Poppalina

My inheritance

This Christmas, I started taking photos of some of the beautiful textiles in my grandmother's home. Then it occurred to me that I don't really have a record of her personal style. Photos taken in her various homes throughout her life have mainly been of people. That's important too, but one of the things I dearly love about my grandma is the way she puts objects together in a room.

The way she'll disguise the ugliness of a heater, for instance, by surrounding it with so many lovely things, you no longer even notice it's there.

I missed the opportunity to record her decorative style with the gorgeous house she and my grandpa had when I was growing up. I've missed it with the smaller house they moved to when the old place became too much to handle. I'm left with the tiny flat she lives in now that she's a widow and 91 years old.

But it still speaks so strongly of her and her unique aesthetic. I look at what she does, and I see love.

Eviction

 

 

And so it came to pass that, after recent verbal assurances that I could stay living in my house as long as I wished, and an enthusiastic go ahead to get chickens and really commit to living here...

I received a notice to vacate. Within 8 weeks.

Never trust a landlord. I really should have that tattooed on my forehead. Backwards, so I can read it clearly when I look in the mirror.

I sat in the no-longer-mine-but-still-beautiful chicken coop with my mental but much-loved brood and cried. For 3 days. Someone should have taken a photo. They could use it to put me away forever.

Then I dried my eyes and hit the streets.

Which precipitated still more crying. Honestly, the things people have the audacity to call homes. How do they fucking sleep at night? I get depressed at the thought of anyone living in these loveless, lightless, smelly little hovels with their pre-war wiring and their spakfilled doorlocks. To consider doing so myself causes me to hyperventilate with terror. And, for the dubious privilege of occupying said miserable deathtrap, you then hand over either your virginity or your first-born child, whichever you're still lucky enough to possess, as security.

 



 

That said, it's all slowly coming together. A house has been found and applied for, though I can't talk about it yet, as it's by no means finalised, and more nervous breakdowns may yet be forthcoming. But the ducks and chickens have been found a home even better than the one they have now, and for that my heartfelt gratitude goes out to my oldest friend in the world. We started school together, and she could whisper animals even then. I never did work out how she does it. It's just a mysterious gift she has. Those are some lucky birds, let me tell you.

The Kid has been a champion. She chose, unlike her mother, to be forward-thinking, excited and optimistic, and did a lot of patting of shoulders and making of tea, lest Mummy lose her vital bodily fluids from all that leaking. Only twice did she ask me to please stop crying and come out from the chicken coop because it was 3 in the morning and I was starting to freak her out.

So. Cross your fingers, your toes, your eyes, if it will help.

And I'll be back in a few days with either good news...

or a suicide note.

 

 

 

Editor's note: application successful. See you on the other side... xo

 

The Odd One Out

Those who say Sydney is a beautiful city aren't necessarily wrong. They just haven't seen most of it.

Sure there's gorgeous harbour and plenty of serious beauty, I grant you.

But then there's the suburbs.

They stretch on for ever, and they're really ordinary. The western suburbs of Sydney, where I live, contain row upon row, street upon street of variations on this house, the California Bungalow.

Not that it is so awful or anything. It's just that there's so many of them, all built over the first half of the 20th Century, and although they take on the style of each decade, they're all basically the same house.

There are four rooms, with a central hall, and what comes after that basically depends on when the back part was added on.

This one at least gets points for the seahorse balustrade.

Houses of this type are punctuated every so often by one of these monstrosities.

They're apparently what everyone aspires to, God knows why.

You can tell it's what everyone aspires to, because sometimes you see one of the older houses renovated to look like one of the new ones.

 

But walking the dog one day, I came across this.

I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. I just know that it made me laugh, but I also kind of admired it too.

It's so Italian Riviera, with a touch of Versace.

I just had to share it with you.

Studio pack up

As I stand in my studio wondering where to start, I curse, for the nth time in the last month, the zero tenure enjoyed by tenants in Australia.

Thanks to a landlord who wants to knock down this house and redevelop, we have to move. I'm self-employed, so the cost to me of no earnings for the next week is added to the truck hire, the disconnection/reconnection fees, the boxes, the mail redirection fees and all the other costs associated with moving house.

But possibly the most overwhelming part of all this is the task facing me: I have to dismantle, pack, move, unpack and re-mantle (?!) my entire studio. For the third time in four years.

I hate to get all complainy on you, but those industrial sewing machines are HEAVY!

Joys of Summer...er.. or something like that

The Summer harvest continues. Actually getting to eat your own produce makes all that shit-schlepping and all those blisters totally worthwhile. Not that I don't enjoy shit and blisters, you understand. I garden for the hell of it, but it's such a BLAST when it works and you get this beautiful stuff that tastes.....well, tastes of anything, really. (memo to me: get that chicken coop fenced, Shula, even if you have to sell your body to do it; then you could have EGGS that taste of something, too, imagine that?).

This season's Big Discovery is the Golden Nugget pumpkin. More a sort of punklette, really. I suppose they must be a pumpkin/squash hybrid, they're so little and cute. I can't tell you what they taste like because I can't bring myself to cut one open. Because then it would be gone.

So much for yogic non-attachment.

So.

