parismarisamadonna

Somebody that I used to know – Gotye 2011

Thursday of this week, the 26^th of January, was Australia Day, a national public holiday in my native land to celebrate the arrival, 224 yrs ago, of Captain Arthur Phillip and his fleet of 12 prison ships filled with Britain’s finest bread-thieves, poorest prostitutes and canniest criminals. Unlike the Americans, who have thrust the Independence Day upon all humanity, reminding us annually of their self-designated supremacy over the known world as well as the lower echelons of their cinematic oeuvre, yes I am talking to you Will Smith, Australia Day is a relatively quiet affair.

In their homeland, Australians aren’t a particularly patriotic people. We aren’t united under God and we’ve never had to slay a Dragon to become a nation. One day, after the criminals had learned how to raise enough beef to keep Queen Victoria in filet for a lifetime, the English decided to afford us the right to govern ourselves. A century later Elizabeth let us introduce our own money and even make up our own flag. We just never really gave a s**t enough to fight. #

But, when flung to the far reaches of Europe and beyond upon the aluminium Flying Kangaroo, our native lethargy is replaced by a sanguine impulsion to remind all and sundry, even the decent man who sells me apples, of every microscopic claim to fame from that sparse red slab of dirt stuck to the earth somewhere below China. Did you know that the black box, Cate Blanchett, Animal Kingdom, Julian Assange and Gotye are Australian? If you didn’t, stand next to an Australian in a London pub and she’ll be sure to let you know. Whether you care to be told or not. 

Patriots we may not be, protective of our national treasures we are.

  Frocked up for Australia Day in London - 3 degrees

I don’t care how rude Russell Crowe was to that porter in New York, it was simply a case of the yanks not understanding how tight a window we emigrants have to call home on any given day. Julian Assange is not a rapist; he is the genius who exposed the hypocrisy of politics to the common man. I’ll allow that he desperately needs to rethink his hairdo. The Crocodile Hunter, far from being a man who preyed upon the innocent beasts of the swamps of Far North Queensland was a conservationist determined to protect the native fauna of his homeland. So concerned about their welfare, he died after giving a giant human sized stingray a cuddle.

We’ve even managed to find a little love in our hearts for the rusty headed Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, after her brush with death this week, on Australia Day! Dragged from among a crowd of protesters, Cinder-Julia-ella lost her glass slipper (a navy suede wedge pump) and was manhandled by her security guard into a waiting car. The image of the head of our government, in a headlock, wearing only one shoe, could have been mistaken for a snap of any drunken reveller being carried home after a few too many sherbets.  Instead, it was slapped across newspapers far and wide, Julia went home and had a spent the following days justifying the actions of her staff and Australians sympathised for a short time with the mumsy woman who leads the Nation.  

On Australia Day, we also announce the name of the next great Australian to be placed upon the great green and gold throne as Australian of the Year. This year, it was the rubber faced acting legend, Geoffrey Rush. He of the rather large nose piercing a sunburnt canvas of a visage, a passion for Shakespeare and most renowned as not being the guy who won an Oscar for The King’s Speech. Australian of the Year doesn’t hold the same potency as the awards the Queen gives to her own. There is no sir, no dame, and no sword tapped on the shoulder, just Julia in her best summer frock squeaking out your name.

Posh Vegemite in Selfridges. The English trying to gentrify our National Breakfast?

On the 26^th , the one thing I do miss over here in Francalia is the annual tradition of spending the day in the sunshine, listening to the Hottest 100. Triple J, the national broadcaster’s youth station has conducted an annual vote for the best song of the year since the 80’s. The 100 songs are played out over the course of the day with number one announced at around 6pm, just as everyone is packing up the BBQ to go home. On my last Australia Day in Sydney, I could hear the whole street respond as the songs were announced. Increasingly inebriated, the cries of disgust or joy at the placement of a favourite song become increasingly animated as day becomes night and one beer becomes twenty.

This year, Gotye took out the title, he of the dubiously French sounding name and Belgian heritage. The fact that he is now well respected throughout the world affords us the opportunity to induct another Australian into the hallowed halls of "Australians Who Aren’t Really Australian But We Tell Everyone They Are". Just ask Russell Crowe, Olivia Newton-John, Crowded House, Ben Folds and Sam Neill. All great Australians who simply happen to be born somewhere else.

No beer, just Tim Tams, a rather low key celebration at the office...

Listening to a bunch of songs on the radio while carbonising some beef on a barbeque and drinking your body weight in beer. Not an army parade or a frenzy of choirs singing the national anthem, but as much of a tradition as a 224-year-old nation can muster together.

Happy Australia Day.

 

 

 

#I am well aware that my simplified version of events appears to belittle the horrors inflicted upon the native people of Australia by the colonialists. My goal is to stick to what I know and have personally experienced rather than to patronise the exceptional cultural importance of the Aboriginal people.

 

 

Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush 1978

I’ve decided that from now on, I’d like to be known as Lady M. I’d also like to have a button on the wall beside my bed that I could press upon awakening, a button that would bring forth a black and white uniformed maid proffering breakfast in bed on a silver tray. A maid on hand in the morning and again in the evening to dress me, arrange my hair and make my bed. After I was dressed in a corset that would work physiological wonders on my waistline, I would walk serenely into a well-appointed dining room and liveried footman would serve a three-course dinner upon a table for my own bacchanalian pleasure. I would rise after said repast and retire to the parlour to play cards and listen to conversation that would never venture beyond the weather and the latest goings on among our small circle of friends. At some point, a man most certainly resembling Dan Stevens would wander in and stare longingly at me from across the sumptuously furnished room. 

Then I woke up and realised I don’t live in Downton Abbey. That I don’t live at Pemberley, Thornfield Hall, Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park or Rosings. For that matter, I don’t live in any bonnet drama. I live in a 40 square metre damp flat in the 18^th arrondissement of Paris and live in the elasticised cocoon of a T-shirt and leggings everyday. My life is more of a Bother Drama. Which begs the question, why do I torture myself and watch these shows...over and over…and over again?

  The sacred altar of the Bonnet Drama

Obsessed with the search for the divine truth in all things, as I am, I’ve actually tried to research this, both anecdotally and from within that font of recently blacked out knowledge, Wikipedia. In recent years, Downton Abbey has been the biggest thing on UK telly apart from the X-Factor so I’m not alone in my love of pretty dresses and well-mannered men.

Whether it is Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, any one of the prolific Brontës or their contemporary cousin, Julian Fellowes, Bonnet Dramas have that same soothing effect as a golden syrupy glass of after dinner Sauternes. At first glance it appears to be old and yellow and destined for those intellectually superior to oneself, but take that first sip, and alas, the sugary sweet haze takes over. You are lulled into a sense of sublime comfort and cloudy relaxation until that rude awakening when someone asks you to pay the bill, or in this case, the credits roll.

  Hot and Heavy Heathcliff or Tom Hardy before he met Hollywood

A regimented world ordered by daily rhythms and unbreakable rules. A sex-divided world where women wear dresses and hats and gloves and embroidered shoes and perma-smiles. A world where upstairs and downstairs was the only class divide. A world where race and sex and colour described your horse. A world where the guy gets the girl and the girl knew it all along. A heap of steaming bulls**t that we have dreamt ourselves into while we are scrubbing last night’s dishes, or worse still scraping away yesterday’s fossilised mascara.

