On the road again...

Cerulean blue skies, studded with dainty white clouds, which go on forever above hills that, over the course of the day, change colour from dry sandy gold to a lush green as we travel north to Sydney.  The ribbon of grey in front of us, curving, rising, falling.

And the same 6 CDs playing over and over because the sound system in the car is a bit temperamental and we don't want to tempt fate by changing them.

Yes, I've been on a road trip. I would have loved to have blogged during the trip but frankly there wasn't much time. My reason for going was a specific photography assignment, and for several evenings all I did was sort through the 1500 or so pics I took at the Avalon Airshow.

I flew down to Avalon near Geelong just over a week ago, leaving Sydney wet and grim behind me. Avalon was sunny and dry, however, sunny enough to give me a red face on the first day I hauled my camera gear to the show.

My work there done, I left my husband at the show and took the car for a wander around the Bellarine peninsula. Isn't that a lovely name, Bellarine? And the area lives up to it.

From Geelong I headed out to Portarlington, with its fishing boat jetty. I love fishing boats; they look honest and seaworthy, chunky and as cuddly as a boat can be. They have character, particularly the smaller ones. Yes, I do tend to anthropomorphise but you would too if you saw these little cuties:

After a pleasant stroll around the jetty I took The Esplanade, which sounded more interesting than the main road. I didn't know it would reach all the way to St Leonards via Indented Head (which made me laugh out loud). The Esplanade (or whatever it was called by the end of the road) ran beside the sea, with the beach on one side and houses with views to die for on the other. Old houses, new houses, sea shacks and McMansions mixed it up. The sea breeze stirred the air gently, and I felt all the stress inside me melt and escape out to sea as I followed the road around tussocks of sea grass, rocky cliffs and spellbinding views.

My main destination for the day was Queenscliff. Initially settled in the mid-1800s, by the twentieth century it had become a posh seaside destination for Melbournians. There were bathing boxes and bathing machines (which, operated by a hopefully trusty servant, dunked one into the sea and then up out again). Ladies and gents promenaded along the waterfront, walked along the cliff to see the unusual black lighthouse, and stayed in one of the gorgeous Italianate mansions which operated as guest houses or one of the big, luxurious hotels. By the 1930s mixed bathing was permitted on the beach. Gosh! I can imagine Cole Porter's Anything Goes was a popular and apt song for the wealthy people who spent their summers enjoying Queenscliff's sea breeze in the '30s.

For one reason or another - perhaps for once a local Council saw sense - Queenscliff's older buildings are still there. In the heart of the town there are not many buildings newer than the 1920s. It's a living, breathing place though and not a time warp. But it's lovely to walk into a shop, turn around and look up at the light streaming through leadlight windows. 

I got chatting to the owners of a couple of shops, and Queenscliff is still essentially a summer place. The owner of a lingerie shop said she wasn't renewing her lease which was due next month. The "season" was over until the spring. The bookshop owner said she was going to renew, but didn't expect to do a great trade after Labor Day, which is next Monday. I personally think it would be a fab place to visit in winter, with the wind roaring up from Bass Strait. 

After walking around for an hour or so and enjoying a delicious zucchini slice and salad, I headed for Ocean Grove, which is the biggest of the towns on the peninsula (aside obviously from Geelong). Ocean Grove is more modern, so I kept driving and crossed the bridge into Barwon Heads, which was (together with St Leonards)one of the settings for the quirky ABC tv series SeaChange. In the series, the bridge to "Pearl Bay" had been destroyed years before and plans to build a new bridge always went awry. Luckily one of the CDs in G's car was the SeaChange soundtrack - very apt!

My final port of call for the day was Torquay, which boats a surfers' museum and a bloody huge Bunnings, as well as bloody huge surf shops on either side of the road as you enter the heart of town. I was expecting to see bloody huge waves too, but the surf was flat. 

The next day we started our journey north again to Sydney, via Kyneton (for a pie. Bakery pies were a reoccuring theme on our drive home), Castlemaine and Maldon, stopping at Bendigo for the night.

Maldon, below, is another place which has escaped developers. In this case through no fault of its own. It was a goldfields town and the population had dwindled by the 1950s. There was no point in redeveloping. The National Trust took a long hard look and shoved a preservation order on the whole town centre. So what you see is a Victorian town in Victoria.

