The Need for Speed

The Need for Speed
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 14, 2013

It’s athletics season. I know this because hurdles are sprouting from the soggy turf around school ovals. Long jump sandpits are raked and crunchy with wet sand. I see girls with stilts-for-legs limbering up for the high jump. And I feel a wave of relief that my sports carnival days are behind me.

When I was a child, running races was an exercise in humiliation. I was gifted with neither speed nor endurance. At the crack of the starter’s gun, I would jump in fright while the other kids charged out of the blocks. My swifter classmates would become a blur as they streaked away from me. I’d command my legs to accelerate but already, the gap between me and them was widening. By the half way mark, my screaming lungs would overrule any fantasies about finishing in the top eight. I knew I was going to come a pink and flustered last. Again.

Up ahead, some kid with racehorse genes and a slipstream would feel the snap of the winner’s tape and the pack would charge over the line as parents clapped and cheered. No-one needed to clock the time of the pig-tailed straggler, division 6, making her lonely finish. Race officials were already pinning ribbons to scrawny chests barely out of breath. How I yearned to be fussed over in the winner’s circle, to spend the day with a blue ribbon fluttering against my shirt.

Later, in high school, I tried out for the hurdles. I thought my years of trampolining might give me an edge at jumping and running combined. The hurdlers I’d seen were glorious to watch. They darted down the track like gazelles, gliding over the hurdles, each arc barely a blip in the silky rhythm of their stride.

And then it was my turn: I mowed down every hurdle but one, scraping the skin off my shin and wrenching my ankle.  

“Now that’s what I call a demolition derby!” My gym teacher patted my shoulder as I limped off to sick bay. Miss Wadsworth must have been pushing forty but she had the body of a greyhound and a knack for shattering egos: “Stick with softball, hey?” she called, “There’s only eighteen metres between bases!” 

Even now, I feel sorry for kids with no speed. I don’t begrudge fast kids their glory, but it pains me to watch the losers: they look so dejected. I want to reach out to those little downcast faces and whisper: “Coming first is over-rated. It’s how you handle coming last that counts.”

So I grew up to be a walker. Walkers think joggers should stay at home and run in a wheel  – like hamsters – so we don’t have to look at them. But they’re everywhere in my suburb. The same beefy middle-aged man pounds past me as I stride up the hill to my local playing fields. I greet him with a jaunty “Morning!” because I’m not struggling for air. Sometimes he’ll grunt: “Mornin” (no joyous exclamation mark). Other times he just jerks his chin in my direction because he’s trying to hold back a heart attack. I hold my breath against his pungent sweet-sour smell and try not to stare at his contorted tomato-coloured face as he passes. But I think: “No jogger ever looks happy!”

The irony here is that, at 45, I’ve taken up running. I like to call it running because it makes me sound like an athlete. Now that I have my own tomato-face I can tell you why all joggers look pained: because they are.

Here’s what I’ve discovered about middle-aged joggers since becoming one six weeks ago: running only becomes enjoyable when you turn into your street and you realise that in fifteen seconds, you will stumble through your gate. Then your lungs and your legs will finally stop hurting.

But last week, determined to experience a runner’s high, I turned up at the playing fields where the super-mums do their hard-core training.

The super-mums introduced me to the trainer guy who we’d be paying to yell: “Okay ladies! Off you go, across the oval, round the cricket nets and back.”

I took off across the grass, pumping my arms and urging on my legs  until I could feel the headwind in my face and the dewy grass flattening under my hoofs. As I rounded the cricket nets it dawned on me that I had hit the front – the super-mums were at my heels, sprinting and talking at the same time.

I tore back towards the smug trainer guy, my chest burning, legs howling. As I reached him, he began to clap. “Nice!” he yelled. I had won! WON! I bent double and panted violently (and euphorically) as the super-mums cantered in still discussing their new season bikinis.

And then smug trainer guy shouted: “Righto ladies, that was your warm-up! Now for the sprints!”

I handed him a tenner, got into my car and drove home.

Tomorrow People

Tomorrow People
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 7, 2013

Procrastination is the tiresome friend you wish you’d offloaded years ago. The kind of friend who needles you for being a hopeless ditherer.

Procrastination has been my snarky sidekick since I was a teenager. Back then, it was a slothful habit that turned exams into last-minute cramming sessions and assignments into all-nighters. Finally, high on adrenalin, I’d bash away on Mum’s green Remington until 3am, fingers stained a chalky grey from copious blots and smears of white-out.

Now I accept my ineptitude as a personality quirk. We tolerate each other, procrastination and I, in a spineless sort of way. We both know I still lack the mental grit to make my life more efficient.

