On reading

I’ve spent the last couple of years working on my second novel. Looking back on it, my pattern of work seems to have been to have worked like a demon for short patches of time (say two months) and then to leave it, neatly marked-up and post-it-noted on the corner of my desk for long stretches of time, at one point up to a year. Some of those down times were because there were other things going on (writing a thesis, moving countries, cooking meals because oh god, they want to eat again?). Some of them were because what’s the point, insecurities, whatever made you think you could write a book blah blah blah and so on for ever and ever. And some of those breaks were because I was trying to solve a problem of where to go next and I needed a bit of distance.

One of the things I used to do when I was trying to solve a problem in my writing was to read like a demon. Mostly I read authors who write like I want to write, looking for answers to my problems (is it okay to have more than one narrator, is it all right to move through time so quickly, what about all those italics I’ve always loved can I get them to work?). I do find answers. I don’t copy the people I read – I don’t think I do anyway, In a strangely, counter-intuitive kind of way, reading also gives me more confidence in my writing. Not that I ever finish reading Ann Patchett and think, ‘I’m as good as Ann Patchett any day.’ More that I think, ‘It is possible to finish writing a story, look at this, she’s finished quite a few.’

But apart from that, somehow or other I’ve once again got out of the habit of reading and I don’t feel like I spent all that much time reading last year. I know I was busy last year, but for me reading is more to do with being in or out of the habit than it is about busy-ness (though of course being busy does have an impact on habit). Netflix isn’t helping because I’ve started ending my evenings with an episode of Grace and Frankie or whatever Scandi-noir-landscape-damaged-but-I-could-save-him detective currently holds my interest. And then there’s the whole problem of read a bit, put the book down, leave it there for a week another week another week and then so many weeks that I’d really have to start again.

So what I’ve been trying to do is to read books as quickly as possible by which I mean in the shortest timeframe. Like, say to myself, ‘I’m going to read Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth now, and that’s the main thing I’m doing until I’ve finished it.’ This attitude takes a bit of work because even those of us who do consider reading to be a valuable, ethical, rightful use of our time find it hard to place reading in front of life’s many other important tasks such as feeding our children and earning our living. But it’s reminding myself to add ‘book’ to the ‘purse, keys, phone’ grab on my way out the door, or picking up my book instead of scrolling through the news app on my phone (I don’t know about you, but I am constantly refreshing that app at the moment I think trying to reassure myself that it’s going to be okay, it’s going to work out fine, I mean we’re humans right the most sophisticated beings on the planet we can fix this, but mostly terrifying myself like actual, deep-seated fear that I think has become a constant in my emotional repertoire). It also means that I’m choosing books based on my ability to read them quickly – so length primarily. And I was going to say complexity, but that’s not at all true, because I read Grief is the Thing with Feathers a few weeks ago and that might be short, but it lacks nothing in complexity.

And here are some words just to let you know that this is an abrupt ending, but it’s started to rain and I have to go and get the clothes in off the line and I’ll probably never get back to this if I don’t finish it now.

Not sure whether you could really call it a honeymoon

The day after our wedding, the mister and I left Australia to go backpacking. He had been working in a grown up job for two years and I had been working for one, and between us we had saved ten thousand dollars which we changed into US dollar traveller’s cheques on the day that the Australian dollar was at its lowest value all that year. Savvy.

Each fortnight I took my cheque (yes, we got paid by cheque) and took it to the Hindmarsh Building Society and put it into our backpacking account. If we wanted to take money out of that account we had to give them notice (maybe 24 hours, maybe two days, I don’t remember exactly how much). It was supposed to stop us making impulsive purchases. Not that the mister has ever made an impulsive purchase in his life (as far as I know).

I did make one impulsive purchase that year. A flute. Which I played slightly less poorly than I now play the banjo and which I packed in my backpack to take around the world. I cannot explain this to you, but it must have made sense at the time.

The only other thing I really spent money on that year was this: from time to time, I would go to David Jones and buy the mister a new shirt and tie for him to wear at work. I felt so sophisticated, so in love.

