Letter From The Other Side by Cynthia
Written By Elizabeth. M. Thompson.

Dear Del,
It feels as if winter has arrived. The heaters are going and the logs in the fireplace are spitting sparks as the westerly gales puff smoke down our badly designed chimney.
I think we shall be putting in one of those fitted fireplaces that are sealed during next summer to protect our sinuses which were affected so badly during the 2002 bushfires.
It is snowing in the hills. I can only imagine how it looks and smile at the memory of the way the King Parrots visiting our garden used to take it in turns to break the ice on our bird baths each morning.
I visited Aunt Alice and Uncle Rodger this morning and their little rooms were so hot I felt like an onion peeling its layers away. I must have looked quite slim after removing all my thick coats and jackets.
Uncle Rodger is busy running the footy tipping as usual and as ever there are disputes about who has paid and who hasn’t. He keeps on everyone’s tails like a bank’s mortgage department until they pay up their few cents each week.
Aunt Alice is still cross with him over the spilled varnish but can’t help looking at her new walls and furniture with some smug satisfaction.
Her mother’s silverware remains a bone of contention as the stain damaged the surface and although it has been polished, the marks are still visible.
One of the reasons I went to see them was to take a new ribbon for Uncle Rodger’s ancient typewriter. He has been badgering me to buy one for him for weeks and wonders why I’m having so much trouble locating it. I suppose at his age it is hard to grasp the idea that something which was in general use all his working life is now obsolete.
Do you realize how hard they are to buy these days? Eventually after weeks of scouring op-shops and all sorts of mixed businesses and newsagents, I went on-line and found a complete typewriter, of the same brand and 3 new ribbons for less than the shops wanted me to pay for the ordering of the ribbons alone. Uncle Rodger is very conscious of costs and I didn’t want to have to pay too much.
I felt extremely pleased with the purchase and rather proud to have found such a bargain.
He obviously didn’t have any idea of how far I had walked and how many hours were spent doing this little thing for him because he surveyed the package of typewriter and ribbons, grimaced and said. ‘I just wanted black ribbons not red and black. I’ll never use the red. That’s a waste! Besides, what will I do with two typewriters?’
I left shortly afterwards feeling a little, …well no that’s untrue,….. feeling very angry and ill used and grumpy with the world.
I had become quite fond of the small blue Olivetti as it reminded me of the first portable typewriter I had used as a cadet journalist. So I paid Uncle Rodger the money for the typewriter and after tucking it cosily into its case, stalked out.
On my original green machine, I had tentatively typed my first newspaper paragraphs which for the first few weeks consisted mainly of weather reports and short pieces about the births of babies produced by women who were deemed to be more important that the ordinary women who produced their children without any public photos and write-ups. From there I progressed to descriptions of the local Country Women’s Association’s doings which ranged from mind numbingly boring to expertly organised events and displays as well as enormous help during times of natural disasters. Weddings were also on my list of duties and to this day find I can’t work up any enthusiasm for looking at wedding photos.
Because I was a clergyman’s daughter and had lived much of my life incarcerated in a boarding school intent on teaching us to be well mannered ladies and to make us suitable marriage bait for the sons of wealthy men,( I proved an utter failure there), I was deemed to be the ideal reporter to send along to cover any religious events happening in the town. This was a mistake on the part of the editor, who at the time I considered the scariest man I had ever met, because being an Archdeacon’s daughter I had a few first hand insights into the behind the scenes lives of the local clergy and hierarchy and much of it was not attractive. In fact I had grown up with a jaundiced view of the odd, in every sense of the word, Bishop or two. It became a lesson in objectivity and the art of holding my tongue.
Eventually I progressed to accompanying the court reporter. My boarding school upbringing and my complete ignorance of the real world, especially the grimmer sides of life, resulting with me sitting open mouthed in amazement as I listened to the salacious details of the private lives of person on trials. The chain smoking senior reporter, who felt herself unfortunate to be saddled with this quite useless recruit, kept leaning across and hissing with her tobacco laden breath to ‘shut your mouth you dope’.
My education rapidly high-jumped a steep learning curve during that time and eventually I came out of my trance and remembered to write down some of what I was listening to.
No, I had decided as I reminisced while I drove away from Uncle Rodger and Aunt Alice, I would keep the little typewriter. It must have enjoyed an interesting history because it had been so well looked after.
As I drove along I noticed the car in front had one of those yellow Baby-On-Board signs dangling and flopping about in front of the rear window. I started to wonder what the point of such a sign is. Does it mean that a driver suddenly being overcome by the urge to become involved in an accident and unable to wait to go home and have their accident in the privacy of their own home, should avoid the car with the Baby-On-Board sign and crash into the car with the man with three children and an elderly mother to support instead?
That set me thinking about more signs we could dangle in front of other drivers to irritate them. How about Teenagers On Board, Free To Good Home; or Mother-in-Law On Board, Aim for Left Rear Seat.; or Grumpy Granny On Board, So Back Off; and another that would really get their attention. Deaf Passenger On Board with Blind Driver, Both Over 70..
I really get fed up with the conglomeration of signs in the city and suburbs. We are so busy looking out for signs, it is easy to forget to watch out for cars, pedestrians and cyclists (who emerge around the same time as blow flies during the early spring.)
