Election Fever

So, we've got an election coming up and Rupert is out and I am too drunk  - after a small bottle of cider - to do anything useful, so thought I would write a blog post - for the first time in a while.

The last few months have been pretty busy, trying to finish two novels and get a string quartet up and running, gigs here, there but not everywhere, teaching and looking after three kids. Not that they need looking after as such, it's more about driving them places and yelling at them, nowadays. Most of our interactions are along the lines of "Where's my...." and "Who's left their socks on the floor again?" Very occasionally, I get to exchange a couple of words with my other half, but not often.

What I want to know is: is there such a thing as Election Amnesia, in the same way as one gets Childbirth Amnesia and forgets the blood and gore and agony of childbirth, in order to keep the human race going? Because, if this election is as bad as most, then surely we would have ditched democracy a long time ago?

At the moment I am favouring the idea of going back to a feudal system. The thought of being able to build a nice windowless keep, pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world at large is very tempting. Part of me thinks I should just be grateful that we don't live in Syria or Egypt at the moment, but at the same time I wonder - is this how it all starts? How did we get to the point when the major parties are battling it out to see who can be the most Xenophobic? The least compassionate?

I would go on, but am feeling so full of despair that I am going to join Juliette and her friend Keely and watch Justin Beiber. And if that doesn't say something, then nothing does.

A Flash of Fiction

It seems that Flash Fiction is growing in popularity, so here's an effort of mine, not entirely fictional, but more autobiographical.

Pleading

"You know how much I love you, don't you?"
"Um, really?"
"You must know, I think of you all day. I lie awake thinking about you at night and then when I fall asleep I dream of you."
"Oh."
"But I need more of you. I need you all to myself."
"My dear, you know I can't do that. You know I am divided too much as it is."
"Please. I need you."
"Why?"
"I need you to myself and I also need to share you with my husband and my children. Please, just a little more."
"You don't have enough of me?"
"No, I don't. I need another day in the week, or even another hour in the day."
"That's ridiculous. You have me for twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year."
"But it's not enough."
"Look, people have asked for more since my very beginning. And I have never given it. You're wasting your breath, I'm afraid."
Father Time watched as the woman walked away, her shoulders drooping, and he shook his head. "Oh dear, there's one born every minute," he thought. "And I should know."

 

 

A story...

So, I think it's time to post a short story, just because this is one I wrote for an exercise a while ago and it's been languishing in the depths of my short stories folder, unlikely ever to see the light of day. I felt sorry for it though and so thought I would give it a little airing. The exercise was to write a story based on one of the seven deadly sins. So here goes:

The Trouble with Tarts...

Sometimes I go through periods when I can forget about my Sin. For whole weeks at a time I don't even feel tempted to give into it, and so I start to think I've conquered it. I feel clean and light, as if I'm starting life afresh. I walk tall, because I am in control and I have, at last, mastered my Sin.

And then it comes creeping back, when I least expect it.

I wake up in the morning and feel fine, just as the day, or week before. I set off for work full of jubilation. “Good morning, how are you? Lovely day, isn't it?” I greet the other cleaners and they smile back and I can see the raised eyebrows, the “He's in a good mood this morning,” faces they make at each other.

I set to work with a will and then there's a text from my sister.

Hi Tom, are you free this weekend? Haven't seen you for ages. I worry about you being lonely living way over town, all by yourself. Church and dinner on Sunday?

I hardly bother to read to the end of the message, but toss the phone aside and carry on working. I think it means nothing to me so I don't even notice my Sin creeping up on me. It's like those times when it's a beautiful sunny day and you go to the cinema and when you come out again, the sky is grey and it's been raining and you had no idea. At first I try to ignore it, to pretend it's not there – the flat disappointment like an ache in my stomach. But as the day passes, it grows into a scorching hole of emptiness and I know I am weak, I know there is nothing I can do, that however hard I battle with myself it will come to the same thing this evening. My Sin is lurking, waiting for me and I know I will give in to it. All day I work as hard as I can, but it is there, looming at the back of my mind and slowly, the scorching emptiness becomes a lust that spreads and thickens, billowing up in my chest, pouring through my veins till the very sweat on my palms seems to be full of it.

The ridiculous thing is that I still pretend to myself I won't do it - that I'm going to go home and have a normal evening, watch a bit of TV, eat my dinner and go to bed.

