Smug Slow Cooker

when the casserole curdles

Lately, I’ve been lying awake in the dark as the rain pounds on the roof like a malevolent giant. If I am prickling with discomfort, I think, how are folks up north feeling as they lie on makeshift beds, listening to this relentless, epic weather? 

Here in Wollongong, trees are falling, the creeks are gushing and schools are closing, with gale force winds predicted for today, but we have seen nothing like the devastation up north. 

At home, the front door won’t close properly and mould blooms everywhere. The pile of doonas, pillows and soft furnishings for the tip is growing and the air is thick with sinister humidity. Any minute, I feel, mushrooms will sprout from my gussets. The pandemic continues (the teacher has Covid) and the radio updates are all war, all the time. The times, they feel a little biblical.

Just a few weeks ago, I described an early-morning at the start of the school term on Instagram. The smell of garlicky lamb from the slow cooker wafted gently through the air as I read an old New Yorker in the bathtub. The kids and I had just finished the Wordle before school, and I’d squeezed in a session on my novel in the navy darkness. The words were terrible, but they were on the page. Ah, life, I wrote blithely. She is good!

My friends began to make merciless fun of my smug slow-cooker, and the universe also decided I needed my pants pulled down. Cue the sounds of spinning plates crashing to the floor.

First, my specs all got lost, bar a single back-up pair with one arm. Then my phone died, requiring me to manage the complex threads of life for three weeks without a pocket assistant. This left me constantly behind the ball in terms of work and kid-scheduling, but also, without my WhatsApp groups of girlfriends and Instagram buddies, I was disconnected and isolated. The sudden radio-silence was jarring.

My friend L had kindly lent me two bags of books early in the pandemic. She never chased them down, even though I’ve had them for at least a year and long finished with their pleasant company. L and I are old friends. She knew that the books would eventually migrate down the hill to her place. But even though dropping them off has felt impossible -interacting in person almost beyond my skill set these days - I have carefully midwifed them through my own social anxiety, keeping them separate from my own books and adding ‘return L books!!!’ to list after list after list.

At some point, I transferred the bags to the car in in order to move me closer to that inexplicably difficult drop off and then the bags migrated, ominously, from the back seat to the boot, where the op-shop bags for donation live.

I was frazzled, phoneless and half-spectacled as I emptied the boot of op-shop piles into the donation bin. As a bag left my hand, the icy realisation: it was full of L’s books.

‘What kind of moron puts a bag of books to return next to the op shop pile?’ I railed to ten-year-old G. ‘Every moron would, Mummy’, G said loyally.

At Wollongong’s Cheapest Cars, I reversed into the bumper of a second-hand BMW.  I took a deep breath, adjusted my one-armed spectacles and trudged up the lumpy bare concrete to a cluttered office, where a man, proudly sporting a mane of black hair that was incongruous with his well-lived face, took my details and called me ‘sweetheart.’ He wanted to me to regard him as a gentleman, even though I suspected he would rob me blind.

‘Call Anglicare!!!’ and ‘Sort mechanic!!!’ replaced ‘Return books to L!!!’ on the to-do list. They shared the same railing, self-recriminatory series of exclamation points.

It took days, but my series of calls and emails to Anglicare finally wound their way along the sluggish veins of the system to lead me to the number of R, who empties the bins. He arranged to meet me the next day at dawn, where I cried in the inky dark. The bin had been already emptied two days before; L’s books long pulped or sorted.  

The sky never really cleared that morning. A spattering rain began, which would become a flooding deluge, and the next few weeks remained on this trajectory. A friend’s son died, suddenly, like a punch to the heart.

Both cars broke down, my hip bursitis got worse (is it the weather? Am I a witch?) and war in Ukraine unfolded daily. Some of the chaos around me was the result of my own failings, but some of it was shared, our collective experience of living in this strange, crumbling moment.

The glasses got repaired, and the cars too. I got a replacement phone and ordered new books for L. I donated to charity and cared for the children and went to work and hugged my friends hard at a huge, sad memorial for their beautiful young boy, lost too soon. 

These are, I tried to tell myself, the weeks of growth; the rips in the muscle that will  encourage me to grow stronger. To check the op shop piles and the blind corners. To learn how to apologise and explain and take responsibility. To recognise the fleeting, minor stresses of life for what they are: inconveniences in an otherwise outrageously privileged existence. 

These times form a counterpoint, I try to remind myself, a measuring stick against which one can really appreciate the hot bath, the clear skies, the hardworking slow cooker, the solid roof still standing against that relentless rain, and a strong, free democracy. Not smug, but grateful.

On to the televisions. 

Somebody Somewhere, with the brilliant Bridget Everett; High Maintenance, every episode a glimmering jewel of stand-alone storytelling; Sandham Murders,  for gentle Swedish crime. 

Recently I inhaled in a junky, unhealthy, glorious week-long binge, the entirety of Love Is Blind season 2. Perfect deep-Americana reality. Keith and I loved Only Murders In The Building with the adorable Martin Short. 

I am loving the Normal Gossip podcast, a recommendation from Mamamia Out Loud, a podcast I also really like for picking through the issues of the day. 

I’m listening to lots of news,  and I’m reading lots too. But I’m currently writing this on my phone, because my laptop stopped working this morning. That’s today’s issue. No photos here, for the same reason. Let’s just roll with the moment. Sigh. I’ll save the books and pictures for the next newsletter.

All love and solidarity to you out there, comrades.