Saved by the Sisterhood

Saved by the sisterhood
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 8, 2012
Section: Opinion

The sisterhood is one of my most precious possessions. After children and the love of a husband.   (Though sometimes my girlfriends understand me in ways he couldn’t imagine.)

It’s not just about the X chromosome. My metaphorical sisters have been my lifelong companions, a good handful of them since I was 15. They have been in and around my life, often daily, for thirty years or more and rarely have we had a cross word. We have been through awful boys and lovely ones, broken hearts and narrow escapes, white weddings, the blackness of divorce, grand achievements and career stalls, the trauma of death, exhilarating births and the terrible trials of the tracksuit years – those seemingly endless days when babies and small children left you with no fashion sense save for the trackie dacks you thought hid all the sins of procreation, but didn’t.

The sisterhood has been created for all women to dip into whenever and wherever they need it. Some are quite self sufficient and only need a couple of its members on occasion, others like a whole tribe, in constant communication. Some you keep at arm’s length, and some are your bosom buddies for life. You can never be too giving. But you can be too demanding. Sometimes, the truest marker of a friendship is seeing how much it can withstand.

I have one who reads this column, before you do, just to make sure I’m not making a fool of myself. That could test a friendship, but she dishes out constructive criticism like expensive perfume – it packs a punch but then drifts to a soft finish. Our friendship has reached new levels of trust.

Do men have this intensity of friendship? I hope my husband does, though the evidence is sparse, and couched in rhyming slang and blokey deadpans. I’m not clear if it gets much deeper than that. Who knows how many men discuss the things (we hope) are most important to them – the state of their relationships, worries about children, careers, whether their wives are pulling their weight around the house. On nights out I ask him: ‘What did you talk about?’ and he’ll reply: ‘football, Ricky Ponting throwing in the towel, man-opause’ and I’ll reply: ‘How’s such-and-such’s wife? And children?’ And he’ll say: ‘Dunno. Didn’t ask’.

Male friendships are the unthinkable female ones – the kind that if you didn’t ask about someone’s husband or children, or how their job was going, you’d never be invited out to a girl’s lunch again. Perhaps men just don’t want to waste time weaving over and under the same emotionally fraught subject until someone finally breaks the deadlock and says: ‘Okay, it’s settled. Wear the red one’.

Is the much celebrated tradition of Australian mateship, with its ribald humour and jocular put-downs as alive and well and living in the suburbs as it was for the diggers, and drovers, the shearers and bushrangers? When men yarned over a pint in the pub, or spent a larrikin’s Saturday helping a mate move house, or worse, building one. I think mateship is as ship-shape as ever, it’s just that the business and busy-ness of mens’ lives got in the way.

I think for that reason, men’s friendships are about escapism. Of being freed from work and responsibilities to have a belly laugh with mates who keep their angst to themselves and enjoy the process of looking outwards onto the world. I think I envy them. They don’t obsess like we do. Women often churn inwards, needing to share experiences in mind blowing detail in the safety of the cone of silence. There really are few secrets left amongst us. Men are much more careful about thinking out loud.

My most cherished witch’s coven (as the man of the house lovingly refers to us) likes to get together every so often, the three of us, for what we call ‘committee meetings.’ At these, we discuss  the order of the day, usually a crisis for one of us needing three heads, wine and speaking in tongues. By hour’s end, and divination, we have usually solved most of the world’s curses (like teenagers, and g-strings) and why husband A prefers not to have deep-and-meaningfuls about his marriage at three am in the morning? Why not, we argue? It’s quiet, the kids are asleep. And what does he mean: ‘She’s a succubus’? (I had to look it up, too.)

Those girls, and the lovely others I have collected over the years, have been my saviours so many times over, they are the sisters I never had. I don’t know if life would be as rich and varied without them. Certainly I have laughed with them so hard and so often that they are like endorphins. I crave their company.

A true female friendship can withstand as many ongoing conversations as there are participants. You can be in earnest discussion with one, whilst keeping an ear on another and be able to make insightful interjections into a third. We are talented in so many ways. A man has a conversation in as few words as possible. And you’re a best mate if you can keep quiet and nod in sympathetic silence.

Women need their friends because men don’t appreciate the sheer effort required to keep a conversation going at warp speed. Brain and mouth at full pelt, no filter required. I have left girls’ lunches satiated but exhausted from the mental gymnastics of trying to get through everyone’s news in under a lunch hour. I hope that men appreciate the sisterhood for taking the pressure off  their ears.

My mother has a precious collection of her own, a circle of girl(ish) seventy somethings, who  through thick and thin have stuck by each other for near on six decades, and are as close as ever. Rarely grumpy, always empathetic, generous of spirit, they have looked after each other in sickness and in health, and the vows of friendship have stuck fast through the terrible times and more often than not, the joys of a well lived life. My mum has reminded me more than once that my girlfriends will be there for me even when the men in my life aren’t. And so right she has been.

The sisterhood inspires because it is as varied as its members are clever, and funny, and breathtakingly gorgeous, inside, where it counts. And I feel about them the way I feel when separated from my children. Like I’m missing a body part. Legless. They’re good for that too.

In pursuit of love and Lindt

In pursuit of love and Lindt
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 1, 2012
Section: Opinion

Who’s not a sucker for limerence? – that electrifying but dangerously unpredictable state of being in love.  The term limerence might be unfamiliar, for good reason, because it only arrived in the dictionary in 1979. Before that we just talked about infatuation, or having acrush. No matter, because I’ve always lived for its heart palpitations (and sudden weight loss) having realized that being in love is the most exquisite yet fleeting phase of the human condition.

My pursuit of limerence has taken up a quite considerable chunk of my life. In my 20’s, finding a mate was about being in the right place at the right time (any pub on a Friday night) and spotting someone who had that indefinable ‘something’ (usually a bourbon and coke and a packet of Benson & Hedges.)

Go back a few more years and my girlfriends and I were ‘getting the hots’ and hanging around at the bus stop aged 16 hoping the boys we liked hadn’t decided to ride their bikes to school. As one of our nannas used to remind us – boys are like buses – there’ll always be another one along in a minute. On weekends, we’d go to a ‘show’ at someone’s house, and if we were lucky, we’d ‘get lucky’ on the front lawn. (I never did Mum, I’m just generalizing.)

A decade before I was born, lovers would be necking in their Hillman Hunters and Morris 1100’s all over Kings Park on a Saturday night. If a boy was sweet on a girl and ‘had it real bad,’ he’d get down on one knee, they’d get hitched, settle down and raise a couple of nippers. (‘Sprogs’ if they were accidents.)

Now, I’m discovering via my friend’s teenagers, or anyone too young to remember the drive-ins,  that the internet has changed dating forever. The home phone is obsolete now that you ‘hook up’ with people on Facebook, and break up with them via text (I was shamefully way ahead of my time on that one.)

