Columns from The Weekend West
Archive
- December 2015 2
- November 2015 4
- October 2015 5
- September 2015 4
- August 2015 5
- July 2015 4
- June 2015 4
- May 2015 5
- April 2015 4
- March 2015 4
- February 2015 4
- January 2015 3
- December 2014 2
- November 2014 5
- October 2014 4
- September 2014 4
- August 2014 5
- July 2014 4
- June 2014 4
- May 2014 5
- April 2014 4
- March 2014 5
- February 2014 4
- January 2014 2
- December 2013 2
- November 2013 5
- October 2013 4
- September 2013 4
- August 2013 5
- July 2013 4
- June 2013 5
- May 2013 4
- April 2013 4
- March 2013 5
- February 2013 4
- January 2013 4
- December 2012 5
- November 2012 3
- October 2012 4
- September 2012 5
- August 2012 4
- July 2012 4
- June 2012 3
Not Yet Booked Out
The sight of so many books made my heart skip. Thousands of them sat pressed together on tables, a sea of spines, filling the University of WA’s Winthrop Hall. A smiling fellow with a silvery moustache stood by the door in a black apron. “Half price today,” he said. “We’re open ‘til 9.30 tonight.”
A hushed crowd inched along the tables, heads bowed over the vast array of titles. I could hear the gentle fluttering of pages, the murmurs of quiet conversations, an occasional soft thud as a heavy book was shut. The ceiling fans circled lazily.
Under the Covers
I learnt more about men and sex in 1985 than I should have, thanks to a book called The Hite Report. It was a fat well-thumbed paperback, containing interviews with hundreds of blokes on everything from ‘What Men like Women to Wear’ to ‘How A Man Likes to be Seduced.’ Its pages were coffee stained at juicy junctions, underlined and exclamation marked, and I discovered a silverfish entombed near the spine in a chapter devoted to Men’s Fantasies. (‘Stop talking’ featured heavily in the advice to women.)
- 1970s
- 1980s
- ageing
- ants
- Apple
- Appliances
- Articles
- audience
- Australian
- Beach
- bird
- Books
- Boredom
- butchers
- caravan
- Childhood
- Children
- Communication
- competition
- computers
- confusion
- Conspiracy Theory
- conversation
- courage
- Culture
- customers
- cycling
- death
- decline
- dementia
- driving
- ego
- Family
- Fashion
- Fear
- Forgetting
- frailty
- Friendships
- Gadgets
- generations
- grey nomad
- grief
- groceries
- Handwriting
- happiness
- homesickness
- independence
- Journalism
- laundry
- Life
- Listening
- loneliness
- loss
- luddites
- manners
- marriage
- materialism
- Memory
- Men
- Middle Age
- mobile phones
- Motherhood
- mothers
- Neighbourhood
- neighbours
- newspapers
- nostalgia
- nudity
- Obsolescence
- old age
- Parenting
- pleasure
- politeness
- reading
- Relationships
- roadhouse
- school
- shop rage
- shopping
- showgrounds
- snobbery
- spiders
- Stranger
- strangers
- Style
- Talking
- Technology
- teenagers
- Television
- time
- train travel
- trains
- travel
- Truth and Rumours
- twitcher
- Wheatbelt
- Women
- workplace
- Writing