Unlike the reading of classical novels, where you are forced to look up the words you don’t know and your imagination is exercised as you mentally create the visages of each character, modern day Bonnet Dramas have no intellectual import. The language and the etiquette have been dumbed down for 21st Century audiences. People hug each other and say ‘Hi’ both inventions of today’s Americanised society. Kisses between heroes and heroines are rather more lingual than they might have been 150 years ago and situations like the ever present ‘entail’ must be explained for the modern viewer who has no property to inherit regardless of whether they are female.

I know Bonnet Dramas are the two-minute noodle of literary culture but I watch them all the same.

  Richard Armitage pre-Hobbit as your Northern-bit-of-rough Mr Thornton

Mr Rochester brooding in front of the fire, Mr Thornton striding through the cotton mill, Captain Wentworth staring across at Anne in the music hall, Edward Ferrars fumbling his words, Darcy jumping into the lake and more recently Matthew Crawley on bended knee in the snow at Christmas. These are the starched collar romantic heroes a Modern Day Gal would lay down her waxed-legs-email-speed-dating-life for. Or at least we think we would.*

Staring into the handsome hero’s sultry eyes it is oh-so-easy to forget that were we to jump into Marty McFly’s Delorean and speed away into life in that sepia world, we would in exchange, have to forgo modern day luxuries such as toothpaste, Diet Coke, H&M and tampons. Shudder the thought!

Magnetic Magneto Michael Fassbender, Mr Rochester broods like no other

Contrary to popular belief, men watch bonnet dramas too. They just don’t readily admit to it. They also long for a time when the manliest challenge of their day might have been walking the dog. They wish for a world where they could don their favourite tweed jacket with the funky leather elbows (and not all ironic and Paul Smith) and shoot at defenceless game birds for fun. Most especially, they imagine a place where women shut their effing mouths and did what they were told, where marriage meant they were assured of healthy issue and a pretty face to entertain the party guests rather than the 21^st century reality of shared housework, couples counselling and witnessing the birth of their child from that most intimate of feminine biological geographies.

  And in 2012 we have the honest to goodness sultry stare of Dan Stevens - Matthew Crawley

Surveying friends, colleagues and family I have come to the conclusion that we long for the quiet order and bucolic simplicity of the places depicted in the Bonnet Drama. 

In an increasingly chaotic world where the simplest of tasks have been mechanised and snap frozen, we wish we could take the time to actually cook something. Instead of texting or liking or tweeting we would welcome the opportunity to have face-to-face conversation with a lover and argue about something real rather than bitch about the snide comment his ex posted on his Facebook page. Rather than scanning the online profiles of a potential mate we want to be Lost In Austen’s Amanda. We want to be courted by a man who opens the door and kisses you sheepishly on the hand instead of groping your left one while he drunkenly shoves a hand inside your jeans. 

Like all of life’s great questions, this isn’t an easy one to answer. If you don’t mind, I’ll spend the next few months puzzling over whether courtly love and sultry stares from a man in tight pants and a cravat, who is not gay, would be a fair exchange for the silky smooth cover of Tampax.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

* Yes people actually took time out of their lives and made all of these YouTube videos, so I am not the only sad person watching…

Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes 1974

Another year over. 

    New Year's Eve chez Louis

To borrow from the second best Elizabeth on this earth, she of the crown and posh accent, I am very glad to have now seen the back end of my annus horribilus. While there was certainly plenty to be happy about, I can run faster, I can smile and I am far from destitute; there was a cataclysmic shock to the system in the spring that defined my 2011 and all of the events that followed. Everything I did became about ‘getting over it’, feeling better about myself and redefining my existence balancing upon that ever so thin line between Bubbly Bridget Jones and Melancholic Miss Havisham.

Motherbear tells me I am a drama queen, my colleagues tell me I shout too much, I write about the most mundane events of my life on a weekly basis, twisting words to make grocery shopping or catching a train sound like a War or the Worlds/Gone with the Wind mash up. Why settle for mediocrity when language can transform your life into a one-woman stage play? Births, deaths, marriages, holidays, break ups and make ups, visits to places I’ve not seen before, pilgrimages back to the parched red clay of my homeland, hired, fired, happy or sad, there has been one constant throughout it all. 

My eyes.

 

They are slightly larger than they should be, occupying a full third of my face. They change from turquoise blue to clear grey depending on the colour of the sky or the tone of my shirt. They are often hidden behind red-rimmed glasses of all too rapidly increasing strength. But unfortunately, (in my annual performance review for example), no matter how politic I attempt to be, these eyes are a dead give away to every micron of emotion, kernel of opinion or fragment of thought.

If I don’t like you, the crease in the middle of my eyes will inform you of my hatred even if I don’t. If you pinch my delicate sensibilities, the welling dampness in the corners will give away my pain despite my carefully constructed response feigning indifference. Carried away on the waves of comedy, I try to giggle discreetly but my eyes will be saucer-wide with hysteria.

In the corporatised planful* world that we live in, it is no longer socially acceptable to be someone who wears their proverbial heart on their sleeve.

Crying with despair at your iPad when Red Dog died, in front of a full carriage of channel tourists in the Eurostar is a minor infraction. After all Red Dog was red and a visually expressive dog. Watching him pant in pain after being poisoned is more than most people could bear. Crying in pure desperation as you stand under the soothing water of a hot shower is my a weekly ritual; the water trickling away a little bit of the pool of steam that fuels my shallow temper. But crying during a catch up with your manager, or in the middle of a meeting of 100 colleagues, or as you argue with the banker about how to fill in a form or worse still, on the Metro, in front of 1000 people, because someone has just pushed you over…again…and you fell…again…bags akimbo…well, it is really not very cool. 

Feet that struggle to keep the eyes upright

Not that I have ever been cool, but roll with me here…

I find some relief in the knowledge that for every tear I’ve shed, there has been a raucous laugh of equal intensity. I love to laugh out loud like a man and I’ve been lucky to have plenty of reasons to do so over the last few weeks.

Firstly, I discovered The Inbetweeners Movie. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Such astute and witty commentary on how ridiculous the English become when on holiday, languishing beside one of Europe’s many Mediterranean beaches is exceptionally funny. And then there is ‘The Dance’. EMPIRE magazine, my personal film bible, listed it as the second best film moment of the year just after Harry Potter killing Voldemort. I found a link in YouTube here but without the context of the film, I’m not sure you will laugh like you should.

Secondly, I have a most talented friend, Collette, who wrote the funniest one-women Opera, about a girl who spends too much time on Facebook. The Opera was brilliant, if scarily biographical, and ever so cunningly funny. I laughed, like an infant watching the Muppets, for 45 solid minutes. Other people laughed too, like they should, but I was slapping my thighs, doubled over in peals and at one point shed tears. I say, why just be an observer when you can truly participate?

 

Then Finally, I have comedic friends, my own troupe of Monty Pythons. Those you know, La Franglaise, Braveheart, Louis XIV, and some new ones, lets call them Don Juan and the Milky Bar Kid, cohorts with whom I have spent too much time over recent weeks.

