Taut flesh pots

It is ever so fashionable to belong to the Next Generation gym. You pay an arm and a leg to tone an arm and a leg. Toney toning. I know a lot of people who pay the ransom of membership - most of them assuming that belonging is enough. They barely ever go. It is fitness by association.
When my mate, Annie, suggested that, instead of a Sunday walk on the beach, we go to this gym for a swim, my curiosity got the best of me. Why not have a look at the place. Annie has a Platinum membership which comes complete with guest passes - so out with the old swim togs and off we went, into the exclusive underground carpark and up into fitness deluxe world. They wanted a lot of information just to let me have a swim, so I filled in forms dutifully - and off we went to the inner sanctum of Platinum, where only those who pay most may go. Well, for that price, they get three fake venetian glass mosaic recliners with central heating - plus two spas, a steam room, a sauna and an ice room. Wow - not. But it was swim I sought, so off we trotted to another section - indoor and outdoor pools. Outdoor was a bit cold, so we retreated to the warm pool where lines were allocated for different speeds of lap swimming. The water is shallow. No treading water, which is a favored exercise of mine. Oh well. We swam some laps in the quietest lane. I hate splashing, so I was not pleased to find some idiot lapping in butterfly strokes beside me. In a shared pool, butterfly strikes me as plain bad manners. But, hey, I'm not a member, who am I to complain? So I just observed with amusement the sleazy middle-aged men sitting about in the spa to perv on the women around the pool. And the odd sense of superiority people assume when at the gym. Mostly they are alone and looking as if the are terribly important. The one thing one does not see is enjoyment. Instead, it is a mask of exclusivity - and I suppose a sense of narcissitic purpose.
We finished off with a coffee in the big lounge area, which was fairly pleasant, looking onto the indoor pool. And, as we handed back the plastic passes which take one through the sections, I told the receptionist that I was sorry I could never join a gym which did not have a smoking room.

Flatulent politics

How does anyone take these politicians seriously. Prime Minister John Howard has just promised the earth in exchange for his re-election. He promises everything to everyone. Ironically, it is a litany of the things he should have done in his term of office. Now he says he will fund them. Disgraceful, unbearable hypocrisy. And yet the faithful are wide-eyed and impressed.

The rewriter of history

The dreaded Janine Bourke has struck again - another book on Heide, the cultural enclave in which I was conceived. Another tome, this one with yet more editorial arrogance than ever. A woman who writes so-called biography but has never sought to speak to the one person still living who was a part of the culture she reports. Apparently she knows it all without extending her research. Especially as she has a fierce aversion to any history which may reach across the border. Ironic really since this last survivor, my mother, retains the spirit of Bourke's subject, Sunday Reed - for my mother was, in many ways, moulded by this woman. And thus is my impression of this so-called biographer something akin to disdain. Some quasi-academic carving herself a reputation out of the lives of others. And each time, doing it shabbily. She has not even a shadow of the brilliance of her subjects. Poor mediocre parasite.

Fox fixations

I turned on the telly when I woke this morning to see how badly the massive hurricane Ivan had ravaged the Southern States. I saw a bit last night, which was just dawn in the US. Now at 6 in the evening there, I expect to see the full story. Instead I see what I have seen for days and days and days - yet ANOTHER panel of right-wingers obsessing over CBS's forged or not forged documents on Bush's national service. They were on about it when I went to sleep. They were on about it the day before and the day before. How much can they gnaw at this bone? They have a national disaster - an unprecedented string of devastating hurricanes - and they are nit-picking for hour upon hour of air time about a well-known issue, attempting to deny Bush's privilege in the armed forces 30 plus years ago. It is so tedious. Surely their fan-base also must be feeling a certain degree of ennui by now - or are they all so blinkered that the reiterative analysis of this issue truly engrosses them? Fair, balanced and uninteresting, I'd say. And for those of us seeking some real news from across the globe, they are short-change.
Back to Google News for some real information.

The politics of acrimony

Which of the two elections is the worse, Australia's or America's? Apart from the fact that I simply can't comprehend the rise and rise of the mean-minded right, I am finding the game-playing increasingly repulsive. One is beset by biased media thrusting aggressively for the right. There is something in this disease of political aggression which reflects a degeneracy in society, a moral and ethical decline. It reminds me of the way in which the Internet was immediately kidnapped by the pornographers and sexual predators, the spoilers. They rule and ruin. Just as the greedy and corrupt have harnessed politics. Whichever way one turns, one has to sidestep ugliness.