Pumpkins currently featuring as an offering to the Elephant on the Altar (and yes, I do have an altar and elephants totally dig pumpkin, everybody knows that).

 

More baking. This dough proved so fast and so violently that it escaped from the fridge and was last seen heading north towards Yarrawonga, no doubt for the exceptionally cheap gin and tonics to be had there.

Disaster followed, the final result being that every bird in my garden is now lurching about like a drunken pirate, a direct consequence of having gorged itself half to death on two loaves of freshly baked.....concrete.

I have NO sympathy for any them.

 

 

Speaking of birds, a little one told me that my spinning wheel is returning home after a long sabbatical. I'm excited. I confess, I have been missing her lately. My fingers itch to spin again.

But first, I MUST finish this!

Violin recitals, doctors' surgeries, train stations, this baby has been getting around some.

  

 

Bread and Sunflowers and I Do Hope I'm Not Boring You

My New Boss's reputation as the Nicest Man in the World is no joke. He is just a love (don't read anything into that, Marj). My induction involved a Grand Tour of the nursery, and then out for lunch, where we discussed things of Great Importance over a salmon and cream cheese bagel (or kranskys with spuds, depending on whose plate you were attending). There's actually two bosses, and I'm having trouble deciding who is the nicer. They're both so bloody decent, it kind of freaks me out.

Tough gig.

Not.

Well, the job's actually pretty challenging, but nothing that a crash course in Microsoft Access won't fix.

Anybody?  sigh.... I didn't think so.

Meanwhile, the current fiscal crunch (I do wish someone would pay me between jobs, that would be good) has rekindled my interest in breadmaking.

Y'know, I really hate shitty bread. But excellent bread is so expensive that I was obliged to take matters into my own hands.

I'm a bit rusty. I so wanted it to look like Wild Yeast's bread. But it totally doesn't. It has that peanut on steroids thing going on.

It does, however, taste excellent, so I just ate it (all) with my eyes shut.

In Garden News, I scored just one perfect sunflower this season.

 

I'm absurdly happy about it. 

 

Living

I was home today, on a Monday, for the first time in a very long while.

I made my girl breakfast and a cut lunch for her first day back at school.

As I kissed her goodbye, we tried to recall the last time I was home to do this.

We couldn't.

After she left, I cleaned up, harvested some tomatoes and thyme, and then prepped them for a slow roast.

 

It doesn't matter that they take 4 hours to cook, because

I'm

not

going

anywhere.

A 2 hour yoga session and coffee in the garden later,

and I'm as content as it's possible to be.

 

This.

Is living.

Post #500

When cash-strapped, housebound and aimless,

  

a spot of Home Beautification can be Just the Thing.

Meanwhile, on the Domestic Front

Shushu, laid to waste with One of Her Heads for the best part of 3 days, rose like Lazarus today and soldiered on, if only because the prospect of periodically opening her eyes to the monotony of a bedroom ceiling, only to wince, curse the Universe and all that it manifests and then hotfoot it back to unconsciousness, was enough to bore her to death.

So.

The yoga room, while not entirely unscarred by recent events, is nonetheless clean, tidy and ready for action.

 

The floors throughout the house are -  for the next 5 minutes anyway - clean enough to eat from and

The studio is up, running and making me think - albeit vaguely - about crafting again. 

 

 

I owe this last one to Sandra. The way she and Bogi ripped through that studio renovation positively shamed me into action.

Hmmm... and here was I thinking I was on a Low Achievement Jag. Funny how the mind works; double vision can play tricks on your perception, making everything look twice as hard and only half as good.

In other news, the figs, while still as hard as bullets.....

 

are starting to smell.....

well....figgy.

 

Stay tuned, Fig Lovers. It's all going to happen very suddenly.

Memories.....annihilate the corners of my mind

Intense business, all this looking into the past.

In the last fortnight, I've been obliged to confront every last memory landmine that lurked in the dark recesses of what has proven to be an almost bottomless house.

Trust me when I say that each one packed a punch.

Good times, bad times. I've discovered that it makes no difference. All weigh equally heavily, and I appear to share with Gore Vidal a natural reluctance to relive any of it (turns out that his Palimpsest is an excellent companion at such a time, and I highly recommend it).

The things I've given away this week would make a grown man cry. Third generation heirlooms. Books inscribed for me by my mother. Fifty boxes that collectively represented the emotional remains of the love of my life; sorted, culled, tearfully repacked, and shipped out, never to be seen again.

To commemorate this somewhat gruelling week, I would like to share with you one of the happier memories; my best friend Sarah's wedding. My daughter (pictured here in the Baby of Honour matinee jacket that some of you might recognise), startled by post-ceremonial applause, has just finished Hitting the Note, only allowing herself to be distracted by the flowers just long enough for this photo to be snapped. The look of serenity on my face is, no doubt, actually one of sheer relief. That kid could turn your entire universe to white noise when she wanted to, and would, without the slightest hestitation.

 

Nostalgia has never been my forte. I distrust sentiment, seeing it as a perilous and slippery slope, the end of which will see me up late and drunk, singing loudly and tunelessly to the Clancy Brothers, as did my father on a regular basis.

That said, I would give a great deal to kiss those stroppy, fat little baby cheeks again.

And this photo, not surprisingly, will be coming with us.