Author: dean

Now that the temperature has been in the roaring 40s the heat’s on again in my household—for a spa bath.

It was when our friends got their spa bath that I knew we had slipped at couple of rungs down the soapy ladder of society.

Gone was the momentary advantage we had gained with our redecorated bathroom; the shower curtain motif of feeding this, the non-liquefying soap holders; the terrazzo and the toothbrush racks: all this was as nothing.

For who could compete with the frothing frenzy of the spa, encasing the bather in a sizzling seething excitement of bubbles, doing wonderful things to all the wonderful things?

Even a grandmother had bathed in it, we were told, and had emerged at spa-spangled nanna.

We accepted the invitation to view the wonder only with the greatest reluctance.

I felt our reconditioned bathroom on which the wife had placed her status hopes still needed our support. We weren’t washed up yet.

We were received by our hostess in a high state of excitement. We were told her husband was al- ready in the spa bath to give a demonstration, as indeed he was, hairy and moist, his nose as wet as a puppy’s while around him seethed this fashionable maelstrom like an aquatic Krakatoa.

Vivacious

There was vivacity about the bath, if you could imagine anything vivacious with our host like some immobile streaker caught in the Victoria Square fountain.

Personally, I am not one for zest in baths. I’m more of a backwaters bather, content to sit among the used suds and discoloured water like an old Murray carp that’s had a murky day.

An occasional splash to show I am still breathing, a desultory rub of the face washer, a slow, slothful action with the cake of soap, a few bubbles around the buttocks and that’s about as far as my manoeuvring goes.

But here it was all happening Finally, we got our host to leave his bath after our discreet retirement and he appeared at tea full of cleanliness and even a slight touch of godliness.

You’ll never be without a spa once you have one, he said rather mysteriously; a statement which seems obvious enough when you come to examine it

My wife, of course, began getting spas in her eyes but I threw cold water on the idea immediately.

We would stick with convention, I said. Any way, I was already doing two days a week in the plumber’s garden to help pay for our bathroom.

We went home but no before our host began un dressing again to get back in the spa.

It came as no surprise when we received next day a call from our hostess to come over as her husband’s behaviour was a little worrying.

He was where you’d expect. In the spa, of course.

His wife was sitting beside him urging him to come out but it had no effect.

Already she was feeding him by throwing him fish and when we arrived he began barking and clapping his hands and when we threw him a ball he immediately balanced it on his nose.

Sparring

“Here’s Max, your old sparring partner” our hostess said in what could only be described as a desperately unhappy pun.

Since then their spa bath has been rarely empty and the husband remains anything but liquid asset.

His family has tried Marineland but the dolphins have a closed shop down there.

And so it goes.

So, while I know many neighbours who are happy with their spa baths, I must say I remain loyal to obsolescence.

I shall go back and loll in the muddy shallows. No froth or aquatic madness there. So fizz off, why don’t you?

Heavy and obtuse, shall remain wallowing in my old bath, a hippochondriac if you like but comforted by the knowledge that strange things can happen when you hitch your wagon to a spa.

 

Max Fatchen

Not that I’m a man to cross my ‘fridges. But I have a complaint.

In the big, promotional foodstuffs push nothing has brighter trappings, more flavours and names exotic enough for the Arabian Nights, than ice cream.

But this is my complaint. The kids get there first.

Children are harder on ice cream than the Kellys were on banks.

This pampered, pack aged product of the decadent West, this icy aberration named after pop groups and space wars, this soft option of democracy—kids are all over it.

The dignified adult, arriving at the ‘fridge, finds only remnants, a hollow container like a sacked city. The space lickers have gone, the two-litre lifeline in rippled raspberry is a gutted wreck and this old gut rumbles with discontent.

Just as there are films, there should be ice cream for Adults Only: The only way we are going to wrap it up for ourselves is to be crafty with the packaging.

This is the age of the eye. What catches it is what gets gourmandised.

We are so visual. So why not start with dinky wrappers containing sums and potted geography lessons, or advice from parents? No kid worth his salt or honey ripple is going into an ice cream parlour to ask for a “geometry special” or a “New Maths Mouth Mauler.”

