Observation Deck

My daughter loves a metaphor. It’s a shame that they’re so dear to her heart because she’s really quite useless with them. In fact she’s so bad, that as an English teacher in a past career incarnation, it hurts me. “But I’m good at English… I did Advanced and Extension and stuff”, she interjects.  I know, I nod sadly. “And I’m good at it.” Uh huh. Her latest offering was “He gets right up in my goat!” Thank you Kath Day-Knight.

“Grill”, I say.

“What?”

“He gets all up in your grill.” I expand.

She gives me her doe-eyes as I step around her to put the milk back in the fridge. “He gets ‘all up in your grill’ or ‘on your goat’ or ‘up your nose’.”  The fridge door closes with a weary sigh and we stare at each other for a minute before she breaks into a grin and starts to giggle. If there’s one thing about Princess 1, it’s that she can laugh at herself. She may have inherited my father’s complete lack of I-get-a-joke gene, but she can laugh at her own ditzy-ness. “Even by your standards, mixing three metaphors at the same time is a sterling effort”, I chuckle, and we try to remember some of her better ones. It’s pointless. There are so many.

That people mix metaphors so brilliantly is a paradox of joy and irritation for me. A great metaphor is one of life’s wonders. It can sum up a volume of thought in a gem-like nugget, encapsulating moods of entire nations or blips on the historical timeline.

Metaphors are a thinking person’s phraseology and Australians are particularly gifted at the art of metaphor, I believe. I think it goes hand in hand with a laconic way of life and using minimal words to say the most, or to say it in the quirkiest way. Why say someone is incredibly unlucky when you could say “you don’t have to be stiff to be dead”? Why say you could really do with a drink when you could say you were “drier than a nun’s nasty”?

When I think about the gems Princess 1 could mess with, it becomes frightening and somewhat of a relief that she isn’t aware of great Australian classics such as “they could eat a watermelon through a wire fence”, “all over it like a seagull on a potato chip” or “disappearing faster than a fart in a fan factory”. Actually, it’d take her a while to decode those three so I think we’re right for a while.

Metaphorical speech is so much a part of Australian language that it’s long caused conversational issues between us and other English spruikers, especially our American friends. Even more so when we shorten our metaphors because we all know what we mean. “He’s a few roos loose, mate.” I beg your pardon? “You know, a few chips short.” Chips? Who’s short? “No mate. He’s not the full quid.” The full what? At this point the frustration levels on both sides are usually starting to peak.

Perhaps Princess 1’s mixed metaphor recently of “Pfft… he’s not the full basket of eggs”, might make far more sense to our less metaphorically and culturally astute northern associates. I nearly died laughing.

“Please don’t use metaphors”, I gasped through the tears.

“Well I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t think of the right one and it just came out that way!”

“Stick to song writing. You traded in any talent for metaphor delivery for a genius with lyrics”, I said still laughing.

“I understand metaphors completely!” she tells me when I reminisce about this recent misdemeanour. “No Mum. I really do. I knew that it was about not being smart.” There’s a moment silence as we settle back into watching the movie. “What’s that one”, she asks “about wire?”

“WIRE?”

“Oh. No wait. That’s ‘screws’… ”

Merry Christmas! It’s that time of the year again when the best and worst of human behaviours can be observed, en masse in shopping centres everywhere, and watching evening TV has a certain sense of déjà vu as programmers re-run the same “holiday” movies and series Christmas Specials as they have for the last however many years. For many it’s also a time of great Christian religious significance, a fact that my friend Holy Hel – an Anglican vicar – reminds me of with great regularity. She’s not trying to convert me, in fact she appreciates my singular and determined rejection of organised religion of any sort as it might pertain to me personally. She says it’s part of my charm and I think it’s some of the glue that cements our friendship. She reminds me constantly of the religiosity of Christmas due to her constant buzzing about, whipping up a storm with her “Jesus this” and “Advent that” and being already tired from thinking about the fifty-two services she has to fit in to 48hours in a couple of different locations from Christmas Eve on because that’s what you do when you follow the bible like she does. It’s the tradition of the whole event.

