The Road to Edinburgh: what’s the secret of a good joke, timing

Salamanca. Cobblestones, iglesias, and a hotel room that smells like Glade and how do you turn those bloody things off and why does anyone think that Glade smells better than whatever it is that the Glade is supposed to mask?

I have not been able to spot the frog on the facade of the universidad. Spotting said frog is supposed to bring you luck. The lads were rather patient while we looked, but in the end, eldest boy said, ‘Yeah, but Mum, I’ve never spilt even a grain of salt and look what bad luck I’ve just had’. He’s just this afternoon lost a his sketchbook which was filled with a series of cavemen he has invented, and the inventions of the cavemen, and their food and their interactions with each other, and he was going to post it to his granny. We’ve retraced our steps through the streets of Salamanca looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be seen. He’s been as brave as he can, but it’s a lot to lose and I just can’t understand how it happened, because he’s been clutching one sketchbook or another so tight for a month that it’s almost like an extension of his arm.

I will tell you one day about this last month. About me and Spain and two boys and a Ford Fiesta. I haven’t been blogging, but I’ve been writing in my journals. I wrote great screeds in my journals, two new books filled with thinking and thoughts, more journal writing than I’ve done for years and years. It’s such a different way to write. I’ve missed the internet and my blog and your blogs, but I’m convinced that writing in journals has let me learn a lot.

I’ve learnt a lot about what it means to make your way in the world with both of your parents gone. For a while, I thought I was making too much of that, and I tried to talk myself out of giving it too much credence. It happens to everyone after all. But actually, it’s a bloody big deal. For me, anyway. I’m different now to what I was.

It’s been a good (by which I mean opportune) time to have some thinking and writing time, because in one week, it will be one year since my Dad died. One year. I can not believe it. I don’t mean this in some kind of ‘does time not fly’ sense. I mean that even if the year has been a full and complex one, it might easily not have passed. I mean that I could answer the phone tomorrow and Dad would be on the other end saying, ‘it’s me’ and I would say, ‘oh, you’ll never guess where we are’ and he would say, ‘well, we’re at the footy, we’re thumping Richmond by twelve goals, it’s raining and your man Chad’s done nothing all night’.

I mean that we would talk as if nothing had changed as if it had only been a day or two since we spoke. That could happen and I would not be surprised.

And yet.

It couldn’t.

I know that.

So one day, when I’ve got my thoughts in a fashion that’s a little more concise, I’ll blog a bit about the last month or so.

The mister arrived last week, and oh, yes, one day we’ll laugh about driving around Galicia until 4 am and my boys in the back of the car saying, ‘oh, well, it’s all right Mum, you already taught us that word’ and later eldest boy, ‘Mum, I’m one hundred percent sure you know how to find Dad’. But suffice to say that 250 euros that he got as compensation for the overbooked flight is mine. Mine, mine, mine.

But I can’t write about all that now either, because my mind is on other things. Tomorrow, we are travelling down to Sevilla, and then into the mountains of Andalucia for a week. In Andalucia, I will be ‘in rehearsal’ because ‘my show’, the show I’m staging at the Edinburgh Fringe, ‘opens’ in one month. Just the thought, the very thought is making my heart race and my fingers shake and why would anyone do this to themselves? Who makes their solo debut at forty years of age, what was I thinking and so on and etcetera, etcetera, etceteraaaahhhhh.

Actually, I know what I was thinking. It has been, in fact, one of the few rational decisions I’ve made over the last year or so. All I need to do is to remind myself why it is that I’m going to Edinburgh and how it happened that I could think to myself, ‘Well, if I wanted to, I could. So, why don’t I? Why don’t I bloody well give it a go?’

Last night at two am, or possibly three, as I was doing just that, reminding myself of all the excellent reasons to put on a solo show, I thought to myself, ‘That’s a perfect set of blog posts and haven’t I missed blogging and I think tomorrow’s hotel has internet access, so what about a series: The Road to Edinburgh’.

At two am, it was an excellent idea. It has grown less excellent during the day as the time for actually writing the post has shortened, and as I’ve realised that a ‘Road to Edinburgh’ series threatens to be a bit like a term-long school project at the end of which the teacher might write, ‘Tracy might have done better had she spent more time doing her project and less time talking about it.’ And yes, that’s pretty much what my school reports looked like, and yes, I probably could have done better, but anyway, here we are.

The first step on my road to Edinburgh (there are many steps – I’m telling you, this was a highly rational and well-thought-out decision).

It started because I don’t like the heat. Not at all. Like, really. Not. At. All. And even in January, Abu Dhabi wasn’t cold and I knew that I needed to plan my summer escape, and that because of reasons I would be going to Spain (one of those reasons being that before we went to Abu Dhabi, we had planned that the mister would take long service leave and we would visit Spain this September and so I was sort of modifying the plans even though the mister couldn’t come, though as it’s turned out he is here now, as I told you up there a bit). But as I sat in Abu Dhabi looking into things, I realised that August in Spain was going to be hot, August in Abu Dhabi even hotter, and that I needed to find a place to be that I could sit with the boys and life would not be too complicated and also it would be coolish and not too far from Spain on account of airfaires.

It was two in the morning (I’ve seen a lot of two in the mornings these last few years) in a bed in Abu Dhabi, and I was thinking to myself that Ireland would be cool and so would Scotland. And I suppose because I was preparing for the Adelaide Fringe at the time, my brain thought to itself, ‘How about Edinburgh, you could take in the Fringe and the boys would love it and you could have a look around and see if you might one day put on a show’. At that particular moment, I do believe that my brain just said to itself ‘put on a show’ in the way that it has sometimes said ’study medicine’ or ‘become a park ranger’ or ‘actually make a living at something’ – that is, they were words, not an actual idea. But because it was two in the morning and at two in the morning pretty much anything is possible, my brain did translate those words into an idea which went along the lines of, ‘But why not put your own show on if you’re going to be there anyway.’