Why not ice cream buckets with such legends on the outside as “Brussels Sprouts Delight” or “Marrow Leftovers?” Or even a nice picture of the local head-master?

This would give the adults a chance.

One of course could stake out the deep freeze by sleeping on a ground sheet on the kitchen floor, jerking awake at the slightest surreptitious movement.

Guarding your ice cream supply is surely what the Cold War is all about.

There is the medical outlook. Do you want your child to be fat and piggy-eyed like the rest of us?

Has it occurred to you that we are becoming a soft nation, ready to get the thick shakes at the slightest threat?

Bring children up rough on Murray Water jelly. Keep the ice cream for old men who want a gentle recall of long-gone youth.

Spare us a mouthful.

The trouble with our ice cream supplies is that we’ve got brats in the belfry,

The catchcries race through my mind: “Ice cream for oldies”… “Keep It from the kids”… “Bread-and- butter pudding is best”…”Bring back prison hulks.”

There’s nothing I can do, people say.

The kids will get there first. My campaign is well and truly dished.

Which brings me to the sad fact that our ice cream container has been ravished again. Visiting fingerprints fresco its sides. I wept over the small hardened stump of its once-rainbowed contents.

Surely there is something left?

Frozen bread-and- butter pudding? Why not.

 

Max Fatchen

(Who has never been invited to appear as a guest columnist but who never gives in)

Young people are becoming addicted body and soul to video “killing” games, according to the US Surgeon General.

He says that more and more people are beginning to understand the adverse mental and physical effects of video games on pre-teenage and teenage children.

And you can take it from me, more and more post-teenage people are beginning to receive adverse mental and physical effects from pre-teenage people who play video games.

Where grandfathers could once beguile children at night with hair-raising tales of mildly misspent youth the country or even enlist the aid of Alice and the white rabbit, such activities have been outshone by the interstellar mayhem on the small screen in the large front room.

One could even cope with television serials; cricket televises so well and grandfathers could drag unwilling pre-teenagers to watch the finer points of the game.

But now what is there left for a post-teenager who led by some child and bombed silly by spaceships on a screen or missiled into oblivion in cosmic capers that fill him with confusion and despair.

This grandfather, whose reflexes were never terribly good has become known as Spaceship Disasteria and is referred to as the Mutated Mug ever the young experts of galactic encounters gather.

Not only does one’s sitting room resound to the eerie electronic pingings of plummeting space craft and the loud triumphant cries of the beady-eyed young warriors of black hole and quasar but indeed it is taken into public life.

I shan’t forget the terrible debacle when my grandfather role fell as flat as a flying saucer as I waited hopefully for a batch of grandchildren unloading from a mere jet.

Great thrill

I could tell from the blasé look on their faces that the journey in this hackneyed old runabout of the air had been no great thrill when one considers the great war machines of the outer galaxies.

Once they would have advanced, faces abeam to plant a tender kiss on the old sunspotted face of the family patriarch, but no, they gave me a cursory look remarking, “Hullo Gramps you here?”

Then a look of eager tenderness, of joyful glee crossed their countenances.

Oh, they had recanted, I thought. Latent love had exploded in their little hearts and they were about to take their grandfather to their young throbbing bosoms.

They gave a shriek of sheer ecstasy and next moment had rushed by my outstretched huggers to attach themselves to a space war machine. Perceptibly they changed. Cold hate shone in their eyes. Ruby lips went into a ruthless line. Little hands clutched controls, banged switches and the whole thing suddenly assumed an air of space age butchery and planetary mayhem almost too terrible to contemplate.

It was no use telling them not to spend their pocket-money on trifles. Is space war a trifle? These young brooding generals, these Amazonian field marshals were there to fight to the end or as long as the money lasted.

It was when the money clanked away into electronic oblivion that they sensed my presence and for a moment the hood of concentration and devastation dropped from their faces. Quiet childish innocence returned. Lips curled like rosebuds again.

Hallo, Gramps” they said, “It’s lovely being with you. Have you got some 20-cent pieces?”

Why, of course, I thought Every space war needs finance Buck Rogers can’t do without bucks, after all.

