The Christmas Cake

Before the winter flu season hit, I baked my Christmas Cake.
            In Australia, if you're properly serious about it, Christmas starts in August. For Australians - at least those of us of anglo-Christian heritage - Christmas serves the same traditional role as the USA-ian thanksgiving. This is the holiday where families gather together. Come hell or high water, howsoever far we need to travel, we do our damnedest to get back home for Christmas week.
            This is the southern hemisphere, and Christmas is held in high summer, so the celebrating is done antipodean style - picnics on a lawn, BBQs on the beach. If we do a ham or a turkey it's leavened with seafood and salads and fruit, but when it comes to dessert, we live in a cultural blind spot: we cook the way our ancestors cooked when Christmas happened under six feet of snow and food was there to build bulk and sequester body heat.
            We bake and we boil. Steamed puddings, boiled puddings, mince pies, slow-baked fruit cakes. My parents have boiled Christmas puddings in the steaming heat of the Papua New Guinean Jungle and when it comes to the Christmas Fruit Cake - the Tabubil family embraces Tradition with both arms and goes well and truly off the deep end.

In August or September you gather your fruit. A pound or two of raisins, the same of sultanas, another of currants, candied citrus peel and cherries, crystallized ginger and pineapple, glace apricots and peaches and pears and figs and oranges and kiwi-fruit and quangdongs and cantaloupe (if you can find it) all chopped into little pieces no larger than a raisin. When you have a lasagna pan overflowing with sweetly aromatic fruit, you begin to add the alcohol. Slowly, pouring and turning and stirring and resting, over the course of a week you pour in bottle of brandy - and then another. As the fruit swells, you move the overflow into another great bowl and tend to both. The house smell thick and alcoholic - 
            "Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."
            When the fruit is soft and swollen, and boozy sugar syrup oozes at the bottom of the pan, you make your cake.  Butter and sugar, eggs and apricot jam, flour for mortar, and spices (nutmeg and cinnamon and allspice) to earth the heady, alcoholic notes. Stir in the fruit. Slowly. Use a wooden spoon - metal spoons bend under the awesome pressure of the mix.
            Line the largest cake tin you own (and you have hunted down this one specially) with brown paper, building it up high over the edges of the tin to buttress the towering mountain of cake batter.
It’s a solid mix - like concrete. Fill the tin and drop it on the floor from shoulder height - Bam!
The impact shakes the kitchen and, only incidentally, flattens out the air pockets in the batter.
            And then you bake. Slowly, and for hours. Last year was my first solo - I started too late in the day and baked until eleven at night - and sat up until six in the morning, high on brandy fumes.
            Cool the cake and wrap it in glad-wrap and foil and kitchen towels, and tuck it away at the bottom of a cool pantry to mature and marinate for four months or so, and by the end of December, the cake is ready to ice: a coating of jam, a layer of marzipan, rolled thin, and then - c'est voila and sacre bleu - The Royal Icing!  You see it on wedding cakes - thick and white and silky. It tastes Terrible, but it gives the cake the look, n'est-ce pas?
            In Australia, you can buy your Royal Icing in bricks in the supermarket, but elsewhere we found the packaged stuff to be unobtainable - so we made our own.
            Icing the cake was the job of a full afternoon. We'd lay old sheets on the kitchen floor, put on disposable clothes and knead sugar and egg whites and glycerin until the entire kitchen was coated in a faint sticky sheen and we were just plain unspeakable.
            And last: a wrap of tinsel or Christmas paper, and a tableaux on top - a silver mirror for a frozen lake, small plastic fir trees and skaters and sleighs with reindeer, and you have a Christmas cake - a fruit cake with the density of plutonium and an envelope of solid sugar syrup - perfect for the end of an enormous meal on a sweltering summer afternoon.

Well, we think so.

In all honor, not much of that tremendous cake is consumed on Christmas day. It's served in thin wedges - intended for delicate nibbling around a cup of tea. For the remainder of the Christmas season, every visitor to your home - however casual or fleeting - is served tea and cake, and the visit becomes an honorary one. The cake is baked for the family, and as long as it lasts - so are they.

Spring Grass

The first mown grass of spring!
            The moan of a whipper-snipper outside your window, the thick green smell of freshly cut grass - intoxicating odor! Threads of it fizz and burst inside your stomach and brain like New Years fireworks, sending you wild to climb out the window and be off - somewhere- anywhere, traveling by cartwheels and handsprings and running for miles and miles without stopping until the long fuse sizzling inside your belly burns itself out. Sometime next February.
            Or whenever the flies get too much to bear - in November sometime, probably. This is the outback, and the warm weather is waking the insects up. Yesterday I saw my first fly-swarm of the season - a boiling black cloud, buzzing fretfully against an iron fence. Smaller flying things are waking too - tiny stingless winged ants, so small that they pass right through our window screens and make pale clouds around our ceiling lights.

