we're all making our own sense of things
This morning I woke up and I was still an adult, and I still had decisions to make, and I still had the results of previous decisions to live with.
On the upside, my aunty has left me a glorious dressing gown in which to be an adult with decisions to make. Also, my tummy muscles still ache from laughing my way through a bloody brilliant Sunday afternoon looking through my grandfather’s slides with my cousins and their families.
I would like to talk with you today about geriatric dental care*. Yes, I really would.
I know it seems a bit peripheral, but I have, in the last week or so, discovered that this is a serious issue. And not a little distressing for all concerned (no link, just take my word for it). I’d love it if you’d join me in writing to health ministers about maybe getting dental care and visiting dentists to aged care facilities and including dental care in the services available and accessible to our grandparents and great aunts and great great uncles and so on. There have been enquiries, so they should know what you’re talking about. But in the meantime, just thought I’d let you know in case, like me, it’s a useful thing to think about, but a think you haven’t given enough thought. If you know what I mean.
Actually, while we’re on it, we should have better dental facilities available more generally. I’ve been over on the Australian Dental Association website (yes, yes, I have), and in one of their latest press releases they say:
“As with all national schemes that have been introduced (and have invariably failed), such plans deliver limited care to all and allow those that can afford dental care to ‘top up’ their treatment to achieve long-term oral health. Those already adequately accessing care will get subsidised treatment and the rest will have to ‘just do’ with the basic band-aid solutions offered.”
And that last sentence pretty much sums up one of my great sadnesses about the state of Australian politics at the moment. There’s just too much of this kind of thing.
And there ends the sexiest blog post you are likely to read today.
*I’m sure there’s a better way of saying this, but I wanted to get your attention as well as avoid telling you too much of the specific situation in which I am intimately involved
Ramadan has started in the UAE. I’ve never fasted before, not in any serious sense, and I thought I might this year, but since I ended up coming back to Australia for the summer vacation the thought sort of got replaced. My religious views are a bit all over the place and follow no consistent line of thinking, but I would one day like to explore the ideas of fasting and silence a little more. Probably not at the same time, but maybe. One day.
If you’re interested, there’s a bit about the Moon Sighting Committee in this article. I’m quite taken with the idea of a Moon Sighting Committee and I do think that a world with a Moon Sighting Committee is a better world than a world without one.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCVL9vTM_yU&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
(thanks to Pavlov’s Cat for the tip-off)
Reading or listening to Phillip Adams makes my head asplode, and so, over the years, I’ve learned to avoid having my eyes or ears in the same place as his words. Makes our relationship quite amicable. But twice this week I’ve accidentally come into contact with him. Once, because I’d forgotten to never have the radio tuned to Radio National when Late Night Live is repeated and then again today, because he has a piece in The Australian somewhere in the papery bit and not in the magazine.
Why did I do it? Why did I read that piece? The first sentence was innocuous enough, “We’d planned ‘Rudd’s first interview since the coup’ for the previous week.” Okay, trademark namedropping right from the opening ‘we’, but anyhoo and moving on. To the second sentence then, “Kevin knew I’d totally opposed the coup and resigned from the ALP in protest…”
And that was it, the point where it would have been better if my head had fallen off, because it would have forced me to stop reading.
Now, I get that people are unhappy with the change of leadership and the way it came about and I can see why you might not like it. I get it, because I have been uncomfortable with the way the ALP organises its affairs for a very great number of years. It’s one of the reasons I am not a member of the ALP.
What I don’t get – or perhaps what I wish I didn’t get – is why this particular manoeuvre is the one that makes you buy out of the process.
If the mister had not had the idea to move to the UAE then this blog post would not exist. And if the internet did not exist then I bet you would never have seen what you are about to see.
But we did move to the UAE and there is an internet, and so, I am able to bring you, more or less live from the Date Festival, this gi-normous date:
 |
| From miscblogphotos |
update: the mister apologises that he cannot provide photos from inside the date, but the date is only open in the evenings, and he is there in the afternoon. He has tasted prize-winning dates, date cake and coffee and reports they are all delicious.
