Post- Script.

Mr Tabubil's mother is wonderful.  When our lease on our rental apartment ran out with our new apartment still a gutted shell, she smiled as we took over her apartment with our boxes and bags, and she fired up the BBQ and baked apple pies to keep us both in fighting trim. She came apartment hunting, she came tile shopping, paint shopping, appliance shopping - willing to drop everything and anything to lend me her opinion or a firm supportive arm. She stood behind me when I needed moral support, quietly acting as my second guess and sanity check. Was I legitimately upset?  Was this really happening?  Should I be mad or had I lost all perspective - and possibly my mind?
            Always she was there there, with a firm nod of "Yes. Stand your ground. Kitchen plumbing is not optional - nor are front doors - and walls are meant to stand up straight.  I promise you they are."

About a week after the new flooring was installed, there was a day where I couldn’t be on site.  Mr Tabubil took over my agenda - he had a couple of sub-contractors to pay, and a delivery time to nail down with the people who’d sold us our stove. Easy as pie.
            That evening I was in the kitchen making sandwiches with my mother-in-law.  The front door slammed and Mr Tabubil came crashing in –  banging doors and thumping his feet and generally throwing an absolute tantrum.
            The stove people had been intolerable, he shouted.  He waved his hands a lot and stamped his feet -
            Firstly, they'd told him that  the store manager had cancelled the delivery because we hadn't paid on time.
            "What delivery?!” He’d said.  “And what do you mean we haven't paid on time?  There was no time! I'm here to schedule a delivery.  I’ve got the receipt for payment right here -  I’m here to make a time!”
            At that, apparently, the stove people had gotten personal. Rather in the same vein as the man from the flooring company. And Mr Tabubil was infuriated. Because this was ridiculous!  Who behaves like that?!  All he’d wanted to do was schedule a damned delivery!
            It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.  The poor man was stamping up and down the kitchen, waving his arms at the light fixtures and literally vibrating with rage, and instead of sympathizing, I found myself shaking with laughter.  I looked over at my mother-in-law.  Her eyes were bright and she was making little fizzing noises - and squeaking through her nose, whenever he turned his back.
            Mr Tabubil roared and stamped away into the living room.  My mother-in-law and I grabbed each other by the shoulders and we rocked back and forth, crying with laughter. It was tremendous.
            Mr Tabubil thumped his way back into the kitchen, looked at us in disbelief and opened his mouth- and my mother-in-law shouted "Yes! That's right! One more, Mr Tabubil! A big one! All together now- AGGRRRRGGGGHHHHH!"
            And Mr Tabubil gaped at her and said "This is serious!"
            "Yes!" She cried.  "I know! I've been there when it's all happening!  I've seen Tabubilgirl come home every day! This is exactly what it's like!"
            She and I looked at each other and we were off again, laughing like loons.  It was massively liberating, seeing things from the other side of the mirror.. But mostly I just laughed and laughed.  It was too terribly funny.
            And then I made the poor man a sandwich.  His blood sugar was low.

I am Sik

I am a poor unfortunate.  I am home in bed with an autumn flu -  a lady coughed next to me on the plane all the way from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt last week and it's all her fault.  I started a mild head cold on Wednesday, then languished for days with the sore throat from hell, and just when i decided that it was merely a virus and going away, last night it took a running dive into my chest and did its level best to turn into galloping bronchitis.  And this morning, sinusitis as well. Just to cover every possible contingency.  

            The sneezing is impressive.  It echoes.   Do you remember the old saw about how if all of the billion people in China jumped from chairs at the very same time, the earth would move?

I know that the mathematics are bunkum, but here in my sudafed-fueled daze I'm starting to wonder -  do you think that the mind has a resonant frequency?  And do you think that if we found it, and had everyone in the world hum it all at once, we could crack open every narrow mind - drive big wedges into the gaps and sing them open?  Make people hear the points of view that they don't let themselves see?

            Wouldn't that be nice?

Mr Tabubil calls home every hour to ask me about my temperature , but I don't need to know my temperature.  The whole Tabubil family has an allergy to thermometers; when we see one coming, we hide under the bed.

            It's my mother's fault.  (Isn't that another old saw?)  She suffers from an excess of thermometer-related enthusiasm. If one of us Tabubils ever stayed home sick, we'd find ourselves flat on our backs in bed with at least two - and often three- thermometers in our mouths: a digital one, a mercury one to back it up, and a second digital one to average out the other two.  

