A game of chess anyone?

I just knew it. Competitive sport brings out the worst. Has anyone listened to the news? Did I not advice over and over again to award losers in sport instead of the winners? This is going to be big, I mean really big. Australia and sport are one. Forget about Craig Thompson, Slipper and Obeid. That’s just confetti for a reluctant shy bride. No one is going to catch the bridal bouquet from this lot of corrupt, drug addled doped up sport junkies.

The truth has now come out, glaringly.  The minister for sport looked glum. Drugs, crime, doping, gangsters are the catch words in sport now. Woe the parent that enrolls their child in sport from now on. Soon after this evening news I went for walk.  I already noticed children near our park running away from a ball that threatened to roll towards them. Within days people will be burning balls, cricket bats, sport-commentators will be strung up from goal posts. In the dark of the night people will be jettison their boxer shorts, in kerbs you will find redolent of sweaty thighs Lycra cycle gear, knee pads and other sport paraphernalia. I noticed rugby balls sticking out of the Salvos bins. The revolution against sport has begun.

The fault is not in sport but rather in insisting that the ‘winning’ is more important than just playing it. Not everyone was as lucky as I was in choosing sport as one of those activities that should only be indulged in for the fun of it, but ditched it as soon as I heard ‘winning’. I like the fun, the pure enjoyment of kicking a ball as hard as possible or to slice through a wave feeling the water rushing by. Alas, I had trouble finding sport loving friends who did not think that winning were all important. They thought of my tennis playing weird for never knowing the score. I left the tennis club.

Of course, it was always on the cards this would happen. The insane emphasis on winning trophies and medals took away what sport is about, a healthy way of burning of energy and excess calories. I played basket ball years ago for Scarborough but resigned when the coach rebuked me for throwing a ball in the basket of the opposite team, the nerve of him trying to lesson my joy of running and leaping about trying to get the ball in a basket. Who cared which basket?

There was just no enjoyment. Of course, awarding losers might sound silly but when you think that winning only awards the one entity and the rest made out losers, there is a lot that seems to stick in my craw from a social point of view. Does that not encourage the drug and doping that is now occurring worldwide? Why anyone wants to win is also a bit dodgy when you consider that it is likely most won’t. So what if you kick the ball a bit slower or in the wrong direction. Isn’t kicking the aim? If you kick slower or swim in the opposite direction, you are a loser? Come off it. Winning above everything else in sport is insane. It creates whole armies of despondent, depressed losers. No wonder sport had been drawn into drug, crime and despair.

If you are going to award medals, what about medals for empathy, tolerance, stroking a snake, kindness, knitting socks at the railway station, feeding a hungry duck or smiling at a brave lady slowly crossing an intersection, catch a shooting star? Where are the competitions in housing refugees, a race to house the homeless or feed the flotsam of society, the mentally ill and those lost souls with the dark disturbed look sitting forlornly on the park bench? Where is the race for communal inclusiveness whereby no one will ever be allowed to die unknown, unloved, uncared, a pauper’s grave?  Where are the medals and expert coaches to lower our incarceration rates or lower our unwanted teen pregnancies and those lost knee deep in gloom and despair?

There is one sport I would exclude from being subject to my scorn and deeply felt aversion in having to win at all cost. It is a sport that includes a king, a queen, rooks, knights and castles, pawns and a lot more. It is a compulsory subject at school in some countries and is often played outdoors. Everyone can play it, even ex rugby players and gangsters. You don’t need to win but is fun if you do. Just enjoy it.

It is a game and sport called Chess.

Election, Rejection, Erection.

We are again at the threshold of a possible change. The election in September is what will dominate much of the media and news. The worrying thing is the contemplation that Abbott will get in. Can you imagine? The horror, the horror of it all.  And Pyne, oh the pain…That face so contorted with spitefulness formed by decades of anger and malice. What makes him tick, one wonders. Yes, having watched him on Q&A, I could not but push the off button. The man seems filled with anger or revenge towards anyone with a different opinion to his own.