Maldon survives on tourist trade. We were there midweek, outside school holidays, and you could have let off a bomb and not injured a soul. I suspect it's hotching at weekends as it's only an hour or so out of Melbourne.

I love Bendigo. It's a thriving town that was built on wealth from both the goldfields and wool. It has magnificent stone buildings and has echoes of Paris about it, such as this lamppost:

Bendigo is parks and fountains, statues and decoration. This, for example, is the town hall:

I couldn't fit the whole town hall in, even from across the street.

And here's a touch of Paris in the shape of the law courts. 

Bendigo is a university town, so it's a lively place. We love the Shamrock Hotel, where the food is great and the wine list pretty good for a country town. I enjoyed a glass of Ladies Who Shoot Their Lunch chardonnay. Not just well-named but well-crafted too. 

We only stayed a night, but managed to cram in a good walk around the city centre. But then it was off to Albury to stay with my cousin for a night, via a pie in Benalla.

We were making good time as the SeaChange CD came up for the seventh time in five days, so stopped at Glenrowan to see how the town was making a dollar out of Ned Kelly. Ned's everywhere. We walked around the siege area, went into a museum but declined to spend 40 minutes watching a reenactment of the siege (which interestingly runs every 30 minutes). We amused ourselves at the museum trying to teach the two pet cockatoos to say "bugger off", big kids that we are.

Is Ned larger than life? You bet!

Victoria produces some superb wines but after an hour in Glenrowan realised we were running out of time and could only do one cellar door, so we headed into the first one we could find in the Rutherglen region - Scion Wines.  Tall, dark and handsome Rowly ran us through the tastings and we bought half a dozen mixed wines. Rowly and his Mum do interesting things with the grape varieties they grow, and produce unique wines, with pronounced flavours and a delicate balance.  Their After Dark dessert wine tastes amazing with dark chocolate - they keep some on hand to go with the tasting. Not something you find in every cellar door!

My cousin lives on a small property just outside Albury, and two of my other cousins joined us for a fantastic evening of stories, giggles and chats about family history. Plenty of wine was drunk all around. Must have been good stuff though as none of us had a headache or hangover the next day.

Australian place names can often cause a grin and Burrumbuttock, near Jindera, was enough of a giggle to warrant a photo.

G and I started being very silly at this point: "Ooh, I'm going to burrum your buttock if you're not careful!"

A highlight of our drive through NSW was the compulsory stop at the bakery at Holbrook for one of the best country meat pies you can find. I'd been salivating since breakfast thinking about it. It didn't let me down. I'm cursing that I didn't take pics of my pies as we journeyed about as it would make a great blog post or even travel article - The Life of Pie! Anyway the Holbrook pie I chose this time was a Bushman's pie. I usually have the steak and kidney or steak and mushroom, but this was was steak and veggie, and it was superb. Plenty of cracked black pepper throughout and chunks of carrot, pieces of corn and peas nestled in the gravy.

It's been a hot, dry summer down south. Throughout country Victoria the grass was parched and pale; livestock were scattered sparsely as the nutrition per hectare was small. In the five hours it took to get from Holbrook to Sydney the change was gradual. At first there was a smattering of greener grass here and there; around dams, near homesteads. The hills were resolutely the dry shade of sauvignon blanc, but slowly morphed into an equally dry pale green north of Gundagai. Dams started to look full and more livestock were sheltering from the sun under trees.

North of Yass and into the southern highlands, we felt spoilt. There had been SO much rain in the last month, the grass was blindingly verdant, lush and soft. 

Then we hit Sydney and peak hour traffic, and while the sky was still blue it wasn't as big any longer, and the magic fell away from the day more and more with every red traffic light that ground us to a halt as SeaChange played for the ninth time. The utter, blissful, carefree freedom I'd enjoyed for the last week vanished. I don't like to end a happy post on a note of depression but I was as blue as can be last night and this morning, with 150 new emails in the inbox in the last 36 hours alone, one of my client's websites broken (by them, not me but I still have to fix it) and a garden area ruined during by absence by a cowboy garden maintenance man.

I was put in mind of the last verse of Clancy of the Overflow: 

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal —
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow".

