IF.....AUSTRALIA HAD BEEN COLONISED 4,000 YEARS AGO BY THE EGYPTIANS.

Throwing a Prawn on the Barbie!

LIFE RECIPE.

Boarding School Fare - a snail in the spinach

   

Cooking seems to be a very popular subject on television right now.  Women's magazines have always included recipe sections and now there are shows like Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and numerous others.

I've been cooking since my mother decided I should help out in the kitchen.  She didn't know how to cook when she married but she soon learned how to with a vengeance.  In my years at home I never saw a sausage or mashed potato grace our dinner table.  She bought meat weekly from the butcher and ordered exactly the cuts she wanted.

Our steaks always came from scotch fillets and she would roast whole ones as well.  Chicken could  be roasts or so many different casseroles it would make a hen's breast puff with pride.  I grew up in Sydney and my mother made things that I later discovered hadn't been heard of in some other states until thirty years later.  Brisbane was particularly backward cuisine wise and had not heard of cheesecake until the 1970's I believe.  When I arrived there in 1991 I couldn't find brown bread anywhere.  It was like landing in a time warp.

Part of the reason for my mother's success was that my father grew up next door to a French family.  One of the daughters of the household, who was my father's age, became my Godmother.  Her mother, who was always referred to as Madame, shared her French recipes with the younger generation.  My mother's recipe book is full of typed pages in a ring binder.  She gives credit for every recipe in it.  'Madame' is listed under many of the desserts.

No matter how hard I try I can never compete with my mother's cooking.  Some people have 'the gift' and she did.  My ex-husband, blast his hide, also has 'the gift'.  His second wife was double-blessed with it.  When we were still married my husband was an absolute boon when we gave a dinner party.  He would also get all the credit even though I did all the preparation.  For some reason I have always been commended on my salads and, oddly, sandwiches.  I mean any idiot can make these.  Perhaps it is my gift.

There was one little problem, however, with my husband's technique.  While my mother washed every pan after she used it, my husband used every pan in the kitchen and let them pile up in the sink to skyscraper level.  In the open plan kitchen-dining rooms of today guests can see the gargantuan mess so I had to clean the lot up before they arrived.  I would end up a mass of perspiration and just have time to put on my make-up which slid immediately off my face.

I remember a Christmas we spent at my parents' place.  My husband insisted on glazing a ham.  My mother did not like anyone in her kitchen at all.  The trouble with kitchens is that everyone loves to congregate in them.  In the home in which I grew up, the kitchen had a door to the outside and one to our hallway.  It was small to say the least and a thoroughfare into the bargain.

These days kitchens are open plan and attached to a family room.  That solves this age old problem but no kitchen on earth would have been big enough for my mother.  My parents had moved to another state and a house with a much bigger kitchen by the time we celebrated the Christmas in question.

Even so I watched as my mother succumbed to one of her mini nervous breakdowns as my husband entered the kitchen every twenty minutes to glaze the ham.  Mother had these breakdowns on a regular basis.  I'm sure the reason I was turfed off to boarding school at the age of ten was because my mother couldn't cope with her only child, who did everything to please her, taking up space in the house.

Perhaps I should be grateful but at boarding school I suffered through eight years of the most appalling food imaginable.  At school it was possible to leave a fork in the bowl in which the sausages had arrived at a refectory table, pick it up when the fat had set and the bowl come with it.  The delights of afternoon tea were enjoyed all over again when their leftovers from the four previous days turned up in green jelly and opaque pink custard as a trifle for dessert.

At a previous school there was also the mashed pumpkin that was watery mush and had pieces of pumpkin skin left in it.  We named these bits Sister Katherine's fingernails after the woman who prepared it.  It made us gag.  Another treat was the added protein of tiny snails that remained in the spinach and had clung stubbornly on during the washing of the leaves.

I came home from school on Friday nights.  I would have looked forward to this but instead dreaded the meal.  This was because my dear father was a devout Catholic.  My mother was Church of England in name only and not religious in any sense, but she would cook Friday meals according to the Catholic directive of the time.

She would rub this in as she picked me up on Friday afternoon.

"We're having your favourite tonight," she would say.  This was either delusion or downright mean.  "Smoked fish mornay."

I hated that dish.  I repeatedly told her so and I don't know if she kept forgetting or it was dad's favourite and she got us mixed up.  I hate fish period, but smoked, orange skinned fish in a cheese sauce was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and go back to school.

The real treat was her Sour Cherry Pie.  She refused to write the recipe down and when I asked for it years later she had forgotten how she did it.  I said I'd try to make it and she gave me a vague guide.  I never tried to follow her instructions.  I just wasn't going to ruin perfection.

Mum was an innovative cook as well.  She would prepare well ahead and freeze meals so she could always cater for visitors.  On weekends our house was often full of friends and family.  On one of these occasions I must have been out with my future husband and came home to a house full of people.  Everyone was in our very large living room eating fork food from a plate.  It turned out it was a Spinach Pie.

Given my memory of spinach from school I point blank refused to try it even though everyone exhorted me to do so.  It was delicious they said.  After ten minutes I gave in and said I'd try a bite.

I never looked back and the recipe has become one of my favourites.  It is called French Onion Tart of all things.  The French Onion part comes from the addition of a packet of dry French Onion soup to the ingredients.  The actual pie is packed to the gunnels with chopped spinach, three eggs, ham, cheddar and some cream, to which I'm usually allergic, but it's cooked to the point that it doesn't upset me.

Once I would buy spinach leaves, wash and finely chop these in a blender then drain the liquid.  Now it's available, I just buy the finely chopped frozen kind making the dish so much easier.  It's placed in a shortcrust pie crust, which I also used to make, but now just buy, then sprinkled with more cheese and baked in a Pyrex pie dish.

On one occasion I spent a good part of the day making this dish for a couple who were coming to dinner.  All went fine and it was cooked to perfection.  I don't know what I had previously cooked on a hot plate but I forgot it was still hot.  I took the pie out of the oven and gently placed it on the hotplate that I thought was cool.  A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion.  Pie and Pyrex went everywhere.

We bought Kentucky Fried and cleaned up the kitchen.  I have never put anything on a hotplate since before checking the temperature.  It also isn't wise to put a hot Pyrex dish in the sink and run water over it.  I tend to think Pyrex can handle anything but it doesn't tolerate fools.

One of my mother's other great recipes is Madame's Chocolate Mousse.  Real French Chocolate Mousse has no cream in it.  The cream is added, whipped, as a side dish.  Only cheats put cream in a true Chocolate Mousse.  I should admit that I am lactose intolerant and the only cream I can tolerate has been cooked to a temperature where it has broken down such as in the Spinach Pie.

My mother also made beautiful lamb stews but pork was never her favourite.  Pork was once the most expensive meat to buy in Australia but she also found it too dry to casserole although we did occasionally have pork roasts.

My mother kept her appetite for food for her lifetime and was still enjoying food when she lived in a nursing home.  I am sadly losing my appetite.  I am still young but can eat only a little.  I must have a very slow metabolism.  In fact it is probably very efficient but dulls my interest in food.  It simply isn't worth going to a restaurant now.  The most I can consume is an entrée and that's it.

