When Darkness Falls

When Darkness Falls
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 23, 2014

It was the wind that startled me awake. A gust outside the window buffeted the hibiscus against the gutter. The screeching of wood on metal unsettled my ears. A branch thumped loudly and my heart joined in. I closed my eyes, chastised myself for being lily-livered, and tried to summon sleep. It was no use. I was spooked.

I swung warm feet onto cold floor and padded out to the kitchen, catching sight of the oven clock: 05.22. What now?

I put on my running gear and tiptoed out the door. The dark was thick and soupy. I couldn’t see where the slabs of footpath beetled over one another, eager to trip me. My street felt foreign and menacing. Was I stupid to run at this hour?

Only the house on the corner was aglow. At a desk behind a sash window, I could see a man in a dressing gown, outlined in cheery yellow lamplight. I felt briefly comforted, then turned into the next street and the gloom enveloped me anew. I strained my ears, hoping to hear the first kookaburras calling to each other from the salmon gums, but the wind had dropped. The air was still and silent.

My imagination goes into overdrive at night, especially when my husband is away. Eldest son keeps me company until 9pm, but at 11.30, I’m squirming in bed, sleepless and watchful. A floorboard creaks. Is someone in the house? That’ll be Freddy Krueger coming to fillet me with his razor gloves! (I’m sixteen again, living out my Nightmares on Elm Street).

In my first year at University, (back row, Pysch 101), Sigmund Freud taught me that my fear of the dark was maternal separation anxiety. (Or more likely, having the wimp gene). But lately, I’ve conducted a straw poll of girlfriends and all but one is still scared of the dark. We’re not frightened of the dark itself, but of the bogeymen who still inhabit our nocturnal minds.

My childish terror of lights-out began when mum and I moved in with my Nan when I was seven. It was my nightly torment to dash from back door to outdoor dunny. The brick thunderbox, roofed with an arch of corrugated iron, sat on a cold slab of concrete. The pedestal was white porcelain, with a chain flusher and a fat wooden seat.

On wintry evenings, I’d stand on the back veranda in my pj’s, hopping from one leg to the other to steel my nerves (and distract my bladder). The umbrella trees that loomed over the fishpond threw witchy fingers of shadow. When the wind gusted, those old crones grabbed at my ankles as I leapt off the veranda and tore across the damp grass. From porch to dunny was fifteen steps – fourteen after a run-up. I slammed the dunny door on the umbrella tree witches, only to have relief turn to shock as warm bum met chilly seat.

It was only ever a one-way terror. The return journey was a doddle as I aimed myself at the lit kitchen.

As a teenager, I was both electrified and petrified by horror movies. The bathtub scene in The Shining rattled me for days. One Friday night when we were 18, my girlfriends egged me into watching the late session of Aliens at Cinema City. I thought two bourbons and cokes would give me the requisite dutch courage. But even Sigourney Weaver couldn’t soothe my jitters. Half way through the movie, unable to bear the suspense, I fled the cinema. Sitting on the foyer steps, I waited for my friends, polishing off my popcorn and admiring the plush blood-red carpet under the reassuring neon brightness.

Thirty years later, I’m still a sissy. I can only watch re-runs of the X Files with all the lights on. Even then, I grip my husband’s hairy left thigh, screw shut my eyes and repeat “Is it over yet?” “Yup,” he says, and I open my eyes to confront the gory climax. “You rotten sod!” I poke him playfully where his tummy spills over his trousers.

My fear of fear is irrational but ingrained. Yesterday, I went out running again before dawn. Stretching my hamstrings on the corner, I looked up the street and saw a big bloke shambling towards me. I stuck close to the picket fences as he came closer. True to form, I ascribed Hannibal Lecter to his motives, Quasimodo to his gait.

‘Morning!’ the man said brightly as he passed. Feeling idiotic for my panic, I told myself to grow up. I watched him as he merged with the dark. And then he stopped. For an instant, I thought I saw him glance at me over his shoulder. I brimmed with fear. What’s he picking up? A big stick? Nah. It’s only his newspaper.

Racking up the years

Racking up the years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published Saturday February 23, 2013

My first bra came from Jayne Mansfield’s closet. At least it felt like it did. It was pale pink satin and doubled as a bullet-proof vest. The label said ‘Action’ bra but that was the last thing I was going to get in it. The hooks at the back were large enough to catch herring, there was not a skerrick of elastic for comfort and I needed to be Houdini to get in or out of it. Houdini, or a locksmith.

