I haven’t been writing on here because I thought I had nothing to write about. I have no erudite take on the state of global affairs. I am not well educated about how government works, or the law, or the economy, or politics so those are not places I can venture in my writing, and as it turns out, at the moment EVERYTHING is government, the law, the economy and/or politics. It is possible that this has always been the case and it is simply because I am slow that I am only figuring this out now. It may be like when I turned forty and started to notice trees.

Anyway, I think it’s too late for me to become a current affairs writer, given that my chosen method of catching up on an entire lifetime of ignoring The News is to now watch everything a woman on TikTok called The Shipping Lawyer and a man on Instagram who explains political situation for people who don’t look like ‘a thicky-thicky dumb-dumb’ in front of their friends’ (raises hand).

But I am meant to be a writer and writers write so I’m just going to have to skirt around all the major world events like a ghost ship around the Cape of Good Hope and speak to you of other things.

I have one child about to move schools. I won’t go into that too much except to say that they are moving from a school where they did not need a laptop to a school where they do need a laptop and so I am seizing my change to offload my nemesis, my old computer pro with which I have had a major falling out.

This rupture in our heretofore perfectly cordial working relationship occurred when, sometime between early December and February, it chose to discard several thousand words of my new work-in-progress, turning it into a work-in-regress.

Investigations into the how and why of this persisted until mid-March, when the trail ran cold and I finally listened to the many, many people telling me that if I had simply started rewriting as much as I could when I realised some was missing, I would be much further along than I am now. Which is to say, not very far along at all.

The regression happened early enough in the writing that I was still stumbling about trying to figure out what this story was, and why I would write it, which is Part Of My Process. When the chunk of words vanished I became convinced that the universe was trying to tell me something. Not that I should update the software on the computer, which might have seemed the logical thing to take from the malfunction, but that maybe I needed to throw out the whole story, and possibly even the idea of ever writing anything ever again.

I wallowed in that sentiment for a while. There were other things happening in my life that were also conducive to wallowing, including a death in the family, some health issues for loved ones and my neck trying to helpfully stop my head from falling off by seizing up like overcooked toffee. Not to mention the whole situation that we don’t even have a name for but might be World War III.

But I have wallowed enough. There are many, many good things also happening in my life, and if there’s one thing I have learned from my severe and debilitating social media addiction, it’s that gratitude content performs well. I mean, probably it performs better when it’s made in short video form over a viral piece of plinky piano music and contains many pictures of sunsets and dahlias, than when it’s a very long ramble on a Substack with six followers, but we all have our places and I know mine.

A very good thing was that I finally found a builder to come fix the gap in the base of our kitchen cabinetry that rotted off a year or two ago. To paraphrase the late great Leonard Cohen (relax, I mean the singer and poet, not my cat, who is alive and well): ‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the slugs get in.’ I’ll say no more about the situation except that we are now into double figures on the kitchen whiteboard that reads ‘Days without slug incursions” which we update every morning.

This excellent builder also replaced the sash cords in several windows so they now operate as windows again not guillotines. He left his drill behind and isn’t answering his phone so maybe I also got a free drill out of this.

Drew and I went to several gigs. I am not quite comfortable with the word gig. But when you are in your late forties and you say ‘concerts’ people might think I mean classical music and I very much don’t. We saw Pulp on the Opera House forecourt, who were excellent, and we saw M. Ward at what I think was a nightclub on Oxford Street. I have seen both Pulp and M. Ward live before and they were both in my top 5 live experiences then, and I am pleased to say they both remain there.

Even though we forgot how gigs work for the M. Ward show, and got very excited when the ticket said the start time was 7.30 pm. Home by 10, we thought! Result! We drove to Oxford Street, somehow landed a free, unrestricted parking spot right outside the venue at 7.15 and had a drink in a nearby bar. At 7.30 we entered the venue, and like people who are new to this planet were very surprised to find the main act did not step straight out on stage and begin his ninety-minute set right there and then. We walked in past a sign that said ‘M. Ward 9.10’. This was not, as we had hoped, a cool new internet meme that all the kids are saying along the lines of 6 7, but the time he was actually going to begin playing.

We briefly considered a) going home to bed or b) making the most of our rockstar parking spot by sitting in the car and watching an episode of The Americans on my phone, but Drew said I would fall asleep and then he’d have to wake me up and make me go inside and that wouldn’t end well for anyone. What followed was half an hour of waiting for the support act, thirty minutes of enduring the support act, and thirty-five more minutes of waiting for the big show. All this we endured while leaning against a pillar, because what nightclubs do not have is chairs. And having secured one of two poles to lean against, we could not move for fear that we would lose possession of it and be forced to self-support for the whole show, which we are too old and tired to do. We passed the time by saying to each other every few minutes, ‘I don’t want to be here at 9.10.’

In the end, it was a magnificent show. M. Ward is a genius, and has the sort of vibes that make you think he should be one of your friends. Although if he was our friend he would have given us chairs.

Hopefully some more nothing will happen soon and I will write here again before the year is out.

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My children have recently been a bit unwell and a bit injured and they are furious. In the absence of belief in an all-powerful deity, they have chosen to blame me, which maybe I should take as a compliment? In the past fortnight we have had several visits to the GP and the podiatrist, and they’ve both had X-rays. I’m unsure what they think I am getting out of taking them to these appointments, but they both seem to believe I am doing it to have a good time. It does not matter how often I explain that I have better things to do with my time and money; that this is not some bizarre middle-aged hobby like when I did ballet for two terms.

Garnet has a possibly-broken big toe, which progressed from being a sore toe we could and did ignore to suddenly being unwalkable-on last week. I took him to the podiatrist, assuming he needed a pair of very expensive orthotic insoles, only to be sent straight to x-ray, with the poor little foot immobilised in a plastic boot.

Of course this happened during a week of torrential rain, and as Garnet attends a school at the bottom of a steep hill he has the added indignity of having to slither down to classes with his leg wrapped in a rubbish bag, secured with a rubber band.

He is also in rehearsals for a play, and refuses to be consoled by the story of how his Uncle Toby was once in a production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives at the Belvoir Theatre when he broke his ankle and had to perform the whole season in a similar plastic boot. Apparently it is not comforting for Garnet to know he comes by his stumblefooted actor genes honestly.

May Blossom also had to have her leg x-rayed to make sure her it wasn’t broken, because she is devoted to netball, a game seemingly designed for the busting of limbs. I didn’t think it was broken, but the GP wanted to be sure and I agreed as May Blossom is about to go on a skiing trip with school. No one wants to be the parent who sends their teenager to the slopes with a fractured fibula, especially a teenager who has never skied before and who admits that everything she knows about the sport she has gleaned from watching Goofy in Disney’s 1941 offering, The Art of Skiing.

My bones are all intact, but I am suffering from the One Month Slump, which anyone who has ever had a book published will probably recognise. One month after release, the book is out there in shops, but it is no longer the latest release. The next wave of books has broken on the beach, and I just have to hope that my book got washed far up enough onto the shore that the next wave will not cover it up entirely. The reviews have been mostly excellent, the coverage in magazines widespread, and the response from readers wonderful, but I still fear it will be forgotten, and people will forget to tell other people if they liked it and it will stop selling. This worry occupies me almost constantly.

The One Month Slump is also when I typically should begin turning my mind to what’s next. Another book, I hope, because there is a vaguely book-shaped hole forming in my future, I think, and I need to figure out what to fill it with.

Generally something in my own life sparks the next book for me, but right now that’s feeling very much like you’ll be getting a book about X-rays, a twenty-year-old cat whose mortality the whole family is in deep denial about, and a troublesome corner kitchen cabinet with a swivel insert that keeps breaking and sending all the post and pans crashing to the ground.

It will be about a woman who fears she has run out of things to say, who finds her own inner monologue rather negative and tiresome, and whose friends are mostly dealing with even worse things than a broken cabinet, if you can even imagine. It will be about how she finds herself increasingly interested in archaeology and ancient history, but has to devote so much of her ever-dwindling brainpower to making sure she eats enough protein and remembers to occasionally change the bedsheets that she never gets further than a chapter into any book on the subject.

The woman will wear a sticker on her hip that allegedly leaches estrogen into her bloodstream, but only if she remembers to change it twice a week. And yet more of that brainspace will be occupied every time she does by her wondering how, if you start counting on Sunday night, Thursday morning is the halfway point of the week, which somehow seems further than halfway.

It will be about a woman who is maybe a bit tired and emotional after a big month, who marched across the bridge yesterday because she is sad about starving babies, and who should probably wrap this up and go pick up the pots and pans from the kitchen floor and eat some lunch.

The week a book is released is never what you think it will be. For you as an author, it’s the culmination of several years of hard work. For the rest of the world, it’s Tuesday.

I kicked off Tuesday July 1 with an excited Instagram post announcing that Your Friend And Mine was officially Out Now! Available where all good books and other books and puzzles and tarot cards are sold! But coming after a month or two of me attempting to build interest in the forthcoming publication of the book, lots of people were surprised to learn it wasn’t in fact already well and truly out.