By the end of the day, I am exhausted. I wait in line, board the bus, then stand, hot and sweaty, squashed against the bodies of other hot and sweaty and exhausted people. Perfume mingles in the air with the smell of sweat and fart and petrol; mobile phones play stupid tunes and beep and trill and I want to scream. The bus swings around corners and we all bump into each other, barely containing our irritability; but still the lust lies in my stomach, unabated. The further we go, the bus empties and I am able to find a seat. We are moving away from the part of the city where the pavements are swept and the shops sell expensive clothes and the restaurants serve food on huge white plates, at linen covered tables. The bus snorts and sneezes its way out to the part of the city where I live, where the establishments have their names written in neon lights and garbage lies out on the pavements; a place where temptation lurks on every corner, where there are girls dressed in lace and velvet and every fabric in between, flesh revealed in improbable proportions.

I hear my mother's voice so clearly in my head I wonder if I actually told her about my Sin.

“For heaven's sake, my boy, how do you expect to resist temptation when you live here?”

And I hear my voice, replying in a mature, reasonable tone, the sort of tone I would never have dared use: “Ma, I can't afford it, you know I can't.”

“Then why don't you get a proper job like your siblings? You could live in a nice part of the city where there are parks without needles and vomit on the ground and meet a nice girl and live a good life, like your brothers and sister.”

But the trouble is, I like this place.

I like the smell of curry and old Chinese takeaways and cigarettes that hits my nostrils as I enter my apartment block. This is my home, where I feel comfortable. This is the true me. I would like to think I'm the sort of person who lives in a nice flat by a park with no needles or vomit, married to a nice girl with nice children, who goes to a nice church every Sunday. But I'm not. I don't deserve that sort of life. That is the sort of life my brothers and sister live, with their clean wholesome families and their clean wholesome bodies, their nice houses, their nice jobs and their nice thoughts.

I walk up the dark, urine smelling stairs, and let myself into my apartment. I change into jeans and a pullover, help myself to a beer, feed the cat, switch on the TV. Sometimes I even sit down in from of the TV, the cat cuddled into my side and I stroke her, her warm head butting my hand. But there is a burning in my chest and the sweat is breaking out on my forehead and suddenly I don't even want to resist my Sin. Now I feel the excitement building and I'm not even pretending to fight it anymore.

I let myself out of the flat and run down the stairs, my feet skimming the treads. I burst out onto the pavement and there, right on the corner is a hot dog stand. That's where I'll start. I order a hot dog with onions and gherkins and slather it with mustard and tomato sauce, the saliva pooling in my mouth. Then I take a big breath and shove the food in, teeth tearing, gulping, swallowing it down, slimy onions, rubbery meat, the sharp kick of the gherkins and the mustard, the sweetness of the sauce all combining in my throat like a song.

Next door is a grocery store where I buy a blue frozen drink from a machine, struggling to hold the bucket sized cup steady as the icy mush pours into it, my hand shaking with anticipation. A mammoth bag of chips comes with it and a doughnut the size of a soup bowl, dense and sweet.

Then outside again, and two large slices of pizza from another stall, dripping cheese and pepperoni. I down them in three bites before a foray into the Indian shop next door to chomp down a bag of samosas - so quickly the chilli doesn't burn my tongue. The food is bubbling in my stomach now, but underneath there is still a small ache of emptiness that I need to fill and I know what to do about that.

The all night bakery, which I always leave till last.

I wander in, wiping the grease from my chin with the back of my hand and now I take time to survey the shelves, though I already know what I'll order. I come out with two bags and, stopping only to buy a tub of ice cream I make my way back to the apartment, to eat in comfort on the sofa.

First the strawberry tart, pastry thick and buttery, jam sweet and gelatinous, big enough for a family of eight, but I eat it quickly, gulping it down, only coming up for breath. Then comes the lemon tart, an explosion of sunlight in my mouth. I eat this one slowly, letting the pastry melt on my tongue, savouring the sweetness which is mine, ignoring, for as long as I can, the bubbling in my stomach. The sweat is breaking out on my forehead, around my collar.

I make it to the toilet just in time and for a while my body is one heaving, swelling, shaking mess, my legs trembling, my throat screaming and I am joyously, beautifully free at last as I take the punishment for my Sin and all my weaknesses and failures. Then I fall back, down onto my knees, head slumped forward on the cold tiles of the floor.

And then my Sin rushes back and there is nothing I can do. It comes swooping down, enfolding me in its embrace, reminding me that I am its child, that I will never escape, it will always be there, hanging on with its greasy, grasping fingers.

I get up, flush the toilet, wash my face and hands and go back to the sitting room and the tub of ice-cream.

 The End

 Love it or hate it, if anyone has any comments, would love to hear them. 

Aging, cynicism and weddings.

