parismarisamadonna

Time Warp – Richard O’Brien 1973

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…#

I went to school.

The School was an Anglican private school for boys and girls that were happy to wear navy blue wool jackets. I was a scholarship student whose parents paid less than the other kids because I knew all of the answers to the entrance exam. Most importantly, for the purposes of this page, the school is located in the Blue Mountains, hence, Blue Mountains Grammar School, my alma mater, scene of the miseducation of M.

The Blue Mountains refers to a region to the west of Sydney that is now World Heritage listed. Covering just over 11,000 square kilometres this wide expanse of trees, gorges, birds, snakes and spiders is about 110 times bigger than Paris. Unlike Paris, it is home to more animals than people, there is only one McDonalds and it is illegal to throw a cigarette butt on the ground. Like Paris, the Blue Mountains are heaving with thousands tourists, predominately cashed up Asians, bussed in to take photos of kid-friendly attractions, to disgorge thousands of dollars on very expensive kitsch and visiting only to line the pockets of the increasingly wealthy, sardonic, anti-immigration, right wing locals who are happy for foreigners to come, spend their money and then most especially… leave.

I am not native of the Blue Mountains, hailing instead from the city of Penrith, a sprawling metropolis below, straddling the Nepean River, a waterway that swells and shrinks depending on the rainfall from high above. Despite my lowly ancestry, and I only mean in terms of elevation, I know the golden valleys and moneyed heights of the Mountains exceptionally well. I spent 7 years catching a train up and down those hills; two hours, five days a week for school, sometimes on weekends for music rehearsals or debating competitions and in latter years on a sixth day to go to work.

Wentworth Falls Station - scene of many a clandestine menthol cigarette

Visiting in 2012, 18 years after I finished school, on a glorious clear skied Autumn day, bathed in sunshine and sedated by eucalyptus scented air*, I am stunned by how much the place remains unchanged. Despite giant leaps forward in the worlds of technology, civil engineering and geological science, the Mountains are still accessible by a single road. A road that has visibly not expanded at anything like a proportionate rate to its population, presumably to ensure that the local area remains un-penetrated by the horrors of modern society and the terrifying suburbanites below. Terrifying horrors such as items of apparel from generic variety stores, cars that weren’t manufactured in Germany or children who aren’t named Amelia, Bella, Harrison or Henry.

  Named after one of the three men who first crossed the Blue Mountains

The local economy is divided between two interdependent micro-enterprises. Twee village stores prefixed with the descriptor Ye Olde or the misnomer Shoppe (ironically defined simply as ‘shop but used for quaint affect’) clog the high street, all of them proffering similar leaf shaped cakes of bush-flower scented soap, wooden children’s toys and lacy lavender potpourri sachets. Dotted among Ye Olde Crappe Nanna Shoppe are the cafes and tearooms. Purveyors of flavourless mush, steeped in the tradition of catering only for senior citizens with false teeth and super strength spectacles, the tearoom’s Bill of Fare begins regally with a Pumpkin soup and fresh bread roll, glosses over a Waldorf salad or Chicken Mayo Sandwich and culminates triumphantly with scones jam and cream.  In the Café, the name indicating a more international and modern chef de cuisine, the soup might be spiced exotically with nutmeg (or even salt and pepper), the Waldorf has been replaced by the decidedly more modern Caesar (minus the anchovies, let’s not go crazy) and the dessert will include that pillar of Cucina Australiana, racy rhubarb crumble. 

In Leura in 2012, Golliwogs are on sale at Ye Olde Inappropriate Toy Shoppe

I imagine that somewhere around Springwood there is a huge factory fabricating all of the dishes served in the Blue Mountains, a factory that has not changed the menu since sometime shortly after 1945. A factory that is making an absolute mint out of semi-senile locals, clueless tourists and those of us stunned that there is no viable alternative.

I will shout out for Schwarzes, my former employers, the formidable Bavarians Tina and Alex, who have extended the palates of the upper mountains residents beyond the scone and introduced them to the delectable Danish, bold Bretzel and even radical Rye bread! They were very kind to me when I was a girl and thanks to their middling knowledge of the English language, I learned to curse fluently in German as well as name and describe every single pastry item from the Black Forest, Bienenstich, Sacher and Linzer just to name a few.

  Alex is a chef, the certificates, hanging since I was an employee in 1990, prove it

Enough of the geography lesson, back to the school.

BMGS has changed a little since I last walked down the hill and tore off my navy necktie in November of 1994. The school population, and thus the campus have grown significantly, mainly due to the increased revenue of local residents and the increased expectations of fee-paying private school parents demanding that little Amelia learn Ancient Mandarin, Pure Maths, French Horn, Classical Ballet and Girls Rugby. In my days, the geography room doubled as a theatre, the music building was also the admin block and we had sheep in a field where now stands a gymnasium.

  The first schoolroom, Pitt House - my music classes were in a homestead

Spending one’s formative adolescence in an environment circumscribed by Christian values has its advantages. I know that I would never had the opportunity to spend a year in France were it not for a chance visit by an Italian student, I would never have studied so hard and achieved so much academically resulting in a fantastic place at a fantastic university. I might potentially be significantly more tolerant of religion and religious types had it not been thrust down my throat without any kind of check and balance by people who perhaps don’t believe that God created earth, that a girl’s body is not a sacred garden or that the way to enlightenment is not via a song on a Sunday.

Rebelling, as an impetuous youth is often want to, I loudly declared my opposition to the uniformity requisite of a proper young girl in a private school. I spent my days finding ways to be annoying; makeup that was promptly washed off by teachers, feminist opinions that were marked down in Literature essays and a passion for tobacco indulged in the middle of bushfire prone forests.

  The sports field illuminated by real sunshine

Motherbear commuted for many years to the Blue Mountains. Working in customer service, her colleagues informed her early on that living in the Mountains meant that you were one of the four R’s: Retired, Recluse, Rich or Religious. Being a working class, working, sociable agnostic the Blue Mountains could cradle me for only a short episode of my life.

I’ve spent a lifetime not really fitting in. Now it has become my trademark.

 

 

 

#This post was written on May the Fourth, Star Wars Day, hence the gratuitous references to Lucas’ oeuvre

* Well may you laugh! The Koala, the most famous of Australia’s native marsupials is often thought to be inebriated due to the hallucinogenic effects of its eucalyptus leaf diet

 

 

You Never Give Me Your Money – The Beatles 1969

Every single month I work, significantly more than the state ordained maximum of 35 hours, and I work very bloody hard. Every single month I earn a salary, I am not starving, far from it, but I voluntarily give a fair amount away to people who are. Every single month I pay a glorious amount of tax to the French government, I am entitled to no discount or benefit. If I were married or even pacsée (French for de facto), I would get a discount on my taxes. If I had children, the discount would be ever more advantageous. Yes, in France, you pay less tax just for shacking up with a bloke. The Republique openly and systematically discriminates against single people; let’s call it bridgetism. If I could convince someone to move into my house, and sign some papers…they love a form or twenty in France…I’d pay 10% less tax a year, we would not even have to prove we’d seen each other naked.

Every single month I take the state-owned metro, and am subject to the smell of a million man-wees encrusted upon the state-owned tunnel tiles. I rarely go to the state-funded dentist, I sometimes go to the state-funded doctor*, and even then I don’t fill the state-subsidised prescriptions for medication because I don’t believe I need antibiotics to cure a stress induced cold#. I very rarely watch the state-owned television; Top Chef is on the commercial channel you see. You would not say I abuse the privileges afforded me by the government of the country in which I live.

