The long, hot summer

It has been so long since we had an actual summer, I'd forgotten what one felt like.

Now I remember.

***
For a week, Fibrotown has been getting on with business under a haze of smoke. The streets are full of people in bright orange, their reflective strips flashing in the sunlight as they walk. We wake in the morning with the smell of smoke in the air, rising with the heat of the day. We go to sleep to the wail of fire engines echoing through the night. The highway opens and closes.

A marquee city has sprung up at the Fibrotown Showground, full of services to support volunteer firefighters in the area. It looks for all the world as though an epic music festival is about to begin.

Mr6 plays fire rescue on the rug.

The bushfires are down the coast a bit, near the homes of friends, but all are safe and well. I spent the first few days monitoring the radio and obsessively checking the Rural Fire Service website. My parents, veterans of several fires in this area over the years, reassured me that it would never get to us. I checked for our Neighbourhood Safer Place, just in case. It is one block from our house. I was reassured.

So far, so good.

***

On Friday night, Fam Fibro headed out to the beach for some much-needed respite from the heat and the general business of living. We spent a pleasant hour crashing through waves trying to teach the boys to body surf (my technique needs more work than theirs, I'd point out), followed by fish and chips overlooking the bay. We left for home refreshed and relaxed.

On the way home, we passed a convoy of high-wheeling bush-bashing RFS fire trucks, packed with volunteers, a new shift on their way to keep the Dean's Gap fire, 30 minutes further south, contained.

I have friends who are RFS members. Up until now, they seem to have mostly been involved with open days, sausage sizzles and demonstrations at the Fibrotown Show.

When the chips are down, however, they are the ones in orange.

I am swimming.

It makes a person think.

***

Today I stood behind two serious young men at the supermarket checkout as they piled 40 kilograms of mushrooms, dozens of cartons of eggs, piles of packets of bacon and countless loaves of bread into their trolley. Their bright red shirts read Emergency Catering Services.

"They bought only the best stuff," said the checkout lady as they laboured out with their heaving trollies. "Premium steak. Helga's bread. No home brand at all."

"Good," I said, trying to balance my peaches on the back of the conveyor belt to ensure they went into the bag on top. "Those volunteers deserve the best."

***
Tonight, it rained. The first rain of the year, as Mr9 gleefully pointed out.

Relief all round.

You can find more information here on supporting the NSW Rural Fire Service, and more information here on how to volunteer.

Making time for friends

After reading this post (by Nicole at Planning With Kids) at the CareerMums blog, I have decided to take a night off. I am going out for a 'noice bistro meal' and a movie with some mates from the school community. We have been talking about it for ages... and now we're finally doing it.

I think there's a misconception as a mum that you need an 'occasion' to go out. That it needs to be an 'event'. With frocks, and heels, and pearls and stuff. A la Sex and The City. I think that is one reason that perhaps we don't go out enough. You don't need an event. You just need to get out of the house.

The Builder laughed when I told him that I was going out... on a Monday. After all, who goes out on Monday night? Mums do, that's who. It's not the coolest night to go out, I agree. But I'm going out. With friends. And that's cool enough.

When was the last time you went out with friends? Do you do it often enough?


[I appreciate that this image has little to do with a night out in Fibrotown...]

Famous last words: "I'll write my novel when..."

I was watching Grand Designs the other night when, unusually, I found myself shouting at the television. I have been known to shout at the television in the past, but not generally when genteel Kevin is doing his thing. The reason for my vociferous response?

A nice man was building a nice house in France. Part of his reason for creating said house was to install a writing room. Said room was at the top of the house with a wall of windows showcasing a view of rolling French countryside. It would be, he said, the perfect place in which to write His Novel. I remembered a conversation I once had with Australian novelist Allison Rushby about a similar man with a similar dream on that other genteel show Escape To The Country.

"It doesn't matter what's out the window," she said. "You're either going to write it or you're not."

Which is pretty much what I found myself shouting at the television the other night. I then went on to expand on the topic while The Builder watched me, slightly bemused. When I ran out of steam, we resumed polite watching.

At the end of the show, Kevin returned to the house, seven years after it had been built. The man's writing room was now comfortably furnished with not only his desk, but an exercise bike, some boxes, several piles of newspapers, bookshelves, a keyboard, a pile of bags... oh wait, half of that is what's in my office. He had written a book. A guide to buying houses in the French countryside.

I am not disparaging the nice man's dream, nor his efforts. But every time I hear someone say "I'll write my book when..." it makes me wonder if they'll ever actually get round to putting the words on paper.

