Now, by being bored I don’t mean that you’re sitting in a chair like a stuffed toy with half your stuffing removed, wondering why you even exist. Someone else can help you out with days like that!

When I say Bored, I mean times when our brains are just still. There’s no information coming in. There’s no sound, no screens, no talking.

Just you and your brain.

When was the last time you allowed yourself to experience that?

Notice I said allowed yourself.

Because these days, you really have to choose to be bored.

From the moment we wake up until our eyes close again at the end of the day, there are so many stupid things demanding our attention and distracting us from boredom.

Emails. Text messages. Missed calls. The algorithm. Social media. News headlines. Your fitness app. Your heart-health app. Your puzzle-a-day app. A new podcast to listen to. Funny videos to watch. A new movie trailer drops. Reminder pings. Appointment notifications. All before you even leave the house.

So many people are overwhelmed with the firehose gush of information they’re trying to absorb every day. The human brain wasn’t designed to be overloaded with this much crap information. It was designed to think of one thing, have a break, then think about this other thing. Not try and handle twenty channels of mostly unnecessary noise that the world deems that you have to listen AND WATCH RIGHT NOW!!

I realise the irony here. I’m writing this blog to you on an app, and tomorrow morning (or whenever it lands in your inbox) you’ll be prompted to read it. And I think that’s okay. It’s when we’re subscribed to multiple blogs, multiple social media apps, getting hourly news updates, being reminded from FB that today it’s the birthday of someone we no longer even speak to, and then to top it off - just a few spam emails/texts/calls from your best friend in Nigeria who needs $6k real quick.

It’s no wonder we’re buckling under it all.

It’s no wonder we’re not coping with life.

It’s no wonder we’re raising a generation who are almost shunning other humans. It’s all too much.

But what to do?

We can’t just throw our phones in the river - as much as we sometimes feel like that would be the PERFECT answer, and can almost hear that delectable splash as the stupid thing sinks beneath the water.

Technology has improved our lives immeasurably. Wherever we are, we can call for help, we can stay in touch with the people we love, and we can be entertained.

But it’s a double-edged sword.

With that ability to be able to be in touch with others, we get all the other nonsense bursting through the gates like a heard of demented goats, ready to eat up our precious time.

The dopamine hits we get from watching reels, the brain-numbing soothing of a mindless scroll, the feeling of importance we get when Special Deal emails arrive like little bent sunbeams in our inbox - it’s all fake.

As fake as trying to get warmth from a photo of the sun.

Can I ask you to try something this week? Or even tomorrow? Or even this afternoon, if you’ve got time.

Try putting your phone down and walking outside.

It’s okay. Your phone won’t vaporise.

Hey look, there’s a tree - are there any birds in the branches? Is it sunny outside? Rainy? Can you sit down somewhere? On a chair? A rock? The grass?

Sit there for ten minutes. No, don’t run back inside to get your phone and set the timer. If you have a Smart Watch, take it off and leave it inside, too.

Just be alone, outside, with no interruptions.

You might feel a bit of panic that you don’t have your phone with you, and that’s okay. It’s inside, safe. You’re outside, learning to be a human again.

Because this is the environment we were created to live in. Trees, grass, animals, birds, clouds, rain, and yes - spiders and crickets (so many of those little guys at the moment!!)

We are not digital beings, we are human beings, and human beings need to be humans, just as our name suggests. Is it human to sit in a dark room and watch hours of brain-sapping nonsense? Of course not!

It saddens me whenever I catch public transport, and almost every single person is staring at their phones. People stare at them when they’re walking around. They even put them in their prams and get their toddlers addicted to them for goodness sake.

And we wonder why we feel alone in a room full of people. Because a lot of us have forgotten how to start a conversation, or we’ve actually got nothing to say because we just watched some stupid viral video of someone trying to ride their bike on the ceiling. (I don’t know if that’s a thing - I thankfully am not interested in reels)

People! Put the blessed things down and look up! Check out the wonders of Creation! Let your mind empty of all the clutter and the noise, and Be Still.

Be still long enough that your mind is blank. You’re not thinking about messaging someone. You’re not wondering what Trumpty Dumpty’s latest incoherent rant is about. You actually don’t care.

You can feel the grass beneath your fingers. You can hear the pigeons cooing in the rafters. You might even be able to hear a dog barking in the distance. A breeze caresses your cheek. The sun sneaks out from behind a cloud, feel its warmth. See the flowers nod in the gentle breeze.

Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you drew those flowers? It doesn’t matter if you’ve never drawn anything other than a Stickman before, have a go. Get lost in looking at the delicate petals, the way bees come along and collect the pollen on their legs like thick, yellow socks.

Maybe you might write a line or two of something vaguely resembling poetry? Or the flowers remind you of that time you went somewhere with that special person, and you spend some time thinking about them.

This, my friend, is Inspiration.

Inspiration comes to us when we let it in. It’s a bit like a really interesting friend who’s waiting to share something with us, if only we’d stop and listen.

This week, will you try and get bored? Stop all the running around, trying to do fifty things at once, whilst simultaneously listening to podcasts on How To Get More Out Of Your Day.

Get bored.

Allow yourself the freedom of being answerable to no one - even if it’s just for ten minutes. I guarantee you’ll want to make it last a little longer. Let your brain re-set. Let your shoulders relax. Take a deep breath. Maybe even close your eyes. Stop the nonsense.

Get Bored.

Be Human.

Get amongst real things.

That is all.

Off you go!

Maggie x

Before I start on this week’s scribblings, I just wanted to say a big Thank You to all of you who commented on my post from last week. So many of you commented on the post itself, and a couple of you sent me private messages. To have your support when I’m trying to wrap my head around Big Life Stuff is invaluable and immensely encouraging.

However, this week I’m happy to say that I’m on a slightly more positive note, and am going to write the post I meant to write last week.

Dogs, eh?

Are you a doggy person?

Or are you a cat person?

If you’re a cat person, you might find this week’s post a little dull, but the words herein may be transferable to our feline friends as well, so persevere!

Whilst all the legal shenanigans are whirling in the ether above me (or wherever that stuff happens) I am eagerly looking for a home.

I do have a temporary home, I’m renting a little one-bedroom unit which I’ve managed to make very welcoming and very Maggie :-)

To have gone from living in a house, to living separated in that house, to living in a shed/granny flat on a 150acre property, to house-sitting for friends and having dear friends let me stay when I was ‘between gigs’ so to speak, to successfully apply for and get this little rental was great.

But, it is renting; money down the tubes, paying off someone else’s mortgage, yaddah yaddah. It’s a necessary step on my path to freedom.

I’m praying for the day when I will live in my own home, with my own stuff, my own décor, and if the size of the house and yard allows, my own dog.

I’ve always had a dog, and thought I might share a little about them all (there’s only 3, this is not going to go on forever).

First up, when I was about twelve years old, I desperately wanted a dog, a Labrador to be exact. I mean, what’s not to love with those big honest eyes, their goofy smiles, and their absolute loyalty.

So my parents saw an add in the paper for a family who were giving away their dog, because they’d bought it for the kids, and the kids never walked it or played with it or really had anything to do with it {poor dog}. I distinctly remember going to their house one Saturday morning to look at this dog, and the kids were all crying.

Not a good start!

But then the German parents opened the sliding back door and called out ‘YOGI!’ (sounded like ‘Doggy!’ and I thought - oh, they haven’t even given the poor thing a name yet…) and in lolloped this black and white bringer of joy -

-who ran straight up to me and began licking me like I was a long-lost friend. We instantly knew she belonged in our family. We took her to our local park and let her run around, and noticed that one of her back legs kind of skipped out to the side as she ran, so she was re-named Skip. The other family had called her Yogi after the goofy bear because she had big feet. Of course she grew into them very quickly, and seemed a lot more content to be called Skip.

She was the most intelligent dog you might ever have met. When we took her for walks, we carried the lead but she wasn’t attached. A car would come down the road and you’d say, ‘Skip! Cars!’ and she’d trot along behind us until the coast was clear.

One day my Mum and I took her for a walk, and she casually sauntered behind a huge shrub growing on a block of land. After repeated calls, she just wouldn’t answer, so we went to see what she was doing. There she was, happy as a pig in muck, rolling for all she was worth in some rotting fish carcasses (we lived near the sea then). Needless to say we went straight home and washed her.

She enjoyed licking soap bars. Loved to eat bean (singular) on toast. She adored having a bath in the wheelbarrow, and would lay there marinating in the bubbles for a good ten minutes after we’d finished washing her. She had a dodgy ear that would flip up when she had an inquisitive look on her face. We took her to Melbourne with us one year, when we drove there (from Adelaide) and she slept happily in the back seat, guarding our stuff.

She lived to the ripe old age of 14. By then she was mostly deaf, half blind, a bit incontinent, and her favourite pastime was sleeping. When she died I was inconsolable. Skip was my first dog, she’d seen me through my teenage years, been my companion when I broke my leg and was home for 10 weeks, and when I lived in England, Mum & Dad used to send ‘letters’ from her, with a stamp of her paw at the end.