This year I went to my son's place for Christmas.  I was invited for an early dinner.  In the late afternoon the table was spread with dips and snacks.  Everyone ate with gay abandon except me.  I didn't eat, saving for dinner which came three hours later.  I told my son to only invite me for one meal at any time.

I remember a delightful, birdlike, old lady at my mother's nursing home looking at her Christmas lunch.  She said: "I don't even want to eat anymore."  It is tragic to run out of appetite before you die.  In old age, if there is nothing left to you, no sex, no travel, no independence, at least there is food.  It is the final affront not to be able to enjoy what is so life giving.

There are people in the world without enough to eat and sadly there are people who, with food available to them, simply can't eat anymore.  Food is one of life's great pleasures as well as vital to sustain life.  It is wonderful to think that something so necessary can also give such pleasure.

I am also impressed by the fact that humans have turned food into an art form.  It began with subsistence and, when we found a way to store food and have plenty, it became a source of creativity.  We humans are an interesting lot in that we apply art to what is necessary and basic.

Imagine if we had to thresh the wheat, milk a cow to make butter, grow sugar cane and reduce it to sugar grains, raise hens for eggs, just to make a cake.  Cooking shows how far we have come in the sense of how we gather and store foodstuffs.  It is not trivial.  It is a tribute to human ingenuity.

You know how it feels when the electricity goes off and we are plunged into darkness?  We are lost for anything to do.   There are no woodstoves to cook on.  People used to read by candlelight or go to bed.  Life revolved around the sun and fire.  Growing and gathering the ingredients to cook a meal is no mean feat.  A simple recipe requires ingredients from an extraordinary number of sources.

When man was in his infancy he hunted for meat, killed it and ate it raw.  He may have supplemented this with the fruit and berries.  Wheat was a long time coming.  So was sugar; thousands of years in fact.

Next time you make a recipe, consider where the ingredients come from and wonder at how far the human being has come in gathering food for survival.  For something this vital to be raised to an art form is tribute to how well humans have not only adapted to survival but stated in no uncertain terms: we can go one better.  We have enough to make food flavoursome and interesting.

Wouldn't it be a shame if recipes became a sign of the lack of foresight of the human condition?  If, when the world's population reached the level where there is mass starvation, the idea of a recipe may become tribute to the lack of thought about sustaining the future?  As if it was the equivalent of: "Let them eat cake".

I like to see the human race as having the common sense to ensure its survival.  This is going to require a recipe with a whole different set of ingredients but I'm sure we're up to it.  We just need to harvest a few more of our brain cells and add them to the mix and then survival will be assured.

END

THE CATCH-22 OF TRAVEL.

"Calvin and Hobbes Go Exploring"- Cartoon by Bill Watterson

We get stale in the same place for years no matter how much we find to do or how busy our lives become.  I live in a lovely city but I need a break from it from time to time.  Travel blows a fresh breeze through my mind.  It almost literally feels like it and I feel invigorated and refreshed.

I guess brain cells need to take in something different from time to time to exercise them or they go onto automatic.  Just imagine all those tiny cells yawning as they channel the same information when you go through the same routine day after day.  No wonder they start to make you edgy for change.  They decide to revolt and give you a hard time: "Let's go on a holiday, we're bored," they nag me.

They don't seem to let up even when they know I haven't the money.  They just work on making me testier and testier until I have to have a word with them or threaten them with sedation.   So in order to shut them up while I'm attempting to save enough to go away I've taken up this blog to challenge them a little.  It's quieted them down a bit, or rather it's giving them something new to do, but I can still hear them whinging in the background even as I write this.  In order to placate them a little, I'm writing about travel.

The trouble with planning a trip to a place you've never been is that you need to have been there to do it properly.  It's the Catch-22 of travel.  Yes, I know there are travel agents, brochures and friends who have done the trip and can tell you about their experiences.

There are also travel shows on television but I have come to avoid these with religious zeal.  At first I couldn't figure out what bugged me about them, apart from the obvious, which is that the presenters are paid to travel all over the world.  This is my idea of a dream job except for the size of camera they have to lug around.

Eventually I figured out why they annoy me.  It is because presenters are people from my own country, or from a similar cultural background,  whose familiar language and manner overlay and obscure the cultural impact of the place they are covering.  It's like adding too much salt to a meal.  The subtle flavours beneath are overwhelmed by something stronger and thoroughly domestic with which you're all too familiar.

The presenters, although very professional and upbeat, also deliver their reports in a patois developed for the show.  This has the effect of causing them to come across as variations of one another and, by progression, the place they are covering suffers the same fate. 

Even with these factors taken into account a television travelogue can only cater to two senses; sight and sound.  It can't convey the cultural vibe, the atmosphere or the smell.  We use all five senses when we travel and so even the best show can't do more than show and tell.

The hotels, facilities and restaurants that appear on them also usually offer free accommodation and services to the presenters.  There's nothing like free advertising is there?  So you aren't going to hear the presenter say: "God the smell around here makes me want to puke", or "The locals all have their hands out begging and look like they want to cut my throat", or "It's so hot here I can't wait to get home."  What we get, therefore is a Pollyanna version of the place.

They will also decide what to film in order to portray the aspects of the destination they are there to promote.  All the different shots or videos are then edited to form a smooth dialogue, knitting together the pertinent pieces .  A travelogue might concentrate on hotels, local shopping and places of interest to the tourist.  I doubt that you'll catch a news item or a mugging happening in the background while the crew is filming.  If it did happen I bet you wouldn't get to see it.

Even on a large screen television you are limited to a miniature view of the whole.  I mean you can't just spin your head around and see everything as the presenter can.   Film only shows bits and pieces of places not the vistas surrounding them.  For instance, over the years I've watched television series and films set in London, however, nothing on the screen prepared me for what I experienced when I was actually there or its flatness or greyness.

The best part of travel is experiencing the unknown with every one of your senses.  If we've never been somewhere before, to arrive in the midst of it is almost like being reborn.  We have no familiar points of reference.  We don't know which corner to turn next or where anything is.  We can feel lost but renewed.  We can discover things again.  Naturally we go prepared, but imagine if you were sent there in the way Scottie in the Star Trek series beams Captain Kirk to a planet.

Imagine you landed like that in the middle of Paris as a complete newcomer.  What do you do?  You've probably seen films set there, you've seen pictures of the place, you've heard about it but you don't have a map and you probably don't speak the language.  You can't just cut and edit to the next hotel.  You have to figure out where one is and physically get there.  Some people would find this to be an exciting challenge, some others might panic, but not one of them would be bored.

Travel lets us become like a child again because it allows us to take in something new, which in our everyday environment rarely happens.  I think that's why travel satisfies us.  It has the effect of making us feel something that we haven't in years and also relieves the boredom of the same old, same old.

Travel also educates us as to how different other cultures can be.  A traveller from Australia or the US might think that asking a direct question of someone in a foreign country is perfectly fine, only to discover they are considered rude.  Many a traveller has had the dubious thrill of being tossed in gaol for doing something they consider innocent.  Travellers are always prone to greater danger through ignorance but that's the risk of exploration.  In fact the explorers of old seemed to be people who were addicted to danger.  Boredom drives people to extremes and that's why it's best to let off steam regularly.

