Silver lining

Long time no post once more, as I am balancing the meeting of deadlines with the managing of health Ishews. If you ever find yourself with the sort of gall bladder that must come out, but looking at some delay as the surgeon is not available for a few weeks, look on what has for me been a very bright side: you will lose six kilos and counting.

This is because, as I was warned by a friend who's been through this particular brand of hell -- is there any other ailment that is this painful and frightening and yet this fundamentally non-serious? -- you get to the stage where merely thinking about eating anything with any scrap of fat or oil in it of any kind (and you quickly discover that this includes about 97% of the food in the universe, including my very favourite among them, cheese. Especially cheese) is enough to make your inner vulture start chewing away at your vitals again. Or, in my case, thinking about eating anything at all.

Over these last few weeks I have been reminded repeatedly of that sketch from, I think, Beyond the Fringe about the couple in the English countryside during World War 2. (In a strong West Country accent): 'I'll never forget the day that rationin' was imposed. My wife came out to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you moind, my dear," I said to 'er, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'

On grumpiness

1) Had a birthday a week or two back. I am completely the wrong age to welcome birthdays.

2) Since I neither am nor have a mother, Mother's Day is never much of an occasion for sweetness and light either. As my birthday, my late mother's birthday and Mother's Day always fall within a fortnight, it tends to be a slightly churned-up time of year.

3) It's nearly winter. Sooner or later the time will come when those of us fortunate enough to own a house will have to mortgage same to pay the power bills. Thank Goddess that at least I live in Adelaide, and even here I spent half of yesterday wearing my Port Power beanie. Inside.

4) I am seriously over watching other people pirouetting in public over their own cleverness in re-inventing wheels that I was re-inventing 20 years ago, and watching other people get praised and rewarded for things that, 20 years ago, were frowned upon in my workplace as not suitable pursuits for an academic but that these days are, in the same workplace, encouraged and rewarded in various ways. Also, you kids get off my lawn.

5) I cannot believe that the world is still full of people who do. not. get. the fact that gender-wise the world is not a level playing field. See re-invention, wheel, 20 years ago, etc. If you are one of these people, allow me to recommend the excellent Finally a Feminism 101 Blog.

6) An intermittently alarming health problem has arisen that, though not serious, means life-arrangements uncertainty in the short term (when will this surgery take place, and what sort of shape will I be in after it? What about the deadlines? What about the cats?) and mild but permanent diet-carefulness and deprivation in the long.

All of which is how come long time no blog. I expect to snap out of it shortly. I expect to drop a few dress sizes, too. Watch this space.

Silver threads among the mouse

It was brought to my attention this morning in a crueller light than usual that the whole ageing thing has finally caught up with my hair. Both my sisters are also going grey; the older one has dramatic natural silver streaking her almost-black hair with its amazing natural highlights of burgundy and indigo, while the younger has pale champagne threads through hair the colour of ripe apricots. Mine is more in the palette that goes 'mouse, ash, potato'.

There are a number of possibilities for dealing with this.

1) Go grey and be damned. (All very subtle for the blonde, just a little shift from gold to silver-gilt and pewter, and dramatic contrasts for the brunette. But the boring grey in boring brown just looks dowdy and hippieish and, um, boring.)

2) Professionally done permanent colour, which must be constantly maintained if you're not to end up with cheap-looking two-tone hair. Regardless, sooner or later the bullet must be bitten and the colour allowed to grow out, or at least mutate. In the meantime most hairdressers want to colour your hair in such a way as to make you match the tortoiseshells (a cute idea, but disappointing in practice), despite the fact that you have said you want nothing that could even remotely be called red, yellow, gold, peach, apricot, russet, bronze or, the hairdressers' favourite, "warm". Not that they don't sometimes look lovely in the first instance, but with time they all fade to a uniform washed-out orange straw.

3) Home done semi-permanent colour, which is much less hard on the hair, infinitely cheaper, can be done in your colour of choice, and if you hate it it'll wash out in 36 shampoos or whatever. Disadvantage: unremovable dark splodges all over the bathroom.

What do the rest of you do? Advice from the ladies pls.

Family: the weight

Never, ever underestimate how much it takes out of a person to endure protracted emotional strain, particularly if this involves self-restraint. Example: spending an entire afternoon with your family of origin, all of whom you love, and all of whom intend to vote for the Coalition even though Tony Abbott appalls at least two of them.