  Schoolyard Propaganda

I live here at the pleasure of the wondrous Republique, mainly because one day in Schengen she agreed to bunk in with the rest of Europe and they can’t refuse entry to an Australian masquerading as a Brit with regal crown-embossed maroon papers to prove it.

Living under the steely regard of La Marianne I am subject to all of her laws and her idiosyncrasies. I have to put up with her chauvinist men-in-inverted-commas who have only recently lifted their dragging knuckles from upon the cobble stones to stand upright and ensure their thumbs oppose the other four fingers. I am obliged to kiss everyone I meet despite the fact that there are many I would happily slap across the cheek before placing my lips upon it. I speak the goddamn language on a daily basis and can get through a day with less than 15 mistakes. All this, and yet I will not be among the millions who thrust their ballot papers betwixt the lips of the ballot box this weekend…all because I am ETRANGERE!

She is Green, you know this because of her colour-coded glasses

 

The direct translation is stranger but it is also the word for foreigner. I prefer to think of it as a badge of honour, I am stranger than most people, but definitely stranger than most French people. I have the boots to prove it. I am also strange because I am bitterly disappointed that I cannot vote tomorrow. I should have a say as to who gets to spend all of the money I hurl into the government’s coffers. Given the opportunity, I would vote for the one who promised to guillotine the genitals of all the men who piss in the Metro.

Time to be serious though.

French people take their politics very, very seriously. As it is, on a good day they barely have a sense of humour, but in the world of politics their Gallic passion for talking endlessly in circles about absolutely nothing is gloriously, and seriously, on show.

  Sarko - the rips make him look like Gene Simmons from KISS

The language the politicians use is very, very serious. They address the people of France as ‘citizens’, ‘compatriots’ and my personal favourite “les Français et les Françaises”. Politicians do not stand up in front of a crowd and say “hi everyone”, opting instead to revert to the same genre of discourse favoured by Robespierre 200 years ago. Discourse that was required to justify the erection, and use, of a giant head-chopper in the middle of the town square, he was not simply asking for votes. And…if you have to make the politically correct distinction of stating both the male and the female versions of the word ‘French’, can I suggest that you borrow from your inferior English cousins and just say French.

The French, both the men ones and the women ones, are blessed with a wide and diverse array of candidates to choose from this year.

There is the communist guy who has a slogan of ‘taking back the power’. Obviously he does not consider the ability to pee standing up in public transport as powerful enough for one French man and so he took his supporters to ‘storm the Bastille’ last month. I like that he has borrowed his political manifestations from ancestors who lived at a time when men wore make-up and wigs and women wore whale bones to hold up their breasts. He is nothing if not dedicated to reliving the past.

  The Communist one. I know because the poster is red. And he is angry.

There is the extreme right bigot and ignoramus Marine Le Pen who is the daughter of the infamous extreme right bigot and ignoramus Jean-Marie Le Pen who almost won an election a few years back. As you can imagine, coming from the extreme right, she thinks that the only good dark thing is chocolate so long as it doesn’t come from a country that worships anything other than a very white God. She is also very talented at encouraging very dumb people to get over-excited about things they will never be alive to see, kind of like Mel Gibson. 

There is François Hollande, the socialist candidate, who is the ex-life partner (10% off your taxes remember) of Segolene Royal, she who so gloriously lost the election to Sarkozy in 2007. She is still campaigning for François and his party. She evidently got a huge pile of cash when they separated while Monsieur Hollande is testing the Hillary Clinton route to power.

Francois stuck over the top of the Greens

There is a guy running for the Anti-Capitalist party who, if he wins, will, I imagine, blow up all banks, Rainbow Warrior style. There is a Green woman who is about as green as the Cookie Monster and equally articulate. And finally there is the Napoleonic one himself, Sarko, using ‘Strong France’ as a slogan. It seems he has finally realised that he is the current President of “France” and not the United States, nor Europe, nor Universal Pictures, nor the Known Universe. If he were not so short and so blessed with elastic facial expressions, we could be forgiven for thinking that he was in fact the puppet version of himself that dances around on telly every night. Alas, he is a real man, although I am not certain there is not someone behind him with his or her arm up his bum to help him talk.

To ensure that French people (that means both the boy and the girl ones) do not have to read my blog to decide whom to vote for, the government hoists up steel billboards in front of all of the nation’s public schools. On each section is a poster for each of the different presidential candidates among whom the people will choose. Depending on where you live, each of the posters become victim of varying degrees of vandalism. The photos on these pages were taken at my local school. Living in the 18^th arrondissement, a rather multicultural part of Paris, increasingly gentrified, but certainly not the wealthiest part of town, it is clear who the people like, and even clearer who they don’t.

  No one cares enough to deface Bayrou

Native of a nation where voting is compulsory, so compulsory that you get a fine if you don’t, I never realised how important the right to vote was. I never realised how passionate about politics I have become. I never realised how frustrating it is to pay increasingly large sums of money to a man with the intellectual capacity of an infant orang-utan.

Even so, if only to get 10% off my income tax, my door is open to all offers. Even offers from infant primates or senile humans, so long as you put the toilet seat down and like my cooking… Secretly though, I’d happily give up the 10% discount for just one good man. 

 

Marine, obviously very popular in Montmartre

*Only because Motherbear insists

#See paragraph one for evidence of the stress

 

This week, you may note a tone of despair and a lowered opinion of the French (only the man ones). Yes, M, she of the steelier gaze than even La Marianne has recently had her heart broken…again…stupidly. But! Take Heart Dear Reader! In 7 short days, the loving embrace of Motherbear, the Smartarse, the Art-sist-ologer and the whole sun-drenched crew will warm the broken M. Please excuse me if I take a short break to patch together blood pumping organs… and buy some more Vegemite. 

 

Erotica – Madonna 1992

The year that the Material One released her long-forgotten coffee table book ‘Sex’, I was living in France. It was a year after she stormed the Vatican after  JP2’s protest at her pretend masturbation while writhing on a bed during the Blonde Ambition tour. It was a year after she turned the tour into a bestselling movie that immortalised her simulation of fellatio on a glass bottle. After so much pretend sex she lifted the coquette veil and got naked with Naomi on the pages of the book and the sister soundtrack, Erotica. 

Ensconced as I was in the idyllic, verdant and mountainous Basque-Béarnaise region of France known as Les Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the ‘Soixante-Quatre’ for the locals, getting my hands on the latest offering from Queen of Pop proved a Herculean challenge. In the local shops of Salies de Bearn butchers sold duck putrefied in it’s own fat, bakers sold bread light sabres and Basques sold espadrilles in green, red or white. No one sold ostensibly pornographic cassette tapes featuring fab pop songs sung by American megastars.

...like a velodrome but with no bikes

 

After waiting a full month, still the longest I’ve waited for any Material Music, I finally got my hands on it at the Galleries Lafayette in Bayonne. Visiting Bayonne for the annual theatre festival with my high school theatre class, I sacrificed 150 of my 200 Franc monthly allowance from Motherbear to listen to Bad Girl, Why’s It So Hard and Deeper and Deeper on my Sony Walkman until the batteries ran dry. Within a week I could sing every single song off by heart, a week later I realised one of the songs described, in detail, cunnilingus, that day that I stopped singing it out loud alone in my bedroom.

My French host-family were already struggling to understand so many of the unique and interesting components of my hyperactive personality, overly excitable, easily irritable and spontaneously musical just to name a few. Thus an illogical obsession with a woman who made ridiculous amounts of money photographing her gloriously naked self hitchhiking was not even worth a raised eyebrow between duck courses at dinner.

