The agonisings of an unrequited love

Dear Mavis Blue,

I am so sorry. I thought we'd be together for a very long time. In fact, I thought at one point that I might grow old with you. But life has a funny way of taking unexpected turns, and mine will soon take me a long way away from you. And you, being so set in your ways, cannot follow.

There are still so many things I would have liked to do with you: install a rainwater tank, more plantings in your garden, polishing all your floorboards afresh, replacing your remaining original ceilings, doing more about the Wet Season drainage. And there are things about you, too, that scare me: the eventual yet inevitable restumping and the re-laying of your concrete slab, what to do with the enormous Cuban Royal palm in the garden that all the neighbours want cut down but that I love like a crazy person.

In the end I choose my husband over you, as I choose him over all other things in my life. Within that choice though, I must decide whether I keep some connection with you, stringing you along, kidding us both that we may one day be reunited, or that I cut that string, freeing you up to meet someone new who will love you and care for you as I will not be able to do from the other side of the world.

Of all the ties I cut, yours will be the hardest - I am a Cancerian through and through. But it must be done, and for that I am sorry.  

I will miss you.
Beverley


This week I have been in a housework frenzy. I have a co-worker house-sitting for me while I go away next month and the tentative start to the Wet Season has seen blossoms of mould bursting forth on the ceilings, walls and architraves of my 75 year-old Queenslander like so many rose buds in spring. It's a Tropics thing, we get used to it. Kind of. I've been up close and personal with the interior with bleach, spray bottle and bucket in hand, making things nice for visitors again, and while I've been labouring I've had time to contemplate just what exactly I am going to do with this house when I move to Canada sometime later this year.

I've owned this home for a little over four years. It is my first foray into real estate. Buying my own home was something I had wanted for years, almost a decade. I was so proud of my achievement when I bought her, and also crazy shit-scared! I bought her in 2008 when the magnitude of the GFC was just beginning to become apparent here. The previous owner only had her as an investment property and just wanted to get rid of her quickly so he could buy something else. I joked at the time that I stole a house, I had paid much less than was common at that time. Unfortunately, Cairns real estate not only stagnated, its value has gone backwards over the last few years. Agents make valiant claims of a comeback soon, but I know in my heart that if I sold her now I would only get about the amount she was valued at in late 2010 and I have spent $14,000 on a new bathroom since.

I also know I am never coming back to Cairns. Even when (if?) I return to Australia, I will not be coming back here. I will be heading down south, closer to my family and most of my friends. My dilemma, obviously, is whether to keep the house or sell her. While a couple of friends have their hand up to move in, I couldn't charge in rent the full amount of my weekly mortgage repayments. That in itself is scary since I don't know when I will start working once I get to Canada. But even now, when I live with her and love her on a daily basis, there are times when I find myself petulantly resenting the sacrifices I have to make to service my mortgage. Some days it feels like entrapment. When I crunch the numbers, as I am doing with increasing frequency, all maths points to selling and accepting actually making a loss when I consider how much I have spent on renovations and mortgage repayments. Further losses may result otherwise. There are only two things that count against that: the gambler's eternal optimism that the market will improve in the next few years, and total, unmitigated sentiment. The trouble is, I love this house. Oops!

My stepmother, always a beacon of rationality in any financial storm, once sagely counselled: "Never fall in love with your house." So, Reason, where are you? I need you on this one. But Mavis Blue just has her charms, and few seem immune to them. She feels like a holiday house. Every day. She is private, and breezy, has pretty light, and French doors, and just the right amount of charmingly flaking paint (if you are into that sort of thing). And she is the most magnificent shade of blue. It is immediately calming. Every time I think of selling her I feel a wrenching in my heart.

Charles and I will sit down together while I am in Montréal and run the sums again and talk about what is and isn't possible. From 16,000km away it will be easier to make a rational decision.

I should have listened to my stepmother.

Buh.Nah.Naaas!

Yesterday I tackled a garden maintenance job that you only get in the Tropics: I had to cut down a banana tree. Don't freak out non-Tropics dwellers, that's just what you have to do. Bananas grow and spread via suckers, so just like their common tropical garden cousins, heliconias, you are doing them a favour by effectively 'dead-heading' them when they have developed their fruit. The 'tree' can then put its energy into putting up a new trunk, rather than continuing to support a bunch of green fruit that isn't going to get any bigger.

Bananas are so easy to chop down even I can do it with my dicky back. A relatively sharp pruning saw just cuts through the fibrous trunk like the proverbial butter. I'm getting to be such an old hand at it I managed to do it today without getting any of the impossibly sticky sap on my new dress, which I foolishly wore just for the occasion. I think I might have let this bunch go a bit too long, though. There are lots of little tell-tale brown spots and pin holes in the fruit that indicate that the bugs have got into them. But that's ok, there's a second trunk ready to chop down next weekend.

