Review : Fuel of the Day
June 8th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Lindy's article in Beanscene
Published in Beanscene magazine October 2010
Coffee is hero a Café Meccanica, a tucked away café that can proudly claim to brew the best caffeine in Warburton. Genovese Coffee is the preferred bean and perfect crema the fuel of the day.
Once a garage, owners Sam and Kyall have created a light airy space that is unique for its range of motorcycle memorabilia – from café racer to dirt bike, with an original Evel Knievel pinball machine adding to the cool nostalgic air.
Fill up the tummy from the range of light snacks – toasties feature local artisan bread and ‘Fat Mumma’ condiments – all reasonably priced from $4.50. Succumb to sweet treats with panforte, biscotti and home made muffins and loaf cakes which go the extra mile.
The sun-filled outdoor seating area, also known as the ‘driveway,’ boasts a northerly outlook over the pristine Yarra River and the natural beauty of Mt Donna Buang. It’s a wonderful place to linger and check out the steady stream of motorcycles that drop in before tackling favourite rides such as the Reefton or Black Spurs. Café Meccanica has a friendly vibe that has everyone talking. And the locals love it.
1 Thomas Ave, Warburton
Open 7 days from 8 am.
For more information www.cafemeccanica.com.au
Review : Alpine Retreat Hotel Warburton
May 8th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Grand old country hotels like this one are becoming a rare find in a world where contemporary hotel renovations and the ‘bistro’ising of pubs seems to take precedence over preserving hotel charm.
The Alpine Retreat Hotel is idyllically located on the banks of the Yarra in Warburton and carries the history of the town without compromising the creature comforts.
Accommodation is well-priced (from $40 per night) and put to good use by the steady stream of weekend cyclists that ride the Rail Trail, 30 kilometres from Lilydale.
The food is honest and the serving size is overwhelmingly generous. Thursday nights is ‘$12 Parmy’ night and for connoisseurs the ‘Godfather Parmy’ is an experience to savour.
A full bar features a solid range of local and imported wines and the adjacent conservatory is delightful whatever the season. The venue offers a grand ballroom for weddings and functions, but for a daily drop the locals will tell you the back bar is the go.
Review : Monkey Grip – Helen Garner
May 1st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Twenty years on this book is considered a classic of Australian literature. Helen Garners debut novel ‘Monkey Grip’ is both humorous and oppressive in its revelation of the life of Norah and Javo, its key characters. Against a feminist backdrop of the 70s this novel reflects a time when women where consolidating themes of independent life – not much has changed. Garners detailed account of a drug indulgent life in the inner suburbs is evocative, as is the insightful paring away of everyday human relationships, a trademark of her writing to this day. However, re-reading this book almost 20 years later, I did find myself becoming impatient with Norah’s inability to let go of her ill fated lover and just ‘get on’ with her own life.
This book, which was also made into a feature film, had me humming Divinyls songs and showcases the beginnings of the fine writer that Garner is today.
Moving Art
April 3rd, 2010 § 3 Comments
Something has changed in the city. During the week it’s all suits and ties but come the weekend, the laneways and cafes become living, breathing installation art destinations. Street art has a new domain, the limbs and torsos of the people, tattoos seemingly a new form of fashion – one that can’t be changed out of.
Getting some ink seems to hold as much attraction for the nubile young as it does for the tough guys.
Two women stroll past a café arm in arm. Twentysomethings, full of stories about last night, who texted who and what the hell was that about?
Entwined you cant help but notice their heavily tattooed arms. In prison these are called sleeves, but today, in Degraves Street they are a permanent fashion statement about what to wear.
One has even had ‘the work done’ on her legs, bones and grapes wrapping around her ankle, spider webs creeping up her outer thigh to eventually emerge from her black singleted torso to become two angel wings between her shoulder blades.
Jesse has her name tattooed beneath a sailor girl image on her left calf. She has proudly commissioned this design from a friend who fancies herself as an ink artist, and probably is. Her body is a living canvas, the symbols of her young fashionable life permanently etched in her flesh for all to see.
