Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 20, 2020

Sometimes you need to be reminded to look after yourself.

I mean, it’s harder these days because when you watch more television shows on platforms without ads, so you miss out on the ads that suggest you can’t just go letting yourself wallow in a hole. I remember a while back, in the VCR days, there was an ad for vaguely healthy microwaveable meals where there was a worried mum on the phone to her daughter asking if she was looking after herself*. Or the one for an I-don’t-need-to-name-the-brand-because-its-marketing-team-did-so-well hair care company telling me I’m worth it**.

* I can’t find the ad I’m thinking of on YouTube, which means it either never existed OR some noble soul hasn’t uploaded it to YouTube. I’m hoping it did exist and it’s still out there, waiting for someone with spare time, access to old microwaveable meal commercials and a good heart will upload it to a searchable internet platform. Until then, here’s a New Zealand alternative. 

** I did some research into that campaign and found this little explainer about it. I mean,  feminism and capitalism together, selling haircare products? Excellent. 

I mean, if I was that run down that I’d need to rely on a microwavable dinner for some low-effort sustenance, I’d probably chuck on a piece of toast for dinner instead. And my hair colour is too intertwined with my identity for me to go dying it. So an ad would have to be pretty powerful to make me change that behaviour, but I do like the face-level sentiment of the ads to take care of myself (but, hey, it’s not a failure of the advertising teams, because that brand recognition is still strong like 15 years on).

I mean, sure, I know that I need to eat healthy-enough food, do some exercise and shower regularly, but sometimes the specifics of “looking after yourself” get lost in the day-to-day.

Take a toothbrush, for example.

Do you remember when you last changed yours? Maybe you do. Maybe you have a regimented routine for replacing your personal hygiene products and you keep track of the passing of time in a conscious way. In which case, I am impressed.

But I will generally keep using things out of habit until they are worn to the point of them no longer being effective. And, this was the case before I did shift work and worked weekends so days of the week became irrelevant, I tend to operate slightly oblivious to the calendar. It’s odd, because I am religious with my diary, but I glaze over the dates. Like, I’ll forget birthdays not because I’ve forgotten the date someone was born, but because I don’t realise that particular date is creeping up.

For example, I have a pair of comfy floral boxer shorts I was given in the goody bag of a hens party a few years back (hens parties so much better than stags dos – you still get as wild, but there’s also like scented-candle-and-pyjama element to the traditional womenfolk pre-wedding ritual). I have worn them to the point that the elastic has completely lost its power and whenever I wear them, I have to continually hoik them up so the world doesn’t see my knickers – which, let’s be honest, sometimes are quite overworn themselves. I know I should replace the elastic, but I’ll probably keep wearing the shorts like this for the net six months.

Or like when you use a razor so much that goes beyond being blunt and starts to actively damage your skin with its ineffective blade. It gets to the point where I have to shave over the same spots a few times and my skin gets irritated. I think that I should replace the razer head. But it usually takes a few weeks to get from the point of this thought entering my head and the replacement ceremony.

It’s the same with a toothbrush. I will keep using it and using it until the bristles start curling over themselves. I mean, part of this is because there was a period in my childhood where I didn’t brush my teeth according to dentist recommendations and like 40 per cent of my teeth were fillings. I suspect there’s a psychological hangover where I like to prove that I am, indeed, brushing my teeth by having a worn brush, but there’s also the habit, the obliviousness to how long I’ve been using it, the general meh-ness of routine.

But when a within-the-legal-number-of-visitors-to-my-home visitor used the bathroom and pointed out the sorry state of my toothbrush recently, it prompted action.

I bought a value pack of toothbrushes and tossed the used brush out of my life. And, I have to say, I noticed the difference. Not just in the sense that having fresh bristles actually leaves your teeth feeling alarmingly clean (alarming because I don’t know how long I was using that old brush for or how effective my dental hygiene routine was), but in other aspects too.

I’m planning on getting more elastic for my shorts*. I’ve changed my razor head. I’ve thrown away some leftovers that were suss. I’ve washed bath towels BEFORE they started smelling. Heck, I might even get rid of the saggy knickers lingering in the bottom of my underwear drawer.

Because I’m worth it.