I would have written about procrastination earlier, but it never seemed like the right time. Last week, during a sudden cloudburst, I sat down at my desk as the rain pelted down, determined to put procrastination in its place. I flipped open my laptop and up sprang a clean white screen. Through the window, a streak of sunlight skimmed the keyboard. I noticed a layer of dust collecting around the laptop’s hinges.  

An hour later, having dusted the whole house in a fit of pique, I sat back down. I typed five words on the page: Procrastination is my worst enemy. There! A start! But those words rubbed each other up the wrong way with their lumpy rhythm.  I pressed delete and stared morosely as the screen emptied.

Looking up at the bamboo outside my window, I noticed a small cluster of ants gathering at the knot where a leaf branched out from the green stem. I searched the other branches for ant clumps. No, it was just this one hosting peak-hour ant traffic.

Every few seconds, an ant would separate from the clump and begin trekking down the plant, doing the usual meet and greet with another ant making her way up. (Worker ants are always she, Google tells me. Male ants are only good for sex – they laze about in the nest eating and making a mess and getting antsy waiting for their ant-sheilas to get home.)

I killed another half hour googling the study of myrmecology. One scientist was claiming that the weight of all the humans on earth was the same as the weight of all the ants on earth. Ha! Not after I lose five kilos!

Given the chance, I can happily distract myself from serious tasks by trawling the internet. Google is a wormhole in the universe – time accelerates when you’re pfaffing about looking up things you didn’t know you were interested in. Suddenly, it’s lunchtime. How did we waste time before computers?

The next morning, I wake up a day closer to deadline feeling uneasy. I berate myself for wasting yesterday’s free morning on dust and ants, and vow to knuckle down and finish the piece.

Then I spot the laundry bench spilling over with washing to be folded, and two loads of dirty socks and jocks waiting on the floor. A pile of bills is stacked by the phone. What to tackle first? Should I get the house in order or write about procrastination? Determined not to be waylaid again, I wedge my laptop under my arm, march out the front door and head for my local cafe. I tuck myself behind the back table, order a pot of tea and a chicken salad and wait for inspiration to find me.

Why do we allow ourselves to create pointless delays? Delays we know will make us worse off? Procrastination never made anyone happy: it’s a vice, a completely irrational habit. We indulge in it against our better judgement. “For goodness sake, get to work!” I tell myself.

While I fire up my laptop, I notice a young couple in furious discussion at another table. They’re just out of hearing range but I’m fascinated by their body language. I can see she’s on the defensive because she keeps shaking her head and her jaw is clenched. She has her arms folded and is leaning back in her chair. Her partner is pressing his bulk across the table to make his point: he’s jabbing the air with his finger and spitting out his words. I start thinking about Nigella and Charles Saatchi and how mortified she must have been to have him grab her throat in public. Procrastination has me by the throat. Again.

Perhaps stress is the spark I need to ignite my brain. I can’t just switch on my creative neurons at will. I have to be in the mood: preferably last-minute panic.

On the other hand, procrastination might be a necessary evil: it gives us the chance to incubate ideas, to mentally prepare for prize-winning brilliance. It might not be a time-wasting habit at all.

My salad arrives and the waitress points at my computer: “Writer’s block?” she asks with a grin.

“Yep” I sigh, “but I’m planning to be spontaneously brilliant tomorrow.”

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 31, 2013

I still have a big scar on my right knee from falling off the verandah at primary school. The drop from balustrading to bitumen was four foot but it felt like four storeys. Blood ran in rivulets down my shin as a crowd of girls in blue-checked dresses gathered round me in staring silence.

In sick bay, I sat on the edge of the starched white bed, jaw clenched, while the nurse picked out the gravel with her tweezers. She painted my gashed knee an even brighter shade of crimson with mercurochrome. That stuff stains the memory of every graze and scrape from childhood.

Whatever happened to mercurochrome? We always had a bottle in the cupboard. Didn’t everyone? It might have contained mercury, but who took notice of labels back then? Mercurochrome was the only antiseptic that didn’t sting like blazes.

I lived in my grandmother’s house the year I turned 8. She wore pearls and drank Bovril and treated all my childish ailments with common sense: “Only call the doctor when you need a stretcher.” Nan relied on a cupboard full of strange potions with exotic names and whiffy smells. The top shelf of her pantry was stacked with mysterious brown glass bottles, unguents, salves and liniments.

There was Savlon for her chilblains and Milk of Magnesia for indigestion. If one was stuck up, intestinally speaking, one took Carter’s Little Liver pills, (which played fast and loose and bypassed the liver altogether). 