‘I thought it came out ages ago,’ a few people messaged, thereby revealing that they had not attempted to buy it. It’s difficult not to feel cross at friends when they do things like this, but I have to remind myself that if pressed, I would have a hard time explaining what many of my friends even do for a living, let alone which projects they have worked on for the last two years. Unless they have jobs that would be at home in a Richard Scarry book (teacher, doctor, worm who drives an apple), I can be a bit hazy on some of the more modern ways of making a living. One of my friends, for example, seems to advise people about which insurance to buy. Another works for a company that gives you back small amounts of money when you buy things from other companies though their website. Yet another does something to do with the stockmarket, a subject I find so baffling that when she tells me about it I can only a panicked buzzing sound, like my tiny brain is trying to escape from my skull.

Writing books is one of the few jobs where you demand your friends pay money to see what you’ve been doing when you’ve claimed to be too busy to see them. It’s entirely fair if they are not interested in doing that.

My friend Ellie took me for a seventy-minute hairwash the morning the book was released. It was very strange and delightful. We sat in adjoining cubicles in the back of a hair salon and two Japanese women scrubbed our scalps with shampoo twice, then added conditioner and massaged our heads for ages, before rinsing and drying our hair. We emerged into a rain bomb feeling entirely too relaxed and discombobulated for a Tuesday at 9 am.

Then we visited the local bookshop, who saw us coming and shoved my books onto the shelf at front of the shop. Opening o’clock on the day of release is really pushing your luck to find your book on display, but The Constant Reader, where I have been shopping since I was a toddler, know me pretty well and are very kind to me. I signed some books – with their pen because this is only my fourth novel and apparently that is too soon to learn to bring my own special pen for signing – and went home.

I ate a bowl of yogurt, and in doing so chipped my front tooth pretty badly. ON YOGURT. I am a very fragile sandcastle, apparently. The dentist squeezed me in and repaired it, warning me that my front teeth are for display purposes only now.

In the evening I went out to dinner with my husband, children and parents, where I ate a bowl of gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce with my back teeth, and modestly tried not to talk about my book all the time. No one else mentioned it.

The next day was the actual launch event, which I enjoyed more than any of my previous events. I’m not sure why. I felt much less self-conscious than I usually do. Maybe I am growing up. It also helped that I had the best conversation partner for a book event that you can have – Sally Hepworth. We nattered along in front of the audience as if we were in the car together having a chat. I think people liked it. The ones who could hear, anyway. And we had a lot of makeup and nice clothes on so the ones who couldn’t hear could at least admire our new foundation technique which we both learned from TikTok, which involves putting the foundation on the back of your hand and then smashing it into a brush before patting it all over our faces. It’s called priming the brush. We don’t know if it’s an improvement on any other way of doing it but we are both very drawn to novelty.

On Thursday, an article I wrote for Sunday Life magazine was released online, to a flurry of attention from radio stations. (Two interviews — two is a flurry, isn’t it?) The article was about how I didn’t go on a gap year, so instead I took a gap week in my forties — the inspiration for the book.

The first interview was with a talkback station in Melbourne, at 4.40 pm. The host introduced me, asked me about my gap week and listened to my answer for a few seconds, before she went to the callers, almost all of whom were calling to say they had not taken a gap year. My work there was apparently done, so I was free to hang up after that. The callers who wanted to report also not having a gap year continued for about half an hour.

Later that evening, I had a great chat for about twenty minutes to David Astle, the host of ABC Radio Melbourne’s evening show. We had a terrific old chinwag, despite it taking a turn for the weird when he remarked how curious it was that although I claimed to be a bit cowardly, not brave enough to move overseas when I was young, I had definitely done some brave and interesting things with my life, like writing novels and working in the escort industry.

I beg your pardon?

The escort industry?

‘The thing is, David,’ I said, ‘I haven’t worked in the escort industry.’ I felt like such a loser. Every life decision I had made ran though my head. WHY haven’t I been a sex worker? It is such a massive and glaring gap on my CV. All these Melbourne ABC listeners were going to feel so let down.

David was very embarrassed, and we were both a bit baffled about where he’d go the idea from, but we finished the interview on a positive note nonetheless. Later we figured out that in the middle of the article online had been an embedded link to another story in the magazine, about a how working in the escort industry changed that author’s attitude to sex. He had not realised it was not part of my article. I very hope that author is not having to deal with confusing questions about her nine-day holiday to London.

I spent Friday with my twelve year old son, driving around to bookshops and signing books, while he took surprising excellent photos of me. All he asked in return was a new pair of striped pyjamas and a navy velour bathrobe from Kmart. A very reasonable price, I thought. We managed seven shops, before we went home and collapsed. Talking about yourself and writing your name fast and trying to convince booksellers in two minutes that they should handsell your book over the hundreds of others that appear in their shops every month is tiring.

Since then, we have been at my parents’ house in the country, which is full to the brim with siblings, cousins, parents, friends of children, friends of siblings, more children (assorted, unsure to whom they belong), five cats and one puppy. At night there are twenty-two heartbeats under one roof. It’s fantastic. Several of the adults are attempting to work and there’s a complicated system of which cats are allowed outside and which can tolerate the dog. There is always something being cooked, someone eating, and the dishwasher hasn’t stopped in five days.

I veer between being entirely relaxed and absolutely terrified that I am not Out There Promoting The Book. There are a few more interviews and reviews to come, and more events in Melbourne and Sydney, and I’ve signed every copy I can lay my hands on. There’s not that much else I can do, apart from remind you nice readers that the book exists. I hope it will do well. If I haven’t managed to sell my body for sex, I hope at least I can move a few units of my thoughts.

In two weeks’ time, my book will be released in shops and a day later I will have my first promotional event. It has occurred to me that perhaps not everyone has been to one of these and might not know what to expect. Unlike me, it is likely that you were not the child of a book publisher (nepo baby right here), so you were not taken to book launches as a small child when a babysitter could not be found. Then you might not have grown up to be a young teenager who was charged with pouring wine at book launches*, or handing around canapes on little trays**. And you probably didn’t get to be an older teen who was allowed to sit and sell books at a table, taking cash, making change, or – most fun ever – being allowed to carefully place people’s credit cards on top of a triplicate slip, then run the whole lot over with a slidey-cruncher. This slidey-cruncher had more in common with the metal foot-measuring device at the shoe shops of the day than it did with modern tap-and-go card readers.

But I did, so I can not only tell you what book launches were like back in the day, I can also tell you what they are like now and we will not be using judging words like ‘better’ and ‘good old days’.

The very first launch I ever went to was in 1983 at Taronga Zoo, and the book, Ralph the Rhino by Tony Edwards, was launched by none other than Noni Hazelhurst. Noni from Playschool. Everyone’s favourite aunt who wasn’t their aunt. Baby’s First Parasocial Relationship. This launch was notable for several reasons. Firstly, I was four, so it was the first launch I remember. I had also observed the book being produced over the preceding year or so. My mum was the publisher and the editor, and most of the work was done from our house. I remember Tony, the author and illustrator coming over quite often, with his incredible pictures, for meetings with Mum and John, her business partner. It was my first experience of the making of a book, from start to finish.

More importantly, in the book there was a chocolate plum rainbow cake that Ralph the Rhino was eating when he received word from his friend Captain Seaweed that the dangerous madman Count Calimari had emotionally manipulated a cloud called Lulu into stealing the moon for him (it’s a wild and excellent story), and there was a chocolate plum rainbow cake at the book launch. I can distinctly remember Noni and Tony being involved in the cutting of the cake, beside the rhino enclosure.

Finally, and most mind-blowingly, that launch was the day I learned about the Magic of Television. For after my brothers and I had been at the launch for a while, we were taken home to our friend Clare’s house to play with her kids. When we walked in, Clare plonked all the kids down in front of the TV to watch Play School. And there was Noni, on the screen, with long hair. The Noni whom I had seen not half an hour earlier cutting a chocolate plum rainbow cake beside the rhinos, with short hair. What was this witchcraft? This witchcraft was pre-recorded television. I felt equal parts betrayed and let in on a very clever secret.

Since then I have been to many launches – books my mother worked on, books my parents’ friends had written, then books published by my employers. Finally, there have been my own launches, and those of my author friends.

My first launch was overwhelming. My children presented an Acknowledgement of Country, but Garnet was not quite five and could neither read nor memorise lines, so he just echoed everything May Blossom said, which made her furious, and then they tussled over the microphone and had to be carried offstage, each under one of Drew’s arms, like two angry cats. The room, in the back of a bookshop, was extremely crowded with soggy family and friends, on a hot and stormy December night. Frank Moorhouse launched the book, but I can’t remember anything he said because my brain was buzzing too loudly.

Covid had struck when my second book came out, so I cancelled the launch and had an online one instead, at lunchtime on a weekday. New York Times Bestselling Author Sally Hepworth hosted it (she is very down to earth yet insists I address her by her full title at all times), and we drank margaritas in separate states and tried to make it as festive as we could for the small number of people who joined in to watch the Facebook Live event.

My third launch was a lot of fun, and Tim Minchin said lovely things about me and my book, but when I was handed the microphone I didn’t do as well. I don’t remember what I spoke about, except that I one hundred percent did not mention my new book, even once.

This time, I am going to get it right. The first Sydney event is being hosted by Better Read Than Dead (which is a bookshop) in a room in a pub in Newtown. This means there will be drinks available. And maybe even some food. (I have not confirmed this.) NYTBSA Sally Hepworth will be there to launch it in person, and we will have a conversation, which always goes better for me than a monologue.

I expect we will have to sit on high stools, which everyone should be warned about before they write a book. I was not warned, nor had I noticed in all my years of launch-going that authors are often made to sit on high stools so they can be seen by the seated audience. Stools by definition have no backs, so as well as performing the part of ‘author’ you have to perform the part of ‘back of a chair’, using only your weak core muscles, softened from years of slumping in front of a computer. It’s a lot to ask.