I could not help but chuckle when someone yesterday on the ABC Drum described Abbott as ‘The Lance Armstrong of Politics’. I am unsure if he is even in that league, suspect he is much more lacking in imagination than Lance. After all, Lance was so convincing, the whole world remained spellbound by his lies for years.

I stood back in amazement when that scandal unfolded, never in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that a metal frame and two wheels and a man dressed tightly in Lycra akimbo on this contraption could possibly create such turmoil. On TV I sometimes noticed whole mobs of cyclists bent over their bikes going hell for leather trying to go as fast as possible to a mountain top. I could not help but think of the possible itches and rashes that would have to be growing just as fast between their Lycra enhanced speeding thighs. That thought made me switch off the TV with the remote pointing at those cyclists with some cheerful alacrity.

I sometimes think that Abbott’s fondness for cycling and his strange swagger through Parliament might well also be related to Lycra.  Mind you, sitting for hours in Parliament would give anyone an itch if not bouts of incontinence to boot.

With the ageing population I noticed the canny Aussie entrepreneurial spirit rising again. Many super-markets and chemists carry blatant advertising of nappies for the ‘more mature’.  One local chemist shop has an ad where a greying ‘more mature’ man dressed in nothing more than white underpants clearly showing a huge bulging nappy,  smiling defiantly while standing next to his Jaguar staring straight into the camera. What chutzpah, what nerve and male libbers. A standing ovation for the male please!

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/30/3678527.htm

I haven’t quite reached that stage yet but H is making encouraging noises by pointing out the mature nappy division at Woollies.  This brings me to the erection part of my tale. Was it a dream or factual but did I read recently that men lacking in ‘firm enough for intercourse’ tumescence are at higher risk of heart attack? I think it must be true because I have been a little anxious about my own firmness of late. What do they mean with the specification of firmness? Is it some kind of angle measurement? Is anything over ninety degrees (from the floor up)) firm enough? I wished I never read that article, am forever looking and waiting for erections to happen now, and hoping to delay or prevent a heart attack. I used to be so happy waking up and admiring the morning glory greeting me ever so cheerfully. This morning, possibly through that rotten article it was not ‘firm’, just half mast looking a bit chagrined.

It is not easy being a man. We carry a huge burden.

Of course, our eating habits have changed. Who would have thought mums now buy a plastic bottle with the advice ‘just shake it’? The ‘just shake it’ seems to be a prepared kind of pancake mix. I would imagine the intending cook fills up the empty space in the plastic bottle with milk and then ‘just shake’ it, with mixture ready for pancake making. It probably makes about five or six pancakes and at $ 1.85 works out at the outrageous price of 30cents a pancake, not including the golden syrup or jam on top. Perhaps the ‘just shake it’ has been embedded from a latent subliminal message from eager husbands pestering tired wives late at night. A clever use of product enhancement.

It must be back-breaking work to put flour in a bowl, and then add some milk, a couple of eggs and whisk the lot together and get the old fashioned pan-cake mixture for a quarter of the cost. Walking slowly past the supermarket’s shelves there were other similar products. A cheese in a tube, some powder that turns into instant mashed potato, but the most irksome of them all, and H is so sick of me commenting on them, are…simmering sauces. My eyes forever keeping guard on our dietary habits, I even spotted a kind of meat-spread in a tube. It was called, I think, devilish spread which came in mild and spicy.

Yet, again, I switched on the telly and it’s almost obligatory now to find and watch a cooking show. No matter what time, there is someone with eyes turned heavenly upwards, saying ‘oh, how yum’ or ‘wow’. Fresh ingredients are tossed together; fish, meat, snails, frogs are being infused, thrown about and cooked almost to the point of a kind of Le Mans’ car race.

It’s all very confusing. There are options in watching French, Italian; Spanish cooks either cooking away in their own country or in top restaurants in Britain. They seem so enthusiastic, you wonder if they have mattresses tucked behind those huge gleaming stainless steel stoves and just take quick naps in between the stacking of delicious looking char-grilled hearts of goats and noodles with infused ginger and deep fried shreds and strips of celeriac with chanterelle-shiitake mushrooms on giant plates.

