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Boys’ toys, girls’ toys: really?

Screen Shot 2014-04-05 at 7.22.57 AMBoys, you are astronauts, pilots, detectives, scientists; girls, you are mothers and baby minders, and you like pretty things for your hair.

Boys, you will build things, go places, blow things up, conduct scientific experiments, see the world; girls, you will stay at home, heating bottles for the baby, doing craftwork, wearing beautiful clothes and dreaming of being a makeup artist, while dressed almost exclusively in pastel pink.

I could hardly believe my eyes this morning when I saw how an online shopping website I subscribe to was advertising toys based so much on gender stereotypes. Like something out of the 1950s, it told me that boys had the whole world to explore, while girls had better stay home.

For boys, the Crazy Forts Construction Toy offers imaginative play in which you create a cave, igloo, pirate ship or castle. To be fair, this toy also has a girl pictured on the box cover with two boys, so it’s unclear why it’s marketed only for boys. There is also a build-a-fort set for girls—the “Princess Play Set” in…you guessed it, pink… “perfect for your little princess”. No mention of pirate ships, caves or castles, though.

My mum was a neuro-scientist, and she says that to a certain extent, boys naturally gravitate toward more adventurous, rough and tumble toys. But the almost complete demarcation in the media seems unnatural, as if we are choosing for our children what their roles will be before they’ve even had a chance to explore these things for themselves. No wonder there are still so few female plumbers, carpenters or mechanics.

When I was a kid, my favourite toys were Lego and my brother’s case of tiny cars, plus our cowboy play sets with hats, toy guns in holsters (very un-PC now) and sheriff’s badges. I also loved my dolls (though I couldn’t understand why my cats would never consent to being dressed in bonnet, dress and booties and wheeled around in my dolls’ pram). My hero was Georgina (“George”), the fantastically independent girl in Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series of novels. In those days, a girl like George was called a “tom boy” because she didn’t conform to the normal idea of what a girl should behave like.

There’s nothing wrong as such with giving girls dolls and encouraging them to nurture babies: many girls do become mothers, after all. But boys become fathers, and in these days of equality, shouldn’t we also then be giving boys dollies with dummies, feeding sets and nappies? See how dumb that sounds? While personally, I have always loved dolls (and still do), I think we can leave the parenting accessories out when children are young, particularly if you’re only teaching parenting to one sex (girls).

I suspect (well, I hope) that advertisers are hopelessly out of date when they market toys in such a way. In most homes, I’m sure, children end up playing together with many of the same toys. We shouldn’t limit girls to home-based toys and boys to adventure toys: let them make up their own minds what they will be.

 

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What do birds dream of? Or, the soundtrack to my life

Many years ago, I read a short newspaper story that has stayed with me ever since. It was about new research that had found that birds actually dream. And what do birds dream about as they slumber on their tree perches? Apparently, they dream of the songs they will sing tomorrow.

I know, “Awwwww”.

I too dream of the songs I will sing tomorrow. Well, to be more accurate, songs are often popping up in my head, whether I’m waking or sleeping. There’s a soundtrack to my life, and it’s not coming from headphones (in fact, I rarely play music via ear buds or headphone, and maybe this is why).

These are not songs that I want to listen to and some are songs I don’t even like. They just start playing, seemingly randomly, and leave me to solve their riddle as to what they are connected to. They are usually old songs I haven’t heard for a while. Many mornings I wake with a song going round in my head that has nothing much to do with anything. It’s just there. This music often has a shape in my mind, too, like a graph, with colours. In my imaginary mind, I know all the lyrics, too.