NYTBSA Sally will ask me clever and insightful questions and I will respond, and we will laugh a lot and go very off topic. Our conversations, whether public or private, are far-ranging and unmanageable. This will be no different.

After that, we will take questions from the audience. Usually these are from my dad, though that’s not the law. Other people can also ask things. Often someone asks what I am working on next, which is when I make something up on the spot and then that becomes my next book so I don’t look like a liar.

Then you will be shamed into buying a copy of the book and I will sign it, all the while regretting the length of my name, which takes six months to write out, even if you leave off the last n.

The whole thing will be over in two hours, including chatting time with people you will meet there. If you don’t know anyone who would like to go to such a thing, please come anyway, on your own. There will be an intimidatingly good-looking group of women who are also authors. They travel around from launch to launch like the most supportive gang you can imagine, seemingly not aware that we are each other’s competition and should be trying to sabotage book launches, not make them successful. You will meet my other friends and family, who will be on their best behaviour. My children have promised not to have to be removed from the stage by riot cops with high pressure hoses. We shall see.

After the Newtown event, there will be a similar one in Melbourne, and then another in Sydney, with Kerri Sackville instead of NYTBSA Sally. I would love to see you at any or all of them. You can get tickets though this link, if I haven’t adequately put you off.

*Not illegal at the time. Illegal now.

**This was the 1980s. We are lucky books still exist now, let alone canapes.

***No longer available in stores but I know where a few boxes are so hit me up if you want one. It’s unreal.

My new book comes out in six weeks. That means it’s at the printer, or maybe back from the printer and one is sitting in the publisher’s office waiting to be sent to me, and the rest are in a warehouse. This is the point where there’s really nothing more to be done, unless an early reviewer spots a typo of the magnitude of the time in 2010 a pasta cookbook listed an ingredient as ‘salt and freshly ground black people’, and it had to be pulped and reprinted. I’m reasonably sure there’s nothing like that in mine.

Now all there is for me to do is write articles that will appear in the media around the time of release, funny and interesting pieces that will make people rush to the bookshop in search of more of that sort of nonsense.

This means it’s the time I start to focus on what really matters. It’s when I decide it’s not enough to be a published author of four novels and one childrens’ book, I must be a much thinner published author of four novels and one childrens’ book, with fewer pimples on my chin, and nicer clothes. Because when a prospective reader stands in a bookshop weighing up whether to buy this or that new release, what is really going to sway them is which author is the smallest and prettiest and looks the youngest for their age.

To this end I am exercising like a fiend – lifting very heavy weights in the spare room and putting them down in a way that makes Drew rush in to see if I have had a fall, eating the same amount of lean protein as eleven dingoes, and only eating carbs once a day. I am not eating before ten in the morning or after eight in the evening, which renders me fairly useless for several hours of the working day. Now in the mornings all I am fit for is cleaning the house and drinking boiling water and lightheadedly typing things like that piece about the pope, which in hindsight has the manic air of the glucose-starved brain about it.

This is all very annoying, and even more annoyingly it is working and I have lost a few kilograms, which is making me feel powerful and mighty in a way that is a bit worrying. But soon I expect I’ll stop being worried because I will have killed off that part of my brain through lack of nourishment and I’ll be thin and dim and happy about it. Either that or I’ll give up and return to regular programming, being a bit solid and useful for balancing three or four children on a seesaw and finishing everyone’s chips.

Either way, I am aware it probably won’t make a lick of difference to how my book sells. I do see that, but it’s nice to have a goal that makes you think you have any control over the vagaries of the book world.

I’d really like this book to do well not only because it’s my job and if I don’t sell enough books I won’t be able to write another one, but also because I think it’s a really good book. Ugh, what an embarrassing thing to say. But it is. I think it’s interesting and clever and funny where it’s meant to be and emotionally wrenching in the parts where I want you to cry. It was difficult to write, it’s more complex than anything I’ve written before, and I really hope lots of people get to read it. For that to happen, I need people to know about it, and tell their friends. Word of mouth is the thing, so if you are the proud owner of a mouth that can make words, I’d be very grateful for your support in shouting about Your Friend and Mine when it comes out, or even before.

You can do that by preordering it through any bookselling outlet, even the one we’re not meant to use, either as a hard copy, an ebook or an audiobook. I think you can even request it at your local library, which authors love because we get money every time someone borrows it. You can mention it on social media, or share my substack, or write something nice about it with a spray can of orange paint on a queen-sized sheet and hang it from an overpass. Every little bit helps. They will help far more than me dropping a dress size, though perhaps not as much as me dropping two dress sizes.

I said I would write this Substack every fortnight, but forgive me, readers, it has been four weeks since I last posted. Since then the old pope has died and a new pope has been installed in his place. The old one was called Pope Francis and the new one was called Bob Prevost but is now called Pope Leo XIV. I cannot stop thinking of him as Pope Charli XCX.

For the first time in my lifetime, when the old pope died there was a great flurry of excitement in the media about the selection of a new pope. Or was it just the first time I noticed? Am I now of an age where I am interested in things like new popes? It seems unlikely. I am not Catholic, nor any other religion. Have people always cared so much about who gets to be the pope? Is it just because of the movie Conclave that came out this year? In fact, it was released for streaming the very day after il Papa went to baby Jesus. (Coincidence? Who can say? All I know is if I was releasing a movie about something that only happens two or three times a century I might be inclined to slip someone in Rome a little sweetener to, you know, make that coincidence actually coincide at a very convenient time. Was a very special Beef Wellington involved?)

The day after Pope Francis’ death, over breakfast, I read aloud to my dad and son a long article from the newspaper about how a new pope is selected. My son, Garnet, is twelve and like me has ADHD. My father is 78 and like me until three years ago, has not been diagnosed with ADHD. We all enjoy falling down internet rabbit holes of research about random topics with some regularity.

We learned that the new pope is selected at a conclave, a gathering where the wannabe popes vote for pope over and over until someone gets a majority. All the cardinals in the world who are under eighty years old stare up at Michelangelo’s graphic novel of the Bible on the ceiling and think about what’s on their pope wishlist and how that does or doesn’t fit with all their colleagues. I imagine a lot of the time they are thinking about how many times they can vote for themselves without committing the sin of pride. If it takes more than a day, they remain sequestered from the outside world until the decision is made. It’s got the same vibes as when the teacher won’t let the class out for recess until someone takes the blame for drawing a cock and balls on the board. Except the opposite.

Garnet and I were particularly interested because in January we were in Rome and visited the Sistine Chapel, which is where So You Wanna Be Pope takes place. We marvelled that the longest conclave in history went for thirty-three months. Nearly three years. I could not imagine how, until I read that the conclave in question took place somewhere else because the Sistine Chapel wasn’t built for another two hundred years. We were in the Sistine Chapel for all of twenty minutes and nearly expired from the heat. It was midwinter, but it felt like July, in the centre of the earth. I had to leave because after staring up with intense envy at Michelangel’s depiction of the Creation of Adam, in which Adam -- the lucky duck -- got to be in the nude, I had taken off all the layers I could that wouldn’t lead to my arrest.

Drew, on the other hand, seemed absolutely fine. He is the only member of our immediate family who was baptised into the Catholic Church though, so I guess that makes sense. Heathens feel the hellfires more and also have to go to public or independent schools. He stayed on for a fair bit longer, and was driven out not by heat but by concern that he might find the kids and me expired on the floor outside, being readied for burial beyond the Vatican walls.

So the long, long conclave that started in 1268 and ended in 1271 went that long because the cardinals at the time were horrendously disagreeable. Even after the magistrates stopped feeding them anything except bread and water, and even after they took the roof off the palace where the conclave was taking place, those stubborn cardinals lasted another entire year. I am deeply impressed by that. I possess no view that I would hold onto if it meant even skipping lunch.

I watched the movie Conclave, and I thought it was not bad. I mean, I’ll watch anything with Ralph Fiennes or Stanley Tucci, and this has both. It has some very good, quite modern plot twists, and though they did seem to try to give Isabella Rossellini something to do, they failed because it’s a movie about cardinals electing a pope, and there’s not a lot of girl power involved.

It doesn’t seem like the actual conclave this year was anywhere near as exciting as the 1268-71 one, or the one in the movie. It took two days and then there was a new pope, who looks rather like all the other popes have looked. He holds slightly less retrograde views than some cardinals on some important social issues (like immigration) and more retrograde views on others (like LGBTQIA+ rights). He appears to have done the requisite amount of shuffling abusive clergy around like a magician with three cups and a ball.

My brief fascination with all things papal has waned now. There’s too much about this man online. Someone on Tiktok posted a reaction video to her telling her mum that Bob Prevost was now the pope. Apparently her mum had hooked up with him when she was 19, before he was a priest. Popes, in my opinion, should not have pasts like this. He also likes tennis, which is an unseemly sport for a pope. Of all the racket sports, only badminton seems appropriate for a pope. Appopriate, if you will. The little shuttlecock looks like an angel, and if you play it outside in the wind you have no control whatsoever over the outcome. This is my final word on the subject.

We’re staying at my parents’ farm these holidays. There is a new horse for everyone to take turns riding.

