Category: postcards from life

On leadership

In which I am utterly despondent about politics and turn to television

Utterly despondent about politics right now. Malcolm Turnbull has been an absolute disappointment. I mean I was never going to love the leader of the Liberal party, but his continual capitulation of anything he believed in–most particularly same sex marriage and climate change–was unedifying at best. The idea that we might have Peter Dutton has left me, quite literally, in tears. We are locking kids up in offshore detention, and our planet is on fire, and our solution is Peter Dutton.

But I hate, just hate this constant trashing of our democracy by the guardians of our democracy. I think I should write about something different because honestly I am finding this really upsetting and stupidly I engaged on twitter which is something I never usually do because it’s entirely toxic…I should just stay on the instas…

so, quick, what else can I write about? I can’t think of anything much and the only reason I’m writing at all is because it’s only day three of my renewed commitment to my blog.

I know! Over the weekend I watched the loveliest series on netflix–The Dectectorists. I’m a bit sad the last series isn’t there, but I highly recommend. It has that perfect blend of comedy (well, more humour really than comedy) blended with characters who walk on the edge of loneliness because humans and their friendships are always fragile but never quite fall in because friendships win. Writing that sentence has cheered me up a bit and if you need cheering up go and watch The Dectectorists.

On exercise

In which I discover the daggy world of the fitbit

I’ve been wearing a fit bit. I think this is a. quite daggy; b. slightly too focussed on weight and body image; and c. so late to the party that all that’s really left to do is pick up the glasses, tip the dregs down the sink and clean out the ashtrays (and that’s how late I truly am to this party because this party was held so long ago that it was full of smokers).

I have been feeling my fitness shift significantly downwards ever since I moved back from Abu Dhabi and while I’ve never been especially fit, over the last ten years I’ve been slightly above average and I do like the energy and strength that comes from a bit of added fitness. And if I’m honest, I do identify now as someone who has above average fitness and at nearly fifty I’ve got enough identity rediscovery going on without adding another element into the mix.

The main issue is that I haven’t found my exercise groove since I moved back from Abu Dhabi. This is a slightly good development because it means my life has been filled with things other than getting to the gym every day, but at the aforementioned nearly fifty it’s become an issue of ‘what do I do?’ Even when I was working full time, I did still have more time in Abu Dhabi for getting to the gym, and on top of that, the class structures meant that getting to classes with people of about my level of fitness was much easier. Here, I’m a bit out of synch with the school-mum routine so the school-mum classes start a bit too late in the morning; I’m not going to even try to pretend to be someone who can get to an early-morning class; and the evening classes are filled with people who are often twenty years younger than I am. It’s not that I mind being older, it’s just that it’s not all that much fun being in a class of people who are naturally so much fitter and also … well, it’s not that they are actually rude, but it’s true what they say about middle aged women and invisibility.

So I’ve been trying to do fitness without the classes, and when done well, time on the gym floor is more effective than classes but the thing about classes is that the thinking and the motivation is done for a person and all a person has to do is move. I’ve had a personal trainer for the last maybe two years, but I broke up with him a few months ago. There were two things underlying this decision. First, I wasn’t convinced it was doing me any good after a while. It’s that thing where doing one thing convinces you that you don’t have to do another, so all I was doing was rocking up, doing what I was told for 45 minutes a week but without properly constructing a routine around that.

Second, having a trainer is extremely expensive and I was conscious that I wasn’t getting the benefit I needed to justify the expense. Especially in the context of our current household economy which has seen an unexpected expense, the ongoing general expenses of teenagers about to go to university, and a more fine-grained understanding that retirement will come sooner than we realise.

My decision not to see my trainer anymore has been retrospectively justified in his attitude towards me since which has, in truth, been kind of hurtful as, even after a long absence from the gym, he has barely looked at me let alone asked how I’m going on. Not that he owes me anything, but after two years in what is a reasonably intimate relationship (you do have to let your guard down a bit if a trainer is really going to do their work) I don’t think the odd ‘hey, how’s it?’ is too much to ask.

Anyhoo, the point is that I realised that even with the trainer I wasn’t sure what exercise I was really, truly doing. Hence why (a phrase I do hope is going out of fashion as quickly as ‘ace’ because while I love ‘ace’, ‘hence why’ is weird) the fitbit. So I can understand what each exercise session is truly about in terms of heart-rate-raised and time-spent-ways.

