Salt and corrosion

Heatwave and fires further north, but here in the City by the Sea we seem to be in our own little magic weather kingdom. Storms. Lashing rain and howling winds. All that jazz. My shutters blew open three times last night.

It stopped raining long enough this morning to go to the farmers' market to get bread. Later, a trip to the shopping centre - my mother's yoga class is re-starting next week, and she wanted a new blanket for the resting period (she had a blanket, but during lockdown Alistair has claimed it). I haven't been to the shopping centre in the middle of the day for months. So many people. So many noises. So many lights.

I'm watching The Holiday, the film in which Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swap homes for Christmas. It's mindless fun, but Kate has just boarded a plane and they're all packed in their seats and breathing on each other and I feel so anxious watching it. I can't really blame a fourteen-year-old film for not considering that people might watch it in a pandemic fourteen years later.

Hello, f-list. I hope you can hear me OVER THE RAIN. It is fairly bucketing down at the moment. I've just dragged our potted Christmas tree from under the patio where it lives all year to get a bit of rain before we bring it in and decorate it. I hope it doesn't get too wet.

This week: I ran into a friend who is a chef. He had just catered for the Christmas party of one of the City by the Sea's largest employers. "Fifty-two bottles of Pimms on the hottest day of the year," he said. "It was like taking a bath in sugar."

This morning: My mother and I went for our regular weekend walk along the beach front. "They're putting the summer carnival up early this year," my mother said as we approached the green. But it wasn't the summer carnival. It was some sort of emergency services fair. Fire brigade. Ambulance. Police. Coast Guard. SES (they do natural disaster assistance, including tsunamis, according to their website, which may be true if one ever happened here, but I don't think they get a lot of them). Rapid Relief Team, whom I have never heard of (they do mass emergency catering, it turns out). It was the safest place in the City by the Sea, although if you had an emergency anywhere else this morning, you were presumably out of luck.

Also this morning: Further along our walk, part of the Lake Pertobe Adventure Playground was fenced off. They were putting up a summer holiday attraction: thirty life-size dinosaurs. Replicas, I assume. I don't think they're building Jurassic Park next to the mini-golf. (Although if you hear news of a T-Rex running amok in southern Australia, that'll be us.) Anyway, we could see some sort of velociraptor-thing peeping out from the trees, so that was a different sort of wildlife spotting.

Later: A visit to Bunnings revealed knee-high cement garden ornaments in the shape of Star Wars characters: Darth Vader, a storm trooper, Han Solo, R2-D2. All the same size. I mean, one of those things is not the same size as the others, is it? But in cement garden ornament Star Wars, it is. In fact, R2-D2 is the biggest of them all, because once you bring him up to the same height as the others, he is proportionally wider. He could have crushed them all. What a different film that would have been.

Here is a thing: Melbourne has set up email address for its public trees, so people can email if they see a problem. Instead, people are emailing the trees. Just for a chat. Here is an article showing pictures of the trees with some of the emails they have received.

Do you remember last year, there was a poll in Britain to name a... I want to say a ship? Some sort of sea-going vessel, anyway, and they held a poll and Boaty McBoatface won? Only the powers that be were sensible and named it something else instead? Well, Sydney held a poll to name a new ferry and you'll never guess what won. And they're going to use it! Heaven help us. It's a stupid name to start with, but it's the unoriginality that really hurts, I think.

Also annoying: this article that is trying to make me believe that putting books spines in on a bookshelf is a "trend". No, it isn't. I mean, go crazy doing it if that's what you want. I won't judge you.* Just don't try to convince me that everyone's doing it.

I saw Murder on the Orient Express last night. I don't know about you, but when I think of Murder on the Orient Express, I think of glamorous people prancing about on a posh train, and, of course, the famous whodunit part. But when you get down to it, it's a downer of a story, and there's no way to make it upbeat. This version zips along at a cracking pace, not stopping to explain who everyone is. I suppose it actually replicates the experience of reading a Christie novel, in that it all looks very nice and seems very clever, but there's no great emotional attachment to anyone. Kenneth Branagh's Poirot is serviceable, but he's not as charming and kind as David Suchet. He does, however, get a lot of close ups with the light making him glow. Kenneth Branagh the director was very kind to Kenneth Branagh the actor. So... I mean, it's a night out.



* I probably would.

Hello, f-list. I am currently watching Anaconda. Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube are being terrorised in the Amazon by a giant rubber snake and Jon Voigt. It's a very silly film.

(The giant rubber snake just spat a dead monkey at someone.)