              She always forgot about it and left it there.  I'd be in bed with a honking great sinus infection, incapable of breathing through my nose, but she'd beg me - on pain of maternal disappointment - not to open my mouth, so I'd lie there in a haze of headache and snuffle while the world went pink around the edges and she implored me to hold it for just another minute - and right about when I was turning blue and starting to make small squeaking noises, she'd say, from the kitchen, where she'd dashed off to, just for a moment, honestly, I swear I'll be right back -

            "Oh Dear!  How long has it been?"   And it had always been ten minutes longer than it should have been, and she'd sigh and shake her head and tap the thermometer and say "It's been a little too long, I think.  Just one time, sweetie.  Let's do it again." 

            And she'd pop the three thermometers back into my mouth, with a firm finger on my chin to keep the thermometers - and the howling- in.   

            Why Mr Tabubil thinks I'm going to use one is beyond me.

Goodnight.

Vacations are Splendid Places. And the Dutch are Terribly Tall.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks alone together in Italy. 

Holland began in Madrid, where we changed planes for Amsterdam after our flight north from Santiago. Queuing up to board our next flight, I looked at the passengers all around me, and had a moment. 

            “Mr Tabubil!”  I hissed. “They’re all blonde!  And so tall – they’re practically brushing the roof of the plane!”

            When we landed in Amsterdam, Holland kept on coming.  It was something of a shock – Mr Tabubil had warned me, many times, but I hadn’t really taken it in. We were met at the airport by his aunt Anneke and his uncle Pieter and their two teenage sons.  Together they did something that I’d always thought would be impossible: they made my six-foot, strong-boned husband look petite.

            Mr Tabubil has dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, and all of them – even the young boy who has just crossed through puberty and is only now beginning to grow - are at least a foot taller than he is. 

            Pieter is somewhat above normal height.  Just enough to be imposing.  Anneke brushes the ceiling when she stretches up to smile, and their two sons are the height of small skyscrapers.  Dinner-time in their house is rather like sharing a meal with two well-behaved Labrador Retriever puppies.  Anneke and Pieter prepare acres of substantial and nutritious food, and the boys inhaled the lot. I had the feeling that if we turned our backs for even ten seconds, we’d turn around again and even the place settings on the table would be gone. And they’d be back in their seats, not a hair on their heads ruffled nor a smear of tomato sauce or gravy out of place.

            After dinner, the two of the excuse themselves from the table and head for the bread bin and pull out a fresh loaf and start a second supper. 

            “We go through a whole loaf every day” Anneke said – half rueful, but mostly proud.
            It’s no joke feeding two growing boys of that magnitude.  The first night I was in their house I dreamed that Anneke had taken me by the hand and showed me the emergency freezer – piled high with frozen pizzas, in case the boys became hungry and stopped growing in the night.

Three Years and the Night After

Three weeks ago we celebrated the sixth wedding anniversary of our friends  Marja and Claudio.  We went out to a very nice restaurant and toasted them in glasses of French champagne and Chilean wine-

        "To love - "

        "To a lifetime -"

        "To memories of happy days and happy nights - "

 Claudio leaned back in his chair and looked at his wife and sighed mistily.

        "Six years ago today, Marja, I carried you across the threshold of our first apartment -"

        "After we'd walked up five flights of stairs - "

        "There was no elevator and our apartment was on a narrow landing -"

        "With only a railing over the stairwell, and you had to be very careful not to tip me over the edge as you picked me up and swung me around to get through the door!"

        "And then" Claudio smiled slyly,  "I carried you inside for a night of wild nuptial bliss!"

Marja and Claudio looked at each other fondly and held hands under the table.  But they didn't meet my eyes.  I narrowed mine, and leaned forward.

        "May I ask a question?"

        "Absolutely!"  Claudio waved expansively, and poured himself another glass of wine.

        "DID you have a night of wild nuptial bliss?" I said. "I don't know of a single couple who, in real life, on their actual wedding night, actually did.  A wedding is mostly this huge, stressy, organized-to-the-walls THING, and even if it isn't stressy or messy, the party afterwards is generally pretty epic, and by the time you've escaped from the guests and gotten back to your room, any reasonable person just wants to go to SLEEP.  I reckon that there isn't actually a single wedded couple  - at least, any a couple that isn't required to produce proof of consummation in the morning, or isn't 18 and invincibly horny - who DOES consummate their marriage on their wedding night!"  I sat back and took a deep breath.  "There."  I said.  "A speech."

