It’s always illuminating to sup with the youngsters; Millennials, Gen Z’ers. At a recent dinner, the subject of the books The Queen’s Code and The King’s Code by Alison A. Armstrong surfaced.

In my generation we seemed to lurch from home into unsuitable pairings, often moving in with someone after a week (or was that just me?) Co-dependance seemed to me the only way to do relationship number one (or ten), until I woke up from the lust fever dream and didn’t recognise who I had become. What was I doing on a golf course driving range? Why wasn’t I at home reading a good book?

The young people are smarter, always looking to optimise. Perhaps tired of watching their parents make a royal hash of their relationships, these two young people at least had turned to the Queen’s Code and King’s Code books to learn about how to have an intimate relationship.

One of the premises of the book (because now I have binge-listened to the audiobook of The Queen’s Code ) is that women can become frog farmers, i.e. turn their princes into frogs. One of the ways they do this is by constantly criticising and nit-picking their partners. The source of this carping can be traced back to holding men to women’s standards. Mistaking men for hairy, misbehaving women instead of completely different types of creatures that they are.

Men focus on one thing. Women have diffuse awareness. Men never see the value in doing anything, such as taking out the rubbish. But a timely prompt (promt, not nag) from you can trigger them to put the garbage chore into their queue, and when it is the next indicated thing for them, it will be done. By telling a man what taking the rubbish out will provide for you, e.g. feeling supported, will give him motivation. Appreciating him doing the task completes the circle. Bye bye to nagging.

I’m not sure where I land on it all. None of what is discussed in the book covers violence against women. All the male protagonists are good men.

I think of #NotAllMenButAlwaysAMan. I recollect that back in 2002, in the weeks and months after surviving a home invasion and sexual assault, there were so many good men that were part of my healing. My partner, now my husband. The self-defence teacher. The acupuncturist. The lawyer friend. The entrepreneur friend who when we first met up after the assault asked me “what is the point of it all, if something like that can happen?”

And reading The Queen’s Code has been a nice holiday from the polarity of woman-good, man-bad. Plus, I’m keeping up with the young people.

November 11, Remembrance Day 2025. I’m at Perth airport on my way to Melbourne for a meeting. The incessant cacophony of plane announcements is interrupted just before 11am. A recorded voice breaks out with The Ode.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

The bugle refrain lasts long enough to tempt me to snicker at its cartoonish, slightly off-key quality, but then the minute’s silence falls. The uncanny quiet of the terminal grips me in the throat, the heart, the gut. All I can see is the image of my grandfather, Mum’s dad Geordie, at 17, in his World War One uniform. He’d lied about his age, succumbed to the relentless pressure and promise of adventure and had signed up for the slaughter of battle.

Wilfred George (Geordie) Mulligan

I grew up with this photo of Geordie. It fought for space with the jumble of framed ancestors Mum had coated every cluttered bookshelf, mantelpiece and wall space with. After six decades, this photo, among the vast avalanche of all the things that were emptied from Mum’s home, has ended up at my house to be part of my daily life.

His uniform portrait, full length. The puttees bandaging his calves. The coat flaring at the hips. His very handsome face underneath the slouched hat. He’ll be shipped from Sydney to Egypt and Gallipoli, wounded in August 1915 and returned to Australia to heal. And back again, this time to France. He’ll be wounded again in September 1917 but back on duty by April 1918, where he’ll be taken as a prisoner of war in German hands. He’ll be rescued, taken back to England by November 1918 but won’t be repatriated until April 1919. Too emaciated to ship back earlier.

‘I didn’t cry the first time I went away, but I sure cried the second,’ he was known to say. Every Anzac Day, every Remembrance Day, his memory inspires me to say, ‘Lest we forget the horrors of war.’

At the airport, my throat feels like I’ve swallowed a mint whole. My eyes sting with unshed tears, and my heart swells with the piercing melancholy of everything passing. This reaction to Remembrance Day catches me off guard, like I’ve glimpsed the double of a long-ago, long-dead lover in the street. As if the death of Mum one year ago has thrust me into the front line of mourning, of holding remembrance.

I never met Geordie. He died aged 65, nearly three years before I was born. He was a handsome child, ‘the nicest boy in Rivervale’ as he was known. He’d met Essie, my grandmother, while they were still at school.

When he was back in Perth in 1915, healing from his first war injury, he’d re-connected with Essie. When he went back to France, she gave him this photo to hold close during the next round of suffering.

