Closed Book

Closed Book
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 26, 2015

My teenage son’s dislike of reading is a pall between us. I am alternately saddened and infuriated by his sudden rejection of books. A pile of them sit idly on his bedside table, attracting dust. Their spines are stacked to face his pillow, the titles shouting to his deaf ears.

Every few weeks, I add another book to the pile, hoping it will ignite some glimmer of interest. I encourage, I cajole, I coerce. I paint him word-pictures of his smaller self, bewitched by the favourite stories of his childhood. I remind him how he had always been a rapacious reader; his books as precious as his Lego. I pull the Roald Dahls from his bookcase. We had bedded down with them night after night, the pair of us in raptures. I leave them lying around to serve as small mnemonics of the delights of reading. He is unmoved.

I lose my patience. I rant. I thrust books into his hands. “How can you not want to read?” I demand. “You’re so good at it. You’ve always loved reading. He shrugs: “Not any more.”

Later, to mollify me, he flops on the sofa and makes a pretence of being bookish with Stephen Fry. But I can see his heart’s not in it: he cannot find the stillness required to slip into another’s skin, to listen to another’s voice. Instead, he monitors the clock so he dare not read a minute more than the 30 minutes he’s promised me.

That night, sensing my exasperation has expired, he fronts me in the kitchen. “You’ve gotta let go, Mum,” he says, gently. “Reading’s not my thing, ok?”

I carry his words to my desk and remember the narrow-mindedness of being 15. He must discover for himself what the rest of us already know: that reading will give him a safe place to go. Reading will teach him what it’s like to be someone else. Reading will make him forget himself.

As an only child, I escaped to books early. Aged 12, my library card became a precious ticket for transporting me elsewhere. Our local library had soft carpet and high ceilings and a knack for absorbing my Saturday mornings.

The silence was mesmerising. If I tuned my ear, I could detect the low whispers of conversation at the front desk, the thud of a dropped book or a series of metallic thumps as the librarian stamped a stack of borrowings. The shrill voice of a child would shatter the stillness, followed by an urgent “shh!” from a parent. And then the quietness would envelop me again. Against a warm window overlooking the park, I retreated into my book, only to emerge an hour later, elated but mentally exhausted.

My favourite librarian was a flamboyant gent with a halo of wild silvery hair who’d stop by my desk each Saturday and mime his request to see what I was reading. I’d flip shut my book to show him the cover. He’d nod his approval before sweeping away with his armful of books. In a library, all readers are created equal.

A new book still delivers me its own small thrill. Perhaps it’s the promise of deep reading: slow and immersive. I hanker after that meditative state induced by concentration. With a book, I can sink beneath the everyday. I become oblivious even to the mechanics of reading – the gentle turning of pages -propelling me through a gripping story.

Books have left me euphoric but withered by tiredness; I have fought sleep to stay with their characters long past midnight. I have woken, bleary-eyed after a reading marathon, desperate to begin again.

Is it just me, or is online reading somehow less engaging? Less satisfying? I find myself repeatedly sidetracked by banner ads and neon signage. Click this link? Close that window? Visit that site? My brain splinters. I need the speed limits of ink on paper.

Perhaps my son’s boredom with books is not from lack of reading skills, but his inability to focus his attention. Reading for pleasure takes discipline and practice. It requires a stillness of mind. In his world, no book can compete with the endless frivolity of the internet. I tell him books will be his most constant of friends. He sighs and rolls his eyes.

I am not alone in my disappointment. I hear the despair from other mums whose teenage sons have shunned the pleasures of reading. “Where did I go wrong?” I ask a friend over coffee. She shakes her head: “You didn’t. He did. But it’s your job to fix it before it’s too late.”

“How? I’ve tried everything,” I reply, deflated.

I stop in at the book shop for counselling. “Try these,” says the bright young assistant. “Find the right book and he’ll read again.”

I leave $100 poorer but full of hope. Wish me luck.