Then there are culinary delights shown in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, even Thailand. Fresh fish swimming, frogs are croaking and eels or snakes still slithering about. Within minutes it is all cooked and on the table with huge smiling families feasting away.

If pancake making is the only thing my grandkids will remember me by; so be it. It would be nice to have an epitaph on my pebble crete slab; “here lies the greatest pancake- maker” (but keep off the grass).

Cooking needs to be an act of love. You can never cook something in total indifference. When the kids are over, pancake making has almost religious overtones. Their own parents’ pancakes seem to lack ‘crispy edges’, I was told by Max who is the youngest of the three grandsons adding, ‘they are alright though’, not wanting to dob in his parents.

It is not as if I swoon over every pancake but I do hand mix the dough adding water and pinch of salt. I use real butter and cook on two cast iron solid pans on high heat. When I gently lower the mixture into the pan, the edges frizzle and sizzle out into the much desired golden crispy and crunchy edging. While hot, I rush them over to the kids seated at the round table, fork and knife in hand and at the ready. I squeeze some lime juice and sprinkle a light dusting of sugar.

I leave the rest to them.

We all know that even a split second appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show guarantees wealth and fame. That’s the power of untrammeled capitalism. If you mix that in with the word ‘humbling’ and a couple of sparkling crocodile tears carefully stage managed and filmed from the right angle and boy, do the sponsors start lining up.

Remember a while ago when Rupert Murdoch gave his first performance on the inquiry about the phone hacking scandal? After Mr Murdoch got down on his chair and felt comfortable enough he turned his face upwards towards the camera and announced with the sincerity of  Bill Clinton’s ‘no, I did not have sex with that woman’, ‘ this is the most humble day of my life.’  Today, Rupert’s media empire is capitalized at , give and take a couple of billions,  63  billion and the sixth largest company in Australia. It would not be surprising if the word ‘Humble’ will be subject to copy-rights in the future, might even get a patent taken out on it.  During the beginning of the scandal the company was hovering between 32 and 45 billion. Crime paid off handsomely and the ‘humbling experience’ certainly proved it to be for Newscorp.

I am sure Lance Armstrong’s future is now guaranteed just as much. Film rights, book rights, biographies. Boy oh boy, it’s just the beginning!

Banal confessions dripping with insincerity seems to be mainly the domain of the US. Surely, if Armstrong was sincere he would not seek an interview at the feet of the Goddess of Money and Fame, with all the world-wide fanfare and publicity that it would entail and instead lie low and hide his head in shame. He spouted again and again ‘the humbling’ of it all.

The most ‘humbling’, ‘oh, I am now under a death sentence.’ ‘I don’t deserve that’, he mumbled and humbled. The most ‘humbling’ of all times, he confessed tearfully, was the withdrawal from the Livestrong cancer foundation. Oh, seventy five million dollar a day I am now ever so humbly losing.

The foundation and original seeds of corny confessions might well have been sown some years back by Pastor Bakker and Tammy. Remember the disgraced televangelists, Jimmy and Tammy Bakker and the prostitute giving Pastor Jimmy a bit of light hand relief? The whole world was glued to their TV sets for weeks. For many years, the Bakers indulged themselves in conspicuous consumption funded by their televangelism on both land and satellite TV. No one at the time thought the glitz and glamour the Bakkers surrounding themselves with to be a bit unusual for a nonprofit organization…Jimmy was quoted as saying,” I believe if Jesus was alive today he would be on TV”. After it all came out, the tearstained confession of Jimmy Bakker on TV, would have to be one of the most bizarre events ever to have come out from the schmaltz world of American TV shows. Previous to that his “Praise the Lord” TV and Theme park in South Carolina made millions weekly. Some cynics afterwards thought that PTL always stood for “pass the Loot.”

Well, Mr Armstrong is well on the way of a comeback. The sponsors might sue him but were less shy when he was in the lime-light. Are they also giving back money made while the sponsored products were selling thanks to the fame of Lance at the time? For many years suspicion was rife but money as always speaks loudest. Who would be so silly as to upset the cart that was bringing in the loot?

