Adelaide Fringe: Love Letters to the Public Transport System

In which I see Molly Taylor’s Love Letters to the Public Transport System.

The second day of the fringe, Saturday, I was reminded how truly wonderful it is that the mister is now living permanently back in Adelaide. For the last two years, the first term has been a blur of school cricket, district cricket, cricket training, cricket coaching (one on one), early morning swimming training, late night band rehearsals and a brazillion other adolescent activities all requiring my support in some way. This is the first first-term (read it again slowly and it will make sense I promise) that the mister has been back in Adelaide and he is like, ‘Woah! For real?’ and I am like, ‘Yep,’ and then I roll over and go back to sleep and let him get up to take the floppy adolescent to swimming training and the future prime minister to one of the two cricket games he plays on Saturday and could he please stop at the supermarket on the way home because we’re out of milk again. So anyhoo, while the mister left home at 6.30 am and did his final pick up parenting duty at midnight, I was left to tidy the house a bit (which mostly involves shifting the tsunami of school bags and sports equipment that builds up at the front door of the house during the week), do an hour of work, a quick rehearsal and then take in two pieces of excellent theatre, again at Holden Street Theatres.

To be honest, if you want to be sure that you are taking in the best theatre that the fringe has to offer, you can pick up a copy of Holden Street’s programme and just work your way through that. Of course, then you would be missing the quiet, hidden gems like my little show, but I’ve told you about it, and given you the details an embarrassing number of times so you won’t miss that one at least.

I decided to do a quick Saturday binge to try and get a few shows in before the intensity of my week began and I bought tickets for Love Letters to the Public Transport System for 4.30 pm to be followed by Henry Naylor’s Borders at 6 pm. I was not the only person who had this idea so I shared my afternoon’s theatre experience with a bunch of people I didn’t know, although I did recognise a few because this is Adelaide and there’s always someone you were in a meeting with as a graduate thirty years ago, or someone you were just cursing quietly under your breath as they loaded forty-two items onto the ten-items-or-less conveyor belt.

Love Letters to the Public Transport System is a monologue written and performed by Molly Taylor. Without a car, Molly has long relied on public transport and this is the story of her attempts to thank you the people who have taken her back and forth to her destined encounters. The spark to write is ignited after Molly falls in love and, living in the glow and wonder of that time, wants to share her gratitude. It is a potentially naff premise. But she writes so beautifully and she is so genuine in her wish to share the joy of love’s first flourish that even if you do think, ‘this is potentially naff’, you will soon be telling yourself off for not just giving in right from the start. Her face is full of expression that drew me in within seconds and the simple staging helps bring a focus to the storytelling so that it wasn’t until I was thinking about it afterwards that I realised she hardly even left her seat (if at all). Plus, she delivers it all in her Liverpudlian accent giving it a lilt and a poetry that my drawl-tuned self lost herself in. It is a celebration of the joy of life, our inter-connectedness, our duty to each other to share life’s goodness.

I went along to this by myself, and perhaps because it was 4.30 pm on a Saturday afternoon when so many of my compadres are at the U16s cricket, I was among the youngest in the audience. Except the woman next to me who was drinking a Cooper’s Ale which was a little enticing, but she was too cool to speak to me, whatevs. Mind you, she was a better theatre companion than the woman to my right who dragged an A5 pad out of her bag and began taking notes–which is fine, I often take notes myself–only her pad was one of those ultra-crinkly black and gold ones so whenever she finished a page and folded it back I couldn’t hear anything except crinkling. And the crinkling went for a long time, because in an acknowledgment of how loud the crinkling might be she did it veeeeery slowly so as not to disturb the rest of us. Humans, eh? Oh, also, the man in the row in front of us who, when asked if he could move along by one seat because there was just one seat between him and the next person and the theatre was getting full and if he moved along one seat then two people who had come together could sit together at the end of the row, said, ‘But I was told it’s General Admission and I can sit anywhere and I’m sitting here.’ Srsly, WTF, my friend, you looked like a goose and you embarrassed your friends. I’ve just read over this paragraph and it’s made me laugh that up there I’m telling you about our duty to share life’s goodness and now all I’ve done is bitch and whinge. I did love at the end how we all kind of sighed collectively and the gentle chatter as we left all knowing that we had shared beautiful, funny, moving theatre.

