Bedtime

(at bedtime)

P (five year old): can I stay in this house forever?

Me:  Of course, how long did you have in mind?

P:    Until I am all grown up and me and Immy (big sister) have fallen in love with different people and we all live here together.  Me, Immy, the person I love and the person she loves.

Me:  What about mummy and daddy?

P:     You'll be dead won't you?

Me:   I bloody hope not.  (Note: bloody is not a swear word in our house as it is authentic Australian slang).

P:     (looks puzzled)

Me:   For example - look at Heddy, your grandmother. She is my mummy and she is still alive and I am grown up aren't I?

P:     Yes.

Me:   So there you go, when you are grown up, I should be alive too.

P:     Why do people die?

Me:  All living creatures have to die sometime. Sometimes they get sick, sometimes they just get old. The trick is to make sure you fit lots of life into the space between being born and dying.

P:    When will the Queen die?

Me:  I don't know for sure.  She is pretty old though. Over 80.

P:     Why isn't the Queen in the Lympics?  It's in her country.

Me:  I think she might be a bit old for running and swimming.

P:     It will be good when she dies.  There will be no one to boss us around anymore.

Me:   Not sure about that.  Prince Charles will become King Charles and unless we become a republic he will be our head of state.  Last time I looked he was pretty bossy.  About organic things. And architecture.  And the youth of today.

P:   What's a head of state?

Me: Never mind. (Note to self: need to better explain way constitutional monarchy works to children).

P:    I don't want you to die.  Or go to work tomorrow. Or leave me.  Ever.

Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer, something has been worrying P.   I know that this is an obvious thing to say, but I am constantly looking for signs that the fear he must have had to begin with is going away, at least a little.  After all, it has been almost two years now. 

In my lawyerly way I tried to pin his worry down to something specific, which I would then try to minimise or alleviate.  Was it losing my hair, vanishing to hospital for days on end, talking about my sore shoulder, being tired, being a bit sick or being unable to lift him properly anymore?   I have never lied to him about my diagnosis, and used my best efforts to explain bad cells and good cells and chemo to him.  I was always pretty vague about the surgery I had, simply because it was such an assault to my body that I really don't think he should be exposed to that at such a young age.

Of course that was just way too complicated an approach. 

He is five.  He doesn't care about any of that stuff.  He couldn't care less about my hair or my surgery or my blood counts or my bone scans or my fear of recurrence.

He just wants me to be alive.   Sometimes the simple obvious answer is in fact the correct answer. 

I understand clearly now that he is in contact with a visceral fear of abandonment or loss in a way that I certainly was not at his age.  I don't think I even thought about death once until I was a moody 12 year old listening to A Forest by the Cure (thank you Robert Smith for giving me some great black clothes wearing/goth/moping around teenage years. You were just the backdrop I needed).  Here's another one to mope to:

On a lighter note, we have been building up quite a collection of ecologically sound bedtime reading, ranging from this classic:

I love the Lorax still, complete with the Truffala trees and Thneeds.   It is compulsory reading for all children.  And I know a new Lorax was released last year, but you can also watch the original animated film on YouTube, here it is below.

To this:

Wouldn't this make great wallpaper?  Just as I knew nothing of death at 5, I also new nothing of climate change\recycling\ endangered animals, all topics my children are Full Bottle on.

This book is about a forest which was chopped down and a city which smothers everything with its smoke,  but has a happy ending.  

Don't you just love a happy ending? I do.   Although I now have a major hankering for the Cure. Time to get Faith out again. 

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Flower Fields

I have spent more time than is normal lately staring at this wallpaper:

(Blazing Poppies wallpaper by Anthropologie)



wondering if there is some way I could buy it, and then conspire to find a way to use it.   Wallpapering a powder room comes to mind, of course, but we don't have a powder room.  

I have always loved dense floral patterns.  I love it in art:

Untitled no 5 by Kent Rogowski (available on 20x200) 

but most of all I love it in skirts.

