Lashings

Today, for no particular reason, I have been thinking of the ginger beer I never quite got around to making for my Dad. He drank ginger beer to help with the nausea of it all and I thought what a great idea it would be to make some. The lads could watch the plant grow. And making ginger beer, it would be something we could do, something we could give him.

Making ginger beer was something we could do.

I remember that we went to Gaganis Brothers, the lads and I, to look for bottles to put the ginger beer in and I remember the lads bought a packet of wafer biscuits (‘can we have one each, can we, please’), but I don’t remember – and I don’t understand how I could forget – whether we found the perfect bottles or not. And I can’t remember if we did buy them, what happened to them next.

We didn’t quite get around to making the ginger beer.

I hope, if we did find the bottles, I gave them away in the great cleanup before we left. I hope I cried over them as I wrapped them carefully and put them in a box for the Salvation Army to come and take away.

I hope that they did not go into storage.

I would hate to find them, the perfect bottles for ginger beer. Unused.

December will come which will be winter which is weird if you grew up south of here

A meme from suse and janet (at muppinstuff)

What’s hot
– My booty (I know, sophisticated and hilarious)
– Abu Dhabi autumns – while the temperature has definitely dropped and the humidity levels are almost bearable, it’s still around 35 degrees most days
– Vacuuming – my goodness me you can get up a sweat vacuuming in 35 degrees
– Cooking – see vacuuming
– The walk to school – see cooking
– Iced tea left out of the fridge for more than five minutes – see Abu Dhabi autumns
– Swimming pools that have not been cooled – see iced tea left out of the fridge for more than five minutes
…and so on and etceteraggghhhh

What’s not
See above

…>>>…
PS I had 12 kilos on my bar during the chest track in yesterday’s pump class. I am proud of this.

PPS I’m sorry I can’t link to janet’s blog because for some reason I can’t see any typepad blogs – they aren’t blocked, because I don’t get the blocked screen telling me that the site is blocked (as I do, for example, with skype and flickr), and I can see them through google reader (which is good if you’ve got your feed reader set up to send full posts to the reader), but they don’t download.

Opportunity going beg

So I’ve always loved alpacas and I do love olives, and over these last few months as I’ve been devising my cunning plan to not just preserve my sanity, stave off alcoholism and avoid divorce, but also to enjoy a satisfying, productive and contributory life, I have been forming this idea.

An idea which has been brewing for many years, but is finally synthesising into excellence.

An alpaca farm and olive grove.

And I found the perfect place in Spain for just such a finca, not far out of Gaucin, where the boys could walk to the waterhole and I could still see out past Gibralter.

It would be awesome. Ace.

The mister refuses to invest in such a project (in any way – financially, physically or emotionally). He says that having funded his way through university by picking apricots, he has no desire to return to a life of primary production. I say, that’s fine, it will be my farm. At which point, he says…well, let’s just say he is unsupportive.

I have endless niche ideas, and we would have a ready market in the Adelaide Central Market. Alpaca milk cheese (‘do alpaca’s make milk? the mister asked) is only the beginning.

So anyone wants to be a sleeping partner in what is a bloody good idea, let me know. All I need is your money. You would not have to pick olives or shave alpacas or anything like that. Me and the lads will take care of all that. As an added bonus, you could come and visit once or twice a year, and I reckon you’d be able to claim the airfare back on tax (though check that with your accountant, I might just be making that up).

I’m not saying this would be our exact view, but it would be something along the lines of:

From spain
From spain

)

And now I am going to sew a frock

I was re-reading my post on happiness, and as I was reading, it occurred to me that I have never been unhappy before.

Not like this. Not the way I am now.

I have had times of sadness and grief. I have been dissatisfied, unsatisfied, I have yearned. I’ve been stressed, I’ve been lonely, I’ve been scared. But I have never been unhappy. There is not a period in my life that I look back on and think, ‘Those were unhappy times’.

From which line of thinking, I have thought two thinks:
one, I’m bloody lucky;
two, I’m extraordinarily stupid if I don’t do something about the situation I currently find myself in. Why would anyone be unhappy if they didn’t need to be? And I don’t need to be – I am not a woman of unlimited means, but I certainly have middle class choices.

So then I made some decisions – some of which were simple, some of which were hard, some of which are selfish, some of which are selfless – and I feel much better now.

I don’t think reading Dark Places is helping really

Today I am tired, because last night after we got home from the swim and the meal, I watched Survivor (totally sucked in by the Russell narrative and hoping he doesn’t get voted off, like, for ages), then, when I should have gone to bed, I started ranting at the mister about things which I dare not mention, that dare not mention thing being one of the problems really.