Frankly, I'd make a crap drover. But a few weeks in big sky country, away from all work pressures, sounds like bliss.  I can't wait to get on the road again...

It's hard being a girl - at least it used to be

Earlier this week I was watching The Agony of Life on ABC1, a show where well-known and (to me) not well-known people talk about life, the universe and not quite everything. No, not this blog. I wish they did. More readers would be good.

But I digress. Back to the show. This week it was all about the teen years, with guests revealing, to a man and woman, they were NOT cool kids. I can relate to that!

One of the questions presenter Adam Zwar posed was "How did your parents tell you the facts of life?" Ah, The Talk! The answers were varied and often hilarious.

Unlike laconic comedian Judith Lucy, who was a late bloomer ("I didn't have breasts until I was nineteen. I woke up one morning and THEY'D ARRIVED!") I was an early starter.

I was ten when Mum sat me down with a book on Menstruation (aka The Talk). It looked very dated - 1950s or early 1960s.  It was supposed to be written in a friendly style but friendly styles in those days were very stilted. People were embarrassed to talk about the fact that once a month girls start bleeding like stuck pigs. It was full of diagrams, and dry paragraphs. I read it and decided I didn't want to get my periods; sadly I didn't have much choice in the matter and a few months later found blood in my knickers one morning.

Couldn't find an English language ad but this brings back bad memories.

Well, if that wasn't bad enough, sanitary napkins in those days were a far cry from today's. We're talking early 70s. These things were the size of surfboards. And stick-on pads were just about to come onto the market. However, that was a year in the future and the only option was to wear Modess panties, bloody huge underwear with a plastic gusset in the crotch, and elastic strips at each end of the gusset. The sanitary napkins - oh bugger that, call them pads - were stuck under the elastic to hold it in place. I swear these knickers creaked and squeaked when you moved. They didn't hold the pads in place very well either, I was always conscious of the stupid things moving up my back or creeping forward. I was embarrassed beyond belief. I cried every month.

I can't tell you how unspeakable these were.

The other option was the sanitary belt. The pads in those days had foldout strips at each end which you could shove into the little rings on the sanitary belt. The belt was adjustable/elastic. The idea was it would hold the pad in place. I tried it. And tried it. And tried it. It didn't.

Worst of all about wearing surfboards in your underwear was that if you wore jeans or trousers - and I was a tomboy, I LIVED in jeans! - the stupid things were just a bit visible. From behind it looked like you'd crapped your pants. From the front...well, you looked a bit like a boy. I had to be paid to wear a dress in those days. The idea of having to wear a dress or skirt for at least five days a month was abominable so I stayed in jeans and rocked the got-a-willy/crapped-my-pants look.

Then stick-on pads became available. I begged Mum to buy me some. Anything but those creaky, sweaty plastic knickers. These days stick-on pads are pretty good. They have 'wings' to stop leakage. The adhesive is great. They are much thinner than they used be; bless technology. The 1970s stick on pads were shockers. They were still surfboard sized, they still were visible in trousers, but the adhesive was hopeless. One little strip down the middle that didn't stay stuck for very long, so the pad started creeping around your underwear. This meant - oh yes - they leaked.

Sick of having bloodstains on my jeans I regretfully started sticking the would-be stick-ons to the plastic knickers as the adhesive stuck to the plastic quite well. I was one of those unlucky girls who had heavy periods, and heavy period pain to go with them. I envied girls who only bled lightly for three days. I had one week a month of misery.

Then there was the whole palaver of taking spare pads to school to change at lunchtime; they looked pretty obvious and I used to hide them in my brown paper bag with my sandwich and apple.

I wonder if pad technology would have been a lot better a lot earlier if more women had been involved in the development process. I'm guessing that in the 60s and 70s most of the scientists working on sanitary products were men. Being men they were probably embarrassed about the whole job, and certainly didn't talk about their work down at the local pub. They probably said they were working on kitty litter or something instead. Seriously, consider wings on modern pads. A woman had to think that one up, surely. And probably borne of leakage experience. A bloke wouldn't consider something so logical. If they could make pads in the 70s with long strips at either end, they could have made them with strips at the side. But they didn't.

I was so glad the day I discovered tampons.  But girls these days, with a wealth of ultra-thin, ultra-absorbent, wing-bearing pads to choose from - they don't know how lucky they are!