I can’t imagine making such long term decisions about what I like. I can barely stay committed to a brand of teabag let alone a tattoo that would be with me forever.
Fashion is notorious for change and Jesse’s body reads like a storyboard. With so many chapters still ahead of her, I hope she has left space on her canvas.
Where did all the Jakpacks go?
March 10th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Spend a moment anywhere there are teenagers today, and it’s hard not to be amused at the influence the ‘80’s has on current fashion trends. In this 1980’s renaissance we have seen all sorts of apparel from my teenage years reappear, but there is one piece of attire that is noticeably absent. Where, oh where, are the Jakpacks?
Surely you remember them? The Jakpack was a tri coloured, patchwork inspired, Balinese sourced jacket that, in a first for multipurpose fashion, had the added feature of turning into a bag. I remember campaigning my mother for at least 6 months before she relented and finally bought me this must have fashion essential. Every Jakpack was a unique and often jarring combination of batik tie-dyed colour - zips, dangly bits and tabs placed with carefully planned haphazardness. What a break through in fashion fare.
I wore my Jakpack for the last time on my 14th birthday and I have the photo to prove it. My outfit most certainly would have consisted of a pair of Staggers corrugated zip ankle stretch denim jeans, skeg beads, fluoro ankle socks, and a pair of white canvas basketball style high tops. Amusingly, this particular ensemble would still pass as current today, based on what I saw last week at Chadstone Shopping Centre!
Of course all this fashion observance would have been pointless if it wasn’t followed up with the perfect hair. Madonna inspired perms, undercuts and asymmetrical haircuts with mink tips were all part of the look – the Flock of Seagulls look that is.
My Jakpack eventually went to the great Op Shop in the sky, an unceremonious departure because ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in that!’ I was so late to this trend that by the time I had my own coveted Jakpack, the trendy had already moved on to Choose Life T shirts and tube skirts. (Thanks mum!)
So fashion followers of 2010. You may have already embraced the retro notion of bat-wing T shirts, MC Hammer style harem pants and bubble skirts.
But there is still much to mine when it comes to reinventing the typical 80’s wardrobe. Stretch lace tights – yet to reappear, mesh singlets – nowhere to be seen, hyper colour T shirts that simply highlighted your sweaty regions – actually they should never be welcomed back. I know, I saw them the first time.
And while being 80’s retro cool today is not as simple as heading down to the local Vinnies to grab a 25 year old remnant, I wonder if anyone ever bought my Jakpack thinking one day it would be due for a come back.
Like Spandau Ballet (really they are touring next month!), some things are better left behind…in a bin liner bag…at a donation bin…when no-ones looking.
2xMe
March 1st, 2010 § 2 Comments
Today I participated in my second ever fun run. A 10 km run around the river here in my home town of Warburton, a fund raiser for local community initiatives.
My preparation, given I am now such an old hand at this fun run thing, consisted of : 3 peanut butter sandwiches on Thursday, half a packet of chocolate coated teddy bear biscuits Friday (after I had gone to the trouble of cancelling my gym appointment that day) and absolutely nothing Saturday ( in fact I had classes all day which required I sit on my backside for 6 hours).
So what do I gain from the experience of running beyond my comfort zone? Well I did finish in record time – one hour and 7 mins, a new personal best for the distance and a whopping 14 mins faster then the last time. (Regular readers will recall my debut performance at Marysville last November)
And I realised that I fervently wish I could write down everything that I thought while I was running – then you would be reading something fantastically interesting instead of this drivel. When is someone going to invent a wire that connects to your brain via your iPod and records all your thoughts? Yes I see you‘re all rushing to the Patents office.
I also realised that if I am running twice as long as those long legged gazelles that leap across the finish line in record time, then aren’t I getting double the workout? With half the gear. I certainly don’t have a $160 pair of compression running skins or any of the accessories some runners seem to acquire.
It has also come to my attention that at 155 cm tall with legs less than half that, I am never going to be anything more than a jogger. Runners will always lap me and I will always be the turtle and not the hare in this little exercise called exercise.