I don't know why I postpone chopping down bananas so much. Maybe it is that disgusting sap, or maybe it's because they are the chief privacy screen between me and my neighbour. But there are just so many great things to do with bananas once you've chopped them down, I'm always surprised I left it so long once I've done it. I now have recipes for using the fruit, leaf, bell (or 'flower'), and the trunk, so I thought I'd share some with you.

The most simple thing is of course to eat your delicious banana (after it has taken about three to five weeks to ripen, depending on the time of year) and feel proud as Punch that you grew it yourself. Yeeeah! Then you can get a bit fancy and use the leaves to wrap whole or fillets of fish in, and barbecue, grill or bake them. Pop some Asian herbs in with the fish, along with a splash of coconut milk, fish sauce and/or soy sauce. The trick is to soften the leaves first, either by blanching them in boiling water, or by passing them over the flame of a gas burner on the stove. This stops them splitting when you try to wrap the fish. Secure the banana leaf with a toothpick and away you go.

My hands down favourite way to eat bananas, though, is banana cake. In a former life, when I owned a café in Adelaide, I used to make banana bread, toast it and serve it with ricotta and honey. Pretty good, right? But maybe a bit passé these days ... Then a few years ago my friend Jess gave me a CWA cookbook (the Country Women's Association—an obsession I may share with you one day. I've linked to the Queensland chapter because their site has more info than the national one) and it had a banana cake recipe that, with a bit of tweaking, has become one of my all time favourite cakes. Because my home grown bananas are little Lady Fingers or Sugar bananas, or some such thing—at any rate not the usual large Cavendish variety you get in the supermarket—I slice extra bananas up lengthwise and decorate the top of the cake with them and then crumble palm sugar over the lot. Bah.Nah.Naaas!

CWA-inspired Banana Cake

250g butter, softened

¾ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ cups self-raising flour (or 1 ½ cups plain flour + 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

½ teaspoon salt

3 large bananas, or 9 small bananas, cut in chunks (mash if you don’t have electric beaters)

250-300g sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 large or 6 small bananas, extra for decoration

1 handful dark palm sugar, or brown sugar

Preheat oven to 180˚C. Grease and line a 24cm diameter cake tin. Cream butter and sugar with electric beaters. Add eggs one at a time. Sift flour, bicarb and salt together. Add flour mixture, bananas, sour cream, vanilla and cinnamon to the butter mixture and mix well until bananas are dispersed right through. Pour into cake tin and arrange sliced extra bananas decoratively on top—I do a little flower pattern, aaaw! Sprinkle palm sugar evenly over the top and bake for 40 mins or until firm to touch.

Original recipe from: Country Women's Association of Australia, Country Classics, 2nd edn, Penguin Group (Australia), Camberwell, Victoria, 2007, p. 142

My other hot-favourite banana recipe is Luke Nguyen's Banana Trunk and Chicken Curry. Obviously, banana trunk is not that easy to come by if you don't happen to have handy access to banana trees, but if you do, then definitely give this a go. I'm going to trial freezing the sliced up trunk this time (I might quickly blanch it first), as I have no plans to invite a small army around to eat a spicy jungle curry this week. I found my taste needed to add a squeeze of lime and a little bit of palm sugar at the end, but see how you go, you may also want to add a bit more banana trunk—you will have rather a lot of it. If you are in Australia, the following link also has a short video of Luke preparing the dish in a very ambient setting (clearly I should invest in some pigs to help me deal with the excess trunks). Luke is very charming and unpretentious as TV chefs go, so it's well worth watching. Unfortunately, I doubt the video link will work outside of Australia, but you can still get the recipe: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/lukesmekong/recipes/detail/recipe/13878

And then, of course, there's the bell. To be honest though, I just never get around to doing anything with this other than photographing it. Lame! I do want to try this though: Barramundi with Banana Bell, Hmong Style
One day ...
Enjoy!

Introducing Rosé Club

The First Rule of Rosé Club is that you will sheepishly admit that that is a club to which you should belong.

The Second Rule of Rosé Club is that you will be as effective and insidious as the Church of $cientology in recruiting new members, and you will recognise a fellow rosé-loving sister with immediate induction.

The Third Rule of Rosé Club is that you will celebrate the existence of the prettiest wine there is by partaking in cheeky, relaxed, sunny-afternoon tipple sessions in good company and accompanied by high-quality tasty treats.


It's no secret: I love rosé. Dry ones only though, no lolly water for me! There is little I like more in this world than sitting around a table in dappled shade on a warm afternoon with dear friends, several bottles of rosé, some yummy snacks (savoury or sweet will do in this case) and then solving the world's problems. Fortunately, many of my closest girlfriends feel the same way.

