The Maroon Diaries

It's a long, hot day. There's been a lot of these lately; it's that time of year. I've had a certain song stuck in my head lately, just because it's called 'One Long Day.' The Summer. Sometimes that word sounds like a prison sentence to me. This is a hard time for me, every year. I don't cope well with the heat. I can't stand the bright sunshine. On days like these, I just have to stay indoors, and stay still as much as possible. If I move around too much on a hot day, that's enough to get overheated and feel terribly sick. So I spend most of these long hot days lying on my bed with the fan on, napping or reading or doing puzzles. I've certainly been getting through a lot of reading lately. Several excellent books have helped make the days fun and exciting, as long as I stay in the book. Then the sun goes down, and it gets cool, and I am reprieved of my sentence once more, until dawn. I can breathe again, I can move again. I have ...

Like most of my generation, I grew up watching an awful lot of television. An awful lot of crappy, often American television with all the brainwashing advertising in between. I certainly developed addictive behaviours toward televsion viewing as a child. Once I was grown up, I decided that that was bad. When I had my own place, I lived without television, and had no doubt that I was better off. When I thought of people who use television to deal with their moods, I had nightmarish visions of overweight women in pink, Tim-Tam-crumb-infested nighties watching Ricki Lake and home shopping infomercials. As long as I didn't have a television set, that could never be me. I sure as hell wasn't giving up the Tim Tams. However, I did go out of my house sometimes. Sometimes I was in other people's houses. So I still got to see plenty of television here and there over the years. And I came to understand that there's a lot of really good stuff on television, too, and to appreciat...

I want to tell you about a most extraordinary book. There are a lot of books that I love so intensely and profoundly and I wish I could share the wonder of them with others. But in most cases I'm aware that though I loved the book that much, it wouldn't really be for everyone. Very rarely a book comes along that is so deeply universal that I really feel that I need to tell everyone "You have to read this book before you die. Preferably as soon as possible." I'm currently reading Opal by Opal Whiteley again. I've still got the same copy, the Jane Boulton adaption, subtitled the journal of an understanding heart , I found on a clearance table in Fuller's Bookstore in Hobart. And I guess I was really meant to have it, because I lost it once, and it came back to me. I had lent this book to a friend when she went on a holiday and never came back. But some months later I found it in the op shop down the street from my flat. It's the same copy - I'd...

I've noticed that there's a bit of a theme that, when I encounter when reading blogs, fires my anger right up, and I fire off comments in the heat of the moment. And I figure, if there's all that energy there that is going into other people's comments spaces, I should take that energy and focus it on my own blog. The theme is around psychiatrists and the mental health system and how they treat their patients. I don't like it. I don't like it a bit. When making generalisations, I think it's important to be clear about the nature of generalisations, and that is, of course, that they don't fit every situation or individual. There are always abundant exceptions to a generalisation. And so I would expect, even though as a generalisation, I don't like psychiatrists, that I would meet one along the way who was actually quite unobjectionable, or at least that I would know of someone who could tell me, 'Hey, I know this bloke who's a psychiatris...

They grow sugar cane in Queensland. Lots of it. There's even a bit in the Grasshopper song about it. Oh, they grow sugar cane in Queensland They grow sugar cane in Queensland They grow sugar cane  And they load it on a train 'Til it's syrup in a tin in Queensland. I loved that song when I was a kid. I've only just discovered right now, as I looked for a link to give to readers who may be unfamiliar with such obscure Australiana, that the version I learnt at primary school had been abridged and altered a little for the benefit of our tender young ears. Turns out, the giant grasshopper wasn't drinking pineapple juice all over Queensland after all. He was spitting tobacco juice. Well, learn something new and all that. I'm from down south, and I'd never been to Queensland, or seen a sugar cane field, until I was 22 years old. I was on a bus from Darwin to Brisbane - that's three days straight on a bus. On the third day we started driving thr...

I got a new tattoo a little while ago, inside my left forearm. It was pretty damn exciting. It's been fifteen years since I last got a new tattoo. This tattoo is a little different to most, in that it has a very practical function. It's a medical alert tattoo. People have been telling me for years that I really should get one of those medical ID bracelets, but I was not at all attracted to the idea. I don't like to wear much jewellery at all except for dress-ups. I find it so annoying and fiddly to have bits of metal or whatever dangling off my person. And they only end up broken or lost and have to be replaced. No, I couldn't put up with it. But then I happened to hear about the relatively recent phenomenon of medical alert tattoos. And I do love tattoos.  So I looked into it. When I started to come across more and more anecdotal evidence that suggested that the people most likely to get a medical alert tattoo are paramedics and ER workers, I was convinced. I ...

I'll measure it for you. Just one room, 3.7m by 4.9m, and 3.9m by 2.4m of verandah space, for the two of us. And miles and miles of bushland outside and beyond. It's a considerable downsize from my previous home, a two-storey, two-bedroom townhouse. It's been a long journey to my new tiny home, which began, rather bizarrely, with getting hooked on an American reality TV program. It was Hoarders , and it was really horrible television, on a really ugly subject, but I was fascinated with this tragic side effect of our culture of consumption - a disorder caused by affluence. I was a bit surprised with myself for getting into a reality TV show, but even more surprised to realise, as I watched more episodes, just how closely I identified with these people on the show, these people who had a hoarding disorder. How much I understood exactly what they were talking about. How very closely they were describing the way I felt about possessions. How very easily I could become one...