I will never be able to ride on the back of ‘a humbling experience.’ It seems even more remote I will ever get an invitation to Oprah. Will you?

A room of one’s own with basic furniture.

This is what most of us yearn for. A kind of space that welcomes us without criticism or mouldy remarks.  Better not to have anything in it as yet, but a chair might be considered as the basic and most essential piece of furniture to start off with.  Old furniture talks and have stories to tell especially if one is used to spending days in solitude on own thoughts and remembrances.

A mistake that many make is buying new furniture. Of course new furniture is without stories and is best left to buy for those that are either, as yet, without stories or are unable to tell worthwhile stories. Much of new furniture have such unyieldingly hard materials, nothing ever can be taken in. Or never even, harsh as this might seem, leave a story worth telling. So, the dilemma is profound here; either risk stories from others on pre-loved aged furniture or no stories at all on new furniture.

Some years ago we inherited a comfy reclining chair which we used in our first room at King’s Cross. The seating part was quite low with soft kapok filled buttoned down dark brown cushions, both the seat and the backrest. It had a movable back that with the use of a brass rod could be moved forward or backwards by fitting this supporting rod in the groves of the arm rests at the back of the chair. The further back the rod the more the recline. It would not surprise me that those that recline the furthest down have the better stories to tell. Sitting up straight doesn’t encourage story telling. The lumbar and vertebrae are compressed and this blocks vital story telling nerves, just ask Sigmund. He knew a thing about the libido of women and free association without any hindrance, but…. always on a reclining couch. We all know that no stories are more riveting than those told from women who relax horizontally, especially if accompanied by a suitable noble-man smoking a Henry Winterman.

Freud was a great cigar smoker and indeed, understood its addiction but also thought it was a great surrogate for and from masturbation. “The one great habit,” he conceded to Carl Jung, never specifying which one it was.

The type of reclining chair that we bought was the same my father had throughout the years I lived at home. He would recline in it and smoke his Douwe Egberts, while his wife cooked the evening meal. He was a pensive man inclined to stare ahead of himself as if lost in his musings. He might just have been relishing his cigarette without wanting to spoil those moments with chatter or idle doodle-talk. The chair facilitated this pastime with perfection and curling rings of smoke was the very proof of it.. The angle of recline just right and I doubt there could have been a chair that would have better fulfilled the role of a man and his cigarette. On the right hand arm rest he would have an ashtray that invariably, but not always, would tip over on the floor when we ran amok past the chair. There were so many children then, and the house was small. This would upset my mother but did nothing to unbalance the equilibrium of dad and his cigarette ensconced in the chair. He would barely notice and just continue with yet another glorious puff.

Now-a-days, any story alluding to smoking could well be frowned upon, but… it used to be normal, let me tell you. I smoked myself, but not anymore. I am so much the better for it, or am I?

You’ll be pleased to know that the kilo of Christmas prawns has been eaten. The last forty or so of them were one day past their stamped bed-time date and just starting to get this whiff of being off. To my surprise prawns were out at this year’s Christmas. How was I to know? Things and fashions move so fast now-a-days. It’s all salads now with spinach leaves and roasted almonds, with lots of aromatic herbal balsamatic ‘infusion.’ Infusion has made inroads lately; we have to have things that are infused. Has anyone noticed that too? A few years ago, it was ‘logistics’ closely followed by ‘solutions.’ No one had problems, solutions only were allowed. The local butcher sold meat solutions, not just plain meat. Still, waste not; want not, I went solemnly and on my own through the entire kilo of prawns. Glad it is all over for another year.

We now hurl ourselves towards the New Year and grandsons were eyeing the sparklers yesterday at Big W. Thank goodness we have a skate park just across the road. They love it and Thomas especially. He wore a hole in his right shoe where he propels himself forward on the skate-board down the steep concrete slope and then up again at the opposite side.  While suspended in mid-air he makes a 180 degree turn around and goes down yet again.

