of medical staff!)


I felt fraudulent not to require any of the 5 Ps but I will definitely try to remember them.

Hallelujah! Nathan checked the plaster room on spec and there was the ring cutter. Some people do not have the ability to look for things properly he said. As the matriarch of my household I could not but agree. I told him he was a hero, a marvel, a wonder, even before he set to work. Approximately ten minutes later we were returning to our car the severed ring in the side pocket of my handbag. My husband thinks he can smooth off the ends and I will still be able to wear it but I am a bit out of love with it at present!

My finger post ring removal (and a lovely view of our loo) imprint of the ring is visible

Well the drama is over and my finger is almost back to normal. Perhaps I am an alarmist. I start a weight loss program the second week in January and no doubt the ring would have fallen off if I just waited until February.

*Not their real names.

Choosing My Religion

The ABC program The Collectors has finished, at least for this year, perhaps for good. I guess there are only so many collections and collectors in the country they can showcase.  The penultimate edition of the program was given over to a tour of MONA, Tasmania's privately owned Museum of Old and New Art. That's the museum I had some difficulty navigating back in June.  The TV coverage made me realise that I had seen only about a fifth of its collection and whetted my appetite to return. It also convinced me I need to practise using iPhone technology a bit before I do.

Gordon Brown interviewed MONA's founder, David Walsh and asked him the 64 thousand dollar (considerably more in his case) question: 'why do people collect?'  His answer was a bit of a revelation to me. He said that surrounding ourselves with objects we invest with significance is a religious act.  I thought of Randolph Hearst's San Simeon,  Philip Adams's Egyptian artefacts, I thought of  the 50s fetishists, the tin toy tragics, the cricket cards of yesteryear collectors and I thought of my own preoccupation in recent years with finding objects that relate to my UK childhood - Sylvac figurines,  postcards of  holiday locations, pieces of Spanish Garden dinnerware that match my first 'grown up' cup and saucer.

I don't know whether Walsh's theory fits every kind of collection/collector, but it certainly has resonance for me. I can see the relationship between what I have been collecting, when I began collecting it and how that has fitted with my journey of identity and belonging.

 Above: 1970s Poole pottery with stylised Alphonse Mucha design - the height of pop art decorative kitsch. I found a  vase  in a bric-a-brac shop in Newtown some 30 years ago and now have 6 pieces.

In the 70s objects, cards, posters, books & clothing featuring the designs of Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham held an overwhelming attraction for me. I had posters of their art on my bedroom wall and even stole a couple of plastic brooches with Mucha's art nouveau maidens on them from Coles. I had no money and  kidded myself that because I knew the work featured I had some sort of entitlement. The slightly overwrought decorativeness of Mucha and the tendency to the grotesque of Rackham and Beardsley  must have put me in touch with a bit of old world decadence sadly missing in the world of tie dye T-shirts and lurid panel van art that was the Sutherland Shire. The day my Sussans Aubrey Beardsley design skirt shrank at the laundrette will forever stand as the end of an era for me.

Above: Japanese Marutomoware with Kookaburra & Gumnut design - vintage Australiana from the 1930 - 50s. Again I started collecting when these were considered junk, they are now highly collectible.

 In the 80s when we started our life as a couple and had our little gallery in Newtown all was gum leaves and native animals and appropriated Aboriginal imagery. My wedding ring is two gum leaves entwined.  I started buying pottery with eucalyptus and kookaburra motifs, I tried my hand at screen printing, my designs either pinched from indigenous culture or heavily influenced by Margaret Preston woodcuts. I was embracing the Australian side of my identity.

 Above: Richard Clements hand blown perfume bottles, these are the Powerhouse's, not mine, timelessly beautiful.

As I seldom discard objets d'art and pictures from previous eras, by the 1990s our environment was becoming pretty eclectic. Framed prints of Lautrec, Cezanne and Klimt adorned our walls and still do. We have also acquired a few original etchings.  William Morris fabrics covered our lounge suite and windows until they wore out and our budget didn't keep pace with Liberty's rising prices. Working at Craft Australia for 8 years I discovered the glass of Richard Clements and Setsuko Ogishi, the textiles of Barbara Rogers and Vivien Haley and the ceramic decoration of Stephen Bower and Jana Ferris. Some modest representation of these artists' work joined our burgeoning collection!

Above:  William Morris textiles, not one design is less than gorgeous. Our first sofa and armchairs were covered in Agapanthus.

 Above: Sylvac bunnies. I remember that my great grandmother had these on her sideboard and television set in the 1950s. Later a collector cheated her out of them for a few pounds.