She was buried in our backyard in Goolwa, and as her namesake suggested, she was a ‘friend ever true’ 1

Some years passed, I’d been married for a couple of years, and wanted to ‘practice’ having kids. How do you do that? You get a dog. Right? Because dogs and babies are …. nothing alike! But I think everyone does it.

Enter Charly-

We bought Charly from someone - again a newspaper advertisement - when we lived in Wagga Wagga, NSW for a brief time. He was only a couple of months old, and was the Lab I had longed for for most of my life. He was the original Good Boy, had eyes the colour of chocolate, and a tail that could clear a coffee table in two seconds.

He moved with us to Nowra, and was with us when our boys were little dudes who enjoyed being the same size at the dog. He loved walks, jumping in particularly muddy puddles, snoring very loudly, and would do absolutely anything for a treat. He loved car trips, especially if water was involved, and especially the sea. He had a very deep, important bark, but if anyone had tried to break in, I’m sure he would have rolled over for a tummy scratch. When he pooped (yes, I’m going there) he used to spin around, as if centrifugal force would help the waste be emitted from his body. In short, he was hilarious.

He was only seven when he had complete renal failure, something irreversible and fatal. We took turns to say goodbye to him, then I drove everyone home and went back to the vet while he administered the death needle. God I wept. Sobbed. He was such a good boy and he did not deserve to live such a short life. His wet nose and inquisitive nature were such a central piece of our family, that when he was gone, it left a large hole. The empty dog kennel was like the empty portion of my heart where Charly used to be.

As one does when one is grieving, one says, ‘I’ll never get another dog - it’s too hard to say goodbye.’

A few years later, at the Nowra Pet Shop, we met this little bundle of joy -

This little ball of black fluff was only about nine weeks old when we saw her and her siblings in the pet shop. I picked her up, and she lay across my arm, her tail wagging happily against me, as she burrowed her gorgeous face into mine.

I was instantly smitten.

This little lady became known as Gypsy, and she was such a joy. She had the softest fur which grew thick like sheep wool, so we had to ‘shear’ her a couple of times a year. Fun! (Not).

Like all my other dogs, she was always up for a walk, especially in the bushland near the two houses we lived in (at opposite sides of the country). We’d let her off the lead to scamper at will, but a click of the lead and she’d be back instantly. She thought it was hilarious to roll in the grass and come back to us covered in grass seeds and whatever else, then shake it all off once she was as close to us as possible.

Sticks. OMG, did she love chewing sticks.

Sometimes my sons and I used to lay on deck chairs out on the grass and look at the stars of an evening, and she’d be there, snuffling in our ears, whining a bit, as if to say, ‘what the heck are you lot doing, sitting here looking up? Get me a treat?’

She was incredibly intuitive. If any of us went outside to ‘be alone’ because, you know - Life - she would come and sit next to us and just lean gently, as if to say, I’m here. She saw our boys through their stressful upper high school exams, and their university exams, when they’d go outside to decompress. Gypsy was always ready to accept a tummy scratch, or a little tug-of-war on her toy rope. One of our early neighbours in the Perth Hills had a dog which constantly barked, All The Time. Gypsy would ‘mooffle’ in complaint, as if mumbling to herself about the noise.

Unlike her two predecessors, she was NOT a good traveller. The few times we did take her out with us in the car, she pant-bark-screamed as if we were kidnapping her against her will. When we moved to WA from NSW, she was flown over by Jet Pets, and I can only imagine the hullaballoo she would have created for all involved.

As all older dogs seem to, dear Gypsy started going blind and would run into things, and had rather selective deafness. Call her to take one of her very important heart tablets - nothing. Call her for a walk, or rattle the packet of Dentastix - and she’d there immediately, her little cataract eyes full of glee.

She was a ratbag until the end, doing her best to cheer us up, even when her entire system was shutting down and she started having seizures in 2022.

My sons and I raced her to the vet for an emergency appointment early one morning, but it was just all too late. They dosed her up so she wasn’t in any pain, but could apparently hear us, and in the cold, stainless steel surgery, we three said incredibly difficult goodbyes.

When we got home, my heart completely broke, and I wailed like I’d lost my child. I had my own baking business at this point, and was unable to take the day off, so baked through my tears, sobbing anew every time I looked at the back door, expecting to see her little woolly face.

