NSW Teachers' Strike

Fifty percent of the teachers at our local school joined the NSW Teachers' Strike today. This meant that while Padawan Learner went to school, Blossom didn't. I took Blossom and a friend out for the day.

Their reward for tagging along with my errands was a trip to Balmoral Beach.

Where we found that the Shark Proof net, isn't. Luckily it's not swimming weather.

It was, however, eating weather and I treated the girls to lunch at The Bathers' Pavillion (Bistro side).

Where I was given the most enormous, impossibly piled-up, plate of Caesar Salad. Ate about one-third of it.

...and then I woke up to find it was all a dream

"Destination" announced my GPS with its usual nasal-electronic twang. Straight ahead Balmain Road looked to peter out; to my left was a lane overgrown with weeds; to my right was an opening heralded by a boom gate with flaking white paint that looked like it hadn't lowered in twenty years. A dark green wooden sign adorned by a single streamer announced that I should turn here if I wanted to find the NSW Writers' Centre.

As my car crunches over the worn out tarmac I feel in the pit of my stomach that I should've checked this place out before sending my daughter off here with a friend this morning. I was driving through the grounds of a long disused hospital with old sandstone buildings surrounded by fibro shacks, demountables and signs of abandonment everywhere. I assure myself that if anything was amiss I would've had a concerned phone call by now, from the friend who drove the girls.

It's now 2.45pm and I'm looking for the building, amongst the thirty or so I can see, that has held my daughter and two of her friends in a creative writing class for the day. I pull into a makeshift carpark next to an abandoned demountable and see this sign ahead. I am irrationally relieved to note that some care has been taken to print this sign with its deliberately placed apostrophe. I am also buoyed by the sight of recently installed, expensive-looking, outdoor lighting - the sort seen on tennis courts in Toorak or Killara - as if this is a sign that my daughter is in good hands.

As instructed by the sign I walk around to the front of the building, past the book-binding room and a small library, to find a charming building filled with signs of bookiness. Bookiness on a budget. The verandah was filled with plastic tables and metal chairs with flaking paint, possibly of the same vintage as the boom gate I came through earlier.

Inside twenty 9-13 year olds were taking turns to stand up and read from their day's work. Unfortunately, I had just missed Blossom's recital. I'm sure this was quite deliberate on her part. I can imagine her hand went up like a shot to volunteer to read first when she saw I wasn't in the room yet. The other readings, however, were delightful. The convenor, Frances Watts*, had obviously spent a lot of time working with descriptiveness as we heard about a dress that "was so heavy that it almost pulled me backwards" and a Magpie whose "underside of his wing shone like the golden ring he was carrying."

And while there were variations on the theme, not one young author "woke up to find it was all a dream".




*Frances Watts convened this session as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival.

Blue Monday*

It seems to me that homes should be designed to make the jobs that we hate to do easier.

Take the laundry as an example. I really dislike doing laundry. All those dirty clothes; remembering to check Padawan Learner's pockets for stones, tissues, scrap pieces of paper and bits of wood; trying to remove stains from white school shirts and don't even get me started on woollens that need hand-washing. And then the hanging, picking-in, folding and or ironing. Bleh.

Doing the laundry would be much easier if home designers assigned reasonable space for this loathsome task. Space to sort clothes, a decent trough to handwash, if one must, and the ability to put clothes into the washing machine without having to first stand on the kitty litter and reach over the dirty clothes hamper while resting one hand on the dryer to balance.

Check out our doozy of a laundry. I do not live in an inner-city apartment. I live in a four-bedroom home in the suburbs. The previous owners thought it appropriate to assign this small corner of the kitchen to the laundry. It's in a space smaller than our powder room. In a previous life I think it may have been the verandah 'outhouse'. This means that, due to space constraints, both clean and dirty laundry spreads itself all over our house rather than being kept out of sight.

I don't want a big laundry because I love doing the washing but because I hate it.

Home designers are putting in home theatres and parents retreats but placing the laundry in a cupboard in a far corner of the house. It's like hiding it under a rock and hoping it will go away. I understand that sentiment, I do, but I've tried that tack and it just won't disappear.

Wash-day-haters unite! I say we march on our local Architectural practices and reclaim our right to a decent laundry.

* Can anyone guess the historical reason that I've called this post Blue Monday?