Right to the left

How the media plays it down. But the truth is that the debate between Prime Minister and his opponent for the Federal election was something of a watershed. In my week "embedded" in the community to ascertain the public's feelings about the election, I discovered what I believe is an unprecedented number of "swinging" voters who felt alienated by the incumbent Prime Minister but uncertain about his opponent. Mark Latham, the Labor leader, has been poorly presented by a purposely unsupportive media. The result is as the media intended - a public feeling of suspicion about this mystery man, this "inexperienced" man. I could relate to this. He has struck me as a fairly unappealing man and a poor choice. Then came the debate and Latham at last was able to represent himself unedited. And he was impressive - a rational, intelligent, articulate, calm and confident man who could think on his feet. He ran rings around the PM. He won me - and I do believe he won a mass of those swinging voters.
Of course, the race is far from run. It promises to be dirty. Politics isn't pretty. It is no place for the good.

A sucker's born every minute

Well, the old sucker thing takes on a new slant when one has a couple of teeth extracted. With stitches in the gum and a sense of extreme tenderness, I'm strictly on the sucky food. And when the dentist, ringing next day to check how I was coping after the particularly arduous and extended surgical nasties, told me that she'd had two more extraction patients that day and one of them had made mine look like a picnic, I thought of the poor sods, like me, looking for sucky food and feeling oh so wounded and traumatised - and realised that, yes, it's true. If not born, a sucker is made every minute.

Back to school

I had not set foot in the junior campus of my old school since I left - so there was much I did not recognise when I found myself there today to review some in-schools theatre - chore I perform periodically to keep abreast of the theatre-in-education programs. Where we used to walk on our hands, skip and play poison ball - the big lawn and paved areas - were no longer there. Nor was the headmistress's house. Or the corrugated iron bike shed where we used to swap scraps, eat lunch and play name games (I remember it was a big fad to list as many car names as possible). Instead, there was a massive round hall with a row of excessively decorated and jolly classrooms - a far cry from the formal rows of desks with inkwells of my time. The uniform remains the same - and the girls much the same, I suppose. Some of them seemed so tiny. But I was just four when I started there and 17 when I left for Uni. As I left the grounds, I finally recognised a building. The kindergarten building was still there. My very first classroom. A little stone building with a slate patio and a sunken lawn. We performed the Nativity Play on that patio and the parents sat on chairs on the lawn. I was a shepherd - and disappointed at such a non-role, I recall.
But most of all what the sight of that little building did was to bring surging up from somewhere deep within me a huge, primal rage. For, as I looked at the exterior, a kaleidescope of vivid memories of my experiences therein came pouring back, among them the day thar Miss Dawe, the kindie mistress, made me sit behind the piano for an entire afternoon as a punishment for not eating my lunch. I had explained to her that my tomato sandwich had gone soggy and disgusting in the lunchbox and I did not like it. It was repulsive. She insisted that I eat it. I refused. I was put behind the piano with the sandwich and told I could not join the activities until I had eaten it. So I spent the afternoon behind the piano, my falling tears adding to the soggy mess of a sandwich, as the other children played class games, had their nap, and played more. It was a baffling and mindless piece of teacher cruelty. I did not eat another tomato sandwich for many years - even now, I prefer tomato on toast. And, as I looked at the classroom today, I wanted to resurrect that horrid Miss Dawe and give her a lovely, fresh knuckle sandwich.

Trust me. Hah!

Says the Prime Minister in announcing his Octobeer 9 election date, "trust me". I trust him alright. I trust him to lie and lie and lie. Mendacious, dangerous, self-serving politician.
But, sadly, the public will trust like hapless voting lemmings and this era of war-making and economic rationalism will go on. An American critic put it perfectly when commenting on the aquiescence of the American public under the Bush regime of fear and deception. He surmised that the public has succumbed to "an Orwellian false reality".
Thus is it here, too. And it is deeply disturbing and very depressing.

Sea-renity

My idea of perfection. Hours spent reading in a seat by the window with the islands outside and the sea reaching into the ever yonder. And a long walk around to the old screwpile jetty with the bay still and sheltered and the water a sheet of reflected sky. There were six shags sitting on one rock - all looking in the same direction. Like an audience. And the Pacific gulls were perched on crags of the bluff, posing for the world to admire how handsome they are. Only two desultry pelicans were at the boat ramp, although lots of boats had been out fishing on this perfect day. Not much of a catch, said one fisherman. But it was so lovely out in the bay, he said he did not care. Lovely it was - with fishermen on the rocks in each little inlet, happily casting their lines, sipping on a beer, gazing at the sea.
Tonight there has been some steady, nourishing rain. Crickets are singing a rhythmic song outside with the waves providing periodic percussion.
The city does not lure me back - but return I must. Sigh.

