The THREAD: October 2023

Posted on November 4, 2023 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, creativity, Food, music, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Aria, Beatles, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, concert, Get Back, Hamlet, Hamnet, Hey Jude, I've Got A Feeling, John Lennon, Joshua Bell, Lola in the Mirror, Maggie O'Farrell, Marvel Girl, Matt Moran, Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, moonbeam, mother, October, Paul McCartney, Peter Jackson, Shakari Chanran, Taylor Swift, The Bear, The Bloke, Trent Dalton, William Shakespeare • Leave a comment

So this THREAD is late, I know. It also doesn’t include pictures.

But I have a VERY GOOD REASON (and yes, that absolutely required shouty caps). This time last week, I had everything set in my mind about what I would write about in relation to October (because at that point it had shaped up to be a pretty good month, all things considered). But at precisely this time last week — as in 5:13pm last Saturday — I boarded a Manly Fast Ferry and set off for Circular Quay with The Bloke and one of his clients, who had asked us to keep that particular night free.

Because this person is not only a client, but is also one of The Bloke’s great surfing mates (specifically) and an all round good person (generally), we did as requested and made no plans, thinking we were heading out to dinner. But no — he was waaaaaaay more generous than that.

HE TOOK US TO SEE SIR PAUL McCARTNEY IN CONCERT.

And as a result of that amazing and completely unexpected experience, my tiny mind was blown and I failed to put fingers to keys because I was unsure how to adequately describe what had happened. To do so, you see, I need to rewind several months…which I will do when I start the October THREAD proper…which is NOW!

I have been thinking, since that extraordinary concert last week, about manifestation and serendipity. As regular readers of the THREAD will know, in June this year in our entire household was in the throes of Taylor Swift Ticket Acquisition Fever. It was an extremely serious preoccupation, and one which ended very fortunately for us, but not without considerable expense. Which is why, when July rolled around and Paul McCartney tickets went on sale (also at considerable expense), I was sorely tempted to purchase some but held off. I do recall saying, however — and Marvel Girl can attest to this — “If I am meant to see Paul McCartney in concert, the universe will provide. Imagine seeing a real live Beatle, though…that would be really something.” And not long after that, life continued and I promptly forgot about the tickets I had opted not to buy.

Until…one week out from the Paul McCartney concert — and with reports flowing in of how great the shows had been in Perth and Adelaide and Melbourne — I began feeling a little wistful. I even logged on to see whether there were any seats available for the Sydney shows. Still not making the connection regarding dates, I asked The Bloke to call his client to find out what we could bring for dinner…and found out it was not dinner at all. “I’m taking you to see Paul McCartney,” he said. “Can you believe we’re going to see a real live Beatle?”.

They were his EXACT WORDS — I kid you not. The Bloke had the call on speaker, so by this point my jaw was on the floor, as was Marvel Girl’s when I told her what had been said (followed by a short silence, and a firm affirmation that I had completely restored her belief in manifestation). Needless to say, I absolutely loved the concert and remain ever so grateful to The Bloke’s client for taking us along. Paul McCartney is 81 years old but played for over three hours, and got better and better as he went along. It was a once in a lifetime experience, capped off by us making actual eye contact with the man himself as his tour bus left the venue, driving away from the crowds and coming directly towards where we were walking instead, with the four of us waving to a real live Beatle who was waving right back.

Magical doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Anyhoo…I’ll try to stop fangirling now and get on to what I have been hearing, which — unsurprisingly — has been a lot of Beatles tunes, Wings tracks and parts of the Get Back movie Peter Jackson so brilliantly made. I can’t go past this section without including a final anecdote relating to the Paul McCartney concert, which relates to one of the encore pieces he played: I’ve Got a Feeling. During the song, John Lennon was on the big screen singing his part (lifted straight from the famous rooftop performance that ended up being the last time the Beatles played together), and Sir Paul was on the stage in front of him singing his part. For any Beatles fan — or music fan for that matter — it was spinetingling stuff, the kind of moment that brings genuine tears to your eyes. I still can’t quite believe I witnessed it, but am ever so grateful I did.

I’m going to move onto reading, because otherwise this entire post will end up being about last Saturday night, and we have a whole month to review. I have read a couple of great books this month, but not before I finished Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens — I know I mentioned in the July THREAD that it had won the Miles Franklin award, but please get your hands on a copy and discover how great Shankari Chandran is. I love her writing — almost as much as I love Maggie O’Farrell’s writing, and I also had the great pleasure of reading Hamnet this month. I know it’s not new, but it was novel I fell straight into and then…well, several hours had past and I was turning the final pages.

There was one passage in Hamnet which struck a chord with me at a very deep level, describing Hamnet’s mother Agnes:

She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare.

Agnes is, of course, the wife of William Shakespeare, who wrote the play Hamlet one year after the death of his son, Hamnet. It’s a play that holds a special place in my heart, having seen it performed for the first time on the day my grandfather passed away. We never really let go of the ones we love, whether it be casting out our fishing lines while they are alive, or casting our memories back when they have left us.

Ahhhh…moving on to eating, life-sustaining activity that it is. At the end of the school holidays (mid-October) I took my dear mum to a concert at the Sydney Opera House (more about that later), and before the show we dined — and I do mean dined, because it was fancy — at Aria. We began with a couple of sparkling glasses of French champagne, then proceeded to enjoy our selections from the pre-theatre menu, which included multiple amuse bouche offerings from the chef (Matt Moran is a genius) and even an palate cleansing pre-dessert. I had never eaten at Aria before, though have had the pleasure of dining at Benelong (inside the smallest Opera House sail) multiple times. I have to say I enjoyed the menu at Aria more — though perhaps that was because it was entirely new to me, or because we had a view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House (instead of sitting in it), or because I was having a truly extravagant meal with my wonderful and ever-so-deserving mother. OK: it was probaby a combination of all three, but I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a dinner out so much.

And now onto admiring, in which (be warned!) I will wax lyrical about yet another concert I went to — this time the one I attended with my mother. We were fortunate to see violinist Joshua Bell perform with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in the newly renovated Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House.

Bell is famous for performing at an extremely high level, having made the transition from child prodigy to virtuoso violinist many years ago. Yes, he plays a Stradivarius rumoured to be worth as much as $14million (USD), but his technical prowess and musicality cannot be attributed simply to the quality of his instrument. Now aged 55, Bell has been practicing and perfecting his craft for decades. He is renowned the world over for the purity of his tone, which was described by one reviewer of the concert I attended as ‘silvery’, which almost describes what I felt when I heard Bell play.

It was like listening to a moonbeam.

Silvery, yes – but also bright and clear and radiant and possessed with profoundly otherworldly beauty. As I sat, enthralled, listening to the notes of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor spill seemingly effortlessly from Bell’s instrument, I felt tears forming in my eyes. It was another one of those unforgettable, breathtaking experiences, and I was beyond grateful to share it with my mother, who promptly declared it the best concert she had ever been to. I thought she was just saying that to be nice, but she then informed me the best concert she had been to before that was seeing Victoria de los Angeles at the Sydney Town Hall before I was born, so…I suspect she was being truthful?!

And just as aside, did you know that William Shakespeare invented the word moonbeam? That’s also true.

So now we come, finally to doing. I think it’s fair to say that for much of the month, I have relishing the tingling highs that have come with seeing some truly fabulous performances, eating some delicious meals and reading some brilliant books, and then nursing myself through the crashing lows that inevitably follow those experiences. For me, being able to bear witness to cultural greatness is one of the great privileges of being alive, and this month I’ve been beyond blessed — so much so that I even forgot to mention in the reading section above that I also devoured the latest offering from my literary hero, Trent Dalton, which is called Lola in the Mirror. Reading that book is one of the best things I did during October, along with watching both seasons of The Bear on Disney+, which is a complete tour de force. I defy anyone to watch that show and not be viscerally affected.

So that brings me to the end of the October THREAD, knowing that it has been a rollercoaster month of highs and lows, punctuated by some spectactular perfomances: on the stage, the dining table, the page and the screen. It is the sort of month that has made me feel truly alive, and glad to be alive, and wanting to share that feeling with everyone I encounter — but with my family most of all.

I hope October was a good month for you, too. I wonder what November will bring us?!

Mind yourselves,

BJx

PS I’m just gonna leave this here…because who doesn’t want to sing along to Hey Jude with a real live Beatle and 50,000 of your new best friends?

