The Sounds of Silence

The Sounds of Silence
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published Saturday February 16, 2013

When was the last time you heard silence? Not the soothing emptiness of the countryside, with its carolling magpies and leaf rustling breezes, but the complete absence of sound?

I’ve experienced true silence just the once, suspended in the watery blackness of a float tank in Sydney. Climbing naked into an isolation chamber with nothing for company but lukewarm salty water is an exercise in sensory deprivation. 

It was a gag – a gift voucher from my Mum wanting to slow me down. I was only 30, but I still remember the mesmerising stillness that sent my brain darting about in bewilderment, straining for input. (There are only two choices in the confines of a float tank: give in to the nothingness, or have an anxiety attack.) I could repress the urge to panic knowing I could escape the tank, but emptying my head of noisy thought was the biggest challenge. Concentrating on the sensations of breathing loosened my grip on time and I emerged an hour later in a state of dreamy calm.

I’ve never again come that close to silence. I’ve tried to find it lying in the yellow stubble of the furthest paddock at the family farm, but the pulsating chorus of cicadas became intrusive, underscored by the thundering of a road train from across the valley. Last October, being laid out on the white slab of a medical imaging suite became the best manufactured silence of the year. I needed a 45 minute bone scan on my foot. Forbidden to move a muscle, I drifted into a trance, spellbound by the gentle purring of the machine. If not for the $500 bill, I’d be tempted to book in again – just for the afternoon nap.

Silence and modern life now seem incompatible. There is supposedly not a single place in Europe where you can sit still for 15 minutes during daylight and escape the noises of mankind. That’s quite an assertion. Whether the truth or exaggeration, we humans have burdened the planet with the incessant racket of our machines.

As I write, it’s night-time and I am sitting at my desk with the sash windows open. The kids are out to it after a late swim at the beach. Their father is in Manila on business. (When people ask what he does up there, I say: ‘He collects folders.’)

It’s tranquil, but still saturated with sound. If I tune my ears, I can hear the faint whirring of the ceiling fan in the kitchen creating an evening breeze. There is a glee club of frogs in the garden celebrating Retic Day. My fingers do a sibilant dance over the keyboard.  A car turns out of our street and revs into high gear. Someone laughs next door. With my eyes closed I can detect the low drone of the fridge and a pulsating sensation in my head. A wave of relaxation washes over me, replacing the effort of listening.

I spend much of my time living outside of myself. If I’m not moderating the squabbles between my children, or trying to have three conversations at once, I’m straining to hear the TV news as I bang about in the kitchen cooking dinner. A dozen things always demand my ears. Even when my body is still, I continue to cartwheel round the inside of my head: racing ahead to tomorrow’s conundrums or fretting over yesterday’s. I’ve heard it called ‘the storm of inward thought.’ I’d prefer to be becalmed.

My favourite time is those minutes before I fall asleep, when the house is  softly breathing, and I’m alone with my thoughts. I bring them before the Bench to be counselled, deliberated and settled, and then I wind down in the deep quiet.

Remember the silence of the classroom when you were at high school? Me neither. But I do recall brief lulls in the chatter when we kids finally knuckled down and the only sound was the scratch of biros on paper. It was stimulated silence: minds on the stretch, neurons firing. (Or, in my case, neurons scattering in confusion during maths.)

Silence is satisfying. Advancing age has given my mum an intolerance for the bedlam of my house. When three kids are banging doors, shrieking and galloping around their nanna, and the thumping music on eldest son’s radio is competing with our conversation, I can see her becoming agitated.

Before long, she’s kissing the kids and searching for her car keys to escape my noisy world. One child at a time is my answer for mum, especially with a two year old who has only two volumes – shouting and yelling.

I’ve made it my goal this year to seek more silence. I need some tranquilising. While my toddler is napping, I’ll try to create a mind-space so soft and still I’ll be able to hear a pin drop. With cork floors here, that should be quite the challenge.

