poum!

'

2011-12-01T09:48:00.000+01:00

'

2011-12-01T09:47:00.001+01:00

ahem...

2011-11-28T14:25:00.007+01:00

Months between posts...what can i say? I have no excuse. But world events got far too much for me. I couldn't blog about my newfound love for old-lady net curtains (the ones that old ladies down here in the south of France use, with kittens and flowers or horses in fields woven in lace) when the world was going to hell.

Now ghaddaffi is dead I am feeling both more and less reassured. Watching it was like watching hunting hounds rip a fox to pieces. Wish I hadn't.

I've also stopped watching the news for a wee while, and all the yahoo homepage puts up is how awful Johnny Depp's French accent is, so no danger of panic attacks there.

I'm experimenting with the idea of using my new second hand smartphone (oh yes, Ive joined the Zombie Ranks I Am One of Them) to send photos now and then...as I walk around town on the way to my many random tasks and duties. Will blogger let me do this? I'll have a look. Not sure I'm ready for words yet...

PS Oh yes...I have now for three months been alcohol and tobacco free. ITS SO WIERD TO BE COMPLETELY DRUG FREE....total freaking crazy!!!!!! I tried to kick caffeine too but couldn't hack it.

sorry about bold font happening up there...cant get rid of it. someone's telling me something.

Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie? (why are you wasting your life?)

2011-10-17T00:00:00.008+02:00

latest keword fun

2011-05-03T22:18:00.001+02:00

I've decided there's too much going on in the world to even be able to comment. I'm in denial.

Instead, this is what people googled this week to find this blog:

australia love it or fuck off
was this search ironic? i hope so. if not, methinks it be you who should fuck off

men in miniskirts
an old favourite. i had no idea this was such a common fetish.

baby carp
er....?

fat chef costume
i'd really like to meet the person who is actively searching for this costume. hopefully not for their 20th school reunion. then again...

1 month old twins
if you land here looking for twin advice i really really hope i don't discourage you...it does get better...one day you will sleep again, i promise...

insane ape
um....what? i'm trying not to take it personally.

will people know i'm snooping on facebook
no they won't. oh god, i hope they won't. a friend came over yesterday to borrow the internet and when she typed in her email password the name of one of my exes came up in the search list suggestions and she squealed with scandalous victory at having caught me at late-night snooping. oh the shame of it.

maggots in cheese
yep. all that and more. it's France, after all...

almost fall over

2011-04-29T06:36:00.008+02:00

I don't know why, perhaps it's because it's the middle of the early early morning and I can't sleep, but I find this...strangely thrilling....

‘Machines That Almost Fall Over’ by Michael Kontopoulos.
A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it.

Machines that Almost Fall Over from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.

This one I left on loop when i tried to go back to sleep on the couch...I kind of dozed off to it...I like it a lot too....

Find more videos like this on artreview.com

Pascal Sisto

If your internet connection can take it try running both at the same time..creates this very surreal mysterious soundtrack...

health kicking in

2011-04-22T21:21:00.000+02:00

Yippee! I have a new obsession- not being debauched.

Alright, not the gym or anything, but as I'm getting well into the late 30s I need to slow down the spreading flab and the bad habits...starting with booze and ciggies...I am on a one-month no drinking, no smoking binge. I did intend to do it before this but cousins from overseas just left and it was one entire week of boozy picnics and the odd cocktail thingie...or just downright nice food and really nice wine.

I don't know what's got into me but I'm signing myself up for a month of pureness.

My brother!

2011-04-17T23:25:00.000+02:00

full moon, empty skies

2011-03-20T22:46:00.006+01:00

The first day of unofficial spring...the first day of warmth and sun for months, and we were at friends' for the weekend- lovely people. The kind of ordinary normal people that make you want to be a better person.

The morning after a big big night-oh, and that BIG orange full moon last night rising over the hills and the lake!- we were sitting outside on the terrace at lunchtime, grilling sausages on the BBQ, drinking beer in the Sunday sun, we all realized that for the first time for a long time the skies were empty...

We live near a major French airforce base and in their village the skies are ripped open several times a day by airforce planes training overhead...Half Man Half Chip reminded me omniously one day that when you see them flying so low they're in training i.e. targetting the town in their wargames.

This weekend, nothing, not a single one...all gone to Corsica or Sicily to run their bombing/reconnaissance missions in Libya.

Ghaddafi + Sons promised war with France last week, war in the Meditteranean, if France participated in the action...and driving home this afternoon as my children slept in the back of the car, exhausted by a late night and games and cuddles and running around in bare feet in the sun. I actually started thinking about how safe our cellar would be, in the event of an attack.

I hate to give any credence to the ramblings of this insane sociopath. But still...

When I was in my 20s I had a couple of male friends who were enamoured (there's no other word for it) with someone I shall call..Frank...who lived in New Farm in Brisbane. Frank was (he claimed) a vietnam vet and lived in a weatherboard cottage opposite the New Farm shops, a building I couldn't locate the last time I was home...eaten up by cool coffee shops and real estate agencies, no doubt.

Anyway, these young guys thought this guy was so cool...he drank..I mean he DRANK. He had a shaved head. He had no eyebrows because he'd shaved them off, too. He wore camoflague fatigues and army boots. He was years older than they were but they delighted in his mad antics...they'd invite him to our sociology/anthropology/art student parties, flatter him, give him cheap cask wine to drink...he'd do something outrageous and the girls would shrink away from him and the boys would laugh...until the day he seriously went crazy.

Looking up at the empty skies this afternoon I suddenly thought of Frank and boys with their toys and the danger games they play, the backroom deals and the selective amnesia of our leaders. How our politicians just expect us to shut up and take it all, from the 54 nuclear power stations on French soil to whom they choose to pitch their tent on a lawn in Paris. I wonder what was on the menu at that dinner they shared, Sarkozy and Ghaddafi, in 2007. I thought about my grandmother in Edinburgh, crying, after Lockerbie. And how close we are, on the Meditteranean, to the action. Of Japan, and how one day you're living your life, and the next, everything changes.

Strange times...

2011-03-11T23:07:00.006+01:00

Scanning my list of favourite blogs today I realize no one has posted for well on ten hours or more.

I'm wondering if you're all as dumbstruck as I am at the news of the earthquake in Japan. There doesn't seem to be much to say after seeing images like that.

I woke up at 5am to finish a translation I'd forgotten all about...took the girls to daycare for the morning and when I got back settled down in front of the computer with a coffee and a cigarette and as luck (or not) would have it watched live as a black wave scraped away a town on the outskirts of Sendai.

Watched it live...I feel so sorry, so sorry...I'm not sure the human brain is designed to deal with that level of information. We're not meant to be able to be sitting with a coffee in a small town in France and simultaneously watching hundreds of lives disappear the other side of the world.

useless words...

what I'm listening to tonight, sad, sad Friday night...the lovely Moriarty

it's raining..

2011-02-14T03:43:00.005+01:00

pelegrinage (sketches, Marseille)

2011-02-13T23:45:00.004+01:00

.....sick toddlers....rainy and cold...just a photo

2011-01-29T21:43:00.007+01:00

It's cold tonight and Half Man Half Chip (who came home smelling like chip oil as usual but jammed with someone impressively famous last night) is celebrating a 70th Birthday somewhere in the Cotswolds. I wish I could be there too...but no, sick twin two year olds, post-Christmas budget bite and my cowardice (I still haven't quite got over that TGV ride home from Paris after the 26 hours flight from Australia) means I'm here eating chicken soup and buttery toast while the rain falls outside. It's quite nice- I get to feel all lonely and noble, plus get two whole nights to myself. I may pour myself a me-sized glass of this incredibly delicious new Chateau Gigondas we discovered and sneak upstairs and read my book....(these are fancy words aren't they? but what it basically means is I'm by myself on a Saturday night with a glass of red and a secondhand book)

.....

2011-01-21T15:27:00.000+01:00

french post office (or how the french consider anglosaxon politeness proof of pathetic weakness)

2011-01-20T09:47:00.007+01:00

I was actually in a pretty good mood this morning before I got to the post office.

Me: Good morning lovely madam what a beautiful day my word that's a lovely jacket you're wearing

Woman: Yes?

Me: Can I pick up this registered letter that came? Please?

(a few minutes pass)

Post Office Woman: there's nothing here.

Me: Maybe you could check under my first name too? Sometimes they get confused. Or it could be a package, we're still waiting for Christmas packages that have gone missing.

Woman: (sighing, disappears out back again)

(a few minutes pass)

Woman: No, not here. It must be a mistake.

Me: A mistake?

Woman: (shrugs) Ask the postman. (starts absently stapling papers)

Me: Ask the postman?

Woman: Yeah, try to grab him as he goes past your door next time you see him. (starts serving the next client)

Me: You mean there's really no way to trace a missing registered letter? Really? Isn't there someone we could call?

Woman: It's not my job to call the delivery centre, it's not our problem. We can't. (rolls her eyes at colleague)

Me: What, you actually don't have the right to pick up the phone and call the other office, is that correct?

Woman: Or you could go down there yourself, but they're only open in the mornings.

Me: Perhaps I could go down there and climb into the cupboards and search for my letter myself?

Woman: (turns her back and walks away)

Me: (leaves the post office with white lips of anger)

the dying art

2011-01-19T14:51:00.022+01:00

I'm pretty sure I've written something here about darkrooms and that old magic, but I started watching a clip from the Guardian about Richard Nicholson, a photographer who has started documenting them as they disappear- it sounded painfully boring but as soon as it began I got that excited, secretive feeling that I used to get staying up all night making prints.

There was my first darkroom, the one under my friend Sarah's house that had a healthy huntsman population. I had a darkroom tape with jazz on one side and other stuff on the other. We mixed the chemicals a little randomly and the lack of ventilation meant that you'd emerge at dawn with your head buzzing, high on fixer, and have to stumble up the old wooden back steps into the sleeping house. One morning there was a possum on the kitchen table eating bananas. Another time Sarah had to shift an enormous green python out of the way before she could go to bed.

Then there was the hire darkroom in Marseille in the Panier. Radio Grenouille was pretty much always playing on the tiny, tinny radio on top of the drying cupboard. I spent many hours in the company of a friend/future lover/Now Ex, navigating around him in the dark in a sort of slow motion dance, setting timers, rocking trays of chemicals, talking quietly. We'd brush against each other occasionally and I'd get that low down fishjump in the stomach feeling that was the beginning of desire. I still get a little shiver of something sweet and sad when I smell strong white vinegar.

My first homemade darkroom was in my flat on my own, much later. A friend gave me some heavy theatre curtain and I built a sort of semi-lightproof fabric chamber for myself in the kitchen. Still, light would leak in through the shutters so i could only work at night.

Recently made redundant, recently separated from The Alcoholic and freshly heartbroken from the Now Ex, I'd spend entire nights awake listening to France Culture on the radio or Chris Isaak moaning quietly on my halfspeed tape recorder, occasionally coming out for a smoke and a glass of red and stare out into the city streets, empty and quiet, watch the occasional working girl or transvestite from the nearby rue Curiol make her way up the hill. I'd finish my cigarette and go back to the kitchen, construct huge collages of grainy black and white enlargements projected onto the wall: images of friends and abandoned buildings and strangers and lovers. When the sun came up the flat would smell of vinegar, smoke and coffee. I'd put all the prints on the floor and sit on the couch and study them, thinking, trying to find some sort of meaning to it all.

Printing photos, I've always thought, is a form of meditation. It's technical enough to prevent your mind from wandering- the moment you lose concentration, you've ruined the print. Yet it's physical and repetitive enough to calm your body and somehow release your mind into a perfect balance of technique and creativity. I've never had anything close to this feeling downloading a stack of photos off my digital camera...

floods

2011-01-17T10:12:00.002+01:00

Thanks for your kind comments about the floods in Queensland...my folks are fine, they still don't have a reliable electricity supply (the power seems to keep going on and off) everyone is sharing freezers and food stocks...and the odd bottle of wine too apparrently.

