REMEMBERING HONG KONG: my time as an expatriate.

 

Leaving Hong Kong

 

It is hard to believe that it has been thirty seven years since I left Hong Kong.  I had the good fortune to live there for three years and it was one of the defining periods of my life, a concentrate of time that counted as a life in itself.  There was only one other episode in my life like that and it lasted only ten days and revolved around the death of my father.  Both times are each worthy of an entire book.

Hong Kong made me.  I was like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and drying my wings before moving on.  Unfortunately the years that followed were far less interesting, panned out at greater length and in less concentration than the heady times I experienced there.

When I lived there Hong Kong was also marking time to its 1997 handover back to China, which weighed heavily on the mind of its people.  We were both in a state of flux and came together in a magnificent explosion, at least on my part.  It was a privilege to witness the waning days of the independence of this colony as it thrived under the supervision of a democratic nation before it slid into the grip of its communist patriarch while, at the same time, I emerged from the pall of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and panic attacks.  It was a time lived with such colour and clarity that nothing has ever eclipsed it.

Hong Kong had always intrigued me from the time I was a child.  A friend of my mother visited there regularly as she had become firm friends with the female cousin of her ex husband.  The woman was very wealthy and had, indirectly, become that way because she had hidden the documents of a well known Hong Kong bank from the Japanese in WWII.  She spent time in a prisoner of war camp but the bank rewarded her with a sum of money with which she started printing the colony's first telephone directory and made her fortune.  The story fascinated me and, when she visited Australia one time, she came to our house when I was very young.  I was allowed to meet her fleetingly before I was hidden away as she wasn't fond of children.

My mother recounted a story about her on one of these visits in which she went to Newport Beach on Sydney's north shore wearing an extremely valuable and long string of black pearls into the water when she went for a swim.  Happily she didn't lose the necklace but such is the stuff I was told.  She was an Australian by birth and Caucasian but Hong Kong was her home where she lived on the Peak.

As well as this connection I was also exposed to shows such as Hong Kong, starring Rod Taylor, and the movies 'Love is a Many Splendored Thing' and 'The World of Nancy Kwan'.  These were set in the Hong Kong of the fifties and early sixties but the exotic nature of the place just called out to me.  It was my dream place to visit and, while I had made it as far and Fiji and New Zealand, hadn't gone further.

I am very affected by the atmosphere of a place.  When my husband and I moved to Melbourne shortly after we married for his work, we drove there from Sydney.  As we approached the city by car and the view of skyscrapers came into view rising above the flat landscape my heart sank.  The vibe was wrong.  Once a vibe sets in with me it stays and, hard as I tried I hated the place.  I can see its good points today but nothing would drag me back to live there.

Sadly the same thing happened with Perth, Western Australia, when we moved there, again for my husband's work.  It is sunny, it has beaches, a big, wide blue river and is flat as a pancake.  The trouble is that it is too sunny, sometimes so much so that my eyes would water.  There were trees and foliage but they struggled in the sandy soil.  The greenery didn't have the verdant yellow green lushness of Queensland nor were there the hills of Sydney that provided contrasts and shade.  When my mother arrived in the place she actually said, "There's so much sky here".  I couldn't have put it better.  It is a pretty place but I hated it and I know this fault lies with me.  I am a 'place' person and, as I have already said in another blog post, I was spoiled by my early environment.  One reason, however, that I loved my childhood environment is that I do pick up an affinity, or otherwise for a place.  It is simply my nature and I feel for anyone who is subject to my whims.

Due to my absolute loathing of Perth, doubtless aided by post natal depression as I was pregnant when we arrived there, after three years my husband took a Civil Engineering job in Hong Kong.  We flew in at night on May 24, 1981.  Kai Tak on the island was the airport at that time before it was moved to its recent position on the island of Lantau, which is now connected to the city by a bridge.  Landing at Kai Tak was a treat that rivaled all the best theme park rides in the world as you flew in amongst high rise buildings and could actually see people watching their televisions in their flats.  We flew in so that Hong Kong island was on our right and lit up in all its densely populated glory.  My throat felt like it was closing up seeing this.  It really was crowded but by gosh it was spectacular.

The next morning I woke at the Hilton on the island feeling a little nervous until I opened the curtains of our room and, lo and behold, outside down below was a large group of people performing Tai Chi in a square opposite .  I calmed down immediately.  I was home.  The Hilton also became a bit like a home for the next three years.  We only stayed there a week until the company flat became vacant but we gravitated back to it regularly even when we'd found numerous other brilliant restaurants to go to.  We particularly liked it's cafe as well as a restaurant outside on the ground floor.  In fact it was one night in its Ball Room at a function given by the Australian Association that we won a trip to Hawaii.  There is a new Hilton now that I don't know and many more things no doubt since we were there.

The flat the company provided for us was in a block only four stories high and four flats wide.  It dangled from the side of a hill overlooking the Lamma Channel and was situated between Central, the central business district of Hong Kong on Victoria Island, and Aberdeen, the former fishing village further around to the east.  We were fortunate as a lot of expatriates lived in high rises in the mid levels above Central and below the Peak.  These towers could be over twenty five stories high and situated among great clusters of other towers, not to mention among the pall of smog that often settled over the city.

The Company Flat.

Our view was of an expanse of deep blue water past which, on the left, could be seen Lamma Island, which looked like the front half of a platypus lying in the water atop whose head was a pipe.  I never found out what the pipe or chimney was.  In winter when fog sometimes settled over the water we would hear the fog horns of the great ships that made their way into Hong Kong harbour and, once a year, the three level Jumbo floating restaurant in all its red and green Chinese decorated glory, would be towed from Aberdeen to the harbour for maintenance.  Such was the magic of living in this brilliant and exciting place that had mushroomed from an island for fishermen before the Opium War between the British and Chinese into one of the world's great cities within the space of one hundred years.

When we first entered the flat with our two and a half year old son to inspect it there was already some furniture in it including a cane sofa and two armchairs, all with white upholstered cushions.  Our son ran straight across the parquetry floor and climbed onto the sofa.  To our horror his feet were blackened and left marks all over the white fabric as some over zealous cleaner had thought to polish the varnished floor.  That wasn't the first of our woes.  The next was trying to find a store at which to buy groceries.  We'd managed to have a car lent to us in the interim but finding a grocery store just wasn't as simple as it had been in Australia and so our first week proved quite harrowing.  We also discovered that the infant food that came in jars or tins came from the USA and was absolutely tasteless.  My notoriously picky eater son would have none of it until I managed to add some flavour to it.  These were, however, all but small road bumps and part of adjusting to a new culture.  Until we managed to be self sufficient food wise, we just ate out a lot.

Food.

That, of course, brings me to food.  The sheer, unutterable joy of Hong Kong is its food.  It doesn't matter what type or from what national cuisine it originates, the best of every kind is to be found there.  I have never eaten as well again and, in thirty seven years, that's saying something.  I spent three weeks traveling in France and came back unimpressed by the food I ate there.  I've been to many other countries too and Hong Kong remains my peak dining experience whether the cuisine be Chinese of any variety, Italian, French, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai or whatever.

Markets and Shopping.