At the time, Madge was so avant-garde with her thinly veiled references to oral sex, sadomasochism and self-gratification. It has been twenty years, and how the sexual times have changed. Today, living in the middle of Paris’s famed red light district in 2012’s twitterific world blighted by the presence of the Kardashians, the Hiltons and pretty much everyone from British Television, we’ve become somewhat desensitised to Erotica.

..a place where you can imagine you are female if you are male?

 

Britney flashing the exit-point of her two sons while leaving a taxi doesn’t really compare to 54-year-old woman dancing about in her latest video demurely covered in her Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture underthings. In 1991, Madonna only sucked on a glass bottle to show off her linguistic gymnastics. Last month, one of the judges on Britain’s most watched television show was the subject of a sextape. The phallus was indeed still attached to the man who tweeted the video, there was no simulation at all. Tulisa’s upcoming record was the talk of the town for a full week and her Greek Orthodox Church did not threaten to shut her down. In 2012, publicised fellatio is still not as shameful as being Greek. 

Re-reading the first paragraphs of this page, I wonder if I don’t come across as incredibly old. But stay with me for one more moment.

...in case you didn't see it the first time.

I’ve spent the best part of the weekend watching One Direction take over the souls and wallets over my hometown’s female youth during their weeklong publicity visit to Australia. Having watched the season of the X Factor during which the five mediocre teenage soloists were flung together by Simon Cowell to become a mega-group, I am a secret fan of the lads, I quite like the songs, and knowing that Harry has already had one 35 yr old girlfriend gives me confidence.

Beyond their excellently styled bouffant hair and creamy blemish-free young skin I wonder if part of the reason girls all over the world #luv1D is not in part because of just how ‘clean’ they are? In their debut video clip they are dancing around on a beach like a bunch of choirboys so virginal that they never even kiss the different girls they are gleefully chasing across the sand. I am convinced that the dirtiest thing about the boys is the strip of skin immediately above their ankles; all five wear pants that are just an inch too short exposing a sockless, pantless stripe of dirt-magnetic-soft-boy-skin.

So am I old, am I a prude, or am I just bored with the eye-splitting ugliness of modern sex trash?

  At least in the olden days, they did it with a modicum of style 

If you take a minute to look beyond the Botox stillness of commercial news networks, the world is a pretty ugly place. Halfway during the last paragraph my phone told me the Taliban has gone rogue in Afghanistan…again. Syria is descending into the same territory as an adolescent boys video game, except that people are actually dying en masse and you can’t reset after level five. The economy of the Western World has evolved into a hybrid of a Monopoly™ banker’s cash tray and a $2 scratch lottery ticket. And I can’t even talk about the insanity of electoral politics in my adopted homeland without a glass of strong alcohol in my hand.

Maybe then Glee, One Direction, Carly Rae Jepsen and Titanic 3D are the perfect antidote to the visual, aural and intellectual harassment that is TOWIE or any music video signed by that secret romantic feminist Sean Paul? Maybe we’re over seeing girls’ boobs falling out of Primark petticoats at 2am and prefer our nudity confined to the magical world of Game of Thrones? Maybe photos of someone mildly famous in flagrante has become so boring we are now more concerned with whether or not they can actually sing?

And now for the final proof that our trashed, flashed, gashed and brashed world is desperate to be chino’d and showchoir-cover-tuned. The original brother snogging inked gothic girl Angelina has admitted that Brad is finally making an honest woman out of her. When Hollywood’s most celebrated Girl is Interrupted by holy matrimony it is indeed time to admit we are seeking serenity. Madonna’s Erotic days are well and truly behind her, she’s even released an eponymous perfume, and so it may seem are mine.

  ..does the love heart mean she will call you in the morning?

It is time for a cup of tea, a Julian Fellowes scripted Sunday night series and some Cath Kidston bedsocks.

B-Day Song – Madonna (feat MIA) 2012

Well there you have it, thirty-six drama-filled, tear-stained, curly-topped and Madonna soundtracked years trundling across the globe, stamping my loud signature upon people and places innumerable. Thirty-six years bookmarked with the release of a tune from the Material One herself entitled ‘B-Day Song’, just 6 days before my B-Day. She must have known! Does it get any better than this? 

As it happens, it just might.

The Birthday celebrations began early. As Madonna knows, logistics are never straightforward when you are a Global Effing Rockstar on tour. My co-stars, dancers and back-up singers are scattered across the globe and travel often on other (obviously less-important) assignments. Not willing to let any of them off without spending a night with me, in my glorious scarlet honour, the festivities began a whole week earlier than the big Foolish day itself.

Starved of light for 6 months, the exact minute that the sun comes out for spring in Paree, the entire population locates a square of soil, a patch of grass or a slab of stone, and soaks up some serious pollution filtered rays. The Parisians do it in style, cheese and bread spread out on a blanket in a Parc, playing cards and sucking hard and fast on their Marlboro Lights while arguing the finer points of our pending presidential election. 

On a balmy and barmy Saturday evening my rowdy companions and I, Braveheart, Franco-American New Girl, her guy the White Russian, and some Gaelic ring-ins, we chose to enjoy the early evening Parisian sunshine in increasing levels of volume. Our feet dangling over the edge of the river, we began calmly, watching the locals wander by, serenaded by the husky tones of a saxophonist sitting oh-so-conveniently just beside us. He played sax-am-a-phone to the ebb and flow of the putrid water while the smell of manly urine wafted by our now desensitised nostrils. The rosé flowed, our spirits soared, and so did our harmonised voices. The sun had dipped down; it was time to start singing. Glee! At the very top of our lungs. Pourquoi pas?

  The bog of Eternal Stench

Party number one, pink wine, Glee, excellent friends and the bog of eternal stench known locally as La Seine.

Sax-ama-phone

A week later, just in time for the big day, it was serendipitously time to celebrate the return to France of her most prodigal of sons, Ashton. Ashton as in Kutcher, a Californian Geek of French birth, all baggy jeans and youth, blessed with more goofy facial expressions than a Pixar animated clownfish.

Ashton and I are easy friends who share a passion for talking, non-stop, in syncopated synchronisation, pausing only for a breath or a sip of the drink that sits semi-permanently at arms reach. The bar-owner presented me yet with more Pink Wine, crowned with a giant sparkler. There were more friends, there were more acquaintances, even the Gladiator stepped off his Italian engineered chrome chariot long enough to speak more than seven words in a row. The Birthday Song was sung in both languages; someone gave me some Lego, the party had truly begun.

  Sparkling Rosé?

Party number two, pink wine, Lego, excellent friends and the den of iniquity known as Le Prelude.

On the eve of the ultimate and most stylish of celebrations, Louis XIV was unexpectedly imprisoned in Evian, a watery prison similar to the Bastille but with better cheese. It would seem that even if he governs all that is gilt and glorious, the King of France no longer wields influence over the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français. He more than excused his 24-hour delay by gifting me an annual subscription to our shared ancestral home, le Château de Versailles, accompanied by two gargantuan blocks of Savoy Gruyere. How can a queen be angry with a prince on bended knee bearing Castles and Cheese? Cinderella can keep her glass slipper; my prince truly is Charming.

Long hair glossy and straight, extra strength nylons, heels* and a black frock and we were off to dine in regal style with the Fashionista, The recovered Engineer, The American and his not at all American wife. The Body, who was invited, but not in France, celebrated the birth of her favourite Australian, on the other side of the Atlantic, on Broadway, watching Drag Queens prance about in Priscilla. I’m glad that Australia is as equally renowned for ridiculous men who kill crocodiles as it is for ridiculous men who wear women’s clothing and mime ABBA songs.