They've had a few people simply knock on the door and ask if they can help, which is lovely.

They lost a few things from under the house (such as a lifetime of drawings, sketches and paintings by my mother) but compared to some of our family friends, who've lost everything, it's really nothing. My parents were staring at the empty shelves in the local Coles supermarkets last week and got talking to a couple, looking shell-shocked, who had lost relatives in the flashfloods in Toowoomba the day before.

So it was a slow painful powerless feeling, being across the world and listening to the news coverage (thanks ABC!) as the waters slowly rose in Brisbane. But my family is fine....very, very lucky.

rising waters

2011-01-11T09:46:00.001+01:00

Just had a surreal conversation with my parents in Queensland about what to save from the house when the flood comes...and it does seem to be heading their way....

queensland hit by flash flooding

2011-01-11T00:14:00.005+01:00

It's very late here in france but I feel I should stay awake watching for news......just in case. We have friends in this town...

MORE....

found object

2010-12-21T21:51:00.016+01:00

at the back of a cupboard tonight when i was cleaning stuff out i found a tightly rolled ruined film...i was about to throw it out and held it up to the kitchen lights....i found a tiny tiny sliver of an image...and i scanned it....i know who this is, i think. It's the only thing on a long, long roll of film...

through all these years, I have never seen this picture. the man in the shop told me that it was a bad film; they couldnt get anything off of it. it has been sleeping, rolled up in a plastic canister.

no digital camera could give you this thrill....of discovery...of half-hidden meaning, of possibility...

what i'm reading...

2010-12-19T23:55:00.010+01:00

Captain Beefheart is dead and the world is still going to hell in a handbasket, two tears in a bucket, these winter days are about as short as they get, and it's all too much for me. So I'll write about something else-

It's happening. As I hurtle towards 40 all i want to do is go to bed early and read a good book. If I had cats it would be cats, but no, my destiny seems to be one of those people that ends up 90 years old in a dark cold council house wearing fingerless gloves and woolen shawls surrounded by mountains of books and plastic bags of potato peelings and others full of ATM receipts and my bed will be held up by four enormous piles of my unfinished novels and young children will shriek when I glance at them in the street on my way to the wine shop.

I used to have an exciting life, I really did. I'm serious. I've done interesting things.

The old bedside table next to my side is overloaded, I mean overloaded with books...I have upstairs books and downstairs books (each floor of this house has only one room on it, so if you want to go grab something from the next room you need good leg muscles and you have to really want it), toilet books, books to read in the doctor's waiting room to take your mind off your last test results, cookbooks in the kitchen, books for going to sleep by, books for getting in the writing mood, trashy books, books that make me feel good about my writing, books that I bought because I know they're good but frighten me so much by their brilliance I can't open them. Those great books can be divided into clear classics that don't threaten me because who would feel threatened by God? and those other ones that are not exactly classic immortal works but good enough to make me want to curl up in a ball of untalent and burn everything I ever wrote.

I'm reading..six? at the moment. They're all in different rooms. None of them I really chose-I read what they put in the meagre English language section of the library...or I randomly find in second hand bookshops in a dusty 'livres en anglais" cardboard box....

Looking for these photos of the books I'm currently reading has been nice, it's like showing you photos of what goes on in my mind after 10pm...it's very important to find the same covers....

when the mistral blows

2010-12-17T22:36:00.006+01:00

after a particularly windy afternoon...(most of that stuff used to be on the other side of the terrace)

Meanwhile it's going down to minus 4 tonight...wish me luck...Half Man Half Chip is out playing jazz and instead of staying up all night dancing like last Friday I'm going to upstairs to bed with a hot chocolate and a good book. Right where I am is the warmest part of the house- in the back corner where the town is dug into the rock, I am surrounded on three sides by metre-thick ancient stone walls, and underneath nothing but dirt under the tiles...it's pretty toasty. That's the thousand year old end of the house- at the front it's the 16th century and bloody FREEZING.

We think this house probably used to be a stable or a barn...sheep slept here under the wooden beams...wish I had a flock right now, it would be fragrant, but warm....the other theory, given the ornate arch that supports the rest of the upstairs, is that it was gladiator's hovel...you never know. It's pleasant to imagine oiled muscle-men in loincloths (oh here I go again) lounging about down here, flexing pecs and sipping gin and tonics....

because I couldn't express it any better...

2010-12-15T15:10:00.026+01:00

Nigel Featherstone on Wikileaks and Assange...

A pretty thoughtful piece really...about the calls for Assange's assassination (I can't begin to express how I feel about that) among other things....reflecting my mixed feelings about the issue.

I'm fascinated by the recent events, really intrigued to see what will happen. I half think that Assange could be considered no worse than a journalist- and if they prosecute him for publishing the cables, won't they have to do the same to the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais? I suppose legally it will hinge on whether he participated in the theft of data or if he was simply the recipient.

I really don't want to go into the details of the issue. But one interesting and disturbing detail for me are the recent comments, from otherwise intelligent people such as John Pilger, a legendary Australian journalist (but he's not the only culprit) along the lines that the sexual assault charges against Assange are ridiculous because it's obvious nothing serious happened and having sex with someone while they're asleep isn't a crime in England anyway, not fitting into their definition of rape so we can all quite frankly forget about it (last week's ABC Radio national phone interview with Philip Adams).

I'm uncomfortable with the downplaying of rape and sexual assault charges against Assange. He's a stupid, stupid man to let this take him down at a time like this. But, I have to say it, since when is having sex with someone while they're asleep OK? Isn't this what the court is supposed to work out? Why have the two women been labelled liars? Before the trial, outside of any judicial structure?

I feel very uneasy with that side to some of the recent commentary...it's one thing that prevents me from really committing myself to being sympathetic to his cause....not because of what he's alledged to have done (and I do believe that you can seperate the private personnage and the public), so much as the backlash against the women involved.

Are we supposed to choose between two sides? Either we believe he deserves to be prosecuted or assassinated- or we hail him as some sort of spotless messiah- that seems like not much of a choice to me.

I know nothing about the cases. really, nothing. But as a woman the casual dismissals of the rape charges by his supporters disturb me. Almost as much as the ridiculous calls for his assassination...

radionic ghostbusters

2010-12-14T05:20:00.018+01:00

Oh man, I am a crap blogger lately, I don't know what's happened. Winter is closing in on us. It gets dark at 5:15pm...it brings gin and tonic time forward a little which I suppose is one advantage.

This is me up at 5 am to write. This is me up at 5 am and not writing.

I made the fatal mistake of turning on the computer and finding a link in an email from ebay and actually following it and then another (you know how this goes) and now I am staring at an ad for this, sold from Marseille, that home of crazy voodoo witch doctors who all seem to go by the name of Professeur Mbamba.

Perhaps it would help me get down to doing some work?

"Allows the clearance, from all locations, of magic spells, haunted objects, poisoned gifts, wilted plants (???), and even harmful insects.

In half an hour you can be confident that the room is cleared. Ideal for freshening up (!!!!) a house, farm or apartment, and it goes without saying that your morale will get better and better. The device can also be used in boutiques and shops where evil curses are often used by jealous competitors. This device is indispensable for esoteric practitioners. Ideal for chasing away parasites of all sorts in gardens, shops, kitchens, etc. The ultrasound action provokes a fear in parasites. This device allows the cleansing of all evil places, more quickly and more simply that a classic exorcism, even a powerful one."

Only 225 euros!

(I'm sitting here in the dark with the Ghostbusters music in my head and just thinking- did anyone else ever notice that while there were four ghostbusters, the black guy was never on the film posters? it used to really annoy me when i was a kid, I always felt sorry for him. I used to worry how he felt about it. I also used to get really anxious about fat children in films playing the role of a geeky fat kids who get picked on- I mean, how did they feel about that? Obviously as an adult I could talk about the black ghostbuster guy issue more intelligently...but as a little kid I really did just worry about his hurt feelings.

........I think I might go back to bed now...)

eergh

2010-12-11T13:50:00.000+01:00

can someone please remind me that the next time a single friend drops by on a Friday night at 11pm and convinces me that drinking red wine and dancing until 3 am is a good idea...please remind me it ISNT.....(but it was fun)

oui- it's friday night in France...

2010-12-11T01:56:00.000+01:00

ilotopie, port st louis

2010-11-24T01:32:00.000+01:00

flirtation, french style

2010-11-17T15:58:00.005+01:00

I think I might have mentioned this before but something I noticed in Australia last summer was that men don't really look at you. I know I have a few extra kilos and pushing twins around in the pram is certainly not a sexy eye catcher, but even alone in the street looking relatively presentable Australian men just don't seem to notice...

Unless it's the casual wolf whistle from builders driving past, or the occasional drunken leer from a man stumbling home after a night out...and that's not really what I mean.

Years ago in Australia we all knew that if you were out in a pub with girlfriends, the boys would sort of eye you furtively all night until closing time when they were drunk enough to gather their courage in their hands to come over and blurt some highly unwelcome proposal.

In France there's a certain type of flirt you get in the street, in broad daylight. In Marseille the main street that runs through the town centre is called La Canebière...and if you ever feel ugly or fat or generally undesirable all you have to do is take a stroll down there and you have all the attention you need. Of course there's always the unwanted attention, the type that makes your skin crawl (and let's face it, walking down La Canebière at midnight isn't a good idea) but in general it's a flirty funny exchange.

Out last night for a concert I was walking home and for the first time in a long time got a Marseille Flirt that lifted my spririts

Three young men pass me in the street as I'm sending an SMS, head down.

Boy: Oh, Madame!
Me: ?
Boy: Oh, Madame!
Me: Yes?
Boy: Would you like to finish the evening with me?
Me: Uh?
Boy: Would you like to finish this lovely evening in my company?
Me: (laughing) No, thanks anyway
Boy: Oh, you have wounded me! My heart ! My heart!
Me: Oh, I'm so sorry...(smiling)
Boy: Well, Madame, you have beautiful eyes, in any case. Have a lovely night.
Me: You too..

Now that's the type of flirty attention French boys do so well...and both parties walk away feeling good about themselves...it's a game.

Once a particularly cute friend of mine was walking down the Canebière and got the usual smiles and compliments (from mainly Arab men, actually) and for once in her life she actually stopped and when the man told her she was beautiful and asked her if she wouldn't take a cup of coffee with him, paused, and said "OK, then".

He looked absolutely stunned and they went to a café and drank a coffee and he just sat there with not a single thing to say, shy and awkward, and then she thanked him and they said goodbye to each other and they walked off in opposite directions.

UNESCO declares generations of women's work World Heritage...and forgets to mention them

2010-11-16T20:34:00.002+01:00

Listening to French radio tonight, and without fail only male chefs were invited to comment about UNESCO listing the French "gastronomique" meal as intangible world heritage.

facebook snooping on me again

2010-11-15T05:50:00.002+01:00

Is there anyone out there who can explain how this works?

I quit facebook a a year ago, and I can report back that the same ten or so friends that I was in regular contact with before are still emailing me...everyone else seems to have forgotten me, or can't tear themselves away from Facebook long enough to write a real letter or pick up the phone...it seems that the minute someone discovers facebook they centre all their online life on that. But that's OK...

But today I got a "friend" invitation email to my personal account, someone who had made the mistake of letting facebook read his contacts list in his yahoo email account when he joined up. Not a problem.

But underneath the invitation there's this box that mentions other people I might know. I know all of them. Including a girl I once taught English to in Avignon 4 years ago. A good friend now living in Italy. My Mum's cousin in Scotland who I have never emailed or visited on Facebook.

So my question is...given that I deleted my account, and that Mum's cousin doesn't even have my email address (and my mother's definitely not on Facebook), how on earth is it possible for Facebook to know I might know her?