Mr Tabubil is not particularly fond of Australian insect-life, stingless or not.

He does not like it at ALL.

Last night I caught him with the vacuum cleaner again - vacuuming tiny insects right out of the air.

I'll Huff and I'll Puff and - and....I'll, ah... Um.

I am developing my very own Teacher Voice. It's a good one.  Like a Bad Russian Accent in a Bond movie, my Voice is built up around a total lack of upward inflection-  flat and leaden and expressionless and telling you that this is how the world simply - very very simply - IS. There is no appeal, no exception, no explanation, no second chances.
Sometimes it even works.

But mostly it doesn't.
Like this:
"MOVE AWAY from the color printer, Robert. STOP TRYING to unscrew the lid.  NOW, please.  NOW.  Despite my use of the word 'PLEASE', this was not a request.  You are going to put your hand down, and move away from the printer and you have three seconds in which to do it or I'm writing you up in your diary.
Yes, I am very scarey.  Thank you Robert.
ONE. TWO - THR-

Oh, why THANK you, Robert.

NOW put down that filing drawerRobert.  Take that filing drawer off off your head, PLEASE. Notice, again, my use of the word 'Please'. Despite appearances, it is actually a threat, delivered with a great deal of menace. Oh yes. BELIEVE me.

Why, THANK you, Robert. How very kind. Now take your hand OFF OF MARK'S COMPUTER AND SIT DOWN in THAT CHAIR AND PICK UP YOUR MATHS BOOK -

At this point the Maths book is pitched, with a fair degree of accuracy, at the blackboard - or another student's head, losing half of its pages either way, and Robert is staring at me with his arms crossed, sneering, begging for me to try something.

I'm not trained for this. I'm an architect.  Clients send us passive-aggressive emails and refuse to pay filing fees.  They don't throw things.  And if they do, you can fire 'em.  I can't even give these kids a detention.

I Am a Petri Dish

One is obliged to suffer in silence when operatic sopranos massacre bush songs, because there's a number of particularly nasty flus working their way around town, and in the past eight weeks, I've had all of 'em.

Last week I had three at once.  As I shivered through one, and coughed technicolor through another, I pressed my face deep into a nebulizer mask, sucked greedily at the bronchii-dilating gasses, and felt very sorry for myself.

"I haven't been this sick since high school."  I moaned.  The sound echoed weirdly inside the mask and, being higher on the albuterol than a 747 at cruising altitude, I stopped breathing to giggle.   Thick white steam curled out of the vent holes in the mask and twined up into my hair, and I thought about what I'd said.

"Hah."  I grunted.  The smoke jetted out sideways and I giggled again.

I've been out of high school for 12 years.  Any sort of immunity I had to seasonal flus is long gone - and now I'm back at high school as a teacher.

I've had pinkeye six times this year.  Every damn bug floating loose in that hot-pot petri dish of germs and hormones is latching on to my under-exercised immune system like limpet mines on a unguarded merchant fleet.

Everyone at work is being exquisitely kind, and when I call croakingly to say "Yet Again" they tut soothingly and tell me inspiring stories of everything they endured back when they started working in the school system.

Through a near-terminal  addiction to soap and water and anti-bacterial hand gels, I've been fending off the gastro bug that's been plowing through the senior class.   It worked all the way up until last Monday.   Just after I got out of a week's quarantine for suspected Whooping Cough. 

My co-workers really are VERY kind indeed.  And if I make it through all this, I won't catch another flu for YEARS.

Cognitive Dissonance

            "Tie me Kaaaangarooooo Dauown Spooooorrrrrrrt-!"
Cognitive dissonance is sitting in a Doctor's waiting room and listening to a recording of Australian Bush Songs being sung by a classically trained European Soprano.  With a full hundred and ten piece classical orchestra keeping up with her. 
            It's not quite sacrilegious, but it is eye-poppingly absurd. 
            "Giiiive me a hooowmmmm amooong the Guhm Treeees!" the woman sang, through a throat of molten gold and a hundred silver violins.  This was just plain dreadful* but then - then - the CD went completely insane.  Molten trills and curlicues and heart-stoppingly sustained loooong notes do not do any sort of reasonable justice to Waltzing Matilda.  The simple harmonies of sheep-rustlers rasping dirges next to dusty billabongs owe nothing - absolutely nothing - to french horns and oboes and their rusty pathos does not ring extra true when a conductor breaks out in sopranos and kettle drums. It’s like a Polynesian hula dancer trying to interpret Tibetan throat singing with coconuts.

