I have a confession to make. Despite all previous arguments to the contrary I now understand that you can be with someone 24-7 and actually not be in the least bit sick of their company. Furthermore I understand how you can spend hours just lying around talking to someone and then miss them like a whole week has passed when they are away for just one night. This in itself, is evidence of how much one person can change your life. I understand how an unresolved argument can feel like the Berlin Wall itself has been constructed between you, and nothing in the world feels right until someone concedes and bridges the divide. I understand how an hour between text messages can feel like an eternity in isolation. I understand how you can want to lock someone away in your arms, so that they may never hurt again and I know without a shadow of a doubt just how nice it feels to have someone get up ridiculously early and make your lunch for you because they love you.

I have, in fact, come to a whole new awareness of the deep and startling lengths that my own lameness can go. I guess after all, I am just a romantic in disguise. What can I say, people change.

I have one wish, and one wish only – it is a hat for every occasion. At first I thought this was an achievable wish, a worthy goal, but it seems there are so many more occasions than I ever accounted for. At first a hat seems perfect, versatile and open to new opportunities. But gradually I come to see, how it cannot be worn here, and it should not be worn there and there is nothing else to be done, but to purchase a new hat. Thus it became necessary to invest in a spring hat, since no other hat was quite up for the job. These spring days give me the shivers, not because they are cold but because they smell beautiful, and the sunshine tingles on your skin, and it takes a special type of hat, a spring hat nonetheless, to handle the joy of these fine days. So please take this as my excuse, for buying yet another hat.


And while I’m at it, it has been brought to my attention that my ears are forever mis-hearing and malfunctioning. Sometimes, ok mosttimes, if not alltimes, they are just downright useless. Generally, when they have twitched and turned this way and that and asked to hear the sentence again and still can’t decipher the meaning from the general background static, they just shut up shop and vacate the premises. Then my face concentrates on either looking very, very blank or smiling and nodding, based on the assumption that whatever was said was most likely funny. There are times when not hearing is a convenient, instantly believable excuse, and there are times when the creeping growth of deafness, is just plain frustrating, for me and the person whose throat is getting sore from yelling at me. Hence, here a disclaimer – I probably didn’t hear you.

Breathing life into old things

Away in a far off suburb known as Huntingdale rusted a noble old ten speed, wasting away her twilight years dismally in a corner of the family shed. Then one day two girls arrived and took her away to a better place where she was freshly oiled and greased and pumped full of air. Once again she got to feel the road beneath her tyres and hear the joyous chaching of her faithful old bell. Once again she got to cruise the footpaths with her basket full of purpose. She was, Yellow Betty whispered to her one evening, to be part of a revolution. In which old things weren’t just discarded, and the old proverb – Brave men cycle where lesser men drive – would finally become the universal truth it should be.

A Tale of Three Shelves

On my bookshelf there are the regulars, a dictionary, a bible and Harry Potter. There are a row of children’s books with big sprawling pictures, tattered spines and teeth marks from where Olive has began to snack on them. A cluster of Pony Pals novellas, a book ‘borrowed’ and never returned to its classroom shelf, books in german, guide books for far off places and other pages of tales. I pick up a book at random, an old favourite with pages edged in gold and engrained in my memory. On the shelf above live the newer books, they are fatter, wordier and less alluring to the eye. Political Theory, Philosophy of Religion - exposes on subjects I do not understand, but pretend to anyway. And then there is a large and higgildy-piggildy stack of books borrowed and given, waiting patiently to be read and I wonder if I had 100 more of these days, to lie about and do no more than read, would I ever actually finish them all? Perhaps, I decide, it shall be my life’s work.

Camping

We packed some bread rolls and cups, plates, wine, tinned food and a picnic rug and escaped. Vamoose. Up in the hills where the bush is flowering we pitched a tent in rocky earth. I sat there an eternity, while the minutes passed like blissful hours and watched campers come and go; bucket loads of children shovelled into cars at the end of the long weekend, replaced by pensioners who constructed their tent only after due consideration and much humming and haring. We wandered about the lake and forced ourselves into its cold, murky water. We read and snacked and lounged around, had a fire, ate marshmellows and returned home to find, as usual, things to be done and places to be.