Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 15, 2014

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

“Do you need a hand?”

“I can’t find the icecream.”

“Oh, that’s on the other side. I can never find it either.” She brightened and nodded when I said “I’ll show you where it is, shall I?”

Cupping her elbow, I gently steered her round the corner, stopping beside the icecream cabinet. She looked relieved.

I’d always had a soft spot for Auntie G because she’d produced my favourite girl cousin, Elizabeth, who was 36 days younger than me.

Sleeping over at Lizzie’s house, I found the noise of her riotous family overwhelming. As an only child, I was secretly thrilled (and occasionally terrified) to witness Auntie G berating her disobedient tribe.

Their house had a backyard swimming pool, a glamorous addition to any 1970s childhood. On a summer afternoon, we kids played Marco Polo and Pool Ponies and practiced our underwater handstands until our fingertips puckered and the soles of our feet pruned. Auntie G leant over the balcony and dropped down a couple of fraying towels. We lay on them, tummies down, dry-roasting on the hot bricks. She’d send out a plate of her coconut macaroons, left over from a dinner party the night before.

Now, aged 78, my Aunty G has dementia. She’s newly diagnosed and still in denial. Her family struggles to manage her decline. She defends her memory lapses with angry outbursts, slipping into the personality of someone else. But Auntie G is not yet in need of care. The good days still outnumber the bad.

Two years ago, I came across Auntie G in the centre of a busy road in West Leederville. She’d abandoned her cream Camry in the middle of an intersection and was standing aimlessly beside it. Drivers were dog-legging around her, windows wound down to sticky-beak at this surburban oddity. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Oh! Thank goodness you found me!” she said anxiously. “I can’t seem to find Lizzie’s house.”

“You can see it from here,” I said, pointing back down the hill. I wondered how my aunt could have driven past it.

She thanked me and climbed back into her car, swung it around and coasted down the hill. I watched her park outside her daughter’s house. I drove home feeling alarmed.

It was not my first glimpse into mental frailty. My uncle Don, Mum’s only sibling, succumbed to dementia after a career as a concert pianist, academic and mathematician.

The tragedy of his retirement was the swift unravelling of his mind. First he lost the ability to pick left from right, distinguish between cup and kettle and recognise a dollar coin in his wallet. Then it erased his encyclopaedic memory of Schubert sonatas and Brahms concertos until he could no longer play two- finger Chopsticks or sing along to Three Blind Mice.

To watch him, at 76, regress to a childlike state was frightening, but there were lovely moments. His disease bonded him to my two youngest children. He never tired of their knock-knock jokes, cackling at their made-up punchlines. He gleefully joined in their games of hide and seek, bolting for the same empty wardrobe every time. Like them, he startled at loud noises and needed help cutting up his dinner.

The end came quickly and cruelly, four months after a traumatic move into a nursing home.

On occasion, I contemplate my own future. What if my genes, too, are predisposed to intellectual decay? I remind myself it’s normal to be constantly searching for your specs. As I stand in the laundry (what was it I came in here for?) I feel uneasy. Is this how it starts? The foggy brain? Conversations that falter as I try to force an elusive word to crystallise in my mind. The embarrassing pause as I yet again forget the new soccer coach’s name.

Last Monday, as I dashed around the supermarket, I spotted Auntie G again. She was filling a paper bag with potatoes. She waved at me across the fruit crates. “The mangos look nice!” she called. I bought two on her say-so.

Tasty Treasures

Tasty Treasures
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 14, 2014

I lifted the metal lid of our circa-1958 shamrock-green letterbox. Small daughter handed me with a wodge of envelopes, clamped with a fat elastic band. “Bills!” I groaned.

Four-year-old was now scrabbling behind the rickety mailbox post. “Something fell out!” she shouted and flapped her discovery above her head.

It was a postcard. A striking botanical drawing stood out against an inky background. It pictured the life cycle of a sunflower, drawn in exquisite detail in every incarnation, from bud to bloom to seed.

I turned over the postcard and immediately recognised the handwriting – straight-limbed but slanting slightly backwards. The text was a recipe from a friend in her 70’s, a magnificent cook. She appreciates my weakness for chocolate and our shared love of baking. So she’d sent me a copy of her latest triumph – a delectable chocolate cake using sour cherries, ground almonds and rum.