I debated whether or not to use the horse’s real name in this post. I am, I suppose, slightly worried that if I do, someone will come to the paddock in the dead of night and lure him over to the fence by calling his name, then ride him away and we’ll never see him again. A horse is a pretty expensive thing to leave outside at night. It seems to be basically an honour system that people don’t go around stealing each other’s horses all the time. I’m relieved every morning when I go out and find he is still there.

I don’t use my kids’ real names online, but I do use the cats’ names. I guess I can use his real name. It’s Frankie. He is a nine-year-old former racehorse who is extremely tall. He doesn’t like to go faster than a walk. He will trot if you really insist on it but at heart he’s the living embodiment of a Frankie Says Relax t-shirt and walking is just fine. He also has two spots in the paddock where he seems to get no reception. He just stops for no discernible reason, every time. We accept it and wait – we all have our quirks. Eventually he gets going again. He is a vast improvement on the last former racehorse we owned thirty years ago, a demented creature called Basil who was like riding a haunted coathanger.

Frankie is an only horse, so far, but he came from a home with several companions so at the moment he is mostly to be found in the corner of the paddock that abuts the chookyard, where he is running a thus far unsuccessful campaign to become part of their gang. They are supremely uninterested in him. I’ve tried to explain that staring mournfully at them through the fence is not the way to make friends, but he is a horse who knows his own mind. When I told him that he wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway, because actually they’re kind of bitchy, he doesn’t believe me. I’m not lying though. They are pretty horrible. And since he arrived they’ve stopped laying. It’s all a bit adolescent out there. ‘I can’t do my work because the weird new kid won’t stop watching me, Miss.’

On the actual adolescent front, our fourteen-and-a half-year-old daughter, May Blossom*, asked if she could invite a school friend down to the farm to stay for a few days. We agreed, and then she asked if it would be possible not to drive the friend down. We were a bit confused. ‘How else will she get here?’ we asked. ‘It’s two hours from Sydney.’

May Blossom suggested that she might drive back to Sydney with her father when he has to go back for a meeting one day, and then she and her friend could catch the train down together. This seemed odd. Why not just drive back in the car with her dad and her friend? Could this be, I wondered, the beginning of The Embarrassment?

We have thus far gotten away relatively unscathed by the early teen years. Actually tremendously unscathed. Like, I think she still likes us. But I’ve been waiting for that to change, because it mostly does.

After lunch yesterday we were sitting around together and I bravely said, ‘So, the reason you guys want to take the train, is that because your friend hasn’t spent any time with us yet, and you think two hours in the car with one of your parents might be weird?’

She replied that yes, that was the problem. I pushed it. Was there anything, I wanted to know, that we did that was specifically awful. Was it my singing? Was that cringe? (Is saying cringe now considered cringe?)

My singing, she reassured me, was not the problem. And in a million years I don’t think I could have guessed what it was that she was worried about. ‘It’s Dad,’ she admitted. And then, just thinking about what she was about to say made her squeeze her shoulders up to her ears and scrunch up her face in horror. ‘It’s when he says “comfy”.’

‘Comfy?’ I said. ‘As in comfortable?’

‘Yes!’ She was almost disappearing inside herself with the mortification. ‘He says “I’m comfy with that.” Who says that?!’

‘What’s bad about that?’ I wasn’t getting it.

‘He doesn’t need to say “comfy”! He can just say “I’m fine with that.” There’s no need to say “comfy”!’

I found this hilarious. I asked if we could tell Drew**. She said she absolutely couldn’t but that I could. He finds it as funny as I do, and is relieved that it’s not anything else, anything intrinsic to his personality, anything that can’t be changed. Because he can stop saying ‘comfy’ around May Blossom and her friends any time he wants.

He’s one hundred per cent not going to though. In fact there’s been a dramatic spike in the usage of the word comfy since this conversation took place. I’ve taken it up too.

He is driving back to Sydney next week with May Blossom, and there will be a few minutes when she and her friend have to be in the car with him while he drives them to the train station. I can only imagine how many times he will drop ‘comfy’ in that ten minutes. It’s going to be amazing, and I’m very comfy with that.

*Not her real name – there’s a post detailing the origins of the alias here.

**His real name. I am not as worried about husband rustlers coming to lure him away in the night.

A few days ago I went down the front path to collect the mail and slipped on the bricks. It was not raining, but the bricks, I realised, had become black with mold and lichen and dirt and possibly plague. I managed to stay upright, but not without a fair amount of windmilling my arms and skittering about like Bambi on Ice. Or Jessie on Slime, the remake no one wants to see.

My normal response to this would be to palm it off to Drew, who is Outside Guy at our house on account of how I hate the sun and the biting insects and he likes plants. But on Sunday I thought it was time I stepped (skidded like Kramer entering Jerry’s apartment) up, and I was also putting off doing the yoga video my acupuncturist told me to do. I was feeling extremely overburdened with things I had to do, mostly because leading a healthy lifestyle in order to not have a sore foot seems to be a fulltime job, what with all the yoga and foam rolling and stretches and roasting vegetables and drinking water etc.

It was not without a hint of martyrdom that after Drew had been round to see if the power washer we share custody of with my parents was anywhere to be found (it wasn’t) and then he’d been to Bunnings to buy a new one, that I bravely plugged it into both electricity and a hose (thought this seems against all we have been taught) and switched it on.

And blow me down if using a power washer (we call it a gurney in my family. Is that normal or is that just an us thing?) isn’t the most zen then you can do. I was out there for ages. Three hours, that’s how long I spent on path that’s maybe twelve metres long and about sixty centimetres wide. It’s made of bricks: six across, two horizontal beside two vertical beside two more horizontal. In between the bricks I guess there is supposed to be sand or dirt or something, in order to keep them in place. There were mainly weeds doing that job when I started up the gurney, and there was absolutely nothing holding them in place by the time I had finished. All the dirt, sand, weeds and ants that lived between the bricks were blasted away, alongside the lichen, moss, slime and plague. Some of it ran off in the water down the path and onto the road, though much of it went onto my feet and trouser legs, and the side of the house. Did I care? I did not.

I have not been happier in a long time than I was during those three hours. I just stared at the grotty bricks and methodically sprayed the filth off them. I tried out different techniques and angles, but honestly, unlike me in front of a camera, there are no bad angles with a gurney. You either get lots of crap off the surface or all the crap off the surface. It’s like toothbrushing, but one billion times more satisfying.

While I worked, I recalled seeing an ad recently on a local Facebook page for a kid who was offering to power wash people’s driveways for $4 a square metre. I idly did some maths about what Australian authors earn, on average, in comparison to that kid. I wondered if I would be leaving a greater legacy to the world if I gave up writing for professional power washing.

Then my neck got sore and my trigger finger started to ache, so I stopped and went inside. I haven’t had time since Sunday to get back out there, but I will as soon as I can, to clean the backyard and the driveway. And maybe the footpath, the neighbours’ driveways, and perhaps, one day, the whole world.

Yesterday my friend told me that her teenage son had done some sort of self-analysis questionnaire at school, where they ranked themselves on certain qualities. He said he had declared himself very low on honesty (and yet he told her, so can even we believe this ? The mental gymnastics involved in understanding that philosophical conundrum are beyond my level), and ranked himself high for love. He marked himself low on zest.

Zest. What a funny thing to ask teenagers about. By and large a lot of teenagers are probably hormonally zest deficient some of the time. As are perimenopausal women. What a societal error it is for there to be so many teenagers living with perimenopausal women.

My own teenager and near-teenager seem to be reasonably adequately zest right now (this is subject to change at any moment. Also they are at school right now* so who even knows how they’re feeling.)

But I am not zesty right now. I am, as my husband accurately observed yesterday, all lemon, no zest.

It is unfortunate this this low zest period is coinciding not only with living with teenagers, but also with being told it is time to resurrect my blog/substack/it probably has a new name I’m not across. Because I have a new book coming out in a few months and it is now time for me to pivot from the locked-in-a-wardrobe-writing part of the process and into the trying-to-make-people-want-to-read-your-writing part of the process. And I’m no marketing expert but I think people might prefer to read writing by zesty, positive, energetic people than depressed, overwhelmed sourpusses. Zest is what you need to sell books.

So as of this morning I am on a Zest Quest. It’s only midday and I have already done many things to bring more zest to my life.

They are, in no particular order:

• Bought a pair of leopard print pants without trying them on. They fit and they are comfortable and I love them. They cost only $25 from Kmart, so there is the zest-sapping worry that I am a fast fashion tragic and contributing to the decimation of our planet by that industry. So that probably renders them net zest neutral.

• Battled the login gremlins and reset nine hundred and fifty passwords to enable me to crack into my son’s iPad and download the streaming app so I can watch the Oscars while I work on this. Given that I have been putting off writing this for actual weeks now, and I have now managed to get going, this is a zest positive activity. Even the fact that I have watched precisely none of the nominated films isn’t killing the zest. Nor the fact that I haven’t won any Oscars and probably won’t ever.

• Roasted up two trays of vegetables. According to the acupuncturist I saw on the weekend as part of my ongoing quest to relieve the plantar fasciitis pain in my left foot, my body is highly inflamed. I am a towering inferno. Eating an anti-inflammatory diet will allegedly correct this. (And yes I have watched Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix but I really want to believe this acupuncturist because she is very nice and seemed very confident. At the moment anyone who gives me hope that I will not always feel like I am walking on broken glass is my guru.)

