An Aussie Lass, a Frenchman and a Burmese

I was sitting where I normally sit on the métro - on a folding seat at the back of the métro carriage, facing forwards. I like sitting there because I feel like I'm out of the way of other people. I'm sure that we all have the places we prefer to sit, for a variety of reasons.

At the stop after mine, a lady of a certain age got on the métro carriage, carrying two bags and wearing a giant red coat. Despite there being plenty of free seats available (facing both forwards and backwards), she immediately placed herself in the tiny space between me and the guy on the other folding seat at the back of the carriage. She placed her two bags on the floor and proceeded to spend a good five minutes removing her coat, rearranging her scarf, huffing and sighing and pouting all the while.

At one point I absently reached up and tucked some hair behind my ear with my right hand. My elbow was out and she deliberately leaned into it - "pardon!" I exclaimed. She just glared at me.

For a full twenty-three minutes she stood between the guy on the other folding seat and myself. I watched the carriage fill up slowly with people, then empty out again as we passed through a métro hub. At the twenty-three minute mark, she let out an enormous sigh (several people turned around to look at her, she was so loud) and sat down just across from me. She spread her belongings out on the folding seat beside her, and proceeded to glare at me and the guy next to me. I bowed my head slightly and glanced at him quickly - he rolled his eyes and sat there quietly, a small smile playing in the corner of his mouth.

At the next stop, I collected my things, got up and stepped off the carriage, looking back briefly to see that she was still glaring at me.

I chuckled. Out loud.

I know I've seen her before. She does the same thing every single time - stands stubbornly waiting for one of us to get up (which has never happened, that I can remember). I don't see the point in giving her my seat when there are SO many other seats available (especially since she's not elderly, nor does she appear incapacitated in any way). And en plus, every single time I've seen her, at a certain point in the trip, she sits down in a spot which is clearly unsatisfactory to her, and heaves a giant sigh.

When I was younger, several of my girlfriends took ballet classes after school in the town hall. I was absolutely green with envy and was convinced that if only I was given the chance to realise my dream of joining these ballet classes, I would surely become the most amazing ballerina the world had ever seen.

But I wasn't allowed to take ballet classes. And since I was also convinced that if only I was given the chance to realise my dream of joining the netball team, I would surely become the most amazing netballer the world had ever seen, I had to pick my battles. Official ballet lessons were not to be, and I worked hard at learning how to actually catch a ball. A skill which, at 10, I was still trying to master. Hand-eye coordination has never really been my strong point.

I didn't forget about my potential as a ballerina, and I tried to teach myself various moves using the infallible Debbie learns to dance as a reference. I so admired the way that Debbie and her classmates stretched and posed.

Of course, I needed the right equipment. Leotard. Check. (it was the late 80s after all). Leggings. Check. Flowy skirt. Check. Ballet shoes. That was a bit harder... But I was tenacious and wasn't about to let the fact that I had no proper ballet shoes stop me from dancing when I knew this was meant to be.

So I improvised.

I had a pair of pink slippers. They were velvety to the touch, fit firmly around my feet, and featured a practical plastic sole for those moments when I needed to run outside and didn't have time to kick off my slippers. They were the obvious choice for the magnificent dance routines I would make up and practice on for hours on end in the sunroom.

From the moment I put my pink slippers on, I felt like a dancer. A ballerina. In my mind, the practical plastic sole melted away and soft pink ribbons were laced up to my knees. The spotlight shone on me and I could almost hear the crowd roar.

If you were to throw Richard Marx "Right here waiting for you" into an old cassette player and pressed Play, I would be able to show you an entire routine that I worked on for months, and remember, to this day, right down to the very last step.

We should probably count ourselves lucky we don't have any old cassette players lying around.

We waited for the bus at the end of the driveway. The shadows were long, early in the morning. Everything had a shadow. The mailbox. The pine. Us.

I was fascinated by my shadow, and would examine it carefully as it changed. Look at it now - with my hands on my hips, standing on one leg, sideways, crouching.

But, of course (being that it is me), there was something that traumatised me in all of this.

When I stood sideways, you could see my ponytail, perched high on my head in the shadow. But when I stood normally, you couldn't see my hair - the shape of my head was the only thing visible.

My thoughts immediately ran as thus :
When I wear a ponytail, can people not see that I have long hair?
Long hair is OBVIOUSLY the ONLY thing that marks me as a girl!
Would people think I am a boy?
OMG people might think I am a boy.

There was only one solution to all of this.

I pushed my ponytail around a bit, so it was just off-centre. When I examined my shadow again, I could finally see evidence of my ponytail.

I jumped on the bus, swinging my ponytail as I walked up the aisle to my seat, satisfied in the knowledge that no one would mistake me for a boy.

Even if it was the eighties, with my wonky ponytail that wasn't quite centred but wasn't quite on the side enough to be called a side ponytail (à la Madonna), I must have looked like a right dork.

He looked harried, standing there in the middle of the street, with a suitcase at his feet and a laptop bag slung across his shoulders.

He held a dozen little white strips of cardboard, which he was sniffing, one by one. Perfume samples, from a beauty shop just a few steps away.

Was he on a business trip, trying to grab a last minute gift for a loved one - his partner, his secretary, his mistress - back home?

I smiled at him as I walked past. He glanced up at me, then went straight back to sniffing his perfume samples.

Sylvain is heading to Sweden again in a few days. When he comes back from this type of trip, he brings me delicious oatmeal biscuits. Smoked salmon. Cheese. Fluffy blankets.

I prefer to choose my own perfume. Bring me back food and locally made products any day.

