the ravens have left the tower

            This is really a thank you to Jonathan Boakes – a writer of computer games which are so brilliant and so frightening you get the feeling  it’s never going to be safe to sit your arse in front of a computer again. The latest of these is a ghosthunting adventure, in which your new bestie, Nigel, is going to have to solve some spooky derring-do which is going down in a charming Cornish fishing village.

            Nigel is just lovely. He has suitably shambolic clothing, with the hems of his jeans  authentically scuffed – and he wears glasses. I like a man who wears glasses. (Will he make more passes?)  I especially like Nigel because he has no intention of listening to me when I beg him not to go somewhere. He has steel and determination. I like that in a man, too.

            When Nigel arrives in the aforementioned village and finds the only available accommodation (surprise!) is a derelict waterfront cottage, anybody with less steel and determination would have gone home. Especially as villagers were making cryptic comments such as; ‘ooh, the fens, lad!’ and suggesting Nigel’s new place of residence might be a bit suss altogether. Because Nigel didn’t seem fazed by any of this, I attempted walking him back through the fens t’railway … but the bugger wouldn’t go. He informed me he had ‘things to do in the village’.  He also kept shrugging and saying, ‘Nothing ventured …’ Well, Nigel – if you really must.

             I generally like to have the lights off when I play creepy stuff on the computer. Mistake. If you don’t mind crapping yourself, be my guest – but I’m ashamed to say I had to do a dash through the house flicking on every available light and making sure the doors were double-locked. Even kicked the fridge a few times to make it hum.  When I got back to the computer, wouldn’t you know it, Nige was patiently standing there waiting for me. He suggested we might like to do a recce of the museum at night. Excuse me? Could we not just go to bed? I tried double-clicking him onto his bed, but no cigar. Nige insisted he couldn’t possibly sleep until he’d stuck his nose into some more awful stuff which really wasn’t any of his business. Oh, okay then. Let’s break into the museum, virtually crap ourselves, and THEN can we go home to bed? Oh no we don’t. After the museum thing, Nige decided we really ought to take our sorry arses to the cemetery. As you do. *sigh* Nothing ventured …

            All this was pretty horrifying and heart-hammeringly ghastly – but there was far worse to come. I finally managed to double-click Nige to sleep (he had the most gorgeous eyelashes) – and was rather hoping that would be the end of it and we’d somehow get through until morning without further unpleasantness. Ah … no. I don’t think Nige got much sleep before he was awakened by a terrible thumping coming from downstairs. I clicked like mad, trying to make him stay put and just ignore it. But my man of steel and determination (with glasses) was having none of that, either. We had to creep down the darkened stairs, into the darkened passage, where the bathroom door (which had previously been open), was now closed. This is where the thumping was coming from – and naturally, my man couldn’t stay away! He informed me he was going to look through the keyhole. THAT was when I crapped myself. And having seen something ghastly pass across the room on the other side, naturally Nige then had to go in. With moi, of course. I can’t begin to describe how horrible it was. That would be telling.

            A nice part of the game (it’s always about the food) was that Nigel’s landlady felt pretty crap about making him stay in a horrible, haunted cottage with an unusable kitchen – and had organised with a local cafe for him to eat there whenever he pleased. Naturally (because it IS all about the food), I made Nige go in and out of the cafe as often as possible just so’s I could click in his inventory to see what he’d scored. Sometimes there was excellent booty, such as big wodges of chicken and mushroom pie. Or nice iced cakes. Or vegetarian samosas, even! After a while (or a few whiles, anyway), Nige only managed to score a stale lump of bread. (That’s when I realised I was seriously pissing him off, and I’d better let him get back to the ghostbusting.)

            So, PLEASE, Mr Boakes, can Nige go on another incredible adventure soonest? And can I come too? That game was the most fun I’ve ever had on a computer without a credit card and the Gluttons-R-Us website open in front of me. I can hardly wait for the next time!

            What was that, Nigel? Yeah, I know. Nothing ventured …

.oOo.

            You wake up, do the usual, go to bed, wake up again. Nothing strange about that. Just nothing particularly interesting, either. I realised how predictable things had become one day when I found myself in the supermarket – without a list. Shock, horror, abomination! Impromptu shopping! Should I return home, collect the list and set out again on my fortnightly epic adventure amongst the stainless steel shelving and Barry Manilow soundtrack? I think not. Now is the time to indulge in something new, frightening, and knee-tremblingly different. Join me for a round of Extreme Shopping!