In the Passion Pit

In the Passion Pit
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published February 9, 2013

Power is still the best aphrodisiac. That’s why I get all atingle at the sight of my husband brandishing an electric drill or a whipper snipper. The mere suggestion that he has forsaken the cricket, the newspaper and his children to do a job that lessens my domestic load is guaranteed to earn him an afternoon delight. And I don’t mean a visit from my mother.

Sometimes I fantasise about my bloke leaning over the kitchen sink. I like to imagine him up to his elbows in suds teaching that saucepan with the scrambled eggs burnt into it a lesson in brute force.

I can also get steamed up watching him iron a shirt. He likes to do his ironing after a shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. I’m always captivated by the way he moves from cuff to collar instead of the other way around, though really I’m just excited that it’s not me taking the creases out. Just once, I wish the towel would drop to the floor. Instead, his belly works against gravity to keep it firmly in place. (Ironing has always been a wrinkle up the sleeve of fun.)

Foreplay in a marriage is a dance of many complicated steps. It’s not like the  hokey-pokey we did in our single days. Back then, shaking it about after a couple of shandies at the pub was all it took to get propositioned. Now, in a long-term partnership over-run with children’s swimming lessons and endless cut lunches, the matrimonial polka comes a sad second to wakeful toddlers and 12 year olds who can stay up later than I can. Even when the kids are finally asleep, I find it difficult to read the signals coming from the man on the sofa. If he’s engrossed in the latest Economist magazine, I never know if my fortunes are looking up, or if Greece has killed off any hope of a stimulation package: Mine.  

A girlfriend says her husband needs to understand that foreplay starts three hours before bed-time. For her, it involves curling up on the sofa with him while they watch Stephen Fry on QI. During the show, she likes to talk about subjects that have been troubling her during the day. Vexatious questions like whether the dripping laundry tap might fix itself. After that, my girlfriend likes some hand-holding (her hand being held) or foot massaging (her feet being massaged) while they watch re-runs of his favourite show The Sopranos, and she asks him repeatedly whose hit-man is whose. Maybe he gets up to make them both a cup of tea because ‘togetherness’ is all about connecting in ways that make her the centre of (his) attention’.

If he’s perfectly content watching a mob hit without her, having baggsed the comfy arm of the sofa after leaving the dishes for the maid, then she’s not hitting the sack with him later on. Any hopes he has of making faces with her at 10pm sink faster than a Mafia victim in New Jersey habour.

I’m going to make an educated guess here and say most blokes don’t need foreplay. In fact, I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that leaving a man in peace in front of the telly is foreplay in itself. In our house, I have learnt the Golden Rule of obtaining amorous congress: Silence. Sometimes I give myself an extra challenge and see if I can remain mute even during the ad breaks. (No success yet.)

The only trouble with pandering to my man’s love of quiet is that some nights I have no idea where I stand. He might be a prized stud, but occasionally, I like to imagine I am queen of the Stepford wives and can expect certain reward for my verbal restraint, only to discover that while I was loading the dishwasher he has hit the hay and any pleadings for a roll in it are met with: “Go to sleep please Blossom, I have a 7am meeting.” (Business and pleasure are mutually exclusive in our house.)

As far as I can tell, men don’t talk with other men about their sex lives. If they did they’d have worked out that women like to use sex as a reward for good behaviour. A husband who takes the kids out and leaves me in my house alone for an afternoon is in for some conjugal happiness. On the other hand, any husbands who take the rubbish out then act as though they’ve cleaned both toilets are likely to be going to bed alone.

Men should talk more to each other – that’s what the phone is for. Commiserating with mates over the mysteries of the female libido might unravel why it blows cold even after you’ve taken the bins out. Women, of course, are enlightened about what men want because they discreetly share the details for the greater good of womankind. These are the kind of private conversations best saved for fifteen of your besties at book  club.

If men had book clubs they’d have all the answers. Instead they’re doomed to pub get-togethers where the talk rarely ventures outside the cricket or the nags until some bloke, half-polluted, asks wistfully: “You know that look women get when they want sex? Me neither.”