* I haven’t actually fixed my soggy shorts yet, but I’m still planning on doing it. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 13, 2020

I have an addiction.

I grew up in quite an anti-waste kind of household. I mean, we never made our own toilet paper or anything, but we tried to be sustainable before being sustainable was cool. My parents are just pretty practical people who just don’t see the point of chucking something into the rubbish when it can be re-used as something else.

Our veggie scraps fed the chooks. Our empty cardboard boxes went to either Treasure Island* or the Early Education Centre** for the youngsters to use in crafts. Beer bottles went to the Scout Hut. And all our old jars were kept under the sink to be taken up to the hospital to be filled with fundraising jam.

* The local pirate-themed childcare centre

** That’s what they called the Prep classroom in my old primary school when Prep was still a whizbang new idea. I think the school got some kind go grant to go in early with that whole prep thing, which meant we were able to turn the weird concrete-heavy storage room under the school from a vague music room to practice our Stations of the Cross arena spectaculars into a legit classroom with actual floor covering. It was a pretty big deal at the time. 

It became habit to save reusable things and it’s something that I haven’t let go as I blossom into my Late Twenties Era.

This is a time when you’re still young and hip enough to end up at da clubz on a night out (well, it’s really only just da one club I end up at and that’s da club that plays the chart topping hits that are at least a decade old…) but mature enough to make your own bread and get the weekend newspapers delivered.

I appointed myself House Sustainability Convenor when I moved in and have introduced a more regimented recycling program. My cooperative housemates have embraced this change, but not to the same extent of me. You see, they put their jars in the recycling box/green bag/whatever receptacle we can fit under the sink ready to be emptied into the wheelie bin with the yellow lid.

But I fish out the old jars, clean them in the dishwasher and save them for other uses. I just can’t leave them there.

It’s like they call to me and I can’t silence their glassy siren calls in my head until I’ve collected them from the recycling. It’s a bit like Frozen 2, except less mysterious and with a shocking lack of ice-inspired diva dresses.

It drives my anti-clutter housemate nuts. She’s big into keeping things neat, tidy and hassle free, so having a bunch of empty jars sitting around the house doesn’t sit will with her. And I mean, we live in a cosy little house with very limited storage. She has a point.

So I make sure to use what I have as quick as I can.

I have a collection of nuts, flours and dried fruits – which I use to make decadent fruit bread because I’m in my late twenties – that I keep in the jars. I have spare jars to keep the honey I bulk buy in three kilo buckets so I don’t have to keep dipping a teaspoon into the vat of stickiness. But I mostly like to use the jars for plant cuttings.

A while ago now I bought this big drippy kind of succulent from a lady who runs a plant stall out front of her house on the Gatton side of Ma Ma Creek. I have no idea what type it is, but it has these long strings of fat, juicy leaves that look like ticks who have had one heck of a feed, except green. They just dangle over the pot in an effortless, artful kind of way. When I moved into this place, I cut off a few danglers – that’s what I call them, but I’m fairly certain that’s the scientific term for them too – from the Mother Plant and shoved them into the pots in the vertical garden the previous owners built to block out the relentless sun from the back deck.

And now they are thriving. Like, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it looks like something an Instagram influencer would have.

But they’re thriving to the point now where it’s almost too much.

The danglers are danglin’ so low they’re approaching the ground. So I’ve started clipping off little bits here and there. But, again, because I don’t want to go wasting anything, I don’t just chuck the offcuts away.

I shove them into soil in the salvaged jars and let them take root. I have them lined up on the little plant bench I put on the back deck without prior approval from the house council, and somehow managed to avoid an official infringement notice despite how untidy (or, as I like to say, “homey and rustic”) it can look.

But the problem is that, eventually, you get to have too many cuttings on the bench. There’s only so much room.

So I’ve started insisting people take them with them as very trendy, grown up party bags when they come over to the house. It’s wholesome as all heck and just screams Trendy Late Twenties Chic.

So I try to send people home with some greenery whenever they pop by.

Unfortunately, in These Uncertain Times, we haven’t had too many people popping by lately and the people who do pop by have already got some cuttings or are tired of refusing my plant offerings. And in These Uncertain Times I feel like I’m going through jar-related foods much faster than usual. And I’m not talking just jam or stir fry jars, but bottles of various backgrounds and don’t even get me started on the empty scented candle vessels I have floating around.