My brain was a teensy bit sensible and said to itself, ‘Nah, the registrations have probably closed’, but not sensible enough to say to itself, ‘But who will care for your children, because the mister is no longer able to take his leave’. My brain said, ‘Get up and turn your computer on and use the internet to check whether registrations have closed.’

So up I got and thanks to the magic of the world wide interwebs, I discovered that registrations had not yet closed. Finding a venue might be tricky. Accommodation might be expensive. But registrations had not yet closed. Anything was possible.

I got back into bed and I slept not a wink as I waited for the sensible part of my brain to kick in.

…
Still to come on The Road to Edinburgh (though it will be a week or so, because we off to rustic accommodation where there will not be an internet connection): ‘chicks aren’t funny’, or ‘are you some kind of feminist or something?’.

We’ll laugh about this one day

From spain

The car? Oh, yes, it’s manual.
The road? Yes, just the one in and out of the town. What’s that? Is it a steep and narrow road? Why, yes. Yes, it is.

Anyone got a cunning plan on how one can organise to live in Spain for the rest of oneś life? One could, as one has always suspected, be very happy here

Even if I had brushed up on my Spanish before we came – my, one can forget a lot in ten years but also, they speak much more slowly in Guatemala I can tell you – but even if I had, I would not have thought to learn to say, I need something for my little boy, he is constipated.

Still, we went to the Palacio Real today, and they liked the armoury very much indeed. Quite shocked at the armour for los ninos, though.

Yes, I said, and thatś why I say guns are not toys and they said, You already told us that Mum.

Some of the walls in that palace are lined in silk. Lads fail to see significance. Also Stradivarius violins. But they liked the lions guarding the stairs.

It rained yesterday. Thunder too. We got soaked. The hotel staff apologised, but I said, Oh, it makes me feel alive.

Happy, happy days.

PS Dear Australian dollar: you can stop falling now. Please.

I know I’ve forgotten something, but in the meantime

This moving business has proved to be much more emotional than I thought it would be. Look. Here is my father’s recipe for worcesteshire sauce (complete with vinegar stain) thrown into my suitcase for safekeeping in the last move. And here is a colour photograph of my nanna and her sisters, taken by my grandfather and pushed into a book, one of the few books I brought with me. She died an untimely death many years ago, but I have, oddly enough, said her name a great number of times in the last few months as youngest boy grapples with the names of people he has never met but seems to want to know.

The plane leaves at midnight, which makes for a long day, particularly when it begins at six, because everyone is too excited to sleep.

The apartment, dusty and dismantled, smells still of the sunblock the mister applied to the children before they went off for their final swimming lesson this term. Youngest boy can get himself from one side to the other now. Wish I had time to tell you more.

I have a New Yorker and a Margaret Drabble for the plane, although hopefully I will not need them, because the lads will drift off to sleep, easily, and for long enough. Eldest boy has Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though he has already read it six times since we bought it on Wednesday afternoon. Youngest has another Junie B Jones. And fully charged DS machines of course, though I do not encourage their use, because the lads end up fully wired if they get too much DS.

My mostly-formed script is in my bag, along with a diary, notebooks of half-formed thoughts, The Comic Toolbox book and supplemented by a shit-load of cords and wires, two for nearly every appliance – one to charge and one to connect to the netbook. SLR camera, simple camera, phone, my ipod, lads’ mp3 players…not only is there no such thing as the paperless suitcase, those wires don’t weigh nothing you know.

Nervous as anything, but excited too

Moving house the old-school way – by chucking stuff in the boot of the car and driving back and forth until there’s nothing left in the old house. Though trips up and down in the lift is a novelty. We’ve never done that before (tried to post pic, but way too slow, and if I’m still on the computer when the mister gets back there will be words). We’ve accumulated a few things (bookshelf, desk, but no new clothes), but there still isn’t too much, so even with our small car, it shouldn’t be more than five or six trips.

I’ll miss the view, that I will. This building has gorgeous windows.

On Sunday, I’m on a plane to Madrid. One hundred types of awesome.

Haven’t finished my script yet, but will worry about that another day.

The mind, she boggles

It’s passe, I know, to mention, even in passing, the google searches one notices sending persons to one’s blog. That’s why I didn’t mention the rather lovely, ’sing or swim port pirie’ which came my way last week. But I find myself driven to ask, what on Earth were you looking for ‘two ladies and a plate of radish’ person?

Still two dentist visits to go

The mister has been spending a lot of time at the dentist, and rather odd hours the dentist keeps. His appointment last night was 7.30 pm.

While the mister is at the dentist we walk around saying, ‘Poor mister’, and when he comes home we say, ‘How are you? Poor mister’ though in truth, I am thinking a little more than I should be about how freaking expensive this is getting and you wouldn’t want to see a person in that much pain, but, you know, money doesn’t grow on trees and moving is a very expensive exercise and not to mention that tax bill we had to pay because of some miscalculation or other (on which note, how does that stuff happen, I mean really, how does it) and so forth.

The other day, while the mister was out at the dentist, youngest boy sat in bed, making a little book for the mister with illustrations and a text which, as it’s main theme, suggested the mister is ‘awesome’, ‘rocks’, and the ‘best dad in the world’.

‘And you know what,’ youngest boy said to me after he had shown it to me, ‘when Dad sees this, he is gonna cry like Federer.’

And then he gave me a hug, got back into bed, turned out the light and five minutes later was sleeping.

Life, she truly is fogwholloping. Left or right?

quick update, because the script, she be not writing herself you know

The interwebs, she be broken over here. Not entirely broken, but slow as a wet week, as my mother used to say. I can’t use that saying, because my children would have no idea what I mean. None at all. Though I hear Adelaide has had some rain of late. Not here though. Thirty eight degrees today, forty two tommorrow (according to the paper).

Last week, I spent five days without going outside once and remained surprisingly stable. Combination of sick child, sick self, injured child, too hot to care anyway. I used the gym upstairs – a small, but adequate arrangement, such as you might find in a hotel. It has a magnificent view, particularly at night, when everything is just sparkly. And the week that the moon is filling is always spectacular, would you not agree?