I was touched. Some of my most treasured recipes were originally hers. Over the years, she has transcribed them onto handsome stationary, adding tips and tricks she thinks will help me, her less-seasoned protégé.

To make her famous cumquat chutney, I begin roaming the neighbourhood in May for trees festooned with fruit. I beg stripping rights from owners, then lug my golden cargo home. I’ll spend an hour chopping the bitter fruit, extracting pesky seeds. By kilo’s end, my fingertips are pruned and the juice is biting into the quicks of my nails.

My friend’s recipes are reminders of raucous dinners at her place in the 90s. Her table was always laden: slabs of salmon and rollmops washed down with schnapps, curries made from scratch, ripe cheeses and her renowned chilli jam. Her family’s prized dishes have become firm favourites amongst mine.

I’ve been collecting my trove of recipes since I was a teenager. The recipe for Mum’s signature dish, Pineapple Chicken, sits atop a bulging file in the top drawer of my desk. Still rich with evidence of its original owner, Mum’s handwritten page is dog-eared and spotted with greasy thumb-marks. But it’s not the recipe I covet, rather the remarks that live in the margins. “MUCH POSHER THAN APRICOT CHICKEN,” Mum has written in capitals, then underlined it, in case anyone should doubt her.

From her notes, I can track her attempts to combine fruit with fowl. They date back to the 80s, when her kitchen had glazed orange tiles and a clinkerbrick pantry. She has scribbled on the recipe in red biro: “1st time – used fresh pineapple – try tinned.”

“2nd time: Golden Circle Pineapple Rings work best. Check for rust.”

“3rd Time: Delicious served with rice and frozen peas.”

As a child, I anointed Mum’s Pineapple Chicken (and defrosted peas) the birthday dinner of choice.

My grandmother’s surviving recipes are frustratingly terse. Her buttermilk scones require ‘enough flour to make a soft dough’ and should be baked ‘until done.’ She needed only the bare basics to jog her memory. Her cooking was instinctive, a repertoire of corned beef and baked custards learned at her mother’s elbow in the 1920s, recipes she mentally fine-tuned each time she made them.

I have no such confidence in my productions. I like my baking instructions precise and foolproof. On a whim, I might vary the ingredients, but that’s when the dish flunks. I blame my catastrophes on the recipe. “Hopeless!” I’ll scrawl across the page, having wasted six eggs and a pat of Danish butter on a rubbery sunken sponge.

I still remember the first cookbook I fell in love with. I was 28. The Sydney restaurant critic Terry Durack had written a rhapsody to food. (On the cover was a woman wearing nothing but a skirt strung with garfish.)

I took Terry to bed every night for a week. “It was the slippery, silky, mother’s nightie feel of it that got me at first, a reassuring and arousing smoothness of impossibly luxurious proportions.” That’s how he described the taste of his first smoked oyster. I went to the fish shop, hoping I, too, would be overcome with mother’s nightie raptures. Sadly, my first smoked oyster tasted like an old slipper, plus grit.

Recipes are rich histories for swapping between friends and passing between generations. The internet has made recipe-sharing a furtive pleasure. I can waste an hour browsing through litanies of slow-cooked beef cheeks and self-saucing puddings when I’m uninspired by a kilo of mince and a limp head of broccoli.

But my laptop’s cold, plastic interface is no match for Mum’s butter-stained school recipe cards, relics from compulsory domestic science. Sometimes I’ll flick through the cards and marvel at how unappetising 1950s food now seems. (Rock cakes feature heavily). Other times, I just want to see Mum’s girlish handwriting, alive on every page. Satisfied, I’ll put the cards back in the drawer, reach for the can opener and make a start on tonight’s Pineapple Chicken.

Family Territory

Family Territory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 26, 2013

Sometimes, a two hour drive is all it takes to turn humdrum to holiday.

“How about a romantic weekend away?” my Lothario whispers across his pillow, our love life handicapped by the three-year-old octopus suckered between us.