Even I’m starting to think it’s a bit much now.

Thankfully, those restrictos are lifting soon.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an underwhelming recipe, and I’m feeling particularly lazy this week so it’s time for me to give some self-indulgent, unnecessarily wordy directions about how to do extremely basic things in a kitchen setting.

And, look, I’m well aware there’s a growing movement against recipes that have a bit of a life story tacked on to the front. I’ve seen the memes. I get it. So I’m bolding the explicit instructions so you can skim over the rest of this dribble if you chose to deprive yourself of my expertly crafted prose. You’re gonna have to scroll the fuck down if that’s all you’re after.

But, I mean, if you need a recipe for heating up a banana and plonking it on yoghurt, I’m deeply concerned for you. I highly doubt you were brought here because you thought that you wanted to heat up a banana and typed into Google “tell me how to heat up banana please” and it took you here. I know my demographic. Intimately. I’m related to a bunch of you. And I know a few of you HATE bananas. One of you can’t even stomach the thought of touching a banana’s skin. So I know that you’re not here to for a recipe.

So you bastards can just sit and read what I’ve taken the time to write, consarnit. Now, on with the why-is-this-even-a-recipe-recipe.

It’s getting cold. Eating nice food is nice. It’s only natch to want to shovel something sweet and warming into your oesophagus. But you can’t go eating deep fried lard balls dipped in chocolate for dessert every night, because eventually we will be allowed back at da clubz and I’ve heard rumours that the hipster jeans made famous by early 2000s Paris Hilton are on their way back in fashion again. And if you want to carelessly rub up against strangers at da clubz in hipster jeans, having a tight rig is going to up your chances of attracting the singlet-clad beefcake of your dreams.

So if you want to treat yourself with something sweet to acknowledge the impressive achievement of making it to the end of another day without loosing your cool and tearing the siding off the exterior of your home with your bare hands but don’t want to be munging on junk, heating up a banana and plonking it on some yoghurt is a good option to consider.

I mean, I also do this because I often goo too nuts with bananas at the grocery store and can’t be arsed to turn them into banana bread.

You’ll need:

• A banana
• Some yoghurt
• Like 20 grams of butter
• Shredded coconut
• Oatz

The first to do is heat up the butter a small non-stick frypan you can shove in the dishwasher afterwards so you can free yourself of the shackles of washing up. Don’t go too too hard heat-wise for heaven’s sake, keep it on a low to medium heat.

Slice up your banana lengthways. Not too thin or it’ll be too flaccid to handle and not too thick or it will take too long to got all goey. You should get three decent sized slices.

Slap the nana into the bubbling butter and enjoy the scent as it invades your nostrils.

Slop a few scoops of yoghurt into a bowl. I use full-fat Greek yoghurt because being a white girl who uses full fat dairy products is apparently radical and staunchly feminist because fuck the patriarchy and its low-fat women’s yoghurt agenda. I mean, dairy is a gift from our bovine sisters and we should be honouring that, not diluting it with desires to slim down to fit within the constraints of the idealistic female form to appease the menfolk. Rise up, dairy queens.

Sprinkle on a few pinches of the shredded coconut and oats.

Once the banana is bubbly and caramelised, flip said fruit with a spatula. It’s pretty delicate at this point, so be carefee.

Once the other side is sufficiently browned, slap the slices on top of the yogurt.

There, done.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, May 6, 2020

These days, you have to get a little creative to have a good time.

We have a house whiteboard at the moment, which we’re using as a way to keep track of what unnecessarily-decadent meals we’re making, to sprout our homemade “inspirational” quotes and come up with things to look forward to in the week ahead.

I don’t know about you, but after the initial flurry of COVID confusion and late-Sunday-night press conferences, the weeks have had something of a stagnant feel to them. After the adrenaline and action, there’s a sense of calm that somehow feels more draining than the non-stop slog.

A good way to combat a restless rut is to plan things for the future. To give yourself something to look forward to. Lights and tunnels, and all that jazz.

Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to do that when you’re supposed to be staying within your own neighbourhood – and many places within that neighbourhood are shut.

