Monday 23rd July
Dear Bernie,
I had a dream a little while ago that I was on a boat on the wide, blue, sublime, sargasso sea and there were beanbags all over the deck. For a time I wondered what the beanbags meant.......... now I know they're floatation devices for when the boat sinks. Tamsin, your massage therapist ex-wife, must have had a sixth sense about the brevity of your planned visit next week. How come your ex-wife knows more about your travel arrangements than I do. Maybe I need to adopt Tamsin's mantra, for you know she let me in on The Secret.
So please don't ring me as I won't be home. I'll be on the commuter train catching flu and chanting, "This is the first day of the rest of my life and I'm eternally grateful for everything that life throws at me. I live in abundance and will never look at a beanbag with disdain again. I am at one with my flotation device....... I am at one with my flotation device."
I think you and Helen should stay at Bora Bora for as long as possible (provided you can get a broadband connection). It's a beautiful place and I wish you both every happiness. Isn't that where they made that iconic film, what do you call it, The Blue Lagoon? Helen could take an eyeliner pencil and she could make her eyebrows stretch right across her face and she could pretend she was Brooke Shields. You could be the boy that nobody knew the name of and you could play and frolick in the warm seas and catch fish. I've decided if ever I attempt love triangles again, I'll select an equilateral one in a warm climate. The scalene variety in the sub-zero temperatures really sucks. There's no water because it's all frozen in the pipes, which has given me the time instead of showering to write this email........ for which I am eternally grateful and I am at one with my frozen pipes, and this is the first day of the rest of my life, sequential and ad infinitum. I never did do Latin so I don't know if you spell it with a double d.
Harriet
Monday, July 23, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
banal dream analysis
It was now Sunday morning. Harriet and Maisie sat at the kitchen table eating pancakes
"So let me get this straight, did Bernie say he was coming back from the cruise in eight weeks or ten? Was that from when you spoke to him last or does it date back to the time he left?"
"From the time he left, I think....What's the copper for anyway?"
"It's to heat water down at the property at South Buggan, it's a gas one, you fill the copper container with water and a mysterious heating process happens, it's better than a solar shower. There's a photo of it in our last blog. Mind you there's no gas on there yet, but it's my attempt to get ready for the peak oil crisis."
"Oh, it's good to see you finally changed your lightbulbs."
"You know, the fluoro bulb thing has never convinced me. I'm concerned it's yet another conspiracy....oh that reminds me I had a dream about you last night. You were living happily ever after and there was definitely a warm glow."
"Were Bernie and Helen in the picture......or had I become a celibate lesbian by then?"
"Oh no sign of them. There was another man in the dream, he seemed supportive, you were happy, and he was there, definitely there."
"Well I suppose it's helpful if you actually are there in a relationship. What did he do?"
"What in the dream? Not much, it wasn't a very long dream, but I got the sense he wasn't high powered and out there, you know, not an environmental lawyer or anything. Something quite humble, but so what, he was nice and supportive and not too blokey. It's the inner qualities that count after all, but I don't know where you're going to bump into him. Maybe he lives in a flat in Killara."
"I hate Killara, and Turramurra....... and Gordon. Bernie took me for coffee in Turramurra once when we went canoeing, it was one of the low points in our relationship.
"Well maybe you'll have to go to Tasmania to bump into the man in the dream, you should book the trip while Bernie and Helen are still on the cruise."
"I've only just been away to Mt Selwyn with Liz and the teenagers. When we went to Thredbo for the day, so the teenagers could go snowboarding, I realised that I could never be a snowbunny. I was the only person in the whole of Thredbo who was wearing wool, and you know that tea-cosy beanie that comes from the Fair Trade place, you know like the Fair Trade tea and coffee and is dyed and handmade by women in Bolivia. I wore that, it was alright till I fell over and all the snow got stuck to the wool."
"What did you do all day, y'know, Liz can't ski."
"She's getting better after practicing on the golf course at Thredbo. Well, we spent the first three hours sitting in the Alpine Hotel reading newspapers and listening to the conversations of the rich and vacuous."
"Did you order anything?"
"Well, by the fourth hour we felt a bit guilty and ordered a cup of tea. We were reading the Herald and discussing whether to take our explorer socks off and dry them by the fire. Nearby there were two men, legs akimbo, drinking peach schnaps and boasting about the exceptional value of their 20k two week holiday. You should have heard it, they even took a poor boy with them who was depressed as he'd just been expelled from Kings."
Just then Cedric walked into the kitchen and had a dramatic coughing fit.
"See he's just like the girl on the commuter train that gave him the flu in the first place. I'm sure I'm coming down with something."
"But doesn't he work at the bottle shop?"