Growing Pains

Growing Pains
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 22, 2015

I have an acute case of cabin fever. For the past week I have presided over the house of gastro. The virus that took down 5-year-old daughter has now claimed its next victims: her father and brother. It’s Saturday morning and I am shackled to my mop and bucket after another sleepless night.

Teenage son and I are the only members of the family still in rude health. But wog and weather conspire to keep us in solitary confinement. Leaden skies dump a succession of showers. My 15-year-old is stultified. He languishes on the lounge as time slows to a dawdle on his normally adventuresome Saturday.

I glance at my sturdy lad. His six-foot frame engulfs the lounge. He flaps his two clown feet to eject his size 11 shoes. When did he slyly colonize this man-sized body? What happened to the rose-lipped baby who rode around on my hip? The toddler who loved lift-buttons and train rides and eating frozen peas one at a time from a cup? Where did he go – the small boy in a Batman suit who squealed with excitement when a bobcat arrived next door.

How much time did I waste fretting about bottles and dummies and why he didn’t like fruit? Why he still preferred crawling to walking at 15-months? Was there something wrong with his chubby little legs? Last weekend I watched him skateboarding at the park. He walks just fine. He outruns me.

I try to recall him at six; how he looked as he slept, the wobbly teeth and skinned knees, the night he choked on a squid ring. I revisit the everyday anxieties and triumphs of raising a child. If it weren’t for photos, I might not remember the smallness of him at all.

I squandered so much time second-guessing myself. How did I measure up to other mothers? On school mornings, I admired the stylish mums who swept serenely into class, depositing docile children in ironed shirts at their desks.

I tried to be efficient, but mornings were shambolic. Work calls interrupted breakfast. Library books went incognito. I could hear the distant siren of the school bell as we bolted out the door. There was bad language – mine, not his. Will he remember my tantrums over missing sneakers and scrappy homework?

I hope he blanks out the time I dropped him at a party an hour after the guests had gone home. I’d rather he remembers his night-time pyjama walks that cured his fear of the dark. Or the day we painstakingly sieved the sandpit for his missing first tooth. (When he swallowed the second one, we fooled the tooth fairy with a Tic Tac.)

Firstborns are an experiment. They’re good for shattering sleep, egos and expectations of perfection. They cop the best and worst of their mothers. I should’ve worried less and enjoyed more. I should have opened more cans of baked beans and done less vacuuming and spent more time inventing obstacle courses at the park. I didn’t live enough in the moment. I was always rushing to get onto the next job: his dinner, his bath, book, bed.

And here he sprawls on the sofa with his headphones clamped to his ears, tapping those giant feet to some rap song I can faintly hear but fortunately don’t understand.

He is finished with Star Wars and sandpits. The sound of a bobcat no longer turns his head. He knows how to tie his own shoelaces and make custard and ride the motorbike at the farm. He no longer needs my homilies about manners and why bullies are cowards. Instead, he wants bus money and long hair and privacy. He keeps his door shut more than I’d like. My baby has gone. I say this not with sadness but with disbelief.

I want to go back. Rewind the years and build more Lego. Play longer at bath time. Dig more holes at the beach. Fuss less about bedtime.

The washing machine interrupts my thoughts. It shudders to a stop, then beeps for my attention. I wander into the laundry and survey the output from dawn’s washing frenzy. I drag wet sheets to the clothes horse and begin another load.

As I pass the stairs, I see my teenager has flung his sweaty soccer socks over the balustrading. His wet towel is dumped on the carpet. I feel a surge of annoyance and trot round the sofa to chip him about laziness. He catches my eye, puts a finger to his lips and I see that his small sister has fallen asleep in the crook of his arm. And in that moment, I make peace with my mothering self. This weekend, in the house of sickness, there’ll be no attempts at perfection. I’ll be playing Monopoly instead.

Switching Off

Switching Off
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 31, 2015

Above the clatter of cups and the clamourous crowd, the girl’s laugh hee-hawed across the cafe. Heads swivelled in her direction. We customers grinned at each other. She was young, sitting with friends, posing for group photos, her phone bobbing on the end of a selfie-stick. After each press of the shutter, she’d retract the stick, examine the photo and bray loudly at the result.