Anyway, I am home again. It's been a tiring week. As soon as I got home on Wednesday morning, I went into an afternoon of interviews for one of my replacements. Thursday was a day of meetings, followed by an evening at Jenny/NA's house.

(There was just an awesome, and by awesome I mean fake, underwater shot of the giant rubber snake (actually it was a giant bad CGI snake this time) digesting an Owen Wilson-shaped lump, including the impression of Owen Wilson's agonised face on the snake's side. Like Han Solo when he was in carbonite, but in a snake instead.)

Jenny loves a gathering, and she has been threatening to organise something for everyone in the office for ages. The stars aligned this week: my imminent departure, Jenny going on leave next week, a public holiday on Friday. I am not much of one for parties, but this was nice. Jenny bought a trivia game called Linkee specially for the occasion. It was fun, if you are looking for a group board game, and I am not just saying that because I joined with colleague Tim and receptionist Luke to wipe the floor with the other teams. Luke is 19 and does not know who Rod Stewart is, which made the rest of us feel very old.

(Words cannot do justice to what has just taken place. Jon Voigt trapped Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube and the giant rubber snake in a big net, and then the snake broke free and coiled around Jon Voigt, then we got a view from inside the snake's gullet as it swallowed Jon Voigt, then it chased Jennifer Lopez and spat out half-digested Jon Voigt at her, and half-digested Jon Voigt winked at her as he fell down dead. Then Ice Cube managed to set fire to the snake, and the burning snake chased Jennifer Lopez around the river for bit until Ice Cube killed it with an axe. That's what I call entertainment.)

Hello, f-list. I started the day 152m above sea level, and here I am now back at... sea level? I mean, I live on a hill, so it'd be a few metres up, I suppose. Anyway, I'm home.

I had a good road trip. No snow. There are some really lovely rocks on the Lancefield-Tooborac road should you ever be in the area. Lots of them. When we drove past in the afternoon there was a rainbow, right to the end. The end of a rainbow, about a metre off the ground in a paddock. For some reason I thought you could never see the end of rainbow. Or is it that you can't approach the end of a rainbow?

Coming in to Tooborac there is a sign on two boards. It says:

Visit Historic
Tooborac
BIRD BATHS!

The BIRD BATHS! part is on the second board and in a different font, so I'm not sure if they're meant to be read together or not. Either way, the BIRD BATHS! one is an odd thing to be excited about.

My boss said he'd seen a good film recently. An old one. A bit like Jane Eyre. Called A Tale of something. He rang his wife. "What was that show we saw the other day? With that woman and the farmer?" With skill honed over twenty years of marriage, she thought for a few seconds and said: ( Take your guess before you click ).

Did you guess it?

A conversation overheard this week:

Receptionist: I've got Heidi... Cellophane? On the phone for you.
Jenny/NewAngela: [pause] Sullivan?
Receptionist: Oh yes.

I'm glad we got that sorted out.

Tonight I watched the classic noir film Laura. It's a jolly good film, should you be looking for something to watch (Vincent Price as a Southern playboy socialite! No-one being the slightest bit upset that a loved one has been brutally murdered!). It stars Gene Tierney as Laura, but also stars, in a supporting role, Australian actress Dame Judith Anderson. She's probably best known now as Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (she must have liked appearing in films titled after girls' names). To me, though, she is remembered as the best page in the Great Australian Women sticker book I had as a wee daisy (a bud, if you will). The Great Australian Women sticker book also featured such luminaries as first woman in Federal Cabinet Dame Enid Lyons, tennis champion Evonne Goolagong and swimming performer Annette Kellerman, but Judith Anderson was the best. She was obviously on stage in heavy make-up, hands thrown out and head thrown back, wearing a black and metallic green kaftan and an enormously spiky tiara. She was like a live action Maleficent decades before Angelina Jolie. I have no idea what she was doing, but she was memorable.

(Now I think about it, I also had a series of children's biographies of famous women: Golda Meir, Grandma Moses, Dolly Parton, Mother Teresa and Winnie Mandela. My mother was obviously making a point.)

Shall I try my seven-day posting schedule this week? Yes, why not. Thursday might be an issue, because, like Wille Nelson, I am going to be on the road again, but let's see how we go.

As mentioned, I went to the Melbourne Craft Fair yesterday. Sadly, the ALP conference was held in a different part of the building to the craft fair, so the quilters were not mingling with the politicos. Boo. All I saw was a row of TV vans lined up.

(I am currently watching Pompeii, which could also be called Jon Snow versus the Volcano. I love a good volcano film. This is not a good volcano film. We haven't even seen the volcano yet, because the film had to start in Brittania so Jon Snow didn't have to pretend to be Italian.)

