Have I Got News For You! (Spoiler: no)

The view from a bushwalk I went on a couple of weeks ago before I got the treadmill working.
Now I can exercise in a windowless room while watching old episodes of Prime Suspect, as God intended.

It has been both three and a half weeks and a hundred and fifteen years since I proudly declared this blog Relaunched. Since you last heard from me there has mostly been pandemic and lockdown, mental hardship and guilt.  

My counsellor, who is a woman of immense good sense, was pleased to see the blog was back, and told me to keep it up, that what I had to say during this time might be helpful to other people so here you go and you can blame her if it’s boring. And it will be boring because everything is at the moment, isn’t it?

Boring and scary. It’s like we’re all anaesthetists (people say that job is the most boring and the most scary, because there’s a lot of sitting and monitoring your unconscious patient while surgeons fossick about inside them, and then suddenly ALARM! PANIC! Her blood pressure is plummeting! Death is at the door! Only you can save her!). Or is it like we are all parents of small babies, which is similarly just feeding, changing, sleeping, feeding, changing, sleeping ALARM! PANIC! Why is it not on the change table where I just put it?! What is that rash?!

May Blossom has been missing contact with the outside world a lot, so we caved a good eighteen months before we had planned to and let her have a phone. It’s an old one we had lying around, and currently has no sim card so doesn’t make calls to most people, but she can text and Facetime. This has been a very good thing, except that now whenever I tell my mum any news, and trust me there is precious little to tell, it’s not news to her because May Blossom has already been on the blower.

The days feel very trudgy: we put foot in front of the other (rarely in a literal sense).  I try not to think too much, about times when we weren’t in lockdown and mostly I pretend my friends don’t exist, so the missing them isn’t as great.

Moments of thrill do occasionally burst upon me. I made a change to a Woolworths order the night before it was sent, thereby risking losing my delivery slot that I’d waited five days for. But I added the dishwasher detergent and didn’t lose my slot. The adrenaline rush was insane.

It was big enough news to ring my friend Richard with. We’ve decided to report things to each other even though there’s nothing to report. He rang to tell me he had discovered that a bookshelf he had assumed was attached to the wall at the top was not in fact attached to the wall. He attached it. Now his baby won’t get squashed by a bookshelf. These are the things we should be telling each other, the little wins that we wouldn’t have thought twice about before. They’re what we have right now.

Like last week when I took a pair of leggings out of my drawer and discovered they had a pair of underpants still attached. They’d gone through the wash, the dryer and been folded and put away, undies and all. I simply put both items of clothing on at once and for a few minutes I felt extremely efficient and happy. This reminds me I forgot to ring Richard to report the undies and leggings situation.

If you follow me on any social media you will know that I bought a terrible coffee machine last week. It was cheap and nasty, and really I got what I paid for. But I wanted the high of a bargain. I wanted to game the system, find the shortcut through the maze from here to normality and happiness. Why I thought a Kmart espresso machine was going be the way to get there, I cannot say. It did make me feel quite alive though. Alive with rage.

I can’t quite give up on the machine. It makes yucky coffee and takes up too much of our already limited counterspace but still I leave it there, reproaching me for my damn clicky checkout finger, reminding me that there’s no quick way out of this. There’s no espresso route to the world returning to normal. We’ll get there when we get there.

What’s new with you? Are you vaccinated? Have you attached anything to a wall?

Unprecedented Times

This is me, shot by my favourite photographer, also me. As you can see my neck is not holding up well to the stress of the pandemic.

Ahem. Is this thing on. Hi. I’m not sure if you remember me but I used to work here ages ago. Then I left to write novels, which is what I’m still supposed to be doing but then there was a pandemic and the schools closed so now I’m an unqualified governess to two, shall we say, spirited children. I used to write a lot about them when they were little — their funny turns of phrase and how much they were teaching me as I muddled thorough early motherhood. But then they became bigger children, who can read and know what suing someone means, and I had to acknowledge that as such they had human rights, one of which was not to be mined for lols online by their attention-starved parent. That’s when the novels came into it. 

Right now I’m struggling with the fiction writing, even though I’ve got a contract for more books. That’s a pretty terrifying thought. So I thought that I might dip back in here and waffle on a bit while the Havers of Human Rights work on some literacy and maths on all the computers we own (I’m writing this on my phone). I’ll try to talk more about me than them and my goodness what a treat that will be for you all. 

A little catch up for the new kids: I’m Jess. I live in Sydney, with my husband H (that stands for husband, it’s not really his initial) and my children, known on here as May Blossom and Garnet. May Blossom is almost 11 and Garnet is 8 and a half. They are bright and funny and sensitive. 

H runs a business from home, and is a very equal partner in the running of the house and our life. This fact means that I have a great deal of help with my wifely duties (not THOSE wifely duties), so it’s long been something of a mystery to me that I find it so unbearably hard to do all the things an adult is expected to do: help keep the house tidy and clean, cook, keep on top of grocery procurement, keep everyone in the correct size and warmth of clothes, not cry all the time, attend to the health of two cats, be a reasonable friend and daughter and aunt and sister, keep myself fed and exercised, attend to general life admin. 