There's no two ways of looking at it. I am growing old. 
I have a fourteen year old son who is hairier and taller than my husband, have started having to hold things further away from my nose in order to read them, and am nearing that dread age - 3010.
However, it's not all bad. The one thing that has surprises me is that, whilst getting older, I am also getting far less cynical and far less judgmental of others, which is funny, because I always used to think it was meant to be the other way around.
Music is one area in which this particularly stands out. I have recently started playing regularly in a gigging string quartet again, as I used to as a student and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Back in the days when I was a student, my friends and I could be very scornful about playing for endless weddings.
"They only want us for the look of the thing," we used to say, and "oh no, not another Canon, not another Eine Kliene Nachtmusik," we would groan.
Nowadays, I just enjoy playing the music. So what if it is Eine Kleine? It is still Mozart is it not, and how many people have the opportunity to play Mozart and get paid for it? And instead of thinking, "nobody can hear us, doesn't matter how we play," I have started to realise what good practise it is to play when you can hardly hear each other - it takes new ways of communicating, that's all.
And there might be the odd gig when you're not sure whether anybody noticed you were there. But the last gig we did, at a launch for Fiat, an old man joined in to sing Sole Mio with a beautiful baritone, and his wife had to drag him away. A few months ago, we had people fighting over the microphone so that they could join in with our Merry Widow rendition. What price that, eh?
And, when it comes down to it, there is no such thing as "just another wedding." Even if, on the surface of it, things might look similar; another bride in another white dress, more pink bridesmaids, another golf club, another flowered bower - at the end of the day, each bride, each bridegroom is different. For them it is a unique occasion, for their guests, their friends and families, it is a special time  and you can feel it in the air, in the nervous giggles of the guests, the tears of the mothers. And, if anything, it is a privilege to be part of something so momentous, to be adding one's own little piece of confetti to the shower.

And by the way, if you want to support the Brisbane String Quartet, please go to our facebook page and like us!!

Music Medicine

I was going to post one of my stories today as, the mood I was in, I was afraid that if I wrote anything else, anyone who read it would end up slitting their throat.
However, I went round to my friend John's house this morning to have a play. We are planning a house concert in a few weeks, but we spent the morning reading through some stuff that I am considering for an Earth Hour gala that I am playing in with the incomparable Leslie Martin, soprano extraordinaire next month. (Details to follow)
There were a couple of pieces we were considering, one of which I had never heard and an arrangement of one of the pieces I love most in this world - the Leibestod from Tristan and Isolde, by Wagner. But much to our amazement, it was the far lesser known violin solo from L'Amico Fritz that turned out to be the true gem. It is not, perhaps, a piece of great musical worth, not on a par with the original Wagner, of course. But it is quirky and fun, dramatic, romantic and unashamedly sentimental. I came away from John's house feeling like a different person - due, in part, to John's general gorgeousness, but also due to the wonderful fun of discovery and experimentation that comes with playing a new piece for the first time. (I since sat down to eat my lunch with a few pages of Call the Midwife, so now feel back to throat slitting mood, but at least now I feel I can cope with it!)
Some of my favourite musical and childhood memories come from when I was around ten years old in Saudi Arabia; every Wednesday evening my family and a few others would gather at the house of two eccentric doctors - the Harland's - and spend the whole evening playing recorder music. Purcell, Schikhardt, Bach, Telemann of course, Praetorious, Dowland, Schmelzer, Biber. There were piles of music, for two recorders, three, seven; music for trebles, tenors, descants, bass - we never knew what was going to come out next but we all sat around in a circle, air conditioning humming away in the background, Malcolm, with his unruly beard and moustache through which you could hear the wind whistling as he blew, Ruth, who stuck her fingers high in the air like sausages and could never understand why she couldn't play the fast bits, Erasmus, singing out of tune as he played the bass parts on his guitar, my sisters and mother, eyes shining with excitement, my father, not playing anything, but sitting on the sofa, guffawing loudly over Private Eye magazines. And we would play for hours, music that was fun, music that was interesting... and occasionally, we would come across a piece which made our hearts quicken and our spines straighten. It wasn't always by the most famous composer, or published by the biggest publishing house, but even so we would all know that, oh yes, this was it - this was the golden egg that we had all been looking for.
Sometimes, we would play a piece that was okay, but nothing special, but then somebody would suggest that: "why don't we try it twice the speed?" or "half the speed", or "more piano", or "more forte." So we would try it and suddenly the piece would come alive and the music would grow, pouring out of our recorders and around the room, around and into us all - music written centuries ago by almost forgotten composers.
So, the point of all this waffle, is for those parents who have decided that their children should play a musical instrument but are a little bit hazy as to why, or for those who want to learn how to play as an adult. The gift you are giving your children, or yourselves, need not be the gift of talent, nor necessarily the gift of skill, or discipline. It is the gift of creation - the ability to take a scrawl of black notes on a page and give them life; to make something wonderful and magical out of nothing. And what greater gift can you give?
Well, don't answer that, but I, for one, think it's pretty cool.

