Above Bored

Above Bored
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 28, 2015

The ticketing machine coughed and spat a small paper chit into my hand. A64 it read. I surveyed the crowded foyer. A dozen bodies already occupied the grid of public seating.

I sighed, knowing the next half hour of my life would be confined here, waiting to renew my car registration. A woman’s sultry voice spoke through the intercom: “Ticket A51 to Counter three” I silently cursed her for making the Department of Transport sound seductive.

I sat down next to a well-upholstered woman playing Solitaire on her mobile, wishing I hadn’t left my smartphone in the glove box. Closing my eyes, I tuned into the drowsy hum of office machinery. A ceiling fan pattered lazily overhead. Even now and then, the rustling of documents was punctuated by the ka-chunk of a stapler. Sexy intercom-woman called her next customer: “Ticket A52 to Counter one.” I hadn’t been this bored in ages.

As a kid, boredom was my only-child milieu. With a single mum forced to work full-time, my routine was routine. After school, I amused myself by riding my bike on a continuous circuit of the block, accompanied by the tic-a-tic-a-tic of the bright plastic beads that slid up and down my spokes. The faster I pedalled, the noisier my wheels became. Dogs barked as I flew down the hill. I prayed Mrs Gillett’s terrier wouldn’t attack me just because biting was fun.

My job before bed was to climb behind our Thorn television and keep wiggling the rabbit ears until my Nan announced the picture had stopped rolling. She could then watch the rest of Bellbird uninterrupted.

Crouched amongst the cables, each hand gripping an antenna, I couldn’t see the screen. My view was of a blank wall, a standard lamp, and Nan in her Merry Widow armchair, a dinner tray on her lap.

I marked time by studying the two halves of Nan’s face: one side in shadow, the other aglow. When my eyes grew weary of inspections, I opened my ears and silently mimicked the tick-tock of the mantel clock shaped like Napoleon’s hat. Boredom was mine for the next ten minutes.

Saturday mornings stretched languorously before me as I sunned myself on the concrete steps outside Nan’s washhouse, stroking our cat Percy into slumber. That’s when I tugged my doll’s bonnet over his ears. As he jolted awake I fastened the strings under his chin. Then I bundled him into a cardboard box, shut the flaps and whisked Percy away to my room. The carton became a makeshift theatre, Percy exited stage left, a runaway thespian. I was a box office flop.

Boredom reached new lows in Year 10 chemistry. Our teacher, Mr Holden, was florid and nervy and wore squishy shoes. Our windowless chemistry lab had four rows of concrete workbenches. The humid air and the hiss of the Bunsen burners made me sleepy. Reciting the periodic table dulled my brain. I got my halogens and my noble gases confused. I would have dozed off were it not for Mr Holden’s nipples.

They were like nipples I’d never seen. Actually, they were the only men’s nipples I’d ever seen. Large and fleshy, they sat like two discs of polony under his shirt. I couldn’t decide if they were particularly pink or peculiarly protuberant. Or perhaps they showed through his pale shirts because the fabric was transparent from frequent laundering. Either way, my classmates Anita and Sue were equally mesmerized. Flustered by our giggles, Mr Holden’s face would creep crimson and he’d begin to stammer. His nipples became the two least boring elements in chemistry.

Lately I worry I’m not getting enough boredom. Watching taped episodes of Downton Abbey, I fast-forward the commercials. At the checkout I reply to emails on my phone or fire off a handful of texts. I can squeeze efficiency into every spare minute. With a stimulating gadget at arm’s length, I’ve almost eliminated boredom from my life.

And yet I’m beginning to miss the soothing emptiness of wasted time. Perhaps that’s it! Boredom represents the luxury of having nothing pressing to do; when time slumps to its slowest ebb.

On stage at a recent writer’s event, I noticed three silvery-haired women in the audience, front row. They were sitting together, smiling and nodding at me, handbags on laps. Halfway through my lovingly-crafted speech, I glanced at them again. The middle one had dozed off, chin to chest. Her companions’ heads were drooping and jerking, eyelids fluttering a useless fight against sleep. I gulped. Had my talk caressed them into a nap? I delivered a witty punchline and watched the trio startle as people began to clap.

