Pen Hanley

  • churchill 

    The Irish have a saying, ‘A good story deepens the heart.’ I borrowed it for the blurb of my new book, Inspiring Australians: The first fifty years of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (Australian Scholarly Publishers, October 2015.) Finishing it was, as I’d suspected it might be, like doing a PhD in one year. But more fun. (Even though intellectually a tall order. But it’s good to have the opportunity to sharpen the brain by organizing a vast quantity of information into something readable and entertaining.) It took about a year full-time – before that I was writing it on the side of a four-day a week job so took longer than a year but was very part-time before I resigned from the day job. And now I’m back, beginning again on my long-neglected blog and happy to be here.

    ‘We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.’ (Carmine Gallo, Talk Like TED Macmillan, 2014, p. 52)

    Connecting through stories is the basis of my blog, where I can share with others my love of language and ideas, literature, film and the arts in general. No wonder there are so many blogs – they present the opportunity to connect with people, to be creative and to express oneself. All these are very good things!

    One of the Churchill Fellows I interviewed last year for the book was Richard Fidler, whose ABC radio program ‘Conversations’ is the most downloaded podcast of the ABC. It’s not surprising because Richard’s ‘Conversations’ with ordinary people reveal the most extraordinary stories.

    Google www.abc.net.au/local/sites/conversations/ and you’ll find the podcasts and lists of guests over many years. The most recent conversation that had me dropping my jaw with amazement and also had me laughing was with an Irish guy who lives now in Australia, called Martin McKenna. He ran away from home and lived with street dogs and he knows things about dogs that most people don’t, and has, in spite of his tough life – or perhaps because of it – an idiosyncratic wisdom and an uplifting story to tell. He has written a few books too, which I can’t wait to read.

    A previous conversation that Richard Fidler recommended once was with Wendy James, who experienced the World War II bombing of Darwin and Cyclone Tracy there in 1974. You should look her up too – remarkable woman. The one I have laughed at loudest is Greg Fleet, an ex-heroin addict and comedian. And how could you miss the wonderful, engaging writer Iain McCalman on his most recent book on the Great Barrier Reef and about other fascinating things? You can go through the Recent Guests or look them up alphabetically by their name and there you have at your fingertips free access to wondrous stories of the lives of people like you and me who have weathered some storms and lived to tell the tale.

    I listen to a Richard Fidler Conversation nearly every day. If a good story deepens the heart then my heart must be deep indeed – and it is, what with those stories combined with a probable average of two books a week since I was little, and I learnt to read at four. (My favourite book at five was R. M. Ballantyne’s Martin Rattler, which I identified with immediately when I read the first sentence: ‘Martin Rattler was a very bad boy.’ Ballantyne’s more famous The Coral Island influenced Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, another much-loved book. I loved my older brother’s books about boys’ adventures and became a Tomboy, in isolated East Gippsland and later when we moved to Sydney.)

    I grew up to have my own adventures travelling and meeting amazing people, and as a free-lance writer I’m happy to say the adventures continue. Hearing the stories of the Churchill Fellows for the book Inspiring Australians – and also the Board and Committee members, volunteers and other workers connected with the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust – was fascinating and, like the people on Richard Fidler’s ‘Conversations’ they are optimistic and uplifting because they are resourceful people who put their energy into interesting, worthwhile activities.

    The Churchill Fellows whose stories I tell in the book are the tip of an iceberg, to coin a cliché, because otherwise there would have to be about fifteen volumes to cover fifty years’ worth of Churchill Fellows. But every Churchill Fellow’s name is in the book, listed alphabetically at the back, and if they looked at the cover (a collage of hundreds of Fellows’ tiny portraits making up a portrait of Churchill) through a magnifying glass perhaps they could spot their photo. One Fellow I hadn’t had the space to mention in the text laughed at that and said at the Sydney book launch, clutching his book, ‘Don’t worry – I’m going to do exactly that when I get home!’

