Category: Uncategorized

27th July – A new student’s mother, a public servant, asked me to help get her daughter ‘moving forward’.

28th July – Today I submitted two pretty colour photos (rather than black and white) and got more ‘likes’ in one day than ever before.  Clearly, more people prefer sweetness and light.

29th July – On the online German language course, I’ve been taught to say Orangen haben Fleisch – oranges have meat!  I’ve been laughing at this, but today my son bought a blood orange, tore it open and showed me its red flesh and red juice, the colour of blood.  The colour of meat.

30th July – Our local government has banned free plastic bags.  In the bakery today, I was asked to pay 20c for a huge brown paper bag.

31st July – Two weeks’ ago, I heard fifth-hand news that a guy in the Housing flats was torturing someone and was going to be taken away.  He’s still there.  Today, I heard fifth-hand news that he’s a victim of crime and the police are moving him to a safer address.  He’s still there.  I heard all this from a woman who heard it from a woman who heard it from a woman who heard it from the woman who works at the checkout at the local shop, who apparently heard it from the guy himself.

22nd July – Began reading The Brothers Karamazov.  The three brothers are 20, 23 and 27, about the same ages as my three sons.

23rd July – One of my students had an alarm set for 5.17pm, the exact time of today’s sunset, the exact time she would be able to eat (Ramadan).  This is new to me.

24th July – Tonight I glimpsed an unfamiliar light, warm and yellow, in the gap between the curtain and the window. I went closer and found a horizontal crescent moon, like a Cheshire Cat smile.

25th July – Learnt that the three people who work in the local café are all expectant parents. Something in the coffee?

26th July – Heard an old guy telling a young woman that he was “pretty full-on as a child”. “I was reading before I was two,” he slurred, holding his six-pack tightly in the crook of his arm.

17th July – Tried to sew four borders onto a quilt, two long pieces and two short.  I got two of them wrong.  That has to be unusual.

18th July – A friend told me about Cloud computing which I knew nothing about.  A line from Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now came into my head and stuck:  I really don’t know clouds at all.

19th July – My husband read my translation draft.

20th July – In a sports shoe store with my son who is at the end of a flu bout, I saw his skin had a sickly green tint and I worried, until other people came in and turned green.  It was the intense lighting, which was also giving the African-Australian shop assistant an intense headache (but not a green tint).

21st July – A bottle of truffle-infused olive oil tells us that “Over 80% of women describe the odour of truffle oil as very sensual.” “Close your eyes, inhale the aroma,” it instructs. I’ve inhaled it twice and found I belong to the other 20%.

2nd July – In an online German course, I’m learning how to say “The salt is bad”, “The man drinks oil”.  I looked at the equivalent French course where I learnt “My wheat is black”, “We eat butter”.

3rd July – On the other hand, the French course teaches:  “She has a black dress” and “I love you”;  the German, “You are a man and I am a woman”.

4th July – A Chinese student thanked me with a packet of tea from China.  I scooped some into my teapot, drank the tea, inhaled its fragrance, then tried to empty the tealeaves out.  They had morphed into life-size green leaves, like leaf-litter in the bottom of the pot.

5th July – Eating at a table beside the lake when a seagull (lake gull?) landed and walked up to my plate.  It had a black and white polka-dot tail,which is actually the white tips of black edges of white wings.

6th July – A friend told me that her husband cut her hair in the shower this morning.

17th June – A church sermon was illustrated with a Renaissance sculpture of the devil tempting Christ:  the devil is bent-nosed and bald;  Christ is straight-nosed, long-haired and bearded.  They are both white.

18th June – Out for a walk, I passed a flock of ground-feeding sulphur-crested cockatoos.  One took off and flew close to my ear, squawking.  Almost deafening.

19th June – A man and his 10 year-old daughter went past on a bike – him riding and her standing on the bag rack, her hands resting on his shoulders.

20th June – At a closing-down sale of a large store, I was sold a cardigan by a fifty-something saleswoman.
“Are you a member?” she asked.
“No.”
“Would you like to become a member?”
“Ah, no….”
She shrugged.  “We have to say it.”

21st June – On this winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, it’s very cold and blowing a gale, yet a few women are outdoors in strappy tops.