These three people never had facebook accounts when i was on it, so it's not like they can raid my old profile info for old contacts (given I deleted my account this shouldn't be possible but you never know...). Even if these people have let facebook into their email contacts list, how to explain my distant cousin who doesn't even have my email address?

I read somewhere facebook might be starting up an email service...I dread to think what they'll have in store for us. Logically it means Facebook will know exactly who they're emailing. I'm not sure if I would respond to a facebook email....knowing it'll all go back into the facebook stew pot of personal archives...

Anyway- just wondering if there's someone out there who could shed light on the Mum's cousin mystery. There has to be some link somewhere but I don't know where. It's quite disturbing. Facebook tracked me down to a distant relation. How?

They've managed to "profile" me, to put together a list of probable acquantances and friends...I don't want to sound paranoid, but..yeah, it makes me feel paranoid... don't like it....

freedom

2010-11-14T12:09:00.001+01:00

I discovered this program called Freedom which you install on your computer and you tell it how much time you want free from the internet...and it works...you have to reboot your computer to make it go away, which discourages you from randomly checking email or suddenly deciding in the middle of some important task that you simply MUST check out vintage clothing stores or Skype your best friend in Australia or research all the cast members from the worst film you've seen in a long time (Bankok Dangereux, in French- Nicolas Cage as a completely unlikeable assassin for hire) or finding Vietnamese Steamed Bun recipes.

So last night I tried the trial version and got three solid hours of work done. It was surprising how often at the beginning I would stop and fidget then realise I couldn't check email or google whatever...it's like giving up smoking, I spent a few minutes anxiously poking at the stone wall next to the desk and flicking lint off my black jumper instead.

I woke up at midnight when Half Man Half Chip got home from his jazz gig, with my head on the desk, but with ...70 key scenes laid out for the book, in a sort of vague order.

The last week or so has been hard- there was a long weekend in France and the daycare place was shut, which meant that I've been a fulltime Mum for a week- you'd think that wouldn't be so hard but I've turned into such a monster of crankiness. They're two years old and in a very possessive phase, so I can hardly look away and the whinging starts..that high frequency whinging designed by nature to pierce eardrums and drill through any resistance you mght have left. What's amazing is that no matter how horrible and impatient I am they're still smiley and loveable and still want hugs from me...making me feel so so so bad.

I've had some writing tasks I wanted to get done that are way overdue (sorry Alec) but it's impossible to put yourself in a sensitive thoughtful frame of mind when you have two shrieking toddlers beating each other over the head with red plastic Noddy chairs or fighting over who gets to cuddle Baby Cat and almost dismembering him in the process. that sort of stuff just does NOT make me feel anything like artistic.

Half Man Half Chip finally realized that I am close to breaking point and has taken them out somewhere for the day...it would help if we had a garden...no use complaining about that though...in this town you need over 250 000 euros to grab yourself a small house with a tiny garden...out of the question for the moment.

Another useful efficiency tool I heard about was Timepodding (this could be dangerously close to another annoying trendy word) ...you set aside say an hour and you write down what you want to do in that time and you do it.

Does anyone else have this trouble? Getting stuff done? I'm sure it's the internet effect...difficulty concentrating on ONE thing at a time. Reading too much online news that stresses me, reading writer's blogs that make me feel inadequate and intimidated, bombarded by ads for gadgets I don't want or need or can afford...

So if all goes well I have at least 5 hours to myself today, Sunday...I think I might set Freedom up for that block of time and see what I get done. And I refuse to do any housework again. I vacuumed THREE times yesterday. God damn ancient stone walls. Someone give me plasterboard, white pristine plasterboard...I've had enough quaintness...

Manscaping in the mancave

2010-11-13T19:47:00.000+01:00

I recently got back in touch with an old old old flame who ignored my email for three weeks (what's the valid wait-period on emails anyway, before you're allowed to start getting snippy?) and then wrote me back a nice email saying at the end, "Thanks for reaching out".

Now at the time I took it as an emotional outburst and was pretty impressed actually, although a little concerned that the old flame might have thought that I was reaching out...in supplication..kind of begging....or else asking for help for some personality disorder (I'd never do that by email, I prefer to expose my neuroses in person, that way it's harder for people to get away) or expressing some weakness....(what did I say in that email? I can't remember)

So our breakup was a little rough... but still. I was a bit disturbed for a day or so wondering if I'd somehow given away points...you know like "Tell him I said Hi" to the sister of an ex when you're in an expansive mood then gnaw your own head off in shame three hours later. To use a completely random example.

But no, since I read that, it's been nothing but "reaching out" all over the place, like "to reach out" is somehow a synonym for "to contact".

I just read an old article that confirmed it...so it's not just me...

It's strange how language changes...I've been in France for over ten years now and I'm starting to notice...I remember the first time (not that long ago) I heard the word "bling". Or "manscaping"." Cougar" is another one. "No brainer" really annoys me. As do small town Aussie shop assistants who say "Have a nice day, guys." Oh and of course, "Brisvegas", for Brisbane.

I am sooo out of the loop.

what is this, anyway?

2010-11-04T16:10:00.001+01:00

Back before before I thought that Real Writers wrote their books out all out nice and neat and chronologically and it would look all nice like it does on the page of a book... I know it's more complicated than that now.

But I was still gobsmacked (love that word) to discover that when I printed off all the scribble and crap from last year, plus a few thousand words in the last month or so, and I'm at 20 000 words. Which isn't really a lot, but by, say, this weekend, it'll be kind of almost half way there if your goal is a smallish first novella.

But the thing is that sounds good, to be halfway, but my god, I havent even started. There is so much to be done. I'm still just flexing that muscle, playing games, seeing what comes out. I've got a rough outline and plot ideas but jeeez dear mother of god, 20 000 words is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

I haven't even tackled the major scenes really, I'm writing around the edges too shitscared to dive into the real stuff. So all my characters just sort of hang around talking in hushed tones about what has just happened without us actually seeing it. Two of them went and had sex this afternoon, just like that, with no warning. I think that happened last year too. It must be the literary equivalent of people having rampant sex everytime there's a powercut and they've got nothing else to do. Dirty, dirty people.

What this essentially means, I think, is that I'm going to have to write something like 100 000 words just to get everything in that I need to, then take a scythe to it, hack off dubious clichés and just plain bad writing, cutting out all the useless metaphors, pointless scenes, heavy adjectives...then rebuild it again, plugging the holes in the plot on the way. I can see it clearly. And that'll just be the second draft.

What was I thinking, starting this...? My god this could take years.

I like this job...

2010-10-29T21:24:00.001+02:00

Opening a page at random of Syntaxe comparée du français et l'anglais by Jaqueline Guillemin-Flescher today in the solemn translation library-

An example of discours direct...

"She needs a really good spanking"

(her italics)

Just my style

2010-10-25T12:23:00.003+02:00

Taking my courage in my hands this morning and going to introduce myself at a prestigious international centre of literary translation, meeting the director, going on a tour of the library, meeting giants of russian postmodern poetry, explaining my parcours artistique, shaking hands and thanking them all formally, getting to the ground floor and looking down and realizing that the top three buttons of my shirt had come undone when I took off my coat and I'd exposed a cheeky expanse of pale white boob to the entire world.

This type of thing could only happen to me.

françoise, 2005

2010-10-10T22:56:00.000+02:00

out, spirits, begone...

2010-10-05T11:11:00.006+02:00

Two thousand words written today. A million thanks to my brother in Sydney who gave me his half-broken laptop (there's a whole bunch of you out there, people with office jobs, your employers just give you laptops? amazing. I tend to save those 500 euros for things like...spaghetti. Cans of tuna. Red wine. Cat litter. Nappies. Bottles of Bombay Sapphire).

The A and S keys don't work so I had to buy a cordless keyboard and I've discovered that by plugging in the laptop in the kitchen and sitting in the livingroom with coffee and cigarettes close by and a moody David Bridie CD playing I can type away to my heart's content and can't check email (this is very very very important) and curiously, ensuring I can't even look at the screen is a breakthrough.

I wrote a very difficult scene, involving quite menacing events based loosely on personal experience. I got through it though, and when the main character's hands were shaking I realized mine were too. I feel like I've taken some sort of head spinning drug. I feel possessed. Now I'm off to take my out of body experience to the supermarket and try and feel like myself again. Very wierd.

john wayne

2010-10-01T11:49:00.005+02:00

4D4VKNWX24HE
In bed all day (I hope) with the flu and a laptop and Nicholas Shakespeare's book Secrets of The Sea (such a strange title choice, it makes the book sound a bit, well, tacky, when it's not).

I'm downstairs getting soup while Half-Man Half-Chip is out picking up the girls from their morning daycare, and am all hazy and realized I just woke up from a dream where John Wayne in a leather loincloth is helping me film a Roman gladiator movie.

Does it annoy anyone the way I don't blog for three months and then just randomly post...randomness...? Sorry about that. Must be the fever...

Going back to bed to drink Thai chicken soup and dream of Tasmania.

boulevard d'Athènes, 2004

2010-10-01T03:33:00.004+02:00

Georges Cloné (Raoul Petite)

2010-09-23T00:49:00.000+02:00

.

2010-09-19T09:35:00.001+02:00

I suspect there might have been more than coffee in those cups...

accordion crimes (or, If I'm Angry It Means I Care)

2010-09-17T20:45:00.015+02:00

So I'm just going to pretend I haven't neglected my blog for three months (sorry) and carry on as if anyone's still reading this.

Oh, what to say about my return to France after three months back home in Australia?

There's sooo much to say but I'll just go with what comes to mind first.

At Charles de Gaulle airport the sweet smell of cigarette smoke greeted us as we walked out the front doors, as smokers lounged on chilly steel benches sucking down their fix- in Australia I pretty much gave up smoking after it all got too hard:

-the graphic photos of lung cancers, brain tumours and gangrene on the packets
-the insanely high price of the stuff (and yet organic untainted tobacco is still illegal to buy)
-the comments I got from every random shop assistant at the point of sale ("You know you should really give up", "It would be cheaper if you didn't smoke"). Yep, um, what, you don't WANT my 30 bucks for this packet of tobacco ?

Let's just point out that often the people who turned up their noses at me are quite happy to tuck into carbs, fatty cheese, salt overloaded snacks, cheap industrial meat scraped fresh off the abattoir floor, caffeine, caffeine, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol...

Which brings me to another grumpy topic- the inhuman amounts of booze consumed in Australia. Apparently it's OK to eat Aldi chicken nuggets all week and clothe yourself in sweatshop clothes and drink yourself into a stupor every Friday night and end the evening with your pants round your ankles mooning at a sea of digital cameras, but it's immoral to light a cigarette. Even at the regulation 4 metres from any public place. So in fact, it's no longer a passive smoking issue- people just feel they have a real moral right to tell you what to ingest. It makes me want to keep smoking just to spite them.

It's very very tricky territory when individual behaviour starts getting dragged into the public domain on the basis of moral judgement- because none of us lead perfect lives...

Especially the Fat Lady who lunged across the bar in a hotel in Biloela, Queensland, slapped my hand away as I was about to shake the hand of her target for the night (a drunken young farmer called Tim), and threw her rum and coke at me. She'd inhaled a few too many rum and cokes herself that night, as had her drinking colleagues in the pub. By 8pm the place was off its collective face. She then stood over me and said "You think I'm fat, don't ya?" until one of her women friends dragged her away for another drink and advised me not to mess with her mate when she'd had a few.

Moving on.

Australia seems not to have been touched by the economic crisis as much as Europe has. There's a load of money around and loads of jobs, as far as I can see.

Along with jungle-print blouses and blue eyeshadow, there's a New Eighties feel to the consumerist frenzy.

It fuels everyone from the people you see in shops forking out 3000 bucks for a new iPad mutant itouch organic non-stick laptop to the real estate agents slavering over the demolition of gracious old houses earmarked for inner city development - to turn Brisbane into more of a souless Cappucino Theme Park than it's already become- to the mining companies hellbent on digging up every molecule of prime agricultural land and replacing it with gas contaminated wasteland.

