I don’t remember much about the journey.

Sometimes she’d be with me on the train or bus ride up.

As I got older she’d be at the station waiting for my train to arrive to help me carry my bags up the giant flight of steps.

Baba’s home had a smell.

It was seasonal, yet distinct.

Summer smelt of frangipanis drifting through the air.

Mangoes ripening on the enormous tree out the back.

Freshly watered soil baking in the afternoon sun.

Spring belonged entirely to freesias.

Even now, decades later, the smell of freesias can stop me in my tracks.

Not metaphorically.

Physically.

For a moment I’m no longer wherever I happen to be.

I’m back in Baba’s garden, dirt under my fingernails.

Nothing needs fixing.

Nobody needs anything from me.

I’d always be met with a smiling face of what felt like the only person in the world who was happy for me to be there, not for what I would be doing for them, just simply for me existing.

Never “hello.”

Never “how are you?”

Just...

“Come.”

There was a little wall mounted ornate ‘table’ immediately inside the front door.

The kind nobody under the age of eighty seems to own anymore.

Keys landed there.

Shopping bags rested under it.

Life paused there for a moment before continuing into the house.

The kettle was almost always on.

Tea and food simply appeared.

I don’t remember ever asking if she had anything to eat.

She’d already decided I looked too skinny.

Her house smelt faintly of soup, wood polish and garden.

Not candles.

Not perfume.

Just...

...a home that had been lived in carefully for decades.

There was always something to do.

The garden needed weeding.

Something needed pruning.

A tap needed tightening.

A shelf needed moving.

Neither of us were particularly good at sitting around discussing feelings.

Acts of service were our native language.

If I visited, we’d work.

Then we’d eat.

Then we’d work a bit more.

It never felt like labour.

It simply feltlike spending time together.

Out the back stood the mango tree.

To childhood me, it seemed enormous.

Every summer it produced an absurd amount of fruit.

Baba would freeze chunks of mango and strawberries, throw them into the food processor with a splash of cream, and produce what she proudly called ice cream.

Looking back, I suspect she’d accidentally invented healthy frozen yoghurt about thirty years before it became fashionable.

It was magnificent.

One summer a group of teenage boys decided to jump the back fence and steal her mangoes.

This was...

...an optimistic decision.

The back door flew open.

Out stormed my tiny Ukrainian grandmother clutching a shovel.

The boys immediately fled.

Baba disagreed with this outcome.

She commenced foot pursuit.

I watched this little old lady chase teenagers down the side alley before stopping, drawing her shovel back...

...and launching it after them like an Olympic javelin.

It missed.

But not by much.

The boys never came back.

I suspect word spread.

Don’t steal mangoes from the little Ukrainian lady.

She’s armed.

As she got older, our roles slowly shifted.

I drove.

Groceries.

Medical appointments.

Chemist runs.

She’d insist on buying my groceries while we were already out.

Or feed me before I was allowed to leave.

I’d protest.

She’d ignore me.

We both knew how the script ended.

Love wasn’t something either of us were particularly good at saying.

We made tea.

We carried the heavy thing.

We bought each other’s groceries.

We quietly solved the problem in front of us.

No speeches required.

When Baba died, I dug up as many of her freesia bulbs as I could find.

They’re planted in my own garden now.

Every spring they flower.

Every spring they ambush me.

One breath...

...and suddenly I’m ten years old again.

Walking through the front gate.

The kettle already boiling.

The garden waiting.

The little hallway table just inside the door.

“Come.”

There is something profoundly comforting about knowing there was once a place in the world where your arrival never required explanation.

You simply arrived.

🌿💛🫖

It has nothing to do with politics, money, religion or whether they squeeze the toothpaste from the middle (although monstrous).

It starts much earlier.

Specifically...

...when they notice my Ryobi tools.

If you’ve never wandered into construction, you should know there’s an unspoken hierarchy of power tools.

At the top live the serious commercial brands.

Milwaukee - Makita - Hilti - Festool

Then, somewhere further down...

...sits Ryobi.

Apparently they’re “homeowner tools.”

Cute.

Not real.

Gestures broadly at my property.

The retaining walls.

The fencing.

The gardens.

The pergolas.

The sheds.

The pathways.

Nearly twenty years of quietly building a life.

Mostly with little green toy tools it would seem.

The funny part is...

People assume I bought Ryobi because I didn’t know any better.

Quite the opposite.

I’ve spent two decades building an ecosystem.

Not a toolbox.

An ecosystem.

Drills ~ Impact drivers ~ Radios ~ Lights ~ Circular Saws ~ Grinders ~ Recipros ~ Workshop tools ~ Garden tools ~ Cleaning gear ~ chordless glue guns ~ portable air compressors & high pressure hoses.

Around a dozen interchangeable batteries.

Everything shares chargers.

Everything just... works.

When I use something all the time, I’ll happily buy the top-of-the-line brushless version.

Better motor.

Longer life.

Six-year warranty.

Worth it.

If it’s a tool I’ll use twice a year...

The cheaper version is perfectly adequate.

The point has never been the brand.

The point has always been whether it works.

Case in point?

My mower isn’t even Ryobi.

I broke every Ryobi mower I owned, returned it, collected my refund and found the Victa electric has quietly tackled my quarter-acre block for years without complaint.

So that’s what I use.

Loyalty has never been to a logo.

It’s been to things that quietly earn my trust.

Enter Man:

Let the Ryobi Relationship Stress Test begins.

Usually with a smile.

“Oh...”

“Ryobi.”

Or my personal favourite...

“I’m a carpenter.”

“I use real tools.”

Cool.

So do I.

Mine just happen to be green.

It’s remarkable how emotionally invested some people become in somebody else’s cordless drill.

Then something magical happens.

They use the whipper snipper.

The same one they laughed at because it looked too small.

“...actually...”

“...that’s pretty good.”

Every.

Single.

Time.

My favourite, though, is when they decide to “help” reload the line.

“It’s alright sweethear let me, I’ve got this.”

He does not.

Then I have to sit there with him for 10minutes while he dismantles the head of the whipper snipper instead of using the automatic feeder to re-chord it in half a minute. BUT THANKS BABE THANK GAWD YOU’RE HERE TO SAVE ME.

Even my brother has learned.

If he needs a random tool for a one-off project...

He rings me first.

Because chances are...

I’ve got it.

He borrows it.

It gets the job done.

He brings it back.

Nobody spends six hundred dollars on something that’ll gather dust for the next decade.

Somewhere along the way I accidentally became the neighbourhood lending library for power tools.

Which remains deeply satisfying.

The thing is...

The Ryobi Relationship Stress Test has never actually been about Ryobi.

It’s watching what happens when reality contradicts someone’s assumptions.

Do they update their opinion?

Or do they keep telling themselves the little green drill couldn’t possibly have built everything they’re standing in?

Because the tools aren’t really what’s under discussion.

Competence is.

If you’re willing to mock the infrastructure that’s quietly helped me build a house, a garden and a life over the better part of twenty years...

...we’re probably not going to work.

Not because of the drill.

Because of what the drill represents.

I’ve never really been collecting tools.

I’ve been collecting momentum.

Every battery.

Every charger.

Every little green purchase quietly removing another excuse not to begin.

I genuinely couldn’t care less what colour your (tool) skin is.

But, can you recognise value...

...even when it arrives painted bright ‘toy’ green?

🛠️💚🏡

^{* nothing to see here… just a girl trying to fix a metal gate against a brick wall & make some small holes biggerer.}

They leave managers.

I’d like to propose an amendment.

Sometimes people don’t end up in therapy because of divorces, bankruptcies or major illness.

Sometimes it’s just one astonishingly incompetent commercial real estate agent.

The multinational steel company renting our family factory eventually built themselves a shiny new facility and announced they were leaving.

Fair enough.

Businesses move.

Buildings change hands.

No hard feelings.

What I hadn’t realised was that they had engaged a commercial real estate agent to broker the break-lease and find a replacement tenant.

Without telling me.

The owner.

Minor administrative oversight.

I first learnt my factory was apparently available because strangers started ringing me asking about inspections.

“I’m sorry...”

“...what factory?”

Turns out everyone else knew my tenant was leaving before I did.

Fantastic.

Meanwhile ~ another small manufacturer was having an even worse month.

He’d spent nearly twenty years in another factory.

Invested around $1.5 million tailoring it perfectly for his business.

His only request to the landlord had been beautifully simple.

“If you ever sell...

...please let me buy it first.”

Entirely reasonable.

The property sold.

To one of his competitors.

Nobody offered him first refusal.

He suddenly had no factory.

No certainty.

And a business that still had to operate on Monday morning.

Enter...

The commercial real estate agent.

Don’t worry.

He had a solution.

Apparently my factory.

Which was impressive.

Considering nobody had asked me.

Anyway.

One afternoon I happened to drive past my own property.

There was a bloke unloading machinery.

Into my shed.

What?

My future tenant looked horrified.

He’d been assured everything was sorted.

Lease secured.

Paperwork done.

Wild that someone engaged not by the landlord can negotiate terms and sign on behalf….

on behalf of who?

What?

Poor guy had already spent something approaching a quarter of a million dollars relocating equipment.

He was paying rent across multiple sites.

His business was bleeding cash.

I was standing there trying to understand why someone I’d never met was moving into a building I hadn’t leased.

We spent the first half hour assuming the other person was the problem.

We spent the second half hour realising we were both victims of the same one.

From that point on, everything changed.

Instead of arguing with each other...

We started comparing notes.

“What were you told?”

I told him.

“What were you told?”

He told me.

Neither version remotely resembled the other.

Curiously...

One name appeared in every conversation.