Getting over Gypsy’s passing took me a long time. Little things upset me. The first time we sat outside to eat lunch, I looked for her, she wasn’t there, and I burst into tears. The first time we went out and came back again, I looked for her happy wagging body, and it wasn’t there, and I wept.

My (now) ex told me to get over it, that I was taking too long, and I think somehow that made it worse. I’d been working from home for four years by then, and Gypsy was my constant companion.

I missed her on my walks.

I missed her sharp little bark at 5:30pm if someone didn’t appear to be getting her dinner ready.

I missed her demanding a cuddle when I was hanging out the washing on the line.

Since her loss, things continued to very slowly go pear-shaped in my marriage, so I was glad she didn’t have to see any of that. It was hard enough to leave as it was, if I’d had to leave that little ball of gorgeousness as well - I think I would have broken in two.

Looking to the future, I think it’s almost time for me to have my heart stolen away again by another furry friend. If I go with the trend, the next little woofer in my life will be a boy dog, and maybe he’ll be a male I can actually trust.

I have no idea what my house will look like, or even where it’ll be; I’m still suburb shopping right now, finding where I can afford more than a one-bedroom broom cupboard.

But I have complete faith that at the right time, I will find my house, and I’ll be successful in bidding for it, and the money I’ll have will be enough. It’s tough looking for houses, let me tell you. Even mediocre ones are above my budget, depending on how close to the beach/lake/city they are.

I trusted God to find me a full time job that I could manage, in order for me to live a life on my own, and He came through in ways I’m still gobsmacked over. So I know, with full confidence, that He will have His hand on a little place for me.

And that place will be just right for another doggo.

A true companion. A loyal friend. A wet nose and an understanding temperament.

With a nod to all the other dogs I’ve loved before, I think I’m almost ready for my heart to be healed by dog number 4.

Maggie x

It sneaks up on us when we least expect it.

We can be all fine and coping with life, blissfully unaware of the approaching emotional bus, and then -

BAM!

It hits.

I was going to write about something else this week, and had photos prepared to share and everything. But I’m all about being realistic and honest in this blog, and last Sunday I had to gather myself back together after a huge ugly-cry.

I got home from church, feeling an odd uneasy quiet settle on me during the drive home, then walked into my little place, kicked off my boots, and fell on the bed.

As I lay there, curled up in the foetal position, I was thinking, ‘What the heck is wrong with me? What is this?’

I felt disjointed, abandoned, rejected, alone, and very, very sad.

Then the tears came.

I cried for about ten minutes straight, not even knowing why. Sobs catching in my throat, and tears wetting my pillow, as I let all of whatever it was pour out of me.

When it had passed, and I blew my nose and dried my eyes, the revelation set in.

I had just experienced a kind of grief.

The kind of grief born of the realisation that where I am now is so very far away from where I thought I was going to be when I got engaged just over 30 years ago.

I walked into my marriage knowing - knowing - we were going to get old together. Knowing I had his best interest at my heart, and trusting he had mine. Knowing I would - and subsequently did - sacrifice everything for the sake of our marriage and our family. Knowing that the love we had would somehow last forever, and that we would do whatever it was that old couples did together after being married for 35-40+ years. Knowing that I had found my best friend and was about to marry him.

But that is no longer my reality.

My reality is that I am now alone.

I walked away from my marriage because it had become filled with lies, coercion, disrespect, fear, distrust, and listlessness.

The man who was the best friend I’d ever had, slowly became a stranger, a person who no longer had my best interests at heart, but only his own.

The love we had died slowly due to many things, but the overarching problem was that we no longer had anything in common. If someone had told me he would become a Flat Earther who was an avid supporter of Humpty Trumpty and a raging conspiracy theorist, I would have laughed at them.

And yet, here we are.

Over the past eighteen months I have been untangling my life from his. You never really realise how inextricably woven together you become after 28 years of marriage until you start trying to unpick it.

It’s exhausting.

But things are getting finalised now, and legal things are happening which I’m not at liberty to talk about here.

I think having to read those legal things, to read on paper (or on screen) the material things we had together, and what we’d built up over those years, has stirred my emotions more than I thought they would.

There’s something very final about agreeing to abandon the plans put in place 30 years previous.

Even though the reasons for staying died a long time ago, and I do not for one moment regret leaving and finding my own path of peace, remembering what was still smarts. Like remembering the pain of an injury, remembering the ripping off of the Band-aid. It still burns.

Crying was another thing he didn’t like to see me doing. I guess it made him feel uncomfortable because - what I am I supposed to do? I guess he thought.