Esther Florida Northey in 1916 in Perth

Yes, Geordie made it back after the war, but parts of the nicest boy in Rivervale were blasted clean for good.

And on this day in 2025, at the airport, this loss of Geordie’s essence gripped me with the raw freshness of a new grief, rather than a tragedy of more than a century ago. Do we have an Ode to crushed mental wellbeing? When the body survives to grind through the decades, battling the permanent chafe of the battlefield grit?

Lest we forget. Lest we forget the horror of war.

“Are you going to read all that?” the young waitress asked as she laid down my cappuccino in a mug in front of me with a flourish. And not a drop spilled. “That’s so impressive!”

I caught her accolade deftly, but I was hurtling along on the crest of the wave of How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 by Helen Garner. My Garner brick, I have been calling it. All 770 pages of it.

It was worth lugging it down to the cafe because I needed to hasten the end of her third marriage. It’s not suspense that carries me along. I know she has been free and happy for more than a quarter of a century. The way she has edited her diary entries takes me with her. I can see from her intimate account how easy it is to be entangled in a toxic relationship. To have been the frog who entered the sweet, tepid waters, about to be scalded alive.

I’m with her as she hangs on with the stubbornness of a partner who just wants their lying, cheating husband to tell the truth. With the pigheadedness of someone who doesn’t want to fail at marriage a third time. I just have to get to the end when she has finally, finally left him.

I pump my fist over and over in triumph at her delicious blue couch delivered to her, after she’s left, after she’s established herself in her independent accommodation.

Once the Garner brick is finished, more than two thirds polluted with mentions of the third husband, I’m onto reading reviews and articles. In this February 2026 Guardian interview, she comments on the third husband’s elliptical memoir, He, where she is despatched in just twelve lines. She found it funny. “I thought, OK, he put me in my place.”

And that’s why we love her.

While still in Denmark for my writing break last week, someone or something I can no longer recall directed my attention to Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End. Notes on a World of Change. The reviewer promised that it was a book of positivity in a relentless barrage of negativity that is this world we currently live in. I couldn’t resist this.

For some peculiar reason, I haven’t read any of Solnit’s other books. She is best known for generating the term “mansplaining” after the experience of having a man tell her about her 2003 biography and cultural history of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Some time ago I began to seek perspective on world events by dipping back into history, listening to podcasts on the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars and on and on. What we have survived is reassuring to me. This too, will pass.

Rebecca Solnit’s book brings me back into now, but from an eagle eyed view. The book’s ultimate message is that “these brutal politics are a backlash against the vision of interconnection.” (Chapter 6, The Disconnectors.)

The long list of accomplishments and progression relating to civil rights campaigned for and achieved, the appreciation of first nation’s land management practises are dwelled on. What we have achieved in terms of looking after our environment. Her hypnotic, kind voice points out that there are positive signs in our world, along with the brutal chaos. Everything is happening at once, so there is both regression and progression.

Am I doing this book justice? The immersive experience of listening to it was such a soul balm that I am struggling to articulate its impact clearly. There was even the joyous moment for me where she refers to one of my favourite novels Howard’s End and its epigraph, ‘Only Connect.’ I am so taken with this I’ve had tattooed on my right shoulder a couple of years ago.

So if you feel the need for an Easter reset, listening to the audiobook version of The Beginning Comes After the End may just be the thing.

I could be forgiven for thinking that Mercury retrograde had its claws in me. Only it finished a couple of days before I found myself on Monday in my very reliable car at my local shopping centre, everything packed for a self-guided writing retreat getaway. Well, almost everything. I was missing my very favourite fountain pen, which I could not locate. I had let that go. There was just one more errand until I could pick up my writing buddy and we could be on our way. It was a nearly five-hour drive, so I was keen to catch the early morning hours when I’m freshest.

With all my tasks ticked off, I slid into the car. It would not, would not move from Park to Drive. I tried all the things. Leaving it for a while. Turning it on and off. Walking home to pick up the other fob, just in case that worked.

Nothing.

I had to call for roadside assistance.

Normally, this would be a simple thing. But like many support services, you need to answer verbal prompts before actually joining the queue to speak to a humanoid.

But on this day, my voice, which had begun to fade into barks and croaks the day before, had completely disappeared. The cold that had started during the week before, that I had tried to de-create with positive thinking was not so easily dissuaded.