    They say that busy-work comes from your To Do list but good work comes from your heart. Yes, I’ve been busy writing this book but it came from my heart because I was so fascinated with the Churchill Fellows whose stories I was telling in the book. Writing Inspiring Australians was an honour and a joy because of the stories that unfolded and I got to meet smart, entertaining, adventurous people like Philip Green, eco-educator, and David Goldie, film maker, and Helen Lochhead, vibrant, visionary architect and so much more, and because I share the ideals of the Churchill Trust. For those ideals and more plus a way to buy the book if you don’t want to wait for the Canberra book launch (6.00 p.m., 30 November, National Library of Australia) look up www.churchilltrust.com.au/shop

  • I’m a stationery junkie. I love notebooks of every kind, from school exercise books to hand-made, leather-bound journals. Once I bought a very small hand-made notebook in a Knightsbridge stationers in London. Its cover was soft suede of the palest green and the smooth, creamy-textured pages inside were exactly the same shade. The endpapers were of marbled paper in delicate pastels. It was so pure and pale and perfect that it was ages before I could bring myself to sully its perfection with my dark blue scrawl. It was years actually. This probably had something to do with my having bought it while travelling with my boyfriend, who died the following year.

     

    Finally, finally, about twelve years later, I let myself dive into the beauty of the notebook and my blue scrawl became a part of that beauty. My scrawl is a semi-legible idiosyncrasy that a girlfriend used to call a spider’s two-step tango – back in the days before computers when we all saw one another’s handwriting often. But my writing is expressive of a creative person who has lived a life of vicissitudes so I’ve come to terms with my scrawl and it’s easier to read now than it used to be, possibly a sign of more sanity and serenity than I had in my youth.

     

    Don’t I use a computer most of the time? Yes. Touch-typing is much faster. I’m always amazed at the number of people for whom typing should be a tool of the trade – like academics – who can’t touch-type. There are easy courses on the web like ‘Type Quick’ where you can learn it in a fortnight of just one hour every day and that investment is worth its weight in gold, time-wise plus ergonomically plus easier on your eye sight as well. I can type this while looking at the plum trees out the window. It makes it a lot easier and pleasanter to write.

     

    My computer crashed on New Years Day. What sort of omen is that? It doesn’t sound good unless you interpret it as New Beginnings. Well, let’s hope it means that! On that morning, at 8.00am I cycled the five minutes to the pool as I often do. It was unusually and unpleasantly crowded. The lanes were peppered with thumpers as well. Thumpers are inexperienced swimmers who slap their hands onto the water and thump their feet, thus showering bucketfuls of water onto your face as you’re backstroking past them.

     

    I was annoyed. And then suddenly I relaxed. This happens every year and I’d forgotten. It was New Year, the time of New Year Resolutions. The majority of these unfamiliar faces would have resolved to swim every morning in 2014. Inevitably, the first cloudy day or the first morning they feel too tired or when work starts getting busy, they stop coming. Most of these thumpers will not be crowding the lanes in a few days’ time.

     

    Am I feeling smug about my own New Year’s resolutions? No. Nothing to feel smug about – I’m just stubborn. If I make them I usually keep them, in spite of the usual massive obstacles flung in my path. Maybe it’s because of my history of massive obstacles. If you want more morally appealing terms for stubbornness, I could say that my lifetime of vicissitudes have made me determined and persevering, patient and steadfast. If I say I’ll do something, I will do it.

     

    We all have obstacles in our paths and it’s good not to lose sight of the gentle, small things of life that can lift it up to a happier place. Simple things like digging out my ancient laptop from the shed and discovering it still works, the old faithful. And simple recipes. Jules Clancy’s recipe for New Year’s Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Muffins is a good one. I’m going to take them to work on Monday, my first day back. Jules Clancy got it from The Bourke Street Bakery cookbook and it is easy and simple and very wonderful.

     

    250 g plain flour

    1 and a half teaspoons baking powder

    200 g caster sugar

    200 g unsalted butter

    Three-quarters of a cup of natural yoghurt

    Half a cup of water

    2 eggs

    100 g dark chocolate, chopped into rough bits

    150 g raspberries, fresh or frozen

    2 tblsp raw sugar for the tops

     

    Pre-heat oven to 190C degrees. Line two big muffin trays with patty pans – that’s cup cake papers to Americans and everywhere now.

     

    Combine flour, baking powder and sugar in a big bowl and make a well in centre. Melt butter, remove from heat. Stir through yoghurt and water and then add eggs, stirring well.

     

    Pour butter mixture into the well in the dry ingreds and stir to combine. Fold through raspberries and chocolate and spoon into muffin papers. Sprinkle with raw sugar. Bake for 30-45 mins or when they are golden and feel springy. Cool in tray. (If you take them out early and eat them warm from the oven you get the chocolate still a bit molten so it melts in your mouth. Yum!)