No-one mentioned this issue at all during the recent Australian elections, but driving out West all we saw were banners and protest signs lining the highways from farmers defending their land before it gets eaten up by gas pipelines and coal mines.

Instead of tackling what I reckon is a great looming issue, managing a great minerals boom and not laying waste to great swathes of agricultural land (not to mention wilderness) everyone's fixated on the Boat People.

In a country where an important televised political debate was postponed because it clashed with Sunday night's Masterchef finale. Oh please.

Which reminds me- France.

Our Dear President, he of the very short temper, has seemingly lost the plot, in so many ways. Between brown paper bag donations from wealthy heiresses, to the use of the French Secret Service as his own personal private investigation agency, the accusations are running thick and fast.

And the Roms.

Don't our leaders have greater problems than illegal gypsy camps? I would have thought that interviewing a random selection of citizens, a bunch of messy "chicken thieves" caravans would have been way down on the list of things to worry about. The unemployment rate? The falling standard of living? The abysmal relations between the community and the police force? The small town fonctionnaires who have their jobs done by 10am and spend the rest of the day driving around town wasting time? The countless companies who hire people on casual contracts year after year and then put them on unemployment every summer in the slow season? Nuclear power stations leaking their stuff into the watertable? Erm..nope.

In Marseille there have been Romanian gangs operating for years, they have all sorts of tricks and weasely ways to rip people off and there's some serious crime involved. But drawing a cricle around an entire culture and saying Off With Their Heads is shortcutting what seems to me to be an important part of the legal system...case by case treatment of crime. If one person is guilty of a crime, then they are arrested and punished. Deciding to shortcut that and just round up an ethnic group en masse...

I'm confused. They're European citizens. How do you "deport" European citizens within Europe?

I'm a European citizen too... I'd like to think that if I were done for shoplifting or tax evasion (oh, shall we compare illegal caravan camps to more middle class financial crimes?) I'd be duly sent to trial and given my time in jail- not just shipped off. Since my skin is whiter than white I'd probably be OK. But then you never know, do you? Having said that the 'problem' isn't unique to France and the treatment dished out to Travellers, Roms and Gitans in in Italy and the UK also leaves a lot to be desired.

It makes me sad and ashamed, and I want to know what happened to that girl that used to sit outside the bakery that I pass every day on my way into town, the one that nods and smiles and says "Bella!" when she sees me, holding out her plastic cup of loose change. And the guy that plays bad accordion in the square, the one I always disapproved of because he had his small son dancing there next to him, the one that should have been in school. Because they're just not there anymore, and no-one I ask can tell me where they've gone.

Perhaps my husband is right when he says that the happiest people are those that never travel. You never see another country from the inside, never have enough information to compare, never have enough experience to confuse you or fuel your discontent. I sound ungrateful and judgemental and grumpy. I had a great time in Australia and I love living in France. But neither of those countries considers me qualified to criticise...I am well and truly an outsider, from everywhere I call home. It's a strange place to be.

back

2010-09-11T23:18:00.005+02:00

Yes, the return trip was a Hell Ride. But I'm sitting here listening to horses gallop down our street, at midnight, and the torreros' stretch limousine has just gone by, on their way to cocktails after a dubious hard day's work dispatching noble beasts. In Catalonia they banned it not long ago, and

I should be out there taking photos and documenting it all, but I'm sleepy jetlagged and happy to go to bed remembering the delighted look on our friends' faces this afternoon when we bumped into them, followed them down the hill to the terrace bar for a sangria and a dance in the early evening sun...

ron mueck brisbane 2010

2010-09-11T23:00:00.000+02:00

.

2010-09-09T22:52:00.009+02:00

neglect

2010-08-11T20:27:00.003+02:00

The modem running off solar power, and the laptop being in the middle of the noisy family dining room, these are a couple of reasons why I haven't written anything for so long. I'm sorry about that, and annoyed, because there's certainly been material.

To give you an idea- it's 4 am and this is the only time I get to do this sort of stuff and I wish i had something more interesting to say having gotten up so early to do so but this is a big apology for being so boring and when i get to a computer with a card reader i'll post photos...

Paul Squires

2010-08-02T05:54:00.005+02:00

We are out bush with a bad internet connection and solar power so you'll have to forgive my silence the last month. It's also been quite overwhelming and I haven't put pen to paper once, let alone blog. I think I needed to settle in and find my bearings again.

I've just heard that a blogging friend of mine the Brisbane poet Paul Squires - Gingatao- died suddenly last week. I'm days late finding out and I'm angry at myself for not having called him to meet up for a drink like we said we would while I'm in Australia. I'm really, really, sad about that.

A lovely man who was not only talented but always had encouraging words for others....I'm so sorry I never got to meet him. And completely naively bewildered and pissed off that these things can happen just like that. It's not fair. Just not bloody fair...

All my thoughts to his family and friends.

back home, first day

2010-06-29T15:34:00.011+02:00

After thirty-five hours , three years

A bag of jam sandwiches, bananas, biscuits and apple poppers in the car at the airport at 1am, blankets bought so that the girls' car seats arent too hard for them

my father driving carefully, very slowly, too slowly, us following

my mother stopping at intersections or merging into traffic, asking "can i go?"

the smell of hops in the air, with the petrol fumes from my father's car in front, Milton, the 4xxx brewery, the sign visible over rooftops, on a highway, 2 am monday morning

the black ghosts of palm trees cut into the sky, city lights, at the foot of the garden, some stars

a scrabble of possums on the neighbours' tin roof

the whine and pull of the trains

awake, at the wrong time of night

the way my fingers know how to set the microwave at 4am, without thinking, and when i reach for a lightswitch it is always where it is supposed to be

opening drawers

unstrung beads from a broken necklace, five singapore dollars, a one kina note

the boxes of photos and letters that have to be dealt with

falling asleep in my old bedroom, on the mattress on the floor, and dreaming that i was dreaming....

bye bye

2010-06-19T21:18:00.007+02:00

The train to Paris tomorrow is so early that we'll be getting up before we go to bed.

I've been obessively checking baggage and feeling dizzy from the task of a 35 hour trip with twins.

We're travelling in an airbus 380, apparently the biggest newest swishiest passenger plane in the world...I've been drooling over Emirates photos of private cabins in First Class that look a lot like small but very expensive hotel rooms- cramped but minimalist with sliding partitions and bodiless hands serving glasses of champage through special champagne-serving portholes while business men types consult the stockmarket on laptops and original print Citizen Kane 8mm plays on their private Rich Bastards Channel, specially broadcast in gold plated HD from the moon.

but we're in Economy and all I want to know is - will they show the tellytubbies? And is red wine still free?

Talk to you later, at the other side of the world...

the mother in me

2010-06-18T21:21:00.002+02:00

I am now fully expecting a knock on the door from some angry mother wanting to know why I yelled at her kids.

I was putting out the rubbish tonight in bare feet, unbrushed hair and my best party dress because a baby girl had vomited all over me earlier this evening and I had to change quick, and I was draped in every necklace I own after trying to decide what to take on the trip so I must have looked some deranged drag queen.....

when I saw two girls of about ten and twelve come speeding across the road sitting on a giant skateboard go thru a stop sign at the end of the hill and roll across the road...

I thought about it for a moment then went out to find them collapsed in a heap and giggling like cars don't do insane speeds down this straight stretch...it absolutely terrified me...and I just gave my first teenage lecture to two girls and their smirking 8 year old brother...

Holy mother of god kids have no imagination. They absolutely don't understand danger. It's insane. I'm shaking now all jittery like they were my own children.

I didn't yell exactly but was deadly serious and there was lots of angry finger pointing at the oldest who I told should have known better and a black look silenced the little boy's nervous giggling.

Oh, man, oh man...I hope it scared them enough not to do it again...rolling down on a skateboard down a hill, thru a stopsign, across a busy road...crazy...

The Ways of the Ungodly. world copyright 1968

2010-06-12T21:57:00.017+02:00

I am typing this to the sweet sounds of Half-Man, Half-Chip swearing at the TV screen (World CUp, England vs USA).

Life goes on here. I spent an entire morning with one toddler (her twin sister at home with her dad), and I had a fantastic time...to the market in gorgeous spring weather, drank a coffee at a bar with a friend, sauntered over to their place, then to another friend's...my god life is easy with one child. Amazing.

I'm tempted to go upstairs and read a book but I have nothing left except.....when I run out of books to read I regularly turn to The Ways of the Ungodly in desperation. I have no idea where I got it, I think I probably picked up at a charity shop. I've googled it and find no answers to my questions such as

*who was Joan Novark?
*was she clinically insane?

This book is 380 pages long. Having attempted several times to write a book and failed I can only wonder at the sheer dedication it takes to write something...this...bad. And mad.

It seems to be self-published -no surprise there. Apparently it is a "Psycho-dynamic-prize-winning-class psychiatric novel" and "COMPULSORY READING for everybody- including the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES" (Joan Novark's CAPITALS).

Can I share some extracts? Where better to start than page 1...the hot sex scene.

"His hands moved lower, Sculpturesquely. 'And you have the body of a goddess'.

His words were prompted by sincerity and not motivated merely by lust. His admiration was devout, obsessing his desire.

There was a long chess-play of love-play. New approaches, new moves and, of course, counter-moves.

At last he unzipped the dress. The sound sizzled into his emotions.

He was now excited at the sensation of being the seducer. But could it just be that he was decieved by his own vanity. And that the seducer, playing a subtle game, was really the seduced."

Chapter Three. Rita as a child, sees her father naked, gets jealous coz she hasn't got One, turns into a lesbian. As you do. Then she goes to college and fixes her vixen warped lusts onto Carla the cheerleader.

"When Carla saw her she ran towards her with excited relief.

'Rita, I'm so glad you've come. I'm frightfully behind. I can't manage this on my own'

Rita put a huge comforting arm around the demure helpless Carla.

'You sit down and watch, darling.'. She carefully watched Carla's reaction to the casual term of endearment. Carla smiled graftefully and perched herself on her high lab stool as Rita set to work.

'What happened to your boyfriend? The football hero? Why didn't he help you?'

'Oh...he's busy today. He had to do extra training for Saturday's big game.'

'He needs it. To me he's a big sissy and not as tough as he pretends.'

'But,' Carla playfully protested, 'he's so strong. I should know because I've had his powerful arms around me many a time.'

'Ha-ha,' Rita sneered, 'I'm probably tougher than he is.'

'Says you.' Amused but unconvinced, Carla giggled.

Suddenly Rita walked up to her, swooped her off the high stool and embraced her powerfully, yet tenderly.

At first Carla stiffened in surprise but then became limp.

'My, Rita! You are so strong...and tender at the same time...Tony's strong, but he's clumsy.'"

I could go on...but I've rarely got past the first three chapters, by that point I've usually passed out from sheer adjective overdose. So the next time I re-read the first 20 pages all over again. It is truly impressive, this book. It's a wonder.

I particularly love the "interview" just after the flyleaf (see photo).

I'd hate "Joan Novark"'s kids to be reading this- and I don't mean to sneer (well, I am sneering, but it's just such an incredible book).

Who was Joan Novark? Was this her revenge on all her bad psychiatrists? In the book they're all latent homosexual cross dressing shock treatment pimps.

I think we can safely say she'd had some bad experiences. It certainly "kicks the reader right in the sub-conscious"

But don't forget-

It's a book "written in many veins, all leading to the main artery"

And who is "Tony", who so carefully stamped his name on the book so no-one would steal his copy? How did it end up in a charity shop in a small village in Provence?