On the train on the way home, the woman sitting across the aisle from my mother kept looking over at her, before finally saying, "Excuse me, were you a midwife in 1978? I think you delivered my daughter." You would think that would be the only random meeting we would have, but on the platform another woman touched my arm and said, "I just want to say I really like your blue house." It turns out she lives on the same street and knows what I look like, even though I have never seen her before. ("She lives higher up the hill," said my mother. "She's probably up there spying down on everyone.")

The reason for the Craft Fair trip, apart from going to the Craft Fair, was that John's son agreed to stay with John to give my mother the weekend off. So my mother had two nights in town, which was nice. Alistair is used to her now, enough used to her to be picked up and played with, and he was even feeling brave enough to jump on her knee for about ten seconds before deciding to sit next to her instead.

(Jon Snow has just impressed a rich Italian lady with his ability to put down horses.)

I muted the TV when the phone rang earlier (which turned out to be someone wanting to talk to me about the state government's energy-saving light bulb program, which... is a good idea, but can you even buy non-energy-efficient light bulbs now? I don't think I could be non-energy-efficient even if I wanted to.) Anyway, I came back to find the TV showing a sketch of a man. He's got kind eyes, I thought, then un-muted the TV to find that I was looking at a police drawing of Al Capone. Oops.

(A horse has just been spooked by mysterious bubbling in a pond. What's causing that, hmmm?)

(Jon Snow's rich Italian lady friend is supposed to marry Senator Keifer Sutherland, who killed Jon Snow's parents and enslaved Jon Snow back in the day. What are the odds?)

(Jon Snow's name in this film is Milo, which is very funny because, to me, Milo is a malt-based milky drink. Jon Snow also has an African gladiator friend whose name is Atticus, which seems unfortunate given what I have heard about the recent Harper Lee novel.)

(One third of the way through the film and the damn volcano hasn't erupted yet. That's all I want, film. Lava, and lots of it.)

I think I went to the cinema once all last year, and now I've been twice in one week. What a mad, heady, whirlwind life I lead. Today I saw Kingsman: The Secret Service, which is tophole entertainment. I've just read a review that describes it as 'a bonkers update of a 60s spy caper', which pretty much sums it up. It is about an independent intelligence agency run by Michael Caine using a bespoke tailor as a front, from which agent Colin Firth is trying to stop Samuel L. Jackson from taking over the world with SIM cards. There's more happening than that, but, basically, if you enjoyed that sentence, you will probably enjoy the film. (One of the trailers before the film was for Fifty Shades of Grey, which, jiminy crickets, looks terrible, and not in a good way.)

Yesterday I went to an antiques and collectibles fair, running in conjunction with a bottle collecting festival. I had not realised quite how many bottles there were to collect. So many bottles. My favourites were the old patent medicine bottles for things like Horse Ointment. That's ointment FOR horses, you understand, not OF horses. It promised to sooth fever, cure glanders and fix pretty much anything else that might ail your horse. Back in the collectibles side of the fair, I splashed out two whole dollars on a ceramic bird whistle. That's a whistle shaped like a bird, not a whistle to lure a bird. It's a whistle, and then you fill it with water and the whistle turns to a chirp instead. So that's fun.

I also bought a book of vintage Patons hat patterns from the 1940s. Ten patterns in all, every last one of which is delightful.


Gretchen: Did I leave the gas on?

( Clam )

Didn't I have this title before? [checks] No, I read The Chieftain Without A Heart. But he also found love. That's where I got confused.

I am currently watching Arachnophobia. I had forgotten all about this film. I went to see it in the cinema when it first came out, way back in the dark ages. As I type, two spiders are in close-up, having a conference and drumming their front legs thoughtfully, like, hmmm, what shall we do now? Because that's how spiders operate. Never mind the spiders, though. Julian Sands is playing a world-famous spiderologist. He is dressed like Indiana Jones with Lucius Malfoy's hair. It is amazing.

Life is not particularly like a bowl of cherries chez Daisy just now. Not many cherries at all. You can always tell when things are going well for me, I find: that's when I find plenty of nonsense to witter on about. And then the glooms descend and I can't write anything. Anyway. I will try to buck myself up. What shall I say?