A plume of talcum powder followed in her wake after a shower. I was doused with it after mine. So much talc rained down on the bathroom floor that I would trace patterns in it with my fingers.

Nan believed in home-style remedies like Billy Graham believed in the Bible. I went to bed wearing her soft white driving gloves, tied firmly round my wrists with ribbon. Those gloves stopped me clawing at the eczema that itched uncontrollably in the creases behind my knees and my elbows. In the morning, it was my job to put Nan’s gloves back on the dashboard of her Morris 1100, ready for the day’s outing.

But her favourite tonic came in a tall, square bottle and was called Hypol. It was a fish oil emulsion that reeked like a tin of sardines left out in the sun. She would pour out a tablespoon of Hypol’s greasy white glop, and I would hold my nose and force it down, trying not to gag. “You won’t get rickets after that,” Nan would say, and then pour one for herself. “Mmmm, delicious!” I could never tell if she was pulling my leg. (She also had a thing for Peck’s fish paste on toast.)

Every few weeks she’d announce:  “This afternoon I’m going to the chiropodist to get my feet done.” I tried, and failed, to imagine what “done” meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it.

When I had a head cold, Nan would make me a tent out of a couple of towels and I would sit steaming my blocked nose over a basin of boiling water. It worked a treat. She soothed mozzie bites with calamine lotion and I trooped off to school covered in pink dots.

In the 70’s, Band-aids were brown and fibrous and coated in industrial strength adhesive. I’m sure they were designed to torment eight year old hypochondriacs. Mum would stride over as I lay soaking in the bath and declare: “Rightey-ho, time that thing came off!”

In my panic I still had to choose: the slow torture of having the Band-aid peeled off bit by bit, or the jolt of pain as Mum got a firm grip on the edge and tore it off. I would plead for the slow torture method. The Band-aid, like a tick clinging to a dog, would refuse to lift. And then it dawned on me I was going to endure this persecution twice. “Close your eyes!” she’d say, and the Band-aid and I were ripped apart amid my shrieking. I used to cry that bit louder as Mum waved that wet parasite in a victory flourish, to me an extra dose of cruelty.

Now I patch my own children with Wiggles plasters that can barely hang on in a gust of wind. I watched a new Dettol ad on telly the other night. Some glamorous housewife was telling me my children would catch plague if I didn’t douse every surface with disinfectant. I harrumphed in the style of my nanna.

I remember boys at school would compete at enduring pain. They’d take turns to see who could poke themselves the hardest with a drawing pin. Or take bets on who could tolerate a chinese burn the longest.   

Are kids today just as tough? Just as resilient? I’d like to think they are. But if one of my brood came home pricked with drawing pins, I’m not sure if I’d reach for the aloe vera or ring the school psychologist. Perhaps it’s me who has gone soft.   

The Male Mystique

The Male Mystique
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 24, 2013

I live with a man who inhabits a different relationship to mine. Our marriage is a his-and-her version of the same conjugation. I can never tell what my husband is thinking because he’s master of the poker face. On weekends, having tried (and failed) to read his mood, I’ll squeeze in beside him on the sofa and inquire: “Honey, what are you thinking?”  

“Nothing.”  

I like to press him further: “You know, it’s impossible to think about nothing. Even nothing is something if you can’t think of anything.”

“Okay then,” he sighs. “I’m thinking about what a plonker that Hayden Ballantyne is.  And if I’ll have time to scarper to Bunnings at half time. And whether they’ll have a sausage sizzle out the front. Happy now?”

He shoots me a look that’s either bemusement or incredulity but I can’t tell because I can’t read his mind.

I’ve spent years trying to get inside his head. I have tried to follow his man-mind by over-processing everything he says and does. I look for hidden meanings in his shrugs and read far too much into his harrumphs.

Here’s my theory: my husband has a one-track mind. His brain chugs along the straightest possible route from A to B. He stays calm, measured and entirely predictable. As far as I can tell, he neatly divides his day into work, football, family, newspapers and sleep. (On weekends, in reverse order). And if the gentle hum of domestic life with a wife, three children and a cat turns into bedlam, he seeks refuge in the dunny.

On Saturday mornings, the bathroom floor is littered with newspapers. The sports section is in disarray, and the liftouts have had pages torn out willy-nilly. No amount of my shuffling can get the paper back in page order. I can hear contented rustling as I walk past the john on my way to the laundry. The fan is a muffled roar. The kids are yelling for their dad to teach them table tennis.

I’m expected to respect his hide-out by declaring: “Papa’s ducked out to the shop to get milk!” And then I fumigate the hallway with lavender spray to throw them off the scent.

