Freeman of Speech

Mia Freeman is a young and hip mum with an opinion. She often writes articles that the thirty to fourty somethings can relate to: offending our parents, juggling children, awkward sexual encounters and fashion faux pas, but today on Channel nine’s Today and her own blog Mamamia, she just came across as blatantly ignorant saying that all Cadel Evans did was “get on a bike.” Yes he did, but for 3,000 grueling kilometres over three weeks Mia!!!!!

Freeman’s argument was that we elevate sportspeople, label them as heroes and overpay them when there are far more deserving people. I appreciate the old analogy that it’s ‘easy as riding a bike’ but if we break down Cadel’s climb to the Yellow Jersey, it hasn’t been an easy ride and in my opinion his achievement is deserving of the accolades.

In 2005 and 2008 Cadel came so close to clinching Tour de France victory but didn’t get there and had to settle for second. A bad ride in 2009 didn’t rattle Cadel and although he started strongly in 2010, mechanical issues forced him in to a lower placing. He battled on and trained more aggressively, despite losing his coach and friend of twenty years, with the ultimate prize still in sight.

A hero is defined in the dictionary as someone who is admired for achieving something great. Greatness and sacrifice in any discipline deserves recognition. They may be a pioneering scientist; a selfless grandparent adopting their abandoned grandchild; a bestselling author; a brilliant singer or actor; a lifesaver; or an elite sportsperson. Just because Cadel is being financially rewarded for his sporting feat doesn’t mean he is less of a hero in the eyes of Australians.

To come back year after year and ride some of the most unforgiving mountains and this year turn a 3 minute deficit into a 1.34 min lead is surely of hero status. Perhaps Mia needs to just get on her bike and see how awe inspiring this journey of Cadel’s has been?

For the record, I am not a cyclist or an avid viewer of the Tour de France but any commoner can see how much blood and sweat those men shed in the last few weeks as they pushed their bodies and minds to their limits.

It’s so nice to read such uplifting news after the horrific bombing and massacre in Norway. Mia has her right to an opinion but trampling on the achievements of Cadel because he is triumphant in sport is unnecessary.

In joyful strains then let us sing  ‘well done Cadel – you did it and we salute you!’

Conversations with my Grandmother

The heavy black Bakelite*, with her old-fashioned finger-dial face, rang cheerfully. No electronic beeps or booms. No flashing buttons or man-made dialogue. Just the classic ring of a phone from years gone by, echoing out of the receiver. I was lost in this nostalgic moment.

There I was back in the old sunroom at 3 Yonga Road. Mum and Dad had scored tickets to the tennis at Kooyong and it was time to explore my Grandparents’ house. The back room had all sorts of surprises for young inquisitive children. Raffle tickets and empty ice-cream containers from bingo; old stamp pads; letters (I later discovered were from my Grandfather’s brother in WW1) sealed inside reused bread bags; and the old Singer sewing machine, drawers spilling over with interesting buttons, threads and implements.

Plonked on the Singer was my grandparents old Bakelite phone with their phone number scribbled on its dial. It didn’t work anymore but it became one of our favourite play accessories.  Phone calls to our Mum and Dad at the tennis (mobile phones weren’t even conceived,) calls to our toyshop or our office and phone calls to our grandmother in the next room. These were conversations that evoked the same magic from pumpkins, magic beans and toadstools.

‘Ring, ring.’

“This is Dot’s Diner. How can I help you?”

“Hi Dot. We’d like to order a ham sandwich with green pickles, a crab-apple jelly sandwich and two glasses of cordial please.”

 “What time shall I expect you?” 

 “We will be arriving in ten minutes.”

 “Would you like the table set with fine china?”

 “Yes please and we’d love Jacko to eat with us too.”

'Click.' The Old Bakelite phone piece gently presses the receiver buttons and engages our conversation. A poorly insulated wall separates us.

Conversations with my grandmother are becoming clear again as the Bakelite rings on.