The THREAD: May 2023

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, creativity, dance, exercise, First World Problems, Marriage, movies, Musings, Parenting, Uncategorized • Tagged A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Adam Bull, ageing, Alice Topp, Anne Wilson Schaef, Australian Ballet, ballet, Best of Friends, Cold War, Daniel Riley, Darlene Love, Diane von Furstenberg, dual parking, Elana Ferrante, emeralds, exercise, finale, Fran Lebowitz, friendship, garage, Identity, illness, Isabelle Allende, Jane FOnda, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Kamila Shamsie, Karachi, Keri Russell, Laura Imai Messina, living, Lloyd Vogel, London, Manly Skiff Club, Matthew Rhys, May, Meg Bignell, mother, Mr Rogers, music, My Brilliant Friend, Neopolitan Quartet, Noah Emmerich, Paragon, parents, personal training, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, podcast, reading, Ruth Reichl, soup, Stan Beeman, Sydney, Sydney Opera House, tandem parking, Teddy Larkins, The Americans, The Angry Women's Choir, The Bloke, The Hum, The Lying Life of Adults, The Phonebox at the Edge of the World, The Professor, The THREAD, Tom Hanks, winter, Wiser Than Me • Leave a comment

Another month has seemingly sped by. The days are getting shorter here in the Antipodes, the nights longer, colder and darker. Lately I have been watching the moon rise in the early evening, first a fingernail and now a more substantial crescent, glowing with its own beautiful reflected light. It is literally otherworldly, and I look forward to it each night.

May is drawing to a close. I associate May with emeralds (which is the birthstone associated with this month), with the randomly-acquired weird fact that babies born in May are on average heavier than those born in any other month, and with my much-loved and even more greatly missed aunt, Marita, whose birthday was in May. I’m not sure why these are all things that involve birth, but there you go. Freud would probably have something to say about it, but I honestly couldn’t care what it was?!

Anyway, without further ado, let’s get into the THREAD for this month.

I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things this month. Many of them have been prompted by what I have been listening to and reading, but others have been about work (because I recently started a new job and am starting to find my feet) and also about health (because my kids both went on school camps, and two-thirds of the students who went with them ended up sick with Covid or RSV or Influenza or really bad head colds). I also deal with children who are unwell when I’m working, so during the past month I have come to appreciate how good health can be a truly tenuous thing. Looking after yourself becomes far more important when the ill-health of others brings it into sharper focus, though I suspect my age also provides a useful lens to view health through.

For me and many of my friends, our parents are becoming elderly or unwell, and some have sadly already passed away. Our children are at an age where they can almost look after themselves, but they still require reminders to protect — or more accurately not to risk — their own wellbeing (and that, I suppose, will continue until I no longer have to submit online forms when I need to advise their school they will be absent). I’m far more aware than I used to be that my own wellbeing and that of my peers is often being worn down by all manner of things. Lengthy commutes and even lengthier working hours. The infamous mental load — particularly for women. Cramming all the extracurricular stuff in. “Stuff” generally. It’s all necessary, but it’s all…there. And it’s not about to go away any time soon. So, since I only have time for one personal training session a week at the moment, I’ve been trying to relish it, knowing that it’s an hour I have carved out for my own benefit: physical, mental, emotional. And since there is a meditative quality to the reps, I might as well throw spiritual in there, too. I value that time more than ever now, and recognise it for the precious thing it is. As Anne Wilson Schaef said, “Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account”.

On a similar note, I fortuitously stumbled across Julia Louis Dreyfus’ new podcase Wiser Than Me this month, and have been listening as she interviews older women, mining the rich veins of their wisdom about the world and how to live in it. So far I’ve heard her speak with Jane Fonda, Isabelle Allende, Ruth Reichl, Fran Lebowitz and Darlene Love, and I’m midway through the episode with Diane von Furstenberg. Each conversation has been interesting, revealing, and — without fail — provides me with either a much needed kick in the pants to do something (or to attempt to do it differently), or with a ‘nugget’, which is the word I attach to a piece of advice that rings as true as pure gold to me.

The women Julia Louis Dreyfus interviews are all inspirational in their own way, and I have found it interesting to hear them talking about all manner of things. Keeping active. Staying healthy. Dealing with regrets and disappointments. Navigating marriages and friendships. And suggesting that it might be a good idea to rid of the word “ageing” and replace it with “living” — because that’s what we’re all doing: living (or in Paris Hilton’s case, sliving — but that’s a story for another time and place).

I’ve been reading about women and friendships, too. First I devoured Kamila Shamsie’s novel Best of Friends, which brings to life the world of Karachi, Pakistan on the eve of Benezir Bhutto coming to power in rich and atmospheric detail, before shifting to almost present day London. The main characters, Zahra and Maryam, have been friends since they were teenagers. I’m not going to say too much more about it, other than I admired Shamsie’s writing a great deal, and recognised the truth in some of her insights, like this one:

Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friends — all those shared subtexts that no one else could discern. And perhaps shared subtext felt even more necessary when you both lived far away from the city of your childhood that was itself the subtext to your lives. Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships, Maryam thought…it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. You weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domesticity or even — as was the case with friendships made in adulthood — much by way of common interests.

If you enjoy the novels of Elana Ferrante (such as The Lying Life of Adults or, more particularly, the Neoplotian quartet that begins with My Brilliant Friend and features a similar pairing of friends in Lenu and Lila), this is definitely in the same wheelhouse and well worth your time.

I also read a fabulous book by Meg Bignell called The Angry Women’s Choir, and followed that blast of fresh air with Laura Imai Messina’s more subdued but still beautiful novel The Phonebox at the Edge of the World. Both are great and I recommend them.

In terms of what I’ve been eating, soup has featured prominently on the menu for me recently. I generally make a big pot each weekend and use whatever we have most of in the fridge, then take it to work for lunch. So far I’ve made a couple of pots of celery and zucchini soup (the zucchini adds much needed creaminess to the otherwise potentially stringy celery), and more recently have made a giant tureen of another favourite: pumpkin soup. I’m planning on doing another pot of something on Tuesday — I have some pearl barley so I might do good old fashioned vegetable soup and use up whatever odds and ends are in the fridge.

Last week I was also lucky enough to eat out a few nights, because both the kids were away on school camp. Having a couple of unexpected mid-week date nights with The Bloke was great. We hit up a couple of local favourites, first Teddy Larkins and then the Manly Skiff Club. Both were great — but the best bit, for me, was the company. Sometimes it take being away from the whole family for an extended period to remind me that The Bloke is still very much My Person, even after twenty years. It’s nice to know we still get along, too.

In terms of what I’ve been admiring, I finally finished watching The Americans. I know I’ve been late to the party on this one, but I was so happy when Disney+ released all six seasons I started watching it immediately and was just as quickly hooked. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are fine actors, and at the top of their games in this series (though Rhys was also fantastic as Lloyd Vogel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, which starred Tom Hanks as Mr Rogers). Noah Emmerich also deserves a massive shout out for his role as FBI agent Stan Beeman, the unwitting neighbour of extremely active Russian KGB agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Rhys and Russell). Emmerich has now gone from being “Oh, it’s that guy,” when he appears on screen to me actually knowing his name.

The Americans had it all for me, but really delivered in two areas: nostalgia and tension. The sets, props, costumes, language, everything took me straight back to my childhood, and made me realise just how much (even in Australia) the Cold War hung over our heads in the 1980s. The tension, on every level — international, suburban, intergenerational, marital — was brilliantly orchestrated and calibrated, and truly masterfully delivered in the series finale. For my money, the absence of dialogue and use entire musical tracks in the finale following the now-famous garage scene (let’s face it: it had to happen eventually) was a brave decision that — for my money — absolutely worked. Now I’ve finished watching it I feel slightly bereft, but also in need of television viewing that does not leave me realising I’ve been holding my breath.

And now, finally, onto doing. The Bloke and I unlocked an adulting achievement this month when (drumroll please) we managed to park our cars side by side in our new garage for the very first time. After decades — yes, decades — of tandem parking and having to do the old switcheroo when one of us needed to get one of our cars out, we can now simply press a button to raise the garage door and back out down the driveway. I realise tandem parking is the epitome of a First World Problem, but to say this achivement is momentous is underestimating how truly lifechanging this has been for us.

The other thing I did (another drumroll please!) was take my wonderful mother to see the Ballet! If you cast your mind back to the second edition of the THREAD, you might remember I was sad to think that I would never get to see Adam Bull dance again before he retired from the Australian Ballet. Well folks, I did get to see him perform — in one of his last shows at the iconic Sydney Opera House. Mum and I had a fantastic afternoon on a truly sparkling Sydney day (you gotta love this city)…

…and we absolutely loved the performance, which was called Identity and featured two works, The Hum by Daniel Riley and Paragon by Alice Topp. Spending the whole entire afternoon with my mother was such an incredible treat, and I was so grateful to The Bloke and our kids for looking after The Professor while mum and I quite literally sat back and enjoyed the show. In fact, we loved it so much we’ve booked to see another show together later in the year — not ballet, but something equally enthralling which I will no doubt get to write about in October.

Anyhoo, that’s all for now. As always, I’d love to know what you’ve been up to and enjoying, so feel free to leave a comment if you’d like to.

Mind yourselves, too!

