I am not sure where the present obsession of motions and spill originate from. I could google it but at my age I have enough on my plate.
I know that moving motions is the essence of getting on with the business of governing but how politicians can keep a straight face in Parliament while sitting on private motions is tsunami causing hilariously funny. Is that why the English speaking world has produced so many top comedians? How did the word ‘motion’ ever come to be part of parliamentary language as did ‘spills’? Another type of moving motions is the intestinal one, at times far more urgent and necessary. When you look at that coterie of politicians sitting there in rows it might help to see them in their other ‘motion moving’ role as well. It helps to give perspective.
With the latest spill being defeated, our PM can again walk tall, more likely stumble on. He must restrain his habit of rashly following his scattered urges and the flowery repetitious language. His wife ought to take the pictures of Queen and Country away from his bed-side table, replace them with a picture of Erasmus of Rotterdam instead. For his daily drink, give him Billy Tea instead of Earl Grey. It might also help for Mrs Abbott to tie him to a plank to stop him from his obsessive and continuous genuflecting motions whenever he thinks of Australia as living at the feet of Queen Victoria and glorious Beefeaters.
I don’t know what holds the future. Will it be a continuation of what we have now? I feel somewhat deflated with the prospect of seeing the Abbott spectacle for some time yet on TV. I do have the option of switching the thing off.
I remember well the excitement of the new. With age comes repetition of events and the edges less sharply defined, a dulling of experiences, the sun a bit less yellow. But whatever the future holds, I will never give in to the brutality of what our leaders have meted out towards the asylum seekers. That will keep me on edge as nothing else will. Oh, and the silly knighthoods, moving motions and all the rest of absurdity of life…
We mustn’t take it too seriously. Go and get a laugh.
My fishes died yesterday! I was foolish to have left the care of my aquarium to a neighbour up the road. We were going camping. All this back in the eighties or so. She, the friendly neighbour, in her way thought it best to feed them in one hit as she too planned to go away but did not tell us that. What made it worse was that the aquarium held salt water tropical fish with life coral. It held 500 litres of ocean water with some beautiful and very expensive fish. (notice ‘fish’ as the plural)
Too much food for fish means that the water will go off, bacteria will soak up all oxygen and the fish will simply drown and die. I had planned to go back to Sydney half way through our camping holiday to check on my fish. The devastation after arrival came clear within seconds. There was by beloved Emperor floating sideways gasping for air with two blue Damsels as dead as could be. The air pump was going flat tack but with some fish rotting as well, it was an impossible and unfair battle. I knew what to do.
I transferred the still live fish into a plastic garbage container with fresh lot of sea water which I obtained down the hill of our street direct from the harbour, and transferred the air pump to aerate the water nonstop. I emptied the aquarium of the putrid water and buried the dead fish below the paper bark tree in the court yard… A sad day! I saved some fish and after clean sea water was put in the aquarium transferred the live fishes* back into their own home again. Fish are very intelligent and they knew I was in the room and would became agitated, wanting to be fed. I read that an aquarium holder of octopuses’ allowed his pets to go and wander around the house at night before going back into the water.
When I read how reefs are being plundered by money hungry tropical reef fish and aquarium traders, I stopped having them and now just have our JRT ‘Milo’. Even in the dog world there are stories doing the rounds of ‘puppy farming’. It just is never ending how so much is reduced to money. Anyway, Milo is just a street dog without pedigree and was sold by a very caring dog loving family.
I now have to explain the heading of ‘loaves’.
During the last war and my persistent memories of that period so early on I was given a loaf of dark bread by a German soldier billeted below street level in the cellars of our street. It was just a few weeks before it would all end in the capitulation of all German troops. He must have felt pity. It was when hunger stalked the street of Rotterdam and thousands were starting to die of starvation. You can imagine my mother’s joy of having a loaf of bread. It came from the enemy. A kind enemy.
Of all the memories told in front of good decent people, this piece is the one to avoid. Please leave the room now…If you asked what I am by profession it would be better to list the things I am not. Certainly not a lawyer, doctor or dentist. Nor an articled clerk or keeper of tropical fish. That leaves still a lot of jobs. It is likely that I have worked at many of the other available options.