I did not cry once while I was living inside. Then, yesterday, driving home from a birthday party, I nearly had an accident, caused entirely by a man who was going too fast, changed lanes without indicating, then wound down his window and yelled at me. Knees, voice and resolve all wobbly.

The day before yesterday, I went back to bodycombat. It made me laugh, especially when I hit myself in my own face.

The lads have three and half days left of school. For some reason, which I can not fathom, because we are about to have twelve weeks vacation, the school needs to have only four days this week, and one of them a half day.

In one week and one day, the boys and I will be taking off for Spain. Because of reasons, the mister will be joining us after all, arriving sometime in early July (numbers, they just falls out of my collwobbles as soon as theys is entering them). It is awesome that he will be coming, though the reasons, they be not ace. (Sorry, we’re reading the BFG – yes, again – and none of us is talking like we shouldn’t. The BFG is so farwhopping, don’t you think? If you haven’t read it, you must, even if you not be havings chilluns, only you must be readings it out loud).

Then, the mister will come back here, and I will somehow find my way through Europe with my boys and get us to Edinburgh, whereats I will be performing my show in the Edinburgh Fringe. This thought, she is keeping me awake.

The mister will arrive just in time to watch my tech rehearsal (whatever that might be – what the fuck am I doing, I don’t know anything about this, all I know is words, whatever made me think I should be doing this, whose idea was this anyway), tell me I’m brilliant, and supervise children while they hand out flyers on the Royal Mile telling everyone to come to their mother’s show.

Life, she be fogwhollopping. Left or right?

Philosophy? We getz it

The following question keeps asking itself inside my brain:

If I had a party and didn’t invite anyone, would everyone still know they weren’t invited?

And now if you’ll excuse me, I really must try and work even if there is a sick boy on the couch

So I was just clicking my way from blog to blog, because when faced with the choice between aimless blogging and working on a script which really isn’t that good yet but is going to be performed in public fairly soon and there’s only nine more days of school left which means the rest must be written around caring for children all the while travelling through a land whose language you have pretty much forgotten to speak, what would you choose…

when I came across this blog which I’ve not visited before…

and more particularly, this post…

will you get a load of those typewriters…envy, envy, envy…

And today I am listening to Kirsty Maccoll

The ipod, elegantly combining as it does my two greatest anxiety-inducers, those being waste and decisions, has been not unlike my superannuation. I know it’s there, shoved in the bottom of the wardrobe, but if I keep my eyes just so, even when I’m pulling my purple shoes out from the back for their once-a-year blistering whirl, I can pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Head in sand. Wah wah wah.

The mister and I bought mp3 players for each other one Christmas long enough ago that 30GB seemed like an enormous amount of space, so enormous that it could never be used. He bought me a beautiful purple sony walkman knowing that I love gadgets but don’t want to get sucked in by brands, and I bought him an ipod, knowing that I shouldn’t get sucked in by brands, but my goodness what a beautiful creature the ipod is.

Back in the day, such devices came with not-simple software, all that transferring the CD onto the computer, importing it into your library, accidentally wiping your device, but heck, we were thirtysomethings, technology was our friend.

Only it wasn’t. And even in the post-Christmas haze, it all seemed so hard. If I took my music off my computer, then would it wipe it from the device next time I synced? Howcome that goldfrapp album shows up in my library but not on my device? etcetera etcetera etceteraaagghhhh

And then there’s podcasting. It’s a waste not to be listening to podcasts, but how? I mean I can’t get it from juice into my library. And I could never get the hang of playlists, so that whenever I wanted to shuffle I would go from Jeff Buckley to Chopin to a Sunday profile intro by Monica Attard first broadcast in 2006.

Perhaps if our computer had been a little stronger, faster, had a bit more grunt. But trying to get my head around the whole thing mostly just involved hours of sitting at the computer getting nowhere.

Then, last Christmas I really wanted to give youngest boy (which meant eldest had to have one too) an mp3 player, because he loves music and recorded stories so much and spends hours listening. It seemed to me that as we were moving into a more inside life, and a fairly small inside at that, he would really get a lot out of it.

So off I went to the shop to find two smallish, cheapish mp3 players, one in red and the other in blue. I didn’t buy them ipods, because – and I know there is no real logic in this, but this is how it goes – I am trying to train them to not get sucked into brands and other types of consumerism.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that in the few short years since the mister and I first exchanged mp3 players (it was an accident, by the way) the software has got simpler.

Drag and drop.

Beautiful words. Plus I now have an external hard drive, so I could keep all the music on there. It would be fine.

There was a bit of stress when I realised that the smallish, cheapish devices we’d settled on didn’t have docking stations, but they can still go through the stereo so that’s fine. (By the way, how has it happened, mp3 manufacturers, that the jacks of all headsets fit into all mp3 players, and therefore all mp3 players can be hooked into all stereos with just the one cord? How did you let this piece of salvation for consumers get through your design process?)

But then, the nagging from the unused ipod and walkman started getting stronger. I’m in yr cupboard not being used. Not quite waking me up at night, but niggling away nonetheless.

I used the walkman a bit, but never put anything new on it anymore, having given up trying to conquer the software, but the ipod remained largely unused.

Nagging, niggling and nagging some more.

The more I don’t use it, the more it is a waste, the more it is a waste, the more I know I should work the whole thing out, the more I couldn’t bear to work it out, the more I didn’t use it, the more I didn’t use it, the more it is a waste and so on.

Can’t abide waste. Or decisions.

Meanwhile, I really want me one of those iphones. But, oh my, the cost and all of this ‘locked’ to a carrier. So maybe I should get an itouch, because then I get all the stuff I want, but without the phone. But then I still need to carry around the phone.

And you do know the source of the minerals that is in all these gadgets and electronic devices, don’t you (here is a link to raise hope for congo)?

And all the while, the ipod in the wardrobe nagging, niggling and nagging me.