I tried to bark my address into the phone, but the bot was having trouble hearing my laryngitic voice. Was I doomed to be stuck on hold forever, just like the Scottish men stuck in the voice activated lift trying to get to level eleven? (Watch this if you have 3 mins. Too funny.)

Mustering up as much sound as I could, I stage whispered my details again into the phone. Finally I was put through to someone who could accommodate my hoarse whispering to get the information she needed. A maximum of two-hour wait was announced.

Watching the fresh morning slip away, I texted my travel companion to alert her to the delay.

I had just enough time to wonder morbidly if I should go on this long-anticipated retreat after all. Fretted about spreading my germs.

The roadside help mechanic couldn’t get my car out of Park either, and couldn’t determine what was causing the fault. He eventually over-rode it so I could at least drive the car home and get my regular mechanic to review it later that day.

By now it was lunchtime, and in desperation I messaged my husband to see if I could drive his car instead. He texted me back immediately with a yes. As I waited for him, I emptied the car of my luggage as best as I could with the roulette wheel of which door would decide to open when I clicked the fob. The boot was particularly cantankerous but eventually yielded. In between lugging my suitcases and endless bags to the porch, I pummelled the car and shouted at it. I was alone with no witnesses to my tantrum. Alas this also had no impact on the car.

Darling husband arrived home at the same time as my road-trip companion, and finally we were on the way.

The drive was eerily quiet. Our long-awaited opportunity to catch up and debrief was squandered in the silent journey, with me trying to whisper a pleasantry every now and again.

The sudden smiting of my power of speech reminded me of when I moved to Greece in 1996, knowing only the words for hello and goodbye. Not much of a boast, as they’re the same word. Conversation is a vital exchange, and its absence stripped me of power and independence.

As the youngest of six children, verbal repartee was how we manifested our sibling rivalry. Landing the wickedest pun at the highest volume in order to be heard over the din was everything. As a young adult, I clearly took these skills a little too far, and was known by my friends as Razor Tongue.

But despite the social vacuum in the car ride, we made it safely to our writing getaway, albeit many hours after we had hoped to arrive. My voice gradually returned after 48 hours, not the one to two weeks the interwebs had prognosticated.

Emboldened by this, I decided I would purchase a replacement for my very favourite fountain pen. Stick it to the cruel universe. I would feel the flow of my pen over paper during the writing retreat. The small town we were staying in had several shops, including stationery, but no fountain pens. A half-hour drive to a bigger town saw me scanning the aisles of a chain stationery store and snatching up a substitute pen in a snazzy blue colour.

Back at our Airbnb, I opened up the pen to assemble it and plunge into its tactile joyousness.

But. It was a ballpoint pen. A superior one. But not a fountain pen like my favourite.

Darling husband found my fountain pen, which will be there when I return later today. But why? Why?

Sometimes, the universe will have its bloody annoying way.

When The Observer article first dropped in July 2025, questioning the truth of the memoir The Salt Path, I was riveted. The article is entitled ‘The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.’

Let me summarise for you. The Salt Path author’s nom-de-plume is Raynor Winn. Her actual name is Sally Walker. Her memoir posits that she and her husband lost their home through no fault of their own, and then he was diagnosed with the hideous cortico-basal-degeneration disease - CBD. In the face of these two monumental setbacks, they took up their rucksacks and hiking boots and headed to the Salt Path - the South Downs Way - in the UK. He is miraculously cured by all that walking and they re-establish themselves financially and all is joy.

Two other spin-off books with the same narrative arc of man-is-sick-man-and-wife-walk-man-gets-better have since been published, and all have done well. Walker has been a cash cow for the publisher Penguin.

Enter The Observer article which revealed that Sally Walker had embezzled more than 64,000 pounds from her employer when she was bookkeeping at his real estate company in a sleepy little UK village. When her dodgy accounting was revealed, Sally Walker begged them not to press charges and repaid the money by drumming up a loan with heinously large interest payments, using her home as collateral. Over time the loan was called in, and that’s how she lost the house.

Doubts have also been cast on her husband’s CBD diagnosis which usually has a six-eight year prognosis. He is still alive and quite hearty more than thirteen years after his diagnosis.

Anyone, like myself, who attempts memoir understands that the whole truth can never be told. Only my version of events, through my idiosyncratic lenses and biases. But. As the quote from one of my favourite authors that begins this blog says, we as writers have to put down the bad and stupid things we do.