BJx

The THREAD: April 2023

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, creativity, Musings, Ocean, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged A Day of Fallen Night, Anzac Day, art, Australia, autumn, Beejax Silcox, beginner, Billy Joel, Billy Joel A to Z, Dave Juskow, Draymond Green, Elon Altman, Father John Misty, filo pastry, grandfather, Ian McEwan, Jamie Oliver, Last Post, Lessons, Lest We Forget, Light Horsemen, Miss Malaprop, Mr Tillman, muffins, NBA playoffs, podcasts, Priory of the Orange Tree, Reveille, Roland Baines, Samantha Shannon, Seal Rocks, spinach and feta pie, surfing, swimming, Sydney, The Bloke, THREAD, World War Two • Leave a comment

It’s autumn here in the Antipodes. Although the days are still pleasantly warm enough, the nights are starting to cool down. Sleep comes easier at this time of year. The summer doona is back in the linen press, replaced with a warmer one that always reminds me of a cloud — so much that changing the sheets makes me feel happy.

There many aspects of autumn that I love, but one of the best things about this time of year is that the ocean temperature is still delightfully warm, and the beaches are less crowded. An April dip in the Pacific brings me a quiet sort of joy. Sometimes I think autumn in Sydney might be a reward for surviving the drooping humidity of late summer.

But enough rambling on about the season. Even though we have just slipped into May, it’s time for the April THREAD.

It was ANZAC Day last week, so I’ve been thinking about my grandfather, who served in the Royal Australian Navy during World War Two and was present in Toyko Bay when the Japanese signed the surrender ending that awful conflict. We went to a small Dawn Service on April 25th at the caravan park at Seal Rocks, to which we had escaped for a couple of days to cap off the Easter holidays. It was a solemn and simple commemoration: a couple of school kids reading short reflection on the bravery of the ANZACs and the Ode, then a trumpeter playing the Last Post. There was a minute’s silence before he continued with the Reveille, followed by the beautiful and moving sight of a lone uniformed horseman with an Australian flag paying tribute to the Light Horsemen who served in World War One, riding along the beach as the sun rose over the sea.

I wondered, as I stood there, my hands cradling a candle in a paper cup, whether my grandfather had seen Seal Rocks from his ship when he sailed back to Sydney Harbour, having survived the war in the Pacific with all its horrors — not least of which were the infamous kamikaze pilots. Perhaps he saw the coastline, crowned by the lighthouse that has warned ships away from the rocks since 1875. Maybe he didn’t — and it really doesn’t matter. I felt gratitude as I stood there, surrounded by my family and by strangers. There were people of all generations, from well dressed retirees to kids still in their pajamas and dressing gowns, all gathered to remember those who served, especially the fallen, and to pay our respects to those who continue to serve. It also felt distinctly Australian, perhaps because as we sang the first part of the National Anthem I felt all of us there knew exactly what it feels like to be girt by sea, or maybe because despite the solemnity of the occasion the vast majority of us in attendance were wearing thongs or ugg boots or no shoes at all.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. Lest we forget.

Ahhh…moving on. Because we’ve had a few hours in the car getting to and from Seal Rocks, I’ve been hearing a couple of podcasts The Bloke has been listening to lately. The first one is called Billy Joel A to Z, a podcast by a couple of comedians called Elon Altman and Dave Juskow who happen to love Billy Joel songs and have decided to go through all 121 songs he recorded from A to Z — or, more accurately perhaps, from A Matter of Trust to Zanzibar. I’d never heard any of it before, so landed where The Bloke was up to (towards the end of the F’s), and found it entertaining enough. It seems I made the same complaint many listeners do, which is that they do not play the song they are talking about at the beginning of each episode — though given licencing laws I can understand why. Some of the content is genuinely funny, especially the song parodies they come up with, and if you’re a fan of Billy Joel’s music, it’s worth a listen. That said, I would also recommend listening to the specific song they are dissecting before each episode so it makes more sense.

Since the NBA Playoffs are upon us and The Bloke is a big basketball fan, we also listened to the latest installment of The Mismatch. Fortunately, I’ve been watching some of the game highlights on YouTube so was familiar with some of the big topics covered (not least of which was Draymond Green’s suspension), but at the end of the episode it came out that their theme song was recorded by Father John Misty, which led us down a rabbithole of his songs — kicking off with Mr Tillman, which has the kids and I have counted as a favourite for quite a while but The Bloke had never heard, until we found ourselves pulling into our driveway at home.

I mentioned during the March THREAD that I had just finished reading Ian McEwan’s book Lessons, which explores — in a significant amount of detail — the life story of one Roland Baines, starting from his primary school days at an English boarding school and finishing when he has become a grandfather. Beejay Silcox summed the novel up well in her review for The Guardian:

McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long; the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank). But Lessons is also deeply generous. It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion?

I’m still not sure whether I enjoyed Lessons. It’s densely written, full of allusions and references (if you care to pick them all up), and of historical and socio-political detail (frequently from more than one point of view). I will admit, however, that since I finished reading it I have thought about passages in the book often — particularly in relation to women and the creation of art. As McEwan writes towards the end of Lessons: “The larger subject was the ruthlessness of artists. Do we forgive or ignore their single-mindedness or cruelty in the service of their art? And are we more tolerant the greater the art?” This is a question that makes me wonder about my own creativity, because although I may possess a room of my own (or more accurately, passageway?!) à la Virginia Woolf, I know I do not possess the sort of ruthlessness portrayed by Roland’s first wife in Lessons. Does that mean I will never create something great? I wonder…

Not surprisingly, after reading Lessons, I needed something entirely different — and so devoured Samantha Shannon’s epic A Day of Fallen Night, which returns to the same fantasy world of The Priory of the Orange Tree. Happily, it did the job I needed it to.

As part of our return to menu planning, we have been eating some old favourites and some new creations lately. After ordering a massive box of green vegetables when my usual fruit and vegetable delivery was on a hiatus, I made a silverbeet version of what was meant to be Spinach and Feta Pie, based on a recipe from Jamie Oliver. I’ve not used filo pastry for ages, and forgot how versatile it is, not to mention how crispy and tasty. The kids told me this one definitely needs to be added to the list, along with various other favourites like Beef and Bean Nachos, Satay Chicken and good old reliable Spag Bol.

I also made a batch of passionfruit and pear muffins this week. These were intended to be blueberry muffins, but upon opening the freezer I discovered that Miss Malaprop her helped herself to a bag and a half of frozen blueberries while making smoothie bowls. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and the pears were on the verge of being relegated to being thrown out or turned into crumble, so…yeah. At least we had something to go into lunch boxes until the next lot of blueberries arrived.

I have been admiring the resilience of my dear little cat, Tauriel, lately. She had emergency abdominal surgery just before Easter, having (very unfortunately) blocked her own bowel with a furball. Despite being in obvious discomfort — not to mention slightly off her head on methadone and fentanyl — she has patiently endured the post-operative recovery process, with all its vet visits and oral antibiotics (I only got scratched once). Since being given the all clear to return to her regular feline pursuits, Tauriel has been rather more affectionate than usual and has even given me her version of a hug. Truly heartwarming stuff.

My admiration has also been kindled by a dear family friend of ours, Valda, who was experiencing some health issues recently and subsequently received an unexpected and unpleasant diagnosis. She has displayed great dignity and calm as she faces this challenge — which, upon reflection, is hardly surprising, because as for as far back as I can remember she has been a dignified and calm person. She also has a wonderful sense of humour, which I sincerely hope serves her well in the coming weeks and months, and she has always been very kind to me and mine — so fingers crossed some exceptionally good karma is coming her way.

And that brings us, as always, to doing, and also returns this post back to where it started — at Seal Rocks. After having a great initial experience in the surf at our local break in late January, I mused one evening that I might like The Bloke to teach me how to surf when we went for our ANZAC Day getaway up the coast. He, having being provided with this flimsiest of excuses, decided this would be a great opportunity to purchase (yet another) surfboard for our burgeoning collection — a foam topped one for beginners of my size and (lack of) ability.

On our first day at Seal Rocks, the surf was too big for beginners such as myself. But on the second day, The Bloke deemed the conditions to be more manageable and decided it would be a good time to take me and my new blue board and push us out to sea. The water was very clear, and the most beautiful shade of turquoise I’ve seen in a long time. It was also reasonably warm, but a little bit dumpy. Friends — I had a go. Not a particularly successful go, given I grazed both my knees on the surface of my new board (which turned out to be a weird combination of rough and slippery). Sadly, I did not manage to stand up on the board a single time without immediately pitching sideways into the surf. Then, having experienced the excruciating ignominy of attempting to paddle back out to the break and discovering that — despite my genuinely best efforts — the board was travelling backwards through the water instead of forwards, I was forced to make a demeaning retreat to the sand and walk along the beach beforing attempting to catch one more wave.

I ended up riding that last wave in on my belly, boogie board style, to The Bloke’s (probably) eternal shame. Clearly, I did not cover myself in any kind of glory, but lived instead to tell the tale — however humiliating. That said, I have not given up and to my immense surprise, my ego has rebounded from the experience far more swiftly than I thought it would. I will, despite my relatively ancient age to be taking up such pursuits, try surfing again at some point…most likely when The Bloke is next willing to suffer through what will likely be yet another embarrassing spectacle. Such is life?!

Anyway, that brings us to the end of the April THREAD.

I would love to hear what you’ve been up to and what you’ve been consuming — via ears, eyes, mouth or any combination of these.

Until next time, mind yourselves.

