By Catherine Watson
Saturday October 17
Beth is taking her dogs for a walk in Tank Hill when she notices me on the verandah and stops for a chat. She’s just finished her first week back at work in six months. “Having to get up at 6am ... I’m not used to it. By Thursday we were all looking at one another saying ‘This is exhausting!’ By Friday night I could hardly think.”
As the days warm up, the bird bath is getting some serious traffic. It all happens so quickly. It's not till you try to photograph them that you get a glimpse of what's happening.
Saturday October 17
Beth is taking her dogs for a walk in Tank Hill when she notices me on the verandah and stops for a chat. She’s just finished her first week back at work in six months. “Having to get up at 6am ... I’m not used to it. By Thursday we were all looking at one another saying ‘This is exhausting!’ By Friday night I could hardly think.”
As the days warm up, the bird bath is getting some serious traffic. It all happens so quickly. It's not till you try to photograph them that you get a glimpse of what's happening.
Tuesday, October 20
Miriam calls in for a cuppa. She was running run lots of classes at the local recreation centre and is now down to just one session a week. She says she sometimes forgets she’s working. Now the gyms are reopening under strict conditions – classes will be held outside with limited numbers – and she’s having to get back into work mode. Not easy to refocus.
Monday October 19
A pair of wood ducks is roosting in a tree stump on the edge of Tank Hill, opposite my place. The kookaburras protested noisily for a few weeks then moved out in disgust. They’re now living on the other side of Tank Hill but return now and then to jeer at the ducks. A butcher bird is a regular visitor to my bird bath, announcing its arrival with that gorgeous trilling. S/he now has a young butcher bird in tow and is teaching it life skills, while the wattlebirds swoop and shriek at the youngster.
I open the door and the cat walks in with a baby rabbit. I scream, she drops the rabbit in shock (it was a present for me, after all) and it runs across the room and behind the extremely heavy filing cabinet. I manage to extract it and liberate it.
Wednesday October 21
An email from Margaret in the US, as COVID takes off again: “Everyone I know is feeling exhausted by Covid fears and the angst of isolation again. Several of our friends are single and we are all trying to figure out if we will let certain folks into our homes. Many are too afraid to do this. We have decided that we will do this with a limited number of people. I worry about my mother and altho we will continue to see her, we have to be mindful of who we see as a result.”
I ring Val in Inverloch. She says her electric scooter broke down in the middle of the road. She and it were transported home by a couple of kind tradies. Now it’s in pieces in a friend’s workshop and she’s confined to home. No more jaunts to the jetty to talk to the fishermen, no more visits to the kangaroos. “Never mind,” she says cheerfully. “I’ve got plenty to keep me amused here.” The grevillea at her front window attracts a procession of regular visitors, thanks to the seed bells she hangs. The regulars include four sorts of parrot – eastern rosella, crimson rosella, rainbow lorikeets and a new olive sort that she’s not sure of – butcher birds, doves, noisy miners. She even had a rat family (Mum or Dad with a baby rat on its back), coming for seeds, but she hasn’t seen them for a while and suspects one of the neighbours has poisoned them. A blue-tongue lizard is a regular visitor. One evening a big koala came and sat on the front porch. All this is an area of about three square metres in front of a flat in suburban Inverloch.
Thursday, October 22
Lunch at the Kilcunda café with the two local winners of the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction, Linda and Jeannie, and the sponsor Phyllis. It’s my first time "out" and I’m unsure of COVID etiquette. We wear our masks into the café, register with our names and contact numbers and then must sit until someone has verified our photo ID to prove we’re not city escapees. Then we’re allowed to take off our masks. We had an interesting discussion on creative freedom and concluded that it usually comes down to money!
Thank god, another scandal and nothing to do with COVID. Aussie Post chief Christine Holgate spent $12,000 on Cartier watches for four senior staff. She could have paid out half a million in bonuses (and did!) but hardly anyone noticed. But there’s something about those watches that we can almost smell. “The chief executive can either step aside or she can go!” Scott Morrison thunders in Parliament. Part of me wonder if he would do this to a man. Shades of the sports rorts, when Brigitte McKenzie took one for the team.
Friday, October 23
An email from Fiona, one of the entrants in the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction. “I want to express my appreciation for the decision to bring the competition forward in this year that has exhausted all my adjectives. I spent the first lockdown in Bass, but in this second, much longer haul I’ve been in Melbourne. The chance to mentally take myself to my ‘homeland’ when I couldn’t/can’t see my loved ones or landscape has brought solace and motivated me to write.”