About as far as my family ever got into religion at Christmas when I was growing up was when my mother would tilt her head slightly to the side as we all sat down to a meal that we called ‘Christmas lunch’ but was normally eaten sometime around afternoon tea o’clock, and ask in pious tones that I only ever heard her use on this one occasion each year, “who is going to say grace?” I dreaded this moment. I dreaded it because I knew that someone would always immediately nominate me, and the rest of the gathered assembly would breathe out in a monsoon of relief and instant muttering of collective approval at the suggestion. It was a case of singling out weakest in the herd, youngest being the equivalent of weakest in this case.

What did I know about grace? Bloody nothing outside what I’d gleaned from an education of nostalgic early black and white American movies on Sunday afternoon ABC TV. Poignant filmic narratives, where stereotypically traditional but bland families seemed to bless every meal in their lives.  That was the total extent of it. (And I have to say that it was the mother or father, or the crusty old grandfather or spinster aunt at the very least, who said grace in these depictions. Not the children. Never the children.)

It wasn’t that none of us were religious. My mother’s German heritage was deeply rooted in the Lutheran church and while, to my knowledge, she never attended church outside hatches, matches and dispatches, she has always had a very quiet but solid faith. My father on the other hand was a self confessed atheist. This didn’t stop him from being Mum’s biggest advocate on the Christmas grace issue. As far as I was concerned it was a complete betrayal, and ruined the three hours of Christmas Day leading up to the meal for me. “Righto Tupp…” he would say, not daring to make eye contact, hands clasped and head bowed as if he was the most holy of all pissed blokes that ever drew a festive breath.  Every year from the time I could talk, and that was early, we did the same dance.

“I don’t know how to say grace”, I would petulantly mutter.

“You just say, ‘Thank the Lord for the food we’re about to receive’”, my mother would helpfully suggest.

“Well you say it then!” I’d retort.

“No, I’d like you to say it.”

“I don’t know why I have to say grace. Why can’t someone else say grace? I said grace last year.”

No-one else spoke. It was a bit like those moments in school when the teacher asked for a volunteer to escort the kid who’d just vomited all over the front of their uniform to the sick bay. Fear of drawing attention to oneself with any movement, utterance or random bodily tic created an eerie, deathly still silence.

“I’d like you to say it”, my mother would go on in ever increasingly agitated tones, “because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Well why don’t you say it!”

“Tupp!” By this stage my father’s patience had usually run out. His turkey was going cold and he was always worried the gravy was going to touch his pork crackling and impact on its quality before he got to rate it – a Robertson family Christmas tradition that was never spoken of but somehow always expected. Dad’s crackling window was closing fast. Usually this one word was enough and I regurgitated mum’s instructed line immediately at lightning speed, with an elevated tone of resentment, far removed from the sentiment I’m certain my mother was hoping for. Every year was the same and every year I hoped the next year would be different.  It never was. So in our house one of our Christmas traditions was that lunch usually started with tension over a religious observance that was resolved, religiously, by an atheist.

Another of our traditions was Dad giving a running commentary on the Christmas leg of ham. This commentary usually started about mid November when he’d be organising the ordering of the ham from one of the local butchers. New year, new butcher. This was inevitably due to the fact that the previous year’s ham had fallen short in some key regard (moisture level, texture, correct colour level of pinkness, saltiness, lack of saltiness, sweetness, smoking technique or duration, tenderness etc). Around October, before the real organising began, there were general rumblings after boozy discussions at the local watering hole with his mates – all ham connoisseurs – of “having to think about this year’s ham”.  My mother’s anxiety levels began to rise exponentially from here.

One particular year is infamous in family folklore as the year dad decided to bake the ham. “What about the year the old man decided to bake the ham!” someone will say. There is a family eruption of collected anecdotes and my mother’s pitch raises an octave and phrases such as ‘he would never listen to me’ and ‘no, no NO, there were THREE hams that year’ are tossed from her end of the kitchen table. The abridged version of the story is that the family business put dad in contact with a baker. After several collegial ales one night talking hams, the baker had convinced dad that cooking a full leg of prime ham, encased in bread dough and run through his industrial ovens would deliver a culinary Christmas delight, nowhere before witnessed. A ham that would go down in
Robertson family history for its magnificence. The holy grail of hams if you like.