            There are a few games in the genre. Firstly, you can merely complete your shopping to the best of your ability – sans list – and have an extremely amusing time on your return home, ticking off the things you remembered and shouting BINGO at the end if you were 100% successful. Which you won’t be if you’re my age and have a brain already well past its use-by date. Even if you manage a 90% success rate, there’s something satisfying in looking at yourself smugly in the mirror and saying, ‘Not ME for the Alzheimer’s, thank you very much!’ It’s daring. Flying blind, so to speak. Out of your comfort zone and hanging free!

            Now, before you get judgemental and say, ‘get a life’, take a look at your own existence and consider whether there are any areas which could do with some excitement being injected back into them. If everything’s jolly hockey sticks, you can be excused from having to read further. If, however, you realise there’s something lacking – trust me. I’m almost a qualified fruitcake.

            Included in the Extreme Shopping stable is another activity I like to call Supermarket Chaos. It involves you changing supermarkets. Just for the week, just for the hell of it. This is a real bastard, because you won’t be able to find anything. All supermarkets have different ways of arranging their stuff. You’ll need a thermos flask and a pith helmet. This is because you’ll be theriothly pithed off. Be prepared to take extra money, as naturally there’ll be ‘foreigners’ – things you can’t buy in your usual venue, which you simply must try out. Afterwards, in the totally alien car park, you get extra points if you can’t find your car. This will add to the excitement, and there’s a free set of steak knives if you actually have to call the security guard to find it for you.

            If you lack the intestinal fortitude to brave the aforementioned adventure, maybe you’d like to try Product Alienation. In this game, you’re permitted to go to your usual supermarket, but you’re not allowed to buy anything you normally buy. You have to choose totally unsuitable things which you wouldn’t normally pick if you were half pumped with amphetamines and having a psychotic episode. That’s the rule. By the time you reach the checkout, you won’t recognise any of the contents of your trolley. By the time you reach next shopping day, you won’t recognise yourself. You’ll be too full of polyunsaturated fats and dangerous (but exciting) food additives you never knew existed.

            A variation of this game is Trolley Alienation. This is where you do your normal shop – then covertly swap your trolley with someone else’s at the checkout counter. It’ll make you happy that they’ve done your work for you. It’ll make their husband happy that you chose the DoubleChoc GreedyGuts Cream Cake and he’s reaping the benefit.

            You can employ the same tactics at home with a variation of the supermarket game  called Program Alienation. Throw away the telly guide with your favourite shows carefully marked. Buy another one and pick totally crap sitcoms you wouldn’t dream of touching with Gordon Ramsay’s tongs. Make yourself sit in front of them and watch. If you have to go out, tape them. Find out what a night’s normal viewing is like for those members of the community who are brain dead and can tolerate whining American voices and horrifying smartarse kids with tombstone orthodontia who are in dire need of taxidermy. Give yourself bonus points for sitting still during the commercial breaks and enjoying them too. If you’re still awake and your dinner hasn’t come up through your nose – double points.

            Getting a little bored with your Bing Crosby CD every night? Try Headbanging Horror. Go to the loudest music store in town. The one with the monster speakers which cause the entire mall to vibrate. Take notice of what ‘young people’ are buying. Especially the ones who keep saying ‘Huh?’ This is a good indication they have deafened themselves by listening to the kind of sound you require. Buy it. You will immediately feel very, very grateful you are old and not compelled to bow to peer pressure ever again.

            Just bear this in mind – if you run into me in the supermarket and notice my trolley’s full of rhubarb flavoured Shagalot Condoms and Just-Add-Double-Cream pudding mixes, it’s not normal behaviour. I’m just in the middle of a thrilling round of Product Alienation …

.oOo.

            Well, I can just lie here all night with my eyes closed or I can check out the ceiling and note that the crack which looked like a teensy little dinosaur last week now looks like the Gates of Mordor and is probably going to open up and swallow me whole. Note also that the dinky little spiderwebs which were softly fluttering in the breeze this morning have now taken on a more menacing appearance altogether and might just fall on my face and suffocate me. I can check out the night sky for the millionth thrilling time. Full moon, no moon, Swiss cheese, green cheese … la de da de dum.

            Wriggle the toes, the knees, the elbows. Think about maybe one day cooking something from scratch. Or climbing Everest and bungeeing off it. In the nude. Because let’s face it – some nights are just plain boring.