BJx

The THREAD: March 2023

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged Adam Bull, Agnolo Bronzino, Annabel Crabb, Anya Taylor-Joy, Australian Ballet, Bad Sisters, ballet, Booker Prize, C S Lewis, Charles Perrault, community, Duke of Ferrara, feminism, Galaxy Stern, Garvey sisters, Girl With a Pearl Earring, good habits, Helen Garner, Hell Bent, Hetty McKinnon, hydration, Ian McEwan, intelligence, Joahnnes Vermeer, Jonathan Franzen, journals, Kelly Reilly, landscape, Leigh Bardugo, Lessons, Lucrezia de' Medici, Maggie O'Farrell, Marvel Girl, mental load, menu planning, My Last Duchess, New Zealand, Ninth House, parenting, personal training, Robert Browning, salad, Scarlett Johansson, Shahan Karunatilaka, Sri Lanka, Tchaikovsky, Ted Lasso, teenagers, The First Stone, The Marriage Portrait, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, The Sleeping Beauty, THREAD, Tracy Chevalier, vocabulary, Yellowstone • Leave a comment

I’m not entirely sure who said it (though I strongly suspect it was C S Lewis), but there’s an old saying that goes something like this:

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?

It doesn’t feel like more than a month has gone by since I sat down and wrote the first of these THREAD posts, but here I am again. Only a few weeks ago that I was musing about raising teenagers, reading Jonathan Franzen and reminiscing about our (now far less) recent trip to New Zealand. That holiday feels like an eternity ago, now we are well and truly in the swing of all things school and work.

Since it’s been a busy month, I’ve got a bunch of things buzzing around in my head — so best to let them out.

This month I have been Thinking about the imminent retirement of Adam Bull from the Australian Ballet. I have genuinely enjoyed watching him dance over the years, and am sorry the blasted pandemic meant I had to put my ballet subscription on hold, meaning I will probably not get to see him take the stage again. I’ve never been a dancer (my body favours sporty stuff rather than the life balletic), but I have come to love and appreciate the athleticism, grace beauty of both classical and contemporary ballet. I will be sad to see Adam Bull’s tall and striking figure leave the company after more than two decades, but am grateful to have seen him perform.

I’ve also been thinking about how various artforms inform and inspire each other, largely because I have just finished reading Maggie O’Farrell’s book The Marriage Portrait. The novel opens with Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara realising — on page one, no less — that her husband intends to murder her, and that the portrait he has commissioned of her is being painted in isolated castello precisely because that is where he intends to carry out the fell deed without anyone realising or interfering. Needless to say, I was pretty much hooked from the initial paragraphs and finished the book in a night.

The painting which inspired the novel is generally attributed to Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino, and also served as the stimulus for Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”. Like O’Farrell’s novel, the poem has an equally memorable opening:

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,/Looking as if she were alive.”

When I first looked at Bronzino’s portrait, I was struck by how modern Lucrezia appears — and how worldly, despite her youth. She did not survive her marriage to the Duke of Ferrara, and died suddenly at the age of 16. Lucrezia’s dress in the painting might be dreadfully outmoded, but her expression is intelligent and her gaze direct. I went down quite the rabbithole trying to figure out who she reminded me of, and stumbled across this comparison, which seemed rather apt:

Fortunately, Anya Taylor-Joy is very much alive, and I suspect she’d do a great job of playing Lucrezia de’ Medici if The Marriage Portrait ever made it to the big screen — much like Scarlett Johansson did in Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was based on Tracy Chevalier’s novel of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the painting by Johannes Vermeer. Or how Adam Bull played the Prince in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty, which was based on the fairy tales of Charles Perrault.

Is everything created somehow borrowed, rather than brand new? I’m not sure…but it’s certainly given me a lot to think about.

I finally got around to Hearing this interview Helen Garner gave Annabel Crabb late last year. Recorded to mark the occasion of Garner’s 80th birthday, it is a thought provoking hour of insights into the life of artists generally and writers particularly. I suspect one of the main reasons I enjoyed listening to this so much was that this particular interview was a discussion between two women I admire (and whose general vocabulary I covet). Then again, in my experience it is always pleasurable to listen to intelligent, articulate and opinionated people discuss…things. Anything, really. If they are speaking of something about which you know nothing, you have the opportunity to learn something new. Perhaps more importantly, if they are discussing something with which you are familiar, you may gain a fresh perpsective or better understanding of someone else’s point of view.

In any case, Garner spoke candidly about many things, including the self-doubt which plagues her whenever she is writing something new, the book she believes to be her worst, her views on feminism, the controversy provoked by The First Stone and her understanding of how and why that particular storm erupted and how it appears differently to her now. She also talked about her numerous journals, leading Crabb to extract a promise from her not to burn any more of them. I found the interview thoroughly entertaining — much as I did Garner’s book Everywhere I Look, which just so happens to contain a superb extended essay about the Australian Ballet.

In addition to Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, I have been doing quite a lot of Reading lately. Truly excitingly, I strongly suspect some of the books I have read lately are Great Books (and yes, those capitals are Definitely Required). Last weekend I finished reading Ian McEwan’s lastest, Lessons, which was brilliant but requires further reflection before I write about it. A few weeks ago, however, I finished Shehan Karunatilaka’s outstanding novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which won the 2022 Booker Prize. This book got under my skin, and well and truly into my subconscious. Quite literally, I found myself dreaming things based on the pages I had read before I went to sleep — and, not surprisingly given the novel details the post-mortem exploits of a war photographer, they were not particularly pleasant things.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is both a ghost story and a murder mystery, but is neither in the traditional sense. Set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the novel demands you engage with all sorts of things including politics, religion, gender, class, friendship and family dynamics — the works. Despite concerning the exploits of a dead photographer during his first week an the Afterlife populated by supernatural beings, the book brims with roiling mass of humanity. This is a novel of colour and movement, peppered with dialects and idiomatic speech, bursts of hilarity and moments of adroitly observed insight, like this one:

Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.

I highly recommend The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. A word to the wise, however: if you do choose to read it, really go with it. Suspend your disbelief and you’ll be in for quite a ride.

I next read Leigh Bardugo’s book Hell Bent, her sequel to Ninth House. Even though this is a fantasy novel with substantial supernatural elements, reading Hell Bent after The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida felt like returning to a reassuringly familiar world: not only is the geographical setting real, but the temporal setting is also close to present day. Additionally, the main characters are distinctly human…until they’re not. No spoilers here! Though I’m genuinely looking foward to the next instalment of Galaxy Stern’s adventures.

In terms of Eating, I’ve been getting a lot more organised and have resumed menu planning. Not only does this save me time and reduces my mental load, but it also boosts the variety factor when it comes to family meals. The added benefit of posting the week’s menu ahead of time is that other family members can also pitch in and start meal prepping if needs be (not that this has ever happened…I live in hope). Knowing I have increased work commitments coming up next term, I am making an effort to get into good habits now and and am reminding myself of meals I can cook ahead or dinners that are “one pot wonders”. In this vein I’ve also been calling to mind various traybake recipes, and have been figuring out what (other than muffins) I can make as lunchbox treats.

Since we’ve had a long hot March, we’re still enjoying our salad days — especially the salads featured in Hetty McKinnon’s brilliant cookbook Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen. I don’t think I own a single coobook I have made more meals from than this one, and our most recent discovery from this gem is Pumpkin with Chickpeas, Toasted Coconut and Lemon Tahini (except we ditched the Lemon Tahini dressing in favour or a bit of extra lime juice). It’s a Fijian inspired salad, packed with fabulous flavours and topped with the satisfying crunch of toasted pepitas. It’s also truly delicious.

Admiring is one of my favourite sections of the THREAD, and this month I cannot go past the brilliantly and blackly comic television show Bad Sisters. Set in present day Dublin and featuring five sisters, the first episode features the funeral of John Paul — husband of the second eldest of the Garvey sisters, Grace. It turns out JP, during his life, was quite a piece of work (abusive, controlling, manipulative and generally nasty) so it may come as no surprise that the storyline flip flops between the past — during which all four of Grace’s sisters have some sort of a go at bumping off their evil brother-in-law to rescue their sister and niece — and the present, when a harried and hapless insurance agent is desperately trying to prove JP’s death has been caused by the Garvey sisters’ foul play so he does not have to pay out a life insurance claim. It is not immediately apparent who or what has killed John Paul, but the show is so darkly funny and entertaining that Marvel Girl and I binged the ten episodes over the course of a single weekend.

Back at the beginning of the month I also found myself admiring the glorious scenery that forms the backdrop to Yellowstone. I had been putting off watching Season 6 of this fabulous show, because I didn’t want to watch an episode a week. (I also suspect I was feeling slightly superstitious about watching the most recent season because I watched the other five while I was isolating when I had COVID, and a fresh wave was hitting around the time Season 6 came out). In any case, I adore the scenery in the show — which could probably, given how many people fight over the land in Yellowstone, be counted as a character in itself — particularly as it reminds me of the country near where I spent part of my childhood when our family moved to Canada for a couple of years. So, as it turns out, I watch Yellowstone the nostalgia it evokes for me just as much as the drama — and for Kelly Reilly’s vivid portrayal of badass Beth Dutton. Just as an aside — did you know Kelly Reilly is English? Her accent in the show is pretty tight.