The results are in: I am shocked at how little exercise I really do. As I suspected my time at the gym was not especially strenuous. But not only that I am way more inactive during the day than I had realised. I mean, I sit at a desk writing or on the couch knitting for most of my time so obviously I knew I was at least moderately inactive. But honestly, I can see now that there are days when I did almost nothing beyond breathing. I’ve also been shocked to understand how little sleep I’ve been getting. I do go to bed a bit too late, but even allowing for the fitbit’s inaccuracies I don’t spend much time in deep sleep.

As daggy as the fitbit is, it does suck you in with all it’s little progress measures (have you done 250 steps this hour? don’t you think it’s time you had something to eat?), and I’ve been walking a lot more since I got it (on which I will write more tomorrow, because how good is walking) and now that I’ve had it for a couple of weeks it’s cheaper than a trainer.

Perhaps the least interesting blog post ever written but it’s helped to distract me for another hour from the idea that Peter Dutton is likely to be our next prime minister. This is extraordinarily alarming and who will save us? (Julie Bishop? I bet she wears a fitbit–of no relevance to whether she can run a country of course. I can’t abide her politics but I do love her wardrobe–again of no relevance to whether she can run a country).

On tulips

In which I discover that tulips aren’t the only flowers

Tulips seem to have gone out of fashion, which is a pity because they’re my favourites. I buy a bunch of flowers every Friday with my market shopping. It’s my last stop on the way, and this final thing, a bunch of flowers pushed jauntily into my basket carries me through the week. Except less so because they’re no longer tulips.

When my dad was sick, flowers were my treat to myself. They were an anchor to the living. Which I guess is weird given that they had been cut off from life and now were dying. But I brought the deep orange tulips home and watched them open, their stems growing longer so that the tulips looked like spiders spreading out of the vase.

These days when I do find a bunch of tulips they sit in the vase, limp and pale, many of them never opening.

I keep buying the flowers, but each week now, it’s as if another part of my father has died. The world moves on.

Adelaide Central Market

In which I take hours to do my shopping but it’s worth it

I’ve been lurching from one thing to another lately and was starting to feel really ground down. And the more ground down I felt the more grumpy I was getting myself because all in all my life is pretty straightforward right now and then I was getting more ground down by being grumpy and so on and etcerearrrgh … looking at what I was doing there wasn’t a lot I could change in relation to my actual activities because it’s all fairly standard has-to-be-done kind of stuff: get the lads back and forth to things, go to work, do the shopping, fit some writing in … so I thought I had better try to build some breathing space in. That’s why I’ve gone back to doing my shopping at the Central Market every week. It’s been part of my routine for over twenty years, in fact whenever I’ve been living in Adelaide I’ve done most of my food shopping there. The foundations of the habit were really laid when the boys were little and it was an easy thing to do with littles. On Saturday mornings we would meet my dad for breakfast and then he would take the lads for a wander around while the mister and I did the shopping. We would often walk there from school and kindy so that we could stock up on apples (there was a time when the floppy adolescent would eat twenty apples each week). And when we were living in Abu Dhabi the market was one of the touchstones I used. After sausage rolls at our aunty’s a lasagne at Lucia’s was our first point of call whenever we came back for a visit. Walking into the market is like taking a breath of my whole adult life. It was a good decision to build it back into my week.

Running

In which I wonder who I even am

From 1981 to maybe 1983, at around 10am every morning, as students at Risdon Park High School (now demolished), we had to go out onto the oval in our (somewhat inappropriately named for this moment) ‘care group’ and spend what seemed like one hour but I think was fifteen minutes doing DPA. Daily Physical Activity. I cannot describe to you how excruciating each of those single minutes was for me as an entirely uncoordinated teenager with a dreadful fringe perm (why was I only allowed to get my fringe permed? That makes no sense to me) and in increasing understanding about how my hips did not conform to the Dolly standard. All of the activities were dreadful, but the most dreadful of all was the ten-minute run an activity whereby you ran in a square marked out by cones (or, more often, rubbish bins dragged across the oval by year eleven boys) for a total of ten minutes.

‘Stop being a dickhead,’ my dad said to me one day after school. In that first year at high school, he was at the same school I was and he had noticed my many and varied attempts to get out of the dreaded DPA. ‘It’s good for you to do things you’re bad at. Helps you understand that’s how some people are feeling in maths.’ Why he chose maths as an example I will never know, because I think it’s safe to say I rarely turned in a stunning performance there either.