Where to begin with shopping?  One of our first experiences was at a night market in the city where there were also fortune tellers.  The city never sleeps and, after Perth, Western Australia, that closed at nights pretty early and on weekends, the atmosphere was electric.  There is shopping in Wanchai and Causeway Bay, both in shops and street markets.  In Central there were fewer street markets but plenty of shops and laneways that were for specific products.  Wing On Lane had masses of fabric shops, Little Stanley Street had shoe shops and I forget which lane had handbags and bags exclusively.  All merchandise was priced at a fraction of what you would pay in your home country and the variety would be from cheap but well made to high end goods.

Central and Causeway Bay also had department stores.  At that time there was Wing On, the exclusive Lane Crawford and Japanese department stores such as Daimaru.  I practically lived in Wing On, which was just a little way out of Central heading to Kennedy Town on the south east of the island.  There were also factory outlets on Kowloon side and in Mong Kok that you could visit.  A lot of these produced silk clothing but I didn't find these as interesting as just shopping at various stores.  Some factories specialized in jeans and some in manchester.

I would frequent Wing On Lane for fabrics and found a tailor through a Scottish friend who was married to an Australian engineer.  While I can sew, I need a pattern and the tailors there can produce an item from a picture in a magazine.  I would buy the French version  of L'Officiel magazine, the couture magazine of France, and have my tailor copy things for a fraction of the price I would have had to pay a seamstress at home.

Work.

The company for which my husband worked as a civil engineer did a lot of entertaining and would take the staff out regularly for dinners and wives and husbands of staff were always included.  That is, unless the fellows were taking a business client out to the bars in Wanchai.  There were quite a few girlie bars and they could have that on their own.  Some of these were Japanese, very expensive and many a naive young man has left some of these with their drinks costing them the price of their holiday.

We ate out with the company at least once every fortnight and would take ourselves out on weekends to explore cuisine.  Everybody in the expat community also entertained and there was an endless round of dinners and lunches.  What I always loved about the meals in Chinese restaurants was that the dishes were in the centre of the table to share.  At the start of each meal the tablecloth would be clean and white but by the end a complete mess.  As soon as tables emptied, a pristine new cloth replaced the old one.  Nobody used a fork at a Chinese restaurant and it amused my husband and I when we returned home and ate at a Chinese restaurant and had to ask for chopsticks.

We ate at high end, medium and low end restaurants and it was all delicious.  My only disappointment occurred at one of the two top restaurants in Hong Kong, Gaddi's in the Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon side.  I have devoted a whole other post to that experience titled, 'The Worst Restaurant Experience I've Ever Had', if you are interested in reading about it.

One of the best restaurants there at the time was not high end but had the best Chinese food I had ever eaten and was hugely popular with both locals and expats.  It was situated in Wanchai and called The American.  It had pale green walls on which Botticelli type prints hung, laminex tables and harsh fluorescent lighting.  The Chinese waiters all looked like they had been there for decades.  We went there regularly, often with friends or the company.  In our last year there it closed after being there, I believe, for many decades.  The New American across the road remained open, but it just wasn't the same.

Lamma Island.

A lot of companies had their own junks but ours wasn't one of them.  These boats were great for entertaining and we were invited on them sometimes by people who had access to one through their companies.  Bankers were generally the best looked after expats in Hong Kong and I envied them their junks.  These boats are large, wooden and beautiful to look at.  At the time we lived there Aberdeen still had a large population of people living on junks in its harbour, moored side by side.  If you took a Sampan ride to get to a restaurant in Aberdeen you went right past them.  There were families living on board with televisions and all the mod cons.  By the time we left three years later the boat people were gradually being moved to high rise housing estates.  I couldn't think of anything worse after living such a life, but I suppose the harbour pollution lessened.  Mind you, given the state of the water in Hong Kong Harbour, Repulse Bay and Clearwater Bay, sewage treatment was obviously not a big issue at the time.

Hong Kong as it was originally spelled meant 'fragrant harbour'.  It was fragrant for a whole other reason when we arrived there.  Swimming at Clearwater Bay in the New Territories one day, a piece of toilet paper wrapped itself around my calf and there were no boats nearby.  At Repulse Bay on another day the Manager's wife of the company and I took and American tourist to the beach.  He went swimming and came out covered in red algae bloom.  He was horrified thinking that it was faeces and ran to the showers.  It was no doubt the putrid water that gave rise to the algae so he wasn't far wrong.  Mostly we swam in the pools of the large high rise housing flats of the other expats.

While it may have been fetid, the waterways of Hong Kong and the New Territories were pretty and the views spectacular.  One of our favourite weekend outings, and sometimes they were company outings, was to the restaurants perched above the water on piers along the water's edge on Lamma Island.

The restaurants there were basic and to get to a toilet you usually had to walk through the kitchen and find yourself at the back faced with two cubicles.  One cubicle offered a hole in the centre of the floor, the other a shallow trench along its back wall.  As I waited for the one with the hole in the floor to be vacant I watched, just outside and squatting on his haunches, a man washing an eel under a running tap.

The food, however, in all the restaurants there, was delicious.  It was all fresh seafood and, on weekends, every table was packed with both Chinese locals and expats.  We usually took a ferry there from Aberdeen where we parked our car and returned the same way.  It was a very large ferry and it only went a few times a day.  Our son would often play with other children in the restaurant in which we were eating and one day, within a split second of having him in my vision, he disappeared.  All the men at our table went off to look for him and sent me to look for police.  I went off into the backstreets of the very small village and could find no police or anyone for that matter.  After a while I returned to our table where the women remained and they couldn't believe how calm I was.  I wasn't.  I just couldn't do anything but wait.  There was water all around us but he didn't fall as there were barriers and I knew he wouldn't go down onto the sand to the water's edge because he simply hated it.  Nothing would make his little feet touch the stuff.  After thirty minutes the men found him.  He had walked off to follow a Chinese child.  He was only four and I feel guilty to this day but somehow my mother's instinct told me he was fine and I was happily right.  What I couldn't understand, as my husband was watching him too, was just how fast he disappeared.  The trouble with having a sensible child is that one can trust them too much.

Another thing about our son is that, at almost five, he would only say the occasional word.  A sentence was just too much trouble and we awaited his first string of words with anticipation.  It came on Lamma Island when he had obviously become bored.  Suddenly he said, "Ferry come now.  We go home."  I was so impressed with his eloquence that I wrote it in his baby book of events when we arrived home.  He has remained a man of few words all his life and only speaks when he has something to say.  A few years ago I was at his Veterinary clinic one day waiting to see him for some reason, when he came out of a consultation room with a dog and its owner.  He proceeded to talk to the owner at some length about the prescription he was supplying for the dog and how to use it.  I listened entranced as I had rarely ever heard my son speak at length about anything.  It's the little things that warm a mother's heart.

Walks.

Hong Kong island and the New Territories have some wonderful walks where there is plenty of foliage and no buildings.  There was a place not far from our apartment where we could park our car and walk all the way up to the Peak.  Lots of locals would take advantage of these walks on the weekend.  We also found great picnic spots in the New Territories to go with friends.  This gave the children some time with nature as our son's only play area around our apartment was the downstairs car park beneath the building, which was at least open, although under cover.  The only other options were playgrounds where there were gardens but no actual grass.

 What I didn't like were the high-rise housing estates in the New Territories.  Once you drive out of Kowloon, you head through the Lion Rock Tunnel to arrive in the New Territories.  One of the first places we came to then was Shatin, which was on flat ground and stood alone as a residential township consisting of numerous high-rise buildings surrounded by concrete with little greenery amongst it.  It lacked the magic of the districts that, no matter how crowded, were set among hills and shops and vibrant precincts.  Further on was Tai Po.  Gradually the people living in the shanty towns on the hills on the island and in Kowloon were being moved into these modern high rises.  No doubt this was better and safer for the residents and perhaps, with time, these estates would develop a vibrancy of their own.  Frankly though, they made me shudder.

