Rubbish is in the eye of the Beholder

When you see people searching through rubbish bins you probably have one of two reactions: pity or disgust. Save your reactions. You could be looking at me.

I am a student of Neology, the science of going through what people have thrown out on the street. As a pioneer neologist, I have turned “field walking,” which is an archaeological term for walking over fields in search of ancient pot-shard dumps, into the new art of “city-scrounging” which is searching for hopefully whole pots.

In the old days I would spend hours rummaging around on building sites for a few bricks or bits of copper pipe - and in those days there were no safety fences to keep children out. Scrap was good business. “Where there’s muck, there’s money”. Collecting old copper tube, bits of lead (not always from church roofs) and even the odd discarded aluminium road sign brought in a few extra coppers. Many a time I had to whack a few people over the shoulders who tried to beat me to a good bit of brass.

Now, with the local government organising ‘hard waste collection days’ I have to sprint to beat the antique dealers and hold them off with my walking stick just to pick up a discarded china dog with a chipped ear.

How times have changed

Time changes

I get so confused with my modern appliances. Especially when I have to adjust the time. I can change my bedside clock, that’s just winding a few knobs at the back, but I don’t even know how to open my kitchen clock.

And I have just noticed that everything has a little clock in it! The video, the DVD, the burglar alarm, the stove, the hose in the garden and the (new) microwave oven, and I may have to ring up an electrician to come over and adjust my time settings. Time was never so confusing when I was young. Why do they all need to tell me what time it is?

But what actually is time? Does time exist when nothing is changing? Is the future infinite? Was there time before the Big Bang? What role does time play in our reasoning? What are the neural mechanisms that account for our experience of time? Does time exist for beings that have no minds? Does anyone care?

It’s all too much for me, I need a small glass of sherry while I wait for the electrician to come and move my clocks forward. Or is it backward?

Thoroughly Modern Queenie

I’ve joined the modern age at last. I have a mobile phone, a DVD player and now a microwave oven.

I resisted the oven for years. All those microwaves flying loose about the house, who knows what damage they could be doing and what awful consequences of random radiation?

Would it reverse the air conditioning? Turn on the garden sprinklers? Give the budgie a brain tumour?

But my Council Home Help Girl insists the oven is safe and it wouldn’t matter if I became suddenly sterile anyway. So I now have this white box on my kitchen bench and the Girl is bringing me a little bag of wheat that you pop into the microwave, enter a PIN number or something and there you have it — a sort of waterless hot water bottle.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Naps are fashionionable these days

I’m sure I read about these little napping machines in a sci fi novel many years ago when I was young. But this is a real appliance for people who are too busy to go to bed. Or for people to sleep at work. Before you wonder why people would be encouraged to sleep at work (this is what they do at my phone company, I swear the skeleton staff are all half-asleep) I will show you the advertisment urging us all to nap.

Naps have been shown to benefit almost every aspect of human wellness. The benefits to the body include better heart functioning, hormonal maintenance, and cell repair. They help you live longer, stay more active, and look younger.

Look younger? I’ve been napping all over the place for years and I can tell you right now it hasn’t done anything for me.

Only yesterday as I was taking the bus to the podiatrist I had a refreshing little nap and woke up with the busdriver asking me where I wanted to go…. Kindly chap, he knew I had missed my stop. I hope he didn’t see the dribble on my blouse.

Stretching your mind with new sights

My Lodger Gina thinks things that would never cross my mind. Not even in a fit.

Today it was : Just as we create flexibility in our bodies by stretching physically, we can create limberness in our minds by stretching mentally. We can do this in small ways such as taking a different route home from work ..

Well I’m always on the qui vive for anything that slows down my inevitable slide into the hellish pit of mindless old age, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I walked a different way to the butcher shop, and found a whole new supermarket had sprung up overnight. With bolts of coloured cloth on the footpath, windows full of dead ducks and aisles and aisles of strange exotic vegetables. Not that I look at vegetables much, nor should you, they’re very over-rated.

For a moment I thought I had inhaled some secondary smoke from my Council Home Help Girl.