‘Ring, ring’

“836 3442…Hello Mrs Meagher speaking”

 “Yes. Hello Mrs Meagher. We’d like to invite you to our fairy party.”

“That sounds splendid. When is it?”

 “Today of course!”

 “I’d love to, but I’m not sure I will have time to bake.”

 “That’s o.k. We are eating magic fairy food in the garden.”

“ I’ll put my boots on and see you soon”

“ See you soon Dot.”

Silence as the Bakelite swallows our secret conversation with a smile.

It takes twice as long to call out on the old Bakelite but the eh urrr, eh urrr sound of the finger dial being turned is enjoyable. For that moment I am the little girl at the diner ordering her lunch and the magic fairy planning her party. I am having a conversation with my grandmother.

‘Ring, ring’ the Bakelite cheerfully exclaims as I wait…

* Bakelite phones are the old black hard cased phones from the 50-60’s (see pic). I recently purchased one on EBay because I was feeling nostalgic and it reminded me of my happy childhood as we approach Mother’s Day. Who needs an IPhone when you can have a Bakelite phone?

I Read the Reader (Book Review)

‘Cyclone holidays’ are still upon us and not a room in the house has been excluded. My kids started their assault in the kitchen where paper, pencils and Easter crafts are strewn on the dinner table. They’ve made a pink woolen spider’s web that wraps itself around every chair and door handle and the bedrooms have had every box and trinket upended on the floor. There’s even a plate of pretend spaghetti from the spider web off-cuts. If only my children would sit down quietly and read!

My big challenge for the past term has been listening to two readers a night. As much as my hub gets involved in every aspect of our kids’ lives, he’s often too late for readers or has his course to attend. We have to squeeze in sports training and dinner in the mix too. Find that balance. Seize while the mind is focused.

When I stumbled upon Mem Fox’s Reading Magic: How your child can learn to read before school – and other read-aloud miracles, I was quite relieved to receive some guidance and advice at last.

I may have mentioned before that we have read to our children since they were in cots. According to Fox, if you’ve done this, your children will be able to read before school. Not quite. Our children have a fascination with books, love being read to and are starting to unlock the mysteries of language and reading. However, they are not reading on their own and I believe it’s unfair that Fox assumes reading is such an easy skill to learn if your parents read to you.

Our kids have all the right influences, being read to every night, my love of the English language, bookcases chocked full of books and fun inventive word games. My hub and I are committed to supporting them with their readers and reading. We want them to enjoy this wonderful pastime.

Fox thinks that school readers are detrimental to learner readers, often with poor grammar and boring repetitive text. She believes that we should be reading quality picture books and learning from these. I agree that some readers are mundane but I also think we need to keep the rituals of nighttime reading separate from school reading. I make readers exciting by imagining together what will happen next and encouraging every attempt at a new word. A book in bed is about sharing this close moment together and any learning is a bonus.

Which brings me to my blog title I Read the Reader. It can be read in past or present tense and although the word read is spelt the same, it sounds different. I read (red) the reader, or I read (reed) the reader, or the reader was red. Complicating enough for us and I haven’t even mentioned reed or reid or reyd. Our vowels make so many different sounds. You only need to look at a Thrass Chart* for your head, let alone your child’s to go in a spin.

What did I take from Reading Magic? Fox says that children who have been read to by an adult expect the book to make sense. Agreed. They know if you are making coherent sentences. Children who do not comprehend the words may still be able to read language without knowing what is happening. Fox goes as far as saying we can’t assess children’s reading abilities by reading aloud. How do we know they understand what they are saying?

It’s also important how we read and the intonations in our voices. You should hear my German accent. I make a very good crackly old person’s voice too after reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches to my children recently! Playing games and creating distinct and engaging character voices makes reading fun and inventive.

The first secret of reading, according to Fox, is understanding the print on the page: “The more they see of the printed word, the more they will understand its peculiarities – such as the letter combinations tch, sh, th, ight and words ending in tion.”

