Is your nine-year-old at the waxing salon?

 When I was at primary school, the worst indignities you could suffer were bowl hair cuts inflicted on you by your mum, hand-knitted jumpers that were forced onto you for school camp and the horror of having your uniform flip over your head on the monkey bars.
 Fast-forward to 2011, and as my local newspaper reported recently, children as young as nine are being taken for waxing treatments and there is an increase in depression and anxiety and eating disorders in children as young as five in the playground. Now, aside from medical reasons that may make very hirsuite girls the subject of teasing, can there really be a need for a nine-year-old to have her legs waxed? I cannot think of a single reason.
 It is bad enough shaving your legs for the rest of your adult life, but to start before you have even hit puberty strikes me as dangerous on every level.  First there is the sexualisation concern. If a girl of nine is already worried about looking like a hair-free, grown-up woman, then surely that opens her up to an entire ream of potential evils. 
 Where does it stop? Make-up, padded underwear, early sexual experimentation and early comparisons with models in magazines? Can’t we just let them be kids?

My kitchen's rules.

 I have just eaten a bowl of microwave popcorn, possibly the greatest food invention of all time. How I love watching the bag swell up through the window as it goes pop-pop-pop all on its own. Ping! I like the sweet variety that comes complete with all kinds of cack that tastes delicious while you’re eating it, but leaves your mouth more than a little tainted. In fact, I feel as though someone has been raising battery chickens in mine.   Yet still, when I want a treat that’s naughty but not a complete disaster, it’s one of the things I reach for. This is because popcorn is one of the foods I have convinced myself is healthy. My thinking goes like this: how can something with so much fibre be bad for you? I have similar delusions about home-made cake. Shop cakes are bad. Full of colouring and flavouring, Trans fats and preservatives. But cakes I make are healthy.
 They have good eggs and good butter in them. Eggs are growing food, so I think a lovely cake containing four of them is good. I also think butter is good. It’s yellow and sunny-looking. It makes me think of milkmaids and happy cows in green fields and Heidi. It’s a happy food. Margarine is bad. Margarine makes me think of factories.
 Working on the same rationale, I am convinced of the healing power of home-made apple pie. This is a foodstuff that has the distinction of being the single worst thing you could eat on the Atkins diet. This made me determined to become a master of making it. Served with the good cream as well. Which is extra-thick double cream. The sort of cream you think of when you hear the phrase “peaches-and-cream complexion”.
 Cheese is good too. It’s a growing food. As is ham. Not slimy supermarket ham, but chunky butcher-cured ham. Proper salami is also good too. The more European-looking and smelly, the better. The fact that any salami I can buy clearly wasn’t made in my father’s cousin’s orchard in a smokehouse stoked with his own wood, but in a processing plant where it would have been well doused in nitrates seems not to figure in my food logic. I associate all smoked meat with vital European people who eat it for breakfast washed down with some terrifyingly strong moonshine liquor/vodka/grappa.
 Most ethnic foods have this healthy quality, and the more ethnic the better. Similarly while holidaying in any European country, white bread holds no fear. Generations of slender French children have been raised on a breakfast of hot chocolate and baguettes lavishly spread with butter and jam. In Italy it is cornetti (plain/cream/jam/chocolate croissant-type pastries) and cappuccinos for breakfast (mmmmmm…bliss!!), so if I’m in Paris or Italy that’s what I’m going to have for breakfast! All that lovely butter, so scented of fresh air and wild flowers. In France, even chocolate feels like a health food.
 I am fully aware that all of the above is deranged thinking. But the conclusion I’ve reached is that over the years, I’ve read so much contradictory crap about which foods are good for you or not, with the same ones moving back and forth between categories, that I might as well make up my own rules.

Show your true colours.

 According to paint spruiker Pantone, the colour for 2011 is honeysuckle. It hails the reddish pink as “a brave new colour for a brave new world”. Whereas last year’s turquoise served as “an escape”, honeysuckle “emboldens us to face everyday troubles with vitality and vigour”. Who writes this crap? And why do we need a colour of the year anyway? Can’t we choose our own? I’m betting Pantone had a squiz in its stockroom and figured it needed to shift a few units of red pigment.