That bra came from the bottom of mum’s drawer of antiquity and I’m pretty sure the cups hadn’t seen breasts since 1953. But I was 13 and desperate. It was Thursday night, there was school on Friday and late night shopping hadn’t been invented. My breasts and I could not face another round of heckling from the leering boys who hung on the fence watching our school softball.

That afternoon, my bra-less dash round the bases clinched the game – but my breasts must have sailed over the home plate before I did, because those boys started cheering: ‘Hey yer headlights ‘r on! Yer blinding us with yer high beams!’

I was deflated. And humiliated. So that night, mum dug through her cupboard and unearthed her heirloom bra. I thought I was going to be swallowed in it, but if it kept my particulars under wraps, I was prepared to wear it. And so began a complicated relationship with my breasts.

For 30 years, I have re-played that bra-less home run as my Bo Derek moment. Me: nubile gazelle-woman, running in slow motion, nothing jiggling, just a gentle swaying up front, spectators mesmerised. That was until I took up jogging last year and the man of the house watched me stumble in through the gate: ‘Hey blossom, Dudley Moore would have been proud of that running style. Even sober.’

Having worn a bra since 1980, I’ve grown accustomed to constriction. (Breasts that don’t move are my objective now.) But women are never happy with what they’ve got. Breasts are always too small, too pointy, too cumbersome or just too big: those boobs so outspoken they take all the male attention off your face: ‘Hey soldier – eyes up and front!’

Why are men still fixated on breasts when half the population has them? And why are there so many names for them? In the 50’s there are photos of my mum in bras so pointy they could take your eye out: “Look at the lungs on that sheila!”. By the 60’s bosoms were ‘Bristol cities’ and winging it freestyle. In the 70’s,  ‘A Clockwork Orange’ called them ‘Groodies’ and then foxy mammas went disco: ‘Check out the rack on that chick!’ In 1982, Jane Fonda dressed her Pointer Sisters in lycra and aerobics took over the gym. By the time I was at school we were comparing ‘hooters’ and girls with ‘bodacious ta-ta’s’ were flaunting their assets every chance they got.   

Now I notice two types of women: those who dress for the breast and those who don’t – women are either offence or defence. Some breasts are so properly controlled they’re standoffish. Others aren’t shy enough – they’re in your face everywhere  – spilling out of the waitress’ uniform as she takes your order, or blindsiding you in the supermarket aisle.

I pity men confronted with a pair of barely contained breasts. Cleavage a woman can hide her keys in is like a car crash – no man can look away. I can’t either.

Fashionable women disguise their breasts in wonder-bras and push-ups, minimisers, firmers and separaters. Breasts can be made to look bigger, higher, friskier. It’s not until we get them home that they can really be themselves and relax. (Some relax better than others.)

The breast connoisseur I live with says bosoms quicken his pulse. That’s because until he’s allowed to unwrap them, he doesn’t know what he’s going to get: ‘I’ve never been disappointed. I’m just thrilled to see them in the wild at all.’

My breasts have served me well. They’ve done their hard work putting fat cheeks on three babies,they’ve not complained about getting up in the middle of the night or the endless dawn starts.

For that, breasts deserve some respect. Good manners dictate men don’t ogle women whose breasts are feeding babies. Or breasts that fall out of bathers while their owner gets dumped in the City Beach surf.

Maybe my breasts need to reclaim their charisma. Now I’ve finished with the business of procreation and my breasts can go back to being just for fun, I  have to juggle them into support mechanisms because they’re tired and can’t stay up late anymore.

Sometimes the sight of an impossibly pert pair of breasts makes me pine for those days when I didn’t realise how good mine were. Breasts start out in life as star-gazers and end up as path-finders, but all breasts get their quality time. I’m okay with what I’ve got. I think we’ve finally got the hang of each other.

Chewing the Fat

Chewing the Fat
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published February 2, 2013

A few weekends back a girlfriend and I were at the beach for our first swim of the summer. It was an overcast morning and the water looked dark. We were trying to stave off the inevitable shock of cold water by discussing our chances of getting eaten by a shark. She turned to me and said: “Any self-respecting shark would take one look at me and say: Geez, I’m not that hungry.”

A real friend doesn’t lie about her weight. A real friend understands that a woman’s weight can be central to her mood: thin = happy, not thin = grumpy. My bathroom scales are an electronic slab of nastiness hell-bent on destroying my morning.

A nutritionist once told me: ”Do not weigh yourself every day, it’s bad for your mental health.” But most mornings, I roll out of bed, skip to the loo and then step daintily onto my scales. It takes about three seconds for them to calculate how many squares of cooking chocolate I had the night before and deliver up the numbers that have me inwardly cursing (and outwardly cranky) for the next half hour.