What was produced instead, was a concrete encased nightmare that was brought home by attempted stealth at night and deposited in the laundry. Here my father shut himself in and tried to free the ham from its tomb with several knives at first. Eventually he resorted to a hammer to break it open. It took a long while. Mum and I sat in the kitchen and listened to the activity. Every now and again she’d quietly mention that my father never listened to her… that nobody ever listened to her, and sigh. When dad eventually emerged, he declared that the ham was “Bloody dry! It’s bloody dry. You can’t eat it! I don’t know what Johnny was thinking – bake the thing in bread dough my arse. We’ll have to get another ham”, and went to bed. He was right. The ham was inedible.

My sad confession about Christmas traditions is that even though I perpetuate many of the lovely sane ones like Nana’s German potato salad and Christmas pudding and Mum’s wonderful stodgy, rum laced Christmas cake, as well as building a bank of my own, my father lives through me with the Christmas ham. I start thinking about the leg of ham around about October.  Then I get a bit serious about who’s got a good quality product in November. I like to look over the Christmas hams and check for colour and smokiness. I don’t like them too fatty or not fatty enough. The rind has to be exactly right. I can’t help it. It’s not until the first slice that you can be sure if you’ve picked a winner, and I feel truly judged by the ham. That’s my father’s Christmas legacy to me… ham anxiety. I guess I can live with that.

Merry Christmas everyone.

A friend of mine has just bought a bike. Not as in Ducati. As in pedal power. She picked it up from the bike shop where it had been specially ordered in, as per her colour request, donned the Australian regulation safety headgear and coasted over to my place, where I could ooh and aah over it with the appropriate degree of admiration. I use the term “coasted” loosely. I’m not sure of the exact timeframe, but she did indicate that it has been a while since she her rear end last connected with a triangle of torture. In all our years of friendship I’ve never once heard her talk yearningly of wanting a bike. I’ve never actually heard her discuss bikes at all outside telling her own children to “For God’s sake! Go for a ride on your bike!” Anyway, she arrived at my front door red faced, sweaty, breathless and complaining that she was probably “a little unfit”. You should know that the distance between our homes is about 700m by road – pretty much without incline – so I figure her self assessment probably had some truth to it.

I don’t like bikes. My relationship with them has been tenuous since childhood. I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was about twelve and in high school. This had nothing to do with me not wanting to learn, rather it was a parenting blip that probably had a lot to do with lack of interest on their behalf, coupled with my older brother’s history of having several of his bikes stolen from our front yard. I was the youngest by ten years and my folks were really a bit over it all by the time I came along. They were also, by then,  very skilled in the art of deflect and ignore, so even my most well aimed and executed childhood pleas, whinges, blackmail attempts and tantrums for a bike fell on them like zephyrs on a pleasant spring day.

All of my friends had bikes. Early on it was the golden age of the Dragster. Kids would congregate after school and on weekends on the corner and outside the local shops with their two-wheeled totems of collective neighbourhood terror, comparing spoke decorations, handlebar grip streamers and the intensity of glitter in their ridiculously long low-rider saddles, while dripping melting ice block juice onto crossbars from Sunnyboys, Razzs and Glugs.  When dragsters were no longer cool, they all upgraded to 10-Speed racing bikes. Not that one of them raced anyone or anything except the roll-call bell on school mornings. But they all had gleaming machines and would jockey for space in the bike rack, oblivious to my sensitivities and bicycle envy.