“Just a couple of days hey?” he murmurs. “Somewhere exotic. By the beach.  Away from all this.”

I could have kissed him. Instead, my arm is paralysed by the dead weight of a sleeping child’s leg-tentacle flopped across my chest.

“Promise?” I whisper back.

“No” comes the reply, “but the weekend after next I have to go to my high school reunion in Bunbury. I’ve booked us all into the Lord Forrest hotel.”

Those who remember Alan Bond will recall his gift to Bunbury: a five storey shiny white high-rise with a single porthole window skewered through its pointy apex.  Driving into town last weekend, Bondy’s tower loomed over the back beach like the snout of a white pointer. Its dark porthole eye followed me all the way to the hotel carpark.

“It doesn’t look like a shark, dopey!”  says my husband. “It’s supposed to look like the prow of a ship!”

“Well I say it’s a shark!” (much like its owner in 1983).   

So here I am at the Lord Forrest, sitting on a plastic patio chair by the side of the once-famous atrium pool, staring up at the hanging gardens of Bunbury (devil’s ivy).

“Mum!” cries my 6 year old. “There’s a bridge! And pretend rocks! And a waterfall! And look! You can see through the roof!”

Outside the rain is sheeting down, but my children are intoxicated by their first taste of three-and-a-half star luxury. Small son plays hopscotch on the crazy paving, mindful not to step on the cracks. Then he discovers a blue button in the wall and leaps in fright when the spa gurgles to life. His sister flaps her inflatable orange arms and paddles over to the pretend-rock steps for a closer look.

The pool gate swings open and in walks a portly bloke in baggy shorts, flanked by two primary-school-aged granddaughters.

The girls leap into the water and the granddad settles himself at the only poolside table – mine.

“Nice day for swimming!” he says and we laugh politely.

I can see through the lobby windows a row of date palms flailing in the squall outside.  

“Frank!” he says, by way of introduction, and pumps my hand. “Travelled far?”

“Just from Perth. It’s my husband’s 30-year school reunion tonight. He’s up in the room deciding which side to part his hair.”

“Ha!” he snorts. “We’re holidaying close to home this time. My wife has a sore hip. We’re doing the wineries, sixteen of us.”

“Sixteen?” I say, thinking he must be on a tour.

“Yeah, the whole family. We do all our holidays together – two daughters, their husbands, my son, his wife, the grandkids – 11 of them.”

I must look incredulous because he adds: “Yep, we’re the Griswald clan. We travel in convoy. We need five cars – the eldest grandkid is 19 and they tail down to three.”

“Wow!” is all I can manage.

“Yeah, we’ve seen the world all right. Last year we went on a cruise through the Caribbean, we did Greece and Turkey before that. We’ve gone from one side of America to the other. Sometimes we take up four rows on the plane.”

“Why?” (I feel a hermit by comparison). “Doesn’t everyone want to do their own thing?”

“Sometimes. But this way, the kids learn how to be part of a tribe. We learn about them. I can tell you, that one there…” – he points to the elder girl in the pool – “she’s only nine but she’ll do anything for anyone. Her cousin, she’s six -smart as a whip. Best speller in her class.”

I see the pride on his face. He shrugs at me and grins, as if all families are like his.

I try to picture my family, en masse, checking in at Air Bulgaria. All those niggling, squawking personalities trying to control proceedings: dominators, peace-makers, martyrs. Didacts, autocrats, me –  dreaming of an upgrade.

“Is it relaxing?” I ask.

“Most of the time. Neutral territory helps. We use these holidays to catch up on everyone. I want to know what the young ones are thinking, how they see the world. In return, we tell the grandkids all the old family stories – remind them how they got here.”

I wonder if I tell my children enough about their past. Do they understand the world had its own momentum before they arrived? That they belong to something bigger than themselves?

Frank’s grand-daughters have climbed out of the pool and are shivering. He stands up and hands them each a towel.

“What’ll we do now, Granddad?”

“Let’s go and see what the others are up to!” He winks at me, then raises his hand in a gentlemanly salute: “You can never separate who you are from where you’re from.”

And with that, the pool gate clangs shut behind them.