And that brings us, as always, to Doing, though this month one of the main things I have been doing is waiting for and then celebrating the return of another stellar television series: Ted Lasso. Season 3 is landing at last, and not a moment too soon! There are so many things that I (along with the rest of the known world) love about Ted Lasso. The writing is so sharp it sparkles, and the performances — especially now we are three seasons in — are so well-honed they truly shine. Rather than fangirling at length over the cast, because I can’t think of a single one of them I don’t love, let’s just leave it by saying there are so many lines from this show that have found their way into our family’s daily vocabulary — not least of which is simply, “Oi!” — that I can’t imagine life without Ted Lasso. It’s that good.

Other things I have been doing have included making a concerted effort to maintain good hydration and to keep stringing together sessions with my personal trainer. PT sessions are easier to keep up with (you schedule regular sessions, you turn up: “Simples” as the meerkats say). Drinking enough water? You’d think it would be so straightforward, but making and sustaining this habit is taking me longer than I expected. I am incredibly grateful to my girls, who thoughtfully presented me with a large Ravenclaw drinkbottle for my birthday, because I now try to chug my way through this several times a day. I’m getting better with hydration, and I’m deadset sure it will be worth the effort, so…go me?!

Anyway, we’ve reached the end of the THREAD for March 2023. Like a piece of string, I’m never sure how long it’s going to be and this one has been a bit of an epic, (so good on you if you’ve stuck with me and got this far), so my head is definitely less “buzzy” than it was when I started. As always, I’d love to hear what’s buzzing around in your head or what you’ve been THREADing your way through, so leave a comment if you’d like to.

Until next time, mind yourselves!

BJx

Introducing the THREAD

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, creativity, music, Musings, Travel and Trips, Trips and Travels, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged 2023, A Cast of Falcons, A Murder of Crows, A Narrow Door, A Solitary Walk on the Moon, Allegra in Three Parts, Alone With You in the Ether, Amy Betters-Midvelt, Atticus Finch, Auckland, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, books, Christchurch, Christmas, Crossroads, degustation, dolphins, Elvis, Exiles, Felix the Cat, freedom, Front Left, Harry Styles, Hilde Hinton, Hobbiton, Hot August Nights, icebergs, Indie Folk, Jane Harper, Joanne Harris, Jonathan Franzen, Kaikoura, Katy Hays, lakes, Lana Del Ray, Libby app, Marvel Girl, Matamata, Midnights, Milford Sound, Miss Malaprop, Mt Cook, music, Nagi Maehashi, Napier, Neil Diamond, new school, New Year's, New Zealand, Nigella Lawson, NZ, NZ roadtrip, Olivie Blake, parenting, Pier Hotel, pool, Queenstown, RecipeTin Eats, road trip, Rotorua, Sarah Yarwood-Lovett, seals, Shotover River, Spotify, summer, Suzanne Daniel, swimming, Taylor Swift, teenagers, The Beatles, The THREAD, THREAD, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, U2, Wellington • Leave a comment

It’s been a long while since I last posted here. Christmas has come and gone, and New Year’s too.

Since our family finally ventured overseas for the first time in years at the beginning of January 2023, my year in review posts for 2022 never eventuated. And, although I often have a multitude of ideas for posts, I frequently don’t have the time to execute them — mostly because life. So between my last post and this, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to make this blog more relevant to my life as it is now.

When I started making a list of what I wanted to write about — things I’d been thinking, reading, eating and doing — I realised I had the beginnings of a workable acronym for all I wanted to communicate. A couple of minutes of tinkering later, I had a plan in my notebook and a smile on my face.

And so, without further ado, I would like to introduce you to the THREAD.

I’ve been thinking about this post by Amy Betters-Midvelt, which someone shared to the Chat10LooksTeen Facebook group recently. It’s called All Parents of Teenagers are Liars, and examines the way we speak about — OK, lie about — the lives of those she refers to as “tall kids”, or teenagers. It reminded me of the old saying, which I may have heard myself imparting to my own tall kids of late, that everyone is dealing with something. You might be privy to someone’s situation. Perhaps, to you, it seems trivial, perhaps not. Or maybe you’ll never know what a person is going through, and it’s something truly ghastly. Or maybe it’s not. But the fact remains: everyone is dealing with something.

My two main takeaways from this thought-provoking piece were, firstly, that regardless of how tall they are (and believe me, Marvel Girl has well and truly passed me, and Miss Malaprop’s not far behind her), teenagers are still kids. And secondly, that just about every parent of a teenager I know is more likely to respond as cheerily as they can to a query about how their tall kid is doing rather than launching into a ten minute diatribe about whatever it is they are dealing with at that time, whether it be school refusal, bullying, slipping grades, vaping, porn, alcohol, general slothfulness, or their insistence on publicly wearing a bikini so miniscule it would make a Brazilian blush. We’re all doing our best, with varying degrees of success, and sometimes as unsure of ourselves as parents as our tall kids are of the almost-adults they’re becoming.

Everyone is dealing with something. But focusing on the good bits when we’re asked? Maybe that’s not such a bad thing…

Since I live in a house with two tall kids, I’ve been hearing a lot of their music lately. Our summer days have been filled with songs from Lana Del Ray, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles. Marvel Girl got a record player for Christmas, so there have been numerous trips to various music stores in search of specific titles on vinyl. (I suspect I did clock up more than a few brownie points for presenting her with the Moonstone Blue edition of Midnights to start off her collection, but that may have been more good luck than good management on my part).

The Bloke and I have made sure Marvel Girl has added a few classics to her record collection too, making sure she’s got some Beatles tunes, and some U2, and even dug out some old vinyl we’d been hanging on to since forever and introduced her to Neil Diamond’s Hot August Nights. We even found some Elvis records that had belonged to her great grandmother, and the theme song to Felix the Cat, just for good measure.

When the kids are not around, I’ve been listening to a weird mix of Indie Folk and whatever happens to be on Spotify’s ever-changing “Front Left” playlist. And when I’m working, it’s all instrumental…no words, because lyrics have a tendency to get in the way of the words I’m writing.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading this summer, have have been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen kick after reading Crossroads just after Christmas. I was happy to hear Crossroads is intended as the first of a trilogy, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read Freedom. Franzen writes about family so well — the weird, somtimes stilted, inter-generational dynamics of living with people purely by accident of birth — and often in a darkly funny way.

I also plowed my way through several holiday reads via the Libby app (Jane Harper’s Exiles, and two very British mystery novels by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett called A Murder of Crows and A Cast of Falcons). In various airports and armchairs I read Allegra in Three Parts by Suzanne Daniel, Hilde Hinton’s new book A Solitary Walk on the Moon, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold and a couple of entertaining thrillers: The Cloisters by Katy Hays and A Narrow Door by Joanne Harris. I also read and found myself frequently reflecting on the tragically beautiful portrait of love and mental illness in Olivie Blake’s novel Alone With You in the Ether. I enjoyed them all, some more than others, but mostly because each was exactly what I needed at the time.

Eating is something I am eternally grateful for. I am one of those people who lives to eat, not one who eats to live, so good food — whether prepared by me or for me — is something I truly relish. We ate some fantastic meals during our road trip around New Zealand, discovering some great restaurants. To this end I highly recommend Atticus Finch in Rotorua, Pacifica in Napier (where our kids enjoyed their first ever degustation dinner), and the Pier Hotel in Kaikoura.

Since we’ve been home and school has resumed, we are back to far more routine offerings, such as Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Banana Muffins (my copy of her book Kitchen automatically falls open at the page featuring this recipe, not least because it is a very effective way of using up over-ripe bananas). Like most of Australia — OK, half the world — we’ve been singing the praises of Nagi Maehashi, of RecipeTin Eats fame, whose cookbook Dinner has been a source of many a home cooked meal at our place this summer. We are particular fans of the Asian Glazed Salmon, not only because it’s insanely delicious, but also because it is super quick to prepare. We tip our collective hats to Nagi, a Northern Beaches local who creates amazing recipes and gives so much back to our local community via RecipeTin Meals.

I know it might seem like a peculiar thing, but one thing I have been admiring lately is the bottom of our new swimming pool. Yep — the bottom! You know how the light hitting the water creates those mesmerising moving patterns? The ones that make you think you might be swimming over the top of a gigantic turquoise-shelled sea turtle (if such a thing existed)? Or some kind of weirdly warped honeycomb-like tessellation? OK…maybe it’s just me. But I do love watching it, floating on the surface, gazing down into the blue.

I am also admiring my kids, who both started at a new school this year. It’s not been entirely plain sailing, but they’re both doing all those hard things that stand you in good stead later in life, as well as in the here and now: making new friends, finding their way in unfamiliar territory, remembering (after a long summer) how to be punctual, showing up to things they’ve signed up for, speaking up for themselves when they need to. I’m struck by their courage, their tenacity, their humour. It was truly gratifying to see their care for each other after their first day, checking in and making sure their sister had survived their first day before regaling me with tales of what they’d experienced. And I’m grateful — beyond measure — that after four years at separate schools, they are finally together again.