I feel sorry for business people I talk to who say things like: "Oh, I travel overseas a lot for business but I'm just there for a few days.  I only see the airport and the office".  I bet these people have very unhappy brain cells or they've scared them into submission.

I'm building up quite a head of steam at the moment and my brain cells are almost in revolt.  I think I'm hearing talk of a union being formed in their mutterings.  I can only hope someone pays me to travel somewhere soon or I win some money.  I don't really care where I travel to, I just have to shut the little guys up.

END

BULLYVILLE.

 

I had my reservations about writing this post.  Even the memory makes me shudder, but I overcame my reticence and here it is.

Bullies exist everywhere and always will.  They are like the algae that spontaneously grows
in a perfectly clean and chemically balanced swimming pool, or the scum that rises to the top of a pond. They come in all age groups, ages and genders.

When my husband, son and I moved to a country town for my husband's work, each of us experienced it first hand.  The place was a coastal town in Victoria, close to the border with South Australia.  My husband took the position because he was trying to appease me after taking a job in Perth for the second time when he knew I hated the place.  His company offered him a post in this town where he would be Project Manager on the site of an Aluminium Refinery's upgrade.

You know those movies where an innocent family moves into a haunted house and nothing but trouble ensues?  Well the whole town, which shall remain nameless, was creepy.  As well as an Aluminium refinery it boasted an abattoir and a port that existed exclusively for loading and unloading sheep destined for slaughter.

Also in this town was a clique of company wives who made that other creepy movie, "The Stepford Wives" look tame.  To top this off, and the real cherry on top of the cake, was the stupidest school principal who ever held that position.  The whole atmosphere was bad, as was the miserable cold and wet weather.

As if an omen for what was to come, we rented a house in a cul-de-sac near the centre of town.  The real estate agent told us on no account to open the oven before they had the place cleaned.  The last tenants had left a roast lamb in there and the smell was beyond description. They would have it removed before we moved in.

But we were in a hurry.  How bad could a dead roast possibly smell?  Nothing prepared us for what emanated from the oven when we opened the door to evict the deceased beast ourselves.  We had never smelled anything like it.  We slammed the oven door shut and fled from the house.  Perhaps the evil of the place had even made an old roast smell like the pit of hell.  It was very strange indeed.

Once the lamb was properly exorcised we took possession.  Our son started in the local primary school, my husband went to work and I busied myself studying for my Communications degree externally after having started it at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

The previous Project Manager had been single and, in this incestuous town, the wife of the second in command had become Queen Bee of the company's other wives.  This situation was strange in itself but existed because the refinery's owners had a club for the wives of their employees in the town.  What this company had, our little company apparently had to have also.  They would meet for lunch once a month in a restaurant and the bill was paid by the company.

Without ever being aware of it I became the new Queen Bee.  The first I knew of this was when a persistent knock sounded at the door of the house we had rented.  Queen Bee Number Two was there to visit.  I was in a rush to finish an assignment before collecting my son from school.  She would not take the hint that I was otherwise busy and stayed for three hours.  She was there to feel me out.  Was I interested in usurping her role?  She didn't ask this straight out but I got the drift.

When I was growing up no one called in at your house without phoning first, unless they were close friends, neighbours or people who knew that they were always welcome.  For this woman to impose herself on my hospitality for so long without so much as a 'by your leave' absolutely amazed me.

I was naïve enough to think other people were brought up with the same standards that I was.  I learned a lot on my travels with my husband and one of these was that courtesy had gone out the door.  It is a hard lesson to grow up with standards and find them littered like broken china wherever you go because the world was changing and not for the better.  I had always felt that good manners arose from consideration for others and common sense.  I was wrong.

After this episode, however much I tried to discourage her, QBII did not let up.  Perhaps my resistance drove her on.  In the meantime the ladies of the cul-de-sac had their very own Queen Bee.  She held a tea party to greet me to which all the women in the street were invited.  I thought it was a lovely gesture but had a vague sense of unease.  This was not really my thing.

Then I was invited by the company Queen Bee Number Two to a baby shower for one of the employee's wives.  The expectant mother was, to put it mildly, a bogon of the first order.  I am not a snob but I soon learned to be.  She eyed me as I entered the room as if deciding how she would skin me alive.  I sat through this horror party attempting to be both convivial and invisible at the same time.  After surviving this I did my best to hide from the lot of them.

Apart from these unusual social forays behind the Looking Glass, I found unpaid work at the Community Radio station which allied nicely with my degree.  My husband was busy with his work and our son at the Primary School.  I don't remember exactly when things started to go wrong for our son, or perhaps he hid it for a while.

A boy in a grade a year ahead of him, who also lived in our street, the son of the very mother who had given the tea party, started bullying him.  He would do things like tell him to stand in a shrub or he would hit him.  He had plenty of back up too.  My son attempted to comply with this bully's demands and, naturally, he still got hit.

What is a mother to do?  Will her son look like a wuss if she shows up at the school immediately?  How did I advise him to handle it while I harboured a desire to kill the little monster who would dare touch my son?  His father was very busy at the refinery being knifed in the back himself so I felt I should handle the matter.

I gave it two weeks.  Son was upset but not damaged.  Then I made an appointment to see the principal.  In his office I asked him how it was possible that my son could be bullied under the noses of teachers?  Wasn't there supervision of the playground?

It seemed the teachers couldn't be everywhere at once but naturally they tried to supervise.  But this is when it got weird.  The principal started to wax enthusiastically about the bully.  He said such things as: "Bradley is such a bright boy, I'd really like to put him in a higher grade where he could be more intellectually challenged."

He kept on along this line for some time while I attempted to overcome yet another feeling of unreality and lift my jaw off the ground to where it had fallen.  I don't have to tell you what mothers are like.  It is a wonder I didn't throttle this moron.

Instead I hissed: "I'd teach him some manners first," before storming out of his office.

If this happened today I'd be able to report him to the Department of Education.  Fortunately for him, I've forgotten his worthless name.  I also like to imagine what might have happened to Bradley.  I like to think he is in gaol or a drug dealer or both.  My son became a Veterinary Surgeon.  What some school principals may see as a child's creative frustration channeled into aggression may just be a lack of intelligence or empathy.

It is worth noting that whenever the principal caught sight of me around this small town afterwards he would hide.  I was once in the Video shop and he hid out of sight behind some shelves.  Such was the fine stuff in charge of little minds.

My next course of action was the one I didn't want to take.  I had to talk to the bully's mother and father.  Father was at work or hiding inside the house, so I spoke to the most ferocious member of any family, the mother.  We had that in common at least.

I informed her of events as delicately as possible but she didn't take kindly to what I had to say.  Her little bully had never bullied anyone.  In fact my son had bullied her younger son.  That remark was so utterly ludicrous, and no I didn't have wool over my eyes, I realised she was either deluded or that attack was the best means defense.