My gentleman neighbour, roused from his newspaper, leaned towards me and raised one grey eyebrow:

“I don’t know what’s funnier,” he said drily, “that crazy laugh, or those stupid selfie-sticks!’

We nodded at each other in smug agreement. Then he flapped his newspaper and I resumed clattering away on my second hand laptop, relieved to be in such sensible company.

I eyed the girl with her selfie-stick. She was now laughing hysterically, her friends crowding round her phone. Her delight was infectious. I felt a small stab of shame. Everyone but me seems to be high on gadgetry, I thought. And here I am, a laggard, scrabbling to keep up with the latest gear. Is it just me who’s struggling to master the devices I already have?

Last week, my Macbook Pro had a seizure, then blacked out on my desk. I palpated every button but no sweet little apple appeared. In my online darkness, there was only gloom: no email, no Google, no Facebook. The earth was flat again.

What if I’d paralysed my laptop with my own ineptitude? Rather than parade my electronic failings before all-knowing husband, I made a dash for the Apple store. The lanky door-geek waved me towards the Genius Bar. Cradling my lifeless laptop to my bosom, I consulted the brainiac behind the counter.

“Hmmm” he said, fingers flying over my grimy keyboard. I cringed as he frowned at the missing Ctrl’ button.

“I’d say your superdrive’s crashed,” he said, flipping my laptop over to inspect the serial code birthmarked to its bottom.

“It looks pretty worn out. We’ll see what we can do.”

I slunk home.

Seeking comfort from teenage son, I told him, “The genius guy called me a late adopter. Or was it a slow adaptor?”

“More like a slow learner,” he hooted, and re-clamped his headphones to his ears.

Here’s my problem: I’m not wired for rapid uptake. I don’t covet an iPhone 6. I still use my phone for making calls. (Please, no more apps!) I’m content to read books made from paper. No-one has convinced me I need a personal GPS. I’ll happily stay lost until I’m found. But I live in fear of being left behind.

Teenage son is a tech-head, his Y chromosome pre-programmed for gadgetry, like my husband’s. I see them hunched together, their rapturous faces reflected in the vast touch-screen monitor in the loungeroom.

“What are you two doing?” I ask.

“Checking out Google Glass.”

“Google Glass?”

They roll their eyes in unison.

“They’re specs with tiny built-in computers. Operated by voice command.”

I wander off to hang out a load of washing, convinced I’ll never catch up. By the time I return, my two smallest children have joined the duo, having already absorbed the basics of electronic miniaturisation.

Why does it take all my nous (and the limits of my patience) to juggle the three remotes needed to download a movie with Apple TV? My phone and tablet hustle me with their endless stream of posts and tags, links and feeds. Staying connected is exhausting. And oddly dissatisfying. I waste valuable time attending to the backlog to clear a path for uninterrupted work. I have become hobbled to my machines.

My teenager’s online social life started with a trickle and is now an electronic flood. Instagram and Facebook have locked onto his likes and dislikes and deluge him with electronic prods and prompts. His phone beeps for him continuously. He has been conditioned like a Pavlovian dog. He’ll interrupt homework, a conversation, even dinner, to check his gadgets. In fits of pique, I’ve silenced his phone in a drawer. Slammed shut his laptop. The virtual world never sleeps, and if I gave him free reign on his screens, neither would he.

The cyber-world is a disconcerting place for the uninitiated. Mum claims to have no need for email or internet. At 78, she still licks stamps, pays bills by cheque, finds an electrician in the Yellow Pages and navigates by UBD. But she’s adept at texting, and will spell out her day’s adventures with an SMS treatise. She’d be horrified to be labelled a Luddite, but claims learning new gizmos is tedious and she has better things to do, like the watering. She’s right about that, at least. I’m sure I had more freedom before computers made my life simpler.

Old School Ties

Old School Ties
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 4, 2014

She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.

She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.