     

    Yum! And if your New Years Resolution is to give up sugar? Go to the website of either David Gillespie www.sweetpoison.com.au or Sarah Wilson www.sarahwilson.com.au where there are chocolate recipes with no sugar. Sarah even has an I Quit Sugar Chocolate Cookbook, which is good.

     

  • First, an apology. I was taught how to blog by a not very good teacher who has gone on to something else and can’t be contacted. I didn’t realise until just the other day that in order to edit one’s blog, presumably one doesn’t have to press ‘Publish’ and then press the Edit to make changes but that there is a ‘Save’ and if I press that and then ‘Edit’ I get a chance to correct mistakes before I ‘Publish’. All this is guess work. I’ve just realised that it’s my more or less 1st drafts that must fly into followers’ in-boxes when I press ‘Publish’; and the version of two minutes later, edited, with corrected typos and the small changes that make a big difference are saved for posterity but that is not the version that followers receive! So sorry. It won’t happen again.

    (It is just arbitrary; the above seems to have worked but now I don’t have any scope to fill in the Categories or tags. Sigh.)

    People sometimes ask me how I come up with such fascinating books to read. Apart from having a BA (Hons) in English Literature (ANU, 1985) behind me plus 20 odd years of book reviewing, I rely a lot on the reviews in the New Yorker, the Literary Review and the Guardian Weekly. But the best one is the Guardian Weekly’s section just before Christmas where about 40 famous writers in English recommend their top few for the year and are given a paragraph to say why. You usually find some particular titles turning up on several lists and these are the ones that will usually be riveting.

    This year’s section has Roddy Doyle, Philip Pullman, Michael Palin, Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Bill Bryson and Colm Toíbin and many others. As you probably know, The Luminaries won the Booker prize this year, and it is 830 pages long. Robert McFarlane writes ‘I read Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries three times in my capacity as Man Booker judge and each time round it yielded new riches. It is a vastly complex novel about investment and return, gift and theft, value and worth …’ (Guardian Wkly 20 December 2013, p. 50)

    Someone gave it to me for Christmas and I’m really looking forward to reading it. But 830 pages – phew! Maybe I should postpone it until after my commissioned book deadline. My own favourite for this year? The one that really stands out for me is Andrea Goldsmith’s The Memory Trap. I loved it for the beauty of the language, the fascinating theme and the un-put-down-able plot. I actually tried to stretch it out so I wouldn’t have to finish it – and yet I also longed to read it as fast as I could! It’s about love, memory, relationships and more. I also loved Andrea Goldsmith’s previous novel, Reunion, which I thought was stunning, and it’s a mystery to me why such a great writer is not being feted and adored the world over. You will think about the ending of Reunion for a very long time.

    A book I keep returning to is Michael Dirda’s Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life. You can dip into it anywhere and find treasure. There are wonderful quotations – to choose three at random, two of which happen to be relevant for this Australian holiday season. The first is not I hope relevant to anyone reading this. Franz Kafka wrote in his diary: ‘Sunday July 19, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.’ William Gerhardie says, ‘We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed possible.’ And Albert Camus said, ‘No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life.’

    I don’t think he was thinking of the scorching Australian sun. I don’t understand what exactly he means but I love it. I don’t know the context but I imagine he is using sunlight as a metaphor for hope and optimism and focusing on the positive in life. Well that’s me for sure, so I won’t be a failure, even if I never get another novel published. (I know, I know, we can publish our own now. No time at the moment; I barely have time to submit it to publishers, and I want to try them first, the few who still accept “unagented” novel submissions. And no, no agent because it’s harder to get an agent now than it used to be to get a publisher.)

    Now before I ‘Publish’ this I’ll do it in ‘Save’ and see if my deliberate typo (is that an oxymoron?) appears. I have hope and optimism and all things seem possible, even without a cognac!

  • I’m back. Because finally I sent in my draft of Chapter 2 of the Churchill Trust book. I’d been working on it for ages, getting up at 5.00 am and writing before work and it was a hard one plus had been very busy at my other job, my real job, and the day I finished the chapter I was so tired that I came home from work and slept 14 hours in a row.

    Now I am half-way through This Is Not the End of the Book (London, Vintage, 2012) which is a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière. I’m not a big fan of Eco but I love Carrière, who is a really good screenwriter and writer. He writes about our loss of being in the present moment, a theme I often raise in these blogs – he travels a lot (and gets in different time zones) and gets ‘lost in the corridors of time’ – just in conversation poetic phrases run off his tongue. I love it so much I will borrow it for my title.