So I roasted up a bunch of cauliflower, capsicum, sweet potato and other rainbow hued planty things and lectured my husband about how these are MY roasted vegetables and neither he nor the children is allowed to eat any of them. He backed slowly out of the room with his hands up in front of him, which is becoming his default method of leaving rooms ever since the perimenopause came to live with us. Upon reflection, I realise two trays of roasted vegetables are likely extremely safe from being eaten by anyone else in this house and my defence of them was unnecessarily extreme. I ate some for lunch and they were very nice. It would deplete my zest to wash up the baking trays so I have not.

Once I get my zest back, please tell me what, if anything, you would like me to write about on this blogstack or whatever. Without suggestions I am very likely to just witter on about other symptoms of perimenopause, not just plantar fasciitis (although I do have more to say on that, for instance do women of a certain age get it because we cannot have babies and therefore back in prehistoric times we were most useful at this age as snacks for sabre tooth tigers? Is plantar fasciitis designed to slow us down, to be eaten by the predators, thereby giving the young and fertile and the kids and the men the opportunity to escape? If so, rude.)

I’m feeling a bit daunted by what I’m going to write about. When I began blogging, many years ago, I wrote about my kids, but they are now the aforementioned teens or near enough, and don’t really need their business splashed all over the internet. Apart from parenting them, my time is now spent in roughly equal parts worrying that I won’t ever come up with another book idea, helping my parents get to medical appointments, and trying to fix my foot. None of that seems like anything a normal person would want to read about.

I’d love you to throw me a prompt. Ask me anything. Otherwise it’s plantar fasciitis until the end of time. I’m going to try to write here once a week. Surely even I can find something entertaining to say once every hundred and sixty eight hours.

Also, if you would like to pre-order my new book, Your Friend and Mine that would be great. If enough people preorder it the bookshops will think I am a Very Big Deal and inherently zesty. Let’s see if we can trick them, shall we? You can order it from your local Meg Ryany independent bookshop, a less independent, more Tom Hanksy bookshop, or even a great big Darth Vader seller of all things. There will be no judgement from me. (Firstly how would I even know; secondly all my judgement is reserved for myself.)

Also also, if you know anyone who has a dearth of waffly substacks in their life and might enjoy mine, please encourage them to sign up. It’s only going to get better from here.

Love, Jess

*LOL. I wrote this on Monday and was interrupted to fetch a sick kid from school. Here we go…

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I have a new book coming out next year and a new publisher to work with. All these new things and yet the face I have attached to the front of my head, which there needs to be a picture of in order to promote the new book, is the same old one I have always had. In fact, it’s older than it’s ever been.

The new publisher asked for a head shot yesterday and I said that my current ones are seven years old and possibly not an entirely accurate representation of me anymore. I was hoping she’d reply and say my goodness no, you look just the same and if anything even younger than you did in these shots but alas she has working eyes and does not live inside my very vain head, so instead she said yeah, probs get some new shots done.

Now I want some Botox. I have wanted this for a while but inside me are two wolves and one of them is a feminist wolf who believes in ageing naturally and the other is a raging narcissist wolf who thinks everyone is always looking at me and wondering what went wrong with my face. (Both wolves are really pretty.)

It is possibly the disagreement between these two wolves that has given me really bad eczema around my eyes, and the itch of it has made me rub my eyes so much that most of my eyelashes have fallen out, leaving me to face to world like a naked, bald-faced senior mole. And not in a good way.

Even if I had eyelashes, the doctor says the eczema will be made worse if I wear makeup. This has only made things worse because eczema is exacerbated by stress and when I can’t wear makeup I look like a fatter version of my little brother, which is stressful because in my head I think I ought to look like beautiful woman, and my little brother does not go around looking like a beautiful woman (except when he went as Kate Bush last Halloween, and then he looked did like the most beautiful woman. Idea: Could I use the picture of my brother dressed as Kate Bush as my author headshot and perhaps no one would be the wiser?)

I mentioned the Botox idea to my nearly-fourteen-year-old daughter, to whom I have attempted to espouse only body positive views for a decade and a half. She was horrified.

‘You mean for your migraines?’ she said, because I have previously had botox in my jaw to alleviate tension which causes migraines.

‘Um, no, for my wrinkles,’ I said, like an idiot.

‘But you don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ she said, because the feminist wolf has been in charge of the microphone for most of her life.

‘I don’t not believe in it,’ I said. ‘I think people should be able to do what they want with their faces.’ But that didn’t go over very well. For two reasons, I think. Firstly, she doesn’t like change. Secondly, we have pretty much the same face, and so me saying I think mine needs improving might have come across as a bit rude. (To be clear, her face is perfection. Mine is like if someone left hers out in the garden for thirty years.) I suspect I could get some Botox and not mention it and she wouldn’t necessarily notice but I am a pathologically honest oversharer (yes, this is a terrible quality in a parent, thank you for asking), so I would be able to keep quiet about having facial injections for approximately six seconds.

Then there is the issue of my nose, which seems to be growing larger as I age. Is this the Pinocchio effect, from lying about how confident I am about my appearance to my children, so they could have even the remotest chance of growing up happy with how they look? If so, that seems unfair.

No amount of Botox will make my nose smaller. And while I suspect if I dig around on Instagram for long enough I will learn there is something I can spent thousands of dollars on to hoist up my jowels to less Rumpole-esque levels, I don’t think I can justify it.

Then there is the question of who I want to portray myself as when publishing this new book. My books are funny, but also dark, and they deal with such lighthearted topics as death, sexual assault, relationship breakdowns, ageing parents, and how to parent in this day and age. So, life, basically, it all it’s horror and glory. How do I portray myself in a still photo as capable of exploring all that in a commercially viable book? Smiling coqetteishly over one shoulder? Staring aggressively down the barrel of the camera. At this point I am leaning towards the pose ‘slumped in an armchair with my head in my hands’, only I worry that will make my tummy look fat. And head in hands means doing something about my nails.

Some would say that maybe all this worrying about my author photo is taking up time when I should be working on the edits of this book, and those people would be spot on. There is only so much resurrecting of long dormant blogs and baking cupcakes for Fathers’ Day cake stalls at school and replying to all the long-ignored correspondence from their accountant that a person can do before they have to face the fact that it’s what’s inside that counts, and what’s inside this book is the only part of this terrifying process that I can actually control.

Back to work I go.

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It has been both three and a half weeks and a hundred and fifteen years since I proudly declared this blog Relaunched. Since you last heard from me there has mostly been pandemic and lockdown, mental hardship and guilt.  

My counsellor, who is a woman of immense good sense, was pleased to see the blog was back, and told me to keep it up, that what I had to say during this time might be helpful to other people so here you go and you can blame her if it’s boring. And it will be boring because everything is at the moment, isn’t it?

Boring and scary. It’s like we’re all anaesthetists (people say that job is the most boring and the most scary, because there’s a lot of sitting and monitoring your unconscious patient while surgeons fossick about inside them, and then suddenly ALARM! PANIC! Her blood pressure is plummeting! Death is at the door! Only you can save her!). Or is it like we are all parents of small babies, which is similarly just feeding, changing, sleeping, feeding, changing, sleeping ALARM! PANIC! Why is it not on the change table where I just put it?! What is that rash?!

May Blossom has been missing contact with the outside world a lot, so we caved a good eighteen months before we had planned to and let her have a phone. It’s an old one we had lying around, and currently has no sim card so doesn’t make calls to most people, but she can text and Facetime. This has been a very good thing, except that now whenever I tell my mum any news, and trust me there is precious little to tell, it’s not news to her because May Blossom has already been on the blower.

The days feel very trudgy: we put foot in front of the other (rarely in a literal sense).  I try not to think too much, about times when we weren’t in lockdown and mostly I pretend my friends don’t exist, so the missing them isn’t as great.

Moments of thrill do occasionally burst upon me. I made a change to a Woolworths order the night before it was sent, thereby risking losing my delivery slot that I’d waited five days for. But I added the dishwasher detergent and didn’t lose my slot. The adrenaline rush was insane.

It was big enough news to ring my friend Richard with. We’ve decided to report things to each other even though there’s nothing to report. He rang to tell me he had discovered that a bookshelf he had assumed was attached to the wall at the top was not in fact attached to the wall. He attached it. Now his baby won’t get squashed by a bookshelf. These are the things we should be telling each other, the little wins that we wouldn’t have thought twice about before. They’re what we have right now.

Like last week when I took a pair of leggings out of my drawer and discovered they had a pair of underpants still attached. They’d gone through the wash, the dryer and been folded and put away, undies and all. I simply put both items of clothing on at once and for a few minutes I felt extremely efficient and happy. This reminds me I forgot to ring Richard to report the undies and leggings situation.

If you follow me on any social media you will know that I bought a terrible coffee machine last week. It was cheap and nasty, and really I got what I paid for. But I wanted the high of a bargain. I wanted to game the system, find the shortcut through the maze from here to normality and happiness. Why I thought a Kmart espresso machine was going be the way to get there, I cannot say. It did make me feel quite alive though. Alive with rage.

I can’t quite give up on the machine. It makes yucky coffee and takes up too much of our already limited counterspace but still I leave it there, reproaching me for my damn clicky checkout finger, reminding me that there’s no quick way out of this. There’s no espresso route to the world returning to normal. We’ll get there when we get there.

What’s new with you? Are you vaccinated? Have you attached anything to a wall?