Cedric replied,"I'm not just like the girl on the train. Look I've been covering my hand with my...I mean my mouth with my hand."
"Quick someone, get him some tissues."
"I've got some, look! I'm going, I've got the message. I'll just go back to my beanbag in my sunroom, but first I'm going to trim my maiden hair ferns."
Maisie made another cup of tea. "I've been thinking, you know a triangle can only remain eternal if it's equilateral, I can't see how a scalene or an isoceles could hold its shape over time."
Saturday, July 14, 2007
The Weekend that wasn't
Harriet and Maisie met for their regular Saturday morning cup of tea. The previous night had not gone well. Maisie the spinster school teacher had been confronted by her personal 
black dog earlier in the day and a shopping trip to the op shop at Lithgow to purchase a copper hadn't eased the emotional pain. Meanwhile Harriet had gone to the local bowling club for an environmental comedy night and had indulged in a rather ominous looking merlot.
"It reminds me of the time I drank all that mulled wine on the camping trip to Mt Selwyn when I had to sleep in the back of the ute. Did I tell you that your hair looks like a rats nest, especially at the back, why don't you let me cut it for you.
"How's the love triangle going anyway?" Maisie was always interested in the secrets of other peoples romances. In her spare time she was writing a novel about love and was always fascinated to find all of the corners of a new love triangle. She always wanted to unpick these love fabrics and restitch them in a new form.
"Not so great," replied Harriet,"They've gone to Bora Bora on a cruise, they've told me it's ten weeks but there's an option to extend it for another two. He's got to come back for a work meeting at the end of the month so I'll be able to see him for 24 hours."
"Oh, how long's the meeting?"
"It's all day but he might take a sickie and stay an extra night, any longer than that and she'll feel abandoned and turn a little bit high maintenance."
They were making fried tofu and shitake mushroom omelette. Later they were planning to walk the dogs up to the village and indulge in a latte. Harriet admired Maisie's typing abilities, once upon a time she'd been able to touch type at 60wpm, it was one of her 'big moments' as she liked to call them. Maisie was desperately lonely and was thinking of becoming a librarian, the children at school called her Madam Have No Fun and it was starting to give her migraines. She admired Harriet's zest for life and the many adventures she was able to manifest through the power of positive thought. Once she'd met a fellow traveller on the commuter train to Sydney and befor the day was out they had dined at Bar Italia and exchanged phone numbers.
"Do you think the collar is a little too big for Captain Goodspot? asked Cedric the neighbour as he wandered in with a basketful of lemons from the garden. He'd been a vegan for far too long and sometimes felt faint if he stood up too quickly.
Just then the phone rang, it was one of their friends,"I'm just on my way to Charing Cross. Charing Cross, Waverley...that is." Maisie and Harriet were speechless. They were engaged in a philosophical discussion.
"Do you really think that Jane Austen wrote about social contracts?"
"The problem with a social contract is that it remains far too general, the specifics aren't ironed out, the opposite of bi-polar, oh myopic I mean"
"What are you going on about? What did the dyslexic, socialist, insomniac, agnostic pet lover do?"
"Oh I know this one......speaking of which Cedric has such a bad commuter flu that I could hear him coughing through the tree tops all night long. I woke up from the strangest dream, I was on a cruise ship looking out across the great wide sublime sargasso sea and all around me on the deck were beanbags. What do you think that might mean? Then I woke with a start...."
Cedric doubled up with a grim, pnuemonic spasm.
"What do you think we could give him for that?"
"Lemon and honey....... I think we make a social contract with everybody and if you ask me people should stick
to their side of them. What's the point of spouting philosophical points such as; "Ultimately we're all alone", when you're not the one that's abandoned and besides which if you haven't even read Goethe, which I haven't, or Kant for that matter, I've only read a bit of Nietzche but I don't know how to spell it. What I'm saying is if you haven't read the great philosophers than how can you position yourself in a philosophical discourse, do your words then just become a flurry of hot air?"
"Thus spoke Zarathustra....when he was on the hillside communing with Ahura Mazda.....did you know there's a fire somewhere in the middle east that has been kept burning by Zoacastrians for thousands of years?"
"I wish my Jotul would do that, it always goes out."
And Harriet said,"Yes, there's no one around to light my fire either! Actually that's the hardest part of this triangle business."
Maisie replied,"If I was going to be in a love triangle I'd like it to be an equilateral one in a warm climate. The whole scalene thing sucks if you ask me."
"I didn't ask."
