And this is my other favourite aspect of life in Brisbane: the storms. I’ve never lived in a subtropical environment before, and I never get used to it.

The storm rolling in from the west:

The palm tree in the front garden:

The palm and jacaranda in the front garden:

Rain pouring through the guttering:

The mulberry outside the study, with the amazing sky behind:

As suspected, I am now strongly attached to the idea of adding photos to the blog. In fact, this evening’s storm means two whole entries devoted to photographs (perhaps a little odd, given that my ostensible interests are reading and writing, but everyone likes attractive pictures to look at on the Internet, surely?)

Brisbane is not known for its autumnal foliage. Those plants that are deciduous—the mulberry tree outside my study, for example, or the little frangipani out the back—tend to be the less-interesting kind of deciduous; the leaves just turn yellow and fall off.

But sometimes, the autumn seed pods are attractive in their own right:

Despite my woeful lack of anything approaching botanical knowledge—made worse by the fact that my father now refuses to use anything but Latin names, which I can’t remember and, in fact, now make no effort to remember—I’m fairly certain that these are the seed pods of the Cat’s Claw, a weed that spreads prolifically but does produce gorgeous, bright-yellow, bell-shaped flowers.

I also like the seed pods, mostly because they look like they’d be fun to pop—like the flowers of fuschias. Since Cat’s Claw is so noxious, I don’t pop them—not that I think the creeper needs my help to spread its seed, but I don’t need to make the situation worse—but I certainly enjoy thinking about it.

My bougainvillea is still in flower, too:

It’s only a small bush, growing at the end of the garden, but the magenta flowers are magnificent, even when they’re towards the end of their life span and yellowing:

I think, ultimately, that’s what I like best about Brisbane: the greenness of it all, even in the approach to winter.

I have a bad habit of hitting myself on the forehead with whatever I happen to be holding—usually books or papers—if I become irritated with myself or with the task at hand.

I probably don’t need to describe this as a “bad habit”; I think its ill-advised nature speaks for itself.

The problem with habits, though, is that they become habitual.

Unthinkingly pursuing my habitual behaviour, then, I have just smacked myself in the head with a hardback copy of The Concise Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary (second edition.)

I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.

I completely failed to notice my 100th post; it was, for the record, “Insanely Creepy Song Lyrics,” which I don’t really think was worthy of such a signal honour.

Still, at least it wasn’t the last post, about how annoying Nick’s been this evening.

I suppose I shall just have to celebrate the 200th entry, as I did the 200th comment.

ME: You are very annoying.
NICK: I can’t help that.
ME: Yes, you can.
NICK: You are very annoyed by me. I can’t help that.

That’s exactly why I tell my students not to use the passive voice as a weapon.

We’ve had Nick’s father around for dinner tonight—as we usually do on Thursdays—so we ate unusually early, to let him get to his 7 p. m. French class.

This meant I was in need of coffee much earlier than usual—and I turned to Nick to provide it.

I explained that I’d had a cup this morning, but only a weak one, and had been too lazy—alternatively, too busy—to make myself another pot during the day. This put me at least two cups behind my usual quota.

We compromised, in that Nick promised to make me a cup, but not until Specks and Specks started.

So as soon as that began, I was tensed in anticipation of the forthcoming coffee.

But I couldn’t smell the heavenly aroma of fresh-brewing coffee.

So the following conversation ensued, about fifteen minutes into the programme:

ME: You haven’t put the coffee on, have you?
NICK: I have!
ME: But it’s been fifteen minutes! Where’s the coffee?
(Honestly, I’m not an unpleasant person—just lazy and coffee deprived.)
NICK: It is on!
(Leaves the room, at which point a long pause ensues.)
NICK: Bugger.
ME: Yes?
NICK: It was on the wrong element, would you believe?

I would believe.

And I still don’t have a cup of coffee.

But I suppose it’s a small price to pay for being to lazy to make it yourself.

I’m really not sure what APIA thinks its new advertising strategy is doing; following the scamming-the-Third-World, blood-diamond advertisement, we now have one about dangeorusly rear-ending innocent drivers because you’re not paying attention to the road.

“These days, I’d probably just walk the two blocks home.”

What does that line mean? Is he just priding himself on his physical fitness? Or is it an exchanging-insurance-details-is-for-suckers reference?

I can’t tell—but I’m veering towards the latter, given the horrors of the previous advertisement.

(Technically, this qualifies as reading, since this is about the lyrics. Plus, I haven’t posted anything about reading in ages, and this is, after all, called Circulating Library.)