Funny how quickly patterns emerge.

Over the following months he simply started forwarding me every email.

Every promise.

Every piece of correspondence.

“I don’t know what to do with this.”

Me: giddy-up.

Years of strata management had quietly trained me for exactly this sort of administrative nonsense.

Some people panic.

I make timelines.

At some point the agent rang.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

I remember thinking...

That implied there’d been a right one.

The funny thing is...

None of that is what I remember most.

I remember the bloke.

He turned out to be exactly the sort of tenant every landlord hopes for.

He repaired things.

Improved things.

Lodged insurance claims properly.

Spent well over a hundred thousand dollars making the property better than he’d found it.

Somewhere between the site meetings, insurance quotes, increasingly absurd phone calls and more then a cheeky beer or 10...

He stopped being the incoming tenant.

He became my tenant.

If I ever sell the factory...

He gets first right of refusal.

Not because it’s written into a contract.

Because a handshake made after surviving someone else’s incompetence is worth considerably more than a commission.

Him only condition for me keeping the little front office out front was that there’d always be a few cold great northerns in the bar fridge for when he wandered in for a yarn.

Funny, really. The agent thought he was moving commercial properties around a spreadsheet.

He actually accidentally introduced two exhausted small business owners who quietly agreed that they weren’t going to do business like that.

🍺🏭🤝

^{*Cheers ~ my favourite beer glass. Don’t judge my shitty nailpolish job.}

Four seasons in one day.

Carry a jumper, jacket, swimmers, umbrella and you’ll be right.

What they don’t tell you is that occasionally Melbourne skips straight to Biblical Apocalypse.

One afternoon the little radio playing in the office abruptly stopped the music and began screeching.

The emergency broadcast cut in.

Essentially:

If you can get home in under ninety minutes, leave now.

If not... Find somewhere safe. Buy food. You’re probably not getting home tonight.

Well.

Shit.

The office quickly worked out who was having an involuntary sleepover and who still had a fighting chance.

Fortunately...

I was in the second group.

I grabbed my bag and bolted.

My usual tram stop greeted me with a cheerful little sign explaining the tram network had already stopped due to debris on the tracks.

No worries.

Redirect.

Train station.

I managed to squeeze onto the next train into Flinders Street only to discover something my little regional brain had never really appreciated before.

Melbourne...

...has a lot of people.

Like truly...

An unreasonable number of people.

Thousands of us poured through Flinders Street together looking for then next train home before the weather properly arrived.

All the platforms already had Police and transport staff helping manage this shitshow.

I fought my way onto the correct platform.

The train rolled in.

I pushed.

Shuffled.

Squeezed.

Failed.

By the time I reached the doors, the conductor looked at the human sardine tin in front of him...

...and closed them.

The train left.

Without me.

That was the moment I started to panic.

If I missed the next one...

I genuinely had no idea where I’d end up spending the night.

The second train arrived.

This time...

I became the pointiest bag of elbows I could be.

Not to be aggressive.

To be successful.

I pushed and jabbed and ducked and wove my way onto that train.

The doors closed.

Personal space immediately became a distant historical concept.

Mild claustrophobia I didn’t know I had subtly set in.

We were no longer individual commuters.

We had become...

...one panicked organism.

Now, I’m five-foot-six on a generous day.

Reasonably sturdy.

But still fundamentally a little lady.

The carriage, meanwhile was full of big humans.

Rude.

At some point I was pushed completely across the carriage onto the side opposite the doors.

Wedged against the carriage wall and seats.

The crowd had become structurally responsible for keeping me upright.

I accepted my fate.

I looked up just trying to find room to breath and think and saw him.

My sardine neighbour.

An enormous bloke.

Huge beard.

Built like somebody had accidentally crossbred a wardrobe with a forklift.

He glanced down.

Caught each others eye.

Without saying a word he shifted his stance.

Braced one arm either side of my shoulders against the corner of the carriage I was smooshed into.

Wriggled slightly.

And somehow created...

...one Daria-sized pocket of oxygen.

Not much.

Just enough.

We travelled like that for several stations.

Neither of us spoke.

There wasn’t really room.

Outside, the sky kept getting darker.

That peculiar charcoal grey where the skyline slowly begins disappearing altogether.

The stop before mine I started looking around.

I had absolutely no idea how I was getting off this train.

He noticed.

“Your stop?”

“No... next one.”

“mhmmm.”

That was the entire conversation.

The train started slowing down to pull into my station.

Before the doors had even opened, he grabbed my hand.

“Hold on.”

Then, with the sort of efficiency usually reserved for airport baggage handlers...

...he ripped me clean through the crowd.

One determined pull.

One perfectly timed shove.

One tiny airborne Australian.

I landed on the platform.

He immediately jumped back onto the train himself.

The doors closed.

He gave me the tiniest little wave.

Good luck.

The train disappeared into the storm.

I’ve never seen him again.

It remains one of the strangest acts of kindness I’ve ever experienced.

No conversation.

No expectation.

No heroics.

Just a bloke who looked at a problem, solved it in under five seconds, and continued on with his day.

I’ve noticed something over the years.

The bigger the bloke...

...the gentler they often seem to be.

Perhaps it’s because they know exactly how much strength they possess.

Perhaps it’s because once you’ve spent enough years carrying heavy things, making space for someone smaller becomes second nature.

Or perhaps...

...when you’re built like a wardrobe with feet...

...the universe occasionally appoints you temporary commuter shepherd.

Either way...

I made it home before the storm.

Thanks to one giant stranger who decided a little lady probably shouldn’t spend the evening accidentally living on the Craigieburn line in the middle of a catastrophic state declared storm.

🌧️🚆🫶

One evening I met a bloke maybe eight years my senior.

Well spoken.

Well dressed.

Worked at the Attorney Generals Office.

This was back in the day when titles and places of employment seemingly “woo’d” me more.

The sort of person who looked like he ironed his opinions before expressing them.

We bumped into each other around town a few times.

Each time he was immaculately dress ~ always a fancy suit.

Eventually after a few minor interactions, we ended up sharing drinks one night.

Far too many drinks.

Eventually he suggested we head back to his place.

Seemed reasonable.

It was only a couple of blocks away.

We stumbled there laughing.

The first surprise was the house.

I suppose I’d imagined someone with the polished exterior and fancy government job would live... well... somewhere that matched.

Instead it was a fairly tired share house.

No judgement.

I’ve lived in enough questionable rentals to know appearances don’t mean much.

His bedroom, however, had a faint smell about it.

Not overwhelming.

Just... present.

The sort of smell that quietly asks questions.

-

We sat on his bed chatting while he attempted to steer the evening in a direction that was becoming increasingly obvious.

I was only half paying attention.

Because in the corner of the room sat a small mountain of large garbage bags.

Curiosity won.

“So... what’s with the bags?”

“Oh,” he shrugged.

“They’re just my worn clothes.”

I nodded.

“Don’t have a washing machine hey? gotta trek to the laundromats or something?”

He looked genuinely confused.

“No.”

“No?”

“I throw them out.”

“...”

“Every week I buy two suits, seven shirts, pairs of socks and jocks.”

“...”

“Then throw them away.”

“...”

I could not move past this information.

My brain had left the building.

This man was trying to kiss me while I was mentally calculating the annual textile waste.

“What do you mean... throw them away?”

“Yeah.”

“Like...”

“...in the bin?”

“Yep.”

“But...”

“...why?”

He looked at me as though I was the strange one.

“It’s easier.”

At this point, whatever romantic chemistry had existed was rapidly being buried beneath a small mountain of disposable underwear.

I wasn’t thinking about kissing him.

I was wondering if he’d ever used a washing machine.

Or an op shop.

Or... literally any other option.

-

Unfortunately my apparent fascination with his laundry habits wasn’t producing the response he’d been hoping for.

After a rather awkward pause he frowned.

“This never happens.”

Before I had time to ask what “this” was...

He disappeared from the room.

A minute later he returned.

Holding...

A carrot.

A whole carrot.

“Baby...”

“...can I...”

I have absolutely no idea what the rest of that sentence was.

Because every survival instinct I’d inherited over several hundred thousand years quietly took over.

One moment I was sitting on his bed.

The next...

I was fully dressed and halfway down the street.

To this day I have absolutely no recollection of getting dressed.

Apparently Fight or Flight has a lesser-known third setting.

Dress Efficiently.

Occassionally I wondered what became of him.

I hope he’s well.

I hope he eventually discovered laundry detergent.

And I sincerely hope someone explained to him that root vegetables belong in many wonderful places.

I remain unconvinced that the bedroom is one of them.

🥕👔💨

^{* So proud of this seasons only carrot I managed to successfully grow. It’s a boy!}

Decades ago, he and his business partner built two neighbouring sheds and began manufacturing roof metal. Eventually they parted ways. Dad retained one factory. His business partner the adjoining one.

For the next thirty years or so, one of Australia’s largest steel manufacturers became the tenant.

From our perspective, they were excellent.

Rent arrived.

Maintenance requests rarely did.

They were so enormous they simply... existed.

You didn’t really manage the relationship.

You merely orbited it.

Eventually they’d outgrown us and built themselves a shiny new facility twenty minutes away.

Bigger.

Newer.

Purpose-built.

Fair enough.

That’s business.

Then they handed the keys back.

Imagine giving your car to someone for thirty years and discovering they’d been using braille to park.

Roller doors bent.

Flashings crushed.

Fascias dented.

Brickwork chipped.

Apparently trucks had been repeatedly attempting to establish whether momentum could overcome geometry.

Buried somewhere in the decades of correspondence was an email casually explaining that one of their trucks had rolled into the building after a brake failure.

In hindsight...