Like Wil Patterson did in his memoir Mr Ordinary Goes to Jail where he traces his gradually escalating financial pressure to provide the lifestyle his spouse wanted. And then there is the day when he sees a cheque cross his desk (he works in insurance) which is made out to his name. He banks it, panics and then - nothing. Nobody notices, and so bit by bit he steals cheques that are not made out to him. On and on it goes, but eventually he is caught and fully co-operates with the police. He also shares the experience of his three-year sentence and what he learned about the prison system. It’s a deeply human book. Maybe Sally Walker could have written that book, but instead she chose to write a novel in which she cast herself as innocent victim. And markets it as a memoir.

The journalist who broke the Salt Path story, Chloe Hadjimatheou, has recently done a seven-part podcast on the controversy, bringing yet more deceit to light. I binge-listened to it. Public service announcement - you have to sign up to the Observer podcast as a free trial to hear the last episode so you may as well sign up in the beginning and save yourself all those ads.

In case you don’t have the time required to listen to it all, I can share some nuggets:

• The affecting scene in the book and movie where the bailiffs knock on the door? Didn’t happen. They’d already long left.

• As well as embezzling from her employer, Sally Walker stole from her parents-in- law. And her mother. She has never faced criminal charges on any of her thefts.

I could go on and on. Penguin still lists The Salt Path as an unflinchingly honest memoir. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a literary heist on the public’s sympathy and kind hearts.

Here’s forever and always to the Garners of this world, the memoirists who tackle writing all the worst things about ourselves, honouring the integrity contract between author and reader.

So imagine my horror to find myself the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s

jokes about how to spot a Gen-Xer. It’s obvious because we use book-like phone covers, with actual credit cards stored in the fly leaf of the book-like cover, if you will. (See pink phone case above, now off to its new home on the Buy and Sell group.)

Some time ago I did put my digital credit cards in my iPhone wallet, but I found my fingers tripping and fumbling at the cash register when trying to tap and go. So I’d regressed back to using the actual credit card. Because they were sitting there, right in that age-defining, Gen-X pink phone case.

After watching Kitty’s skit, I looked around me, and sure enough, I could see a demarcation line between women my age who were keeping up with the techy trends, with just a phone cover on the back of the phone, and those book-phone nerds like myself who were falling behind.

This failure ate away at me. Onto my lengthy to-do list it went “purchase a new phone case asap.”

I started practicing my tap and go, and planned to get a new, clear phone cover. My magnificent yellow phone had been cloaked in a pink phone cover which both aged me and occluded the buttercup tones of my device. But I wasn’t completely stupid and vowed to get a screen cover so my exposed phone screen would survive the transition from the pink book.

“Would you like another screen cover on top of the one you’ve already got?” the man at one of those phone shops in the middle of the shopping centre aisle asked.

Doh. “Um, no thanks.”

“Would like plain or sparkly?”

“Sparkly. Definitely sparkly.”

So I’m back in the tech game for the next six seconds at least, no more the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s jokes.

Like many youngest children of large families, I read books when perhaps I was too young to fully comprehend them.

Wuthering Heights was one such book. I can’t count the number of times I read it as a teen, stumbling through the Yorkshire dialect and trying to visualise the dark, powerful moors and dysfunctional households. Bit by bit I made more sense of it the book.

I studied Literature in High School and still recall the long, ranty essay I wrote to refute the notion that Wuthering Heights as a book dies when Catherine does. With passion I asserted that the second half of the book was every bit as good as the first. “Your essay is as wild as the moors you are writing about,” was one comment from the teacher, but any criticism of Wuthering Heights at the time generated a vociferous, if incoherent defence.

I continued to re-read the book as I matured, and eventually formed the view that there’s something wild and unformed about Emily Brontë’s only published work that has adolescent appeal. That it is better to read it while still on the cusp of adulthood as I did, to appreciate it. Otherwise it may come off as shrill and histrionic.

All this to say, I enjoyed the 2026 “Wuthering Heights” movie adaptation as a creative riff on a classic work. For me it was satisfying to end the movie when Catherine died, and to utilise the lush possibilities of sets and costumes to consummate the desperately unhealthy connection between Catherine and Heathcliff. The movie passes beyond the worldly experience Emily Brontë had and weaves its way to modern times with the Yorkshire moors still as the star of the show. As they should be.

As least, that’s how I experienced it.