If the figure is really offensive, I move the scales around the bathroom floor, hoping a second (or third) try will give me a more considerate read-out. Sometimes I hold onto the door frame and voila! I weigh the same as I did when I was 18. Self delusion makes me thin.

When I ring a girlfriend to say: “Good morning, I am a circus tent” she doesn’t reply: ‘Hey, I’ve lost three kilos and I’m back to what I weighed on my wedding day.” Instead she sympathises: ”I weigh the same as the day I gave birth to my third child.”

My Adonis does not realise that all nearly all women obsess about their weight, usually to their partner’s detriment. (The fatter we feel, the thinner our libido.)

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not so shallow that our weight is all we care about. We have discussed at length our disappointment that even the head of the CIA can’t have an affair without getting caught. We worry Julia Gillard was talked into becoming a redhead by her hairdresser boyfriend. And then we go back to our weight, because society demands that the female of our species should always be pert and thin. Any woman who has had children or is within fifteen years of menopause knows pert requires surgery and pert andthin is a pipe dream.

I have two lovely pals who meet with me every Friday morning. Our husbands think it’s a weekly discussion to exchange housekeeping tips, and how to serve up more marital happiness. But really those girlfriends come to my house to find out what the scales of injustice say. Having starved ourselves all morning for ‘weigh-in,’ the more sensible one of us records the offensive number of kilos in her diary. Then we put the bad news behind us and get down to the more important business of tea and cake.

I wouldn’t miss those Fridays for quids. They began five years ago when we decided one of us might need a weekly catch-up to help her endure the horrors of chemotherapy. (We didn’t need to weigh her to know she was thin.)

Since then there has been a wonderful survival story, one last baby, two husbands’ vasectomies, two new places to live, one new career and several sets of hateful scales. Cancer free and in perfect nick, the most disciplined of our threesome now sympathises with the two of us whose blasted weight has stayed more or less the same, always five kilos too many.

We still de-brief every Friday, except now we use ‘weigh-in’ as an excuse to check up on each other and restore some girly equilibrium.

What Friday weigh-ins are good for is motivation. The three of us come away hardened with steelier resolve to be Elle McPherson pure about what we eat. (Usually sabotaged by Troy Buswell self-control.) On occasion our iron will has lasted a whole week – the record is three months -but usually we’re texting each other by Friday night: “Do organic brownies count?” (Apparently, if they came from the health food shop, they have no calories.)

For me, trying to lose weight at this time of year is hopeless. And pointless. There are too many good things to eat. So I’m going to move those scales around the house until I find that elusive G-spot  – G for gravity. That’s the spot where a slight incline confuses the scale’s pea-sized brain into thinking I’m three kilos lighter. I have high hopes for that bit of the kitchen floor that dips as it merges with the pantry. If my plan fails, I’ll just use the stupid scales as a step-up to reach the top shelf. I’m sure that’s where I hid the last of the cooking chocolate.

Under the Covers

Under the Covers
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 26, 2013
Section: Opinion

I learnt more about men and sex in 1985 than I should have, thanks to a book called The Hite Report. It was a fat well-thumbed paperback, containing interviews with hundreds of blokes on everything from ‘What Men like Women to Wear’ to ‘How A Man Likes to be Seduced.’ Its pages were coffee stained at juicy junctions, underlined and exclamation marked, and I discovered a silverfish entombed near the spine in a chapter devoted to Men’s Fantasies. (‘Stop talking’ featured heavily in the advice to women.)

I used to hide out with a girlfriend in a deserted corner of the University library, sitting on the floor between the compactors. There we would pore over the book we re-named ‘the boy bible’ absorbing every carnal secret: “Surely they can’t want us to do that?” If we were startled by approaching footsteps, we would slam our bible shut and in fits of giggles, jam it back into the shelf. That book sustained us through an entire semester of Psychology 100. I can still faintly remember the sweet woody scent of its yellowing pages.

Twenty years later, with the mysteries of marital relations (mostly) solved, I’ve made several attempts to rediscover a copy of The Hite Report on the internet or in second hand bookshops, but it’s out of print. Part of me desperately wants to be shocked anew, feel the weight of a thousand men’s desires in my hands. Like all books, that one transcends time: it is the only graspable remnant of my 17-year-old self, hungry to learn the ways of the world.

Such is the power of the book: the cleverness of minds printed onto leaves of pulped wood and sewn to leather bindings. Or bound and glued to a paperback spine. If asked to name what things I would be most devastated to lose, my book collection would top the list.