This afternoon though, I settled in for an afternoon of blog writing and popped the cork - yes, cork - on a new-to-me rosé. After a couple of random recommendations I had finally purchased a bottle of Casal Mendes (Portugal), replacing my regular staple of Banrock Station White Shiraz (recently discovered to also come in casks - saints preserve me!) Not only is the CM refreshingly savoury, it is ever so slightly spritzy, it comes in a very delightful bottle, it is a very reasonable price point, and it is the prettiest colour you could wish for. Of course I had to photograph it straight away. I think I now have a new staple.

Dude! That was, like ... whoa!

Sometimes things really are all they are cracked up to be ...

Some items on my personal list of such things are the miracle of birth, Uluru and the Roman Forum. This morning I added another one: a total eclipse of the sun.

This morning at around 6:39am we had a total eclipse of the sun here in Cairns. As the photographic evidence shows, my camera equipment is not quite up to the task of documenting such an event, but please indulge me. Being the build up to the Wet Season, it was also really cloudy here in Cairns itself. Apparently it was clear about 60kms south and on the northern beaches, about 20kms away. While I could, in theory, see the sun from my front deck, I was pretty convinced I was going to miss the actual moment of totality due to the cloud cover. The quality of light, however, was just incredible. If it is possible for grey to glow, it did this morning. I went and stood out by the creek in the middle of the street and I had the whole eerie place to myself.

As it got darker and darker in the minutes before totality, the street lights started to come on and a few neighbours finally wandered out. Then, click, the sun went out, but also at that moment it popped out from behind the clouds. Totality was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And, just like when I first saw Uluru, I was awestruck and, in response to all I've ever seen or heard of it, could only manage to think the words: It is true!

It takes about an hour from the time the moon first touches on the edge of the sun to totality, then about another hour until it has fully passed off it. As luck would have it, about 10 minutes after totality the clouds had thinned significantly as the morning warmed and the sun had also risen above the thickest part of them. I was able to watch the remaining 50 minutes or so as the moon passed off the face of the sun through my flimsy yet surprisingly effective special eclipse viewing glasses ($5 to $6 a pop this week for something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned pair of 3D viewing glasses). I almost think it was better with the cloud cover, either way was just as remarkable.

If you ever get the chance to see this phenomenon, even if you have to travel a way, go!

 

All the world's a stage

Westcourt Street Theatre announces Summer Season
Review by Beverley Mitchell

With the departure of former co-artistic directors Drug Dealing Granny and Her Drug F#%ked Son in February of this year, the Far North Queensland arts community has been wondering who could possibly take over the helm at Westcourt Street Theatre after such directional stewardship.

Last week the company finally answered that question with the launch of its Summer Season 2012-13 program.

With the bold move of an unconventional performance time of 6:30am Monday, the season launched with what at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill production of the classic work Who Can Yell F#%k Off The Loudest. The three man cast was capable, though not ground-breaking, despite fine support from a small female chorus. Then, five minutes in, the magic happened. Without warning, newcomer to the company Partied A Bit Too Hard Over The Weekend scaled a creek-side paperbark and wedged himself high in a fork of the tree, flatly refusing to come down and asserting the new Absurdist direction the company has chosen to take. In a stellar ensemble performance the rest of the cast implored him to come down until interrupted by a commuter vehicle attempting to pass by. On cue, the ensemble slipped off stage leaving the actor alone in the tree, arms flailing weakly, calling out hoarsely. Not since last year's guest appearance by Female Domestic Violence Perpetrator Across The Road, with her masterful rendition of You're F#%kin' Useless, Darren ... Wait, Where Are You Going? (sob), has an actor managed to so perfectly capture the pathos and solitary existentialism of the individual in the midst of the hubbub of modern life. A true star is born.

With such a promising start to the performance program the residents of Westcourt are no doubt eagerly looking forward to the Build Up and the Festive Season, as they warmly welcome their home grown talent back to the stage after eight months of touring and rehearsals.

Westcourt Street Theatre, Boland St, Westcourt, QLD
Tickets: Free, no bookings taken

***

Seriously folks, I am not making this stuff up. What I have come to affectionately call Westcourt Street Theatre is a highly amusing (if somewhat sleep depriving during the late shows) feature of living in my dear ole' suburb of Westcourt, Cairns. I have seen or heard some world-class performances, covering the whole range of heightened human emotion, sometimes artificially enhanced, sometimes not. I have laughed my head off, made notes of the time of incident, and called the police - sometimes all in the course of the one performance. Mostly I have just heard the word 'f#%k' a lot.