Usually, I don’t pay much attention to the songs in my head, unless they’re especially amusing or annoying. But this month, I thought it would be fun to make a list of what I’ve been listening to in my mind. Here goes:

This reminds me of the daily trial just trying to get through crowds of people to do ordinary things like get on the train, find a seat (good luck), buy lunch. Picture: ©Caron Eastgate Dann 2013

This reminds me of the daily trial just trying to get through crowds of people to do ordinary things like get on the train, find a seat (good luck), buy lunch. Picture: ©Caron Eastgate Dann 2013

Thursday March 20

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover came into my mind while waiting for a train. You know, “Get out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Sam…just set yourself free”. I had been thinking about the rat race and how awful it was sometimes to be trudging along with thousands of other workers, never getting very far. Or, I feel like a fish in a pond full of others, pushing and scrabbling when a few grains of food are dropped on the top of the pond.

In a way, that “rat race” is like a bad lover that we just can’t seem to get away from. My inner psyche is obviously telling me to make a new plan to do just that!

Later in the day, my song-brain wasn’t so kind to me. It started playing MmmBop!, that 1997 teenybopper hit by Hanson. Oh dear! I think my brain was inspired by an ad at uni for something called Kimbap, a Korean students’ group function.

Friday, March 21

Comin’ through the Rye: OK, I was watching a TV show about the Scottish highlands when this one started up. But they didn’t feature this song. I remembered it because I used to sing it as a child and once won a singing competition with it.

Saturday, March 22

Oh yes, a day when I don’t have to cross town on trains or buses. I can just work from home instead. It’s peaceful, and Everything is Beautiful comes to mind. I laugh to myself, because humming this song used to be a code long ago between me and a photographer I worked with. If we didn’t like the way our interview/photo shoot was going, one of us would start humming this song. And we knew the real words were, “Everything is shit-ful, in its own wayyyyy…”

I was too busy the rest of that week to think about writing down the songs in my head, but come Friday, I remembered again to take note. It’s good to have a break from noting anyway, because otherwise you might make conscious song choices.

Friday, March 28

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, by Leo Sayer. This is good, because it’s always been one of my favourite feel-good songs. And Friday is a feel-good day because I don’t have to get up early tomorrow!

Later in the day, as I’m walking to the bus at the start of my journey home, my brain is singing Barry Manilow’s Copacabana in all its glory.

On the train, I give up my seat to a pregnant woman, and straight away, Don’t Blame it on the Boogie, Michael Jackson’s great 1970s disco beat, is playing up a storm. This was one of my favourite songs in 1979 when I was a teenager.

Saturday, March 29

I’m writing a lecture for my master’s class on book history and the publishing industry, and up comes River Deep, Mountain High, the original 1966 Tina and Ike Turner version. No idea where that came from, but I like it.

Sunday, March 30

It’s 5pm, and I’m feeling calm about having done enough work to start the week with. The music starts and it’s a famous ballet tune whose name I can’t recall. But it’s very calming. When I come to write this blog, I remember that it’s The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, by Tchaikovsky.

Thursday, April 3

I’m on my way out the door to my job as a university lecturer, and that classic song, the theme from Sesame Street, pops into my head, just like that: “Can you tell me how to get, How to get to Sesame Street?”

Whatever next?

As I say, I don’t know where these songs come from, most of the time. My mum plays songs in her head too, but she takes it a step further: the songs in her mind are all ones she makes up herself. She said she doesn’t ever need to play the radio, because there are always new songs playing in her head anyway!

And with that, I begin a new month of madness—I wonder what songs this month will bring?

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Life on Mean Street

monkeysI see meanness all around me: mean employers trying to make their poorest employees work harder and harder for less and less money; mean local councils cutting back on maintenance of community streets and venues; mean people in car parks crashing into other cars and then just leaving, or nipping into a park to beat someone else; drivers not stopping for pedestrians on crossings; mean governments making the rich richer and the rest poorer; mean countries trying to invade and take over other countries; mean institutions making everything into a competition that participants must fight in to the (figurative) death.

Yes, it’s a mean old world out there. My late father once told me, “Life’s not fair”, but so much unfairness (just another word for meanness) need not be so.