            "So we tanned his Haiiiiide when he daiiiide Clyyyyydddd 
            (!!!!!!) 
            - and That’s! It! Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaangiiing in the 
             SHEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDD!"

* To orient those readers unfamiliar with the Australian Bush Music tradition, "Gimme a home among the Gum trees" is traditionally played on a  bent banjo with the strings held on by sheeting nails, and sung by an antique shearer who has just walked his way from Dubbo to Gundagai in high summer with one pair of cracked boots,  a rusted tin kettle, a woolen bedroll six generations older than he is, and six tins of fosters beer to sustain him.  He has swallowed sixteen hundred pints of dust and thirty seven hundred thousand flies and when he settled down for the night at the one watercourse he met in the whole journey, a bunyip tried to eat him.  And found the banjo more nourishing.

Neoprene.

Today our town had its Big Show! (County Fair.) Hot Cinnamon Donuts and Fairy Floss on sticks and Rides painstakingly designed to bring your stomach up through your nose and Big Agricultural Halls full of prize-winning Chickens and Pigeons and 9-patch Quilts and Fruit Cakes.
            Tomorrow Mr Tabubil and I, with our friends Sarah and Peter, are going snorkling with the cuttlefish.  Between May and August, Australian giant cuttlefish breed along our coast in the seagrass beds.  Most of our coast is sand flats half a kilometer wide, but about 20 minutes out of town there is a steep rocky coast where the seagrass starts right along the shore.  You walk into the water, and when you're about 4 meters out, you put your head underneath and find herds of cuttlefish swimming and mating all around you. It's one of those natural phenomenons, David Attenborough-style.
            We went to the dive shop this morning and got kitted out.  We expected to need wetsuits and flippers, but Diver Tony and his wife take cuttlefish viewing very seriously.  The water temperature is only 12 degrees C, so we got neoprene boots and neoprene socks, and neoprene under-suits and enormously thick and heavy neoprene wetsuits and hoods and gloves, all of which had to be fitted to a very precise degree of fit, with no excess space at all for water to slosh around in!
            The tightness of the fit caused a few complications.  The first suit I tried on was a size too small.  It felt even tighter than it should have been because I put it on backward.  I had to be dragged out by main force.
            We all thought that was pretty funny, then we turned around and saw that Sarah had managed to get the arm of her suit all the way up her leg to her hip.  It was impressively tight- she had seen me trying to squeeze on the too-small suit and thought a circulation-pinching fit was customary, and while I was being poured out of mine, she was wheezing and huffing that neoprene sleeve all the way up over her thigh.
            It took three of us to get it off her.  One to pin her into a chair, another  with a firm grip on her leg, and Diver Tony's very strong wife, who has arms like sides of beef, to haul that neoprene sleeve back down to her ankle.
            We reckon we've already gotten our moneys worth of entertainment out of those suits and we haven't been near the water yet.

We also had our federal elections today.  Mark your preferred option firmly with a large 1, or list every single one of the forty-two parties in preferential order. At least we're not Queensland.  Up there, they've got sixty.

My Sister and Orthopedics

My sister is in her final year of medical school.  She is doing her Orthopedics rotation.  She is not terribly thrilled by it.
            “Nope.” She lay back on her bed and shrugging with elaborate casualness. "Surgery doesn't do much for me.  It’s just glorified butchery.  Change that – no glory.  Just butchery.”
            “Skilled butchery, surely?” I said.
            We were skyping, and she wrinkled her nose at me in the video.
            "You’d be surprised.”  She said darkly.  “And Orthopedic surgeons are the worst.  They’re such snobs. They’re boy doctors and they're all built like brick houses because they have to be strong enough to re-align someone’s leg.  It’s a club made up of all the boys who used to play rugby in university.  Enough said, right?”  She sniffed.  “And I have to be with them for eight whole weeks.  So no, in answer to your question, I’m not particularly thrilled about it at all.”

She called me after her first day with a rather superior look on her face.
            “There was a gorgeous registrar at the orientation today.  You can tell he used to play rugby, but he was so handsome that the extra muscle looked really good on him.  They were sorting out who was going to teach whom and I was staring at him and praying ‘Please be my teacher, please be my teacher!  And while you're at it - let it be ethical to date my teacher!!”
            “And is he your teacher?”
            “No. But it doesn't matter.  He gave a talk and when he opened his mouth – Tabubilgirl, he was a total orthopedist. It was so disappointing. He’d looked like such a normal person.”
            “Seven weeks and four days, babe.”
            “Huh.” She looked depressed and rung off.