Dear lovely readers, I am so sorry I haven't gotten back on the blogging horse. And I don't just mean that I'm sorry out of an obligation to the blog or anyone - I'm really, honestly, just sorry for myself. Truth is, I've been pretty bloody depressed lately. Yep, it's possible to get depressed even living in a tropical paradise. Various people whom I care about are going through hard things like illness and outrageous family problems, and one died recently. And the bloody federal election didn't help any, let me tell you. Like life is worth living under a Tony Abbott government. Pfft. At least my late friend didn't live quite long enough to see that come to pass. And I've really been missing the blogs so much, mine and all the beautiful ones I love to follow. But you know how things seem harder to catch up on when you're already depressed. But this morning, as part of my ok-I-really-have-to-pull-myself-together mission, I made a deliberate po...

...which is not at all surprising, seeing as we are officially living in a sub-tropical rainforest, but, my goodness, it's a bit of shock to the system for this winter-loving lady. I'm aware that most people from other countries have an impression of Australia as a generally very hot place, and for the most part of this nation's landmass, it's quite true. But I have lived most of my life in the southern states of Victoria and Tasmania, enjoying a proper cycle of the four seasons in a fairly regular European fashion - cold winters requiring woollens, firewood and raincoats, and hot summers with ice cream, sunglasses and broad-rimmed hats. I've always adored the colours of the autumns and the thrill of the icy winters, and barely tolerated the hot summers, hiding indoors as much as possible in the daylight hours. And now I am here, where it's summer nine months of the year, and winter is something that only happens in the night hours, and retreats each day at ...

Aye, and I've been a terrible bad, bad blogger again. Not only that. It's worse this time. Not only did I stop blogging again, but this time I stopped following the blogs I love, as well. And now I know. Life is less without blogging. I miss it terribly. So, what the hell happened, Lady Demelza, to get yourself into such a state? Ah, well, that's where the exciting news comes in. I left off blogging when I got too busy with the mission of moving house. This is where I live now. It's so beautiful I could just burst. I started out with the best of intentions, and a long list of half-finished draft posts that I intended to keep me going through the busy move. But the process of packing, sorting, cleaning and moving proved more than I could handle as it was. The digital world seemed less relevant as the physical world became so very full and demanding. Then I arrived, and as fate would have it, there were some 'issues' with the Internet connection ...

How many times a day do you see some advertising in all our varied forms of media that is really stupid at best, or horribly offensive at worst? Probably really quite often, unless you live in a cave in Outer Mongolia. How often do you speak out and try to do something about it? Probably not very often. You might have tried once or twice and become discouraged at how hard it is to find someone responsible for the ad to listen to you. Or maybe you're just so overwhelmed by the enormity of this issue and don't know where to start. I want to give a HUGE congratulations and thank-you-for-fighting-the-good fight to Lucy from the wonderful blog Lulastic and the Hippyshake for her her fantastic response to an incredibly stupid AND horribly offensive ad for Weetabix in the UK. Bonus points for sending Barbie through the mail. Really, have a look, it's gorgeous. I must admit, only twice have I ever bothered to actually put my outrage into a formal complaint. The first time was...

I read a fabulous book recently, as I often do, and I want to tell you about it, which is something that I also often want to do, but often don't. I had a little epiphany about why I don't get those thoughts out and onto a blog post. I've been using the term 'literary review' in the titles of posts about books. This is because I like literary reviews, and they're definitely a good thing to do. But now I realise I need to stop using this expression. I have too many constrictive ideas about what a literary review actually is, and many of the thoughts I have about books don't seem to be part of my definition of a literary review. So I'll just write about books. If you would like to read a more conventional kind of proper literary review of this book, there's this one here on Goodreads and this one on Novel Niche , both of which I quite liked. To begin with, my story about a book begins quite a bit earlier than when I actually read it. First, there ...

My family and I have had at least our fair share of health problems and hospital stays, but I never really understood how much pain there is in the world until I became Mr CJ's carer. When he first became unwell, I knew that it would take a long time and a gazillion tests before they worked out what was wrong with him. But I was still naive enough to imagine that once they worked out what the problem was, they would be able to treat him, and he might not get cured, but at least be able to manage and learn to live with it. That was four years ago. It turns out that even with all our whizz-bang medical technology, there's not much they can do with him other than prescribe addictive painkillers that just dull the pain, just a little. He's still in almost constant, intense pain. Whenever I look up from what I am doing, whether it's the dishes or a puzzle or blogging, the first thing I see is Mr CJ heroically bearing up under incredible pain. The first thing that happens...

I had to have a little chuckle when I came across  this post this morning, where  Stan Carey describes his 'to-read' stack of books as a mountain. Then he corrects himself and points out that the mountain is actually more of a range. Now there's a man who's honest with himself, I thought to myself. I am still in total denial, obviously. I'm still just calling mine a 'pile' - though now I'm suddenly aware that this is a terribly inadequate word. Since as long as I can remember, there has always been, somewhere, in some form, a pile of books that I intend to read. This is what my Pile looked like a fortnight ago when I started writing this post. Then I procrastinated, which of course is something I'm very good at... though now I'm kind of glad for it, because I got to find that gem about the Pile becoming a mountain range. In the meantime there was another trip to the library. And now my Pile looks like this. These pictures, however...