Especially if it's a birthday gathering and there's a lot of pressure to play nice.

I come from a family of implacable ALP-haters who are quite happy to vote Green in the Senate and are all going to. They're all perfectly intelligent, though not what The Australian calls the 'tertiary left', and they all loathe the Shooters and Fishers and the Christian fundies and the climate flat-earthers skeptics and love Barack Obama as much as I do.

For them it's not about left and right as such: it's about teh unions and teh evil commies and teh Great Satan Whitlam and so on. Both sisters work in the health sector and have had their politics formed over decades by listening to male doctors, while my father has never forgiven the commies unions for the wartime strikes.

By the time I got home last night I could hardly walk from the exhaustion of the strain of refraining from shouting and throwing things. Fell into bed at 8.30 with my Ruth Rendell, which was as much as I could manage, lights out by nine and slept till 7.15.

The moral of this story is that the older you get, the more physically knackered you are rendered by stress. I would have been better off going for a long, long walk.

On disappointment

Several days ago I told myself that if I'd heard nothing by lunchtime on Wednesday then I would give up, and then I would refocus and move on. And here we are.

Can't go into details, but details aren't important. This is more about a psychological trajectory.

I've been around long enough to rack up quite a few disappointments over the decades and develop various strategies to deal with them, some more self-deluding than others but all more or less effective. They range from 'You're not being napalmed' and 'Suck it up' through 'Oh well, I didn't really want it/him anyway' to 'Hey, it was a learning experience', or 'At least I won't have to [insert description of tiresome condition(s) attached to object of thwarted desire here], or 'Next!' which is pretty much the mood I'm in at the moment. Thank God I have a truly lovely major project to be getting on with. Can't really talk about that either, yet. Yes yes I know it's irritating, sorry.

Like the last biggish disappointment I experienced, this one is exacerbated by the knowledge that the process hasn't been entirely fair. Although I would say that, wouldn't I. And considering how often I admonish both of my sisters and some of my friends for talking and acting as though there were actually somebody in charge of the universe, bleating 'It's not fair' seems particularly pathetic and I'm trying to get on top of that one as we speak.

But the whole idea of 'getting past it' -- or, as footballers' managers say when their charges have been caught grabbing strangers' breasts in the street, king-hitting little drunks and/or doing lines of cocaine in the nightclub toilets, 'putting it behind you' ('Yes, he drugged and raped twelve virginal teenage fans, but he's going to put it behind him') -- has always seemed to me to be not just useless but positively harmful.

If you put bad stuff 'behind' you then you will simply do exactly the same thing next time. You can't learn, grow or thrive as a human being unless you actually take your failures, crimes and misdemeanours and their consequences in: assimilate and transcend, as I used to say many years ago to an earnest feminist friend who had no intention of giving up lipstick and perfume but used to agonise about it constantly. You have to let everything sink in and become part of you, or you'll just keep repeating yourself. Even disappointment and failure. Especially disappointment and failure.

One of the many consolations of ageing is that if you resist going into denial about the bad stuff, if you take it all in and process it, transform it into something useful, then the mind and the heart and oh all right the soul all go on growing even while the bod is in regrettable but unstoppable decline. It's the alternative to becoming a caricature of yourself as you age; you become instead a deeper, darker, richer and more complex brew. Certain good friends and certain favourite writers rise wraithlike before me as I write this and remind me of how true it is.

But one thing it did take me ages to work out is that this kind of internal process of assimilation and regrouping actually takes a huge amount of effort and energy. Like other kinds of psychological effort, it can make you really, really physically tired. So when I drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning feeling as though I have been hit by a train, I'll know why. I just wish it hadn't taken me half a century to work this one out.

Some anniversaries are more ambiguous than others

It's 24 years today -- and yes yes, I know what the date is; how apt -- since I rolled and wrecked a brand-new car with my father in the passenger seat at the 110k speed limit just west of Bordertown, on a sinister traffic-eating stretch of the Duke's Highway, notorious for the number of single-vehicle accidents there, and came within millimetres of breaking my neck. Where other people have a smoothly curved cervical spine, I have an S-bend at C4 and C5.

How we both walked away without needing any first aid or going into shock I really do not know, but it's those sorts of times that prompt me to make a sacrifical offering of some kind to the tough-as-nails pioneering ancestors.

Now excuse me while I go and re-heat this wheat bag and take some Nurofen Plus.