We were never entirely sure that we would reach our savings goal. The economic times in South Australia at the time were particularly uncertain, living as we were in washup of the State Bank disaster, and paying a high price for the potent mix of greed and ineptitude from which the state has still not entirely recovered. Like nearly everyone I graduated with, I was employed on a series of contracts and the mister, a structural engineer, came home from work each week with the news that someone else had been laid off. A junior drafter, an accountants person who had been with the company for twenty years, a receptionist… in many ways not much has changed in that respect. I’m self-employed now and have a casual contract with an employer and the mister…well, he lives a long way away.

Anyway, we saved our ten thousand dollars which even now seems an enormous amount of money and a fair proportion of that went on the plane ticket because plane travel was extraordinarily expensive then, and not saying that it’s cheap now but discount airlines and the interwebs hadn’t been invented yet. We bought a one way ticket and left some money with my dad to be sent to us when we wanted to fly home.

We were on an international flight to Bali, which transited through Perth. Adelaide had an international airport by then, though how many flights were going in and out I can’t say. We had one night booked in a fancy resort at Kuta and for the rest we had the Lonely Planet guide to South-East Asia.

Many lovely people came to the airport to see us off, including my parents who were in charge of bringing the passports. When they arrived, a little bleary-eyed (I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest possibly not entirely sober) I said, ‘Oh thank goodness you are here, can you please pass us our passports so we can check in.’

They said, ‘Oh! Shit! The passports!’

I said, ‘Yes, very funny, now just give them to me.’

They did not reply because they were running back to the car so that they could drive quickly to the place where they had not brought our passports from.

Anyhoo, this is Adelaide and it was early Sunday morning so they were able to go and get our passports and bring them back in time. We got on the plane with our traveller’s cheques, our matching backpacks (which we had bought on layby from Paddy Pallin and they were excellent backpacks but deadset the dude who sold them to us should have said, ‘Yeah, look, you don’t want matching ones though’), my flute, the mister’s doctor martins and almost zero knowledge of global geography. When the air hostess (for that is what they were called back then) found out it was our honeymoon she brought us a glass of champagne and gave us a bottle of Veuve Clicquot to take off the plane.

We had hundreds of plans none of which involved living in Berlin on a diet of apples dipped in nutella, letting post-wall punks’ pet rats run across our shoulders while we were on the train, then buying a ticket to Auckland and living in New Zealand for four years, but that’s what happened in the end.

A most unusual way to say I love you

For many years after we got married, I was ambivalent about the act of having got married. This was, in part, a reflection of my father’s ambivalence. He had no ambivalence towards Adrian (he loved him deeply) or the relationship and he got into the spirit of the wedding for sure, but I’ve always felt that he would have preferred if it I’d been more radical in my politics (which is personal), and less conforming.

I sometimes do still feel that I should have stayed not married as a political act. Even while I write to Malcolm Turnbull about marriage equality I feel deeply uncomfortable about the many people whose varied and various relationships are increasingly excluded as we further entrench this idea that long-term, monogamous relationship is valued above all others. Spending seven years in a country where I couldn’t have lived with Adrian without being married to him have made this even trickier to resolve in my mind.

For a while, I tried to convince Adrian that we should get divorced. Not that we should abandon our relationship, but simply that we should no longer be married. Obviously, he never thought that was a good idea. And as time went on, I stopped talking about it because it started to seem like a flippant thing to do, disrespectful to the people who had celebrated our marriage with us, and entirely disrespectful to the increasing number of people I knew who had experienced the deep pain of divorce – kind of the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.

Most recently, in a few random conversations this anniversary has come up for one reason or another and people have said, ‘You don’t hear about that so much these days, do you?’ in that kind of nostalgic tone loaded with moralising. It’s made me feel kind of icky. Relationships begin and end for as many reasons as there are relationships. Some are short, some are long, some begin and end many times over, some end abruptly, some are sparked again years after they ended. Some people live alone because they want to, some because it’s forced on them, some because it’s just where things ended up. Life is messy and unpredictable. When I got married I was 23 (or maybe a few days older than 24). I didn’t even know that 25 years was a thing. Getting here has been a bit of luck, a bit of work, a bit of acting bad, a bit of acting good. All sorts of other things could have happened, but didn’t so this is where we are.