I felt in in my pocket, which was heavy with 20-cent pieces that I had mentally last aside for confectionery.

“Have a go, Gramps” they said.

I found myself pitted against a young child who should have still been lisping poems about Christopher Robin.

Space chariot

Once she was in her space chariot, I found her play to have the determination of Carlton in a grand final overlaid with the less attractive qualities of Boadicea blooding her chariot wheels on the Romans.

She brought her space Squadrons out with an Interplanetary frenzy and before I knew where I was, I had been blasted out of the electronic sky. In fact, the battle had attracted the attention of other passengers in the terminal lounge and several remarked it was terrible seeing an old man in his ultimate enfeeblement encouraging innocent children in such wasteful and warlike pursuits.

I realised that shaving failed in my first spacial combat I was now relegated to a minor role.

“You can be Treasurer of the Galaxy” one grandchild told me and I forked out obediently.

I’m glad to say he beat hell out of his sister, lasering and missiling her into a near-tearful state.

It was then my son and daughter-in-law arrived and showed that while outer space has a fine independence, there are still a few earthbound disciplines with us, thank heaven. As we all wandered towards the car, the children said they had brought their own video games for my television and that we would be among the warring stars again as soon as they got into their pyjamas.

I raced off and spent a couple of 20-cent pieces or chocolate bars.

They had a steadying influence on me and when I got home I defected the television set with all possible speed.

The children shouted “Earthman pig” at me as they were set to bed early but I took it as a compliment.

After all, we old terrestrials still have a trick of two up our unpressurised sleeves.

 

Max Fatchen

Stand before the mirror in the nude (the story says).

“In the soft glow of the light you can see the contours of your reflection.

Your body swells with expectation.

Your flesh is rosy with light and warmth”

So writes Dr. Irene Kassorta in her best-selling book Nice Girls Do as reported by our Keith Dunstan in Los Angeles.

Nearer home, and upon reflection, our mirrors are revealing but chastening, those of them that haven’t been turned to the wall or have pantyhose or gardening trousers hanging over them.

Apart from recording some of the State’s biggest goose pimples, our mirrors are more for the horror movie fan and weight-watching anonymous In fact, if you want to watch weight, come and peer.

In fact, people peer into our mirrors for all kinds of reasons with distorting faces staring at gaping mouths to see where the bit of bone is lodged in an old yellow fang or a dripping denture. Or there are those whose lips assume fearful and contorted shapes for the application of lipstick, like marking lines on roadways.

Or there is the time-honoured art of pimple squeezing, which one learns in puberty and which accompanies one through life.

We also have the eye pullers trying to adjust their lashes, those frivolous lacquered verandahs of the bloodshot orb.

I’ve looked over other people’s shoulders and screamed with terror as poor Jekyll must have done when traces of Hyde appeared

Then there are the persons making themselves up with the aid of the reading lamp, the standard lamp and a couple of torches, creating a veritable cosmetic flare path.

Do you need all the light at the mirror? If you’re not careful you’ll have an Orion landing on the dressing table.”

“At least my face is not afraid of light. You might try shaving your face, I don’t want to go out with a werewolf.”

My flesh immediately goes rosy with light and warmth.

My wife also has a narrow full-length mirror but I find it inconvenient. I have to reflect myself in instalments—first the paunch, then the central area and, finally, the rump.

Yet people aren’t always going to believe what they see in a mirror.

None of us wants to know the brutal truth. None of us in the soft glow of light wants to be acquainted with the fact we look like an old hot-air balloon with a faulty burner.

Some people prefer to operate in semi-gloom rather than rosy light. Gloom lends mystery it you get the right angle. And I know some people who have been looking for an angle all their lives

And does the mirror fill you with passion, your heart throbbing, your eyes full of guilt?

Well, Doc, down our way it could involve a fairly long wait.

“How does my hair look at the back?”

“Look, is my skirt creased or not?”

Thus we need a mirror attendant. someone eyewitnessing in the background, a cantor to chant the state of pleat and backstrap, a sycophant to gush over jewellery and make-up, and someone to zip up or even, in a moment of wild abandon, to zip down.

