The Ides of March
Whoever said you can save money during a reno has obviously never been to my house
Welcome to The Middle. I hope you enjoy this selection of my thoughts, feelings, etc. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a single unhinged sentence. Sian x
Thoughts
Oscars fashion boring boring boring but HELLO TO CAREY MULLIGAN IN 1950s BALENCIAGA. My runner up was Da’Vine Joy Randolph in this ice blue confection.
Hmmm floating shoulder straps. No.
I received my book embosser last week and now there will be no mistaking who owns the faerie smut.
Princess Kate conspiracy theories are out of control; the tin foil hat brigade is shining so brightly. The Royal Family’s PR really screwed the pooch with the Mother’s Day photo debacle but I guess they had to divert from the fact that poor Kate has probably been living with a stoma for the past 3 months.
Speaking of the royals, I am SCREAMING at Meghan’s lifestyle brand launch in the midst of the drama hahahahaha. Brazen as fuck. I’m impressed but thought the name (American Riviera Orchard?!) would be a bit more zeitgeist-y and less Martha Stewart.
Dolly Aldteron is finally coming to Australia and I’ll be escaping my child for as long as possible to enjoy a night of peak millennial nostalgia. Haven’t told my husband it’s on a Thursday.
I’ve realised that fitness apps are like diets: expensive to maintain and unsustainable long-term.
If you have a toddler, do not feed it rice. It’s practically an invitation to use it as confetti. I’m still finding dried up grains on my floor days later.
Feelings
It’ll Buff Out
“It’ll buff out,” my husband cheerily tells me down the phone. I can hear the smile in his voice and I am not impressed.
I’m not impressed because I’m staring at a crack in my kitchen wall so large that I can see the light from outside seeping into the jagged wound. It’s worried my demolition man, Kev*, enough that he refuses to do any further work on it until we can verify it’s structurally sound.
“Buff out?” I screech back into the phone at him. My patience with his power of positive thinking bullshit is really wearing thin.
It has been, as often lamented on renovation reality shows ad nauseam, the week from hell. It goes a little like this. Monday, I get a call from Kev, who is in charge of demolition. Kev tells me he can’t make it to the house that day, it’ll have to be Tuesday. “Fine,” I say, “not a problem. Kitchen isn’t going in until next week.”
Tuesday comes and Kev and his mate are huffing their way up and down my stairs, hands adorned with a new item with every lap; the sink, a beige cabinet door, a section of the 90’s laminate bench top. Back and forth they go, paces steady, a feat of endurance. I can see them breaking down and loading the old cabinets into their trailer from my office window. I think they are making good progress from the growing pile. All on track, I think smugly, as I type away on my laptop. What’s all this fuss about reno’s being difficult?
I maintain this attitude when Kev comes to retrieve me, telling me gravely about the several holes in the walls. “Oh really?” I reply vaguely, unfazed. I smile at the interruption, quite happy with Kev’s pedantic nature if he’s worried about a few screw holes. Of course there will be holes in the walls, he’s removing my old kitchen. I wonder if Kev is slightly senile.
Until I walk into what used to be my kitchen and am confronted with a big fucking hole in my wall. Several of them, in fact. “What the fuck, Kev? Why can I see the back of my laundry cupboards through there?” I exclaim, my voice shrill with shock. Kev looks at me grimly, lips pursed and thin. He gestures to the other wall where the window is. “There’s this, too.”
I turn and see that the brickwork that is meant to be surrounding the window to, you know, support it and the wall, is either missing or crumbling so badly, it resembles some sort of fucked up life-sized game of Jenga. Push on it and see which bit flakes away. I stare, shocked, and desperately try not to say ‘what the fuck’ out loud too many times.
Kev, seasoned tradie and emotional savant that he is, says firmly from beside me, “We can fix this.”
Speech resumes. Okay okay okay. When? How? How much? How long? I need to call my husband. I think I should call my husband.
I call my husband. He’s interstate at a conference and so far removed from this entire project, I could have told him I’d ordered a fuchsia kitchen and he would have believed me. “Don’t worry about it!” He says happily, “It’s not like we can go back now. Just get the price to fix it. She’ll be right!”
She’ll be right? No she fucking won’t be. I ask Kev if he thinks it’s appropriate for me to have a drink. It’s 9:50am.
Wednesday comes and goes. I think about how many more thousands of dollars this little detour is going to cost me.
Thursday comes with the removal of the decorative wall panelling above the window. This exposes the aforementioned delicate, subtle crack in the wall. Kev has again retrieved me for this new discovery. As if he is Charles Darwin displaying a new species of fuckery that has entered the uncharted realm of my home. The conversation with my husband has left me in a quiet state of shock and frustration as I stare up at the wall. Buffing it out doesn’t even cover it. “Kev, just give me a quote to make this shit show disappear,” I say with resignation, staring at the wall, wondering how the fuck I’m going to get a structural engineering report done by the following afternoon so that Kev and his team can fix this mess.
I begin my hunt. Messaging friends, searching the internet. Frustration builds as one firm tells me it’ll take a day to quote and then they can arrange an assessment the following week and did you know it was extra to do the actual report? Yeah, that’ll be two thousand bucks thanks.