Sit with me? Still love me? Make me a cuppa? Go for a walk with me?

It was all just too hard. Instead, ‘You’re too sensitive.’ ‘You take things too seriously.’

Etc.

The grief is real, friends, but so is the healing which follows the tears.

Crying and grieving allows space for calmness, for peace, for the joy of a new day tomorrow.

It allows me to straighten my shoulders, trust that God has great plans for me, and move forward in my life.

The Grief Bus will more than likely call in again, and my pillow will be damp with tears.

But I will also have the peace which passes all understanding.

I will have my very dear friends to talk about it all with.

I will have my gorgeous sons to share life with.

And I will have my own new life to look forward to.

Almost makes the grief survivable.

Almost.

Thanks for reading and letting me have a space where I can share my journey with you.

If any of this resonates with anything you’re going through, feel free to comment, or message me if it’s private.

Catch you next week with what I was going to share this week.

Maggie x

And apologies for my absence last week. Too much brain-things going on to even have a fingernail’s worth of inspiration as to what to write.

But it’s all settled down for the time being, so I thought I should write about that very thing - inspiration - and how the way in which it’s coming to me these days has changed a bit.

For those of you who’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know that I’ve already written about this topic - funnily enough it was around this time last year:

In my previous life - the one I had a few years ago, not an actual previous life where I was the Queen of Sheba LOL - my working-from-home job was such that whilst baking cakes and treats for cafes and markets, the creative side of my brain could ‘wander at will’.

Ideas would arrive with regular occurrence, and I would scribble them down on my baking run-sheet.

Finding the time to actually write those scribblings into a legible story plot might have been another thing, but I often treated myself to half an hour of writing at the end of a long day, after I’d done the invoices and paperwork my day of baking would produce.

Of course, I no longer live that life now (the baking one, not the Queen of Sheba one). I’m on my own, have a full time job, and the evenings are all mine.

My job is incredibly rewarding, in every aspect that a job can be, and for that I’m endlessly thankful. But it requires every ounce of thought to concentrate on the task at hand, the tasks coming up later on, and all the events we have coming up in the weeks and months ahead.

Driving to and from work is a time of peaceful reflection. In the morning, I am rewarded with glorious rays of sunshine stretching ethereal limbs across the grumpy half-awake sky. Corellas huddle on street lights like barnacles, while other birds zip-zap between the trees like they just drank six red bulls each. One morning last week after some welcome rain overnight, I saw four rainbows. Four of them! Coming home again, the roads are a crazy place little busier, so the drive is a little longer. I’m tired after a busy day on my feet, and thankful for a 30-40 minute sit down in mostly-flowing traffic.

Inspiration?

I’m not seeking it.

I am getting back into writing Book 3, after being reminded by a writer friend that the more I ‘sit in the story’, the more the ideas will blossom.

But when my body and brain are both exhausted, it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open on the drive home, and then stay awake long enough in the evening to do a little cross stitch, watch something on TV (I bought Season One of The Crown for $3 at an Op Shop recently and am rather addicted to the show now!), or hop into bed and read. After I’ve dealt with that days’ emails and other shizz going on, of course.

However, inspiration still comes, and for that I am amazed.

A few weeks ago I was driving home from work, not even thinking about Book 3 and the conundrum I had about what the heck to call it. The working title was ‘Replated’, which I hated (hey, that rhymes!), but I wanted a title that reflected the fact that my main character in that story, Bronwyn, a 50+ year-old celebrity chef who goes from being a total b***ch and getting what she deserves, to a woman who realises her life mistakes and tries to right them. So she is kind of re-representing herself, it’s still her but she’s different; the dish has the same ingredients, but it’s plated differently - replated. Get it? No, it sucked. But it’s what I was working with.

And then I’m sitting in my car somewhere along the Roe Highway, just one of hundreds of commuters going somewhere, when the title of the book literally just dropped into my head. Like, just dropped out of nowhere.

Just Desserts.

I think I had what some people call an epiphany.

I mean, the book is about food (as are all my books because - duh - I’m a chef), and desserts and all manner of deliciousness feature in this book (as do all my books), and one getting one’s Just Desserts means - receiving an appropriate, deserved punishment or consequence for one’s actions, and mate - everyone in my book gets their just deserts - proper spelling there.

Where did that name come from?

This is the magical thing about writing and inspiration - it seems to come from nowhere, but it can be so good, and so perfect.