A glass of wine after work, an apero at the weekend and even full blown benders that end at 4am are threaded together with the telling of stories, the reciting of experiences and the fact that we all have something in common, something that I cannot reveal here. Their company has afforded me a winter of side-splitting laughter alleviating the weighty stress of the daily grind. La Franglaise’s biting wit, Braveheart’s genuine joy for life, Louis’ faux-snobbery, The Milky Bar Kid’s refreshing innocence and Don Juan, apart from being dark and mysteriously Iberian, is blessed with an earnest belief in the innate good of human nature, a belief in which I am gradually proving him wrong. 

Imagine that fantastic scene in Pulp Fiction with Christopher Walken and ‘this watch’; hear that voice, see those eyes and reflect on this.

These eyes, these eyes have seen more of this world than they ever thought possible. These eyes look into the dark grey wintry sky of Paris and know that tomorrow will still come. These eyes look out into the world in the naïve hope that Colin Firth might dump his eco-wife or that Bradley Cooper might decide to perfect his French from within my flat. These eyes stare into the LED void of a computer screen and hope that you feel a microscopic shard of something after you’ve read this. These eyes just shed a tear. These eyes look into the sea of people pressing upon me as I whistle a happy (OK, Madonna) tune.

‘you know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”

And the beat goes on...

 

 

* How pleased was I to see a squiggly red line under this word. A word used increasingly in the working world, a word that does not exist and is certainly nota replacement for the dictionary approved prepared

The Name of The Game – ABBA 1977

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a good fortune (and not of a husband) must be in want of somewhere to spend the Christmas Season. It is a truth slightly less universally acknowledged that she should seek out a foreign place that chooses to celebrate the festive season with at least twelfty million varieties of alcohol, one to accompany each of the traditional festive dishes. Perhaps one that tastes like liquid Christmas Pudding, another that tastes like a mixture of Guinness and curry powder and only if you are very fortunate, one that tastes like a mixture of petrol, toilet cleaner and Zippo lighter fluid. But onto the story… more about the alcohol later.

  Gothenburg

Those of you who did not read this would not know that I was destined to spend a celebratory week in a sort of far off city, invited by a sort of family of mine, a family blessed with stunning good looks and bright blue eyes, a family who live in a place of elegant and harmonious design, a family that live in Sweden. Let’s call them the Nobels; Nobels in part because the name is synonymous with Sweden but more specifically a name synonymous with the pursuit and achievement of excellence in all fields, science, the arts, philosophy and peace. 

  Stockholm

Despite my being in possession of what I would call more than reasonable intelligence, let’s face it, I alternate between 2-3 languages a day, and I’ve managed to figure out the French income tax website, I’ve never felt so dumb in my whole life as I have for the last week.

A week with the Nobels in Stockholm and I’ve learned more about romantic English poets that I did in 8 years of advanced secondary English …in an English speaking high school. A week with the Nobels and I learned more about Roman gods and mythology than I did after 25 years living with the Art-sist-ologer. Yes, a qualified astrologer taught me less about Venus and Mars than the Nobels did. A week with the Nobels and I lost a week’s wages betting on questions about popular movies. They’ve got all the bases covered from pop to polar physics, from Lisbeth Salander to Elizabeth Bennet, there is a reference book to answer every potential question, there is an expert on every subject, the room is unseasonably hot with the competitive sprint for the correct response.

Being correct is not something I’ve ever been overly concerned with. I am much more in the line of sounding 150% convinced of everything I say …even if I am wrong… I always appear to be right. After a rather devastating week for my finances, I’ll never stake my own money on appearing to be right ever again.

So now down to the facts.

 

Every single window in every single abode in every single city in Sweden has the same seven-light Christmas decoration. Despite the wealth of knowledge to be found at chez Nobel, no one could tell me why everyone has the same lights. The 10 million inhabitants of Sverige have no idea from whence the seven-step-light tradition originates, but every one from Alexander Skarsgåd to Lisbeth Salandar to Stellan Skarsgåd (Google them if you don’t know) has one in their window. Given they are tiny lights, they are nigh on impossible to photograph so here is an example. Who knew Scandinavian Volvo/IKEA socialism could be so conformist?

 

I’ve written before about how well-organised everything is in Sweden, they have a customised solution or even better, an IKEA produced item of flat-pack furniture to solve all of life’s problems. They’ve also figured out the chaos of Christmas.

  Pickled Herring and Mustard Herring

Smorgasbord. Or during yuletide, even more specifically Julbord.

My Julbord...note the Cheese..

The Swedes invented the art of organising a variety of small plates on one table allowing the diner to choose exactly his or her perfect mix of shrimp, herring, sausage and egg to create a personalised Christmas lunch plate. Allowing the diner to choose? How very unlike the anglicised tradition of forcing every poor soul from infancy to infirmary to eat their body-weight in dry turkey and saccharine sweet cranberry sauce? The Swedes have also matched a different beverage to every element of the traditional Julbord. Spiced wine Glögg for aperitif, spiced beer Mumma when you are eating and spiced Schnapps with dessert. Don’t make the mistake I did of relying on the middle Nobel to serve your Schnapps or you may need to run to the bathroom and revisit your lunch. Rather surprising given my iron lady like liver that has withstood triennia of abuse.

  Glögg ..and a sun-damaged Australian finger

Mumma and Schnapps - big Headache meets little headache - in Finnish Ittala glassware

Beyond Christmas, Sweden has also solved the problem of alcohol in general. 

In a country famous for the creation and proliferation of pornography, there is a certain irony in the government-controlled distribution of alcohol. If you wish to buy any kind of alcohol, you must visit a System Bolaget. The green and gold# sign can be seen on many a main street, crying out to the would be alcoholic, “come hither to my fluorescent aisles and get thee a box of wine, a box of Glögg or a keg of Absolut Kurant”.

  Stockholm, photo taken at 4pm

Nobel is most famous for awarding their peace prize from under the three golden crowns representing the three ancient kingdoms of Scandinavia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Even if the Swedes gave away Denmark to an Australian (okay Tasmanian) and forgot about Norway’s penchant for harpooning whales, they keep the three crowns as their national symbol. Famous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize include Desond Tutu, Jose Ramos-Horta, Al Gore and the man with the stars and stripes tattoo, Barack Obama.

  Need to hang your coat in a busy restaurant, problem solved

While I cannot pretend to be a diplomat of such international reputation, I can pretend to be an English-Australian who lives in Paris and spent the yuletide with a Swedish family and lost 100 EUR betting on an American movie.

I am the white (Ok, reddish) dove of Peace with a Dragon Tattoo.

 

# I too find it ironic that the alcohol board has the same colours as Australia.

 

Swedish Ryvita and a Carpicorn Birthday Present...

 

Lyin’ Eyes – The Eagles 1975

I am slightly ashamed to admit that after living for a grand total of 5 years and a little bit in La Republique of Le Coq I had never been to her second city Lyon (or Lyons for the language purists). Not really that shocking when you consider that I live in the first city (Paris) and prefer to go only to weekend in places where I know someone with a top floor terrace apartment like The Body in Firenze or Louis XIV in Evian.

Not unlike Miss Havisham* I am a woman of means doted with a passion for the melodramatic visualisation and characterisation of daily, unordinary, mundane events. Not unlike Miss Havisham I am also given to abusing the hospitality of my friends who live in places far more interesting than mine. However quite unlike Miss Havisham, I do still leave my house and as such, embarked upon the great southern city of Lyon, perched between the Le Rhône et La Saône, and rather significantly the home of the Godfather of French Cuisine Paul Bocusse and rather serendipitously, the ancestral seat of the family of Louis XIV.