            I never had insomnia when I used to read in bed. What is it about men that they can’t stand one weeny little bedside lamp with a five watt bulb? People have been reading in bed for centuries and no-one ever died. Not that the HG ever actually SAYS anything. He just shifts position and grunts a lot. Every time he grunts there’s a little aura of ‘quelle inconvenient’ wafting around the room. Sometimes it’s ignorable. Sometimes I just turn the light off and hope he has nightmares of being squashed under a falling library.

            One night, salvation came – with the extraordinary discovery there’s a whole world out there in the airwaves. While you are sleeping, life is going on. And going off. There are thousands of other insomniacs out there; calling chat shows, quiz shows, talk shows  - and they’re all barking mad!

            Yessiree folks – plug in those earphones and mentally head for the hills! With all the other nightcritters whose husbands and wives get pissed off about a little old lamp glowing on the outsides of their closed eyelids while they’re trying to snore.  Because that’s the great thing – the other nightcritters are mostly certified nutters – and the later the hour, the stranger they get. They hang around on the other end of a phone line for hours and hours, just to tell a perfectly strange radio jock stuff you wouldn’t tell your gynaecologist if he was blind, deaf and you were in a darkened confessional box. They say bizarre things in a conspirational voice like; ‘I’m in the NUDE, you know …’ As if we all care. Most of us are probably in the nude – given we’re in bed.

            Being a genuinely interested person (a sticky beak) – I find all this totally fascinating. With a really small radio, two AAA batteries will last you at least a fortnight. Going all night. This is good value, considering all the stuff you are soaking up whilst you’re out of it. Yep – it’s the subliminal learning thing. Remember those tapes which promised you’d wake up being able to speak fluent Yiddish if you listened to them during your sleep? It’s quite amazing. I was astounded at myself when I found I could do that!

            ‘What does she want?’ asked one of the Right Hons at the breakfast table, puzzled at the rubbish spouting forth. ‘Kosher cornflakes, I think,’ I told them proudly. ‘In a bagel.’

            Because the scary thing is, the brain is taking in all this crap whilst you’re asleep. You don’t even know that you know what you know. You hear yourself butting into people’s conversations with snippets of useless trivia, and you think , ‘Woo – how ‘bout that? How very good am I?’ Some mornings after a night absorbing medical advice, I’m convinced I could pick up a scalpel and have a go at Uncle Mort’s gall bladder. And maybe it’s not beyond the realms of possibility I might be able to actually boil an egg one day!

            It’s like having a Pandora’s box in your head, full of stuff you don’t know is there. If you could run a printout, you’d be absolutely stunned to find you could speak five languages, understand quantum physics and know exactly what to do with that random collection of 70s Tupperware which is breeding in the back of the kitchen cupboards. (Or maybe that last part’s a little fanciful.)

            There is, as ever, a downside. As you doze in and out of consciousness, you catch discombobulated bits of conversations which have no meaning. And the beginning of book readings and bits of terrific poetry you’d love to know the author of – except you snoozed off in the middle of the third verse. And one night, I woke to hear the shock jock say in a trembling voice, ‘… and THAT’S the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard in my life …’ WHAT WAS? Can you run that by us again, dammit?! It’s a bit disconcerting to realise there’s something really horrible inside my head. Something scary and awful festering away in there, just waiting for an opportunity to go BOO.

            It got quite bad the other morning, and I actually woke in a state of total panic and thought I had died. Well, there’s nothing quite like getting your earphones tangled around your neck …

.oOo.

            Every mother, without even knowing she’s doing it, leaves little bits of vital knowledge lying around to enlighten you as you wearily trek life’s perilous highways. And it makes you wonder. As you hoot with laughter, are you guilty of inflicting similar crackpot ideas on your own unsuspecting offspring?

            We were discussing it the other day when a friend remembered his Mum telling him never – but never – to drink from the water bubblers in Hyde Park. The reason she gave him in explanation is not for publication – unless you are willing to send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and have the reply posted to you in a discreet brown paper wrapper.

            It got me wondering about my own Mum’s little words of wisdom – and here, in the spirit of Mother’s Day, are just some of them.

On growing up:

            . Watch out for ‘white traders’. They look just like ordinary people. That’s until they grab you off the street, stuff you into the back of a car and next thing you know you’re part of a harem in the Middle East. (Not with my thighs, Momma …)

            . Never accept a cigarette from anyone.  (This was when I was about eight.) It might be a reefer.

On getting married:

            . Find a minister with a nice voice. (???)

            . Never marry a man with an ugly nose. You wouldn’t want to pass it on to her grandchildren.

On having children:

            . Name them with the assumption they’ll be Prime Minister one day. Choose something which looks acceptable with ‘The Right Honourable’ tacked in front of it.