One of those was working on swinging stages. In those early days they were primitive wooden platforms suspended by steel cables or thick ropes from timber needles on top of the building’s roof on outside multi-story buildings. They were hoisted up and down the exterior by the use of winches or by a combination of pulleys and ropes. It was very well paid but not a job for the nervous or faint hearted. I started at nineteen and looked at my savings every week. I wanted to save up to go back to my school friends and life in Holland. The savings were kept in a metal box.
We all know that Australian Christmas parties at work involves a lot of arm movements lifting copious amounts of brown ale. They have calmed somewhat now. During my swinging stage operations in the early sixties, I was employed by a very large painting company with over one hundred fifty men and many apprentices. Their Christmas parties were legendary. They were held underneath the offices in Blues Point Rd, North Sydney. It was an area that also held the ropes, cables, ladders and winches and other equipment for those swinging stages. The joint was tidied up and stacked with boxes of the most glorious looking bright pink smiling prawns shimmering on ice. The lubrication necessary for ingesting the prawns was given and provided by large kegs of beer. Remember Christmas is very hot in Australia and working outside was thirsty and very hard dangerous work. The men were given the afternoon off to collect their pay and join the traditional Christmas Party. We all descended towards the office and the much looked forward Chrismas Party in droves. Thirsty and keyed up like hell. We were in for a cruising bruising but earned it.
All this has to be seen in the period when after-work drinking was the norm. A walk past any pub at 4.30 pm was a Bedlam re-invented. The din was overwhelming. Course oaths renting the cigarette smoke riddled stinking beer heat air. Large burly blue singled men standing at the bar. The trough below their feet ready for spills and butts. Pyjama clad kids with mums waiting outside for dad to come home, hoping they would not have totally pissed the earnings up against the walls of bitumen coated lavatories. It wasn’t a good time.
The verb and noun ‘chunder’ relates to much earlier times still. The English convicts on the way to Australia’s Botany Bay. During big seas and suffering bad food, huge waves and the first of the prisoners getting sick. Those on the top deck while vomiting overboard would shout to those on the lower deck ‘watch out under.’ In time this became shortened to watchunder and finally to ‘chunder’! It was a form of consideration for their ‘mates’. Mateship is still high on our national psyche.
It might also be possible to now join the above explanation and include the wise and profound Australian saying to ‘coming the raw prawn’. This means telling a lie or having someone on, as in; Don’t come the raw prawn to me, matey!. Are you getting what I am leading to?
I too was drawn to the Siren call of the Christmas party but combined it with picking up two suits from Reuben F Scarf in Sydney’s George Street first. At the time they promised two suits for the price of one. Tailor measured they were and dark charcoal in colour. After arrival at the party I did get stuck in many prawns and drank endless schooners of beer. Boy, I felt euphoric and happy, a rare event at that time. Two suits and my Christmas pay in pocket, the latter waiting to be placed in the metal box at home in Revesby.
But, for those that left the room to avoid unpleasantness; it won’t be long now, it is coming to a peak.
On the way home, and don’t ask me how, I got on the train, things started to come down a bit. Rather, things started to come up a bit. I had safeguarded my bag with the two suits and was lucid enough to feel the reassuring packet of my earnings in my pocket. I was kind-o-getting in preparation for an event I have never forgotten. Oddly enough, with all I had coped with, even now, I don’t really feel remorse or shame. It is or was really an event of reckoning or getting even, a kind of reward for things, a cathartic letting go…
Fortunately, at those earlier times the trains still had those ornate luggage racks above the seats and smokers could open windows, not to let the smoke out but to jettison the cigarette butts out. Anyway, I opened the window and ‘chundered’. It was wholeheartedly and with gusto. The prawns were not raw. Barry Humphreys would have regaled endlessly on about the stained-glass effect of the windows behind me as the train was in full flight. The passengers behind me, oh no, oh no, nervously racing to close their windows. Even so, no one complained, not that I would remember.
I came home to my parents in Revesby with my two suits intact and my money saved. What an achievement.
One more of those ditties and I’ll go on a rampage. I drove past the local church to try and find parking. I had run out of balsamic vinegar, an item much needed in my cooking the Holy Raan. This Raan dish is for North Indian Moghuls and Oosterman tribe each Christmas.
As I drove past the church it showed a luridly bright pink sign which said the most profound ; “Jesus is the reason for the season.’ This, just after I had recovered from a solid bout of some clear-sighted despair and much festive gloom. I wavered and felt like another good old re-visit to darkness and despair. Miraculously, a parking place offered itself and I was able to get to the sourness of the vinegar. A child was being smacked by an overwrought mother. Noelll, Noeeeelll, the Coles supermarket amplified over the Dairy division. The poor child, trying to help mum had dropped a Kilo of ‘plain yoghurt’ which exploded on the linoleum floor. Poor mum, nothing is ever plain.