We can build our children’s understanding of print by acknowledging everyday print around us on signs, posters, in junk mail etc. The learning is fun and beneficial to the child.

Fox’s second secret is the magic of language. The fun we can have with our language is essential to learning it through its rhymes, songs, jingles and poems. Dr Seuss – rhythm, rhyme and repetition is a great starting point. Green Eggs and Ham and If I had Duck Feet bring such delight to my children’s faces.

The third secret to teaching your child to read, according to Fox, is general knowledge. For example, if your child knows what a dinosaur is, has been to the ballet, visited the War Memorial, or gained knowledge through similar experiences, many words have a familiarity with them and are easier to decipher in print.

Fox believes that poor readers use phonic learning only, do not see the words connecting and do not use the other secrets mentioned above to help them unlock the world of reading. She continues by saying that children need to read efficiently because their memories can’t hold onto the information. The slower children read the worse they will be at reading. Harsh Mrs Fox!

Fox doesn’t hesitate to self promote her own picture books, vast education and accolades and daughter’s exceptional reading ability by age three years. I found this to be the least interesting part of her book.

However, I like Fox’s focus on parents reading aloud to their children and making it fun. I believe that most children will be able to read eventually, but it takes longer for some of them to unravel the language. Even Fox’s Reading Magic cannot guarantee that your child will be able to read before school.

On that note it’s time to get the books out – a stray basketball’s just broken the lounge light!

*Thrass Chart is a Teaching Handwriting Reading and Spelling System

How it works.

English: The alphabet has twenty-six letters, but the English language uses more sounds than this (approx. forty-four discrete sounds (phonemes.) Some of the letters have more than one sound and get combined to make a new sound.

THRASS identifies the forty-four phonemes we use in English and the different graphemes we use to write each one of these phonemes. It relates each grapheme with a key word and identifiable picture. The picture helps the student to read the word and the phoneme for the particular grapheme demonstrated in that word.

E.g. Bed and Bread

Taken from www.acea.org.au

The Way I'm Heading

There is a condition that many of us (especially females) have to live with daily. I am not exempt from this disorder and in fact suffer quite severely from it. I see a page of black, red and orange lines with green and yellow spots and squares. A blur of arrows and colours are before me. For a CantworkoutwhereI’mgoing sufferer, maps just don’t make any sense.

I needed to get myself to Women of Letters on Sunday afternoon.  I picked up my faceless Melways and got as far as the turnoff at Chandler Highway. From there my disorder got the better of me. Was I to go left? Or was it right? If I turned my Melways upside down would that help? Why does Westgarth Street look like it’s off a service lane? These are the questions that flash through the mind of a person with no sense of direction.

I find my way to places through visual markers. Looking for a postbox, shop front or unusual house. Verbal directions also tend to stick. I’m the sort of person that goes shopping, enters a store and then walks back in the same direction I’ve come from until I see a shop I’ve just been to.

Being in unfamiliar territory is quite daunting for a CantworkoutwhereI’mgoing sufferer. “Just use you sat nav!” I didn’t bother getting it in my car because I couldn’t understand it anyway. More complicated electronic maps and distances to grapple with. There is always the mobile to “Come and get me” or the wind down your window “Excuse me, how do I get to..?” Luckily, I don’t mind approaching people because I would have been late to many functions when I simply lost my way.

I had to suddenly turn left and jump across lanes when I realised that right was not left, but I made it in good time for Women of Letters. I even managed to find the toilets from my memory of walking up a small flight of stairs last time.

It was another enjoyable and uplifting afternoon listening to distinguished women discussing their letters of complaint. Whether it was their working conditions, our disregard for the environment, employment issues, disenchantment when championing for a cause, or a distracting psychotherapist and writer’s block, it had us chugging back the vino with big belly laughs or sympathetic smiles.