And the latest:

            ‘When I die, get straight round here and take my jewellery.’ (Presumably both pieces.)

            And all of these were delivered with a completely straight face.

            Whew. Lucky me. Nobody whisked me off the street (thighs?), my straight-nosed children have suitably ministerial names, and the minister who lashed me to the Hunter-Gatherer for eternity had an extremely gratifying Alan Rickmanesque voice – no matter he was later imprisoned for deeds unrelated to hymn singing. That would be the minister, not Alan Rickman.

            Times have changed, and Mum no longer worries so much about reefers or white traders. She’s a PC gamer now, and if you phone her there’s every chance she’ll be miles away in the Barren Lands or tromping through the Underground Realms … and you might not get her back much before Christmas. I leave a message with Dad and figure she’ll email me later.

            Even the cooking out on the farm took on an ethereal slant. On offer with afternoon coffee was a two kilo wodge of Hobbit Cake tied in muslin to the end of a stick. It was apparently full of nuts, grains, treacle and chunks of fruit. The kids with ministerial names remarked on how good it was, and Mum told them it was what Hobbits took when they began their long journeys, and was chock-full of nutrition which would sit in your tummy for days. Very handy for an excursion to Food’o’rama. The Rt Hons (bless) didn’t bat an eyelid.

            Modern-day advice, too, has taken on a more useful tack. For instance:

            . Never go into a dark cave without your lantern and some kind of weapon. In case there are Orcs (and there are bound to be – or what would be the point?)

            . Carry enough food for the journey (presumably a doorstep of the aforementioned comestible – which you can hack at with your elven sword whenever the fancy takes you). You can also share it with other travellers in order to gain trust and companionship.

            . Speak to everyone you come into contact with until they won’t talk to you anymore. (Just my luck they’ll be white traders.)

            And most important of all:

            . Always save your game. Yup – you wouldn’t want to have to kill those Poison Gobbos’ o’ Horror all over again, would you?

            I asked my straight-nosed children whether I had ever given them dumb advice.

            One of them said she was glad I’d dropped the habit of asking them whether they were wearing knickers before they left the house. This was because I found one of them wasn’t after she executed a cartwheel halfway down the road. They laugh with derision about me asking them to tell the bus driver to ‘drive carefully’ when they went on school excursions. And ‘don’t forget to eat your lunch’ was apparently just plain dumb.

            Mostly, they assured me, any advice I gave them was ignored.

            I hate to tell you, Rt Hons., some time, somewhere, when you least expect it … it’ll all come back to haunt you.

.oOo.

            All in all, it’s a bit worrying – this ‘sports hero’ business. What’s so heroic about working up a sweat and wearing bodysuits? (asks she who can’t).

            Heroes in the old days – before political correctness caused men to slam doors in your face and expect you to pay for your own large fries at McDonald’s - used to save damsels in distress and slay the odd offensive dragon. Heroes are firemen, rescue workers and the man in the street who nonchalantly climbs a tree to bring down your cat – which was chased up there by unthinking sports heroes, pounding up and down the street in tight lycra doing their beastly training.

            Sports people are doing what they love doing most. Which, in the main, is working up a sweat and wearing revealing stretchy things. If they happen to work up a sweat in a brand name stretchy thing, they get sponsored to do it. If they have wobbly bits, they get to be centrefolds. And at the end of the day, they can say they’re ‘doing it for Straya’. Good one. Like the rest of us are doing whatever we do for the sheer hell of anonymity and the key to the executive washroom. Well, hoot-a-toot-toot.

            What I’d like to see is a bit of equity here. Recognition for everyone else who’s doing what they love doing most. Arts Heroes. Writing Heroes. Air time on prime time telly  and sponsors for paper, canvas and those really nice fountain pens with ergonomic grips. Or how about a tickertape parade for Gardening Heroes – men who dare to weed under your grevilleas without wearing gloves. Then there are those champions of industry, Office Heroes – who bring their own biros, don’t make personal phone calls from work and go home with their bladders straining like the Hindenberg because they refuse to let it rip during production time.

            When the rubber hits the road, most heroic acts have absolutely nothing to do with running tracks or swimming pools. Indeed, often heroes are right there under your nose in your very own home – purveyors of unselfish acts which give pleasure to other people in the immediate vicinity. For instance:

            . Remote Control Heroes – Men who refrain from clicking over to another channel when you’re getting all excited about the outcome of a Sara Lee commercial.

