Naive Psychologist

Neighbour to youngest child: where’s your mum?

Youngest child to neighbour: she’s inside, because she’s a wife.

‘Right, so we’re agreed: now that only 4 out of 13 lights are working, something has to be done.’

‘Oh, yes. We agreed on that when we had 5 out of 13 lights working.’

The knitting needles clicked.

‘They’re a bit of a pain, aren’t they, those halogen things?’

‘Yeah. I certainly wouldn’t have put them in if it was me did this room up.’

‘Mmmm.’

And they passed the evening in the almost silence of an ageing relationship. The knitting needles were clicked. The milk rock was scoffed. The cups of tea were slurped.

And tomorrow the glasses would need to be found. And possibly a torch.

10 am and I still don’t know the soccer result.

Stupidly, she has eaten all but the yellow snakes.

He will know that she has been sneaking them, and has eaten significantly more than her share.

If she eats the lot, there is a chance that he will never remember they didn’t finish the lot in one sitting last night.

Eating the yellow snakes is punishment enough.

The tram doors gas-whoosh close, the computerised bell dings. She is still surprised by trams that glide and don’t rumble as they pull away from the stop.

The pedestrian crossing is ticking out its quick metallic pitch, so she moves quickly to catch the green lights. The water in her bag glugs.

The small white car waits for her. It needs a new muffler and that squeak can’t be good.

Her cough is turning into a bark, but her sniff is still dry.

The native grass in the median strip whispers trendily.

She turns right. She imagines that when the architect presented his plans for the eco-village, there were children on the lawn, but she walks through here four times a month, and she has never seen a child.

There is the sound of a kettle boiling and a student on the phone. Four essays due in the next three days and I have to work tonight. Someone is eating, the metal repeating itself against the ceramic. Quickly. She imagines it is a silver spoon and the dish is white. Soup is a perfect meal for this time of the day, when the shadows are already long and if your back is not facing exactly the right way, the sun doesn’t give enough warmth. Someone is drying their hair and someone else is vacuuming. They do not need to hit the nozzle so hard against the wall.

The leaves on the Japanese maple rub together. The rustle makes her wonder why it is that this tree still has all its leaves, and the others have nearly none.

A garage door right at the end is whirring, but it never opens. She turns back to check, but it is still closed.

The next shoes she hears make a loud clunk on the footpath, but they are light pink and made of soft leather and carry a small woman. The woman almost smiles. Her lipstick suits the dark of her eyes and the colour of her skin.

Three of the cars at the front of the school have their radios on, all tuned to the same station and not the one you’d expect. None of the windows are down. One woman is reading a New Idea. One has her head back and her eyes closed. One is a man, talking on a mobile phone and with the radio on like that she wonders how he can hear himself think.

A teacher says now when we go up the stairs in a voice which shows she says the same thing day after day, and day after day at least one of the children – a different one to the day before – will push, and another will yell, and another will pull the hat from another who will in turn retaliate.

If school is nearly finished, then she is nearly late for her meeting. Her trousers rub together as she walks. The fabric is heavy and makes a small snap with every second or third step.

She can not tell whether that it is the sound of air or water coming from behind the wall of the Car Detailers Garage.

The phone in her bag beeps the arrival of an SMS. She hopes the news is good, but she won’t look until 5 o’clock. Just in case. It is a big meeting, and she will need to concentrate.

The man on the bike is wearing a helmet which doesn’t fit. His shoes are canvas and worn. He has a cardboard box strapped on to the back of his bike. He says hello in a voice which grates in his throat as he speaks.

She says hello, but he has already gone.

It is an eight minute walk and she is not quite late.

From the Green and Gold Cookery Book, forty fourth edition, 378,000 copies sold

Fritz sausage

One and a half pounds of chuck steak, 1/4 lb. bacon, 1 1/2 cups (large) of bread crumbs, one teaspoonful of salt, one small teaspoonful of pepper, one dessertspoonful of Worcester sauce, pinch of thyme and one egg.

Mince the steak and bacon very finely, add bread crumbs and the well-beaten egg; mix well together; make into a roll and tie in a floured cloth. Put into boiling water and boil 1 1/4 hours. Turn out and roll in bread crumbs and serve cold.

– Edith F. Rutt

‘So,’ the mister asked, ‘if fritz really doesn’t have pig p*n*s, does that mean a snot block isn’t made of snot?’

‘The good thing about getting so worked up about stuff and worrying so much about the finer points and trying so hard not to upset anybody even when you know you can’t make any of them truly, properly happy, is the incredible up you get when it is off your plate,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t get so down, then I couldn’t be this up.’

‘Yes, I suppose,’ the mister said picking his right foot ever so slightly off the floor and shifting it two millimetres to the right thus maintaining his ever-even-keeled-ness.

If you got selected to go on Survivor, would you not, as soon as you had put down the phone to the producers who were telling you you had won, go straight to the WEA or the Scouts or whatever appropriate place you could find, and enrol in a quick course in firelighting?

What is it that makes Justine such an ace PlaySchool presenter?

The warmth. It oozes from the television whenever she is on the screen. If you invited her around for the afternoon, you wouldn’t feel like you had to do the dishes before she arrived.

The body. She is not at all angular and she looks like someone’s mum (especially in those ones you still see every now and then where she is pregnant). She is someone you might come across in these particular years of pre-schoolness.

She can sing. Which means she does not have to make up for out-of-tune-ness and/or mono-tone-ness by droning above her co-presenter.

She is having a good time.

And Rhys is to PlaySchool what Tony Jones is to LateLine.

create your own visited countries map

Very unrealistic map of places visited by Adelaide and the mister. For example, a visit to Shanghai, Beijing and a couple of places in between, splashes red across a huge swathe of unvisited territory. Likewise a week on a train and a few nights in Moscow translates itself into remarkably large splotch of red.

Particular points of note: no visits to India which completely destroys potential backpacker cred.

map not expected to change within the next twenty years

first spotted by dogpossum