On the way home, I proceeded to get swallowed up by traffic and disoriented by road closures for the Grand Prix. My hubby even had to come and meet me when his “turn left,” “travel 400 metres” and “adjacent to the stadium,” instructions washed over me like an undeveloped image.  I was there but not really there.

I battle on with my disorder and the impossibly of reading a map, but thankfully I have my own ‘sat nav’ hubby on standby to show me which way I am heading.

P.S Ironically, it’s 15 years to the day since my lack of direction got me into real trouble on the streets of BudaPest. At least I’m not scared of spiders!

Lines and Words

Lines. Charting our wayward heartbeats. Forming grids in our maps. Guiding our vehicles. Cocaine ready to snort. Words ready to be penned on them.

A thin blue or pink line is even better if it’s parallel to another blue line. It can be ecstasy for some couples and devastation for others. It’s amazing what those two dye indicators can tell you. Lives forever changed for better or worse.

When did words become part of a pregnancy kit test? I couldn’t believe it when I saw a television advertisement for a very advanced ‘wee on a stick’ pregnancy indicator. You can now be told after that five minutes of anticipation that you are “three weeks and two days pregnant.”

If you want to be really ‘New Age’ you can grab a USB pregnancy test kit and the device will tell you how many babies (if any) and your estimated due date in words*.

I am past the days of pregnancy testing kits but thought it was an interesting example of when words weren’t really necessary.

The lines, bold, faint or absent, speak as much as words.

*http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/pteq.html

My House

The following is a small piece I had to recently write about my house as a child for my online Novel Writing for Junior and Young Adults Readers course:

The French doors were unlocked as always. One of the kids had lost the key years ago. If we went out for a long time, Dad tied the handles with rope to deter would-be thieves. Mum said we had nothing of value any way. Her precious possessions were us.

The lower door panes had been splattered with the wet dog whiskers of our Old English Sheepdog and the green paint was chipped from where you had to kick the door and push it open when it expanded and dropped in wet weather. “We’ll put it on Dad’s list,” Mum would announce. It’s still on Dad’s list.

Luckily the carpet has been replaced. Our home had singular brown carpet squares that you inevitably skidded or tripped over as they came unstuck. They were rough and cheaply made, exposing smooth pine boards as they peeled off. Textures so contrasted, it was like walking on an infant’s sensory book. Only there was no soft fluffy duckling-like surface.

After our homework had been done we were allowed to eat a snack in front of the T.V. There were only four chairs for five children and ‘chair rules’ applied once you had secured your seats. The seats were soft and spongy and had twice been recovered by Mum after her upholstery course.  The orange plastic K-Mart stools were our makeshift coffee table to place our snacks. Books about birds and Australia wedged the T.V in. My brothers’ footy trophies adorned the shelf above.

Amongst this mediocrity a billiard table was placed. Strong with feminine curved legs, it stood in the middle of this vast room. Almost out of place with this eclectic cheap furniture. Polished and strictly out of bounds for food and drink consumption – back then any way.

The walls were bare apart from a photo that was the result of entering your name and winning a free family portrait. Dad’s tense look indicated his frustration at the dithering photographer. I wore my favourite brown velour skirt and my cute as a button sister wasn’t allowed her teddy in the photo. This image only ended up costing five hundred dollars when my parents were coaxed into buying albums and frames. Free?

Further down the corridor, bedrooms shot off in all directions. My bedroom that I shared with my younger sister was large and framed by a delightful bay window. Northern sunlight streamed in as I lay on the unyielding itchy gold carpet and played with my Barbie dolls. When I was a child the road outside was unsealed and clouds of dust would waft through the Liquid Amber tree when a car ventured to the orchards opposite.

From my room, I could hear Dad preparing the morning cup of tea in the kitchen. This narrow room had equally narrow benches with barely enough room for seven lots of sandwiches and one single stand-alone cupboard to cram in all the food stores. The potatoes lived under the sink. So did the occasional family of field mice lured by the promise of a decent meal. The kitchen was a cramped and dark space with a dodgy oven and one small rectangular window. Still cracked from a cricket ball mishap after a game of backyard cricket.