When I dream of my perfect writing life, it involves a little weatherboard studio, open and spacious, with big French doors opening onto a little verandah. There are big, blowsy, old-fashioned David Austin roses involved. The room is always free of clutter, clean, white, fresh. Small boys are conspicuous by their absence.

If I waited until this place materialised, I would never write anything. So I sit in my cluttered (all my own fault, I know) office, in my Fibro, with my family happily rumbling around me. The view is of my struggling vege patch. On hot, still nights, I can hear my neighbour snoring (true story - the first time I heard it, I thought there was a large, dark beast outside my window and was totally freaked out).

Author Fiona Palmer has been sharing pictures of the writing spaces of some fab Australian novelists. I love having a look. Some of them have beautiful views. Others work at the dining table. Some are out in a paddock. Others in offices that would not look out of place in an accountancy practice. For the most part, they involve a desk and a chair and a wall.

To me, it's not the place that makes the writing special. It's the writing that makes the place special.

What do you think? 


[image: Flickr.com]

The people that you meet

Sometimes it's worth the effort. Whatever 'it' may be. However much effort may be involved.

Tonight the Fibrotown library played host to two fab Australian writers. Dianne Blacklock and Ber Carroll made the trip down from their various parts of The Big Smoke to talk about their new books, their writing journeys and, surprisingly, their sex lives (well, technically, how their sex lives do not end up in print, but my line was better, right?).

I nearly didn't go. I'd made all the plans, tweeted Dianne (whom I didn't know from a bar of soap) to tell her I'd be there, lined The Builder up to leave our bathroom renovations to get home on time. And then it rained. And it was cold. And we had visitors in the afternoon, which put my quiche making/washing up/bathing children/feeding children/getting showered/getting dressed plans out the window. It would have been so easy to give up, put my slippers on and stay home.

But how often do fab Aussie writers come to the Fibrotown library? Not often enough. So I went.

It was a great talk. Funny, informative, personal. They covered the process of writing, the process of writing with children (quite a different process), where ideas come from, how ideas become books. And the aforementioned sex, of course.

Afterwards, I somehow ended up at the pub with Dianne (how these things happen is just a mystery to me) talking about writing. For hours. We'd never met (though I did remember reviewing her first book for CLEO, back in the day), but that didn't seem to matter much. It never does when you're talking about writing, I find.

An unexpected bonus on a Wednesday night. Definitely worth the effort.

You can meet Dianne too - she's on Twitter here and on Facebook here. Her eighth novel, The Secret Ingredient, is out in November (that's her current book in the image), and I'll be inviting her to the Fibro for an intimate discussion about how to blend personal observations and details into fiction - and still keep your friends. 

Riding on trains with boys

There's nothing like a long train ride to finetune your eavesdropping skills (as a writer, I like to call this 'research'). Catching the Fibrotown Express back from Sydney with the Misters, I was privy to four different conversations involving the males of our species. They went something like this.

Conversation #1
The participants: An elderly man and a younger woman, possibly late forties.
The duration: Two hours.
What began as a desultory conversation about the weather, somewhere around Redfern, ranged across a huge diversity of subject matter. She is at university, caring for an elderly father, and passionate about camellias. She leaves home at the crack of dawn to see a dentist in Sydney because she can't imagine going to anyone else. He is an immigrant, from Europe, after World War II, interested in politics. They have a lively and engaged debate about everything from the Carbon Tax to manners to her university degree. The subject of what happens to us when we get older came up a lot. The importance of having a hobby or interest. I suspect their trip went very quickly.

Conversation #2
The participants: Three older teenagers, around 17 years old
The duration: Twenty minutes
These three got on in a clatter of skateboards and a flicking of fringes about halfway through the journey. There was a lot of discussion about hair. Specifically about how girls wouldn't look at you unless you had 'the full mop'. One young man outlined his attempts to get back into school - life in the 'outside world' wasn't really working out. The conversation turned to girls, specifically to one young lady who was 'tuning' the guy with the biggest hair but whom he was resisting. "Why?" asked his friend. "She's pretty hot." "She has her V-plates on," was the response. "I don't want to be responsible for her losing those." Everybody nodded in a serious, understanding kind of manner. "I've passed her on to [another boy]. I'm hoping he'll sort it out."

Conversation #3
The participants: Two younger teens, around 14 or so
The duration: Ten minutes
As the older teens vacated the seat behind me, these two could be seen to be saying goodbye to some girls in short shorts on the platform. One received a goodbye kiss, the other a tiny wave. Both boys are at that puppy fat-plus-pimples stage that is pictured next to 'awkward' in the dictionary. They slump into their seats just as the train takes off. There is much sighing. "I really like her," says one to the other. "You should totally tell her," says the other to the one. There is much back and forth, and attempts to use a mobile phone that has little prepaid credit on it. "I won't tell her," says the one to the other. "Yeah, right, better to keep her guessing," says the other to the one.