Marja and Claudio looked at each other.  They looked at me.

        "To answer your question," Claudio said slowly, "We did NOT.  To be honest, I didn't even carry her very far over the threshold."

        "About three steps." Marja giggled.  "Then he fell over. It was two o'clock in the morning when we got upstairs, and it had been a  LONG day!"

        "First I picked her up at her parents house - at noon -"

        "And then we went to the courthouse -"

        "And then the church -"

        "And then we had a party -"

        "A REALLY good party- "

        "And after THAT, lifting her up to carry her across the threshold almost floored me. We sort of OOOZED across, with her feet about an inch above the floor -"

        "And then we went to sleep."  Marja grinned.  "But the day afterward - THAT was another story."

Mr Tabubil and I were married at ten o'clock in the morning, barefoot, on a beach.  We were married out of a small hotel in Titikaveka on the Island of Rarotonga, and after the ceremony, we and our few beloved guests repaired to the hotel's little restaurant for a truly EPIC wedding breakfast.  The weather was tropical hot and  tropical sticky, and when the party floated to a finish, Mr Tabubil and I, drowning in our splendid wedding togs, dribbled upstairs to our room, throwing promises behind us to see everyone again on the beach, in an hour - just enough time for a shower and a change of clothes and the briefest of restorative shut-eyes- that's all -

In our room we barely had the strength to close the door and slip off the dress and the suit before we fell face-down on the bed and fell asleep, his hand on mine, clasped together over our fine new rings.

We woke up three hours later to the sound of laughter and splashing below our window.  We slipped into swimsuits and went down to join our guests and only came out of the water when the sky had turned red and the sun was setting over the reef. 

Upstairs again, we discovered that while we were down in the water, the housekeeper of the hotel had crept up into our room and laid out a wedding tableaux.  Two cane chairs had been dragged over to the window and turned so that they faced the sea.  A small table had been placed laid between them, and laid with my wedding flowers, a candle and a box of matches and a bottle of champagne.  Over the back of the chair she had draped a brand new pareo, in the same shades of blue and purple as the water outside.  The bed had been turned down for sleep, and as a final touch, the housekeeper had gone into the closet and found a lacy little bit of nothing that I had brought with me in my suitcase, and she had smoothed it flat and laid it out across my pillow.

It was perfect.

But this wasn't an evening for romance.  We were new-married in paradise, but we were also in the middle of a one-week window where we had the north American friends that we loved best in the same place as ourselves, so we dried ourselves  off and walked across the road to a little cottage where our Canadian friends were staying, and a rather splendid after-party burst into the black tropical night like a catherine wheel.

We crept home again at three in the morning, and slipped into bed and fell straight asleep.

When we woke the sun was high in the sky, and looking around the room at the untouched wedding tableaux, we felt a terrible remorse.  The housekeeper had spent such time and shown such kindness setting up the perfect nuptial night, and there we were, the unspoken wedding cliché, and all her efforts wasted.

So we stepped into the breach.

Mr Tabubil dragged the chairs around to face each other and lit the candle to blacken the wick and blew it out again, and dropped the spent match on the table.  I wadded the freshly pressed pareo into a ball to crease it, and pulled it straight again, and dragged it across the floor half-way to the bed and left it there.  While Mr Tabubil twisted our bedsheets and pillows into a perfect storm of acrobatic disarray, I took the lacy bit of nothing and wadded it up and shoved it underneath one of the pillows - and considered it, and took it by the corner and dragged it out again and left it hanging artistically half-way down to the floor.

We looked at the chaos and smiled.  We'd said thank you.  In the best possible way - with a tableaux to match her own. 

And Mr Tabubil took my hand and we went down to breakfast.

Happy anniversary, Mr Tabubil.  It's been three wonderful years.  Here's to another three, to match Marja and Claudio's six, and three more after that and three score times three -

Here's to happy days and happy nights -

To love and to a lifetime.

The Devils You Know

Speaking of earthquakes - it's an interesting thing, watching the mental processes by which humans process risk.

            Over the last two weeks, I've received some lovely letters from family members, telling me how much fun the earthquakes didn't sound - and wanting to know when are we coming home, back to Australia, where things like this don't happen and the country is safe.  Soon, they hope?