(The Sartorialist on the streets of Milan) 

(Prada resort 2007)

(more Anthropologie)

I even know why I love this look so much (and I loved it long before Mad Men came along). It is something to do with this book, which I read as a child:

Because fields of flowers and full skirts make me think of the Swiss mountains.  

Just as children who live in the snow dream of the strange orange dust of the desert, I, growing up with pale green eucalypts and dry hot summers, dreamed of a little Swiss chalet and green fields of wildflowers.   For us, green lawn came for half the year, but tended to dry up over summer.  

When I actually went to Switzerland as an adult, I could not believe how like my imagination the country was.  It was just like I pictured it.  The emerald green, and soft rolling hills.   The little dappled flowers everywhere by the roadside.  Just perfect. 

But back to business.   When, I ask does it become inappropriate to wear a flowery full skirt?  I have been sorely tempted online and in the shops recently.   Does it get to the point where it is a bit silly if one is over 40? 

(Am sorry for my intermittent posts and comments lately. I am flat out at work, and heading up to Queensland for a conference later this week.  Looking forward to the weather (hot and rainy! How can you Queenslanders keep your hair straight?)  Thank you all for taking the time to read and comment over the last few weeks)

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A Tiny Market Stall

There are many things from my childhood I wish I had kept and saved.  Others I am not so fussed about. (My mother recently produced my teenage diaries complete with lock and key which she had kept all this time.  Oh the angst and high emotions in just one day's entry.   I decided after a quick glance not to read them any further).  

When my parents travelled to the UK in the 1970s they made a point of seeking out these little hand crafted market stalls to bring back with them.   Yesterday I got them out of the shoe box and tissue paper they had been residing in for more than 25 years.   I thought I might give them to my daughter for her upcoming birthday.

Apart from the disintegration of some of the glue, they were in remarkably good shape.    They are quite small, only about 20 cm across. 

The quality of the workmanship is quite incredible.  And they are also a little history of traditional English food.   There are pork pies, fresh butter, pigeons, wild rabbit, turkey, Swiss rolls, chocolate eclairs and strings of sausages. 

These apples look the same as they did when I was given them in 1977.

And this wedding cake was always one of my favourites. I found playing with cakes was every bit as satisfying as eating them!

I also have a fish shop, run by Mr Pike the fishmonger, complete with native oysters, Cornish crabs, lobster and salmon. 

These stalls were designed by Caroline Watt, who in 1979 employed 35 people making these crafts, which is quite a sizable business in one sense.   A bit of googling told me the business ceased in 2000.    Her items are catalogued by the British Design Council, and the above photo shows a much newer shop.

What is a cream horn anyway?  I am dying to know. 

I love these little stalls for the same reason I love this book, illustrated by my favourite children's book author, Raymond Briggs, and which tells the story of an elephant and a bad (red-haired) baby who run around an English village stealing various food items from shops, including a pork butcher and a snack bar. 

The illustrations evoke the now gone past world of the specialist food shop.   In our current world of over airconditioned food halls and supermarkets which sell everything, I find that I miss the little local shops.   And I could do with some more East End barrow boys hanging around the place menacingly!   Like this one, who doesn't even notice the elephant behind him. 

After all, it was only in the early 1960s that they stopped delivering milk by horse and cart in Melbourne.  (It's true.  My husband can remember hearing the clip clopping noise of the hoofs).

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Each Little World

It has been a long, tiring, tension headache kind of week. 

In the midst of this, on Wednesday I found myself stuck in the junior library waiting for my daughter to finish ballet because the finish time had arbitrarily changed that day, which was kind of annoying because I had torn through early peak hour traffic to get there on time because she was unwell.

I sat on the tiny little plastic chair and picked up a book from the nearest shelf.  

The Secret Garden. 

Given to the school by Judith Bruns, in 1990.  That was a coincidence as Miss Bruns, with her horizontal shelf bosum, was my Year 7 teacher.   A confirmed spinster, with very few people skills but a wonderfully kind heart. 

I read the first chapter while I was waiting.  You remember, it begins with the description of Mary Lennox as yellow skinned and pinch faced, and selfish and egotistical.