After this she ordered all the cul-de-sac women to ostracise me.  Even the two who were decent types did so out of fear because they lived there permanently.  If they thought this bothered me one iota, it did not.  I had work to do on my studies and at the radio station, which allowed me to remain unaffected by this nonsense.

Now my husband and I looked around at other schools in the area.  The choice was limited to another public primary and one Catholic school.  The Catholic one seemed more promising as we felt there would be better discipline.  In the meantime bully backed off having been outed.

My husband, however, was going through a campaign of resistance at work.  These guys just didn't want to let the new Project Manager in, even though the previous one had left of his own accord.  Obviously the second in command had his eyes on the job and had been overlooked.

I also didn't make myself popular with the General Manager who drove from his office in Adelaide to make his visits to site.  He was Iranian and married to an Australian woman.  On one occasion he took my husband and I out to dinner and, in the course of conversation, boasted that he had driven his high powered car at 140 kilometres an hour for most of the journey.

By this time I was fed up with idiots and let him have it in no uncertain terms.  I have no patience with fools who put the lives of others at risk because of their egos.  The town had finally pushed me to the limit and I simply didn't hold my tongue.

I wasn't popular and did my husband no favour with his company.  The whole town had a bad vibe and I wondered if everyone in it was possessed.  In the end the best course of action was to leave and go back to Perth of course.  Well, I'd almost escaped it once, I would again, but nothing was worth letting our son grow up in that environment.

Our family had lived in many places but, to this day, this town seems like something out of a horror movie.  I treasure my memories, good and bad, but if there is one I would cheerfully delete, it is this one.

END.

TRAVEL TRAVAIL.

 

The French word for "work" is "travail", which is so like our English word "travel".  The similarity is fitting because often, no matter how hard you try to enjoy yourself when you take a trip, it feels like hard work.  It is also fair to make the comparison in this post because it is about my trip to that wonderfully egocentric, bloody-minded country of the Gauls.

My trip to France was in the late '90's, but don't think anything in France changes.  That's the beauty of the place.  In World War 2 the French had the Resistance.  They still resist almost everything.

I think that all the three and four star hotels my partner and I stayed at in France used "Fawlty Towers", John Cleese's television show of the '70's about a hotel in England, as a training video for their staff.

First I will describe the route we traveled on our three week journey.  We began with four days in Paris then hired a car and found our way to Versailles.  We then headed to the Loire district at a leisurely pace.   After exploring this area for a few days my partner began to head East.  I will explain why further on.  We went through the French Alps on the Route Napoleon until I was able to redirect him towards the south.

We stopped at Grasse for a day and then moved on to stay at St. Paul de Vence where we based ourselves for three days.  We moved on to Juan-les-Pins and from there explored Nice and made a quick trip to Monaco.  Later we discovered we could not leave the car in Nice and return to Paris by the TGV (Train Grand Vitesse) without paying a great deal more to the hire car company.  My partner drove up the Autoroute at speed for two days as France flitted past.  We spent the last three days in Paris.  Now, onto the trip.

Part of the exploring that you do when you travel to distant shores is into the personality of your partner.  You may discover that the person with whom you have lived for years is not Dr. Jekyll but Mr. Hyde.  This is a man who refuses to suffer from jet lag whether he is traveling from East to West or the other way around.

He can fall asleep in an air plane seat for the whole time it takes to travel half way around the globe and then will not sleep for the next three weeks at the times you need to, chiefly night time.

The same person will not eat dinner when you are hungry but insist on waiting until you find a hotel to stay the night, even if the kitchen has closed.  He was a boon to every pharmacy that we passed in France as he caused me such stomach spasms that I needed constant medication.  I don't know if the French still don't put Codeine in their over-the-counter analgesics but at that time, caffeine was used instead.  I love Codeine.  It is an upper far superior caffeine and I needed upping.

When our plane from Australia landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, Hyde's sister, who only spoke Polish and French, picked us up.  They hadn't seen each other for ten years.  If I thought Hyde was perverse, I hadn't taken into account the familial strain.  To be tactful his sister's arrangements went cockeyed at light speed.

As we whizzed past the Eiffel Tower, I excitedly pointed to it and asked if we could slow down.  She ignored me.  I suggested to Hyde that this was the kind of thing I had come to see.  I was admonished and reminded he hadn't seen his sister for years.  They continued yabbering away in Polish and ignoring me and she failed to point out any sights. Nothing about our trip was pre-booked.  We had decided to wing it.  That week we were meant to stay at an apartment his sister, who lives in Paris, had arranged free of charge. 

This accommodation wasn't yet available and she had placed us in a hotel that was at the intersection of five streets, not air-conditioned and incredibly noisy.  I lay down and attempted to sleep while they went somewhere.  When they returned they found me about to leave the hotel with luggage in hand.  I said I was going to find a quieter place where I could sleep.

Apparently this was terribly rude of me.  Like her brother she didn't understand the meaning of jet lag.  I didn't care.  I simply walked off and they trailed after me.  Soon we found a three star place in St. Germaine with a room available.  I asked for one at the back so it would be quiet.  There ensconced I again attempted sleep.

The Mr. Hyde part of my partner's character went into full swing.  He deserted me as I once again attempted to sleep off my jet lag.  We hadn't even been in Paris ten hours and he took off with the room's only key.  Still unable to fall asleep I had great need of some wine and, having arranged to get in and out of the room with the help of a porter, I bought a bottle and came back to find there was no way to open it.  The French aren't big on providing things and that includes bottle openers, glasses or cups.

I also didn't know the French word for corkscrew.  Having located my dictionary I looked it up and then made another excursion to the shops.  Luckily I managed to buy a '"tire-bouchon" but it was fairly basic .  So was the cork.  Back in the room as I attempted to pull it out, it broke into pieces.

Never has one person wanted a drink so much.  For over an hour I gouged at the cork.  I thought of breaking the bottle but I decided drinking from it might have resulted in disaster to my intestines.  I hadn't counted on my partner having the same effect as our trip continued.  Finally I broke through and drank straight from the bottle.  Needless to say my partner didn't receive the warmest welcome on his return.

We spent time with the sister in those first days but it was necessary for me to talk to her in French as she spoke no English, and I spoke no Polish.   After four days of this linguistic triangle, and trying to understand her Polish accented French, I was more jet lagged than when I had arrived.  She also insisted we walk 'a few metres' to a restaurant instead of taking a cab, for which I'd offered to pay.  Some three kilometres later and sick with jet lag and hunger, I burst into tears and went back to the hotel by cab.

A curious thing about the French is that they don't tell you anything in any language.  We took a cab to the Louvre on a Tuesday.  Not only did the driver dump us at the rear so that we had to walk a long distance to the front, when we reached it, we found it was closed.  It is always closed on Tuesdays as are many things in France as we later discovered.

We also went to the Eiffel Tower.  Do you think there is an obvious sign that shows in which of its four feet the entrance resides?  It may be better now but we weren't the only tourists wandering about trying to find it.  Once we got to the top the view was disappointing.  Paris is flat, the buildings not very tall and on this day it was hazy.  Well, it is still Paris and no one said it needed hills.  A tourist should have no expectations.