Aahhh Friday

TGIF. I've fled the city driving a very snazzy Lexus RX330 which really came into its own when I hit the country roads. Now, with a coffee and a ciggie, I let go of the wicked week. Too much work in it to think straight. Taking on a freelance job which consumed two nights of writing was the straw on this camel's back. Getting too old to hack the pace, methinks. But perhaps it was a tough week by anyone's standards. But now, the sea is outside and all is calm.

What writers do

Carlos Ruiz Zafon was our celebrity author last night - and a magical man of vivid words he turned out to be. So often writers are very separate entities from their works. But this Spaniard inspired and delighted - even in a second language. Oh, the wicked things he had to say about his years as a Hollywood scriptwriter. And the reasons why he would not sell screen rights to his book "Shadow of the Wind". Which were linked, of course, to his experiences of the cannibal world of screenwriting.

From Carlos's fanciful gothic world, I am now immersed in that of Mark D'Arbanville who is "The Naked Husband" - and I read with revulsion, loathing the man from deep within my gut, as many female readers will. His book is an explanation of his infidelity to his wife, of his discontent with a perfect life, and his need for another. I thought, in reading this book, that I would gain some enlightenment about the male of the species, or particularly about the ex-husband who betrayed me in a similar way. What I have understood from this man's attempt at controversial paperback writing is that men can be brutally selfish and feel sorry for themselves at the same time. I knew that already. But the wounds of all that are far behind me. Faded old scars. And the negative turned into a positive. For had life not taken that turn back yon in England, I never would have found my Bruce.

Chocolate Intensity

An assignment to judge chocolate for the Royal Show. Oh, how the colleagues oozed their envy. I must say I was not displeased with the challenge.
Equipped with a very prestigous judge's badge and a lab coat, I was one of three judges - head judge being a leading retired chef and culinary teacher, the other being a confectioner and speciality cake maker. My only qualification was my choc snobbery, being one who refuses to eat couverture or compound chocolates and who believes that Belgium's Leonidas chocolates with their fresh cream centres are the best in the world.
Chocolates were laid out in categories on trestle tables. 66 samplings in 12 categories.
Sadly, we had to start with the worst and work our way up to my favorite - chocolate ginger. This, said the head judge, because we work from mild flavors through to the strong.
Shaving slivers of chocolate bars and cutting centred chocolates, we let each sample melt naturally on the tongue to explore its qualities after examining the appearance of each offering. I had not realised how many things there were to be considered. But I caught on. The head judge was a wonderful teacher. And, hey, it's hardly an unappetising subject.
Well, it took four hours to go through all those chocolates. Four hours of nothing but chocolate and water.
I had not had breakfast, apart from the usual coffee and cigarette. But the chocolate did nicely as first food of the day. In fact, as the hours wore on, I found I was feeling charged and a little high with all the chocolate. It is good energy food, after all. The process, however, was incredibly intense - so much so that one hardly noticed the time passing. It was an adventure in subtleties puctuated by thrills of excellence. The top chocolates were world class. They rivalled Godiva and Hefty. They were sublime. Two in particular - neither of which I am permitted to reveal until the results are announced. But both are made in Adelaide.

After the judging I had thought maybe I would feel sickly. But no. Instead I had a passionate craving for salad.
And I absolutely could not face another chocolate. For at least a few hours.

Sharing friends

Never again will I tell one friend of another "you'll love him/her". No, sir! I will make no assumptions that friends with things in common will get on with each other. Not after last weekend when, thinking I was delivering the gift of potential friendship, I brought two interesting friends together as houseguests, only to see them go for each other's jugulars in a steamy dinner table argument about, of all things, the atrocities that King Leopold inflicted on the Congolese. Friend A, who has lived in Africa, attempted to tell the Friend B that some of the techniques of utter cruelty used by Leopold's minions were adoped from Congolese tribal punishments and that colonial Africa and colonies generally had been rife with brutality and genocide. Friend B took this as an expat Third World colonialist apologia for Leopold and went into a state of deepest, grim hostility - from which he refused to emerge. And thus was our jolly weekend a complete disaster.