 I’m all for directions in fashion, but homes are not fashion statements. You don’t take them off at the end of the day; they are your end of the day. Or, they used to be. Maybe I’m just miffed because we’ve repainted our kitchen light green, which is just, like, so 2010. But it’s also because homes are losing their character as we follow trends and stuff them full of plasma televisions, go-with-everything-beige and seascapes that owe nothing to a spot of beachcombing, but rather a trip to Jedo’s Beach House.

 Home porn is the fix of choice for many a Gen Xer, and I’m as beguiled as the next. But the increase in homewares stores has robbed us of our imagination. We no longer collect things lovingly over a lifetime. Instead, to steal a bit of interior decorator jargon, we ‘dress’ our homes as if to showcase them, rather than live in them.

 A friend and I laugh about these styling follies. I loathe bowls of limes – does the inhabitant really exist on a diet of margaritas? – and those signs spelling out ‘relax’ in jaunty cursive, usually positioned above the sort of gleaming kitchen in which no one has ever relaxed. Her pet hates? “Beds made with so many layers and cushions, it would be time to get back into it by the time you’d made it; shoes positioned as artwork; and council clean-up braggarts.”

 In the wake of the floods, I find myself looking at my home and wondering what really matters: a comfortable bed, certainly; enough plates to feed friends; and the morning light through the kitchen window. That’s it. Even my mother’s antique tea sets are just ‘things’.

 One of my neighbours organised a garage sale to raise funds for a flood appeal and, as I filled boxes of belongings to sell, it was sobering to see how little of what we own is either needed or precious.

 I don’t know how it feels to lose your home to a natural disaster, but I doubt anyone who has is thinking much about paint colours. But maybe the people from Pantone are on to something – whether or not you fancy a pink wall, honeysuckle is a gorgeously scented climber that grows vigorously and tolerates hardship. What’s more, it symbolises love.

Trivial matters.

 A couple of weeks ago I went to a family friend’s dinner party and when the host of the dinner party announced we’d be clearing the table to play an alcohol-fuelled game of 80’s Trivial Pursuit, I wasn’t overwhelmed with excitement. Nor was I underwhelmed. I was just...whelmed.
 I don’t consider myself a child of the 80’s. While I was alive to witness the decade in its entirety, I feel no allegiance to it. When I read in the local paper that my nearest over-28s nightspot is having a retro night, I don’t rush down with my proof of age. And when I hear that a radio station is having an 80’s weekend, I feel more than free to change that dial.
 Having said that, I don’t begrudge the 80’s worshippers their cultish celebrations. An all 90’s weekend on radio would be worse – double plays of Ace of Base and M’People going back to a time when you were nobody without a Fido Dido t-shirt and MC Hammer moves on the dance floor. My lack of enthusiasm towards the decade is less about music and fashion, and more about content. The 60’s had Woodstock, The Beatles, Martin Luther King, JFK, Bob Dylan and a man walking on the moon. The only time the 80’s came close to a moment of similar historical significance was when Billy Joel sang through that list in ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’.
 The game confirmed my theory. When you limit Trivial Pursuit subject matter to the years between 1979 and 1990, you tend to cover the same ground a few times. Statistically you could be forgiven for thinking Michael J. Fox was more important than Michelangelo, or that Michael Jackson’s moonwalk was as groundbreaking as Neil Armstrong’s. But putting my Gen-X cynicism aside, I did learn a few lessons from 80’s Trivial Pursuit that will prove invaluable, especially the next time we play.
 Firstly, when in doubt, the answer is probably Duran Duran. Which New Romantic group performed the hit song ‘Rio’? Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon fronted which chart-topping 80’s outfit? Duran Duran. Which 1982 war with Argentina claimed 258 British lives? Duran Duran. Sure, it isn’t always the right answer, but it’s right often enough to make the questioner stop bothering to check the card whenever you say it.

 Secondly, if the good people at Trivial Pursuit are to be believed, it’s a foolish person who underestimates the contribution Yahoo Serious made to Australian cinema. You’d be amazed how many questions have his name as the answer. I also learnt that in “The Slim Dusty Movie” the part of the older Slim Dusty is played by none other than Slim Dusty. That’s right. It’s possible for a question to have the name Slim Dusty in it twice and for the answer to still be Slim Dusty.

 This, really, is the story of the 80’s. In a decade when the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down and John Lennon was assassinated, what we remember is the bad hair and even worse music. When I was asked the question: “Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael formed which pop duo?” an opponent sang a Bros song to throw me off the scent. But I still answered Duran Duran, and I was right.