Why do I protect him from his own children? For love, apparently. What’s a wife worth anyway? I’ve become as ever-present and useful to him as fresh air.  

Sometimes, marriage and its chores are stultifying. For every man who dives for the dishcloth after dinner, there are plenty who push back their chair and announce: “Delicious, darling.” Then they ignore the kitchen carnage and settle into the sofa to watch Four Corners.

It’s never 50-50 in domestic work. It’s 60-40 or 70-30. Or worse. One party works tirelessly to keep the household juggernaut rolling, the other takes advantage of the smooth ride.

Every six months or so I like to give our relationship a litmus test. I prop against the door of the study and casually enquire: “So, honey, should we go out to dinner, just the two of us, and talk?”

“Talk about what?” he says.

”The state of our relationship.”

And he’ll reply: “It’s chaotic. There. Now can we stay at home?”

It’s the same answer every time. No man wants to talk about his relationship. Every woman likes to dissect hers.

My husband thinks my working week involves sitting around with my housewifey girlfriends drinking pots of tea and gas-bagging. It’s the kind of ignorant accusation that infuriates me and my two best pals when we meet on Friday mornings to discuss the latest Nielsen poll and why our husbands are infuriating.

I admire those women who tell their man to shape up. Instead, I have a happy husband by default. I pretend I don’t mind him always getting his own way because I don’t want to sound like a nag. Instead, I only come unhinged every few weeks. The resentment backs up and explodes at inopportune moments. Usually on turbulent school mornings when he’s swanning around after a 20-minute sabbatical in the shower.

The sexes also divide over fine detail: I like a nicely made bed with hospital corners, my husband cuts corners by shutting the bedroom door. After dinner, he’ll earn an adoring glance from me by announcing: “Sit down Blossom, I’ll do the dishes tonight.” And then he’ll put the last four plates in the dishwasher and leave the crusty lasagne dish and a burnt saucepan on the sink.

Marriage is the accumulation of thousands of nondescript conversations held over thousands of unremarkable breakfasts. It’s the kindness of a husband who lets me have the first shower, and the tolerance of a wife who picks up the five socks scattered across the bedroom floor. But next time the kids are screeching for their dad on a Saturday morning and I can’t find the newspaper, I’m going to give them a wink and point them in the direction of the lavatory. I hope they annoy the crap out of him.

The Restless Years

The Restless Years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 17, 2013

A homesick Irishman is the last person you expect to find on a storm-wrecked Swanbourne beach on a Sunday morning. It was not yet 8am and the wind was biting. As the kids and I climbed over the craggy rocks jutting out over the point, we spotted a middle-aged dad and his two small boys down in the cove. They were fossicking about in the great mounds of seaweed coughed up by the still surging ocean.

My three kids were keen to see what mysterious flotsam those boys were collecting in their buckets. So the dad and I got talking. His wife was sleeping off a nurse’s nightshift, he told me, and his boys needed to blow off steam. My own husband had just flown in from the Philippines, I told him, and we’d abandoned the house so he could enjoy his jetlag in peace.

“Ryan!” he introduced himself, and crushed my hand in his. We laughed at the lunacy of a trip to the beach on a day like this. He’d come prepared to be weather-beaten: his boys were in woolly turtle necks zipped inside windjackets. They were sloshing about in knee-high welly boots, beanies pulled down low to cover small ears.

My boys had refused to wear anything but board shorts. Three-year-old daughter had agreed to a tracksuit, but was saturated within a few minutes. She stripped down to her knickers and a singlet and began collecting shells, flashing her goosebumps at the weak-willed sun.  

I had to concentrate to decipher Ryan’s south Dublin brogue as the wind snatched his words and flung them past my ears: “Y’knaw, there was nothin’ doin’ at home” he said. “We’d been to Australia on holiday and I loved the place, milk n’ honey, like. We came out eighteen months ago. It was my idea to move – I landed a job in construction.”

“How have you found it here?” I asked.

“Ay, I like it, but not enough. I think we have to go home soon” he said, scuffing the sand with his left boot, “My wife is desperately homesick – she’s not managing well.”

 “What are you missing most?”

“Green fields, family, the neighbours.”

“In that order?” I laughed, and he nodded.

“My wife has 27 nieces and nephews all about, and the neighbours, we’re very close with the neighbours. The village comes alive after knock-off – we head in next door or up the lane for a couple of pints while the kids play. You don’t do that here – I miss it.”

That got me thinking. Is homesickness a weakness? I always thought homebodies who stay rooted to the same familiar place must lack ambition or curiosity. But then I experienced the wrench of dislocation for myself. 