            . Toilet Roll Heroes – Skilled in the dying art of unwrapping a new one, putting it on the little wooden roller, removing and disposing of the old one. (Note: This is an extremely rare genus – possibly extinct, in the event it ever existed in the first place).

            . Grocery Heroes – Men who come shopping with you and pick good stuff.

            . Silent Heroes – Men who don’t tell you how you look when you have PMT.

            . Blissfully Unaware Heroes – Men who haven’t the faintest idea you have PMT.

             These types of heroes may look good in a tight lycra thingy … or they may not. Who cares? They can be a cross between Albert Steptoe and Bob Carr for all I care. I’m too old to give a hoot about wobbly bits, and the smell of sweat is only an aphrodisiac if it accompanies a man who’s just hauled 10 kilos of chocolate all the way from Belgium.

            Those of us without a sporting bent don’t go on telly crying, ‘Watch me, watch me!’ as we flick our way lustfully through our exotically illustrated cookery porn and tuck into pecan Danish.

            Not likely. We’re confident enough in our own ability that we can sit quietly back in our overstuffed chairs, resting our choice of literature on our overstuffed tummies – happy in the knowledge somebody else is out there, bravely and heroically ‘doing it for Straya’ …

            Go, you good things! (Love your work …)

.oOo.

            A few people have asked lately whether I happen to be jealous – of Elle. Oh, haha. Not. These queries have no doubt been prompted by a few things I’ve written which were apparently not very nice. And gave the impression, furthermore, I might perhaps be a tad bitter. Well, no. FYI, I’m not. I’m happy as a clam looking like this, as you would be. I’ve developed it into an art form.

            There are multitudinous advantages to having very short legs. It’s likely to be terrifically handy one day when Osama or someone decides to come over and start attacking. Yessiree – I’ll be closer to the ground. Providing my reflexes are in order, I’ll hit the floor a damn sight faster than Elle will. After the holocaust, there’ll be plenty of wombats left, but alas – not too many giraffes.

            In the event of famine falling on the pillaged land, those of us more generously padded will be able to live on our stored energy for quite some time, thank you very much. Supermodels, on the other hand, will not last much past morning tea. Look at how convenient this arrangement has always been for camels. Oh yes indeed, the gazelles had a fine old time sneering at them back at the corral … but who managed to cross the desert, hmm? And with their thighs still intact – go, you good dromedaries, go!

            In times of difficulty, people of my ilk won’t care if we can’t get chartreuse nail varnish. We’ve never varnished our nails in our lives. We won’t have to worry about getting ladders in our non-existent stockings or give a rat’s whether anybody can lend us a Silky Mitt. We won’t give a stuff if the hair under our armpits is dragging on the ground, because it usually does anyway and nobody died.

            In times of hardship, beauty will become trivial. Nobody will be looking at Elle with their tongues hanging out, I can assure you. They’ll be asking me if they can please shelter under my stomach. Begging, even. They’ll be borrowing items of my clothing to set up a tent city. Elle’s clothing might possibly be useful for tying tomato plants to stakes – but she probably won’t part with it without a struggle – particularly the designer label jobbies. You’ll have to kill her first.

            ‘But,’ Elle will cry, wringing her hands. ‘You boombahs will eat all the supplies!’ Well, yes – we probably will. We’ll need it – we’ve got more space to fill. If there are any celery sticks, she can have those. If things get really desperate and the community has to revert to cannibalism – who would be more popular then, hmmm? Elle … or moi?

            What Elle and her cohorts do comes under the banner of ‘decorative’. In an emergency, it’s not terribly useful. When you’re having your home bombed and can’t find your children, who are you going to long for most? A thin woman in gold latex hotpants or a Dominos delivery lad? Will you want to know what to wear this autumn, or how much tinned crap we’ll need to get us through until Christmas? Indeed, will the smell of Chanel No.5 manage to permeate the stench of rotting bodies and charnel houses?

            Sure, it would be okay to look reasonable, I suppose. I don’t deny it. But we’re still all going to end up with maggots crawling through our eye sockets – and after all, the whole lot of us will ultimately attain thinness when we’re reduced to bones.

            It’s astounding how supermodels and sportspeople earn more money than leaders of the country and great scientific minds, who struggle for handouts to cure disease and benefit mankind. What does that say about us? How intelligent is a country which showers accolades on drunken yob footballers who can’t string two words together coherently, and stick-insect clotheshorses who earn more per hour than it would take to feed a Somalian village for a year? The world has gone crazy, and it’s not a good look.

            So don’t just sit there and feel bad about the extra pounds you’ve stacked on – have that slice of torte! Take a second slice, even! Go on … sooner or later, when it comes to the crunch, your country will need YOU.