            My Auntie Dee wrote to me from Queensland.  She didn't ask me to come home, but she expressed elegantly and forcefully how completely she is not a fan of natural disasters such as ours  -

            Dee and her husband are farmers in Queensland's red soil belt.  In any given year, they are up to their elbows in floods, droughts and bushfire watches.  It's hardly worth noting the ordinary, everyday, scarcely to be mentioned Aussie annoyances of venomous snakes and spiders in the downstairs lavatory.  During 2011's epic floods, they spent the better part of a week in their farmhouse shut off from the rest of Queensland while water lapped around the margins of their garden path, and later that year, when man-made disasters appeared on the horizon, my uncle was instrumental in defying a particularly bloody-minded government-sponsored attempt to seize the local farming land for strip-mining.

Auntie A  lives in the same part of Victoria that, three years ago, was blasted by horrendous bushfires that killed almost 200 people and left more than 7000 homeless.  Two days after the 7.1 quake, she wrote to me to say that Mr Tabubil and I ought to come home now, please. Soonish. Her own daily concerns are scarcely less considerable, and her own risk calculations deserve full presentation here:

            "I thought my little episode with the Tiger Snake in the lounge room last week was unsettling, but it was nothing compared to your earthquake. I had been ironing in the lounge room for a couple of hours.  I went into the bedroom to put on my shoes, and I think at this stage I may have disturbed the snake. I glanced down at the floor as I walked back into the lounge and there it was.  My brain did a double take as I swung back for a second look, quickly called your Uncle A (who works on the property where they live)who jumped up from his office chair in a hurry and banged his knee (he is now limping) flew home and caught the snake, which was hiding at the back of the couch.  Of course, we turned the bed upside down to see if there were any of his family left.  Still can't work out how it got in as I always am checking the doors to make sure that they  are closed fully.  Anyway, so far we have survived its visit."

            Four days ago, I had another letter from her - her young grandson had been bitten by a tiger snake in her backyard, next to her lemon tree.  He spent 7 hours under observation in the local hospital with his leg wrapped in bandages from his ankle to his hip.  Ultimately, he was let go with no more than a good fright- the snake had struck his ankle-bone and recoiled for a second strike without depositing any venom, in which moment the boy had been able to run and get away -

            "It was a good outcome." Auntie A wrote to me, far more casually than I could have sounded under similar circumstances.  

It's all about perspective, isn't it?  The devils that you know.  Known devils can become almost routine, and if not exactly tolerable, then bearable, and if not actually reasonable, then able to be reasoned against.

            The quakes that we are having here in Santiago are reckoned to be part of the tectonic reverb after the great big 8.8 quake in 2010's 8.8.  The first aftershock of that one rung bells at 8.2, and after a few days of 7-point-somethings every hour or so, the tectonic activity  has been trending more-or-less reasonably downward, ever since.

            Earthquakes become familiar.  As each new one builds, it brings to Santiaguenos what has become a familiar terror, until it peaks and then, then fear settles into calculation - "Well, we got through the big one, and this one feels less than that, so we'll get through this -  so no worries, no worries at all -"

            There's a night spent outside on high ground if you live on the coast, but you're through, and it has settled in the ground and inside your head, until next time -

            Would Chileans take the floods, which drowned so many in Queensland,  or Victoria's fires, which left nothing but scorched bones on scorched earth, or even the daily Australian caution against snake and spider?  Or up in Darwin, beaches that are salted with crocodiles, sea-snakes, box-jellyfish and the immortal blue-ringed octopus?  Or we could be up in Texas this month, praying for a storm cellar as we listen to the roof come off -

            The devils you know are the ones we can live with.  Strange dangers are terrors.  The danger we know are calculable, considerable and endurable.

            So we all endure.

Wine and Ghosties

On my sister and brother-in-law's (hereafter to be known as the SIL and BIL) last day with us here in Santiago, my mother-in-law planned a day trip to a local winery, with a tour, and a walk around the estate, and lunch.  My father and brother in law are rather into wines.  They adore visiting wineries - touring the cellars, looking out over the vines and spending an enjoyable hour or two propping up a bar in a tasting room, engaged in the absorbing ritual of comparing vintage and grape and, eventually, emerging with a bottle or two of the very best. 

