Author: ThirdCat

Visit to Sharjah

In which I am not the adventurer I think I am

I loved that green scarf my eldest boy had wrapped around his waist in that photograph. It was soft to touch, the creases fell out of it, and it matched nearly everything in my wardrobe. I took it with me whenever I left the house and it nearly always ended up wrapped around one of the boys.

At the time this photograph was taken we had been living in Abu Dhabi for ten months, and those ten months included the extended three month summer break that I spent travelling through Spain and then living in Edinburgh for a month where I staged my first (what would come to be my only) solo show.

We were spending the weekend in Sharjah, the small emirate that borders the other side of Dubai and is about 150 kilometres from Abu Dhabi. At the time, it had a lot more cheap accommodation and schooling than was available in Abu Dhabi and many people on low incomes would commute. Every day. They probably still do, but I’m not sure about details like that anymore.

By this time, we had found a place to live and while the lads and I were in Spain, the mister had moved out of our temporary apartment and into our new compound apartment. We had passed the first anniversary of my dad’s death, my grandfather was more settled in his new accommodation. In the shadow of the GFC and a company merger, the mister’s employment was not unstable but was more complex than we had thought it would be when he accepted the job offer over a year before.

I was also facing something entirely unexpected: I was not loving living in a different country and culture to my own. This messed with my mind because until now I had thought that I loved travel, that I wanted to live anywhere, everywhere allthewhere. For more than twenty years nearly every decision that I’d made had been on the understanding that I wanted always to be seeing new places. On our backpacking trips I had listened to everyone else’s stories of living in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Middle East and I had thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ You understand, don’t you, that when I say ‘thought’ I mean ‘believed’. I mean that this was who I thought I was. A person who wants to be in new and different places. Even if it had sometimes frightened me or made me feel uneasy, the opportunity to think beyond myself had always energised me.

This was not my experience in my first year of being in Abu Dhabi. During that time I was filled with such intense and debilitating feelings of dislocation that it was impossible to focus or concentrate on anything much more than the immediate task at hand. More deeply, whether I was conscious of it or not this was having a profound impact on my sense of identity and self.

On the weekend that this photograph was taken, I was taking practical steps to grapple with this mismatch in my expectations of myself and the reality of my feelings. I was organising trips like this thinking that it would help me to root myself more firmly in the place. That’s what I’d always done previously when I felt out of place and dislocated – I’d thrown myself fully into that space.

It didn’t work. I did not enjoy my weekend in Sharjah even for one second. The emirate of Sharjah is dry (that is, without alcohol), but the Russians we shared the lift with as we went down to the lobby of our hotel were clearly drinking something more than water. Sitting by the pool for an hour I felt like I was a character in a road trip movie only I was the only one who hadn’t taken three days of drugs to get there. The weather had not cooled and I hadn’t adjusted to the constant heat of the desert. I couldn’t get my head around the museums’ hours and so we were mostly wandering around between closed museums and empty markets. And I didn’t once feel that spark of excitement and discovery that I do at new museums and art galleries.

Of course, this was a temporary unhappiness. Soon enough, time would soften the sharp edges of my grief. I would make peace with the many changes to my identity – the changes that had been forced on me and the changes that I had made. I would stand steadily again even if the ground under my feet were sand.

But on the day I took this photograph I didn’t know any of that.

Coffee

In which I am, once again, a sucker for an accent

This is the story of how I know you cannot have an orgasm simply from drinking coffee.

Once upon a time yesterday morning everything went wrong starting from the moment when I got out of bed at 4.50 am to get a floppy adolescent to swimming training on the other side of the city. For example, the cat upended the food scraps bucket in order to get to the imagined delicacies contained therein. I have no idea what he was after because when they were upended on the floor all I could see were coffee grounds, carrot skins and an avocado seed. I will not bore you with the rest of the details because although they felt horrific as I lived them, when I write them it looks like nothing more than a boring list.