Here’s my list of how to make the world a kinder and more peaceful place just by not being mean:

*Governments: you are the servants of the people. Your most important loyalty is not to the party, but to those whom you serve. Your priority is not a career path for yourself, free travel, or becoming so power-hungry you forget your real role. Your job is to make the country better for the people, not worse. Your job is not to make a few rich people get richer. It is to promote equality for all, and a decent life in which people are safe, comfortable, educated and treated humanely. Warmongering is not on.

*Employers: don’t try to make people work for less and less. Hire good people, reward industrious workers, give them proper jobs with holiday and sick pay. They will reward you by wanting to work harder (as opposed to being forced to), because they will love the business they’re in. Instead of fearful drudges, you will have an enthusiastic, happy team with you who want your company to be profitable.

*Drivers: just chill out. No matter how much you speed, weave in and out of traffic, toot your horn, monster the car in front or rip through a pedestrian crossing, you’ll probably only cut one or two minutes off the journey. Also, you might crash, and at the very least, you’ll make life miserable for others. There’s a great Greek word that covers this: “endaxi!” (relax). And if you happen to dent a parked car, own up and leave your contact details on a note.

*Neighbours: if a tree from the property next door drops some leaves on your side, it really doesn’t matter. Learn your neighbours’ names, say “Hi” to them, don’t leave nasty notes on their car like you own the road if they happen to park in a spot in front of your place.

So, to answer this month’s B4Peace challenge from Kobo at Everyday Gurus, How would you teach children to promote a more peaceful world?, my answer is that I would teach them not to be mean. This starts at the most basic level in the playground: share your toys, don’t hit others, coming first is not the most important thing, and if you see someone fall down, help pick them up. And here is some more great advice on how to make a more peaceful world.

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Young or old? Here’s how to tell

photoSince last year, something strange has been happening to me. Younger people occasionally get up in a full train or bus to offer me a seat. It doesn’t happen every day, or even every week, but perhaps once a month, whereas before last year, it never happened.
Last year, I was gracious, but firmly declined any offers of seats, being secretly mortified that anyone would deem me less able to stand than them. This year, I’ve started to accept. Well, I’ve only been offered a seat once this year-that was this morning-and I was glad to have it. It was on a bus full of mostly students carrying us from the train station to campus, so there might have been something about respect for staff in it, too. Another student also offered the older, grey-haired but fit-looking lady standing beside me a seat. She graciously declined.
Is this the beginning of the end? I said to myself. Is this the beginning of the time when I begin to think of myself as “older” or no longer young, by any stretch of the imagination?
I know that people under 25 think anyone over 35 is ancient. In my (admittedly unscientific) questioning of young people, many have shown that they can’t recognise the difference between 40 and 60 or 50 and 70. They’re all just “old people”. My parents were quite a bit older than the norm when they had my brother, and when he was a mid-teenager and they were in their early 60s, one of his friends said, “How old’yer parents—about a hundred?”!
But who they perceive as being “young” is interesting and not necessarily about years. It seems to have something to do with “coolness”. I once asked a group of students, mostly aged 18-20, to decide whether a list of famous people I named were young or old. They had only those two choices, nothing in between.
I asked them about the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd. “Old,” was the verdict. Then I asked them about the President of the US, Barack Obama, also in his 50s and less than four years Rudd’s junior. “Young,” they said emphatically. “Because he’s cool,” added one bright spark.
Perhaps I’m just not cool any more. *Sigh*

Coincidentally, this week’s Daily Post Writing Challenge is about ageing. You can read more here.

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Goodbye to all that: decluttering your life

Goodbye, dear little car. Photo ©Gordon Dann 2014

Goodbye, dear little car.
Photo ©Gordon Dann 2014

We’re trying to declutter our home because we foresee we’ll be moving in the next year or so, and because we simply have too much stuff. Yesterday, my husband’s beloved 1958 MGA car was picked up by its enthusiastic purchaser and taken away on a truck. He had owned the car since 1969, when he bought it as a teenager and as his very first car. But he was pleased to see it go to a new person who would love it: he didn’t want to restore it (again) and he wants to do different things these days, such as travel to India.