My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.

The ladies’ loo is the only sanctuary at a school reunion. Re-applying my lipstick, I examined my reflection. Was it so surprising she hadn’t recognised me? I no longer had a centre part and camel-brown plaits. She and I were never close at school. We had no classes in common. To her, I was just another girl in the corridor in a broccoli-green blazer and drab pleated skirt.

And yet her memory lapse rattled me. Was I so forgettable? How could she have failed to notice my magnetic personality and sparkling wit? What was I like at high school? Twenty minutes into our reunion and my old insecurities, so long buried, swarmed to the surface.

I was the girl desperate to fit in but afraid of standing out. Always self-conscious. I remembered the hours spent preening, the bouts of self-loathing. “Better to be a late bloomer, I reckon,” said a friend’s dad. I still don’t know if he meant it as a compliment or a put-down.

Aged 15, I wanted a name like Jenny or Sally or Lizzy or Tracy because then I could reinvent myself as a Jen or a Sal, or Liz or Trace. I wanted a Reef Oil tan. I started drinking cola to look sophisticated. I blew a week’s waitressing money on a red string bikini like the one Elle McPherson wore in the TAB ads. (I mustered the courage to wear that bikini just the once – from my bedroom wardrobe to the bathroom mirror and smartly back again).

I feigned self-assuredness at school and wallowed in my inferiority complex at home. I was desperate to own a pair of white Starfire rollerskates because my friend Jane pirouetted effortlessly in hers. I wanted a boyfriend called Brent, or Shane, or Troy, preferably driving a V8 Falcon with a racing stripe down the side. I ended up with a boyfriend who drove a Ford Escort with a smashed tail-light. His name was Andy. Close enough, I decided.

I couldn’t bear to be parted from my posse of girlfriends. These were trusted friends who warned me that soaking my ponytail in lemon juice would make my hair go brassy, then brittle, then snap off. But they still went with me to the emergency hairdresser’s appointment afterwards. (Mum had already counselled me against do-it-yourself colorants. She disparaged hair dye the way she disparaged Gough Whitlam).

The door to the loos at the reunion hall banged open and in barrelled an old classmate. I snapped out of my teenaged angst as she shouted in mock anger: “I still don’t get why they made Jane the tennis captain! It should’ve been me! They made her bloody captain of everything!

I snorted.

“Trace,” I said, “does anyone, ever, get over high school!”

“Nup. Never.”

Back in the function room, the champagne was settling nerves and dissolving inhibitions. We shouted to make ourselves heard. I took a few moments to register some faces, but remarkably, our voices had stayed the same. One by one, we reconnected, exchanged life stories, surprised each other.

I recalled our previous reunion a decade ago. Then aged 36, I’d felt uncomfortable amid the jockeying that night. Who had their dream job? Who’d snaffled the perfect husband? Who looked good, better, different, old? Who was making a tit of themselves on the dance floor?

I’d arrived at my 30th reunion expecting more of the same. But actually, we’d finished gloating and posing. I admired the air traffic controller, the flamenco dancer, the opthalmologist, the mother of five. I heard about sick children. I swapped stories about ageing parents, friends who’d died. I listened to tales of crumbling marriages and cheating husbands. In middle age, most of us had shed our envy and were arriving at humility.

We all thought we’d grown out of our childish ways. Yet really, we’d just consolidated our personalities. The extroverts were still extroverts. The shy girls were still shy. And everyone said I was exactly the same. The same how? I don’t know what they meant. A giggly drunk? Hope not.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 6, 2014

“I’m trying to get the kids excited about the power of words,” her email said. “They are selecting subjects (for the rest of their lives).”

It was a letter from a high school English teacher, asking if I’d talk to her Year 10s. I cast my mind back to last century and tried to remember being 15.

That was the year I rolled down my camel-brown school socks until they sat like a pair of bagels around my ankles. I thought those bagel-socks made my legs look longer and shapelier. Really, I just looked like someone who needed to pull her socks up.

