Author: dean

The democratic Swiss propose to give their women the right to cash-payments from their husbands for staying home as housewives.

The money would be in addition to housekeeping expenses and would have to be the same as the husband had for his own pleasures.

This news has been processed in a less hilly and less chilly canton on the other side of the world and has caused much financial frenzy and fiscal effrontery.

I don’t mind having to come home to face the music but now I have to listen to the sound of it. I arrived this week to a spirited rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” and I knew immediately the monetary situation had reached a new peak.

My wife said: “The Swiss are shrewd and progressive people. They believe in equality. Payment of wives is rational and overdue. I’ll take mine in notes.”

She held out her hand for her Swiss roll. She got it but it made her fingers sticky,

My daughter tried a different approach. Wearing old spinach loosely disguised as edelweiss and answering to the name of Heidi, she flung me a Julie Andrews flash of her fine but covetous eyes and said: “You have been to St Moritz before, mein herr. Tip please.”

But I shrugged off this blatant commercialism, screwed up my eyes at the imaginary mountains and said: “Vot is dis, fraulein, you think I come down in the last avalanche.”

She retired to consult with my wife: “He’s not so much a gnome of Zurich as a midget of Munno Para.”

I gave a close, secretive smile. It’s my contention the Swiss men have panicked because their accusing wives have just sat staring at them. And you know how closely a Swiss watches.

But you can see I’m on the border of hysteria myself.”

I’m not against it in principle. It’s just the Interest. As for her getting the same amount as I spend on my pleasures, I have prided myself on my skill at concealment.

Certainly my wife questioned me about the entry “Winter sports at Victoria Park.”

She said: “But it’s nearly summer.”

I said: “For me, it’s always winter at Victoria Park.”

Returning to the Swiss Idiom, however, there are several recreations we can share such as roping ourselves together to climb the mortgage, then sitting around on our frozen assets waiting for that big dog with the brandy to give us a small nip.

Yet now my family has become more violent. Last night they seized me, took my wallet and tied my hands and legs to the chair, explaining that I was bound by the Geneva Convention.

Now they are economising in other ways. No longer do we have the expensive cuisine of the finest Swiss resorts with sheiks and beautiful double spies at the next table.

We have just a wisp of onion and a sea of lettuce leaves. Ah me. How green was my chalet!

 

Max Fatchen

The Reserve Bank of Australia is considering making money last longer by coating notes with plastic or impregnating them with stronger materials.

I have been conducting my own research but not with conspicuous success.

I tried to preserve a $10 note by hiding it in a picture frame but next moment my wife was brandishing it triumphantly and shouting “Frame and fortune at last!

Her idea of breathing new life into the economy is giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to our piggy bank.

But certainly we must do something about our folding money. In fact anything I put money into folds immediately.

I am wondering if plastic-coated notes won’t Just slip through our fingers. I suppose it’s because I like to fondle money, to touch money, to coo to it and rock it to and fro and to smooth out its wrinkles.

The economy should be healthy. Notes tend to get feverish when they’re clutched in my hot, little paw.

Money then is beautiful, picturesque and it deserves longevity.

We should preserve it as we preserve old buildings and I hate to see money changing hands unless it’s from my right to my left.

We could have conservation parks for money where people could go and view money as we do animals.

Money could be made a protected species and it might live a lot longer than it does now.

Injections might help too. My financial friends are also talking about injecting into the economy. This makes money climb and firm and generally has a beneficial and quite athletic effect.

My money is limp and pale. It tends to lie in a darkened sock and frets at the light. It is subjected to many predators.

Of course I want strong, firm money. I’ve had to prop mine up for so long.

Only this week the bottle man called: “Bring out your empties.”

So I took him my wallet.

My wife shrieked recently: “Quick I think I’ve washed your pay envelope in your trousers.”

I raced into the laundry and fell on her neck: “Darling” I said, “You’ve made our money go around at last.”

Of course we could varnish our bank notes. But then again they varnish quickly enough as it is.

Yet money is getting tougher. Anyone will tell you. It’s the people who are becoming frayed at the edges.

I rushed into my bank.