I don’t have anything as large or valuable to get rid of, but I still have too much. A lot of the stuff I have is kept for sentimental reasons, but sometimes I wonder if these reasons are misplaced. For example, I have a novelty Easter bunny cup given to me by my brother when he was a little boy…truth be told, my mother probably bought it for him, and he wouldn’t even remember it now that he is nearly 30. The cat book-ends and the husband-and-wife cats with parasol I bought from Bali can probably go, too. Then again, when I grouped them for a photo for this post, I found they all looked so cute, I couldn’t do it. Back on their shelves, they went!

The Balinese cat book ends, the Balinese cat couple, the novelty Easter cup...could you part with these? Photo ©Caron Eastgate Dann 2014

The Balinese cat book ends, the Balinese cat couple, the novelty Easter cup…could you part with these?
Photo ©Caron Eastgate Dann 2014

There are some things I will keep forever and never even contemplate giving away. For many years, I’ve had a small art-deco style turquoise glass vase that I love—I’ve even done a painting of it:

"My Mother's Mysterious Vase", oils on canvas, painted by Caron Dann, 2011.

“My Mother’s Mysterious Vase”, oils on canvas, painted by Caron Dann, 2011.

My mother gave the vase to me, and it had belonged to her mother. But recently, I mentioned it to Mum, and she couldn’t remember off-hand which one it was. That’s because she gave it to me so long ago, and it was just one of those things she had in the cupboard and perhaps didn’t care for that much herself.

Talking about gifts, when people give me something, I am very appreciative. I love receiving a present and always feel so happy that someone has taken the trouble. I love beautiful wrapping paper and cards, too. Many of the presents I receive are things that I treasure for years, and keep for sentimental reasons. Yet, if you asked the person who gave you a particular present years ago, they probably wouldn’t even remember it, unless it was special to them, too. That’s because they bought it for you, had it for a very short time, then handed it over, duty done, and forgot about it.

Sometimes a present just wears out. In the late 1980s, I met a young woman who was to become my lifelong friend, and she gave me a huge framed Man Ray print. I loved this print and it travelled with me everywhere. It’s been on the wall of at least 13 different residences I’ve had over the years. Sadly, I realised recently that not only was the frame falling apart, but the print itself was the worse for wear. So, unfortunately, it was given away to the local second-hand shop. But someone else may be able to repair it and use it.

A few weeks ago, my mum finally gave away an old cassette recorder she bought in the US in the 1970s: actually, I would like to have kept this gadget, but it is gone now. Luckily though, I did this painting of it last year:

Old Gadgets #3: Panasonic cassette player-recorder, 1973; Sony Walkman, 2000. Acrylics and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens on treated board.By Caron Eastgate Dann, 2013.

Old Gadgets #3: Panasonic cassette player-recorder, 1973; Sony Walkman, 2000. Acrylics and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens on treated board. Painted by Caron Eastgate Dann, 2013

Sometimes, over the years, I’ve lived to regret what I’ve discarded. For example, all my handwritten notes and essays from my bachelor’s degree. Now that I’m a tertiary educator myself, I would love to be able to look back on my own undergraduate work.

But the worst decision I made about throwing something away was an electronic gadget my parents gave me in 1983. It was an early word processor, a light and portable machine about the size of a current-day notebook computer. It even had a small memory, and you had to buy special “thermal paper”, which you inserted in the top and which it then printed on as you typed. I wish I had kept that: it belongs in a museum, now.

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You still have to fix the fence or, Dear Architects: Let’s Drag Houses Into the 21st Century

Technology can't fix a broken fence

Technology can’t fix a broken fence

As I was having breakfast one morning, I heard someone next door hammering nails into the fence. This was a good thing, I thought, since our fence was about to fall down and the landlord was not interested in fixing it. Unfortunately, they weren’t working on the fence between us and them, but between them and the next dwelling. Oh well.