Housanality

Ok, what's Housanality? Well, people have personality, houses have housanality. OK, I just made that up. But think about it, it works, doesn't it?

This is the context I'm talking about:  In our group of 8 townhouses we find that certain types of people live in certain houses in our complex.

For example, house number 2 attracts noisy people. The tenants before the current lot screamed and argued with each other on a daily basis. We were tempted to call the police once or twice when it threatened to become physically violent but luckily they backed off. Often outside, too, in their courtyard, so they could share the hate with their neighbours. The courtyard is number 2 is a bit of a noise amplifier because of the shape of it, we think. Every shout is magnified.

The current tenants in number 2 are loud, too. Like the previous tenants they are from India or Sri Lanka. It seems many Indian women have LOUD voices. Maybe they have to shout to make themselves heard above city noise in India. I'm not trying to be racist here. But most of our neighbours are Indian or Sri Lankan, and the women have voices which can clear blocked drains. Fact.

Anyway, our neighbours in 2 have a toddler, and they play, at loud volume, a CD of nursery rhymes in English, but with an Indian accent. We can hear them clearly in our own house. These songs become ear worms for me; I get "to marrrket, to marrrket, to buy a fat pig" stuck in my head for minutes at a time. It's worse when the child's mother, who we call Gobbler (more on that soon), sings along. She shouts loudly and tunelessly; the funniest song is Baa Baa Black Sheep, when Gobbler bellows, "YES, sir, YES, sir, thrrrree bags FULL!!!!"

The kid cries and screams a lot as all toddlers do, and then Gobbler gobbles to him. Yes, she could be mistaken for a turkey. She does an amazing turkey imitation, heaven knows why, and I swear that kid is going to grow up believing he's raised by poultry. When she's not gobbling, or singing, she talks to him, either in Hindi or parrotting back his own baby noises at high volume. Needless to say whenever it's not raining all the action takes place in their courtyard, so we hear every gobble whether we want to or not.

Then there is number 5. Number 5 attracts noisy dogs. The owners had two dogs there a few years back before they bought a bigger place and moved out, and their dogs barked and barked and barked and barked and barked. At nothing. When the owners were at work and I was busy working at home I wasn't above turning a hose on the bloody animals to shut them up. Now the place is tenanted and guess what, a noisy dog lives there. He barks and barks and barks, but usually for a reason, ie someone is walking down the street 25 metres away. His bark gets higher in pitch the more excited he gets until he sounds as if he's being strangled. When the maintenance men did the lawns today I thought he was going to choke. Thankfully, unlike the previous dogs, if you go out and say his name gently and tell him to be quiet, he'll look you in the eye and shut up. He's nice. If noisy.

Whoever lives in number 8 is scared of dogs. The previous owners were petrified of our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who does have a nasty habit of rushing out of the front door and barking at people from a distance. We're trying to get her out of it but she's determined to protect us from our neighbours, all of whom she knows well and likes. On the lead she's fine but off lead she's a wolf. So we try and keep her on the lead when we go out front. But... a few weeks back we'd been out in the car with her and we let her  jump out of the back seat. G went to open the front door of the house thinking she'd follow him but our dog spied the new guy in number 8 and went galloping up to him, barking, tail wagging frantically. Harmless but loud. Poor guy - he's scared of dogs and he ran to his car and jumped onto the bonnet, then the roof. I couldn't believe it! I was mortified. Poor bloke! He's Indian and I've met many Indians around here who are frightened of dogs. I had to grab our dog and apologise profusely. Inside our house G and I collapsed in cruel laughter as jumping on your own car was like something from a movie.

So there are the personality traits of a few of our neighbouring houses. Numbers 3 and 6 attract quiet people; we've seen a couple of families come and go in each of them over seven years and we've never heard a single shout. Numbers 1 and 7 I can't make a comment on, as the people in them have lived there longer than we have; will number 1's future owners have a penchant for white fluffy dogs and twee garden statues? Will number 7's future owners be outgoing and friendly?

Who knows? The local council is likely to rezone our entire street to high density housing, and if developers make us owners an offer we don't want to refuse, our houses, and their housanalities, may be gone forever in a few years, replaced by an apartment block. That's a sad thought as apart from KFC on the corner this is a quiet street, a neighbourly place, a sleepy hollow where houses sit on quarter acre blocks and kids still play cricket in their back gardens. Once land is gone, it's gone. And so is a way of life.