At age 26, I was distraught with homesickness after moving to Sydney for a new job. It was meant to be summer, but the rain bucketed down. My excitement soon wore off and I slid into  despondency.

Home was a rented flat in an unfamiliar suburb. Work colleagues were indifferent to the new girl. On weekends, I became a lonely observer of other peoples’ happiness. I traipsed around my new city on foot. In sidewalk cafes, I was the solitary figure contemplating the  parade of couples and families. It seemed everyone but me took the comforts of belonging for granted. I never quite shook that feeling of restlessness. The dull ache of homesickness stayed with me even as I made a new life in a city I grew fond of. Four years later, I seized the opportunity to move back to Perth.

Now I question whether my homesickness was a deficiency: me, pining for home, because I couldn’t cope with the newness of being alone.

Fifteen years later, I fantasise about escaping the stranglehold of my domestic responsibilities and moving the five of us to some exotic locale. I fool myself into believing I could be at home anywhere in the world. After all, I could instantly re-connect with friends on Skype and Facebook, family would be just a text or a mouse-click away. Such are my daydreams. Technology may have created the global village but it cannot convince me migration is now painless.

I ask my perpetually jetlagged husband if he struggles with homesickness when he’s away. “Always” comes the reply.

“What does it feel like?”

“Melancholy” he says, “Waves of it. And talking on the phone just reminds me of what I’m missing.”

Homesickness must be a close relative of nostalgia. We are not easily separated from the people and places who shape our histories. The Irishman on the beach could not explain his wife’s deep longing for the green fields of Dún Laoghaire. But even I knew a balding Australian paddock was a poor substitute.

“My wife comes from a family of twelve” he tells me. “It’s not easy leaving that behind.”

“Twelve?” I gasp. “My husband’s one of seven and I thought that was a big family! He and his younger brother are born in the same year!”

“Aah” he replies, “back home we call them Irish twins.”

Withered by star glower

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

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

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

“Nah,” they said, ‘”We’re only 13.”  

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

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

“Famous for what?”

She shrugged: “Whatever. Just famous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was right.

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

A stake in the cake take

A stake in the cake take
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 3, 2013

Sometimes the mother of all inventions should keep her ideas to herself. But it was a slow Sunday morning, so I suggested we should play pretend shop in the front yard with our favourite kids across the road. The smart alec I live with said: “Why don’t you sell real food for real money!” The kids leapt all over him, squealing his praises.

I helped my brood make gingerbread. They created biscuit men with round bellies and stumpy legs modelled on their father. There were biscuit cats and biscuit dogs who crossbred in the oven and came out fused together in awkward positions. The mum over the road wisely kept her three mess-makers out of the kitchen and produced a fat sponge in record time.

My 3-year-old daughter skipped around in her improvised shopkeeper’s outfit – a ballerina’s leotard that kept riding up to expose one cheek of her bottom. Her six-year-old brother took charge of the till. He found an empty Taco box and sealed it with half a roll of sticky tape. He cut a tiny slit in the top of the box so the coins, needing to be forced through the slot, would make a satisfying thump as they hit the bottom of the box. His father baffled the kids by calling out: “Don’t forget to register an ABN!”

At 2pm sharp, our pop-up patisserie opened for business in the driveway. Pre-primed, the couple from next door wandered up, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the spread. My lad absentmindedly fingered his gingerbreads to make them more appetising. The neighbours chose two pieces of virgin sponge. “How much is that please?” the wife asked.

“That’ll be fifty-cents” said six-year-old firmly.

The wife handed him a shiny two-dollar coin and my son pushed it through the slot in his taco till.

“What about her change?” I asked him.

He looked at me, puzzled. “Nothing comes out of the till, Mum – it only goes in.”

Isobel, the old dear from the corner house, stopped at our gate.

“What are you raising money for?” The kids looked at each other nervously.

“Savings!” said the neighbour’s nine-year-old.

“You are not!” piped up my 3-year-old, “You’re gonna buy lots of footy cards!” Isobel winked and bought two gingerbread men. Two 20c coins vanished into the taco box.

“I wanted to do the money!” wailed my toddler, tearing off her leotard and storming into the house, both cheeks now on display.

Business became slow. Nanna arrived as the neighbour’s kids abandoned shop and went scooting up the street to find more customers. My lad, left in charge, was eating the smartie buttons off a gingerbread man, having already licked off its icing smile and dotted eyes.

“Can I re-sell him?” he asked. “Not to me” said Nanna, “I like my men with all their faculties.”

She handed over a fiver and asked for a smorgasbord. “Don’t expect change,” I whispered.

