Category: Adelaide from Adelaide

Thunder bolts and snow

I got out of bed twice to adjust the curtains, thinking that the flashes of light into the bedroom must be coming from the roof of the Al Wahda building. The building is two or three kilometres from here and this flashing has never happened before, but it is an enormous building, its towers now being finished one by one and its apartments helping to ease the city’s accommodation shortage. Who knows what light show they might one night start projecting into our bedroom.

‘What is that?’ I said to the mister after the fourth flash. He hadn’t noticed.

A thunderclap clapped, loud and close.

‘It was lightning.’

A dog started to bark, something started to hit against our bedroom window. I got out of bed and held the curtain a little way back. It was rain. Hitting our window and falling onto our lawn.

As the rain and the temperature fall (only thirty degrees forecast for today), life in Abu Dhabi becomes much simpler. Sitting in the playground after school or in our courtyard after tea, the breeze weaves the evocative magic that all breezes weave. I made a descriptive list once of all of my happiest memories, and you know, the greater percentage of those descriptions included a breeze.

It had rained the night before, 120 kilometres down the road in Dubai. I heard about it on facebook and rang the mister who was staying the night in his apartment there to avoid a mid-week commute.

‘Is it raining?’ I asked him. ‘I heard it’s raining.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m in the Mall of the Emirates. All I can see is snow.’

DSC01162
Lads at Ski Dubai, Mall of the Emirates

The journey continues

From miscblogphotos

A rather cliched photo of Adelaide

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Two days ago, a google search asked my blog

What the fuck am I doing in Adelaide

This cracked me up because I mean, really. Asking me that is a bit like asking the Man in the Moon, ‘Are there aliens?’

I wonder whether the person on the other end of the search had a look around and, if they did, what they thought. (yes, yes, I know there are site analysis programmes that could tell me this stuff, but they’re awfully confusing for a person like myself, and, because they just add another layer of procrastinatory potential, they are best left alone).

More generally, it is a source of endless fascination to me the way in which the internet is no longer used simply as a source of yes or no questions (do I have bowel cancer); or of statistical possibilities (what are the chances I will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s); or of factual information (how to make alpaca milk cheese); or of verification (slow as a wet wig?); but increasingly as a source of divination.

What the fuck am I doing in Adelaide?

I fully appreciate your desire to know, your feeling that there must be an answer, that if you only look hard enough you will find it. But really, I don’t know that google is the answer. Get a tarot reading, read your stars, stay up too late drinking too much with your friends, yell at your partner, read Jenny Diski, speak to whichever spiritual forces you believe. Whatever it is you do, if you are in that frame of mind, you need to get off the computer.

That bit about the pelicans is true

It happened just as Adelaide was throwing her second u-turn on the road she would later discover they didn’t need to be on anyway.

Her eldest boy said, ‘Mum, haven’t we already been here? It’s half past twelve and we told them we’d be there at eleven’.

‘Well, thank you Captain fucking Obvious,’ Adelaide said, while simultaneously realising that her arms were long enough to reach into the back seat, unbuckle her eldest child, pull him towards her then fling him from her window in the manner of a newsagent delivering the morning papers.

So giddying was the liberating effect of this move that she repeated it for her youngest child who landed softly in the next paddock next to his brother, such was the previously unknown skill of for her extended throw.

Guiltlessly, Adelaide watched as the children were rescued by a pair of passing pelicans, who, coincidentally, were the same pelicans who had perched on the roof of the school only two days before the end of term and dropped such spectacular shits on the path leading down to the playground that the children had danced around the collected mothers at the end of the day recounting the moment that the pelican poo had almost hit Oscar and Lucinda, while the mothers could only look on incredulously until said incident had been confirmed by a teacher and a mother who was an expert in pelican poo.

Adelaide put her foot to the floor. She could afford to burn petrol like it really was juice, for just yesterday afternoon she had received the advance for her latest novel which she had, after all, written, instead of sitting mindlessly at her computer, refreshing bloglines, playing games of word twist against herself and reading Josh and Donna fan fiction.

As with her previous novels, this would bring her both literary acclaim and financial fortune.

She used her handsfree phone kit to check her messages. One from Pinky Beecroft and one from Willy Vlautin, both of whom had just penned songs inspired by her raging hotness which she hid, seductively, beneath her fragile exterior of delicate beauty.

She pressed 5, once, twice, deleting both their messages. She needed no man. She needed no one. Adelaide was a proud, independent, self-sufficient woman. She was satisfied that she had achieved to the best of her intellectual capabilities; she was heart-stoppingly excited that time had marched her through her twenties and thirties and towards the adventure-filled years that would be her forties; she was proud of the life well-lived she saw reflected in her wrinkles; and she had not even noticed that she had put on one whole stone in the last twelve months because in fact, she had not fallen into a miserable slump on the lounge, mimicking her mother by comforting herself with alcohol and unwise food choices and had not, therefore, put on even an ounce of self-punishing weight.

And she drove off into the sunset, which was especially beautiful for that time of day which was twelve thirty five, knowing that she had a suitcased filled with clean knickers and matching bras.