We were there during a powerful typhoon in 1983 and, at the bottom of our street, was a small shanty town hanging off the side of a hill.  An elderly woman died there during this storm as did a young policeman who was trying to help her, so one has to be grateful the shanty towns were being cleared.  It is terrible to admit that they added to the mystique of Hong Kong, but they did and most of them disappeared during our time there.

Public Transport.

The public transport in Hong Kong was a dream and there was so much choice.  One of the great modes of transport were the mini buses that you could hail anywhere either in the city or residential areas.  There were also regular bus services with allocated stops.  There were ferry services that ran between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon as well as other areas.  In the city there were trams and there was also the fabulous MTR, or Mass Transit Railway, that would get you anywhere in the blink of an eye.  A tunnel ran between the island and Kowloon and this took cars, buses and the MTR.

One of my first journeys on a bus was from my street to the city via Kennedy Town.  This meant I caught the bus as it went down my street then passed through Kennedy Town, which sat at the water's edge and then on into the city.  Kennedy Town was very much a Chinese enclave and not cosmopolitan.  The people who got onto the bus there looked at me as if I was an alien while I had the pleasure of sitting across from and facing a Chinese gentleman who was holding a live chicken on his lap while he blatantly stared at me.

There was something my husband and I noticed after a couple of months of residing there and that was that the locals began to treat us differently after that time.  It is as if they could spot a newcomer on sight.  As we settled in and looked more at home they took much less notice of us.  They also didn't try to scam us as much in business.  Quite often cab drivers would try the long routes on susceptible foreigners so we got around this pretty quickly by giving directions in Chinese or noticing quickly if they took the wrong route.  The Chinese are honest people but business is business and bartering was commonplace.

One of my favourite trips was taking a ferry across the harbour.  It is one of the world's great trips although only lasts a few minutes.  On the island side the Peak rises up with the cluster of high rises beneath it and, on Kowloon side, Tsim Sha Tsui with the Harbour Centre and fabulous five-star hotels.  Kowloon is basically flat and it isn't until reaching Lion Rock Tunnel that the hills begin.  The ferries that cross between Central, Hong Kong Island, and Tsim Sha Tsui are large, double story and the fare incredibly cheap.  There were two classes, one for the upper deck and one for the lower.  I never minded which class I paid for as there wasn't really any difference in the seating.  I relished the crossing each time I took it sometimes alone, sometimes with my son, or son and husband.

I seem to remember the tunnel link between the island and Kowloon for the MTR was completed while we were there and we decided to try it.  The MTR was just so modern, efficient and fast and went almost to the New Territories.  Driving through Kowloon and surrounds could be a long and tedious business but on the MTR you could get through it in no time.  I did take trams a few times but wasn't very fond of them.  If you drove beside them you had to stop when they stopped to let off passengers.  Their ceiling were always a little low for the taller foreign expats as well.

Toilets.

I've mentioned the toilets on Lamma Island but the ones in the city in buildings were the usual western kind.  If you happened to be in one of the many five star hotels for lunch or just passing through, you could easily access the toilets in them.  These were as five star as the hotels and there was often a woman in attendance who handed out hot flannels for you to wash you face and hands after you had used the basins.  It was customary to tip these ladies and I always did.  The up market department stores often had attendants as well.

The truly appalling toilet experience I had was at Stanley Markets.  The markets themselves were fabulous and ran along the streets surrounding Stanley Beach.  Some stalls operated under canopies but there were many shops in buildings, all low level and one supermarket.  There was a great restaurant some way done one street on the waterfront where we went a few times with friends but I wouldn't have used their toilet unless I was eating there.  This left the public toilet block that was an experience I will never forget.  There were cubicles through the floor of which ran a trench about twenty to thirty centimeters wide and the urine and excrement ran right under you as you straddled the trench to do your business.  There was, of course, no seat.  The first time I used the facility I foolishly put my feet both on one side of the trench and tried to balance my bottom over the top of it.  I don't know what I was thinking but the smell must have made me unable to think.  Somehow I managed not to fall in.  The next and only other time I used it I realized what a dummy I had been on the previous occasion and put my feet one each side of the trench.  After the first visit I developed a gastric upset and I really hadn't touched anything while I was there.  I swear the smell was so rank it caused the upset.

Sights and Sounds.

Such is the variety of life in Hong Kong where you can experience the basic to the luxurious and high tech.  I bought some beautiful things over the years at Stanley Markets in the way of lamps, a silk screen and ornaments.  We also bought amazingly cheap and well made clothing as well as food.  It was the first time I saw meat hanging outdoors, dead chickens and dried fish.  I first thought I'd never get used to the sights and smells but very quickly found it quite normal.  There was, however, one place in Central that I was never brave enough to enter and that was the fish markets.  I had to hold my nose just to get past it.  Supermarkets near to our unit were housed on the ground floor of a block in some of the housing estates.  At Chi Fu, an estate a couple of kilometres drive from us, was a western style supermarket and, on some days, there was a wet market just outside with butchers and fish sellers.  On one occasion I went past a vendor who sold live frogs that were tied in pairs by their feet and just had to grit my teeth and deal with it.  This was normal to the locals and I was in their country.

In our first year there I was driving to a supermarket housed in a small high rise residential building, Scenic Villas, situated below and to the left of us on the waterfront.  It was a narrow and winding road and I found myself behind a tray truck with a canopy.  A bare chested man with a huge goiter on his neck was sitting in the back atop what must have been a dead pig or sheep whose entrails had fallen down between the end of the truck and the back flap that closed up so that I had a view of its stomach or whatever dangling out as I drove.  It was these strange sights that I loved about the place.  Things like an old Chinese gentleman doing Tai Chi on a tiny traffic island that held a traffic light in Kennedy Town oblivious to the traffic, noise and smell around him; peace in the middle of such chaos.

That sight alone helped me learn to be calm within myself.  I had arrived in Hong Kong still subject to the panic attacks I had suffered for many years but I loved the place so much I forced myself to go out and explore everywhere.  I had a massive attack one day at Stanley Markets when my husband and son left me for a while.  I sensed all morning that it was coming and it did.  The world began to turn and I leaned against a shop wall trying not to pass out.  It was the worst I ever had but it finally passed without me pitching forward onto the pavement.  Having survived that one, I never had another until my marriage started to break down ten years later.  I'm completely over them now but Hong Kong was so overwhelming that I told my mother that it scared me more than I scared myself and helped me control my own inner fears.

Work.

So what did I do with myself while my husband was at work?  We had hired a Phillipina maid so that I could get out and about without our son and so that we could attend the numerous functions that the company put on.  She was a lovely girl named Clare and only eighteen.  She couldn't say our son's name, Asher, properly and the way she said his name it came out sounding like Asia.  We offered her a normal size bedroom in our flat and she wouldn't hear of it.  The flats all came with tiny rooms for maids or amahs with their own tiny bathrooms and she insisted she would stay in it.  She was so adamant we had to concede.  We also had to have a tiny bed made to fit the room as everything in the shops was too long.  Clare was tiny too and seemed quite happy in her room.  The maids in the unit blocks relied on one another for company and there were only twelve apartments in our block and the Chinese residents had Chinese amahs.  There were only two other Phillipinas in our building and Clare left us after her contract was up two years later because of this I believe.  We met up a few months later and I think she regretted it.  I wonder to this day where she is as, even with the internet, I can find no trace of her.

