A learning exercise

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Gcon Sausage Sizzle_25apr15Last week saw us gearing up for a sausage sizzle fundraiser barbecue outside our local hardware store. The preparation phase included getting up to our elbows in raw onion a few days before the event – and the miasma continues to permeate my house and fridges, car and numerous plastic containers. 40kg of medium sized brown onions is a whole lot of onion. In fact it’s two very large sacks of onions. Being involved in peeling and processing them individually made me realise much more clearly just how much ‘a lot’ really is – and it’s heaps!

We had a good system going, though: five people and an industrial strength slicer/dicer machine. This combination of teamwork and machinery peeled and shredded all 40kg in about four hours. This was followed by a fair amount of cleaning up, because little bits of onions somehow just went everywhere. Then we had to find somewhere to store 16 bags of onion slices for two days, whilst leaving space for about 400 sausages. My fridge and freezer may never recover from this little exercise…

The adventures with onions was just one part (but definitely the smelliest part) of the preparations. Other aspects included ensuring that the group’s public liability insurance was up to date and that the venue was booked – these things needed to be done well in advance. Then there was costing, sourcing and purchasing the onions (!), soft drinks, sausages, sauces, bread rolls, cleaning equipment, oil, serviettes and so forth at the best prices available. We also had to acquire 30kg of ice and a 135 litre esky (giant cooler box) to store the items that had to be kept below 5 degrees on the day of the ‘sizzle,’ specifically the onions(!) and the sausages. The hired esky may also never recover completely, despite the enthusiastic application of bleach after the event…

Next time round we’ll try to get some of these items donated, which would no doubt help our bottom line.

Only one the helpers on the day had had any prior involvement in running one of these events – and her input was invaluable. Nevertheless, there was a very steep learning curve for all of us. Fortunately we had a relatively short day of trading, since it was a holiday. This meant we could only set up to start selling by 11.30am and finished up at about 3.30pm. Generally the stalls run for twice that long, which would have been quite a stretch for our little team.

Next time round we’ll also try for some extra helpers so that we can work in shifts, rather than flat out for the whole day.

Things I learned along the way:
* Shopping wisely (like pre-ordering the bread rolls in bulk and keeping and eye out for special offers on soft drinks) can bump up the bottom line considerably
* You can NEVER have too many helpers
* Aprons are amusing
* Onions are smelly… really, really smelly… and the stench lingers in a house (my house!) for an awfully long time

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Confit d’Oignon, almost ready for bottling

On the up side, it turns out that Confit d’Oignon (French onion marmalade) is a cunning way of using up a LOT of leftover sliced onion – but it’s quite a lot of work and once it’s made it needs a home… I don’t need that much onion jam – so all offers of rehoming a bottle or more of onion jam will be considered.

After all the dust has settled we made about $650, which is an excellent start towards our fundraising goal of $4,000 for the year. We raise the funds in order to cover the venue hire and insurance for our annual convention (GenghisCon). If we didn’t do this, we’d have to bump up our membership prices (like every other local convention has) and we quite simply don’t want to go there.

So sausage sizzle #2 is booked for 21 November – put it in your diary now and come on down to support us 🙂

That’s what friends are for…

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Having watched The Jungle Book (again) this week, I now have an ear worm buzzing around in my brain.  With the strains of That’s what friends are for on internal auto-repeat, it’s not very surprising that I’ve been thinking about friendship – what it means, how we define it, how we live it.

So what ARE friends for?

I did a whole research project on this topic about a decade ago. It was (rather boldly, I now realise) titled Towards an understanding of the role of friendship in contemporary Western society. In about 20,000 words I examined comparative notions of friendship, from Aristotle forward. What I found, in essence, was that friends are broadly seen as being bound together by a combination of altruism, kindness and high levels of trust and support. After speaking to various people on the topic over the last couple of days, I would add that these relationships are based on trust, honesty, reciprocity and mutual understanding – usually between equals. Indeed, many people consider friendship to be the most meaningful of relationships.

Broadly speaking, it seems to me that choice, equality and mutual trust appear to have remained the foundation stones that encapsulate our notions of friendship as a whole. However, ideals such as these need to factor in the rapidly changing nature of our public and private interactions – and the constraints that these impose on us. Clinging to them if they don’t is, quite simply, setting ourselves and our relationships up for failure.

Friendship is complex and many-faceted. It doesn’t operate in isolation and there isn’t a set of formal rules that can outline how individual interactions can or should evolve, who one can be friends with or why.  This is simply because having such rules would limit the nature of what is an essentially fluid relationship. Perhaps the most, and the least, that can be said is that friendship is. It is part of our greater and ever changing social milieu, it is a source of support and comfort to individuals, and it is the one area where people feel that they should be able to be comfortable and relax with their peers.