Then, last night, while the mister was out looking at a selection of secondhand washing machines and furniture with which to furnish our new flat, I realised I did not bring a single Pogues CD with me. Two years without Summer in Siam and the Sunny Side of the Street?

No way.

The tipping point was reached, and I reached into the wardrobe, past the purple shoes (their chance for their annual outing gone when I got a cold on Friday and did not go to the ball) and I got the ipod out.

I downloaded itunes. I found out that there is new software for this ipod classic. I let it wipe everything that was already on there (goodbye back in black and human frailty – and yes, I cried when I did that, because what if the mister dies while he’s out and this could have been my last connection to him, I mean I know he won’t, but what if he does, bloody hell, woman, get over yourself, slap slap slap). I used my emusic audiobooks subscription for the month on myself instead of the children, and last night, I went to sleep with the sounds of Dylan Thomas in my ears.

To begin at the beginning…

And that’s under the verandah

The mister has been in Al Ain this week. It’s an oasis town in Abu Dhabi state, less than a two hour drive from here. We were having a quick chat about things before he raced off for another night on the piss networking and I mentioned that one of the mothers at school had mentioned that her car computer read the outside temperature at fifty degrees today.

‘That can’t be right, can it?’ I said in a ‘and-who-would-want-to-spend-their-money-on-a-luxury-European-car-anyway-cos-who-can-really-tell-the-difference-between-one-car-and-the-next-and-look-at-that-their-computer-doesn’t-even-work-properly’ kind of way.

‘Well,’ he said in a ‘don’t-forget-you-can-take-the-lad-out-of-the-country-but-you-can’t-take-the-country-out-of-the-lad-and-I-know-a-lot-about-the-difference-between-cars’ kind of way, ‘…it was fifty two degrees today at Al Ain.’

Significant pause.

‘And yesterday, it was fifty six.’

Two weeks until school holidays start. Two weeks and three days until the boys and I are on a plane.

UPDATED TO ADD: I dunno, I’m still a bit sceptical…fifty six sounds like some kind of world record and my quick googling can’t find an official site that gives retrospective information. Anyway, the forecast today is for forty five, gradually sliding down to be thirty eight by Monday.

Music and words

It is my mother’s birthday today. This time last year, Dad was still able – just – to take my brother and I out for tea and raise his glass in a toast, although he barely ate a thing.

I shall mark the occasion with a story.

The day before my Mum died, she took her school choir to a rehearsal of the Combined Schools Choir. At the rehearsal, there was some suggestion that during the public performance certain children should not sing.

In the days after she died, a little boy – and I wish I knew which little boy it was – sent us a card and in the card he described the choir’s bus trip back to school when my outraged mother told them not to worry that everyone would sing.

The little boy wrote: ‘…and Mrs Crisp told us, “Stick to your guns kids”‘.

And a few days after that, we went to the Combined Schools Choir performance and everybody sang.

Now, if only I could get my script written

I got the SMS to let me know my visa was ready for collection, so yesterday afternoon off I went. I collected the boys from school, drove myself down Najda St, Electra (I think, or was it Hamdan), past the disconcertingly large hoardings surrounding the Cultural Foundation (on which excellent institution, more information will be forthcoming), did the U-turn, found a park, went upstairs and collected my passport which was indeed back, complete with visa glued in.

It all went swimmingly well. Which made me realise just how awful the other day was. I told you about it just down here. The mister did get back in time from his dentist appointment (an abscess on his old, already-fixed root canal, so it has to be redone ewwww and ouchies), he had money in his wallet and he knew exactly how to get there (the visa building being just a few down from the dentist’s – small world, no?).

It was okay, going okay, I was holding it together, but then, just before we got there we saw the worst, very worst kind of accident.

The mister, who had, I think, been hoping I wouldn’t notice the accident while I kept an eye out for the building, found a park, turned the car (and thus the air conditioning) off, the sun beat in through the windscreen.

‘That looked like a bad accident, didn’t it?’ I said. Quietly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It did.’

I sobbed. Great, gut-wrenching, very few times in a lifetime kinds of sobs.

My poor boys. Eldest boy said (quietly), ‘Dad, do you think it would be okay to give Mum a hug?’ As my Dad would say: ‘How good is that?’ How good indeed.

I felt completely, absolutely, utterly unable to cope.
Like if the mister died, how would I survive? No, really, how would I? And I don’t mean how would I survive his death, I mean how would I live. How would I ever look after myself?

One week on, that moment is easy to understand. There was a lot going on.

Firstly, there’s me learning to live without parents. I know I’m forty, and it’s been a long time – nearly half my life – since I was dependent on my parents. But there’s a safety that parents give you that no one else can (and here I note how lucky I’ve been that it’s only in their death that I’ve had to grieve this loss, far worse for children who must learn to live without that safety even while their parents are alive).

Secondly, in form after form after form I’m labelling myself ‘housewife’. Every time I want to do something, I have to get a form from the mister that says he has ‘no objection’ to me doing it. We’ve only just been able to add me to the bank account, but it’s not a joint account in the way that I might have understood it, because if the mister dies, the assets in that account are frozen, and do not automatically become mine.

Now I don’t want to get into a big discussion about ‘housewife’ here, suffice to say, I’ve had an important and valuable cross-generational caring role and different people bring different things to relationshps and so on and etcetera and I think our society would be a better place if more people had the opportunity to do it. So that’s fine. And I completely understand that when it comes to living in foreign lands, someone is the person around whom the rest of the family is defined. That’s fine too.

It’s just that after a while it does grind down your sense of self-identity – there are days when I cringe even to hear the mister say ‘we’ or ‘us’. Actually, I shouted at him about it the other day.

And of course, there’s nothing quite like submitting your husband’s salary slips and bank statements as official proof to another party that you can support yourself to prove to yourself that you can’t.

Other things that led to this point?