A few things suddenly made more sense.

The lease, was wonderfully clear.

The property was to be returned in good order.

Excellent.

That seemed refreshingly straightforward.

So I politely asked when they’d like to organise the make-good works.

The response surprised me.

Apparently...

“We don’t do that.”

...

I’m sorry.

You don’t...

...comply with the lease?

Interesting strategy.

There is something you should probably know about me.

I possess a deeply unfortunate personality trait.

When confronted by a giant corporation insisting obvious contractual obligations don’t apply to them...

...I become persistently reasonable.

Especially when it affects my immediate family and finances.

Not loud.

Not abusive.

Not threatening.

Just...

Inconvenient.

I poured a cheeky mug of whisky ~ I’m a whisky-and-casual-malicious-plotting kind of gal.

I opened gmail and commenced weaponising the scheduled send function.

It was time to galvanize.

I spent an entire evening writing emails.

Each contained exactly one question.

In total, forty-seven emails.

Nothing emotional.

Nothing dramatic.

Just one perfectly reasonable question relating to the contract terms - one legal questions requiring one perfectly reasonable answer.

Sometimes intentional red-herrings just so they had to waste time trying to find things that didn’t exist.

Sometimes references to previous contracts just to fuck with them.

I already knew the answers.

That wasn’t the point.

The point was that someone, somewhere in a very large organisation, had to keep wasting time.

I didn’t send them all at once.

I’m not an amateur.

I scheduled them.

Some twenty-four hours apart.

Some forty-three.

Some seventy-six.

Just enough variation that every time they thought I’d wandered off...

Bingo-bongo ~ enjoy another question.

-

It took less than a month.

Eventually the contract manager of said big multinational corporation rang.

Her enthusiasm for the discussion shifted.

“What will it take to release us from the lease?”

Well.

Now we were negotiating.

I explained that complete make-good remained my preferred option.

She offered ten thousand dollars.

Let me think on it.

Two emails later, no - fifty.

Twenty?

A couple more emails, no - fifty.

Then came thirty.

Curious.

Administrative attrition appeared to be working.

After a handful of entirely unrelated questions via individual emails ~ I accepted.

As long as all the blue painted trim and branding was removed, we had a deal.

I was told that ‘this wasn’t normal’ and this had not been authorised elsewhere, not even the conjoined neighbouring shed they’d just vacated.

Fascinating.

Apparently I’d become more expensive than the problem.

Wonderful.

I must have been successfully been bleeding their legal team enough money to offer the gnat money to go away.

Thirty thousand dollars wasn’t really the victory.

The real victory was challenging that whilst large organisations are often incredibly powerful.

They’re also forced to explain themselves.

Repeatedly.

In writing.

To someone who refuses to be distracted.

-

It’s been a few years now, and i’ve been asked a couple times how it I managed to negotiate with a multinational company.

The answer disappoints people.

There was no secret legal strategy.

No brilliant negotiation tactic.

No dramatic confrontation.

Just an infuriating volume of meticulously polite questions and an almost supernatural unwillingness to go away.

Turns out death by a thousand papercuts works surprisingly well.

Especially when every papercut is professionally formatted.

-

I have a deeply unfortunate personality trait.

Given sufficient motivation, I become persistently petty, yet annoyingly reasonable.

📧🏭😇

^{* an example of the ‘wear and tear’ that sure looks like impact damage to me.}

We were all ~ quite understandably ~ still fucked up and broken spiritually, emotionally… and any other way a young family with children who had lost their father can be broken.

Mother nevertheless made a decision that, in hindsight, I admire.

If life was going to be awful, it may as well be awful somewhere interesting.

I’ve always been fascinated by anthropology and archaeology.

So, off we went for a couple of weeks to Egypt & Greece.

Would have been early 2000s.

Which, depending on your appetite for civil unrest, was perhaps an adventurous choice.

Our itinerary sounded magnificent.

Cairo.

Luxor.

Karnak.

A short cruise along the Nile.

Then a few days in Sharm el Sheikh before flying home.

It would become one of the strangest holidays I’ve ever taken.

And that’s saying something.

-

Our introduction to Egypt came somewhere between the hotel and the cruise terminal.

Traffic in Cairo is less about road rules and more ‘if you can fit you can zip through there’ be it human or vehicle.

Footpaths?

Nah, more like optional spare roads.

Fucking wild.

Cars occupied whatever space they believed they could physically fit into.

Lanes non existant.

Pedestrians zipped confidently through six-twenty chaos lanes of moving traffic as though mortality were merely a suggestion.

Halfway through the drive there was an enormous thud.

Our minibus lurched.

The driver slammed on the brakes.

Arabic erupted from every direction.

People were running.

Someone was screaming.

A man had attempted to dart across the traffic.

Our driver’s side mirror had struck him squarely in the head.

He died instantly.

Mum and the other adults immediately blocked the three of us from looking outside.

One death was enough for three Australian kids to process that year.

The driver eventually returned looking understandably shaken.

He apologised.

Explained that he needed to remain for the police.

But not to worry.

One of the bystanders would drive us the rest of the way to the cruise so we wouldn’t miss our departure.

Looking back...

I find it remarkable how readily everyone accepted this as a practical solution.

We stayed in the vehicle with a complete stranger because, apparently, that was simply the next administrative step.

Egypt was introducing itself.

-

The cruise itself was everything I could have every dreamed about.

Day trips to Karnak and Luxor and Aswan.

Hatshepsut’ Temple.

All the glyphs and pyramids and obelisks and monoliths I could dream of.

I quickly became friends with another late-teen on the cruise.

Half Egyptian.

Half American.

Absolutely stunning.

The entire crew adored her.

Meanwhile two impossibly blonde, impossibly slim American girls spent much of the trip trying to understand why the ‘fat’ girl was of interest while they had effectively become decorative furniture.

It was probably my first real learnt lesson that beauty standards are cultural.

One countries fat is anothers voluptuous curvy goddess.

What one country disregards...

Another practically writes poetry about.

No matter.

Teenage sociology lesson complete.

-

One evening, as we quietly made our way further along the Nile, the captain made an announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen...

For your safety we’d appreciate everyone returning to their cabins by nine o’clock tonight.”

Curious.

But righto.

At around 8:45 the crew began politely ushering everyone inside.

Curtains closed.

Cabin doors shut.

Then, right before nine, the captain returned.

“Ladies and gentlemen...

For your safety we ask that you remain completely silent.”

“Please do not turn on any lights in your cabins.”

“We’re approaching a known pirate location and will likely be boarded.”

Pause.

“You may hear gunfire.”

“It will almost certainly be intended only to frighten us.”

“We have the baksheesh prepared as part of your journey.”

“So please remain quiet, we should be through this in less than ten minutes.”

...

Excuse

The

Fuck

Me

What?

That definitely hadn’t been mentioned in the brochure.

Pirates?

Actual pirates?

Not Johnny Depp.

Not Disneyland.

Real, honest-to-God Nile pirates.

The captain had also been quite clear.

Remain quiet.

Do not attract attention.

Naturally...

Within about thirty seconds there were three teenage Australian children with faces pressed so firmly against the tiny portholes that we were probably leaving permanent nose prints on the glass.

We barely breathed.

Squinting into the darkness.

Waiting.

Listening.

Certain that at any moment we’d see someone swing aboard carrying a cutlass.

Because pirates belonged in books.

If actual pirates were about to board our boat...

Well...

We were absolutely going to have a look.

Instead we heard shouting.

Running.

General commotion.

Enough noise to convince us something was definitely happening.

Not enough to actually see anything.

Five minutes later the captain calmly returned.

“Ladies and gentlemen...

We have safely passed the danger.

The restaurant and bar will reopen shortly.”

As you were.

Like he’d just announced we’d encountered a patch of slightly inconvenient weather.

-

It wasn’t until years later that I truly appreciated how bizarre the whole thing was.

Not the pirates.

The administration.

The cruise company had clearly done this before.

There was a process.

Someone, somewhere, had sat in a budget meeting and allocated funds under something resembling:

Operational Expenses

• Fuel

• Food

• Crew wages

• Pirate baksheesh

It wasn’t a crisis.

It was procedure.

An anticipated interruption to the evening’s entertainment.

So yes, I remember my travels through Egypt.

The pyramids.

The Valley of the Kings.

Karnak.

All extraordinary.

I remember discovering that the world was much bigger, stranger and less predictable than suburban Canberra had led me to believe.

Sometimes your driver doesn’t finish the journey because life intervenes.

Sometimes strangers quietly step in to help.

Sometimes beauty means something entirely different depending on where you are.

And sometimes, apparently, the safest way to travel down the Nile is to budget for pirates.

It wasn’t in the brochure.

But, in hindsight...

It probably should have been.

🚐💥🏴‍☠️

^{* Some of the sailboats out on the water when passing Aswan. Alas, no photos of pirates in the night.}

She could identify an opportunity from several hundred metres away.

One summer morning I’d driven over to help tackle some of the heavier jobs around her garden.

Like most Eastern European grandmothers, she believed plants should either be producing food or being aggressively disciplined into doing so.

Several shrubs had become less “garden feature” and more “attempted coup.”

So I got to work.

An enthusiastic haircut later we’d accumulated a truly impressive mountain of green waste.

The plan was simple.

My brother would swing past later with his trailer.

Problem solved.

Meanwhile...

Council workers had arrived a few houses down, trimming branches around the powerlines.

I watched Baba quietly observing them through the kitchen window.

Then I saw it.

The look.

Anyone who has spent enough time around Eastern European grandmothers knows the look.

A plan.

Before I could ask what she was doing she’d collected her walking frame and begun the slow, deliberate journey down the driveway.