The time my bathroom mirror really gives it to me is in the morning. The eye bags sag, the chins are heavily rutted, the forehead lines slash deeply and woundingly into the old flesh, the lips droop with a faint film of denture cream while every mole and pimple stand out in terrible detail.

A mundane sex life can be compared to a frozen TV dinner, says Dr. Kassorta.

After looking at myself in the mirror. Doc, I slink off to a broken egg, a gritty piece of bacon and charcoal toast.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

I know when I’m licked.

 

Max Fatchen

The mini-Budget has set me desperately thinking about money again and the fiscal fragility of our times.

I don’t mind saying that some of us are not happy with this electronic, plastic credit-carded and coded world.

Some of us take to it like a duck takes to water. But at least a duck can keep her head above it.

Mysterious banks-in-the-wall that dispense money at all hours at the introduction of a pass card, computerised computations, video display terminal interrogation… they all scare me clean out of my overdraft. When I’m financially video displayed it can be very terminal indeed.

So I am making my last stand, a man resistant to all change except small change.

I still have the school penny bank book mentality and I’m proud of it.

Born and bred financially in an era when the bank man called at school and we young pupils enjoyed that magic moment of the entry in the bank book while breathing heavily on this scion of capitalism, I have always thought big and saved small.

Pocket-money pay day of brown pennies, shining threepences and occasionally the circular sleekness of the two bob bit was a time for mental arithmetic of the most serious and studied nature, juggling the cost of a comic with such brainwashing slogans as Thrift Means Merit, Pennies Grow to Pounds and Sensible Savers Make Solid Citizens.

And at least I eventually achieved solidity even if I didn’t make much sense.

Nevertheless, in those tender days, when the amount had been settled upon, the school bank book was brought from its place behind the clock. This was a stately clock that chimed through half a dozen country kitchens in its career and was a repository for cream cheques and fodder bills as well.

It was on the mantelpiece and, in the course of time, turned out to be the nearest thing I ever got to high finance.

One studied one’s school bank book, tucking away the allotted money, usually wrapped in grease-proof paper so that other people wouldn’t get their greasy hands on it.

There was a kilometre to cover to school, every step fraught with peril.

There were pig-tailed Delilahs waiting for me, moist of lip and bright of eye, saying they wouldn’t mind my being on their short list if we detoured to the store on the way and inspected the lolly jars, glinting with sugared lust.

But I knew what that money meant. It had meant cleaning out the fowlhouse, one of the great subjugations of youth practised earlier in the century.

Neighbouring bulls bellowed sonnets

It had meant feeding the calves, thrusting one’s fingers into the bucket of skim milk and letting these bovine slobberers nearly tear off one’s fingers under the delusion they were at their mother’s teats.

It meant minding cows on the road where the grass was lush while jolly neighbouring bulls bellowed sonnets across the paddocks.

Money gained from such travail was not lightly surrendered. And so to school on penny bank day, avoiding the small Ned Kellys and rural Shylocks, the kids who squandered their book money on perfidious puffballs.

Psst… lend us threepence and you can wear my footy guernsey.

Eventually the schoolhouse was reached safely and later one came into the presence of the bank man, who praised thrift and how-much-this-week, who greeted you as one would greet a future captain of industry or a landholder of consequence who at the moment had nothing much more than a sniffle and a jam smear on the left nostril.

So the money was taken, the transaction recorded, the bank man departing with his bag of thrift to be duly placed behind the great steel walls of the bank where that mysterious breeding process known as interest would begin.

I felt released, purged, uplifted after my school bank day. The book was taken home and the entry inspected by a suspicious mother. The bank book was returned to its place behind the wise old clock.

The fowlhouse inmates were working hard to provide me with new income, the calves bellowed for sustenance. Liquidity was abroad and Thrift Means Merit refrained through my brain.

So I have kept my penny bank-book psychology, unshaken by the cash inflows, the Wall Street rallies, the Futures furore and all the economic gobbledegook. Conditioned by caution, financially inarticulate and a non-freak at figures, I have remained in the backwaters of economic intercourse.