It’s hot. Scorchingly, searingly, relentlessly hot. On the walk to school, if I’m wearing my knee-length skirt, I feel the sun burning my shins. Once I’m out in it, I can’t think. I have to plan every move before I leave the apartment, and if anything happens that doesn’t fit that plan, I don’t know what to do.

And the accident. That was it. Any ounce of reserve I might have had was gone. On my bad days, the days when I’m tired or homesick or lonely, the roads here frighten me. The cars are big and the windows are tinted and people use their horns too often, their indicators rarely. I’ve always preferred the bus or the tram even on roads I understand (and it’s true there are buses, but I’ll tell you about them another day). And then, as it so often is at the moment, my Mum. It was a car accident that killed my mum and it’s her birthday this week.

So, you know, that was me, sitting in the front seat of a car, which was in a carpark, which was in front of a building which I’d been too frightened to come and find for myself.

But wait…

I don’t want you to think that I’m miserable every moment of every day. Because I’m not. Far from it. I’ve had lots of great moments.

My Dad used to say that every five years or so you look in the mirror and you see yourself for who you are right now. Not quite as young as you thought you were, but not unhappy with your age.

That’s what happened when I looked at that photograph you can see down there. I do know a photograph isn’t a mirror, but in this case, it’s the same effect. It isn’t especially flattering of me, but I love it. It’s a woman who woke up one day and found herself, quite unexpectedly, forty years old and exploring the Dubai Creek.

From dubai creek

I think it’s Tuesday today

I like this ‘new math’ website very much, and in particular, I like this. It’s CQOTI* rather than a LOL, but I like it.

Today, the book I wish I’d brought with me instead of sending into storage is Barbara Hanrahan Diaries. I could use me some righteous petulance right about now.

*What’s a CQOTI? I’m glad you asked: ‘chuckle quietly on the inside’

English as she is spoke

They are playing Poptropica again and when they ‘customise’ their avatars, my little boys say ‘costume-ise’.

Just call me Confusion

There’s nothing quite like starting the work to stop the panic about getting said work done.

Keyah!

So I told you I’ve been going to a few aerobics classes lately. So far, I’ve been limiting myself to pump and step which I vaguely understand because they were doing them back in the nineties, the last time I was engaged in any form of regular exercise (in truth, I’m not even sure that they’re called ‘aerobics’ these days).

I was intrigued by the other classes on the list – bodyjam, bodycombat and so on – but you know, I don’t really want to fight my body I just want it to be a bit more fit than it has been.

But then, Zoe tweeted the other day that she had been to bodycombat and I thought ‘hmmm’ and then I thought ‘even though I’ve never actually met her, she’s the type of person whose company I enjoy and she’s got a sensible head on her shoulders, maybe I could give it a try.’

So I did.

Be sure to ‘keyah!’ Zoe advised.

So I did.

And now I’m thinking, maybe I should write a few stunts into my show. So, dear brain, there’s something to ponder while I sleep: in what kind of combat would a vegetarian librarian be involved?

A short rant

One thing giving me the shits is this whole ‘oh, look at twitter, isn’t that amazing? All these people writing things in 140 characters or less.’

Brevity is nothing new, peeps. Haiku, anyone?

And shock. Brevity nurtures wit. Really? Oscar Wilde, anyone? Dorothy whatshername?

Look, I wouldn’t be so fussed, but some dude has just signed a five figure deal to publish a book of people’s tweets (I’m not linking to him or any of the articles about him because he doesn’t need me to and because then he’ll think I’m just trying to get his attention so he’ll put me in his next book) and that has tipped me over the edge. Don’t get me wrong. Twitter is fun and all, it’s just that brevity is not a literary revolution.

I dunno, maybe I should be happy that there is a revised and revived interest in poetry…I just wish they’d stop pretending it was all amazing and new.

On a not-unrelated note, this twitter-facebook status crossover is not entirely successful, because twitter asks, ‘what are you doing’ while facebook asks ‘what’s on your mind’?*

It makes for imprecision and imprecision is what poetry is not.

To my mind, the day that Facebook caved to populism and shed the old ‘ThirdCat is…’ civilisation lost a lot.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a sense of perspective to find.

*UPDATED TO ADD: I didn’t really explain myself properly there, it’s only a problem when you’re getting twitter updates automatically sent to update fb statuses, because then you’re answering different questions with the same answer. Anyway, look, a friend has just emailed to tell me I’m losing the plot and has suggested that I (and here I paraphrase) forget about it.

Visas

Today I am going to the place where you put in the forms to get a visa for the UK. I’m not entirely sure that I need the visa, as Australians generally don’t for such short stays (about four weeks). However, I am performing in the Edinburgh Fringe in my very own, very first solo show.

This may or may not mean that I need to apply for the visa before I get there. Some official types have told me no, others have told me yes. So, just to be on the safe side I’m putting the application in.

It’s been keeping me awake the last few nights, worrying that our passports won’t get back before the boys and I get on a plane to Spain to escape this wretched and rising heat. I just double-checked about the visas a few days ago you see, because I was going along with the official person who told me I’d be able to get my UK visa at the border.

Anyhoo, I’m tootling off with my forms and my boys and applying for the visas and getting our biometric scans. I have got a lot of forms and a lot of copies of forms and it’s going to cost me a lot of money. It’s the part about travelling that I do not like.

I’m very much hoping that the mister is finished with his trip to the dentist by 1, so that he can take us (suspected root canal, poor love, he’s had a very sad few days and mostly been asleep by 8.30 while I wander sleeplessly around the apartment without the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change). I have no idea where the Khaladiya Centre is, I’m sure the parking will be impossible, and it’s forty plus degrees again today. It would be much better to have the mister help me find my way.

Sometime after 5 pm

From from my window

This is what I will miss when we leave this apartment. This view from our kitchen at this time of the day. I have taken many photos wanting to show you, but none of them quite work. Perhaps because I’m trying to take a photo of a moment, but perhaps because the clouds and the smog and the dust do strange things to the light. It’s hard to photograph the sun.