It got me thinking, though, about the fact that fences still need to be fixed and painted, in the same way they’ve always needed to be.

This, despite the amazing technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries; despite the fact that I can write an email and send it to someone in Iceland and have an answer from them in a few moments; despite smart phones with apps for everything from spirit levels to measuring your heartbeat to doing your shopping; despite reports of 3D printers being touted as the next great thing that will be able to grow body parts and print cars; despite all this, you still have to fix the fence. And when you do it, you still usually need a hammer and nails, pretty much the same gadgets our forebears were using thousands of years ago. There’s not an app to do that, now, is there!

There must be a better way.

All around me, I see in our house and in the houses of everyone else I know, design from a bygone era of servitude. This was the era when rich households all had servants to work full-time on cleaning and maintaining a property, while not-so-rich households had women to work in this role, even when they took paying work as well.

Out with grouting, tiny tiles and difficult shower doors

Out with grouting, tiny tiles and difficult shower doors

Today, few people have servants; few women accept that their entire role in life is to clean up after others, acknowledging that, even if they work at home full-time, they should still be able to have some time off, the same as any other worker. In such a time, we should be making houses that need a minimum of maintenance. Architects, engineers, designers, and builders, please take note!

*I don’t want shower cubicles with nooks and crannies that collect soap and mould. I don’t want tiles with grouting that collects dirt, then discolours and cracks.

*I don’t want fancy “period style” doors that collect dust. For example, each of the doors inside my rented townhouse has 91 separate surfaces to clean. The front door is the same, and there is also a decorative screen door (see picture). Ditto cornices and skirting boards. I blame the penchant for Victorian style in all its fussiness. Although mine is a late 20th-century house, it was built in Victorian style, which has been very fashionable for a few decades.

Our Victorian-style front-of-house security door: a dust collector.

Our Victorian-style front-of-house security door: a dust collector

*I don’t want wooden fences that warp and spring out of their nails. I don’t want to have to paint a fence every few years.

I have seen pictures of amazing houses designed by top architects that have all smooth surfaces that need little maintenance—but they have multi-million-dollar price tags. That’s well and good, but I’m talking about houses for the ordinary person.

My idea of the perfect house would be the lowest maintenance place possible: no fancy edges round the walls or light fittings, no tiles with grouting. The decorative touches could then be added via soft furnishings, beautiful artwork and sculptures…which would all need cleaning, I know.

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Don’t get mad…

Ever heard the missive “Don’t get mad, get even”? I agree with the first half of this statement, because getting mad serves no positive purpose at all. When you get angry, your stress levels go way up, you do and say things you haven’t properly thought out and that you’re usually sorry for later. Also, you make the place unpleasant for those around you.

I’m not talking about a situation in which your safety is threatened—getting angry for survival is different. I’m talking about everyday life: the times we thump the table at a pathetic or biased story on the TV news; that we grimace or gesture at a driver on the road who’s done something stupid; or that we yell at our partner for something trivial.

There was a mega-selling book that came out in 1997 called “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”. I never actually read this book, but I loved its title. This is because, much of the time, I DO sweat the small stuff, and know I shouldn’t. My brother once made the comment a few years ago, “Oh, Caron will worry enough for all of us”. Ever since then, I’ve tried to stop worrying so much, because worry can so easily lead to anger. I don’t always succeed, of course.

Think of all that energy we expend on being angry, and how much better placed it would be directed to constructive things. Instead of yelling at poorly constructed stories on trashy current affairs shows, for example, I should paint a picture or go for a walk.

The Crayon Files

“Rays’ Ways”, pastels,  ©Caron Eastgate Dann, 2011

Speaking of pictures, surrounding yourself with beautiful art is a great way to help you feel less angry and more peaceful. You can even make your own art using inexpensive materials. Give it a go—you’ll be surprised what you can do, even if you haven’t tried since childhood. The picture on this page of rays under the sea was one of the first I did when I took up art three years ago, and it always makes me feel peaceful.