A big white church on a hill not in Paris

La Franglaise and I were fortunate enough to have a very good reason to visit and as such I can now say that I have visited, tasted and drunk the health to the home of salty, dry Saucisson, fluorescent red Tarte Praline and fresh Beaujolais Nouveau.

Tarte Praline - take a bag of lollies, a bucket of sour cream, a tart case and a defibrilator....

Dionysius and his younger Roman counterpart Bacchus are indeed the someone’s who watch over me as I roam the great wide yonder upon this earth. How surprised was I really to discover that the one day I happened to be in the capital of the Rhone wine region coincided with the festival celebrating the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau for 2011. Stalls lined up along the streets of Lyon proffering sliced saucisson to accompany a thimble-sized glass of the recently released acidly green tasting red wine.

The festival for the Beaujolais Nouveau

 

Be sure to review the comments section at the bottom of this page because if I get any of this wrong, Louis will most certainly correct me.

In ancient times, Lyon was the capital of France. The Twin Rivers allow for easy access to the ports in the South and the invading hordes. As such, the rather more land-locked Paris eventually got the job of bossing around the realm of France. The city of Lyon, not quite as inhabited as Paris has managed to perfect that tenuous balance between having everything, and not being so inundated with humanity as to be impossible to live in. The architecture is reminiscent of Paris with it’s Haussmannian symmetry, the streets are laced with restaurants and bars if only the people were a little bit less up their own bums I could seriously imagine myself living there.

Besides being a really very beautiful city, the best thing about Lyon is the food.

Saucisson de Lyon ad infinitum

Australians will know that during her seminal series, French Food Safari, Maeve visited Lyon several times. While not busy fawning over the gallant gallois Guillaume, she found some time to sample the wares at Les Halles de Lyon, an enormous food market bursting forth with charcuterie, a plethora of cheese and the most delicious patisserie. Only in France could the most significant tourist attraction of a significant city be its food market.

Fromage Lego

I was not able to spend more than 36 hours in Lyon and so not much more to talk about than the exceptional food. I will be certain to remedy this as soon as the exigencies of Festivus are done with in mid January.

But as always, Louis to the rescue with his chariot of gold (OK, a SEAT Ibiza), 2 hours in the car and hop, we were in Evian. Louis, trained to five star level in the arts of aristocratic entertaining is always the best host and did his utmost to make us feel at home. Some cheese, some wine and then some cheese and then some more wine before we were off to the baths.

Yep, that's the logo of the Evian Bottle up on that hill

 

Switzerland is the calmest of countries to be pinned to the terrain of this earth. A Saturday night, at 7pm, it is the only place you could find all the youths of the surrounding area, semi-naked in once place. Not a smoky nightclub, not an underground drug-den, but thermal baths. The place to be for the residents of La Suisse Romande on a Saturday night in winter is gathered together within the safe refuge of a giant swimming pool filled with the warm waters springing forth from the mountains upon high.

What better way to sweat out the lactose and the alcohol than banded together in a giant bowl of hot water?

More to come after the remainder of Festivus to be spent in Sweden, the home of pure clear alcohol and small rooms filled with steam. A recipe for disaster or delight?

  Geneva proves that size does matter

 

 

*For those of you who don’t know who Miss Havisham is, Google Great Expectations, or even better, get thee to ITV so you can watch the new version with Gillian Anderson (yes Agent Scully) playing the formidable femme fatale

Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town – Bruce Springsteen 1973

Bah Humbug!

Starting this missive with the words of Dickens’ most infamous personage certainly sets the scene for just how wildly un-Christmassy I am feeling this year. A bad case of the flu, persistent memories of last year and the incessant teeming rain are all serving to remind me on an almost minutely basis that this year, Christmas is not much more than an mucous stained, rushed, overly commercialised reason to empty my wallet.

My very little eco-friendly fake Christmas tree

Unlike Ebenezer, I’d be more than happy to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. At the very least spectral beings would be a welcome break from the hoi polloi that I am obliged to mix with in the freezing damp streets. 

I despise traditional Christmas food. Everything is laced with cinnamon, dried orange peel and raisins. 

Normally, I am no more prejudiced against cinnamon and raisins than porridge, stew and all other items I lump into the general category of nanna food. Food that was eaten during the war, invented as a result of government enforced rationing prior to the dawn of globalisation and the advent of fusion cuisine is nanna food. Why make a solid brown cake that could easily be mortared between two bricks when you can eat a creamy fresh Panna Cotta. Is there one good reason to eat a pudding that is strung up in a muslin bag over boiling water like a dirty medieval criminal and cooked for four days? Is it wise to eat something that can be stored for a month and eaten at Valentines Day? I won’t even comment on the Bûche de Noel, a butter-cream covered woodlike monstrosity that the French swallow whole at Christmas.

I will avow that a 30 years spent eating fresh seafood, chicken salad and ice cream on Christmas Day has potentially created a bias towards the traditional perfumed stodge so loved in the Northern hemisphere. 

But then there is the shopping.

Shopping at Christmas time is an arduous task of Herculean proportions. The French, so proud to be the last bastion of everything-closed-on-a-Sunday (in a secular country) open all of their shops on the three Sundays prior to Christmas in the hope of injecting some much needed cash into their increasingly downgraded economy. From somewhere far away, the entire population of Paris descends on the Grand Magasins to invest their not-so hard earned Euros on all manner of crap and clutter. In London, they go one step further and close Oxford St to traffic. The sea of humanity halted only by the twelfty million police officers attempting, in vain, to control the flow of chavs onto the unclosed cross streets.

  All of London gather and pray to the God of Christmas - Selfridgus

So how about some free gift-wrapping Madame? Sure, are you going to pay me a year’s salary while I queue and wait for that unfortunate Eastern European intern to stretch some tin foil around a box? The meditating exercise of wrapping Christmas presents is surprisingly one of the few pleasures this obsessive-compulsive Ebenezette actually looks forward to. Just give me the paper and I’ll do it when I finally manage to squeeze myself past the swelling hoards of and get home.

Mouth agape in shock, I learned from an affable black cab driver that spending time with Santa, an invention of Coca Cola early last century, at one of the larger stores in London is reserved at least month in advance and depending on where you go, costs a yuletide fortune. In Hamleys, a one-hour tour with the polyester-bearded red man will set you back a cool 45 pounds. I suppose he uses it to pay for additional flu meds to ward off the myriad bacteria he is subjected to as they are sprayed forth from the orifices of London’s snotty children.

11 months of the year I quite like children. I don’t own any myself but I am quite fond of those belonging to my brother and other friends in Paris. Kids are cute, they say daft things and they are allowed to wear leggings as pants outside the house. Three qualities I am rather envious of. But in December children turn into demon-possessed monsters. They holler in a high-pitched banshee-like fashion at the sight of anything remotely Santa-ish while waving their mitten covered hands in all directions with no regard for anyone or anything nearby. They also seem to be constantly dripping with syrupy moisture from the eye, the nose and the mouth for a whole four weeks before returning chameleon style to the dry, well-mannered little humans we love them to be in January.