Le Miroir, famous on these pages as the restaurant I frequent weekly to write these missives did an excellent job of rewarding my extra-regular patronage. More wine, stylishly white for this very stylish evening, foie gras (duck fat poached duck liver sounds decidedly un-stylish) stylish conversation followed by a stylish return to bed before the witching hour; a very stylish affair indeed. After two weeks of debauchery, even I was surprised I could keep it stylishly together for four hours#.

Duck fat poached Duck Liver that is made fatter with Fat Ducks

At the stroke of midnight, just in time for me to turn into a prostrate pumpkin, and for the date to tick over to Fools, the Australians got on the phone, all at once, and tried to draw out a sensible discussion from betwixt my wine-soaked lips. They tried, and they failed. Even so, the song was sung again, the day was just beginning, and the Birthday Girl was exhausted. 

Party number three, white wine, Liver, excellent friends and the stylish red velvet banquettes of Le Miroir.

Turning 36, five years behind the median age of women in France and almost exactly the median age of women in Australia (now you know why I stay here); I learned in the hardest of ways that while the mind might be more than willing, the body is not. I was cruelly brought down by a crippling flu (leaving me without a voice for more than a day^) thrust upon my newly minted middle-aged physiology that left me lying low, buried under a mountain of crumpled Kleenex and exuding an aura of codeine-induced confusion.

Peering out from underneath hooded eyelids, eyelids that bear the symptoms of weariness and fatigue, aging eyes that are the natural consequence of too many late nights, a body bruised from falling down the stairs, a psyche that is pinched tight with stress, a smile that is too-often forced for show and a heart that burns hotly for love; I think on the year that has been. The tears that were shed in vain, the regret, the denial, the grief and the yearning for the day in white that never came.

Kleenex Kloud

And then I get out of bed. I paint on the turquoise nails. I tease out the blonder curly hair. I lace up the shiny red shoes. I slick on the sparkly lip-gloss. I turn up the volume. I walk out into the world. And then I remember…

I am having the time of my life!

And the beat goes on, I'm a happy girl
It's my birthday song, in my happy world
I know it's gonna be a good day
Oh yeah, today is my birthday… 

   Taken at 3pm April Fools Day

*Born with a calamitous clumsiness to rival that of a tottering toddler barely off her knees, I prefer the steadiness of my Docs, but, on very special occasions, when I know I will only have to walk one block, I am inclined to slip on a sturdy ankle-supporting wedge.

 

#I have since returned to Le Miroir. Evidently I did not leave in quite as stylish a mode as I remembered. Matthieu, le Patron, spent a good hour giggling at my Folies.

 

^ Stubbornly unwilling to forgo the gift of speech, I whispered.

 

 

 

Lucky Star – Madonna 1984

Staring down the barrel of 36 extremely loud and vividly red years on this earth, I’ve been thinking… 

  A little old lady dances alone in Paris in Springtime.

I do that sometimes, not often, but sometimes. I am more of a feeler; she who jumps then wonders why she has a broken leg, she who cries wolf and cries crocodile tears. Thinking, lubricated with a glass in my hand or indulging in one of Sebastien’s springtime creations at Le Miroir happens on increasingly rare occasions. Even so, sometimes I sit still for 10 minutes or so and I just think. I think about the little things, why is there never salt and pepper on the table in a French restaurant? And also about the big things, do I move to Sydney, do I move to London, do I stay where I am. Lately, with the shadow of old age orbiting my huge head, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood. 

The eldest of three with a big mouth and an enormous intellect (…and a huge ego) I never enjoyed being a child. From the moment my memory kicks in, at the end of infant amnesia, I knew I wanted to be an adult. I knew there was more fun to be had on the adult table, the questions in junior trivial pursuit weren’t hard enough and I yearned for independence from the direction of the parental unit.

As a spirited, loud and impulsive child, I regularly wished I were something different or somewhere else or someone cooler.  

I whinged regularly at Motherbear; I wish I had a Sportsgirl T-shirt^, or I wish we lived somewhere else, or I wish I had more Barbie Dolls, or some other nonsense. Unfazed, my wise mater nostra would always counter with that formidable tool of parental domination, the saying. She had many, she used them often, and one of her favourites was the perfect counter argument to many an “I Wish” shouted loudly from within the lungs of her unsatisfied daughter.

“You should thank your Lucky Stars” 

A qualifier always followed that phrase. For example, “that you don’t live in Ethiopia”, “that you don’t have AIDS”, “that you aren’t addicted to heroin”*.  As a result, I grew up petrified in the belief that most of Sydney’ s inhabitants were AIDS infected malnourished Africans with a drug habit. In truth, and not in maternal wisdom, most of Sydney is beer addicted, over-nourished Australians with a thug habit. 

All the same had I have dutifully followed her advice at the exact moment it was proffered; I would have spent the better part of five days a week on bended knee thanking my Lucky Stars. As it happened, I didn’t think I was that lucky and I certainly didn’t think I had celestial bodies governing my fate that should be regularly prayed to in thanks for what I thought was a pretty average existence.

Dear Lucky Stars, I thank you for my big forehead and gi-normous eyes.

 Dear Lucky Stars, I thank you for making me born on April Fools Day.

Dear Lucky Stars, I thank you for being from Australia, a place sans chateaux.

Dear Lucky Stars, I thank you for my red skin that fires up at the first sign of heat.

Dear Lucky Stars, I thank you for ensuring Madonna’s tour never comes to Sydney.

…Anyway, you get the picture

 

Infuriatingly, I’ve come to realise, as on so many other occasions, Motherbear might just be right.

Last month I shared a wonderful repast with The Fashionista, recently married to The Engineer. Not yet one year confirmed in their harmonious matrimony, The Engineer has had a shocking accident with an engine, (the irony), resulting in horrific, life-threatening injuries.  He is alive and well, (thankfully), he speaks and he laughs, his hair is growing back. Everyday, The Fashionista wakes up and thanks her Lucky Stars.

Faced with something truly dramatic and violently earth shattering…me carping on about being “single in the city” rings a bit hollow.

Truffles for lunch on a Saturday. Because I can.

I am relatively healthy#, I earn a good living, I have about a dozen people who name me as their friend and I do have pretty awesome hair. Hair that comes at increasingly significant a cost, vaguely reminiscent of the red mane Julia sported in Pretty Woman, but I am rather proud of it. I get to sit in fancy restaurants, albeit alone, on a Saturday and sit still for two hours and write about my rather non-eventful existence. I spend my weeks talking to very interesting people while trundling my shiny red suitcase and shinier pink computer across the continent.

I thank my Lucky Stars for the people I work with. On the whole they are pretty amazing and unfortunately for them, in the absence of my Motherbear, the Art-sist-ologer and the Smartarse, my colleagues have become my pseudo-family. Four of them, La Franglaise, The Bruce, Björk and Heidi have the significant misfortune of being directed in their employment by a loud, demanding, emotionally volatile and hyperactive woman who does her darnedest to traumatise them on a daily basis.

Some very Lucky Stars indeed must be hovering above me. The formidable four gave me the most excellent Birthday Present I could have ever imagined. Made even more excellent because it was a surprise, and then even more excellent because they filmed me shaking and squealing when I opened the envelope so they’ll be able to blackmail me for eons…

Yep, Pretty effing brilliant they are.