Tiny.

Smiling.

Completely harmless.

She waved one of the council blokes over.

Negotiations commenced.

I couldn’t hear the conversation.

I didn’t need to.

She was making what I can only assume was an extremely compelling argument that, seeing as they already had a truck full of branches...

...what possible harm could there be in taking just one more little pile?

The poor bloke listened politely.

Smiled.

Nodded.

Then explained they couldn’t.

Council policy.

Wrong work order.

Insurance.

Whatever the official reason was.

The answer remained no.

What happened next remains one of the greatest physical transformations I’ve ever witnessed.

The sweet delicate hunched over little old grandmother vanished.

She straightened.

Not emotionally.

Literally.

Her back, previously curved with ninety-odd years of life, suddenly remembered perfect posture.

She turned sharply on her heel.

Grabbed the walking frame.

And dragged it back up the driveway in complete disgust.

The walker had very clearly ceased being a mobility aid.

It had become luggage.

The hustle had failed.

There would be no encore.

I stood there in absolute disbelief, even though I’d just witnessed it with my own eyes.

Not because she’d been told no.

Because the performance had ended the exact moment it stopped being useful.

To be fair...

If you’ve survived war, migration, raising children and several decades of bureaucracy...

...being defeated by a council green-waste policy must seem like a spectacularly undignified way to lose.

I still think about that council worker sometimes.

To him...

She was probably just a lovely little old lady asking an innocent question.

To me...

She was Baba.

A tiny Ukrainian force of nature who firmly believed every rule was merely an opening position in a negotiation.

🌿🦆

^{*The eventual greenwaste pickup. To say we make our own entertainment is a mild understatement.}

I left Sydney Australia in 39°C.

I landed Vic BC in -10°C.

What.

The.

Actual.

Fuck.

Posh Spice had assured me,

“It doesn’t really snow much where we’re going.”

Bull.

Fucking.

Shit.

Regardless ~ I was now officially employed as a tax lodgement officer.

This sounds considerably more impressive than it was.

I was, very specifically, not an accountant.

I was simply competent enough to match Box D with Field D and confident enough that nobody questioned it.

I was most definitely over-confident considering my first morning in Vic BC had me caught asleep, upright, in the front window of my new office with the instruction manual for lodging taxes in my hands.

Jet lag after a 35+ hour long haul flight from the other side of the world is no joke.

So.

I lived with Baby Spice’s mum out of town ~ some 45min drive away from down-town.

Worked four days a week.

Spent every long weekend wandering.

Outside work I collected little routines.

Bookstores.

Second-hand shops.

Coastal drives.

And one tiny sushi place where I quickly became friendly with one of the sushi chefs.

Not because I was sophisticated.

Because sushi was quick, cheap and met all my lunchtime requirements.

One afternoon he invited me to a housewarming party.

I accepted because my personal risk assessment strategy throughout my early twenties was basically “She’ll be right.”

I arrived knowing precisely only one person.

The sushi dude.

Within an hour I’d met half the room, discovered Australian accents were apparently fascinating, and somebody handed me a joint.

Now...

My limited exposure to Australian weed at the time was generally...

...polite and diluted.

Whatever I was handed was industrial grade.

Two tokes as the cool kids call it.

That was it.

Game Over.

I ceased existing.

I have vague memories of someone putting a pillow beneath my head.

Someone else covering me with a blanket.

One of the girls gently playing with me hair and telling me I was safe.

At one point I distantly remember hearing,

“Do you think she’s alright?”

To which somebody replied,

“Yeah...”

“...she’s Australian.”

Which, in fairness, seemed a perfectly reasonable clinical assessment.

Eventually I rose like a zombie and became convinced that an impromptu shower would improve the situation.

It did not.

Firstly, Canadian taps made absolutely no sense.

I remember standing under cold water trying to telepathically will hot water through the pipes.

I for the life of me, no matter which way i turned the tap, could make it not frozen water.

I became trapped beneath freezing water for what I now realise was an alarmingly long time inside the only bathroom at a house party.

Eventually the bathroom door cracked open.

A very shy Canadian guy carefully poked his head inside.

“I’m not going to rape you...”

“...but you really need to get out of the shower.”

Entirely reasonable.

As he approached me with a towel held up to save me my dignity, he did his darndest to wrap me in towels while maintaining aggressive eye contact with the ceiling that I suspect he believed one accidental glance would immediately invalidate his Canadian citizenship.

Outside, an increasingly desperate queue had formed for the toilet while I emerged looking like a drowned cold rat, dragged straight from the sewer.

Gal’s gotta try make an impression amiright?

Mr Polite Canadian was called James.

Once he had freed me from the bathroom he saw just how cold I was and realised I was in no state to be doing anything other then sleeping.

He bundled me me into his sleeping bag.

Wrapped his arms around me and held me while I slowly thawed from the inside out.

When I woke the next morning he had slipped from the sleeping bag and was quietly chatting in the room to his friends.

The moment he saw me move, he rushed over with a big glass of water.

Without a breath, I’d devoured the first glass, with not one word, he quickly hopped up, refilling the glass and returning it to me.

Mildly more functioning, I reached into my bag.

Pulled out a tube of Berocca.

Dropped one into a glass.

The entire quiet chit chat of the little apartment stopped.

“What...”

“...is that?”

Apparently effervescent orange vitamins fizzy tablet happy make feel goods in water had not been seen to the Canadians around me.

I explained that Australians regarded them as somewhere between medicine and religion after a big night.

The household watched me drink it with deep scientific interest.

A few people tried one.

Whether anyone actually enjoyed it remains unclear.

Once we were all dressed and 2 pots of coffee deep, we all moseyed down to the local Denny’s ~ a first for me.

On our walk back after breakfast James asked if he could have my number.

I obliged, not really expecting anything of it.

Later that day he called.

Which was notable because boys generally didn’t call me.

We arranged a date the very next night.

We started dating almost immediately.

Looking back...

I’m still not entirely sure whether I met my Canadian lumberjack...

...or whether he simply adopted a mildly hypothermic Australian after finding one feral in a bathroom.

Either way...

...it worked.

🌿🦆🃏

Some have assumed jewellery.

Others think it’s antiques.

One particularly confident visitor guessed fishing tackle.

It’s my seed bank.

Every drawer contains another category of poor financial decisions.

Tomatoes.

Beans.

Squash.

Herbs.

Flowers.

Several varieties of cucumber that, despite all available evidence, I continue convincing myself I don’t already own.

There are two versions of me.

Sober Daria.

And Procurement Daria.

Procurement Daria generally appears after approximately two bottles of sauvignon blanc or one and a half of shiraz.

This has become important enough that several close friends now actively monitor it.

Not because they’re worried about the wine.

They’re worried about what I might buy.

Now, to be fair, drunk people have historically made far worse purchasing decisions than heirloom cucumbers.

Mine just happen to arrive in little paper packets.

It always starts the same way.

“Ooh...”

“I don’t think I have this one.”

This is ~ almost certainly ~ a lie.

I have it.

I may well have multiples of it.

***ADD TO CART***

I have approximately enough seeds to restart civilisation after a casually inconveniently sized apocalypse.

I know this because I eventually had to build a filing system to organise them.

Apparently there are people who buy cabinets like this for stationary.

Rookies.

My Facebook history suggests I’ve been fighting this battle since at least the 2010s.

There are public records of me announcing I needed to stop buying seeds.

There are also public records of me immediately buying more seeds.

Eventually my friends staged an intervention.

Not for the drinking.

For the seeds.

Whenever we audit my collection there is now a small quarantine container reserved exclusively for purchases Drunk Daria is no longer allowed to make.

Gazanias.

Agapanthus.

Other repeat offenders.

Apparently after two bottles of wine my horticultural standards become...

...basic.

The lectures are remarkably gentle.

Mostly because they also know I’m the same person buying bizarre black flowers, obscure heirloom vegetables and enough pollinator plants to keep the local bees permanently employed.

So I only really get into trouble for buying the peasant plants.

The truly unfortunate part is...

The seeds keep working.

Wonderfully.

Every now and then my investment portfolio pays dividends.

One year it was spinach.

Not spinach leaves.

Spinach territory.

The plant became so large it physically began undermining the garden bed it was growing in.

Naturally I photographed it across the bonnet of my SUV before offering enough free spinach to feed half of my town.

Because if you’re going to accidentally grow mutant vegetables...

...you may as well flex responsibly.

The escalation didn’t stop there.

One weekend I decided hand digging forty metres of garden edging seemed inefficient.

So I accidentally bought an auger.

I’ve never been so aroused.

His name is Mr Muscles.

Together we’ve made several questionable landscaping decisions.

Also, for anyone arguing that a battery powered auger isn’t enough, I can assure you as a hefty enough woman being launched into the atmosphere by it, it still can claim the ‘wrist snapper’ nickname.

There have also been the nursery pots.

Hundreds of them.

Perhaps thousands at this point.

I once confidently announced that I would keep exactly one milk crate full.

I still own the milk crate.

I simply re-stacked the pots into infinite towers and avoided any culling.

#winning

The funny thing is...

Nobody questions someone buying another designer handbag.

Or another watch.

Or another pair of shoes.

Ohkay, arguably, I may also be collecting an unreasonable amount of shoes / boots BUT WE AREN’T HERE TO TALK ABOUT THAT TONIGHT DON’T LOOK AT ME.

Yet somehow purchasing an unreasonable quantity of seeds is where society gently suggests you may have lost perspective.

If I have the money...

And it brings me joy...

Why shouldn’t I spend it on escalating horticultural infrastructure?

There are certainly more expensive addictions.