Teddy is a cyclist so I have to keep that opinion to myself, or try to.
I have to admit country councils also put up ridiculous notices for people who suffer from an intelligence deficiency
A highway near us had about one hundred kilometres of thick bush-land and trees either side of the road. Some of the trees were old growth eucalypts which towered into the sky and had massive girths.
Sitting tucked amongst this forest, just to the left of the road was a small yellow sign which said for those who drive blindly Trees On Side Of Road. If someone else hadn’t beaten me to it, I would have eventually written the same, they wrote underneath No Kidding?
Newspaper headlines are another irritant under my skin. Our local paper couldn’t fit in the headline they wanted last week so instead they put. No Pig Flu Here.
Evidently we can’t even have the option of suffering swine fever which for some reason I can’t explain, sounds a little more dignified than pig flu.
I stopped buying the glossy magazines about two decades ago when the heads of the companies must have employed a statistician. This person who exists in my imagination only, must have been a failure at his chosen career as he came up with the number for the average I.Q of their readership to be below 90, and reduced the breadth of magazines vocabularies to about the same number of words. Of course if he had ever existed, he would be now saying he was right. I suppose that is called a self fulfilling prophesy.
The glossies do of course have a number of words they seem to consider eye catching to their chosen readership. These seem to be sex, divorce, latest, split, glamorous and the inevitable celebrity! Celebrity usually covers anyone who has been in court with a drug problem, on T.V for five minutes or in the case of many young women and the occasional older ones, who should know better, have appeared almost naked at some function only casino owners, television personalities (there’s another one) and sports stars can afford to attend.
I’m sure if they went through an epiphany of some kind and began printing happier and more positive family and community related stories, the affect would be immediate on the mind set of their readers and the ripple affect would pass through our societies.
Television advertisements yelling at us with voiceovers which speak so quickly it just becomes a blur of ranting noise is another bane of our lives.
The spelling of signs and advertisements above businesses and shops leave me grinding my teeth and wanting to front the owners to ask them how they expect teachers to teach children how to spell when all around them words are misspelled and butchered.
English speaking countries all have their own individual grammar, spelling, pronunciation and accent.
Each of course, knows they are right and everyone else is wrong.
We in Australia scoff at the New Zealanders who scoff at us and we both scoff at the Americans who scoff at the Canadians, who are far too well mannered to scoff at anyone except in the privacy of their own homes. Sorry South Africa we scoff at you too, I’m not sure who you scoff at but by the manner in which you play cricket, I’m betting it is us.
When we all meet we experience great difficulty in understanding one another, although we all smirk because we know the English know they are right even though they have stolen many of their words from the rest of Europe. England, the mother of our language is the smallest of the countries but seems to have more dialects and accents within their shores than any other English speaking country…these folk, in turn have difficulty understand each other!
It really is a miracle the written version of English was ever agreed upon.
In Teddy’s family for instance, his mother’s accent is east London, his father’s
is southern Irish, his brother and sister’s are south east England but both are different and Teddy sounds as if he has just stepped off the set of a 1960’s BBC Noel Coward play.
They all lived in the same house for years and to an outsider, it’s amazing!
In Australia I’m from Victoria and the only way I can pick a Queenslander who lives two thousand miles away is he will call a suitcase a ‘port’ and sometimes for no apparent reason put the word ‘but’ on the end of a sentence.
Western Australians who live three thousand miles away don’t appear to have anything I can ever pick from their language that singles them out from Victorians.
I put it down in part to the way we all think nothing of driving a few hundred miles or so to holiday, visit friends and family or live. We are a very mobile population.
Real Estate agents have a minimal number of words which they use, STUNNING is a favourite. In fact some weeks there are so many stunning homes to visit that if you went to view more than a couple in a day you would be living in a daze for weeks afterward.
Never trust the word magnificent either as the young man writing the advertisement has usually been admiring the outdoor barbeque area and owner’s daughter lying seductively on the chaise by the pool, rather than the bathrooms, kitchens and the amount of cupboard space.
As a sometimes writer of articles for the overseas market, I find the U.K editors far more forgiving of our language differences than the U.S editors and I also find the overlap of the U.K sense of humour matches our own sense of irony and the ridiculous. For the U.S market, I have to sometimes explain it, which really takes the laugh and spontaneity out of the humour rendering it flat. Leaving the writer feeling a failure and wondering what I actually did see funny in it in the first place as well. Humour is a very difficult think to grasp. It’s like trying to hold a shadow. You see it or you don’t.
I can see Teddy standing gazing into space at nothing in particular. It is a habit which once worried me but I’ve learned his body can’t function when his brain is turning around at an enormous speed. He has been painting the facias of the house and I worry about him getting up so high but it seems he came down via the ladder and not in any painful way. He has started rocking on his heels so the wheels in his mind must be really whirring. I sense an idea for an invention being spawned.
I shall step down from my high horse Del and go and make us some lunch.
Did I tell you we are having a new kitchen fitted? Some of the quotes would have almost cleared the national debt.
I have a feeling it may be one of those renovations which are great when they are finished. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any other sort.
Love from your ‘flower child friend’
Cynthia.