Although I suppose if I lived in another time, in another place, perfume from Paris would be pretty darn special. Maybe just as special as smoked salmon from Sweden.

I wrote journals throughout many of my high school years. My dad told me that he has most of them shrink-wrapped and sitting in the attic. "Do you want them?" he asked, when we were home over Christmas. "No, keep them there, I don't want to read them." I replied, very quickly. The idea of exploring my teenage head is slightly nauseating.

At lunch today, I circled the stand of pens at the bookshop for 20 minutes. I couldn't decide.

I wanted something that writes nicely. Not too big. On the smaller side. One that won't leak all over my handbag if the lid slips off. It has to look nice, but not too girly, and not too utilitarian.

Then there was the choice of a journal. You don't want to know how long that took.

I have decided to write again. Really write. Write more than I can write on here, for many different reasons - to explore my creativity, to experiment with my writing, to exercise my mind, to consider some really personal questions. I want to write stuff that is crap, but to be able to read it over and see why it's crap, without deleting it straight away. I want to write stuff that is good, but to be able to read it over and see why it's good. I will keep writing here, because I think it's therapeutic too, in a way, but I think I really need to sit down and put pen to paper.

I am so used to writing on a computer that I'm expecting some serious hand crampage. But that's ok. I am so used to writing on a computer that I'm not sure how I'll handle not being able to use Backspace or Copy and Paste as I realise that this sentence would be better there. But that's ok too. The goal is to see what sort of adventure this will take me on.

I just couldn't decide on a pen today. When I wrote in my journals as a teenager, I grabbed whatever pen came to hand. My journal pages were filled with blue, black, purple, green. It took 20 minutes for my teenage self to convince my 30-something self that not everything has to be perfect. Perhaps I do have something to learn from my younger self... It's just a freaking pen.

Let's just hope that this time around, there'll be less bad poetry.

Mum used to take us to the hairdresser in one of the big towns, about an hour away from the farm. The hairdresser was always very nice to us, even when I cut my sisters hair for her and tried hiding the evidence under the couch. It must have been quite mangled because I have a hard time cutting paper, let alone hair, in a straight line, even now. The girls working in his salon looked so grown-up, I loved the smell of shampoo and other products, and I was always trying to figure out what the mysterious little room with the bed in it was for. It was only years later that I realised it was for waxing and other grooming. Ah, how naïve I once was.

I think I was the only one in my class (of 8 girls, 4 boys) to get my hair cut in the big town. At a real hairdresser. The rest of them got their hair cut by their mum or a relative or by a local lady, on her verandah.

But I always wanted to get my hair cut by the local lady. My female classmates came to school with crimped hair and (what I thought were) the most fashionable cuts. I was desperately jealous and wished fervently that our hairdresser would propose something like this to me one day. When I was twelve, it took all my courage to tell him I'd like to grow my fringe out. I was tired of having a giant and heavy 70s fringe which I felt started right at the back of my head, when all my classmates had tiny wispy fringes which started just at the top of their foreheads. Despite having a giant cow-lick and the hairdresser's advice against it, I persisted. And he did his best with my sillyness.

I know my parents splurged by taking us to get our hair cut. Even if they couldn't afford to put us in the brands of tracksuit pants we wanted, we always got our hair cut properly.

I am sure that the local lady did her best with the tools she had available. But it is only now, when I look back at photographs of me and my classmates in primary school, that I realise how profoundly grateful I am that mum took us to a proper hairdresser.

Crimped hair. Jagged fringes.

*shudder*

I'm very careful with books lent to me by friends. I will make sure that I don't put unnecessary pressure on the spine, I turn the pages with care.

But almost all of my books - my prized books, my beautiful trove of books, my small but well-loved collection of books - are somewhat tattered.

It's not because I don't care about them. It's not because I actually like the dog-eared pages or slightly creased covers. I think it's because they live with me as I'm reading them.

My books follow me everywhere. I read on the métro. I read as I walk to and from the métro. I read in the park. I read at lunch. I read in the car. I read in the bath. I read in bed. I read when I stir custard.

I read when I'm eating spaghetti bolognaise and quite a large number of my books have tiny red spots on the pages. I read when I'm eating a giant bowl of phô and sometimes the noodles make splashes. I dropped a book in the park the other day when I was trying to juggle my falafel and read at the same time. It landed in a pile of leaves and narrowly missed a puddle. I've dropped a book in the bathtub. I was so upset because it really couldn't be saved and I went out and bought another copy.

My books are everywhere. There are books on the couch, on the table, on the kitchen bench, on the floor beside the bed, on a shelf in the bathroom. There are books on the steps of the staircase. My bookcases are overflowing and the books are piled up precariously on top of them.

It's no wonder my books are tattered. They're loved. They're read over and over and over again. They're lent to practically anyone who shows even a passing interest. I find myself shoving my books into the hands of friends and I say "you must read it. you must".

I would like to have bookshelves full of books in pristine condition, but it's never going to happen. This is just the way I am.

I recently went to a reading with a pile of books to be signed and was a little embarrassed to pass over my stack of well-thumbed novels to the author. He just patted them, and said, "this is good - they're loved".

I'm drawn to other people who love to read and I once thought I could never marry someone who doesn't enjoy reading as much as I do. But I find it doesn't bother me very much at all that Sylvain doesn't read beyond scientific papers and the occasional comic book. He is incredibly enthusiastic about my reading, and certainly doesn't begrudge my habit of dragging home a couple of new books a week. It's actually a good thing that he doesn't read.

Cos there wouldn't be room for his books if he did.