At any rate, having Clare meant I could try to find work but it proved very hard.  I didn't speak Cantonese and had too little experience as a programmer to find work in that capacity.  I did some office work for an engineer in a company allied to the one my husband worked for and also took a disastrous job managing a high end dress boutique in Central.  What I didn't know was that the staff were ripping off the designs of the well known designer whose shop it was and put me through an honesty test wherein I found a wad of paper money on the counter that wasn't entered in the books and rang around our clients trying to ascertain who had left it there.  My mistake was apparently not offering it to the staff and keeping it a secret.  It took my husband, I and a savvy friend back in Australia a couple of years later to twig to what had happened.  I was fired a couple of days later on the most spurious pretext having only been there two weeks.  Apparently I'd messed up the books as we were doing a stock take and the girls kept giving me wrong counts that I had to correct.  The whole thing was a set up no doubt to test if they could keep stealing dresses right under my nose.  The owner had told me they had a problem with shoplifting and to keep my eyes open.  I wondered then how anyone could shoplift as it was a small boutique and we could keep our eyes on anyone in there and there were never many.  Hong Kong has a huge knock off trade and the designer was one of its best known.

I was paid a full month's wages and took it.  I was furious.  A week later the accountant phoned and my husband took the call.  He was asked some very odd questions and we realized later that the accountant was trying to ascertain if we'd caught on to them but this was too late to do anything about it.

Modelling.

I lost a fair amount of weight in Hong Kong, not that I was ever big, and decided to try film extra work and modelling.  I had a portfolio done by a professional photographer who specialized in such things.  I'm so glad I had it done as it's a record of me in my prime looking very glamorous.  I did a few hotel brochures, an advertisement in the South China Morning Post and a housing estate brochure.  One day I had a particularly riotous television extra job with a few other expat models for a Chinese crime show.  One was a crowd scene where we were dancing in a club in Wanchai.  In another we were by a hotel pool out in the New Territories in bikinis and also, in another scene, in hula skirts.  I kept trying to hide and not be photographed in this outfit but ended up in some shots and also a Chinese language television guide.  When the manager of the supermarket at Scenic Villas recognized me from the show I was mortified with embarrassment.  I turned down another job where I would have been an extra in a scene on the Jumbo floating restaurant and starring Ali Macgraw and George C. Scott.  I don't like being stranded for hours and had learned what a long day it could be from my previous, experience especially after we discovered no one had arranged for us to get a lift home.

Leaving.

It was a sad day when my husband decided that he'd had enough of working in Hong Kong.  He refused to look for any other work beyond Australia before we left and arranged to work back in Perth, Western Australia with his old company even knowing I didn't like Perth one bit.  We made friends in Hong Kong but gradually people would leave.  We kept in touch with some for quite a while but our lives eventually diverged.  I was stuck in Perth for another eight years before we moved to Queensland where I, my ex husband and son all still live although separately.  My son is grown with his own family now and my husband and I divorced two years after coming to Queensland.  The years in Perth, after the vibrancy of Hong Kong was like living in a morgue.  I love Queensland and am grateful the openness, cleanliness of the air and lack of crowding in Australia but I will be forever grateful for my time in Hong Kong.  It was a life changing and affirming experience.  I would very much like to have experienced life in one more country as well but something tells me that I experienced the pick of the crop and it would have taken a lot to outdo it.

END

 

 

REALITY SHOWS: of artifice, botoxed babes and voices that could cut glass.

 

Illustration courtesy of Gary Brookins politicalcartoons.com

All right, I know there are people out there who like reality television shows.  Good luck to them for having something on their sets to watch when there isn't a good comedy or drama scheduled.  I'm not one of them but I'm still fascinated by their appeal.

I first heard of reality television or its precursor, the infomercial, just over twenty years ago when I was holidaying with my mother in Port Douglas in Queensland.  This was a rare treat as we had never had a mother/daughter holiday before.  I was still reasonably attractive at that time, even a little 'glam', and my appearance drew the attention of a married couple who were sitting around the hotel pool one day.  We exchanged greetings and started chatting.  It turned out that they had something to do with producing shows for television, I can't quite remember in what capacity, and asked me if I'd heard of infomercials.  I had not and they went on to explain that these were a long form of advertising in the form of entertainment.  They said a lot more than that and more succinctly but that's the gist of it.  They went on to say that they thought that I'd make a good presenter on such a show.

Well most people would have said something sensible in response to this that might have landed them a job.  Not me, no.  I remember thinking to myself 'how ghastly' about the notion of such a show and, although I don't remember my exact reply, I'm sure it wasn't as enthusiastic as it should have been and they did not follow up with an offer of employment.  If I'd had a brain in my head at the time, I should have gushed about the idea.  I had, after all, been a model for things such as hotel brochures, newspaper advertisements and the like when I lived in Hong Kong.  I'd also appeared in television advertisements  when I moved to Perth.  Deep down, however, I did not like the idea of advertising as entertainment but I confess to being disappointed at the couple ignoring my disinterest and not offering some work.

For some years after that I waited for infomercials to make their appearance on television.  It took a while and I can't remember now which Australian made version of such a show came first that would fit the infomercial category, but I think it would be The Block.  I have to confess to never having watched it, but because it promotes the use of hardware and like materials I figure that it rates as an infomercial.  Even if it doesn't mention a product's brand name, it undoubtedly encourages people to renovate, which in turn sends them to their local hardware store.

The type of shows that followed it were not in any way what could be described as infomercials and I haven't heard that word again since the nineties.  Survivor and Big Brother followed and they weren't trying to sell anything.  In my mind the only thing these shows helped to sell were advertising slots for the stations that showed them.  What they also accomplished was to help television stations comply with the percentage of Australian content they were obliged to broadcast.

I can understand if you criticize me for writing about shows I haven't actually watched but I have watched as much of them as I could stand in the beginning except for Big Brother.  The commercials for Big Brother alone were enough to turn my stomach.  I was simply appalled such dross could make it to our screens and some of it was morally questionable to even the most open minds.  I've watched commercials for the most recent Big Brother and it seems to have lost the seedier aspect of the show but I'm still not going to watch it.

Most shows of this type now fall under the heading of reality television.  Shows such as Masterchef, Dancing with the Stars, Big Brother and Survivor fall into this category along with The Bachelor, Australia's Got Talent and The Voice.  The Block and Better Homes and Gardens probably would be considered what the couple in Port Douglas had in mind when they were planning to make infomercials.  While they are not classed as reality television but as lifestyle programs, to my mind the difference between the two is semantic.  Here is the blurb on one website for Better Homes and Gardens:

"With a total audience reach of over six million, Better Homes and Gardens is the country’s original and most successful multi-platform brand, combining a TV show, power-house print magazine, thriving digital and social platforms and dedicated e-commerce vertical, bhgshop.com.au."