I’ve written this post in response to Kozo’s monthly challenge over at Bloggers for Peace. The challenge is to write about the one thought you will focus on this year to bring more peace. So, instead of “Don’t get mad, get even”, I would like to change that saying to, “Don’t get mad—get happy”. I think the world would be a much better place if everyone kept this in mind during their everyday lives (with the aforementioned exception, of course). Over at her blog Delightfully Different Life, the writer D. S. Walker also answered this challenge, and explains how happiness can be found in simple ways.

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Love Letters in the Attic

LettersHistorical literature and film are full of sentimentality, of, for example, images of love letters tied with pink ribbon that are kept forever, to be found decades or generations later.

But how often did this happen in real life? For people who had big houses with attics for storage, and who never moved, a lot of things probably did get saved, if only because they were placed in the storage area and then forgotten. But for the ordinary person before the late 19th century and even beyond to the first half of the 20th century, it wasn’t the norm to keep things forever. It just wasn’t practical or affordable if you were moving house, for example, to lug along all the letters you’d received for the last 20 years.

In the 1950s, my nana moved from the South Island of New Zealand to the North Island. She burnt everything that wasn’t needed, including family letters going back decades. My mother doesn’t know why, but can only guess that it was because it just wasn’t practical to move it all. Nana could see no purpose in keeping old letters, clippings, souvenirs or family documents no longer current, nor in spending money to have them transported.

I’ve been thinking about the idea that things must be saved for posterity since I was reminded recently of how much TV footage the BBC taped over or destroyed, including most of the British coverage of Apollo 11’s moon landing in 1969, which was the first time it had broadcast all night, for a start.

Today, it seems incomprehensible that the BBC also destroyed 97 early episodes of Dr Who in the 1960s and 1970s to save space.

The powers that be in those days, however, still harkened back to a different age. Though they were part of the 20th century, they still had a 19th-century mentality. Before the age of, progressively, mass photography, film, TV and, ultimately, video,  there were of course no actual images of anything. Before photography, you had to be rich enough to have your portrait painted, and then the likeness depended on the painter’s interpretation and skills.

Before recorded music, you bought sheet music and played it yourself, or went to a live concert. There was no one authoritative version of a piece of performed music.

Long, long before that, before Gutenberg’s press became operational in the mid-15th century, most knowledge that ordinary people used was based on memory, not stored in books. Until the 20th century, it was mostly only the well-off who had home libraries of books.

The rise of sentimentality in regard to objects and the cult of keeping things almost to the point of hoarding them seems to me to be a modern thing.

We now have more memories of ourselves than in any other time in history: social media records our thoughts, photos, what we had for dinner, and other minutiae, as an everlasting record.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, we took photos only on special occasions and vacations, and then sparely, because developing and printing were expensive and took a week or more.

Today, we take photos of anything and everything, every day if we want, and post them to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter where they remain indefinitely. We have access to all our favourite songs, thousands at the touch of a button wherever we are, thanks to portable devices.

While these sorts of archives are digital, so don’t actually take up any space in the home, they encourage a mentality that everything must be kept.

I keep reading articles about our modern houses that are stuffed with way too much stuff. We only get rid of stuff when we need to bring in more stuff.

I am no exception, from ridiculous trinkets bought on trips overseas to piles of books I will never read again and clothes I’ll never wear again but that remind me of an earlier time. I used to save all my books because they were a talking point. When visitors came, one of the first things they would do is peruse your book collection.

I have got better at weeding out what I don’t need and I am gradually whittling down my possessions to those I use and appreciate. I would, however, keep old letters if I had them. I have only a few left, as almost all my childhood and early adulthood letters went missing during an international move. Now, of course, it’s not a problem since almost all the letters I send are emails.

