Last night Dad asked my how my blog was coming along. ‘I haven’t had an update for a few days,’ he commented. I replied that I hadn’t had much time lately to write, what with flying back home and attending funerals and suchlike. We chatted about the number of visitors the blog’s been getting lately, which is not a number to inspire awe and sponsorship and book deals.
‘Maybe you should write more about things that lots of people really like to read about,’ Dad suggested helpfully.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Looking after a baby and stuff like that.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Things like the Rugby World Cup.’
Maybe he’s right. The thing is, I know very little about rugby, or the World Cup. It took me about twenty years to stop asking ‘League or Union?’ when Dad referred to ‘rugby’. Rugby, as any fule kno, means Rugby Union. League is called League.
I also know that the Canadian rugby team is made up of bushrangers, and that Australia’s Phil Waugh is spectacularly ugly. I know you aren’t allowed to throw forward (or is it back?) and that, my friends, is about the extent of it.
As a child, I would try to watch sport with my dad and brothers, but I was always more interested in the ads. They would, infuriatingly, talk through the ads or mute them as if they weren’t important at all, but to a kid raised entirely on the ABC, the ads on commercial television were like crack to an Amish teenager. Proper ads, I mean, not regional tv ads where every small business owner starred in their own commercial and there was always a monumentally uncactchy jingle about mower repair or discount dirt. I liked the big budget, glossy ads from the eighties, like the Decore ads, and the Ski yoghurt one.
So there now, I’ve written about the World Cup. That ought to help drag in the readers. Now back to our regular programming. Since I last posted, we have flown back across the country to our home. We flew, as if it were the seventeenth century, on a plane with no tvs. NO TVS. None. A woman across the aisle, travelling with two small children, summed it up for all of us when she sat down, looked at the back of the seat in front of her, which was made of SEAT, and said, ‘Where are the TVs?’. ‘There aren’t any,’ a passing flight attendant told her. ‘None at all?’ she said, with more than a hint of panic in her voice. ‘Shit.’
Shit indeed. Being the second day of the school holidays, we were essentially trapped in a flying day care centre for four and three quarter hours. It wasn’t my favourite flight. We had to entertain ourselves and our child the old fashioned way: by shredding magazines, kicking the seats in front of us and slamming open and shut the window shade.
We arrived home to a taco dinner on the table though, and there’s really nothing bad about that. Now we are back for a while, hopefully, and there’s nothing in the way of me tackling my terrifying To-Do List. I have obviously taken the sage advice ‘do the small, manageable things first’ a bit too seriously, because the list is now composed entirely of huge, deadline-driven monster tasks. Like finishing the application for the Baby Bonus, which I have had for 49 weeks. I now have three weeks left to complete it. It isn’t getting any less impenetrable. I think I’ll put it off a bit longer. I might look for a photo for this blog post instead, and then eat a crumpet and find a way to tie up the end of this impeccably structured ramble. Oh look, there’s a natural finishing spot. Done.