I am used to the view of Sydney Harbour and also, having lived in Hong Kong, its amazing views from the Peak and also those from the ferry when crossing Victoria Harbour.  Paris has other attributes and one of these is its history.

At last we hired a car and headed out of Paris alone.  The free apartment hadn't eventuated and maybe that was for the best.  We spent a few days in the Loire district seeing chateaux such as the magnificent Chateau Chenonceau and Chaumont-sur-Loire.  We based ourselves in a hotel in Charolais, a quaint old village in the Loire district.  There were lovely gardens and a little brook, however trucks roared through its narrow street during the daytime.  At night you could walk through the streets when it was quiet.  We stayed there twice, once on our way south and again on our way back to Paris.  This lovely village helped make our trip.

In the foyer of the hotel in Charolais, I had my first experience of sensor taps.  As soon as I entered the Ladies toilets on the ground floor of the hotel the faucets of all the three hand basins started flowing at once and I was nowhere near them.  I felt as if I was being applauded.

We drove eastwards again and found a  superb chateau that was now a hotel and the most beautiful place we stayed on our trip.  It wasn't the friendliest but it was magnificent.  We stayed two nights and on the second decided to eat in our room as we had eaten out the night before and wanted to save some money.

We asked for pate and toast to be sent to our room.  It is never easy to ask the French for such a thing.  They look at you as if you are a maggot crawling out of food.  The next morning we paid the bill.  I almost fell over when I saw the cost of the snack of the previous evening.  It came to AUD$100.  "Mais," I objected, "il etait pate seulement."

"Non," replied the chatelaine, "il etait foie gras."

In other words it was pate from zee liver of zee goose.  Well that cooked mine and our budget.  So beware of the beautiful chateau with la snooty chatelaine Francaise or yours will be too.

I knew about chateaux before I arrived in France but not about their wonderful gardens.  Surprises are the best thing about travel; the experiences you're not expecting that happen on foreign soil and make them even more exotic.

I really wanted to see the old parts of France; the villages, some ruins, the chateaux and finally Avignon and the south.  But all did not go as I had planned.  Mr. Hyde had seen all of Europe when he had lived in Poland and he drove our hire car as I wasn't used to driving on the right.  He tried to trick me and kept driving East.  I could have explored more of the Loire district before heading south, but that was not his evil plan.

We started to head across the French Alps.  He was attempting to get to Poland but kept denying it.  In my opinion, once you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all. Also it was chilly up there even in September.  Mr. Hyde hadn't brought a sweater with him so he wore one of mine.

Every half hour he would insist on opening his window and smoking a cigarette.  I would freeze but fortunately my body, already wracked by stomach spasms, couldn't handle getting pneumonia on top.

The Alps, however, did hold one or two surprises.  One was a place called Sisteron.  It is a natural pass through cliffs and the rock formations are amazing.  Atop one side high on a cliff perched the ruin of a building, either a monastery or a fortress.  As usual, there was no real information and it hadn't been mentioned in the various books I had studied before leaving.

The other surprise was a restaurant, the Hotel de la Poste Corps.  It was in a small village, on the Route Napoleon, Place de Mairie, that appeared as we rounded a corner.  There were two buses outside it.  We were in need of a coffee and a little something to eat so we went in.

It was full of very portly German tourists and they were there to feast.  A caravan of silver trays paraded past us to an area below where the Germans were seated.  The trays were so long that each was carried by four waiters.  The array of food on them was like nothing I have seen before or since.

It seemed a crime to ask for mere cake so we ordered a hot dessert of crepes in chocolate sauce which was magnificent.  We stayed for a while and watched the banquet below us.  Just as we decided to leave the Germans stood en masse and began to depart so we let them go ahead rather than be crushed.

The chef stood by the exit to bid everyone farewell.  When our turn came I thought he would know we were just stray tourists but he took me by both hands and kissed me on either cheek.  Nobody else had received this treatment and both Mr. Hyde and I were astonished.  Perhaps it was  because I was the only slim woman there.

It's those kind of things that really make a trip.  I often wonder if you should return to a place that has given you such enjoyment but I believe you shouldn't.  If you've had a terrific time and been surprised once, the next time can never live up to it again as the element of surprise has gone.

Later, having managed to re-route Mr. Hyde southward again, we arrived at a lovely town called St. Paul de Vence.  We spent two nights there and explored the surrounding areas. 

This town had the original fortress town within it.  The old town's buildings were constructed of stone and winding cobbled paths ran between them.  There were flowers on creeping vines everywhere and its buildings were full of art and craft galleries.  If I could have afforded any, these were the type of things I would have liked to buy, but I did have the pleasure of looking.

We went on to Monaco after St. Paul de Vence.  Approaching it from the winding roads above is one of the most stunning views I have ever seen and I would love to go back.  Every person there looked as if they had fallen out of the pages of a magazine.  There wasn't a woman over a size ten in the place.  We parked and walked around near the marina in the evening but I had traveled all day and looked like something the cat had dragged in.  I just wasn't going to be seen like that or eat out there.  We agreed we would return later when we were refreshed and had changed.  Due to a mix up with the hire car, we never did.

The next few nights we stayed at a villa hotel in St. Juan-les-Pins.  From there we did day trips, one to Nice which was lovely.  My stomach spasms, however, had increased to the point where we called the medical insurance company with which we had taken out cover for the trip; one that guaranteed an English speaking doctor in an emergency.  A female doctor arrived at our hotel and her grasp of English was non-existent.  I had to make do with my French and I had never learned anything to explain stomach spasms.  She got the drift and gave me some pills she had on her.  They were actually quite good.

We returned to St. Paul de Vence and the hotel we stayed at previously.  The only room available was an attic room and we took it.  We could only stand erect in one small section.  The rest of the time we stooped or lay on the bed.

We planned to go down to Monaco again but first phoned the hire car company to arrange to drop off the car so we could take the TGV back to Paris.  The chatelaine was an English woman married to the French proprietor.  She phoned on our behalf and discovered there was a penalty for not getting the car back to Paris.

We made it back there in time to return the car only stopping for on night to stay at the lovely hotel in Charolais again.  Once we reached Paris we stayed at the same hotel as before in St. Germaine.  On one our last nights we found a French, French restaurant nearby.  With my adequate French I ordered a lamb dish and specified that it must not have a cream sauce.

Naturally it arrived swimming in the stuff as if it was born in it.  I called the waiter who was the archetypal French kind, portly with black hair slicked down, a moustache and a sneer.  On informing him that I had asked for the dish without cream, he snorted, picked up the plate as if I had stolen it in the first place and stomped into the kitchen.  He stomped back some time later with the lamb "sans crème".  It was as if a lactose intolerant tourist had absolutely no right to be in France if she could not eat their magnificent food.

One thing the French do well is conserve power.  In many hotels the hallways are unlit.  You need to push a switch, when you can find it, that gives you about thirty seconds to find your room.  Notre Dame Cathedral is dim inside in the daytime and there is also no lighting until someone puts a coin in a slot.  The lighting doesn't stay on long so it's best to work in relay with other tourists so you can look around and take some photos.