Anyhoo, for many and varied reasons (including avoiding my master’s thesis) I did begin exercising in my adult life and I’ve maintained a surprisingly consistent gym attendance record for many years. And I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to running. No idea why, can’t even begin to speculate. But drawn I have been. Except not really able to follow through and for about three years now, I’ve had the Cto5 app on my phone. For a while I diligently follow the programme, three minutes running, five minutes walking, five minutes running, three minutes walking … I get my playlist increasingly hardcore (Rawhide!). I keep getting to the point where she chirpily says, ‘Congratulations! You are halfway through the programme! People who make it halfway complete the programme!’ And then I stop.

I haven’t really been at the gym for the last few weeks because I’ve been a bit consumed by my show and also I’ve been drinking too much so I’ve been pretty sluggish, and also I have had terrible insomnia. But it was time to get back into it this week, so after catching up on Barnaby Joyce’s latest dickheadery, I went down to the gym. I didn’t have a plan of what I was going to do, so I got on the treadmill for a warmup then thought, ‘Well, I’ll do Week 6 Day 1 on the C25 app again,’ and I did the warm up, then I did the first five minutes running block. At about one minute in, I thought, ‘Fuck this shit, I’ll do the five then I’ll go and do a few leg curls or whatever, I’ll start back properly tomorrow.’ But then when I’d finished those five minutes and she said, ‘Start walking,’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just run these three minutes, then at least that’s eight minutes and that’s not too bad,’ and then at the end of those three minutes I thought, ‘If I do another 200 metres that’s two kilometres,’ and the next thing I knew I HAD RUN THE FULL FIVE KILOMETRES. WITHOUT STOPPING.

Now, in truth, five kilometres is not a very long run for runners, but for people such as myself who fall off stationary bikes and punch themselves in the face at pilates, this is something of an achievement. When I looked around the gym there was no one there I knew well enough to say, ‘Look! I just ran five ks.’ So now I have had a shower, a cup of coffee and the last of the Florentines and I am still filled with the endorphins and I have to tell someone so I am telling you.

And people this is why those ‘letters to my teenage self’ make no sense to me. There is absolutely no point telling the 12-year-old me, ‘One day, you will be so very grateful to be alive that you will WANT to run five kilometres.’ She doesn’t need that shit filling her mind. She’s too busy just making it through to recess, she doesn’t need to try and understand how she is going to get to be forty-nine and wanting to run.
THE END

Christmas in the campervan

In which we are glad to be dry.

Christmas, eh? I guess like most people who grow up with Christmas as a cultural marker I’ve had a fluctuating relationship with it. I have loved it (waterfights with cousins, yay!), I have scorned it with the scorn of a world-weary, uber-cynic who is only there because her parents made her, I have dreaded its emotional pressures, and I have been entirely ambivalent. (I am only talking here about the cultural aspects of it, not the religious aspects, though I think it’s fair to say this has changed for me over the years as well.)

This year it transpired that on Christmas Day we were in New Zealand, our first full day in the campervan. When we set out from Christchurch it was fine and sunny, and by the time we got to Aoraki / Mt Cook it was raining. The road was extremely busy with campervans. I guess everyone was from France or China or Germany or Japan and may as well be driving. We played my ultra-excellent Christmas playlist as we drove although it’s impossible to hear anything when you’re in a campervan. My goodness, they are rattly and bangy–I had bought a packet of blu-tac the day before and by the time I’d tacd down all the things that were rattling there was only the smallest blob of it left.

We went to a Department of Conservation campground which had a few other campervans and many, many tents. The mister and I have spent our fair share of rainy New Zealand nights in a tent and we were deeply appreciative of our dry space with its working stove and our dry sheets. What’s a bit of squoosh when you’re dry? We bored our children by retelling the stories of our youth. Like that first time we went camping in New Zealand. In our excitement at finding a car we could afford we didn’t check our eleventh-hand Honda Accord all that closely and it wasn’t until we were huddled in it for warmth one stormy night by Lake Waikaremoana that the silicone seal which had been used to hold the hatch together fell completely away and a sheet of water just poured in through the back. The LOLz, eh mister?

Other times when we’ve been away for Christmas there has been at least some time during the day when I’ve felt the absence from family. There’s a different quality to the homesickness at those times. But towards the end of the day this year I realised I hadn’t felt that at all this day. Perhaps because everyone was camping and so we didn’t get any glimpses into other people’s Christmas Days.