Chewing the Fat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under the Covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor’s Orders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tangling with a bad hair day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mutton dressed as man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success comes after a fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting in a bind over a fix

Getting in a bind over a fix
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 22, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am not the person you call on to get something fixed. Unless it’s a missing button, a sandwich or a broken heart. Year 8 home economics and the empathy gene have served me well, but not well enough to be trusted with important things like dishwashers that don’t, taps that drip like nightly water torture and new digital tellies that refuse to play ball when the tennis starts.

Every household needs someone who has patience, logic and the ability to read an instruction manual.  Apparently I have none of these skills. Actually, I know I have none of these skills because I switch off the minute the man of the house starts lecturing me about why domestic life might be easier if I kept my cool, attempted some rational thought and located the darn instruction manual.

I’ve already learnt one of the most important lessons for marital harmony: decide which one of you is going to play the helpless role, and which of you is going to pretend they know what they’re doing. I don’t like to tread on my husband’s area of expertise – self delusion – because he prides himself on his masterful tool-work.

Our garage, depending on your point of view, is either an obsessive-compulsive’s shrine to hoarding or a spider-pit of uselessness. Countless bits of sawn-off skirting boards have been stacked on the rafters, all manner of timber off-cuts festoon the walls, some rusted gardening tools first used to topiary the gardens of Versailles are propped behind the door and a there’s a kayak whose bottom has been wet just the once. (By the sprinkler.) Trying to coax a hoarder into sending scraps of wood to the tip is like asking a kid to give up Christmas. I get a staunch refusal backed up by some pithy remark: “If I ever got some time to myself on a weekend I’d be oar in hand down the river right now.” Little does he know that over the years, I’ve portered trunkfuls of his prized junk across town to friends’ verges, awaiting their council ‘bring out your dead.’

When my jack-of-all-trades is fed up with his squabbling progeny interrupting the cricket on weekends, he grabs his car keys and calls to me over his shoulder: “I’m just popping down to Bunnings, do you need anything?” I like to yell back: ‘I’d like a new set of knockers please, wooden ones if they have them, they feel nice.” “Oh, and an all purpose spreader.” In case he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I add: “And some lawn fertilizer to put in it.” Then I sit back and make a cup of tea knowing he’ll be gone for hours because Bunnings is his Aladdin’s cave.

I’m sure the place is also a cult. Customers in Bunnings look disconcertingly happy – like they’re high on the sheer spectacle of a million bits-and-bobs with easy reach. (Of a fork-lift.) I notice there’s a lot of waiting around at the paint counter, but everybody is calm – people making small talk with each other while they finger the silky new paintbrushes. I see their eyes glaze over as they fantasise about new colour swatches and virgin rollers and trays, all fluffy soft and inviting. No-one does their lolly there, even when it takes fifteen minutes to locate the plumbing expert and the queue at the cash register is a dozen deep.

My right-hand man uses trips to Bunnings as a rite of passage for our five year old. Together, man and boy drive off in the ute and vanish for half the afternoon, signalling their return with a flurry of excited shouts “Hey, I got a really big tool box, some new drill bits, a hot dog and a piece of special wood.” And then I turn to my small son and say “And what did you get darling?”

I know there might be just as many women as men who love fixing things. But I doubt it. Though I do have several girlfriends who have been forced into the role of household trouble-shooter by necessity. Like me, there are men out there who won’t read instruction manuals – believe it or not. They’re usually the ones who  have ‘tool tempers’ that erupt while hanging (their wives’) paintings – where the air turns blue from their constant stream of invective and the hallway is littered with hooks and screws thrown down from the ladder in disgust. Those kind of tinkerers need to accept their limitations, hand the drill and plugs to the missus and dish out instructions instead.