Look” I cried, “Have you some strong, durable money?”

I discovered one thing. I have a strong durable bank manager!

Yet the search for enduring money goes on. I have a friend who tests 20c pieces by biting them. The rest of us just have to be content with biting our nails.

Why not, as I told one banker, go back to gold bars. And if that fails, crowbars.

Last night I sat on my porch facing the setting sun and holding up a banknote, towards it.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing?” said my wife. “I want my money to know it’s not the only thing that goes west,” I said.

And, on that note, I might as well close.

 

Max Fatchen

The news that English children say that more than $A5 is inadequate as weekly pocket money because of the price of lollies and comics, comes as no surprise.

The children I know have stopped writing to Santa Claus. They now write to the World Bank.

I found one of my grandchildren studying the stock exchange reports, Superman and Flash Gordon have slipped as his favourite characters. He now keeps pin-ups of Mr. Holmes a Court.

Of course, children apply the pressure to me in their sweet, endearing, lisping, materialistic fashion. They are right up with interest rates and takeovers.

I went to tell them a bedtime story, Pooh Bear, and male chauvinist Piglet and all the rest.

“We don’t want that,” they cried, “Read us your bank book.”

I made a note of it.

In my day when money had true value the weekly copies of Comic Cuts, Rupert the Chick (not related to the other Rupert) and Film Fun were my delight, painstakingly saved for with gritty pennies and halfpennies in an old jam jar. When these dazzling publications arrived with the groceries (and they smelt of flour and new bread and buns) I would take this gentle literature and sit spelling out the words while popping an acid drop or a boiled sweet into my tender young mouth. What dazzling captions I read. I guffawed madly with the on chooks joining in. Such were the simple pleasures of a country boy.

In my old age I am not so simple, surrounded as I am by kids with pocket calculator minds, and an innate understanding of the brutal mathematics of Star Wars.

Only this week I heard a couple of these mini-multinationalists discussing a takeover bid for me. They put my market value somewhere between a new football and a carton of Kiss ice blocks.

Granny,” one of them said, “Are you a shareholder in Grandpa?”

“Grandpa,” she said, “is in liquidation.”

Then she bawled at me: “Are you going to stay in the bath all day?”

But they still stood outside the bathroom door, waiting for the flow-on.

People around our way think thrift is a small creature that lives on plants.

Of course I’m sorry about the rise in lollies. Chocolate bars were fatter in my day. Now they’re thinner and I’m fatter. Isn’t it the darndest thing?

The whole family is caught up in the economic outlook.

“I’ve been studying the gross national product,” my wife told the neighbour. “How can I help it. I married him.”

She calls me her guilt-edged security.

Yesterday I heard the children having a rowdy game.

Showing my usual kindly interest I asked what it was.

“We’re playing stock markets,” one said, “I’m a bull and he’s a bear.”

Then they tried to get money from me.

I said: “I’m afraid trading has been suspended for the day.”

Now the national wage is going up and the kids are clamouring for more pocket money.

“What about your collateral?” they shriek at me.

Oh that. The last I heard of it, it was still in intensive care.

 

Max Fatchen

Queensland’s kiss-a-cop campaign for happier relations with the Law reminds me that I have been an advocate of kissing for a long time.

In fact I’ve been a member of the CIB (cuddle-in-bed) squad for as long as I can remember.

It’s my contention that it’s better to kiss than hiss and to love than to shove but if the Law wants to keep me at long arm’s length, that’s its business!

This is the time of year for lip service and the office party has found me in my usual amenable frame of mind.

I saluted the tea lady in gallant fashion and she squealed and screamed and pelted me with used tea bags, the wanton that she is.

“Ullo darlink,” I whispered Charles Boyer-like (he was a great lovair, kids, back in the old romantic Dreamtime), “Your tea is weak but your passion is strong. Let me take you away from all this, at least as far as the mistletoe.”

“Lawks a-mercy,” she shrieked, “he doesn’t half carry on.”

“It’s not what he carries on.” said a cool, young secretary. “It’s who he carries off.”