So, ambivalent about getting married, ambivalent about celebrating my marriage’s longevity.

Where’s this going? It’s the weirdest wedding anniversary thing you’ve ever read, isn’t it? (And let me say, it’s not at all what I imagined it would be when I started to write.) Let’s go wherever I’m eventually going via my mother.

The last conversation I had with Mum was about the plans she had for her 25th wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks. That part of the conversation took me by surprise. My parents were not at all into ritual and they eschewed any glorification of family (see above). But her words from that conversation have always stayed with me.

‘Some things are worth celebrating.’

She died a few days after that conversation, meaning that after my wedding, the next time my family was all together was 18 months later, at my mother’s funeral.

Because of reasons, I don’t wear a wedding ring. What I do wear every day and every night is the ring Adrian gave me for my 40th birthday. When I was 23 (or possibly 24) I had lived a simple, uncomplicated life, but when I was 40, life was messy and unpredictable. I wasn’t easy to love. I was in a deep, dark place and I could not see a time when life would ever be light again.

‘What if this is it?’ I said to him one day. ‘What if this is how I am?’

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘This is how you are for now. But I’ve known you for a long time. It’s going to be okay.’

It was the first glimmer of light I had seen in a long time.

So this is where we are: He knows the worst of me and loves me still.

It is worth celebrating.

Tuesday morning

I’m not at all athletic, I’m uncoordinated, and I don’t especially like sport. But I do go to the gym three or four times a week. I go because it is good for my equilibrium, for my heart and my arteries, and because as much as this shocks the 20-year-old me, I love it. I even, for a little while and after I’d been training seriously for a couple of years, considered becoming a personal trainer. After all, I reasoned, who could possibly make a better trainer than someone who knows what it feels like to be rubbish at nearly all athletic activity? What could be more inspiring than the sight of a trainer who regularly gives herself a black eye at body combat and sprains her nose with a medicine ball?

That was one of my less brilliant ideas and although I did end with a certificate III in personal training, I think the fact that it took me two goes to pass one of the exams says a lot. I just could not get straight in my head the difference between hyper- and hypo-extension.

Anyway, at the gym I do see a personal trainer two mornings a week, this morning being one of this week’s mornings. I’ve been seeing him for about six months now so we’re starting to get to know each other a bit, and we have a bit of chit-chat (but not much because I am usually struggling to breathe and he’s usually trying to encourage me to do things I don’t much want to do at the time he is suggesting I do them). This morning, knowing that I was taking a few days off work while the mister was here, he said, ‘How was your day yesterday?’

‘Yes, good,’ I said, ‘The mister and I went for a walk along the beach and had breakfast on Jetty Road Brighton.’ We have to say Jetty Road, Brighton to distinguish it from Jetty Road, Glenelg. It’s a beachside suburbs thing.

‘Oh, where did you go?’

I told him where we went and he said, ‘But why wouldn’t you go to Cream?’

Turns out that Cream is the place the mister and I had walked past and thought, ‘Well, that’s intriguing, a teensy, tiny place with loud music,’ and then promptly forgot about.

‘You have to go,’ my trainer said. ‘The coffee is ten out of ten. Also they’re really young and they play gangsta rap.’

I didn’t pay much attention to that last bit because Jetty Road, Brighton, a southern suburb of Adelaide is not a place you would normally associate with gangsta rap. Especially on a Tuesday morning.

Anyhoo, I came home from my hour of jump squats and tricep dips and said to the mister, ‘We should go to that place we saw yesterday,’ and it being a beautiful morning we walked along the beach in the direction of Jetty Road, Brighton.

On arrival at Cream we discovered that the cafe was full.

‘You’re full?’ I said.

‘Every morning.’

‘Can we put our names down for a table?’ I knew to say this because I’ve seen it on the movies never thinking I would need to say it at Jetty Road, Brighton.

‘What name shall I put it under?’

‘Tracy.’