What next? Breeding for the baby bonus? Whatever happened to flirting in person? Or making eyes at someone? Or being (pretend) shy and coquettish?  Or laughing at a boy’s dumb jokes because ‘he’s a God,’ as we used to say, and all of God’s jokes are hilarious. Especially the withdrawal method.  And the wonder bra.

How many hours did I spend hogging the phone with girlfriends dissecting the subtle nuances of the 20-second call I’d had with my teenage heartthrob, Andy, who’d rung to say: ‘Hello?’  followed by ‘Will you go round with me? followed by ‘Great. Bye.’

At 16 I would sit on the beach all afternoon watching him surf. He was always so far out I couldn’t tell which one was him – sometimes I wondered if he’d caught a wave in behind the groyne and gone home. I wasn’t even that interested in boys’ groins then, I just wanted the adrenalin-fuelled charge of being smitten.

At university, a lovely Greek boy would pass me little notes in the library and take me to candlelit dinners in restaurants where surf ‘n turf was new fangled and cool. (Now it’s even more hip and they call it reef ‘n’ beef.) I used to write him gushing love letters on perfumed paper and post them with those sticky little squares we used to know as stamps.

Later on, in another time warp, I wrote poetry and swooned over my French tutor, until I discovered he wasn’t really Parisien but the enfant terrible of Midland. No more kissing frogs, but I remained a sucker for an accent, so I took up with a Norwegian one, thinking I knew it all, age 23.

These days science tells us the smell of our armpits, the symmetry of our faces, and the distance between our waists and our hips all factor in our unconscious attraction to certain members of the opposite sex.

I’m a big believer in Schopenhauer’s theory of attraction. He was the 19thcentury philosopher who believed we unwittingly seek out our ‘physical’ complement, because, in evolutionary terms, the search for a mate is really about the continuation of our particular gene pool. Unconsciously, we are drawn to that individual who might balance out our shortcomings  in the next generation –  the one person whose long legs might cancel out our stumpy ones, or whose petite ears might be given precedence over a set of wingnuts.

Unfortunately Schopenhauer’s theory ends bleakly, because he then tells us, invariably, our most suitable physical complement is not usually our most suitable life-long complement. Long term happiness and creating robust children are like two radical, but mutually exclusive science projects . I wonder if that’s what happened in my first marriage, because the product of it has been a (mostly) delightful child, while his father and I became a disaster. I blame Schopenhauer. And Norwegian accents.

Second time round, I’ve gone for the one bloke who makes my heart thump but who clearly has my short legs and no hope of cancelling out my histrionic gene with his calm, rational one. He is without accent, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of war history, in case I ever need it, and is quite a dab hand at writing a love letter, though come to think of it, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. He can also shoot a dugite with one bullet from a shotgun, at point blank range, and has ironed every shirt he’s ever worn, since telling me in 2005 I was doing it wrong, and you have to start with the sleeves first.

I get the feeling romance is no longer a high priority in our house because only once in the last six months has that lovely man I live with remembered his (loose) commitment to affairs of the heart. Last week he announced: ‘I’m ready for date night, blossom – but let’s have it at home – I’ve rented Downfall, that great Hitler movie’.

No wonder speed dating is held in such high esteem these days. Weed out the dud candidates in two minutes and you’re left with a pool of genuine romantic possibility. I just wonder if hunting in the wild is a more dependable outcome, even if it takes the best part of your mating season to find who you’re looking for. Those matchmakers are in a rut – packaging and controlling the rules of attraction takes half the fun out too. I’d rather drop a line in the ocean and hope some buck-wild specimen chooses my bait, than cast out in an artificial lake full of pre-selected exhibits. I’m not after small fry, I want Moby Dick.

My lifetime lothario knows a thing or two about hosing down my romantic tendencies, seeing he brings home a box of my favourite Lindt balls on a Friday night, and then eats all the blue and red ones. I don’t much like the white ones, but I appreciate that he leaves me any at all. Then he makes me a cup of tea and we settle in on ‘date night’ to watch Hitler’s last days in his bunker. I’m already looking forward to next date night. I think he’s pencilled it in for September 2013.

Myths of a classless society

Myths of a classless society
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Date: Saturday November 24, 2012
Section: Opinion

A pedigree is no longer something you’re just born with. It can be learnt, earned, inherited, pretended. Perhaps that’s why class is still such a touchy subject: no one really knows how the class system works anymore.

Most of us claim to be middle class, except few of us really know what ‘middle class’ means. It can mean poor, but with credit cards. Or it can mean wealthy, but with working class values.

I have a friend, a top-notch lawyer, who declares he’ll always be blue collar at heart. He says he pines for well behaved children, a respectful wife, humble sports stars, union leaders who don’t lie and Labor politicians who care about the hoi polloi. (He also keeps a fluoro safety vest in the wine cellar in case he ever has to change a light globe.)

Middle class is now a destination:  those who claim it stretch from the highly privileged, (people who would never call themselves ‘rich’ in public) to families paying off the two year loans on their home theatres and ipads. Middle class people tout their disposable income, even if they relentlessly dispose of it.

Why do so many now aspire to be called ‘middle class?’ Does the class struggle no longer exist? Of course, we’re all equal now – how nice! I guess that means ‘working class’ has become a dirty word? It used to be worn as a badge of honour – a respectable way to earn a quid with your muscles. Skill with a shovel distinguished real blokes from pen-pushers, construction brawn from the soft-skinned and the un-tanned.

Luckily for me, journalism is rarely choosy about the social standing of its recruits. In television, the gift of the gab and an ear for storytelling are prized whether you were born rich or grew up on welfare cheques. And those who hailed from out in the sticks often had the common touch – that ability to make people feel so at ease, they willingly poured out their stories and then asked: ‘Would you like to stay for tea?’

Politicians target us like we’re some bland mass of supplicants. We’re not. Take that hackneyed Labor line ‘working families’ – it has been trotted out ad nauseum for the past five years. Politicians imagine we’ll swallow rhetoric like ‘working families’ because the phrase appeals to blue and white-collar workers alike. Actually, it’s a cliché that makes even the well-to-do feel included.

The mining boom has been a wonderful leveler. It has enabled the unskilled, tradies and construction blokes (and gals) to set themselves up for life. But if you ever needed proof that high society doesn’t tolerate upstarts, then the mindless label ‘cashed-up bogan’ says it all. Poseurs looks upon the nouveau riche as a blight on the social landscape – as an unwelcome species who carve up the genteel tranquility of waterfront living with their jet skis and over-sized runabouts.

Even the Wall Street Journal swooped in for a closer look at Australia’s new money when it unearthed a 25-year-old high school drop-out from Mandurah who was earning $208,000 a year as a long hole driller up north. He happily admitted to blowing every cent he earned on his Chevy ute, custom bikes, electronic gadgetry and partying: “Without mining, I’d be an auto mechanic making $600 a week. I love mining, mate.”

