Salt and corrosion

Yesterday my mother and John came in to run various pre-Christmas errands. My mother and I braved the supermarket: 39C out and 'Walking in a Winter Wonderland' playing in. (Fortunately the change arrived late in the afternoon; it's been 20C and drizzling ever since, and is apparently going to stay so for the rest of the week. I can live with that.)

After that, we returned to my house, where Mum and John made a list of things they would need to build a scarecrow. This seemed unusual, as I couldn't imagine John making anything as prosaic as a scarecrow when he already has an elaborate mechanical Bird Scaring Machine of his own devising, but it turned out not to be for them. There is a youth theatre group here that puts on a musical every January, and John does their set designs. Well... he used to do their set designs. These days, he cherry picks the jobs he thinks sound interesting and lets other people get on with the rest. Anyway, this year they are doing Oklahoma! and they want a scarecrow in the corn field. So John is assembling the scarecrow's body, while Mum is making his head and hat.

'It's a floppy felt hat,' said Mum, who then claimed never to have heard the song I learnt in kinder about the dingle-dangle scarecrow with a flippy-floppy hat*. 'With a felt mouse on it. And for his head, I'm going to get some hessian and make a sort of pillow slip. I'll stitch the face, so when it's stuffed the features will come out.' She took a piece of cardboard and cut out a face shape and drew some features on it. John looked at it and said it wasn't quite what he imagined, so he drew more features over it. Then I looked at it and said that they've either come up with a new horror film villain or a children's book character called the Very Scary Scarecrow.

( See what you think )

The very scary scarecrow
Has four beady eyes,
A pointy nose and big, square teeth
To bite a child who lies.

Or 'at passing flies' or 'steaming hot pies' or something. It's a work in progress, obviously.

This morning when I went out to get the mail, I saw a huntsman spider on one of the verandah posts. Then it flapped in the breeze and I realised it was dead, just an empty husk.

( It's sort of decorative, isn't it? )

Nothing says Christmas like a dead spider.




* He shakes his hands like this, and he shakes his knees like that.

The magazine that comes with the Sunday paper is celebrating its tenth birthday today and marked the occasion by printing some interviews with a group of ten-year-olds. For your entertainment (because they certainly entertained me), here are some of the answers:

What was the world like 10 years ago?.
- There weren't any cars or transport. You just had to walk around. (Samuel)
- A more dangerous place because of fighting. Life was harder, I think. (Marcus)
- I'm guessing there were less shops. Maybe life would be harder because you didn't have dishwashers, for example. (Ashna)
- More old-fashioned. (Javier)
- My dad told me the internet was very slow and there were not computers and no TVs. (Madeleine)
- I actually think it was the same as it is now. (Luke)

What will the world be like in 10 years' time?
- Robots. Cars are probably going to be in the air. (Me: And we would call them "planes".) The trees could all be broken down because of pollution. I'd like to be rich. I'd buy a car and a Nintendo Wii. (Marcus)
- I think they might get rid of confetti because it damages the environment. (Thomas)
- There may be flying cars and when you click your fingers, your room is cleaned up. I wish I could live on a farm and get an electric house so that when you press a button, it just cooks for you and stuff. (Javier)

Isn't "stuff" one of the most useful linguistic concepts? I find it so handy, I really do. It speaks volumes about this whole world out there - a world full of stuff - that I know about but just can't be bothered spelling out. Young Javier is clearly the same, with that electric house that does stuff. On another note, aren't robots and flying cars what we were promised when we were little? By the year 2000, we were all going to have jetpacks and live like the Jetsons. So where are all these things, hmm? The twenty-first century is nowhere near as futuristic as we were led to believe it would be. Then again, we aren't all wearing form-fitting one-piece spacesuits as promised either, so that's a plus.

When I went to the second-hand book fair yesterday, I bought a book of poetry called The Fireside Book of David Hope, 1976. This features "a picture and a poem for every mood chosen by David Hope", whoever he is. I think he may be responsible for the the illustrations, which are all by the same uncredited hand and look similar to the ones from the 1979 version I remember as a child. The poems themselves are a mixed bag by various authors whom I suspect could be grouped together as a literary movement known as "Friends of David Hope". The book was published in London, and I imagine its raison d'être was that you could give it to someone for Christmas and they could see out the long winter by contemplating a different poem each evening. So let's do that now, shall we? Imagine yourself settling down into a cosy armchair - perhaps with a cup of cocoa and a slice of Christmas cake - in front of a burning log fire. Perhaps it's snowing out. You pick up your Fireside Book and read today's offering:

( Time for tea )

My favourite part of this terrible poem is that the speaker doesn't include him or herself as a monarch, celebrity or person. So what is the narrator - an animal? An alien? A teapot?

Today the alleged "gossip and humour" page of The Age finally came up with something that amuses me. Apparently one of the Valentine's Day personal notices in yesterday's paper featured the romantic line:

You are my density.

Who wouldn't want to hear that from their special someone? *

Still, it's not funnier than the Valentine's Day personal notice I saw in the local paper a couple of years ago, which went:

To my Blow-fly,
Thank-you for our lovely Maggots.
Be my Valentine.
Love,
Your Dead Sheep Carcass

Romance: not dead yet.



( * Cut to spare lovers of literature everywhere )