I mean, we’ve all got plans for When All This Is Over – for me, there’s an increasingly long-term goal of a trip to the UK and Ireland, a visit to Uluru and an insufferably bougie group trip to WA’s wine regions. I mean, I personally think it would be fantastic to embark on a great Australian road trip from Brisbane to Margret River, but I think most of the group is waiting until domestic flights are open for non-essential travellers again, which is still a bit of a way off by the looks of it.

While these vague plans are carrots dangling overhead in the unknowable distance, we’ve needed to have things in our more immediate future.

So, for the tail end of the week, we had the words “Backyard Wine Tour” to help drag our sorry selves towards the weekend.

Now, what’s a backyard wine tour you ask?

Well, each housemate had to select two bottles of wine that neither of us have tried before and introduce it to the other housemates as if they were an expert at a fictional winery. We had to come up with names for our “wineries” and offer some swanky nibblies to go with the plonk. We also had to dress up in the kind of kit you would wear on a winery tour – think linens, florals and floppy hats.

Essentially, we were playing wineries. Sort of how you used to play in the Home Corner at preschool, except with alcohol.

It was an exercise in planning, cooking and improvisation/talking out of your arse.

(In case you’re interested, my winery was called Ice CUBErnet, because its long-held philosophy was to promote the benefits of chilled red wine and how chewing the cubes as you go helps to hydrate the drinker and prevent hangovers. My winery also had an iconic wombat and a strict, foot squashing only policy for mushing the grapes).

As you can imagine, there was all kinds of frivolity on the day. Six bottles between three people with nowhere to go, nothing to do and not much to look forward to got a little out of hand.

There was a broken glass, a few stains on my white shirt and a large candle that melted wax all over the decking on the veranda. And, at some point, my housemates had arranged for greasy, greasy fried chicken to be present in the house as an attempt to soak up some of the day’s events.

After the dawn broke the following day, my housemate had to make an early dash to the servo for milk for the morning cuppas. My shirt was soaking in the bathroom sink. The wax was very much attached to the wooden decking. And the grease from the fried chicken was giving me visions of those fatbergs that clog London drains, which build up in the sewers in ginormous rancid clumps (of course, in this scenario, my intestines were the underground drains and there are no brave, noble souls to go in and clear all the gunge out with shovels and buckets).

I had something else to add to the whiteboard that morning: “rebuild our lives”.

At least it’s something to do.

Right so I’ve been a wee bit slack this week on account of some disgustingly early starts.

I’ve been neglecting my buns-sculpting routines, living off leftovers and experiencing a lot of unplanned naps.

So I haven’t whipped up anything special for today’s schedule posts, even though I had the whole day to do so yesterday. Thankfully, I have a whole bunch of Word Documents on my desktop containing half-written columns that I’ve abandoned but can’t bring myself to place in the digital trashcan. They’re mostly rants that I’ve gone on after being inspired by the muse of unwarranted rage at trivial things. Halfway through writing it down, I either run out of steam or, faced with my reasoning in black and white, I realise that perhaps I’m overreacting and back the heck off. I decide that no one needs to read it and it’s best to just let it go.

I was going to revive one of these I-will-die-on-this-hill kind of rants, but as I started to write the introduction to something that ticks me off about mileage, I referenced one very timely example of something that makes me cranky: Mother’s Day.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the day itself – I certainly hope to one day be congratulated for squeezing life out of my vagina with a luxe pair of silky pyjamas (the plan is to have children when I can afford to keep them alive while still living like a diva, soooo I may never reproduce). It’s nice to say thanks to the woman who brewed you up from a tiny zygote into a person.

But it’s the gramma of Mother’s Day that shits me.

I’m not often a grammar Nazi because that would be extremely hypocritical of me, as someone who often commits cardinal sins against the English language. In fact, I’ve probably already committed many in this blog post. I think it’s about writing the way you talk and, even though the way you talk doesn’t always align with the rules of grammar, you’re still able to communicate your message to someone. I’m liberal in that sense – language is fluid and evolves with society and what was incorrect 60 years ago might not suit the uses we have for language today. And, while I’m at it, who even gets to decide what the “rules” are for gramma anyhow?! But I digress. This is a conversation to be had over a bottle of wine.