Another gush of inspiration came last week during my fortnightly Writers Group meeting at KSP Writers House in Greenmount. Members take turns each fortnight to present a ‘writer’s tip’, which can be a discussion, a power point presentation of notes from a course someone’s done, or anything writerly. The topic of the Tip was Subtext - the unspoken underlying meaning in dialogue - and we were offered a choice of things to write about for half an hour. I wanted to write something to do with Just Desserts, purely because the name had recently come to me, and I wanted to write the book that went with such an awesome title.

My fingers started tapping across my dodgy laptop keyboard. I saw the scene in my head. One of the characters - the youngest daughter of Bronwyn, the character I mentioned earlier - was emerging from behind some bushes and trees, limping in the dark across a large, recently watered, lushly grassed oval. She was injured, in pain, in tears, but as she got closer to her dad and Bronwyn who were sitting in the rays spilling from a streetlight, she chose to play down the pain she was in. Her daughter was missing - taken by (NOT REVEALING THIS - YOU’LL HAVE TO READ THE BOOK one day), and that pain was overriding everything else going on in her body. The words and scenes and dialogue just poured out of my brain and down into my fingers, describing what I could see going on in my head was brilliant. I was like, ‘Oh? That happens? But that’s so cool! He comes back? And that happens?’

The half hour of writing vanished, and I wanted to write more, but the night has to move on, so I saved (IMPORTANT!) and closed the file.

The thing I guess I’m learning at this point is that the inspiration is out there. Even when my brain is overwhelmed by Life Stuff, and all the mess that is smeared across my path with the nitty gritty reality of separation, even if I can shut all that crap out for just a little while, story snippets will appear.

It’s encouraging. Because for a while there, I thought I’d lost the ability to be creative anymore. When it feels like your brain is being battered by bull**it, writing stories feels very flippant and unnecessary.

But it isn’t. In fact I’m realising just how important being creative is, and how important it is to let inspiration find me.

I’d love to hear how inspo finds you! Do you have to do a routine in order to ‘get in the zone’, or can it just tumble from the heavens?

Maggie x

‘A rose, by any other name, would smell just as sweet.’

You’ve probably heard this Shakespearean quote a few times before, but the topic of names has arisen in my life a few times of late, in a few different ways, so I wanted to meander through the reasons why we even have names, why we might change our names, and how characters in books get named - well, the ones in my books anyway!

According to history, the very first person to write their name, was a guy in ancient Mesopotamia, who squiggled his name at the bottom of a clay tablet 5,000 years ago. Kushim, as the scribe called himself, might have been his name, or it might have been the name of his office. It’s all a bit vague.

People in the Roman Empire chose to give themselves two, three, or four names, depending on how important they were. The names stated clearly their lineage and social standing, so I guess the shorter your name was, the less important you were.

Aristocrats in ancient in China had very important surnames, showing their clan heritage, and therefore their prestige.

Obviously, names themselves help us have an identity, help us distinguish ourselves from other people, and hopefully give us some kind of connection - to either family, place, or a person.

In the UK, when surnames as we in the Western world know them began appearing, there might be a bloke called John, and he has a son, so his surname would be Johnson - son of John. In Medieval society a lot of surnames were attached to the work someone did - Smith, Weaver, Potter, etc, and gender played a role in deciding surnames, believe it or not. A bloke who was named ‘Baker’, obviously made bread for a living, but if it was a woman, she’d be ‘Baxter’.

Women changing their surnames to that of their husband’s when they marry dates back to the dim, dark ages of the 15th Century, when a woman was viewed as a man’s ‘property’ when they married, and so had to have his name. Thankfully these days, women have the choice of whether to take their hubby’s name, for him to take her surname, or be a hyphen-name, or just choose something else completely different, more inline with the people getting married.

Taking on another person’s surname is a symbolic gesture that you now belong to their family. You are essentially leaving behind the ‘old you’, and embracing the ‘new you’.

When a marriage ends, for whatever reason, the woman might chose to keep the husband’s surname, or she might choose to return to her ‘maiden name’. Reclaiming a maiden name can signal a new chapter, sever social links to the ex-spouse, or reclaim a previous identity.

You might have noticed that I have changed my surname here on Substack. I’ve spoken a little about the messy separation I find myself in, but I had always hoped my ex and I could part as friends. His recent upsetting emails to me of late clearly lay out that he doesn’t want this to happen. So I am embracing my Maiden Name, and all the love, family, warmth, and comfort that name brings to me.

Maggie O’Brien.

That’s me.

The woman who was confident, brave, and had her whole life ahead of her. I want to ‘tap into’ the woman I once was, the woman I can be the older version of, the woman who is independent and loving life again.