Just when I’ve learned to distinguish between cappuchino, capocollo and a kreatopita, I have to grapple with a congee and a chua. Quite enough mental stretching for one day.

I had to have a little sherry to recover.

Is this a cankle?

So is this a cankle? It looks more like someone has been in the sun without protection.

Just last week at Bingo we were discussing how the young people of today always talk about protection. Even when doonah-dancing. These things never crossed our mind when we were snogging up the back of the hall.

Whatever happened to fish and chips

Remember Fish and Chips on Fridays? That’s how we knew what day of the week it was, by the greasy bits of flake wrapped up in old newspaper. (We never minded the print dye running into the batter, it gave the potato cake an extra zing.)

You just can’t get fatty food like that anymore, all these young people want nothing but low fat, no salt, no sugar, biodynamic batter and organic cold pressed oil for totally taste-free flake.

Constance Brown, 98, has been frying fish and chips for 80 years in her little corner fish and chip shop. She’s been eating them too. “That’s all I eat. I don’t eat any vegetables at all.”, she says. “So I’m living proof you can eat nothing but fish and chips and still be healthy.”

You can’t tell me that Connie has been tucking away this new-fangled low fat fish since the war.

April Fools’ Day

Well I managed to stay inside for all April Fools’ Day. No one has managed to pull my leg for a while, but I kept an eye out through the venetians for suspicious activity just the same. Some of the nippers around here need a firm hand. My goodness, back in my day if I used the language I hear from these neighbourhood cherubs, it would be paddy whack the drumstick so hard I wouldn’t be sitting down for a week.

One year in primary school I pinned a note which read ‘Kick Me’ to Father Camilleri’s back. There was absolute hell to pay. I was hauled up to the Head Nun and she rang my father at work! I was nearly expelled, at the age of seven.

Father Camilleri wasn’t fashed about it, he liked the fact that I could pronounce his esoteric name. At the time of this lamentable incident, it was only a few years after the lifting of a ban on migrants from Malta. They couldn’t come here because of the White Australia Policy. Too dark, you see. Too swarthy, too somehow black. And these were Maltese! Fellow Members of the British Commonwealth and war allies.

And we haven’t moved forward since then either. We just don’t pick on the Maltese anymore, especially when they make such superb jockeys.

Another Kindly Reader …

I interrupt this blog to thank the kind lady over at In a Coma who chipped in for a glass of sherry.

She’s a Melbourne girl, and understands the plight of the pensioners who find it increasingly difficult these days with the cost of living increases to get a good bottle of sherry. Dear me, last week, what with the gas bill, the arthritis pills and the cat license, I had to get a bottle of cooking sherry. The young chap in the bottleshop asked me what I was going to cook. What a drongo. Young people of today have no idea of hardship. In my day we would never waste a drop of cooking sherry on cooking.

I’m just about to have a little sip now with my slippers off

Foreigners have visited me

My neighbour put this little map in here. See it? Clust’r maps, in the right column there.

It shows me all these foreign lands with people who came here and looked at my diary. It gave me quite a turn! I had to sit down with an asprin and a small glass of sweet sherry to recover.

You would think these people had nothing better to do. Would you voluntarily choose to read an old lady’s diary? But I suppose foreigners have a different way of spending their time. When they have any time left over from growing their strange foreign vegetables.

They must get very tired speaking a foreign language too, it takes a lot out of you. I know what it’s like, a simple stroll to get a pint of milk from the corner shop can be exhausting.

With a bongiorno and a bella gianata to Mrs DiBenedetto and Mrs Poggioreale, a kalimera to Mrs Karayannis and a buenos dias to Mrs Ramirez, by the time I reach the corner I have to stop for a little rest. Fortunately Mrs Nguen speaks English.

The map shows people from USA have been here, I think they speak mainly English, a type of English at any rate, at least as understandable as Danish. Although I don’t think they actually grow any strange foreign vegetables or any vegetables at all for that matter. I’ve seen them on the telly, their vegetables come in packets.

It takes all types I suppose.