And finally, we find ourselves at doing! We’ve been doing so much, but the standout highlight would have to be our New Zealand road trip. We flew into Auckland, and drove — via Hobbiton, of course — to Rotorua in all its (stinky) geothermal glory, then onto Napier before heading down to see very dear friends who have made their home in Wellington, at the tip of the North Island. A particularly exciting moment for Marvel Girl was watching her godfather flying a plane out of his “office”, Wellington airport: she had requested he do a barrel roll but apparently such aerobatics are frowned upon on domestic flights, so we settled for seeing him take off instead. We might even have cheered.

From Wellington we made our way across to the South Island via the Interislander Ferry to Kaikoura, saw hundreds of seals including about fifty pups at O’hau, then made our way via Christchurch to Aoraki (Mt Cook). There we were blown away by mountain views, icebergs and glaciers, and even swam in the very cold but still refreshing Lake Pukaki. We finally wended our way to Queenstown, made a magical day trip to Milford Sound and saw a bunch of bottlenosed dolphins put on quite a show, before finishing up with a hair-raising jetboat ride on the Shotover River. We flew home tired but happy, pleased with all we’d been able to do and see but also glad to be back in our new house.

So there you have it, folks: the inaugural edition of the THREAD, which I hope you’ve enjoyed.

I’d love to know what you’ve been getting up to over the summer and how life is treating you now school is back in session for another year. I’d also appreciate any thoughts you have on tall kids and how to manage being a parent (I’ve just about given up trying to “manage” the tall kids at this point, but I think that’s also kind of the point at this stage in their development?!), or anything else that has got your brain turning over lately. And feel free, as always, to use the comments for recommendations for any music, books or recipes you’re into as well.

Mind yourselves,

BJx

Write Like You’re Running Out of Time

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged characters, first draft, Glennon Doyle, inner critic, novel, persistence, plot points, time, writing • 4 Comments

I’ve not been posting much here lately.

It feels like my patch of cyberspace is looking a little desolate: far more like a wonky pavement with weeds spilling from between the cracks than a verdant, carefully tended garden. That said, there is a good reason why I have neglected this space, despite my various attempts to nurture it over the years, and that is I’m trying to finish the first draft of my novel.

Writing is one of my great true loves. I love the feeling of sentences pouring forth from my fingers, pooling themselves paragraphs and flowing into pages of prose. I savour the feeling of selecting precisely the right words and placing them in a specific order to bring a particular scenario, emotion, or plot point to life.

But it takes time.

It takes time to enter the headspace of the character whose perspective you’re writing from, to inhabit their skin and to bring their inner life and backstory to the forefront of your own mind so you can produce a believeable, genuine response to what is happening in the story at any given time. And to achieve that, you need to possess a clear understanding of exactly where the tale you’re telling has come from and where it will end up — because you’ve had to create all that too, not to mention the world in which it takes place.

And sometimes you need time just to sit with an idea.

For the past two days I have been allowing a scene to germinate in my head. I’ve got some writing done, sure, but writing is not always about how many words you’ve got on a page. I’ve needed time to flesh out a new character in my mind, to understand where they fit into the action and how they relate to the other characters who already populate my world. I have needed time to figure out what they look like, how they move, and what makes them unique. And then I have needed time to turn my attention to the first impressions the character whose point of view I am currently writing from might have of them, and what knowledge these characters possess about themselves, each other and the wider plot of the novel as a whole. Only then could I map out how these characters might interact, and to decide what information I needed to hide or reveal to build suspense and drive the story towards its climax.

And that’s just for one small scene at the end of Chapter Thirteen!

Writing is hard, sometimes, no matter how much you love it.

It’s hard to find uninterrupted time to let the story unfurl in your head in the way I have just described.

It’s hard to admit you’re writing a novel in the first place.

It’s hard to answer questions about when your book will be finished, or where you’re up to, or whether it will ever be published.

It’s hard to silence the ever-present and insistent voice of my inner critic, who frequently tells me I am a fool for attempting to write a novel, or I’m arrogant to assume anyone would want to read it, or I’m any number of other negative things. (Then again, I’m yet to meet a writer whose inner critic does not persist in making a multitude of unhelpful comments and suggestions, usually at the most inopportune times).

It’s hard to keep believing in yourself and your story, knowing it might never make it onto the printed page.

But since I have started creating my characters and the world in which they live, I feel a strange sense of duty to make sure I see them through to the end — even if it means my patch of cyberspace suffers from benign neglect in the meantime.

As Glennon Doyle says, we can do hard things.

So I wish you well with whatever hard things you’re doing.

I’m off to write that scene.

Mind yourselves,

BJx

The Thrifty Fictionista Feels Nostalgic…

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, Thrifty Fictionista, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged Anna Karenina, Annabel Crabb, Anne Lamott, building, childhood treasures, Donald Penobscott, Dorian Gray, Ed Ayres, Helen Garner, Hilary Mantel, hummingbirds, hurricanes, Leo Tolstoy, M*A*S*H, Maine, Margaret Houlihan, Nigella Lawson, Oscar Wilde, picture books, Poh Ling Yeow, Roberty McCloskey, sailing, space, T E White, The Once and Future King, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Thrifty Fictionista, Time of Wonder, Trent Dalton, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Woolf, Yotam Ottolenghi • Leave a comment

“Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day . . .”

These are the opening lines of the Thrifty Fictionista’s favourite picture book, one I have loved since I was a child: Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder. Telling the story of a girl and her younger sister spending their summer holidays on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, it follows them as they explore the natural world around them. They swim, they sail, they laze in the sun — they even survive a hurricane that blows in one night.

I still love everything about that book: the beauty of the painted illustrations, the cadence of the sentences, every last carefully chosen word. I often wished, when I was little, that I could go on holidays just like the girls in the book, even though I lived on the other side of the world from Maine.

Like the girls in the book, I spent a lot of time on boats when I was a kid. My grandfather, who had served in the navy, was never one to be without some kind of seafaring craft, so my brother and I enjoyed time on a succession of yachts, one of which had sailed the Sydney to Hobart race multiple times, and later on an old Halvorsen cruiser. The sights, sounds and smells of moorings and marinas still make me happy.

What reminded me of Time of Wonder most recently, however, was something equally nostalgic, but completely unexpected. I was watching M*A*S*H with my kids (having got them hooked on that golden oldie after they had watched so many episodes of Brooklyn 99 I thought I was going to scream), and we came to the part of Series 5 when Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan gets engaged to Lt Colonel Donald Penobscott — and at the first mention of his name, there I was: right back in the middle of Penobscot Bay, exploring the Time of Wonder island and all its natural wonders.

At the moment, all I would like to do is dive between the pages of my old, battered copy of Time of Wonder and relive it all once again. Or even the shiny new copy I got for my own kids when they were old enough to read it.

But, since we’re in the process of building our house, that dear old book is somewhere in storage, along with many other treasured possessions of the paged variety. It has been hard not having my book “friends” around for the past nine or ten months, but now that build is drawing to close up stage I am itching to get my fingers on volumes I have wished for while living here in our tiny rental.

The Thrifty Fictionista could not do with out ALL her books, however — so old favourites and new have found their way up the 49 steps to our front door. Anna Karenina is here, rubbing shoulders with Lolita and Dorian Gray, and even The Once and Future King. There are books by authors whose writing I can’t live without: Helen Garner, Trent Dalton, Ed Ayres, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, Anne Lamott. And there are cookbooks, of course, too, thanks to Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigella Lawson, Poh Ling Yeow and Annabel Crabb.

Before too long, however, it will be time for us to pack these few books that did wend their way up all those stairs into boxes and take them to our new house. In Time of Wonder the girl is a little bit sad about the place she’s leaving, a little bit glad about the place she’s going to. The Thrifty Fictionista, on the other hand, is a little bit impatient to get out of the place I’m leaving, and tremendously excited about the place I’m going to — not least because it will have a library.

There will be space for books, space to watch endless re-runs of M*A*S*H, space to cook and space to dream, and even space to wonder where hummingbirds go in a hurricane.

And I can’t wait.

The Thrifty Fictionista Is Cranky

Posted on May 9, 2022 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, First Principles, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged A Room of One's Own, angry, Becoming, cranky, destiny, fate, gender roles, Glennon Doyle, hypocrisy, living bravely, misogyny, patriarchy, reading, sexism, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, Thrifty Fictionista, Untamed, Virginia Woolf, Young Adult • Leave a comment

Readers, the Thrifty Fictionista is cranky.

Seriously cranky.

Not with herself, nor with anyone else currently living, but with Thomas Hardy — who died almost 100 years ago.

Why? I hear you ask.

The answer is simple: I have just finished reading Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and the whole book made me fed up and furious.

I never even planned to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but it turned up in one of those brilliant bargain boxes of books the Thrifty Ficionista falls prey to every now and then, this time a Young Adult collection purchased for my elder daughter. I nabbed Tess before she got hold of it, thinking it would be an entertaining read — which, for the most part, it was — but I was not prepared for how angry the novel would make me.