Which bring us to the final ‘names’ part of this blog - character names in books!

Have you ever read a book where you thought the character and the name the author gave them just didn’t match up? Or the name reminded you of a real life person, and you just couldn’t get past that? Or the names of the main characters in the book were too similar, and you got discombobulated remembering who everyone was? Amy and Emmie, Lacey and Lucy, Charlotte and Scarlett, Noah and Owen.

Naming characters is a very defining moment in writing fiction. It can give clues as to the sort of person this character is going to be, it can let readers know their ethnicity, and it can make or break the book.

I am a writer of foodie fiction, and have three books ‘in the pipeline’. The Darlington Baking Society, the story of four very different women who connect during lessons in the methodical art of baking, was read and enjoyed by two of the Big Five publishers in 2024/25, but they already had ‘enough’ feel-good fiction books coming out at that time. -sad face-

My second book, Breakfast in Bickley, is my current submission work with my writers group and other places. It’s the story of a patisserie chef who realises a life-long dream of opening a gourmet B&B in the Perth Hills suburb of Bickley, with a two-timing husband and a valley full of neighbours who hate each other.

Book three is still in the Discovery Phase (i.e. it’s complete rubbish!) but it’s called Just Desserts. A 50 year old Celebrity Chef has an accident at the opening of her latest restaurant, and has to recuperate in the tiny city of Albany on WA’s South Coast with her two estranged daughters, and a husband she realises she never should have divorced.

Coming up with character names for these three very different stories has actually been easy(ish). When I’m in the composting stage of writing a story (the long thinky bit before I actually write anything) the characters usually show up at the same time as the story. But the names arrive separately. So it’s a bit like hosting a party with people you know really well, but you don’t know their names. Then you get handed a list and you have to guess which name belongs to which person.

In my most recent feedback submission of Breakfast in Bickley with my writers group, I introduced the previous owner of the decrepit old guesthouse Jacqui (my chef character) ends up buying. When I was in the composting stage of this story, he came to me with his name, Laurie. But no surname. It was a while later when the surname came to me, Metcalfe. Perfect.

Except, as one of the brilliant members of my writers group pointed out, Laurie Metcalfe is an actual person already. She is an American actress and comedian. So when this writer-friend read my character’s name, the American actress’s face popped in her head.

Ooops!

*note to self - always check your characters’ names and make sure they’re not real people already! *

Do you ever read a story where the main character might have the name Scott, and the only Scott you’ve ever known was a complete drongo, and you can’t not attach that character judgement to the fictional character in a book? Or is that just me?

Other authors and writers out there - how do you choose your character names? Do they arrive with their name on a tag? Or do you have to ‘talk’ with them for a while to find out that information?

Non-writers might think it odd that we scribes ‘talk’ with our make-believe characters, but it’s really quite normal.

Right? (laughs nervously)

(crickets)

And two last thoughts about names,

‘The ‘P’ in my name stands for patience, that’s why it’s not there’

‘If you can’t remember my name, just say “Chocolate” and I’ll turn around.’

Have a great week!

Maggie x

Let’s face it, unless you’re living under a very big remote rock, you’d know something about all the things that are going on in the world today.

A war has been started without consultation with other nations, resulting in death, destruction, loss of peace, and other nations being choked at the petrol station, and life as we know it slowly grinding to a halt. Tensions are escalating daily, with a US President whose incoherent ramblings have suddenly become very fixated, and particularly vicious.

A war that was maybe started to shift attention from the **stein Files, which in and of itself is fully pukesome.

The rise and rise of this horrible undercurrent of gender wars. The notion that Women’s Liberationists have gone too far; let’s scrap the entire thing and drag them back into the kitchen at home, remove the vote and equal pay, and make them baby machines. Meanwhile lost men follow toxic men online who are spreading lies that the world is screwed all because women got the vote (or some such nonsense). Women are increasingly afraid to go out, to speak up, to even engage with men.

The environment is slowly suffocating. This fuel crisis is showing us all just how damnably dependent we still are on oil, despite years and years and years of innovations that might steer us away from being in this very position we find ourselves in.

Our children are watching on with mouths agape. We’re supposed to be the adults in the room, but the leaders are behaving worse than toddlers. What on earth are we going to leave them? What legacy will we pass on? What kindness and grace are we showing them when we can’t even get along with our neighbours? Will there even be a planet to leave them to live on?

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There are heaps of other depressing things going on in the world at large, and in my life - no doubt in yours, too.