            One hump or two?

.oOo.

            The Warrior Queen has been a bit peeved. She wants to know why you can’t get real food anymore. There were so many different types of milk on offer down at Food-o-rama, she didn’t feel qualified to make an intelligent decision.

            Manufacturers obviously wouldn’t know a cow from their elbow. It was either skim, trim, lite, brite, lo-fat, no-fat, soy, protein enriched, thigh-enhancing or joggers’ delite. What are you supposed to do? All you want is a drop of white stuff in your coffee –  is it too much to ask? Well, yes, actually. It either comes with everything taken out of it, or a whole lot of other stuff put in. You can’t just get it the way God intended, because that would look as if nobody had bothered. No matter how much trouble the poor old cow went to, trying to ensure a fresh, nutritious product – the human being has to get right in there, stuffing about with it.

            It doesn’t stop with milk, either. There’s the bread enigma. Not content with it being merely white or brown, you can now get it with hidden grains. Secretive ones, even. Grains you have when you don’t want anyone to know you’re having grains. Grains your kids can’t see, so they think they’re having bread that’s bad for them when you’re really fooling them into having something nutritious. Like grains. That’ll be 50c extra for the hidden goodness, please – and sucked in because you can’t prove whether you’re paying for anything extra at all!

            The WQ wants to trot down to the shop with her pail and have it filled straight from the udder. She wants to take her burlap bag and have them weigh out a pound of faggots and a few grams of broken biscuits. She wants to go home with a lump of cheese wrapped in muslin and stuck solidly under her armpit. Such were the halcyon days!

            It’s all becoming too complicated by far when you need a chemistry degree to go to Food-o-rama to choose ingredients for a simple family meal. What’s worse, most of the stuff we’re getting these days tastes like crap. That’s because chemicals taste like crap – and they’re supposed to – they’re medicine. Chemicals were not supposed to taste like roast beef. When you pump cows full of them, roast beef doesn’t taste like roast beef. But it’s supposedly immortal. You can keep it in your refrigerator forever. An eight-year-old cheeseburger found recently under the seat of a car still looked edible. Bully for it.

            Not satisfied with having destroyed the very essence of milk, bread and meat, there are people – thin people – employed to create smug little labels to stick on everything. If you check out the labels you can see exactly how many calories you’re going to pack on if you eat the whole box – which, let’s face it - was the general idea. Sometimes the amount of calories is thousands. The front of the pack says ‘Baked not Fried – 97% Fat Free’. It’s still thousands. This is something I really need to know.

            There is absolutely no enjoyment in a Mars Bar if you are forced to read first how it has 100% fat, 10 million calories and the potential to render you incapable of fitting into a bus seat unless the one beside you is unoccupied.

            There is no fun in having to read a list of numerals which indicate whether or not your children will trash the house and try to kill each other if they eat the product. Why not skip the additives in the first place? Who cares if the stuff won’t last until the middle of next year? Who wants to stare at a packet of bacon in the fridge for longer than a few weeks anyway?

            Nobody used to die from eating fresh food. They didn’t crawl the walls either. They didn’t need to fill themselves with prescription chemicals to override the effects of food additives. We were perfectly happy with a bit of botulism every now and then, and the odd attack of dysentery. Chickens were free to lay their eggs wherever they damn well pleased, in the sunshine, under trees, in the privacy of their own yard – and you didn’t have to pay extra for them having the pleasure.

            Eliza … where the devil is my burlap bag?

.oOo.

            What are we doing to the minds of our young ones? Consider for a moment the toys available in our advanced and intelligent world – educational, realistic – giving valuable life skills which will carry our sons and daughters through their days armed with an ability to cope with just about anything. Believe it!

            And how better to introduce them to the obnoxious and disgusting habits of the human race than to supply them with the latest advertised craze – a miniature lavatory which emits noises of flatulence when the lid is opened and the contents (which appear to consist of oozing blobs of brown slime) are pressed. Charming. Sure, farty jokes have always been a hoot for the under 10 brigade – remember the good ol’ whoopee cushion? We’re all well aware flatulence is a fact of life and screamingly funny. Nevertheless, it’s only screamingly funny when it happens to someone else. You don’t let one rip in front of Aunty Fanny, and you do your darndest to keep it out of the office. It boggles the mind why you’d  want to encourage your son (who probably has enough foul habits already without making much effort), to spend his valuable time making totally inappropriate noises with a device costing considerably more than the original wind-breaking equipment he was endowed with at birth – his own highly effective backside.