And if my particular vice is accidentally stimulating Australia’s heirloom seed industry, I suspect we’ll all survive.

If anything, I’d counter this is far more healthy than a raging drug addiction.

I’ve never been particularly interested in owning things that appreciate in value.

I much prefer owning things that appreciate...

...into dinner.

Or flowers.

Or food for the bees.

Or neighbours wandering over the fence because I’ve grown too much zucchini again.

That’s the most tangible investment portfolio I own.

🌱🦆✨

Anyone who knows me knows it’s not a particularly common thing to do but I was seeing a guy who turned out toe be VERY into that.

So he made a joint, I had a few puffs. Apparently in this department I am a lightweight.

Now this turned out to not be “let’s have an adventure” high.

More “well this has become inconvenient” high.

Unfortunately I’d already volunteered to cook dinner.

Fortunately, I’d previously decided that 165°C for ten minutes produced the perfect chicken.

Safe.

Moist.

No salmonella.

Excellent.

Unfortunately, every ten minutes I completely forgot I’d already done that.

So I’d wander back to the air fryer.

Look at the chicken.

Think,

“Can’t be too careful.”

Then reset it for another ten minutes.

At 165°C.

Again.

This continued for... longer than I’d like to publicly quantify.

The remarkable part wasn’t that I overcooked the chicken.

The remarkable part was that my internal food safety auditor remained unwavering.

At no point did I think,

“This chicken looks a bit dry.”

I thought,

“Excellent. Still no salmonella.”

By the time my boyfriend wandered off to bed ~ having concluded that his increasingly cooked girlfriend with her cooked chicked was no longer a reliable source of nutrition ~ the chicken had achieved a structural integrity previously reserved for charcoal drawing.

I still attempted to eat it.

Not because it tasted good.

Because I’d worked hard on it.

I may as well have gnawed on a little chunk of charcoal.

At least...

I knew with absolute certainty...

...there was no fucking salmonella.

🔥🍗✨

^{*is this a photo of my firepit or some of the actual chicken, we’ll never know}

To be fair...

Sometimes they are.

They’re just rarely intimidating.

Well, in the way they think they are.

One afternoon a builder friend asked if I could swing past a job because some membrane detailing had become... creatively interpreted.

Which is consultant language for:

“Something has gone weird. Can you come unfuck it?”

Naturally I arrived wearing steel-cap boots approximately three sizes larger than my dignity and began wandering around the house sticking wraps back where wraps belonged.

Tape here.

Fold that.

Fix this junction.

“the fuck is that?”

Explain why gravity continues to exist.

Eventually I found one final section where the wall wrap disappeared into the ceiling junction near the top plate.

It needed another piece of tape.

Unfortunately...

I am give or take, 167cm or five foot six for those elsewhere in the world.

The wall, somewhat selfishly, was not.

Now, I could have gone and fetched a ladder.

Instead, I committed to what can only be described as optimistic T-Rex behaviour.

There I was.

Standing underneath it.

Flapping one arm in the general vicinity of the tape.

Convinced that if I simply wanted it enough, my arm might grow another half meter.

It was at about this point an enormous Islander labourer wandered over.

Now, one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the bigger the Islander bloke...

...the softer they seem to speak.

This man was built like a wardrobe.

His voice barely disturbed the air.

“Excuse me, miss...”

I turned around.

“Can I...”

Before he finished the sentence, he gently grabbed me around the waist.

And simply...

...picked me up.

Not dramatically.

Not awkwardly.

Just effortlessly.

Like I weighed roughly the same as an enthusiastic shopping bag.

Suddenly I was eye-level with the membrane.

Well.

This certainly solved the problem.

So there I was.

Hovering several feet off the ground.

Calmly applying tape while suspended by a stranger.

In fairness...

His solution was considerably faster than mine.

Within about fifteen seconds I finished the repair.

~ahem~ “I’m done.”

He gently placed me back on the ground.

“Uh… thank you.”

“No worries, miss.”

Then he wandered off to continue whatever enormous-Islander things enormous Islanders do.

I stood there for a moment experiencing what I can only describe as ideological buffering.

Because here’s the thing.

Part of me wanted to deliver an impassioned TED Talk about personal space, bodily autonomy and appropriate workplace interactions.

The other part had to concede...

...he had solved my problem with astonishing efficiency.

The internal fight of your principles and your immediate practical requirements find themselves in direct conflict.

This was one of them.

To this day I remain delightfully conflicted.

Was it appropriate?

Probably not.

Did it work?

Spectacularly.

Construction, I’ve discovered, is full of people like this.

People who won’t always solve the problem the way HR would recommend...

...but will absolutely make sure you get home safely.

It’s one of the many reasons I keep coming back.

🌿🦆✨

This sounds significantly more impressive than it actually was.

Through a series of administrative oversights involving a crypto bro, I somehow acquired access to a conference that cost about fifteen hundred dollars a ticket.

I paid approximately...

...nothing.

Which became awkward whenever people asked what I did.

“So...”

“What do you do?”

“Oh...”

“I do alright.”

“What sort of investing are you into?”

“All sorts”

Blank stares.

“So... property development?”

“Sometimes.”

“What else?”

“I solve problems.”

“...What kind of problems?”

“The expensive kind.”

“...Hows your crypto portfolio?”

“I do alright”

Then I’d smile politely and wander off.

The funnier I found the whole situation, the more convinced they became I was hiding something.

Apparently answering questions with the enthusiasm of an evasive woodland cryptid signals enormous wealth.

Meanwhile I was quietly treating the whole event like a wildlife documentary.

There were complimentary massages in the VIP lounge.

Naturally, I abused that privilege shamelessly.

Bottomless food.

Bottomless bars.

A motherfucking superyacht.

Again...

...all free.

I remained deeply committed to maximising shareholder value.

The real entertainment, however, wasn’t the networking.

There would be elaborate drone light shows over Sydney Harbour.

The crypto crowd would collectively gasp whenever one of the drones malfunctioned and disappeared into the water.

“Oh my God!”

“That’s three quarters of a Bitcoin!”

I, on the other hand, found myself quietly cheering for gravity.

“Unlucky, my dudes.”

Perhaps that says something about me.

Or perhaps I’d simply spent enough years in construction to know that expensive technology still occasionally meets the same fate as every cordless drill ever left on a scaffold.

What fascinated me wasn’t the money.

It was how desperately everyone wanted to know how everyone else had made theirs.

The more cryptic I became...

...the more fascinating I apparently became.

Which was ironic.

Because I wasn’t there to network.

Or invest.

Or pitch.

I was there for the harbour.

The seafood.

The cocktails.

The massage.

The people-watching.

Most evenings I’d quietly disappear from the conversations upstairs to a little table overlooking the water.

Sydney would slowly begin glowing.

I’d grab my seafood.

Collect an increasingly irresponsible number of cocktails.

Watch the ferries drift past.

And largely ignore everyone else.

It was beautiful.

Not because of the yacht.

Because of the water.

The breeze.

The golden light.

If I’m honest, you could have achieved ninety-five percent of the same feeling from a picnic rug and a decent esky.

Which has become something of a recurring theme throughout my life.

People assume luxury looks expensive.

For me, it usually looks suspiciously inexpensive.

A train to Sydney with a single serve sauvignon blanc sippy cup beside a cheese cracker.

The countryside drifting past the window.

No emails.

No phone calls.

Nobody needing anything from me for four and a half glorious hours.

Luxury.

A construction site.

A ladder.

A plank balanced across two sawhorses.

Someone finds an old tablecloth.

Suddenly we’ve accidentally opened Canberra’s most exclusive rooftop restaurant.

Luxury.

Bushfire smoke finally clearing enough that Captain and I can escape for the coast.

Fresh air.

Salt water.

One happy dog.

Luxury.

A ridiculous grazing board assembled in my own kitchen.

Candles.

Music.

Close friends who know exactly where the wine glasses live.

Luxury.

Somewhere along the way I realised I’d been sold a very strange definition of success.

Bigger house.

Fancier car.

More impressive postcode.

More expensive holidays.

More things.

I’ve accidentally spent enough time around genuinely wealthy people to discover something mildly inconvenient.

The nice things are nice.

They’re just not where the magic lives.

The magic has always been hiding somewhere much cheaper.

Good music.

Dogs.

Fresh air.

Ridiculous conversations.

Road trips.

Food shared with people you adore.

A beautiful view.

The first stars appearing.

A bottle of wine that tastes significantly better because of who you’re drinking it with.

My happiest memories don’t seem to have a price tag.

They’re just... moments.

Which is fortunate.

Becuse moments are available to almost everyone.

Sometimes we simply forget to notice them.

These days I think my version of wealth is remarkably uncomplicated.

Enough money to pay the bills.

Enough freedom to disappear for an afternoon.

Enough friends to fill a picnic table.

Enough curiosity to keep finding beautiful things.

The rest has always felt a little negotiable.

I don’t actually think I’ve ever wanted to be rich.

I just wanted enough fuel in the tank to keep driving toward beautiful places.

Everything after that has been a bonus.

Go on.

Be delightfully difficult to categorise.

It has taken me to some thoroughly improbable places.

Occasionally those places include a superyacht.

More often they involve dogs, cheese and construction sites.

🌿🦆✨

This was not it.

It was a white 1.2-litre Ford Festiva called Bessie.

Calling her “underpowered” would be deeply unfair to underpowered vehicles.

She produced what I can only describe as aspirational horsepower.

Steep hills required encouragement.

The air conditioner was considered an optional luxury.

Overtaking was less a manoeuvre and more a long-term strategic commitment.

She wasn’t fast.

She wasn’t pretty.

She had one missing hubcap, a dent in the driver’s door and all the structural elegance of a determined toaster.