Aged 15, I went to my first school dance in a raspberry dress paired with mum’s Glomesh clutch hoping I’d be mistaken for Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman. I fantasised about sashaying past some Richard Gere look-alike in my white snakeskin court shoes and overhearing him whisper to his mate: “Look at them bodacious set of ta-tas!” Instead, I spent the night dancing with another Debra Winger I met in the ladies.

When I was 15, adults persisted in asking me: ‘So! What are you going to do when you leave school?’ I’m sure these were grownups who hadn’t talked to a teenager since they’d been one. Their inquiry, loaded with expectation, would hang awkwardly between us. I knew my interlocutor was hoping to hear me say: “Actually, I’m thinking of becoming an astronaut!” That would give them the starter they needed to slide easily into a conversation with this sullen teenager: “Wow! An astronaut hey. Wouldn’t that be marvellous?”

Instead, I said nothing. I’d inspect my bagel-socks: “I dunno.” I took a 15-year-old’s delight in having silenced my interrogator. Our heart-to-heart would be paralysed by rigor mortis and I’d be granted a getaway.

Aged 15, my school’s career counsellor demanded I choose a profession, if only so she could book me in for a week of compulsory work experience. My girlfriends were desperate to impress as wannabe veterinarians and architects and stockbrokers.

I decided I’d do work experience as a dental nurse. It was an odd choice given I was scared of the dentist’s. But I figured dental nurses couldn’t be scared of dentists, could they? More importantly, I might get to wear one of those pink nurses’ uniforms with a little watch hanging from my breast pocket. I could twirl my hair into a bun and wear soft-soled shoes.

And so I arrived at 8am outside the shiny white doors of my designated dental surgery. The dentist seemed friendly and not-so-scary, but I think that was because we were both standing up.

All that week I made excellent cups of tea. I presented miniature toothbrushes to little kids. I gave knowing smiles to all the patients sitting glumly in the waiting room.

On the last day, the dental nurse called in sick. The dentist asked for my help with a patient. Puffing up with pride, I tied a perfect bow on my crunchy paper apron and blew a lungful of air into my washing up gloves, the way I’d seen Delvene Delaney do it on The Young Doctors.

A very old man was reclined in the dentist’s chair. He was staring at the ceiling with his mouth stretched open. The dentist presented me with a long metal nozzle. He called it a high volume evacuator, but I can tell you now, it was a saliva sucker.

The dentist put on his pretend glasses, and began drilling a putrid incisor. I gingerly inserted my metal probe into the patient’s slackened mouth, trying to steer it inside his cheek and down beside his gums towards his one remaining molar. But the nozzle had other ideas. It lurched sideways and suckered itself to the root of his tongue.

I panicked as the old man gagged and gurgled. I couldn’t tell if he was talking or choking so I yanked on the high volume evacuator. I thought if I jerked it hard it’d break the suction from his tongue. But the patient only yelped in shock and pain. His arms flew up and knocked over a tray of instruments.

That’s when the dentist grabbed my hand and shoved me aside. He gently let a puff of air escape from the nozzle which released the suction. The old man’s tongue flopped back into his mouth.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in dentist’s detention, tidying up the magazines. And then I slunk home.

A weekend later, back at school, the work experience report cards were handed out. Mine said: “I don’t think Miss Thomas has the necessary skills or temperament for the dental profession.” I was mortified. As were several of my teachers. I don’t think they’d had anyone flunk work experience before.

So I decided to become a journalist instead. And now I embarrass myself for a living.

The end of the line

The end of the line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 5, 2013

My home telephone is almost obsolete. It hardly rings any more. Sometimes I forget it’s even there. It languishes by the window on my desk, a wallflower obscured by the showy blooms of a potted cyclamen.

I know my home phone is lonely because as I walk past, it emits a weedy ‘peep.’ I see its will to live ebbing away, unable to compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny iphone. I feel sorry for my home phone – trapped by its own limitations – good for talking, and not much else.