    Titles are hard. That’s why so many people borrow them from other works, like the film Days of Wine and Roses – what a great title! Great film too, about alcoholism, with Lee Remmick and Jack Lemmon. The title comes from a not very good poem by Ernest Dowson that includes the very good line:

    ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’

    Poignant. The feeling I get is of deep nostalgia. So sad. Nostalgia is not something I’ve had much experience with, luckily. I’ve known some people to be virtually crippled by it. I can barely imagine. (Just Googled Dowson and learnt that he died of alcoholism at 32!)

    Carrière quotes a Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin: ‘In the past, even the future was better.’

    Ha! He also says that the worst criticism of Jesus that Mani, a Christian heretic who founded Manichaeism, made was that Jesus didn’t write anything down.
    And Eco says, ‘He did once, in the sand.’

    And I thought: How does anyone know that? Maybe that scene is in the Bible, written by an eye-witness, an Apostle who saw Him writing some profundity in the sand. I also thought: Maybe writing was really hard for Jesus; maybe He was dyslexic.

    Possibly a blasphemous thought. Ha.

    Before I talk myself into more hot water, let me tell you what else made me so tired I slept for 14 hours straight: osteoarthritis. It’s exhausting. The Chinese say that the legs are the second heart. I interpret that to mean: pretty damn essential. Now I know the truth of this more than I ever wanted to know. To continue a conversation about that, to which previous blogs have been devoted, I’ve come to the end of my year of the A to Z of alternative therapies for it. Of all these, I wouldn’t say that any did no good. They all worked to some extent and all were good for other things and health in general. But I have three favourites: Acupuncture, the Infrared sauna, and Hanna Somatics (similar to the Feldenkrais method, which is also very, very good).

    Acupuncture takes away the pain. But not immediately. After several weeks of weekly sessions it does, and does so for several months. Then you have to go back and do more weeks of weekly sessions. And it does nothing for flexibility.

    The Sunlighten Infrared sauna is very effective too. Someone told me that Sunlighten is the best brand. I bought a solo one and this is also the cheapest. Sunlighten salesperson Peter Reynolds was knowledgeable about infrared saunas and very helpful over the phone and by email. When it was delivered, I used it for a fortnight or so once a day and felt improved. Then I went away for a fortnight and towards the end of the first week I was really in pain. When I got back I leapt into it immediately and did two 30 minute sessions a day and after a few days it got a lot better. From my experience it’s worth the investment. It’s good for pain relief and promotes healing and flexibility was a bit better too. Go to www.sunlighten.com.au or you can ring for free: 1800 786 544.

    There is a great book by Martha Peterson called Move without Pain, about Hanna Somatics. It’s about muscle memory and full of easy exercises that straighten out our bodies. It’s wonderful, (and so is yoga of course). Move without Pain can be ordered from America, it’s not available in Australia. (New York, Sterling, 2011) The exercises in it are quick and easy and painless and will make very fast improvement in your life – since most of us sit too much, which is the cause of a lot of problems – I think I can make that generalisation safely. Peterson’s writing is a pleasure to read too, she has an appealing casual and clear style, which makes you feel she is with you, taking you through the exercises and that you are in good hands.

    Now, have a great break, a peaceful Christmas and happy New Year. Have some days of wine and roses and enjoy them while they last.

  •  

    It is very hard for me to narrow myself down to focus on only one thing. I have two jobs, I do Argentine tango dancing, I’m a film fanatic and I love theatre. I swim and do tai chi and yoga. And I always want to read as widely as I want.

    This week in my spare time after work and after my second job (the commissioned book, of which more anon) I read Leslie Kenton’s Skin Revolution (London, Vermilion, 2003). Leslie Kenton is a gorgeous guru for health and beauty. She is a wonderful writer and I love her books.

    She’s got a five day skin diet in this book – a lot like a paleo diet and not a lot unlike my normal diet – except no dairy and no coffee. Oh, and no alcohol. Yes, my skin does look better plus I lost a few pounds. Hardest thing of course was giving up my morning cafe au laits for green tea. But I did it! Yay!

    She has these inspiring quotations in her books. One in this I liked was Á beautiful young person is an accident of nature. A beautiful old person is a work of art.’ I liked Louise Nevelson’s one too: Í never feel age … if you have creative work, you don’t have age or time.’ Wonderful words of wisdom; they make me feel so much better!