So now that I’m in Hobart, by default I must go to Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art. This phenomenon is the creation of David Walsh. From his spoils as a professional gambler he has created this glorious money pit of a gallery dedicated to art, drinking and music, in his home town of Hobart.

Going to Mona means you need a day to visit. Then a day to digest. What’s stayed with me today is this installation by Arcangelo Sassolino entitled ‘the paradoxical nature of life’. Metal legs, a glass top makes up the table. And a large rock has been carefully levered into place. The glass bows under the weight of the boulder.

What I took from this artwork is that the boulder is our awareness of our own mortality. The the glass table is death, which will have its way in the end. Everything passes.

This magnificent tension between awareness of our own mortality and courage to function day to day is what makes life magical, I believe. To paraphrase E.M. Forster from Howard’s End, we are better humans, day to day, if we remember that in the end, we all die.

But right now, the glass is holding. Right now, we’re alive.

At some point in my school life, possibly in primary school, I developed a writer’s bump on my right hand. As someone who can be spatially challenged, I have by now an almost unconscious habit of touching my right hand to orient myself in space.

Perhaps my writer’s bump was caused by a burst of conscientiousness when I studied with extra force. Or maybe it was just normal at that analogue time of teaching and testing when pen and paper was where it was at.

I had tried to learn typing in my first year of high school, but the nuns assured me ‘there are girls that do French and girls that type, and you are a girl that does French.’ However even my Dominican Nun high school had become sufficiently renaissance by 1980 to concede that perhaps there were girls that could do both. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, anyone?) Being able to touch type was the single most useful skill I learned at high school.

But in those analogue days, I do know that by the time I’d finished high school and completed every last sodding exam, my handwriting was unravelling to the point of illegibility. In Year Thirteen when worked in a bank to fill in time before I could start at university, I had to learn how to print neatly again. None of the data processors who viewed my handwritten account application forms could understand what on earth I’d written.

Instead of going into medicine where poor handwriting is a career-long phenomenon, I went into the arts and community services. But by then, everything was being digitised.

And yet. Handwriting has been my go-to since I started journalling at age 23, committing the horror that is our twenties to the page. Even in those days when I would often note how much I wanted a Word Processor (remember those?), there was a recognition of the magic of handwriting. The moment of sitting down, pen to page to this day generates a deep sense of peace. Perhaps it is the different parts of my brain coming together to create words on the page, rather than just tapping them out on a keyboard. (See NPR article for a synthesis of a research article on the topic.)

And if ever I’m creatively stuck, analogue writing always shifts me into a slipstream of delicious forward momentum. And while life is much simpler at 60 than it was at 23, my journal will always and ever be my constant companion.

But here I am, the afternoon is now fresh and bluff, and can still wind some of my thoughts into a spool of thread before the weekend is out.

Last week I mentioned my octopus issue - namely having so many things on it is hard to keep all eight legs in the boat. And this week I knew it was time to re-invoke the old acceptance of what is. One of the many remember, then forget, then remember wisdoms. I’m still painted into the corner of overdoing it, but accepting this immediately makes me feel better.

Also, I did my Vision Board prior to the Chinese New Year. So everything is going to be just fine. And if not, I’ll let it be as it is. Or something.

It’s definitely too early to be making such heady claims, but I think my smart watch has created the personality revolution that I hoped I was paying for. Sure, I may have jabbed inexpertly at the preferences and set my goals a little low. It tells me every day that I’ve closed my activity rings, often by 8.30am.

But there’s a special magic to me of having a dashboard of my lifestyle. What I eat and how much I move is now on a dial. I take a photo of whatever I’m eating, and before you can say algorithm, it’s analysed it with frightening accuracy down to the last micronutrient. My display shows calories in and out, like seeing how much petrol or windscreen wiper fluid I have left.

Sadly, this dashboard is only reflecting my physical behaviours. There are large swathes of self-sabotaging behaviours which are harder to measure, perhaps. Like trying to pack an octopus into a boat, no sooner do you get eighth recalcitrant leg into the boat when the first and second flop back out in rebellion.

Right now, my “over-doing” it legs are flailing around and paying as much heed as a dog at the beach pays to their owner. Lulled by the quietness of January, I’ve gone back to my compulsive “yeses” with the usual result of a diary that hypnotises me with its complexity. But I comfort myself with the impending Chinese New Year. I’ve got another chance to get all eight legs into the boat, if you will.