Unlike most of the collectors featured on The Collectors my focus ranges widely.  I haven't even touched on owls which I have collected on and off since I was a teenager or on my passion for virtually anything connected with Alice In Wonderland. When I arrived in Australia from Britain in the late 1960s I put all my childhood postcards into 3 albums which I still have. They comprise chocolate boxy animal photos, Molly Brett woodland scenes, cutesy images by Mabel Lucie Attwell (and her imitators) and traditional souvenir views.  I still buy and send postcards when I am on holiday or in those shops you need to pass through at the end of art gallery exhibitions, but it only recently occurred to me that I could look online for postcards of my childhood haunts. Of course they exist and now I've bought 5!

In fact the focus of my collecting over the past few years has been making concrete and communicable my childhood memories. Many of the treasured things that didn't make their way out here with the family or which were lost in the mists of time even before we made the trip can and have been restored to me through eBay. Bugger the holy grail,  replacing my Midwinter cup and saucer was a transcendental experience for me!

Midwinter's Spanish Garden design. The shapes were designed by the Marquis of Queensbury , not the one who brought down Oscar Wilde, his grandson, and pattern is by Jessie Tait. Mum bought the cup and suacer to be exclusively for my use in about 1967.

You 'avin a laugh?

I've probably expressed my affection for British telly from the 60's & 70s more than once in my blog. At a recent press conference, John Cleese, in Sydney for the Just For Laughs festival (which I sadly missed because of study, disorganisation and poverty, though not necessarily in that order) damned the current state of British television as a sharp decline from its status as the 'least worse television in the world between to the 50s and the 90s'.

The UK TV of my childhood certainly provided a nourishing diet. I cut my comedy appreciating teeth on The Frost Report, The Worker, At Last the 1948 Show, The Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son. I was also, much to my mother's horror, a stalwart fan of the Carry On series of films. I must have seen them on telly as I can't imagine being taken to the cinema to see such coarse, crass entertainment unless my maternal grandmother became my enabler for this 'ever so common' form of entertainment as she did for seaside amusement parks and panto.

Somehow I recently became aware that the BBC had produced a series of tributes to the stars of this era, Legends of Comedy, and quickly adapted my online buying skills, usually dedicated to clothes and china, to tracking down the DVDs. The search became particularly tantalising when I discovered that its highest rating dramatisation, The Curse of Steptoe, had been withdrawn from sale because of a successful defamation action by the family of Harry H. Corbett's second wife.

Well Amazon came through for me, at least I found second hand copies of the DVDs on their site, but then there was some palaver about not being prepared to ship them to Oz. The tyranny of distance had not impressed itself so strongly upon me since 1969 when we arrived and it took 2 -3 weeks to receive an aerogramme and you couldn't buy Callard & Bowsers butterscotch or Branston Pickle for love or money.

The long suffering Harold Steptoe, Harry H. Corbett with a brindle pup that
looks uncommonly like our Stella.

Kind friends in the UK took delivery of the parcel and re-directed it to me here so I have now watched 'Hattie', a biopic of Hattie Jacques starring Gavin and Stacey's/Little Britain's Ruth Jones, 'Rather You Than Me', featuring David Walliams as Frankie Howerd and 'The Curse of Steptoe' with its inspired casting of Jason Isaacs as Harry H. Corbett and Phil Davis as Wilfrid Brambell. This review from The Guardian captures its tragic magic better than I could. If I have one tiny qualm it is that their lives look so unrelentingly miserable. They must have had one or two moments of fun being in the best written and acted comedy of the day and earning all that money. Maybe not, they certainly both seemed to have been lugging huge, mortifying albatrosses around with them!

The real Hattie Jacques and the divine Ruth Jones who recreates her with stunning aplomb in 'Hattie'.

Less depressing and a must-see is 'Hattie'. Behind the smirkiness and stereotypes of her Carry On roles Hattie was one classy, sensual broad who had the bittersweet fortune to fall passionately in love/lust with her driver (played by the delectable Aidan Turner from 'Being Human') while still in an affectionate but lacklustre marriage to John Le Mesurier. Ruth Jones strikes just the right note - mixing the excitement of newly realised sexuality with a thoroughly kind and admirable desire to harm no-one and see that everyone is looked after. Too tall an order of course. Your heart breaks for her and Le Mesurier trying to be civilised while living in the most unorthodox of domestic situations.

All the performances are great and the recreation of scenes from Carry On Cabbie, with a subtle commentary on the appalling limitations placed on roles for women, be they 'lookers' or matrons, work beautifully!