The gardens smiled with colour and growth and the backyard was shaded by a towering gum tree, standing proudly and often in full flower in the centre of the lawn. A makeshift swing hung off a branch and bark concealed a nest of bugs and spiders to terrorise. There were lots of nooks and crannies where we hid our annual Easter eggs.

There was a plentiful supply of hard-shelled eggs. At the bottom of the garden where the brick path meandered was an aviary. It housed Eastern Rosellas, Cockatiels and Silky Bantams and the everyday speckled hen (rescued from its demise at the chicken farm when my brother smuggled it home after being on death row for cosmetic reasons.)

Mum and Dad’s abundant veggie crop was the benefactor of all the chook poo and grass clippings from the acre property. I could smell that fresh cut pile of clippings from the bathroom window when I stepped out of the big blue porcelain bath. This was another space in much need of a renovation. That wasn’t going to happen with a single income and Dad busting himself to send us to private schools. We were used to the old shower, so dark and unventilated that occasionally tiny mushrooms sprouted in the far corner. The loo didn’t have a separate light, but interesting black and white wallpaper of naked nymphs with strategically placed vine leaves and wandering hands. It was my first crash course in sexual desire.

On the outer, the home was weatherboard with a tin roof that amplified the possums bumping and thumping every evening. On the inner it was simple and predominantly yellow and brown, just as well we are avid Hawthorn supporters. Our house oozed character and a sense of belonging. It was my home – mice and mushrooms included.

Black Swan

What a lovely day for a picnic. Let’s have my birthday in the Botanical Gardens,” said Dad. “We can make some gourmet food, go for a run, kick the footy and it will be great, reinforced Mum.” Sounded just like The Bears’ Picnic by Stan and Jan Berenstain. I wondered what disaster was to befall us and didn’t have to wait long.

There we were perched on a rolling hill eating our medium rare beef and Asian duck on involuntarily collapsing plates with precariously placed wine glasses. The distant hum of twenty Grand Prix Formula 1 racing cars was a precursor to the invasion. A determined black swan waddled up to us and tried to move in on our picnic.

“Nothing can bother our picnic here! Lay out the picnic things, my dear.”

My family all tried to send the swan on her merry way, minus my sister who had been terrorized (along with me) by our brother holding mangy chickens to our heads fifteen years ago. Ornithaphobia is on our profiles now.

Someone foolishly threw a crust, another tried his bravado with a picnic rug matador-style, but the wisest one brandished the shopping trolley and drove the pestering bird back to her lake…or at least the outskirts of the picnic.

“Now take this perfect piece of ground. No one but us for miles around!”

I was expecting ants, seagulls or bees but certainly not an adult swan and a persistent one at that!

“No noisy crowd! No pesky planes! And no mosquitoes, trucks or trains.”

The Bears’ Picnic follows the adventure of the Bear family. Papa Bear is enthusiastic about taking them on a picnic and doesn’t lose that excitement in his quest for a lunch spot, despite his poor choices. Papa Bear is an optimist and oblivious to the dark and impatient mood of his family. It is a fun rhyming story that allows children to pre-empt the problems and identify the mixed emotions. It also shows us that outings don’t always go to plan.

This story is shades of our picnic when my brother (same chicken trickster one) wanted to boot the swan out of our picnic with a drop kick into it’s feathery behind. My sister and I were anxiously watching the swans every flap and waddle. It could have ended in tears and one very irate swan. Not to mention a report to the ranger from a woman giving us a discerning look on a nearby path.

Cynicism aside, it was a nice evening despite our imposter and the fact that my pistachio birthday cake resembled unleavened bread. Ever the optimist, family friend Doris said she preferred smaller serves anyway. Perhaps Papa Bear needed Doris at his Picnic!