Spring

The closest thing I have to a goddaughter is M, the soccer-playing soprano and third-year Aerospace Engineering student who has made occasional appearances on this blog before, and of whom I stood in awe even before she reported earlier this year that she'd scored a 95 for a subject called Space Vehicle Design.

Her birthday is on the last day of winter -- I remember the first one well; I have a vivid memory of sitting on some hard institutional seat in the maternity hospital with her late father, handing him the hip-flask of brandy that my own father had thoughtfully provided for his use -- and yesterday she turned 21, an occasion celebrated with an afternoon tea party.

As she floated down the hall of her auntie's house to greet me I was dumbstruck by what she was wearing --




-- not only because of its perfectly-preserved beauty as a piece of vintage clothing but also because the last time I'd seen it, her mother (above right, and below) was wearing it at my own 25th birthday party, 30 years ago:




I don't get a lot of opportunities to observe the young en masse, but there would have been about 60 people there yesterday, of whom only ten or fifteen were my generation or older. Most of the more-or-less-21-year-olds would have been from either the soccer team or the Adelaide U Choral Society, though in their tea-party clobber -- there were some very pretty floral frocks, waistcoats, bow ties and so on -- it was impossible to tell these two groups apart right up to the moment, not long after that photo was taken, when it came to sing Happy Birthday, which was the most brilliantly tuneful and certainly the only eight-part rendering of Happy Birthday that I've ever heard in my life. Having warmed up with that, the AUCS members present -- at least 25 of them -- sang several other things, most of them through mouthfuls of cake or champagne, and were magnificent.

To a person, the younguns were friendly, sociable and courteous, some of them showing a degree of social adroitness that I don't even have now, much less when I was their age. I saw a great deal of thoughtful behaviour, particularly towards M. Nobody was rude, nobody got drunk, nobody whined and nobody behaved like a prat. Perhaps young persons who join choirs and soccer teams are not necessarily representative of their generation, but I'd like to think they are. Watching and listening to them made me very happy.

Memory loop

This morning after I'd dropped off the car for its regular service, I wandered down to the nearby Hutt Street Precinct for a protracted mooch and dawdle in flâneuse mode till the garage should call and let me know the car was ready to be picked up.

Some time later I found myself passing a narrowish restaurant frontage: old black-painted wooden door, delicate little old-fashioned door-knocker in the shape of a little wreath, ancient art nouveau leadlight panel above the door. All incredibly familiar. I peered inside and recognised it as the restaurant that four of us went to for dinner the night our English Honours results came out in 1976; we'd hung out as a gang all year, and had planned the dinner as an act of solidarity no matter how well or badly each of us turned out to have done in the exams. And we did.

The restaurant was Neddy's, which had been opened by the now-legendary Cheong Liew the previous year, and was already one of the earliest signs that Adelaide was about to transform itself into a city of excellent restaurants, with radically new fusion-style cooking and an equally radically new emphasis on fresh local produce.

I found a near-empty cafe in an old and not-too-tarted-up building, ordered a hot chocolate and had just sat down with my novel when the music started up: Jimmy Barnes, another Adelaide boy, singing 'Flame Trees'.

... and I'm just savouring familiar sights
We share some history, this town and I ...

A message

Two of my dearest friends lost their husband and father last week and the funeral was on Friday. I wasn't going to blog about this at all, but the friend who "MC'd" the funeral said he had a message for us from the dead, and since I think S would want his message disseminated as widely as possible, I shall do my bit here to help.

Don't smoke.

Just don't.

Eleven things I've learned over the last few days

CHRISTMAS EVE

1) Buying a new Christmas tree ornament guarantees that you'll break one of the old ones while you're decorating the tree.

2) The unexpected sight of your mother's handwriting,


also while you're decorating the tree, can still bring tears to your eyes eight years after her death. (I expect this to go on indefinitely.) It says 'Pearly bells & icicles'. You can see a few of the icicles and one or two bells in the tree photo if you look hard enough.

3) Even if you don't put the tree up


till Christmas Eve, you'll still be really glad you did. Especially when you see that for the second year in a row, the presence of a non-organic stylised metal Christmas tree suggestive of Leunig's Mr Curly has excited no interest from the cats at all, and it is therefore still up and uninterfered-with.

4) If you are making custard from eggs and cream and have the heat up any hotter than a small candle while you stir and wait for it to thicken, you will end up with a suspension of scrambled eggs in cream. If you attempt to remedy this with a sieve, you will end up with a suspension of finely pulverised scrambled eggs in cream. I had already learned this and forgotten it several times. New Year's resolution: buy shares in Paul's.

5) I can still remember (as I learn from singing along with the carols from St Paul's on the teeve) the first two lines of Silent Night in German, from lessons at Adelaide Girls' High in 1966.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht
Alles schläft; einsam wacht ...