Actual Santa, while barely tolerable, is nothing compared to the horror that is the modern corporate invention, Secret Santa. Devised most likely by a well-meaning HR Manager in the mid eighties who was trying to eliminate the high-flying competition of Christmas present purchasing in a Wall St investment bank (Here is your Audi Smythe and thanks for the diamonds Cornelia), Secret Santa has since become the sole reason pound shops have not gone the way of the dodo. 

Watching the dweeb from accounting giggle behind his toupee while you unwrap a penholder that farts every time you remove your pen is a delight reserved for that most festive of moments.

  A Lego Christmas Tree in St Pancras - I can admit it, I liked it.

It must be said that spending time with people you don’t really like is truly the shining star on the just-cut-from-virgin-rainforest Christmas Tree. Running between a candy cane swirl of drinks, dinners, parties and cocktails is not a bad thing, especially if there is free alcohol. Being asked over and again, why I am not flying to Australia (too expensive) whether I will be alone (I won’t) and will I be fake-sad-eye-look “OK” (I will) requires more than the one free glass of cheap wine that I am injecting into my eyeball to avoid having to listen to another mundane conversation about just how great/tough/quick 2011 has been and what about those floods in Queensland blah blah jingle blah.

I am not going to get all ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ on you here but not unlike the Christians perched upon requisite soap boxes screaming to the earphone-deaf hoards about the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ I would like to take a moment and remind you to reflect on what Christmas should be. A time to spend with family, a time to remind each other about the delights of giving rather than getting, and most importantly a time to eat a bucket of fresh prawns.

 

Bring on the starry newness of 2012, I am more than a little bit over 2011.

 

Dog Days Are Over – Florence + the Machine 2008

There is a place so magical and bright that even the distant memory of my first visit to the place brings a nostalgic tear to my increasing short-sighted eye.

I was 22 years old that first time, a virgin whose senses were opened to a place of raw beauty and carnal lust. I had already visited a large chunk of continental Europe, but a well-heeled peninsula had remained thus far elusive. Finally, accompanied by my well-equipped and internet-advised travel companions, Motherbear and AG, we made the treacherous journey over the Alps and down into onto the Elysian Fields below. The fertile green albeit mosquito-ridden fields that entice the uninitiated innocents with their siren call of opera, the syrupy peppery elixir of the olive and the most delicious bloody tomatoes on earth. The place where men, proper good-looking ones not construction labourers, call out to girls like me as my long hair trails in the wind…Bella! A nation where men are men*, they have facial hair and muscly exposed arms, and are masculine enough to wear pink polo shirts and white loafers or the most immaculately tailored suits designed by their countrymen Giorgio and Ermenegildo and still not appear gay.

  Five minutes in town and I've discovered the food

That testosterone charged place is Italy. The Mediterranean Boot kicking France and the rest of Europe far away from its azure watered coast, owning the sunshine, the sea and the sensuous south.

  Pig in all it's forms, be sure to sew up the mouth...

Frequent visitors to the ongoing saga of M will know that my last visit to Italy was cut tragically short by the separation with the F-Word. His opening argument was, “I do not want to go to Florence on Saturday”. Italy being such a hedonistic dreamland fantasy for me, I was more devastated not see Florence than his leaving me. I was devastated that my love of this warm, sensual country would forever be tainted by the memory of his cold dismissal. 

The Farmacia Santa Maria Novella... love potion?

It took me a little over 6 months, but I made it back. I went to Florence; I had a room with a view, a view almost of the Arno and completely of the Ponte Vecchio and I spent three sun-drenched glorious days eating and drinking and sleeping and walking and relaxing and wishing.

Italian Humour

The Body, a most excellent friend blessed with brains, beauty and a job that pays her to live temporarily in the Tuscan capital, has been living the highlife in the ochre-hued town I first discovered on screen in the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s, A Room with a View.  The film that would make a star of Helena Bonham Carter as well as of her long mane of tumbling brown curls. I loved the cream marbled scenery, I fell girlishly in love with Rupert Graves who plays the younger brother, and any movie blessed with the twin RSC trained acting talent of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith is sure to leave it’s mark on a teenage girl obsessed with BBC bonnet dramas. It did, and in 2007 I first made my pilgrimage to the Arno and the ancient city straddling its banks. It was only two days, but in 48 hours I managed to take in the greatest hits of Italian art, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian and Caravaggio before leaving all too soon and desperate to return.

  Neptune surveys his domain

This time, recovered from the distress of my last operatic Italian adventure, I was determined to indulge, to enjoy, not to plan, and just take it all in…

On the first day, a three-course lunch in a restaurant that most definitely had a view preceded a three-course dinner with The Body that was preceded by a bottle of Champagne and followed by drinks in a Terrazzo. If you’ve been reading this for longer than a month you are well acquainted with the Herculean strength of my much-abused liver and my passion for too much very good cheese. Truffles, mozzarella, a piece of beef grilled and served only with salt, rosemary dusted potatoes and the creamiest Tiramisu; I mean really, how is it that just one narrow nation can lay claim to so much deliciousness, and that is only the food! The verdant freshness of Pinot Grigio, the spicy warmth of Brunello and the honey-like syrup Vin Santo accompanied by biscotti that you steep in the glass in lieu of a heavier dessert all serve to remind you that it was in fact the Italians who taught the French how to make wine.

The view...over the Arno

The city itself is so beautiful, I can’t pretend to have the words to describe it, and besides, many of you I am sure have seen it before. That so many spectacular Palazzos and marble statue dotted Piazzi could be crammed into a space that requires only a couple of hours to discover on foot is truly incredible. That it has remained largely intact after all those wars, Mussolini and even Berlusconi, is astounding. Every street corner opens up onto another ancient church or some other medieval treasure. David’s steely gaze watches over the crowded hoards in at least three different open spaces in the city. Lovers meander along the lanes, couture-clad women walk about to buy bread and the omnipresent river of American tourists queue to buy pizza and diet-coke only to complain that the pizzas don’t taste like ‘real pizza’.

  David surveys Florence from high above at the Piazzale Michelangelo

And then there are the Italians.

If the Italians created the Catholic Church and there is a God to be prayed to in their myriad ornate marble churches then that God must be seated upon a white moulded plastic chair. Some time after the Italians discovered plastic instead of marble, they decided that all chairs should be moulded from one pristine piece of white plastic and that those chairs should be sent forth into the world beyond heralding the Italian Diaspora, most especially in their restaurants that serve anything at all with a giant Black Pepper Grinder.

  Pure white, pure plastic, pure Italian 

Italians have managed to perfect the art of good living. In France, good living is the logical outcome of their revolutionary individualism. Taking time for a lingering lunch is as much a right as it is a desire to sit and spend two hours eating. In Italy, shaky economy and shakier political scene, they’ve got so much less to lose. A laid-back lifestyle is an antidote to the insanity of their daily evermore-corrupt reality as it is a traditional way of life. And the way the men look at you…I’d risk the safety of my pseudo-socialist Gallic ghetto for a lifetime of “bella!” as I wander the corsos, the vias and the piazzas.

  Perfetto!

The Italians are so unaware of how lucky they are to be native in a country rich from its freezing alpine north to the corrupt sunburnt south with baroque beauty and culinary delights that they’ve become totally oblivious. During that first lunch, I sat in a restaurant that looked over the river straight at the Uffizi. The Uffizi is the veritable home of Italian art. Nowhere in Italy is there a larger and more diverse collection, spearheaded by the big-as-your-living-room Venus di Botticelli, she of the long blond hair and wobbly thighs sprouting from within a clamshell.

