October 10, 2011 · 2:37 am

Being Bolshie

This new category of my blog is dedicated to my friend Jim who is able to express umbrage at anything from the idiocy of the Iraq war to the junk mail filling up his letterbox. Indeed he recently starred on page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald ranting about the latterly mentioned stuffed letterbox.

What would Jim do? is a question that provides a boundary to my increasing fits of grumpiness. Sometimes I think I am a one old-woman consumer rights association but then Jim pulls out a rabbit and takes the title hands down.

In the past few weeks in the land of consumer rights trivia I have:

  • taken a $5 bunch of daffs back to Woolies because they wilted within 24 hours;
  • repeatedly reported next door’s leak to the Council since it keeps flowing into my yard and across the footpath;
  • threatened to report a minor bingle to the police until the other party (who appeared to have only an Indian driver’s license) came good with a claim number;
  • returned an inadequate v. expensive salt grinder for the second time;
  • whinged loudly in the fruit shop about having to pay to lease a trolley to shop there and ending up leaving; and

On two recent occasions I had bad cafe experiences: –one where there was a rubber band in my soup; andanother where the avocado in the salad was black.

Both times the atrocities were quietly pointed out and on neither was I charged.

Outcomes that have encouraged me to try charm as an offensive for a change.

Surely things weren’t as bad in our day? Perhaps because the world was slower, more accountable and smaller. Then traders lost reputation if they sold dying flowers or flawed salt cellars; people felt responsible if their water leaked across the footpath.

Anyway I intend to keep whinging about bad service, bad bureaucracy and bad manners. Lousy financial advisors, skinny fashions and blond women driving 4 wheel monsters are next in my sights.

At least my mate and I are having a shot of making our little corners of the world accountable. If we don’t do it, who will? Besides these little pokes keep our skills honed for the next big ones.

And really all this superficial trivia of life is meaningless indulgence when 25% of children in a country like Britain are destined to live below the poverty line; there are 15 million poor children in American now; there are a million starving people in Somalia tonight; and hundreds of children are being sold into sex slavery.

Any wonder I escape into the immediate and the manageable.

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September 20, 2011 · 3:03 am

Dead friends

While I’m on the funeral kick, I muse on the two funerals I went to in the past year. There were more but I’m a shirker when it comes to staring death down.

Two feisty women, late fifties early sixties, both taken out by The Dancer, dead. One woman whose prodigious energy created a idyllic family of three, many friends and that trickiest of all, a loving marriage. She read; she worked; she entertained; she was politically engaged and helped where she could. And all the time exuding an awesome elegance.

The other was forever setting up new projects, trying to change the world, recreating her life in cycles, sashaying forth with skill, flair and ideas, bringing up a son alone.

Both left wing, these friends of mine who did not know each other, were united in the fact that neither could see a wrong without trying to right it. A driving sense of justice ruled each compass.

And what a generation of women this was and is. We were formed by key social events of the times —the advent of TV, the swinging sixties, the pill, the Vietnam war, Vatican 2, feminism…. and that just takes us to the beginning of the 80’s.

It is a fascinating generation because it is one that faced great change agents and the first one where the majority faced real choices or learnt to balance work, family and play. I think the women of our mothers’ generation also faced great challenges (e.g. world wars, the depression, the loosening of the British straitjacket through immigration and growing affluence). I regret never chronicling some of that.

Anyway here’s to my dear dead friends and all the women of my generation.

PS  I don’t think it too weird that I keep a list (on file on my PC) of all the people I have known who are dead. Why? So I don’t forget them.

I think all this maudlin’ stuff has been brought on by the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death. I think I’ve written through it now!!

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September 12, 2011 · 3:01 am

Funeral planning

There we are in an elegant Northern Italian restaurant on the water at The Spit in Sydney, two old school friends who have known each other for over 50 years. Convent girls trained by nuns in long black habits.  We talk of many things – mostly about my friend’s new Italian lover who is maybe 20 years younger than she although it makes her glow like she was 20 years younger.

It might have been miserable me that turned it, but we start to ponder funerals; those we have been to and then arranging our own.

Unlike me who finds these topics and everything related to them depressing, dreading the inevitable event that precedes the funeral, my friend elaborates her happy view. (Everything is happy with her since the advent of the dishy Italian.)  A life must be celebrated; grand music must be played and sung by an actual small orchestra and choir; the things that weren’t said in life must be said now (presumably only the flattering things); people must be dressed in stylish black; a horse drawn carriage should carry the coffin; yellow roses are everywhere.

We agree that the Catholic Church does these rituals well. I think she still believes and although I have long since lapsed I might return for the send off pomp.

I am charged with arranging her final rite of passage – literally – and I express concern that not many people will come. She instructs me to gather them from the highways and byways. “The people” can follow the coffin and then have a great feed. We are attracted to the notion of an anonymous crowd. The homeless shelter is a resource that appeals but then the tailor may need to be involved if the elegant black theme is to be consistent.

The very thought of organising it all is exhausting. Can funerals become more demanding than weddings in their detail? We solve the problem. We invent a whole new job category, The Funeral Planner. Think of all those young people doing courses in public relations and event planning fantasising a future  of champagne and celebrities. We know life isn’t really like that and this new line of work could at least supply them a steady clientele.

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