There also isn't much lighting used in the Palace of Versailles and you are not permitted to take photos with a flash.  It is said bursts of bright light gradually damage the décor and artworks.  This is also true in the Louvre.

The gardens at Versailles aren't as beautiful, in my opinion, as those surrounding other lesser chateaux.  The worst part of Versailles, however, were the toilets that you pay to use.  French toilets are problematic at the best of times, but these catered to many tourists and were dirty, smelly and not the best memory of my trip.

Good and bad memories both make a trip and, had we traveled on a pre-arranged tour, there is a lot we would have missed.  Although doing it on your own can be stressful, it's more of an adventure and the unexpected really adds another dimension to the experience.

On the subject of shopping, I didn't find it any better in France than here in Australia.  I can hear you say, "Oh, you must be joking."  No, I'm not.  Not only that, Australian cafes were superior in their variety of food if not in their sense of superiority.  In fact frites (now I know why they are called French fries) were available in the cafes there which I found amazing.

I did try to shop for clothes and shoes and to find something different to what is on offer in Australia, but to no avail.  I went through department stores, along the boutiques of the Champs Elysees, past the couturiers and I looked in every shoe shop I passed.  In Nice I finally bought two pairs of shoes but in the end I didn't buy much at all.

Before leaving Paris I just had to buy something that would be a memento of the trip.  In a Limoges shop I found just the thing.  It was a candle holder made of  delicate, bisque white porcelain made by Bernardaud, an allied company of Limoges.  It was about ten centimetres in diameter and made up of a dome that sits on a small plate.  The plate holds a jasmine scented tea candle.  The dome had been engraved by laser with the great landmarks of Paris and, when lit from inside by the candle, they look three-dimensional.  The candle lights up the thin shell of the dome and it makes it glow.  It cost me AUD$110 and must have been one of the first of its kind.

A few years later in Australia I found just such a dome again, a number of them in fact, with different engravings.  The inside was glazed white but that was the only difference.  It was manufactured by the Japanese and cost AUD$12 but I still treasure the one I bought in France.  It also has "Limoges, Bernardaud, France", stamped underneath.

We had to move hotels on our last two nights in Paris as our room had been booked in advance for that time.  Fortunately we found an even nicer hotel nearby.  The last night in Paris, Hyde's sister came over when I was safely asleep.  I really didn't wish to see her again. They spent the entire night in the lobby smoking and talking.  Hyde didn't sleep at all.  The concierge at the desk for the night was probably treated to more smoke inhalation than he had ever had in his life up to that time.  Poles can really smoke.  Of course Hyde fell asleep on the journey home even though we were crammed into the plane like sardines.

Perhaps I should take up smoking too.  He seems to cope with things better than I do.

END.

SOUND TRAVELS.

 

I've decided to write some Travel posts.  It is fitting, however, to start with something I wrote almost nineteen years ago.  It appeared in The Courier-Mail, in Queensland on March 28, 1994.  At the time I was recovering in hospital from an emergency appendectomy.  I was forty-one.  Strangely my father also had an emergency appendectomy at the age of forty-one.

At any rate, afterwards, I left hospital more dead than alive.  Prior to discharging me one week after the operation, the surgeon who had removed my appendix said there could be nothing wrong with me as I had no temperature or swelling.  I felt worse than when I'd entered hospital and had to be given anti nausea medication to keep food down.  The day nurse had decided I was a hypochondriac and passed her diagnosis on to him.  This was her opinion because, at the time, I was on an anti-depressant.  I will add that I had lowered the dose gradually from three tablets to a half a tablet a day over the course of a year.

At home the following day the swelling finally showed itself.  I called in a locum who advised me what to expect and prescribed antibiotics.  She suggested I get in the shower and when I did, what followed wasn't pretty.  It took three months for me to even begin to feel well again.

The surgeon apologised.  I had developed a huge post-operative abscess and was too unwell to even think about suing him.  The only thing that cheered me up was having my travel story printed in the newspaper.  It follows and it's all true.

"IN OUR CASE SOUND TRAVELS."

 

In the Outback there is a silence so profound it almost possesses a voice, as if mere humans are called upon to listen to something they don't have the means to hear.

I was seven when I discovered this eerie quality of the red centre.  My enjoyment of it must have drawn the attention of some mischievous spirit which decided to stir up noise on my future travels.  It became a curse.

It began in earnest when I arrived in London six years ago, alone and almost terminally jet-lagged.  After an interminable trip in a bus from the airport to my hotel, I begged the staff for any room that was ready.

Seeing my glazed look they offered me a pit near the goods entry driveway on the ground floor.  I took it and fell into bed.

It was 7.30am.  Time for jackhammers to wake up.  One did, about 15 metres
from my window.  I don't know how I did it, but I fell asleep anyway.

That must have made the gremlin really mad.  It would get me another time.

Back home with my husband and son in Perth, I decided to join my parents on a trip to Sydney.  We flew on the midnight "red-eye" flight and arrived ready to fall into our hotel beds, again at the witching hour of 7.30am.  The gremlin breathed at our necks.  it didn't know the meaning of moderation, or even subtle torture.

Jackhammers wake everywhere at that time.  My head had hit the pillow when a harangue from hell started in what seemed like the wall of the next room.  We phoned reception and were told that the hotel was under renovation.  The jackhammer was four floors below.  We were moved further up, to a penthouse suite.

We caught up on our sleep that night, but the fun began early the next day.  Dressed in my nightie, I threw open the curtains, safe in the knowledge only birds could see me.  Right in front of me stood two men on a scaffold.

"Morning", they said, "Can we start work now?"  Did we have a choice?

They began to hammer away at the exterior of the building.  Not another room could  be found anywhere in Sydney, so we went out a lot.

I returned to Perth a nervous wreck.  It was then that construction began on a mini-mansion next door.  One weekend, to escape the endless noise, my husband, son and I drove down to Albany.  We booked into a good motel.  We joked there would be no jackhammers there, but then, we'd arrived in the dark.

Saturday morning, a bulldozer began to demolish the building next door.  We stayed, thinking they wouldn't work on Sunday.  They did.

When we decided to move to Queensland, we made a trip up to Cairns for a vacation first.  You know the scene: nice hotel, etc.  But it's night that's dangerous in the tropics.

I called him Albert.  I find it helps to give a name to something you're swearing at.  He croaked.  There were plenty of cane toads under the surrounds of the hotel pool, but Albert was the Pavarotti of all cane toads and he was right under our window.

We begged the hotel to do away with him.  They laughed.  After three nights of this, however, Albert must have croaked for good.  Not a sound by evening.

That night a very loud drunk started singing in the hotel restaurant.  He continued late into the night in the outside bar, straight across the pool from our room.  I think Albert's spirit had possessed him.  He was singing over and over, "Ayo, ayo, daylight comes and I want to go home".

I began to feel like singing along with him.

End of excerpt of "In Our Case Sound Travels".  Read on for the rest of the post.

 

It's strange reading this back after all these years.  In fact I'd like to correct some of the punctuation and grammar but I've left it as the paper did.