Last night I had the joy of attending a private musical evening with the sublime Alexia Parenzee singing. She will be touring more over 2026, so 10/10 I would recommend you sign up for updates on when and where and get along.

Before the music began, another gem was deposited in my ear by the host, Ecoburbia’s Shani Graham. She explained about weak ties and strong ties. Strong ties are our parents, partners, children, siblings. Weak ties are our local barista, the people in the dog park whose name you might not remember (known in your own mind as Banjo’s Mum), colleagues in a big office you might chat with at the water cooler.

While strong ties are important for wellbeing, even six or seven interactions with weak ties each day offers benefits equivalent to an hour of counselling, Shani said. There were audible gasps in the room.

While I couldn’t locate the exact paper that mentioned this, I discovered enough articles (like this one) about weak ties to bask in the sunshine of these findings today. This is why I spend my time volunteering in my neighbourhood to increase connection and community.

So I wanted to share this nugget with you, so next time we are schlepping through the supermarket and see someone we know and share a wave, a smile or even a chat, that’s a big tick for our mental health.

And now, as per last week’s blog, time for me to re-focus more on my writing goals and make sure my community volunteering isn’t yet another wily distraction from creative pursuits.

For those of you who have not yet jumped on the “New Year New You” bandwagon, one of my personal favourites, there’s still time. The Chinese New Year is not until 17 February. 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse, of which more later.

Right now we’re still in the year of the Wood Snake, which was my year of turning 60. In this time I’ve visited my grandfather’s birth place in Corballa, in County Sligo, Ireland and then his grave in Margaret River, Western Australia. A life’s beginning in one hemisphere and an ending 77 years later in another.

See image - top left I’m smiling madly into the camera with my grandfather’s humble birth shack in the background. I’m hoping my distant-ish (second cousin twice removed or something like that) doesn’t suddenly show up and make good on the many threats codified on the farm gate. They all underscore the message “stay away, also I have a gun.” (See short video below of Corballa gate)

The right hand image is my grandfather’s grave, with the not entirely true latin epithet that means “he has done all things well”. To be honest, he didn’t sound like the best of husbands and his parenting was patchy too. But, different times.

As I stood and looked at his grave, I spotted an actual snakeskin, tucked into one side of the grave. A sign from the patriarch? I took it as such. It was retrieved and photographed. Middle image.

And so to the year of the Fire Horse. Vogue magazine says “In simple terms, think: rapid change, fresh opportunities, personal growth, and a faster pace of life.”

Sign me up. Whatever we’re doing in 2026, it’s going to be a galloping year. Get out your planner, shake out the vision board and let’s go.

The in-joke each anniversary was like a nervous tick “X number of years and Never a Cross Word.” For their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2009, I immortalised this verbal tic into icing on a cake for them. (Top image, cake on right, Mum and Dad on the left.)

This celebration was less than a week before my wedding. Somehow I’d convinced Mum it was a great idea for my wedding to be held at their house. Dad needed no convincing and had spent months preparing the house for the wedding with his big energy. Their fiftieth wedding anniversary almost slid under the radar of the fuss of my wedding, during a week where Mum was always on the verge of a “why, oh why, oh why did I agree to host a wedding at my house?” meltdown.

The gap between the trope of fairytale wedding endings and reality is wide. Children have a ringside seat to the grinding reality of their parent’s marriage. Perhaps this is why we so enjoyed the tired “Never A Cross Word” joke. The chasm between the hope and experience could possibly be encapsulated by one of Mum’s quips a couple of years into her four-year widowhood. “I’m missing Dad so much I almost long for one of his homophobic rants.”

Dad died in 2020, Mum in 2024. January 2026 marked 67 years since they married as a mature couple (for that time, being 29 and 30 when they married was OLD.) They had chosen each other with the vulnerable hope of older adults and they made it work.

Feeling maudlin I slipped down to their graves with a bunch of flowers for their anniversary. Someone else had been to visit them, had left a small posy.(See small photo below Mum and Dad’s 50th anniversary pic).

This year was my 17th anniversary of getting married under Mum and Dad’s mulberry tree (bottom left, and there’s a wistful shot of me in 2024 looking up at the mulberry tree just before the sale of their house settled).

There have been cross words in those seventeen years. It took me at least fourteen years to work out that conflict in itself is not the problem. In fact, as the Gottman Institute for relationships and families states, 69% of conflict can never be resolved. It can only be managed. It’s how you repair afterwards, whether you feel closer or further away at the end of a conflict cycle that counts.