These are relationships that clearly continue to be seen as providing levels of interaction not available from or in any other kind of relationship. A true friend is still seen as a treasure – something both to aspire to be and to have. With this in mind, perhaps it’s worth considering the words that Buzzie, Flaps, Ziggy and Dizzy (the vultures) sing to Mowgli and to come to our own understanding of what we think friends are for.

That’s What Friends are for.
From “The Jungle Book” Composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.

We’re your friends…
We’re your friends…
We’re your friends to the bitter end

When you’re alone…Who comes around
To pluck you up… When you are down
And when you’re outside, looking in… Who’s there to open the door?
That’s what friends are for!

Who’s always eager to extend… A friendly claw?
That’s what friends are for!

And when you’re lost in dire need… Who’s at your side at lightning speed?
We’re friends with every creature… Comin’ down the pike
In fact, we’ve never met an animal.. We didn’t like, didn’t like
That’s what friends are for!

So you can see… We’re friends in need
And friends in need…Are friends indeed
We’ll keep you safe… In the jungle for ever more
That’s what friends are for!

Finding the Faraway Tree

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This week a friend and I managed to find a last minute booking for what was described as a “quaint, rustic cottage” next to a lake in Bridgetown.  We jumped at the chance and headed off for a few days of sorely needed downtime at the end of a very busy term. The plan was to rest, but also do some writing, photography, drawing and (most importantly) chatting.

I’d been itching to try out my new camera since my birthday, so as soon as we were settled in our distinctly rustic abode I set out to walk around the lake and find something photo-worthy. I soon came across a derelict footbridge (snap), a rose arbour that had fallen into disrepair (no snap, too sad), a very orderly row of fairly young gum trees side by side with a lone fig tree (snap, snap), and a rather palatial kid’s cubby house (snap). All of these were interesting, but none of them stirred me more than superficially.

Then I saw it – a huge river red gum, standing head and shoulders above all the other trees. It was glorious and immediately evocative of a much loved childhood story. Indeed, the first thing sprang to mind as I gazed up at it was ‘It’s the Faraway Tree!’ I could easily imagine Moonface, Silky, the Saucepan Man, Dame Washalot and the rest of characters that paraded through my highly imaginative early childhood hiding somewhere in its branches.

Bridgetown Faraway Tree

Bridgetown Faraway Tree

Our host had placed a bench under the tree and from that vantage point I could gaze up at the enormous trunk as I reminisced. I remembered wishing that I had a tree with a slippery slide built into it so that I could whizz down on a tasselled cushion. What fun that would be!

I found I couldn’t quite stop myself from glancing up at the top of the tree as I thought about the lands that drifted across the top of the Faraway Tree, just in case… Like the storybook version, this is a tree that cries out to be climbed, for children to adventure into, for artists to photograph and paint, and for arboriculturists to conserve. It’s quite magnificent and the childhood memories that it stirred up made me smile each time I looked across the lake at it over the next few days.

Although I’d remembered the names of all the magical characters in the Faraway Tree books, my memory referenced the human characters generically as the children. Out of curiosity, I looked it up as soon as a Wifi connection was to hand and the second or third ‘hit’ I got was a link to the Enid Blyton Society. This provided me with a plethora of information on all things Blyton, including the names of the children in the series (Jo, Fanny, Bessie) and some examples of the lovely illustrations and cover art from the early print runs.

I spent ages pouring over the covers and jumping between examples of some of my favourite early reading matter. Much to my delight I found a listing for the Five Find-Outers Mystery Series. I read these books with alacrity at much the same time as the Faraway Tree series, but subsequently never found the books again. In the intervening years I’ve asked numerous people whether they’ve read them, but no one I know had even heard of the series. Most people went so far as to ask whether I meant the Famous Five, Adventurous Four or even the Secret Seven! So the sense of vindication was actually quite ridiculously strong and decidedly childlike when I discovered that the Finder-Outers and little Buster the dog really do exist in Blyton-land and that I hadn’t made them up.

The combination of the real and imagined trees, the photographs I took and the information and images on the website has been like catching glimpses of a kaleidoscope of my childhood, of a fragmented land that seems to move further away each year. It’s brought them closer together and has made me want to climb more trees and to hunt for adventures – or perhaps it was simply relaxing for a few days that did that.

From The Enchanted Wood, by Enid Blyton. Illustration by Dorothy M. Wheeler, taken from the first edition.