As for the 'drunk' who sang the same song endlessly, I believe he must have had Tourette's Syndrome.  He may not even have been drunk.  He had started singing loudly in the restaurant during our dinner and continued as he moved to the bar and sang into the early hours of the morning.

The sound curse stopped after that last episode thank heavens.  I'd  traveled prior to this time and afterwards.  My next posts will be about those times, but it seemed only fitting to start with this one.  It may be hard to believe all this happened.  It certainly was for me. 



END.

DAMNED DINGS AND THOUGHT POLICE.

 

Altogether too many things in this world ding at you.  My phone, microwave, iron, fire alarm and watch all ding at me.  A lot of the time I have to figure out which of them it is.  All dings have significance but the sound's immediate effect is just to irritate me.

It means I should do something, or have failed to do something.  Car's dings are the worst. The one I drive for work, not mine or I would have silenced it somehow, has more dings than I've had hot dinners.

It dings continuously if I haven't put on my seat belt, if my passenger hasn't put on theirs, if a door is open, if the trunk is open, if the handbrake is on and even if I get out of the car and the key is still inside.  It dings if my passenger takes off their seat belt as we arrive at our destination.  If I fail to put on my belt for too long it dings with absolute hysteria.  I would much prefer a ding that tells me my lipstick has faded and needs reapplying or my hair needs combing because I never forget my seat belt.

I don't need a car to harass me.  I don't mind it being occasionally informative, but its concern for my well being is completely over the top.  I wouldn't buy a car that is such a nag. Unfortunately deactivating the ding device would probably result in it refusing to drive. Worse, all new cars seem to be fitted with this annoyance.

At the very least a ding, which is an alert, should be informative.  It should say: 'door', 'trunk', 'seat belt', 'handbrake' or 'don't forget your key you idiot'.

I blame the insurance companies.  They will do anything to avoid paying out and therefore have stipulated that all these safety devices should be installed.  This means if one is found not to be working at the time of an accident, aha, I bet it's one more reason for them not to pay up.

The same goes for fluorescent work clothes.  They are everywhere and global to boot.  I shudder at the thought of individualism being replaced by uniformity because we are being dictated to by business interests.  Imagine if your employee falls off a roof without his fluorescent vest on and the insurance company won't pay up because the ground didn't see him coming.

These outfits don't suddenly make the wearer more safety conscious in the way that Superman's suit allows him to fly.  I personally don't believe in protecting idiots.  I wouldn't go out of my way to hurt one but I confess to being sick and tired of avoiding pedestrians who attempt to incorporate themselves into my tyre treads.

I am a great believer in Darwin's survival of the fittest.  Modern society is just not practising it anymore.  Instead it is protecting idiots and thus allowing them to breed more of their own kind. The world's population has jumped from 3 billion in the 1960's to 7 billion today. Modern medicine, better nutrition and lack of world wars are responsible.  Oddly that great boon to women's emancipation, the contraceptive pill, appears to have had little impact on the blowout of the global population.

Why then are we protecting idiots?  Don't we want more intelligent, responsible humans? Strangely idiots come in all varieties.  They can be university professors, successful entrepreneurs and even charitable types.  Yet, they may still not take responsibility for their own safety and frankly this galls me.  I like a well rounded intellect that covers all the bases.

I admit that some safety wear, of the fluorescent kind, is helpful; such as on road workers and builders where they need to be highly visible.  However, there are plenty of jobs in which they are useless.

I had a job at a company with rigid safety rules.  When I needed to walk between any of the buildings, I had to wear a fluorescent jacket and walk on striped markings leading to the next building. I was so busy following the lines that I had to glance up to make sure trucks that were meant to avoid me on this special pathway, weren't going to hit me anyway. I trust no one.  I don't need to wear a stupid jacket to cross a road because I take responsibility for myself.

The second day I was there, one of the trucks had just exited the driveway going no more than 10kph and managed to spill a large portion of its load of plaster powder all over the road.  Safety regulations do not a brain make.  

When I applied for an office job at a recruitment agency I was forced to watch a safety video .  It was about how not to cause or have accidents in an office; you know, not to put boxes in front of the fire exit; not to throw hot things into the waste bin.  It was so mind bogglingly banal, so insulting that when I came out to Reception I asked when they were going to make the adult version.

You can inform people about activities that may prove dangerous but it won't stop fools from doing them.  Such people don't believe that bad things will happen to them.  They are the kind who stand outside in lightening storms and think the other guy will get struck.  What a shock they get when it's them.

As for dings, this is just the beginning of machines telling us what to do.  I think it's time to tell car manufacturers exactly how much and about what they allow a car to ding us. Gradually our wonderful technological devices are being used to annoy us.  I really don't think this was the idea when it all began.

Why must these infringements into our personal space be part and parcel of technology? We're only just at the start of the technological revolution and now is the best time to make rules about what we allow it to do.  Don't leave it too late or it will become too complex to achieve and the old excuse of "We can't do anything about it, it's how it's programmed" will always be the comeback.

We are not only being annoyed but also losing our freedom to these advancements by the minute.  Do your bit and say something to the manufacturers of technologies while they are still human beings.

END.

A WORD FROM GOD AGAIN.

 Yes, it's Me again.

Having assimilated the results of My "Life Satisfaction Survey", I realize that many of you are confused about the Ten Commandments.

In My survey I asked you to tell Me which ones you think are outmoded.  Your answers suggest that you did not understand some of them or their relevance.  I will, therefore, try to explain the ones which confused you and their relevance to your present time.

Commandments One and Two caused the greatest confusion but Two basically follows on from One.

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Firstly the words 'other gods' are problematic.  These do not mean other deities.  No matter what you call Me, as I have stated before, I'm the one who is listening.  'Other gods' means those things to which you give the status of God instead of Me.

Commandment One means that I must take precedence over anything you choose to worship.   In Commandment Two, a 'graven image' is an idol; a material representation, or an actual object, which you worship, or give priority to, over Me.

Now it's not about jealousy.  It's about you having a brain.  By and large most of you put material things above Me.  They have become your gods.  Partly this is because you have invented these things and they are testament to your cleverness.  However, the danger is in falling in love with your own inventions.

You give them priority over spiritual matters as if they are the be all and end all of everything. You place earthly things above the spirit.  You do not realize that the reason you exist is to continue to evolve as a spirit above and beyond the corporal vessel in which you are making this part of your journey.  I find it hard to believe that most of you think that your life on Earth is it; that it is all there is.  Just look around you at Creation.  It is, just as you are, a work in progress.  There are also cycles to everything in nature.  Doesn't that tell you something?  There are no dead ends.

Perhaps the word 'spirit' has put you off seeking yours.  The concept of a spirit is nebulous, so it's not strange that a spirit is portrayed in the same way: as a vaporous wraith.  Consider the 'spiritual' world as that part of creation you don't have the ability to see as yet.  Your corporal world is just one part of the whole and, just as your eyes only see certain wavelengths, your mind is still not evolved enough to see or understand the other dimensions. Basically, you have blinkers on.

Only a rare few of you philosophize.  Philosophic people don't try come up with answers because they know they don't have the ability to comprehend the nature of existence, let alone the size of the physical universe.  All power to you scientists for trying though.  People who possess philosophical minds see their lives as a journey.  They do not worship so much as wonder, but that's a kind of worship I can appreciate.

