Being the penultimate footy weekend, we sat around most of the weekend watching it. It was well-timed for us, because being night games in Australia made them afternoon games in Abu Dhabi.
The mister dedicated himself fully to the watching-ness of it, but after the first quarter of the first day, I got a bit twitchy, so I worked on my Commemorative Election cross stitch which I’ve been meaning to get around to.
I like to have the footy and the cricket on in the background, it soothes me. I guess it takes me back to the safety of childhood or something. The mister is always shocked that I can have been apparently watching or listening to an entire football game and still say, ‘Oh, is it finished? Who won?’
The cross stitch will be hung in the boys’ room. There are people who let their children develop their own political beliefs. I am not such a person. I would be, but I’m so right about my politics, that they don’t need to develop their own thoughts.
A funny thing has happened, just as I’ve been putting this blog post together. I have realised that this is a lot less true than it used to be. Events of the last few years – living outside a democracy, the swearing in of our first woman Prime Minister, the fear of living with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister – have left me caring very much that they learn to be politically engaged, but less inclined to bludgeon them (cross stitch evidence notwithstanding). I have been noticing more and more lately, that in politics and political action, I am much more like my mother than my father. The personal is political rather than the explicit political action of joining parties and so on. And that’s not the person I expected to be, I always thought I’d be much more involved in a political party than I have ever been.
Actually, this isn’t the cross stitch I was planning. I wanted to take the opportunity to do my first person cross stitch. That is, cross stitch an outline of Julia, pearls and all, but I just haven’t organised it, and I knew I could get this finished before the next election.
Fittingly, I completed it during the Collingwood Sydney game, so I was working on something else when Julia’s team got whipped by the Saints.
So now, all that’s left is the grand final. We have to get up really early for that. If I recall correctly, it begins here at 8 am. Which is definitely an early time to be watching football.
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| From miscblogphotos |
PS You’ll notice that I’m a bit of a sloppy cross stitcher, and I don’t go back and correct mistakes – like if I start a line too low, or do a run of stitches with the crosses reversed from all the others, I very often just leave it that way. Unless it’s a present. If it’s a present I do undo it.