"Tony" is also the football brute in Chapter Three. Is this a clue?

pathetic organisation

2010-06-04T13:52:00.018+02:00

This is typically me. Deciding to enter a major short story competition 2 weeks before the closing date. Try to locate notes for something I wrote two years ago. Launch Windows keyword search of entire computer- the only line I remember from the document is "Where's my fucking Mars Bar, Melvin?" and fail to find it, but do find mysterious poems (I imagine) and documents called things like

BP station drunk and forwards.doc

the dead wife.doc

ferry on fire.doc

thinking of P at work.doc (who is P??? no memory)

pizza smell.doc

cranky.doc (could have been written anytime in the last ten years)

ten reasons to never speak to him again.doc (more than a couple of candidates for this one)

in the back of the car that always smells of gitanes.doc (I actually opened this document and all it contained was the line "in the back of the car that always smells of gitanes")

or even

BP station APOCALYPSE.doc

Don't clearly remember writing any of this and don't have the energy to trawl through them...instead, rifle through CDRom backup discs, 90% of which are unlabelled (of course) and mostly contain grammar exercises for my students or blurry failed photos or unsent drunken music compilation CDs for friends.

What I lack in talent and organisation, I make up for in vague ambition...

Down with dieting

2010-06-03T13:39:00.003+02:00

I caved in but I feel more like I'm caving into common sense. No diet that gives you dizzy spells and fatigue can be good for you...I had vegetables for lunch...and an apple...and a slice of bread....the way humans are supposed to eat, dammit....I'd rather be flabby but sane.

Dukan Diet Day 3

2010-06-02T23:22:00.004+02:00

Well I'd like to write something witty and Brigit Jones-ish but I can't be arsed, because I'm so bone tired exhausted that I can hardly even summon the energy to type.

Breakfast- 0% fat yoghurt.

Lunch- tofu stir fried in soya sauce, and an egg

Dinner- 500 (!!) gms frozen calimari, stir fried in smoked hot paprika with sea salt and pepper. ( I looked at the nutritional chat on the package and the entire meal earned me the measly total of 200 calories)

Now I don't seem to have lost any weight this week, despite the extravagant claims of Dukan Diet fans.

I remain delirious and slightly insane in my membrane due to lack of vegetables, fruits and carbs.

Not enjoying this. This is not me, not me at all. I think this diet is geared to real serious cases who can't resist a packet of biscuits a day, or the third helping of lasagne. Whereas I eat quite reasonably and I reckon it's got more to do with motherly hormones than eating habits. Breastfeeding twins til 9 months seems to have flooded me with all sorts of oestrogen overloads...my body is still in that state where it thinks "Oh damn, got to feed three people, ABSORB, ABSORB, ABSORB..."

Yeah OK I know this might be boring for men, or those who have never had kids, but I'm sorry...at some point you realize that you're just this thing, this animal, and you have to face up to the fact that chemistry has a lot to do with how you exist.

That's my excuse, anyway...

more barcelona

2010-06-02T13:52:00.007+02:00

a pointless, stupid near death experience

2010-06-01T14:32:00.009+02:00

I'm feeling...slightly... strange.

I was pushing the girls home for lunch in the pram a couple of hours ago, down a street just before we turn the corner to our house, a street I walk down several times a day.

So I'm walking along pushing the girls and a movement catches my eye and I look up and a streetlight, an old-fashioned metal and glass thing that must weigh at least 20kgs, drops like a lead weight, directly in front of us.

This thing is huge, its heavy, and if it had hit any one or all of us we'd be dead. My girls would have been dead.

The old lady in the house underneath came out and she complained about the townhall and about her neighbours and the sewers and her grandchildren and the maintenance crews that never come when she calls. It took a few minutes and I picked up the lamp and put it on the pavement. All the while feeling the blood drain out of me, hands shaking.

Thinking about recent conversations about parallel universes and how the thousands of small decisions we make (or don't) every day branch off into other futures.

I was very busy this morning while they were at daycare, I got loads of things done. The last thing I did before I went to pick them up was hestitate a minute or so over two packets of frozen fish in the corner shop. I finally shrugged and picked up the cheaper one, then went to the checkout where a woman fumbled for her money in her purse, and I tried not to get impatient.

I'm not at the hospital, I'm not dead, my babies aren't dead,

A matter of seconds.

In other less dramatic news Day two of Dukan Diet finds me hallucinating in front of the vegetable tray in the fridge again. More of the same, really, cravings for fruit and vegetables. Don't like this thing. Bleah.

dukan diet day 1

2010-06-01T10:19:00.004+02:00

I'm going to ignore the rage and confusion i feel about what's happening in the world today by talking about me me me me.

After seeing a shocker of a photo of myself - the type that you can't excuse to bad angle or lighting or the ill-will of the person taking it- I thought I'd have a crack at 5 days of the protein thing (French Dukan concept), with the hope that the bingo-wings I'm developing might not become a permanent feature.

I'm not at all one for dieting, I reckon this is the first time in my life I've caved into one of these diet things, but several French friends swear by it, and from googling it a bit it doesn't look too demented. It's clear that the weight I put on breastfeeding just isn't going to shift.

I had a colleague once who claimed she was doing the Atkins diet but she did it for months and while she lost loads of weight I just couldn't bear her constant tooth-brushing and the sight of her pathetic can of tuna lunches in the staffroom. She was really cranky, too.

So apparrently what you do is just do it a few days. The idea being if you eat no fat at all and no carbs, your body will eat up a bit of its resources of fat. Then when your few days are over, and you've broken that hommus on nan bread addiction, when you don't need 3 plates of tagliatelli and cream and huge slabs of cheese for lunch anymore, you can slowly get back to normal.

OK. Sounds...reasonable. I'm ten kilos overweight, I don't seem to have any physical problems that would prevent me from doing this, I saw the doctor last week and she gave me the go ahead for any reasonable diet, and if it helps get me started eating better again, I'll give it a try.

I didn't properly realize this, but you literally eat nothing but protein. No chickpeas or beans. No lettuce. No rice. As a semi-vegetarian this is going to be interesting.

DAY 1
7am- scrambled eggs for breakfast!! yummy!! This isn't so bad.

12pm I had two bits of fish for lunch, with lemonjuice on top. That was it.

3pm Something's going all strange. May be having blood sugar crisis. Lucky half man half chip isnt here or he's get it in the neck. Oh GOD, CHIPS!!!!

6pm- I'm cooking the kids' tea. I find myself staring at onion with wild look in eyes. Onions, oh I know how those onions would taste. Even raw. Give me a raw onion.

Very, very thirsty. How wierd.

8pm- Ate literally HALF a roast chicken and nothing else. Except three glasses of red wine and five litres of water. Stand in front of fridge zoned out, looking at the courgettes.

I don't know if I can do this. But I just realized that I have already done it, when I lost inhuman amounts of weight a few years ago when I was heartbroken and not eating properly...that was basically my diet. At least I know it works, but do I really want another week of this??

blood sugar + armageddon

2010-05-31T22:21:00.008+02:00

Is it just because I'm on a no carb diet and my blood sugar is going mental (how's that for a shallow opener?), or this latest Israel thing not the most terrifying thing to happen for years? I've got worst-case scenarios playing over in my mind while we're located nicely on the Mediteranean and about to board a plane in three weeks.

It makes me angry, it makes me very angry, and I know I should have something wise and informed to say about the broader political/humanitarian scheme of things, but tonight I'm just angry at these bloody imbecile men playing at their wars.

And don't even get me started on BP.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll feel safer.

barcelona 2004

2010-05-30T22:13:00.002+02:00

I cannot give more
than what I have
and what I have
is your absence...

I'm an alien

2010-05-28T20:10:00.017+02:00

A strange week or so, trying to finish a couple of hundred finnicky small translation jobs, trying not to compulsively check the BP oilspill webcam and write them another desperate angry email like I did three days ago (jesus, have you actually spent half an hour watching that shit pour out of the pipe? it's terrifying), preparing to get on the plane in three weeks' time for a 30 hour trip (!! The Fear!!!) to Australia. Going home for the third time in ten years...always a bit traumatic. The last two times I went home I had strange spin out experiences when i realized that home was no longer the home I remembered, and that France isn't home either. So dear my friends, you can expect some strange posts in the next couple of months...

I'm dead tired, exhausted, bone weary, and I don't know why. I went to the doctor today to try and get rid of this nagging earache/toothache/eyestrain I've been getting. It's the first time with her, a petite grey-haired woman who is literally two doors down from our house. She booked me in for 45 minutes, as opposed to the 3 minutes 34 seconds you usually get from a GP, which was a nice surprise.

She quizzed me about the usual stuff, medical history, allergies etc, then she put down her pen, leaned back in her swivel chair, adjusted her organic cotton scarf and fixed me with one of those sympathetic earnest looks that usually send me running for the hills and the tissue box-

"So, Madame, tell me a little about yourself"

".......?"

"What sort of a person are you?"

I found it almost impossible to answer. I had nothing to say. Here I am at 37 years old and I still don't know how to talk about myself without resorting to self-depreciating humour, glass of wine in one hand and cigarette in the other. I made a couple of jokes about how hard that question is, but she just kept staring at me...

There was so much I could have said. Instead I opted for "Uh...generally relaxed. With peaks of stress."

That was it. She looked at me over the top of her glasses in a meaningful way and scribbled something damning in my personal record. I tried to read it upside down but all I could see was "Peni!". Penible (painful?) Pain in the arse?

She poked me and inspected my ears and I didn't have to strip off and submit to a medical-but-touchy-feely-homeopathic fondle as I'd feared (I'd even changed into socially acceptable underwear befoehand, at the last minute noticing that my toenails are blue from a pair of cheap blue cotton slip ons I bought last week).

She found nothing wrong, and sent me off with a perscription for belladonna or essence of rotting otter snout or something.

Perhaps I am iron deficient. I went to the local health food shop and picked up some Floradix tonic, the stuff that my Mum made me drink when I was a vegetarian teenager. My mum! so lovely, taking care of me like that. It's only now I realize how thoughtful, how caring that small gesture was.

A good friend told me yesterday that her new boyfriend thinks I'm an "alien". I asked her what exactly this means and she said "You're not normal like most people".

"Normal?"

"Yeah, you know, you have, like, opinions. No, he likes you, really he does, I just think it took him time to get to know you"

I think the origin of his discomfort stems from the time we had them to dinner, a surprisingly bad night, the kind where you and your partner turn to each other in bed after they've gone and say "Oh My God". As I recall, we were discussing parallel universes and the concept of destiny and I kept harping on about ants.

He cited some French author who wrote a story about a man who decides he is a slave to preprogrammed social norms so gets up from his seat on the metro and stabs a stranger to death, just to break out of normality.

The way I see it, there's no way we can break out of normality from within a system. If I go and shave my head and staple my ears to my chin, I'm still working within a system- the human being system- our world. Like ants. It's not because some worker ant decides that he's going to dance anticlockwise instead of clockwise that he's breaking free of predestiny.

If this ant suddenly vaporizes himself and instantly reappears in several locations around the universe in the form of a blue whale, wearing a pair of high heels and whistling the theme song to Zorba the Greek, then yes, that would be interesting.

I knew that husband (who is 16 years older than me and was a real English art college Punk, having gone thru this half a generation ago) had switched off, but I was toiling away valiantly, feeling like I'd been transported back to when i was 25 years old, when all conversations ended up the same after 11pm, where all roads lead through a haze of cheap incense and cheap red wine to someone's gap-year personal spiritual journey through India and a soulful boy would play us Light My Fire on his guitar and then the music would be turned up and we'd all end up dancing uncertainly to Sinead O'Connor or, if it was a boy's house, The Cult or if we were really lucky, The Pixies. Often, at 2am, as the evening wore down and the Aussie boys who'd had to drink themselves into a stupor just to articulate their lustful urges would lunge toward us smelling of beer and aftershave, we'd chill out to soulful tunes and hope for Big Love.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble and it's only 8pm. But frankly, if he thinks I'm an alien, he should clearly get out more often. And maybe I should too.

Coz it's Friday night:

.