The place sure looks good.  Assembling in the lee of an adobe wall, just inside a pair of enormous iron gates, we were led through a garden and up to the spreading classical frontage of a mansion that had belonged to the 19th Century founders of the winery  (Someone knew his Palladio).  Our guide spread his arms wide to embrace  the luverly parks that stretched off toward the horizon and invited us to take pictures.  (But Mr Tabubil was told off for putting one foot into said lovely park to take said picture at a slightly better angle than what was offered up officially.) 

            Lawn and lake and green forested groves beckoned invitingly, but we were shunted sideways and circled through a pretty little display vineyard.  We weren't allowed near the winery's working vineyards, but in this little garden there was every sort of grape and vine that was growing out in the fields, and our guide peppered it with one of those exquisite sort of half-information spiels that lets you know what sort of research you need to do later find out about what was actually going on.

            Semi-enlightened, were herded up onto a shaded terrazzo and served a 2011 chardonnay.

            We were invited to tilt the glass to examine the "wine's charrrracteristic colorrrrr."  (The guide rolled his rr's richly.)  Then, at the guide's instruction, we sniffed, and sipped, and rolled the wine about our mouths and thought deeply about the flavors  -

            I tasted citrus.  I tasted apple.  I tasted - mustiness?

            I looked around and all of us in our little party were looking at our glasses with deep distaste. 

            I passed around the breath mints.

From the terrazzo we were shepherded into a shed full of barrels and  marched down a flight of stairs into a genuine cellar.  With real brick arches and proper cold cellar-damp and everything. 

            This was where the winery's "Internationally Famous Casillero de Diablo label" ™ was aged.  "Do You know where the devil in the name comes from?"  The guide asked us, and then he scarpered out the door, turned out the lights and turned on a PA system and a rich, fruity disembodied voice in the darkness told us a ghost story so deeply, spectacularly, anemically anticlimactic, that when the lights came back on, we were all goggle eyed and prone to random manic giggles. 

            And we were marched back out of the cellar, led up another flight of stairs and the whole rigmarole with the wine was repeated with another glass of terrible plonk - but red this time and served out of a bottle that some genius in marketing had had the brass to slap a Gran Reserva label onto.

            And that was it. 

            But this time we were encouraged to keep the glass as an exciting ™ memento of our tour.  Golly.

            Our entire day-trip experience, which we had been led to believe involved a real wine-tasting and a tour of the wine-producing process - consisted of a forced march through a garden, a quick pass through a cellar, and being fed two of last years failed wines that one imagines they couldn't get away with selling in their shops.

            But what a shop! It was nothing more nor less than a temple to a brand. Every imaginable object you could imagine slapping the house label onto was being sold, from t-shirts to chefs hats to cigarette lighters to golf balls. And wine, of course.  Wine was everywhere.  But there was not one teeny little opportunity to try a single one of them before you bought.  Which rather removes the point of visiting the winery in the first place.  

            So we were sort of feeling let down.  My mother-in-law especially - she'd wanted something special for the SIL and BIL before they flew home.

            It was close enough to lunch time that we decided to play nice at the establishment's little restaurant and wine-bar.  We sat down at a nice little table in a sunny courtyard and ordered empanadas. 

            The waiter was friendly.

            "Did you hear the story of the Devil down in the cellar?"

            "Why, yes,"  we emphasized - with feeling.  "We certainly did."

            "Yeah..." The waiter picked sheepishly at his apron.  "They used to have a guy down there dressed up in a devil suit and have him jump out at the visitors when they turned the lights off, but a couple of months ago some guy panicked and had a heart attack... and died.  They changed the presentation after that..."

            And then we started laughing manically again, because any ghost story that ends (in a big booming voice) "and it was all a big hoax because there was no devil down there after all!  But when you leave this place tell all your friends that there is so that nobody stops listening when we tell them!!!" just has to be coming from some place pretty powerful.

The Gift-Wrapping Status Quo, Post Stabbage.

Mr Tabubil DID take over the gift- wrapping.  After an evening spent ostentatiously shuddering every time he saw me holding something so deadly as a blunt butterknife, he picked up the scissors and tape and became so very enthusiastic about the wrapping that he went a little too far and wrapped up the comfort-food sci-fi paperback books I had strewn around me on the sofa, and labeled them to his father and put them under the christmas tree.

And since Mr Tabubil-in-law IS receiving a small stack of books of his own for Christmas, we had to unwrap EVERYTHING to get at the wrong ones.

I'm allowed to use the scissors again now.

Christmas Nit-Wittery

Feliz Navidad, you-all.