I went home and inspected my 4 Kilo leg of sheep sweetly being marinated in a large oven dish in the fridge. For those that want the best Christmas dish, look up Raan recipe by Juli Sahni. The leg of lamb needs three days of marinating in a slurry of all sorts of ingredients. It really works each year and you will get praised to smithereens.
I’ll have to keep this post short and snappy. Within minutes of the grandsons arriving I was sitting in the Emergency ward of Bowral Hospital. Thomas had cut his foot on a shard of glass. This a result of a bottle falling on the tiled floor of the kitchen. Doctor Tony inspected the cut and cleaned it out. Thomas was back playing cricket twenty minutes later. Noeeel, Noellll. Jesus is the reason for…..?. Oh no!
Anyway. This is it till further notice. “A happy Christmas and season’s best” wishes to all of you having had the patience and endurance to keep reading so many drivelling words in some order.. Nothing profound here. Try next door.
We all have to do this. Fill up the car’s fuel tank at the petrol station. With the price of oil dropping by about twenty percent we would expect a similar drop in petrol. Not so, it has dropped, but not by as much as the Brent Crude oil price. It figures. The companies have to make up for the lower price by holding onto the higher price paid at the bowser for their dear life or dear profit. ‘Our Dear Brent Crude give us our daily Bollinger Oh la la French Champers;
The oil devout execs must be praying, eyes slanted piously upwards.
I can’t think of anything less inspiring than poking the fuel hose through the inlet opening of the fuel tank. In my car it has a spring loaded cover under which is a black cap with below it a dire warning ‘Diesel.’ It is about as far as my reading goes. Just one word, ‘Diesel’. However on the bowser itself are several items that one can read. ‘Please pay before moving car’ is one sentence, but there is more. Several options and grades of fuels with their different prices to study, but,… there is more, much more still. ‘Spend another five dollars you get another 4c off’ it states frankly but insistently.
Those words include vivid images of an ice cream called ‘Gay-Time’ and a slanting open soft drink bottle. (usually a 600 ml Coke bottle). The slant and the gushing out of the brown liquid is to invoke a kind of latent or hidden thirst in the petrol purchaser, almost imagining the fluid going down the throat and giving the two second joy as a decoy for true happiness. That’s what those images promise, true satisfaction of fake thirst sated and a more happy, happy feeling.
The problem is that once the hose is in the aperture one just has to watch the bowser tick over. This is when an overwhelming ennui takes over. I am desperate for a diversion, any diversion away from the maddening ticking over of the bowser. But I get drawn in each time. It is an addiction. I don’t want to miss out on the exact Fifty dollar amount that I always use as a limit and aim by the cent to achieve this. Don’t ask where this originates from. Perhaps the bombing of Rotterdam or maybe the Kipfler potato.
It is a small ambition, I know, but heaven help me out of this dreadful concentration of such a stupefying event. As I get nearer the fifty dollar mark my concentration reaches fever pitch. I slowly, cent by cent increments crawl towards the forty nine dollars eighty eight cents and then take a breather, surveying the situation calmly, collect my thoughts and try not to look down the floral blouse of the lady next to me, also bending and busy with bowser. I ignore the distraction and bravely continue on till the Fifty dollar is reached, right on the dot. Such triumph!
I walk to the garage and hand over my previously extracted fifty dollar note that I have kept in my closed fist just for that purpose. ‘Receipt?’ ‘No thanks.’ I walk out, relieved it is over.
And that’s that.
PS: The pictures are mine and totally unrelated to the article.
Tags: Bollinger, Brent oil, Coke, Diesel, Gay time
Our neighbours living opposite us in Rotterdam migrated to Australia in 1949. They were my mother’s best friends and helped us out during the war, even though it was a habit of theirs to put us in the coal shed if we had done a number 2. The pedagogues today would have a field-day and the issue no doubt worthy of a Royal commission. Anyway, they did that to their own kids as well, so we oft shared the same coal shed.
