20 April 2011

My piece on today’s Mamamia…

I grew up with Kate Middleton, what’s your celebrity claim to fame?

It’s just your average little village in your average country valley in your average chunk of English commuter belt. It’s got a butcher, a pub, a surgery, a council estate, a load of twee cottages and a beautiful tree-lined avenue called, um, The Avenue. Oh, and it happens to count a future princess as a resident.

Welcome to Chapel Row, Bucklebury. My family home until precisely seven months before the royal engagement was announced. Ouch – how’s that for timing, no sooner had my parents bubble-wrapped the last Beatrix Potter figurine, when house prices started nudging up as a national, no, a global spotlight turned onto little old Bucklebury. To add insult to injury, the Daily Mail chose to run a feature about property in the area using OUR cottage above all others as a shining example of what’s on the market, with none other than Kate and Carole, all smiles, superimposed onto our front lawn! Oh the unwelcome muddle of pride and pain!

We walked past her – always perky and pretty – on muddy lanes in our wellies. We sat next to her after she bustled into the Remembrance Day church service a full five minutes late (tut, tut). We queued behind her as she paid for for milk at the supermarket: it may not sound like it, but the truth is we got used to seeing our famous Kate around. But when Will came to visit – that’s when tongue-wagging went stellar and village knees went all a-quiver. I remember my mum breathlessly rushing in from the post office and, barely able to get the words out, telling me how she’d JUST. SEEN. PRINCE. WILLIAM.

But just because we’re no longer in prime situ doesn’t mean we aren’t as wrapped up in wedding day hysteria as the next kind-of-once-sort-of-knew-Kate-a-bit-ish family. Oh, no. Thanks to the all-encompassing gossip network that pervades Berkshire countryside like an overzealous boxing day fox hunt, yes, even in Sydney, I am exposed to fallout from The Wedding Guestlist. And the stories of my ex-neighbours knock the socks off my claim to fame.

Half the village will be inside Westminster Cathedral on the 29th. I happen to know that in addition to Ryan the postman (undisputed heavyweight king of Bucklebury gossip), Martin the butcher and Hash the Spar shop proprietor, a host of other highly reputable local service delivery agents and family friends are all invited to THE big day. From stories of frantic dieting to frenzied frock buying, the local grapevine, it’s fair to say, is going into meltdown.

Ryan and co. – who get to see the Queen, witness “I do” and sing along to the hymns for heaven’s sakes! – leave us mere mortals to get our wedding fix via TV and twitter, along with the rest of the predicted 3 billion global congregation. Gulp, that’s going to be a long walk up the aisle for our Kate.

Lucky invitees will dine out on the juices of the matrimonial experience forever more.

So, my miniscule smidgen of a connection with future Princesses aside, what are your brushes with celebrity?

Calling all claims to fame – did you share a slurpee with Kylie, have you danced the conga with a President, is your yearbook signed by a future Spicegirl? Hell, are YOU also invited to the wedding of the decade?

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Bygone # 2 – First Fleet obituary // 19 April 2011

The obituary of First Fleet member, convict and builder, James Bloodworth, birth date unknown, died 1804. Published in the Sydney Gazette, 25 March 1804.

Update, 20th April: I have just learnt from a historian at the ANU that James was sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1785 for stealing one game cock and two hens. Food, or bounty, for thought.

“On Wednesday last died, generally lamented, Mr. James Bloodworth, for many years Superintendant of Builders in the Employ of Government.

He came to the Colony among its first inhabitants in the year 1788, and obtained the Appointment, from his exemplary conduct, shortly after his arrival; the first house in this part of the Southern hemisphere was by him erected, as most of the Public Buildings since have been under his direction. To lament his loss he has left a Widow and five Children, the youngest an infant now only one week old; and the complaint which terminated in his dissolution was supposed to proceed from a severe cold contracted about two months since.

The attention and concern which prevailed at the interment of the deceased were sufficient testimonies of the respect with which he filled, and the integrity with which he uninterruptedly discharged the duties of a Public Trust during so long a period. His Excellency was pleased to order that the Funeral should be provided for at the Public Expense, and to show other marks of attention to so good a Servant of the Crown.

Four in the afternoon of Friday being as the wish of the widow appointed for the Funeral, the Relics of the deceased were at that hour removed from his house in South Street, and conveyed to the place of interment, attended by a great number of friends, among whom were most of the Sydney Loyal Association, in which he had been appointed Sergeant.

Opposite to his old residence a Procession was formed, which moved in the following order.

12 of the Loyal Association, arms reversed
Sergeant of the Association
Drum muffled & Fife
THE BIER
Two Sons, chief Mourners followed by an Infant Daughter,
Fourteen Female Mourners,
Twenty-four Male ditto
A number of respectable inhabitants in Rank
The Non-commissioned Officers of the New South Wales Corps
And a crowd of spectators

When near the Burial Ground the Association were obliged to file off, for the accommodation of the friends of the deceased, and the populace, who were become very numerous; and when the remains were disposed approached the grave and performed Military Honours.”

Cited from Obituaries Australia.

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You don’t win friends with salad // 15 April 2011

Dear enormous piece of red flesh, seeping blood onto the plate and asking to be cooed at. You do look lovely and bright tonight (and yes, you are sitting on a normal dinner-plate sized plate).

But I am not interested in you this week.

I know that fellow Australians love to fill half of their plate with you each and every lunch and dinner time and also sometimes for breakfast if they live north of Tweed Heads.

But I am feeling rather you’d out. So, this week, I am being uncharacteristically puritanical. Or, that is, I am trying not to eat you and your bedmates.

So here’s a little problem. Last night, I ate a snail or six.

Garlicky, buttery, moreish and piping hot, I dipped my bread and sank my teeth into the diminutive, dark flesh and totally forgot about my week off.

So, this is my question to you, mister steak, miss bacon, muchacho tenderloin and monsieur liver: do snails count as meat? Are they one of you? Do little house-carrying slugs mean that I may as well have tucked into a juicy steak last night instead of eating an omelette for my main course?

Being vegetarian in Sydney – I have decided after just one meal out – is a bleeding minefield. Safe to say the whole ~~city~~ country thinks along the same lines as Bart and Homer…

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Monsoons spin the earth’s plates, Australian Geographic // 15 April 2011

LONG-TERM, NATURAL CLIMATIC events can alter the motion of the earth’s tectonic plates, according to new research.

An international team – led by researchers from the Australian National University – found that intensifying monsoon activity has sped up the motion of the Indian plate, which crunched into the Eurasian plate to form the Himalayas 40 to 50 million years ago.

Over the past 10-15 million years, monsoons – which increase rainfall in northeast India by 4m annually and cause erosion – have sped up the anti-clockwise motion of the Indian plate by almost one centimetre per year, the researchers say. This is quite fast, considering tectonic plates move about the same rate at which fingernails grow.

Read the rest of my Australian Geographic here.