Anyhoo, I decided to treat myself to a coffee before I went to my office to do some work.

The barista said, ‘Can I help you?’ and his accent was Spanish, and this was the best thing that had happened to me all day.

‘I would like a skim milk caffe latte please, but I can have it only half…I don’t mean half the shot of coffee but half the milk.’

‘Ah, you mean like piccolo, I will make you piccolo.’ His accent was still Spanish.

We chat and I say, ‘I need the coffee because I get up early to take my teenager to swimming.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ (Still with Spanish accent.)

I shook my head.

‘Where do you swim?’

A little more conversation ensued because he wanted to know where to swim that was not too expensive, because in his country he swims a lot and he is missing it.

Then, he passed me my coffee and said, ‘Are you a coffee member here?’

I shook my head and he said, ‘I will charge you only two dollars anyway.’

Spanish accent.

At my desk, I drank that coffee and not only was it made by a man with a Spanish accent who only charged me two dollars, it was the smoothest coffee ever made, ever drunk and I drunked it but I did not have an orgasm and that is the story of how I know it is not possible to have an orgasm just from drinking coffee.

But that is not the end of the story. I went back to the coffee shop at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and ordered another coffee although lunchtime is the time past which I do not consume caffeine. He only charged me two dollars, but the coffee was a little bitter and a little tired. And not every story has a happy ending.

Another anniversary

Exhaustipated to the point of exhaustipation I decided that there was no better time to deal with the last remaining boxes than now. Not the boxes of books that remain, unopened, in the shed. No, not those because I don’t have any bookshelves yet. I mean the three boxes that have stayed in the corner of my bedroom because they are labelled, somewhat ominously, with the mismatched labels “Stationery and Shoes.”

In the end, those boxes were not so hard, consisting as they did of lead pencils, notebooks and the rainbow-coloured sandal for the left foot for which I have searched high and low because somehow I brought the right in my suitcase and have assumed, all this past year, that the left must be here somewhere. But it was in transit.

This week, it has been a year since we moved into the house. This time last year the list of renovations included but was not limited to: knock down back wall replace with bi-fold doors; kitchen; bathroom; remove bar; put up wall; move bathroom; turn door into window; convert shed into studio; take up carpet in bedroom; remove built-ins; replace light-fittings; replace curtains; replace tiles in the entrance;…you get the picture and that’s just inside.

Current list of renovations: clean out cat litter tray.

(I hasten to point out that List A minus List B is not equal to the things that have been done, but I’m sure you already worked that out.)

We probably do need to do a bit of work on it. It’s been chopped and changed in a couple of strange ways so that now it’s layout is odd and that and makes for many oddities and quirks. But there is not a single day that I have not come home and thought, ‘Really? Do I really get to live here?’

In my adult life, I have never felt this way about a house before. That this is my house, where I belong. I have loved each house that I’ve lived in, but until now I’ve always known that I would leave. I know that there will still be many times when I am restless and filled with wanderlust because that is who I am. But I’ve found the home that I will always come back to. And one day, I’ll have all of the boxes unpacked.

Going to the fringe: Lana Schwarcz Lovely Lady Lump

There is not long enough between now and the time we have to leave for the airport to get the lunchbox muffins cooked. But if I don’t do them now then when will they get done? I keep the sugar in a drawer and when I lift it out, a thin stream pours through an invisible hole. It is like sand under my feet as I hurry to get the muffins done.

We are on the home stretch now, we tell ourselves. We all cry less than we usually do.

Home, cup of tea, washing in, right then, I’m leaving, I’ll be home in time to get your dinner done.

I am taking myself into the Fringe to see Lana Schwarcz in her show Lovely Lady Lump. Walking from the car to the park, the wind is cold and the sky is grey. This is not how I remember Fringe. I’m wearing a coat instead of a sleeveless shift, I’m shivering instead of sweating, thinking about a glass of red instead of a beer. The air is thick with the smell of rain which might or not fall.