However, If you worship your technological achievements above Me, let them take precedence over Me, put Me in the back of your mind or, worse still, think that your cleverness means that there is no Me, this is breaking the first two Commandments.

In breaking Commandments you are diminishing your potential.  That is what I deem Sin to be.  You won't reach Heaven because you won't be looking for it and will get lost.  No GPS will help you find your way in another dimension.  You'll probably, if you are lucky and not wandering around in limbo, be reincarnated in an increasingly techno-centric world.

A word about Heaven.  It is a ridiculous word.  It is a 'state of being' to which you graduate.  It is a state of enlightenment.  It isn't possible to explain enlightenment.  It has to be attained to be comprehended.  As to where Heaven is, it is merely an extension of your existence in a dimension you can't perceive in your present form.

Science is presently working on how to upload the conscious mind into a computer chip so humans won't die and will live forever.  I believe you call it SINGULARITY.  I hope you will be able to see, smell, touch, move, hear and love when this takes place.  In fact I hope this concept is so good, it completely resembles My creation: the human being.

In this new incarnation you may be disease, age and death proof but don't you think you might just get a teensy bit bored eventually?  I'll tell you right now and it's a big yes.  I'm going to be interested to observe and see if it is possible to go mad with boredom in your computer chip heaven and then, what you're going to be able to do about it.

I hope this goes some way to explaining why the Commandments exist. They are a guide to help you reach your potential rather than letting yourself diminish if you live just for the now and so cause your soul to erode.  Now 'soul', there's a lovely word.

END.

THE EVOLUTION OF BARBIE.

The Evolution of Woman to Barbie then to Techno-Barbie.

If girls were like boys, Barbie's little cars could be taken apart.  Their tyres would be inflatable, changeable and come with lock nuts, and their mufflers could be taken off and replaced.  Barbie would also be able buy accessories such as spoilers, chrome exhausts and mag wheels.

Mrs Barbie, her mother, would own a shed in which Barbie could store assorted car bits and pieces such as three spare engines, a couple of car doors, a bonnet, a spare windscreen, numerous tyres stacked in a pile that harbour a range of deadly spiders, various thinners and enamels, an engine lifter and bits and pieces whose use even Barbie has forgotten, if she had a brain that is.

When I was a young girl, I never had the slightest desire to take anything apart.  That was my father's forte.  He managed to turn a bicycle he thought I had stopped riding (well I was at boarding school, how could I ride it?) into a boat trailer.  He turned my two working toy phones connected by a wire into an alarm bell for my grandfather who lived in a granny flat on the property (also while I was conveniently at school).  He was clever at that sort of thing but failed to ask my permission and made me feel bad for suggesting that he should have.

It was no use complaining because somehow I always ended up feeling that I was being selfish.  There was also the fear they would find a boarding school even further away to which to send their one and only child.

When my son was little, as soon as one of his toys broke he wouldn't play with it anymore.  Then something happened at around the age of ten.  He took his bicycle apart.  Thankfully it was not reincarnated as a boat trailer.  After all, we didn't have a boat.  Miraculously it became a bike again.  He was just teaching himself its mechanics.

Then came the Volkswagen Beetle and my version of Mrs. Barbie's shed.  That strange instinct peculiar, it seems, to the male of the species, gestated in him.  He began to take engines apart and put them back together, and they worked.  Men have a strange affinity with things mechanical.  There are some women who do, but mostly we just like our cars to keep working and ignore their protestations.

I often wonder how man the hunter became man the mechanic.  Men no longer have to hunt leaving the women behind with the babies, as happened centuries ago.  How did the hunter become the fixer?  How does the pursuit and kill of a warm blooded animal compare to tinkering with a basically metallic object that, while it can 'run' in a sense, doesn't require you to chase after it unless you forget to put the handbrake on when it's on a slope.  Nor can you eat it, which was the aim of the hunt, after all.

There is only one possibility that I can think of and it is the tool.  Hunting tools came first. They required making, sharpening and maintenance.  I can just see the hunter coming home and, when everyone is fed, his woman asks him to help with the children.  Oh, no, so sorry, the hunting tools need some work; can't have them getting blunt and all.  It followed that when farming took over, those tools came next; ploughs, carts and threshers.

I believe men decided to find anything to do to avoid helping with the baby.  They became so good at it that it eventually found its way into their genes.

This masculine trait has merits of course.  For example one day my car was side-swiped by an old fellow who took off without leaving his name.  A witness said that he thought the car was a Ford sedan.  It had left a piece of tail light behind.  I showed it to my son and told him the witness had said it had come from a Ford.  No, he stated with authority, it had come from a such and such year model Toyota Corolla.

I was, as you can imagine, fairly gobsmacked.  He was not training to be a mechanic but a Veterinary Surgeon.  He was right.  With the aid of the police we tracked down the poor old fellow who had hit my car.

If anyone thinks the genders are the same, they need brain surgery.  We may have equal rights, at last, but we are different.  It would be very sad if we were not.  "Vive la difference", as the French say; those lovely, perverse people who have genders for every noun.

My parents did one or two things right.  One of them, as I was an only child, was not to fashion me according to my gender.  In truth I don't think my mother cared all that much and dad was always at work.

However, as a girl my passion was for dolls.  I also loved comic books much to my mother's chagrin.  If she hadn't thrown them all away, along with my teddy bear, I might now be worth something given the value of old comics.  She read books.  I waited until I was twelve and forced myself to read one.  It didn't, after all, have pictures.

The better part of my first ten years was spent up a tree where I made castles in the air.  I was a real tomboy but I still loved dolls.

But never did I get the urge to take apart my bike or my car when I had one, or my dolls.  Nor did I know any girl or woman who did.  My future husband, father of my mechanically minded son, worked on his Volkswagen every weekend to fix things that were broken or didn't sound right.  His friends did the same to their cars and so I decided this was a guy thing.

My son's old Volkswagen now resides under his house.  His actual shed, amazingly, is pristine and you wouldn't find his car bits in there.  The under croft of his house is for that.  I sense his son will inherit the VW and by then it may really be worth something.  But cars, like everything, are changing.  You need to be an electrician to fix one and I think the only thing the Volkswagen will be good for is as a collector's item.  There'll be no point in tinkering with a car that is purely mechanical and can't teach you anything about fixing a next generation model. 

I feel we need our natural gender outlets in this world to reinforce our identities but soon we will not able to take things apart let alone allowed to climb trees.  What then?  How will we channel our masculine and feminine traits?

In the future dolls will probably talk back to you, do their own hair and choose their own wardrobe.  Heaven forbid, they might even demand an allowance.  They will probably have computer chips embedded in them that imitate brains, so they may even take you to court if you infringe on their freedom of choice or store them in a box.

Imagine this: "Barbie doll takes owner to court for stereotyping her as a female fantasy figure."  I should be so lucky!  But if the gender lines do start to blur in the future and she starts asking for a bicycle and a tool kit, watch out and get her a matching shed or she'll use yours.

END.