When I was a child, the telephone ruled from its own settee. Ours was Bakelite and sat like a black brick on a small lacquered table by the front door, attached to a bench seat upholstered in flocked green velvet. This is where we sat to answer the phone. The handset was a dumbbell, only heavier. Holding it to my ear for more than three minutes made my neck ache. Next to the phone lay a glossy white teledex that sprang open to reveal the numbers of everyone we knew.

Everything stopped when the phone rang. It had to: the cable to the mouthpiece was only two-feet long. My nanna would settle herself on the bench seat, wait politely for another three rings to pass, then pick up the handset: “Good afternoon,” she’d say, lips pursed to round her vowels, “Mrs Thornton speaking.” She knew rushing down the hallway made one breathless. (And being too eager was crass).

Calling someone on the Bakelite phone, however, took a 7-year-old’s concentration.  Dialling the number 1 was a short stop, so my finger only had to rotate the wheel an inch. But dialling the number 9 took effort, a full 240 degree trip. I can still hear the ticka-ticka-ticka as the wheel, reaching the end of the spring, lurched backwards, eager to discolate my index finger. Mum dialled numbers with the pointy lid of her Bic Cristal pen, the height of secretarial sophistication.

In my teens, the home phone was the centre of my universe. Ours was squat and custard coloured with a panel of ten push-buttons on the front. It had a springy cord which I could stretch from the side table, around the corner and under the pantry door. There I’d sit, out of earshot, between the dog biscuits and the bread bin, phone clamped to my ear, knees hugging my chest. I got leg cramps, but it was worth it. After forty-five minutes on the blower, it was decided – I’d wear my nylon parachute pants on Saturday night.

Sundays were for post-mortems on the electrifying events of the night before:

 “Didja see the way he was lookin’ at you?”

“As if! Was he really lookin’ at me?”

“He was lookin’ at you, all right!”

“Stoked! Was he lookin’ over his shoulder, or right at me?”

“Over his shoulder AND right at you!”

 “Get off that phone!”

“Gotta go, Mum’s doin’ her block!”

I’d emerge from the dim-lit pantry, blinking in the daylight.

Back then, I knew all my friends’ numbers by heart. Even now, twenty years since my besties moved out of home, I can still rattle off their childhood home numbers, along with my teenage phone patter: “Hi Mrs Simpson, how are you? Off to the tennis club today? Great! Is Jane there please?

I cursed holidays that separated me from my home phone.  One summer at Rottnest, with heartthrob Andy stranded on the mainland, I spent all my pocket money at the Bathurst settlement pay-phone. It was always occupied. Some bloke with a Swan Gold would be flicking through a tattered White Pages while he leaned against the glass talking cricket with a mate. I’d wait impatiently as my 3 o’clock telephonic rendezvous with Andy drew near. Finally, Swan Gold man would shamble off and I’d dive in, ramming coins into the slot, hoping Andy would pick up, not his Dad.

 “Hi Andy! It’s me!”

“Hey! Been swimmin’?”

“Yeah. At the Basin.”

“Hot here too. Cricket’s on.”

“Oh.”

“3 o’clock tomorrow then?”

“Okay”

“Okay. See ya.”

Now, phone booths are all but extinct. I don’t miss them. But watching an old episode of Dr Who, my 6-year-old son piped up as Tom Baker and his trailing scarf vanished into the Tardis: “What’s that blue box?”

“That’s a phone booth.”

I decided the next time we take the kids to Rottnest, I’m going to make a pilgrimage to the Bathurst phone box, that monument to 20th century phone technology.  (It’s still there, outside Unit 501.) I’ll tell the kids about the time I worked up the nerve to ring a boy I liked, only to slam the phone down in panic as he answered.

And that’s the thing with mobiles: they’re too delicate. Smart but fragile. I need a phone that can handle my temper when those blasted telemarketers call during dinner. Only the home phone appreciates a good hang up.

