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

Adelaide Fringe: Louise Reay, Eraserhead

In which I see Louise Reay’s Eraserhead at Tuxedo Cat’s Broadcast Bar

I am going to interrupt my chronological narrative of shows I have seen at the fringe to tell you about the most unique show I am likely to see. Monday is one night when I can sneak in an unexpected show or two. There isn’t much fringe on on Monday nights (again, read it twice and it will make sense I promise), but I haven’t been to anything at Tuxedo Cat’s Broadcast Bar yet and they do indeed run their programme on Mondays. So yay. I know this is going to sound very, ‘Yeah, nah, I liked their early stuff,’ but thank goodness for the Tuxedo Cat. The large fringe hubs like The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony are brilliant fun, and they have added a dynamism to the fringe and opened it up to audiences that might not otherwise have existed. But the danger is that their emphasis on carnivale and big-name stand-ups can suck the life from other smaller, quieter events and shows. Through the many evolutions of Tuxedo Cat (and it does sound a little like a Pokemon so perhaps I should call that ‘evolves’ instead of ‘evolutions’) Cass Tombs and Bryan Lynagh have been fighting the good fight to provide a venue that is more than a little bit left of centre. I’m not sure about the idea of ‘real fringe’, but definitely we need a range of different spaces and venues that allow audiences and artists of all types and flavours to see and be seen.

So now I’ve got that off my chest, by happy happenstance, the Tuxedo Cat Monday lineup included a show that I especially wanted to see, Louise Reay’s Eraserhead. The few comedians/artists facey groups that I’m part of have all had at least one post talking about Louise Reay, a comedian from England who is being sued by her (ex)partner for defamation. This goes far beyond the midnight tangles I’ve got myself into wondering about whether I should or should not say this or that about my mother, will people get the wrong idea, will they think I’m making fun when really I’m trying to demonstrate my love? Mine have been usual worries any one who writes any kind of memoir struggles with from time to time.

Being sued for defamation takes things to a whole new level. I can’t comment much on the whys or wherefores because, as explained in the many articles around the place such as this one the comments for which she is being sued weren’t in the show for very long. But I will say, as have many other comedians and artists (such as this one), I find its potential precedent a truly troubling one. And speaking feministically, I would also point to the issues of control. And just so you know where I stand (in case I need to spell it out), I will certainly be contributing to her crowdfunding fund to help pay for legal costs.

As to the show? Under the advice of lawyers, the original show has been scrapped and this has been written and put together in a matter of days and that does show. It is not seamless, and it is clear that she is sometimes still finding her timing. She holds a script in her hand for much of the time, reads directly from it for some of the time. But where that is often an unforgivable weakness, I saw that as a true strength. Sometimes ‘the show must go on’ is more than a simple cliche, it is a call to arms. A celebration of solidarity.

There are moments of palpable vulnerability and rawness that give us a glimpse of how deeply she feels the impact of being sued and the subsequent silencing of her work. We meet her mother through pre-recorded skype calls and her own sense of humour and her love for her daughter shine through. I was the oldest person in the audience by some way, and the closest in age and experience to her mother. Seeing the calls with her mother in combination with the aforementioned vulnerability it was all I could do last night to stop myself stalking Reay’s mother and sending her a note to say, ‘It’s okay, we’ll look after her while she’s over here, she’ll be okay.’

Reay is a truly unique performer, willing to take risks and to push her art. She has previously performed shows for English audiences in Chinese and mime as demonstration of the truth that communication is only seven percent words (and I was pretty pleased to find that my own rather basic and rusty Chinese allowed me to understand nearly all of the dating scene). She isn’t only unique, she is talented too. She writes beautifully, her delivery is disarmingly precise, and she has an oddly unassuming but charismatic presence on the stage. I have no doubt that she will one day soon be filling the tents down at The Garden of Unearthly Delights and I for one will be happy to buy a ticket in advance so that I can skip the huge queue to get into the GOUD.

In the meantime you should go and see this show, not only because it needs to be seen, but because you won’t see anything else quite like it this fringe.

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.’