Blue collar workers have become a precious commodity in this country – rarely has manual labour been in such demand. Who’s not fascinated by a resources boom that has driven wages into hyperdrive? But why isn’t a Forex trader with a Ferrari a cashed-up bogan too?’ Only the working class cop it for daring to rise above their station. Perhaps Australia’s middle is uncomfortable about relying on mine workers to keep the economy afloat by splurging their red-dusted paychecks.

Urban myth would have us believe every frustrated shop-hand and salesman has packed it in and headed north to drive a dump truck for $150-grand. That’s a flight of imagination, not a Skywest flight to Paraburdoo. A cashed-up bogan might be the much lampooned poster-boy for the mining boom, but why denigrate the thousands of workers who’ve committed to the disruption of a fly-in fly-out existence? Men and women slogging it out on 12-hour shifts, knocking off for a half- life in a hot dusty town, a donga to call home, leaving families elsewhere to cope for long periods on their own.

How do newly affluent mine workers fit into our class structure? They’d give Karl Marx a nervous breakdown: wage slaves with nothing to lose but their gold chains? Revolutionaries with Rolexes? And let’s not kid ourselves that class discrimination is dead – it’s as common as a mock Prada handbag. There are always rich peoples’ kids blushing at their Peppermint Grove addresses and ordinary people mocked for saying ‘haitch.’ (At parties in posh suburbs, that’s ‘haitch’ as in ‘hypocrisy.’)

Guilt, anger, shame, pretence – few of us escape the confusions of class. And social climbers  are everywhere, (as they’ve always been) now driving leased Range Rovers and flashing their fake tans and fake personalities.

Perhaps my fantasy of a classless society is fantasy in itself. I’d like to return to that time, not so long ago, when people were admired for what they did, not because they owned a weekender at Eagle Bay. That era before celebrity culture drove ego and reckless materialism into places it should never have gone – into schools and playgrounds. Last week I overheard a 9-year-old girl complaining to her mum: ‘Jessica gets to go skiing in Japan, how come we only get to go to Bali?’ A month ago, I asked my eldest what he wanted to be and he gave me a smirk and said “rich.” He thought it was funny. I’m still not sure if he meant it.

I hope education, not affluence, opens the door to better lifestyles. We all want to choose our careers, not have the choice taken away by disadvantage. Snobbery amongst the younger set is usually nothing more than the parroting of their parent’s pretension, of having no clue (and no curiosity) about how the other half lives. I hope my children learn early on that delusions of grandeur are more likely to make them an object of ridicule than an object of envy. And I want them to believe me when I tell them kindness and thoughtfulness will gain them respect far quicker than loading up on ‘stuff’ and showing off. Perhaps then, they’ll end up in a class of their own.

Slave to the Beauty Grind

Slave to the Beauty Grind
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: November 17, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am maintaining a veneer of calm, but the bathroom mirror is starting to show my age. And I’m beginning to wonder if I have a thick enough skin to grow old gracefully?

Apparently, on the cusp of 45, I am approaching middle age. Some would say I’m in the middle of middle age but I say their arithmetic is pessimistic . After all, I’m a glass half-full kind of person. (Usually it doesn’t even take that much.)

I keep hearing  forty is the new thirty, and sixty is the new fifty,  and I’m confused because I just want to feel new fullstop. New, as in no longer tired, new, as in carefree with shiny hair and bouncy step.

Gravity is cruel to women. We have nice bits that stick out, partly to get noticed, partly to counter- balance high heels. Sometime around 45, you give up stilettos because they hurt and they’re impractical, so gravity decides your stick-outs are impractical too and they give up the pretence of weightlessness and down they go.

Do men feel this way about ageing? Heaven knows, my oil painting doesn’t. Why would he? He knows I find his soft belly and lack of definition rather attractive. (Actually, I feel that way about anyone less defined than me.) Moreover, I think he’s getting more distinguished with advancing years:  he’s greying around the temples and doesn’t have to do anything about it. He needs no more maintenance than ten minutes in the barber’s chair once a month. Perhaps it’s his absence of conceit that shows up the obsessiveness of mine.

For the first time, I have begun waxing my face instead of my body, and it hurts and it’s scary. My beautician blinds me with that lamp that is brighter than a thousand suns. She pulls it down so low even the capillaries behind my eyelids  try to shrink and look away. My beautician is a Nigella Lawson-styled Italian mamma, all heaving bosom and peachy skin, but she has the ability to tear hair out of me at the speed of sound. (I know this because there is a split second between when she finishes  and when I let out a shriek of shock and pain.)

Don’t expect sympathy from a beautician. She knows natural beauty is an oxymoron, and no one wants to look like one of those. She also knows beauty is bloody hard work, (‘the longer you leave it the worse it gets’). I arrive all sheepish with my inane apology : ‘I know I should have come sooner….’ but she’s already tut-tutting over my overgrown eyebrows and –dare I say it? – the fluff on my upper lip. I like to call it fluff because it sounds cute, like the down on a baby bird or the fuzz on a dandelion seed. Except it’s not cute, it’s mortifying. And then she gets out her spatula and spreads a pad of hot wax so big it covers half my face. I whine something about ‘I’m not Santa Claus yet, am I?’ but my question goes unheard, smothered by the tearing sound that means the wax and I have separated. My palms are clammy, which reminds me why I’ve only ever had one Brazilian in my whole life. (I didn’t get enough horizontal Samba to make it worth a second.)

I’ve also started having facials. I rarely feel like a client in those places, usually I feel more like a patient – those young lab assistants in their white tunics invariably ask: ‘Will you be having the oxygen facial today?’ and I want to reply ‘Why? Do I look like I need to be resuscitated?’ I say yes anyway, because really I’ve come for a power nap in a dark room with nice smells, which is rudely interrupted by a sudden blast of freezing air. It’s squirted at my face from point-blank range from an air hose connected to an oxygen tank, also connected to the smooth hands of the wrinkle-free facialist. I can never tell the difference afterwards, except for the greasy wreckage of my hair and the shame of having to venture out in public with a shiny naked face.

I guess that’s why it’s called maintenance – the effort of preserving what you’ve got so you’re not white-anted by sag and staleness – pounding away at the weights to stop the formerly good bits of us heading south for the winter and retiring there. Where did the rosy cheeks of my thirties go? I get them at the gym, but then it’s called florid.  Grey hair needs an arsenal all of its own, but repeatedly spreads like a plume of pollution, always leading from your forehead for maximum exposure.

I just don’t get this ageing business, but I think it has something to do with fertility: when we are young, beauty is handed out for free so we can attract a mate and produce children who never let you sleep. After you’ve produced the world’s cutest offspring  and you’re no longer good breeding stock by virtue of age and weariness, then beauty wanes, and vanity takes over. The saggy neck cream companies start trying to flog you really expensive potions we all secretly know do nothing. They can smell our desperation.