2010-05-23T02:44:00.002+02:00

I just watched this video again for the first time since becoming a mum, and it's really blown me away (no pun intended). actually I think it's about being a mother, sending your kids out into the world...mortality...the final separation that comes to us all...yep, pretty full on stuff...can't really put it into words right now. Lovely lovely song too.

ha haaaa!

2010-05-15T20:38:00.005+02:00

If you kept a diary, like I did, from age 13 to..erm..now, with gaps here and there of months or whole years...and you've still got that box of spiral-bound notebooks and the old black and red hardcover notebooks that you used to be able to get from Chinese Tradestores...somewhere in your parents' house, and you live in fear that one day they'll find them and read them...yet you can't bring yourself to throw them out...this is an article for you

ps Mum if you're reading this I never said you were a slapper, it's just that I was a female Adrian Mole and even if I havent ever re-read them I know it's nothing but cringeworthy

Oh and this too! Now you can perform your teenage angst! it just gets better and better!

tellytubby twin love

2010-05-08T23:43:00.004+02:00

we don't usually dress them the same but that day we just felt like messing with the daycare people...

ps one baby girl slammed her hand on the keyboard randomly and now my pics and fonts are wierd on blogger...can anyone tell me how to scale down a size..? I have no idea what she pressed...

thanks a lot

2010-05-07T20:58:00.005+02:00

Dear Girly-Girl in Aviator Sunglasses and Strappy Spartan Sandals

thank you so much for reversing into the back of our car this morning in the carpark of Geant Casino. As we were practically stationary at the time and my head hit the side of the windowframe and my sunglasses flew onto the dashboard I can only assume you had a nice speed going there as you tried to reposition your zippy little red secretary car that, incredibly, was unscathed.

I'm very happy everyone was safely seatbelted in, and of course I am particularly referring to my two small children who we now cannot take out in the car because you managed to destroy the entire back of it.

So there'll be no family outings for a while because a) in the eyes of the law a rear collision is automatically our fault so insurance will give us nothing and there were no witnesses b)we can't actually fit the pram or anything into the back now c) we have to now fork out almost a thousand euros to get the entire back of the car fixed.

Apart from the slight lapse in good manners by not removing your sexy reflector designer sunglasses once as you told several obvious lies (oh, and yes, destroying our car), I did appreciate your calm in the face of my husband's ranting anger, and the impressive address that you wrote down on a piece of paper attests to your good breeding, but

bloody bloody hell, you really drive like an arse, love.

things

2010-05-02T21:48:00.017+02:00

Things I'd like to talk about but life is crazy and don't have a lot of time-

* hormones. moods. why do we have them? do men have the same things happen? inexplicable lows that make you want to stick a fork in the love of your life's forehead and then 6 hours later marry him/her a second time? every 2 weeks?

*bought tickets to go back to Oz (home) this summer. i am inexpressibly excited about this.....Hugely, obscenely expensive. it's about as far away as you can possibly get. i need to work when I'm back in Qld to fill up the financial black hole that i have created. please send me offers of Brisbane based employment over July/August, asap...

* 25 hour flight fear of toddlers. we bought four seats even if we didn't have to. i've done this trip lots of times and the thought of adding a 13kg child on your knees in economy class Emirates doesn't bear thinking about

*the carp that is TV (that meant to read crap, sorry). After a year without TV we finally got the antenna reinstalled. the same people on the same talkshows!! french weekend tv makes me want to gouge my own eyes out with a wheelie bin.

*eating the first roast chicken for two weeks. it...was...incredible......oh my god...imagine the first ape--person-human who devoured a fire-cooked bit of meat. Her brain must have exploded.

*i'm now seriously vegetarian. I looked at an organic raw beetroot yesterday, at its little roots at the bottom and leaves up the top and thought "i can't eat this, it's still alive" and it is now in a jam jar full of water on the downstairs windowsill and i'm trying to coax it back to life. what is wrong with me???? i dont know what has come over me, but its definitely not carnivorous. strangely enough, free range chickens don't seem to count.

*tonight I saw this ad on telly. i live in France, I occasionally go to Paris, it's not like it's my own personal Valhalla/Jesus but this ad is about as opposite to what i am currently feeling about my post-twins-self as you could possibly get. i'm not sure- am i supposed to identify with this woman, or bazooka her?

(ps is there some strange orgasmic thing happening with the scene thru the tunnel/under the bridge- or is it just me? perhaps it's too subtle)

This self-image-mother-woman-thing is a recurring theme in my life lately, given that if i Let It ALL HAng OUt I could pass for 6 months pregnant. Jeez. It's insane. I saw this waitress putting out chairs and tables yesterday in town and I swear she looked like me, 10 years ago, all skinny and black jeans and Cool. but then again she probably smokes too many cigarettes and drinks too much red wine and eats microwave lasagne for one in her studio and is in love with some Waster Fool, like I was.

*i havent smoked a ciggie for three days

*in other news, spring is here, the summerbirds are out, and life is looking up...desîte my crankiness, i remain, very very happy...

*where's the ashtray? i'm sure there were some butt ends i could smoke..

letterbox

2010-04-30T00:08:00.002+02:00

monkey brain

2010-04-29T08:58:00.010+02:00

It's about time I posted something other than recycled photos...even if I have nothing to report...

Spring is here...the street sweeping machines toddle up the roads with their spinning brushes and throw a billion pollen bombs into the air (as I write this I can hear Half Man Half Chip sneezing uncontrollably up on the terrace where he's laying the floor so we can start having BBQs and rooftop aperitifs).

I have been clawing my own eyes out trying to finish a website for translation and training services...I used to be able to pick up computer/software stuff pretty easily. I am First Generation Computer, after all- I remember our Dad brought home the first PC, a ZX Spectrum, when I was about 8. It had a nifty blue keyboard with soft clicky rubber keys and programs were loaded onto a tape recorder and you plugged it into the TV. I used to play Boulder Dash, and a game called Horace Goes Skiing, or something...and even started programming myself, in Basic. At 8 years old- back when my brain cells were still regenerating themselves, before I discovered beer and cigarettes and soulful guitar-playing boys at uni.Does anyone remember the sound that used to make, when the programs loaded? It all worked by sound..you just plugged in an audio jack and the computer understood... It was great. Another one of those sounds that will be forgotten as technology progresses...

Like the sound of external modems connecting...ice cream trucks...old ring phones...shortwave radio crackle and whine...the hum of the test pattern on the tv after midnight...the sqeak of an old metal Hills Hoist (Australian clothes hanger thing in your backgarden) being raised and lowered by cranking the handle...the rolling clunk of those primitive photocopy machines at school (remember that nice alcohol/ink smell on fresh copies?)...the sound of a cassette reaching its end in a car stereo and clicking back over to play the other side...the sound of a cassette stretched and distorted coz you left it on the dashboard in the sun...the click of a pile of records dropping one by one onto the record player when you could stack them up in a playlist...the sound of a camera shutter opening and closing when you take a photo...the hum and click of the timer in a darkroom...the sound of your Dad's 8mm projector showing home movies in the sitting room...that noise that fluorescent tubes used to make which they probably still make but my ears have aged too much and I can't hear it anymore...old metal alarm clocks going off in the morning...

Anyway, where was I?

It also had a massive 48K memory. I think my plastic cigarette lighter has slightly more than that, now. And I seem to have reached some sort of biological ceiling where my brain just can't go any further. I can no longer simply doodle away at some software package and work it out by instinct... According to my brother my seven year old nephew solved some deep programming hardware disk shell extension thingy problem on their computer the other day. Horrifying.

I recently finished Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, where the human race reaches an evolutionary dead end...I won't tell you the end, but it scared the willies out of me, and I think I might be hitting the same wall.

Another beer, please, barman...

barcelona

2010-04-23T21:33:00.003+02:00

tout petit

2010-04-21T15:06:00.006+02:00

Et la
tout
petit
tu
vois
c'est
nos
vies

And there
so
small
do
you
see?
our
lives

a little backstory to the Bunker Man

2010-04-16T21:04:00.026+02:00

In my previous life as archaeologist, some 15 years ago (!!) i found myself on a remote Scottish island, excavating Pictish settlements on a university project. Bunker Man hitchhiked his way to us one day, a tall lanky fellow Piscean, a blond boy from New Zealand on a quest, and we were both thrilled to encounter another antipodean and from then on we were kind of inseparable.

Highlights from that time include Bunker Man and I being interviewed in a small tent, hungover, by a young ginger-haired baby-faced policeman in a missing persons case the day after the infamous and surreal Eurovision Song Contest Party in our tiny cottage by a loch, a loch full of mussel beds that we weren't allowed to touch because we only had Sunday off and the local protestant church would not tolerate any sort of work on the Lord's Day. We were even warned not to leave the cottage in groups of more than three in case the islanders thought we were going to excavate.

The hermits (but not their leader, H, a charismatic woman with a small child who held all of us in her spell for a time) who inhabited the burnt out (and in some cases, bullet riddled) bunkers at the abandoned airforce base came down from the hills and drank inhuman quantities of whiskey and danced with us, semi-naked, to, amongst other things, the dreadful Eurovision Song Contest winner, and then later to the Shallow Grave and Trainspotting soundtrack, in the smoke from our peat fire.

We were the last ones to the see the man alive, a young guy who'd come up to the cottage and asked for directions. A couple of days later the alarm was sounded when a backpack containing clothes and personal items and his passport was found neatly placed at the foot of the standing stones by visiting white witches who'd gone up there in the dead of night to do whatever it is they do at the place where we watched the UFOs circle the spreading sky.

(UFOs ....um...yes..yes I know....but sorry...the only explanation for what we saw, barring insanely advanced technology that we don't know about)

After the police had dragged the lochs and taken our statements, the missing man was found safe and well in England. He'd left everything he had on the island and walked home, in the grip of some breakdown.

There are oh so many more stories, including a personal appearance by Billy Bragg (oooh my hero....), but I'll stop there. I'm kind of glad now that dear Bunker Man has read every single post I've ever written and is still speaking to me! A dear friend has read my secret diary and has still found me acceptable as a human being. Deeply surprising but lovely...

Ps: re reading this I think to myself well bugger me, i've had an interesting life so far. Huh!

to blog or not to blog, that is the question

2010-04-14T07:50:00.005+02:00

Café, le Corbsuier, Marseille 2005

Hello Jonno (Bunker Man)!

My mind is a complete blank...

Um....here's another photo while I think about this...

dear bunker man (or, my blog cover has been blown)

2010-04-12T22:23:00.003+02:00

but what?? how?? what??? when did you...? you read my blog?? oh jaysus!! i may have to delete everything. NOW.

aggrrrgghhhhhh !!!

bunker man, 1996

2010-04-09T01:43:00.003+02:00

lourdes 2002

2010-04-06T00:01:00.002+02:00

I think I'm making book-ends here, in between angsty wannabe writer and angsty hormonal housewife posts...bear with me...

Charleville 1997, waiting for the cessna

2010-04-05T21:11:00.000+02:00

coup de gueule

2010-04-02T13:50:00.009+02:00

So i know the best blogs are apparrently those with a bit of focus, like "this is a twin mum blog", or "this is a blog about my journey from obscure suburbia to famous author" or "this is my slam poetry anarchist artichoke farming tofu fermentation mixed media foot fetish blog" or something but hey, i cant help it, i never really did know why I started it anyway so i might as well continue in my random fashion.

It's spring, it's sunny outside, it's Easter weekend. I can hear brass bands and horses and tourists and laughing kids and couples walking hand in hand past our window, and I am inside tiptoeing around because my gorgeous darling teething crying twins have gone to bed for a siesta, smoking dried up old tobacco (me not the girls), drinking coffee and feeling sorry for myself having just vaccumed the living room for the second time today.