And that is perhaps the punch line. There will be cross words. And that’s OK.

Life has a way of flowing on, and flowing on, and here we are. Two years after your death, a retrospective exhibition of your work spearheaded by your son is on all until 26th January for those of us lucky enough to live in Perth.

There was an Opening Night crush. Of course there was. We lined up waiting for the door to open, the queue slowly growing outside Moore and Moores. Then we filed in to see your artwork.

Just past the reception desk there was a big white board where we were invited to write about what gave us joy.

I accepted the invitation and scrawled that writing, being creative, and loving people gave me joy. I cried a little. Walked about the exhibitions. Looked close at your pencil marks and brush strokes and images and words.

To see all your artwork in one room was overwhelming. And not just your works large and small, sketchbooks and drawings. Your old post box you painted, and the plants you nurtured in your East Fremantle garden. I felt you every where.

So many of the images are friends from calendars or prints or art classes or visits to your home. There were real-life friends from your courses, workshops and retreats, and we hugged and some of us cried. (Well, especially me.)

Today I went back in the quiet after Opening Night and before long I was crying again. At once so much artwork and not enough. Because you gave so much of your time to teaching people like me, and that cut into your time to create artworks.

Around 2012 I first went to one of your classes seeking permission to be creative. Actually, I thought I was signing up for an art class. Turns out, you were there to help me wriggle through the fence of self-doubt and learn to gallop through the endless paddock of creativity.

Dawnie, you always brought so much joy and fun to your classes. And your artworks are sublime. Thank you again. You were a one-off.

Just a note - the video is me reading this out - so listen or read as you choose.

Last week I tantalised with a picture of the contents from my 2025 memory jar; this week I thought I would write them out like pearls. Here goes.

• Flowers from darling husband for our 16th wedding anniversary

• Dinner with my daughter at Ode to Sirens - a new(ish) Greek restaurant in Fremantle

• Having a gorgeous time at Jackson’s 30th - good to see familiar faces (that was one I didn’t write)

• My writing breakthrough at Carmel, California

• Movie night with my daughter starting with wine and cheese. We saw A Complete Unknown.

• Susie’s birthday afternoon tea with the friends and cousins and sisters

• Dinner under our new gazebo with the fam (another one I didn’t write)

• Singing happy birthday to my nephew for his birthday party I hosted

• Red Tent Easter Sunday brunch with the Sisters - food, talk and ceremony. (darling husband was away for all the witchery)

• Sleepover with my daughter that night and re-doing the Easter Ritual together, writing our rebirth intentions and burning them in the caldron (yes, there really was a caldron)

• Yoga, poached egg and witchy Easter business with Mum (another one I didn’t write)

• Wagging the Digital Health Festival afternoon sessions to see the Van Gogh Lume and Virtual Reality show. Bliss.

• Kalgoorlie trip with darling husband in July

• Meeting Helen Garner in July

This is such an incomplete list of 2025 highlights. It cuts out before the August and September trip to Ireland, Italy, France and Greece, for example.

But still. It got me to thinking. Where does the Memory Jar concept come from, other than from Instagram? After a bit of AI slop I found this article which highlights how writing out and re-reading memories can make us happy.

I reckon I’m going to have another go at a Memory Jar in 2026. Aim for at least 52 memories, one a week.

I would be a liar if I said I didn’t like this time of year. The days between the years - between Christmas and New Year - are all about the goals. Reviewing the goals. Setting the goals. Talking about goals. And I’m all about the goals. Weekly goals. Monthly goals. And I love me a New Year’s Resolution.

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to deaden the blade of my ego-driven goal setting. Setting process goals (developing a writing practice) rather than outcome goals (finishing the damn book). Desire-based goals where I focus on how I want to feel and make sure I do more things that make me feel those feelings. Like a sexy process goal I suppose. But however I try and game my own tendencies, I’m wired to make goals. And vision boards. And crack open the new planner to dream up a whole new year’s worth of goals.

But first, there’s the navel gaze of 2025. Generally, I’m very happy with how I’ve shown up. The most important thing, finishing the damn manuscript has been achieved. Having two women to review goals each month has been just as transformative as my 2025 planner said it would be;

People with written goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than people without written goals. Telling a friend increases this rate to 78%.