I suggested I would take some photos but howls of protest ensued. They don’t want an old fogey in front of their skating and scooting friends. They call everybody ‘guys’ now, don’t they? Even girls are now guys.  It is nice to be so young and lively. I suppose, training for making backward turns does no harm, an imitation and good practice of life to come. Come on you guys, can you do the back-flip? Sure can. Look at me, yippee. I suppose if girls can join the group name as ‘guys’, why not then also include the boys as ‘gals’. It would be fair. Perhaps that era is yet to come. Come on you gals let’s do a back flip with a somersault. Up, back, and down again.

Call me a curmudgeon if you like, but I still yearn for the years when we had ‘blokes and sheilas.’ At the back of Parramatta girls home, as the teen-age boys were wont to brag; you could pick up a sheila for a good root for a malted milkshake, against a six foot paling fence. It was all so much more wholesome and honest. Sex was a quickie after trying out a bit of a fondle while watching Ben Hur at the local cinema, breaths all vinegar chips and chewing gum.

Perhaps it is all a yearning whereby facts and fantasy are now playing havoc. It was never THAT good. I do remember though, as if yesterday, getting my hand to rest, momentarily, on Mavis’ left thigh while she was all agog over Victor Mature in the Cinemascopic triumph of ’The Robe’.

Well, on left thigh is a bit exaggerated. It was really the edge of her knee, my hand precariously hovering to the point of almost dropping off. It was difficult enough to get a date, even more difficult to become intimate enough for an evening to the Burwood cinema with a real sheila. It was only after I mentioned The Robe, that Mavis felt safe to accompany a migrant reffo boy. This migrant boy having blond hair and from Holland was more than a mitigating circumstance in able to pull off a date. At least, not a dago. She wouldn’t have been seen dead with a swarthy knife puller. The Robe in full Cinemascope had enough religious overtones for Mavis to overcome any doubts of inappropriate behavior. ‘It would be as safe as one could possibly get,’ she must have sighed in her final acceptance.

The advent of Cinemascope was very cutting-edge technology and it held great promise. The Robe was advertised on posters with the audience just about inside the action or at the very minimum surrounded by a giant screen.  My intentions were less religiously oriented than Mavis’, much more real world. I wanted to be able to tell my friends of finally having touched the holy grail of all teenage boys ambitions, a real thigh, even if fully clothed. A couple of inches away from its so much sought after destination would be acceptable too. Even with the hand in between two legs could, with some solitary conjuring up later on, be at least thought of as being on the right track.

The Hammond organ rose majestically from the bowels of the cinema. A white suited Liberace doppelganger belted out a very sweet ‘Yellow rose of Texas.’ The suspense was palpable with the promise of Cinemascope still hidden behind giant curtains. Next, came the obligatory ‘God save the Queen’. Mavis and I with most of the patrons stood up as was the mode at the time. A few remained seated. They were the rebellious rock and roll anti Queen and Country bodgies and widgies.

After those preliminaries, the organ with the white suit vanished into the bowels again and lights were switched off. Apart from the pervasive redolent vinegar chips rustling about, you could hear a pin drop. The curtains slid open and exposed acres of screen with giant sound boxes on each side. The Robe announced itself with a thunderous roll call of drums and trumpets. Let the action begin!

I am afraid that my intentions were less pure than Mavis’ who wanted to gain insight into the story of The Robe. She remained transfixed to the screen and even the appearance of Victor Mature’ jutting profile did not add much mellowing of her ram-rod body language towards my side of the seat. If anything, she moved slightly away from me and I sensed rigidity. I suppose, the theme of the movie where Roman soldiers and Greek slaves are in mortal conflict fighting over God’s Robe wasn’t really suitable for any erotic conquests of a thigh. My hand did manage for a split second to hover on the previously mentioned knee when I realized and accepted the hopelessness of it all.

I decided to wait for a more suitable movie and a girl with more welcoming and pliable thighs. Some years later I finally achieved my hand on a welcoming thigh. The movie, I remember it well, was ‘Tammy.’

Food, Sex, and smoked Eels.

