There are paragliders swooping past our veranda and surfers out there with wild eyes and broad freckled shoulders. Down on Noosa River there’ll be canoers and kayakers and sailboarders and others swinging around on catamarans. Fishermen will probably be finding a nice bit of whiting off the beach or in the river (at least that’s what I think I read in the local newspaper). Mackerel is running somewhere else, apparently.
I haven’t left the house all day.
Every year here, idleness takes hold of me. A good book, Vanity Fair, an afternoon nap, are so appealing.
But I’m the master of the “should”, so every year that idleness is stirred and disturbed and troubled by all the ideas of the things I should be doing. I should enroll in surfing school, I should inveigle Dad to take me out with the fishing rod he’s bought and never used and about which he knows as little as I, I should drag him to the golf course, I should go riding on the sands of Lake Weyba, I should do a diving refresher course, I should hike at dawn every day.
And the “shoulds” compound. I should cook X and Y and Z recipe. I should write X and Y and Z for the blog. I should work on the children’s story I’m writing. I should get out into Mum and Dad’s garden and try and tidy it up a bit. So instead, I wander, incapable of properly relaxing with the good book, Vanity Fair, or the afternoon nap. I do a bit of this and a bit of that. A bit of tidying after my messy family and the Vegemite-toast-wielding niece, a bit of chasing the niece around on the floor, a bit of catching up on newspapers, and almost nothing I really want to do. My guilt-ridden "should" problem might be personality-related. I also write lists when I’m on holidays.
I prefer though, to think that there are deeper, more insidious reasons why I can’t relax into “should”-free idleness. Something in my genetic makeup perhaps, passed down through generations of cussing women with washboard-hardened hands and aching backs. That old warhorse Germaine Greer set me on this train of thought. In a Guardian article published in May, she wrote:
“There are powerful historical reasons for women's imperviousness to the demands of leisure. The typical world citizen – who is still female, illiterate and an unpaid family worker – knows only too well that if she is ever to be seen with her hands in her lap, a job will be found for her. In traditional societies, the high days and holidays on which menfolk are permitted to straighten their backs and put on clean clothes are the days on which the women have to work the hardest, smartening up the house and putting together giant meals. It is not so long ago that on Sundays, while rest of the family frolicked, the woman of the house had to cook and serve a three-course Sunday lunch and clean up after it.
Many women these days would like nothing better than the chance to serve soup, roast and pudding to the assembled family once a week. If they don't do it any more, it is less because they rebelled against such hard labour on everybody else's day of rest than because nowadays there isn't anybody around to eat the food they cook. Everybody else is out doing leisure. Has the woman of the house grabbed a kitbag and followed their example? Apparently not. Women don't go fishing. Women do play golf, but not many and not much. Women don't buy sports equipment or season tickets. Women don't buy sports cars, boats, jetskis, trailbikes, guns, crossbows ... Women don't collect stamps, spot trains, buy music products.”
As ever, Greer’s view had its dissenters, including UK blogger Tim Worstall, who offered statistics to support his view that men and women have the same amount of leisure time. Maybe so, but the point Greer is making is about the way men and women use their leisure time. Right now, as I write, my Dad’s watching the cricket with a gin and tonic in hand, my brother is napping upstairs, my sister-in-law is washing the dishes and my mother has just finished baking the most divine little friands.
Orange and Poppyseed Friands
(makes about 30)
½ cup plain flour
1 ½ cups icing sugar, sifted
1 cup almond meal
1 ½ tbsp finely grated orange rind
1 tbsp poppy seeds
6 egg whites
180g butter, melted
Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Place the flour, icing sugar, almond meal, orange rind, poppy seeds, eggwhites and butter in a large bowl and stir to combine. Spoon the mixture into 30 lightly greased, 40ml capacity mini muffin tins. Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer inserted in a friand’s centre comes out clean.