Saturday, October 24
I don’t know if it’s a COVID thing but I’ve had a real good cleanout. I’ve unsubscribed from about 45 email lists and services that I don’t remember ever subscribing to, ranging from animal rights in NZ to wine clubs. They’ve all been very obliging with one exception: the Victorian Opposition. The emails keep arriving, three or four a day. “Now is the time for truth on hotel quarantine …”, “Labor leaves Victoria’s health workers exposed to COVID-19 …”, “Liberal Nationals establish Inquiry into Labor’s failed contact tracing system …” Yabber, yabber, yabber.
Sunday, October 25
An email from Sergeant Emad Alabbasi: “Hello, Hope I can trust you with the huge money I recently shared with my colleague during our peace keeping mission recently in an Oil reach area in Lybia. The sum of $13.5 million US Dollars is my share and already with the company that will bring it to you for us to share 50% for you and mine 50%. Kindly reply for me to tell you everything directly [[email protected]]. Thanks.”
Monday, October 26
Gardening for Valerie, who has recently entered the digital age, well into her 70s. I spend part of each fortnightly gardening session trying to navigate through her tablet, which usually involves closing about 50 pages she’s inadvertently opened to return to her home page. I tell her I charge $120 an hour plus an $80 callout fee for this service but she only laughs. She’s engaged in a rancorous email exchange with an old friend in London who refuses to take COVID seriously. “She’s got a closed mind,” Valerie snorts. She is bombarding her friend with statistics and facts about Sweden. Valerie was initially gung-ho about COVID but has become more cautious as the year rolls on.
Tuesday, October 27
The ute’s broken down. The auto lec has to make a house call. “The wiring’s cooked!” he says. He jump starts it and I drive down to the workshop with my bike in the back. Mask? Check! It’s only when I get on the bike to ride home that I realise I haven’t got a helmet. Since it’s illegal to bike without a helmet, but legal to remove your mask while you’re biking, I put my mask over my head as I bike through town to confuse the local constabulary.
Dinner with Gill and Liz, our first dinner together since May. Liz does the maths and reckons it’s an illegal gathering, which makes the occasion even more enjoyable. She's cooked an Indian feast from scratch, out of her old cookbooks, complete with home-made paneer and paratha. Sublime! Our assorted dogs lie under the table, snowing contentedly.
Wednesday, October 28
Liberation day for Melbourne. An email from Andrew: “Fitzroy is once more buzzing with café owners, restaurateurs and clothing store owners talking loudly as they heft furniture and boxes in and out. One good thing out of covid is it's got them talking to each other again and there's a sense of community; shared war experience, I suppose. No doubt I'll soon be wading through hordes of suburban tourists on the weekends again. I miss the tranquillity.”
Since Val has lost her electric scooter, we’re going for a drive. She asks if we can go to Tarwin Lower. It’s a warm sunny day, so we open the windows wide and enjoy the open road. Val says it's her first car trip since April when she visited the doctor. We start off in masks but it’s too hard to talk. Given a choice between wearing a mask and talking, it’s no contest. Tarwin Lower is pumping. It’s got a new supermarket and a café. We take our coffees and sit on the riverbank and Val tells me about her fishing trips with her father and how much they loved this spot. Her father was in a wheelchair. She’d wheel him down by the river and they’d sit and fish and talk until well after darkness fell. Beautiful memories.
A text from Amelia, who lives in the middle of the city: “Oh my, it was such a thrill to walk into Big W today. Soooooo many things we couldn’t do and now we can. It’s like being a kid in a candy store. I didn’t buy anything, just looked, and that was such a thrill. Super busy in the city today. It’s such a beautiful thing to witness.”
Thursday, October 30
Vilya is back from Upwey – her first visit to the family in four months. Her daughter Clare is back teaching at school, her son-in-law was suddenly resummoned to his restaurant job in the city, so Vilya was the emergency babysitter. Clem, aged two, clasped her round the leg and refused to let go. Esme, older and wiser at five, kept order in the household and forbade all other touching. She is well schooled in protocols at her kinder. Vilya returned exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure. “It was SOOOO good.”
A visit to the dentist, my first for three years. Painful in several senses. I ask the dentist, Rachel, how business is going. She tells me they were very quiet in March and April but it’s been exceptionally busy ever since. “I think because people had nowhere to go to. They thought at least they could still go to the dentist.”