Must track down Eric and Ernie next.

ROFL (well, chuckle with) Roiphe

Just finished reading Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements - Seven Portraits of Married Life 1910-39. I can honestly say I romped through this book, my interest in what made these people and their relationships tick never flagged. Amongst the unions caught in Roiphe's amber are Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, Jane, H.G. Wells & Rebecca West and Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge & Evgenia Souline. All her studies reveal exceptional, creative early 20thC minds consciously reshaping or replacing the institution of marriage. H.G. Wells was as much the charming complete bastard I had been led to believe, Radclyffe Hall was one controlling, tory mother f*cker and Vanessa Bell was a surprisingly coy boheme. The relationships that most challenged my received knowledge were those Vera Brittain had with her brother Edward, fiance Roland Leighton, husband George Catlin and long time companion Winifred Holtby.


My understanding of Vera Brittain's suffering in love, emerging pacifism and feminist pioneering came straight from the 1979 BBC television dramatisation of her book Testament of Youth in which the delightful Cheryl Campbell created her as the most disarming of heroines. While there was lots to like and admire about the real life Vera Brittain, Roiphe, as she does with all the personalities examined in this book, paints a thoughtful, psychologically credible and drily amusing portrait of a complex human being. It is by no means always flattering but we certainly glimpse the myth making, compromises and to some extent, the self obsession, that can go into becoming a literary and political icon.

I thoroughly recommend Roiphe's book to anyone fascinated by the Edwardian era and the emergence of modernism in British society. You will enjoy hobnobbing with DH Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, discovering their noble and nastier traits and maybe Roiphe's dry humour will make you ROFL or at least enjoy a wry inner chuckle.

Here is a bit of light verse I dashed off after reading Roiphe's portrayal of Vera Brittain:

In youth Vera Brittain was terribly smitten

With brooding, bright Roland who died in the war

From his death, her brother’s and (implied) many others

She created catharsis

In her Testaments - one, two, three and four

(Last unfinished)

Passion less rattling she found with George Catlin

But privately thought him a great bloody bore

A new minted text she preferred much to sex

And domestication she came to abhor

Spared it thanks to Winifred Holtby

Vera’s fuelled tragic jollity

Gave her a persona the UK could adore

Freed from love’s dreary fetters, this left lady of letters

While a true self made woman, slightly chills at the core!

A Tree Grows in Fairfield

I've been to Fairfield three times this year. I think I had previously been to Fairfield only twice in my life. Once in the 70s, when I was about 13, my siblings and I were taken to Fairfield to meet my Auntie Elva and Uncle Arthur, and John, the only one of their four boys who still lived at home. My main recollection of that visit was that they had a sulphur crested cockatoo that shrieked 'Arrr... thur' in perfect imitation of my aunt! Then, in 1990, I went to Fairfield Library for the launch by the Hon Gough Whitlam of my mother's Fairfield - a Pictorial History. That she wrote a history of this south western Sydney suburb suggests some connection or relationship with the area, but in fact she just happened to be the freelance writer commissioned to write the book.

Mum's book published in 1990 for Fairfield's centenary and dedicated to the memory of my brother Nicky.

Facebook is the reason I've started visiting Fairfield more often now. Through Facebook I have re-connected with a branch of my family I hardly knew. So now I go to Fairfield to see my elderly Uncle Arthur in his nursing home and recently I went to see him with his youngest son, my cousin John. This is the same cousin John who was at home being an introverted teenage boy strumming his guitar while the cocky summoned his Dad so melodically back in the 70s. He now lives in Alice Springs. When he was last in Sydney we went together to see Arthur and to find a tree! In one of life's peculiar but abundant coincidences I had given John Mum's book to look at and amongst the memory jogging images he encountered therein was one of an enormous oak tree in Fairfield called Bland's Oak.

It turns out that back in the 60s when I was rambling about in the fields and woods behind our house in the Essex village of West Horndon, climbing the odd diminutive tree and occasionally falling in streams (subject for another posting), my four male cousins in NSW were hooning around the streets of Fairfield and climbing Bland's Oak. This tree is ENORMOUS, and it is enormous because it is really old. Not Californian redwood really old, but colonial-remnant-planting-on-previously-clear-felled-land old! It was planted, probably from seed, in about 1850 on the estate of prominent Sydney doctor and politician William Bland ( 1789 - 1868).

A West Horndon field and bit of vegetation.