Ahem. Is this thing on. Hi. I’m not sure if you remember me but I used to work here ages ago. Then I left to write novels, which is what I’m still supposed to be doing but then there was a pandemic and the schools closed so now I’m an unqualified governess to two, shall we say, spirited children. I used to write a lot about them when they were little — their funny turns of phrase and how much they were teaching me as I muddled thorough early motherhood. But then they became bigger children, who can read and know what suing someone means, and I had to acknowledge that as such they had human rights, one of which was not to be mined for lols online by their attention-starved parent. That’s when the novels came into it. 

Right now I’m struggling with the fiction writing, even though I’ve got a contract for more books. That’s a pretty terrifying thought. So I thought that I might dip back in here and waffle on a bit while the Havers of Human Rights work on some literacy and maths on all the computers we own (I’m writing this on my phone). I’ll try to talk more about me than them and my goodness what a treat that will be for you all. 

A little catch up for the new kids: I’m Jess. I live in Sydney, with my husband H (that stands for husband, it’s not really his initial) and my children, known on here as May Blossom and Garnet. May Blossom is almost 11 and Garnet is 8 and a half. They are bright and funny and sensitive. 

H runs a business from home, and is a very equal partner in the running of the house and our life. This fact means that I have a great deal of help with my wifely duties (not THOSE wifely duties), so it’s long been something of a mystery to me that I find it so unbearably hard to do all the things an adult is expected to do: help keep the house tidy and clean, cook, keep on top of grocery procurement, keep everyone in the correct size and warmth of clothes, not cry all the time, attend to the health of two cats, be a reasonable friend and daughter and aunt and sister, keep myself fed and exercised, attend to general life admin. 

Last week I learned from a new psychiatrist that this is because I have ADHD. I am forty-two. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Then I would have lain on the ground staring at the ceiling rose for ages, and then googled what kind of feather it was, and then thought a lot about feathers and particularly about feather beds, and then spent some time recalling how interested I was in the bed fillings of the children in books I loved as a little girl. Laura Ingalls and Heidi both had hay-stuffed mattresses, which sounded cosy to me back then but which now I fear might be a bit prickly. I suppose it would depend on how thick the fabric they were stuffed into was. My parents had a mattress on their guest bed that was made of horse hair. Guests hated it. 

Anyway, ADHD. I don’t know. It might explain some things. I’ve never had trouble sitting still class or at work. I’m pretty bloody sedentary for a diagnosis with “hyperactivity” in it. I did very well at primary school. High school was harder, and I definitely daydreamed a lot more than I listened (because MY STARS the Peloponnesian Wars were really just stunningly uninteresting. So many islands. So many naval sorties. Herodotus can get in the bin.)

Apparently one symptom of ADHD is that you’re fine concentrating on things you find interesting, it’s just boring stuff that your brain will go to any lengths to avoid. I thought that was just how brains worked. I’m still not a hundred per cent sure it’s not how everyone is and it’s just the weak and pathetic who can’t force themselves to just get through the tough stuff. 

The doctor tells me that girls often manage fine with ADHD in primary school and even through parts of high school if they are quite smart (there’s a compliment in there somewhere), and it is true that once there was more required of me in life (what is colloquially termed “adulting” because what are the young people for if not the verbification of more or less everything) I started suffering from anxiety and depression. 

Long story short (‘SHORT?’ I hear you scream. ‘We might have to have a bit of a chat about the meaning of short’): I haven’t done my tax, I’m struggling to sit down and write my book, and I’ve just started on some ADHD medication this week. What a time to restart a blog! 

Now all that’s out of the way I will try to write more normal fun stuff for you every few days. Perhaps I’ll tell you about how H and I have been watching Line of Duty and now we amuse ourselves by speaking only in police jargon. Perhaps I’ll tell you about what I’m cooking. Perhaps I’ll talk more about Mattresses of Yore. If there are things you’d like me to talk about, leave me a comment on here or on Instagram. I love messages and comments. Mad for a chat, me. 

It’s nice to be back. 

I’ve had a novel published. This one here, called How To Be Second Best. Just thought I’d get that out there. It was released in Australia a month ago. It’ll come out in Canada some time this year. The rights to publish in the UK, USA and rest of the world are up for grabs so get on it, foreign publishers! There is a paperback, an ebook and an audiobook. People seem to have liked it. I’ve had lots of nice emails from readers, some of whom aren’t even my friends. That’s a bit mind-blowing. It seems to appeal mostly to people around my age, who have children, although my Dad’s friend James, who is in his seventies and has no children, said he laughed out loud at parts and was very pleased when I wrote that the protagonist’s house had two rooms on each side of the hall, not two rooms on either side of the hall. Apparently the second one is incorrect and a particular bugbear of his. I’d like to say I knew this and very deliberately wrote that sentence but that would be untrue. It was luck. But I’m glad James liked it.

Because it is January and I have another book to write, I have been doing a lot of decluttering. I know this is very fashionable because of Marie Kondo and that Netflix show about tidying up and only keeping things that ‘spark joy’, but I only watched a few minutes of the show before I was so bored I decided to tackle the odd sock box. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to work.

Anyway, I prefer the alternative decluttering guru, whom H and I invented. He’s called Murray from Condobolin. This Murray Condo backs a ute up to your house and you throw in everything you hate. Murray then assures you he will dispose of it thoughtfully and recycle everything but deep down you know he drives to the next suburb and dumps it all on the verge.

After the sock box, I decided to tackle H’s office. He works from home, and when we recently gave the kids their own separate rooms, he had to move from the nice quiet upstairs to the room downstairs next to the living room, which the previous owners used as a media room. We have not used it as a media room. We watch media on our laps, like normal people.

Until this room became H’s office, we called it The Chamber of Broken Dreams, because in it we kept all the books we never have time to read, the piano and guitars no one has time to play, the art supplies no one has time to use, and for a while there was an exercise bike no one had time to ride.

Since the kids have stopped being babies, things have improved and the art supplies were used enough for H to have an exhibition last year, I read enough books to figure out how to write one, and we sent the exercise bike to live with a nice family on a farm. So it worked to move H’s office in there. Except for the piano. The piano meant there was no room for any storage furniture so all his files are on a busted old bookshelf and they just sit there looking horrible and not sparking joy. They need to go in a cupboard.

But what can we do with the piano? H bought it after we met but before we moved in together. It was old and out of tune then. It remains thus. He plays quite well, but not often. I play not at all, except for the opening notes of ‘Beautiful Girl’ by INXS, which I taught myself when I was bored in the summer of 1993.

Last weekend we decided to get rid of the piano, which seems to be something you can only do by giving it away for free to anyone who will come and remove it. For it is a very heavy beast, and we once had a friend help us move it and he didn’t talk to us for fourteen months after. Things came good with him eventually, but now he’s H’s business partner and we really can’t risk another schism in the relationship. Someone else must take it away.

Having settled upon it going, we immediately went to a secondhand furniture warehouse and bought a cupboard to put in its place. A cupboard with lovely wooden doors behind which we can hide all sorts of shit. I said I’d list the piano on Freecycle and it would be gone by the time the cupboard arrived.

Well that would all have been fine, if I hadn’t listened to the soundtrack to Jane campion’s movie The Piano on the way home from our friends’ house last night. I was dragged, like Holly Hunter with a rope caught around her ankle, into a sea of 1993 nostalgia. (What is it with me and 1993?) I remembered I wanted to learn to play the piano. And be a mute Scotswoman married to Sam Neill while having an affair with Harvey Keitel. (I was a bit of a weird fourteen-year-old.)

So we’re keeping the piano. My plan is we will stuff it into the small cupboard when that arrives. Because one day, I’ll put on a bonnet and play the piano and it will spark so much joy that this decision will make sense.

Here’s a tiny bit of book. My book. Yikes. 

Good grief, the last time I blogged was three months ago and I was ordering cheese for H’s exhibition. Well, the exhibition came and went and was a resounding success, and we have only just finished eating the thirteen kilograms of cheese that accompanied it.

My book is now at page proof stage, which for those of you not indentured to the publishing industry means the editing is more or less finished and the words have been laid (lain? anyone here an editor?) out into the design the pages will have when it is a real live bound book. It’s being proofread by a professional, and I’m reading it, and so are a few other people whose eagle eyes I trust. Next week I’m going round to an editor friend’s house to read it aloud to her, which will no doubt throw up a few more errors we can fix. It’ll be like audio books would have been in the olden days, before recording existed, when authors had to go from house to house reading their books aloud to people while they did the ironing, or sat in the back of the car reading to them while they drove to Canberra.

And there’s a cover now too. A cover which I completely love, which is a very lucky thing because authors don’t always get covers they love. I happen to have had an award-winning genius designer create my cover, which certainly increases your chances of getting a cover you love, but it’s never guaranteed.

Cover design processes can be a bit like clothes shopping with your mum: there’s a fair bit of getting affronted when a suggestion is made because while sure, that’s a nice enough large geometric print a-line tunic/ cover design, DO YOU EVEN KNOW ME/HAVE YOU EVEN READ THIS BOOK? When you’re shopping with your mum you can pretend you thought she meant the tunic was something she would like, and you both save face, but with book covers you are terrified of pissing anyone at the publisher off and getting a reputation as A Difficult Author so you have to just say ‘that’s a very interesting direction’ while also screaming ‘NO NO NO’ with your eyes, which has a less than 100 percent success rate when done via email. Luckily for me, it all worked out fantastically well and my cover is the greatest, so please feel free to judge my book by the cover and recommend it to your friends and family accordingly.

