Meme time

Elsewhere has tagged me for a meme, and it is no more than Good Manners to respond, and besides, nearly everyone whose blog I like has done this meme by now. So here goes, especially since the post about the Audreys concert last night has blown out into a three-volume novel and I'm still nowhere near finished. (And if anyone's reading this who doesn't like personal posts and doesn't understand enough about the blogosphere to 'get' memes, for God's sake leave now and don't drop any steaming piles of personal abuse in the comments box about things you don't understand. Thank you.)

It's revealing of the psyche of whoever originally wrote this meme that so much of it seems to be about food. Ah, food: my favourite.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Being enjoyably shellshocked in my first year of freedom after 18 years as an academic, my first year home in Adelaide thawing out after 18 years in Victoria, my first year of home ownership (bittersweet: nobody told me that houses eat money), and my first year of trying to scramble together enough of a portfolio of regular work to make a living as a freelance writer. Trying and failing to grow vegetables. Breaking in a new bloke. Spending a lot of time with my mother during what nobody knew would be the last year of her life.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. Chocolate Paddle Pops.

2. Haigh's dark chocolate truffles.

3. Chocolate cake.

4. Gelati: a 3-flavour coppa involving coffee, baci and chocolate.

5. Chocolate.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

6. Natural Confection dinosaurs and snakes.

7. Raw carrot sticks. (Really.)

8. Unsalted roasted almonds.

9. Mozzarella.

10. Macadamias. In this perfect world, not only does one not gain weight but one has unending supplies of cash ...

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire: (See what I did there?)

1. Give up working and write fiction.

2. Resolve my father's, sisters' and best mate's housing/mortgage issues.

3. Give vast sums to chosen charities, especially Médecins sans frontières, World Vision or similar, men's health centres and groups (anything dedicated to making blokes look after their health more carefully), and the RSPCA.

4. Buy a big house where we both could live* by the sea at Rapid Bay,


get a Border Collie and some chooks for it to round up, and take up snorkelling so I could watch the Leafy Sea Dragons


under the jetty.

5. Set up a fund for legal representation and other support for asylum seekers.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Senior Lecturer in literature.

2. Restaurant dishwasher.

3. Research assistant to an economist.

4. Labourer (really).

5. Girly singer and keyboard player in an otherwise testosterone-addled band.

Three of my habits:

1. Not putting my seatbelt on until I'm out on the road.

2. Singing in the garden.

3. Creasing and mashing the more exciting pages of books.

Five places I have lived:

1. Toorak, Melbourne

2. Curramulka, SA

3. Hawthorn, Adelaide

4. Klagenfurt, Austria (if a five-week summer-school residency at the U of Klagenfurt counts).

5. In streets called Alpha Street, Princess Street, and First Avenue. I think this is a worry.


No tagging from me. As Ampersand Duck would say, follow your dreams.


* Listen hard for the muted piano intro at the beginning of this and see if you can hear who it is. Like I didn't just give you a dirty great big hint.