My life is bookended by the assorted volumes of other people’s imaginations in print. It began with the Golden Books read to me as a toddler in the 1970’s, every one of them saved by Mum in her longings for grandchildren. My small daughter and I now read those slim little board-books with the same wonder. For me, the illustrations are instantly recognisable even after forty years of living have got in the way.

Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis soon followed. As a teenager, I discovered the great novels, and was carried away into the villages and slums of Thomas Hardy and Dickens, curled up in my single bed at home. At 35, newly divorced, I was overwhelmed reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, because I too felt alone and adrift, like the boy on the boat with the tiger. Books can exalt time and place, remind you where you were in life the week you read them.  Just last month, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed with the new Nigella cookbook and fantasise about the gluttonous pleasures of chestnut icecream, at the expense of the husband who gave her to me.

Stories of the death of the book are everywhere . But not once had I heard an argument that captures what it is about books I love most, until an elderly American author called Philip Zimbardo said simply: ‘It is something you hold, near to your heart.” Yes! My books too, are pressed into me.

I am drawn to bookshops – there is something soothing about browsing amongst the shelves, thumbing new books, fingering embossed covers and sharp cut edges. It’s the promise of quiet escape.

Try getting sensuous with a Kindle, or an iPad – please tell me it’s not the same? Friends, avid readers also, have emptied their houses of books, fed up with the clutter and dust. They tell me I won’t miss the clumsy mass of my books, that electronic readers are brilliant by design and just as satisfying. I don’t believe them.

Do I fear the extinction of the book? Not yet. But I fear for bookshops. I take heart knowing the internet hasn’t killed off television, that television didn’t wipe out radio, radio didn’t hurt newspapers.  Technology is changing how we read, how we buy books and store them, but I will never part with my leafy treasures.

I will, however, buy hard-to-find books on the internet, and order others on-line when they’re half the price. But some books need to be fancied and flirted with in person. A cook book, in particular, must be felt, studied, assessed for compatibility with the cook. If it still inspires after that first meeting in the shop, it can be bought and taken home in a stiff paper bag to be consumed with the same greedy thrill as a new lover.

I cannot imagine the day when I do not look upon a much desired book and want to hold it as a rare and marvellous thing. I will then carry it gently to the bath, where no Kindle dares to follow.

Doctor’s Orders

Doctor’s Orders
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 19, 2013

What is it about growing up in Perth that sticks to me like beach sand whipped up by the Freo doctor? Remembering mums and dads struggling to wrap wet kids in flapping towels. Brothers and sisters duck-diving under waves trying to stall their departure until someone shouts over the howling wind: “Icecreams for kids who help carry!” Everyone searching for their thongs.

Try explaining to someone who’s not a native: “Hey! I think the doctor’s in” – that bastard-saint of bluster and balm so familiar to Perth beach-goers. The sea breeze that’s welcome relief from yet another stinking hot day, but the killjoy that makes the beach so unpleasant everyone packs up and heads back to the baking car. As a kid, the bitumen was always so hot you had to stand on your towel until there was a break in the traffic. Back then, as we drove away from the sinking sun with all the windows open, I would take one last look back at the ocean, sun-dappled but choppy now. One last laugh at the seagulls being buffeted sideways as they swooped down to the fish and chip wrappers on the grass.

Thirty years later, these are the memories that hallmark an Australian childhood. We must tell our children how we tortured the Hills Hoist in the backyard, how it made terrible creaks and groans that brought Mum outside to tell us off. We, too, now have the buffalo lawn, and another generation of kids knows the sting of grass cuts from rolling around on it. Someone still gets sent inside to fetch the calamine lotion. And little ones still go to bed in shortie pyjamas with the fan on full bore, legs covered in pink calamine dots.

I want my children to know by instinct all these ways of being Australian. I want to hear them squealing  as they jump on the trampoline while Papa squirts them with the hose. I want them to know that the best thirst quencher is a slab of cold watermelon; that the hot plate needs a slosh of beer before you cook a dozen snags. I think back to all those backyard barbies where Uncle Hughie would send me inside for the tomato sauce (“Get the dead horse for me will ya Rosi-gal!”) I would sit by his elbow and marvel as he drowned his steak in it.

Killing flies was small-game hunting when Mum handed us the red plastic swatters she kept on top of the fridge. (Fly spray was expensive and only for special occasions.) Anyone who didn’t shut the flyscreen door got a peeved: “Were you born in a tent?!”

I’d spend Sunday afternoons on the swings at the park with a girlfriend from six houses up. Sometimes we’d vanish to the corner deli to play Pinball while we waited for Countdown to start. We’d blow our pocket money in an hour, but a dollar lasted for ages and Smarties were three for a cent.