Last week I learned from a new psychiatrist that this is because I have ADHD. I am forty-two. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Then I would have lain on the ground staring at the ceiling rose for ages, and then googled what kind of feather it was, and then thought a lot about feathers and particularly about feather beds, and then spent some time recalling how interested I was in the bed fillings of the children in books I loved as a little girl. Laura Ingalls and Heidi both had hay-stuffed mattresses, which sounded cosy to me back then but which now I fear might be a bit prickly. I suppose it would depend on how thick the fabric they were stuffed into was. My parents had a mattress on their guest bed that was made of horse hair. Guests hated it. 

Anyway, ADHD. I don’t know. It might explain some things. I’ve never had trouble sitting still class or at work. I’m pretty bloody sedentary for a diagnosis with “hyperactivity” in it. I did very well at primary school. High school was harder, and I definitely daydreamed a lot more than I listened (because MY STARS the Peloponnesian Wars were really just stunningly uninteresting. So many islands. So many naval sorties. Herodotus can get in the bin.)

Apparently one symptom of ADHD is that you’re fine concentrating on things you find interesting, it’s just boring stuff that your brain will go to any lengths to avoid. I thought that was just how brains worked. I’m still not a hundred per cent sure it’s not how everyone is and it’s just the weak and pathetic who can’t force themselves to just get through the tough stuff. 

The doctor tells me that girls often manage fine with ADHD in primary school and even through parts of high school if they are quite smart (there’s a compliment in there somewhere), and it is true that once there was more required of me in life (what is colloquially termed “adulting” because what are the young people for if not the verbification of more or less everything) I started suffering from anxiety and depression. 

Long story short (‘SHORT?’ I hear you scream. ‘We might have to have a bit of a chat about the meaning of short’): I haven’t done my tax, I’m struggling to sit down and write my book, and I’ve just started on some ADHD medication this week. What a time to restart a blog! 

Now all that’s out of the way I will try to write more normal fun stuff for you every few days. Perhaps I’ll tell you about how H and I have been watching Line of Duty and now we amuse ourselves by speaking only in police jargon. Perhaps I’ll tell you about what I’m cooking. Perhaps I’ll talk more about Mattresses of Yore. If there are things you’d like me to talk about, leave me a comment on here or on Instagram. I love messages and comments. Mad for a chat, me. 

It’s nice to be back. 

The Useless Piano That Might Spark Joy

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged. I’ve been putting it off because it’s been a long time, thereby making it even longer since I’ve blogged. I keep doing this. And then I have to keep beginning my posts like someone going to confession. Forgive me, readers ,for I have not written a post for five months.

I’ve had a novel published. This one here, called How To Be Second Best. Just thought I’d get that out there. It was released in Australia a month ago. It’ll come out in Canada some time this year. The rights to publish in the UK, USA and rest of the world are up for grabs so get on it, foreign publishers! There is a paperback, an ebook and an audiobook. People seem to have liked it. I’ve had lots of nice emails from readers, some of whom aren’t even my friends. That’s a bit mind-blowing. It seems to appeal mostly to people around my age, who have children, although my Dad’s friend James, who is in his seventies and has no children, said he laughed out loud at parts and was very pleased when I wrote that the protagonist’s house had two rooms on each side of the hall, not two rooms on either side of the hall. Apparently the second one is incorrect and a particular bugbear of his. I’d like to say I knew this and very deliberately wrote that sentence but that would be untrue. It was luck. But I’m glad James liked it.

Because it is January and I have another book to write, I have been doing a lot of decluttering. I know this is very fashionable because of Marie Kondo and that Netflix show about tidying up and only keeping things that ‘spark joy’, but I only watched a few minutes of the show before I was so bored I decided to tackle the odd sock box. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to work.

Anyway, I prefer the alternative decluttering guru, whom H and I invented. He’s called Murray from Condobolin. This Murray Condo backs a ute up to your house and you throw in everything you hate. Murray then assures you he will dispose of it thoughtfully and recycle everything but deep down you know he drives to the next suburb and dumps it all on the verge.

Cover Me, I’m Going In

Here’s a tiny bit of book. My book. Yikes. 

Good grief, the last time I blogged was three months ago and I was ordering cheese for H’s exhibition. Well, the exhibition came and went and was a resounding success, and we have only just finished eating the thirteen kilograms of cheese that accompanied it.

My book is now at page proof stage, which for those of you not indentured to the publishing industry means the editing is more or less finished and the words have been laid (lain? anyone here an editor?) out into the design the pages will have when it is a real live bound book. It’s being proofread by a professional, and I’m reading it, and so are a few other people whose eagle eyes I trust. Next week I’m going round to an editor friend’s house to read it aloud to her, which will no doubt throw up a few more errors we can fix. It’ll be like audio books would have been in the olden days, before recording existed, when authors had to go from house to house reading their books aloud to people while they did the ironing, or sat in the back of the car reading to them while they drove to Canberra.