Conversation #4
The participants: Mr4 and Mr7
The duration: About 476 hours
Put two small boys on a long train ride and you have to imagine that at some point the conversation will run out. But it does not. In between building Lego and intermittent wrestling bouts, Mr4 has many questions and Mr7, to his credit, does his best to answer them (because clearly his mother is far too busy listening to other people's conversations to listen to theirs) before handing over the hard ones to me. So I got: "Why do we need to scratch, Mum?" along with "What makes a bruise, Mum?", "What is coal, Mum?", "How come there are no more steam trains, Mum?" "What's the fastest shark in the world, Mum?", "Why are turtles yellow on their tummies, Mum?" and so on and so forth.

Little boys, little questions, big boys, big questions.

Are you a chronic eavesdropper?


[image: via weheartit.com]

Losing the gentle art of browsing (part two)

Recently, the ABC ran a series called Turn Back Time: The High Street, to which The Builder and I, in our fuddy duddy way, took a shine. The basic premise was that a group of modern-day shopkeepers moved into the High Street (main street for we Australian types) of a rather dour town in Somerset called Shepton Mallet (seriously, worth watching just for that, don't you think?). Once a thriving centre of hustle, bustle and industry, the SM High Street in 2010 was a cold, empty, boarded up and very unenthusiastic kind of place.

Each week, the shopkeepers were installed in a different era of the SM High Street, beginning with the 1870s and ending in the 1970s. The aim was to show the highs and lows of shopping over six different eras. To show exactly how and when personalised service was replaced by convenience. Exactly why the diversity of little shops and friendly shopkeepers were driven out of our main streets (because we suffer the same malady on the other side of the world) by homogenous brands.

We all complain about the two-horse race that is Woolworths and Coles but, as The High Street pointed out, it all comes down to our choices. We help to create the very situations that frustrate us.

One of the video stores in Fibrotown closed suddenly this week. The boys were devastated. It was our supplier of choice for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVDs. It also had a good foreign film section. I confess, though, that for everything else we tended to go to one of the others. Why? It was cheaper.

I know that in the scheme of things the humble 'video' store is living on borrowed time. One of our other stores is a Red Room, with it's automated doo-dads and it's tiny store space. No displays. No browsing. The Builder and I don't go there. Why? We never know what we want to see. We know we've missed 150 great films in our early child-rearing years, but do you think we can think of a single one of them on the way to the shop? No way. Red Room, and online DVD purveyors for that matter, seem to require that you know what you're looking for.

Where am I going with this? Choice. We made our choices and now we're left with fewer choices. Just as The High Street demonstrated has happened over and over again in the last 150 years of retailing. It's something that the dairy farmers of the South Coast would like us to remember as we pay for our cheap 'homebrand' milks at the supermarket. When the choice is gone, we have to take what we can get.

And, as many a regional town, with empty shops and dying populations can attest, what we get isn't always what we want.

There's a cafe in town

There's a cafe in Fibrotown. Simple, stylish. Good coffee, great cakes (not that I ever have any, you understand). It's run by a young couple who work harder than it seems possible to work. That's the thing with cafes. It sounds so romantic and it ends up in long hours and lots of smiling at people (Masterchef contestants take note).

What I love about this cafe, apart from the aforementioned (untasted) cakes, is that every time I go there, I run into someone I know. My friend C, who holds one long-running meeting (with a changing cast of thousands) in there, sipping coffees while answering her iPhone. The beautiful G, who often pops in after the school run - she's as good at procrastinating as I am. Or, maybe, my friend Y, who runs the gorgeous little shop around the corner. She runs in and out with her KeepCup, dropping it on the counter, knowing her order will be delivered.

There's always someone to say hello to, before I head home on my child-free workdays to the empty Fibro, where the housework waits accusingly and my computer cursor blinks endlessly on a blank screen. A moment of connection before isolated reality kicks in.

On Mr4 days, I don't tend to go to that cafe. With him for company, there's connection everywhere and, besides, he doesn't consider their milkshakes, made with real chocolate and not syrup, to be the best in town. He's four. We walk a fine line between great coffee and good milkshakes. It's not easy, but compromise is key when you are a team.

I save My Cafe for the other days. When I really need it.

The 'same' can be surprising

Now that we have been in Fibrotown for two and a half years, The Builder and I are beginning to notice a little bit of, er, repetition in our social calendar. The various community fundraisers that provide the 'events' in a town of this size, all tend to fall around the same time each year, and take on a similar format from year to year. Which, I confess, can lead to a little bit of 'ho hum' in our attitude towards them. But complacency can often be misplaced.

