Columns from The Weekend West

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

For Old Time’s Sake

He’s wearing a pale grey tracksuit with darker cable-knit panels decorating his shoulders like epaulettes. An emergency buzzer is looped around his neck. Dangling off the silver chain is a plastic likeness of Walt Disney’s Goofy, painted orange. His name is Jim. He’s 85.

We’re settled into a small lounge curtained off from the dining hall of an aged care home. A bookshelf is lined with a well-thumbed collection of Robert Ludlums and Frederick Forsyths. Someone has lit the fire in the brick fireplace.

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

Leave Me Alone

When was the last time you spent 24 hours alone? An entire day and night without human company? For me, it’s been decades. I now find it faintly ridiculous I spent so much of my early life trying to avoid being by myself.

The idea of a Saturday night at home was once unthinkable. I couldn’t imagine aloneness being enjoyable. Twenty years later, a Saturday night-in is a relief. I’ve lost my appetite for nightlife. Somewhere between giving birth to my third child and waking up on the wrong side of 45, wild partying and seedy Sundays no longer appeal.

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Opinion Ros Thomas Opinion Ros Thomas

Only the Lonely

“So, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asks the school mum I’m standing with.

We’d been chatting, this new friend and I, waiting for our six-year-olds to come barrelling out of class. I feel a thud of embarrassment at her question, but I force a smile and reply: “I’m an only child.”  

I say those four words with a shrug so they’ll appear weightless, but they drop between us like stones. I see on her face that peculiar mix of curiosity and suspicion. She can’t hide the look I know so well.

“Wow!” she says, “I wouldn’t have picked you for one of those,” and our conversation skids in a direction that makes me feel exposed.

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