At this moment, it is late afternoon, I am getting (fixing as my American-schooled boys now say) tea, my boys are running in and out, helping sometimes and sometimes not, asking constantly, What time is Dad getting home, Will he have time to take us to the corner for soccer?

When the window is open, the call to prayer floats in. When the window is closed I will hear it, but faintly, and very often youngest boy will say, Can we open the window so we can hear the call to prayer?

I have been trying to write a post which explains exactly why I will miss this moment. Why it makes me think of other beats in other days where I felt just this way. Other beats which are so often prompted by a breeze, or the light of the sun. The autumn light on the parklands as I walked home from my first real job. A summer evening breeze through the open front door of our Parkside place. Winter sunsets over the tops of eucalypts when we lived in Blackwood. The greying light on Rangitoto from our bedroom window in Meadowbank as clouds covered the sun.

But just like the perfect photograph, the perfect words won’t come.

And the imperfect ones? Sometimes imperfect one are okay, but other times they are nothing more than naff.

From from my window

Signs in Dubai

Every now and then, we take a trip to Dubai for one reason or another. Here’s a selection of signs:

accommodation is always required

From dubai

the bus stop outside our hotel is (I think) airconditioned and also has this sign:

From dubai

don’t know what this says:

From dubai

and just no idea what this means:

From dubai creek

Flamingos turn pink depending on the shrimps

The flamingos are here. You can see them if you follow Salam until you get to the Corniche. (I’m sure he said the Corniche). You know when you come over Maqtaa Bridge (nod)…yeah, well they were in the mangroves you see on your left as you cross that bridge. There’s about one hundred of them and they should be here for a couple of weeks.

You can’t miss them.

Apparently.

I’m pretty sure I do know those mangroves, but when I look at the map, none of the words I think I’ve heard make sense. The Corniche and Maqtaa Bridge are linked by Salam, but they’re at opposite ends. Though I have heard that there’s more than one Corniche. And I thought he said Reem Island, but maybe he said Sas An Nakhl.

And mangroves? There’s mangroves everywhere.

I’d love to show the flamingos to my boys. And because of reasons, it would be good to take them birdwatching tomorrow to say, ‘Do you know who would love to see this’ and ‘Shall we ring her when get home?’

But I’m not sure I can get us there and where will we park and I know the boys will shrug when I say, ‘See? Told you it was awesome.’ I will give them facts about flamingoes turning pink on account of the shrimps and they will say, ‘You already told us that, heaps of times’. Then one of them will hit the other ‘in the kidneys’ or ‘on the spine’ and the other will yell indigninantly, ‘He hit me on the spine’ and they will argue over who takes the photo and who stands where and then they will start playing tag and it’s probably near a busy road.

We’ve seen flamingos the mister and I. In the south of Mexico back when I was still a senorita and I had just mastered the Spanish subjunctive tense and truly believed it would always rest in my mind. We caught a boat that we were probably supposed to bargain for, but probably didn’t. That was magic out in that boat. Now there, there’s some happy times.

And when I was the mother of preschoolers I spent a great number of afternoons wandering around the Adelaide Zoo. On our last trip there (a pupil free day) I was hit by the sense of how much my life had changed since the boys had both started at school. The three of us were laughing and making jokes about monkeys’ bums and I just had one small bag (no pram, no nappy bag) and sometimes they ran in front of me, but I didn’t worry too much about it because I knew I’d see them at the next turn. All of the other mothers there were the mothers of preschoolers, staring off into in the distance in the way that mothers of preschoolers do, offering distracted ‘mmms’ and ‘yes the monkeys are playing’ in sing-song tones. And running after the child who had just made a dash, because who knows where they’ll go and what might happen to them.

I hope never to be that tired again. And thirsty. I was always thirsty, like I always had apple and dried apricots, but I’d never packed myself a drink.

Anyhoo, the flamingo enclosure is by far my favourite part of the Adelaide Zoo. It has the sculpted elegance of days gone by, and the Dragon’s Tree exoticism of far-off lands. The Friends of the Zoo were selling Dragon’s Tree cuttings a few months before the mister turned 40 and it would’ve been an ace gift, truly wonderful. They live forever those trees and Tashi, with whose adventures the mister became intimately acquainted during the preschool years, once hid in a Dragon’s Blood Tree. The day I saw the clippings (I guess they have a more substantial name, but I don’t know it) for sale I couldn’t buy one because…well, I can’t remember why but maybe because I’d walked from the tram…and the next time we went they weren’t selling them anymore.

The best thing about the flamingo enclosure is that I have no discomfort standing in front of it. There is no overhead wire, no ‘cage’. The flamingos are perfectly able to leave, but they never do.

From miscblogphotos

Oh

Today, I was listening to the BBC World Service and I heard someone say something along the lines of “coming up, the controversy over drug testing in Third World countries”.

I thought they were talking about drugs in sport or drugs in the workplace. But no, they were talking about drug testing on children (here’s a link, sorry I couldn’t find a more recent report). Which made me feel quite despondent for the world.

Physical

To get to the aerobics classes, you must first pass sloganising banners

Fitness is a Battle: Welcome to the Front Line
and
something or other about bodies which aren’t somethinged: They’re Forged

And then they’re decorated by illustrations which probably started out as people, but really, do you really expect me to believe that a person naturally looks like that?

I don’t know whether they’re meant to inspire or intimidate, but what they do for me is make me think, over and over and over again,

“You’re the Olivia Newton-John of the future.”

(my, but it was hard to choose which video to include here, in the end I went with this one, because I especially like the crowd shots).

Which would have made for a short and witty blogpost, except that I went looking in youtube and found it had been covered by goldfrapp a band whose music is often on high rotation on my single-disc CD player.

So now I don’t know what conclusions to draw. Which doesn’t really matter, because the whole exercise has made me feel kinda sorta good about things.

I always did like Olivia Newton-John

gr8 m8

I forgot to tell you that the mister kindly signed the piece of paper stating that, as my sponsor, he had “no objection” to me getting me driving licence, so I got it.

