One of my guilty pleasure favourite movies is The Greatest Show on Earth, a Cecil B. DeMille epic about circus life. I went to a couple of circuses as a child. Once, when a smaller touring company came to Kempsey, I remember the rickety, temporary seating and the smell of popcorn, but little else. Later,…
Did Valentines Day Feel Like Metal Prongs Being Pulled Out Of Your Body? Then Riley Can Relate. I’ve waited a week to write about this experience, because I didn’t want to descend into hyperbole (well, more than I already do – zing! – beat you to it), but time enough has passed now that I…
April may have been the cruelest month to Eliot but February is mine; the calendar, it snakes left to right, down and down like some intestinally-shaped hourglass before finally stopping here on the nineteenth. And here I stand, still squinting under the pall of grief, but the sun must be endured – it hurts my eyes…
Life / February 13th, 2013
I hate head lice and nits. Our family has been-there-done-that many times. Look! I even wrote a poem about them! I used to be really embarrassed about infestations and rarely talked about the subject, unless it was a quiet word in someone’s ear: Um, just so you know … I’m not like that anymore, and…
Read / February 11th, 2013
I took The Marriage Plot with me on our recent holiday, thinking that nine-hours in a plane each way would be ample time to knock it over (Eugenides’s style, among his other talents, I find, is a true pleasure – consequently I read faster). However, I forgot the biggest temptation: in-flight movies, and there were…
Vacuuming up the tiny pink and blue pieces from the Game of Life, sprinkled like chaos on the floor, I feel like God or some higher vengeful being. I listen as they rattle up the pipe, through the tube, before being spat into the belly of the machine; the clear perspex, there to demonstrate the…
Days 6 & 7 I’m going to be honest here by admitting I didn’t know much about Macau before arriving there. Yes, I knew it was a very old Portuguese trading port. Yes, I knew it was also very big on gambling. It also featured as a locale in the latest Bond movie, Skyfall. In…
Day 3 Broken arm and hospital Days 4 & 5 As you can see, I was a little tired … … and yet, we pressed on! Saturday afternoon was spent wandering around the central district of Hong Kong. The biggest I had for wanting to explore Hong Kong, why I put it on my living…
Days 1 & 2: Disneyland How to become a ‘first family’ Being time-whacked travellers, having only arrived at our hotel late the previous evening, we were up early and at the gates well before the opening time of 10am. This put us up near the beginning of the queue on the left hand side of…