CHRISTMAS DAY

6) No matter how much seafood sauce you make to dip the prawns into (homemade mayo + Beerenberg Hahndorf Tomato Sauce + Tabasco), it will be perceived as not enough.

7) In a family fight, presenting the assembled multitudes with a solution to the problem -- even if it is a solution that all of them accept -- is a waste of time. They don't want a solution to the problem. What they want is to go on fighting.

8) If a cat is given a special present by one of her servant's doting sisters,


there's a slim chance that she might accidentally play with it by mistake.


BOXING DAY

9) The alpha tortoiseshell is a mighty hunter before the lord.


She can manage with one swipe of an elegant yet powerful paw what it took the Australian people over eleven years to achieve: rodent extermination.

She didn't eat it; she is pictured here nudging the already quite dead varmint to try to make it get up and run around so she can chase it some more.


THE DAY AFTER BOXING DAY

10) Taking a week off is dangerous. Last week was the first week since Boxing Day last year that I did not read and review four novels, and now I'm having hell's own trouble getting up into fourth gear again.

11) One of the boys I was at school with 40 years ago (a category that includes former Senator Nick Bolkus and Greig Pickhaver aka HG Nelson, among others) has not lost his sense of humour.

I learn this while getting the email up to date and reading the December newsletter of my old school's Old Scholars Association. I've written on this blog and in various other places about the crucial importance to me when I was at school of being surrounded by European fellow-students, particularly my Greek mates, from whom I learned that there was a world beyond the Adelaide suburbs. The aforementioned newsletter contains the text of a speech given by Dr James Katsaros, in 1967 the Head Prefect of Adelaide (then Boys') High and now a distinguished plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and Patron of the Adelaide High School Old Scholars' Association. And I'm fairly sure he won't mind me quoting a bit of his speech to Adelaide's Lord Mayor and the assembled Table Captains at a planning gathering, in the Town Hall, for next April's Adelaide High School Centenary Dinner, at which I have already secured my seat:

"When I read ... that our old scholars hold positions of prominence in business and society in South Australia and Australia, I could not help thinking about the likes of Greig Pickhaver, better known as HG Nelson. I wondered how did he develop that passion for Greco-Roman wrestling which we enjoyed so much during the Sydney Olympics? And the answer is, of course, that he feasted daily on the sight of a seething, brawling mass of boys with names such as Koutsamanis, Kari, Finocchio, Zacharoyiannis and Zinghini."

The year's midnight

Suse at Pea Soup and Stephanie at humanities researcher's mentions of the Winter Solstice have reminded me that I too celebrated the solstice, which coincided with the return home of one of my oldest friends from foreign parts; she stayed with me while recovering from jet lag, and on the night of her arrival home we made some mulled wine.

They say you have to do something 27 times before it becomes a habit, which explains why I forgot to take photos for blogging purposes.

Take one (1) bottle of decent red, something not too bossy that will accommodate additions, and pour it into a saucepan over low heat. Shake the cinnamon jar over it a bit. Tip the honey over the pan and squeeze till you think that's enough. Chuck in six or seven cloves.

Heat gently, stirring. Don't let it boil, just get it nice and steamy. (Actually you are supposed to heat it with a red-hot poker but that presupposes an open fire, which I could, but do not, have. The alpha tortoiseshell's tail would be on fire before you could say 'Too perverse to come in out of the rain', quite apart from the labour-intensiveness and the cost of firewood.)

Strain into pretty mugs.

Drink.

Repeat.

Illness and recovery

Over the summer two of my closest friends came face to face with mortality. One is married to a man who not long ago was diagnosed with lung cancer, with an initially really terrible prognosis. Then, quite unexpectedly, the tumour turned out to be operable. He's now staring down chemo and radiotherapy, but the women in his life -- his wife, his mother and his 19-year-old daughter -- are all very happy Vegemites.

The other is my dear friend Stephanie, who spent the summer undergoing treatment for breast cancer and blogging brilliantly about it at Humanities Researcher. When I saw her in February she was well enough, but only just, to come over to Adelaide from Melbourne for a conference.

Here's what she'll be doing on Friday.

Reality blogging

The friends I have coffee with every Saturday morning have made it all too clear to me that they don't think much of this blogging caper. The general attitude is 'Why would you want to sit staring at the computer for hours and hours when you could be spending time with real people?'

I'm not sure how much time with 'real people' they want me to spend. For a start, the amount of time I spend actually hanging out with people has not lessened since I took up blogging -- every Saturday morning with them for a start, and a precious, long-established ritual it is and long may it continue. (M, we will find a place with better pancakes, I promise.)