And you know what, that’s very OK by me because I was out there and I did it for me, not for the competition. Having said that, I was first in my class – for my age, my height and my star sign, for the last 3 people to cross the line.
And that’s winning enough for me!
Enough Said – Costco, consumerism and crap
February 14th, 2010 § 6 Comments
Today I paid my first visit to the hallowed halls of excess consumerism. A strange warehouse style monolith filled by pallets of people all on the ‘give me, give me, give me ‘ hunt for a bargain, a special bonus or at the very least an extra kilogram of something they don’t need at no extra cost.
Yes you guessed it, destination Costco, on a Sunday afternoon, the latest retail offering on our shores from our dear, most influential friend, the USA.
The visit was borne more out of curiosity than the need to purchase, although stories of a dozen bagels for $10 had filtered into my psyche over time, a very potent example of how suggestible we can be to the foibles of marketing, even when we think we are immune.
Costco opened late last year at Harbourtown, yet another ode to excess because I am sure that even with our ever growing population we couldn’t possibly need another DFO retail outlet in Melbourne. Lets face it, when you go to see the new Melbourne suburb of Docklands, it is less about picturesque harbour views from architecturally sculptured buildings (in fact there’s none of that!) and more about grey warehouses with jauntily placed entrances to power sucking, brightly lit spaces that feel like public toilets.
I am not anti consumers. I am one every time I buy a carton of milk or a new pair of shoes. Some of the nicest people I know are consumers! But I am anti consumerism, that relentless need for more, better, best at the expense of our personal sanity, our credit card balances and most importantly, our planet.
Did you know that the word Costco is recognized by your spellchecker? Try that with the word fairtrade? Yep you guessed it little red underlining squiggle.
The first thing you will notice about Costco is their exceptionally large trolleys designed to carry more of the exceptionally large crap that you will inevitably have to buy there because A. the trolley demands you fill it and B. you’ve just paid a $70 membership in order to save this vast amount of money you are spending.
Once you are in the lift there is no going back, much like an Ikea store you must follow the throngs of people going in one direction only, towards the ten kilo tubs of chocolate mousse.
Five minutes into this whole bulk buy experiment I am actually feeling quite nauseous. Its honestly just all too much for my slow food sensibilities and I am overcome with visions of couch sloths spooning American style puddings into their cavernous pie holes straight from five kilo buckets (and no low fat versions of anything to be found!).
Sure there are olives, and we typically eats lots of those although a jar bigger than my head is probably overdoing it. There are lots of basic stapes like rice, flour and pasta that may well be worth the bulk buy, but you can get these things at your local and do your own economy a favour, rather than Uncles Sam’s.
My man has his own unique take on it all. Whilst I looked at products, he looked at people and came to the conclusion that if ever a weight loss program were looking for participants, Costco would be a great place to scout contestants. And he is right.
Pushing those impossibly large trolleys, laden with soft drink, fat pizzas and caterers size everything are large people. Who would have guessed it? – a large proportion of customers are large proportioned people buying large proportioned items.
And there is one other very important fact that cannot be overlooked. Everyone was buying massive packs of toilet paper, which just goes to prove – garbage in, garbage out.
It’s back to the country IGA with only 2 aisles for me but with Costco in our world, too many may just have too much tonight and tomorrow, you will most surely read again about Australia’s obesity epidemic.
You do the math…….
Birth rites, birth wrongs
January 27th, 2010 § 2 Comments
It started innocently enough. When I first became pregnant 4 years ago, I was surprised at how quickly I became overwhelmed by negative birth stories. I made a very conscious decision to embrace only positive and life enhancing stories about birth, so that I could stay centred and delighted in my pregnancy and birthing time. I left conversations, turned off the TV or just simply tuned out whenever I felt that instinctual feeling that what I was about to hear wasn’t truly supportive.
That worked well for me, so a few weeks ago when I chanced across the ‘final episode’ TV birth scene of what I understand to be a successful Australian drama series, I felt able to view it for what it was, and I was terrified. There it was in all its stereotypical glory, labour portrayed yet again as an angry, confronting, dramatic, joyless experience.