It’s only just occurred to me that one of the great benefits of a really good cover is that if you’re feeling a bit nervous and fearful for your book, (which let’s face it, who isn’t, because it’s taken everything in you to write it and get this far and what if everyone hates it?) then you get to wrap it in a protective layer of someone else’s talent to present it to the world. That is an excellent deal.

I’m not going to show the cover in this post, because I am doing what’s called Building Interest. Next time, I promise. Or sooner, over on Instagram Stories, which is where I do most of my day-to-day timewasting or ‘Content Production’ as I prefer to call it.

On the home front, all continues as it generally does at this time of year, with various viruses queueing up all the way down the street to take their turn to strike us down. This week it’s May Blossom’s turn with a chest infection, while last week we had Garnet with my personal favourite, the Night Vomits. I was certain we’d all get it, as the virus was so virulent that practically every kindergartener at the school came down with it. But it’s seven days and eighteen bottles of Domestos later, so I think we might have dodged it.

Oh, and I’ve rejoined the gym and lost my mind with enthusiasm over it, as I am wont to do. I’ve been three days in a row and now I can’t walk up the stairs. I’ve been doing Zumba classes with the old ladies, like I used to. It’s all the same old ladies that were there before, but now they’re a few years older and a few years hotter than me. But this time I like them more. Last time I found all the sexiness and gyration and shouting ‘woooo!’ that goes on in a Zumba class completely intolerable. It made me cringe to see them all flailing about, loving themselves and reclaiming their sex appeal. And all those mirrors. Gave me the absolute horrors. Probably because I’d just had a baby and had lost my centre of gravity along with my sense of self, and couldn’t swing my hips in the right direction or in time with the correct arm to save myself. I felt like a highly uncoordinated hippo in a salsa club.

I don’t know what’s changed. Maybe it’s that I no longer have postnatal depression. Maybe it’s that I’ve come to terms with my new maternal figure and have realised that life’s too short not to dance yourself stupid with a bunch of life-loving women a few times a week. Maybe it’s because the first class I went to happened to be a fundraiser for the drought-stricken farmers so everyone there except me and one other newbie was dressed head to toe in animal print, all the songs were African-themed and half of the class was taught by a man in a gorilla costume. Whatever the reason, now I feel like a sexy highly uncoordinated hippo in a salsa club, which is a distinct improvement.

Things around here are ticking along, as they do. Time is passing. Children are going to school, my first book is off with the editor, my next book is becoming notes on a page, which are slowly and unsurely revealing some sort of story. I don’t know. Don’t ask me about it.

Ask me about running. Because once again, I’ve taken up running. Well, jogging. But my knees got really sore, so my physiotherapist Nicole, one of the crack team of therapists it takes to keep me going these days, had a look and told me my kneecaps were not where they ought to be. Apparently they were sloping off round the side, like they thought they could get out of doing sport if no one could see them. Well sorry, kneecaps, it’s not that easy. We see you. Nicole dragged them back to the front and taped them firmly in place, which worked absolute wonders. She said they were causing the fat pads to bulge out the front, which was a revelation because I just thought that’s what my legs looked like. I’m not holding out great hopes that one day I will nice-to-look-at knees, but it’s exciting to think it’s not absolutely out of the question.

Pretty soon it may be all up to my knees to maintain my sex appeal. Because in addition to how I now pepper my pillow talk with references to fat pads, I also have to wear a mouthguard at night to stop me from grinding my teeth down to stumps. Hot. The dentist built up some facades on my front teeth, which were starting to look a bit like a shitty falling down fence. They look more like teeth now, but I have to be protected from myself with a charming plastic mouthguard when I sleep. It’s useful for games of night hockey though, I suppose.

I’ve also taken to wearing a mask over my eyes to get to sleep. I might as well just sleep in a sarcophagus. H is one lucky man.

Actually he is a lucky man, because he’s off right now on an excursion with Garnet’s class. They’ve gone to the Opera House to watch something or other. There are two parents joining the teacher for the outing, presumably for the purpose of sharing the blame if they lose any of the kids. They won’t lose the kids, probably, but if they do, H will be useful because as a psychologist he can provide the police with a behavioural profile of the kid they can’t find, and as an artist he can sketch them. He’s the whole package.

I’d like to be on the excursion but it’s my job today to stay home and work and listen to Spotify and its frankly judgmental playlists. Spotify has no sense of humour. You play ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’ ONE TIME for your kids, AS A JOKE, and for months Spotify has been all “Here’s some more Ini Kamoze for you, Jess, we know how you love a lyrical gangster.’ Sorry if I’ve now got that song in your head. But welcome to my world.

The best thing on my to-do list today, and you can be very sure I accomplished this first thing, was arranging the ordering of ten kilos of cheese for the opening night of H’s art exhibition. Yes, I know there is a lot of information in that sentence. Art exhibition, let’s begin with that. H and his fellow artist and friend Amy have an exhibition called Canopy (here’s a link, tell your art-loving friends, and come have a look) opening next Tuesday at a gallery in Camperdown. I’m ridiculously proud of them because they both have very time-consuming jobs and children and wives and yet they’ve managed to draw all these magnificent pictures of birds and trees and get them framed and hire a gallery and organise wine for the opening. I’ve volunteered to do the cheese, which was only partly so I could make quite laboured puns about canapés and canopies which people have mostly ignored. I have ordered ten kilos of cheese. I’ve gone cheese mad. I can’t brie stopped.

Like sorting Lego into colours, listing your worries makes you feel like you’re making progress. In both cases this is an illusion.

I’m supposed to be revising my manuscript. I’m supposed to be making the characters appear at the right times and the jokes be funny and the poignant parts be more plentiful and the scenes that don’t carry the plot forward be gone. But I can’t because I have too much panicking to do.

When I get like this, my first instinct is to panic at other people. Those in prime position to cop the panic are H and my Mum. I’ve panicked quite hard at them over the past few days and they’ve, in one voice, said ‘make a list of all the problems’ and ‘take the list to your counseller and stop banging on to us’. Obviously they said this in a nicer way.

What they probably really meant was ‘make a list and publish it on the internet, so there is a permanent record of your lunacy’, so that’s what I’ll be doing this morning.

Here, in no particular order, are all the world-ending crises currently affecting me.

1. Book 1: See above. I’m at the point where I’ve got a superb set of editorial notes from my publisher and agent. The purpose of these is for me to see how the book looks to fresh readers’ eyes, and very smart ones at that. Now, for many years I’ve been the one doling out the editorial notes, and that’s a lot of fun. I never really understood why upon receipt of such notes authors tended to go into a decline and take to their fainting couches and put the back of their right hand to their forehead and moan. Now I do.

‘I can’t to these revisions,’ I categorically told my friend this morning, as we walked home from dropping our kids at school.

‘You said that last year,’ she replied. ‘But you said you couldn’t even write the book in the first place.’

‘Oh yeah. Well this time I mean it.’

She went back into her house.

My panicked brain is saying I can’t under any circumstances to the work that needs doing. But if I dig a little deeper I realise it’s not that I can’t, but that I don’t want to. I want to have written a perfect book, first try. But I haven’t, because no one does. Especially not a first time novelist. There’s work to be done. The only way to do the work is to do the work. There’s really no way around it. That’s such a bugger. There’s nothing I like more than getting around things.

2. Book 2: I have to write another book. I can’t possibly do this. Who can write more than one book? No one, that’s who. It’s never been done. I’m unlikely to be the first.

3. May Blossom knows about the Internet. If that’s not enough to induce full-scale panic, I don’t know what is (apart from points 1 and 2 on this list.) She’s in year 2 and last week she had to sign a contract covering her use of the internet at school. We made her read it aloud to us. She read it beautifully. When she finished, she paused, then said ‘I have no idea what any of that meant.’

So we had to start explaining uploading photos and downloading images and cyberbullying and websites and it was all quite confronting. I used the example of my blog, when explaining how people white things and publish them on the internet. I explained how she has a pseudonym and there are no pictures of her face. She seemed highly sceptical of the whole arrangement and now I’m scared she’ll take legal action.

Oh yeah, and the Year 2s are learning javelin. Javelin and the Internet. Jesus. No one’s going to come out of this unscathed, are they?

4. Garnet has another ear infection. I assume this is because I am a bad mother who is preoccupied with her book.

5. Guns in America. It just makes me cry every time I think about children in American school and their parents sending them off every day, knowing that what should be unheard of is becoming commonplace. Seven of the children in America going off to schools and colleges in danger every day are my cousins and this makes me panic. I worry about my kids too, but not on the same level because we don’t have the same number of weapons as they do. I’m not saying javelins don’t kill people, but the javelin lobby here doesn’t have anywhere near the power of the gun lobby in the US.

6. Some of my friends are going through hard times and I find this outrageous and extremely unfair. I can’t fix their hard times, because I do accept there are a few problems in the world that I haven’t caused, but I’m not sure I’m doing enough to help them.

So there are my top six worries at the moment. Have you got any solutions for me? Because now I’ve written them down they’re not looking any less problematic. I suppose the answers are simply: just sit down and do it, just sit down and do it, throw all the computers and spears in the sea, antibiotics, peaceful protest, and send flowers/make lasagne for them. And take some deep breaths. As if I’m going to do any of that.

Here’s me at five, being bamboozled by sport. Nothing has changed.

