This week we had an electricity blackout.%% A big one. I was at the mall when alarms started going off; most people ignored them. The local mall has a water leakage issue that constantly sets off the fire alarms and we’ve all heard it before. They should just make a fire engine parking space at the back entrance, but this time seemed different. The supermarket was on quarter lighting, alarms were going off out the back, and the staff rushed about shutting all the fridges and putting away all the deli goods.

This was serious. An announcement said there would be further information but I grabbed my purchases and walked home.

At home, the power shut off as I came in the door.

Then it remained off.

The entire region was out. An estimated 26,000 homes, the traffic lights, the railway station, the local hospital… everything. All we could hear in our front street was ambulance sirens. Later, a friend in the police force said they had all available ambulances ferrying patients to other hospitals.

We have a gas stove, so with the aid of a good old box of matches we could heat water and cook.

But the internet was also affected; all the nodes were down and our phones were useless.

The cause was a fire in a substation basement and the problem was that such fires release toxic chemicals so no one could go in there until it cleared. Plus, no power for fans to clear the mess and no windows to open. It seems like an obvious design fault, but still…

At about 5:30pm we got power back. Kid 3 got a craving for a halal snack pack so we headed off to walk to the local. Amazingly, it was open but it only takes cash and we had none. Trust the ex-refugees to have a cash economy and a generator. All the first responders know this and eat there.

Everything else was dead; the pub, the petrol station, all the ATM machines. A highway patrol officer was directing traffic and had probably been doing it for hours. On our walk, we noticed that none of our neighbours had lights on. Just us and our street. We are close to the hospital and have formed a theory that we are inside its service loop. [at my exercise class everyone else got the power back at 6:30 am the next day]

‘This is how the apocalypse starts’, I said to Kid 3. ‘First the internet goes, then the power, and no-one has any cash. We’ll be reduced to a barter economy.’ We went home and cooked burgers.

I cannot imagine how much food had to be thrown away by the supermarkets.

The electricity supplier is begging people not to turn on high energy using appliances, but of course, it’s on their webpage and nobody can read it. People with power won’t bother and people without can’t. It’s almost like they don’t understand their own business.

%% this was written on 15th February but when the power DID come back on it fried all the internet nodes. We had no internet for six days, no TV, no games, and no ability to post the blogpost I had written and then forgotten about. Honestly, my house nearly went feral. I had to go to the library to keep up my 4theWords streak.

So swings and roundabouts I guess. We got power early but lost the Internet.

Early in 2018 I bought a complete DVD boxset of Agatha Christie’s Poirot with David Suchet.

It’s a beast. There are multiple disks on each spike.

See that? 5050 minutes… almost 85 hours.

And it has taken me a little while to watch them all. It revelatory to see how the production values changed over the series; and as always it’s a game of ‘spot the awesome English actor’.

It is singularly amazing that all the main character actors stuck it out for the entire series. It would not be the same if it wasn’t the right Hastings or Chief Inspector Japp or Miss Lemon in the last episodes. Expertly played by Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson and Pauline Moran respectively.

But more and more I see just how clever Christie was. They are amazing stories. An absolute master class in mystery writing.

It’s as if she challenged herself. I’ll make the murderer the narrator. I’ll make the murderer one of the victims. I’ll make the murderer the doctor. I’ll make the murderer all the suspects. I’ll make the murderer the investigating police officer. And so on. I’m reading ‘Talking About Detective Fiction’ by P.D. James and she laughed that all you had to do with a Christie story was pick the person most unlikely to be the murderer and you had a good chance to get it right.

Some Christie expert will no doubt swear she repeated herself, but I’m struggling to think of an example.

They focus more on the story than the method. And the thing Christie was so good at was writing these utterly appalling but somehow so English families. Decades of building anger, resentment and guilt. Adult married children still living with their parents or step-parents and waiting patiently (or not) for the old tyrant to die and leave them the estate.

Personally, I want to be Ariadne Oliver, the self insert Christie character who hates her own fictional detective. ‘Why did I make him Norwegian?’ she moans in the same way I expect Christie did about making Poirot from Belgium.

It’s a bonus episode of writing class radio**

The theme is love, for February and Valentine’s Day, but they’re talking about all kinds of love.

A woman is reading her work about how she’s in an emotional state at a pharmacy. She has just heard her friend is dying. She collects her purchases but when she gets to the counter, with tear filled eyes, she just hands her wallet to the cashier.

‘She handled it like we were sisters,’ she reads.

The cashier takes out her cash, puts the change back in, and says to her, “Whatever news you just received… I’m sorry.”

Her breath catches, she can’t speak for a moment. And I’m crying with her.

I’m back in a memory of my own from ten years ago. My mother is dying. She is in a hospital that’s a six hour drive away and I am mid divorce, and mid house sale. I have three small children and no one to leave them with. No one to hold the open house for me. No one to hold my hand.

Our father is useless. My sister is there so I know Mum isn’t alone. She says Mum doesn’t know who anyone is. She’s lost in her own past; a combination of the morphine and her Alzheimer’s. We don’t know how long it will take for her to die. It could be days or weeks. Weeks I don’t have. I don’t even have days.

If I make the trip, she won’t know that I am there.

It’s taken two years of fighting in the divorce courts to reach this stage. Two years in which the children and I have been waiting for a resolution. We can’t pause the process now. $$

I don’t go. And when my sister phones me with the news that our mother is dead, I absorb it and I don’t react. I have things to do. We need milk.