MiGoals 2025 Diary, in the Goal Setting 101 section.

But even with all that stationery and motivation and monthly goal check-ins, that still leaves a 22% chance that goals won’t be achieved.

So there is one little ache as I finish up my 2025 navel gazing. I tried to set up a weekly jar of good moments. But something about this felt tender and vulnerable and perhaps a bit stoopid. Mostly my beloveds were not inclined to commit happy moments to the little square bits of paper I left next to the memory jar. I tried encouragement and maybe a little coercing in the first few months of the year but I gave up. So only a handful of weekly memories have been committed to paper, folded and put into the jug I left on the hearth. Looking through the few of them still gives me a warm, glowy feeling. Should I try it again in 2026?

2025 Good Moments

"I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been sporty," I found myself asking my very sporty husband recently.

Ours is a union of very different people. For me to have ended up with a sporty non-drinker is as unlikely as Trump deciding that perhaps he is not the expert in, well, anything. Yet here we are.

I’m not sure what prompted my sporty what-if question. Some possible influences;

1. I’m listening to Brene Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground. It has a lot of sports and coaching metaphors. I mean, a lot. If it’s important to Brene, it’s important to me.

2. My social media feed is full of images of the stretching exercises I need to do in order to finally achieve the suppleness I dream of. It’s all in the ankles, apparently.

3. Meanwhile, thirty years into a regular yoga practice without achieving the perfect forward bend, nose pressed to knees, I’m thinking maybe my run is just too late.

Hence my question.

A couple of years ago, my social media feed was full of knee stretches. I began to incorporate daily knee manoeuvres into my daily routine. As I was holidaying with others, we all began to embrace our heavily accented tutor as he took us through the sequences of exercises. But that didn’t last. I found an abandoned video on my desktop entitled “Chanje Legs” because that’s exactly how he pronounced it.

Whether the secret is knee stretches, or ankle stretches, is there just a cut-off point in your youth when if you are not sporty you lose the flexibility option forever?

Dodging sport in 1970s Perth was actually quite strenuous. Choosing not to play netball made me just as big a schoolyard freak as my lack of access to commercial TV shows. There was so much in the playground I couldn’t follow. Because our family culture was all about education and marks. While other families (like my husbands) went to the beach and surfed for hours, our most energetic workouts were mental. The marathon of mental dexterity we would subject ourselves to in order to come up with the best next line in the latest “sung to the tune of” song. You could hear our brains whirring with the effort to think of a rhyming lyric with the right amount of mockery. Or we might vie to be the first to have read the full works of Jane Austen, including Love and Freindship (sic) and Sandition.

“How do you think your life would have been different?” darling husband asked.

“Maybe I would be more flexible. And I would have been more confident.”

So many awkward 1980s and 1990s moments came from my almost total physical ineptitude and green inexperience. Trying to board a yacht and losing my footing, dropping a shoe in the Swan River. Feeling panic if someone asked me if I wanted a game of tennis. A decade living in Europe avoiding any kind of holiday invitation that might include skiing.

“I would have been more embodied, less in my head,” I continued.

But he’s moved on to other things, and I’m left to finish the thought for myself. So I decide to be grateful that I found yoga 30 years ago and be happy with my rickety knees and that even though I can’t always touch my toes, I can be more embodied in my third act in life. I can still do yoga every day.

As promised, I’m back on the planning horse for 2026. The year hasn’t even finished, there are still goals I’m hoping to achieve before New Year’s Eve rolls around, and already, the 2025 year’s post-mortem is racing down the track, leaving my quieter, introspective self choking in its dust.

It’s been a huge year. Carmel, California. Bali. Italy. France. Greece. And that was just the writing retreats. There was also and incredible, unforgettable Ireland family holiday.

There was also Mum’s first deathiversary (I was in Derry, Ireland that day) which was nowhere near as hard as Mum’s first birthday since she’s been gone. The death date is one I have to think about to recall it, whereas the birthday was a well-worn date in our family calendar and rituals. (Bleeping over her 1979 birthday when we were travelling in Europe, we were all sick and forgot. For the whole day.)

But back to goals. Aside from over-performing in my travel goals, my first inspection it looked like the only goals that I hadn’t achieved were those not in my control. Note to self: only include goals that I can carry out.

But on closer inspection, the healthy weight goal is within my control but hasn’t quite eventuated.

Well, there’s always next year. And a new planner. And new stickers. And. And And.