    Leslie Kenton’s books are always inspiring plus she does extensive research. I was researching Infra Red saunas – meant to be good for arthritis – and she has a whole chapter on them in this book! She reckons they’re great too, and you really can trust her research. Sunlighten ones have had various recommendations. I bought one of those – will keep you posted.

    So that book should really be the last one for quite some time not related to my commissioned book. The thing is, I must focus on one thing (besides my main job) or I won’t get this book written in time. And I do love it – it’s fascinating and worthwhile. But we’re rushing towards the end of the year and I’ll only have a bit of 2015. I won a Fellowship to write fiction at the Eleanor Dark Foundation, then there’s an interstate Conference on Arts and Health – my favourite part of my main job. Then we have a big work conference thing and then it’s virtually Christmas.

    That means that 2014 for me will be like doing a PhD in one year. I will have to focus on only that one thing, and I’m happy to do it – it’s so interesting. But no more reading books on beauty on the side. I must read only on Churchill Fellows – well, that’s lucky because you could not get a wider variety of fields. Churchill Fellowships cover everything from health to glass blowing, zoology to hat-making, agriculture to baking. So it really suits me. Now I must stop this and do some more on it.

  • ‘The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tyres.’

    American writer Dorothy Parker said that. I was lucky to get four stepchildren, three of whom – the three boys – lived with us for about half the time. Lucky because it had become too late for me to have children (that drought of men remotely possible that happens to women about mid-way through their 30s) and lucky because the stepchildren themselves were wonderful.

    The only down-side was more housework, but their dad was pretty good at doing his share. This puts me in mind of another American comedian, Joan Rivers: Í hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.’

    I recently converted the last, the youngest, boy’s bedroom into a gorgeous guest room when he moved into a converted garage at his mum’s place, not far away. Of course he is perfectly welcome to sleep in his old room any time he wants to, but now it looks (and smells) appealing.

    The toy car engines are in the shed. The real car engines are in the shed. The heavy-duty dark blue curtains are in the shed. The dark furniture lasted about three minutes on the grass outside the house before being taken away. The desiccated rat behind the chest of drawers has gone.

    His old single bed (handed down from older brothers) has become a sort of day-bed, with its pale green cotton doona cover with magnolias and embroidered blue and turquoise hummingbirds and matching pillows and cushions.

    People – grownups, not adolescent boys – sigh with pleasure when they see the sunlight spilling in through the delicate white muslin curtains with blue embroidered borders onto the pale blue suede-painted walls and light cane and wicker furniture and recycled silk and cotton turquoise and blue rugs – it’s a dream of a room, they say.

    And if it’s too “girlie” for the boys, there are always other rooms they can sleep in. When they lived here half the time, there was “girlie” bread and “girlie” milk, “girlie” butter and “girlie” rice. It was wholegrain versus white and full-cream versus skim and real butter versus margarine and white rice versus brown. A conflict expressed by the eldest boy with teasing affection to the only girl in the house.

    Now they have gone except to visit, my house can be as “girlie” as I like. I even have flowers sometimes –pink lilies, delicate jasmine or armfuls of our jonquils and daffodils, bright yellow in blue glass vases. The boys don’t really notice flowers. But I’m with Iris Murdoch: “People from a planet without flowers must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

  • ‘Don’t get your food from the same place your car does.’

    This is the advice of writer Michael Pollan. American petrol stations make more money from food and cigarettes than from petrol. It’s very probably the same here in Australia. And the food is all ‘Highly process non-perishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks…’ Pollan writes that petrol stations ‘have become processed-corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside you.’ (In Defense of Food, 2008, p. 192)

    I don’t know that Australia uses as many corn products as the US but the principle remains the same – petrol stations sell food that is very high in sugar and this is very bad for us. Very addictive too.So-o-o-o-o hard to give up.

    I liked Pollan’s book a lot. His basic advice is this: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ It sounds a bit Zen. I love the simplicity of it. It doesn’t say anything about alcohol but grapes are food, are they not? You’re not supposed to have more than two glasses a day if you’re a woman. And the size of that glass is probably smaller than you imagine. Sadly.

    Men can get away with a bit more than two glasses a day because they have bigger livers. A bit more though – not a lot more. I think it’s three glasses a day.

    In Defense of Food is well written, informative and funny. I think people should read it because they need to know about the massive number of poisons and toxic chemicals in manufactured food today – and how this desperate situation came about. They can see the desperate consequences of it all around them: unhappy, sick, obese people everywhere and a national healthcare bill that is completely unsustainable.