The hallmarks of a ‘ratings worthy’ TV birth would seem to be:
- Woman screaming loudly and abusing anyone within a 500 metre radius – usually lying on her back in a bed surrounded by strangers and strange gadgets
- A remark about squeezing out a watermelon
- Dithering partner suffering an endless tirade of profanity for getting her like this in the first place
- Over bearing, doom laden doctor threatening the worst case scenario all the time
- An over-riding drama of some sorts which threatens everything
- A ‘phew we made it’ ending with everyone gazing adoringly at the babe, and mother looking only slightly dishevelled
Why do we never see lovely, gentle, calm, flowing, spirited births on TV?
Yes, birth is a life or death experience and one cannot take for granted the very thin veil that can exist between these two extremes, in both the babes and the mothers’ experience. Birth can be gritty, hard, messy and demanding on a woman in a way she has never experienced before.
Yet each women’s’ experience is so very different and I know, through my own birthing stories, and that of many other women, that labour is heartbreakingly beautiful, challenging, joyous and expansive. Yes! The process of labour can be all these wonderful things…not just the end bit when the baby is placed in a mothers arms.
What message are we giving our women friends when such a negative image of birth is so normalised in the media today?
A very new Hannah calm after a magical homebirth
So many women must approach their own labours with only these images to inform them about what birthing is like. And I can’t help but wonder what message we are giving our girls about their precious womanhood via this persistently negatively skewed portrayal of labour. It is heart breaking that so much of what makes us women is not honoured by the world in which we live.
I am not looking to blame the media or a patriarchal culture for current attitudes to birth. More simply there needs to be some acknowledgement somewhere of a simple truth.
Society views birth from a place of fear, rather than a place of love.
The effects of this seemingly obvious, yet enormous, shift in consciousness about birth would be profound.
There are many implications of the entrenchment of negativity around birth. At the most fundamental level it denies most women the opportunity to know themselves as powerful amazing creatures, and to transform themselves, through their labouring experience, in an entirely new way – spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. It denies our precious new children a passage into this world that is ushered by calm beauty. And on a larger scale this negativity denies women of their right to choose how they birth. The current move to criminalise homebirth serves as a poignant reminder of what happens when women, and men, lose the truth – that birth is love, not fear.
Meanwhile, in worse case scenarios, some pregnant women have no choice but to work until the birth, a time when rest and contemplation is preferable, if not vital. (Research suggests lack of rest may contribute to higher then necessary caesarean rates.) Doctors book dates for babies to be removed from wombs and childcare facilities are full as newly born mothers are forced back to work just to pay bills. Somewhere in all of this, the prevailing negative attitude to birth has a role to play.
And whilst our media cannot help itself but to resort to stereotypical birthing scenarios, we as informed and conscious peoples, can do more than just exercise our right not to watch.
We can attempt to bring some beauty to the world by talking more about our joyous births, by sharing our stories with anyone who will listen and especially sharing and supporting women who are yet to be mothers, but want to know a better way.
Birth is not a bitter experience, birth is a ‘once in a lifetime’ glimpse of the sacredness that is life.
A cougar by any other name
January 20th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Seems like the word “cougar’ has way too much currency these days. While driving this afternoon, one radio station devoted at least 30 mins of airtime to the task of establishing exactly what criteria must be met for a woman to be classed a ‘cougar’.
It seems it is a term mostly reserved for an older woman who hooks up with a younger man, but this is where the debate commences. To my amusement some callers to the station suggested that anyone over 40 is a cougar, another that any woman with children can be classified as such. There’s no mistaking my membership in both categories!!
Fortunately I am happily hooked and no longer need to be on the look out for potential partners, so perhaps that gives me an exemption now, but according to one caller, any relationship between two people with an age gap of greater than 7 years, renders the older woman a cougar. Caught again! At the age of 33 I did have a lovely, albeit brief, time with someone in their mid 20’s!
All I know is that since having children I have felt to be a non-entity in the world of ‘attractiveness to the other sex’. Even if I was single, wielding a pram does not seem to set one up for much attention from the opposite sex, save for the odd kindly grandfather type who will hold a door open.