I also thank my lucky stars that, almost a year ago now, the F-Word chucked me. If he hadn’t, very unlucky stars would certainly hover above me today, married to a man, who did not love me, who found me ridiculous and who was an arrogant French F-word C-word.

The Fashionista has her Engineer. The Stylist has her Shogun. The Art-sist-ologer has her Professor. The Academic has her Academique. The Micro-Chef has her Squirrel.

 

 

Surely M needs only Bond. James Bond. 

Wrapped up tight in strong arms and an even stronger character, then I really will thank my Lucky Stars.

 

 

 

 

 

^We were not permitted to wear T-shirts brandishing advertisements, even if everybody else did, Motherbear’s lefty ideas prevailed

*Motherbear was always ahead of her time when it came to ‘causes’; a bit like Germaine or Ita she would round table topics with the family that would have shocked most women of her generation

# If you don’t count the stress induced cirrhosis, lung cancer or hypertension

 

 

California Gurls – Katy Perry 2010

I hail from a city perched upon the expansive blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. I grew big and strong under the brightest of burning sunlight. I ate fresh fish and even fresher fruit. When I was a child I played outdoors in the sand. I am happier when the sun shines. Even so, I am not a California Girl.

Granted, my experience of California has been limited to a few trips, mostly concentrated around the Bay Area and San Francisco. I reckon that all that sunshine compromises the neurological functions of the brain. After a recent trip to the world’s fourth largest economy, I suspect that not only am I not a California Girl, but that I might indeed have become f**king French.

I don’t trust people who are happy all the time. I’ll allow that this is possibly genetic, but I think it is also Australian. Forging our national heritage from the misery of a penal colony, we don’t really trust anyone.

 

Human Beings were blessed with free will and a brain and a heart. If you use all three in equal measure, there will be occasions when shit goes wrong, when you are sad, when you wish you could punch someone in the face. A woman who smiles with 32 platinum bleached evenly shaped teeth, peroxide blonde straightened hair and perma-surprised glossy eyes belongs inside of a hot pink box with a bloke called Ken. If I met a Barbie Doll in real life, I would not trust her; she can’t put her feet flat on the ground and has boobs that are bigger than her shoulder blades. So why would I trust a whole state brimming with similarly fake women with even faker smiles and those ridiculous breasts made from the same material I use to protect my hands from burning hot oven dishes? 

 

Apparently we walk around with very tiny Koalas attached to our arms. 

I also don’t trust people who use code words to describe real and evident things. I don’t take comfort breaks I go to the toilet. I don’t sit on a cold porcelain toilet to seek comfort; I go to a bar with plush couches and a roaring fire to seek comfort. I go to the toilet; I don’t go to the restroom. A restroom is a place where one rests, relaxes and unwinds. A toilet is a place where one goes to remove waste from one’s body. The two places seem very different to me. Although blessed with British intelligence of Mi5 level as I am, perhaps I see things that Americans can’t. But maybe Californians don’t actually go to the toilet because they have the same genitals as their Mattel trademarked Doppelgangers, none.

In California, everything is huge. Cars are bigger than they need to be; huge pick-up trucks carry one person and ten litres of fuel per metre, five minutes up the road to pick-up a take-away pizza box as large as your dining table. Highways tear through the valleys and hills, up and down the state with at least four bitumen lanes on each side. Eating in a restaurant brings on type-2 diabetes as the huge plates are filled to the brim with seasoned chips, dressed salad and a giant bloody pickle that no one ever eats so why the hell do they go to the effort of putting them on the plate?

Fortunately you can ask for your dinner without the pickle. In fact, I learned that a menu in California is not so much a list of dishes that a chef prepares but rather an indicator of the ingredients available in the establishment that your vegan-macrobiotic-celiac Californian can combine into the dish of his or her choosing.

 

“I’d like the Mexican Turkey Burger. Can I have ground beef instead of turkey? Can you add grilled vegetables instead of the fries and I’ll take the Indian Spice rather than the Mexican sauce. And can I get a side of grilled tomatillos and a diet cherry coke with a slice of lemon?” No wonder the service staff earns 100-dollar tips off each table. They pay for the wrist surgery required after working in an environment where every diner orders a dissertation on cuisine rather than a number 37. 

Despite pumping their bodies full of silicone and Botox and peeling their faces off with hydrochloric acid and pebbles, Californians absolutely do not smoke. Nicotine causes cancer although carbon monoxide from monster Humvees does not. Tobacco is an illicit drug but cocaine is party powder. Standing in front of the hotel to smoke a quick one before retiring to my non-smoking room, a woman actually crossed the street to avoid the toxic fumes I was sending out into the obviously crystal clear California air. She crossed the street, I laughed under my breath.

Every day, in the taxi, the driver would comment on the fact that I was Australian. Everyday he would ask ‘what’s it like over there’. I’d talk about our relaxed casual attitude to life and he’d ask about Koala Bears. I’d say it is just Koala, they aren’t bears and he would ignore me. Everyday, I would specify that I lived in Paris and everyday he would remark that the French were rude.

If only I could have crossed the street each time I wanted to avoid an ignorant conversation.

 

Empire State of Mind – Jay Z and Alicia Keys 2009

The Little Orphan Annie’s life changed as a result of her first visit to New York. Annie and her fuzzy ginger afro were transformed from owning one filthy dress, being humiliated daily by a very drunk Miss Hannigan and cleaning a huge house to earn a few pennies into living it up in the lap of luxury on Central Park, more dresses than she could count and her own personal Indian butler. Unfortunately, no amount of money flung upon little Annie from the overstuffed wallet of Daddy Warbucks# could cure the fluffy red Afro. Those of us born with boucles know, unless you develop a love of wigs, there is absolutely nothing that all the Benjamin’s on this earth can do to tame curly, fuzzy Afro hair or any colour.

Strawberry Fields

 

My life has also been transformed after my visits to New York.

New York helped me to discover that despite the overwhelming list of examples to the contrary, Americans can be cool, they can be clever and they can be just as pessimistic as their British forefathers. 

Prior to visiting the Big Apple, there were only two Americans in my life that I was able to tolerate for more than a 42-minute episode of something on telly*, The Academic and The American. Both natives of one of the star spangled states. Both doted with a humour that has been thankfully blackened by the pursuit of knowledge through higher education and 10 years under the coffee and tobacco stained bitterness of the tricolore.

Ten years in France will cure even a Californian of their incessant, plasticised, chirpy optimism. It cured me of an Australian’s laconic could-not-give-a-shitness. Now I spend my evenings whining about Sarkozy through gritted teeth and rolling my eyes at lost tourists while I purse my lips angrily around a cigarette and exhale into the face of I-don’t-give-shit-who. Ah, la vie en rose…

  Grand Central Station

 

So anyway, back to New York.

You have to love a city that is designed for morons who can do little more than count. A city that numbers the streets from bottom to top so that even a sleep deprived, hung-over M, cruelly deprived of the data roaming on her phone that would normally guide her from one shop to the next, can get to where she needs to go. It is virtually impossible to get lost on Manhattan Island. And even if you are born under the star of total cluelessness and you struggle to find the location of the next purveyor of something-totally-normal-which-seems-cooler-just-because-it-is-in-New-York, there is a friendly yellow and black chariot that will happily ferry you up and down the Island until you haven’t got a dime left to spend.