    Australia, like the US, has staggering levels of disease and ill health. Nearly 300 people in Australia are diagnosed with diabetes (Type 2) per day! With a population of only 22 million, that is awful. David Gillespie – www.sweetpoison.com.au – writes about this and has a similarly clear, witty style as Pollan. His books are a pleasure to read. A danger on public transport because you burst out laughing sometimes.

    Pollan quotes Wendell Berry’s essay, ‘The Pleasures of Eating’ where he writes about monoculture and the increasingly vast size of farms. Of course this generates vast profits. ‘But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.’ (Pollan, p. 159)

    And so, if we don’t want to be plagued by the ill health that makes us dependent on drugs and chemicals, Pollan advises to eat as many plants as possible – they all have different anti-oxidants and these help the body eliminate different kinds of toxins. The more toxins there are in the environment, the more plants we should be eating.

    ‘There are literally scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases. In countries where people eat a pound [you know, that’s about half a kilo – Pen] or more of fruits and vegetables a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States. We also know that vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer than the rest of us.’ (Pollan, p. 166)

    ‘A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.’ George Bernard Shaw said. When he was on his death bed – actually, he lived for years after that – he thought that his hearse should be drawn by all the animals he hadn’t eaten.

    I’m not really a vegetarian. I just have never liked the taste of meat. I do like fish and chicken. When we lived in the bush (East Gippsland, Victoria) chicken used to be only for birthdays and Christmas. (Yes, they do run around the yard for a bit just after their head’s been chopped off. Ugh. But as kids we never felt Ugh.) On my father’s sheep farm, he’d cut the throat of a sheep and we’d live off that for a while. We lived on porridge in the morning (we had a cow) and mutton and mashed potatoes, mashed pumpkin and boiled peas. Oh, and bread. My mother made that as well as the butter and jam. (She even made the soap.) I always loved Fridays because we were Catholics and forbidden to eat meat on Fridays. To this day, decades after I could eat whatever I wanted when I wanted, Friday still has a great taste for me.

    My older brother Bill told me that my father thought I was just being stubborn when I didn’t want to eat my meat and vegetables. So the last time I saw him, Bill was recalling when I was two, and our dad forcing me to eat my mutton, and I projectile-vomited all over him! From then on, I still had to eat it – there was nothing else and we lived in an extremely isolated place – but I could take my time to do it. This went on for years. I have memories of still being at the table at 10 o’clock at night; I wasn’t allowed down until I’d finished. Ugh.

    No wonder I so enjoy eating now. And yes, I do eat mostly plants. No more mutton. No more mashed spuds and no more pumpkin. I know the latter two are plants but there are kinder ways to treat them. I still can’t stomach pumpkin (except in scones or the wonderful American invention of pumpkin pie) but the best potato recipe is Aussie food writer Jill Dupleix’s Crash Hot Potatoes. Ooooh, so good! And easy.This is how you do it:

    16 small spuds or chats
    Handful of thyme
    Carraway seeds (or any herbs you have on hand, fresh or dried)
    Salt and pepper
    Olive oil

    Parboil about 16 small spuds or chats. Put them on an oiled baking tray. Squash them flattish to about half-way through, with a potato masher. Then drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle thyme and caraway seeds – or whatever herbs you fancy – plus sea salt and ground pepper on them, and put them in the oven – 350 degrees, you know, average temp – for 20-30 minutes. Yum! They will emerge hot, crispy and aromatic.

    Have with a green salad and some protein – meat, if you eat it, or grilled fish or chicken. Plus a glass (or two) of wine. The crash hot spuds are also very good cold the next day.

  • Óleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, regarded by many as one of the most beneficent agents in the history of espionage, was tried and sentenced to death in Moscow in 1963. Having only by a near miracle escaped that fate myself in 1985, I naturally have a close personal interest in the subject of this monograph.’

     Now, that’s a great opening to a book review! You’ve just got to read on. It was written by Oleg Gordievsky in September’s Literary Review p. 6.

     I used to write a ton of book reviews – mainly for The Canberra Times. I learnt a lot from it and enjoyed it – up to a point. In the time it takes to read, digest, re-read bits of and write a review of a book, one could have written a whole chapter of one’s own writing or a draft of a short story. George Orwell might have been thinking partly of this when he said, ‘Book reviewing is pouring your immortal soul down the drain, a half pint at a time.