If You Are Reading This I Am Not Dead

It’s been a hundred years since I last blogged, and you probably thought I was dead, unless you follow me on Instagram, in which case you knew I wasn’t dead because I’m over there all the time providing incredible content like videos of my cat pole dancing and pictures of me driving a ferry.

Things around here are ticking along, as they do. Time is passing. Children are going to school, my first book is off with the editor, my next book is becoming notes on a page, which are slowly and unsurely revealing some sort of story. I don’t know. Don’t ask me about it.

Panic Stations

Like sorting Lego into colours, listing your worries makes you feel like you’re making progress. In both cases this is an illusion.

I’m supposed to be revising my manuscript. I’m supposed to be making the characters appear at the right times and the jokes be funny and the poignant parts be more plentiful and the scenes that don’t carry the plot forward be gone. But I can’t because I have too much panicking to do.

When I get like this, my first instinct is to panic at other people. Those in prime position to cop the panic are H and my Mum. I’ve panicked quite hard at them over the past few days and they’ve, in one voice, said ‘make a list of all the problems’ and ‘take the list to your counseller and stop banging on to us’. Obviously they said this in a nicer way.

What they probably really meant was ‘make a list and publish it on the internet, so there is a permanent record of your lunacy’, so that’s what I’ll be doing this morning.

There’s No Me In Team

Here’s me at five, being bamboozled by sport. Nothing has changed.

My kids are now five and seven. As of two days ago they are both students at the local primary school. They wear uniforms, they will attend five days a week, and are learning to read and mathematicise and understand what the moon does (totally beyond me). The next thing, if I am to go by what all my neighbours and friends are doing, is for them to join some sort of sports team. Around where I live, lots of very nice people have their children in netball, soccer, cricket and that other one that’s like AFL but the players are roughly 85% uglier. They all seem to be thriving. I get the feeling we should be doing something like this.

So we had a vote recently in our house about whether any member of the family wanted anything to do with that sort of malarkey and the result was a landslide: 100% NO FUCKING WAY. I’m extremely relieved, but I feel guilty because maybe, despite all my feeling about team sports, they might matter. Lots of people I love and respect think they matter.

I truly did ask the children, in a neutral way, whether they wanted to play in a sports team this term and they really did say no, but I’m worried that I’ve influenced them in a subtle way, due to my less than happy sporting past. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not a total bunch of idle layabouts. I do understand about physical fitness and the importance of it from a health perspective, it’s just sport I don’t get.

H played team sports – including rowboating, horseless grass polo and perhaps AFL (I think? Possibly?). He liked them, and I think he was pretty good at some of them, and he still likes watching many sports, thought not so much that he’d chose it over at least six other activities.

Wake In Fright: My Idyllic Country Writer’s Retreat

On Sunday I started a three-day writer’s retreat at my parents’ weekend house in the country. The plan was to come home after dinner on Wednesday. Today, Tuesday, I finished that retreat, at 4.55 am.

I’ve done a couple of these little three-day stints in the past few months, and until now they’ve been fantastic for getting a huge amount of work done in a really short time. There’s something about not having to get small people’s lunches made, clothes on, and delivered to school and preschool, then not having to plan dinner, shop for dinner, and do laundry and bath, dinner and bed that really helped me focus on the book.

Lots of people, when I said I was going to the country on my own to write, expressed concern. Mostly the people who have actually been to the house, because it is big, old and, not to put too fine a point on it, haunted.

Halloween Hacks For Parents

Completely disorganised this Halloween? Got no costume? No decorations? If you’ve got kids, I think you’ll find you’re all set.

4 Simple Costumes!

1. Zombie: don’t sleep through the night for seven years. You’re good to go.
2. Cold Sore Monster: stress out like a maniac for a week before Halloween. By the big day you’ll have a nice crop of sores on your lips. Gross.
3. Count Moneysworth: get the shits about how many random costume parts are alreay in the toy box, yet no child will consider wearing. Put them all on at once. Wear at least three different types of animal ears. A couple of crowns. Novelty glasses, if you have them. Plastic vampire teeth. A mask. Harry Potter scarf. A tail or two. Job done.
4. Massive Killjoy: Striped shirt, jeans, flat sandals. Roll eyes constantly. Confiscate most of everyone’s treats. Make children eat chicken and vegetables before they go trick or treating.

Billy, Don’t Be A Hero

Seven year olds can make their own fairy bread. That’s dinner for the rest of the year sorted. 

I’m a long way through the writing of this first book but I’ve hit a little wall. It’s not a big or hard wall, and it’s nothing to do with the book (which will be great and excellent so my publisher who reads this need not freak out and go into labour or anything), it’s just a wall with a sign on it that says ‘nearly there: reduce speed now’.

It’s to do with the fact that if I keep writing at the rate I have been I will finish it well before the deadline and then what fun will having a deadline be? For surely the only point of a deadline is for it to cause enormous trauma and misery to me and everyone around me, right? Like the deadline for my thesis at university, which was approached correctly, by doing bugger bloody all for months on end and then writing almost the whole thing the night before it was due.