Last night, we fronted up to our third annual Hall-Near-Fibrotown Ball. We've had a good time in each of the previous years, but were suffering a case of the 'why bothers' this year. We knew the format would be the same, the band unchanged, the faces would be similar - even the fashion wouldn't hold too many surprises as many women I knew, including myself, were planning to wear the same frock as last year, with new accessories. But, it was for a good cause, and we live by the rule that it's churlish to pass up the chance for a night out in an area where they don't come up that much, so we frocked up and headed out into the cold and rain.

We began with a cocktail and a cheese plate at Fibrotown's cocktail bar. Just the two of us, on a sofa, in our finery, enjoying the chance to be grown-ups. "Going somewhere?" asked the barman, nodding towards The Builder's dinner suit with red rose buttonhole. "Just home to watch DVDs," he responded with a straight face. (Yes, we crack ourselves up.)

We arrived at the ball half an hour early - note to self: check the invitation next time - and were promptly dispatched to a friend's house in the next paddock for a pre-ball drink (at which point I was wishing I'd gone with my threat to wear gumboots this year). By the time we returned, the queue for entry stretched beyond the red carpet and into the mud, which gave us plenty of time to catch up with a few people in the line. One of the brilliant things about the ball - which we'd forgotten during the 'why bothers' - is the opportunity to catch up. So many friends in one place, with nobody required to wash up or placate the neighbours.

It was a wonderful night. The best yet. The ball went by in a flash, a series of happy moments (picture one of those sentimental montages they do halfway through schmaltzy movies). There was a lot of laughing, joking and talking. Some quieter moments spent perched on a hay bale, morphing acquaintances into friends. Perhaps a tiny bit of foot stomping and hip shimmying.  There may or may not even have been some interpretive dance.

Before we knew it, we were squashed into a cab with our town friends, reliving the highlights, all of us talking about how much fun we'd had. Expectations are everything, aren't they? It's when you have none that you get the best surprises.

[image: next year, I may be in the same dress again (why mess with a great formula), but I'll be working it back with a pair of wellie boots with knitted boot cuffs, such as these by VintageOfNow/etsy]

Sometimes life in the country is not worth a bean

This is the soup I made for dinner tonight. Only, not really. Every once in a while I am reminded that I live in a country town. Today was one of those days. Where am I going with this? It all started with the borlotti beans...

When you live outside the Big Smoke, there are certain things you expect not to be able to get. Lebanese food. Good Japanese food. Reasonable access to a doctor (oh wait, wrong post). Borlotti beans? Not so much. I have spent several days trekking the various supermarkets (and we have many), health food stores and organic doo-dad shops of Fibrotown searching for dried Borlotti beans. I was all ready to soak, boil and do whatever else was required to have those suckers in my soup.

No dice. Today, I admitted defeat.

So, this is the soup I made tonight, only I used tinned cannellini beans instead of dried borlotti beans. It was still good and, admittedly, it took about one 20th of the time it would have taken had the borlottis showed their little faces. The recipe is here: Chorizo and Borlotti Bean Soup.

I'm keen for more soup recipes, so if you have a favourite recipe, link it up below. I've got a feeling that it's going to be a long soup season this year. And if you find a good stash of dried borlotti beans anywhere, send me some, c/- The Fibro, Fibrotown... Otherwise, I'll add them to my shopping list for my next trip to the Big Smoke. Let's see... shoes, a coat, serious make-up, borlotti beans. See, they fit right in.

The Red Badge of Courage: Fibrotown edition (an update)

Remember this story about the girl at the supermarket checkout? The one with the dreams of being a police officer and an HSC exam to get through?

It's been nearly six months since that post and I have an update. Our checkout paths crossed again today. Finally. I could hardly wait for her to get through the usual 'How are you today? Do you have a [insert name of loyalty card] card?' before the question came gushing out.

"How did you go?"

She looked at me blankly. "Your HSC," I said. "The police force."

She smiled. "I got the ATAR* I needed," she said.

I cheered. But wait, I thought, she's still here. At the checkout. Not at the Police Academy.

"And the police force?" I asked, crossing my toes, hoping against hope that this wasn't going to be one of those moments where I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

She looked sad. "I have to wait until July to apply," she said. "You have to be 18 and a half."

So she's waiting. Which, as we all know, is the hardest part.

Stay tuned.

*The primary criterion for entry into most under-graduate university programs in Australia, giving you a rank in relation to the rest of the student body that sits the year 12 exams that year.


[image: This beautiful illustration by SarahJaneStudios/etsy is called 'waiting'.]