I could see that she was jealous. Young, liberated and with her eye on the prime minister-ship, she saw me as an old decadent, kiss-about, perpetuating the ancient right of the Lord of the manor to kiss where and whom he might; a relic of chivalry when knights went forth etc. with their hawks and driving their falcons.

At this stage I put up my pre-fabricated mistletoe and stood, huge and watchful, beneath it, my great form frozen into immobility and my leather lips trembling like a stoble pole on a windy day.

People kept away from me as if I were a redback.

It made me think that Time has not altogether left me unscathed.

Oh, I may be just a kisspot but I’m not altogether immune with blue eyes looking into mine, eyes alight with passionate intensity, eyes saying “I’ve given you all I can, you have drained me dry,” even when they belong to my bank manager.

I’m disappointed with my poor kiss tally this office party time because I thought my safari suit was particularly appropriate what with me being the size of an elephant and swinging off the decorations and shrieking “you Jane, me Max” at passing office girls.

I think those courteous days when, if people weren’t dancing the gavotte, they were kissing each other’s hands, could be returned with some advantage.

While I’m continually invited to kiss people’s feet, it seems to me the graciousness inherent in the kiss has been overtaken by the sensual slobber or the perfunctory peck with a lot of lip in between.

It’s not so much that people want to kiss my mug, but mug my kisser. It all goes with higher Opec prices and violence in cricket.

And what about kissing a cop?

The whole city watch-house would be full of whimpering patrols with the thought of my being loose on the streets.

The pretty policewoman says to the duty sergeant as she brings her prisoner: “He said “Kiss me, Hardy, so I applied a full Nelson.”

Or, as they say in the Banana State: a hard kiss often leads to a soft cell.

 

Max Fatchen

The shortage of whiting, which has prompted the Minister of Fisheries to say there are other fish in the sea, has brought a sour smile to the cracked lips of the hard-bitten brotherhood of jetty, ledge and beach.

Having endured the inroads of foppish whiting fishermen into my slow, painfully constructed accounts of rigorous days among the shrieking gulls and be-rugged wives where the sea meets the sky across the gulf, I can only say that the breed that goes swanking around with two outboards and an Esky the size of a floating dock deserves all it gets.

You caught only tommies, sneered a whiting fisherman in our office as he minced distastely from the presence of an honest journeyman who has fished the Grange jetty for so long that children have carved their initials on him.

Relating the art

The poor fellow was merely relating the art of catching the tommy ruff with a freezing wind coming over the sea and his numbed fingers peeping from the periphery of old gloves; the art of reading the message of tug and tide upon one’s sensitive line.

The tommy fisherman strums the Stradivarius of ne sea, playing his concertos of the catch with a finesse that Yehudi Menuhin would applaud.

But the whiting fisherman must have the unrelented lunge of his fish on the line, leering at his slacks-and-sweatered spouse pouring coffee or some North Arm concoction to warm the cockles of his heart and strengthen his mussels.

Once I was taken out by whiting fishermen and dare I say, I was also taken in.

They made me do such menial tasks as raising their accursed anchor which wrapped itself around the waving weed and enveloped me in a kind of marine botanic garden.

I was also enjoined to watch for a sandy bottom.

Got the message

There were several on other boats and nice ones too, but I eventually got the message after being hit twice with a heavy sinker.

What they actually meant was sand on the seabed into which the fabled whiting forayed, loose-jawed to satisfy the ego trippers floating on their ritzy fibreglass platform above.

The whiting came aboard. The fishermen congratulated each other, making me serve drinks and pump the bilge.

Once a mullet was deposited in my basket with bellowing beneficence. a crumb from Neptune’s table.

Before we turned the bow for home and I had my last encounter with the floricultural anchor, I was allowed to gut the fish.

I was given a board much as a scullery maid gets the washing up. I scaled, beheaded and operated like a seagoing M*A*S*H. I was screamed at because of my poor filleting although I did a nice job on my finger.

Meanwhile, the whiting aristocracy lounged in foam rubber opulence, eating cold chicken while the aging sea nymph frolicked in her T-shirt bearing the eye-stopping epigram “Catch of the Year.”