I’m constantly amazed by the frequency with which people play “Every Breath You Take” at weddings despite the fact that it is, frankly, an insanely creepy song.

Apparently—and I’m quoting from the Wikipedia page here, so take that as you will—the song was written during the collapse of Sting’s first marriage, and in his words “It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realise at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control. These were the Reagan, Star Wars years.”

If even Sting thinks it sounds sinister, who am I (Leavisite or not) to argue with that?

(Also, it’s clearly creepy.)

But I was listening to my Bon Jovi album tonight (yes, it’s a best-of compilation. Shush.) and I came across a song.

I don’t know the title, because the album cover was lost many years ago in an evening of drunken CD playing, and I can’t remember most of the song titles any more. I suspect it’s called “I’ll Be There For You,” but I can’t be bothered looking it up.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that it included the line “When you breathe, I want to be the air for you.”

Is it just me, or is that also ridiculously creepy?

My general response to that would be something along the lines of “Wow. That’s . . . wow. No, no, honey—I mean that in a good way. I . . . wow. No—stay over there. I find that remaining on opposite sides of the room at all times is actually good for a relationship.”

Perhaps I’m over-sensitive, but these don’t strike me as love songs.

Maybe my standards are skewed.

I don’t have the same number of complaints as Nick does about Brisbane public transport—I generally find the bus drivers efficient and courteous. But then, my daily trips are much shorter than Nick’s.

I did, however, come up with this imaginary epistle after this morning’s bus trip to the university.

Dear Bus Driver,

I realise, of course, that there’s a reason for the bus being quite late. That reason is readily apparent from the vast number of people standing in the aisle, desperately trying to cling to whatever support they can grab.

What I’m wondering is why you continued to stop at bus stops—not only mine, but at least two more on the route to the university.

By the time you stopped at my stop, people were crammed nearly up to the front windscreen. I only managed to find a space when a lovely elderly gentleman—who was 80 if he was a day, and should not have had to stand—was kind enough to share the pole with which he was supporting himself.

I realise I had the option not to get on the bus and, in fact, nearly waited for the next one, but Wednesdays are not days when I have a great deal of spare time, and I felt compelled to get to work as early as possible.

By the time we arrived at the university, of course, people were actually bouncing off the windshield, because you had continued to stop at the bus stops. Those of use who were buttressed further back in the aisle were becoming far too acquainted not only with the bus’s various safety features but also with one another.

I do think it is very kind of you to attempt to convey as many of us as possible. But honestly? I would rather the bus sailed by than that you lured me into thinking it had room for me; by the time I have my foot on the step, it’s too late to turn back.

Buses in Sydney are restricted in the number of standing passengers that they can carry, and have been since I was in high school. I hate to think what might have happened to my nice, elderly aisle-neighbour had we had to stop suddenly.

Perhaps some such restriction would work here, too?

Sincerely,

Your Slightly Bruised Passenger.

It’s been a night of strange conversations.

When I got a little worked up, and Nick suggested that listening to Rage Against the Machine probably wasn’t helping my mood, I switched to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Nick was standing right in front of me at this point, but the following conversation still ensued.

NICK: Jesus!
ME: What?
NICK: Oh, it’s coming out of your computer. I thought it was coming from behind me!
ME: You thought Paul Robeson was behind you?

A strange night, but not that strange.

Since I’ve been downloading images from the camera—and a blog is essentially an exercise in solipsism—I thought I may as well upload some images of flower arrangements from my 30th birthday.

I’m actually not really keen on being given flowers; Nick very rarely does so, although he occasionally bought a pretty bunch when we had a service station next door to us, largely to save them from the petrol fumes.

But flowers make me anxious, because I struggle to keep them alive and each day they get a little more ragged and I get more distressed about my botanical skills.

I think my family knows this, because they rarely send me flowers.

But they clearly felt that a 30th birthday was an occasion, because two bunches arrived.

I’d forgotten about these photos, which were taken 18 months ago, so it’s wonderful to see the arrangements in all their glory.

The first bunch is from my parents.

(Conveniently, this picture also shows my swan-shaped lamp, which I love quite beyond reason. I saw it first on a ridiculously expensive antiques website, and we decided it wasn’t worth the money. When I saw it again—at a much lower price, I might add—on ebay.com six months later, my heart leapt in my chest and I insisted on buying it. I love it every time I look at it.)