Can't stop that day

Monday. What is it about Monday that makes songwriters attracted to it in a way that they aren't about Wednesday or Thursday? Tuesday got its chance with Ruby Tuesday, and Friday on My Mind is a 60s classic.

Friday songs are upbeat. The weekend is on the way.

But Monday... oh dear. Monday Monday, can't stop that day. I don't like Mondays. Manic Monday. And let's not forget Blue Monday (New Order). Says it all really.

Frankly I don't like Mondays either. I get blue on Mondays. I am a classic sufferer of Mondayitis, and this is my second working Monday of 2013. I've already had enough!

This year I'm trying to only work part time; I'll be choosing my clients carefully. If someone sounds like trouble at the first conversation, I don't take on the job. My experience is that troublesome clients always want to pay as little as they can and indulge their right to change their mind often on fixed price projects.

Menopausal women can go through weird emotional and mental stages. I suspect I'm in one right now and have been for over a year. I just don't want to work. Part of that too is that I don't make much out of what I do so slogging away for nine or ten hours a day is discouraging, but the thought of going out and getting a paid job, with a supervisor/boss telling me what to do and watching how long I take for lunch, peering over my shoulder to see what I'm doing, the awfulness of KPIs and reviews, the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach when you ask for annual leave in case it gets knocked back and the unspeakable hell of workstations and shared offices... oh no, I don't want that again. No money would be enough. I'm an unemployable renegade these days.

So Mondays (like rainy days... there's a song in that!) are getting me down at the moment. I've had three weeks without work, weeks to explore painting, drawing and dressmaking/craft stuff. Fantastic weeks with little computer time. Freedom. Me time.

I'm not alone - I know that! But time was many years ago when I DID like Mondays and quite enjoyed my job. I was an employee at that stage but extraordinarily blessed with a great boss and my own office. This was in the heady days when email was just coming into regular use and didn't take up 90% of your work time. The company I worked for had a wonderful family atmosphere which changed after we were taken over; I scored a new boss who was a total control freak and sent me pretty close to a breakdown. I began to loathe my job and used to cry in the mornings as I drove to work. After that, my third control freak boss in my career, I decided enough was enough and lit out on my own.

They say that if you have a hobby you enjoy, make a career out of it. That's what I did twelve years ago, when my hobby was building websites and doing graphic design. Now I need a new hobby and new career! So I can like Mondays again.

Painting is an option.... suggestions on a postcard please!

You're so vain... Or, the French Solution

Well, actually, I'm so vain. I feel about 25 and skinny inside but the reality is fifty and overweight (but not yet obese, officially). I don't want to look fifty. I don't want to be tubby. I am also, and I state this unequivocally, the world's laziest bint. I have a gym membership but haven't used it in ages. Just the thought of hot gym-based sweatiness in a Sydney summer makes me want to lie on the sofa with a chilled glass of pinot grigio. Lying on a sofa won't help my thunder thighs though; summer is especially awful for me as wearing skirts or dresses means my big inner thighs rub together and get sweaty and uncomfortable unless I wear panty hose or thigh-length underwear. So I spend summer in trousers or shorts, even on the hottest days.

Having perused several books by French women or Brits and Aussies writing about French women (Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, Parisian Chic by Ines de la Fressange, All You Need To Be Impossibly French by Helena Frith Powell and - like millions of others - French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, among others), I have decided to pursue a French solution. French women don't go to the gym. They simply move a lot. They walk. They take the stairs rather than a lift (although an office block of 30 floors would defeat me). Having spent five days in Paris walking my arse off last year there's something about Paris which compels you to walk everywhere, because there is so much to see and the city envelopes you in Parisian-ness. Um, western Sydney doesn't have the same charm but I'm doing my best. Even downtown Sydney doesn't have the same pull walking-wise but curiously central Melbourne does.

(Why French? you may ask. Because I've always thought French women to be chic, and while I was born without a chic gene, it doesn't stop me trying.)