I was really reminded of my ‘ black hole of attraction’ just the other day. While out for a walk, with two children in the pram, a young man with P plates on his expensive ute, slowed and yelled a lovely ‘compliment’ my way. I started to smile, just a little, on the inside – you would never have even noticed.
But I am not sure what is sadder. That it actually felt good to be wolf whistled after all this time (even though my feminist principles of former years would have been enraged), or that, as he sped off round the corner, a stereotypical youth laden with testosterone and cheek, his back wheels spun in the dirt and he showered my children and I, in a cascade of loose gravel.
And, as I picked dirt out of my hair and brushed off my children, the only cougar I could find lurking inside of me, was the one that could have deftly pounced and knocked his sorry butt to the ground before neatly rearranging his entrails with my fierce gnashing teeth!
So, I wonder what name society has given to a young man who dates an older woman – it seems that society just smirks a little and mates give high fives. Sigh…yet again it’s the woman who faces the chagrin of the masses.
Some people might say that any attention is good attention, so perhaps the fact that older woman are even being discussed as vital women, could be seen as progress. Potent older women have featured in literature for centuries and are not new to popular culture. From Mae West to Mrs Robinson, Demi Moore to Samantha in Sex and the City, there have been many examples of post 40 empowerment, that go beyond the stereotype of the desperate old woman clinging to her youth via a boy toy extra.
What cannot be missed however is that even now, despite the protests of pioneering women like our mothers and grandmothers, our sisters and our aunties, real and true equality largely escapes women in our first world economy, and remains a far off concept for our sisters in second and third world lives.
If only, the rise of the cougar was seen as a celebration of womanhood.
Such respect for a mature woman, would be a quantum leap forward for all women… and all men.
(Crap, I sound so old – perhaps I should just give in and listen to Gold FM and not youth radio!)
Words Count
January 12th, 2010 § 1 Comment
We now have about three and half minutes to share, if you stay with me and read this little 500 word expose to completion. Three and half little minutes – not long hey?
Today I have set myself the task of writing to a word count, for I am apt to generally wander over any set limits, and approach a word limit in much the same way as a builder approaches a quote– i.e. always factor in another 20-30%!
Whilst it will take well over 30 minutes to write this draft, you will read it in less than a tenth of that time.
Three and a half minutes seems to be all anyone can spare to read anything these days. I know in my life, three and a half minutes is about as long as I get alone before a child is at my knee ordering more juice, or to be read a book.
I love words. I love reading. I love writing. I always have. I always will. I love the smell of a new book, and don’t see myself ever being attached to a Kindle. But the truth is, with the encroachment of Twitter, Facebook, even texting into our lives, it seems that most people just want to read the shortest possible way home.
In the process, I fear our language is being macerated and that we are losing the very essence of a life filled with beautiful words. Instead we try to say it all in less than 140 characters. Get to the point and get on with it.
What if my favorite poet Pablo Neruda had adhered to the less is more word economy of today?? The opening line of Ode to a Beautiful Nude, “With a chaste heart, with pure eyes I celebrate your beauty…” would become “UR a QT”
A friend last week shared enthusiastically how much she liked reading my writing. But, she said, she found herself scanning quickly through rather than reading them properly and we discussed how trained we are now to expect bullet points and our information mainlined.
The Web has certainly been a catalyst for succinctness, but it would be narrow minded to suggest that all writing for the Web be stripped to its essence for the sake of brevity. In this context the Web is simply a vehicle for publishing articles, one of many publishing destinations.
I cannot compromise pleasurable writing for word economy. Victor Nell author of Lost in a Book, talks about ludic reading (reading for pleasure) and how the Web environment works against such writing. “Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return,” he says, and there is truth in that.
Lets not get too caught up in brevity at the expense of beauty. Lets slow down as we read and savor the selection of words. Lets slow down and savor life.
Writing is a wonderful and creative process.
Reading wonderful writing is a simple pleasure worth lingering over.
Time’s up.