     I used to review films too and that was a lot quicker. Your average book takes longer to read than the 90 minutes films used to be or the 2 hrs they are now. And, scribbling in the dark, I’d make pretty comprehensive notes so that it didn’t take all that long to write a reasonable review later. And most films are less complex than the kind of books I was attracted to.

     Last night I saw Diana. Naomi Watts played her. It was a very kind portrait, a hagiography really. Very kind and sweet all the time, lonely and then desperately in love with a noble guy who saves lives. No mention of all the other lovers before him, and then when she’s on Dodi’s yacht (haven’t we all done stupid, impulsive things on the rebound to get back at an ex?!) they meet on deck in the morning and he says, ‘How did you sleep?’ As if he didn’t know! Ha!

     Naomi Watts is much prettier than Diana was, and much shorter. Naomi Watts is a fantastic actor (must have been so frustrating getting tiny bit parts for 15 years while Nicole Kidman got all the big parts when Naomi is by far the better actor) and she got the gestures, expressions, smile, voice and laugh precisely right. But their faces are so different, even though they’re both blue-eyed blondes – and I never got that suspension of disbelief persuading me that I was looking at Diana; I was always aware of looking at Naomi Watts.

     That said, it was absorbing and interesting. Someone summed up films as all fitting into categories of: Good person goes bad; OR Bad person goes good; OR Bad person gets worse; OR Good person gets better. Obviously the first two are extremely interesting; the third mildly so and the last unbelievably boring. Diana could be summarized as Good person goes haywire (over lost love, in this case). Yes, it was interesting.

     And the love of her life (the Pakistani heart surgeon) quotes her that Rami quotation I mentioned in a previous blog:  ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ But in the doctor character’s version it’s translated as ‘garden’.

     The weekend before Diana, I saw Stoker, and apart from the gorgeous credit sequences I was bored. Two psychopaths are on screen for almost the whole time. Someone wrestling with his soul is interesting; or someone in conflict with someone else. To me, real drama is soul drama. But with psychopaths there is no struggle, no conflict, no hopeless yearning or deep passion or shocking turnaround. They just get whatever they want by taking it, killing people if they happen to be in the way or if the psychopath feels like it.

     Mia of course was really good, but I was still bored. Bad person gets worse – it was in that category. And then it just spiralled downwards into schlock horror, which looks easy and fun to write and act, but not such fun to watch, unless you’re maybe a drunk adolescent.

     A film like Polanski’s Repulsion is so much more interesting, depicting a young girl’s deterioration into mental illness (Good person goes mad. Which is bad.) It was fascinating, you should get it out on DVD. Seriously creepy and scary. Not a moment’s schlock horror, it goes much deeper and has an enduring impact.   

  • ‘Be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.’ Gustav Flaubert said that. So I make my house clean and tidy and lay the fire and fill two blue vases with bunches of my yellow jonquils, and I write my commissioned Churchill book.

    Not that the Churchill Trust necessarily wants a ‘violent and original’ book! It will be original but perhaps I will leave the violence to my novel writing.

    I brush the white cat who is so pretty he looks like a girl and I do my tai chi in the sunshine. And to relax, between writing and domestic things, I clean out two rooms and build a whole new decor around a glorious doona cover I fell in love with and so bought a single and a double and built everything around them. Doona covers are a good way to bring art and colour into your life. Often on special too. Some of them really are works of art, the same as rugs from Afghanistan or Iran or Pakistan are. If you can afford to buy ‘Persian’ rugs you can walk on art.

    I need to do things like this because writing and art are what make me happy – those and people. And with an election coming up in Australia very soon that everyone predicts will be a huge win for a party who do not on the whole share my values, I need to cultivate my garden as Voltaire said.

    And in a world in which: ‘For every dollar spent on U.N. peacekeeping, $2,000 is expended for war-making by member nations’, we need to find ways to feel at peace sometimes. Or we’d go crazy. That quotation and the next is by Paul Hawken in his book, Blessed Unrest: How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. (New York, Penguin, 2007) both on p. 18.

    ‘Four of the five members of the U.N. Security Council, which has veto power over all U.N. resolutions are the top weapons dealers in the world: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia.’ So the latter quotation very depressing but the title of his book so hopeful! It is a good book, and good to read books like that at times like these.

    And because I must get back to my Churchill book I’m taking the easy way out and ending with an extensive block quote from Hawken’s book.