He wrote Gracie and I said, ‘No, it’s Tracy. Gracie is the wrong demographic.’

He laughed as if he might be old enough to understand the joke.

‘You get a free coffee for waiting. What would you like?’

Okay, so how weird is that? You stand outside on the footpath and they bring you a free coffee while you wait twenty minutes for a table to buy the thing they’ve already given you for free. Anyway, we stood outside, looking twenty years older than everybody else who was standing outside. My trainer is right about many things and he was one hundred and ten percent correct about this. Ten out of ten for the coffee.

Some interesting things happened while we were waiting for our table, but I don’t really have time to tell you about them.

The food! Oh my goodness, I could not choose. The mister suggested that we could share and I said WTF WE HAVE BEEN MARRIED TWENTY FIVE YEARS AND WHEN HAVE I EVER WANTED TO SHARE MY BREAKFAST and then I refused to tell him what I was going to order. Actually I didn’t tell him much at all because every time I spoke he said, ‘What? Sorry, I can’t hear you.’ On account of he has the hearing of a middle aged man and the gangsta rap was fairly loud, particularly for a Tuesday morning.

I had the stack of hotcakes with maple bacon. In truth, it wasn’t a stack because I chose the ‘one hotcake’ option, and I’m not sure how anyone would eat the ‘three hotcakes’ option. I’m certain that my trainer would not have recommended that as post-workout fuel, but holy moly ravioli it was delicious. The hotcakes were fluffy, the bacon was crisp, the maple was maple. I did have to leave a little bit on the plate, because I could feel a bit of a chemical reaction inside my body as the sugars from the maple began to ferment and joined forces with the weekend’s gin which I think had not entirely diffused. No lies, by the time I finished, my hands were shaking and thank goodness for the sea breeze on the gentle walk home.

Notebooks aren’t really a mirror to my soul

a selection of my increasingly ridiculous notebook collection

One of the fun parts of doing a degree in psychology is that you get to diagnose yourself with all sorts of conditions you always suspected you had but didn’t know for sure, along with a whole host of things you never knew existed. Of course, a person can’t possibly have all the things she’s diagnosed herself with so I think it must work in much the same way that reading your horoscope does. You pick out all the bits that you think match goodly (my goodness me why yes, I am creative and ahead of my time) and ignore the bits that don’t (what’s that word ‘stubborn’ doing in there?).

I don’t know that a penchant for notebooks and diaries could ever be considered pathological, but cleaning up my desk I feel forced to admit that there is something going on which might not be entirely healthy. That small collection of notebooks all currently reside on my desk and, with the exception of the trusty filofax about halfway down, all have been purchased in the last couple of months.This pile does not include the cascade of A5 clipboards, my diary, the notebook I keep in my handbag and the bajillion moleskine notebooks which are scattered about the room like the frangipani flowers in the driveway after that weird midsummer storm.

Each of the notebooks has a different function. I’m not going to go into those details because I started to write the list of what each notebook was for and nearly bored myself to death and I care too much about you to cause your death after you have innocently clicked through to read what is proving to be a rather tepid, insipid blog post.

A lot of the notebooks I have bought have been from the airport newsagent stands. I know that the airport newsagent stands are robber barons, but just being at an airport fills me with a sense of all that is possible, and there is nothing that says anything is possible like a new notebook. With each one, I am filled with a sense of joy that stems from a belief that here is the perfect way to organise my day, week, month, year. To prioritise my projects. To set out goals and objectives, integrating timelines and budgets. To write like a demon. To remember everything. To be in control.

I read a wonderful essay on the weekend Neat and Tidy: The New Magic in the Sydney Review of Books about books on tidiness. It includes an excellent discussion of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I do have a copy of that book. I tell you what though, reading it sent me to a whole new level of anxiety, because with every page I turned I knew that here was something it would be impossible for me to achieve. For one thing, I’m quite attached to my things. For another, I haven’t fully recovered from the six month period in which I cleaned out my dad’s, my grandfather’s and my own house. This cannot be helpful to me, I remember thinking this quite clearly as I read Marie Kond’s book. I closed it, and I have never bought a self-help book since, never even looked at one.