The only good thing about maintenance is that everyone has to do it. It just depends how much of a slave you want to become to it. A bit like my husband and our lawn. He knows there is nothing quite like a freshly mowed, weed-free lawn with clipped edges. I’d quite like him to think that way about me. You can tell just by looking at someone if they need a good clip, or a grease and oil change. How many men do you see obsessively washing and polishing their car on the front verge of a weekend? Or bending over the engine with the bonnet up and their shorts at half mast. They know the only way to keep turning heads is with maintenance.

For some reason the need for maintenance seems more acute with women. Is it because we are the early bloomers? That we stayed peachy for so long that suddenly, somewhere past 39, it’s an awful shock to discover that while our fruit is still firm, the current crop is tending towards overblown, and may, in fact, be ready to drop.

Men don’t have to put up with this middle-aged demarcation because models like Anna Nicole Smith agreed to marry men who were 89, proving men get better with age. How come they get all the plaudits? We get good with age too.

I wonder why I care so much how society perceives older women – those who are keeping the fabric of multiple lives sewn together, mending fraying seams and making the stains of modern life disappear with hard work, brains and charm – why is this glorious slice of society so ignored? Fashion doesn’t want to waste its painfully short attention span on dressing middle aged women and they remain under-represented in art, photography, on stage, in cinema, on rich lists and in boardrooms. And what about bedrooms? – who knows more about how to have good sex than a woman who’s been enjoying it for 25 years?

So, if my exterior upkeep is insurance against ever being described as dowdy, then let’s do the sums here: Suppose I now spend ten-fold the time and money I spent on maintenance when I was 20, then by the time I’m 70, it’ll be all I do. (At least it’ll give me something to do.) And when I fall off the perch at the hairdressers one day, my children and grandchildren will be able to take comfort in the fact I spent every last cent of their inheritance staying a natural blonde until I was 90. And my epitaph will read: ‘she didn’t look a day over 80.’

Memories are housed here

Memories are housed here
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 10, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am having a housemourning.

With a sold sticker out the front, and the frenzy of home-open’s behind us, we are moving on – our Federation cottage outgrown by a long- legged tween and a couple of smaller racket-makers.  As settlement approaches, I have been reflecting on the meaning of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. You have to be a certain age to be nostalgic don’t you? Nothing specific – just old enough to have lived enough to look back and feel sentimental. Or wistful. Or grateful.   

I feel I ought to pay my respects to this house that has shepherded twelve years of my life and sheltered a new generation of my family – because I now know it as well as it knows me. How many times have I walked  the jarrah boards of this hallway, the same boards that have echoed similar footsteps since 1907? I can tell you which boards still creak loud enough to scare the dead, though time and familiarity have softened the sudden heart thump I get when the floor cracks like a whip in the middle of the night. It’s always my eldest padding to the loo.

I can share with you the history of a house built when cars were a novelty in Perth, when the city’s population hit the magic mark of 30-thousand, and when tuckpointing and sash windows were coveted by those who could afford bricks and mortar over weatherboard.  I know these rooms later harboured a brothel – the West Leederville train stopped at the bottom of the street and those in the know would wander up past houses with dinner smells wafting in the air to score dessert with a one night wife. (A hundred years later, this house is so disorderly most days it could still pass as a brothel.)

I can talk you through the life cycle of the elm tree in the backyard, having watched this very week the first two leaves spring to life off a skeleton of bare branches.  The tree the kids went wild over last Christmas when Uncle Andy strung it with fairy lights. The summer canopy that cools off the back deck by 3pm but drives us nuts in autumn when it blankets the lawn with fallen leaves – we draw straws to see who lands the seemingly endless task of raking them up.

I can also bring to mind that afternoon two years ago when a massive storm sent a lightning bolt down the trunk of the gum tree out front, shorting the whole street and exploding branches all over the verge. I thanked the house that night when the rain fell so hard I was sure the gutters would give up, but didn’t. The night we couldn’t hear ourselves speak from the deafening torrent on the tin roof. The one we still laugh about as the only night our new baby daughter slept through.

My house has carried me through the tumultuous years of pregnancy and small babies, first steps and first days at school. I have finger smeared photos on the fridge of little boys in new uniforms sitting expectantly on the verandah steps. I can remember their excitement at having scrawled their initials in the soft cement out the front as the council laid a new footpath. (The workmen kindly turned a blind eye.) Or living through the chaos of month after month of renovations, then panicking when the painters were all set and I still couldn’t decide which tester pot I liked best.

As far as I can tell, nostalgia does not like remorse for company, or shame, or bitterness – the unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable downtimes of a human existence – low points strung randomly between the day-to-day loops of life. Those things are best tucked away and revisited as little as possible. Regret is not for sentimental retrieval.

Why do we feel nostalgic? What is the evolutionary point of the recollection of powerful emotions? Is it so we can regret those feelings that are no longer with us? So we can mark  the passage of ‘time lived’? What about painful memory? Can we still call it nostalgia if we reminisce about the traumas of past illness, the pain of lost love?

I hope I will retain the mental agility to look back on 80, if I’m lucky, 90 years on this planet as well lived. Will I still be able to recall, and, more importantly, draw pleasure from, the faint memories of childhood, blurry chapters of another life, a smaller one – the new car smell of the red upholstery in my grandmother’s Morris  1100. Or remembering the feel of her as I gave her a tight hug and felt stiff bones – not hers – the Playtex girdle’s.

Strangely, I cannot recall her voice, or her laugh. She must have taken them with her. But I know smell is a potent reviver of memory. I can recall in a flash the perfume of her bright pink lipstick in its gold case, or the powdery scent of her makeup. Can we really memorise smells? In 2009, scientists discovered that childhood smells have ‘privileged’ position in our memories, that they bypass the usual sensory processing stations in the brain to be stored deep as primary impulses. That might explain why memories triggered by smells are more vivid and emotional than those triggered by words, sounds or pictures.

What will my children remember of this house? What deep seated impressions will it leave on their memories? I hope it’s the smell of their birthday cakes in the oven, or the scent of the jasmine in flower as they brush past it on the narrow path around the back. Or the sun-baked joy of the first summer we spent in our new pool, bypassing the beach for an inflatable shark.

Home is primal : somewhere we feel safe, and familiar, and in control. No wonder moving house is a stressful life event – I already feel uncomfortable, bereft even,  knowing I am about to lose my sense of ‘belonging’ – a decade of knowing most people in our street by name, my childrens’ favorite playmates across the road, our houses interchangeable on any given day, each almost as familiar as their own.

I wonder when we’re old, if we tell our life stories realistically or nostalgically, if we embellish them to make them more interesting, or censor our misdemeanours to save our pride? My mother’s stories from her childhood have the glow of halcyon days – I know the stories I tell my children of high school have the rough edges smoothed over. How do we present our history to others? How will I set the bones of this house for re-telling to others?

My youngest won’t remember her first home – it’ll be up to her dad and me, and her big brothers, to regale her with all the funny stories we collected here. Instead, the memories of her childhood will be laid down, year by year, in another century-old home in another suburb not far from here, a house (with stairs!) preparing itself for the onslaught of our family.