These arrived quite early in the day, when I was tidying and decorating the house with the help of my marvellous best friend—who had arrived from Sydney that morning with her less-than-four-months-old younger son in tow, and then not only spent the entire day helping me decorate and cook, but also spent the entire evening running around after people while I drank. Her son, my equally accommodating nephew, spent the night sleeping.

Nick must have been apprised of the imminent arrival of some flowers, because he answered the door and called me to the living room. When I insisted I was busy, he said, “No, you really have to collect this yourself.”

Turned out he was as surprised as anyone, because he’d been expecting this bunch, from my sister and sister-in-law:

(Alas, no swan lamp, but pretty funky curtains.)

It’s strange how not downloading photographs from your digital camera for 18 months can bring on such such a saccharine outpouring of nostalgia, isn’t it?

Blame it on my happy childhood; a happy childhood makes nostalgia a wonderful place to visit.

Tonight’s bizarre conversations.

This one was held while I was looking for the nail clippers on the kitchen windowsill.

NICK: Oh, what have you found?
ME: The nail clippers.
NICK: Oh . . . wow.
ME: Well, you were the one who suggested it was an exciting find! I was just looking for the clippers.
NICK: I like to bring a sense of wonder to life.

And later, while Nick was doing the washing up:

ME: I’m going to give my Mam a ring. Will you pour me a glass of wine?
NICK: I’ll try, but I’m very busy and important.
ME: Pour me a glass of wine, or I’ll give you busy and important.
NICK: Oooh.
ME: That wasn’t a euphemism! Well, it was, but not in the way you think.

We’re really a very happy couple. Honestly.

I’m always suspicious when a book is touted as “the new Harry Potter“, and it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the Harry Potter series. I did—immensely. But “the new Harry Potter“ as s shorthand description of a new novel doesn’t always seem applicable.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, for example, is occasionally mentioned as a “new Harry Potter“ and, despite seeing its popularity among my late-teen students, I don’t see the analogy—except in that it’s sold a lot of copies and is being made into an expensive-looking film. That, to me, is not what makes a new Harry Potter.

I’ve probably bored a lot of people with this story before now, but I did come into the Harry Potter series reasonably early—reasonably early, that is, compared to many of the six million people who bought Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I read the first two just before the third book came out in hardback.

But that’s not the main point of this anecdote.

At the time, I was teaching in a coaching college; among my classes was a Year 4 group, who met on a Thursday night at about 7 p.m. While not reluctant or in any way illiterate, they were not keen readers. They’d been reading Hating Alison Ashley and, frankly, hating it. In consultation with my boss, I suggested Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, fresh off my own reading of it.

At first, the students were very reluctant. They all bought the book and brought it into class. But they sat there while I read the first chapter out loud and moaned, “Miss, this is boooring. Do we haaave to read this, Miss?”

I wasn’t particularly sanguine about the outcome.

Until I came in the next week. And they were all sitting there, with the book lined up in front of them. Most of them had little piles of books one and two and the hardback of volume three. And they mobbed me when I came in; “Miss, I sat up all night reading this! Miss, I’ve read it twice already! Miss, I’ve read all three books! Miss, I had a dream that Voldemort came after me because I didn’t do my homework!”

The last one was a little disturbing.

But I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of coaching classes of students ranging from Year 3s to graduate students. By the time I left that job several years later, those students were ploughing happily through the many hundreds of pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I’m always suspicious, then, that “the new Harry Potters“ that are frequently vaunted refer only to the books sales, franchising, and movie deals, which to me is only part of what made Rowling’s novels a phenomenon.

But, and this immensely lengthy preamble has been building to this point, I still bought a copy of Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels, despite the fact that it’s occasionally touted as “the new Harry Potter“.

Of course, according to the Wikipedia page, it’s attracted this accolade simply because Barry Cunningham, the man who signed the novel to the “plucky new children’s book publishing company” Chicken House, was the man who signed J. K. Rowling up to Bloomsbury—which seems a more tenuous connection than usual.

Of course, I haven’t read Tunnels yet; I only know that it’s the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who shares a passion for digging with his father and, when the latter mysteriously disappears down an unknown tunnel, unearths a terrifying secret deep underground.

Sounds great, frankly. I’m looking forward to it, even if it doesn’t generate the same general enthusiasm for literacy that marked my experience of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

But I’m not sure how those Year 4s of mine would have responded to it.

And I really hope it doesn’t have a borderline psychotic vampire anywhere in it.

Nick has claimed for many years that we have too many cushions. In fact, when we were watching a season of Coupling and Steve went into a rant about the uselessness of cushions, Nick couldn’t even meet my eyes.