Eventually we reached the shore and there was the finale of a whiting fisherman’s day. We bombed out on the boat ramp; the winch failed, the boat tried to relaunch itself over my stomach and the propeller placed a shamrock of bruises on my left thigh.

Never again, I told myself.

So I have returned to my beach and to my jetty where one gives nothing away except breath.

No wonder I snarl at the vulgar roar of whiting boats as they clamour across the cringing waves.

There may be fish in the sea beside whiting but keep your distance. Come after any of mine and I’ll give you a squid jag straight through the gizzard.

And let the sea lice pick your bones, shiver me aging timbers if I don’t.

 

Max Fatchen

The news that a WA tycoon is making a bid for a share in Rolls-Royce parked off intense financial activity in our house.

My wife read it in a voice full of toast, tension and last years marmalade and I took another dry biscuit with a hand that sweated slightly.

Frankly, I was surprised at her interest.

For someone who thinks a corporate raider is a kind of electronics detection gear, she has never come on strong about big business, which she says she has been in ever since she began ironing my shirts.

Certainly one would count Rolls as a glamour stock.

“What about Rolls?” I said to my assembling family.

Tomato, cheese or ham,” they chorused automatically.

Yet the prestige of this great silent car, the whisper of mink and the hint of expensive perfume, the flawless profile of some beauty peeping from her furs beside you, the curt “To the Ritz” to the obsequious chauffeur.

What a dream for the prospective investor.

The best we can manage is my daughter’s pert profile leering from a twisted safety belt carelessly stung over her shoulder and the shout “To the take-away, Baldy!”

I feel a monetary interest in Rolls-Royce would being style to our home; one would be less inclined to drive with a hole in the manifold and the old pillows faded by the sun glaring on the tatty upholstery of the back seat.

One would think twice before being drowned at the car wash through leaky windows, or kicking and fighting for the car key on Saturday morning in a family scrum that would make the All Blacks turn pale.

There would be an end to funeral exchanges with the garageman about the cylinder head.

With a Rolls it’s different. You don’t put all your eggs in one gasket.

“Think,” I said. “Even if our attempt falls, it is better to have tried and lost than not to have tried at all”

My wife responded dreamily: “We’ve tried so much and lost so much that one finishes fit to be tried.”

“Think of it,” I said, “a share in a Rolls, a cigar at the club, the doorman…”

“Slamming it in our face as usual,” she said

“We would move into the automotive nobility,” I said. “These cars are sought by the oil princes. All you do is open the door and let out a loud sheikh.”

Her eyes glittered at the picture.

“What’s in it for me?” she said, her knuckles whitening on the piggybank.

“Monte Carlo in the sun,” I said.

“Lunch with the Rainiers on the terrace. A little futter at the Casino, a swim from a Greek tycoon’s yacht… playing the Paris Bourse with the bulls and the beach at Saint-Tropez with the bares.”

“We need only a small cut in Rolls and then our credit would come into its own?” I whispered.

“The butcher would smack his chops and your rump. The greengrocer would stop stalking us among the celery. We’d be able to stand on our feet at the bank instead of on our knees.’

So she’s thinking it over

I’ve written to an English friend saying I want a piece of the action in Rolls. He hasn’t been very encouraging, ending his letter “I hope things aren’t too bad in the prison hulks and remember me to Ned Kelly”

Meanwhile, the man from the finance company is calling to ex press his interest in my present vehicular situation.

So I’m contemplating my next move—on the back-door and down the street…as silently as a Silver Ghost.

 

Max Fatchen

The phsychiatrist had just been reading that the image of the fit, robust Australian had been shattered by a government survey showing that almost half the population suffered from a chronic complaint, when the woman and her daughter were shown in.

“Do begin.” he said.

“Well,” said the woman, “there are many manifestations of my husband’s state, doctor. One is the extraordinary and quite impenetrable bone-structured perimeter of rock-like skull allied with a low response level and a seeming inability to register to certain sounds delivered with utmost clarity into his left earhole.”