The hot sultry day gives way to dark skies and stillness. Something’s brewing. I grab Matilda and head to Harmers. A couple of other people are there with their dogs and we are all spellbound by the colours of the sea and sky. Matilda and I climb to the top of a big dune and survey the scene. It’s perfectly calm, at least until Matilda spots a big fox loping along in the next gully. She plunges down the dune in pursuit. But she’s forgotten she’s on a lead and she drags me behind her, face first in the sand. We are both laughing.
Miriam calls in for a cuppa. She was running run lots of classes at the local recreation centre and is now down to just one session a week. She says she sometimes forgets she’s working. Now the gyms are reopening under strict conditions – classes will be held outside with limited numbers – and she’s having to get back into work mode. Not easy to refocus.
Monday October 19
A pair of wood ducks is roosting in a tree stump on the edge of Tank Hill, opposite my place. The kookaburras protested noisily for a few weeks then moved out in disgust. They’re now living on the other side of Tank Hill but return now and then to jeer at the ducks. A butcher bird is a regular visitor to my bird bath, announcing its arrival with that gorgeous trilling. S/he now has a young butcher bird in tow and is teaching it life skills, while the wattlebirds swoop and shriek at the youngster.
I open the door and the cat walks in with a baby rabbit. I scream, she drops the rabbit in shock (it was a present for me, after all) and it runs across the room and behind the extremely heavy filing cabinet. I manage to extract it and liberate it.
Wednesday October 21
An email from Margaret in the US, as COVID takes off again: “Everyone I know is feeling exhausted by Covid fears and the angst of isolation again. Several of our friends are single and we are all trying to figure out if we will let certain folks into our homes. Many are too afraid to do this. We have decided that we will do this with a limited number of people. I worry about my mother and altho we will continue to see her, we have to be mindful of who we see as a result.”
I ring Val in Inverloch. She says her electric scooter broke down in the middle of the road. She and it were transported home by a couple of kind tradies. Now it’s in pieces in a friend’s workshop and she’s confined to home. No more jaunts to the jetty to talk to the fishermen, no more visits to the kangaroos. “Never mind,” she says cheerfully. “I’ve got plenty to keep me amused here.” The grevillea at her front window attracts a procession of regular visitors, thanks to the seed bells she hangs. The regulars include four sorts of parrot – eastern rosella, crimson rosella, rainbow lorikeets and a new olive sort that she’s not sure of – butcher birds, doves, noisy miners. She even had a rat family (Mum or Dad with a baby rat on its back), coming for seeds, but she hasn’t seen them for a while and suspects one of the neighbours has poisoned them. A blue-tongue lizard is a regular visitor. One evening a big koala came and sat on the front porch. All this is an area of about three square metres in front of a flat in suburban Inverloch.
Thursday, October 22
Lunch at the Kilcunda café with the two local winners of the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction, Linda and Jeannie, and the sponsor Phyllis. It’s my first time "out" and I’m unsure of COVID etiquette. We wear our masks into the café, register with our names and contact numbers and then must sit until someone has verified our photo ID to prove we’re not city escapees. Then we’re allowed to take off our masks. We had an interesting discussion on creative freedom and concluded that it usually comes down to money!
Thank god, another scandal and nothing to do with COVID. Aussie Post chief Christine Holgate spent $12,000 on Cartier watches for four senior staff. She could have paid out half a million in bonuses (and did!) but hardly anyone noticed. But there’s something about those watches that we can almost smell. “The chief executive can either step aside or she can go!” Scott Morrison thunders in Parliament. Part of me wonder if he would do this to a man. Shades of the sports rorts, when Brigitte McKenzie took one for the team.
Friday, October 23
An email from Fiona, one of the entrants in the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction. “I want to express my appreciation for the decision to bring the competition forward in this year that has exhausted all my adjectives. I spent the first lockdown in Bass, but in this second, much longer haul I’ve been in Melbourne. The chance to mentally take myself to my ‘homeland’ when I couldn’t/can’t see my loved ones or landscape has brought solace and motivated me to write.”
Saturday, October 24
I don’t know if it’s a COVID thing but I’ve had a real good cleanout. I’ve unsubscribed from about 45 email lists and services that I don’t remember ever subscribing to, ranging from animal rights in NZ to wine clubs. They’ve all been very obliging with one exception: the Victorian Opposition. The emails keep arriving, three or four a day. “Now is the time for truth on hotel quarantine …”, “Labor leaves Victoria’s health workers exposed to COVID-19 …”, “Liberal Nationals establish Inquiry into Labor’s failed contact tracing system …” Yabber, yabber, yabber.