To me, a washing machine is as complex as a space shuttle, so when I’m left alone in a house with a malfunctioning appliance, I feel uncomfortable. Last month our toilet threatened to block because our two-year-old thinks ‘toilet training’ is teaching the bog to swallow an entire roll of poo-tickets. Having fished reams of sodden paper out of the bowl, my bloke fiddled around with the flush mechanism and pronounced it ‘fixed.’

As he left the house for work the next morning, I was given strict instructions to gently press the button until the water subsided. Gentle pressing I did, but when the water started rising – fast – I did what any level-headed woman would do and started frantically bashing the button. It worked a treat. Until the button stopped being a button and got stuck in the hole. I thought I might sort it out if I lifted the cistern lid off and had a play around but some valve popped out of alignment and then I couldn’t get the lid back on. Knowing I was faced with certain disgrace, I rang three plumbers before one agreed to call by, fixed it in 30 seconds and charged me $90 for the pleasure. Frankly, it was a small price to pay for saving my bacon.

Domestic life is not just divided into do-it-yourself-ers and incompetents. It’s about who kills the cockroaches, especially the summer ones that rocket into the house with their Boeing wingspans. It’s about which half of a partnership likes spiders enough to slide them out the back door on a piece of newspaper without histrionics. And it’s which person wakes up fast enough to make a flying leap from bed when there are scary noises in the middle of the night. It’s never a burglar, always middle son falling out of bed. His father usually gets the trailing foot tangled up in the sheet and traumatises all three children with howls of shock and pain as he crashes to the floor.

Misbehaving computers, however, are a burden to be shared equally. When they go on the blink, or blank, I yell for my 46-year-old technology wizard, who tells me (much too gleefully):  “Isn’t it time you learnt to fix it yourself?”

“Help!” I then plead to eldest son, who calls back: ‘You’re such a noob Mum, you can’t even find your own Word document – Epic Fail.’ I tell him to lower his voice so my cover’s not blown – really, I have no idea how to retrieve any documents from the Microsoft cloud, but hey – I don’t need that telegraphed.

I don’t believe anyone should be facetious about maintenance matters. When the dishwasher improves to washing 80-percent of the dishes and sodden husband finally emerges from inside it, I hand him a glass of wine to reward his genius and remark: “Thanks honey, you’re quite a catch.” (Dishwashers are not all he can get going.)

Last law of marital harmony: appreciate the effort, not the result. (Then get a professional in first thing Monday.)

60 and too old to register

60 and too old to register
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 15, 2012
Section: Opinion

Three years ago, my local supermarket made a very smart decision. It hired an Italian blonde bombshell called Nella as a check-out chick. I use the term ‘chick’ loosely, because this bella donna was 57 and came with an accent like Sophia Loren: “Everything you see darlink, I owe to spaghetti.” She fast became a charismatic addition to the 12-items-or-less aisle, so much so that a great many of the 60-something bachelors in my suburb started favoring her express lane.

I got to know Nella because she was the friendliest  face I’d seen in the service industry in quite some time. She quickly learnt my children’s names: “Buon giorno piccolini!” and they squealed “Ciao Nella!” when they spotted her behind her cash register. In no time, she knew lots of her customers’ names, and she and I had running gags about noticing each other’s hairstyles when no-one else did. (“Darlink, ‘e’s not looking at your hair, you know.”) For me, she was just the happy fix I needed after collecting yet another trolleyfull of nappies and Cornflakes; all with a headstrong toddler hell-bent on her own shopping expedition.

I tell you this because 2 months ago, Nella was told to go. No reasons given. Coincidentally, a bank of do-it-yourself checkouts arrived soon after, confounding us all with their bleeps-ings and ding-ings. My children still scan the cash registers for Nella, but there’s just the usual teenagers learning the hard way why you pack eggs on top. Buying milk and bread is no fun anymore – I miss Nella’s motherly banter.

I’ve bumped into her near school and at the train station. Each time she recounts for me her latest  rejection:  “You’re not quite what we’re after.” Or “Sorry, you don’t fit the job description.”  She can’t understand why her years of experience in the service industry count for nothing. I notice she has shed a bit of her sparkle – she’s agitated about money, glum about her dwindling job prospects.  I can see her self-confidence waning.