But she was loyal.

At one point my younger brother borrowed Bessie because his own car wasn’t running.

He returned having used my tiny hatchback as a ute.

Twenty bags of cement.

Twenty.

At twenty kilograms each.

Four hundred kilograms.

Looking back, this may explain several subsequent mechanical developments.

In my defence, Bessie never complained.

She simply continued existing through what I can only assume was pure spite.

Much like my own spiritual ethos.

Eventually Bessie carried everything I owned from Canberra to Melbourne.

Every worldly possession I had fitted into a remarkable number of giant striped nanna bags and somehow disappeared into that tiny hatchback.

People underestimate hatchbacks.

Sedans have dignity.

Hatchbacks have determination.

I rented a place in Moonee Ponds.

Worked in Hawthorn.

Only eleven kilometres apart.

Easy.

Unfortunately I’d made the classic Canberra mistake of assuming eleven kilometres in Melbourne meant eleven kilometres in Canberra.

It did not.

It meant somewhere between an hour and the collapse of civilisation.

Some mornings I’d catch the train.

Other days the tram.

Occasionally I’d ride my pushbike.

The rest of the time I’d drive Bessie through Melbourne’s increasingly creative interpretation of road design.

Disrespectfully...

Hook turns can fuck right the fuck off.

One afternoon I found myself on one of Melbourne’s five-lane freeways.

Somewhere in the middle lane.

Trying to determine which of the several rapidly approaching exits I was supposed to be taking.

This was before every phone doubled as a GPS.

Navigation consisted primarily of hope, panic, and a firm commitment to reading road signs at the very last possible second.

Without warning Bessie stopped accelerating.

I tried another gear.

KATHUNK.

Dropped down again.

KATHUNK.

Something underneath the car appeared to be attempting its own escape.

Then...

Nothing.

I was stationary.

In the middle lane.

On a Melbourne freeway.

About this time the traffic report interrupted the radio.

“...there’s currently a small hatchback causing delays...”

Excuse me?

Firstly...

Rude.

Secondly...

Not inaccurate.

But still.

Rude.

An enormous SUV pulled alongside me.

The driver wound down her window.

“WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD?”

A fair question.

“DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T STOP THERE?”

Again.

Entirely reasonable.

Internally I considered explaining that this had not, in fact, been a lifestyle choice.

What I blurted was something deeply elegant like

“NO FUCKING SHIT”

Instead I continued attempting to negotiate with Bessie.

Hazard lights flashing.

Traffic crawling around us.

One locked elbow holding the gearstick upwards while I experimnted with every gear known to mankind.

First.

Nothing.

Second.

Nothing.

Third.

The engine screamed.

The revs climbed into another postcode.

And somehow...

Movement.

Not driving.

Not even crawling.

More... mechanical interpretive dance.

Just enough momentum to begin edging across two lanes toward the nearest exit.

About this time an enormous truck quietly positioned itself behind me with its own hazard lights flashing.

No yelling.

No abuse.

Just one experienced truckie looking at my tiny hatchback and silently deciding,

“Well...

...she’s having a day.”

Together we limped toward the exit.

By some miracle there was a mechanic almost immediately off the freeway.

I rolled into the workshop.

The mechanic wandered over.

We discussed Bessie’s increasingly concerning life choices.

He promised to call once he’d investigated.

The next day:

“Gearbox’s gone.”

A brand-new gearbox would cost about twelve hundred dollars.

A second-hand one from the wreckers?

About four hundred.

Given the entire vehicle was worth approximately the same as a decent night out...

“...let’s go with second-hand.”

A few days later I returned to collect her.

The mechanic was waiting.

Trying very hard not to laugh.

He beckoned me over to the workbench where my original gearbox sat.

“Normally,” he said,

“...once the hole gets to about golf-ball size...”

He paused.

“...people can’t drive them anymore.”

I nodded.

Reasonable.

He then casually shoved his entire fist through the side of the gearbox casing.

“If I hadn’t watched you drive it in myself...”

Another pause.

“...I’d never have believed it.”

He looked at the gearbox.

Then at me.

“I reckon this one’s going on the workshop wall.”

I still maintain that wasn’t a mechanical failure.

That was commitment.

Bessie had one final job to do.

She just refused to die until she’d reached the mechanic under her own steam.

Which, considering she’d previously survived Melbourne traffic, four hundred kilograms of cement, and several years of my decision-making...

...feels entirely on brand.

I’ll never feel right about her being fisted by a mechanic though…

May she forever cruise gently downhill with a tailwind in car heaven.

🌿🦆✨

^{*Exhibit A: Bessie being repurposed as a commercial construction vehicle. Twenty bags of cement. Four hundred kilograms. She had concerns but, characteristically, kept them to herself.}

The difficulty, of course, is that leaving generally requires knowing where you’re going next.

I rarely do.

Money comes and goes.

Work can usually be found when ego is left at the door and desperation is driving.

Historically, the process looks something like:

“Welp. This isn’t it.”

“What now?”

“Fucked if I know.”

Aggressively exits current reality and hopes the next chapter contains good cheese and a decent sauvignon blanc.

This has proven surprisingly effective.

One of my more memorable examples occurred during my final days in strata management.

By that point I’d spent nearly a decade in the industry.

Entirely by accident.

I’d started as a receptionist.

Unfortunately my face apparently does not “poker” as well as I hope and I was quickly extracted from that particular front of house role so at least when I took that asinine phonecall noone could see the faces I pulled.

From there I worked my way through the ranks.

Assistant.

Junior strata manager.

Then eventually a fully fledged strata manager with portfolios spread across multiple firms.

At my busiest I was responsible for somewhere between seven hundred and nine hundred units.

No assistant.

Just me managing the expectations of nearly a thousand occupants.

People often hear that number and imagine buildings.

I imagine complaints.

A broken garage door wasn’t fifty residents complaining.

It was:

fifty residents,

twenty tenants,

forty property managers,

internal staff,

committee members,

and occasionally whoever happened to answer reception that day.

All complaining.

About the same thing.

Simultaneously.

And honestly?

I understood it.

Home is the one place people expect to have control.

Then strata arrives with legislation, by-laws, budgets and committees and starts explaining why they can’t paint their front door purple.

People take that surprisingly personally.

Over the years I survived:

committee meetings,

budget disputes,

insurance claims,

neighbour wars,

parking wars,

pet wars,

and enough passive-aggressive correspondence to qualify for psychological compensation.

Committee meetings were perhaps the purest form of the profession.

Hundreds of them.

Possibly thousands.

Entire evenings spent watching grown adults passionately debate matters of extraordinary insignificance.

The resulting minutes would often read:

“After lengthy discussion the committee resolved to defer the matter.”

Which is strata shorthand for:

A room full of people bitched for two hours and collectively achieved absolutely fucking nothing.

Exhausting.

Unfortunately I became reasonably good at it.

Good enough that a competing firm eventually poached me.

More money.

Less nonsense.

At least initially.

A few years later one of the directors approached me about helping establish a new branch office in my hometown.

Absolutely.

This was my stomping ground.

Building something new sounded interesting.

Then reality arrived.

I went from managing roughly nine hundred units to perhaps fifty.

For most people this would sound relaxing.

For me it was administrative death.

The workload evaporated.

The challenge disappeared.

My brain began slowly leaking out of my ears.

At one point Google had hidden a Mario emulator inside its search page.

I spent an amount of time playing it that should probably remain between myself and whichever holy deity feels right for you.

The other property managers complained.

I didn’t particularly care.

If somebody wanted me to do something else they were welcome to teach me.

Until then Mario and I had kingdoms to save.

The beginning of the end arrived via a re-keying project.

One of the larger complexes in the portfolio required every resident’s access credentials updated.

Simple enough.

After considerable effort I successfully coordinated every occupant.

Except one.

One tenant somehow managed to miss:

morning appointments,

daytime appointments,

evening appointments,

phone calls,

messages,

and every reasonable attempt to assist her.

Eventually the inevitable occurred.

She locked herself out.

The phone call arrived shortly afterwards.

She was furious.

Naturally this was now somehow my fault.

Internally I was thinking:

“Oh no. The consequences of your own actions. What a tragedy.”

Externally I remained professional.

“Wait there. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

One of the perks of a small city is that everything is only ever five minutes away.

I drove over.

Swapped the access card.

Problem solved.

The tenant entered the lift and disappeared toward her unit.

Excellent.

My work here was done.

Or so I thought.

A few moments later a voice exploded across the atrium from the upper floors.

This woman absolutely unloaded on me.

At full volume.

Apparently I was:

useless,

incompetent,

power hungry,

unhelpful,

unprofessional,

and several other things that became increasingly difficult to categorise.

The crime in question appeared to be successfully carrying out the security upgrade she had repeatedly ignored.

I stood there quietly receiving this unsolicited public character assessment.

Then doors started opening.

Neighbours emerged.

An audience formed.

At this point she was delivering what can only be described as a TED Talk on my professional shortcomings.

And then something unexpected happened.

I didn’t feel angry.

I didn’t feel embarrassed.

I didn’t even feel upset.

I felt relieved.

Because suddenly everything became very clear.

Not the tenant.

The job.

I’d spent months wondering why I was still there.

Why I was dragging myself through work I no longer enjoyed.

Why I was shrinking myself into a role that had stopped challenging me.

And suddenly the answer arrived.

I wasn’t there because I wanted to be.

I was there because I hadn’t left yet.

So I yelled back:

“Thank you!”

The shouting stopped.

The audience became confused.

I continued.

“I’ve been wondering why the fuck I’m still doing this job.”

A pause.

“You win.”

Then I pointed toward the the foyer.