And what of this old Federation dame left behind, who has looked after us so well? I’m delighted to tell you we’ve sold to a couple with a toddler and a baby on the way, a young family whom I hope will revel in a new chapter in the history of Number 38 – a new cycle of ‘belonging’. May they create for themselves a houseful of lovely memories.  Just as we have, to be packed up and taken with us for the sake of nostalgia.

Modern manners still in vogue

Modern manners still in vogue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 27, 2012
Section: Opinion

Chivalry is not dead, it’s just deflated, wondering why some women don’t appreciate it any more.

I don’t blame today’s gentlemen for feeling uncertain how to behave around the fairer sex. I think a dapper chap could argue there’s nothing fair about being expected to pay for a woman’s meal, or seat her before himself, but that he does it because chivalry is about showing consideration and respect.

A gentleman might also be aware that standards of public decorum have been in place for centuries, probably since the Middle Ages, when the newly affluent middle classes decided manners were an obvious way to elevate themselves from the great unwashed.

The question now is whether chivalry has become offensive to woman striving for equality and independence?  And have manly virtues been somehow devalued?

Take the recent example of a Melbourne newspaper which signed on a student journalist for a fortnight’s work experience. She later wrote a scathing piece for her student rag claiming to have been the victim of sexism: “Men were continuously and unnecessarily sexist, waiting for me to walk through doors and leave the elevator before them.”

Her article riled women and men alike. Readers considered it a misguided stab at men trying to be courteous and friendly towards a young female associate. The student was convinced those fellas held open doors and gave her first passage from the lift so they could gawk at her rear. As one (male) reader posted online: “If this is the state of Australian womanhood, no wonder there are so many Aussie guys looking overseas for companions”.

Poor love, that intern should be grateful she wasn’t working in the hot-bed of 80’s radio, when one of my editors used to kindly pull out a chair for me then offer me a softer seat. On his lap. (How it hurt to refuse a gentleman who said ‘please.’)

Manners were always a handy aide for navigating the inevitable sexual politics of the office. Politeness was a way to brush off a dirty remark without causing offence, or enable some tongue-in-cheek retort in return. If the language turned particularly blue, social graces gave me an escape, without bruising the egos of superiors.

Now at home, grateful for any lewd suggestions, I can stand in (very early) middle age and survey those recalcitrant generation Y’s who think chivalry is antiquated. Those same 20-somethings who look disdainfully at me as I approach with pram like it’s a Sherman tank about to block their path. Or who collide with me on the footpath because their Facebook has crashed and so panicked are they at the thought of having to converse face-to-face, they haven’t looked up to see where they’re going.

What’s not to like about a well-mannered man? – chivalry isn’t meant to be demeaning, sexist or controlling. It’s just a respectful way to act around a lady. (If she’s behaving like one.) Perhaps the younger generation’s obsession with social media and text messaging has made politeness too wordy and long-winded to bother with. Actually, electronic commmunication causes offence just as easily (if not more readily) than face-to-face communication gone awry. I have dashed off many an email in a rush, only to re-read it later and feel a stab of shame that my directness was probably mistaken for curtness.

The finer points of etiquette are too often neglected by harried motorists and busy talkers on mobile phones, sometimes both. That’s when self-importance and impatience lay bare the rudeness and rancor of those who rely on – among other things – the two-fingered salute to convey annoyance. Drivers who are laid back enough to let me merge, or who hold back behind parked cars to let me pass, get my dainty wave and a big smile. I am a Volvo driver, after all.

On the train, as I often am with locomotive-crazy 5 and 2 year olds, I am touched by those older than me who motion to their seat and say ‘Would you like to sit down?’ Even if I decline the offer to manage my tangle of children, scooters and helmets, I make a point of saying ‘thank you, very sweet of you’ just so they know their gesture is appreciated. That lovely reach of human kindness gladdens my heart – mostly because I know that by the time three stops have gone by to my childrens’ shrieks of ‘doors closing!’, most passengers will be wishing we’d caught the bus.

Of course, gentlemanly conduct is a no-brainer during the first flush of a new romance – when infatuation makes character flaws and faults seem like endearing quirks, not infuriating oddities.

The real test of a man’s breeding is a relationship that generates three rowdy children, sleep deprivation, a depressing mortgage and a wife who is such an idealist she still thinks weekends should be for champagne and kisses, not spreading Dynamic Lifter on the lawn, and trying to fix the pool pump.

A realist (ie. a man) would understand that chivalry is the courtesy shown to his missus when he comes home from work to discover she has poured his prized bottle of 2001 Penfolds shiraz into the spaghetti sauce.

It’s a man’s false bravado when his wife asks him to take all three children to the Royal Show.

And it’s gentlemanly grace under pressure on the fast drive to the hospital with a 5 year old son who has shattered the bone in his finger chopping wood with an axe.

I keep hearing that chivalry is somehow incompatible with feminism – what bollocks! Imagine Germaine Greer having a door banged in her face by the bloke who didn’t check to see if someone was behind him? Door holding is just polite behaviour between the sexes. Actually, it matters not if a man or a woman  is coming through the door after you, you make some effort to hold it open. Manners transcend gender, don’t they?

Sometimes I feel sorry for men – they now have to tip-toe on the tightrope of propriety, especially in the office. When a girlfriend of mine discovered an old Cleo centerfold while pulling up the carpet in her house, she took it into work where it was pawed over and passed around with much hilarity by all the women in the office. Try picturing a bloke doing the same thing? For flaunting an old Playboy he’d be branded a sleaze or a boor. Hypocrisy loves a double standard, and a double page spread is all it takes to illustrate the point.

I now expect my 12-year-old son will automatically help his nanna with her bags, or stand back to let adults pass. I don’t think he’s too young to learn to be generous of spirit. It’s not a male thing, I do it as well because it feels good. And that’s the point isn’t it? Chivalry is a collection of gestures intended to make others feel respected and valued. And that’s never going to be old-fashioned.

Gender divide all man-maid

Gender divide all man-maid
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 20, 2012
Section: Opinion

My husband thinks a period drama is a movie about a woman with PMT. When he sees a petticoat and a china cup in the same television frame, he goes in search of the newspaper. By the time Downton Abbey finished its season, he was very well read and I was in mourning for Sunday nights, and the abrupt end to my well-to-do fantasies about living as landed gentry (mostly so I could have a maid.) When I dabbed daintily at my tears after the hero lost his leg in the trenches (he found it later in the army hospital) my lord of the manor would look sideways at me from his newspaper, with lips as pursed as the dowager Maggie Smith.

Why can’t men enjoy women’s television? – it always has stout-hearted blokes in it, what’s not to like? Take Downton Abbey’s gilt-edged example : a  manly aristocrat running his boundless estate, his wife, five daughters and a house full of servants. Ain’t that gentrified male fantasy too? : money, power, control, ladies-in-waiting? Or am I being common?

