Getting a phone line connected. Guy: “So you’re all good to go!”
Me: “Can I ask you a personal question? You have such a beautiful accent. What is your accent?”
Guy (laughs): “I’m in Capetown, South Africa. It’s very far away.”
Me: “Oh, well hi!” (Pause). “I am waving, but you can’t see me because the curve of the earth is in the way.”
Guy: “Maybe if I look out of the window…”
Me: “There’s too many tall buildings in between.”
Ok, so: imagine you have a lover whose second language is English and who one day refers to you unexpectedly as his spoose. Your spoose is another word for your beloved or your partner and rhymes (conveniently) with caboose. I can tell you that any little irritations you may hold against this person are going to dissolve instantly. You won’t even mind that the last thriller they wanted you to read was so dark and so wiolent.
I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!
Jogging up the stairs through a fresh afternoon breeze past which all I can hear is shredding treetops, dense with roaring leaves, the wind pouring through and through and through them, a movement: a little hand catches my eye. A little furry hand, neat grey, ending in claws, extended past the upholstered arm of the couch, the rest of its owner snuggled away in couch’s lap. The hand is the size of my thumb and I know in whom it ends. This little girl is luxuriously cleaning and grooming herself, rounding the corner I see her toes stretch out hard in an ecstasy and then contract. She doesn’t think, it’s such a beautiful afternoon. Should I really be lying here all day just licking myself? I haven’t got a thing done since this morning. I think she’s thinking, Mmmmm.
But it’s not bigotry, it’s just smallotry, littlotry. What’s happening in Australia this week, laws being rewritten to accommodate cruelty, underlines the unease I have always felt about the sneering term ‘political correctness’, which seems to me to substitute rules for real empathy. Once the heart enlarges enough that other people’s humanness can be, must be welcomed, respected, gratefully loved, there’s no desire any more to ‘get away with’ demeaning jokes, excluding language, the mummifying pariah fire that dries the occluded heart. Andrew Bolt, Tony Abbott, look deeper, look closer to home.
A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense of moral entitlement sicken me. “He” had “that” done to him, as a child, almost certainly, or has been damaged in some way. Where is the difference between him taking it out on another child and us punitively taking it out on him? What is the difference between what he put that woman through and what we are now so virtuously decreeing he should suffer? It feels Old Testament, feels primitive. I discuss this queasy feeling with my local German, who instantly gets it. He says: in Germany on Facebook there are many Nazi pages, real Nazis, always hiding behind this same rubric of “death penalty to child molesters.” It’s under the flag of “save our children,” he says. I’m uneasily reminded of anti-abortion extremists who believe that “baby murdering” doctors are so evil they can righteously be shot in cold blood. Nobody deserves rape. Nobody, not even a rapist. They deserve a heavier sentence than a smuggler. They deserve to be stopped and prevented and given at least the opportunity for rehabilitation. Some are unrepentant and can’t heal, true sociopaths who need locking away, for the safety of the community. But who are we as a people to gang up and declare that we are pure and they must suffer. 90% of our most commonly available porn according to an article I posted this week involves violence against “the talent” – usually women. Foulness and entitlement and a spoilt, rotten, egotistical, moralising snatching of what suits us best, no matter what, pervade our culture and are draining the teeming seas, lopping whole forests and beheading mountains, rupturing the very liveability of the Earth. You can’t fight fire with fire or fear with fear. The fantasy that all the evil can be projected cleanly onto one monstrous, identifiable stranger who is then locked away is a dangerous and to me deeply repugnant fallacy.
A small scream from the other room. “What? What?” “Can you come here?” On the rug is lying toes-up a small, lucid-bellied, iridescent, recently murdered gecko. Its tail has been severed to a bloody stump: it didn’t just drop, it was ripped off. By its extreme corners I pick up the rug and gingerly carry it to the ferns. “Tisch! Tisch! Where are you, you little cat-monster?” A cat-bell is no use to a lizard. We both stand over it mournfully, uselessly. “Poor little dragon,” he says.
I love that porridge rhymes with forage. It feels like you would go out gathering the stalks of grain, and carry them home, and then brew them up over a fire in milk and eat them. Feels both cosy and adventurous.
Today I was sharing a cafe table with two pilots who spent the entire time talking about the missing jet. Their talk was loud and showy and handsomely studded with jargonese. They kept glancing over, and shifting in their seats; I felt that they needed an audience and so I was on their radar. (See? It’s contagious).
One tried to enlist me in his smiling sarcasm when his know-it-all mate discoursed at enormous length with the barista about coffee origins. “Are we drinking coffee?” he asked me, rolling his eyes, “Or wine?” “Well,” I said, mildly, “but it’s nice to enjoy it, right?” It’s so difficult, so impossible, to keep one’s thinking clear of the deeply embedded invisible gateways, like ha-has, imposed by cultural expectation. How obsession with the provenance of soured grapes can be permissible, even compulsory, but an enquiry into how your primary drug is manufactured and grown is dismissed as snobbery.
It was, of course, snobbery: they were performing, uninvited; this is tiresome. The cafe was small and their voices rang. Five staff members ran to and fro; a laneway den down deep in the canyons innercity. I seemed to be reading in the Financial Review how one of Andrew Forrest’s companies made a claim to extract minerals from under the soil of his personal property, his farm; another of his companies, the mining concern, has blocked it with time-wasting “inquiries”. The corrugated rubber, mined from rubber trees, on the wooden sole of my clog suddenly scraped loudly against the foot of our shared table, making an explicit, ripe, farting noise.
By refusing to enact the required Accidental Fart Noise Disclaimer behaviour, I exacted a tiny, petty, and useless revenge on my visiting male experts. You’re supposed to deliberately but as if unconsciously make the same noise a couple times more, to make it clear That Wasn’t What You Think It Was, that was the chair leg. The pilots stared, only for a moment, surprised out of their theories by my apparent demonstration of unabashed personal jet propulsion. Hey, did she cut the cheese? My own flight veered secure in its inexplicable darkness to the right, to the west, out of reach of either the transponder or the secondary radar and reflecting the dim distant starlight on its flanks and back like a turtle travelling inevitably, laboriously, in deep privacy from one tiny unclaimed island to another, by itself.
Brother has a new baby and is taking paternity leave. In the struggle over dinner to translate the concept it came out wrong & I pounced. Eternity leave! That’s when you just walk out and you’re never going back. ‘You can take this job & shove it, I’m going home to my family.’