“Most entertaining!” said the middle lady to me as we mingled afterwards.

“So glad you enjoyed it,” I said. “I was worried I might’ve been boring. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Double the Fun

Double the Fun
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 15, 2014

The Two Ronnies were a Saturday night institution when I was eight. At 7.25pm, my Nan would untie her apron and announce: “Off you go then. Do the honours!”

That was my signal. I’d race down the hall to the good room and switch Nan’s hulking Thorn television to ‘ON.’ We didn’t call it TV in those days because Nan was a stickler for formalities: “Abbreviations are uncouth. We have a television set and a refrigerator and a lavatory and a lounge suite. These are their proper names!” Nan referred to the on/off button on her television set as the knob.

The station dial was always set to Channel 2 – we were loyal to Aunty no matter what she gave us. I would kneel on the carpet and wait, the television staring blankly at me on its splayed wooden legs. Studying the inky screen I’d begin counting: One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… And there it was! A pinprick of light, right in the middle of the screen. It grew larger and brighter, flickered sideways, and then Peter Holland and his moustache filled the screen: “That’s all from the newsroom. Good night.”

“That Peter Holland speaks the Queen’s English,” said my Nan, clearly smitten. Twenty years later, I got a tongue-lashing from that handsome baritone as I bolted into the edit suite with a late-breaking story about Alan Bond. Minutes earlier, I’d screeched my car to a halt outside the newsroom’s back door. I  commandeered the first available car space: Holland’s. His Queen’s English became laden with expletives.

My Nan and I had Saturday nights to ourselves. It was Mum’s date night. She’d be off to dinner at the tennis club with my soon-to-be step-father. Mum had sashayed out the door in her most flattering frock – sapphire-blue polyester blooming with giant yellow hibiscus.

Nan and I would settle into the paisley armchairs that belonged to her Merry Widow lounge suite: great hulking chairs with sweeping arms and plush upholstery. Mine engulfed me. I would sit cross-legged on my velvet throne and wedge my knees into the padding to balance my tray table on my lap. There we’d eat our savoury mince on toast, watching The Two Ronnies, my Nan tittering away –  she was quite the merry widow herself.   

I was confused by the sight gags: Ronnie Corbett, the publican, standing on two boxes to see over the bar –  one marked ‘Agnes,’ the other ‘Champ’. It took me a year of French lessons to work out it was a Champagne crate cut in half.

The sketch that had Sid and George drinking pints and discussing women went way over my head:

“You’ve heard of erosive zones, ‘aven’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I seen pictures of ‘em in holiday brochures.”

“Nuh, erosive zone – it’s the medical term for a place a woman’s got, you see, where if you touch it she goes mad! I bet your Edie’s got one of them.

“Yeah. Her wallet.”

Every Saturday night I’d watch an hour of television I didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter – I loved it because Nan loved it. Ronnie C was my favourite because he looked like a glove puppet, Ronnie B was her’s because his elocution was flawless, even when he was deliberately ‘pispronouncing.’

Their double act would never have survived today’s political correctness – all that groping of buxom maids and lewd patter about knockers and the clap.

Admirably, my husband has a touch of the Ronnie Barkers – a ribald wit (and a shapely figure in a dress).  He also wears square glasses with thick black rims which he uses to score cheap laughs at parties. He’ll wave them in the air and announce: “Whenever I go to buy a new pair of specs, I ask them for the cheapest, plainest, least breakable glasses they have. You know – like Ronnie Barker’s. And every time I walk out looking like Ronnie Corbett!”

I was in London, aged 37, when Ronnie Barker died. I overheard someone relaying the news on the tube from Notting Hill. My eyes pricked with tears and I was transported back to my childhood, enthroned in my velvet armchair watching television with my giggly Nan.

I chastised myself for being a sentimental fool, then saw that the businessman and the matronly woman sitting either side of me were both reading the tributes in the paper. We three strangers were from different worlds but I bet we’d shared many a Saturday night with The Two Ronnies.

As I breached the pale daylight outside Oxford Circus station, I caught The Sun’s headline on a placard propped against a lamp post. Ronnie had the front page all to himself: it featured a giant picture of his glasses and just four words – “It’s Goodnight From Him.” God must have needed cheering up.

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.

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.