To quote Brenda Pittard in Fairfield - a Pictorial History:

Mark Lodge was built by Captain John Horsley in 1814... and stood on the site now occupied by Fairfield Hospital...William Bland bought Mark Lodge from Horsley to use as his country estate... (On his death) his estate was broken up and by the 1930s all that remained of the magnificent property that had once been Mark Lodge was the oak tree that Bland had planted. In 1930 during a violent storm the tree's trunk was split because of the enormous weight of the wet leaves. Fortunately the knowledge and careful attention of a tree expert saved the tree though now supported by metal bands and frames.

And so it still stands, heritage listed and protected, propped up by iron struts on Bland Street, Carramar in a reserve beside Prospect Creek and on the site of Mark Lodge, called Oakdene Park. Despite being split asunder it is still a sprawling giant approx 13 metres in height and 30 metres in spread.

Bland's Oak

The official heritage listing that can be viewed on Fairfield Council's website (click on link under photo) notes that this is not the common deciduous British oak tree but a rarer species, Quercus Virginiana, that may have been a the gift of one of Bland's botanically minded friends such as William Wentworth. Interestingly, to again quote Mum, '(this) evergreen oak is found mainly in southern and central England'. And so, the inter connectedness of things continues...

Cousin John up Bland's Oak, 2011.

I must be into a life (with a foppush bottom)

Thinking of making this my new blog ID (from the ENGRISH site)

Thank god we got "The Kennedys"

Barry Pepper & Greg Kinnear as two charismatic, over achieving, highly sexed Irish boys watch 'Leave It To Beaver' to get a few tips.

So, Sydney finally got to see 'The Kennedys' (Sunday nights 29 May, 5 & 12, June). There are two versions of the story behind its delayed screening. Both acknowledge that the US/Canadian History Channel commissioned the series, filmed over two years, at a cost of $25 million US, but abruptly dropped it in January of this year with the statement: "this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand", The first story says they responded to pressure from Kennedy associates and admirers to walk away from the series. The other version is the same except that the reason given by its proponents for the History Channel abandoning their project is that they realised the series was 'completely f***ing terrible' and that the Reelz Channel who eventaully aired it did so because 'they didn’t care that it is completely f***ing terrible' (source: Best Week Ever TV).

Casting doubt on the first explanation is the fact that the series contains nothing that hasn't been public knowledge for aeons i.e. Joe Kennedy was anti semitic and not above rigging a ballot or two, Rose Kennedy was a manipulative and controlling fanatical Catholic, JFK had a bad back yet consistently put it about a bit (well, a lot), Bobby was uber fertile and unflinching, and, in cleaning up one of his big bro's messes, pretty tough on Marilyn Monroe... None this is exactly bombshell material, but perhaps still heresy for canonising Cameloteers.

The charge that the series is simply bad TV centres both on the characterisation and on the dialogue, lampooned as clunky, melodramatic and pregnant with 'prophecy'. This seems a little harsh. 'The Kennedys' isn't a documentary and let's face it no aspect of the actual story of the dynasty, the Rat Pack, the Mob, Cuba, the USSR, the civil rights movement, Dr Feelgood's magical injections, J. Edgar Hoover, the paparazzi etc and of course, the shocking assassinations, themselves is easy to downplay. I expected a certain chilling profundity of tone for these BIG themes and subjects and that's what I got. And what if some of the writing and the portrayals are a bit self conscious? Setting out to capture iconic figures and moments it would be hard to be otherwise. However perhaps that is easier to feel that way when I come to the series as an Australian via the UK and was 6 years old when JFK was assassinated. I wonder if I would be so ready to suspend disbelief if the story were part of my national heritage, perhaps a dramatisation of The Dismissal with say, Garry MacDonald as one of the reporters on the steps of Parliament House. Hey, wait a moment... .


Basically, like US critic Linda Stasi in the New York Post I experienced the series as 'one of the best, most riveting, historically accurate dramas about a time and place in American history that has ever been done for TV'. And as well as being riveting historical drama, the series was a wonderful showcase for some fine character acting from Diana Hardcastle, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Kristin Booth and, most of all, the wonderful Tom Wilkinson. Katie Holmes was even surprisingly adequate as Jackie but I wouldn't put her in their class.

Mean cartoon from US satirical TV Review Publication Best Week Ever TV).

So, thumbs up for 'The Kennedys'. Damn fine apple pie in its own right and definitely superior to its main competition on those Sunday evenings, that tedious re-evocation of 'Upstairs Downstairs', 'Downton Abbey'.

M'lud experiences a twinge of angst or dyspepsia when a telegram tells him that The Titanic has sunk, the domestics want a living wage and he will need to install a safari park to meet death duties.