I think this recent spate of note-book and planner over-buying is something akin to those days when I filled my life with self-help books. It is an attempt to bring order, a deep-seated belief that the perfect way of ordering must be out there somewhere. Two things about this: first, I definitely need a place to write everything down and have a couple of lists going, and I do like to keep track of my dreams and my hopes and my ideas; second, I’ve read every productivity book ever written, spent a fortune on a billion productivity apps and I just always go back to the filofax, a whiteboard and post-it notes.

And look when I open my trusty filofax here is the quote I have written from Cory Taylor’s beautiful work Dying: A Memoir:

A bucket list implies a lack, a stor of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry that you haven’t done enough with your life. It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true. I don’t have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven’t done. Whatever they are, I figure they weren’t for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip.

I think it’s time to slow down on the notebooks.

February

It is an awesome time of year in Adelaide because the festival of arts and its fringe begin. It’s a wonderful time of the year, the city is full of vibrancy and vibe, and I find it fuels my motivation to create and to work harder at my own art. (Slightly political note: I think in this state we still don’t properly acknowledge that government policy which relies so heavily on festivals is not necessarily fabbo for fostering and developing local arts and artists.)

There’s quite a bit of parenting I’m shit at, but one thing I do well is take them to stuff. I curate an excellent programme that spans the spectrum of arts experiences from visceral to cerebral, I take a couple of risks, and throw in a few of the commercial certainties. It’s great, I’m terrific, you know this, it’s great.

So I’ve spent a few hours today looking through the programmes to see what there might be that the lads and I can do together. It’s been a bit more difficult today than in previous years. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve got a slightly fuzzy brain. You see the mister was less jetlagged than expected last night so we ended up going out and when we got there I realised that because the mister is here I don’t have to be a responsible adult and I proceeded to down gin cocktails like a teenager who has just discovered west coast coolers. The main reason though is that they’ve got their own opinions about what they do and don’t want to see and when they do and don’t want to go. It’s also not so easy to find things that not only appeal to adolescents but that they are happy to go to with their mum. Nonetheless, I’ve locked a few things in and even managed to squeeze in a couple of things before the mister jets back off to his mysterious life.

I made one interesting observation while I was analysing the programme, and that is that there is an ever-diminishing number of Dave/Davo/Davids plying their comedy wares. In 2009 when I was last in the fringe there were more Dave/Davo/Davids than there were women and that included if you added up all of the women in all of the lineups. This says something more about the age demographic than it does about gender, and watching your name go so entirely out of fashion is one of the more disconcerting experiences of ageing and certainly one that no one warned me about.

And now if you’ll excuse me I need to go and shake off the last of the gin haze because I am out for dinner where I am told there will be champagne.

Saturday afternoon

So just in case the dog doesn’t eat its own vomit I am, even as we speak, rehearsing my surprised face for when the mister gets home from cricket. ‘OMG, that’s disgusting, how long has that been there I’ve been so lost in my work I didn’t even hear it.’

It’s not a complete lie. I have been focussed on my work. But not so focussed that I missed the distinctive sound of an animal retching. Really, who would have pets? It’s not just the sick and the poo…

…so, I was interrupted mid-sentence because my phone rang and a lovely man asked ‘are you the owner of (cat’s name)’ because in the ten minutes the big cat was outside this morning he managed to lose his collar. He (the lovely man) insisted on bringing it over so obviously I had to go downstairs and throw a cloth over the vomit as if I had just that minute discovered it because he would be able to see the vomit from the front door.

Turns out it’s a good thing the dog didn’t eat its own vomit, because the vomit was mostly a peach stone. I don’t know why a dog would swallow a peach stone. I would never eat a peach stone. But then I would never eat my own vomit either. (I really mean that, I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect.)

Our neighbour is very lovely, and it was nice to meet him, although I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t our other neighbour over the back fence who sits in her backyard and has loud conversations on the phone about frangipanis. I did not think that there was all that much mileage in a conversation about frangipanis, but my goodness there are conversations galore. I think frangipanis must be one of those plants that used to be in fashion, then everyone except the people who used to live in this house ripped them out of their gardens, and now everyone is planting them again. I hope that happens to loquats too, because I love loquats but it’s pretty rare for someone to give you a bag of loquats of their tree these days.