Another part of the French solution is eating like the French. Not being guilty about having a glass of wine with dinner (but of course, one is not supposed to drink the entire bottle as some of my girlfriends do!). Not eating huge meals. Eating seasonal produce. Eating whole foods. Eating freshly prepared meals rather than package ones (something I have always done anyway). I've also cut down on the carbs, especially after 5pm. Except for the wine. I view wine as 'good carbs'. Heh heh, I've rattled on about diets etc on this blog before, but basically I eat protein and veggies at every meal, and don't have carbs every day. I have also cut down dramatically on sugar, particularly processed sugar. The Christmas season, with its jolly Christmas cake and irresistible Christmas pudding and home-made brandy custard and catching up with friends to - frankly - FEAST has taken its toll however and my weight is creeping up again.

So I have pledged to walk or cycle to the shops unless it's stinking hot in which case the airconditioned car gets a run, I gallop up the stairs in my house several times a day, the diet is back on track, but wait, there's more.

Those canny French women spend a bleedin' fortune on their skin, not just anti-ageing but anti-fat as well. I've been doing some research as I don't have the kind of budget which allows me to spend $200 on a face cream or anti-cellulite/slimming cream. Nor do I have a budget for regular facials, or regular anti-cellulite massages.

One thing and another led me to the No Lipo Lipo program by Carole Maggio, who has a day spa in California. One thing I had been researching was dry body brushing, something you can do in the privacy of your own home at the frugal cost of a sisal mitt. Lo! Carole's program includes dry brushing and also deep knuckle massage. Because I can't go to California for a six week program, I bought Carole's knuckle massage DVD which shows you how to do it all at home.

I put the DVD on yesterday, made notes to take into the bathroom and gave it all a go. Jesus!  My arms will certainly get toned as giving yourself a massage with your knuckles is hard work! You're supposed to do the massage three to four times a week but I'm going to try and do it every weekday while G is at work.

Carole also sells her Facercise book, which for a modest sum looks like it can supplement the skincare cream I use anyway and keep the wrinkles and double chin at bay. The book arrived in the post a few days ago and G flicked through it. "God!" he said. "I hope you won't be doing these exercises in front of me!" The exercises are well illustrated with photos, and some of the facial expressions you have to pull as part of the exercise program are a hoot!

So I'm also doing the exercises while G is at work. They make your face ache :-), which is probably proof they are doing their thing. I'll be intrigued to see if there is a difference. I've noticed the corners of my mouth turning down over the last year or so, and I hate that. I look like a grumpy old cow. (Probably because I AM a grumpy old cow 9-5 Mon-Fri!) Facercise has an exercise to stop your mouth turning down at the corners.

So here's the goal. By Easter, when it's time to hoe into all those cheap chocolate eggs, I'll be a clothing size smaller with a mouth that doesn't turn down. I'll be bien dans ma peau.  C'est tres bien, non?

I must go down to the sea again...

... To the lonely sea and sky.
I left my socks upon the rocks -
I do hope they are dry!

Ah, summer! Boating weather.

When your boat works, that is.

Yesterday I saw a boat called Money Pit II being towed along the road, and thought that with a name like that the owner should have learned a lesson from owning, presumably, Money Pit I.

Maybe we should rename our boat Money Pit. It's called Bootle-Bumtrinket after Gerald Durrell's childhood boat, because - well, frankly it looks like a Bootle-Bumtrinket. It's clumsy and orange and a bit of a conservative old man's boat. I call it Bootle for short. G hates the whole name and only calls it Trinket. It looks nothing like a Trinket. Trust me. Or judge for yourself:

Anyway Bootle has been out of action for a year. She was a cheap buy and twice we've had to screw the front passenger seat back down. However, the wood under the deck had rotted, so this year, with the advice of a friend, G bought some marine ply and fibreglassed it to the top of the deck. He is no handyman. Our friend, DIY-boy for want of a better name, shook his head and said we'd have to sand it back and do it again. In short, DIY-boy did it for us with G watching on to learn. After that, G and DIY-boy screwed new seats (because the old ones were buggered anyway) onto the new raised deck area.

I will mention at this point that one of the new seats is height adjustable, so I, the vertically-challenged, can lower it to drive the boat in comfort. I have a skipper's licence as does G. But, woe is me, G screwed the adjustable seat onto the passenger side. For fuck's sake!  I was bitterly disappointed but as he'd worked so hard and sworn so much over it, I had to say how fantastic the whole job was and that an adjustable passenger seat was probably a good idea anyway.