I still spend the many, many hours on the phone that I have always done, and stay in regular email contact with local, interstate and overseas friends (three Gemini planets, what are you gonna do) though for the Saturday girls this probably doesn't count as 'real' either. I saw both my sisters yesterday afternoon to arrange my father's birthday present -- he turns 80 today -- and will be seeing them again tonight at his birthday dinner. Etc.

I once did that Myers-Briggs personality test thingy and got a perfect 50/50 score on the extrovert/introvert section. Their criterion for deciding which you are, and this rings very true with me, is whether spending time with other people gives you energy or takes energy away. In my experience it depends very much on the people, but in a general way, for me, socialising starts out energising, and if the company consists of beloveds and intimates then it just goes on being that way.

But if it's a big general social thing and it goes on for long enough, there comes a tipping point, a turning of the energy tide, where instead of feeling enlivened by the company I begin quite abruptly to be desperate to be gone. The only thing that stops me fleeing into the night screaming and gibbering is that I don't actually have the energy to get up out of the chair.

Which is where partying en blog is perfect for the borderline introvert. If one is endlessly interested and curious about other people's lives but also needs to spend substantial amounts of time alone in order to recharge and regroup, blogging satisfies all one's nosiness needs without needing to be scheduled for, or in any way endured. You can stop and start whenever you like.

And the other thing is that your perception of the 'realness' of people undergoes a major shift. It may be that I and all other lovers of literature have a head start here. If you've spent your life reading novels and living through the characters' dramas with them, it's only a very small shift to thinking of your bloggy mates, whom you've also only ever encountered through reading, as very real indeed. This is of course is further helped along by photos: of their kids, their cats, their fridges and rugs, the things they've seen and made.

Of course there's lots of really interesting theoretical and intellectual stuff that gets said about blogging, including all the debate about whether it is or is not the New Journalism, though I have pretty much concluded that it isn't. There are all my own still half-formed but actually a bit radical ideas about the practices of reading and writing and how blogging changes the way we do them. There are the special-interest blogs, which in terms of intellectual and/or aesthetic quality -- Pharyngula, The Rest is Noise, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog -- tend to be the best of all.

And there is the political and philosophical and public-life discussion in all its ubiquity, though about 90% of it is dross; for good analysis one goes straight to the people one has learned to trust, usually still in the quality-controlled MSM or the even more quality-controlled library, rather than to interminable comments threads full of frothing, barking, semi-literate raves. (I exempt LP, where the majority of regulars can think and spell, but I still read the comments there more for the personalities than the content.)

For there is an awful lot of undirected aggression and hostility out there, to say nothing of raving lunacy, and the dread of being flamed whenever one happens to mention some word or discuss some subject -- feminism, Freud, abortion, cats, Amanda Vanstone -- that pushes some nutter's buttons is the single biggest thing that might eventually drive me out of blogging.

(This is where 'real' life has it all over blogging, actually. In a room or in the street, all but the most barking of moon units will usually see fit to maintain the ordinary practices of civil discourse and behaviour with strangers. Would that it were true in the blogosphere.)

But for all that, the main thing that brings me to the keyboard every morning is curiosity and concern about how everybody's going. There's a mere handful of people whose blogs I check regularly that I have actually met -- Elsewhere, Whitebait, Cristy, ThirdCat, Stephanie -- but my attention to the people I 'know' only online is of the same quality, and when there are crises or dramas or adventures in their lives I check in very much as I would with my oldest friend to see how everything's panning out.

So the crazy-brave Lymphopo, formerly Grannyvibe, is having her post-chemo scans today, to see whether the cancer has spread or has been halted. Poor Chris Clarke at Creek Running North (danger, Will Robinson, do not follow this link without a hanky) is spending the last days with his beloved old dog Zeke, who is very much not long for this world.

At the other end of life, Zoe and her family are bonding with Jethro, who was born ten days overdue after a bloggy chorus of slow clapping that went on for nearly a week. Chairman Mao the Burmese Cat, whose potential reaction Armagnac'd had good cause to worry about, has taken to the new baby with nary a meou of protest. Laura drops in occasionally to her blog to take a bit of time out from the flurry of cleaning and packing before she moves into her new house.

I've never met any of these people. But they and all my other must-read bloggers are as real to me as anyone I've ever been in a room with. They are, indeed, more real to me than most; I've got to know them through their writing and to care about what happens to them because of their sheer human quality, and the fun of their online company, and the richness of the lives they lead, and the common tastes and values we share.

So it's not a matter of fewer people in one's life; quite the reverse. It's a matter of a whole new dimension to one's life, into which one can pack a whole extra swag of human interest. Pack-rat that I am, with people as with stuff, to me the blogosphere is mainly just a lovely big new cupboard in the kitchen of life.