Chariots 

The 85 square kilometres of Manhattan are knitted together to form the modern world’s Babylon, a living-breathing hyper-populated shrine to commerce. There is money to be made, money to spend, money pressed up against the windows of the fifth avenue boutiques in search of more money. Little money holds the hand of big money as they cross the street to spend more money. Money walks, talks, and burns fast enough to create the energy required to power the homes of the millions of moneyed residents. According to a particularly revelatory advertisement on a billboard, if you have got money in New York, you can pay for someone to find you an equally moneyed member of the opposite sex, or not if that is your fancy, to come into your life and give you the happy ending (all puns intended) your lacklustre love life was yearning for. Money can indeed buy you love…in New York.

The Fallout

Money can even transform an atrocity into an attraction.

In Germany, one doesn’t wander the streets asking passersby about the horrors of the Second World War. “Hey Hans, can you tell me where the Adolf’s Amusement Park is?” But in NYC if you want to ask questions about that one day in September, it is easy as apple pie. Simply handover some more money, pay the entry fee, visit the memorial, tip the tour guides, and you will get all the answers you need. Actual objects that survived the day. Eyewitness testimonials. And a souvenir T-Shirt…

I shouldn’t make light of such a horrific tragedy. After all, the creators of the excellent New York based television show Mad Men, were almost boycotted for an advertisement that was thought to be making light of the event. Anyone who has seen the show’s opening credits knows that the silhouette of a man falling beside the buildings of Madison Avenue is an allegory for Don (is there a sexier man on earth) Draper’s descent into depression and vice. But paste such an image onto the side of a building in New York and the policy-makers find it all too reminiscent of those brave folk who jumped to avoid burning to death in jet fuel. Subtle imagery being the antonym of most American art forms, the confusion is entirely understandable.

  Sailors in Central Park. Gene Kelly would be proud.

What is synonymous with American artistic output is cinema, big budget, sparkly, botoxed, blow out films of every genre, for every generation, at every level. One of the song and dance numbers in Annie is ‘Let’s Go To The Movies’ and every year the world bows down to the holy grail of cinema at the Oscars. Today, as I walk the streets of New York, the city itself the biggest and brashest of all the Hollywood stars, I am reminded at almost every turn of a movie I watched once, or more than once, and that makes me smile.

In FAO Schwarz, the toy store featured in BIG starring Tom Hanks, the ‘big piano’ tinkles invitingly, cashing in on the fame it earned in a movie that is over 20 years old. Around the corner is Tiffany & Co. No breakfast, but filled to bursting with tourists who want to buy a little bit of Audrey’s class and elegance for themselves. Further down the avenue is the Empire spire that pierces the sky, and the heart, of anyone who has seen an Affair to Remember.

  The Rooftop

More recently New York has become the symbol of two of my favourite crap television shows, Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. I know that both have the intellectual value of a tabloid magazine guest edited by Katie Price. I know that not unlike a Cadbury Crème Egg, they are filled with gooey sugary sweet crap that is no good for you. But I love them both.

What luck then that I should have stayed in the Empire Hotel, home to Chuck Bass, Gossip Girl’s sexy but emotionally unavailable tortured bachelor with a penchant for parties, prostitutes and Patron Tequila. After recovering from the shock when I entered my enormous room, I had two, joined together, more spacious than my home in Paris, one for sleeping in and one for lounging in, I got down to trying to locate Chuck or some reminder of him in the building. No joy, but, TV tourist sucker that I am I did drink a Gossip Girl cocktail.

Walking in Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes in Manhattan is significantly easier than walking in real needle-heeled Blahniks. Every shop window on 5^th Avenue evokes the memory of Sarah, her pink tutu, her whiny voice and reminds me that since it ended, they don’t make cool TV shows for smart women anymore. Making a star out of New York in the very title of the TV show that documented the libidinous tales of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, the mercenary locals identified another unique opportunity to make yet more money out of naïve TV tourists. Hence the pink buses that criss-cross Manhattan filled with Champagne and Chanel scented women on the ‘official one and only HBO approved’ Sex and the City tour of New York. I was tempted, but I refrained, preferring instead to spend my hard earned adult money far more maturely and responsibly.

 
Superhero Sandwich

Yes, that is M, three weeks shy of my 36^th Birthday, with Captain America and Iron Man, …in New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made.

 

 

 

#Writing this in 2012, I am struck but just how inappropriate the story of Annie and her elder benefactor would be considered in today’s politically correct nanny society

*I know, I know… I watch reality crap from America. Nothing can cure the anxiety of my life like an episode or two of Top Chef or Project Runway… or a litre of vodka

 

Girls (Who Rule the World) – Beyonce 2011

In recent weeks a political David and Goliath struggle played out for the leadership of the Great Southern Land, Australia. Julia Gillard, that exceptional redhead who leads that exceptional red land almost lost her job to the only prime minister Australia has ever known who looks more like Southpark’s Eric Cartman than Eric Cartman himself, Kevin Rudd. The long and the short of it is that after some toing and froing, Julia came out on top, she is still the Prime Minister and she still has excellently coiffed red hair.

Since becoming Australia’s first female Prime Minister two years ago, Julia has attracted more than her fair share of criticism. People don’t like the way she speaks (bogan^), despise her red hair (common) and they never stop commenting on the fact that she is Australia’s FIRST female Prime Minister. Despite being in a long-term relationship, she has no children and despite being Prime Minister of the second largest economy in the Asia Pacific Region, an economy that has been barely sniffed at by the Global Financial Crisis, she really can’t do anything right#.

At the Royal Wedding of William to his Kate last year in London, all the journos commented on was the design elements of what Julia was wearing. You may or may not know that there were about 20 leaders from the various Commonwealth countries in Westminster Abbey that day, Julia was the only one who, like the eight months pregnant tabloid nothingness Victoria Beckham, was dissected for her fashion choices.  Victoria is a fashion designer, what she wears is essential to her success. Julia is a politician; I am far more interested in what she has to say than the colour or cut of what she is wearing while she says it. 

More importantly, if she were a man, would anyone care what she wore? When John Howard, who occupied the top job for twelve long and arduous years, made a political speech, did anyone begin their opinion piece with those famous words, “opting for a double breasted Armani and shinier than shiny Florsheim brogues, Mr Howard addressed the caucus and bored everyone senseless from underneath his under-epilated eyebrows”. Certainly, I never read that in the Herald.

When, on Australia Day 2012, attending an official gathering, Julia suffered a frightening and violent attack to her personal safety, the press did not comment on her grace under pressure as she was manhandled into a waiting car. Rather, the ‘Cinderella Story’ focussed on the brand of shoe she lost as she was whisked away by her manly bodyguards. A shoe that was later sold on eBay.

The shoe that was gloriously thrown at George W. Bush’s head at a press conference in 2008 was not sold on eBay, nor do I imagine you know its brand or its size. Bush was a moron. He led the (then) largest economy in the known world. He was a man. We didn’t care how items of apparel affected his day-to-day political life. 

Did you know Christina Aguilera had put on weight? Did you know that Duchess Kate wears shoes from Russell & Bromley? Did you know that Helena Bonham Carter wore Vivienne Westwood when she received her Order of the British Empire from the Queen? Do you know the identity of the father of Rachida Dati’s child’s father*?  

Let me re-ask these questions. 

Did you know that Justin Timberlake is going bald? Do you know who designed Prince William’s suit? Do you know what Sir Richard Branson was wearing the day he received his Knighthood? Can you name the child that Tony Abbott allegedly fathered when he was at university?

I am not a feminist, but…I am more than a little bit over the double standards.

I earn my own living, I look after myself (apart from the recreational alcoholism), and I do not ask for any help from the government and nor do I abuse that which is offered. I would not classify myself as a burden on society and do not judge those who are incapable of helping themselves. Call me Socio-Capitalist if you like. But I am sick and effing tired of the comments about my marital status, the number of my issue (none) and the fact that what I do counts for nothing given the answers to the first two questions. 