I get in my car and I drive to the store and I buy groceries. I pay for them and then walk away. The cashier calls me back. I have forgotten the groceries.

The man behind me in the queue laughs at me.

I look at him.

I am unable to say anything to him.

I want to cry, but I can’t.

I want to say, “My mother just died, but we needed milk,” but it all seems so absurd. I don’t know how to express the multitude of what I am feeling. How will he understand? I don’t think he can. He’s just laughed at a person who is clearly lost.

I feel guilty I wasn’t there at her bedside.

I feel guilty that I didn’t say goodbye.

I made a choice between my past and my present and at that moment, I’m not sure it was the right decision.

It’s June and my mother is dead.

*****

** https://soundcloud.com/writing-class-radio/valentinesspecial-final

$$ my elder brother just said ‘you’re supposed to do one of the three most stressful things, not all three at once.’

I’m writing this in September, the month of her birth.

I saw someone comment on Goodreads on the number of unread books they held. It was under a thousand. My number is 3,093. Snort. Chuckles to self. They’re not even in the game.

In my attempt to manage my recent diagnosis of ADHD I saw a recommendation for Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized by Susan C. Pinsky.

Wonder of wonders, the local library had a physical copy. It was a bit of an adventure to get it: first off I had to work out how to make a branch transfer request (cue my anxiety); then it kept saying it was still being read and hadn’t been returned; then it said it was at my library, but when I went to collect it, it was not on the reservation shelf. Not on the normal shelf either. It was gone.

‘I was just trying to get organised,’ I wailed at the librarian. She patted my hand and promised she’d find it. It had taken weeks to get to this point. Weeks in which I had to keep reminding myself to check on its progress.

With two librarians searching, it was eventually located.

Finally, I could read it.

The author said that she ran a professional organisation business and wondered at intelligent, creative clients who would backslide from one week to the next. What was wrong with them? Then her own child was diagnosed with ADHD and she realised the strategies she used with her, worked with clients, too. Weigh, adopt, reject or modify. Some of it was slapdash but if it worked, it stayed.

It certainly wasn’t Pinterest or Instagram pretty. She also recommended against solutions that increased your work burden, like recipe databases or complex filing methods. Rainbow sorted bookshelves give me hives just looking at them.

I also read an interesting Tumblr post (that I now can’t find… tumblr is like that) saying that the whole minimal stuff movement assumes you have money. Let’s choose a pen as the example. You can allow yourself to only keep one pen if you know at any time if that pen runs out or breaks, you can just go buy another one. You have to have the money and the spoons to do it. You have to have a car with fuel in it to get to the mall/newsagent. You have to have a pain-free day or whatever… that’s not easy for everyone.

My hoarding ties into that and also into FOMO [fear of missing out]. I will grab a book when it’s free knowing I can’t afford it when it’s back at full price.

As another example, I bought a couch from Ikea ten years ago. The cover is white. It’s been washed multiple times but it’s not easy to do. It’s enormous – one of those corner ones with five seats – and if the washing machine copes, the clothesline nearly bends with the weight of it. Plus, last time it took two whole days to dry. Let’s not add in the number of litres of water used when 100% of my state is in drought.

Ikea usually makes covers for their products but for a number of years this particular couch wasn’t one of them. To get another cover custom-made would have cost more than the price of a new couch. But recently, they were in stock so I grabbed one. It cost $160. Now I have a huge pile of white canvas in the middle of the living room floor. It’s in pretty good condition; a couple of stains but no holes, and its super soft after a decade of butts sitting on it.

Kid 1 stubbed a toe on it and complained so I know I have to do something with it. The dressmaker in me looks at the huge amount of material and zippers and imagines what could be made out of it. Am *I* ever going to make those things? Nope. It would just add to my unfinished project list, but I can imagine it. It kills me to throw it away.

So it doesn’t move while my brain fights with itself over it. I’ve written this as I sort it out for myself.

Today I will put it in a box with the Ikea diagram of the couch and chuck it in the back of the car. Next time I go past the charity shop I’ll give it to them. Maybe somebody else will use it or make something out of it? If they don’t, it’s out of my hands.

Mostly, it’s out of my brain. And that’ll work.

I was as shocked and saddened as the rest of the world by the death of Anthony Bourdain. Recently I contributed one of my sourdough loaves to a friend’s luncheon and he regaled me with imitations of the ‘feed the bitch’ line from a Bourdain episode on on feeding your sourdough starter. A couple of weeks later Bourdain was gone.

I was surprised to read his estate was valued at just over a million. He was a television personality with a number of shows. He was a traditionally published author, and I assume his sales will increase with his death, as they perversely always do. Nothing sells like death, eh?

In Australia the news has been full of a legal battle between author Colleen McCullough’s estate and her husband. Her most recent will had left her estate to a library in the US but her husband contested it and won. He was awarded the total of two million dollars.

Wait… McCullough?! You mean ‘The Thorn birds’, the Masters of Rome series… the movies, the film rights… everything?!? The Thorn Birds alone sold 33 million copies. It has pretty much never been out of best seller lists and was recently voted Australia’s favourite beach read.

And her estate was only worth two million?

That’s enough to buy a nice apartment in Sydney. &&

*blinks*

Omg. But then again, The Guardian reported recently that wages for English authors were an average of £10,500.

Average. Per ANNUM.

Just as well I can make sourdough…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/27/publishers-pay-writers-pittance-philip-pullman-antony-beevor-sally-gardner

&& Or a NOT as nice one in my area if you want to bank the other half.