I think what triggered my latest hormonal meltdown is...hormones, yes, OK, let's be honest, it started there first. I checked email this morning and got a reply from an old, dear friend in another country (sort of my best friend from years ago at uni, we never really got it together to get together) who I'd finally harassed into replying. He asked after my partner Peter (who is Peter?) and said he hoped our little boy was doing well and must be growing fast (boy? ONE boy?)

Yes I know life moves on and everything but this is the guy who last time I saw him 2 years ago had driven 8 hours across the country to see me, revealed he thought he should have married me instead of his wife, then summarily stopped communicating with me. I mean WTF????

Oh and the usual stuff. The twins walk and run but I can't take them out alone because they're completely unaware of things like car danger, and no matter how tightly I hold their hands there's always that moment when they'll both try to break free at the same time, and I wouldnt have a chance alone to get things under control again safely. They're fairly rambunctious? is that even a word? and don't tolerate the pram now for long unless I'm running through the streets at 40kms per hour delivering them to daycare or something so the idea of casually going out to have coffee down the road is out of the question (I tried it a few days ago, the screaming fit they threw attracted the attention of a concerned-looking group of Japanese tourists. I believe photos were taken)

Lucky husband has a flexible work routine so he's really present, and I am such an ungrateful bitch, we have a roof over our heads and food on the table and two gorgeous girls and husband cooks and does dishes evey night and I hate myself for throwing massive hissy fits like the one I just threw

I'm moving to small font now so you can skip this bit if you like

where he asks what's wrong and I list everything, I mean everything, from the cat having destroyed the carpet to the red wine stain on the white couch to the way I get an actual adult real conversation with a friend once a fortnight if I'm lucky, to the way my single friends find me unutterably boring, to my bad haircut and the way I wear rumpled clothes because I'm the last person I take care of (where is the iron?), I feel I never see anyone, that I don't have any family here and i miss my mum and dad and even though im a vegeterian again iwant my mum to come and cook a roast lamb on sunday, I'm 10 kilos overweight and I'm plain again, to the relentless nightly routine (put girls to bed, eat, drink three glasses of red wine, watch movie, go to bed), to my dreadful career profile to the fact he put his shoes on the armchair again and they left two grey footprints on the cushion, and that I am tormented by paradisical visions of my children running free through wildflowers in the sun not being led by very tightly held hands through city streets, although thank christ I didn't mention my feelings of hurt at my old friend's neglect (the email) or my unsaid and unspeakable envy for a good friend of mine with small twins who is married to a rich man and has a cleaning lady and a childminder on permanent call.

ergh

why am i never bloody happy???

It's so hard when you're in that hormonal funk to identify which one of those things is the real problem, you know, that mood where everythings all mixed up. I'm heading towards 40 and still dont know how to do it. For God's sake!

I want the girls to wake up soon, I need baby hugs.

I may delete this later. GAH!!!

found photo, fleamarket, Avignon

2010-03-31T23:10:00.009+02:00

The father of a good friend of mine is dying...he's in hospital in palliative care. He's the first (almost) of our parents to go. I'm 37 and I guess it's the age, isn't it...it's when these things start to happen. My mum called to tell me, and she was explaining what it's like to lose your mum and dad, and as she was talking I felt the tears coming...the useless, angry, frightened tears i shed when i was about 8 and realized that one day my parents would die.

I remember holding my mum's hand one day and she pulled at the skin on the knuckles and it took a second to smooth down and she laughed and we looked at my hand and it was firm and plump and i couldnt imagine a time when that skin would be dry, when it would take that second or two to smooth down, having pinched it. The skin on the back of my hand, now, when i take the hands of my daughters, when they reach up and look at me and smile

twins vs the roman empire

2010-03-29T13:13:00.002+02:00

attack!!!

anyone for cheese?

2010-03-25T14:58:00.005+01:00

Voila the famous Corsican maggot cheese (before).

There are people who aren't at all bothered at eating maggotty cheese in France. In fact, it's seen as a distinguishing feature of some cheeses, like a tangy taste or a certain colour rind. A few months ago we ate something..we were told was cheese...at friends' after dinner, and it had miniscule tiny little spidery bugs living inside. It was a goat's cheese, very old, all dry and powdery and delicious. I shut my eyes and pretended I didn't know and washed it down with Bordeaux.

This is a nice specimen of Corsican cheese before the infestation went rampant. Do you notice the little squiggly white things? I certainly didn't, and we ate half of it, then two days later I took the rest out of the fridge and found a happy maggot party underway. I don't have an after picture coz I was so queasy the rest got stuck in a plastic bag and put into the freezer for months until we moved and I think it probably went with the fridge to the waste depot.

Bon appetit!

Writing- oh this is not easy, not easy at all

2010-03-23T10:38:00.009+01:00

Ergh.

I re-read my 13 000 words of first draft I'd written before Christmas. Oh. My. Dear. God.

It stinks! It hums! Almost as badly as the Corsican maggot infested cheese a friend brought us back a couple of months ago.

I've reset the counter. Ok, this is serious now.

But dear lord, it's hard. It's really really hard.

First there's The Fear-sitting down in front of the computer and that blank screen. I didn't expect it but it isnt some abstract intellectual fear, but a real physical anxiety down in the stomach. I never had this before just scribbling away in cafés or the train to work. I actually enjoyed it. It seemed so easy. The first two short stories I wrote got published first go. In "real" literary journals. Something must have been working. OK, I was single and demented at the time, but surely you can be happy and creative too?

Is this because it's easy to write and make it average but it's hard to write well, or is it because I'm tackling the wrong thing? Or I'm just crap?

And then there are the more mechanical questions- do we get inside the main character's head? Do we hear her thoughts? OK, so I'm writing and she's just saying stuff and so why isnt she thinking anything? What the fck is wrong with her? And what's that guy doing there, he's not doing anything, he's just sitting there with his arms folded on the table waiting for something...oh, yeah, for me to make him do something. Shit. Ok, do something, damn you!! Say something! No, stop saying endless "hello, how are you" and get to it!

And what's that woman doing there at the restaurant anyway, I didn't know she was coming. Why is she being such a bitch?

Maybe I should change to first person point of view. But I'm afraid it'll all just end up sounding like me. All those anxious thoughts and stream of consciousness mumblings.

And where did my vocabulary go? I seem to only have about 50 words left. It's already getting monotonous.

All they're doing is lighting cigarrettes for each other and looking moody and staring at the camembert.

Oh GOD!!!

.

2010-03-22T21:56:00.002+01:00

It's 10pm on a Monday night and I'm listening to one of my daughters crying, sort of on and off. I think it's her teeth again. I'm sitting downstairs, just finished eating, and Half Man Half Chip has been upstairs for the last hour and a half trying to comfort her.

I spoke to a friend this weekend, she was in a bit of a rage about her fulltime job and having to come home to cook and clean and take care of the two kids while hubby plays playstation...he's lovely really, but doesnt seem to do anything without being nagged 2000 times...

I put the girls to bed and it was really hard...teething overtired toddlers...and he poured me a glass of wine and went upstairs and I havent seen him since. He just popped his head down the stairs and said "you eat, I'll be ok" and he's up there lying down with her on the mattress on the floor, and he may spend the night there. He worked all day and he hasn't even eaten.

I don't want to sound smug, but ... I'm a lucky woman...

Sorry- I just wanted to mark this moment...

friday night is all about me me me

2010-03-19T22:40:00.014+01:00

Husband is out playing jazz in some select bar/resto and i have a delectable whole evening to myself...(may St Bernadette of Lourdes smite me down for having given the wrong impression in my last post-Half Man Half Chip does at least 50% of childrearing...if not more...I was just having writerly angst about other bodies blocking my kreative energies...I'm sooo precious...obviously I'm already cut out for this whole writing thing)

friday night alone and I just knew I'd end up on Youtube, and yes, here I am. Idle hands and all that.

This is an interesting question for those of you who, like us, who have no TV, all alone for an entire evening, left to your own solitary, secret devices. What do you watch on youtube? Quite telling, I think...

I'm apparrently stuck in the 90s when I used to volunteer for 4ZZZ, an anarchist communist lesbian punk rap headkicking radio station in Brisbane...I keep going back to that stuff. The Hunters and Collectors was well and truly mainstream at that point, even then. But I keep revisiting this clip (1982!! amazing!), every friday night so it must mean something...the mysterious ambience, like the inhuman spaces of a disused powerstation...

And besides which, what is there not to love about trumpets and rock??

There's no Aussie like an expat Aussie...

my first morning as a writer

2010-03-19T14:50:00.017+01:00

7am The twins wake up. feed, dress them

9am Back from dropping them off at daycare. Husband announces he has the morning off. Stands behind me crunching toast and slurping coffee while I check email, smoke an angry cigarette and try to keep calm

9:30am think of going to the billiards club to write where it's quiet. remember it's not open til 3pm. Think of the library. Closed in the mornings. Think of the old man bar down the street- one armed bandits, babyfoot games and old men drinking white wine on empty stomachs. Think of going upstairs to bedroom but depressed at thought of sitting on unmade bed with a pad of paper surrounded by piles of washing and the looming bookcases taunting me with other peoples' literary mastepieces

10am Realise I havent had a shower for four days and that in exactly one hour I'll have to start preparing lunch. Have shower

10:20 Dry hair with one hand and hang out washing with the other

10:30am Vaccuum downstairs. vaccuum the kitchen walls (stone dust problem)

11am Cook girls lunch

11:30am Walk to daycare and pick up girls

12pm Back home. eat, feed girls. clean up spaghetti they've thrown onto floor, table, walls, me, the cat. Break up several violent 18 month old twin let's-compete- for-Mum's-attention fights. Play nursery songs on guitar to try to calm them. This drives them into further frenzies.

1pm DESPAIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1:30pm Vaccuum downstairs again after girls go for nap

2pm Do lunch dishes

2:30 Girls wake up due to housework noises. They find my very expensive camera and proceed to drop in repeatedly on tiled floor. They find my printed novel outline and eat it. More despair, followed by short bursts of rage and then a grinding resignation. Decide to try again tonight. Or tomorrow. Maybe 5am.

** i should add that husband kindly volunteered to leave me alone in peace and go do DIY jobs on the terrace but he kept having to come downstairs for tools...his only sin in fact was just being at home, poor thing...

twins are breakup babies??

2010-03-17T09:35:00.002+01:00

Interesting short article in the times this morning about the havoc having twins can wreak on a relationship...

my latest scheme

2010-03-16T09:20:00.007+01:00

I've been busy lately with babies running all over the place, a new fall of snow meant me blocked inside with them for several days...and I also had a sudden frenzy of domesticity which saw me properly clean the house for the first time in months, it seemed. Except our bedroom, where all the stuff I remove from downstairs ends up, because we don't allow anyone to go up there.

Just to get to the window, you must navigate around a Mt Everest of my clothes next to the bookcase offering the kinds of slopes seen only in the winter olympics, two painting easels, an huge, old fashioned draughtsmans drawing table complete with stool and 50kilo iron balance weight, a telescope, and two black and white photo enlargers (one of which a huge monster of a beast). Not counting boxes of cds and books and relentless piles of papers and scribblings and letters saved through the years. I can't actually open the doors to my wardrobe because of a box of retro/antique items I bought when I was planning to launch a get rich quick boutique on ebay (thus the pile of clothes on the floor).

So we basically just throw ourselves into bed at night in pole jumping fashion and if you go to sleep quickly you don't even have to look at the mess.

But the snow has melted, the babies are still full of smiles and joy, and today was I think the first glimmer of spring weather. I've just come back from a café and it feels good to at last get some sun on my face, and I'm feeling ...cautiously...pleased with myself, as I've basically re-worked and re-outlined the structure of my latest book attempt. I stalled before Christmas at 13 000 words because of baby illnesses and all the happens around that festive time and sheer fear of failure and lack of committment and all that.

But I now have little bristol cards with scenes on them that i can rearrange and push around on a timeline. cool, hey?