Love Letters is a well-tested work that’s been showing since 2012 and comes to Adelaide after seasons in Edinburgh, a tour of Scotland, and time at the Royal Court Theatre, London. I only mention this because watching it did indeed freak me out in a, ‘Gah! What was I thinking? Why should I ask anyone to spend time on my show when they can come to this?’ And I had to give myself a stern, ‘It’s okay, everyone starts somewhere, everyone’s art is legitimate …’. Also, Molly Taylor was running a workshop on writing monologues that I would love to have gone to (to which I would love to have gone), but it was on right in the middle of my season (‘my season’ ha!) and I thought I would do myself more harm than good by thinking, ‘Oh, that’s how you do it, oh, if only I’d known.’

So if you’ve read this far you’re probably thinking, ‘Didn’t she say she went to two things?’ Well, yes, I did, but I will write about Borders in the next post. In the meantime, you should one hundred percent go to see this show.

Adelaide Fringe: John Hinton, Origin of Species

In which we watch John Hinton’s Origin of Species from his Scientrilogy (highly recommended)

I wasn’t sure how putting on my own show would affect how many shows I would see at the fringe. I wasn’t sure first, how much energy I would have for getting out and about; and second, whether seeing other people’s productions would spook me and shake my confidence (foreshadowing). As it turns out, I’m exhausted and easily spooked, but couldn’t bear the thought of missing the great shows I knew were out there so I’ve been to quite a number. Not as many as I would normally get to, but a decent amount nonetheless.

I began on opening night of the fringe by getting myself, the youngest lad and our German exchange student down to Holden Street Theatres by 6pm to see one part of John Hinton’s Scientrilogy. This is a trio of pieces, each focussing on a great person of science, The Element in the Room (Marie Curie); Origin of the Species (Charles Darwin); and Relatively Speaking (Albert Einstein). The lads and I had seen The Element in the Room the year we first moved back from Abu Dhabi and it was one of our highlights, so when I saw that he was bringing all three back to Adelaide I was keen to get to see the other two. The one playing this Friday night was Origin of the Species.

Getting us all there by 6pm involved some after-school contortions that probably would have won me a place in a burlesque show at the Garden of Unearthly Delights, but we got there with enough time for the hungry adolescents to buy an overpriced sausage in a less-than-fresh bun. Now, I’m as happy as the next person to buy an overpriced sausage as part of a fundraising exercise for the arts but the unfreshness of the bun was a bit of let down. All the same and nonetheless, it was extremely pleasant to sit under the trees of the HST grounds waiting to be called in for the show.

The show itself was an absolute delight. John Hinton’s physical theatre is captivating, his singing is on-point, and his jokes are delivered with precision. We all had a pretty good idea what Darwin was on about, but through this piece of musical, comical theatre, John Hinton gives us something to think about, something to laugh about, something to talk about afterwards. This show is perfect for people looking for a fringe experience to share with a group of people of many ages, interests and tastes.

Okay, I was going to write about my whole week’s watchings in this post, but we are already at 500 words and I still have quite a few shows to tell you about so we will take a break and reconvene in the following post.

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.

Surrogate launch

In which my book is launched

My book is launched! And I had a wonderful time. We were at the beautiful imprints in Hindley Street, and Deb Tribe from ABC Radio Adelaide launched it for me (oh my gosh, not to gush, but what a generous person she is…and a wonderful speaker too, completely captivating…she’s a marriage celebrant too so if you are getting married you should one hundred percent look her up).

The night didn’t all go quite as I had planned. In my mind, I had this idea that I would spend the time flitting between the many lovely people I know, cross-pollinating my friendships and making sure that everyone was put in touch with everyone they should be put in touch with, and then they could all spend the rest of their lives saying, ‘And to think, it was your book launch we met at, TC.’