Withered by star glower

Withered by star glower
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 10, 2013

Last week I had a disheartening conversation with a gaggle of schoolgirls in an icecream shop. My 6-year-old son and his little sister were capitalising on the ‘free taste tests’ from an icecream lady who was tirelessly handing them morsel after morsel on tiny spoons. While two small children debated the merits of bubblegum over banana, I turned to the three teens behind us. “Sorry! Are you in a hurry?” I asked. “This is the most important decision my kids’ll make all week. When I was an icecream scooper, we weren’t allowed to give free tastes!”

The girls laughed and one replied: “Like who’d ever work in an icecream shop!” I was taken aback. “Yep,” I said, “the icecream was so hard, my arms would ache from dragging the scoop through it. I got paid six-bucks an hour.” The girl in the middle snorted. I persevered: “Have you girls got part-time jobs?”

“Nah,” they said, ‘”We’re only 13.”  

Curious, I asked: “So any ideas about what you want to be yet?”

“Famous!” said the girl on giraffe legs, and for a moment I thought she was joking.

“Famous for what?”

She shrugged: “Whatever. Just famous.”

On the walk home with my sticky children, I wondered if those teenagers believed fame was their birthright. Had they been brainwashed into thinking celebrity status comes without hard work?  

Today, the travelling circus we call reality TV sells us overnight successes. It thrusts people into the spotlight for brief applause then discards them as the parade moves on.

The last star I met was Bette Midler. In 1997, I interviewed her in Los Angeles. Her film That Old Feeling was about to premiere in Australia. It was a stinker and I expect she knew.

I walked into a posh hotel suite to find a woman with a huge head sitting on top of a pint-sized body. Her feet and hands were tiny – dainty extremities overwhelmed by a jutting bosom and a mop of frizz. She was sweating under a bank of studio lights which made her skin so dewy, I could barely make out where her face stopped and her neck began. Unaware that journalists should be lap-dogs during the Hollywood interview, I ploughed straight in and asked:  “Do you ever get tired of fame?”

She stared at me, then barked: “Do you?!”

I spluttered something about being a nobody, but it was too late. She sulked for the next 10 minutes. Refusing to make eye contact, she gave my questions one syllable responses, not caring a jot about what Australian audiences would make of her. The interview was a disaster. The dressing down tirade I got from her publicist afterwards was excruciating. I’m still not sure what riled her: my impertinent question or the fact she couldn’t answer it.

I thought fame was unattainable when I was a kid. There were few celebrities in my patch of town, though a girl in my year had a dad who read sport on the TV news. That gave her instant social status at school. She had the kind of prestige that this single child of divorced parents could only fantasise about.

At age eleven, I would tear home on my bike to an empty house, knowing Simon Townsend’s Wonder World was about to start. Our Thorn TV, on its sturdy wooden legs, needed a good ten seconds to warm up and deliver a flickering screen.

Sprawled into a brown corduroy beanbag, I was captivated by the most famous show on kid’s telly. Simon Townsend was a reluctant celebrity. I remember reading in the newspaper that he’d been embarrassed when kids mobbed him at a school visit. I admired him even more for that.

Mum’s rule was no telly after school, but my secret trysts with Simon Townsend made me desperate to become one of his roving reporters.

At puberty, the closest I came to hero-worship was plastering the walls of my bedroom with centrefolds of heart-throb Rob Lowe and posters of Abba.  Celebrities were good wallpaper but their world didn’t intersect with mine.

Now the likes of Kim Kardashian (famous for what, I can’t remember) are slaves to their own publicity. Craving constant attention, they obsess as much about their following as the star-struck fans who stalk them on social media. The more bizarre the celebrity behaviour, the more the money rolls into their account.

I keep thinking about those girls in the ice-cream shop. They didn’t want to become famous for being talented at something they loved. They were convinced stardom was a shortcut to wealth and happiness. But it was their sense of entitlement that puzzled me most.

I tell Mum about them and she remarks: “In our day, if you behaved like a show pony, you were considered undignified. Famous people earned respect when they were humble.”

She was right.

I hate to say it, Bette, but that day we met, you were obnoxious. I liked you better when you sang your way to the top.