I woke up a couple of weeks ago in the middle of the night freaking about money and the future for my children and my less than superb money earning capacity here in France, and I thought- writing is one thing you can do, so write a potboiler. Like about ten thousand people decide every day, having said that. I know the chances of publication are slim and the returns probably modest but hey, it's better than translating plasterboard leaflets, no? isn't it?? it must be...oh god...

wish me luck. i know i'm a naive fool. but 15 years of regular writing must have taught me something (though obviously you wouldn't know it to look at this blog).

has anyone else gone down this writer fantasy path? any advice? (apart from don't go there, of course) about how to get self discipline? I can hardly even spell the word, and besides which I'm here blogging. Right. I'm off to disconnect the modem now.

please join us, dear my friend

2010-03-11T22:56:00.010+01:00

Now having recently finished transcribing seven hours of unedited documentary word for word, I have to say that any software that can help someone else avoid doing this for a living can only be welcomed. But it's Thursday night in The Bush and we don't have TV, so as usual we're in front of Youtube watching old favourites- tonight an old English whodunnit series..

Up pops a little red box -"CC" which then we find out means that they're experimenting with a new software speech capture gizmo that automatically generates subtitles for the hearing impaired. Which is a wonderful, amazing, far-too-late-in-coming concept. Honestly, I think it's great. In theory.

Far be it from me to claim supremacy over the English language (although my grammar is a lot better since I started teaching English) I'd just like to share with you some examples. These are not the most outrageous examples, they're ..like...how it works. Every time.

You don't happen to know which house Mr Porthrupp lives in by any chance?
If that happens the poll voted to ban itself

I'm Mr Porthrupp
I'm just appalled truck

I know this seems like totally the wrong moment, Antonia
I know it seems like taking a moment and tell me

but we have managed to pick our way through it all now
much to keep coming

I'm afraid it's not what you're gonna want to hear
I'm afraid it's not what you got one

A man who can't bear the thought of time slipping away
I'm an incumbent for time slipping away

desperate to claw back the past
that's fit to call the process still cling

But let's skip to the romantic scene-

You've missed your last train
Please join us

We both know what this means
Please join us

A six hour wait at that sodding station
Six tell you that some of these stations a while

Find yourself a nice bench, try not to sit in any vomit
Contestants going to trust the police

Isn't that what they say, Jonathan? time flies?
He's not in the senate. time.

Maximum points for trying, I think it's a great project. But for the moment I guess my job is safe....I'm thinking of uploading myself reciting some of my vast archives of drunken poetry and retranscribing the results. It could be the next postmodern classic...

when will i write something decent?

2010-03-09T23:52:00.014+01:00

I'm sorry for lack of decent posts- I feel I have nothing to say at the moment. Babies, housework, not writing book but stalking published authors on the internet and re reading my 28 "how to write a novel in a year and get published 5 minute writer the writing book" type books (and yet, cruelly, NOT WRITING), in between playing nursery songs on my birthday guitar and hoovering the quaint but fcking shitful 1000 year old dust from our floors. So I offer up another random snap from my archives.

what i really need is someone to offer me huge amounts of money to go and take photos and write accompanying texts. any takers?

PS these cowboys were lovely blokes...the Katherine Rodeo, 1997.

pps: I stalked myself on statcounter and this page has had about a billion hits since 30 minutes ago. is the entire world obsessed with cowboy bums? why doesnt anyone of them leave comments? how bizarre

things you catch yourself saying

2010-03-08T08:12:00.004+01:00

To my 18 month old daughter this morning:

"Alright then, put cake in your ear, I don't care, but you can drive yourself to the hospital in the snow"

2010-03-06T01:39:00.002+01:00

.

2010-03-03T23:38:00.001+01:00

more from my archives

2010-03-02T11:06:00.001+01:00

Cat, meet Cistercian monk. Cistercian monk, meet cat.

erg

2010-02-26T09:04:00.003+01:00

On having put on my new arty-farty coat, grey wool with a classy monk-like cowl, and longish tails at the back that make me look like a famous writer or art gallery owner or a sexy 17th century dandy in my jeans and boots, striding out this morning accepting the (I assumed) admiring glances of passersby, I get home and realize that the shoulder bag I'd been carrying had shucked up my t-shirt underneath to expose a cheeky expanse of white flabby post-twins tummy over my jeans.

Ah, yes, these moments just make life worth living, don't they?

because the xanax smurfs are still eating my brain

2010-02-22T13:53:00.003+01:00

Montmartre, 2003

photoshopped

2010-02-11T09:52:00.004+01:00

Is it just me or have they shaved 5 kilos of this poor girl's torso?
Courtesy of Les 3 Suisses catalogue..

50 m from le corbusier

2010-02-11T00:12:00.002+01:00

bloodsports and the sunday roast

2010-02-08T15:31:00.019+01:00

They wait for an hour under hot sun, fanning their faces with straw hats, calling out for fresh water from the vendors that climb over the seats carrying trays of cold drinks. Afficionados, curious locals, tourists arms folded unsure, first-timers like me. The colours, applause and music burst over the head of a young bull that charges out of the cool darkness into a bright, noisy space. Startled to a skidding stop, thick neck swinging its head around, finds the little man standing alone, shaking his red cape, dancing a little dance, shouting, jeering, a provocation.

The animal runs, kicking up sand, already sweating, misses. The Torerro slides his body away at the last moment, sweeps his cape over sand. Time and time again.

When the Torrero tires, other little men emerge, wave their capes. The beast's brain a hot pulse of anger now. It runs towards them and into nothing. Again, and again. The Torerro approaches, pushing his hips out, salutes the crowd and plants his feet firmly apart, spreads his arms wide and lowers his head, eyeing the bull, lets out a shout of challenge. He doesn't move, he is absolutely unflinching as the enormous mass brushes past his stockinged thigh. An intake of breath, then the crowd cheers.

Tiring now, slower, the beast paws the sand, drooling fatigue, tongue flapping as he swallows, thirsty, enraged, uncomprehending.

While the Torrero struts around the arena, a figure in black runs onto the sand with two spears in his hands. The bull takes clumsy aim and as it struggles for balance he thrusts the points deep between its shoulderblades. I am suddenly deeply, deeply surprised to be here. Did I just see that? Did he just stab something into that animal?

A low noise of pain. Blood appears in the froth at the animal's mouth. By the crowd's nodding and applause, this is considered clean.

The sand is spotted with blood and scored by stumbling hooves. The short spears, wrapped in red and yellow ribbons, flop at an unnatural angle from the animal's back. One, two, three more sweeps past and a final approach, slower now. The Torrero places himself head-on to the animal and brings the sword down behind its neck. The crowd cheers. The bull drops to its knees, then drags itself away, head swinging, stiffly seeking.

It ends badly, it is too slow. The crowd begins a low uneasy mutter, a tourist places her hands over her eyes. Some of those who continue to watch, like me, think Is this it? is this what all these people have come to see?This sad little spectacle ?

The figure in black runs to the animal, now kneeling by the sideline, still struggling, and the Torerro steps back, the strut taken out of him. The older man bends down close, and a short dagger finishes the job. He carries the ear nonetheless, the young Torrero, this little man, around the arena as the crowd applauds him politely. But when the carthorses drag the corpse across the sand the spectators stand in respect, clapping slowly.

What I am thinking, stupidly, is ten minutes ago, that thing was alive.

Walking to the car five bulls later, I feel saturated. My eyes hurt from the sun. I feel sorry. I won't go again. I'm not sure what else to think.

I pass a restaurant where locals are drinking aperitifs in the evening sun. People, more compassionate than I, who have refused to see the Corrida out of protest against the cruelty (or perhaps simply indifference), tuck into steak and salad. Cheap grilled chicken and chips. A middle aged man comes out of a butcher's carrying a white plastic bag with a kilo of sausages. As I'm driving home I start thinking about tonight's dinner.

.

2010-02-04T23:33:00.002+01:00

um...ahem...

2010-02-02T00:58:00.002+01:00

Ok so when you've had twins, if you're not a 22 year old supermodel type, yes, you do have a slight tummy afterwards, even a year afterwards, OK ??

But tonight, putting the girls to bed, they pulled up my t-shirt and started slapping that tummy, shrieking with laughter, and offered their dummies to my bellybutton.

the old switcheroo-fondues-karma free cooking

2010-01-30T15:25:00.008+01:00

I was by myself last night, my man has got a cosy gig playing music with two other friends in a restaurant on Friday nights, and at the end of the night they feed them fondue, tartiflette and other cheese crimes. He comes home smelling like Half-man Half-chip from all the fondue oil in the restaurant.

So put the girls to bed, then went through an hour or so of one girl waking up with a sore tummy- I took her downstairs and we watched the screensaver going through my 200 GB of photos (the downside of buying a high-quality camera, it has eaten my computer's brain), me all the while whispering her name, rocking her and softly explaining the photos. She fell asleep in my arms and I put her to bed...

Early this morning we were in their room playing, eating madeleines the four of us, scattering crumbs, and I corrected my husband (Half-man Half-chip) several times because he kept mixing up their names. Until I realized that not only was I wrong this morning but all last night, and I'd actually even put the twins in the wrong beds dressed in each other's pyjamas.

They are so incredibly alike. It doesn't really bother me, making mistakes like that, although I dislike doing it in public because people give me looks of shocked condemnation. But I do hope it settles down and I stop calling them the wrong name because I'm pretty sure it could be a bit confusing for them, once they hit say 2 years old, and I don't want to be the cause of any existential crises...it's tough enough growing up without not being entirely sure who you are, after all. That stuff usually starts at age 13 and for some (me?) never resolves itself...

On the toothache front, I went to the chemist to ask for a stronger painkiller but the woman looked at me meaningfully and said "Oh, that painkiller works, Madame". I said "No, actually, it doesn't. Can I have something stronger, please?" and she just pursed her lips and repeated "Oh, no, it does work, Madame, and I'm not giving you anything stronger without a prescription". Obviously she has me marked as a codeine fiend, huddled in the kitchen boiling down cough syrup while my neglected children (who I can't tell apart anyway) cry in the corner playing with broken syringes. My usual disshevelled appearance probably didn't help (uncombed hair, random toddler bodily fluids on my clothes, reeking of white vinegar after an environmentally freindly but smelly cleaning session).

It has now been ..um...four days since a morsel of industrial meat passed my lips. Half-man Half-chip ate a bacon sandwich for lunch today and it was very, very hard not to beg for a bite. But I managed it. Mainly because I dug up my old copy of The Higher Taste, the old Hare Krishna cookbook- "A Guide to Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking and a Karma-Free Diet"- with sections called Factory Farming and Compassion and Karma and Reincarnation. There used to a brilliant Hare Krishna vegetarian restaurant in Brisbane, on Elizabeth Street, back when Elizabeth Arcade was full of hippie shops selling saris and bongs and incense, little vegetarian sandwich shops, a second hand record store, and nearby of course was the old Bohemian Café...all this before the developers moved in and demolished anything of any character and inner city Brisbane was transformed into a Cappucino Themepark with all the old style charm of the Dubai International Airport duty-free gallery (but that's another story).

We used to go to the Hare Krishna restaurant as students, stuff ourselves with dirt cheap delicious veggie meals that you ate sitting on cushions on the floor in a big sunlit room. Sometimes it was free- but as I found out at Byron Bay one year, only if you go along and sit through a lengthy lecture about the Lord Krishna and listen to 15 white middle class young people dressed in robes bang tamborines and chant "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama" for about three hours before they brought out the good stuff.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah- so I'm arming myself by re-reading the karma free cookbook, and Fast Food Nation, and trying to avoid my treasured 1000 page Classics of Spanish cuisine, or the encyclopaedic Cuisine Française.

So for the moment the fish and free range diet is working well...I just have to be strong...when i open the fridge to family-sized packets of bacon...

old stuff

2010-01-29T13:38:00.005+01:00

Edinburgh 1995
Maclean, NSW, 2004