“I think Bora Bora was an atoll in the Pacific that the French used for nuclear testing in the seventies, I’m not sure though. Maybe it’s a nuclear waste dump now, or it’s the capital of the Bikini Islands. It would be a good place for beach combing then. You know there’s a whole cargo cult that is supported by flotsam and jetsom”
Harriet pulled a sour face,“The thing is about lemon and honeys is that you need a lot more honey in them. Do you realise that we have to put in a daily entry on our blog”
“You’ll have to learn how to access it first,” said Cedric
“Good point”
black dog earlier in the day and a shopping trip to the op shop at Lithgow to purchase a copper hadn't eased the emotional pain. Meanwhile Harriet had gone to the local bowling club for an environmental comedy night and had indulged in a rather ominous looking merlot."It reminds me of the time I drank all that mulled wine on the camping trip to Mt Selwyn when I had to sleep in the back of the ute. Did I tell you that your hair looks like a rats nest, especially at the back, why don't you let me cut it for you.
"How's the love triangle going anyway?" Maisie was always interested in the secrets of other peoples romances. In her spare time she was writing a novel about love and was always fascinated to find all of the corners of a new love triangle. She always wanted to unpick these love fabrics and restitch them in a new form.
"Not so great," replied Harriet,"They've gone to Bora Bora on a cruise, they've told me it's ten weeks but there's an option to extend it for another two. He's got to come back for a work meeting at the end of the month so I'll be able to see him for 24 hours."
"Oh, how long's the meeting?"
"It's all day but he might take a sickie and stay an extra night, any longer than that and she'll feel abandoned and turn a little bit high maintenance."
They were making fried tofu and shitake mushroom omelette. Later they were planning to walk the dogs up to the village and indulge in a latte. Harriet admired Maisie's typing abilities, once upon a time she'd been able to touch type at 60wpm, it was one of her 'big moments' as she liked to call them. Maisie was desperately lonely and was thinking of becoming a librarian, the children at school called her Madam Have No Fun and it was starting to give her migraines. She admired Harriet's zest for life and the many adventures she was able to manifest through the power of positive thought. Once she'd met a fellow traveller on the commuter train to Sydney and befor the day was out they had dined at Bar Italia and exchanged phone numbers.
"Do you think the collar is a little too big for Captain Goodspot? asked Cedric the neighbour as he wandered in with a basketful of lemons from the garden. He'd been a vegan for far too long and sometimes felt faint if he stood up too quickly.
Just then the phone rang, it was one of their friends,"I'm just on my way to Charing Cross. Charing Cross, Waverley...that is." Maisie and Harriet were speechless. They were engaged in a philosophical discussion.
"Do you really think that Jane Austen wrote about social contracts?"
"The problem with a social contract is that it remains far too general, the specifics aren't ironed out, the opposite of bi-polar, oh myopic I mean"
"What are you going on about? What did the dyslexic, socialist, insomniac, agnostic pet lover do?"
"Oh I know this one......speaking of which Cedric has such a bad commuter flu that I could hear him coughing through the tree tops all night long. I woke up from the strangest dream, I was on a cruise ship looking out across the great wide sublime sargasso sea and all around me on the deck were beanbags. What do you think that might mean? Then I woke with a start...."
Cedric doubled up with a grim, pnuemonic spasm.
"What do you think we could give him for that?"
"Lemon and honey....... I think we make a social contract with everybody and if you ask me people should stick
to their side of them. What's the point of spouting philosophical points such as; "Ultimately we're all alone", when you're not the one that's abandoned and besides which if you haven't even read Goethe, which I haven't, or Kant for that matter, I've only read a bit of Nietzche but I don't know how to spell it. What I'm saying is if you haven't read the great philosophers than how can you position yourself in a philosophical discourse, do your words then just become a flurry of hot air?""Thus spoke Zarathustra....when he was on the hillside communing with Ahura Mazda.....did you know there's a fire somewhere in the middle east that has been kept burning by Zoacastrians for thousands of years?"
"I wish my Jotul would do that, it always goes out."
And Harriet said,"Yes, there's no one around to light my fire either! Actually that's the hardest part of this triangle business."
Maisie replied,"If I was going to be in a love triangle I'd like it to be an equilateral one in a warm climate. The whole scalene thing sucks if you ask me."
"I didn't ask."
“I think Bora Bora was an atoll in the Pacific that the French used for nuclear testing in the seventies, I’m not sure though. Maybe it’s a nuclear waste dump now, or it’s the capital of the Bikini Islands. It would be a good place for beach combing then. You know there’s a whole cargo cult that is supported by flotsam and jetsom”
Harriet pulled a sour face,“The thing is about lemon and honeys is that you need a lot more honey in them. Do you realise that we have to put in a daily entry on our blog”
“You’ll have to learn how to access it first,” said Cedric
“Good point”
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