Especially the ending.

Without spoiling the story (or its ending) for anyone who has not yet read it, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a novel exposing the sexual hypocrisy, entrenched misogyny, and overbearing patriarchy of the period in which it was written. Even though the book was first published in 1891, many of the themes and abhorrent behaviours depicted in it remain all too relevant today — and this realisation was a substantial contributor to the Thrifty Fictionista’s current crankiness.

I’m now faced with a dilemma: do I give the book back to my (early teenaged) daughter to read or not? Would she find some of the characters’ conduct as offensive as I did? Would she dismiss the behaviour I found so repellent as simply being fusty and of its time, or would she also recognise it — repackaged and more than likely digitised and/or broadcast — in her own experiences of the current century?

I can only imagine, given she has been raised by me, that my daughter would respond to Tess of the D’Urbervilles in a similar fashion to the Thrifty Fictionista. But does she really need to read a fictional account of how lousy things were for women back in the day? Or am I better off giving her books like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, which may give her the headspace and the tools to forge her own way as a woman in the world?

You see, getting cranky is a good thing.

It might make the Thrifty Fictionista uncomfortable, but it also makes her think.

Hard.

About what’s important. About what influences — fictional, historical or otherwise — I want my daughters to be exposed to. Even about the possible effects of reading the works of a novelist whose female characters generally appear to be subject to fates they can neither change nor challenge.

Honestly, I want my kids to get cranky if they read books like Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But — more significantly — I want them to focus on becoming the incredible human beings, and not being circumscribed by history or sex or gender or labels of any kind.

Most importantly, I want my daughters to understand life as Glennon Doyle describes it:

I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself.

So: thank you, Thomas Hardy.

The Thrifty Fictionista read your book and is cranky.

But she’s also a whole lot clearer on what she wants for herself and for her children.

2021: The Thrifty Fictionista Reviews

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, creativity, movies, music, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged 2021, 30 Rock, Actress, Alec Baldwin, Anne Enright, Balenciaga, books, Bring Up the Bodies, Can You Get to That, Casino Royale, Colombia, COVID, Craig Silvey, Daniel Craig, Dave Grohl, Devotion, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, DRAMA, Ed Ayres, Evie Wyld, feeling, Flight Facilities, Funkadelic, Gilmore Girls, Hannah Kent, Hawkeye, Hilary Mantel, Honeybee, Hugh Grant, I Will Follow, James Bond, Jenna Maroney, Kerry Salter, Laura Marling, literacy, Love Stories, Lupin, Marvel Girl, Medellin, Medici, Melissa Lucashenko, Miss Malaprop, Move, music, Narcos, New West, Old People's Home for Four Year Olds, One Headlight, Pablo Escobar, pandemic, Paris, Pedro Pascal, Pink Siifu, Quantum of Solace, Rivers Cuomo, Rose Island, Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks, Running Red Lights, Sam and Vic, Sarah Winman, Silent Theory, Skyfall, Smile, Spectre, Still Life, Strange Girl, summer, The Avalanches, The Bass Rock, The Bloke, The Gentlemen, The Mirror and the Light, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Storyteller, The Wallflowers, Thrifty Fictionista, Tina Fey, Too Much Lip, Travel Guides, Trent Dalton, U2, Valerie June, video store, Wagner Moura, Whole Notes, Wolf Hall • Leave a comment

In which the Thrify Fictionista abandons her usual carefully considered annual Top 5 posts and crams all her thoughts about the things she has read, watched and listened to during 2021 into one hot mess of a post entirely appropriate for the year that was…

Folks, I am so grateful for the gift of literacy. To be able to read — and hence escape between the pages of a book — is one of my life’s true delights, a pleasure that has only been heightened by being part of a protracted historical event. So, as of now, I’m putting on my positive pants and dismissing any further mentions of that pesky Pandemic in this post, and presenting to you in an order as yet unknown to me with the things I loved most this year. Books, TV shows, movies, songs and various bits of ephemera that caught my attention, held it, and made me feel. Because FEELING is what it’s all about, my friends.

I’m going to kick things off by recommending Craig Silvey’s book Honeybee, which just so happened to be the first book I read in 2021. It’s brilliant. So much so, I wondered whether I would read anything as good for the rest of the year (spoiler alert — I did, so please read on). Honeybee made me laugh, cry, shake my fist in both rage and triumph. I absolutely loved it, and reckon you should get a copy for yourself. Pronto.

Another summer holiday read I thoroughly enjoyed was Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip. In addition to having a cracking storyline following the main protagonist, Kerry Salter, and generations of her First Nations family, this story is dramatic and darkly comic. I may have found it even more engaging because the country where the tale is set (despite focusing on a fictional town called Durrongo) reminded me strongly of a part of northern NSW where I spent a lot of summers during my childhood.

Shortly after reading these, I got stuck into watching Narcos on Netflix. I was very late to the party, I know, but after watching Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian I was keen to see what he could do without a helmet on and was not disappointed. Wagner Moura did a brilliant job of portraying Pablo Escobar and (being a non-Spanish speaker) I was not troubled by the fact that he apparently wasn’t so great at nailing the Medellín accent. Watching Narcos was an edge-of-your-seat ride combining politics, risky and highly illegal business, insurgents, excess and corruption, ever-present danger, families and cartels, the Colombian jungle, and a few blokes who were trying to stop the whole cocaine trade in its tracks, and I loved it.

By the time Lockdown rolled around again (I think it was the third one for us — the one that went for 17 weeks?), our whole family was looking for something to escape into, and when we weren’t snort-laughing watching back episodes of Travel Guides, which we also watched to take in scenery of anywhere but our own backyard, we got right into The Mysterious Benedict Society on Disney Plus. This was a show the entire family enjoyed, and the fact that a new episode dropped only once a week gave Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop a taste of what life was like for The Bloke and I when we were kids in the days before streaming services. We’re all looking forward to Season Two!

Speaking of second seasons, we also used up quite a few tissues earlier in the year watching Old People’s Home for Four Year Olds on ABC iView, which also prompted Marvel Girl to develop an app for older Australians with some of her classmates for a Praxis project at school. The entire family loved the show and The Bloke and I were really proud when Marvel Girl and her mates took out the top gong for the project it inspired.

During lockdown I also embarked up on a Couch to 5km project that was curtailed only by us having to pack up and move house, but heading out on a run gave me the opportunity to listen to tunes. Not surprisingly, the music I’ve been listening to this year has been far more gentle than I would normally go for. I got into things like:

Running Red Lights by the Avalanches, Rivers Cuomo, Pink Siifu
Balenciaga by New West
Strange Girl by Laura Marling
Smile by Valerie June
Move by Flight Facilities, DRAMA

I also delved back into some oldies but goodies like The Wallflowers’ One Headlight, Funkadelic’s Can You Get to That and U2’s I Will Follow. Troubled times call for familiar favourites.

On the reading front, I got through those seventeen long weeks with the help of Hilary Mantel and her truly remarkable trilogy of Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies (both of which I re-read) and The Mirror and the Light. I am in awe of Mantel’s writing: sometimes her words were so beautifully, perfectly chosen that I would have to mark my place in whichever of the gorgeous hardbacks I was currently reading with the jewel-toned ribbon bound into the cover and simply close my eyes. Then I would go back and read the passage again and sigh (often quite audibly), and would then find myself hoping that one day I, too, will be able to write so succintly, so eloquently, so precisely, and also to elicit such feeling. Because — as I said earlier — it’s all about the FEELING, folks.

I had a similar reaction to reading Ed Ayres’ book Whole Notes, which is truly and utterly a MUST READ for any music lover. Unusually for me, I have embarked upon a second reading of this volume, which is part “call to instruments” and part memoir of becoming a trans man aged 50 (better late than never, as Ed says). Same goes for the brilliant Trent Dalton’s book Love Stories — but as any regular readers of this blog will know, the Thrifty Fictionista is a massive fan of Dalton’s work and it did not come as a surprise to me that I found myself wanting to stretch Love Stories out for as looooooong as I could, trying to make it last — it was that good.

Sigh, again.

What else did I enjoy this year? I binged all three seasons of Medici on SBS On Demand and found myself going down various Florentine themed rabbitholes on the interwebs for quite some time afterwards. Filmwise, I got a bit of a kick out of the 2020 movie Rose Island (or, in the original Italian, L’incredibile storia dell’Isola delle Rose), and I also enjoyed Hugh Grant in The Gentlemen.

The Bloke and I decided it was high time we introduced the kids to Daniel Craig’s Bond movies, and so far we’ve watched Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall. I suspect Spectre will be on the menu soon (if my offspring are not devouring more episodes of Gilmore Girls, which they have recently discovered and have many questions about — including what a video store was — thereby making The Bloke and I feel somewhat antiquated, if not ancient). We also made the kids watch Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which looks massively dated but the jokes still hold up, for the most part. I tried to get them into watching Lupin (which I loved) but it only piqued the interest of the Paris-loving Marvel Girl, and failed to grab Miss Malaprop. That said, we all thoroughly enjoyed Hawkeye.