The gulf of good breeding between my beloved and me is widening as fast as a fallen woman in the family way. He thinks being confined to the Grand Prix for half a Sunday is all the drama anyone needs. Don’t get me wrong – I love cars as much as the next woman  (I had a buttercup-yellow Datsun 180B once) but I’ll be blowed if I understand why staring at cars doing perpetual loops of a racetrack constitutes entertainment. I ask questions about which driver’s doing what and why to stave off the boredom, but after ten minutes I am catatonic, even from pole position (closest to the telly).

And it’s not just about who dominates the remote control. Domestic responsibilities are still unfairly divided along gender lines. I know this because our washing line has not been touched by a man since it was rigged up by one last century. Our washing basket lives undercover behind enemy lines – no-one but me knows it exists. It straddles the space in the laundry I call occupied territory – and there’s no peace for me until it’s empty. I don’t know why my freshly ironed spouse thinks he can ignore all entreaties concerning washing, drying, folding and putting away the family’s clothes, but my civil authority over this matter is clearly non-existent. (I now know encouraging people to put their smalls out is part of the delicate cycle of being a housewife.)

The dishwasher, however, is the land mine in our house. I love that appliance like no other, we know each other so intimately, I could fill and empty it blindfold. But my soft-skinned occasional kitchen-hand continually rearranges my bad packing ‘for the good of the dishes’. I say it’s a workhorse happy to get rough treatment, he replies that my cavalier attitude towards the art of plate stacking is contemptuous. Late at night I hear him muttering under his breath as he restores efficiency and symmetry. It’s just a pity he’s not around to rearrange the two loads I’ve already done without him.

Domestic servitude is a dead end job. We all hate it, we all want to do less of it, or share more of it. But it’s a rare man who thinks about housework like women do. I know that because the latest census figures show a woman my age – a youthful 44  – spends two hours and 51 minutes on housework a day compared to her mate, who puts in an hour and two minutes (the two minutes is for procrastinating. Actually, maybe it’s the hour that’s for procrastinating?)

Lo and behold the census reveals that suddenly, at the age of 85, Australian men get a taste for housework and out-clean their wives by eight minutes a day. The only possible explanation is that by 85, a bloke probably feels he’s held out long enough, or his wife has kicked the bucket waiting.

My live-in eye candy has become ever more short sighted since I left my career on the box for life back in the nest. His clothes are now left where they’ve fallen, his coffee cups are plopped into the sink for the dish-hand and my morning vacuuming  is an annoyance that interferes with radio news. He still mows a mean lawn, has the deft touch of a handyman and can get a squirming toddler dressed without tantrum, but I remain handmaiden to all.

But lately, an odd thing has happened. I seem to have risen above the resentment of feeling subordinate in my role as housewife, and have grown to tolerate the gentle hum of my morning rounds. While the breakfast chatter of children is at full throttle with dad, I quietly make beds with hospital corners and find homes for lost things. I think it’s the need to control one’s environment: my home is my office is my home. I still detest cleaning, but  a veneer of household order is at least something achieved when writer’s block strikes, or I discover that  5 year old has given 2 year old a sly haircut with the craft scissors.

Working mums have it much tougher. Many arrive home to the dreaded ‘second shift’. After a full day on the job, they walk in the door to make a start on cooking, homework, baths. In between they try to jam in some meaningful time with their children. If they’re lucky, they have spouses who help to shoulder the load but plenty of partners are still toiling away in the office. Why has the division of domestic drudgery proved so resistant to change, despite ever more numbers of married women entering the workforce? Why are women still picking up the slack? Because most still aren’t earning as much as men?  Or because men would rather work late than come home to face a mountain of washing? No question – I’d rather stay holed up in the office as well.

I have sampled all the permutations of domestic life: I’ve been a double-income-no-kids, a working wife and mother of one, and a single mum trying to be all things to a 3 year old, pay a crushing mortgage and keep a level head at the office.  Now I’m a mother of three with a breadwinner who allows me the luxury of a few precious years at home. Luxurious the hours may appear through the window of an office in town, but my day is no longer divided into work and rest – instead, I am always ‘on’ and ‘doing’.   I’m backed here by the latest statistics showing women get much less free time a day than men. No matter whether they work for money or love.

The biggest problem with domesticity is that it never ends, and no amount of technology has circumvented the tedium of keeping house. All I’ve learnt is that the more housework a man does, the happier his partner is. And I’ll hypothesise that men who willingly share the load get a lot less grief from the trouble-and-strife. In the meantime, I’ll try not to care if my house gets trashed. I’ll just remind myself that it’s clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy.

Dirty tricks on Animal Farm

Dirty tricks on Animal Farm
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 13, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am seriously considering becoming a donkey voter at the next Federal election. Really. The political animal in me is so disenchanted by the reprehensible goings-on in Canberra the past week (actually, make that the past two years) I am prepared to be a voter’s ass. Because I can’t trust any of them anymore and they clearly don’t care about me. Me: taxpayer, woman, wife, mother, daughter – someone who is fervently patriotic but can no longer abide this sordid sty we called Australian politics.

Fancy giving a disreputable candidate the one job that requires unimpeachable integrity? As Speaker, he was required to uphold the standards of Parliament and yet plied his staffer with his catalogue of filthy text messages, denigrating everything from his Liberal colleagues to the particulars of the female anatomy.

What I saw this week, while trying to keep tabs on the news over the racket of children on school holidays, was a female Prime Minister and her male opponent trying to pulverize each other on the unwinnable issue of gender politics. It didn’t make either of them more likeable, and it didn’t make their lust for power any less transparent. Frankly, a plague on both their houses.

Politicians might love hurling tit-for-tat verbal grenades, but I think they’ve failed to notice that I, for one, might like them a whole lot more if they stuck to governing. I’d like more policy debate and less hateful personal abuse. I have enough chaos at home, thank you, without seeing my Parliament descend into farce and hypocrisy for an entire week.

Scandals blacken everyone who participates in them. On the vexacious subject of misogyny, politicians should be more careful about who throws the first stone. As I see it, neither the Prime Minister nor the Opposition Leader is in any position to claim the moral high ground:  Julia Gillard can’t, because she let the blatantly chauvinist Speaker slip through the noose while trying to send Tony Abbott to the gallows for the same crime. The Opposition leader can’t claim any moral plaudits either, because his history of gender-charged political jibes shows questionable judgment at best.

While I don’t like my politicians hypocritical or bloodthirsty, I do like them quick witted and penetrating: I think of Paul Keating’s put-downs with shameful delight. He of the sharp suit, the sharp one-liner, sharp-eared, sharp-eyed and sharp-fanged. The one time Prime Minister who called Andrew Peacock a ‘painted, perfumed gigolo’, who declared Peter Costello was ‘all tip and no iceberg’ and who considered going head to head with John Hewson was ‘like being flogged with a warm lettuce.’