I am late. I stand in the line to collect my tickets and I try not to click my tongue or clear my throat as someone forgets his PIN, someone else can’t decide what to do instead of the sold out show, and the woman in front of me holds up her phone and says to the cashier, ‘But look! My friend sent me a message on Facebook. She said she’s paid.’

The show is a few minutes in when I sit down, and I remember my phone is not on silent. What would be worse? To rummage through my bag or take the chance that this is the night someone chooses to ring? I sit, my shoulders tense, my teeth clenched. That’s ruder still, to bring tense energy in. I think, ‘I’ll wait for a moment, and then I’ll flick the silent on.’

Soon, the warmth and the energy of her performance shuts everything out and brings me in. It is the kind of show I love. A monologue, a stand up routine, a narrative. Truth and honesty and generosity. Here’s the premise of her show: A routine mammogram shows up a lump. Suspicious. She is barely 40.

The show is funny and it’s smart. Using her voice, her body, lights, sound and video she makes us feel her pain, but doesn’t let us wallow. I cry. Twice. And then, before we leave, she makes us laugh again. I am filled with admiration for her. Not only for surviving cancer, but for making art. For making this the thing she does, the contribution that she makes.

When I come out of the tent she is performing in, the air is filled with the lemon-scented gum, and from somewhere across the park a bagpipe is warming up. I drive home to the sound of Archie Roach’s Let Love Rule, a birthday present from a wonderful friend who said, ‘I know no one listens to CDs anymore,’ and I said, ‘Well, I do.’ At home, I take off my boots and my socks. If I leave them here in the door I will not have to scramble to find them tomorrow when we leave have you got your lunch, your stuff for cricket, your saxophone.

‘How was it Mum?’

There are not supposed to be more active screens than there are humans. And just like that, I’m exhausted. I put sausages on for them and the kettle on for me. The cat rubs against my leg, the kitten nibbles at my toes. And underneath my feet, granules of sugar. So fine they feel like sand.

Split – this is nothing even approaching a review, but it potentially has spoilers

I suppose it had to happen that I would get to a day where I had nothing to say and little time left in which to say it. It’s an hour before the end of the day. All day I’ve been trying to decide what I would write about, and now here I am. I did have an idea but it will take me more than an hour to execute that idea so I will have to do that tomorrow or the day after.

I went to see Split with the Floppy Adolescent today. (I think I should say spoiler alert here, although I’m not sure that I’m actually spoiling anything, but possibly I do, so consider yourself spoiler warned.) It was his idea to see it and even though I knew it wasn’t really my bag of chips I wanted to go to the something that he suggested as a gesture of goodwill towards him so often going to the things that I suggest. (It really isn’t easy at this age, is it, finding things to go to, because I can think of heaps of things he’d love to see but as is the case with so many things, once he is at a certain age I suddenly remember how it was to be that age, and what I remember about being that age is that going out with your mum is okay, but it’s not okay if you’re out with your mum at something where lots of people are out without their mum.)

I don’t think I enjoyed Split at all. This is not to say that I don’t think it’s good – I mean, I was completely sucked in by it, that is for sure, with the opening credits and music sufficiently suspense-filled. But I knew right from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be a film that I would be glad to have seen. I avoid, whenever I can, movies that subject women to humiliation or violence or some combination of the two. I thought Split did an okay job of avoiding being overly gratuitous. But I was (am) deeply uncomfortable with the use of child sexual abuse which I thought began as opportunistic and by the end had become exploitative.

There was a beautifully poignant moment in the closing scenes which was well-directed and beautifully-acted. That moment pulled a lot of things together for me. It left me bereft because all I could think about was the deep pain that some people live with all their lives. And then I wasn’t at all sure that I’d done the right thing going to it with my teenaged boy. Judging it simply as a film, I’d give it I think 3 1/2 or 4 stars out of 5. Judging it as a film-going experience?

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.