I still present my savings bank book and avoid all the glamorous cliches of plastic cards that leap at me from the walls of this temple of transactions.

“Your bank book is full. Do you really need a new bank book or will you easybank your way into the 20th century?” asks the beautiful, young teller.

I recoil from her as if she has offered me an asp. I watch her place the cancelled stamp on my old bank book.

“Be gentle with it,” I say.

She anoints my new bank book and slides it to me with amused fingers and I steal away, mouthing my balance.

Sometimes I wish we’d go back to the old-fashioned system of barter. At least then I’d know which side my bread was bartered on!

 

Max Fatchen

It is an insidious undercover organisation when one thinks of the example one should set.

It is more clandestine than MI5, more secretive than the CIA

There are passwords slight intonations of the voice, a certain sidelong glance that only those in its inner circle can interpret.

I refer to the jelly baby brotherhood and the members of the lolly snake consumers lodge. Why grown men, full of macho, should resort to such childish sustenance heaven alone knows and, anyway, nobody’s asking it.

Sufficient to say it is a substitute for bunny rugs, teddy bears, an antidote to workaday discipline, a panacea of pressure.

I say this, tongue in cheek, because that’s the only damn place where there’s any room for it.

We keep our forbidden sweets in official envelopes filing them under C for Confectionary which is nearly as secretive as you can get.

Some may say we have never grown up, that our tastes are immature; that instead of sucking our thumbs we suck these childish confections.

Only this week one of my bearded colleagues began nipping and mauling a lolly snake, stretching it until its coils snapped and wolfing it down while we broke into a low chant, waving our lolly bags.

This rite was viewed with horror by the salad-and-celery bunch whose slogan is emaciate is great, mate.

Yet there is an ascetic cleanliness about a shapely lolly snake, and if jelly baby consumption is crude and juvenile, remember ancestors ate the real thing and thank your stars you weren’t around.

There is also a reptilian rapport with childhood and the long lost lolly bag ebullience that attended sticky-fingered youth.

Small suburban country shops had little trays with sweets a few cents a time, orbs and spheres to suck and relish; gobstoppers extraordinary that would rot whalebone.

Those were the days of hoarded pocket-money with small girls hanging around for the young sugar daddies.

Jelly babies and snakes. Her eyes would light and her small dainty fingers probe the bag like a doctor’s scalpel.

She married a doctor eventually, I recall, and he has her walled her up in some nunnery of nutrition where jelly babies are children of the Devil Decay and lolly snakes are the serpents of temptation whether lying sweet-fanged on some confectionary counter or that tree hissing in someone’s ear about toffee apples.

I must confess to a terrible experience last week.

My wife found a bag of forbidden fat fetchers in my satchel, a writhing. mass of lolly snakes and a whole nursery of jelly babies.

Snakes and jelly babies. What childish folly, what calorie mad ness is this?

The kilojoule killjoy that she is she was soon on the phone to other wives, for she can be sharper than the serpent’s tooth even if it is only glucose, gelatine and artificial colouring.

Next morning there was a coolness towards me in the office.

I was called to an extraordinary meeting of the jelly baby and snake committee.

The head snake charm er hissed at me. “You are no longer the courier. You have betrayed us by loose security. The brotherhood rejects you. So snake off”.

So I went, writhing with embarrassment.

This week I sent the head snake charmer a small offering through the post.

He gave me a slight inclination of the head when I next saw him and I hope things will crawl to a satisfactory conclusion, and while the jelly babies not yet out of the wood I can see light through the branches.

My wife is still in a state of full alert, continually searching my satchel and sending scrapings from my denture mug for analysis and any signs of sugar particles.

I went into my favourite sweet shop where they understand me

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said the attendant, “We’re just bedding the jelly babies down for the night.”

“Pop a handful of the little dears in a bag,” I said, “and adder few snakes for kicks.”

I hissed and hushabyed them into my hip pocket.

I have now put them in my safe deposit box and hidden the key.

If I’m going to be left holding the jelly baby it will be in a secure spot.

If questioned I will answer evasively and, of course, with a forked tongue!