Yes, I know he descended into caustic abuse too, but corrosive as he was, love him or detest him, he was entertaining to watch. I don’t get quite the same pleasure from today’s crop of politicians trying to claw each other loose from the greasy pole of power. In fact, the older I get, the less pleasure I get from politics full stop. The unrelenting hatreds, the back-stabbing, the wolfish cunning, the dishonesty, lies and manipulations. And all designed to win us over.

In my student days, I thought of politics as an honorable profession, the kind of career that must only attract those with the fire in their belly for progress and change, and a sensitive moral antenna for social and economic injustice. I used to wander past the podiums on the lawns at University (usually on the way to the tavern) and admire the speakers for their guts and gumption.

Now, from an age of (supposed) maturity all I see is my parliamentary representatives’ obsession with each other, not the business of government. And here I am at home with the telly on, and every news story from the national capital is brimming with foul language and vituperation. I have made a point of trying to teach my boys not to use language as a weapon, and to respect beliefs different to their own. Yet I am cooking dinner with the air turning blue from the 6 o’clock news. I also don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking she’s got a get-out-of-jail-free card just because she’s female. I turn the telly off to protect my childrens’ ears (and my idealism.)

Meanwhile, lurking backstage around the Parliamentary theatre, the desperate puppet-masters are thinking of new ways to butter us up for an election: Julia Gillard, in a recent interview, saying of her partner Tim Mathieson: ‘Tim is often the only bloke [among the spouses at events]. Fortunately, after a lifetime in hairdressing, he’s used to hanging around with a lot of women. He can dispense hairdressing advice at the same time.’ Then Margaret Abbott getting up on the podium herself to defend her husband, while the spin doctors pace the floor back in the office, hoping she lays it on so thick Tony Abbott will look like the icing on the conservative cake: ‘Just don’t ever try and tell me that my husband of twenty-four years and father of three daughters is on some anti-woman crusade. It’s simply not true.” (In an interview published on the same day, she added that he even loves Downton Abbey.)

Both Margaret Abbott and Julia Gillard can colour-in the perfect post card of domestic equality and spousal harmony. That’s called standing by your man. Fair enough. But it’s also a pitch for the female vote from both sides – for women who would still like a reason to embrace their first female Prime Minister, and for those who need reassurance of Abbott’s soft spot for Margaret and his daughters and women in general. All I see is a cynical ploy to play the gender card. Am I too jaded?

For my mother, in her 70’s and very observant of the political landscape, it’s been the worst show the democratic process has to offer. ‘Appalling behaviour’ she texted me, ‘the standard of politics is degrading our country.’ From my 50-something bachelor neighbour:  They’re all a bunch of idiots, and we yet we still have to find one to vote for.’ And from a girlfriend who has worked on the sidelines of politics: ‘The person I feel most sorry for is Mrs Slipper. And his children.’

But Australian politics have always been laced with a dollop of poison. The conniving leadership battles between Rudd and Gillard, Keating’s insidious campaign to unseat Bob Hawke, Robert Menzies referring in diaries to Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon as ‘a contemptible little squirt’ – the language may be less offensive, but the venom is the same.

What’s new then about this week’s political rivalry? Plenty. Because this is the week I lost faith in my Parliament. And I suspect we’ll all be at the polls before we know it, having to decide the winners from the losers, painfully aware that our preference is no guarantee of good government. Perhaps I’ll be cheeky and stand in the ballot box with my blunt pencil and stab a few professional politicians. Maybe it will give them the jab they need to rediscover their dignity.

That elusive state of bliss

That elusive state of bliss
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday, October 6, 2012
Section: Opinion

Sleep deprivation is the torture of the damned. And I damn well can’t put up with it anymore.

The smallest member of the house, now two, should be sleeping like a baby. Except that she never has, save for a briefly exquisite interlude last year. Now she collapses mute into her cot at lunchtime (a Mack truck couldn’t wake her), only to spend the deepest recesses of night waking every couple of hours and crying long and loud for anything that might take one’s fancy in the middle of the night – a hot bottle, a dummy, a cuddle, a rendition of the Wiggles at 3am. It’s infuriating and I am withered by tiredness.

I hope this will come with nods and hazy recollections from anyone who has ever had a child. Mothers and fathers and grandparents who look back on the halcyon days of baby-rearing and still see the black shadows of lost sleep.

I write this for those who have ever had problems with sleeping. Blokes of a certain age whose bladders have decided to start telling the time by nudging them awake every two hours. Women whose minds race ahead of their bodies, and whose brainwaves jolt them awake at five in the morning.

We take it so for granted, this third of our lives. It’s supposed to be of fairy-tale proportions:  still and long and dewy-faced in the morning. But Sleeping Beauty can be a right harridan – she’s had it in for most of us at some time or other, and finding the magic kiss of sleep is often a brutal exercise in sheer bloody-minded frustration.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve tried all the usual trickery – no coffee, no television, a room as black as night, warm milk, a hot shower, a roll in the hay.

But if you’re held hostage by a mind that won’t relax and a body that refuses to drift, it can be the mother of all battles between id and ego.  Never mind the superego – it’s not playing by the rules either, and it has no conscience, happy to let you toss and turn mindlessly half the night.

A Harvard Medical School study documented that sleep deprivation causes the brain to become incapable of putting an emotional episode in the proper perspective. That would explain why getting on the scales makes me cry.

I hear from my mother and her friends that you need less sleep as you get older but it’s all about the quality. That is, hours – in – a -row. They complain they can’t sleep past 4.30 or 5am, and find it exasperating. Sleep deprivation at any age is the rack and thumbscrew of nightly torment, except the chambers now have electric blankets and duck down pillows.

Most of what we know about sleep has only been learned in the past twenty  five years, since MRI’s began giving us detailed images of the inside of our brains. In 2000, the biggest survey of Australian sleep habits ever conducted suggested women need  an hour more sleep a night than men, and that not getting it may be one reason women are more susceptible to depression. And that’s depressing.

I thought I’d sail through the nightly interruptions of motherhood. After all, I’d had no trouble with the 4am graveyard shifts in my early da ys in radio, the round-the-clock breaking stories and travelling to far flung time-zones only to have to hit the ground running. My camera crew and I prided ourselves on how, when it counted, we were machines, and could power our way through jetlag on next to no sleep.  And then I had a baby.

I was very good at the four hour shifts in hospital, and for the first few weeks at home, my post partum brain bathed in the euphoria of a successful birth. I think adrenalin kept me going for a couple of months because the crash was as shattering as it was unexpected.

The only thing that was asleep for most of that first year were my legs. From sitting crumpled on the floor, one arm through the wooden slats of my baby’s cot, mindlessly, endlessly patting his rear. Then came the aching back from rocking figure-of-eight’s and doing deep knee bends with a strapping 10 month old whose head was lolling with sleep, but whose mother was too scared to put him down in case he wasn’t asleep enough.