By the time the shop closed at 4pm, the taco till was rattling impressively. My son, corrupted by his new-found wealth, refused to let anyone help him count out the proceeds. His father growled:

“Listen up! Five of you ran the shop, so five of you share the profits.” Small boy took off up the stairs shouting “It’s not fair! That’s my money – I was in charge of it!”

Delusions of power run in the family. One taste of the free market and my six year old had become a tyrant. At his age, I was greedy too.

When I was six, Mum caught me stealing a pet rock from a souvenir shop in Rotorua. One shiny pebble had caught my eye. It was smooth and honey-coloured with little stick-on eyes. I’m sure the shop owner put those pet rocks on the counter because he knew they were irresistible. And so I reached up and stroked that rock and before I knew it, I was walking out of the shop with my new pet clenched in my fist.

I showed it to Mum. “Look! Isn’t he beautiful?”  

“Where did you get that from!”

Her arm tightened around mine and she marched me back into the shop. Mum yanked me up to the counter and demanded I own up to my crime.

I’ve never forgotten the hot stabbing shame, my stammering apology and the crushing realisation that my silky smooth pet rock was not coming home on the plane.

And here I am, about to teach my six-year-old tycoon why the proceeds from our cake shop don’t belong solely to him.

I find him face down on his bed, still moping. I cut a big hole in the Taco till and shake the money out. He perks up at the sound of paydirt  and helps me sort the coins into piles: “We made fifteen dollars!” he shouts excitedly, “I’m going to buy a soccer net!”

“Not so fast,” I say. “You get $3 each remember?”

“Yes I know Mum. But the shop’s open every day of the holidays. We gotta start making more gingerbread!”

Feeling worse for wear

Feeling worse for wear
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 27, 2013

I am unrecognisable at the hairdressers. That cape of black plastic is oppressive, always one press stud too tight at the neck. My shroud and I am pinned to my chair by a dazzling beam of expensive salon lighting. It shines down from the fashionably blacked-out ceiling and gives my skin a sickly pallor. I try to escape the kaleidoscope of mirrors by burying myself in New Weekly’s latest on George Clooney’s beard but eventually I am forced to confront my reflection.

It’s a shock to see myself: I am not this woman, am I? Is this what 45 is supposed to look like? I notice a droop around my jawline – never spotted that before. There’s a new crease in my neck, the start of some strange puckering under the chin, a deepening furrow between my eyebrows. The face I’m staring at in the mirror is a good decade older than the one I was hoping to see. Do people over 40 feel as old as they look?

Which raises another question: How old do I feel? I’ve been bluffing maturity for years. Perhaps I now look weathered enough to pull it off. I like masquerading my immature self as a grown up. Doesn’t every generation think it has mastered the deception of youthfulness?

So what age am I on the inside? The death of one of my best girlfriends has shattered my belief that I am guaranteed to grow old. Days after her funeral, on the most depressing of rainy afternoons, I perched on an upturned milk crate in our garage, sifting through boxes of photos I hadn’t looked at in a decade. I couldn’t pick out half the faces without my glasses, which was disconcerting. I got pins and needles in my foot from squatting at an uncomfortable angle. I used to sit like this by choice. But on this day, it was painfully obvious I was looking back on my past self – the girl who thought she’d always feel invincible.   

There was something about those early snaps, pictures of my girlfriends and me in our early twenties at all those parties and trips away. It took me a while to work out what it was: it was a freshness, the jubilation of starting out, life abounding with potential. It was a time before we knew the meaning of illness, or tragedy or divorce. I am no longer so wildly optimistic. I’m still optimistic, energetically so, but I feel the weight of my responsibilities. I cannot imagine feeling as carefree as I did at 25.

I got off the crate, packed up and wandered back into the house. My husband was taking a shower: “How old do you feel?” I asked.

“46, of course,” comes the reply, “how could I feel anything else?” I press him further: “Yes honey, I know your rock-hard body is 46, but what about your head?

“That’s an absurd question, seeing I can only feel the age that I am. If I feel 35 then what am I to do with the last eleven years of memories?” He had a point, but not one I wanted.

So I asked my mum. At 76, she is in great nick, save for the arthritis crippling her hands and feet. She comes back to me hours later saying the question had thrown her. She felt 66, she had decided. “My body still does whatever I tell it, apart from these stupid fingers. But I’ve lost so many special people. That takes a huge toll. Grieving makes me feel old.”

When I was 14, my mum was 45. Our house hosted a stream of raucous visitors, the men sitting around on folding chairs with their stubbies on their knees as Mum and the other wives handed round platters of cocktail onions and smoked oysters on toothpicks. To my teenage self, her crowd seemed enviably worldly.