“You mean,” said the psychiatrist,” there are response or reaction words and non-reaction words”

“Give him a non-response word,” Interrupted the daughter, eagerly parking her chewing gum on a case history, “and he sits there like a pillar or salt, staring into the middle distance. And his middle stretches for quite a distance.

“Give me an example of responses and non-responses,” said the psychiatrist.

The woman said: “He remains comatose to such words as ‘spade,’ ‘garden,’ ‘house-keeping,’ ‘costume,’ ‘cosmetics’ and ‘it’s-time-you-had-a-talk-with-your-daughter’.”

“His response words include ‘fishing,’ ’food,’ ‘mother’s here,’ ‘Taxation’,’ sheilah’ and ‘Victoria Park acceptances” she went on turning over her notes.

“There are also his non-activity levels, beginning Friday night until Monday morning and his fixation levels in front of the television where he can remain trance-like for three hours, his movements mostly from hand to mouth. Indeed it has been my impression since Life on Earth started that he is reverting to a dinosaur.”

“We call him Dr. Who,” said the daughter.

“But this means surely,” said the psychiatrist “that he is in a space-fantasy world, a science fiction fix, galaxy-orientated with a black hole in his head.”

“We call him Dr. Who,” the woman explained, “because when I have described something of personal interest and mentioned the names of many people he will sit there for two hours after I’ve finished and suddenly he’ll say ‘Who’.”

“He’s a typical Australian man” said the daughter.

“Now why do you think he’s a typical Australian man?” asked the psychiatrist

“Well” she said, “after mother has harangued with him, pleaded with him, threatened him, reasoned with him and illustrated diagrams for him and vibrated the bone structure by his left earhole and he says ‘No’ then I know he’s a typical Australian man because my mother stands with hands on hips and shouts ‘Now isn’t that typical’.”

“Where have you left him?” the psychiatrist asked anxiously.

“Oh,” said the daughter “he said he was going down to the aviary to chat up some birds.”

“I’m afraid I can do nothing” said the psychiatrist. This is perfect case of the chronically chauvinistic typical Australian man. Try a few new response words such as ‘Get lost’ and ‘drop dead!’ But don’t expect too much.”

“Next please.”

As they left, the psychiatrist with a sigh, leant back in his chair and began gently massaging the bone structure by his left earhole

 

Max Fatchen

So now an Australian company believes it has solved the problem of sagging socks.

I, for one, am glad the suspense is over. Like children, some socks are raised and the others just dragged up.

At work, my socks are known as The Odd Couple. It’s this peculiar habit of individual socks going walkabout. You can’t keep them together for five minutes.

Socks hide in the washing basket. They lurk in forgotten corners, Mind you, no dirty sock is going to pull the wool over my eyes. I believe in getting down to the knitty-gritty.

I put on a new pair of socks only this week. I had barely reached the door when something had fallen around my ankles. It was only my daughter, reminding me of her allowance. I went to a shop to buy new socks and was questioned about size. When I showed my feet to the shop assistant, he shrieked “With calves like that you should be at Samcor.”

Old socks never die they simply fray away. Or they gather in colonies and are hosts to myriads of moths. I disturbed one moth and it balanced on the edge of the drawer, showing its teeth and singing: “Just a wee sock one of those tiger moths.”

Another moth sauntered past, carrying its golf bag. It had just teed off from the 18th hole.

Yes, we have socks darned in our house. “Darn your ruddy socks,” they say. Who can resist such an invitation?

What I now suggest is a uni-sock with only slight pattern variation so that if you lose a sock anywhere in the world you can quickly replace it without people staring rudely at your ankles.

Or we can have the compusock which is programmed to throw a small signal to a detecting device with each pair of socks having a different call sign.

I can see them at the Houston control saying: “Our satellite has Just picked up Fatchen’s socks.”

And someone screaming: “For heaven’s sake, be sure to disinfect them.”

Today I’m wearing my pink socks which have earnt me the endearing names of “Flamingo Legs,” and “Scarlett O’Hara.”

Yet I know there are socks rejected and forlorn, lying down-at-heel and never having a chance to get back on their feet again. But that’s life isn’t it.