Of course the reality was that I had about seven seconds with each person, and spent a lot of the time feeling rude because I was chopping conversations off before they’d even begun.

But it was brilliant beyond brilliant to have a chance to reconnect with friends I have lost touch with, to nourish family connections, to thank people who have helped me to write and to be a writer, to acknowledge the creative relationships I’ve been so lucky to have through the years…to share this time with people I love and respect and admire.

I can say without a doubt that I have enjoyed the process of having my second novel published much more than I did the first. When the first one came out, my dad had only recently died and we had moved to Abu Dhabi and then I turned forty … I kind of tried to hide from the publication of Black Dust Dancing. But this time I really have wanted to celebrate. To celebrate not only the book, but so many other things too. Friendships mostly I suppose.

Anyway, not to get too sooky, because there was enough of that on the night. My book is out and about in the world. It’s nerve wracking of course, but it had the best bon voyage party any book could ask for.

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.’

Twentysomethings

In which I discover that things are going okay

The main thing that happened while we lived in Abu Dhabi is that seven years passed. Lots of the woodo-psciences say that Seven Years is a Thing. If you google, you’ll learn that all of our development occurs in blocks of seven years, that our cells regenerate entirely leaving us (literally) a new and different person every seven years, that a different chakra dominates at each of our seven year cycles…all this and much more besides.

To be honest, I’m up for a bit of woo. I mean, I believe in climate change, and my kids are fully vaccinated, but I like to have a tarot reading every now and then. Astrology and tarot talk about seven year cycles too. There’s the seven year itch, the 7-Up movies, and maybe George Costanza wasn’t as silly as he sounded when he wanted to call his kid *swish-swish* in the shape of a seven.

So, anyway, we were away seven years (well, the mister was away for nearly 9, but when I say ‘we’ I guess I mean ‘I’) which means that when I came back I was seven years older. And so was everyone else. I’ve noticed this in all the obvious ways – children are taller than I am, for example – but what has taken me by surprise is the sudden appearance of a whole new generation coming up behind me.

They were always there. The twenty-somethings. And for nearly twenty years I’ve been older than them. Until recently – until I got back to Adelaide—I could sit in the lunchroom or a workshop with a twenty-something and it would be clear that I was older than her. But I wasn’t old enough to be her mum. Now, I sit in the same lunchroom or a workshop, and it is clear to both of us that there is a distance between us. The change has been generational.

I think one of the reasons this has taken me so much by surprise is that in my part of expat-world there weren’t really all that many twenty-somethings. They are too old to be there with their parents, too young to be there with work. It’s a segment of the population that I didn’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. And now, bam! Here they are again, everywhere I look.

My dad used to say that every five years or so (let’s call it seven) you look in the mirror and see yourself as they age you really are, not as they age you think you are. So maybe it would have happened anyway. But certainly, being away has exaggerated this effect.

If there’s a younger generation, then I must be part of an older one. In most respects, and as I think I’ve mentioned before, I like to think that I’m jiggy with getting older because truly it’s better than the alternative. But confronting the reality of my writing career has been a little confronting. Lurking in online writing groups, I see the many wonderful young women who have so very much to say and who say it so beautifully. They are so much better at navigating the world of writing now, working much more intuitively with a sense of what is needed in a world of always-on connectivity. Their writing has resonance and relevance that I only recognise after the fact and not in advance.

It makes me think that maybe I had my chance. It makes me ask myself: Is it realistic to expect that a middle aged woman in Adelaide can advance a rather patchy writing career?