  Even the intercoms are bellissimo

As I stared out across the water wondering what Firenze might have looked or smelled like at the time of Sandro and his probable working girl Venus, I noticed a group of ten men playing five-a-side football, sweating and running, bouncing and kicking, cheering and jeering, all against the wall of the Uffizi. That a young misty-eyed girl from Sydney would have travelled across the globe just to visit this one place lost on a group of men who use the foreground of the art world’s Mecca to square up for a bit of Friday afternoon fun. That paintings preserved for 500 years are holed up in the darkened corridors of the Uffizi does not register for the average Florentine. Everything is old, everything is beautiful, the food is always this good, and besides, given the state of the Euro, they’ve got bigger problems to ponder.

Footballers in front of the Uffizi

With my Italian first name, my brown curls and my rounded Botticelli belly, I’ve often been mistaken for an Italian; it should be noted that a good portion of Sydney’s residents have an Italian ancestor or six. While I am the daughter of a post-war immigrant, he came from the conservative United Kingdom and not the sultry Roman Empire. I do love tomatoes, I do love two women, one named Madonna and another named Florence and if I was cursed to only ever eat one thing for the rest of my days I might just choose the aniseed crunch of fennel. With my just-too-loud voice, my hands as punctuation when I talk and my penchant for melodrama, I might just be re-born of some ancient woman of Toscana.

 

Whatever your take, mine is that after three days in the sun, the dog days are most definitely over

 

 The View from The Body's Room.

 

 

* So much so that their former president is better know for his libido than his legislation. Bunga Bunga!

 

Ticket to Ride – The Beatles 1965

The most frightening thing I can possibly imagine, the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night in cold sweats because I have had another nightmare, the thing that forces me to run screaming from the room if I see it on TV or leads me to tear apart a newspaper if ever I see a photo in a news story. That thing, not blood, not clowns, not the likely prospect of ending my days as a slightly less evil version of Dickens’ Miss Havisham is spiders. When asked, as I am at least once a day, why I chose to move to France, I always give the same half true, half smartarse-do-you-think-you-are-the-first-person-to-ask-me-that-question-today answer, because I am scared of spiders and there are no spiders in France. *

It therefore goes without saying that I would endure just about anything to avoid ever coming face to face (or skin to skin) with a spider. Never one to do anything by halves, I even went as far as to voluntarily leave everything I know, my friends, my family, cheddar cheese, sunshine and Vegemite just to get as far away as possible from those eight legged freaks.

If, in some dark real life version of one of those gothicky, black, psychologically damaging David Fincher films like Se7en or Fight Club I could be granted one wish in exchange for having a spider placed upon my naked hand for 2 minutes (let’s not go crazy here, I am not going to let the bastard take a stroll up my arm), I can tell you exactly what I would ask for, in an instant, no reflection needed, no 10 seconds thinking time, or ‘are you sure that is your final answer’ required. It is dead simple. I would ask to never have to take the Metro or it’s savage English cousin, The Tube, ever, ever again, ‘til death us do part, so help me God.

  Waiting on the Lego bumps...

Hailing as I do, from Sydney, a city with relatively poor public transport services, I wholly appreciate the convenience of the Parisian underground train network. In the wee hours of many a morning, I have been grateful for that open-armed bottle-green and amber-lamped Art Nouveau arch and her Siren Call, come down here, I’ll take you home. More often than not in fewer than two line changes, more often than not, speedily, safely and securely. More often than not…

  Art Nouveau in Abbesses

A funny thing happens when man is confined to a network of underground tunnels. Down there, in the dingy, dark and sooty air, all the norms of etiquette, social order and basic humanity remain above in the golden warmth of the sunlight as we descend into a shaky subterranean New World Order. As on Orwell’s farm, we become animals, animals that would spit upon one another for the right to slide in before the doors close, animals that would happily force an elderly woman to the ground in exchange for a spot on the 8.59am line 9 to Pont de Sevres. Animals.

The leonine King of the underground jungle is Mr My-Back-Is-To-You-So-I-Ignore-You. At just that moment when the vestibule can longer support the weight, or more importantly the breadth, of another human being, at just that moment when the doors sound their death knell alarm of closure, Mr MBITYSIIY jumps onto the train, his back to the crowd within, forcing the handbag of the woman in front to dissect your spleen and jamming your right heel into the crotch of the person behind. He, oblivious to the ensuing carnage, stares, nonchalantly beyond the glass doors, looking out into the tunnel, blissfully ignorant.

Much like the heavy reptilian presence of a Saharan rhinoceros is the immovable grey stature of Ms I-Am-Not-Standing-Up-Even-If-Your-Bum-Is-Pressed-To-My-Left-Cheek. In order to provide standing room when the trains are overcrowded during peak hour, the vestibules of Parisian Metros are fitted with ‘strapontins’, a hinged seat designed to flip down when there are few enough people to allow for extra seating and flip up when the whole of French humanity is jammed in for their morning journey to work. Ms IANSUEIYBIPTMLC remains seated, in silent protest, even when you are hooked over her like a circus contortionist to grip the rail behind her bowed head. Like the protesters of Occupy London, she will not be moved, like the protesters of Occupy Wall Street, she is usually young enough to be in high school. Like most people her age, she is plugged into her phone, texting, listening to music, unaware of the world beyond her little LED screen.

The Pushers. Not at all a group of people that walk between the carriages to peddle illicit drugs, although I am sure they do exist even if I’ve never seen them, The Pushers are fluoro-vested, white-gloved employees of the RATP. Their mission, should they wish to accept it, during the afternoons, usually on the Cattle Train line 13 to St Denis, is to push people into the trains during peak-hour. The brainchild of the good folk of Tokyo, The Pushers are there to ensure the train doesn’t leave with the arm of a small child flailing wildly beyond the safe harbour of the doors.

A Pusher awaits

Children. The young of our above-ground world are curly topped, cute, cherubic angels smiling at you from underneath their fur-trimmed parkas, happy to be awake, happy to be moving about, happy to be little enough to laugh out loud for no reason without eliciting stares from their older counterparts. They are strong, robust and protected by the downy cocoons of their winter coats. Why then do they need the safety of a seat when an elderly/pregnant/disabled person is wavering unsteadily right beside them? 

Troubadours. Usually hailing from lands beyond l’Hexagone, the Troubadours seek to ease the sweaty tension of your journey with a Little Night Music (or any other synthesised version of your favourite classic). Any two-bit musician with an accordion, an amplifier and a shaky show tune can make a buck or twelve from the tourists who have not yet tired of hearing La Vie En Rose on every street corner. The Troubadours would indeed be a welcome addition to the time spent in transit if only they could actually sing…in tune. 

The Arms. Detached from the bodies to which they belong, The Arms are a series of long, unwieldy, hairy male arms that cling to the central poles in each vestibule. During times of high passenger traffic, The Arms materialise from a nether world, even deeper than the Metro itself, a world that is cursed with a lack of soap, a lack of deodorant, a lack of basic personal hygiene. The Arms have a unique talent for always realising their disembodied presence just above the olfactory glands of your nose, forcing you to inhale the smells of a hundred unwashed armpits, the stench of a hundred unwashed days all while you struggle with your hangover and the immediate involuntary need to vomit.