On day two, she called me again.  In the video window she was laid out across her bed like a load of damp laundry.
            “Big day?” I said.
She laughed weakly without opening her eyes.
            “I assisted on a complete knee replacement, watched an arthroscopic surgery and assisted on a hip replacement review.”
            “What do you mean by assisting?”
            “Standing by, handing instruments, handling retractors and pulling back big chunks of flesh… everything.”
            “How do you do a knee replacement?”
            She sighed and said “I’m too tired to explain it properly” then sat up and explained, with hand gestures (the pulling and hammering ones were rather disturbing) for almost forty-five minutes.
            “You take a knife and slice down through the thigh and knee and calf, and then you retract all the flesh and hold it out and away.  That’s the part I did.  Then you carefully lift off the patella and the ligaments and sort of slide them around to the side.  Then you go in and isolate the tibia and the fibula, and you take out the electric saw and slice off the ends of the bones and it makes the most disturbing sound.”
            “How much do they take off the ends?”
            “Not much.  Half a centimeter maybe?  Just enough to make it even and flat.  Do you know what Orthos wear in surgery?
            “A Welding shield?!?”
            “Just about!  There’s this construction helmet type thing that comes down into a big face shield that sits, like, six inches out from your face.  You put that on first, and then you put on your scrubs over the top.  That movie Outbreak?  Just like that. And there’s an air supply; it’s hooked up to a battery pack that you wear on your back and air comes out of a set of vents all along the top of the shield and aims downward to keep away condensation and blow away any bits of things that stick to the front of the mask.”
            “Bits of things?”
            “OH yeah.  When the doctor pulled out the circular saw I squinched up my mouth and closed my eyes -and then I realized: Hey! – all the flying bits of bone and flesh and blood were landing on my shield!  Not all over my face! “
            “Urgh.”
            “Yeah… It’s pretty messy.   They have tables and tables of hammers and guides and templates and they keep checking for size and swapping them out and everything gets covered in blood. And when it’s all sawed and grinded they pick an artificial joint and match it up with the tibia.  Then they do it with the femur.  Then they fill the bone with cement and stick pins in everything and slide the patella back around and sew it all up. It takes about an hour, tops.
            And then I went and watched an arthroscopic knee exploration which was very soothing after all that blood.   Yet still, somehow, entirely gross.
            In the afternoon I assisted on a hip replacement review, which I signed up for because I naively thought it meant a post-operative interview, but what it actually meant was that the patient had had a hip replacement and it kept dislocating, so they had to redo it.
            After this morning, which went really well, I had started to think that orthopedics might be pretty interesting and something I could totally do, but then that hip replacement happened. And it was….. messy.
            The knee replacement was okay because you can place a tourniquet on the thigh and actually see what you’re working on, but there’s nowhere to put a tourniquet on a hip.  My gloves were soaked in blood.  I had blood up to my elbows and blood on my mask and down my gown and all over my little fabric booties.  It was brutal.
            It was also a mess– the patient had had the original surgery done somewhere else, and there weren’t any notes.  The scar showed that the original insertion had been done in the wrong place and even after the doctors opened her up and rummaged around, they couldn't figure out what size replacement had been used the first time.  So in the end they just picked a new size and shoved it in and waved it around to see if it fit – and then did it again until they found one that worked.
            The leg part of the hip replacement is a pin with a ball on the end– they just chop off the end of the femur and pipe it full of cement and stick the pin in.   But the really really horrible part?  First they had to get the old cement out.  And there was a lot of it.  And do you know how they did it?
            Before he started, the senior consultant said ‘She’s got pretty bad arthritis, so we’ll have to go really gently here.’  Then he picked up a hammer and started bashing at the chopped-off end of her femur.
            I thought ‘That’s supposed to be gentle?’ Only I said it out loud because he looked at me and went “Yea-ah...” and looked at me like I was a total baby.
            My God.   He just hammered and hammered and all sorts of things were flying all over the place and then” -my sister's voice became very low and quiet- “there were times when I had to turn away and go away to my happy place.  I didn’t need to faint or anything, honestly.  I just couldn’t LOOK.”
            “Where’s your happy place?” I asked, fascinated.
            “Anywhere but there.  At one point I even had to sing my happy song.  I’m standing there, holding back half of the poor woman's thigh with a retractor, and singing the Carpenters under my breath.  “E-very sha na na na, every oh oh oh oh….”
            And then they put her back together.  Like - that’s it. The cute registrar said “Give us some tension?” And the other doctor said “Right-oh” and they both went “Uuuhhhhrrrr” and pulled her leg really hard and then let it all sort of …. squish back together.”
            “Uuuurrrrghggggghhhh.”
            “Yeah.”
            There was a brief reflective silence. Then she sighed.
            "I’m going to go have dinner now.  Are you hungry?  I'm hungry."
            “You do that.” I said weakly, and she pushed herself up from the bed and logged off, while I sat in front of my computer, contemplating the possibility not eating anything at all - not for a while, anyway.