The courage… to get through life without this sense of home, without this refuge, whilst surviving a world which exploits our mothering kindness and assaults us for our femininity, is untold. But many many many women of my acquaintance will know exactly what I mean. I crave this home. Built with somebody who will not […]
We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers […]
Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas […]
Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he […]
Mum’s just taken Dad on an outing & waving goodbye to them I began to cry. Soon it will be the long goodbye. My Dad seems so cheerful and excited, sitting up in his passenger seat having been hoisted up by two of us out of the wheeling chair. The carer said he woke up […]
My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and […]
Caring for Dad is painful. I love him, naturally, and now he’s very frail and unwell; so it’s wrung from me like dark water out of soaked wood. But Dad tormented me with minor sexual attentions during my pubescence and twenties, and into my adulthood; he would never listen when I said No and always […]
So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, […]
So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never […]
I love how the cat comes and sits, not next to the fridge, just sort of within range… letting me know with infinite courtesy that, you know, no hurry or anything, but some people might say it’s high time for Meat Time. “Meat Time!” I say, finally noticing her where she folds like a furred god, immaculately footed. Her […]