So this is a show that is both entertaining and designed to sell products while the talent, survival and peeping Tom style shows such as Big Brother and The Bachelor are there solely for entertainment.  Well, some people's entertainment.  Okay I'm being derisive again but I do know plenty of people love these shows.  My son, his wife and mother-in-law do, at least Survivor and Masterchef.  A friend of mine in Sydney, with whom I was staying for a week, also made me sit through days of Australian Idol when it first aired.  I did have the privilege of watching Guy Sebastian win it.  I didn't mind it too much as Sebastian has a stunning voice and I was plugging for him to win.  I think I even voted but that was the end of my Australian Idol watching days when I returned to the safety of my reality show free watching home.

If anyone thinks reality shows aren't scripted, think again.  In my taxi driving days a few years ago I drove a couple early in the morning to the airport.  They had to be on the Big Brother set down south and they worked on the sets as I recall.  At the time the shows were live at Dreamworld but before the people who actually appeared on the show arrived and it went public, the couple informed me that other people rehearsed the scripted scenes.  So much for the reality component of the show.

When I watch advertisements for The Bachelor, The Voice or even Beauty and the Geek what I mostly catch sight of is people on the show feigning extraordinary surprise with their mouths wide open and their hands up to their cheeks at the antics of fellow contestants on the show.  With The Voice it is even more ridiculous as highly paid celebrity judges jump from their seats, arms akimbo in admiration at a contestant's talent.  It is so obviously over the top and designed for the audience that it is an insult to the intelligence.  Added to this, while some contestants may have admirable voices, they all seem to choose songs that push their volume to the limit and make them sound like a cat mating.  What happened to a bit of mellow crooning?  Do they have to flex their vocal chords to breaking point to prove they've got what it takes?  It is these feigned emotional responses and formulaic method of presenting songs that puts me right off watching the shows even if I ever toyed briefly with the idea of doing so.

I have recently seen advertisements, way too often I might add, for the latest series of The Bachelor.  In one I saw the bachelor sucking on the lips of three different women who were vying for his affection and that was in the one advertisement.  It just seemed unhygienic and how can people on these shows actually show natural emotion after they're placed in the ideal position, the lighting set up and then the cameras start to roll?  It's so fake it's mind boggling but apparently I'm a cynic.  Or perhaps viewers get a laugh out of it.  I suppose that makes it entertainment.

On a final note, and this applies probably only to me, I have a problem with the 'strine (Australian vernacular for those who don't know the expression) accent of some of the people on these shows.  I am Australian and, I believe, no snob.  I just hate the accent and hadn't heard a strong one until I met my future husband, his family and friends.  I must have lived in a pretty isolated community.  His family and friends assumed I was snooty, which I wasn't, but my voice apparently cast me as such.  It's a common Australian attitude I've discovered that the more roundly spoken are considered snobs.  It's known as the tall poppy syndrome and I can tell you that it's enough to make you a snob because you are judged when you are not, in fact, judging.

I do believe, though, that I have become a voice snob.  Before the seventies the Australian accent wasn't really heard on our televisions.  Our newsreaders were roundly spoken and enunciated clearly.  Then along came Bob Hawke and the Labor government after decades of a Liberal and more elitist government.  Bob Hawke did many great things but his voice sounded like a saw hacking through metal.  Bob promoted and financially supported the Arts and Australian television and cinema.  Also great, but there was a catch.  It had to reflect real Australia.  Unfortunately and for a time, it only tended to reflect what was then termed the working classes and most of them spoke with the heavy 'strine accent.

The Australian film industry at last had some money to churn out films that they tried to sell internationally but they had little success at first because the Australian accent and colloquialisms were too strong for the international moviegoers to understand.  Besides the actors talked too fast.  How to fix this problem?  The film makers then reverted to making period films set when Australia was younger and spoke with a more British accent.  Such gems as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Man From Snowy River were the product of this and our films began to sell overseas.

How do I know this?  I studied Australian Film and Television as part of my Media and Communication degree.  There was even a period called the Ocker Period in Australian films, ocker being another term for the Australian accent.  These were the films made with the Australian vernacular that flopped.

Okay, that was a long side track.  The point I was going to make before going on it was that I hear too much of this vernacular on our reality shows.  Pretty women with botoxed foreheads, plumped up lips, tattooed eyebrows and voices that could cut glass.  Yes, I know other Australians probably couldn't care less but it makes me wince.  Have you noticed how many well known Australian actors have become internationally famous?  Yes there's Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and many others but when they appear in films in the USA or the UK they take on the accent of the country in which the film is set.  Only occasionally does our accent pop its head up and when it does, it can be quite appealing but not when everyone in the film has it.  Only Paul Hogan got away with it in Crocodile Dundee but that was because the whole film revolved around a very lovable Australian larrikin and his 'strine was part of the story.

Don't judge me too harshly.  I'm immensely proud of what Australia has achieved in its television and film industry.  I'm just terribly sad that it doesn't promote more rounded speech as much as it allows the heavier and less melodious accent run rampant.  I can live with both but I'm afraid Australian children only hear more articulate speech on shows that come from overseas and, frankly, I don't want them to sound American or copy variations of the British accent.  The Australian accent can be very pleasant when it's not over the top or the words all slur together when it's spoken too fast.

I doubt if I'll ever change my mind about reality television shows but enough people like them to keep the industry coming up with more and more of them.  It seems that, like Cricket, I just can't escape them.

END

 

 

 

 

FUSSY EATERS: the bane of a cook's existence.

 

I remember not being a particularly fussy eater as a child.  I believe the only problem with me was that I didn't eat much.  This may have been because I wasn't very well until I was about five years of age.  After my antrums were drained my health was restored but, judging from childhood photos, I remained a string bean.  Boarding school made me a fussier eater but hunger drove me to eat all but the most gross offerings.  These included beetroot and junket.  To this day I can't stand either.  I gave beetroot a good try when it was served with salad three days in a row at lunch.  I forced it down the first two but on the third I gagged too much and gave up.

I hadn't run into a fussy eater until my son came along.  As a baby he was just so easy care he was a dream and remained that way in all but one respect.  He was a fussy eater.  Once he went onto solids there was a repertoire of foods he would stick to and from which he would not vary.  These were: eggs, sausages, fish fingers, corn on the cob, salami, cheese, noodles, bananas, ice cream and spaghetti without sauce.  He did eat cereal with milk and may have eaten toast, I can't remember.  Straying outside these lines just wasn't worth it as he would just stubbornly refuse to open his mouth.  I told my doctor about it and he said that my son was getting enough protein and sustenance and not to worry.

I would give my son his dinner early when he was young and cook for my husband and I and we would eat later.  Eventually son developed a liking for my Spaghetti Bolognese, a passion he retains to this day now he and his wife make it.  We lived in Hong Kong when he was between the ages of two and five and a half.  We would take him with us to restaurants and one of my favourite memories is of watching him eat a bowl of noodles with chopsticks.  His head would be just above table height and he would use two hands to stick the chopsticks into the bowl then bring the sticks together and grip them in one hand, raise them up high with their clump of noodles, bend his head to the side and then lower the noodles into his mouth.  He enjoyed doing this and didn't want help.  To me it remains a sign of his tremendous self reliance that has endured and I admire to this day.

I remember being five years old and having breakfast with my parents.  My mother, father and I would sit at the dining table and eat poached eggs on toast.  I used to have cloudy apple juice to drink with mine.  I would watch fascinated as Dad would cut the egg that sat atop his toast into nine squares by slicing two lines one way and another two the other way.  This left the nice, soft, runny yolk sitting on the middle square and that was the best bit.  He always did it this way and for years I did too.  Over time, however, I realised that to get some yolk with the other parts of the egg I had to be less tidy and after that I carved mine up so I can get some in every mouth full but I am still nostalgic for Dad's method.