I am astounded that someone who is ‘goodwill personified’ cannot find a job in retail –  it’s because Nella is now 60 – hardly old, but positively ancient when out job-hunting.  Goodness knows, she could teach those snippy young shop-girls a thing or two about being warm, efficient and polite. She’d cost the same to hire as any 21-year-old, be markedly more reliable and give to her customers that lovely reach of human kindness. When shop owners call for someone ‘dynamic’ and ‘creative,’ Nella is their perfect candidate, except those descriptives are now code for ‘young.’

Nella now inhabits society’s never-land – too old to be considered an asset, too young to be cast out as unproductive and dispensable. Is it because she is seen as a greater health and safety risk? Or that someone her age is automatically regarded as less efficient, or unwilling to learn today’s technologies? I’d imagine there are plenty of 20-somethings showing the same tendencies (especially on Mondays.)

When I was a kid, we knew all our shopkeepers’ names . As it happened, our butcher’s name was  ‘Alan Butcher’ (the perfect marriage of occupation and identity.) He wore a blue and white striped apron, had one knuckle missing and always had blood on his hands. I used to scare myself imagining him de-boning his finger but was placated by the slice of polony he always handed me over the counter. Our family and his were bonded by chops and rissoles for a decade, part of an affectionate familiarity between customer and proprietor, the kind that breeds long loyalties.

If competition between businesses is fiercer than ever, you’d think longevity in a job – the wealth of accumulated experience – would be prized. But the great swathe of baby boomers now hitting their 50’s and 60’s are discovering workplace ageism is now turning its prejudice towards them. Funding retirement is a scary prospect if there’s little job security in middle age. How have we allowed people at the peak of their working lives to be stripped of their responsibilities, their status and once cast out as dead wood, their dignity.

I hear stories from my mum and her girlfriends, now well into their 70’s, about how they are made to feel invisible:  how shop assistants and service providers look through them, past them, as though younger customers are more important. Last week, a lovely neighbour of mine in her late 60’s recounted how in the queue at her favourite deli, she feels pressured to let the younger set go ahead of her, because, of course, she has nothing better to do. Out shopping, or at the bank or the post office, my mum says she now makes a point of being polite, but assertive. What really annoys her is when seniors (in her book, anyone fifteen years older than her) have their requests ignored until there’s no-one else left to serve. Society needs to re-learn how to appreciate its oldies.

I’ve already had my first taste of ageism. Ten years ago, at the decrepit age of 35, I tried to get income protection insurance to safeguard my reporting position on one of Kerry Packer’s national current affairs programmes. Even then, during the golden days of Kerry’s empire, I was told that no-one would insure a woman of 35 working in television. Indeed, I’d be lucky if I was still in front of the camera much past 40. I was horrified. TV presenting is no country for old women.

I don’t like what I see as a culture against ageing in this country, where younger workers are prized for their risk-taking and submissiveness and gray-haired ones are being encouraged to surrender their independence well before 65.

At my favourite bra and knickers shop, one of the sales assistants would have to be 75 not out. I seek her out and spend a fortune there because she is the doyenne of bra fitters: the old school kind who demands I lean over to ensure my cup does not runneth over. She is also the bosom lady who flicks her tape measure from around her neck and whips it around my chest so she can tut-tut: “Yes, you’re up another cup size, but it’s because your back is getting wider.” Good grief. I can take it on the chin from  her, but I don’t want that kind of bad news delivered by some perky A-cup bra-girl reminding me why three children are bad for your assets. I want a matron. And she is brilliant at her job.

Noone wants to be forced into early retirement. I’d rather keel over from exhaustion than boredom. My friend Nella is not ready nor willing to be a pensioner – she wants to stay employed, play that cash register like a piano and feel good about being needed. Turning 60 should be no impediment. And if you happen to be in the market for a part-time shop hand, Nella might just be your gal.