Awesome. Because you know I just love driving, right?

Anyhoo, just now I got a text from an official source:
“Congratulations on obtaining your driving license. Thank you and we wish you safe driving through following the traffic laws”.

I’m from Adelaide. I’m an eldest child. If there’s one thing I do well, it’s following the laws.

Honestly, I am sitting here grinning like a Cheshire Cat

WE FOUND AN APARTMENT.

Hoo-fucking-ray.

The skankiness we have seen in the past few weeks.

And because no one uses maps or street directories, viewing apartments and ‘villas’ involves quite a bit of cloak-and-dagger-type meeting of agents at landmarks (Khalifa Hospital or the Co-op on 28th-or-is-that-26th) and then following them (which usually involves losing them which usually involves me losing it to the mister who in turn loses it back to me) to an apartment which is nearly always locked (although the agent had always only just rung to check that it would be open) and then finding the guy on security to come and let you in.

Then, the agent tells you that it will be painted before you move in, and because the building’s only just been finished the water hasn’t been connected yet, but next week for sure. And the power too. And the security guy’s mate’s makeshift bed of cardboard and a blanket on the floor? That’ll be gone too. But gone where? And shouldn’t I just stop whingeing and be grateful for what I’ve got?

And here’s a villa which was six bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a box for the maid, but it’s been converted into eighteen apartments (yes, yes, he’s got the municipal approval, don’t worry yourself about that), and it’s a good conversion, you know only half of the walls are particle board, so here’s the vacant apartment, and here’s the kitchen and you’d never know it used to be a bathroom would you, and if you put lots of lamps around you’ll never notice that there’s no window.

Get back in the car, chuck the shits at the mister again. You know it’s not his fault, but you can’t chuck the shits at thin air.

And everyone says if you can just hold on til June, it’s the end of the school year and everyone’s leaving then, and look what happened in Dubai, rents have fallen by forty percent. Rumour, speculation, more rumour, increased speculation. Still, it’s something to talk about besides the heat. Everyone knows someone who is leaving, who has already left, who expects to be asked to leave. But our lease runs out in June and the prices won’t drop straight away and anyway this is Abu Dhabi, not Dubai, and there’s much less foreign ownership here. Of course, sure, it’s supply and demand, but that graph they teach you in year eleven, year twelve and again in 101, that doesn’t always apply.

Have you looked in Khalifa A or what about Raha? So we do. But I’m from Port Pirie, so you know living in a house that’s buffetted by hot wind and filled with red sand, that’s not a new experience, that’s just an extension of my life. I know, the lawn’s going down today and the sand won’t be that bad, but still and all the same. And the drive. What’s that? The new freeway will make it just fifteen minutes from here to Abu Dhabi Mall? Yes, and I’ve heard we’re about to colonise the moon.

Here’s a question: what’s worse than looking for a place to live? Answer: looking for a place to live on a hot day, in a hire car when it’s air-conditioning stops and the ELECTRICS FAIL, and you turn to the mister and say, Didn’t we already do this? Didn’t we already do our time in crap cars looking at crap accommodation? Oh, and won’t we laugh about this in about twenty years? So, here’s the list of places we’ve had to sit on the side of the road, next to an over-heated or otherwise deadbeat car: Burra, Blinman, Blanchetown, Crystal Brook, Sheoak Log, Edwardstown, Elizabeth, North Adelaide, Berri, Port Pirie, Berri, Port Augusta, Abu Dhabi.

See? We’re laughing already, aren’t we?

And that’s why I say: WE’VE FOUND AN APARTMENT. HOO-FUCKING-RAY.

So. The rent for this place is more than our accommodation allowance (don’t get me started, because I know, global financial crisis and all that, but haven’t I just dragged myself…ahem…like I said, don’t get me started), but, it’s ace because there’s no problem with parking and it’s still close to the school and the mister’s work which means that we won’t need two cars (brilliant) and also that I won’t need to get up in the morning to take the boys to school (fucking awesome). There’s a small swimming pool in the apartment complex (deep, but the lads can swim, they can swim, eldest boy did a whole lap, freestyle, without his kickboard, oh my, my boys can swim). Three bedrooms, kitchen window, patch of lawn (again, small, but there), ground floor (no dragging groceries up 17 floors). Water and power working, quiet streets, few trees around, a Lebanese Flower restaurant and bakery not too far away and also it exists.

We’ll need to go to IKEA to buy a few things (beds, lounge, table, chairs, that kind of thing), but the mister, no doubt still thinking about the towels, has agreed that it does not need to be a consultative process and I should go alone one day.

And please, if in one month, there’s suddenly more accommodation than there is people, if rents really do fall and you can get a villa in Kahlidiya, two blocks from the Corniche, swimming pool, two carparks, 150,000 dirhams…don’t tell me, okay?

WE FOUND AN APARTMENT.
I can see, I can breathe, I can think. I knew it would all work out in the end. Didn’t you?

PS Do pardon my bad language, which seems to be increasing (in print form, I always swear a lot irl which I know shows a lack of imagination and all that, but it’s my upbringing, what can I say).

updated to sayerm, just been back through that to eliminate one or two rather ordinary errors of the grammatical and spelling kind, and also ‘Sheoak Lodge’ ha! that’s hilarious, wonder why my brain typed that.

Chandeliers look a bit like meringues, but not really, that’s a fairly dubious link

In answer to the question, it is indeed b. our health and fitness club. I present you with, the chandelier:

From Recently Updated

updated to add: yes, v disappointed not one of youse believed this might be in my apartment – do I not exude chandelier-in-the-foyer chic?

After we had returned from the health and fitness club, youngest boy and I made chocolate ice cream. The basis of a good ice cream recipe is a custard. Custard uses a lot of egg yolks, which leaves egg whites and egg whites are best used for meringues, so for desert last night, we had home made chocolate ice cream with meringues. It was fucking awesome. If I do say so myself (which I did, though just mouthing the inappropriate word over the heads of the children, which is just working a treat and they totally never swear).