Beware the apparition of The Arms

The Urinator. Like his namesake, the Austrian-born California resident Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Urinator is an omnipotent, omnipresent being blessed with a God ordained responsibility to take his powers to places beyond those from whence he came. 

Due to the underground lime walls from within which the Metro was carved, there is constant seeping moisture that spreads a Dalian surrealist sculpture of calcium fungus across the tiled roofs of the tunnels, a moisture resulting in the need for trough-like ditches dug in against the walls where they meet the station platforms. A trough that the Urinator is obliged to fill with the golden issue of his bladder, for his urine is so special and holy that it cannot be confined to the sewers of his home like ordinary common men. Spreading for time eternal an ammoniac stink increasing the array of nasal assaults to be found in the underground world of the Metro.

  Surreal Stalactites and Stalagmites 

 

It is true that time spent pressed against the humid skin of strangers in transit does at least allow the mind to wander and the imagination to run wild. 

  An arrow points the way down

 

 

 

*Pedants, I know that this statement is not entirely true, but at least in Francalia spiders are confined to the wooded wilds beyond Ile-De-France. They don’t camp out on your kitchen walls and they certainly aren’t giant, black and furry.

 

Telephone – Lady Gaga and Beyoncé 2010

After much reflection on the matter, the late-night Googling of a relevant twelve-step programme and being no longer able to bear the shame, I have a confession to make. 

I am an addict.

Despite my solid commitment and lifelong dedication to the consumption of Bacchus’ magnificent, syrupy and sweet contribution to my life on this earth, I am not alcoholic. At least not yet. At least I don’t think so. But I’ll keep you posted if I start wearing smeared black eyeliner and a black bouffant beehive.

No it isn’t the wine. However it has become clear to me that I can no longer take a breath without the loyal, loving and lyrical companionship of my phone.  

Paris, the calm before the storm

It starts early in the morning when I am plugged into her* jukebox of the plenty and bountiful while I sweat at the gym. Held tight in a sweaty hand or pressed against a humid arm in her purpose designed little strap so I can easily change from Guetta (running) to Glee (Cycling) to Garfunkel (stretching) with just the flick of a thumb. I am more than a little worried that should anyone ever do one of those swab tests on her to check for DNA there’s probably more of me on her than there is left in me.

I then shed a wistful tear as I confine her to the dark and stinky little wooden box disguised as a locker when we are forced, albeit briefly, to go our separate ways. I’ve not yet figured out how to take her for a swim.  But the short-lived desperately unwired to-ing and fro-ing in the basin of liquid chlorine masquerading as a pool ends with our delighted reunion after the shower. I plug in while I paint my face; I get all booty-shakin-licious as I wander underground into the metro.

I am not sure I could take public transport ever again if I was deprived of my phone. Gym to home, that’s at least 10 games. Gym to the office, I can watch an episode of Glee. Paris to London, you get a whole movie out of her, X-men this week, Bridesmaids next. I’ve reflected on what I actually did during the 9 years of my life I commuted 3 hours a day to school and university without being hard-wired into a telephone. If memory serves, I spent most mornings anxiously trying to finish something that was due at 9am that I had barely commenced the previous evening.

Now I am never late! My phone, obviously much more organised than I, can now organise everything for me. She wakes me up in the morning, three times in 30 minutes, just in case I resist the first or second of her banshee alarm howls. She beeps at me throughout the day telling me where to go, who to call and why, what city I should be in and by what mode and when I’ll be leaving. Without her, I am sure I would stand in the middle of the room, stare at the floor and spontaneously combust. I just would not know what to do next.

  Bloody Beef

My phone is my best friend and she tells me where all of my other slightly less best friends are and what they are doing. Ding, Louis likes my photo. Ding, Braveheart is at the airport (again). Ding, The Body says you can come and stay. Ding, the Microchef says hello, all the way from New Zealand. The wonder and delight of her connection to all my social media; I know everything about everyone at all times, without the inconvenience of actually having to talk to them. 

She’s actively increasing my general knowledge. Throughout the day she taps me on the shoulder to let me know that Persephone, goddess of the bounties of maternity with equally godly long blonde hair, is challenging me to another unwinnable game of Words.  My phone lights up to tell me that Greece is still clinging to the precipice of being classified as an actual country with an actual economy rather than owning up to the fact that they are the smelly kid of the EU that no one wants to sit next to. She buzzes me to squeak with gossip-girly-glee that Carla Bruni had her baby. She pings me photos of Duchess Kate’s latest foray into high street fashion glam. She reads everything for me and only tells me the bits she knows I’ll give a s**t about. 

She is also an artist. I go out and about in the world being very average and rather boring while she looks at everything, quite literally, through rose-coloured glasses. The photos on this pages are hers, not mine. I see it and snap, and she with her eye for colour and faded edges turns it into a work of art.

  Paris, the flag proves it if the Haussmanian monolith doesn't

In this modern world, a modern Darwinian gal has to adapt to survive. Why rely on the service of an actual living breathing male companion when you can achieve perfect happiness with a small electronic version of yourself.

Sitting in a bar seeking out the future Mr Darcy why bother with the mundane activity of talking to a potential future mate? We simply exchange phones. You want to know anything about me? Here is my phone. She will tell you what music I like, what I do with my days and read you my daily horoscope. That is so you can predict how I will react if you don’t call me back. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine” is no longer an X-rated game requiring you to take off your clothes; you just reach into your handbag.

A comforting thought; I know I am not the only one.

Recently, during an ill-planned afternoon about town, Braveheart quickly stopped in at home to get his charger before we sat down to a repas extraordinaire in a nearby restaurant. The kindly waiter kindly charged his phone while we ordered entrees. By main course, phone, full of juice and safely back in his right hand, he was able to breathe again.

Unplugging for one breathless moment I ask the question. How did we ever survive in those ungodly dark ages before we all had smartphones?

When you were sitting in a pub talking about Rugby World Cups past and present and the guy in front of you erroneously cited England as beating New Zealand in the quarterfinal, how could you prove him wrong without being able to rapidly search the answer on your phone? How were such life-altering disagreements ever resolved? Did you just have to get over it? 

When you went outside into the world to shop or to eat, how did you find where you were going without clicking on your friendly Google map and meandering your way up the street as you watch the little blue dot on the map do the same? Was everyone lost? Did people (even men) ask for directions? 

When you were in a café and you heard a song you didn’t know, how would you find out what it was without holding you phone up to listen to the song and tell you what it is, and offer to download it? Did everyone have to remember the names of every song before they hit HMV to buy it?

The chaos, ignorance and total lack of soundtrack that my little life would be without my shiny black saviour just do not bear contemplating.

Her snazzy new earrings

… and from time to time I also use her to make phone calls. 

 

* Obviously, with her designer pink and black accoutrement, my phone is a girl.

 

 

 

Take a Bow – Madonna 1994

It occurred to me last week, while perched upon the red chair, wearing the red slippers and looking into this screen through the red glasses, I’ve been writing upon these pages for a whole 20 months. That is 608 days out of the 12 775 that I have been walking upon and flying across this great blue earth. 608 days during which I’ve put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard as the case may be, originally to keep my family up to date on my rather small life in this very big city in a land far, far away with a penchant for garlic and butter.