My parents never did this and I am not aware if doing nr 2′s stopped after a while or if we got cunning and somehow ditched the load before getting home from the Montessori pre-school/kindergarten. My mum was forever in hospital with undefined ails or perhaps complications in birthing as that seemed to be, despite wars and lack of food, a yearly event. I was born one year and four days after my brother was born. After I saw the gloom of daylight first, my younger brother came out 1 year and four months later. So they were really rollicking rocking times.
After the neighbours’ migration to Australia, which then took 6 days by air, we were given jubilant reports about Australia which we found out later had been somewhat festooned and given balloons with cup-cakes instead of the reality of gruel and leached out mutton. They too had six children, five girls but only one boy while I had the reverse four brothers and one girl.
We arrived in Australia in 1956 and my mother immediately regained the previous friendship. I was to turn sixteen that year. For a while we shared the same house which they claimed they had bought. It turned out it was rented! They had an old Chevy ute on three wheels with the missing wheel propped up by bricks. Their three legged German Shepherd used to chase very large but frightened looking rats.
Of course memories of having shared the coal shed with their girls, many years before, were rapidly fading and I became reconciled that sharing nr 2s might well change into sharing better and more pertinent intimate details of a different softness and lushness. The roseate looking young girls that they had turned into were tantalisingly near. It was my first experience of true love. That is if you can call the first viewing of a pair of budding breasts ‘love’. I do still have fond memories of those first sexual discoveries and remember as if yesterday. The breasts were offered without any coercion or even asked for. She just bared them as if they were toffees.
The friendship between my parents and theirs continued. When my parents returned to spend their retirement back in Holland the friendship became more distant. I certainly moved on and away from pre-teen budding breasts into marriage and starting family of my own. It was during the late seventies that my mother’s war-time and migrated friend turned up in Holland. Her husband had died. He was a concrete form worker.
Australia could not get enough workers spreading concrete far and wide. Australia was expanding its suburbs as far as the eye could see. Hill after hill were bulldozed and concreted over. It was hard work but the husband got by with smoking and help from his supportive very Dutch wife. They had achieved a better life with own bathroom and cake eating on Sunday. The daughters had married well and the son became a potter. One girl married a fire-man, another a car salesman in Hunter’s Hill. I never found out what happened to the daughter who was so helpful in easing my curiosity about breasts.
“Yes, she told my mother, we were watching TV and I thought he was his usual grumpy self. Not a word out of him.”. When the show was over, I told him, why are you so quiet again? He refused to answer. I prodded him, he was dead.”
I was abused from an early age by having to eat lumpy porridge. It has left its mark and no psychologist or therapist has given me any insight into how this continues to shape me into the present dysfunctional personae, still grappling with life so fraught with fits of uncertainty as to its real meaning or purpose.(Phew)
The weeks just prior and after the end of WW 2, Holland was on its knees. Oats, Biscuits and Spam was fought over by people running towards the US, Canadian and English Lancaster bombers overhead, dropping food parcels. I remember my dad running on a field towards one and bringing home a huge metal box with rock hard but very nutritious English biscuits. The sky was dark with food being parachuted , raining down on Rotterdam. How glorious a liberation it was! Dancing in the streets.
Despite the biscuits saving us from starvation, I still remember being very churlish about having to eat porridge with lumps and preferred the biscuits soaked in water. It was years later, when ‘easy oats’ came into being that could be cooked with milk without resulting in uneatable lumps. The porridge cooked by my mum then became silky smooth and with the Golden Syrup was delicious, a real delectable food. Even so, I have hardly touched porridge ever since. The lumps left their mark. That’s what a war does to you.
Walking around, pondering and practising a pensive thought or two is now a well earned pastime in advancing years together with offering adages and words probably so wasted on the much better informed. Together with Helvi and Milo, I traipse through our town forever hoping to find solutions to life and purpose. How this can be found by walking with a dog, hand-scooping his toilet habits in plastic bags, and drinking a latte in between is questionable but probably as good as studying Plato or taking Prozac.
But going back to lumpy porridge and hunger, we are surprised how much food can now be found just on the streets and parks. A half eaten hamburger here, bags of chips there. I sometimes, much to the horror of Helvi, lift a lid on public rubbish bins to see what has been discarded, much the same as I am curious about peoples washings on the line. Don’t ask, why? There is no hope. There is so much that can be gleaned from washing lines. Is the husband an office worker or tradesman? Are there children? How lithe and slim (or large) are they? What are the favourite colours etc. (Even that little joy is getting less with so many now lazy and using a cloth-drier).