 

Max Fatchen

Ever since my since my friends and colleagues have been wearing bleepers—those small electronic alarms which notify them they are wanted by someone—I have felt a cold wind from the stars.

My friends tell me the bleep comes from a central transmission point; that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But there is much that goes unsaid and I’m no fool, especially where sliced bread is concerned.

I have noticed that they spend much of their time listening, hoping to be summoned. They are on their own wavelengths, mesmerised by a hidden power. Their explanation that it has a terrestrial source carries no weight with me who carries a lot of it.

Some people, in fact, believe we are in the midst of a flock of extra-terrestrials ruled by a giant amoeba near the Milky Way although I would put it closer as near Lake Burley Griffin.

Yesterday, for instance, a colleague’s machine bleeped and he began speaking in a strange, mechanical voice: “I cannot accompany you to the canteen. I have other tasks.”

And it was his turn to pay.

What terrifies me is that my wife has found out about bleepers. She is setting up a new control in co-operation with this mysterious force; between them they could make my life a misery. I am frantically seeking electronic counters so that my movements don’t come under surveillance and that I’m not logged and even obliterated by rays hitting me just as I enter the deli.

Tyranny

Imagine the technological tyranny of it, just as one is about to pass a witty comment to the typist or one’s fork is raised over the second pizza and one is suddenly bleeped. Oh, the embarrassment, to know that Big Mother is watching you.

Strange things are happening. Yesterday I was told that something interesting was waiting for me in the foyer. I rushed out but it was only a small creature about a metre high with a long neck and a queer, wrinkled face with pathetic eyes.

“Oh, it’s you, E.T.,” I cried petulantly. I thought they said E.AT.”

Yesterday one of my colleagues came in, his bleeper sounding faint and disoriented. We rushed him to the nearest power plug. It was obvious he’d been in the Star Wars again.

I’m not telling this to everyone but lately I’ve been subjected to some kind of magnetic force that has maintained constant pressure on my hip pocket.

But I can see the danger increasing. Conversation will deteriorate into a few electronic impulses and sonic squawks.

No wonder they call me Mad Max

Already you can’t get into a telephone box, what with people inside changing into Superman and Dr. Who.

I understand they’re even making a new science fiction film about football—The Umpire Strikes Back.

One arrogant child, arrayed in space paraphernalia, told me belligerently that children were tired of tame planet Earth and were already looking for relocation with the third moon of Jupiter as a likely choice.

“Well, don’t let me keep you,” I cried, planting my old terrestrial sandshoe in his retro-rocket.

The intergalactic dialogue continues. This week my vehicle was described as a low impulse, Earth-oriented, unprogrammed, subsonic Juggernaut, not worth disintegrating, which irritated my old Torana and its unpressurised clutch jockey impacting in the lube pit.

Certainly I’m expecting new developments. Our train still arrives but all the station seats have vanished and there’s a popular theory they have been transported by molecular motivation for further study by young Martian toughs and Venusian space vandals.

I’m also told that food may soon be extraneous and stomachs will be fitted with small calorific receivers transmitted from a central microwave. The sequence is activated by pressing a belly button.

Surprised

I must say that I was surprised when I was summoned on a monitored wavelength to present myself to a small space-helmeted person reposing on her astro-couch amid a bower of ray guns.

I was told she wanted that strange old earthling anachronism— a story

So I told her one. What else but Little Bo Bleep?

 

Max Fatchen

About this time of year I’m in a quandary concerning clothes. My clothes always in a quandary. Either they’re too loose or too tight according to my avoirdupoised excesses.

I’m speaking about forsaking winter woollies, the clutch of winter singlet and venturing into the athletic attire which is the only athletic thing about me.

Recently I wore my Harris Tweed suit and the day turned warm and steam rose from me by the time I had breasted the railway station barriers.

Next day I had taken the plunge into summer apparel; the wind whinged, and goose pimples came up like Australia II on the last leg.

One day I wore winter under-pants and a summer singlet so that I would be half right. This brings me to weather forecasts; it’s all very telling graziers about a cold front, or forecasting air pollution levels, but what about underwear forecasts?