Music and Lifestyle

Yesterday was a reminder of why we live in Australia.

The kids were all tired and lay around the house in a state of lacklustre. The HO in particular was hunched for almost the entire day, in front of a computer screen of some sort – either the family computer, his iPod, or his school lap top. But as soon as it got cool enough, I bullied them all outside – actually, the girls didn't need bullying, only the HO. For the next two hours they played in the pool and, after a quick dip to reassure myself that I was still brave enough to get in - even in less than 40 degree heat - I sat and watched them. The garden is rather overgrown at the moment, giving our pool a rather forest glade sort of appeal, so it was lovely to sit and crochet in the shade of the mulberry tree, whilst the rainbow lorikeets, the scaly breasted lorikeets, the sulphar crested cockatoos, the galahs and the Rosellas squawked and screeched and trilled overhead, watching my little darlings at play. (when they weren't fighting and calling each other names, that is.) But it reminded me that this was one of the reasons that we wanted to emigrate in the first place: in England when a teenage boy is hunched over electronic equipment, it is much harder to force them out into the drizzle/pouring rain/gale force winds/snow. Whereas here, most days of the year, I have no qualms about kicking mine out into the swimming pool.

Saturday night was a concert with Sarah Blasko and the Pops orchestra. I had never heard of Sarah Blasko before, but it seems that she is quite a big star here. The concert was completely sold out and there was a huge ruckus when she came on stage. I think though, that one must miss quite a bit, when one is sitting on stage. Either that, or one is getting old. I'm not sure what genre Blasko's music is - it is certainly not jazz, but not sure I would call it pop exactly or rock or punk. Long and deep and soul searching with lots of blackness. She has a lovely voice, and is very beautiful in a lovely natural way, I will give you this. But it must be quite exhausting to take oneself so seriously all the time. The audience, as I said, went wild, so, as I also said, one misses a lot, being on stage.

It was also an interesting concert, because the Pops orchestra has just been sold on to a new owner and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen. We are all feeling a tad uncomfortable about it, though of course, when there is more certainty, it could well be very exciting and a good thing for Brisbane as a whole.

The next Pops gig is in a couple of weeks and we will be playing for Glenn Frey. When I got the contract, I assumed that it must be a Scottish concert, a la Scotland the Brave. Then I googled Glenn Frey, and discovered that he was one of the founding members of the Eagles. Right, so no strathspeys, then. It's a good thing I googled properly and didn't turn up in my tartans, that's all I can say.

Paranoia?

So. We are slowly getting back into our normal lives here in Brisbane. Actually, it's not been that slow. Kids started school last week and were straight back into all the soccer grading sessions, Ta Kwondo, Kung Fu and ballet. Choir starts this week and I am back to teaching and so we are in our normal headless chicken acts. Hmm - possibly not a good term to use, since I intend to get more chickens this weekend...

It has been unseasonably cool this last week, making my morning walk with The Even Hairier One a joy – the air is full of mock orange blossom and the chatter of a million birds and the kangaroos have been gambolling around the dewy grass – and kangaroos really do gambol, much more so than sheep. Snow and ice, hot muggy winds and the scent of sewage are all a thing of the past – I hope.

The trouble is that it's so easy to forget, to move on. People keep saying that “oh yes, Australia is a land of extremes, we have always had bad weather,” etc etc. I know that's true, but still, the 1974 floods were meant to be a once in a life time experience and then the 2011 floods were just bad luck; but they seem to have been followed awfully closely by the 2013 floods. And I may be misremembering, but back when I lived in England, only 14 years ago, we didn't always get snow in the winter and when we did, it was pretty short lived. I don't remember schools and roads closing – not in the London basin at any rate – and yet this seems to be a normal occurrence now. Then there's New York. Two floods in two years, in a city where they have never been flooded before.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here, as this is my blog so therefore it is my privilege! But maybe, just maybe this extreme weather is something that all the scientists have been warning us about for years. Maybe this is what Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough and highly qualified, brilliant minds like theirs have been wittering on about. Maybe this is what the weather is going to be doing for the next few years – getting worse and worse and more and more extreme, so that by the time my kids grow up, they won't be able to plan anything in advance and will have to make sure they always have a plentiful supply of toilet paper and candles and chickens and live on a hill.

Or maybe, on the other hand, I am just being completely paranoid. Maybe this is just part of a normal weather pattern and I should just start focussing my attentions on the Really important issues at hand – whether to vote for a man who believes that the world was created a few thousand years ago and that the Aboriginies should be grateful for the British invasion, or whether to vote for someone I don't particularly like or trust just to make sure that said lunatic doesn't get into parliament. Because this is what is filling the news at the moment, so it must be the most important matter, mustn't it?