We had our Christmas lunch at work yesterday, even though we have one-and-a-half days to work next week. We did a Kris Kringle. I like to try and guess who gave what present. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about that. I drew our boss' name, which made it the easiest Kris Kringle gift I have ever had to buy. I am not sure if I have mentioned this before, but his horrible former boss is married to a man who is suspected of murdering his previous two wives. A journalist has written a true crime short story about this, which is only available as an e-book. 'How can I read that?' my boss asked me earlier in the year. I explained about iBooks on his iPad, or downloading the free Kindle app on whatever device he wanted, then whatever app he was using, he just buys the book and reads it to his heart's content. 'I'm not paying two dollars thirty-six for it!' he said, and went off the idea. So I bought the Kindle version and (shhh) removed the DRM so I could turn it into a Word document and print it out for him. It cost me $2.36 plus whatever it costs for toner, thirteen sheets of paper and a staple. That would be nowhere near our ten dollar limit, so I threw in a jar of bacon and onion jam from a batch I made last weekend. He seemed pleased with both. (He guessed they came from me.)

(Julian Sands is no longer dressed like Indiana Jones. He is now wearing a pale suit with a particularly wide-legged pant, which would seem like an ill-advised costume for someone hunting a rogue spider. Not that it mattered, as the spider jumped on his neck to bite him, that being far more dramatic than running up his trouser leg.)

I did well out of the Kris Kringle myself. I think my giver was the office manager, and she gave me a set of mugs:



I like owls, which she knows. What she couldn't know is that only last week, the fourth and final of my one set of matching mugs broke. So that was a timely gift.

The office manager is very sweet-natured. The gift she received was the most ghastly figurine you can imagine. It was about 30cm high, an extremely detailed hamster wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt and a sombrero, and playing a wooden guitar. Hideous. The office manager is so nice, she smiled and said what a lovely surprise, and actually sounded sincere. Then she opened the card and read the note inside, which said that her giver had ordered something nice but it hadn't arrived in time, so please accept this hamster as a placeholder. And the office manager, bless her, said, 'Oh my goodness, I get two presents!' (I believe Jane the Researcher to be behind this.)

(I have to say, top marks to the music score of Arachnophobia. It sounds very dramatic and thrilling. It is doing some very heavy lifting in this scene in which Jeff Daniels is trapped underneath a lightweight wooden wine rack, throwing bottles at a rubber spider half a room away.)

I sat next to New Angela, whom I cannot get used to calling Jenny in these pages. For all her many fine qualities, she is not a woman given to whimsy. Her Kris Kringle gift was a pop pop boat, which is a little tin boat that you stick a candle in to make it putt along in the bath. I thought it was cute, but she seemed slightly baffled. (I think she would have preferred some nice hand cream.) I can't quite decide which of our colleagues gave her that. Process of elimination from guessing who gave all the other presents suggests it was New Lady... yes, I can see that.

She told me she is getting bicycle for Christmas. 'I told Peter I wanted one,' she said, 'and he believed me.'

(Jeff Daniels is now engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the rubber spider. Now he is paralysed with fear while the rubber spider walks up his leg. Now he is flipping the spider off his leg and into a fire. Now he is screaming in terror while the now flaming spider runs at him. Now he is shooting the flaming spider with a nail gun. Man, this is a good film.)

Today I went to the cinema with my mother and her friend Jan to see Song for Marion. The cinema was about half-full, maybe a bit less, and I counted exactly one man. I was the youngest person in the room by some measure. So, yes, a film with appeal to the more mature lady. Vanessa Redgrave is terminally ill and helps her choir make it to the final of a competition before dying; her husband, Terence Stamp, is a choir-hating grump who, surprise!, can sing. How does it end, do you think? It was not bad for all that. There was not a dry eye in the house. I did have to laugh at one point, though. Before she dies, Vanessa tells Terence to make an effort to get along with their son, Christopher Eccleston, after she dies; Terence promises, but straight after the funeral, he tells Christopher that it would be better if they don't see each other again. There was a murmur of disapproval through the theatre when that happened, and the woman sitting in front of me actually gasped. Don't break promises to your dead wife, Terence! Mature ladies will be upset.

The Saturday paper has a samurai sudoku in it, that being five interlocking sudoku grids. The 8 June one was marked Easy, so I thought I'd have a go. I finally finished it today, and I'm ludicrously pleased with myself. Not that I've been working on it for eight days straight. Just a number here and a number there. I'm sort of tempted to start yesterday's Medium to find out how long that will take.

Also, I did a crossword (straight, not cryptic) that featured the clue 'pitchfork wielder'. I was thinking of a farmer, or maybe someone in a mob. No. It was 'devil'. Also, 'iris's place' was 'eye'. Do those clues seem odd to you? Weirdly stilted, perhaps.