The good thing about this is that I’m asking from a place of peace and satisfaction with my life. I am very happy to be a middle aged woman in Adelaide. After many tumultuous years I welcome the simplicity of my life as it stands at the moment. Not only that, but counterintuitively, recognizing that I have only a slim hope of establishing a writing profile of even small significance has given me back the joy of writing. This was really brought home to me a little while ago when I was listening to a conversation some people were having about the frustrations of trying to establish a career as a writer. I realised that I was entirely free of any of those problems. I don’t expect to be able to make a living from it and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to be able to do it full time and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to make shortlists (though I’d like to). I could empathise with every person in that conversation. I remember clearly a few years ago when I was paralysed first with grief and second with the knowledge that I would never be anything more than a second-tier writer (and not even that because no words would come not matter how I tried). For some time, I was sure that I would never write again. So when I heard them speaking about these sorrows and frustrations I knew exactly what many of them were describing. But I also realised that I don’t have them anymore. That I am, as I said, at peace with myself and my place in the world.

This year, I’ve had more energy and enthusiasm for writing than I ever remember having before. I’ve mapped out my next novel with a clarity that I have never experienced. And a few ideas for short stories and essays that have been wallowing in the deepest recesses of my brain have developed some form and some shape that seems perfectly do-able. And I feel confident that I’ll be able to get a script together in time to put on a fringe show.

This won’t last. I do know that. Life will happen around me or to me and projects will get put on the backburner. Someone will write a horrible review and I’ll be back in the pit of self-doubt and agony. I’ll get to a point in my novel where all I can think is, ‘What’s the point?’ But for now, I’m going to let myself enjoy this feeling. I think I will celebrate with an evening of solid procrastination catching up on half a season of Nashville.

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.

If I were the kind of person to have Eureka! moments then this would be one

In which I begin again

A good thing happened to me today.

The foundation stone for my next novel fell into place. It missed hitting my toes and everything.

And the world looked different to me.

I hadn’t realised it until about 2.30 this afternoon, but not having a novel-in-progress has been having quite an impact on the rest of my work. I mean I know that I’ve been feeling blah about my work, but I didn’t understand what I was feeling blah about. And in fact, the feeling of the blah was making me feel even more blah because I thought I should be feeling wonderful. I had assumed that getting my current novel back to the editor with its final-before-copy-edits edits would invigorate me. It would free me to get stuck into the other projects I’ve got on the go. A couple of things I’ve got are reasonably solid and should be easy to work on.

But no. Instead of sitting down and working with focus (which I’m actually not too bad at doing despite appearances) I’ve been bumbling around, picking one thing up and then another and not really sure what to work on next.

I sat down with my journal this morning and instead of trying to write an essay or a short story or get started on my novel, I decided to write about how I was feeling and what I was thinking about my writing work. I know. It sounds uber-naff, but I did it anyway. And after writing and writing and writing, I discovered that there was a deep, tight knot of frustration somewhere in my brain. This in itself isn’t unusual, but this particular knot seemed to have some kind of quality that other knots have not had. So I kept writing and writing, until…I don’t suppose you can call it an epiphany exactly after three hours and several pages of writing, but it was a revealing (I think revelation is probably a bit too biblical too).

For the past fifteen years I have lived with the foundation stone of a novel in my consciousness. I have not always been writing a novel, and I have not always known the details of that novel, but the foundation stone has been there and the rest of my life has been about building the novel up from there. By that, I mean that I’ve always had an understanding of what it is I’m trying to write about. Even if I’ve had to knock walls down and rebuild them a million times since, the foundation has been strangely rock solid right from the beginning. I’ve just always known.

Perhaps this seems an odd thing for a person who has only managed to produce two novels in fifteen years to say – that a novel is an anchor in her life – but as far as my work goes it’s been the only constant and I hadn’t properly understood until today the function that it has provided in giving me something to organise the rest of my life around. (An ungenerous interpretation would be that my powers of procrastination are so phenomenally powerful that I can’t function without something to avoid.)

So after I’d worked that out I turned the page on my journal and wrote down every single idea related to my novel that’s in my head. Of course its foundation had been there all along, and once I started writing with a bit of focus it came to quite quickly. So there you go, and that’s that then. I know exactly what it is I’ll be avoiding working on for the next three years.