            Far more disturbing is another recent innovation, no doubt formulated to encourage early animal cruelty and set the kiddies on the road to being able to annihilate REAL creatures – that cute-as-darn plaything imaginatively named the Squirt Bug. This fun-for-all-ages toy consists of a rubber cockroach/beetley thingie – whichever is the critter de jour on which to vent your spleen – which can be filled with either a blood solution or a neat little concoction of slime’n’guts. Having diligently stuffed your preferred bug with the chosen intestinal cocktail, you then proceed to stomp on it. Delightful and educational, both. Don’t do this inside, kiddies – or you’ll stain momma’s carpet. Do it on the driveway so we can hose it down afterwards and pretend we were only pretending … and when you’ve run out of slime’n’guts, feel free to pull some cicadas apart or lob a few snails at the Rolladoor. Who was the perverted moron who came up with this little gem – and furthermore, what type of parent buys it? What happened to teaching kids to love all God’s creatures, great and small?

            It bodes ill for the future, while we wait with bated breath for the release of the exploding battery operated koala (with napalm), the microwaveable plush aardvark (see it splatter as you nuke!) – not to mention Baby Dope Fiend, which lies there on the floor and does sod-all after you’ve inserted the authentic-looking hypodermic needle into its realistic-feeling vein – though there’s more, kiddies! Yessiree Bob, it comes with its very own dole application form and full set of housebreaking implements!

            All very lovely and sure to put the kiddies on the path to a fulfilling life in the new millennium, where it’s dog eat dog (and the neighbour’s dog, too!)

            The good old Meccano set doesn’t seem to have much credence anymore. Why spend time creating something when you can sit mindlessly in front of American sitcoms in which smartarse kids show appalling disrespect for their elders and the elders guffaw indulgently at how cute they are?  Why curl up in front of the fire with Famous Five Go To Camp when you can download enough information from the internet to blow half of Year 5 to bits with a length of hosepipe and a frozen orange? Nah – Enid Blyton’s old hat. These days, the Famous Five wouldn’t get a look in – even if the paedophiles hadn’t got to them first. The most popular computer games are those in which the death toll far exceeds the IQ of the person playing them, and you couldn’t interest your kid in making fairy bread if Tinkerbell herself sat up and begged.

            Kids are encouraged to live in the fast lane, grow up too quickly, dress beyond their age, annihilate Squirt Bugs on the driveway and understand things they have no damn business knowing.

            Then we have the audacity to wonder why …

.oOo.

            The difference between optimism and pessimism is merely the way you look at things. Whether you see the glass as half empty or half full. Naturally, my glass  is always half empty and there seems to be a desperate struggle going on most days to top it up a bit.

            There is, however, an area of one’s life which brings such inexplicable optimism you feel it simply oozing out of your pores. That magical and hope-inspiring moment in which you buy a new shampoo. Those few moments when you actually feel … ethereal.

            There is a horrible truth which we highly intelligent and educated women just can’t seem to get a grip of. A gruesome but nevertheless honest fact – hair is dead. It’s clinically dead the moment it emerges from your scalp. Fact number two – you can’t DO anything with dead. Except for washing the grease out. Why then, do we imagine a shampoo we have taken out a mortgage to afford, will make it thicker, bouncier, healthier, whatever? It’s because, where matters of vanity are concerned, we are terminally stupid. Because we think, in our addled little brains and if we don’t look in mirrors too often, we too can resemble the woman on the telly with the thick, bouncing, healthy, whatever. Rubbish. She has a wind machine and a wig. She has a soundtrack. She also has a team of people who have just spent 12 hours under hot lights doing the impossible with dead. She’s filmed in slow motion. I don’t need to be filmed in slow motion – it’s my natural state. While I’m doing it however, my hair is just hanging there. What it is NOT doing, is gently caressing the tips of tree branches as I go wafting through Central Park in a kaftan. You do not get waft out of a bottle. Just soap.

            Sure, hair feels better when it’s clean. That goes without saying. It’s just debatable whether $1 or $20 will do a better embalming job. Whether it will make you feel, psychologically, as if you waft and don’t have cellulite anymore.

            Then there are the products endorsed by superstars. If a 200kg truckie uses it, he’ll step out of his rig looking like Elle MacPherson. I’d like to endorse one called ‘Bushpig’ which makes you look and feel like a middle-aged woman with a serious chocolate addiction, whose bum is too close to the ground.