I am a woman who has made decisions that have inexorably defined her path, even if I wish they hadn’t.

Some years ago, I was the other half of a man, a good and kind man, who wanted me to be his good wife. Wanting something more, something that would push my intellect beyond its known realms, I pushed the Danish designed diamond ring back across the dining table we had bought together at a Swedish furniture store and wished him well as I ventured off into the then unknown wilds of French socialism.

I did not know then what I know now.

When a woman chooses to live a life less ordinary, she will ultimately give up that which to so many seems commonplace. Respect. Affection. Equality. At least if I had red hair like Julia, I’d be really different.

Had I have made the decision to marry that good man, I would no doubt be living a somewhat happy life in a somewhat happy family home somewhat happily somewhere in the south of Sydney.

At that time, I had recently witnessed the death of my father, a man who had somewhat happily given up his musical ambitions to become the carpenterily breadwinner of a somewhat happy family. I decided that I did not want to die having never at least tried to fulfil my dream of living abroad in the country I dreamed of and speaking the language I had spent 12 years learning by rote. 

Like Julia, I have no children. Unlike Julia, I have no life partner.

You see, when you can take care of yourself and you have demonstrated that even in a land of language foreign unto you, that you’ve survived, broken leg and broken heart, you take a profoundly deep dive on the desirability-for-partnership scale. When you have managed to do everything, without the assistance of a manly presence, when you can cope without an abdominal six-pack to carry you off into the sunset, everyone assumes you are Snow White, equipped with seven dwarves to do the hard graft, eating an apple a day to keep the doctor away, but in no need of a Prince Charming to whisk you off into the sunset.

Francois Fillon, the very manly and very heavily eye-browed Prime Minister of France this month enacted a law that the word Mademoiselle will no longer appear on official government documentation. From now on we are only Madame (me) or Monsieur.  Robbed of the title ‘Ms’ in French, the idea is that there will no longer be discrimination against unmarried women…of a certain age.

Despite his revolutionary bill of parliament, Francois has obviously never spent a night with me in a bar in Paris.

 

^ Google it, you will learn something

#For the record, I am not here to comment on her politics, just the media representation of her, the Prime Minister

* How many male politicians have born children onto this earth unbeknownst to them, to the voting public or to anyone else.

 

Hotel California – The Eagles 1976

An interesting fact about my life, or maybe not if you are one of the many who think my life is not at all that interesting, is that I spend on average 3 weeks a month in hotels. For the millennials among you who know that FourSquare is not a kind of country dancing, I’ve managed to ‘check in’ 8 weeks in a row at hotels. In the pointless yet highly addictive game that is earning points on FourSquare, I beat my friends simply be being away, all of the time. 

Understated Italian Hotel Style

Spending hours whiling away my life in trains and airports, I’ve taken to reflecting upon the finer points of hotel service; finer points that I myself was once responsible for in a galaxy far, far away, in my former life on the red dirt, as an employee of InterContinental Hotels in Sydney. Working in a hotel is like joining the army; the dress code is as rigid^, the hierarchy as strictly observed, and it is a job destined for those young people who didn’t get good enough marks in high school to do what they really wanted to.

Hotels are designed to make the visitor feel at home, the people who work there are employed to make you feel welcome and the amenities in a hotel room are intended to bridge the gap between your house and theirs. So why is there a telephone in the toilet?

German Emergency Loo-Phone

I’ve lived in more than a dozen homes in my life. Just like hotels, these homes were furnished with a bed, a sink, a television and a toilet. Like a hotel, in these homes I have slept, I have washed, I have watched television, I’ve gone to the loo and I have often made phone calls. My enormous brain fails to comprehend is why hotels install telephones in the toilet. In all of the places I have lived, I have never felt the urge to pee come on at exactly the same time as the need to make a phone call, a phone call so urgent that it could not wait until after I had finished my ablutions.

Moreover in this the age of the Smartphone, does anyone even use the telephone in a hotel? On the numerous occasions I have slept in hotels, and they are super numerous, I’ve never actually used the telephone in the room other than to ask reception for a wake up call. Despite being adept at multitasking, the urge to request said wake-up call has never come upon me so urgently that I felt the need to make that call while sitting on the loo. Having even one phone beside the bed seems a waste of money, let alone an additional handset coated with other people’s bacteria and microscopic dots of crap installed inside of a room reserved for expelling material while reading a newspaper and not indulging in light conversation.

Breakfast in London including mini Flowerpot - just like at home...

My father was one of those people who lived for free stuff. He would never pay for a meal in a restaurant without eating every last mouthful…including the curly parsley garnish…because he had paid for it. He was what many an Australian refers to as a ‘mean-whinging-pom’*. He would not pay for us to go to the annual Royal Easter Show in Sydney and buy us Showbags because “you can go to Woolworths (Sainsburys or other) and buy the same chocolate in a much less fancy plastic bag for a quarter of the price”. One of the earlier memories I have of him was our first trip to Europe, I was ten, and he was almost forty. I was left in England with relatives while he and Motherbear travelled around 12 cities in Europe.

Thirty years later, I remember they visited twelve cities because when he returned to collect me in London, he had twelve different brands of tiny bottles of soap and shampoo, each one removed from each of the hotels in which he slept. He took it, even though he didn’t need it, because he had paid for it.

Nordic Minimalism in Stockholm

Today, in these terrorist-troubled times of not being able to carry on luggage that contains a bottle of anything larger than a tampon, I (perhaps foolishly) still check in my small suitcase, replete with normal sized bottles of shampoo and soap. I incur this additional inconvenience despite being afforded many an opportunity to pinch the little ones from the many hotels in which I find myself on a weekly basis. I don’t take them out of the rooms because despite being British and a bit of a whinger I am not mean, a credo to which I have strongly cleaved…until recently.

I have lately discovered a hotel that has teeny-weeny bottles of stuff that you actually want to take.  Indeed, I must be a snob, because I never took them, but now that it is Malin + Goetz, I have myself become a mean-whinging-thieving-pom, albeit a mean-whinging-thieving-pom who washes her hair at the gym with Cilantro Conditioner and Rum Body wash. Finally, a hotel that gives away something worth taking! 

Unlike the sewing kit.

I’ve given this one a lot of thought, and have significant personal experience. Being a fan of the twin Swedes that clothe the better part of the modern world, Hennes & Mauritz (that is H&M for the uninitiated) I wear more than my fair share of crappily constructed clothing sewn together in China. I have many a button that falls off, many a hem that drops down and many a seam that pops#. However, strangely perhaps, when I am in hotels, my buttons do not all spontaneously and simultaneously pop from the shirt upon which they are fastened. When I walk into a hotel I do not suddenly have the desire to sew up the many hems I have stapled, super-glued or blu-tacked into submission. When I am in a hotel, I do not think about sewing or darning, I think about how many hours of cable television I can squeeze into 24 hours. Why don’t they give you something small and handy that you might actually use?

I don’t polish my shoes everyday. Those who see me regularly know that I usually wear patent leather shoes eliminating the need to polish them at all, let alone daily. So why oh why do hotels spend thousands of very un-eco-friendly dollars on such frippery as shoe sponges. I’ve lately learned that the good folk of Germany must also have difficulty shoeing themselves on normal days. Hotels in the Bundesrepublik come with not just the sponge, but also a mini shoehorn. Maybe after drinking ten jugs of beer a day the Deutscher struggle to bend over and slip on their boots.