And yet here I am at home on yet another Saturday night, stretched out on the sofa with the cat and the weekend papers, my old man engrossed in the Tour de France. I must look like a middle-aged dullard but I don’t even care.

I no longer skip down stairs two at a time. I’m scared of tripping, knowing what havoc a twisted knee would cause to family life. I’m not so fond of looking at my body (I try to avoid the rear view at all times). But if I had to take a stab at how old I feel, I’d say I feel 37. That’s about the age I’d comfortably settled into my skin. I was happy. I keep that age in my head as a favourite.

Maybe I’ve already used up my quota of late nights. On evenings out, when I’ve done my hair, put on high heels and am preparing to hold a glass of champagne in each hand, I feel 30 again. Until the next morning, after five hours sleep, when I feel 80 plus a fortnight.

Taking it on the chin

Taking it on the chin
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 20, 2013

It’s lucky beards don’t hold grudges because I make damning generalisations about their owners. Shifty weak-chinned buggers they are. I like to know where the beard ends and the man begins. Why the wearers of crumb-catchers always stroke their whiskers while thinking about what they’re hiding behind.

I’ve had some bad run-ins with beards. It started in the 70’s with Catweazle, the TV wizard. I watched every episode from behind a bean bag, revelling in being scared witless. I don’t know if it was Catweazle’s ratty goatee, the crazed look in his eyes or that toad he kept in the pocket of his filthy brown cloak, but that warlock did some lasting damage. Beards gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I turned the corner in Year 6. My teacher Mr Pearsall had an Abraham Lincoln beard, bushy but neatly clipped and a vibrant shade of orange. In the afternoons, he sat on a stool reading to us from a book called Stranger from the Depths, a gripping novel about a bunch of kids who befriend an underwater alien. As he spoke, his beard would catch the sunlight streaming in through the windows of our demountable classroom. His face aglow, Mr Pearsall and his incandescent beard were mesmerising. That book came to life in the hands of a man who might well have been an alien himself.

I never quite understood the appeal of the beard; why 98-percent of the world’s lumberjacks, sea captains and bikies are so attached to their woolly faces. But then I met Gordon.

Gordon and his wife live not far from us. Their Jack Russell and my 3-year old like a morning constitutional so we always stop to chat. I’m fascinated by Gordon’s wispy white beard, the way it fans out from his chin then tapers to a point halfway down his chest.

Even the slightest breeze lifts the delicate ends of his beard and they float up around his face. Abstractedly, he gently strokes them down: “Fifty years I’ve had it now,” he tells me, “Grew it at 30. Every day I comb it, shampoo it once a week. I used to plait it to keep it out of the way, or roll it up and pin it with a clip under my chin, but I’m a fading hippie now so it can fly free.”

His wife shrugs: “I still don’t like it” and Gordon roars with laughter. I suggest he might like to reacquaint himself with the bottom half of his face just to keep the missus happy. He gives his beard a pat and replies: “Nope, too late. It’s part of me.”

My razor-sharp spouse likes to grow a beard on holidays. He calls it a beard but really it’s just ginger scraggle. After two weeks it’s like a badly mown lawn – tufts growing east on one cheek, south on the other, a prickly clump on his chin sporting a smear of dried toothpaste.

But that scruff of whiskers has a strange effect on him. Newly hirsute, he fancies himself as Chuck Norris. I play along and declare him the most macho bloke. And then the bearded one kisses me like he’s Lone Wolf McQuade and days later I’m still applying ointment to my gravel rash.

This season’s footballers aren’t doing facial hair any favours either. Those bushrangers just make the game more untidy. I say leave the chin curtains where they belong, boys: in the 70’s – on singers like Kenny Rogers and Barry Gibb.

But certain beards have the ability to stop traffic. Only yesterday, catching up with two pals at a coffee shop, one girlfriend exclaimed “Hey! Check out that beard!” We all turned to look outside and there was an old gent with a giant Father Christmas beard, white and bushy with an elaborate moustache that curled up at the ends, giving the illusion of a permanent smile.

On older men, the beard can add a veneer of gravitas, on younger men, a rugged virility. Or villainy: Fu Manchu’s evil moustache became the template for Disney scoundrels and Hollywood’s bad guys. 

Whatever the fashion, I say Brad Pitt’s untamed goatee looks one park bench away from deranged. George Clooney’s salt and pepper version gives him the kind of retrosexual manliness my mum fancies.

