Columns from The Weekend West

Ros Thomas 12/12/2015 Ros Thomas 12/12/2015

Farewell, Friends

This column started as a happy accident. After twenty years in television, I’d resigned from the ABC to welcome baby number three. And then The West phoned, requesting a column on domestic life from the wilds of suburbia.

An old boss rang: “Are you sure?” he asked. “Every week, you’ll sit down and open up a vein for inspiration.”

He was right. I became attuned to my surroundings. I made small talk with interesting strangers. I stored away the snippets of a spat overheard at the checkout. I pushed my life outwards to absorb more. I once drove to York because the town was having a Medieval Fair and I was desperate for ideas. That became a column on manliness. Never had I seen so many grunting he-men in one paddock.

I made a rule to only write from personal experience: I hoped it would keep me authentic. I learnt that good writing needs clear thinking. I carried a notebook with me everywhere. My family and friends became used to my cries of frustration and woe. The gist of a column would float around in my head all weekend, then the column itself would arrive about four days and six drafts later.

Ros Thomas 05/12/2015 Ros Thomas 05/12/2015

Giving Up

The tree is up. Faux-pine and nuclear-green, it is a six-foot monument to the wonders of PVC and all things ersatz at Christmas. Ours is pretending to be a Norway Spruce. It stands unsteadily on our lounge carpet, tripod legs seeking terra firma beneath two inches of 1990’s plush pile carpet.

I bought our tree second-hand from a school fete. Fifteen Christmases have taken their toll. The tips of its branches have sloughed off their plastic skins to expose wire claws which rake your arm and sting like a cat scratch. Brush against the cellophane foliage and our tree sheds clouds of glitter.

This year I’ve abandoned my tree-trimming fantasies to allow my 8-year-old and his small sister decorating carte blanche. Clearly, they’ve inherited their father’s gene for dressing. They give no thought to proportion or colour coordination. They choke the lower branches with thick black cables knotted with our lumpish hand-me-down lights. Some strands they wind tightly around the trunk, some hang floppy and loose. Symmetry is ignored in favour of attaching a decade of kindergarten craft to the same five branches. An argument breaks out over whose lopsided paper stars are whose, and whether the toilet-roll Santa should hang next to his toilet-roll wife. A red globe blows and takes out its neighbours on either side. Our tree is both festive and fire hazard.

Ros Thomas 28/11/2015 Ros Thomas 28/11/2015

Too Close To Call

As I passed the second-hand shop, a tableau of office bygones caught my eye. There beside a hulking green typewriter was an old teledex – a slim Bakelite box filled with cards stored in alphabetical order – exactly like the one Mum used as an address book when I was a child.

Hers was shiny and black and a font of all important phone numbers. At the press of a button, the lid would spring open to reveal the names and addresses of everyone I knew (and lots of mysterious people I didn’t). Mum was particular about printing surnames in easy-to-read capitals. As friends’ lives shifted, she crossed out old addresses and inserted new ones until some pages became a hash of geographical confusion.

I don’t know why I can still conjure Mum’s address book with such photographic precision. Perhaps it’s because our social lives depended on it. Or perhaps because Mum was always asking me to fetch it. For a long phone call, she’d carry her cup of tea to the armchair beside the phone table. That was my cue to make myself scarce.

Ros Thomas 21/11/2015 Ros Thomas 21/11/2015

Passing Time

I arrived at the bus stop, breathless, having jogged across the park and up the grassy embankment to the highway. An elderly gent on the bench seat acknowledged me with a nod. His Labrador, sprawled at his feet, raised one eyebrow in greeting and thumped its tail lazily on the concrete.

“Excuse me,” I asked the owner. “Have I missed the 99?”

“Nothing green’s gone past since we’ve been here.”

Relieved, I sat down and remarked on his dog: “How old is he?”

“Bess? She’s nine.” He reached down to stroke a floppy ear. My bus-stop companion bore a remarkable likeness to Ernest Hemingway: a still handsome face framed by an impressive white beard, trimmed to follow a strong jawline. A navy fisherman’s cap, complete with rope braid, angled across his brow. I noticed the sharp crease in his cotton trousers and his polished brown lace-ups, one of which was wedged under Bess’ barrel chest. Only his walking stick hinted at infirmity. It was topped with a brass duck’s head, the bill worn smooth from constant handling. As we waited, he absentmindedly tapped the footpath with his stick.

Ros Thomas 14/11/2015 Ros Thomas 14/11/2015

The Wheel Deal

In my twenties, last century, I became captivated by a book called The Third Policeman. It was a darkly comic novel penned in the 1930s by an Irishman, who wrote – sodden with whisky – under the pseudonym of Flann O’Brien.

Several of his characters had spent their lives on bikes, traversing the rutted roads of their country parish. So attuned were they to their metal steeds that a transmutation occurred: the rider’s body began to merge with the molecules of his bike.