(I agree, it is a bit undergraduate here at the moment, come back tomorrow and we will be our normal sophisticated selves)
So you know that I am in Australia enjoying the cool weather, but the mister is in Abu Dhabi writing proposals and going to meetings and looking at spreadsheets and so on. He tells me – by phone, not skype, because he can’t work it out, and how does an engineer not understand skype, like it was working dude, but anyway, and moving on – that it is very frigging hot. And humid. And he’s working hard.
But it’s not all hard work in his life you know.
No sirree. There be adventures.
For today, he and his friends are off to the
drumroll please
Festival of the Date.
Laugh? Fark, I nearly carked it.
There is possibly a better winter lunch than a toasted sandwich, but I doubt it.
I had an email from a friend today and she told me that in Abu Dhabi at 11 pm last night, it was 45 degrees. Myself? I am sitting in front of a gas fire, half a bottle of red still to go and not to mention that block of green & black’s dark chocolate that hasn’t been opened yet.
I have a great number of other things to say, because it is mighty fine being here in Adelaide. But right now I’ve got wine to drink and chocolate to eat. Perhaps tomorrow.
So I was at the newsagent to buy a 2 ring binder to replace the 3 ring binder which, when I bought it, I was sure was a 2 ring binder, but anyhoo and moving on, at the newsagent, I saw Caroline Jones’ book, through a glass darkly: a journey of love and grief with my father and I bought it.
Even though I was on the way to the bottle shop to buy (yet) another bottle of Langhorne Creek Bernoota (cannot recommend it highly enough) for the purchase of which I did not need to seek my husband’s permission, I sat in the carpark and opened the book and there, in the introduction, I read this:
“I was unprepared for my own grief and for the extent to which it disabled me….the main quality of my condition was uncertainty. It was difficult to make decisions. I found it hard to know what mattered. My sense of meaning was shaken and I was unclear about my purpose. I put on a good face and I made myself do everything as usual, but my heart wasn’t in it. I felt very sad most of the time and sometimes I was angry. What most people talked about seemed very trivial. I felt that I was behind a pane of glass on the other side of which people’s lives went on. But I was not part of that life.
I now have come to think of grief as a sort of severe illness, bordering at times on derangement; an illness that dislocated me physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually…
…Suffering, loss and grief are facts of life for everyone, although I am sure some people accept the death of a parent as a sad event but one which is acceptable in the order of things. While they may feel sorrow, they soon resume the business of their lives without suffering any deep trauma. People who experience a parent’s death in this philosophical manner would, almost certainly, find this book a puzzling over-reaction to a natural life event.”
Having read most of the book in the six hours since then, I agree that many people might find this book an over-reaction. But for myself? I say, Caroline Jones, I will never be able to thank you enough.
I am now back at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table after having had the worst espresso I have ever had.
Given the amount of time I’ve spent drinking franchise coffees in Middle East malls, this is really saying something.
The man at the table next to mine (at whom I wasn’t staring, but at whom, given our seating arrangement, I could not help looking each time I lifted my gaze from my diary) was having a cafe latte which looked to have good creamy froth.
I shall try the latte tomorrow.
Usually, I avoid lattes and cupofchinos at untested cafes. This is on account of our experiences at the Invercargill Airport, following two winter days (or was it three years) on Stewart Island. Have you seen that Blackadder episode when Baldrick is offering coffee with milk or without milk and so on? Yes, well, the baristas at Invercargill Airport learnt everything they know about making coffee from that Blackadder episode (though in fairness, that day was many years ago and things may have changed, but all the same I do not recommend a Stewart Island winter trip).
I am very much enjoying sitting at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table drinking a cup of soup.
edited for clarifications: I don’t want you to think I was complaining about my mother-in-law – the espresso was not made by her, and I would hate to think anyone thought I was using the interwebs to complain about a woman who is nothing bu welcoming and hospitable, and particularly in terms of food and drink