My kids are now five and seven. As of two days ago they are both students at the local primary school. They wear uniforms, they will attend five days a week, and are learning to read and mathematicise and understand what the moon does (totally beyond me). The next thing, if I am to go by what all my neighbours and friends are doing, is for them to join some sort of sports team. Around where I live, lots of very nice people have their children in netball, soccer, cricket and that other one that’s like AFL but the players are roughly 85% uglier. They all seem to be thriving. I get the feeling we should be doing something like this.

So we had a vote recently in our house about whether any member of the family wanted anything to do with that sort of malarkey and the result was a landslide: 100% NO FUCKING WAY. I’m extremely relieved, but I feel guilty because maybe, despite all my feeling about team sports, they might matter. Lots of people I love and respect think they matter.

I truly did ask the children, in a neutral way, whether they wanted to play in a sports team this term and they really did say no, but I’m worried that I’ve influenced them in a subtle way, due to my less than happy sporting past. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not a total bunch of idle layabouts. I do understand about physical fitness and the importance of it from a health perspective, it’s just sport I don’t get.

H played team sports – including rowboating, horseless grass polo and perhaps AFL (I think? Possibly?). He liked them, and I think he was pretty good at some of them, and he still likes watching many sports, thought not so much that he’d chose it over at least six other activities.

Maybe I’ve ruined watching sport on TV for him, with my extreme bafflement about pretty much everything ball and field based and my very short attention span. I remember watching a lot of sport on TV when I was a kid, although I have recently realised that I only liked watching rugby and cricket and Formula 1 car racing because it was the only time my ABC-obsessed parents let me watch commercial TV. It was my one chance to discover products like Solo and Nutrigrain, companies like Windscreens O’Brien and Beaurepaires, and figure out what kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be by committing every detail of the models on the Ski Yoghurt and Flake chocolate bar ads to memory.

There’s this weird reverence about televised sport that I don’t understand. How come, for example, when I was a kid it was perfectly acceptable to watch TV for eleventy-six hours if was the cricket but if you wanted to watch eight episodes of Press Gang back to back you’d have been laughed out into the back yard?

So I don’t I like team sports and I don’t entirely know why. I played soccer for a season when I was five years old, which, in the strangely negative terms used by sporting teams is called Under Six. It wasn’t a terrifically competitive team, composed as it was of five year olds who didn’t know anything about soccer, being coached by a peace-loving Balinese Prince. I was one of two girls on the team and we received negative feedback from some of the other parents about our habit of moving everywhere by skipping, while holding hands. As far as I could tell, we weren’t doing soccer any worse than the other kids were doing soccer – we could skip faster than they could run — but it was rather off putting to be criticised so.

That was the first black mark against sport’s name in my book of reckoning. One other time I played in a cricket game at school and when I missed a catch it a few people said ‘good one’ in a way that seemed to mean the very opposite of that.

After that I stuck to individual sports, where if you didn’t win there weren’t so many people to blame you. If you lost that was down to you, or, and this is key, I think, you could blame the judges, because I mainly did gymnastics, where winning is somewhat subjective.

Maybe I just don’t like competition that much, although in some parts of life ‘m as competitive as anyone. I encourage it in my children, to a degree. You know, just in sensible ways like dinner-finishing races and who can locate my phone the quickest when I have to log into Find My iPhone on the computer and make the bugger play an alarm.

Individual sports are ok, like diving and gymnastics and I don’t mind the odd, quite short, running race. It’s just long complicated games I can’t handle. They’re like stories but without a decent narrative arc. They don’t make sense. There are all these rules no one can explain. They have nonsensical scoring systems and each one is different.

They don’t even go for a set amount of time, which is BONKERS. I remember when I went to my first AFL game and my then-boyfriend explained how there were seven quarters or whatever and that they all went for ninety-six minutes. Right, I thought, as long as I know what I’m in for. And then seven times ninety-six minutes later, when there was no end in sight, he casually mentioned that there is overtime but no one knows how long that goes for so you just have to stay basically forever. How is this not against the law?

And then there’s what joining a sports team does to the family’s weekend. Spoiler: nothing good, unless hours in the car driving all over the city, logistical planning slightly less complicated than your average Commonwealth Games and half a day spent standing either burning your face off in the summer sun or freezing in ankle deep mud in the winter. Seriously, what is the appeal? Is it just that your kids will grow up to be physically fine specimens who can join in when people talk about the tennis?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying May Blossom and Garnet start gymnastics tomorrow at 8 am because I can hold out against the forces of sport no longer. It’s the beginning of the end.

I’ve done a couple of these little three-day stints in the past few months, and until now they’ve been fantastic for getting a huge amount of work done in a really short time. There’s something about not having to get small people’s lunches made, clothes on, and delivered to school and preschool, then not having to plan dinner, shop for dinner, and do laundry and bath, dinner and bed that really helped me focus on the book.

Lots of people, when I said I was going to the country on my own to write, expressed concern. Mostly the people who have actually been to the house, because it is big, old and, not to put too fine a point on it, haunted.

I laughed off their concerns. I’ll be absolutely fine, I told them. It’s lovely and peaceful. Just me and the birds. And a few bats. I’m not scared. I lock up well at sunset, and I don’t ever look into the downstairs bedrooms when I walk past them. (This has been my rule since childhood. The ghosts may be there but if I don’t look at them then we’ll all get along fine.)

But this morning, a bit before 5, I was woken by music so loud I thought it was coming from inside the house. You know that feeling when you wake up with your heart pounding, in total terror? Like you’ve woken from a bad dream into a worse one? It was like that.

And to make matters worse, I was pretty sure there was no ghost involved. The ghosts in this house date from the 1870s and the song that was blasting right next to this isolated farmhouse was the 1992 dance hit ‘Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good)’. You’ll appreciate, this was horrifying on a number of levels.

After a minute or two my brain adjusted as I realised the music might be coming from outside the house, but very very nearby. There is a caretaker’s cottage on the property, but the sound wasn’t coming from that direction. Apart from that, there’s not another house for a long, long way.

I peered out the window. What I expected to see outside was some sort of combination of Wolf Creek and Say Anything: a psycho outside the house watching my window while holding up a ghetto blaster.

If I’d had to hazard a guess as to the identity of the psycho, I’d have said possibly the bloke who has been living for the past week in a camper trailer that looks like it’s been on fire more than once, beside the road down by the river a few hundred metres away from the front gate. His little roadside setup comprises the aforementioned pop-up camper, a generator, a busted-looking four wheel drive crammed with his possessions and one of those five-dollar fold up camping chairs from Bunnings, filled with a hundred golf balls.

But it was pitch black outside. And my window looked out the back, and I was pretty sure this was coming from the side of the house, possibly from the verandah underneath my bedroom.

Then there were some whoops and yells. They were just bloodcurdling icing on the bone-chilling cake.

And then the song finished. There was a brief snippet of another song, then silence. I returned to bed and lay there waiting for my heart to explode and kill me.

Finally the sun came up.

I packed up and left. On my way out I chatted to the caretakers. They hadn’t heard a thing. There were fresh tyremarks near the front gate, though, and they put the noise down to drugtaking locals arsing about.

As I drove off, I passed the roadside camp. The camper, who looked about twenty, had evicted the golf balls from the chair and he was sitting in it, wearing a hi-vis vest and a look of sheer lunacy. He was staring down the road.

A hundred metres on was another young man, running in the direction of the town, wearing only a pair of cargo pants, his long hair and beard streaming in the wind. And a hundred metres on from him, on this long straight stretch of road, was a woman, around forty, also running. She was wearing running clothes, but she was so fast I was a bit concerned. I slowed beside her and rolled down my window.

‘Do you know that man who’s running after you?’ I asked.

She turned and checked. It was like she’d only just noticed him. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said, ‘his gran lives up the road.’ She turned and started running back towards bare-chested cargo pants man, with her arms outstretched, like he was her long-lost love.

What a bunch of fucking crazies. I’ve never been so glad to leave one of my favourite places on earth in my life.

4 Simple Costumes!

1. Zombie: don’t sleep through the night for seven years. You’re good to go.

2. Cold Sore Monster: stress out like a maniac for a week before Halloween. By the big day you’ll have a nice crop of sores on your lips. Gross.

3. Count Moneysworth: get the shits about how many random costume parts are alreay in the toy box, yet no child will consider wearing. Put them all on at once. Wear at least three different types of animal ears. A couple of crowns. Novelty glasses, if you have them. Plastic vampire teeth. A mask. Harry Potter scarf. A tail or two. Job done.

4. Massive Killjoy: Striped shirt, jeans, flat sandals. Roll eyes constantly. Confiscate most of everyone’s treats. Make children eat chicken and vegetables before they go trick or treating.

8 Great Decorating Ideas!

1. Never wipe the cobwebs off your house.

2. Drive into your own fence so it’s all rickety.

3. Carve a jack-o-lantern two weeks early so it rots in the spring heat.

4. Forget to put the bins out for a couple of weeks before the big day. Add a heat wave.

5. Make sure your letterbox has fallen off the post and is just lying in the flowerbed. Like it would if an angry ghoul had kicked it there.

6. Scatter front path with junk mail, as if your house has been long abandoned.

7. Live beside an abandoned building site.

8. Decorate the orange tree with stink bugs. Accessorise with an angry man on a ladder plucking them off and swearing as he flings them into a bucket of poison.

Happy Halloween!