So today is 'take the boat out' day. Or it's supposed to be.

The battery was flattish yesterday, so we bought a new battery charger as the old one was broken, and charged it overnight. It hasn't retained its charge so G has headed out now to buy a new one. The battery is officially buggered.

I reminded him we'll have to top up the tank with fresh fuel as the old fuel will be too old to ignite easily. Fuel over six weeks old doesn't work as well as new fuel. I sincerely hope the tank isn't full to the brim with old fuel.

So by the time we get this show on the road today, the tide will be racing out and it'll be awful old low tide at the boat ramp, never much fun.  High tide peaked an hour ago. There's a southerly wind due and the harbour will be choppy, and the sun isn't even shining, but G is determined to get Bootle/Trinket/Money Pit out on the water. We're going to take the orange monster into the fish markets.

Chips ahoy!
.............................................................
Three hours later:

Well. We were puttering around for a maximum of 20 minutes including time when the motor conked out thrice and refused to restart for a while. Boats!!!

I know the poor little thing had a very cold engine so I didn't take it about 1500 rpm, but even after letting it warm up for ten minutes, it kept conking out at anything above 1500. The worst time was when I was frantically trying to restart it and G was using the paddle to move it to the side of the channel, and a speeding Rivercat was bearing down on us!

Still, she hobbled back to the boat ramp for me, and now we have to find out her problem. My bet is that it's dirt somewhere in the fuel system. Watch this space.

Ink and flowing hands

I read in The Australian a week or so ago that writing implements may be on the endangered list, along with ties and hard copy diaries.

That's sad. I do love a good pen. There's something grand about writing with a fountain pen, for example.  I write letters to family members and old friends who haven't embraced the digital age, and take the trouble to use my fountain pen as it's about the only gallop it gets these days.

Even sadder on the handwriting front, there was a letter from a reader to the Oz's magazine stating that her grandchildren, in their early 20s, couldn't decipher their great-grandfather's WWI diaries, written in an elegant copperplate.

At school these days, it seems, kids aren't taught cursive/joined up writing. They learn a sort of italic printing but by the time they're in high school most of their work is via computer. Handwriting is not a skill that's desirable any more. Hence a generation who'll struggle to read the handwriting of their ancestors; they haven't learned how to form the shapes themselves.

There's a likelihood that cheques will go the way of the dodo as electronic banking buries them; that a signature written by hand won't cut the mustard at some point and that biometrics will be used to prove you're who you are. Handwriting, which has served us for more than a thousand years, will be more or less redundant.


That's a real shame.


Both my grandparents had elegant writing. Despite going to the same primary school their writing styles were quite different. Both slant forwards but my Pop's was copperplate, very neat and small, and Nan's was a flowing hand, big and generous. I write much like Nan, in a hand that lies about my age.

I grew up learning a very plain joined-up form called modified cursive, all the rage in NSW schools from the late 50s to at least the 1970s. It looked so plain and ugly - and even worse in my eyes, childish - beside my Mum's and grandparents' hands that once I was out of primary school and not marked on my handwriting any more I swiftly put loops on all the strokes I could and should. Fancy capitals, too.

I couldn't easily find an image of the cursive we learned at school on the net, so here it is, with my own cursive hand to show the difference.

I don't write by hand as much as I used to. My day book, beside my Mac, is covered with my scrawl, some of it neat, some of it all over the place as I take notes while I'm on the phone and/or pushing a cat out of the way.

This afternoon though, as work is getting quiet now with Christmas approaching, I did the annual Christmas card job, using my lovely fountain pen. I do have some fancy calligraphy I use when I'm handwriting, funky styles that I use for one-off cards, ie birthdays. It takes me a bit of time to do each card that way however, so with a pile of cards in front of me I elected for my usual handwriting, the one with loops and fancy capitals.

There really is something satisfying about writing by hand rather than simply tapping away at a keyboard. It means you have to think about what you're writing; you can't simply backspace if you change your mind half way through a sentence. Or misspell someone's name through being hasty. (Sorry to my cousin Louise, I really meant to put the 'i' in in the first place, not add it afterwards.)

There's some ink left in the pen; time to write a Christmas letter to my last surviving relation who doesn't own a computer!