As I grew older my father would become very frustrated watching me eat a roast dinner accompanied by vegetables.  Dad would put meat with gravy on his fork, add potato, pumpkin or whatever and then squeeze some peas on it as well.  I ate everything separately.  One night he took my fork over and made a compilation and asked me to try it.  I did and went straight back to eating everything separately.  Mum told him not to worry.  Eventually I ate the way of adults.  It all comes around in the end.

This brings me back to son.  There is something particularly galling about trying to encourage your teenage child to try some salad with dinner.  Once he began to eat the same meals as we did, I would put out salad with certain dishes like spaghetti or steaks and urge him to try.  I gave up pretty quickly and the salad remained untouched by him for years until one day when he was about fifteen.  We were eating and, all of a sudden, son puts some salad on his plate and, lo and behold, begins to actually eat it.  I gazed at him in wonder and said, "And when did you start to eat salad?"

"Oh, I tried it at a so and so's place," he replied.  I can't remember his friend's name now, hence the 'so and so'.  I was pleased I suppose, but also a bit miffed.  What had so and so's mother or father done to make salad so appealing?  My thought is, however, that it wasn't the appealing look of the salad but the fact that another teenage boy was eating it.  I think that was why he deigned to try it or was shamed into it and then discovered that he liked it.

The worst experience his father and I had making him eat was on our return journey from living in Hong Kong when he was five and a half.  We arrived in Perth, Western Australia on a weekend.  Now Perth was a bit backward about opening anything on weekends and that meant we had to rely totally on the kitchen of our upmarket hotel to feed us.  I think the chef was deeply insulted at having to create dishes for our son that were to be delivered to our room.  In fact we didn't want him to create anything.  When we ordered an apple and some cheese that's all we wanted but, not only did it take an hour but what arrived was a cored apple with cheese grilled in the centre.  Guess who wouldn't touch it?  We sent a message: simple please, no embellishments.  Next time we ordered a bowl of spaghetti noodles.  Please don't add anything.  Either the chef was brain dead or toying with us.  He melted butter over it and then ground fresh parsley on the top.  Again son starved as he wouldn't touch it.  I think he survived on milk the entire weekend.  There was simply not a shop open where we could buy him anything.

I also spent years trying to get him to spell properly.  You know how parents have to go through the spelling exercise at night with their children on the words they are learning that week.  This went on into high school and, brilliant as son was in most subjects, his spelling was never perfect until year four of high school and then suddenly it was.  I will add here that I was a brilliant speller from the get go.  Son, however, was like a chrysalis in regard to things such as food and spelling.  At some stage he just emerged from the pupa and did it properly.  Actually I think he just made the decision to do so and before that happened he just went with the flow.

Having a child is like being handed a self drive car that comes with absolutely no instructions and is designed to be self autonomous and take no passengers.  First you have to figure out what fuel it takes, and it spits quite a few types out, then you must maintain it until it can start its own motor and begin to steer itself.  Having then put your heart and soul into looking after it until it reaches self sufficiency, you then watch it putt putt off into the distance and hope it comes back to visit.

Of course it's not just children that sometimes prove difficult to feed.  My ex husband had a grandfather who used to demand a roast lamb dinner every night of his married life from his long suffering wife.  Apparently he put her in a mental home for a few years but she eventually returned home.  He was eccentric and my guess is that he had driven her to a nervous breakdown.  It's not always the nuts who end up in the nut house.

I live with a Polish man and have for many years.  He is lovely in so many ways and so utterly perverse in others.  So many meals I used to make are now off the menu as he simply refuses to eat them.  I ask him what his ex wife used to cook and tell him to get the recipes.  But it's not just that.  In his world and his past he could open the refrigerator door and find all manner of goodies to eat.  You know, pre-cooked meals and so forth as well as smoked meats, sausages and cheeses.  It never occurs to him that food goes off and also that it costs money.  My fridge always has the necessities but I'm not going to keep it fully stocked with different meals to fancy someone's hunger pangs at any hour of the day or night.  When I dare to ask him in the morning what he wants for dinner so I can get something out of the freezer to cook he grumbles.  I then tell him that he's lucky he doesn't have to go out and hunt for something to bring back to cook.

As for Polish food, some is good and a lot of it is not.  I recall a meal at his friend's house that began with an entree made up of a boiled egg around which was wrapped a herring, both of which sat on a potato, carrot and pea salad in mayonnaise.  As for Bigos, well it's basically a hunting stew that, in the past, you would keep adding to as time went by.  Modern versions have smoked sausages, pork and I honestly don't know what else but it always tastes distinctly suspect to me.  My partner will bring things home from his ex's house that she has kindly cooked.  We all get on famously.  I love her pirozhki and some of her desserts but some things I leave to him to consume and there is always so much.

He also loathes lamb.  I think they used to get mutton in Poland that wasn't very good when he was growing up and nothing will make him eat it.  There is also one other thing I simply can't get him to try and that is a prawn.  I don't much like fish but I love crustaceans.  A prawn does not taste like fish but he just says they are the cockroach of the deep and won't touch them.  I love lobster too but when I realise some are boiled alive, I'd have to be pretty sure they were killed humanely.  Even so they can live to be one hundred and I would just feel like a spoilsport if my desiring to eat one cut short a long life.

My partner also just goes off things at a whim.  One moment he'll like my curry, the next he won't.  I make a pretty mean Chili con Carne but, no, it's too spicy and besides, like Bolognese, there's tomato in it.  He hates tomato in cooked dishes and there aren't many stews and sauces that don't have it.  My one staple for him, pork rissoles, he decided the other day I was making too thick so he formed the patties next time I made them.  They were just as thick but smaller in diameter.

Now I come to my grandchildren.  The eldest boy lives on not much but noodles and wraps, sometimes with chicken in them.  Oddly they all love my Spinach Pie.  Granddaughter likes Taco boats with sour cream and she also likes noodles.  Youngest grandson isn't picky yet but I'll bet you anything he'll like noodles too.  The Chinese really came up with a winner there.

Children usually grow out of their choosiness but I am blessed with an adult who is like a child but he makes up for it in other ways.  Aren't we lucky to be able to be so choosy?  Imagine if we had to hunt and grow things to eat to survive without any farmers or supermarkets to help us.  Also imagine the time when humans ate what they caught raw.  Apparently cooking food led to us being smarter but what on earth made us so picky when we have so much choice?

END

 

 

UPROOTED: longing for a long lost home.

The view from my home when I was a teenager after the pool was put in.

I was born in a place as close to being paradise as you can imagine and it has been a serious liability to me.  I don't for one moment regret it but it has had a curious and irreversible effect on my aspirations.  You see, I didn't develop any until after I left it.  Nowhere else has come close to what I felt for my home and nothing will ever live up to it.

People may come from less appealing surroundings or even hardship but at least this makes them strive for something.  It's like a rocket booster to thrust them onward to better things.  I didn't want to strive, I just wanted to stay put.

I count myself as very fortunate that I came from, not only beautiful surroundings, but also a happy home.  From the time I could perceive and think I fell in love with the nature and beauty around me and reveled in it.

My grandfather, my mother's father, bought a large parcel of land situated overlooking Pittwater, a large inlet of the Pacific Ocean thirty kilometres north of Sydney, Australia.  