Sunday, October 25
An email from Sergeant Emad Alabbasi: “Hello, Hope I can trust you with the huge money I recently shared with my colleague during our peace keeping mission recently in an Oil reach area in Lybia. The sum of $13.5 million US Dollars is my share and already with the company that will bring it to you for us to share 50% for you and mine 50%. Kindly reply for me to tell you everything directly [[email protected]]. Thanks.”
Monday, October 26
Gardening for Valerie, who has recently entered the digital age, well into her 70s. I spend part of each fortnightly gardening session trying to navigate through her tablet, which usually involves closing about 50 pages she’s inadvertently opened to return to her home page. I tell her I charge $120 an hour plus an $80 callout fee for this service but she only laughs. She’s engaged in a rancorous email exchange with an old friend in London who refuses to take COVID seriously. “She’s got a closed mind,” Valerie snorts. She is bombarding her friend with statistics and facts about Sweden. Valerie was initially gung-ho about COVID but has become more cautious as the year rolls on.
Tuesday, October 27
The ute’s broken down. The auto lec has to make a house call. “The wiring’s cooked!” he says. He jump starts it and I drive down to the workshop with my bike in the back. Mask? Check! It’s only when I get on the bike to ride home that I realise I haven’t got a helmet. Since it’s illegal to bike without a helmet, but legal to remove your mask while you’re biking, I put my mask over my head as I bike through town to confuse the local constabulary.
Dinner with Gill and Liz, our first dinner together since May. Liz does the maths and reckons it’s an illegal gathering, which makes the occasion even more enjoyable. She's cooked an Indian feast from scratch, out of her old cookbooks, complete with home-made paneer and paratha. Sublime! Our assorted dogs lie under the table, snowing contentedly.
Wednesday, October 28
Liberation day for Melbourne. An email from Andrew: “Fitzroy is once more buzzing with café owners, restaurateurs and clothing store owners talking loudly as they heft furniture and boxes in and out. One good thing out of covid is it's got them talking to each other again and there's a sense of community; shared war experience, I suppose. No doubt I'll soon be wading through hordes of suburban tourists on the weekends again. I miss the tranquillity.”
Since Val has lost her electric scooter, we’re going for a drive. She asks if we can go to Tarwin Lower. It’s a warm sunny day, so we open the windows wide and enjoy the open road. Val says it's her first car trip since April when she visited the doctor. We start off in masks but it’s too hard to talk. Given a choice between wearing a mask and talking, it’s no contest. Tarwin Lower is pumping. It’s got a new supermarket and a café. We take our coffees and sit on the riverbank and Val tells me about her fishing trips with her father and how much they loved this spot. Her father was in a wheelchair. She’d wheel him down by the river and they’d sit and fish and talk until well after darkness fell. Beautiful memories.
A text from Amelia, who lives in the middle of the city: “Oh my, it was such a thrill to walk into Big W today. Soooooo many things we couldn’t do and now we can. It’s like being a kid in a candy store. I didn’t buy anything, just looked, and that was such a thrill. Super busy in the city today. It’s such a beautiful thing to witness.”
Thursday, October 30
Vilya is back from Upwey – her first visit to the family in four months. Her daughter Clare is back teaching at school, her son-in-law was suddenly resummoned to his restaurant job in the city, so Vilya was the emergency babysitter. Clem, aged two, clasped her round the leg and refused to let go. Esme, older and wiser at five, kept order in the household and forbade all other touching. She is well schooled in protocols at her kinder. Vilya returned exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure. “It was SOOOO good.”
A visit to the dentist, my first for three years. Painful in several senses. I ask the dentist, Rachel, how business is going. She tells me they were very quiet in March and April but it’s been exceptionally busy ever since. “I think because people had nowhere to go to. They thought at least they could still go to the dentist.”
The hot sultry day gives way to dark skies and stillness. Something’s brewing. I grab Matilda and head to Harmers. A couple of other people are there with their dogs and we are all spellbound by the colours of the sea and sky. Matilda and I climb to the top of a big dune and survey the scene. It’s perfectly calm, at least until Matilda spots a big fox loping along in the next gully. She plunges down the dune in pursuit. But she’s forgotten she’s on a lead and she drags me behind her, face first in the sand. We are both laughing.