    ‘Unlike indigenous cultures, whose worlds are local, intimate, familiar, we live in the age of giants. In one day alone we pump 85 million barrels of petroleum out of the ground, and then burn it up. And on the same day we spew the waste of 27 billion pounds of coal into the atmosphere. One hundred million displaced people now wander the earth without a home. One company, Wal-Mart, employs 1.8 million people. ExxonMobil made nearly $40 billion in profits in 2006, enough money to permanently supply pure clean drinking water to the 1 billion people who lack it. We have consumed 90 percent of all the big fish in the oceans. Bill Gates’s home covers one and a half acres and cost nearly $100 million.
    Not surprisingly, people don’t know that they count in such a mal-ordered, destabilized world, don’t know that they are of value. A healthy global civilization cannot be constructed without the building blocks of meaning, which are hewn of rights and respect. What constitutes meaning for human beings are events, memories, and small dignities—gifts that rarely emerge from institutions, and never from theory. As the smaller parts of the world are knitted into one globalized unit, the one thing we can no longer afford is bigness. This means dismantling the big bombs, dams, ideologies, contradictions, wars and mistakes.
    In the midst of such giants a worldwide gathering of ordinary and extraordinary people are reconstituting the notion of what it means to be a human being. While they are organizing themselves into the largest movement in the history of the world, the movement only happens one person at a time.’ (p. 23)

  • ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’

    Rumi said that. I found it in Richard Brennan’s Alexander Technique: Change your posture, change your life. It’s in the Canberra public library system and fairly recent. It’s a good book with some wonderful quotations in it. Who was Rumi? Sounds a bit Sufi. I almost don’t want to do the research because I want to retain the mystery for myself. The quotation sounds like someone promising to meet one after death. Even though I don’t understand that quotation I keep coming back to the poetry of it. It sounds profound; I just don’t know exactly why yet.

    It’s something to do with there being no judgement, just pure acceptance. It makes me want to sigh with a deep sense of expansive, relaxed happiness. Even if I did the research and thought about it, and teased out and analysed the quotation to the Nth degree I suspect that a part of it would still elude me, and that’s fine. Part of the power of art is its mystery. It must retain some enigmatic quality if we are to keep wanting more of it, keep coming back to it, keep watching it or listening to it or yearning for it.

    It also reminds me of some psychic once saying that all those young soldiers who died on the battlefields who were on different sides – there are no sides where they are now; those boys from opposing countries are on the same side now and having a good time together. (Now it’s girl soldiers as well.) No matter what your beliefs in the afterlife are, I reckon it still puts things in perspective. One of my beliefs is that our similarities are much stronger than our differences. It’s not in the interests of certain politicians and the big weapons dealing corporations to have people think like this but left to their own devices, most people would.

    ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ I just want to repeat it. Such a peaceful and beautiful thought. Like that famous line from one of my favourite poets, Andrew Marvell: ‘To a green thought in a green shade.’ From his poem The Garden. You just want to repeat that too, don’t you? – á green thought in a green shade.’ And sigh with bliss at the perfection of that line.

    Back to more prosaic things, in the same Alexander Technique book by Richard Brennan, he quotes Ram Dass: ‘Life is not an emergency.’ p. 78. It does our bodies and minds much harm to rush through life. I have rushed through a lot of my life, but I’ve achieved heaps! Makes me feel good, even though in the writing field I’ve probably published about a tenth of what I’ve actually written! I’m proud of finishing my degrees and of my careers and achieving stuff in spite of life always throwing massive obstacles in my way. But someone always is there to help me – fantastic counsellers etc. who come into my life just at the right time. And then you really must slow down – there is no rushing some things. But my instinct is to rush! Driven by curiosity and a hungry impatience to know. However, I’ve learnt to slow down more these days and it feels good.

    Brennan writes that posture is the outward expression of how you feel inside. It’s not something many people in our society are aware of now. The author describes what we get from the Alexander Technique as a feeling of lightness and ease that is brought about by all the parts of the body working in unison rather than in conflict. This gives a sense of peace, oneness and awareness.

    It sounds like Sarah Wilson on meditation, which she does every day. See her recent blog on it at www.sarahwilson.com.au

    Tai Chi is a kind of meditation too. It certainly is at the pace that my teacher does it on the DVD I bought. It’s really hard for me to slow down that much! I can do all the moves okay but I want to race through them! That is not the way you’re supposed to do it. I’m learning but it’s hard. It’s something you can improve at every day though, and that’s always a good feeling.

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