For their Christmas lunches the lads had chosen mac and cheese and spaghetti bolognese. I put together these Campervan Trifles which are strawberries, yoghurt, and iced animals. Iced animals are a strangely delicious biscuit although as I said on instagram they do look like they’ve been slapped together by someone whose kid waiting until 8pm Sunday night to mention Monday morning’s bake sale.

For our evening’s entertainment, we transformed the table into the bottom bunk and each of us found a space to sit or lie to watch Die Hard played on my ipad with the sound streamed through the mister’s wireless speaker. I think Die Hard is far more Christmassy than I remember it being when we watched it last year. After that we had The Nightmare Before Christmas. I loved it. I did fall asleep part way through, but I still know I loved it because I’ve seen it before and my sleepiness was to do with being sleepy and not to do with the quality of the film. The floppy adolescent also loved it. The other half of the family will never watch it again.

And that was Christmas in our campervan.

The Campervan

In which we are squooshed.

When I was growing up our family camped, first in a tent and then in a camper-trailer that we bought secondhand on a day trip from Port Pirie to Adelaide.

I remember that trip well because that morning I woke with a headache that felt like I was having knives stabbed through my head and a heaving guts. I did actually throw up when I got out of bed, but we had barely left the seventies behind and parents didn’t let a little thing like their child’s stabbing headache and squelching nausea get in the way of a trip to buy a secondhand camper-trailer. My dad did make a makeshift bed for me by taking out the backseat and putting the lounge cushions across the back so that I could lie flat–this meant that my brother and I travelled without seatbelts but again the seventies (you know sometimes you see those memes on facebook our toys were sticks and SHARE IF YOU AGREE, okay, yeah, sure the seventies sure were great LOL hahahaha).

Anyway, we bought that camper-trailer which was one of those arrangements where it was a fancy trailer with beds that pulled out from each end and keeping it stable was a pair of rather insubstantial legs that wound down and — if you remembered — back up again when you were making the trip home. It was like this only significantly less fancy.

My holiday dream was to stay not in a camper-trailer on a windswept west coast beach dragging a spade into the sandhills whenever I needed to go to the toilet (west coast of South Australia), but in a caravan parked in a caravan park. My goodness, the number of hours I spent daydreaming about those neat rows of caravans all within walking distance of a flushing toilet. Also, I was fairly convinced that I would meet a boy and we would fall passionately in love and spend the year writing letters before we met the next summer at the caravan park again.

I’m sure I brought some of this childhood longing to my decision to book our potential final family holiday in a campervan that would tour the South Island of New Zealand. Now, usually when I book things I spend countless hours researching every possible angle of every possible option before I finally hand over my cash. This time, I was booking in a bit of a rush because it was a last-minute decision to go and I know that New Zealand books out at this time of year. Also, I suppose because I’d spent an entire childhood lusting after a caravan, any caravan, please god just let me sleep in a caravan that it did not occur to me a van is not a van is not a van. Reading that this 4-berth van is “ideal for two couples or a family” and was available for the time we needed it, I just pressed ‘Book’ and paid the deposit. After nine nights I can say that as a family we worked it out, but deadset any two couples who can successfully negotiate a holiday living in this particular van are unknown to me (no offence). The two beds are bunks one on top of each other. During the day the top one gets lifted into the ceiling and the bottom one–through a feat of engineering and design–becomes the table. At night, the people on the bottom bunk have approximately ten centimetres between their noses and the bunk above them. Remembering that this is New Zealand so it is going to rain about eight percent of your holiday, this is not an experience for the faint-hearted and I think the word “ideal” should definitely be left out of the description of this particular van.

Other people had clearly spent more time researching the layouts of the van because we did not see another family with teenagers spilling out of the doors in this model van in any of the places we stayed. Do you know that strange thing when an emotion you haven’t felt for many years resurfaces in your body and it is immediately a touchpoint to a different time and place? Each time I saw one of the vans with the layout I should have booked I felt exactly as I had felt when I was a child in a yellow commodore dragging a camper-trailer behind it and we passed a caravan or a caravan park.

Somehow or other though, this was one of the best holidays we’ve had together. I will tell you more about it tomorrow, but in the meantime please enjoy the accompanying image which is at 7am on the final day of our time in this van. Ha! You think living together in it is tricky, you should try packing. At least one of those bags came to be resting there after it was thrown somewhat, um, energetically from the doorway.

Taking off

In which I am reminded that my body knows more about grief than my mind does.