I try to give my 12 year old son the same long leash –  let him skateboard round the streets and vanish ‘up the shops’ with a mate. I hope he’s sensible enough not to take for granted the freedoms  I give him, because I feel uneasy every time I let him out the door. At the same age, I was horsing around at the local pool for hours, only coming home when I was hungry.

I spent most Saturday afternoons unsupervised at the tennis club, racing my blue bike up and down the driveway, or hitting balls up against the clubhouse wall. The members’ last sets always seemed the longest – waiting around for the grown-ups to finish play because then we were allowed a packet of chips and a bottle of red creaming soda. With a paper straw. We didn’t get in the way of the adults socialising: we were part of a family, not the centre of attention.

All those sunburns, and heat rashes, and chafing from too much sand in our bathers – the small but vivid discomforts of an Australian summer.  How many times did I slather myself in baby oil and lie out in the backyard to summons the New Year’s tan? That night, I’d be soaking in a bath loaded with bicarb soda to take the sting out of red shoulders. My childrens’ peachy skins will be saved by sunscreen and long sleeved rashies. And the comfort of air-conditioning.

I have promised my children we will go to the beach every single day of these holidays. Their father thinks that’s way too much effort. But I have chosen to ignore the sand-pit in the car and the endless wet towels. Rather, the kids and I are now craving our daily dose of sea and salt. With each swim, a new generation of Aussies is laying down a patina of beachside memories. I hope these memories will be easily retrieved when in years to come, someone asks them: “So what was it like growing up in Perth?” Or better still: “Who’s this Freo Doctor?”

Tangling with a bad hair day

Tangling with a bad hair day
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Saturday January 12, 2013
Section: Opinion

A hair cut is not a trifling matter. This, men do not understand. To a man, a haircut is a way to kill fifteen minutes of a lunch hour. It involves no more mental taxation than reclining in a swivel chair arguing with a barber about Shane Warne’s discipline problem.

For women, a haircut is the fastest route to an identity crisis. Period. It can coincide with that too. I should know – I just had one – a haircut, and a freak-out. Some people will no longer recognize me because I’ve gone short – I had a whole 3 centimetres cut off. For me, a change is nowhere near as good as a holiday.

Men should also know that women have a fraught relationship with their hair because hair the only thing that can be changed at whim. And let’s face it, most women grow up wanting to change everything about themselves. Well at least I did.

I was seven when I began noticing Serena down the road had a shiny blonde ponytail like Barbie, while I had limping stick-brown plaits like a Holly Hobby doll.

My downward comparisons got worse as I became a teenager. I measured myself against other girls according to blondeness or cascading wavy-ness – and was always left lacking and dissatisfied. It was the start of an uncomfortable relationship with being female, of wasting a significant portion of my young life sizing myself up against some narrow measure of the perfect woman’s exterior.

I was in my 20’s by the time I realized my insecurities were simply character weaknesses, and I could fix those. I decided that my negative body image was unhealthy and perverse, and I would no longer indulge it (except during ‘that time of the month,’ when nothing is curable and there is no bright side.)

Women have a peculiar knack for self-loathing, something I’ve rarely seen in a man. Really, it’s a nauseatingly first world problem – I’m sure if we had to rifle through a rubbish tip to find dinner or wash our clothes on a rock by the river, we wouldn’t be giving two hoots about our hair. (We’d probably have sold it off to some merchant making fake hair extensions for the elaborately coiffed in Perth.)

Self-loathing is the flipside of self-obsession, two symptoms of that disease called vanity. Vanity must also be a side-effect of not having enough to do. I’m sure it’s nice to always look flawless – but those who aspire to perfection must find themselves slave to an entirely joyless process. After all, a bad hair day can ambush even the most military of beauty regimes.

I like to miss a few gym sessions and lose control at the smorgasbord because, well  – because I can. My friends won’t desert me and I like to imagine my husband will still think I’m a fox – he’s seen me thin(ish) and also 9-months pregnant, and hasn’t passed judgment on either. (Smart men never do.)

The cult of female beauty is ingrained at an early age. In high school, I must have frittered away days of my life wishing for longer legs and less curves, obsessing over my Roman nose and muscly calves. I couldn’t see anything but my faults. I was the sum total of a collection of ugly body parts.

Insecure as a teenager, I often mistook sexual harassment for compliments. Once, when the father of a girlfriend pinned me up against the wall of his shed after school, I felt flattered instead of repulsed. I look back on that day and still feel incredulous that my self esteem was then propped on such flimsy scaffolding.

I had the best of role models – a mum who was confident, positive, and motivated to keep fit and eat well – no closet psychoses there. I had female teachers I admired and respected, aunties and friends’ mothers I loved to bits who told me I was kind and intelligent, not pretty and thin. (I wished they’d said ‘funny’, because funny can compensate for all other shortfalls.)

