Milestones.

Hello! Finally, I have emerged from the miasma of tax reporting....although not absolutely, as I still have one financial year to go.

Anyway, I managed to escape from my everyday reality for a day last week when I had a 12 hour leave pass to attend the festivities that were my mum's 70th birthday celebrations.....in Sydney. Never have I been so organised....school lunches were packed the night before, a cake for afternoon tea was pre baked and dinner was all ready to go.....I didn't want to freak the babysitter out with the usual after school hard yards. She might never come back.

I acquired 25 macaroons from Sweet Envy:

.....which I carried on the plane as hand luggage. I donned my sparkly French Antik Batik dress:

as dictated by my mum. I still do as I'm told. Last time I wore this dress it was summertime in Uzes.....mum was visiting and she very kindly babysat our children so that we could slope off on a dinner date to Bec a Vin. Memories. This wearing there was nothing summery about the weather in Hobart....it was the day where it snowed in our garden. So, even though I covered over most of the dress, by accessorising with a jacket and tights.....I still I attracted some v. strange looks at Hobart International Airport at 8am in the morning. You would think they'd never seen a sequin at that time of day before. The chap manning the metal detector complimented me on my dress and then asked me to take off....my shoes. Oh, the violation. I may have became a tad paranoid that people were looking at me and thinking that I was plying an ancient trade. If only they knew that I was a housewife with four children on a desperately needed jaunt to the big smoke.....to hang out at a party full of seventy year olds.

Now I know that this is a bizarre segue yet bare with me......prostitutes in the South of France, are a very common sight.....especially when you are driving along the B roads. Heavily dolled up in cliched attire, you regularly see them sitting on a chair by the side of the road, in broad daylight, waiting for business. I kid you not. There can be no denying their profession. We would flagrantly lie to our children when they asked what the lady sitting amongst the dust and litter in the middle of nowhere was doing.....waiting for.....a bus, we'd say.

Anyway, I made it to the party which was at the beautiful Victorian Italianate home of old family friends. Look how gorgeous their rambling old garden is:

Dare I admit, out loud, that I'm not such a fan of azaleas, yet I must say that planted, en masse, as they are here they really can be quite captivating. Maybe it's time to relax my azalea prejudice.

It was spooky being back at a house that had featured so prominently in my early childhood.....way back before my parents moved overseas and we landed in boarding school. On the plane, I worked out (using all of my fingers three times) that it has been a very long time since I visited last. It's funny what snippets you remember from when you were little. I remember vividly that the lady of the house (who has very eclectic taste) had just had a much lauded white bathroom installed.....complete with a ceramic zebra....this was circa 1977. The zebra is still in situ, I know because I saw it with my own eyes when I ducked off to the loo. It took me back. The same lady also had the baby teeth of her three boys, after they'd fallen out due to natural causes, mounted in gold and set on a bracelet. I distinctly remember thinking how unfair it was for the boys that their teeth weren't traded with the tooth fairy for coinage but rather became curious jewellery for their mum. Although, let me say, that now that I've had my own children I've toyed with stealing this idea for myself....yet I never followed through.

So I drank champagne with my mum on her 70th birthday. It was a wonderful day. Later in the week, it was the fifth anniversary of my dad's death. He didn't make it to seventy. We celebrated his 69th birthday with him while he was in hospital undergoing chemotherapy for leukaemia. On the anniversary, I took myself for a long walk along the beach. On the way back to the car I discovered a clump of wild freesias. I've never been able to stand the cloying, overpowering smell of freesias.....it also takes me back to my early childhood. Freesias used to grow wild in the cemetery where my paternal grandfather was buried and mum used to pick them and take them home where they'd fill the house with their scent. Freesias, for me, will always be associated with death....a memento mori. The other day, though, I picked them:

Their perfume was strangely comforting.

Rx

PS The winner of 'The Diary of a Provincial Lady' is....drumroll please....CMM! Congrats and a very big thank you to everybody who follows my blog! CMM, can you please email me and I'll get the book in the post.