So imagine my surprise when, after restarting a campaign of particularly potent and incessant pre-teen badgering regarding my state of humiliating bike deprivation, my father took my mother’s advice (a startlingly unique occurrence), and retrieved my sister’s bike from the dusty, redback spider infested recesses of the back shed. My sister’s bike. My sister’s bike. My sister is sixteen years my senior and let’s just say a few things had changed in bike design in the intervening years. The woman had been married for six years by that stage and I have zero recollection of her ever pedalling anywhere. It was a bottle green horrideous fright of thing that looked like it could have actually belonged to my mother before it had been my sister’s. It bore no resemblance to the sleek machines I desired so covetously. It had an obnoxiously oversized white chain guard that might have been the height of cycling fashion when Elvis was hitting the big screen in “Love Me Tender”, but was seriously cringe-worthy within a generation of Flashdancers who thought the “Star Wars” series was a getting a bit tired.

Undeterred by my look of horror and extremely rare inability to utter anything other than a strange choking sound, the old man declared that he’d get one of his mates “to have a look at it and give it a bit of a cleanup. Be as good as gold, Tupp”. He delivered this news while balancing on his left leg, trying to hold the thing with a hand unsteadily gripping a recalcitrant saddle, the other hand vice-like on a handle bar and his right foot trying to push the jammed left pedal without any success.  I just wanted to die.

When the bike reappeared sometime later after having had its overhaul, I wanted to look grateful. I really did. But I know I failed. It took me weeks to find the “right time” to get the bike out and have a crack at teaching myself to ride the thing. During these weeks, my parents clearly congratulated themselves on not having wasted money on buying me a brand new bike due to the lacklustre reception I’d given its return. Of course the “right time” was at night with low visibility, when the streets were deserted and, most importantly, when none of my friends could see the bike or me wobbling about on it.

Eventually I got the hang of riding, but I never got to like it. I would occasionally ride to one of my friend’s houses on it, taking back streets, and only because she didn’t have a bike and didn’t care for them at all. She thought they were all equally stupid. Consequently, my lack of experience led to a lack of confidence which led to a lack of desire to ride. When you added this to my underlying seething resentment of not having a bike like all normal kids at age 4, having to teach myself to ride in high school, and the ignominy of the fossilised bike itself… well, I don’t like bikes.

Some years later this was confirmed when my now ex husband got it into his head that I should have a bike one particular Christmas. He had a bike that I’d bought for him for his birthday when he’d asked for one. He’d ridden it about half a dozen times – he was such a committer. Was he aware of my cycle history? Yes. Was he aware of how I felt about bikes and my personal engagement in the pastime/sport of cycling? Yes. Did I tell him: A) I didn’t want a bike for Christmas; B) Not to buy me a bike at that point or at any point in the future; C) If he bought me a bike it would be stupid and a complete waste of money as I would never ride it? Yes. Did he buy me a bike a few weeks later for Christmas? Yes. It was a goddamn girlie bike. And it was Barbie pink. For anyone who knows me, and you would think that a woman’s husband would be somewhat clued in, when it comes to my sporty pursuits, they know I’m not a “girlie” type. I am into solitary gym style activities that involve cardio and free weights, and would not be seen dead anywhere near pink. I wanted to take the bike back but he wouldn’t let me. He sulked and I believe there were even tears about how he just wanted us to have a hobby together.

Through my deepening bike-bitterness I reneged on my stand of never riding it, just to shut him up, and we went for a ride together one weekend. Two blocks from home I hit a pothole in the road and came off over the handlebars. I limped the bloody thing the rest of the way home, spitting vicious invectives at his retreating back through a split lip, and hurled it in the garage. He never mentioned it again. We parted company not many years later but the bike remained there until recently when I put it out for a council cleanup and someone helped themselves to it from the front lawn. Good riddance.

I’ll wait and see how seriously my friend takes her new bike and how soon the novelty wears off. She informs me that it’s going to save her on a gym membership, that she’s going riding with her boys and her husband, and that she was a fanatical rider in her youth. Okay. I remember when another friend of mine spent six months paying off a top-of-the-line bike for exactly those reasons about seven or eight years ago. It had a pretty good work out over the first summer of weekends. Now it does a tour of duty once a year I think, if that. I guess her intentions are good. At least she’s bought a good looking, current model town bike. Sadly though she special ordered it in pink. I could almost live with that. It’s the matching pink safety headgear that brings me undone.