BUT I’ve been irked by the apostrophe placement in Mother’s Day – and Father’s Day – since I became aware of news organisations style guides. A style guide is a like a grammar bible for a news organisation to follow to ensure that all copy is consistent. It sounds very boring, but it’s actually quite interesting if you unpack it all. Again, a cracking topic to discuss over a bottle of wine.

Anyway, the style has always been Mother’s Day. And I thought it should be Mothers’ Day, because it’s a celebration of all the mothers out there. It’s not just a single mother’s day, but a day for a whole bunch of mothers. I’ve always been irate over it, but never actually looked into the issue. So I decided to do some scholarly research.

And, after reading three articles that appeared on the first page of Google results, I have a few things to impart.

Firstly, as I learned from a blog by a bloke called Rob Ashton, Mother’s Day was celebrated in the UK in the 17^thCentury, when it was known as Mothering Sunday. It was on the fourth Sunday in Lent and a day when apprentices and servants could take a break from their assumedly unpleasant lives to go home to visit their mums.

But this kind of died out there until World War II, when US troops brought over the Mother’s Day tradition and made it cool again (I would like to think they said Mother’s Day was so “fetch”, but I haven’t seen any research that would confirm this).

And on May 9, 1914 the US president Woodrow Wilson – who you’ll remember was Bart’s inspiration for the name of the man who was writing love notes to his teacher Mrs Krabappel – signed a document declaring the second Sunday in May was a day for set aside “as a public expression of love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

And on that proclamation was Mother’s Day. Apostrophe between the R and the S.

But before you go blaming the Yanks for all this, there’s a point that goes deeper. The folk behind The Grammaphobia Blog go into the history before this declaration. There was a woman called Anna Jarvis who organised services to honour her mum after she died in May, 1905.

And this blog points to a dissertation by the historian Katharine Antolini about this this Jarvis lady, who apparently Jarvis wanted the singular possessive to emphasise that it was the day to honour your own, personal mother, not mothers in general.

So, I guess that’s that.

I have no way to end this, so I’m just going to leave you with a link to the best song about mothers there is. I implore you to click on this link.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Look, I’m not going to lie, this isn’t going to be the most brilliant blog post you’ll ever read.

But it might just change your life.

I’m feeling a wee bit under the weather for reasons that may be related to the consumption of red wine, white wine, beer and mojito, but could also be a stomach bug things that’s going around. It’s impossible to tell. Anyway, in light of my current condition, I’m not really in a position to be composing the kind of “yeah geez, that really made me think” intellectual gut punches that you’re used to copping from this site. But I still want to contribute my ideas to the world. I still want to be part of your weekend. I still want to connect with you through this medium, even though the chances are you’re in a secret Snapchat group with me.

So I’ve whipped up this little morsel for you to mung on to tied you over until I bash out something print-worthy (which is to say, a piece that went to print, how worthy that may of the ink and paper be is open to interpretation) on Wednesday.

My sister and I planned a cheeky we’re-allowed-to-picnic-now picnic yesterday, which obviously called for egg salad sandwiches.  I mean, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but a good egg sal sang is can be better than repeatedly penetration in a rapid succession.

And I’m not just saying that because of that whole double yolker episode from a few weeks back, which will absolutely prove to be the peak of my career. Egg salad sandwiches are just really, really good. That’s an undeniable fact.

Anyway, my sister, being the organised legal beagle she’s trainer herself to become, looked up a recipe for egg salad to ensure we had the best eggy mush to slop on to our bread. I mean, I personally just crush the eggs with some mayo and pepper and a bit of something extra (you might say the extra ingredient is salt). But she wanted to get it right. And good heavens, did we get it right.

Because this recipe called for a few bits of snipped up shallots to the gunge.

And, sure, the extra pops of green added a certain level of aesthetic to the egg, but it was the oniony fly kick to the tastebuds that raised the sangs from “essential” to “YESsential”. (yep, that’s where I’m out mentally right now, this whole thing just worked up to an underwhelming pun).

I’m not the best person to be giving out life advice, but I think I’m well within my rights to strongly suggest you try snipping a few deep green rings of pep into your next egg salad.