Or, to put it more succinctly (which I’m sure the mister wishes I had done last night): you don’t have to be stuck in a lift to be feeling claustrophobic.

It’s true, I need to get out more

A while ago in internet terms, there was a post on Spike, the Meanjin blog about the site forgotten bookmarks, which I promptly visited. I liked it a lot. It’s the kind of blog that I love, feeding as it does, the social eavesdropper, collector, lover of books, librarian and general internet addict in me.

But even as I loved it, I found myself feeling unsettled by the postcard highlighted and transcribed on Spike. The one that was found in The Remains of the Day. I tried to write a comment on Spike at the time, but couldn’t get the words quite right so deleted it (as I so often do, I’m crap at commenting, I really am).

The discomfort I felt, however, kept following me. I would say it haunted me. I even dreamt about it one night. My discomfort had nothing at all to do with the general idea of putting these treasures on the internet. Like I say, I love the site. My discomfort was to do specifically with that letter.

Having, as I do, time on my hands to engage in emotional over-analysis, I have been doing some thinking about why I have been so affected by this particular postcard.

Probably, I’m more sensitive about things and artefacts and mementos than I might previously have been. Having, within the space of twelve months, co-ordinated the cleaning out of my grandfather’s house when he moved into aged accommodation; my family home after my father died; and my own house when we moved over here, has left me…well, let’s just leave it at sensitive for now.

In the last six months, I’ve been writing a bit about how it has been, what it means to deal with so many things, things that quickly translate into memories and artefacts and mementos. I’ve been fiddling it all into essays which will hopefully weave themselves into a book. Through that, I’ve been doing, as I’ve said, a lot of thinking about the rights and wrongs, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts, the oughts and the ought nots. The ethics of it all. Topped off with some postgraduate research into ethics and life writing. So, that’s affected (affecting) my thinking too. While the thinks that I’ve thought about life writing don’t automatically transfer to this situation, some of those thinks do.

Now in the end, I did leave a comment on the Spike blog, to which Jessica replied that I have raised an interesting point about privacy and ethics. I guess my comment over there does seem to be specifically about privacy, but actually, my discomfort goes deeper than simple privacy. It is more to do with the rights we do or don’t have to tell other people’s stories. Certainly, privacy is an aspect of this, but it is only one aspect.

Life writing cannot avoid the telling of other people’s stories to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer will need to decide whose stories, and how much of those stories, they are allowed to tell, and that decision will be affected by all sorts of factors (journals and books and essays filled with such factors if you are interested, let me know, I can point you at some good places to get started).

So it is with this postcard. Do we have a right to this postcard, its contents and the story it tells? My simple, general answer would be that yes, as a society we do have a right to such things and my simplest arguments in favour would be that we are all enriched, we all learn from them, there is more good than harm generally done.

But this particular postcard? Why is this troubling me?

One crucial issue is, I think, the time. It is dated 00. That’s 2000, barely ten years ago. In internet years, ten is a lifetime, but in stories of loves lost and found, ten years might not be much time at all. If I were a player in that story, if I were him or her, or if I were the person now wearing that ring, I wonder what I would think if I came upon that postcard on the internet?

And then I started thinking not so much, ‘What if that were me?’, but, ‘What if I were the custodian of that letter?’

If I had come across this letter in my father’s things, would I share it with the world? Possibly – probably – I would share it with my closest friends, but not with the internet. So if I can think of circumstances under which I might not share it, then wouldn’t they stand for a stranger too? Don’t we owe more benefit of the doubt to a stranger simply because we have even less chance of knowing their ins and outs?

All of these are interesting questions, but they are intellectual, theoretical questions and don’t explain what it is that is specifically bothering me. Why did I dream about that postcard? Why do I care that much about its publication?

It took me a while, but I finally worked it out. The real reason this particular letter is gnawing at me is because when you are left with someone’s things, you could quite easily become the custodian of such a letter.

You could easily become the custodian, but not even know.

So when I look at that postcard, I’m not thinking of all the boxes that I bundled up in my grandfather’s and father’s houses and took to my own. But of all the boxes I bundled up and gave away.

Wednesday

I get this email from this mister, and it’s the best email he’s ever written me, and I email back and say, ‘I hate to make hay from your misery, but can I blog that?’ To which there has, so far, been no reply.

But I suspect that’s only because he’s sleeping. Stay tuned for a guest post from the mister.