After I had thrown a cloth over the dog’s vomit, I scanned my immediate surroundings in the way that you do that if you know someone is about to knock on your door when you really hadn’t planned for someone to be knocking on your door. I quickly cleaned up the remnants of the Floppy Adolescent’s afternoon of online gaming. Remnants included but were not limited to:

the foil left from last night’s garlic bread that came as part of the combo deal. Last night the garlic bread was deemed disgusting and no one wants that, but apparently all it needed was another twelve hours to sit on the bench;
an empty Sprite bottle (also came as part of the combo deal);
an empty punnet that used to be a full punnet of tomatoes (did not come as part of the combo deal).

Sometimes I wonder how it is that I am nearly fifty years and I have not yet achieved greatness. Other times I don’t.

Dear Prime Minister

Dear Prime Minister

Further to my correspondence dated 1 February 2017, I am writing now to continue our one-sided dialogue.

I begin with offering you my sympathies. You must be spewing over this whole Cory Bernardi thing, eh? Like, you compromise your entire moral being to the extent that I’m sure your skin will never lose that grey pallor you’ve acquired and then he goes and does this anyway.

You have a country to lead and I have cat vomit to clean so I will get straight to the point:

Pull your head in.

Pull your head in on Nauru and Manus Island. Seriously, just pull your head in. It’s pretty clear by now that the idea of resettling people United States is either a. not going to happen; or b. result in an awful outcome for those people. It is time to convince your cabinet to find a humane and compassionate solution. For example, we could probably have them in Australia and that could probably happen pretty quickly all that is missing is political will.

Pull your head in on electricity: I know you know that climate change is a real and present threat, and that we’re better off with renewable energy than we are with coal. Do you know how I know this is what you think? Because you said it. Quit with demonising the South Australian government. Do something smart and do it smartly.

Pull your head in on your parliamentary performance: That ridiculous tirade in parliament the other day. Do you know who liked that? Political journalists who don’t get much entertainment otherwise; your back bench and Barnaby Joyce. Do you know who didn’t like it? EVERYONE ELSE IN AUSTRALIA. Do you know how I know this? I read the comments. (And apart from anything else, the logic is what? It’s okay for you to be a millionaire, but not okay for Bill Shorten to have dinner with them.)

Pull your head in on this Centrelink debacle. Seriously, mate. Not cool. Can I suggest that you find someone who currently relies on Centrelink payments and that you spend a day or two (and you will need a day or two) trying to work your way through things with them? I can guarantee you that you – like all of us who have done this – will be shocked at how difficult this is.

We are at a crucial point in the history of democracy and of political leadership. There has never been a more exciting time to be Prime Minister. (Sorry, you must be sick of that.) Perhaps instead of framing this letter in the negative tone, ‘Pull your head in,’ I should frame it more positively.

Be strong. Do good things.

Yours sincerely

Tracy Crisp

PS If, as I suggested in my previous correspondence, you did want to meet, perhaps you would like to come to a reading I’m doing at the West Terrace Cemetery on Thursday evening and we could go for a glass of chardonnay or something after that? I could also do Tuesday, but Wednesday is out because it’s my 25th wedding anniversary and I expect to be otherwise engaged. (Which reminds me – with Cory Bernardi gone you could probably do something about marriage equality now, eh?)

Claudia Karvan, white handbags and pillows of memory foam

I had something to tell you, but I can’t remember what it was. It was lighthearted and amusing and didn’t involve me sitting in front of the television watching episode one of Newton’s Law and comparing myself to Claudia Karvan. But comparing, obviously I mean saying such things as, ‘She’s really made a go of things, hasn’t she, she’s so smart and talented and my goodness she is gorgeous.’

One of the good things I’m finding about my late forties is that I’m able to be genuinely admiring of people’s successes because I understand that there’s something much more than luck in sustained success. I understand that there’s been a lot of hard work and resilience and probably a bit of picking themselves up and dusting themselves down going on behind the scenes.