I look back now and see I was much like every other girl, and every other girl was much like me: consumed with the glorified images of the impossibly glamorous models in our Dolly magazines. And yet as wives and mothers, when we’re trying to trying to stay sane juggling parenthood and working and caring for extended families, I find some women are still as competitive as ever. I don’t get it – are they forever desperate to outshine the sisterhood?  Is this relentless pursuit of perfection some misguided attempt at one-upmanship? What the blazes for? I can only surmise that there are women who need to feel envied to feel good about themselves.  In my imperfect world, that looks to me like low self-esteem. Can’t we all just admire each other?

I’ve decided the best test of a woman’s vanity is a hideous haircut – the kind of haircut that you can see is a disaster even before they’ve finished drying it.  I can recall the taste of rising panic as it dawned on me that the he-she with the scissors did his apprenticeship as a butcher, not as a hair ‘artiste.’ There I sat – (under that black plastic shroud that’s always too tight around your neck) – struck mute by the dawning realization that for the next three months, my new do would be the new don’t. And when he’d finished his masterpiece, and I was looking as inviting as a soup sandwich, I got up and grinned stupidly: “Thank you so much – no, no – really, I love it,” handed over $150 and sobbed all the way home in the car.’ People who are vain are also smart enough to cause a scene belittling the hair-man so that at least they get a free disaster, and scare off all the other clients.

I have an impeccably stylish friend who claims hair, skin, weight and clothes, in that order, betray a woman’s age. Oh dear, so boring hair now makes you look decrepit too? I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with stylers, straighteners and hot tongs. Those blasted appliances take up fifteen minutes of my sixteen minute daily beauty regime. After all, it’s just hair, it’s not even alive, but it’s the most demanding thing I own. And I expect it will be until I’m the owner of a perm and a blue rinse. At least then I’ll take comfort in knowing the one upside to death will be never having to think about my hair.

Mutton dressed as man

Mutton dressed as man
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday January 5, 2013
Section: Opinion

My husband is so fashion forward he thinks he’s the new black. Apparently, the new black is a portly but cute middle-aged father of three with Henry Kissinger glasses decked out in an electric yellow Polo shirt and cargo shorts with a hammer holder.

He’s not alone – I know other charismatic men of a certain age who dress smartly at the office, but who throw caution to the wind at weekends and go out in public looking like a one man sailing regatta – all stripes and baggywrinkled Bermudas –  convinced they’re the ship’s biscuit.

Or there’s the dad I know who favours an oversized mustard-coloured Rugby shirt he calls ‘Golden Boy’ because it protects against every combination of chocolate, coffee and clumsiness. If you’re a stylish woman blessed with a fashion plate husband of your own, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Mine is more a fashion platter, an XL hunk of man who only sets foot in a clothing shop twice a year during the David Jones sales. It must have been there last summer, in the men’s department, that some pretty shop assistant managed to offload some unsaleable stock by telling him: “No, no sir, you’re one of the lucky ones – your ginger hair goes with everything .” (And canary yellow was everywhere in Kazakhstan this season.)

At weekends my Beau Brummel gets around in a kaleidoscope of loud boardies and even louder shirts. The new ones are so bright they hurt my eyes. The hot pink Polo is his pet right now, closely followed by the purple one with the chlorine stains down the front. His favourite shorts are printed with a rainbow of small elephants. Friends and family never tire of taking the mick: “Hey mate, when does the circus leave town?” but he refuses to take the bait. I fear he has become what the rag trade calls ‘the technicolor middle-aged.’

Don’t get me wrong, there’s not an ounce of vanity living in this man. He is no ageing peacock, he couldn’t care less what he looks like (obviously) nor does he give a hoot what people think. Clothes do not maketh my man, they are simply for hiding his nakedness.

I have given up trying to change him, or his clothes. I’ve got enough to worry about keeping my own fashion sense in check. But I bet on Saturday nights as babysitters arrive at their destinations all over town, there are wives saying to husbands: “You’re not wearing that are you?” All those tiffs that start with: “I’m not going out with you dressed like that!” Exasperated men trying to defend why they’re wearing their own ‘Golden Boy’ as the perfect camouflage for beer drips and gravy spills: “Hey, I chose this to save you some washing – I’ll get three wears out of this before anyone notices it’s dirty.” Uncle Tony says he’s learnt to save time (and marital grief) by saying: “Okay Marg – you choose what I should wear.”