I was never going to make those mistakes with number two and three. Those babies were going to learn to sleep on their own, from day dot. No patting, no dummies, no rocking. That lasted until I got out of hospital. The tracksuit years, as we liked to call them, were not kind. Nor was witching hour. I think the term is used to describe toddlers who hit the wall at 5pm. In our house, it’s when I do. And the lovely coven of my motherly friends know it’s a bad spell that lasts a long, long time. Until the youngest of your brood learns how to do an all-nighter. And I don’t mean party.

To test your mental strength to breaking point, try managing a crying baby and a sick child. Or get sick yourself. I see the drained, hollow faces most days on the school run – mums and dads you know have been up half the night. And their children, who despite such broken sleep, are still bouncing up and down. Until they get home again – for witching hour. Perhaps it is advancing age that ruins the delusions of parenting, that we all would have been better at it in our twenties, not in our thirties and forties.

My mother-in-law had seven babies in nine years and I have lamented to her of my altered state. She listened sympathetically and then said ‘yes, mine all slept through from three months, at least I think they did – the door was shut.’

So last night I took her advice. I gave my two year old a little pep talk, a cuddle and a teddy. I turned off the baby monitor. I shut the door between her and us and I turned up the telly. Her father and I sat together on the sofa speechless. We listened to her cries and the hyperventilating that went with it, and stopped each other racing in to her to plant kisses on her wet cheeks. Eventually, after the longest twenty five minutes of my recent life, she stopped crying. Completely. The silence was truly golden and eerily quiet.

We went to bed and celebrated. And then we took turns getting up every two hours when she cried louder and harder than she ever has.

A healthy respect for life

A healthy respect for life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday, September 29, 2012
Section: Opinion

Life, interrupted: in hospitals, you find all the lonely people. Where do they all belong?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in a public hospital lately, visiting the dearest of girlfriends. She is no stranger to chronic illness, but this time she scared us. Out of immediate danger, she now lies in a room pasted with photos of her small angel-haired son as streams of visitors take turns keeping vigil by her bedside.

I’m one of those people, urging her on, whispering  fighting words in her ear, silently cursing an illness so fierce it chose at whim to blacken five days of her life with a coma. On the long walk from the carpark, I have become acutely aware of the divide between well and sick – I feel almost guilty, not grateful, to be in rude health with no reason for marking time. Twice now, I have passed the same elderly man huddled at the bus stop. I can’t tell if he is wishing the bus would come, or just thankful for a place to sit, protected from the wind. He looks worn down by the business of living, weary of his age. How does he come to be here? Is there someone waiting for him somewhere?

All along the corridors of Ward 71, left and right, doors half ajar, I see glimpses of lives visited by sickness. The signs of infirmity are everywhere:  the musty air and the strange medical smells, the half light, windows with a view of more windows, all shut to the outside world. The only energy I feel is from the nurses, so cheerful there is no small comfort too big to ask them for – the place enlivened with their briskness and busyness.

Squeezing in behind a gurney in the giant lift, I’m given a close up of someone wrapped in a white blanket : a middle-aged man too unwell to care if I see him at his most vulnerable, at his lowest ebb. The orderly smiles at me across his parcel: for him, moving between floors with a patient on a trolley is part of the ups and downs of an ordinary day. For me, it’s like stepping into another dimension, the underbelly of the human condition.  A half-life of bedpans and hacking coughs and pressure stockings.  Another world we all acknowledge, but vainly hope never to enter.

Nothing reminds you of your good health more than seeing someone without theirs. Even small tastes of illness signpost how the spirit can falter when sick. Unless you’re Clive James, terminal with leukaemia, (and recently kicked out of home for infidelity), telling a journalist:  ‘In my life I have managed to get a certain amount done, and my chief aim now is to live longer so that I can do more.’ Usually, fear of the unknown is the default position when ill health announces itself, until doctors reassure us modern medicine will save us. Or at least give us reasonable odds. Then it’s down to mental grit: can we overrule a mind that threatens to run wild with doubts and panic, that carries us off down dark gloomy alleys morbidly pointing out the dead ends. Conquer that subconscious traitor and you’re on the road to recovery.

I have been desperately sick only once, eight days after my third baby was born. A post partum haemorrhage that threatened to be my undoing, just as I’d completed the miracle work of giving birth. Not once during that 12 hour ordeal, with teams of doctors swapping shifts through the night, and the father of my week old baby left to his own devices behind the throng of white coats and soft soled shoes, did I ever let myself believe I would leave my family. But I saw the looks on the faces of the emergency team, as they smiled down at me and squeezed my hand, and gave each other those  lingering glances that meant I was in real trouble.

I never considered I might die – I had my new baby fretting in the hospital nursery for her mother’s smell and touch. There were two young boys whose lives would falter without their mum. And a husband who hadn’t planned on raising his family alone.

I have rarely thought about that time until now, weaving my way along hospital corridors to the bedside of my friend. My lovely friend, who has known no end of sickness by (ill) virtue of the awful junction between her genetics and advancing age. On she fights, frail now, but robust enough of mind to know she too, is needed by many.

Through it all, there are the constant reminders of what she can no longer do or be – that bastard disease hungry for the healthy parts of her. Doctors, one after the other, testing their own limits to rebuild a body under siege, trying to reverse the damage already done with ever more arcane treatments. And what of the girl I grew up with, in and out of hospitals her whole adult life, now mother to a 6-year-old, confined to a bed yet again? Where is her freedom to just ‘be’ – her independence curtailed by the nemesis inside her, and on the outside, by those whose job it is to save her with endless tests and doctoring.

What can illness teach us? We can fantasise about endlessness, knowing full well the end will come to all of us. But often the transformation from person to patient is insidious. Our lives suddenly on hold as  the enemy infiltrates our defences and takes away our control.

I have known those who regard their sickness as a companion, no friend but no foe. An unwanted  possession to be outgrown, outwitted and outlived.  The American essayist Susan Sontag wrote that: ‘Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’

What of the old woman in the next room to my friend? Residing in ‘that other place’? Just a small face above the sheet, always alone, her wispy white hair a tangled halo on the pillow. Where are her visitors? Are there children or a husband to love? She looks peaceful when asleep, as she mostly is when I pass by. I wonder if she will ever leave this place, with its ticking machines and constant footsteps, for the peace of her own home, wherever that might be? Will there be some other freshly made bed, comforting and familiar from which to recover from her sickness?

George Bernard Shaw once said “I enjoy convalescence. It’s the part that makes the illness worthwhile.” For my childhood friend, the convalescences get longer and more torturous, small parts of her lost along the way. How long will her recovery take this time? How much more damage will be done?

Feeling utterly useless, I will use my sturdy health to replenish hers, if by doing nothing more than breathing the same air in a stuffy room screened by a blue curtain. I’ll take her my childrens’ drawings and let her see herself as a stick figure in a glittery dress with a crooked smile. And I’ll whisper the story of an old man huddled at the bus stop who was rewarded at last, when an old friend pulled up in a car to take him home.