At the same time of course the envy cuts deeper because middle age is as much about coming to terms with one’s middling successes as much as it is coming to terms with one’s mortality. Or perhaps they are both elements of the same thing.

(Newton’s Law has finished now and in my judgment, the jury is still out. Apart from anything else, the music could be way better.)

I still haven’t remembered what it was I was going to tell you about. It wasn’t these bites on my ankle which I got at this time last night when I was also sitting here on the couch and watching television. I don’t know how long its been since I spent two nights in a row sitting on the couch watching television. I’m watching Netflix now. Suits. It’s okay, but it’s no Boston Legal, is it? Though I tell you what it has got that Boston Legal didn’t have: Jessica’s handbags. I’m in season three and she’s just been on with the amazing white handbag ever seen in the history of amazing white handbags. I mean obviously I’d look ridiculous carrying it around Romeo’s Glenelg South Foodland, but it would totally suit me in the alternative life I sometimes construct for myself in my mind.

I’d be better off going to bed than sitting up watching shows that aren’t as good as shows I used to watch. I’m very tired partly because the bites on my ankle kept me awake all night and partly because my neighbours seem to have installed a new security light and its not their fault if they don’t know that every time a possum triggers the light my room lights up like its just been lit up by a security light that’s been triggered by a possum. Imagine how tired I’d be if I hadn’t finally treated myself to the wonder that is a tempur memory foam pillow? Oh my goodness, people get on that STAT.

Me and my banjo, a lamentable song

You might know that a little over a year ago I bought a banjo. It was a decision made on a whim at the moment that, instead of heading straight from Zayed Sports City after the rugby carnival, I turned left and headed out towards Raha Mall. I had no idea whether the music shop out there would even have a banjo and, as it turned out, nor did they. The person at the counter had to go and check with the person out the back who had to go and check with the owner who eventually came out and said, ‘Did you want a 4 string or 5?’ (His accent was Australian, east coast.)

‘Oh, five,’ I said.

It didn’t have a price on it, and he pulled a number from the air and said, ‘What do you think?’

Numbers fall out of my head the minute I hear them, so I can’t remember what I paid exactly. The owner disappeared back out the back and along with the banjo I bought the only banjo book they had and also some picks.

Picks aren’t picks.

When I got home and opened the book I discovered that guitar picks and banjo picks aren’t the same thing and of course there being only one banjo in the shop it was hardly surprising that there were no banjo picks and they had sold me the ones for guitar (not deliberately, they didn’t know). Then I was cross because they hadn’t even put them in for free.

It’s reasonably easy to get a good sound out of a banjo because, unlike guitar, the open strings make a lovely chord. I had this idea that one day – probably the next day and if not then definitely next week – I’d be able to play Rainbow Connection. I used to play that on the piano in 1983 and 84, my god I loved it. To play it on the banjo would be such retro fun. A new party trick (not that I had an old party trick, but you know what I mean).

Time has taught me that my natural talents do not lie with the banjo. I’m shit at it.

I taught myself a few things, and then I went to lessons last year, taught by a wonderful young man of excellent music talent. I’m sure he dreaded my lessons. I’m sure that every time I turned up he went home thinking Do I really the money this much? And that every time I cancelled he was like, oh, there really is a god.

I haven’t got very far. I can play a couple of chords, but my rolls are still very slow. My biggest disadvantage though is that I can’t really sing. I can hit a range of about five notes (two down from middle C and two up) with vague precision, but that does limit a person’s repertoire. So even though I learn a new song each week all I really do is play the same chords in different combinations.

The only way I’m really going to get any better is to play a whole lot more than I do. But the thing about middle age is that you have this ever-increasing awareness of the value of time and there are so many things I want to get better at in the space where banjo might be – sewing, baking, reading poetry. I want to read more books and watch more movies than I do.

I’ve always lived my life by doing more things, but I wonder if that’s changing. Maybe I want to commit to other things by deciding that I’m not committed to my banjo.

What would Kermit do?