I pity all those blokes being asked: “Does this dress make me look thinner or fatter?” Every woman knows this is a minefield across which no man has traversed successfully. I can see the look on my husband’s face as his brain registers a no-win situation. He’s only been waiting for me for twenty minutes while I agonise over what to wear. And yet my last act of wardrobe desperation is to ask a man who’s wearing a shirt with umbrellas all over it whether my outfit is flattering?

Those of you who think I’m being cruel should remember that I met this man when he was sporting a pair of Dunlop Volleys. I fell in love with him anyway. Since then I have had to attend all manner of social occasions on the arm of a man who thinks dressing up is wearing a cardigan.

Last Father’s Day I spotted an old man’s cardie in a shop selling Fair Isle jumpers  and other grandfatherly  attire and knew right away he would be beside himself: shawl collar, cable knit, covered buttons, deep pockets, I can’t remember if it had elbow pads but I bought it anyway. As a joke. I’ve had to put up with him going out in it every chance he gets with all the buttons done up. When the weather’s changeable he teams it with the elephant shorts.

On occasion, my fashion smorgasbord has been clairvoyant. He came home from a business trip to Spain some years ago sporting a pair of vibrant orange sneakers: “Mark my words, I’m way ahead of my time.” He wore them until they were in tatters, and basked in the smirks from strangers. Now neon runners are everywhere, and he likes to remind me:  “Orange is the new Matt.”

Having just moved house, I valiantly tried to cull his wardrobe. I had hopes of ushering some of the faded, torn or hopelessly stained specimens towards the Good Samaritan bin, but was intercepted with a furious: “Move away from the cupboard.” I made a futile attempt to argue the merits of spring cleaning but then gave up, defeated. In the end, it would be less trouble if the offending articles came with us. (Even the homeless have fashion standards.)

I have come to the conclusion that men, as they get older, realise that how they look has less and less to do with the quality of woman they attract. Partnered and 40, they stop trying to impress women by looking slick and cool because they’ve landed the one they want. So Monsieur begins dressing for comfort, sometimes in ways other blokes find amusing. He knows it isn’t pretty but hey – he’s still gets lots of sex from a woman who inexplicably still likes him.

No man ever calls himself a metro-sexual but they’re out there, being lampooned by my husband and his mates. Apparently, those young blokes who’ve converted to man-scaping their bodies with tattoos and shaved chests and skin tight jeans are letting the team down. In the name of research, I asked my James Bond some apparel questions as he was spread-eagled on the sofa watching Goldfinger. He was in smart casual: a favourite stained shirt with a pair of footy shorts last worn during the legendary  University Football Club A-colts 1985 grand final. “Would you wear skinny trousers?” “Only if I was man-orexic. “  ”How about a man-purse?”  “Yes, if you were Pussy Galore and I was armed with a Walther PPK.”

Perhaps men’s fashion should be left to those who understand it. According to Oscar Schoffler, the  longtime fashion editor of Esquire: “Never underestimate the power of what you wear. After all, there’s just a small bit of yourself sticking out at the collar and cuff.”What about the not so small bit of my man sticking out between the shirt and the shorts? His response from the sofa: “That’s the fuel tank for a sex machine.” (The bad jokes are never-ending in our house.)

I console myself that his self-esteem is rock solid. While I dress to conceal the naked truth I see in the mirror each morning, he likes to put it about in low-slung Levis and shrunken t-shirts. He still thinks I am living with a God.

So for any husbands out there wondering what piece of apparel they should make space for in the domestic wardrobe next season, my husband says the gent’s waistcoat is going to make a comeback. In grey woollen flannel a la Sean Connery in Thunderball. I can’t wait to see if he’s right. Or how it’s going to look with a cardigan.

Success comes after a fall

Success comes after a fall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday, December 29, 2012
Section: Opinion

Failure is not my friend, but I’ve got used to its company over the years.  It has been shadowing me at a quiet distance since I was a kid, biding its time until I tripped up or blundered, then gleefully trumpeting my wrong turns and dead-end decisions. Failure has made a fool of me on plenty of occasions and brought me to my knees on others.

Most people like to measure themselves by their successes, but it’s their failings that are far more illuminating. I like to look back on mine as faint imprints on the stepping stones I’ve used to go places. They signal turning points in my life – those humiliating times when I made an ass of myself, or was blind-sided by hubris. Minor defeats were annoying reminders of why I needed to try harder, or get smarter. In truth, my career began with a succession of failures.