These days, facial hair needs lessons in etiquette. A beard is too big if you can wring it out, or it joins up with the hair on your chest. A beard must not be used as a bib for eating garlic prawns. When two beards cross paths, the bigger one gets right of way.

None of this matters in our house. Yesterday morning, as Mr 7 o’clock shadow lathered up, I commiserated that the beard-growing season doesn’t start until Christmas: “Never mind,” I said “you look just as rugged without one.” “That’s nice, Blossom, because I haven’t had a close shave in years. Maybe you could find me a razor that hasn’t shaved the beard off your legs.”

Fast Track to Nowhere

Fast Track to Nowhere
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 13, 2013

Train travel is the ultimate vehicle for people-watching. It’s the perfect antidote to the four-walled claustrophobia of housewifery. I like to feel part of the throng to-ing and fro-ing, strangers heading briefly in the same direction.

On my way to the station, I cast my eye over the dozen commuters up ahead on the platform. Everyone does their waiting in their own way. No-one looks agitated or out of breath, so I conclude we haven’t just missed the train.

My three-year-old daughter scrambles out of her stroller to empty her ten cent coin collection into the ticket machine. A dishevelled young bloke with wild hair and no shoes shuffles past us. He settles himself down in a patch of sunlight strobed by the wooden bench and closes his eyes. For a moment, my toddler stops feeding the machine while she studies his face.

“Hit the jackpot yet?” An elderly gent in a tweed jacket has strolled up behind us. As the last of the ten cent pieces clunk down the slot, small daughter fishes for the ticket as it drops into the tray. “I winned!” she yells, waving her prize in the air.

We crane our necks to see who’ll be first to spot our train snaking round the bend. We hear the hiss of metal brakes and soon after four carriages rumble into the station.

I always turn left once inside the doors, just to imagine the thrill of first class travel. Three-year-old, kneeling on her seat, presses her face against the window. I settle in for the ride to town, trying to guess where my travelling companions are going and why.

Next to me is a nerdy-looking bloke wearing Woody Allen glasses. He holds his smartphone in his lap and texts: “Be there soon, darling” I feel guilty reading over his shoulder, but I can’t help myself. I wonder if he’s texting a lover, a girlfriend or his wife. I settle on ‘girlfriend’ and picture her as Annie Hall in wide-legged woollen pants and fedora hat.

Opposite us are two middle-aged women talking in sign language. I am mesmerised. In between bouts of furious hand movements they throw back their heads and laugh raucously. Their merriment is the only human sound in our carriage.

Everyone else has their head bowed, fixated by the gadgets in their laps. There’s not a book or newspaper in sight. No-one is talking, or taking in the view. There is only quiet concentration as thumbs sweep over keypads. Technology is hard at work here.  

I’m struck by the notion of eye contact, and what has happened to it. There’s certainly none in this carriage. Even the three teenagers huddled by the door are isolates bent over their devices. They are strangely expressionless, oblivious to their surroundings. A businessman standing near them stumbles and grabs for the handhold as the train brakes start to grip – but not one of the teenagers look up. Twice he has to say “excuse me” before they begrudgingly move aside to let him off. 

Perhaps the virtual world makes reality dull by comparison.  But I remember the bus ride home from high school as the highlight of my school days. The novelty of having boys on board sent our girly chatter into hyper-drive. One sly smile from a cute boy would provide endless entertainment. We would duck behind our seats giggling, then dissect his body language so intently we thought we could read his mind before he even spoke it. (“Can you reach the bell for me?” became as exciting as a first kiss.)

Yesterday, at my favourite corner cafe, I was puzzled by two young women having coffee at a nearby table. They looked to me like old pals, but for several minutes, they sat in silence, absentmindedly punching their thoughts into their phones. Perhaps connecting on Facebook is more fun than connecting across the table, I thought. But it was an odd sight. What’s driving this obsession? Fear of missing out? On what? The rapid-fire rush of social networking.

At dinner I tell my eldest son about my train ride. I recount for him what it was like before smartphones and iPods. How I would catch buses and trains and have no choice but to kill time watching the passing parade of commuters or the slideshow of suburbs flitting by. I tell him I quite enjoyed the downtime after the frenetic pace of the newsroom. 

I wonder out loud whether we’re all the more productive for having the internet as our constant and available companion. Whether this ever-present connectedness is making us super- efficient. And are we happier for it? My son pipes up: “Maybe those people on the train were just plain bored, Mum.”

That got me thinking. Dead time is now considered a waste of time. Portable technology fills the quiet gaps in living and keeps us permanently switched on and plugged in. Perhaps that’s why I love forgoing the car for the train: someone else to do the driving. Twenty minutes of mental holiday. That’s what I crave.