Many a time I’ve forgotten toothpaste, a toothbrush or a razor to sort out my unruly legs, so why don’t they give us toothbrushes instead of a showercap? Even so, I have never ever, not in this lifetime or any other that I remember, walked into a hotel and thought to my sweet self, “bugger, I forgot my boot polish and shoehorn!”

Little bottle of milk for coffee (I took that)

And then there is breakfast.

Everyone is different. Some people scull a coffee and walk out the door, healthier people sit down to fruit and yoghurt, the good patriots of China eat congee and the United Kingdom fries the best part if a pig every morning for breakfast. As for me, an Australian lass born and bred, I eat two slices of grain toast with Vegemite, simple, reliable and packed with Vitamin B and thanks to the travel tubes of veggie, available in every single city I visit.

The cornucopia that is spread across a buffet in a hotel at 6am blows my mind. If there were only four types of bread, would anyone actually complain? Four kinds is three more than your average human being has in their pantry at home. If there were only regular full fat milk, would you refuse to eat your cereal? If the orange juice was only pedestrian orange and not Spanish Seville blood orange, would you call the United Nations and plead diplomatic immunity? Do you eat eggs, bacon, sausages and hash browns every single morning? Do you need to eat it when you are in a luxurious five-star hotel and not stranded like a refugee in a McDonalds?

Three kinds of yoghurt, no Vegemite

Why then do most hotels spread out forty-five kinds of baked flour and yeast? Not just sliced grain and sliced white but little rolls and pastries and ten kinds of berry jam and salted butter and unsalted butter and cheese and pate an ham and salad and salmon and despite this they still don’t have bloody Vegemite…

 

 

Bring your Own Vegemite in Berlin

*For the foreigners, mean in this context refers to their tightness rather than their personality

#Although that may be down to my penchant for Foie Gras and Frites more than the quality of the workmanship

^Frustrated and broke after putting a finger through my black nylons almost every morning, my time at IHG was cut tragically short

Dizzy Miss Lizzy – the Beatles 1965

Today I handed over the princely sum of 1500 Euros to fly to Sydney in May. It was particularly expensive this time round as my trip across the sky to the red dirt coincides with no less than four French public holidays.  I wouldn’t normally choose to travel at exactly the same time as half of France, especially the half under the age of 14 as I’m not very calm inside aircraft, but duty calls. My sister is having a baby.

Like Mick hollers in the Rolling Stones classic Beast of Burden; my little sister is a pretty pretty girl. She is also a very beautiful woman, but her resemblance to one of Michelangelo’s cherubs is a minor detail. More significantly, the Art-Sist-ologer is a talented scholar, a gifted painter and a dab hand at mixing a Martini. All of which are essential life skills when you share 24m2, one towel, one bed and a plastered right leg. 

We came to Europe together to share the world’s smallest living space in France not that long after our father went to share a celestial flat with John Lennon. Pooling our wealth, our three languages, our brown curls, our dimples and two suitcases we went in search of herring, Hammershoi and life experience in Europe. After trundling around the freezing north in frozen trains for two months we settled in Paris, in an attic apartment with a bed and a bath and walked the streets of Paris until the fateful day a bike diverted its path across my right ankle. She went home 8 months after we arrived and I am still here. She browns her freckled face under a luminescent blue sky while I go blind in weakening sunlight. Sitting here after two weeks of sub-zero cold, I wonder who made the smarter decision.

Whatever the answer to that question, I have only one sister so I can say without bias that she is my favourite.

A dedicated enthusiast of the Mafia, she is more than a little obsessed with all that is Scorsese, de Niro, Pacino, Corleone and Soprano. I’ve known her to say on more than one occasion that she wished she had been a gangster’s moll. Not for the money and danger but because they had better clothes than we do today and her just-so-bobbed hair would have suited the Prohibition Era fashion for headbands. Or maybe, like her elder sister, she has a thing for muscled Italian guys with guns? Guns between their shoulder and wrist, not the more deadly lead variety.

A graduate of one of Australia’s finest art schools, she is naturally a keen observer of all that is visual, balanced and beautiful. She has taught me about the significance of the naked woman who sits beside her clothes and stares at the voyeur in Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, the importance of the division of space in David’s The Death of Marat and the beauty of shadow and light as defined by Raphael and Vermeer. Lessons I memorised and have since put into practice, visiting Europe’s art galleries without her as my personal tutor. I’ve heard her voice in my ear last year when I stood in front of the Girl with the Pearl in The Hague and she silently advised me again last week as I was transfixed by Venus’ eyes in the Uffizi. Her encyclopaedic knowledge of European Art History does not explain why she spent a year painting putrefied rotten potatoes.  Although I will admit that their extra-terrestrial otherworldliness fascinated me when they hung on the walls of our shared apartment. I think I miss them.

  Pomegranates - 2006

For 10 years I carried one of her earliest oeuvres, a cigarette and a cup of coffee sketched onto the back of a Post-It sized bus ticket, inside my shiny red wallet. A wallet that was distressingly stolen one night while drinking in a bar close to the flat we shared in Glebe. Crying to the police officer as I listed all the cards and ID that had to be replaced, the constable couldn’t understand why I was so upset about losing a bus ticket.

Ironically it is I that writes upon these pages for the world at large to read, while she is far more talented at articulating a discourse, logical and pragmatic, to convince the reader of her chosen argument. Sitting in the back seat of a sweaty Sydney bus, I remember her asking me once to proofread an essay that she had written for her history class. An essay unclouded with my melodramatic emotion but balanced with an eloquence she inherited from our parents that I unfortunately did not. She, reason to my passion, we do make a formidable pair.

Our adventures as little women in a house lorded over by a macho carpenter had their highs and their lows. Sisters, only 20 months apart, there were times when I was just that little bit older and the sight of her reminded me of the Barbie Dolls I had outgrown. A few years later, we reached the point post puberty when we became partners in crime, partners in love and defenders against the oppression of the parental unit.

After a year as exchange students in France (me) and Sweden (her) and under the European spell of nicotine, we would lock ourselves in her patchouli-scented bedroom, the only room in the house that locked, and smoke illicit cigarettes. We shared secrets and lies, stories and rumours, a brother and two parents. I find it uncanny that what we share is only equal to that which we do not.

She sees the world via the stars and milky impressionist images, I see it as an interminable range of mountains to climb and battles to win or lose. She has made many friends for life; I am the transient traveller who has never settled. She observes and acts with prudence and careful judgement while I jump in head first, often breaking something (leg, arm, heart) upon landing.

Today, the Art-sist-ologer shares a proper-sized home with the Professor, and her protruding belly ripens with their progeny. I’ve not seen her in her latest incarnation as Persephone of Petersham, but I talk to her often and I have no doubt that she’ll make a wonderful if slightly offbeat mother. A child of two artists, that little person inside will most definitely have an eye for all that is spectral, balanced and aesthetically pleasing. My childish curiosity wonders only if she will inherit her mother’s melodic giggle, fantastic hands and tight-knit curls.

As the eldest, there is something unsettling about the reality that I’ll soon be an Aunt to children of both my younger siblings. I’ve come to accept that life has laid a long road before me that won’t necessarily include the milestones of marriage and children of my own. In the confines of my overactive grey matter, I’ve learned to imagine what I don’t have. It comforts me and provides me with plenty of inspiration for what I hope will one day be a novel in my name, the closest thing I have right now to a child. All the same those three little people growing strong under the Southern Cross are among of my life’s greatest treasures. I just wish it didn’t cost a king’s ransom to go and see them.