“I’m out.”

And that was that.

I got in my car.

Drove back to the office.

And by the time I arrived several committee members had already contacted the director.

News travels remarkably quickly when somebody resigns via public atrium declaration.

He was waiting.

“Please don’t leave.”

“It’s done.”

“Sleep on it.”

Fair request.

So I did.

The next morning I arrived to find flowers, chocolates and emails from committee members asking me to reconsider.

It was genuinely lovely.

And completely beside the point.

The problem wasn’t the tenant.

The problem wasn’t the workload.

The problem wasn’t even the job.

The problem was that my soul had already resigned months earlier.

The paperwork simply hadn’t caught up yet.

So I thanked everyone.

Sent the email.

Packed my desk.

And left.

No grand plan.

No backup strategy.

No certainty.

Just a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that staying somewhere your spirit has already abandoned is usually the greater risk.

The details tend to sort themselves out afterwards.

They always have.

And if they don’t?

Well.

There’s usually wine.

🍷🏢🃏

^{*Google photo of a russian super complex}

My research specialities include:

• advanced mantis diplomacy,

• roadside floral acquisition,

• hidden dinosaur deployment strategies,

• train charcuterie,

• emergency picnic logistics,

• and the ceremonial application of sauvignon blanc.

My qualifications are entirely self-awarded.

Nevertheless, I consider them valid.

Sometimes impressive, othertimes impressively unimpressive, in say the form of miniature praying mantis living in the garden.

He was approximately five millimetres long.

And somehow already carried himself like a veteran of several successful military campaigns.

Tiny.

Determined.

Entirely convinced he was personally responsible for local security operations of the Basil plant he lived in.

I became emotionally invested almost immediately.

As one does.

This was not my first mantis.

Nor, I suspect, will it be my last.

Over the years I appear to have accidentally accumulated an extensive archive of praying mantises, roadside flowers, unusually charismatic insects, hidden dinosaurs, random geodes, suspiciously interesting sticks and other entirely unnecessary treasures.

My garden contains a number of concealed plastic dinosaurs.

I consider this a public service.

I have also maintained a long-standing observational relationship with a protea bush hidden in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town.

Posh Spice and I periodically provide one another with updates regarding the bush.

The bush remains entirely unaware of our existence.

Nevertheless, the relationship feels important.

Friends occasionally comment on the flowers around my house.

The native arrangements.

The dried gum blossoms.

The proteas.

The bits of foliage appearing mysteriously in jars and vases.

They assume I spend a small fortune.

In reality, most of it was acquired through what can best be described as opportunistic roadside goblin behaviour.

The world is full of beautiful things.

Most of them are free.

The older I get, the more I realise this is not actually a story about mantis’.

Or flowers.

Or hidden dinosaurs.

It is a story about noticing.

Because somewhere along the way many adults become convinced magic is reserved for extraordinary occasions.

Big achievements.

Big milestones.

Big moments.

I understand why.

Life can be difficult.

People leave.

Hearts break.

Bodies fail.

Money disappears.

Plans unravel.

The world gives us plenty of reasons to become serious.

Yet somehow, the longer I live, the more convinced I become that the magic never left.

Most people simply stopped looking for it.

It’s still there.

In the first stars appearing.

The smell of rain.

A dog asleep in a patch of sunshine.

A perfect song arriving at exactly the right moment.

A roadside protea bush.

A tiny mantis standing on your finger as though preparing to defend the kingdom.

The magic is everywhere when your world has been truly dark.

Perhaps that’s why I notice it now.

Not because life has become easier.

Because I know how difficult it can be.

And once you’ve seen enough darkness, you become fiercely protective of delight.

So I continue hiding dinosaurs in garden beds for my friends kids to find.

I particularly delight in telling them there is one additional dino to how many I have actually hidden. This typically buys mum and I an extra half hour of scavanging.

Collecting flowers.

Checking on mantis’.

Pointing out sunsets.

Annoying children by insisting they stop what they’re doing and look at the clouds.

Along the way I somehow became the favourite auntie to most of my friends’ children. Hopefully to my actual nieces and nephews as well.

Let’s just assume they’re all my niblets.

Not because I’m particularly responsible.

Or sensible.

Or even the coolest.

I suspect it’s because I’m the auntie who refuses to play by the rules.

The auntie who points out unusual clouds.

Who names ducks.

Who insists they stop and watch sunsets.

Who teaches them that adventures can happen on train rides and that picnics belong in entirely inappropriate locations.

The auntie who demands they witness the magic around them.

Not the big magic.

Not castles and fireworks and winning the lottery.

The small magic.

The everyday kind.

Because one day they’ll discover what the rest of us eventually do.

Life can be hard.

I can’t protect them from that.

But perhaps I can teach them to notice.

Someone has to maintain standards.

Besides, if adulthood requires abandoning whimsy, I respectfully decline.

I have invested too many years in this field of study.

The mantis kingdom still requires vigilant protection.

🌿🦆✨

^{*my incredible photoshopping on the miniature mantis i found <3}

This became relevant because when your partner is about to commence chemotherapy, medical professionals become surprisingly interested in whether the people living with them possess functioning immune systems.

Which seemed reasonable.

I however, quite simply, did not.

As it turns out, my mother had successfully raised three children using what I can only describe as an aggressively Eastern European interpretation of preventative healthcare.

To be fair, this wasn’t entirely unusual in certain circles.

If you had a cold, you were given tea.

If you had a fever, you were given tea.

If you had emotional problems, you were also given tea.

Sometimes the tea contained honey and lemon.

Other times the tea contained whiskey and whatever mystery liquor happened to be living in the back of the cupboard.

If things became particularly serious somebody might additionally recommend:

cabbage,

prayer,

or cabbage while praying.

Medical intervention was generally reserved for situations where a body part had detached and was no longer participating in team activities.

Physical injuries were often treated through a combination of:

hydrogen peroxide poured directly into open wounds,

burning pain,

and being told to stop whinging.

As a result, by my early twenties I had somehow travelled through parts of Asia and the Middle East, survived countless mosquito attacks despite apparently being mosquito crack cocaine, and reached adulthood with approximately zero vaccinations.

Not a few.

Not some.

None.

Which was unfortunate because oncology departments tend to prefer documentation over vibes.

Apparently:

“Yeah, nah.”

is not considered an acceptable medical record.

So it was decided I would receive catch-up vaccinations.

All of them.

Immediately.

As luck would have it, my best friend Posh Spice worked at a travel vaccination clinic.

This should have reassured me.

Instead it removed any possibility of sympathy.

She reviewed my shopping list of required vaccinations and squeezed me in immediately.

There was apparently some concern about the fact that Lindsay was about to commence chemotherapy and I was essentially wandering around society without any factory-installed immunity.

Nine vaccinations were required.

Nine.

NINE.

At no point had I mentally prepared myself to become a human pincushion.

I vaguely remember asking whether this was medically sound.

Posh Spice assured me she’d checked with the clinic doctor and it was apparently doable.

She then added that, as my friend, she would probably be checking on me later that evening.

This should have been a warning.

Instead I remained optimistic.

Posh Spice began loading syringes with the sort of enthusiasm usually associated with military procurement contracts.

One arm.

Then the other arm.

Then back to the first arm.

By the end I felt less like a person and more like a suspiciously cooperative dartboard.

Then, while administering the second-last vaccination, she paused.

A grin slowly appeared.

“Oh.”

“What?”

“This is the most vaccinations I’ve ever delivered in a single sitting.”

Wonderful.

Love that for me.

Lindsay drove me home.

At this point I was mostly intact.

A little sore.

A little grumpy.

A little dramatic.

Unfortunately the situation deteriorated rapidly.

Within minutes of leaving the clinic I developed what can only generously be described as a vaccine-induced goblin fever.

My fingers started tingling.

I sat in the passenger seat staring at them.

Wiggling them.

Testing them.

Increasingly concerned.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“My fingers are falling off.”

Lindsay glanced over.

“They’re still attached.”

“For now.”

Things continued to escalate.

The next symptom was an overwhelming irrational desire for kiwi juice.

Not apple juice.

Not orange juice.

Not water.

Kiwi juice.

I have never had kiwi juice in my life.

There is absolutely no reason I would ever want kiwi juice.

Yet suddenly it had become central to my continued survival.

I wanted kiwi juice.

I needed kiwi juice.

I was prepared to discuss little else.

Fortunately we happened to be passing a small grocer.

Lindsay pulled over and went inside.

I waited.

Hopeful.

Trusting.

Certain salvation was moments away.

Several minutes later he returned.

Empty handed.

“There wasn’t any.”

I stared at him.

“No kiwi juice?”

“No kiwi juice.”

Winter in Canberra apparently means not only no kiwi juice.

It means no kiwis.

There were not even raw materials available for kiwi juice manufacture.

I lost my fragmented little fever-riddled mind.

Then he held up a bottle.

“Got apple juice.”

He had returned with apple juice as though I was some peasant.

I was devastated.

Not angry.

Not disappointed.

Devastated.

The kind of devastation normally reserved for natural disasters and tax audits.

I found this deeply unhelpful.

Meanwhile my arms had begun falling off.

Not literally.

But spiritually.

Both shoulders felt as though somebody had replaced the muscles with wet concrete.

I could no longer comfortably lift either arm.

By the time we got home I was operating on approximately seventeen percent battery and whatever fever dreams happened to be available.

Lindsay more or less barrelled me into the apartment.

I shuffled around making increasingly dramatic observations regarding my imminent demise.

Then things became weird.

Lindsay put me to bed.

At some point during the afternoon he came in to check on me and discovered me asleep.

Sort of.

I was lying completely motionless.