But I love my cushions. Partly, it’s that I don’t like my sofas. One—salvaged from a share house many moons ago—is brutally uncomfortable, especially now that the foam cushions have reached the couldn’t-bounce-back-even-if-they-wanted-to stage of life. The other two sofas came from a family member’s estate and, while we were and are very grateful for them, they’re shallow with low arms, which means you need cushions to sit on them, given the orientation of the living room.

However, I admit I may have gone too far. I’m attached both to the idea that cushions are a convenient way of adding colour and texture to a room and to symmetry in room furnishings. These two notions have led directly to a cornucopia of cushions, all in neat pairs.

But which ones could I possibly get rid of?

The ones in pseudo-Chinese “silk”: one gold and one a beautiful dark green? Nick bought them for me, so they have sentimental value. (That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.)

The ones that look like someone skinned and stuffed a Muppet? Well, two Muppets, pink and blue. Those are pleasingly furry on cold nights.

The big, square ones shaped like fuzzy dice? Those speak for themselves, surely—as do the furry blue stars.

The retro-patterned blue and red ones made out of the material you get when you turn a tracksuit inside out? One would have to have a heart of stone not to want cushions made of that fabric. Is there anything more comforting than the inside of a tracksuit?

No, I can’t cull my cushions, although I may curse them when I have to tidy up my living room or when Nick gets frustrated and throws them all over the back of the sofa.

The best I can do is not to buy any more.

I mentioned in my post on the first of this saga that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would—and I did.

I even lent it to my sister-in-law, because I thought it was very much her cup of tea. I don’t know yet if she enjoyed it.

But I also mentioned that I needed to read the others before I could legitimately judge what I thought. I’ve now read two and three, New Moon and Eclipse—the fourth, called I believe Breaking Dawn, hasn’t been published yet—and I now find I’m more ambivalent than before.

These books have been going through my first-year students—the female ones, anyway—like a dose of salts.

(On that note, giving a lecture on cliches last week seems to have had an adverse effect on my writing: “cup of tea” and “does of salts” in one post? Let’s see how many more tired metaphors and battered similes I can use in this post.)

But my students are reading and loving these books; in fact, when I said that halfway through the third book I started thinking to myself, “You know, this vampire is psychotic!” they were up in arms.

(And there’s another cliche for you.)

But that’s where my thoughts starting shifting; and it retrospectively changed my understanding of the previous books.

It wasn’t so much that at one level Edward thirsted to drink human blood; that’s not actually that psychotic, for a vampire. (It reminds me of a news broadcast that talked about the damage caused in the U. S. by a “rogue cyclone”; really, a cyclone causing massive property damage is a fairly well-adjusted cyclone.) No, I started thinking he was psychotic when he removed the distributor cap from his girlfriend’s car to prevent her visiting her Native American werewolf buddies.

Of course, I didn’t like her werewolf best friend, either—he was just as possessive, in a different way.

But Edward’s behaviour bothered me, more than the idea that he might one day be unable to resist the impulse to have Bella for lunch.

When I was reading Twilight, I said to Nick that there were shades of a domestic violence debate coming through the novel for me; I couldn’t judge whether it was deliberate on the author’s part or something that I was reading in for myself, but it came through the emphasis on the dangers of consorting with vampires. Somewhere in there was the sense that we all, on one level, take that risk; we all, when we enter into a relationship, determine—usually on a subconscious level—that this person will never pose a threat or a danger to us and, horror stories aside, we’re mostly right.

The idea of layering that through a romance with a vampire, inherently more threatening than any human partner, fascinated me; it seemed to give weight and substance to the discussion of a relationship that otherwise seemed to accelerate too quickly, even for a romance between teenagers.

Until he removed the distributor cap.

So now I’m not sure how I feel about these. I know as the books progressed, I became more and more annoyed at the idea that the romance would end in marriage—or, analogous to marriage, being turned into a vampire or both—for an eighteen-year-old protagonist, which is not something with which I find myself in sympathy. We haven’t got to that point, yet, but I suspect we will.

On the other hand, I did read all 1200 pages of the second and third novels and, while I’m not generally someone who puts books down unfinished, that does say something about Meyer’s ability to write page-turners. And she is capturing a broad readership among late teens, arguably a harder task than grabbing the early teen market, given the greater time pressures on 17-20 year olds.

But that’s not, I suspect, enough to make me ignore my growing feeling that this vampire is psychotic and that this might be less a great romance than a damagingly co-dependent, potentially abusive relationship.