But for discarded food…Only last week an entire ‘meat lover’s’ pizza in its specially designed aerated box was thrown out in the bin. Half full drink bottles, chips, steaks, even calamari rings, all gets thrown out.
It is nice to know that if ever I became destitute and homeless, food will not be a problem. I could probably make a living as well from sitting near a supermarket with Milo at my side, a cap with a few coins next to him and holding up a sign. “Help, I have still not found the purpose of life.”
The most avoided event for young boys and perhaps girls as well was the looming of the haircut. That’s why I cannot remember this ever happening when I was very young. I am sure it was done and most likely by my mother or perhaps even dad. There were vague references to a terracotta flower pot being used to snip around the perimeter after it was placed on the hapless victim. Money was scarce and seen as a waste spending it on kid’s hair.
Adults would go to a barber and a women’s hairdo were referred to in French as in coiffure or bouffant to give it a special and heightened sense of feminine importance. With men it would be a shave and a cut. A flick knife with a frighteningly long blade would be sharpened in front of the victim on a leather belt before the stubble or beard would be tackled. You would not want to have a violent disagreement with the barber and politically savvy positions would be taken at all times. The barber would politely ask ‘brush good and warm today, Sir?’ The reply was always a mumbled, ‘yes, very nice and warm.’ The brush would be soaped up in warm water and rubbed around the palm of the barber’s hand or a special dish to get a nice lather, not too sloppy nor too firm. There were skills involved that seem to have got lost.
However, my last haircut a few days ago, those lost skills were re-discovered. I had held off as long as possible but after Helvi’s remark I looked like a Hottentot, I felt I should really get a cut, especially as our fiftieth marital milestone had been reached. I decided to try a new barber shop. It looked rather snazzy and had a computerised system with special rewards for loyal customers. Now-a-days, any business has to have some gimmick and what more gimmicky than having some connection with the electronic world, especially a computer. I punched in my name and phone number. Out came a ticket with a number and I sat down waiting for my turn.
I was immediately struck by the performance of one of the cutters. He was hair cutting enthusiasm incorporated. He had a dark complexion and with a full head of pitch black hair, always a major plus in my opinion. I mean a bald hairdresser doesn’t quite cut the mustard in the world of hair. I don’t know why; perhaps an odd prejudice on my part?
He displayed a barber agility I had never seen before except perhaps in the world of gymnastics or even ballet. He danced and jigged around the man he was haircutting. The amazing part was that the customer did not have much hair to cut. He was an elderly gentleman of slim proportions with the only hair available at the back of his head creeping towards the lower part of his neck. Even so, the hairdresser was clicking his scissors as if approaching a fully fleeced Merino. The customer’s wife was sitting next to me, giving gentle instruction to this dancing and swiftly darting about hairdresser who, in full flight, was giving every strand of his remaining hair full and undivided attention.
I could not wait for him to do my hair. I was fully rewarded. He was overjoyed to work on my still fully bouffant head of hair and soon got in his stride. Fever pitch would be an understatement. It turned out his darkness was not Spanish but originated from a Philippine mother and Australian father. He learned his considerable skills on the job and did not go to a technical college. Towards the end he rubbed some fragrant pomade between his hands which he did by holding them above my head. I felt I was getting some kind of laying of hands, it was almost religious. He looked at my head and turned it a bit here and a bit there, almost like an architect contemplating a new opera house on the banks of the Danube at Bratislava. He finally rubbed it on my hair, gave a sigh of utter satisfaction and was finished. I must say it was the best haircut I ever enjoyed.
An improvement on the terracotta job of so many years ago.
Now here is a post that any pub ought to be proud of discussing. What to make of those gloriously looking females willing to put so much of themselves on the line in protecting their freedom to express whatever crosses their minds without being overtly or covertly abusive.
Could the Pig’s Arms learn something from a humble Russian pussy? Two of them were jailed for ‘rioting’. This was apparently a result of the group performing in a church singing anti -Putin songs. The jailing was seen as an overreaction and Human rights groups became involved. Many were aghast they were jailed for, what many felt and thought, as a rather funny but controversial act.
Anyway, I am pleased two Pussy riot members are now taking their plight up with the Dutch Government. Not long ago Holland got involved with their International Court questioning the treatment of the protestors trying to disrupt oil exploration platform in the Arctic area near Russia.
Nice work!
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 