Our Family Tree

Our Family Tree
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 2, 2013

How wonderful to find a fig tree growing wild, the tips of its branches sagging under the weight of dozens of fat purple figs.

Sixty-six years ago my mum discovered a giant fig tree jutting out from the banks of the Swan River. To reach its uppermost branches where the ripest figs were sunning themselves, she would climb barefoot up the rocky cliff and shimmy out along the sturdiest branches. She could only pick as many as she could hold in one hand without falling off her perch. And there she would sit, scarlet juice running down her chin while her brother shouted up from the beach: ‘Drop some down to me Sis! C’mon! It’s not fair!’  (A fear of heights and pianist’s hands meant climbing trees was not his forte.)

My mum likes to think of that particular tree as ‘hers’. It has stood beside three generations of her family, tolerating the multi-million dollar mansions that have sprung up around it. No-one has dared fire up a chainsaw despite that tree hogging the best of waterfront views. Every year my mother makes a pilgrimage, green bucket in hand, to ‘her’ tree. She won’t tell fig-loving friends where it is, and her secrecy has become a running joke: ‘Hey Joanie, have you put the coordinates of that tree in your will yet?’ Most years her clandestine operation is sabotaged, not by informers, but by the dozens of Ringneck parrots that get a toe-hold in the canopy before she does and gorge themselves on the best fruit.

My mother’s lust for wild figs is as curious as her unorthodox manner of eating them. She tears the fig in half and mashes the two pieces together until the red flesh spills over the skin and she eats the resulting mess in raptures. (I don’t understand why either.)  

Every summer I look forward to the day mum calls to say: ‘Time we went down to my tree’, and the kids and I pile into the car: ‘Fig-hunt!’

Expeditions to that secluded bend in the river have become a rite of passage in our family. Members are allocated their responsibilities according to sprightliness and fervour. The little ones are the ‘fig spotters’, the more agile are ‘climbers’ and those who’d rather man the bucket are ‘catchers.’

My normally rebellious 12-year-old revels in the best climbing adventure of the year. He yells down through the branches: ‘Hey Nan, there are loads up here!’ It’s a rare thing for a child born this century to share a slice of his grandmother’s Huck Finn heritage, still there for the taking. Summers have come and gone but the big brown jellyfish still beach themselves on the river’s  edge, and the water in February is always briny and warm. We now carry a plastic bucket instead of a tin pail. The older I get, the more determined I am to keep this ceremony alive. I picture myself as a doting nanna telling my grandkids not to worry when the milky sap from the fig-stalks itches their skin: ‘It’s not poisonous poppet. Have a dip in the river and you’ll be right as rain.’

I want to impress on my children the value of belonging. I want each of them  imprinted with this family ritual for when they need to remember where they came from. I savour that a new generation of sturdy little bodies is just as adept at finding treasure in the tree.

After an hour by the river, mum’s bucket contains enough figs for a dozen jars of jam and chutney but the branches are still laden. She and I like to amuse ourselves by having alibis at the ready for the odd dog-walker who wanders past: ‘Did you see the possum up there?’ Mum looks forward to the day she can stand her ground before an inquisitor and declare: “The tree’s mine. I planted it.” (Exaggeration is a dominate gene in our family.)

Mum’s tree, of course, is everyone’s tree. Like the huge mulberry we found as kids when the house up the road got demolished and the backyard was indecently exposed. On Sunday afternoons, half the neighbourhood kids were stained crimson and we were too full of juice to eat tea. Back then, every house had a loquat or a plum or an almond tree, a passionfruit or a muscatel grape. Harvests were shared around for jams and preserves and came back in re-cycled pickle jars wearing gingham hats cut with pinking shears. Rear laneways were common ground for cricket games and cubbies and family histories intertwined over side fences like the tendrils of vines reaching for new strongholds.

My wish is for my mother’s secret tree to still be there when my children have slyly turned into adults. When their childhoods can be recaptured in an instant by that bark under their feet or the coarse leaves in their hands. The tree won’t look as big to them as it once did. But I hope it will loom large when they reminisce about the innocent adventures of a bunch of kids and their prowess as a clan.

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.

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.

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.