            Personally, I just buy the stuff for the packaging. I really like those ones where the shampoo is transparent and there are those little botanical plants and things printed on the inside of the bottle. It’s extremely aesthetically pleasing – while it’s in the bottle. It’s the closes thing to sucking me in enough to feel remotely as if I might waft. And as I’ve mentioned before, I won’t buy anything packaged in orange.

            There isn’t much hype around men’s shampoo. They don’t have KRudd coming on telly to entice men into washing their hair with something that will make them feel jumped up and important and capable of running the country. He doesn’t need to – men feel like that anyway. They have enough confidence to just reach for whatever the little woman has put on the bathroom shelf – and it’s a sad fact of life they generally come out looking full of bounce and waft anyway, without even caring. Their mates don’t ask them what product they use, or titter behind their backs about their roots showing through. For men, hair is effortless. As is should be, bearing in mind it’s dead.

            The rest of us ought to wake up to ourselves. The only soundtrack real life has is the sound of advertisements nagging at you. The only wind machine you’re likely to come into contact with is probably your husband. And let’s face it, you’re never going to waft again.

            Just keep hanging’ in there for next week’s telly commercial when that brand new product will promise you’ll look like you’ve been filmed through a soft focus lens.

            It won’t happen overnight. Nah, face it - it just won’t happen.

.oOo.

There are people out there who can’t stand their own company. As the saying goes, they’re usually right. So what do they do with their spare time? Wreck yours. Phoning, visiting or hanging around malls waiting to head you off at the pass when you’re on your way to the car with a bag of fresh cream doughnuts and the latest copy of Chow Down (Bumper Holiday Edition). For some reason, they think they’re doing you a favour by inflicting themselves upon you without notice – and it’s just not fair.

            You can pick out The Prey in the crowded streets. People with haunted expressions and dust balls clinging to their hair. They sometimes wear dark glasses and towelling hats, and resemble people in a witness protection program. This is because they’ve spent the morning under the bed, hiding from someone jolly in a floral tent who kept punching the doorbell and calling ‘YOOHOO!’

            On the other hand, The Predators have little beady eyes, darting everywhere in order to spy a victim. They also have Tupperware catalogues, lamington drive order forms and photo albums full of crap you wouldn’t want to know about. They never phone first to give you time to make up an excuse. When you don’t answer the door, they tramp round the house trying all the locks and windows. While you’re lying under the bed trying not to breathe, you wonder what in hell you’re supposed to do if Maisie Fansbarns comes hurtling through your bedroom window. Do you come out from under the bed and pretend you were dusting, or let her go through the personal papers on your dresser? It’s a tangled web you have woven, and it probably serves you right.

            The Warrior Queen, who desires solitude and the company of other animals above all things, was once caught out badly by Mrs Fogsbottom, a ghastly neighbour who turned up each morning at 9am as soon as we kids were off to school. She’d be in situ still when we returned home. The WQ was quietly going batshit. She had never hurt anyone’s feelings before in her life, but found herself in the position of inventing dialogue/scenarios in her sleep with which to defray the dreaded Fogsbottom in a permanent and resolute fashion.

            She decided to say she wouldn’t be available for morning coffee for a couple of weeks because she was going to springclean. The idea was to break Mrs F’s habit so she’d move on to greener pastures. ‘Good idea!’ Mrs F agreed. ‘I might do the same!’ The next morning the WQ awoke with hope and optimism. She thought she might curl up with a book and do sod-all. She packed the school lunches, shoved us out of the door – and there, like a battleship in full sail, was Mrs F-Bottom sashaying across the street with a duster in one hand and a container of Vim in the other.

            The WQ went feral. There is no other way to describe it. From the top of our steps she screamed across the road – ‘Go AWAY! I can’t TAKE IT ANYMORE! Don’t you DARE come any further!’ The whole thing was accompanied by some rather menacing pointing gestures and much stamping of feet. Mrs F-Bot was rooted to the spot. There was no way to disband gracefully and return to barracks with her dignity intact. None of us can quite remember what happened next, but nobody in that neighbourhood ever spoke to the WQ again. Which was a very happy ending altogether, because that’s just the way she likes it.

            If you happen to be a Predator, spare a thought for those who love their own company and delight in talking to themselves and not sharing their cream doughnuts. Go to the library and choose the first book – something by Aarronson about Aardvarks – and start reading. Do not phone anyone or visit a neighbour until you have worked your way through to Zxybrand and read every single word of his million-page trilogy on life in a 16^th century throttlers’ camp.

            By the time you’ve done this, you’ll be so wise and well informed, people might actually be interested in what you have to say.

.oOo.