anyresemblance

Road weary warriors

At the risk of repeating myself (no I'm not moaning about the heat this time), let me say that I never need to hear Stephen Fry read HP and the Order of the Phoenix ever again. I mean, even my daughter was rolling her eyes at Harry's self pitying, me, me, angst on the car journey from Canberra to Melbourne to the Twelve Apostles and back again. Maybe JK Rowling has perfectly captured the self obsession of teenagers but I don't need to wallow in it. Good bits - Ron's outrage that Ginny has a boyfriend, the scene when the Weasley twins abandon school, the maniacal studying for end of term exams. Overall it could have done with a good editor to point out that all plot endings did not need to be resolved in the last 50 pages. And do all characters have to "bellow" Don't get me wrong, I find these books perfect aeroplane reading for international flights. I think the richness of her imagination in creating the wizarding world is marvellous but the characters have become very one dimensional and the plots are not that well constructed. But as I've said before, Stephen Fry, is possibly the most irritating reader in the world and is hopeless at conveying girls' voices or making Harry sounding anything other than constipated to convey frustration and anguish. Now the thing we listened to and loved was Fiddleback by Elizabeth Honey read by Rebecca Smart. My sister, who can't watch the Sound of Music without tearing up, sniffled her way through the baby's birth and the scary scene at the end. Notwithstanding that complaint, the journey was pretty good considering the girls spent 8 hours sitting in the car. We made McDonalds in Albury for lunch - just ahead of the japanese coach tour, thank goodness. I caught the look of horror on the face of the teenage girl in the queue beside me as the tour guide asked for 40 cokes and 40 big macs. We reached the outskirts of Melbourne in time for me to score a speeding ticket from the glorious Vic Police. Miss I was mortified and worried that I would be carted off to chokey. We met my sister and her husband that evening in Federation Square. (She's over from the UK visiting her daughter and granddaughter in Perth and these few days were to be our only chance to catch up.) Ok, I don't get Federation Sq. Is it supposed to have something happening there? There's more going on at the ticket queues in Flinders St station. Looks nice but.... Wed was a bad day to be walking the streets of melbourne as I got sunburn. I was horrified. I am "Ms brought up in the Northern Hemisphere and preserving my porcelain complexion" and instead I have a bright red nose. It reminded me of when Anne and I cycled around Kerry - we had a vision of ourselves gliding into small Irish towns in the late afternoon, our steely thighs admired my the local male populace, instead of which it was more beetroot and radish come to town. Thursday we set off for a rapid tour of the Great Ocean Road. We stayed at a great bed and breakfast with the cutest dog in Victoria, a sheep shed and plenty of chooks to admire. The owner was looking a bit harassed as his wife had gone off to hit the night life in Geelong leaving him to rustle up dinner and deal with ten guests. I reckon he did it pretty smoothly though the facade slipped a bit when he couldn't find the chocolate sauce for one of the deserts. "I phoned the pastry chef, but the bitch is obviously off drinking cocktails somewhere". Friday was a whistle stop of the 12 apostles, swimming in the sea at Lorne and dropping my sis and her husband off at the airport for their return flight to perth. We then hit the road back to Canberra. Dinner at the local italian restaurant in Albury. I love those towns and laughed at how excited by kids were with an Italian restaurant that gave them those tubs of ready grated parmesan cheese - they think this is so much cooler than the finest grana parmesan their mother makes them have. We were home at midnight but I was weary of driving. My sister and I didn't really get a chance to talk. Like most of my family, her concern is more about when I'm going to get divorced. I'm less worried about that than about how I get my husband to sever our financial ties - he's bought another car and I see the debt spiralling again. I am pretty feckless with money but I'd like to be only responsible for my own fecklessness. As I dropped the children at his place today I thought how much stuff he has - the house is so cluttered and I breathe a sigh of relief that I no longer have to live with that and the oppression of spirit that it used to cause me. Today has been rest and recover. If I say I hung out towels and jeans at 7am and they were dry by 8am you'll get a sense of how hot it is. The girls are with their father so I only have my only internal temperature to anguish over. I'm planning trash tv and an early night on my crisp clean sheets - what could be nicer than home?

Slacker

I hereby do solemnly swear to stop whining and get on with it. I'm back at work today. There's one more week of school holidays left but the children are with their father for the duration. Despite my moaning, we ended up having a good time. Friday we made furniture for the doll's house out of salt water dough. I'm not sure the finely crafted Edwardian house is quite the match for the funky bright painted sofas, television and beds the kids made but I think they look great. Saturday we drove down to the beach. We have a beach house which is a haven of peace and tranquility. I love to wake and hear the waves crashing on the rocks or the noisy kookaburras yakking in the early hours. Unfortunately, I reckon the divorce settlement is likely to see my share of it go but I'm philosophical about it - I've had some happy times there and the kids will probably always have it. I've also had the worst Christmas of my life there which precipitated my decision to separate so there's a lot to deal with in that house. I was doing a mental inventory of what things I might want to stake a claim on - most of the furniture is the sort of cast offs you want in a holiday house - but I definitely want the rug I bought and carried back from Kairouan in Tunisia. I was going to travel to Libya but you couldn't get a visa in the UK so instead I flew to Tunis and planned to cross from there. I waited 8 hours in Tunis airport for my girlfriend and her husband to collect me - they'd been stopped at the Libyan border. We drove to Kairouan - the 4th holiest city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem- which is also reknowned for its rug making. I was determined to buy a rug and found this one in the bazaar. We went through the usual ritual of mint tea, pleasantries and gentle bargaining in fractured english and french before handing over my credit card for the purchase. We left carrying the rug. An hour later the man from the rug shop came running up behind us. "Madam, Madam - your credit card limit has been exceeded and we can not process the payment". I look embarassed and then he said "We'll process it again next month - just make sure you get the limit down by then". And he let me take the rug with me with no other collateral. So much for cheating the foreign traveller... It rained while we were at the beach but we're equipped with jigsaw puzzles and scrabble. It's a very old scrabble set bought for me by my then boyfriend when I was convalescing from some long forgotten illness. The box still has scribbled inside old scores of long scrabble tournaments between myself and E. I played scrabble in London last August with the lovely A and was horrified to find myself beaten for the first time in years by her. Of course, the fact that she has given up drinking and I had got through a bottle of wine might have had something to do with it. Just wait for the rematch now I'm practically teetotal. It's not that I'm competitive or anything. Yesterday was Australia Day which was ... nothing much. I can't get into this - Anzac Day seems a so much more potent national day. Still, it was an extra day off work which was good. We watched Freaky Friday on dvd which the kids liked a lot. They love Lindsay Lohan since the Parent Trap . Amidst all this PG viewing we also saw the dreadful Honey - please make it stop now - and Spy Kids 3d but in the case of the latter, since I have virtually no sight in my left eye, it was Spy Kids 2d in grey and white. I was disappointed since it had none of the verve and inventiveness of the first two. Still, it was worth it to see Ricardo Montalban and about 30 seconds of Antonio Banderas who I've loved since Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. I also finished reading Anything She Can Do, I can Do Better by Rachael Oakes-Ashe which is about the myth of female competiveness. I liked her "skipping theory" about the girls swinging the rope for the girl skipping - they have to hope she trips up to get their chance in the spotlight. But a promising start was just lost for me in the cosmo-style anecdotes and gratingly, jaunty style. So now I'm halfway thorugh Henning Mankell's Firewall. It's my first taste of this gloomy Swedish policeman but I'm enjoying his struggles with his car breaking down, wondering if he'll ever find someone to have sex with again and his ill health as well as the mystery that is facing him.