The land sloped down to the water through bush and tall eucalypts and had a north easterly aspect.  Our house was built on land my father bought from my grandfather.  It was higher up on the slope than the house my grandfather built and had, in my opinion, the better view.  Over the bay we could see Scotland Island to the left, which protruded like a headland, and further out over the bay to the right, the headland that contained both suburbs of Newport and Clareville.  The bush and trees were so dense on these that the houses on this headland only peeped through the foliage but at night the lights from them sparkled like stars.

A narrow, sealed road runs along the bay beneath our land and leads further into Church Point and onward to Kuringai National Park and also West Head.  It is single lane in both directions and only a couple of metres from the water.  There is a small rock wall of sandstone a couple of metres from the road that is barely a metre high and at which the water laps at high tide.  At low tide the water can recede up to fifty metres exposing sand and some mangrove aerial roots.  At Christmas however, there are king tides and it was always a thrill when the water would come up to the bitumen and sometimes encroach on it.

 At night I would lie in bed and listen to the musical sound made by the masts and rigging of the yachts moored on the bay and some nights the moon would cast a glorious path over the water.  Happily my bedroom window had a bay view and also a door that led out to our patio.  There was one annoying street light down below on the road that, although at least two hundred metres distant, would shine into my room.  I did have a blind and would pull it down.  I loved the darkness even as a child and to this day I loathe street lights that intrude into any bedroom I occupy.  In fact I am annoyed by the fact that street lights near houses aren't turned off at night.  Now I know this isn't practical for safety reasons but that doesn't stop me feeling that civilization is intruding upon nature and the natural peace and darkness of the night.

These days, if I look at a photo of the view that once was mine it does look lovely but no photo can do justice to the scene.  The bay's mood would change throughout the day because of the angle of the sun on the water that either sparkled or became varying shades of blue depending on the time of day.  The sound of insects filled the air and the various greens of the bush and trees, the lantana, the smell of frangipani and the bush itself created an incredible palette for the senses.

As I faced the bay standing in front of our house, to my left was another block of land that ran the whole distance down to the road below.  On it there was an empty house that had been built many years earlier and was called by the neighborhood children 'the haunted house'.  It was owned, so we were told, by a Papua New Guinea plantation owner.  It was built of dark, purple brown bricks on a foundation of beautiful sandstone blocks.  It wasn't easy to get to as it was surrounded by lantana that surrounded the house and also most of the way down the hill to the road.  We had many fun excursions through that jungle to the house undeterred by snakes and spiders.    In fact, we never saw anything dangerous although we knew they were there.   We were fearless and, as an adult today, I would never have the courage to do the same.  Other local children had left chalk drawings on the bricks but nobody went inside as it was fairly secure.

When I reached my twenties the haunted house property was sold to a retired airline pilot who subdivided the land, thankfully into large blocks so that the natural beauty of the area remained intact.  He demolished the haunted house and used the sandstone blocks as a foundation for his house, which he built on the block he had designated for himself closest to the water.  I was grateful, however, that the land had remained a jungle throughout my childhood.  It had been completely taken over by nature and was a playground for our imaginations and adventures.

Our property had a long driveway that went down to the road below.  At first it was a dirt track but was later concreted at great expense to my parents.  We even had a little boat that we could take down to the water and go out on forays into the bay.  It was a dinghy with an outboard motor as my father was never into sailing as so many in the district were.  I'm with him there; I loved our boat.  Sail boats just seemed like work to me.  You can fish from a dinghy and explore.

We also had a driveway leading up to the road above the house.  Until I was about eight years of age, the road ended at the top of our driveway until one day the council decided to extend it about one hundred metres.  This required cutting upwards into the hill and then it finished in a cul-de-sac.  This also had to be cut into the hill and a great cutting into the orange clay made up its upward side.  Houses were built precariously above this and a driveway also extended from the end of the cul-de-sac on either side of which other houses were built.  The one on the lower side was built further up above where the haunted house had been.  Many years later that house went for a trip down the hill thanks to rain and the unstable clay.  Another house was built in the same spot on the land but with a very wide, concrete open drain built into the clay above it.  I saw it on a visit to my old home although I don't remember if it was after my parents sold up or earlier.

When this extension to the road was planned the council did something I could never forgive and made me, if I wasn't already , an ardent greenie.  I used to try and estimate which was the tallest gum tree in our area.  One was on my uncle's property next door and one was at the top of our driveway where the cutting was to be made.  We were informed the tree was to be taken down and I was, all eight years old of me, furious but there was nothing I could do to stop it.  When it was brought down I salvaged a large thick piece of its outer trunk.  It was at least 45 centimetres long and 20 wide.  I kept it in my cupboard for years until my mother, an obsessive tidier upper and thrower outer, threw it out.  She'd do this kind of thing when I was away at boarding school.  She threw out my teddy bear and another dear stuffed toy when I was away and in my teens.  I never forgave her for it.

The good thing about the cul-de-sac was that it was on a hill and was just great when we reached our teens and had bicycles and would launch ourselves down the road.  One day my girlfriend and my male cousin started off from there.  Now the road, Bakers Road, was two way, although narrow, and had driveways going off to houses along the road.  Some of the driveways went uphill to the houses on the high side, some downhill to the lower houses.  Well my cousin lost his brakes and yelled out to warn us and we followed him with our hearts in our mouths.  Bakers Road is one steep hill and went all the way down to the water but there was also a road at the bottom, the one that curved around and met our lower driveway.

My cousin made the brave decision to head up an uphill driveway to stop his descent but, unfortunately, a few metres up it, a gate was closed blocking it and behind that a parked car.  My friend and I watched horrified as my cousin hit the gate, went up into the air, did a somersault and landed on his back on the car.  Happily and amazingly he didn't break any bones although, to this day, he has a very bad neck.  I don't know if that had anything to do with this incident but I had also witnessed him fly off a cemented area into lantana beneath it on his tricycle years earlier and disappear.  He was nothing if not resilient.

My parents sent me to two different boarding schools during my youth.  One was a primary school in the leafy suburb of Wahroongah.   I cried for two weeks but eventually got used to it.  I would go on Monday morning and come home Friday afternoon.  I was there for two years and then I was sent to a school overlooking Sydney Harbour, or part of it, for high school.  I had a bad dream about it before I started and it was right.  I hated the school with a passion for six years.  It was also weekly boarding but nothing would convince my parents to let me go to a local school as a day pupil.

It was situated overlooking Rushcutter's Bay in the wealthy eastern suburbs and looked directly over the bay to Bellevue Hill with its many apartments and houses that were older in style than those of the north shore.  I found the view distinctly inferior to that of my home.  I liked to look at trees and bush.  It also smelled because of the smog that settled so heavily over the city in the sixties.  What I really resented most was not being home.  I loved everything about my home.  Oddly my mother did not.  I don't know to this day what her hang up was but she was a depressive and generally unhappy without knowing the cause.  She had a good life but I think lacked purpose in spite of her many friends.  I have very few friends to this day but as long as I have nature around me I'm fine.  Sadly that didn't work for her.

After leaving school I was encouraged to go to University but, having been so miserable at school, I had developed no direction.  I studied Science for a few years and dropped out then sat around at home thinking what to do next but no one would let me take time to think.  My parents encouraged me to do a computer programming course.  Apparently my presence wasn't appreciated in the house and it never occurred to them the damage that had been done by keeping a psychologically distressed teenager in the wrong environment against her will.  I had had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder badly since I was six and eventually panic attacks.  I'd coped at the first school but not the latter.