There are a couple of other things I don’t think I could have got through 2021 without — like watching episodies of 30 Rock on Stan, because sometimes all you really need is 20 minutes of madness and mayhem from Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey to lift your spirits. In a year where internet shopping has taken on a life of its own, I am still eyeing off a T shirt reading “Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks” in honour of Jenna Maroney’s alma mater, but I ended up settling for a 3 pack of Silent Theory T shirts instead (the Lucy style is great and the quality is top notch, in case you’re asking). Another internet purchase I loved? A drink bottle from Target that has the hours of the day printed down the side so I know where my water intake should be up to when. But I digress…

What else? What else did the Thrifty Fictionista love? Well, towards the end of the year I got right into reading Dave Grohl’s book The Storyteller, which inspired our New Year’s Eve feast of Kentucky Fried Chicken and French Champagne. And I finished up the year reading Hannah Kent’s Devotion, Sarah Winman’s Still Life, Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock and Anne Enright’s Actress — all of which were great, and made for a solid finish to a rather troublesome year.

And so, friends, here endeth the Thrifty Fictionista’s cultural ramblings through the year that was. I would love to hear what you watched, listened to and read during the past year than made it more bearable for you and yours. I hope you find some solace or joy in what I enjoyed.

Mind yourselves, and all the very best for 2022,

BJx

2020 in Books: Blue Jai’s Top 5

Posted on January 2, 2021 by Blue Jai • Posted in Blue Jai Creative, Books, Musings, Uncategorized, Writing • Tagged 2020, Algeciras, Australia, Ayiti, Barack Obama, Bernadine Evaristo, Bill Clinton, biography, Booker Prize, books, Curtis Sittenfeld, Education of An Idealist, fiction, Fleabag, forest bathing, Girl Woman Other, Hillary Rodham Clinton, impermanence, Julia Baird, Kevin Barry, Laura Bush, M Train, Margo Jefferson, memoir, Negroland, Night Boat to Tangier, non-fiction, Overview Effect, Patti Smith, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Phosphorescence, Queen Victoria, Richard Osman, Rodham, Roxane Gay, Samantha POwer, Sunrise, The Erratics, The Thursday Murder Club, Think Like a Monk, Thrifty Fictionista, Trent Dalton, Vicki Laveau-Harvie, Victoria, writing • 2 Comments

Well, I’ve covered my Top 5’s for 2020 in music and on screen, and now it’s time for my alter ego, the Thrifty Fictionista, to take centre stage and reveal Blue Jai’s Top 5 Books of 2020.

I don’t normally keep track of how many books I read, but for some bizarre reason utterly unknown to me I did in 2020 – and, despite home schooling and remote working, somehow found time to escape into more than 60 books. They ranged from non-fiction to biography to literary fiction to fantasy, read either on the page or on an iPad using the Libby app (which I think is brilliant).

Along the way I read some stuff I definitely won’t pick up again but which served its purpose during the darker times of the year just gone, but I also uncovered some genuine gems which, without further ado, make up Blue Jai’s Top 5 Books of 2020.

Phosphorescence: on Awe, Wonder and Things that Sustain You when the World Goes Dark by Julia Baird (2019)

I actually kicked off 2020 by reading Julia Baird’s masterful biography of Queen Victoria (which, if that sort of thing is your jam, I highly recommend). But it was this gorgeously ornamented hardback volume, which I will refer to simply as Phosphorescence for short, which took my breath away. In it, Julia Baird has delivered what I view as the best kind of writing: thoughts and ephemera so beautifully expressed and interwoven that you want to start reading the book again as soon as you have finished it.

In preparation for writing this post I was flicking back through Phosphorescence trying to find a specific passage which stuck in my memory – it was a description of sunrise on the East Coast of Australia, which compared (if I recall it correctly) the suddenness of the sun’s appearance over the rim of the Pacific to a lit match being dropped into petrol.

I couldn’t find the precise quote I was looking for…but as I leafed through the pages of this wonderful book, it reminded me of all the amazing things Baird talks about: not only phosphorescence, but storm chasing, and the Overview Effect, and forest bathing, and so many other glorious things. And in the process, I found another, completely different passage, which probably sums up even better what I love about this book:

If we accept flowering by its nature is a fleeting occurrence, then we are more likely to recognise each blossom as a triumph. And if we accept impermanence, we are far more likely to live in the present, to relish the beauty in front of us, and the almost infinite possibilities contained in every hour, or every single breath.

Enough said, yes?

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (2019)

Turning now to fiction, I could not fail to include Bernadine Evaristo’s prize winning Girl, Woman, Other, which deservedly took out the Booker in 2019. The intersecting stories and perspectives in this book stayed with me for a long time. Reading this novel might be described as the literary equivalent of looking into one of those glass faced clocks you can see the inner workings of – all the wheels and cogs are separate but still necessarily connected, which I loved. I also appreciated the diverse perspectives were overwhelmingly female, and the characters’ experiences – both good and bad – eminently familiar to female readers. Girl, Woman, Other is well worth your time and money, and I highly recommend it.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (2019)

Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne are “fading gangsters from Cork City”, sitting in the port of Algeciras, looking for Maurice’s missing daughter, Dilly. The entire novel takes place over the course of a single day, but because it is packed full of reminiscences of their time drug running in Spain and the various ups and downs of their lives in Ireland, it feels like it takes in decades.

Kevin Barry’s ability to capture the nuances of speech of the various characters in the book –particularly of the two main protagonists – stayed with me for long after I’d finished it. This novel definitely has a streak of darkness at its heart, made lighter by comedic turns and the banter between two old and very battered mates.

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld (2020)

The Thrifty Fictionista has come late to the Curtis Sittenfeld party, not having read American Wife or Sisterland or any of Sittenfeld’s other novels. And yet, the premise of this book – what if Hillary hadn’t married Bill? – had me hooked from the start. By necessity, the first part of the novel deals with Sittenfeld’s imagining of the romance between university students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton, but midway through the book they part: and when Hillary refuses Bill’s proposal of marriage, a very different version of “history” ensues.

To date I have resisted the urge to go googling down various rabbit holes on the interwebs in an effort to determine whether the very much still living Hillary Rodham Clinton has read this fictionalised account of her life as it might have been and how she has reacted to it, partly because it reminds me a bit too much of Barack Obama adding Fleabag to his list of favourite television series for the year some time back (which raised at least several eyebrows given what Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character was doing while she watched a video of him making a speech). At least, after American Wife, one can only assume Hillary Clinton can chat to Laura Bush about what must be a truly singular experience.

I’m not going to say any more about this one for fear of spoiling the ending, but I can tell you it is well worth a read.

M Train by Patty Smith (2015)

It’s only fair and fitting, I suspect, that I bookend this Top 5 of 2020 with a biographical meandering far more similar in tone to Phosphorescence than the fiction writing I’ve included as the meat in the sandwich, so to speak.

When my aunt lent me her copy of M Train it took me a while to get into it – I suspect I was on a massive fiction bender (no doubt plowing through a massive fantasy series by Sarah J Maas or someone similar), and after reading a chapter or two I found Patti Smith wasn’t what I was after at the time. When I picked it up again later, however, I devoured the remainder in a single sitting and absolutely loved it. Smith, who is perhaps better known as a singer-songwriter and poet, has – unsurprisingly – a lyrical ability to express emotion and to bring her interior life into the light…such as this passage when Patti visits a friend in Morocco who is close to the end of his life:

Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds. The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.

—Paul, I have to go. I will come back and see you.

He opened his eyes and laid his long, lined hand upon mine.

Ahhh….I don’t think there’s a better way to end the main part of this post than with such beautiful, poignant words.

The Thrifty Fictionista’s Highly Commended Books of 2020 are, as ever, a mixed bag of goodies:

All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton (2020) – how I love anything this man writes! A truly unique Australian voice with an abundance of humanity;
The Erratics by Vicky Laveau-Harvie (2017) – a tyrannical mother, a traumatised father, an extraordinary memoir;
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (2020) – a mystery, some giggles and a few keenly observed words of wisdom;
Ayiti by Roxane Gay (2011) – short stories that pack a real punch;
Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty (2020) – a self-help book, but notable because it’s the first I’ve read based on a Vedic perspective;
Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power (2019) – a fascinating autobiography from Barack Obama’s UN Ambassador to the United Nations; and
Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (2015) – one of the most engrossing and interesting memoirs I have ever read.

Thanks so much for checking out my Top 5s for 2020!

Here’s to 2021 being a very different year, in only good ways. I am looking forward to delving into a whole trove of excting new volumes and engrossing experiences, all between the pages of books.

Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve read something awesome, or subscribe to receive new posts directly to your inbox using the Follow button.

Until next time, mind yourselves.

BJx

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The Thrifty Fictionista Feels Nostalgic…

“Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day . . .”

The Thrifty Fictionista Is Cranky

2021: The Thrifty Fictionista Reviews

2020 in Books: Blue Jai’s Top 5

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“Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day . . .”

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