This year Tabubilgirl is celebrating with a knee full of stitches.  She managed to stab herself with a pair of scissors while wrapping Christmas presents.

            One minute I was looking around for address labels and the next moment there was a bright red fountain coming out of me. I didn't even feel the blasted thing go in, but blood was spurting twelve inches sideways onto the tile floor.  It was pinpoint perfect stabbage.

           I have the worlds most wonderful mother-in-law (may the gods bless her and keep her forever and ever and ever).  She took my rather frantic phone call and jumped straight into her car and came straight over, and took me with her to the hospital. 

            She even mopped up the floor of my flat.  (Which was very brave and kind of her - she is very very unhappy around blood.)

As I hopped through the doors to the local Sala de Emergencia (Emergency Room),a bloody washcloth clapped against an even bloodier leg, an admitting nurse scooped me straight into a wheelchair and said "What happened?"

            "Stabbed myself with a pair of scissors."

            "Aaaaah." He nodded knowledgeably. "Wrapping presents, were you?"

            "I'm not the first person this has happened to, then?"

            "Dearie, you're not the first person today. We see this right through the New Year.  There's a whole season for what you did."

            And smirking slightly, he wheeled me over to the admissions desk and abandoned me.

Sigh. 

I was given a tetanus shot for starters, and this being the Clinica Alemana, they insisted on an ultrasound to make sure there wasn't anything inside the wound, because -

            "Sometimes the tips of the scissors break off!" 

            "The scissors were in one piece when they came out of me!!" 

            "There might be something else in there!!!"

            -and when there wasn't, I was sent back to my cubicle for suturing - and had to wait while a small child who'd fallen and sliced open her chin screamed the whole hospital down while she was sutured up.

            She was quite upset about her situation and most of the ER staff was looking quite seriously agitated by the time she was done.  Which was nervous-making.  A strung-out doctor who's spent half an hour being kicked by a hysterical seven year old is not a doctor I want approaching me with loaded needles.

            But after the last harried nurse fled the suturing room we waited quite another while- about the right amount of time for a nice friendly coffee break, and at last, I got stitched up. With steady hands.

           His hands were steady, but the doctor was sarcastic. He stitched, I said "Thank You, Doctor," he smiled and said "Take Care" and strode off into the hallway - and as he cleared the door he turned back and said "I presume your husband is taking over the rest of the gift-wrapping, hmmm?"

And then he about-faced and was out of that door fast, grinning manically.

My mother-in-law and I went home. And found Mr Tabubil looking pale and woebegone.  He'd just been drilled for an entire hour at the dentist, and was minus most of a tooth, and looking forward to more of the same after Christmas.  He was curled up in one of his beloved Ikea Poang chairs with a very sore face and looking very sorry for himself.

              In other news - My sister-in-law broke her toe this evening.  Or rather, her husband accidentally stepped on it and broke it for her, and she's not feeling so great either.

My mother-in-law is not having the best of all possible weeks.

Samovars and Pedicures

As a farewell present, Dr Tabubil too me out for a pedicure. I had never been to a spa before and my word - I can't believe I spent thirty years missing out on such a hedonistic experience!

It goes like this:

You are sent to wait for your "therapist" in the Tranquility Room.  The lights are dim, soft violin music plays out of hidden speakers, and the walls are lined by enormous wicker armchairs upholstered in something soft and squashy and velvet.  Half of the armchairs are occupied by blitzed out humans in soft brown robes.  They have unfocused edges - as if they've been massaged and rubbed so long that their edges are blurred - they're still vibrating to a happy cosmic resonance frequency. 

            The chairs ooze - invitingly.  Sit in me, they seem to say.  I am comfy like you have never known before.  Three enormous candles flicker against the far wall, and you are softly invited to drink the house herbal tea blend in the glass teapot, resting on a flickering, candlelit samovar.

The light is very dim indeed, so when you pour yourself a cup you overshoot the teapot and pour tea all over your hand.  Fortunately the candle-powered samovar has no heating power worth mentioning, so the shower is barely lukewarm.

            You pour again, and take a sip and gasp and choke and scrabble for the pitcher of water and drink and drink and drink and stuff your mouth with tic-tacs and collapse, heaving, into the armchair next to Dr Tabubil.  She is fascinated.

            "Don't drink the tea." you rasp.

            "Uh huh."  She says, enthralled.  "You're exaggerating." And she gets up, and walks over to the ledge to pour herself a cup.