And do you know, if there was one food I would have sex with, it would be whipped egg whites and caster sugar just as the cornflour is being folded through. Plus, these eggs were French, so I wouldn’t marry them, but I’d totally have sex with them. Whipped. With caster sugar. Just as the cornflour is being folded through.

From miscellaneous2

I’ve gone back to using my picasa account, which isn’t flickr, but will have to do for now.

I apologise in advance for any spelling mistakes or half-finished sentences, but I have to get off to swimming lessons now

One of the few books I brought with me is The World of Charmian Clift. How did I choose my small box of books? I have no real idea, but so far, they have brought great rewards.

Like the other night, in the essay ‘The Time of Your Life’, I read this:
‘…one of the things that experience teaches is that happiness is not a permanent human condition, nor is the single-minded pursuit of it ultimately rewarding. It occurs, but occasionally, and often quite incidentally to some other purpose or endeavour. But if I am not a consistently happy person, I think I am an optimistic one, in that I belive in the possibility of happiness and my own ability to recognize it’.

I like that paragraph. It’s helped me to work something out.

Because at the moment, I am sad. Deeply sad. I miss my Dad. We were very close. We spent a great deal of time together. We talked on the phone. He was, as the mister once said, my Go-To man.

I know, however, because experience has taught, that this particular state of sadness passes. I know that days will come when I no longer sit up too late trying to stave off ghosts. That I will stop seeing things and reaching for my phone, because I know my Dad would love to hear them. The sight of his handwriting will not always make me cry. I know that those days will come.

And so, I am not seeking a way to lose that particular sadness just yet. I am not actively looking for a way to ‘get over/on with it’ or to ‘move on’ with life. I am not finished with that sadness yet. It still has a job to do.

At the same time, I want to live a not-unhappy life. In a few months, my youngest boy will be seven, my eldest nine. There are not so many years that they will want me in their classrooms, that they will ask me for a cuddle before they go to bed, that they will be turning to me to say, ‘Mum, were you looking, did you see that?’ We are in the midst of an adventure, in a city that is growing (yes, literally) before our eyes, in a culture and a state of being that I do not understand. I am about to live the dream I’ve had for a decade when I take my boys to Spain.

I need to be sad, but I want to be happy too.

I’ve been feeling quite guilty about that. Almost as if it’s disrespectful to Dad, as if I haven’t loved him enough, as if moments of happiness mean that I haven’t been sad enough.

I’m not a fan of guilt. I realise it’s got it’s place, and for other people it’s fine, but for me it’s generally related to self-indulgence. An ugly kind of self-indulgence, not like a new book or scrubbing the bath or wherever good self-indulgences take you. So I want to lose the guilt. And one way to do that is to remind myself that life is not lived in static states of being. Memories might make life look that, but of course it isn’t. Charmian Clift again:

‘Time has a particular trick, and a very clever one, of threshing and winnowing experience. As years pass the inconclusiveness of events in actual formulation is husked off and blown away like chaff on the wind. All that memory retains is a hoard of spearate grain. Oh, I was happy then, one says. Or, that was the greatest time. Forgetting that the happiness was inextricably mixed with all sorts of vexatious problems and irritations and interruptions. Jobs still had to be done. People knocked on doors at the wrong moment. One waited and waited interminably. And the greatest time ever was probably husked in boredom, doubt, and even fear.’

For the past few years, since Dad’s diagnosis, I’ve survived by living on two different layers. The top, coping layer, from the top of my head, down to my chest just lived moment by moment. Get out of bed, have a shower, make the lunches, take the children to school, buy the paper, come home, have breakfast…and so on. Underneath that, was the space from the ground to my chest, a heaving layer of uncertainty and stress, always threatening to break through the top layer, often succeeding.

One of the most difficult things to reconcile during this time, was whether to be hopeful or realistic. Where there is life, there is hope, (and what’s the point if you don’t believe in the hope), but the reality of his prognosis was always fairly grim. It seemed very strange to me that hope, deeply felt, utterly believed-in hope could live side-by-side with realistic pragtamism. Surely one of them must be right and one of them must be wrong.

But maybe not. Of course not. Emotions are a seething mass of dichotomies and inconsistencies. Having one emotion does not exclude the possibility of having another.

Certainly, there are some dichotomies which, for me, are difficult to manage. But even stress and uncertainty have not been entirely incompatible with happiness. All of us meeting Dad at the market for breakfast, for example, they were happy times. Not forced, we-may-never-do-this-again happy times. Just simple happy times of sitting together and comparing the weeks we’d had.

I have been trying to tell myself that I should not label emotions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. That I should just let them all be. I mean, it’s true that I am sad, but I am also angry and bitter and cross, because despite the time we had between his diagnosis and his death, there is so much unresolved. Dad said that time was too short to be angry and then he got too tired anyway and so did I, and so there are things we did not address and now I’ve got a few emotional messes that I have to sort out for myself. But if I’ve got no problems letting my brain be sad and angry at the same time, so why not occasional happiness too?

There are still more sad than happy moments. When horrible things happen – as they have over the past few weeks – I fall back onto the couch, a fragile, unspeaking wreck. There are still days when I just could not give a shit. I am exhausted still. I’m not quite ready to stop being sad and I don’t expect that when I look back over these days I will think, They were happy times.

But I am glad I brought this book in my small box and tonight I’m going to read the essay on page 27. Is There a Hypochondriac in the House? And after that, youngest boy, you’d better watch out.

PS This is nothing at all what I expected to be writing when I first read this essay.

Slices of Abu Dhabi Life

The most enormous chandelier I have ever seen is in the foyer of:
a. the children’s school;
b. our health and fitness club;
c. our apartment;
d. our bank.

Answers in comments please and the winner will be given the privilege of my flickr password so they can help me transfer my photos from flickr to somewhere else, because flickr is now well-blocked (and that’s why there’s no photo of said chandelier).