It is curious how we are drawn to food especially on how it looks. Was it always like that? I can’t remember my mum having cook books or reading about food. She simply cooked nourishing food within her means. Within her means was very difficult during and even after the war. Food, costs generally speaking, money, except for those that grow their own. However, as their income grew, so did the intake of more expensive food and from hardly ever eating meat, it came to eating it perhaps twice a week and the boring brown beans turned into witlof, leeks and carrots..

Has anyone ever succeeded in growing their own not being a farmer? We tried on our farm to grow our own but were beaten back by the near impossibility of it. The exceptions were rocket and silver-beet and the first year lots of strawberries. We had rain then.

In Holland during school years most students would at some stage be given a small bit of communal ground on which, for just one season, we would grow edibles, either green or even pinky red coloured. I remember riding my bicycle home with a bag of potatoes strapped on the back. My mother was ecstatic. Apart from spuds, I grew lettuces, carrots and some kind of green stuff looking like grass. It was spicy and on sandwiches delicious, especially with some sugar sprinkled on it. One could keep snipping it and it would be harvestable again the next week. It was a kind of cress but was not grown in water. Perhaps it was rocket except it looked more like grass.

When arriving here, growing anything was challenging. I can still see Dad, all red faced and perspiring hacking away at the unforgiving hard soil in suburban Sydney’s Revesby with Dutch coarse oaths renting the still air. It was so hard and I’ll never forget his efforts in trying to grow something to supplement my mum’s cooking. I doubt the growing of food was ever a success. If it wasn’t for the hard soil, it would be drought, insects or birds eating all. He bought all sorts of poisons and sprays, even scaffolding for the fruit trees carefully inspecting all the apples for worms etc. At one stage he prepared scaffolding decked out with planks around one fruit tree which he would climb into and peer inside the thousands of flowers to look for fruit flies. He was that determined. He spent ours perched on top of that scaffolding. Poor dad, he did really try so hard.

We have achieved quite a good herb garden here in Bowral but have done this through containing all the herbaceous plants within the borders of two timber boxed.  We pre-filled the boxes with good friable top soil and copious cow manure. This is so much easier to control and water. Milo, our Jack Russell, of course keeps the birds away.

Now-a-days, food and cooking are very different and elevated to an art form. Brown beans have disappeared.  Whole libraries are devoted to cookery books. As some wit stated, anyone who eats three times a day understands perfectly well why cookery books sell three times more than sex books.

For some eating has replaced sex as their favorite pastime. You can’t pick a fight with your boeuf tartar nor is it likely that this dish would take your home and kids in a bitter and protracted divorce fight.

I can’t remember ever seeing people in the past eating while moving about. Now the fact of putting food in a mouth seems to encourage the body into a forward locomotion onto the streets and even crossing traffic lights, but as yet have not seen any doing it in reverse.  I have even seen driving and eating. One hand is stuffing the mouth which is masticating wildly from side to side, the other on the wheel with similar sideway movements. Women don’t generally eat while driving but do stroke their hair or eyelashes.

However, it wasn’t totally unknown for people to also eat while having sex. That apparently has been the norm for centuries. I have seen with my own eyes in Pompeii a fresco with a reclining gladiator on a sword holiday wearing a Roman toga fornicating languidly and casually while calmly eating bunches of grapes at the same time.

A good friend of mine told me his wife loved taking small bunches of smoked eels to bed which she would devour in between their entanglements. The husband preferred smoking a cigar. The only place where cooked food is more dangerous than sex is in Britain whose greatest contribution to its cuisine has been the chip.  I was told that if you believe mussels increase your libido with an enduring and endlessly lasting tumescence, to always make sure you don’t put them on too soon.

With women, always a bit tricky at the best of times, it is often romance that is more important than food. Nothing is more romantic than having a pair of new shoes as well as breakfast in bed. With men shopping is often a bit like sex, after five minutes of it they get tired and walk out of the shop.

In the meantime we all plod along the best we can. The choice is as always, make the best of this round world that spins around trying to shake you off. We cling and hold on, grasping at anything that we might find nourishing, gives us a bit of security. And that happens to includes food. Keep hanging on in there folks!

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