Friday arrives and I’ve secured an engineering assessment and Kev has given me a quote that didn’t require me to sell a kidney. He can start work on Monday! The kitchen only needs to be delayed by three days! I am smug yet again, aglow with my powers of resourcefulness and efficiency.
I stand in the war zone that was my kitchen and start to feel excited about the renovation again. Start imagining how the new window will look (Jenga wall intact), the dishwasher, my massive new fridge.
I look down at the floor. See where the fridge is meant to go. Notice there are no floorboards there, only an uneven mess of half crumbled red tiles from the 70’s that were hidden by the old cabinetry. I look at the rest of the floor and realise with growing dread that there are more holes, more gaps that will not be filled by the new kitchen.
I sigh, all smugness gone.
I buy two bottles of wine that night.
*Not his real name obvs
Etc
I’m starting with something quite depressing but unfortunately necessary. Last month, Samantha Murphy was murdered at 7am while out for a run in Ballarat. Aside from the accused attempting to keep his name out of the public eye (don’t even fucking get me started on this), this is another devastating case of a woman in Australia being murdered by a man. I don’t normally consume a lot of Mia Freedman’s content, but I had a friend send this to me and I’ll be sending it onto others now. Please read it. Please send it to someone else. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s to share in the devastation and rage this crime has again dredged up in me. As a woman, you don’t realise how vigilant you are at all times of the day, until it’s pointed out to you and it’s exhausting. Just this week I talked myself out of getting up early to go for a walk because it’s dark outside until 7am. I’m tired. Is nothing safe anymore?
Don’t go running at night, they warn us. It’s not safe.
So we go for a run in the morning, on a mild Sunday near our home. And we are murdered. Like Samantha Murphy.
Don’t go home with someone you don’t know, they say. It’s dangerous.
So we walk home alone. And we are murdered. Like Jill Meagher.
We are murdered on our way home from work. Like Anita Cobby and Prabha Kumar.
We are murdered at work, even when we work in schools. Like Lilie James and Stephanie Scott.
We are murdered while walking in parks. Like Eurydice Dixon and Courtney Herron and Masa Vukotic.
We are murdered in cars, alongside our children. Like Hannah Clarke.
We are murdered on beaches. Like Toyah Cordingley.
We are murdered in shopping centres in broad daylight while doing errands with our grandaughters. Like Vyleen White.
I’ve just finished reading Kindred by Octavia E Butler for this month’s book club. I wasn’t really sure if I even liked the book for the first 80 pages or so, but by the end I couldn’t stop thinking about what a masterpiece of storytelling it is. This is a book about slavery and it is harrowing and uncomfortable and brilliant. The story is told from the point of view of Dana, a young black woman in 1976 who gets repeatedly sent back through time to save the life of Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner in the antebellum South. There are multiple violent scenes throughout the novel, so fair warning if you dive in but it’s a part of history that shouldn’t be diluted or shy away from the horrors of the time. The language is so concise and spare and one of the most horrifying sentences is spoken by Dana after observing the lives of the slaves on the plantation:
“… I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
Something Butler does so well is build multiple threads of tension constantly but not in a way that feels onerous or difficult for the reader to hold. You don’t realise you’re holding your breath about a situation Dana finds herself in until Butler circles back to it so seamlessly. Your heart will be in your throat reading this book. But I always value a book that makes me feel, whatever the emotion, rather than nothing at all.
Onto happier things.
This past week, I have had a banger of a podcast in my ears. The Dream is an award-winning podcast investigating MLMs and pyramid schemes (there’s a very small difference) and how the wellness industry has enmeshed itself in them. Season 1, which I am still listening to, is uncovering some very interesting tidbits about how some of these companies leverage church and religion to make sales and enrol people into their downlines. This is structured so beautifully and the team even get one of the producers to enrol into an MLM or ‘direct sales company’ to gain more information because the companies themselves are so secretive about their business practices. I love this shit.
But if you can’t listen to thirty-plus episodes of this, then I highly recommend watching On Becoming A God In Central Florida on Apple TV. It’s a single series satire following the journey of an MLM distributor as she tries to climb the ladder in her company to support her family. Kirsten Dunst is incredible in it.
I’m still in seafood season (never not, really) so when I spotted some fresh lingfish at the fishmonger this week, I bought a kilo and immediately thought about making a curry. This tangy, fresh Sri Lankan fish curry is so easy to make, don’t be daunted by all the spices because I bet you already have most of them in your cupboard. I also threw in a bunch of baby eggplants I had in the fridge and garnished with heaps of lime juice. Would also go well with the Pinot Gris I mentioned in my last newsletter!
This is a great entry point if you’re a bit unsure how to cook (or eat) fish; you can’t fuck it up, really. Except if you buy King George Whiting fillets for $95 per kilo. Don’t do that.
Sort of alright now,
Sian
It’ll buff out.
Not bleeding cash, opportunity to explore improvements!
Stronger walls, better floors, yeah baby LFG 🔥🔥🔥🍆
Also, it'll buff out.