People in the Adelaide area are advised that wearers of trunks may for chilly kneecaps after 4 p.m. Winds will switch to the south-west around the armpits.

And so on.

One must blame the current epidemic of throats, chests and viral vexations on this uncertainty of underwear. Hot, moist air is all very well, but when it’s blowing over my infected tonsils because a virus sneaked by when in singleted frailty I went to wheel a barrow in the garden under the impression that it was spring, I become unsure and uneasy.

I still go to work with a bag of pullovers and have been seen stripping at my desk while office colleagues have gathered around, shrieking, “Take it off, take it off,” amid much obscene whistling and catcalls.

This brings me to my summer wardrobe which came out amid cloud of evicted moths while I began trying on coats to see whether they fitted and shirts to see whether they buttoned and trousers that had been let out to their last stitch.

May I say my summer wardrobe will be about the same as last year; the usual greys and blues, the old safari suit that looks as if it has been mauled by a lion, the buttock bracers which some people de scribe as shorts and my long socks which will again unleash my unique knees upon the sensibilities of an unsuspecting public.

I haven’t the name of Lard Legs for nothing!

My tailors are ready for my onslaught. They have been practising all winter on wheat bags.

I envy my wife and women who can buy nice frocks at reasonable rates while I must needs go for measuring and reflecting by my trouser-makers who said last year. “Man has built the Great Wall and the Colossus of Rhodes. Now for the real challenge.”

So I’m putting the dark suits of winter into their slumbering recesses, hibernating on their hangers until the cold breath of another season arouses their drowsing lapels.

This brings me to the great pyjama switch. There is some disappointment that I’m moving away from the frenzied marriage of heliotrope stripes and wool that caused cars to run off the road whenever I appeared in the garden.

I now go into my shortie pyjama circuit. This year I am in lavender and pink.

I appeared briefly on the verandah in the new season’s wear and several people rang the Meteorological Bureau to say that Halley’s Comet had arrived earlier than expected.

This will go with my new high- line dressing gown, mottled and spectacular, that sends shocked visitors back to their cars and neighbouring dogs whining to their kennels.

I can’t help it. Summer brings out the gipsy in me. Sometimes I wear a knotted handkerchief over my brow and my old cricketing hats and fishing regalia are out again airing themselves atop that fine dome of bone that presents one of the most interesting cranial structures since the discovery of the Piltdown Man.

All this means the human frame, like Nature itself, turns and acclimatises to the seasons.

I have looked over my thong rack wondering whether I’ll wear the ones with pink plastic straps or blue rubber. It also reminds me that it is time to cut my toenails, if I can find a friendly blacksmith.

I find this transition period difficult but I am prepared for the changeability of climate. Dress must not cause duress; comfort before haute couture. I shall not hide my tights under a bushel.

Sail into summer with sincerity. Let your garments play fast and loose. Indulge and bulge. It’s changeover time!

 

Max Fatchen

Have you noticed that this is the time of the great sporting events; one is glued to one’s chair watching the test, or ooh-ing and ah-ing at the terrific tennis women, or gaping at the galaxy of golfers?

This has made for a disjointed conversation in our house—and some sharp interrogation.

“How is it you watch tennis when Sue Barker is serving?”

“Well, I thought I would watch it for a change.”

“But usually you’re rivetted to the Test Why aren’t you watching the moustached and agile Rodney Marsh?”

“Because I’m watching the attractive and agile Sue Barker.”

“If you ask me the reason you’re watching Sue Barker has nothing to do with tennis.”

Departure of interrogator in a huff. She returns later.

“What are you watching now?”

“I’m watching Big Bird bowling.”

“But I though birdies were only in golf.”

Affectionate name

“Dearest, Big Bird is the affectionate name for the tall West Indian Joel Garner now playing cricket for SA.”

Deep intake of breath by interrogator

“Why isn’t he back in the West Indies and why is Greg Chappell playing for Queensland when he is really a South Australian and that Kepler Wessels person, why is he playing for Queensland when he is really a South African and why is?”

“Look dear, I think I can hear something boiling over in your kitchen.”

“That’s right. Send your lackey away Slaves to the galley, you television watching male chauvinist cricket pig.”