And then she woke up and it was all a nightmare and she was still driving around Two Wells trying to find the new dog kennel they were using because she was too ashamed to use the other dog kennel (which did pick ups and deliveries of the pups) after the last time when the cheque bounced and the woman was a bit unecessarily snippy even after Adelaide had explained the unusual circumstances and immediately transferred the money into the dog kennel account; and if they didn’t find a petrol station soon they would be not only lost at around lunchtime with no food and the children’s stomachs already grumbling, but out of petrol too, and her without a charged mobile phone.

And there was still the washing to be done.

What sitemeter is telling me

I imagine there’s a direct link between the number of ‘Adelaide jokes’ ‘jokes about Adelaide’google searches and the upcoming Festival of Arts, Adelaide Fringe Festival and Writers’ Week, and the subsequent arrival of various comedians, buskers, cabaret performers, writers and others in need of quick quips with which to get their audience on side.

I was thinking of leaving you-all a few tips and pointers, but then I realised that was just another reason not to be writing my own material, so I won’t. I did hear two very funny Adelaide jokes from Fringe visitors last year, but I’m not going to write them here, because I can’t rememebr who said one of them and because the other performer is coming back this year, and might be wanting to use her joke again (it was brilliant enough). So, one piece of general advice only: jokes about weird murders and so forth are okay, providing they are original – we have pretty much heard every variation over the years and they mostly haven’t been that hilarious. Feel free to email me if you want to fact-check anything such as whether the Harris Scarfe cafeteria is still open (in my opinion, a shadow of its former self) or whether the air-conditioning on the trams is working (barely) or whether there is any lawn left in our backyard due to water restrictions and recent introduction of beagle (no). Also, the Port Power footy team rocks the universe, and you can go on a dolphin cruise on the Port River for only $3.50. It’s awesome. If you don’t believe me, ask Pavlov’s Cat.

I really must stop there.

Saturday shopping, Central Market 10 am

Although she could not read minds, Adelaide knew, from the way the woman’s made-up eyes flicked a look in the mirror and then another not quite at Adelaide, that she, Adelaide, should not have said to this black-haired woman whose lipstick was on straight: oh, I have a shirt like that isn’t it a beautiful blue.

Next time, thought Adelaide, she, Adelaide, would almost smile in the mirror, let the woman almost smile back; and then they would both look down to their hands, make sure they had rinsed off the soap, before they both reclaimed their trolleys and their own Saturday lives.

and he has such a lovely name

Adelaide, who had been married long enough that even the good quality towel-sets were beginning to fray, had only heard herself say ‘my husband’ three times. No, four. And all of them in the last six months.

Which was strange she thought as she watched him load the washing machine, because, apart from the flanellette pyjamas he now wore against his once-bare skin, he seemed not to have changed.

She scratched at her head, thought that in this morning’s shower she should have washed her hair, and vowed that tomorrow she would drink less water and eat more cheese.

Crumbs and sandpit sand

‘Just follow through. Just get the dustpan and sweep it up,’ the mister said as Adelaide rested the broom, carefully nesting the pile of crumbs, glitter, paper snow and sandpit sand between the bristles and the wall.

There was a silence between them – despite the boy dressed up as Spiderman and the boy with the basketball – and her silence was this: when you aren’t here, I open the door and push at the mat with my foot and swoosh the sweepings into the yard. And then I hold the broom at shoulder height..I look at the shit that is scattered around and I think ‘that will all just blow back in’. And then I get the outside broom and I sweep it all across the pavers and over towards the lawn.

His silence was the grout. And the way that he always said oh, look here they are whenever she said I can’t find my keys.

Adelaide looked at the pile she’d swept and it was all the piles she’d seen. They’d been on parquetry, floorboards, lino, slate. This house, that house, that one too. The brooms were blue and yellow and red.

But those piles underneath the orange broom…against the lino that was never quite Handy Andy white…whose piles were they? Probably Mum’s. Possibly Dad’s. And who in the end had scooped those up? Who was the one who followed through?

Adelaide cleared her throat and wished again that if the cold she had almost got this week were going to appear it would just get on with it, she wouldn’t mind the day in bed with a book. And then she said: ‘would you like a cup of tea?’ and the mister said ‘yes’ and she put the kettle on. And later on, he stuck his face over the top of her book and said ‘peppermint or green?’

Friday night and it’s getting chilly now

‘You’d be amazed at how just twenty minutes housework would get you warm,’ Adelaide said.

‘Did you read that somewhere?’ the mister asked.

He was not, Adelaide thought for not the first time, the polite man she had married.

‘It’s also a good way to get the incidental exercise you need if you truly are going to stop yourself pudding on the pounds,’ she said scratching at eyebrows which had never, not once, ever been plucked.

‘I think I’ll put the heater on,’ he said.

‘Good idea,’ she said and reached for the cross-stich at which she was proving to be not very good.

And they sat in what was, for now, a messy, but warm, room and lamented the fact that Spooks had finished last week.

Sinking feeling

Adelaide had changed the sheets, dusted the dresser and as the Sunday shadows grew long, she was enjoying the sound – the tinkling, crinkling, most satisfying sound – of the things in the vacuum tube. Until she realised that last was a worry doll. A Guatemalan one.

‘Oh dear,’ she thought. ‘That can’t be good.’ And in anticipation, she opened a bottle of wine. Giving it time to breathe.