It took me years to get into journalism in the 80’s, long before there was a university degree of the same name to carry under my arm to job interviews. Back then knocking on doors was an acceptable entry route, but few bosses saw any potential in me. I was too naïve, too unsure of myself. I don’t really know what I ‘wasn’t,’ I was just wet behind the ears, I suppose. I never thought to trade favours on my father’s newspaper pedigree – that would have involved the shame of having to explain why I didn’t know my absent dad, so a career in print was not an option.

Instead, I got part-time jobs writing the funnies for breakfast radio and being the ditzy barrel girl (scatterbrained required no acting at 20) until finally, the news editor got fed up being harassed on the way to the loo and let me join the newsroom. I loved the business of writing hourly bulletins on the run,  dashing from the printer to the tiny sound-proofed booth to read the news, chasing tip-offs and ambulances, but it was telling stories with moving pictures that I really hankered after.

Trying to make the transition from radio to television meant getting rejected in newer and more painful ways. I spent a year working for peanuts, making cups of tea, doing the photocopying. News directors would sigh and give me another weary: “Nah, nothin’ going.” Or better still: “Come back when someone else has given you a crack.” Every knockback throbbed for a few days until I resolved to test my bruised ego again, each time that little bit more desperate to get noticed. When the ABC finally took a punt on me, I was 23, and tenacity had become my middle name.

TV is a fickle business – if you’re in front of the camera you live and die at the whim of executives who decide if you’re watchable. (Whatever that means.) Management faces change as often as rating seasons and those new to the job of hiring and firing like to make their mark by axing programmes, boning has-beens or elevating no-ones into some-ones. It’s a cruel business for wannabes and also-rans, but a favourite Chief of Staff once told me: “You haven’t made it in television until you’ve been sacked at least once.”

Once was all it took – age 31 – I was fired from my hosting job three weeks after having my first baby. No-one ever said why, but getting shafted on maternity leave meant hiring lawyers and going into battle, if only to preserve what shreds remained of my dignity. There was an out of court cash settlement, but psychologically, I was devastated (post-natal and devastated.) It was a terrible start to motherhood.

That sacking taught me how ruthless and disloyal people could be, and the identity crisis that followed floored me with self-doubts. I found out who my real friends were, and who was dining out on my misfortune. But I learnt why the greatest weakness is in giving up. I sat at home for six months adoring my new baby and acknowledged my shortcomings. Rock bottom isn’t a bad place to be when you realise there’s nowhere lower to go. The thing I feared most had happened to me, but I had survived my fall from grace and discovered strengths I didn’t know I had. So I dusted myself off and spent the next 12 years on other programmes, taking on tougher roles than I ever imagined myself capable.

I know my children need to taste failure sooner or later, the eldest one especially. But that’s a politically incorrect thing to say when many parents today prefer to clear the obstacles in their children’s path. I see it in my own parenting sometimes, that tendency to want to spare my children the pain of failure. And I remind myself to step back and let them fall.

Maybe it’s persistence I need to teach my children. I see them wanting to give up at the first sign of struggle, or trying to bow out as soon as they realize they’re not a natural at something new. I wonder if failure is often about arrogance too, because the smart set like to imagine that hard work and doggedness are for upstarts who aren’t gifted by birth. Show ponies expect to wake up one day and be an overnight success. (Actually, they’ve got it half right, because invariably, they will wake up.)

I checked with my bloke about his failures: “Haven’t had any.”

“Don’t be silly, what about failed relationships?”

“Haven’t had any.” (Perhaps self-delusion can be as rewarding as conceit.)

Stupidly, I pressed him further: “Well, what have my failures been?” That got him going: “Failure to get the message, failure to do what you’re told.”

Society now considers failure as some sort of deficiency. “Failure is not an option” is the new mantra for mavericks and up-and-comings. I subscribe to JK Rowling’s thoughts on defeat, as she reflected on a time when her marriage was over and her wizard Harry Potter had been rejected by a dozen publishers: “It’s impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

I don’t know many people who readily accept that the breakdown of their marriage was a failure of their own making – it’s usually the wicked spouse who’s blamed. That’s the escape clause we use so often to excuse our failures:  watering down the facts and re-telling our histories gets us off the hook – and offloads the burden of responsibility.

Agreeing to write this column was my biggest risk in several years: not least because it’d be my first foray into newspapers. The editor told me: “Your brief is to write of an ordinary life at home.” I set out to write a column from a woman’s perspective that a man would want to read. I worried that you would think less of me the more I wrote, that your dismissal would be like a rejection of my take on life: an awful prospect. But whether you desert me next week, or stick by me with your lovely emails and encouragement, I will keep trying to be fearless and honest. I may later regret some of the things I’ve written, but at least the regretter will be an older and wiser version of myself. I’m a veteran of failure, but I’ll take a risk on your tolerance.