From The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, by Enid Blyton. Illustration by Joseph Abbey, taken from the first edition.

The eye of the beholder

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I was recently in a group of people asked to name the most unusual item in our respective kitchens (ingredient, implement, other – as long as it was a bit quirky). The tricky thing with this question is that I, like most others there, consider my own kitchen to be fairly ordinary. This is a room that’s been equipped to be functional and, in many cases, designed to be attractive. So coming up with ‘the most unusual item’ in amongst the mundane actually equates to figuring out which item someone else might plausibly consider unusual.

Bringing up a mental map of my kitchen and gazing around it, I was hard pressed to see anything out of the ordinary. The butcher’s block, crates, appliances – they all fit in and work in their context. Condiments and tins – perhaps far too many of each – have been stocked with some sort of goal in mind. Cutlery, crockery and so on have accumulated over time and, whilst they may not be my ideal Homes & Garden version of same, they serve their purpose. Certainly nothing unusual in any of those.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I have a small collection of teapots on the kitchen window ledge. I wondered if they counted as unusual? They’re fairly brightly coloured, but – when you come down to it – they’re just teapots. In the dishwasher I have a little clean/dirty sign, to let people know the status of the current load – but we think that’s pretty normal. Perhaps the handmade mosaic trivet on my bench top? hmm…

Then I remembered the yellow Tonka Toy lurking on top of the kitchen cupboards. It’s one of the classic road graders, a remnant of my son’s childhood. When he moved out, he made a pile of his Lego, Meccano, toy cars and so forth and asked me to donate them to a good cause. Most went to charity shops or friend’s children without a second thought, but the grader was harder for me to part with. I had (and have) so many fond memories of the roads we built with it in the sandpit and the games that followed.

But what does one do with a discarded toy truck or, indeed, any discarded – yet beloved – toy? In this instance I perched a pair of discarded dinosaurs on it (a diplodocus and a triceratops, I’m told) and there they’ve remained ever since, our watchful kitchen deities. They keep track of everyone and everything that happens in this crazy central space in our home, where people congregate and culinary experiments happen.

My dino-truck combo definitely counted as an unusual kitchen item in most people’s books on the day and, try as they might, no-one could trump it. Since then I’ve looked more closely at people’s kitchens when I visit, keeping an eye out for their version of quirky. To my surprise, most kitchens actually do contain at least one oddity – but the dino-truck still rules 🙂OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Musical Adventures

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We attended our first ever house concert this weekend – and what a joy it was! Mikaela and Stephen Castledine hosted a very enthusiastic crowd of over 50 people, who filled their house with laughter and song on Friday evening.

sparrow house concert

The draw card was Sparrow – a delightful progressive acoustic Celtic quartet. Supporting them was Darling, a local ten-piece all-girl acappella group.

So what exactly is a house concert? More than anything else it’s an opportunity to enjoy music in an intimate setting, usually in someone’s home or garden. It’s an informal and very sociable event, with most people being friends or acquaintances of the hosts.

For an event of this nature to work, there are any number of logistics to consider, ranging from the capacity of the house to the selection of musicians and what their fee might be. Then there’s whether or not to have a lead-in act, how to publicize the concert, how and where to sell tickets and the complicated juggling act involved in getting the crowd seated in time to start the music.

The Castledines managed all of this with panache. Although house concerts often don’t provide much in the way of sound systems, thanks to a family friend this one was completely plugged in. There was only one very brief power outage, but Sparrow had been warned that this might happen and simply carried on ‘un-plugged’ without breaking stride, much to the delight of all. Most people took along food/drink to share, which added to the sociability of the evening, as did the very generous catering and outgoing manner of the hosts.

Seeing just how much work they put into preparing for the concert, it would be easy to wonder why they would even consider hosting such an event. The answer was there on the night, however. The happiness quotient in the room was very high, both on the part of the (very interactive) audience and the musicians. It was a pleasure to listen to Darling, who will undoubtedly go on to greater things. Fiona Rea, Charlie McCarthy and Jon Edwards from Sparrow seemed delighted with the response that they received from the crowd. Apparently we (the audience) have lovely ‘fronts of heads’ – this from Fiona, who said that they often play in pubs and mostly to the backs of people’s heads, which are not nearly as responsive 🙂

I could blather on ad nauseum about the wonders of finding a bouzouki player in a Celtic band, about the extraordinary fiddle playing of Charlie McCarthy and the joy of Fiona’s vocals, but instead I’ll just say that I take my hat off to the hosts and the performers – and can’t wait for the next one!

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