Fabulous Clip and Song

For the last two or three years in the run up to Christmas one of my colleagues has been in the habit of bringing in some “lollies” as a gift to the workplace.

Snakes. Bananas. Teeth. Bullets. You know the stuff I mean? The stuff we all grew up with and love. Even butter-scotch which is a particular favourite of mine.

He places them on the partition above his workplace in some “party bowls”.

It’s a lovely thought on his part, and we all think it’s terrific that he does it. But oh my, it’s such a temptation for those of us with a sweet tooth!

There must have been eight or nine occasions today when I needed to go to his desk to ask about something. “How are you going? Is everything okay? Shall I check back in half an hour?”, I found myself asking, while sneakily grabbing another sweet (or two).

Just yesterday, another colleague who I haven’t seen for a while commented on how much weight I’ve lost this year. “I can’t believe it’s as simple as regular exercise and eating properly. It’s crazy! I always thought it was glandular!”, I told him, adding that I’m sure there’s room on the market for another weight-loss book based on my experience this year.

But with the sweets on my colleague’s desk, I fear I’m on the verge of a return to being overweight. Nooooo!

Tomorrow, I’m going to have a lollie-free day, I swear.

And next year, he’s moving to an earlier shift, so hopefully that might help as well.

Since I’ve been working from home, preparing meals has become a much more important part of my life. When I was full-time from the office, I’d mostly pick up some takeaway for lunch. But since I’ve been at home, I’m much more inclined to make something, from a simple salad (my favourite is a simple calad of tomato, cheese and cucumber) to something more complex.

I made a terrific Thai Chicken Curry last week, and in previous years I would have eaten the meal and then frozen the rest. My freezer used to be full of frozen meals. Frozen, but then hardly-ever unfrozen! And so since working from home, I’ve been more inclined to just keep eating the meals until they were finished. I think I set a personal record the other week with that curry – I had it for lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner, and then lunch the next day.

The other thing I’ve done recently is go back to basics wirth bedding.

The first time I had one they were called “continental quilts”. I don’t remember exactly when it was, thoughI suspect it wasn’t until about 1987. Photographs from my day at university, and living in Tarragindi reveal I was still using blankets. It wasn’t until I moved into the house at Taringa that I had a continental quilt, later called a doona.

As part of “growing up”, I think I thought it was time to walk away from blankets, as a thing of “childhood”, and to embrace something a little more”grown up”. And they’ve been with me for the rest of my life.

The one thing I could never do was put on the cover “properly”. It was always a bit of a drama, and once the task was completed, they never really looked “tidy”. Thus, the “organisation” of my childhood gave way to an “unmade bed” look of adulthood.

I was thinking about this the other day when I saw some statistics – I don’t remember where I saw them – about the low percentage of people who make their beds every day. I’m not one of them.

Co-oincidentally, as winter returns, I’ve been thinking of going back to blankets. I’ve been thinking about the environmentalism of the doona. Even though they can appear to be very “natural”, I’ve been wondering about the likely synthetic nature of most doonas. Yes, I use that word now.

The other day I decided it was time to buy a couple of old-style blankets for my bed. I have a couple of lovely “throws” which I use. But I thought maybe a couple of old-style blankets would be something I could use in preference.

And you know what? They’re terrific. They feel warm, they feel good. All I need is for my mum to come into the room to tuck the blankets with an almost-suffocating tightness. Love it!

And in conversations, too, it’s time for back to basics!

I was thinking the other day about the adrenalin rush some people find from having an argument. I was watching a very weird discussion on Facebook about how someone I know who had seen an older man (he was described as being in his 60s) ask a young woman (she was described as being in her 20s) to pick up her newspapers on a crowded train so he could sit down.

By the account of my friend, it was a tense discussion. “Not without a facemask”, she said, to his reply, “I have one, but I don’t need one”. He put the mask on, and that was the end of it. None of the people were there went into overdrive on the Facebook post saying things like “She must have felt threatened”, “He must have been menacing”, and it was about “Women’s right to consent”.

I was a bit surprised about the backlash to the older man, because my response was “If it was me and an older man had asked me to pick up the newspapers, or more than that I would have stood up and offered him my seat. I see this quite a bit on Sydney buses and trains, where younger people will stare are their phones and “pretend” not to see older people. I’ve become the person who says to them, “Get up, there’s an older person who needs a seat, just like the signs say”…

I went to work today with a packed overnight bag. We thought it might have been a good idea for me to travel to Brisbane to support my colleagues there. They’ve all been working incredibly hard over the last few weeks. But in the end we decided they were probably best supported from a distance, for the moment at least.

Rapidly and dramatically, Brisbane has become the focus for the Queensland floods, with predictions the water will reach higher levels than in January 1974. Although close family members lived through that flood, I have only a vague childhood memory, being more focussed on the Lismore flood of that year. In terms of water in the CBD, there were similarities in the depth between both Lismore and Brisbane.

“Do you remember much of it”, I asked Margaret on the phone tonight. “Oh yes” she said, reflecting on the fact that she and her family were living in Brunswick Street, New Farm at the time. They had water all around their house which she, as a nine year old, experienced strongly.

The house they lived in is now long gone, probably replaced by a shop or an apartment block. The change is reflective of what’s happened in that particular part of Brisbane since then. New Farm was a strongly working class, reasonably poor suburb then. Even now, it has a reasonably economically impoverished population. Thirty six years later and area also had a significant high income population, and I’m guessing a lot of those people will be panicking right now about the flooding that’s likely to affect their suburb over the next three or four days.

I have a strong connection to Brisbane, not just because of close family there, but also because I went to university there. I’ve also lived through a few floods myself, as my hometown is Lismore. Two weeks ago when I was home in Lismore family and friends were talking then about how much the weather pattern resembled 1974. In the back of my mind today, as well as the concern about Brisbane, was concern about Lismore. If the weather pattern repeats itself, Lismore too could face a major flood over the next two months. Lismore floods generally follow a little later than those in Brisbane. A higher than 1974 flood in Lismore would put water in the houses of my family members there.

And so in the midst of it all today – and particularly as I did a welfare check on family in Brisbane – I found myself get a little teary. I’m hoping everything will be okay.

I’ll keep the bag packed, I think.