Some socks make it and some don’t. Some socks keep a tight grip on themselves and then there are the others.

As a very strict relative says: If you wear loose socks be sure your shins will find you out.

POINT OF VIEW—Max Fatchen

There is nothing so insufferable as a friend who has acquired that new status symbol the video recorder.

And nothing so piteous, so grovelling as the cinema sycophants who attend his picture nights.

One of my friends now has a video recorder and he acts as if he has just leased Disneyland.

I can forgive him the beret and talking like Sam Goldwyn and idly tossing off the names of the great stars.

I can forgive him his daughter, suburbia’s new Cyd Charisse, and even his wife who dispenses chocolate rice bubbles from sticky patty pans during interval. But I can’t forgive him has arrogance, his sending me to the video film exchange (“Shirley Temple again, mate? Why don’t you grow up”)

I can’t overlook  his constant consulting of vintage copies of Screen Gems and his smirking re marks about my re semblance to the larger part of Laurel and Hardy.

But this is all part of this social phenomenon, this electronic status symbol.

“You see, Fatchen” he said, sprinkling ash over me from his Alfred Hitchcock cigarette holder, “I am no longer the slave of commercials, I am my own man. If you want to attend a session, see my casting director. We don’t just allow riff raff at our viewings.”

I noticed that he was growing a beard for a coming screening of Henry VIII while his wife was already doing her block because she couldn’t dress as Anne Boleyn.

He screens every weekend and some neighbours begin arriving with chutney and apricot conserve even before the declining sun has kissed the western rooftops and slid into the blue crab riviera of the gulf and before the local David Nivens have stabled their fast cars before an evening at the tables.

Let my friend mention he is showing Mutiny on the Bounty and every woman in the street wears a flower behind her ear, and knock on any door and you’ll find Fletcher Christian.

Everyone afraid

There was the night we had the sinking of the Titanic and everyone was afraid to defrost the fridge for weeks.

Dracula caused the worst outbreak of tonsillitis for years and I know at least two people who had to visit the kitchen sink during a screening of The Cruel Sea.

Of course we’ve had The Adventures of Robin Hood which even I reluctantly admit enjoying despite my friend’s wife shrieking on my arrival, “Well look who’s here. Friar Tuck!”

Certainly my friend consults me about his new releases but it’s merely a kind of snobbery so that he can blabbermouth his cinematic chit-chat

For instance he rang to see how I felt about Doris Day.

I said that indeed I had been big for Doris Day at one stage. But then I began to detect in Doris a terrible tendency to dominate the male and so I had shed her for Debbie Reynolds who was as sweet as syrup.

I knew by my intake of honey crumble that we were involved in a meaningful relationship but just as everything was as neat and nice as a ribbon on a chocolate box who should happen along but “Legs” Liza Minnelli I and began doing little routines from Cabaret which got me some odd stares in that strong hold of conservatism, our local train.

But then my age began to tell and I reverted to Greer Garson That’s the way we golden oldies go. Greer today and corn tomorrow.

So I haven’t a video recorder. I’m still with those big poles on Mount Lofty and what they like to send to my old aerial with its bird lime and thoughtful sparrows, quivering its impulses into the telly set in my uncluttered sitting room with its easy chairs lined with crumbs and peanuts.

But at least you can still see nice people feeding chunky pieces to their dogs, cockneys singing among the furniture, lollies exploding and beautifully coloured plaque on teeth and even, if you’re lucky, a fleeting glimpse of Des Colquhoun making our State great.

Machine freak

At least you won’t have to endure the staggering crust of the video recording machine-freak

One of my friends called yesterday. Normally at sane woman, she was wearing a pith helmet and chattering shrilly in Swahili so I knew that she had been invited to a screening of The African Queen. But I shall not weaken again. Not for Doris or Debbie, Marilyn or Bette.

A pest even on Cleopatra. She may have left her Mark on some but you won’t find me grovelling for carpet space tomorrow night.

So go leap in Golden Pond, you cassette creeps

Now my friend wants me to see his screening of the original Lost Horizon.

There’s only one response to that.

Get lost!

 

Max Fatchen