The Floppy Adolescent is about to start year twelve, and it occurred to us that this summer might be the last school holidays that we have a chance to take a holiday together. The mister has started a new job so doesn’t have any leave accumulated but his office does close for the Christmas-New Year break so we had a decent amount of time if we left the morning after his office closed and stayed until the afternoon before his office opened its doors for 2018. So we decided to return to New Zealand.

The mister and I lived there from late 1992 until 1997, and we always intended to go back but apart from a quick trip not long after that for a friend’s wedding it’s been nearly twenty years since we were last there.

It was a bit of a last minute decision and I was pretty frantic in the lead-up to Christmas so I didn’t do too much in the way of preparation except book the plane (there’s a direct flight from Adelaide to Auckland again now and we managed to get some pretty cheap tickets, although on our flight home our inflight entertainment did not even include the movies) and a campervan for ten days in the South Island. This campervan thing was something I’d always wanted to do so it seemed like the perfect holiday for what is potentially our final family trip (and you might think that a campervan is one way of ensuring that yes, it is the final family trip and we will never holiday together again, but more on that later).

I’ve always been a bit surprised that I haven’t ended up back in New Zealand. I loved living there. The landscape was wonderful, and we camped and tramped a lot. Like really a lot. I felt like I really got the sense of humour. And living in Auckland we had great jobs with many opportunities that we could never get in Adelaide.

But that’s where we were living when my mum died, and somehow I always felt that if I didn’t come home, back to where she wasn’t anymore I would never truly come to terms with her death. I felt like I needed to touch her absence more strongly and more often than I did (or could) from Auckland.

It’s funny you know, what your body knows before your mind, because for the week before we left I started getting slower. My body was sluggish. At the gym I went to pilates instead of spin, and in the evenings when I would usually pace my way along the esplanade I ambled. I slept. I went to bed early and I got up late, and I had been asleep the whole time but I was not rested. I kept scanning my body for a virus. A ticklish throat, an aching ear? But there was no sign of illness that I recognised.

And then, a few days before Christmas, we got on the plane and as we pulled away from the gate I began to cry. Truly cry, like I haven’t cried for years. And that’s when I understood what was going on. New Zealand was the last place I saw my mum. Twenty four years, half my lifetime, spent making an intimate study of grief and it seems there is still so much to learn.

Hindsight

In which The Mister and I fail to see eye-to-eye over the colour purple.

It is not until we are standing at the counter of Mitre Ten that the conversation we had in the car makes sense to me.

As we reversed out of the driveway the mister said, ‘Shall we go to IKEA afterwards?’

He wants to go to IKEA because the household has still not bedded itself down so to speak after our return from Abu Dhabi, and what should be our bedroom remains a cold, damp space that no one wants to sleep in which leaves the mister, more often than not, on a mattress behind the lounge. Having moved home over a month ago, he’s keen to find a more permanent solution beginning with a frame to dignify the mattress.

I said: ‘There won’t be time, it closes at five on Saturdays.’

He said: ‘It’s only four o’clock. We’ll be five minutes at Mitre 10 and it’s only ten minutes from there to IKEA.’

I said, ‘Well, even if that’s true—five minutes at Mitre Ten—we can’t get to IKEA, find a park, wind our way through lounges, couches, kitchens, to the beds. Choose the bed, decide if we need more tea light candles and which colours, find the right aisle then the right box in the warehouse, stock up on pickled fish and get it into the car all in forty five minutes.’

In the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘Five minutes. Twenty-five years I’ve been listening to him say, “It’ll only take five minutes”.’

At the counter of Mitre Ten, it becomes clear that if we had come to do what he thought we were doing it would only have been five minutes. Maybe even four.

He has come, I now discover, simply to buy four litres of the colour we already have.

I have come, he now discovers, to choose a different colour.

When the woman behind the counter hears the mister say, ‘But you said you liked this colour and I’ve already cut it in,’ she says, ‘Excuse me for a moment, I need to help someone over in BBQs.’

She disappears.

The mister says, ‘This is the third colour we’ve tried.’ And then he repeats: ‘You said you liked this colour and I’ve already cut it in.’

I am looking at the colours on the wall. It gets confusing, doesn’t it because it isn’t just blue or green, yellow or white it’s all the shades and tones between.

We have narrowed it down. We are looking for blue.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I wonder why I didn’t see this last time. This could be it.’ I pull the card from the pocket. I see its name and I know it’s perfect.

It’s called: Hindsight.

The mister, known for his calm and gentle nature says (and I think I quote him accurately here): ‘Fuck that. As If I Need to Sleep in a Room Painted with your Hindsight.’