            I will cherish until I die the memory of the following fifteen seconds.  There is a clanking noise as she drops the cup, her mouth works like a goldfish and then she seems to stretch and doppler in the flickering light as she lunges across the room, her fingers flexing madly as she groped for the tic-tacs that are still three feet away from her.

            I think we were good entertainment.  And that tea tasted like a glass of highly astringent sick.  There are no words.

Fortunately, about the moment that Dr Tabubil was sucking on her own life-saving mouthful of peppermint, our therapists arrived.

            I was led to another dim room, and seated on a chair only slightly less sybaritic than the big wicker armchair outside, and asked to step my feet into a silver basin  filled with milky, scented water.  Seated cross legged on the floor, a divine goddess washed my feet and ankles with creamy unguents, dried them with a cobweb cloth and led me over to a divan.  Over the next hour she rubbed and scrubbed and rasped and buffed and soothed and smoothed and massaged and painted my toenails in bright scarlet and far too soon, led me back, blitzed and beatific, to the Tranquility Room.

Mmmmm!

I would like this again please.  Regularly.

Census Night, 2011.

Yesterday evening was Census Night in Australia. We are visiting with Dr Tabubil in Brisbane at the moment, so she had herself, one sister (currently unemployed by virtue of recently winding up her last job) and one brother-in-law (an engineer on his way to a new job in another country) to prod and poke and tally up for the public record. 

            A census turns into a thing - deep terminology, that. It's sort of amusing, and sort of embarrassing, sort of like getting undressed in front of a doctor and sort of like getting undressed in front of an auditorium.

            It's Very Important, so you feel full of Public Virtue, and even faintly Self-Important, because your little statistical data point can build hospitals and inspire public works initiatives like highways and bus routes (so the carpet-bombing pre-census advertising told us) but when you're a doctor working 16 hour shifts six days a week or a couple that has spent the last two weeks eating their way across the continent in the arms of wonderful and wonderfully hospitable relatives, some of the questions tend to come across a little uncomfortable, and put a nasty leak in your deeply inflated chests.

Examples:

"Have you provided any unpaid childcare for relatives in the past five days?"
Or:

"Have you performed any charitable activities in the last two weeks?"

And you begin to feel rather like Butterflies - or even Mayflies - and Parasites, and Pimples on the hard-working arse of society.  

So your answers start to get a little bit dippy.

"Occupation?"

"Doctor."

"Provide a comprehensive description of your job duties."

"Hah."  Doctor Tabubil said.  Reinflating, she took up her pencil and  solemnly inscribed: "I SAVE LIVES."

Things got a little misty after that. From Mr Tabubil, the engineer who was last seen helping to re-line the blast furnace of a steel mill, I distinctly remember the words "contributing to the carbon load of the Australian atmosphere" being bandied about, and me - well, if we're determined to be pedantic, I've got no job at the moment and haven't actively sought a new one in the past four weeks, and that doesn't look like an example of productive public virtue any way you slice it. 

I do remember Mr Tabubil posing his sister-in-law the following question:
            "Have you performed any unpaid domestic work for your household in the last week?"

            "Oh yes."  She replied, relieved.  "Lots.  At least three hours." 

I'm sure that I hooted. 

            "Oh yeah?"  She said.  "And I suppose you've done any on your holiday?"

            "Yes."  I said smugly.  "I washed out our underwear and socks every night while we were traveling.  And I unpacked and repacked our suitcases every four days."

            "I'll put you down for under five hours then.  That's the lowest option.  And if you were washing the socks, then Mr Tabubil wasn't doing anything, was he?  Typical male.  You won't be shaking up any demographics here, will you?"

            "If you would care to recall" Mr Tabubil said with great dignity "I spent most of that holiday in various beds with a case of the flu."

Dr Tabubil made a rude noise and wrote something uncomplimentary in the comment box. 

            "Ahem." She said.  "Another question - are you willing to have your name, address and other personal information made available in the public archive after ninety-nine years?"

Mr Tabubil and I looked at each other and shrugged.  "Sure. "

            "Really? All public?"

            "Why not?"

            "Well I'm not sure that I want...I mean, that's pretty... Hah, wait a second! I'm the cool cat who saves people's lives!  Hell yeah!"

And with that, the party rather broke up.  Five years down the track, lets see if we can be in a permanent-enough situation to make us out to be rather more than mayflies and drains on the public purse.

Amen.