I did the course and worked as a programmer for nine months, decided it wasn't living, dropped it and agreed to marry my boyfriend of four years.  Harsh as this sounds, he was my friend and the only chance I had for peace and to heal.  We had a son and divorced after fifteen years but I am eternally grateful for those years he gave me to become whole before the marriage fell apart.

When I married, naturally I left home and that was the hardest thing of all.  It isn't that I was a natural homebody, it's just that the place was magic.  I truly had been in love with my environment since I could remember.  My husband's work took us interstate and eventually overseas and we lived in some decent houses and owned a couple but I could never feel anything for them.  To me they were suburban boxes with no view and fences.  There wasn't a fence in sight where I grew up.  The houses I lived in were also close to one another on grid like streets and had no soul but they were comfortable.  My old home wasn't at all grand, just comfortable and reasonably large but it was the surroundings that were exceptional.  Yes, I was spoiled and terribly grateful for having grown up there but the sad thing is that nothing else could live up to it.

Over the years I would go back and visit my parents of course who were now relieved to have me off their hands, their one and only child.  They also loved their grandson who was able to see my old home until he was about four.  We were living in Perth when my parents gave me the news they were selling the house.  I was dumbstruck.  I think Dad needed extra money to retire and they liked the idea of starting afresh and to my horror they chose Perth, a place I had come to loathe.  They didn't like it either and two years later moved south to Dunsborough, which they loved.

I don't remember when I last saw my old home.  When my parents owned it I came and went thinking it would always be there to go back to.  There was a time I saw it for the last time not knowing it would be the last.  It's probably just as well or my heart would have broken then and there.  I had always thought I would at least inherit it.  If I had wild horses couldn't have dragged me from it.  It is well out of my price range now and I wonder what I would do if I suddenly won enough money to buy it back.

Something tells me it wouldn't be a good idea.  A home is not just a place, it's a time.  It's the people that surrounded you and the times you had there and it was the most wonderfully close neighborhood in the golden age of the fifties, sixties and even the early seventies.  I am just incredibly grateful for what I had, even though it wasn't exactly mine but in a way it is because it is part of me.

END

FUTURE IMPERFECT: the eroding effects on the mind of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Picture courtesy of The Guardian

Here I sit on a cold and wet winter's day during a global pandemic and wonder what life holds next.  I may no longer be in my prime but I wasn't planning to be dead any time soon.  I used to feel that I had up to twenty good years left in me based on my family history; okay, those family who haven't turned their toes up young.  In fact, I was setting myself the goal of doing better than my forebears.

When I wake in the morning these days, however, I am finding it increasingly difficult to feel any sense of hope or optimism.  At night as I attempt sleep, I chide myself for this and think of those people around the world who have worse things to contend with as well as a pandemic, which sits like a cherry atop their other miseries.  I think of the refugees from Myanmar, the children starving in Yemen and the refugees from Mozambique and so on.  All of this suffering comes from the actions of lunatics pushing their own vicious or greedy political agendas without care about the families caught in the middle.  So many of the perpetrators of these little wars are young, fanatical or opportunistic young men who are guided by older, slyer and more jaded ones.  Women are probably involved in there somewhere too but mostly they are being violated in some way or watching their children suffer.

I really shake my head and wonder how fanatics can carry out their agendas during a pandemic?  I guess the point is that they are fanatics and all else pales to their vision of utopia.  God forbid what that might be after they've made life a hell on earth.

Do these thoughts about the suffering of others make me feel better about my own situation?  Well how could such thoughts make one feel better about anything?  In answer to this question, no they don't.  It does though, help me put my feelings in perspective but someone else's suffering doesn't reduce one's own unless one is a sociopath or sadist.

Before I lost my job to Covid, I retained hope.  I long ago ran out of money due to divorce, having Chronic Fatigue and other factors but I live comfortably enough.  When I got over Chronic Fatigue I found a job that provided me with a living and, when I reached pension age and worked part time, what my job gave me was the possibility of affording a vacation or something to look forward to.  It also kept me busy.  That is now something completely off the table.  I don't own my own home and am enormously grateful to this country for its social security that gives me a pension.  It's not where I envisaged being at this age, having come from a reasonably privileged background, but I've taken some pride in being able to take it on the chin but I'm not taking things on the chin as well anymore, which rather surprises me.  I thought I was made of stronger stuff.

It may have to do with the way this last year and a half has panned out for me on a personal level.  If you, reader, have read any of my other blogs, you may know I took a year to come off an antidepressant I'd been on for thirty years.  I also caught pneumonia.  When I first caught it the clinic that I visit to see a doctor wouldn't let me in as I had a fever so I went off for a Covid test.  At that time I wasn't particularly worried and, when the test showed negative I just stayed in bed and waited to get well assuming it was 'flu.  It was my son who eventually called an ambulance.

Since then I've had two viruses and had to have a Covid test each time.  Both times I have been very nervous and upset that the results would be positive.  Neither were but I sure didn't feel good and the wait for a result each time played havoc with my nerves.  I don't even know how I got the last virus given the precautions I take and that is a worry in itself.

That's one of the big problems about this pandemic, it's shredding our nerves.  There are some people out there who don't worry or simply don't believe there is a pandemic and that it's all a conspiracy.  In a way I envy them.  If I'm going to get Covid, I'd rather just not worry about it first but I think this year has taken its toll on me and I can no longer stop worrying.  My mood sometimes improves but, with any new concern, it plummets to new depths and this is becoming a concern to the point I am considering going on another antidepressant.

I am, of course, I suspect not the only person whose mental state is deteriorating.  When I told my general practitioner doctor that I was feeling more optimistic a few weeks ago after having my first vaccine shot, she said a lot of her older patients were too.  The virus has obviously been preying on the minds of those of us who were anticipating a couple of more decades of life.  After my last virus, post the vaccine, I began to lose that hope again.  If it was only a rhinovirus, it was a beauty.  I didn't have a fever, blocked nose or cough.  My lungs were fine too.  I had a mighty sore throat and just felt as if I had the 'flu.  The thing is, I've had a 'flu shot.  If the virus made me feel this bad, how capable am I, even vaccinated, of dealing with Covid?

Perhaps I am being a wuss but I'm rather tired of being sick or feeling unwell.  I am really wondering how other people are feeling mentally at this time.  It isn't easy on any of us but I also wonder how many people are keeping their fears to themselves.  I have sometimes, when wearing a mask to the shops, had people come right up to me and talk to my face.  I figure that these types are not big worriers.  They also can't take a hint.  I remain pleasant but wonder where their heads are.

The old saying that ignorance is bliss is true.  It's become so that I really don't want to listen to the news on television at night and hear one more thing about Covid or vaccinations.  I see it on the internet but can skim past.  I take in the rudiments and the latest local figures and move on.  The television news, however, just won't let it go.  For the last sixteen months we've been fed a diet of Covid related news.

I yearn for the day when I never hear another mention of Covid and I'm sure you do too.  I yearn for the day I can shop or got to a cafe or restaurant without worrying and for the time I can travel again, even though I really no longer have the funds.  I'll just take a road trip to anywhere and enjoy the scenery.  I long for the day I can look forward to thinking I may see my grandchildren reach adulthood.  I just long for another day.

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