Eyes open.

Pupils approximately the size of serving platters.

Talking about leprechauns.

Tiny little leprechauns.

I could feel them.

Busy little bastards.

Running around my stomach.

Performing jigs.

Dancing polkas.

Things deteriorated further when one of Lindsay’s friends dropped by.

Somewhere within the fever fog I became aware that we had a guest.

Hospitality instincts activated immediately.

I launched from bed.

Marched into the kitchen.

Opened every single cupboard.

Every drawer.

The oven.

The dishwasher.

The rangehood.

Every available storage location.

I babbled something completely incoherent.

Then, satisfied I had successfully hosted our visitor, I returned to bed.

Ultimately I slept for approximately fifteen hours.

Fevers had mostly broken.

An ‘in the bone’ ache like I’ve never had since.

The leprechauns had departed.

The kiwi juice emergency had passed.

My arms remained deeply offended but were technically functional.

Most importantly, I was now considerably more vaccinated than I had been the day before.

Looking back, I realise I have intentionally consumed substances requiring significantly more paperwork, expense and legal risk than those vaccinations.

None of them got me remotely as fucked up.

Not even close.

The Australian Government may have accidentally administered the strongest thing I’ve ever taken.

All in all particularly impressive given I somehow managed to become the medical emergency under the circumstances.

💉🥝🍀

^{*image ai generated}

A distressed woman was trying desperately to explain a situation involving:
her cat,
the neighbours,
and a holiday.

Unfortunately she was crying and speaking at 7,289 words per minute.

Eventually I managed to extract the facts.

Her neighbours had gone away for a two-week holiday.

While loading their car, her cat had apparently seized the opportunity and infiltrated their townhouse unnoticed.

Several days later the cat owner realised her cat was missing.

About a week after that she spotted it.

Inside the neighbour’s townhouse.

Staring out the window.

At this point the neighbours were still away for another week.

The cat was trapped.

The cat had not eaten.

The cat was, understandably, casually losing its mind with it’s unwanted cabin fever.

So naturally one of my first real strata management matters involved coordinating:

a cat owner,
a locksmith,
and the police

to legally break into somebody else’s house.

The police attended purely to confirm that yes:

this was genuinely a cat extraction operation and not an unusually specific burglary.

The locksmith opened the door.

The cat owner bundled up the cat.

Noone stepped foot inside.

Door was immediately re-locked behind the lady and her feral crazed cat.

This should have been the end of the story.

It was not.

Because once the door was open everyone was finally able to inspect the interior.

That cat had spent over a week trapped alone inside a townhouse.

And apparently dedicated every waking moment to vengeance.

There was shit everywhere.

Piss everywhere.

Furniture damaged.

Plants excavated.

Household items shredded.

The place looked less like a residence and more like the aftermath of a small-scale domestic insurgency.

This cat had not survived.

It had radicalised.

The police, however, advised that despite the circumstances nobody was permitted to enter, let alone remain and try cleaning.

The cat was removed.

The townhouse was secured.

The door was locked again.

And there the catastrophic feline crime scene remained for another week until the neighbours returned home.

Before leaving, the cat owner did the only thing she could think of.

She wrote a note.

An apology.

An explanation.

A desperate attempt to prepare them for what awaited inside.

Then she placed it in their mailbox.

Unfortunately nobody checks their mailbox while on holiday.

Which meant that one week later these poor people returned home late at night after two weeks away.

They unlocked the front door.

Walked inside.

And were greeted by what can only be described as a biohazardous revenge manifesto written entirely in cat.

No sign of forced entry.

No missing property.

No obvious explanation.

Just absolute destruction.

Naturally they rang first thing the next morning.

Completely bewildered.

I listened patiently.

Then asked:

“Have you checked your mailbox?”

A pause.

A longer pause.

Then:

“...no.”

The note explained everything.

And thus, within my first few weeks as a strata manager, I learned two important lessons.

Firstly:

people are much stranger than you think.

Secondly:

never underestimate the destructive capabilities of a deeply outraged cat.

Or the administrative complexity of rescuing one.

🐈🚔🃏

^{*image ai generated}

For context:
when I was about twenty-one I had freshly lost my licence due to what the ACT government described as:
“persistent speeding offences”
and what I described as:
“an ongoing misunderstanding regarding urgency” and a blatant disregard for authority I had.

Unfortunately during this same period I had also unknowingly purchased a BMW that had apparently once belonged to a drug dealer because every police car within a fifty-kilometre radius seemed to recognise it on sight.

So naturally:
I was driving unlicensed.

One morning I got pulled over while making plans to Sydney for a Tony Robbins event my mother had bought me as a birthday present.

Which honestly already sounds like the setup to a psychological evaluation.

The cops were deeply unimpressed.

Apparently my file contained:
speeding fines,
warnings,
administrative notes,
and enough prior leniency to make my usual:
“teehee I’m just a girl”
routine completely ineffective.

So there I was on the side of the road while police explained that if I kept behaving like this I would permanently lose my licence.

Fair enough honestly.

Eventually they leave.

I wait a respectful few minutes.

Then immediately get back in my car because I lived literally around the corner.

The phone rings.

It’s the police officer.

“Hello, this is Constaaaaa… are you driving again?”

Now.

What followed was one of the least convincing performances of my entire life.

“No sir,” I replied calmly,
“my friend just arrived and is driving me home.”

I then muffled the phone and loudly announced:
“next left not this one.”

Absolute criminal mastermind behaviour.

I am fairly certain the officer knew I was lying.

But I could hear genuine exhaustion in that man’s voice.

Like:
deep spiritual fatigue.

Eventually he simply said:
“Just understand next time you lose your licence forever.”

Noted.
Thank you sir.

I got home, parked the car, caught a taxi into town, then spent three and a half hours dissociating on a bus to Sydney.

By the time I arrived at the Tony Robbins event everyone was already outside in little emotional support circles.

What I did not realise was that Tony had spent the entire day convincing thousands of middle-aged women that walking barefoot across hot coals was a good idea.

Apparently:
mindset.

My mother — glowing with the energy of a woman who absolutely believes this giant motivational man can fix people spiritually — was ecstatic I’d arrived in time.

Now.

At this stage I was:
sleep deprived,
emotionally detached from reality,
and twenty-one years old.

So naturally my response to:
“Would you like to walk across burning coals?”
was:
“Fuck it. Why not.”

The walk itself actually went fine.

What I failed to account for, however, was my absurdly high arches.

Which meant tiny coals became trapped in the middle of both feet and failed to dislodge during the little grassy wipe-off section afterward.

So yes.

I successfully burnt my feet walking on coals at a Tony Robbins seminar after illegally driving that morning.

Anyway.

My mother was absolutely radiant afterward and proudly informed one of the staff that I had only just arrived before voluntarily firewalking.

Which apparently impressed Tony greatly.

So later when everyone was back inside the giant hall he suddenly sings out:

“I hear we have a particularly courageous young lady with us tonight.”

My soul immediately left my body.

“Daria, where are you?”

Meanwhile my mother is enthusiastically windmilling her arm in the audience like she’s locating survivors from a shipwreck.

A microphone appears in front of my face.

Tony smiles warmly.

“Now Daria,” he says,
“tell us what was going through your mind when you stepped onto the coals and overcame your fear.”

Me:
“Fuck it.”

The disappointment in that man’s face could have powered small regional infrastructure.

Honestly:

One of my proudest moments of flagrant aussie disregard.

👣🚔🃏

^{*image courtesy of le google}

This sounds complimentary.

It is not.

Because once you’ve experienced a man who treats effort as a verb rather than a theoretical concept, future comparisons become deeply problematic.

Lindsay was one of those men.

During his chemotherapy we developed an increasingly aggressive campaign of mutual idiocy.

This was important for morale.

Cancer tries very hard to flatten people into patients and carers. Statistics and appointments.

Humour kept reintroducing us to each other as ourselves.

If Lindsay was admitted to hospital he would text asking me to bring supplies.

An eye mask?

Absolutely, my love.

You shall receive:
frog eye mask.

Need socks?

Done.

Tiny yellow duck socks incoming immediately.

Requested:
basic dignity.

Received:
novelty woodland creature accessories.

Meanwhile he delighted in retaliating through facial hair choices that should have been criminal offences.

One phase involved a moustache that made him look like a regional magician accused of tax fraud.

I invite everyone to search ‘monkey beard’.

You are most welcome.

Chewbacca Jackets as genuine outing attire.

Shirts that were thrifted from pirate garage sales.

Neither of us was willing to surrender first.

Eventually my baba became involved.

Which was how my elderly Ukrainian grandmother somehow formed an alliance with my twenty-something boyfriend undergoing chemotherapy.

He entertained her.

She fed him.

Both worried about me constantly.

I genuinely believe they formed a mutual aid society dedicated entirely to preventing my nervous breakdown.

Sometimes they would disappear together to appointments.

Sometimes I would receive photographs from wig shops.

Sometimes messages would simply arrive saying:

“10-4 rubber ducky”

Which somehow translated perfectly to:

still alive,
still ridiculous,
continuing.

The thing nobody tells you about loving someone through serious illness is that the big moments are actually quite rare.

Mostly it’s tiny things.

Novelty socks.

Terrible beards.

Checking someone got home safely.

Remembering the specific juice they wanted.

Driving them places.

Picking up prescriptions.

Making tea.

Trying very hard to keep life recognisable while everything else becomes frightening.

Unfortunately, once you’ve been loved like that, a surprising number of modern courtship efforts begin to feel aggressively underwhelming.

Which has had devastating consequences for my tolerance levels and dateability ever since.

🦆📡💛

*image of one of my artworks at home