It is a traumatic start to a children's book:   a cholera epidemic breaks out in India, where Mary is living, her parents die, and those servants who are not struck down flee the house.  Mary is forgotten and left abandoned for days on end.    She wanders the house in a dreamlike state,  encounters snakes and drinks a left over glass of wine as she is so thirsty and falls down and sleeps again.   

Once discovered she is sent to live with an English clergyman, and then ultimately to Yorkshire to her uncle's windswept stony abode.   And we all know what happened then.

This chapter transported me, just for that five minutes.   To a world of little girls who are not loved enough, and a different era where life was cheap, short and hard.   I read this book many times as a child and that horrendous first chapter had completely escaped my memory in place of the happy secret garden activities in the end of the book.  Isn't it funny what your memory retains? 

Reading this, trivial little things like waiting for my sparkly pink ballerina girl, and peak hour traffic, and challenges at work melted away.   We are all fortunate, and largely blessed. 

(Images (1) EachLittleWorld.com (2) not sure sorry  (3) Flickriver.com)

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An Ode to Lauren Child

(Lauren Child's kitchen, with white piano and specially built shelves to display her crockery - after all, she says, noone really needs 20 mugs do they, so they may as well be on display.)

An Ode to Lauren Child
I have this little daughter Imogen

She is small and very funny.

She is a philosopher like you, Lauren Child

She wants to know why, why, why and how come?

She thinks grown up rules,
especially hypocritical ones about spelling and going to bed, are silly.

She can mark a green vegetable never tasted at twenty paces

and not ever never eat it.

She has an imaginary bestest friend called Wormy

who has a birthday most every day and

is almost always responsible for breaking her little brother's toys.

She has sticky outy hair like Lola

and a don't mess with me hands on hips stance when feeling brave.

Like Clarice Bean she wants to save the Planet of Earth

But she still worries about things which cannot be changed,

such as whether the size of her feet are acceptable in the scheme of things. 

(an amazing home made Charlie and Lola house, go to Sweet Sweet Life to see it all)

But for me, I love Lauren Child for different reasons.  I love her use of pattern and colour and wallpaper in her illustrations:

(Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent)

(from Who Wants to be a Poodle)

(Princess and the Pea)

(Pippi Longstocking)

(Pesky Rat)

And I love her ability to articulate life's chief worries. Including this one (from Clarice Bean):

"Worry no 8: What to do when someone is boring you to nearly utter death. Give them the slip and run like crazy".

Oh to be a Running Away From Boring People child again.

(Images: (1) guardian.co.uk (2) -(4) Sweet Sweet Life, all others copyright Lauren Child)

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A Mad Tea Party (in my head)

Everywhere seems to be awash with images from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.   Indeed, tomorrow my daughter is due to see the film at an 8 year old Film'n'Pancake Parlour combination party which is certainly a popular theme this year.   

I, alas, will be having my hair done and will wait to see it on DVD.  Which has been pretty much the case with all films for the last 8 years.

But am I complaining?  No, not a jittery jot.   Alice has been such a wonderful inspiration for artists and illustrators for more than a century.  And it is not hard to see why - a pretty girl and lots of wonderful and crazy animals and characters to portray. 

And everyone brings their own imagination to bear.

(Marjorie Torrey, 1946) 

(AE Jackson, 1914)

(Mabel Lucie Atwell 1910)

(Angel Dominguez, 1996) 

(Gwynned Hudson, 1922)

(Maria Kirk, 1904)

(Nicole Claveloux, 1940)

(Peter Newell, 1901)

(Arthur Rackham, 1907)

(Sir John Tenniel 1865)

I can tell you that this picture used to scare the living daylights out of me when I was younger. Much scarier than even Stephen Fry. 

So, this weekend, I will be tea-partying with the Mad Hatter in this hat:

(from Harvash.com)

And drinking my tea from one of these, because I think a tea party calls for flowery porcelain:

Taitu - tea for one

Gien

Taitu - L'Erba del Vicino

Bernadaud - Frivole

Gien 

(all porcelain from tableideas.com) 

And the Mad Hatter can use this teapot, if he dares:

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