This life, and thus, these pages would mean very little if it weren’t for the characters that have populated the stage of the life of M. For those of you who are recent followers, or those of you that have short-term memory loss, and even for those of you who don’t really care, here is a quick recap, and ever more notably, an opportunity for them to take centre stage.

Motherbear. My mother, the singular parental influence occupying my recent life and a thoroughly modern woman obliged to tolerate the tears, the laughter, the midnight phone calls and the fact that her eldest child is a psychologically unhinged quasi-alcoholic drama queen. A drama queen who feels so compelled to live a life less ordinary she recounts every detail of it to the world, albeit with a hint of that same sarcasm she inherited from her mother, inherited along with the curls and the big brain. 

The Art-sist-ologer. A sibling so named after her multi-faceted professional life as an Artist, an Astrologer and my Sister; a person much smaller than me whose belly is now home to an even smaller person. She is creative, she is imaginative and she has mind-bogglingly mastered that most complicated skill of poaching an egg. A skill I never mastered, despite her attempts to teach me when we shared very old and very small appartments in both Sydney and Paris. She would say my failure is down to my Arian lack of patience. I would say that as a Capricorn, she could achieve anything she puts her mind to.

The Smartarse. My brother, father to Sapphire and Smack, the world’s two most perfect little people golden-topped with their parents’ blonde hair and blue eyes from no one is quite sure where. The Smartarse has dedicated thirty years to taking the piss out of his older sister and more often than not, he succeeds. You can read all about him here but in a line, he is my favourite brother.

Myfatherininvertedcommas. Subject of last week’s missive, he now walks up on high with his preferred human being, John Lennon.

AG and Big Al. My Godly godparents have rescued me for hell on more than one occasion. Once, after a particular altercation with the above, they took me into their home, no questions asked and fed and housed me for a week. I can’t say that they’ve managed to instruct me in the traditional ways that godparents are expected to, given my singular drive to be an individual, the tenets of religion and I are not easy bedfellows. All the same, AG taught me how to cater a party with the planet’s most exceptional dip while Big Al, among many DIY skills and the names of almost every aircraft ever constructed has also reassured me that lachrymose does not mean weak.

uPAD. Pay attention. My father’s sister married my mother’s brother. It is legal, but the genetic result is that I look more like their sons than my own siblings. Sharing exactly the same relatives, as a littl’un it took me about twelve years to understand why other cousins had different grandparents. Frequent visitors to Francalia; UP loves the culture and AD the viticulture, they’ve reassured me that a word perfect rendition of a Beatles song and a glass of red (or seven) is a family trait rather than a mutant gene.

Gramma. She doesn’t get a name; she had this one since we were too small to say grandmother correctly. She rocks. That is all.

  Keep it Together - "I've got Brothers, I've got some sisters too"

All the way down there in the Antipodes are The Microchef, the smallest person on earth ever to bake a cake, a muffin or anything else you mix with sugar and roast. She lives in that tiny shaky country that stole the Rugby World Cup from France. She has been my dearest friend for many, many years though that will now have to change if New Zealand continues to win every game they play against both France and Australia.

Many moons ago, The Microchef was my boss at that great big American coffee company that is now not quite so big in the Land Down Under. A few moons later in that caffeinated Kingdom I was lucky enough to become the boss of Pauli Lupone. A young man so vintage he doesn’t do Kylie or Gaga, preferring Broadway, Barbra and Judy. Vintage is five-star quality, it lasts longer and it is infinitely better looking…just like Pauli.   

Last of the southerners, there is notthedogTilly. Sharing a house and a surname with the Art-sist-ologer’s dog can’t be easy for anyone. But for 2 months, notthedogTilly and I shared a bed and 5 square metres of Ealing charm in London. With her innate calm and positive nature she can do just about anything, except be on time. 

In 2007 the casting couch moved to Europe, and as such, series two took on new actors, actors with foreign accents and a fancy for frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.

The Fashionista and The Body. As different in size as in personality, these gorgeous and amazing back-up singers have been forced to endure the tears, the triumph and the tantrums of the past four years. Usually encouraged by the promise of a glass of red wine and a plate of blood red steack tartare. I figure a three-course meal helps them measure out my story telling and the wine helps them listen.

  Music Inferno - "music makes the people come together' - with The Fashionista and The Body

The American. The most sarcastic un-American person I’ve had the pleasure to know. After seeing me out the door of my employment at the Search Engine, he was kind enough to switch roles from manager to friend. An arrangement that has proven to be far more rewarding as he coaches me now in the fine art of Michelin Starred Food; decidedly more fun than work.

The F-word. Ex-Boyfriend, Ex-Fiancé, Ex-Resident of Paris, Ex-Castmember of these pages.

Louis XIV. Every so often in your life you meet someone who you think you could equally marry, love for life and savagely murder. That person is Louis. His tongue for gossip and his ready ear for me are only equal to his eye for aristocratic luxury. He also lives in a small village that makes for perfect weekend mini-breaks so I’ve learned to overcome my violent urges.

Braveheart. As Fabulous as Louis but with a thick Scottish brogue (and that is not a euphemism for anything), Braveheart’s northern heritage has afforded him an exceptionally strong liver. A physical trait shared by most members of the cast. Reviewing the preceding paragraphs, I have to ask…do I seek this ability out?

The Franglaise. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, she is one of the English spying on her native France. Like the Fashionista she was blessed with that innate Gallic style. Like me, she likes wine. Enough said.

The Academic. A special bond forms when you are sixteen and thrust into the wilds of Southern Aquitaine without the support of family and friends. She returned to New York and Yale, I returned to Sydney and a stellar career as a waitress and we lost contact for over ten years. She found me again thanks to the all-pervasive nature of modern social media and we picked up exactly where we left off. I have to admire (if envy a little) a woman who can speak this damned foreign language with perfect grammatical accuracy and is happy to let me drink the wine on the all-included menu at our local bistro. She also trusts me to look after her most precious possession, the Mini-Academique. She is either insane, or she really does love me…

Ashton and That 70’s show. A motley crew so named because unlike me, none of them were actually alive during the 70’s. While they enjoy laughing at me, they don’t get my Ferris Bueller jokes, they think the Beatles are a household pest and they think the woman who has inspired me to do all of this is the mother of Christ. Which leads me to… 

Madonna.

Nothing Really Matters - "Now that I am old, everything's changed, I'll never be the same"

Yes, she of the Gaultier bra and dubious choice of coffee table book photographs. No, we have never met, unless you count the time she was on stage in black hotpants at the Sydney Cricket Ground and I was on the other side of ‘long on’ peering at her tiny form through tiny binoculars. I was asked during the last week why she shares my name on this blog. I am nothing if not loyal. Every since Motherbear bought me my first pair of mini fishnet gloves and a black ruffle skirt I wanted to be her. Not for the s**tloads of money nor worldwide fame. Rather because I wanted to be known by only one name, because I wanted to scream out loud to all and sundry about the way I felt about everyone and everything and because I wanted to bump and grind and vogue and sing my way through my time on this earth. She became more than my inspiration, she became my way of life. 

Every star needs an entourage to keep her from falling off the edge of the stage.

Take a Bow. I thank you all.