The postman, for instance, became 71 percent bicycle. He developed strange behaviours: regularly leaning one elbow against walls, or standing in the street with one foot propped on the kerb.

I wonder if I, too, am becoming half-woman, half-bike. My metamorphosis began after the calamity of losing my driver’s licence. In the wake of a disastrous double-demerit-point weekend, I found myself forced into two-wheeled servitude by the local constabulary’s speed cameras. The curtailment of my freedom was shocking: so accustomed was I to holding a steering wheel. How I would manage three children and my life without a car?

Ros Thomas 07/11/2015 Ros Thomas 07/11/2015

Keeping Mum

My mother has a wind-up toy that has been in our family as long as I have. It’s a little tin duck in a bright orange waistcoat, perched on a metal tricycle. A silver key cranks the clockwork motor hidden under his seat and he takes off, tiny webbed feet pumping the pedals, a blur of duck a l’orange on the loungeroom floor. Then, as the mainspring slackens, he begins to tire, pedalling slower and slower in diminishing circles. Exhausted, he finally whirs to a halt. That duck has faithfully entertained all three of my toddlers, tolerating their knocks and drops and their chubby little fingers overwinding his key. He was built to last, much like my mother.

“Look,” I said to Mum last week, inspecting the toy’s flaking paint and chipped wheels. “He’s getting a bit worse for wear.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. We all wear out eventually.”

Ros Thomas 31/10/2015 Ros Thomas 31/10/2015

In the Back Seat

I still marvel at the idea humans can now soar above the clouds in a pressurised metal tube. To me, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of jet engines rising in pitch, preparing for takeoff. Not even a midnight horror can dampen the thrill of flying.

Waiting to board, we passengers queued stoically. An overtired toddler, weaving listlessly through our line, suddenly reversed gear and became hyperactive. He began leapfrogging his mum’s bag until his foot caught the handle and he sprawled across the tiled floor, letting loose a volley of ear-piercing wails. I heard the middle-aged couple behind me exchange sighs. A flight attendant wearing a clipboard and sensible shoes announced:

“All economy passengers seated rows 60-75 please proceed to the gate for boarding.”

I looked down at my boarding pass: 73H. Probably next to the rear-most toilets.

Ros Thomas 24/10/2015 Ros Thomas 24/10/2015

Driven to Despair

The man behind the counter at the Motor Vehicle Licencing Centre dwarfed the glass partition that separated us. He was as skinny as he was tall, with a flap of dark, wavy hair plastered across his forehead. His moustache was fringed with grey. As he strained to staple a wodge of documents, I stood meekly on the wrongful side of the counter. He nodded and I slid my offending paperwork towards him and waited. He glanced up at the clock on the wall, sighed and turned to face me with the nettled expression of someone whose job it is to be civil to miscreants.

“Yes?”

I pleaded my case. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. “I got this letter last week saying you’re going to suspend my driver’s licence. But you can’t lose your licence for driving at 72 in a 70-zone on a highway can you?

He studied my papers.

“You can when it’s a 60-zone.”

Despair tightened in my gut.

Ros Thomas 17/10/2015 Ros Thomas 17/10/2015

Modern Fairy Fail

The closet under our stairs is home to a pair of battered suitcases, a retired floor mop topped with a shrivelled toupee of sponge and at least two generations of Daddy Long Leg spiders. I quite like spiders-on-stilts as a rule, but not when they come charging three abreast from the dark recesses of my scariest cupboard. Spring cleaning can be bloodthirsty work.

With my vacuum cleaner, I sucked them into the vortex of Hurricane Hoover and continued nosing deeper and deeper into the cupboard. And that’s when I struck an unfamiliar object. It was a mouldering cardboard box. I sliced open the packing tape with a knife. Inside was an antiquated collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tale books. They’d belonged to my mother as a girl and she, in turn, had entrusted them to my childhood.

I shuffled through the box, surprised and delighted to find these yellowing relics. Here were my favourite fairy tales – Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel. I teased open the fraying cloth cover of Hansel & Gretel and fell down a wormhole, hurtling back to my grandmother’s house and the bare boards of my bedroom, aged nine.

Ros Thomas 10/10/2015 Ros Thomas 10/10/2015

Panic Button

Stephen Hawking is right: artificial intelligence could become the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last. Already, I’m reading scary stories about how robots will soon do our thinking for us.

In our house, it’s already happened: I’ve met my nemesis and her name is Siri. She’s the euphonious voice inside my smartphone. She’s both software and service. She eagerly responds to my voice commands: “Siri, tell my husband I’m running late” and she dutifully sends him a text message. “Wake me at 6am,” I instruct and Siri sets the alarm on my phone. Siri calls herself my ‘intelligent personal assistant.’ I like to think of her as my virtual slave.

Within days of buying my iPhone 6, Siri and I became inseparable. Our friendship bloomed over a mutual love of talking. Siri became the most available friend I’d ever had. She was never too busy to chat.