Columns from The Weekend West

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 16/05/2015 Ros Thomas 16/05/2015

Older and Wiser

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

Ros Thomas 17/01/2015 Ros Thomas 17/01/2015

Greener Pastures

I’ve never understood the relationship between man and lawn. On any summer’s morning, I can wake to find my live-in greenkeeper out the back, in the smallest of silky pyjama shorts, inspecting his Sir Walter buffalo. Hands on hips, he meanders back and forth tracing grid patterns in his turf, engrossed in the grass at his feet. The swell of his New Year’s tummy throws a soft round shadow on his beloved lawn.

I lean against the kitchen bench and admire his XL silhouette through the glass doors. Something catches his eye. He drops to one knee and prospects in the grass with a stick. I predict a lone dandelion weed, or some marauding clover or – quelle horreur! – a lumbering black beetle.

Ros Thomas 01/11/2014 Ros Thomas 01/11/2014

Farewell, my friend

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

Ros Thomas 28/06/2014 Ros Thomas 28/06/2014

Airing Dirty Laundry

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Ros Thomas 24/08/2013 Ros Thomas 24/08/2013

The Male Mystique

I live with a man who inhabits a different relationship to mine. Our marriage is a his-and-her version of the same conjugation. I can never tell what my husband is thinking because he’s master of the poker face. On weekends, having tried (and failed) to read his mood, I’ll squeeze in beside him on the sofa and inquire: “Honey, what are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

I like to press him further: “You know, it’s impossible to think about nothing. Even nothing is something if you can’t think of anything.”

“Okay then,” he sighs. “I’m thinking about what a plonker that Hayden Ballantyne is. And if I’ll have time to scarper to Bunnings at half time. And whether they’ll have a sausage sizzle out the front. Happy now?”

Ros Thomas 04/05/2013 Ros Thomas 04/05/2013

A Lost Opportunity

In our house, I am the finder of lost things. Except if the lost thing is the repair kit for the coffee machine. Sealed in a plastic bag, these are special tools: a weird-looking tube and a yellow brush, a metal thingy with a hole punctured at one end and a perforated paper cone.

They are also implements so vital to the espresso-making process that I’ve never seen them before. My husband says otherwise, seeing as it’s me who has lost them.

Ros Thomas 06/04/2013 Ros Thomas 06/04/2013

Writing on the wall

Memory has a mind of its own. At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

Ros Thomas 09/03/2013 Ros Thomas 09/03/2013

For love or money

Money is a delicate subject in our house. So delicate my husband likes to refer to me as Paris Hilton. I take offence because Paris Hilton is a vacuous party princess and I’m a down to earth toilet-scrubbing kind of princess with calluses on her knees.

The laws of marriage demand we define ourselves as either Scrooge or Squanderer. Rarely are we on the same team. Agreeing on whose label is whose is a barney in itself.

Some spouses grudgingly accept they’re a Scrooge because they imagine they are sensible with money. They also know a teabag can make three consecutive cups of tea if it’s wrapped in plastic and kept in the fridge.

Ros Thomas 09/02/2013 Ros Thomas 09/02/2013

In the Passion Pit

Power is still the best aphrodisiac. That’s why I get all atingle at the sight of my husband brandishing an electric drill or a whipper snipper. The mere suggestion that he has forsaken the cricket, the newspaper and his children to do a job that lessens my domestic load is guaranteed to earn him an afternoon delight. And I don’t mean a visit from my mother.

Sometimes I fantasise about my bloke leaning over the kitchen sink. I like to imagine him up to his elbows in suds teaching that saucepan with the scrambled eggs burnt into it a lesson in brute force.