What about I say, pointing to the lighter shade, ‘Hindsight Half.’

Sometimes, the mister laughs at my jokes. But not always.

Hindsight is clearly out, so I go back to the wall of colours and I am looking. It’s so confusing. And then I see it. It’s exactly what I want. I take it out of the pocket and I show it to him.

‘That’s not blue. It’s purple.’

I say, ‘I know, but look at its name. It’s called Vision. Blue is our past. Purple is our future.’

When we get back in the car we have a test pot of something called Indigo Blush and I say, ‘We could go to IKEA. There’s no time to buy a bed, but I could buy you a soft serve ice cream.’

Thursday

In which Leonard Cohen has the last word

Going out for a drink on a weeknight in Adelaide is easier than it used to be, but you can’t leave it too late because the only places that stay open after eleven have music that is too loud for our middle age sensibilities. We had to deal with the possum’s doorway to our roof space first. That meant we had to wait for it to get dark so we could be sure that the possum had left its cosy house in the ceiling space. No one wants to block a possum in. The mister and the floppy adolescent were on the case, but the floppy adolescent needed to finish his pulled pork enchiladas before he could even think of going up a ladder or holding a light.

The mister’s been here since last Friday night, and he’s leaving on Saturday and we haven’t had much of a chance to sit and talk and let the conversation take its path to wherever it might lead. The thing is, in a week, there’s been the Future Prime Minister’s cricket final spread across two days (his team won, and there’s hurrah!); a couple of deadlines; the mister wanting time to hang out with the floppy one, and so on. This is one of the very real challenges of this global commuting caper – finding time to have the casual conversations that glue a relationship together.

For example, I was half a glass of sparkling in when I was able to say, ‘Yes, that’s true, but we’re in a post-neoliberal age now.’

‘Wot?’

‘Yes, Paul Keating said neoliberalism is at the end of his life. I’m the one who’s coined it the post-neoliberal age, but everyone’ll be saying it by tomorrow. You can use it at work if you like.’

‘Keating, hey? Bet he didn’t tweet that?’

‘No,’ I said. It is hard to know where to take the conversation when you’ve got no real idea what you’re talking about and you’re a little distracted trying to work out exactly where you know the woman at the next table from.

We ordered two plates of tapas and I took another picture using the snapchat-type feature facebook seems to have ripped off in their latest update. (This is an aside, but when I discovered it a few hours earlier, I said it’s to stop the flight of middle aged ladies away from facebook and the floppy adolescent told me I was wrong and I said, ‘It might come as a surprise to you, but middle aged ladies do have value,’ and then both the adolescents piled on in a flurry of outrage that I would suggest that they have anything except complete respect for women.)

For my second drink, I joined the mister in a glass of shiraz there being no cabernet sauvignon available by the glass. It was my first red of the season, but the temperature in Adelaide had dropped to sufficiently autumnal levels to allow it. I am a most sophisticated wine drinker and said, ‘Well that’s more like a European shiraz than a Barossa, isn’t it?’ The mister agreed. ‘It’s still not cab sav though, is it?’ I said.

At 10.30 (not on the dot but close enough) the waiter came and said, ‘Were you interested in ordering last drinks at all?’

We looked around and realised we were the last ones in the bar.

‘No, thank you, we’ll just get the bill.’

The relief! Writ large across his face. Though of course, we should take our time, take your time, there’s no rush.

On the way back to the car we stopped and looked in the windows of a place that would be the perfect space for my new business. Well it would be perfect if it cost next to nothing and fitted itself out. And then we drove home along Anzac Highway and parliament was on the radio and I got a notification on my phone that the plans to make changes to 18C had been foiled but they still seemed to be talking about it on the radio but I did not feel like listening to odious people saying odious things so I arranged for us to listen to some music.

If I’d had Redgum’s It’s One More Boring Thursday Night in Adelaide in digital form I would have played that for the laugh. Instead, I put on Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. I often listen to that when I’m driving home at night, but of course I’m usually driving home by myself and it takes me by surprise when the mister says, ‘What’s this? I haven’t heard this.’ At first he’s like, ‘Bloody hell, are we listening to this all the way home?’ But that’s okay because Leonard Cohen is like that, and by the time we’re on The Esplanade we’re up to If I Didn’t Have Your Love and the mister’s like, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

So now next time I play that album, I can think of the lovely night we spent together, the mister and me on a boring Thursday night in Adelaide.