Meanwhile, anything that is chipped, broken or not used goes out. Well, almost anything…

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Agatha Christie and “the quiet moments of everyday life”

In her enormously entertaining self-titled autobiography, the 20th-century mystery writer Agatha Christie discusses a letter she rediscovered in old age that had been written to her by her father about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Forgotten by Christie: Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897. Picture courtesy National Maritime Museum from Greenwich, UK, via Wikimedia Commons

Forgotten by Christie: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. Picture courtesy National Maritime Museum from Greenwich, UK, via Wikimedia Commons

Young Agatha’s grandmother had arranged to take the six-year-old girl to the jubilee procession on June 22, celebrating 60 years of the Queen’s reign. Agatha’s father, who was away in the US at the time, remarks in the letter how lucky his daughter is to see “this wonderful show”, as he refers to it. “I know you will never forget it,” he adds.

Christie comments wryly: “My father lacked the gift of prophecy, because I have forgotten it. How maddening children are! When I look back to the past, what do I remember? Silly little things about local sewing-women, the bread twists I made in the kitchen, the smell of Colonel F.’s breath—and what do I forget? A spectacle that somebody paid a great deal of money for me to see and remember. I feel very angry with myself. What a horrible, ungrateful child!”

Mary_Cassatt_Young_Mother_Sewing

Remembered by Christie: sewing women. This painting, “Young Mother Sewing” (1900), is by the impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

She goes on to write much about memories from childhood that stuck most in her mind: a field of buttercups, the smell of lime trees and grass. The happiest memories, she says, “are almost always the quiet moments of everyday life”.

I agree with her: my most vivid memories are tiny snapshots, seemingly randomly selected from the millions that make up a life. I remember, for example, aged about 8 and going through what was then called a “tomboy” stage, running inside, highly excited, after playing “cowboys and Indians” (in our ignorant way then and meaning no disrespect, but emulating the movies of the day). My nana, who was visiting, exclaimed, “Gosh, you look exactly like a cowgirl!” I beamed with pride: it seemed like the most wonderful thing anyone had ever said to me.

Years before that, I remember the live televised coverage of the lunar landing in 1969, when the astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. It was extraordinary not just for the event itself, but for the amazing feat of broadcasting, which British broadcaster and science historian James Burke has called “the greatest media event of all time”.

In fact, I don’t actually remember the coverage itself very much because of something else that happened. My father must have got us all to sit in the living room and watch the event, but I didn’t understand why we had to sit so still or why it was important, even though it had been explained to me.

Suddenly, I thought of something more interesting to tell Dad, and, at what must have been a crucial part of the broadcast, I started yabbering on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMINSD7MmT4

Uncharacteristically, he spoke very sharply to me, told me to keep quiet, and saying didn’t I realise this would be one of the most important events in history? I was so upset, I couldn’t speak for hours—upset and mystified as to why my lovely daddy had cut me off when he was usually so interested in what I had to say, why he would rather watch something on TV than listen to me. I was so upset, I didn’t really see or hear the event itself. I can still feel my hurt today, all these decades later. Funnily enough, when I mentioned it to my dad many years later, he didn’t remember me interrupting, but he vividly remembered watching the exciting telecast (grainy and in black and white as it was).

With thanks to the novelist Angela Savage, not only for urging me to read Agatha Christie’s autobiography, but for acquiring a copy of it for me. I’m 110 pages into the 551-page tome, and enjoying it immensely. Thanks again, Angela!

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A Perfect New Year’s Day

Today was pretty much a perfect day for me. Why? This is what I did:

—Reading (about 50 pages of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, by Helen Fielding, the third instalment in the series);

—Writing (350 words on my new novel);

—A long walk, during which we got caught in the summer rain. But hey, it’s only water.

—Art (including a quick sketch of an imaginary cat I am calling Michael, pictured below);

—And a dinner cooked perfectly for me by my husband, Gordon, to end the day.

In the words of the famous Australian movie, The Castle, said in awe-struck voice: “How’s the serenity?”MichaelCat