Interrogator again departs in a huff

She returns later

“What are you watching now?”

“I’m watching Marsh playing golf”

“But last time you were watching Marsh he was playing cricket Where are his wicket keeping gloves?”

“This is not Rodney but his brother, Graham. He has just hit a big birdie.”

“But you said Big Birdie was a West Indian playing for SA.”

“That’s Big Bird. This is a golfing Marsh playing a golfing birdie.”

“Look,” she says, why don’t you switch that awful machine off s0 we can have five minutes of sane, simple, unconfused conversation?”

So I switch it off.

“Now,” she says, “have I got it straight? Big Bird is a West Indian and big birdie is what Graham Marsh hits when he isn’t Rodney behind wickets. Meanwhile South Australian Greg Chappell is actually a Queenslander with Wessels.”

“It is pronounced vessels as in ‘vessels” I explain.

Turning nasty

“Very vell,” she says, turning nasty, “I shan’t vorry you vith my vomanly inwective. But sure as heaven I intend to vatch some telewision of my own.”

I turn on the television and stand protectively in front of it, weiwing this wessel of vrath.

“Sue Barker has been eliminated,” says the announcer’s voice.

“That’s a start,” says my wife.

“Now we only have to eliminate Big Bird, the Marshes Greg Chappell. Wessels pronounced ‘vessels’ and also people who are lazy layabouts.”

That’s the reason I’m in hiding behind the oleander bush.

My earphone is plugged into my transistor and my body covered with leaves as camouflage.

Meanwhile, Sue and Joel, Kepler and Greg, Rodney and Graham and Richie and all

Keep vell and see you again, soon.

 

Max Fatchen

A Sydney pest controller has claimed a world record for spending four hours in a tank with 105 deadly funnel-web spiders.

This has caused an immediate surge of interest down our way and challenges are coming fast from Cockroach Corner, where I live in constant peril

For Instance, there was my sojourn in our garden with 85 snails which would gnaw a green finger clean to the bone. I shall never forget the awful tension, lying there in the garden (I’ve lied about the garden for years) and hearing the snails hacking through the undergrowth, the frenzied bellowing of the wounded buffalo grass as it charged its tormentors.

My wife screamed: “Are you doing anything with those snails, or are you letting them slide as usual.”

She was lucky I didn’t slug her. Instead I gave a low laugh, turned jungle green and quickly crossed the herbaceous border.

Then there was the endurance record I set with the white ants “I can hear something gnawing” my wife shrieked.

So I put away the biscuit tin and listened.

She called a pest controller, and he had me under control in five minutes.

He certainly went after those ants, although I thought that he rather overdid it, what with his Warpaint and feathered headdress.

Then, of course, there was our experience with the mice, from which we had a very narrow squeak. My wife and daughter tried all kinds of methods to frighten the creatures such as spitting, scratching and yowling. The mice were unmoved but I stayed on top of the wardrobe,

Finally we each bought a catching device. They went off with a deafening crash and, for the first time In our household, everyone had her trap shut.

Then there was the terrible time we had bees in the ventilator. We called an apiarist “Ah, yes” he said to me. “I can hear them. Lean your head a little closer.”

Finally he collected the swarm but my daughter raced after him shouting, “Hey, you’ve forgotten one of the drones.

I gave that girl a sting in the tail, I can tell you.

Mind you, we also have the fearless people who remain in the bath for two hours under the full, menacing gaze of three daddy-long-legs, a silverfish and a huntsman spider which dances to the tune “D’yer ken John Peel.”

Then there was the friend who reads Mr. Burton’s column on English and was badly scratched by adverbial clauses

So what are 105 funnel-web spiders when people have had awful experiences with 101 trombones or 101 Dalmatian and we mustn’t forget Daniel addressing the first lions’ club.

My family members also claim the record for living simultaneously with a monster, a beast, a chauvinist pig and wolf in sheep’s clothing. These are occasionally joined by a bear with a sore head.

Well, you have to hand it to them. And then there’s the man who’s scared to go to Maslins Beach on a hot day.

He’s afraid of the red-backs!

 

Max Fatchen