We can get overwhelmed.

Sink into the abyss.

Become like all the others and wail at the sky, shaking our fists at whichever group of people we fancy is upsetting us this time.

But…

…nature.

Nature just waits for us.

It breathes.

The birds sing and ruffle their feathers.

The trees sway and sigh with the cooling autumn breezes.

After months and months of little or no rain here in WA, a recent solid rain has encouraged new little sprouts of growth:

I might be an eternal, hopeless optimist, but I like to believe we are like the pictures above.

The ground around is baked dry; no joy, no softness. Just rocks, dead weeds, dust, and the tightly-felt compaction of the rain-starved ground. Hope, like rain, seems fanciful. It’s all just too much.

But sprinkle a little hope, give a stranger a smile, be kind in a torrent of hateful words, be patient, put others first.

Water the ground with kindness. Don’t let the dark side win. Shine light, stand up for each other, encourage conversation, open your home, do whatever you feel you can.

And one by one, with the support of each other, we can rise above the drought of kindness and goodness.

Stick our little green heads above the baked, dry, pitiless earth.

First one, then another, then another.

Before you know it, there’s a clump of greenness in amongst all the seemingly eternal plains of bleak emptiness.

One clump encourages another, and another.

We have to stick together, people.

We’re all we’ve got.

You and me.

At times like this, I’m reminded of 1 Peter 4:4-10

‘The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.’

I particularly like that line - administering God’s grace in its various forms.

There’s nothing about bombing the shizz out of another country because of distrust.

There’s nothing about covering up evils.

There’s nothing about men and women fighting for breathing space.

It’s all about grace.

The knowledge that we are all here on this earth together. We are all neighbours. We all live here.

God’s creation stands by silently, changing with the seasons, giving us places to catch our collective breaths and unscramble our thoughts.

Then it’s up to us to rise above the rabble, to show that we can indeed administer God’s grace to each other in love, in respect, in patience, and in the faith that good will always overcome evil.

As I was pondering the plight of the world on my walk the other day, I passed by this scene (above). Noisy white Corellas gleefully pinching olives off a small grove of trees growing by the roadside.

God provided them a feast, and they were all very obviously (and very loudly) enjoying that feast.

What feast might God provide you today, if you just stopped and enjoyed His creation now and then? What wisdom might you find in the green shrubs and the lofty trees?

Let us not become overwhelmed by the madness of these times and forget that beauty still exists.

Have a great, graceful week, my friends.

Be kind to each other.

Maggie

A society so caught up in its own needs and rules and traditions, that anything that doesn’t look like them must be wrong.

A society ruled over by people who are there for the money and the prestige, rather than for the benefit of the multitudes they apparently represent.

A society carrying heavy tax burdens while the rich and wealthy pay peanuts.

A people so at war with each other - both figuratively and actually - that they cannot even have dialogue about the future.

People groups who are oppressed because they look different, talk different, worship other gods, live in ‘ungodly’ places.

A society which oppresses women, dissuading them from reaching their true potential.

Sound familiar?

I’m not actually describing society today - although you might have thought I was.

I’m describing the times in which Jesus was born, grew up, and had His ministry.

All He did was talk about how we should be treating each other with love. Love is the most important thing - the love of our neighbour, and our love for God.

Sure, He ruffled the feathers of some pretty high-up men, who didn’t want their ‘flock’ to think they could have freedom in their faith - what poppycock!!

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And His radical non-violent response to the abuse He received at the hands of the so-called law of the day was also perplexing to all who heard Him.

They didn’t know what to do with this guy.

He’s peaceful, and yet attracts thousands of followers who are also peaceful. No riots. No rock throwing. No violent acts of unrest.

Peaceful meetings where the hungry were fed, both bodily and in their souls.

Tentative followers who wanted to practice this new-found faith, and invite others over for meals to talk about it all.

He brought a message of Godly peace, radical love, and challenged the rigid religious structures of the day, and they killed Him for it.

They probably felt pretty good about themselves as Jesus’ body hung limp on the cross. Possibly a bit unsettled when the sky grew dark and the curtain of their precious temple tore in two. Relieved when His followers took the body away and buried it in a tomb.

That’s him dealt with. The messenger can’t harass us anymore.

What they didn’t realise was that this man wasn’t just the messenger.

He was The Message.

And after three days He rose again, rolling away the stone door of the tomb, and forever setting us free from the need to believe what others tell us faith should look like.

Setting us free from the fear of death - that last, lonely, cold foe we’ll all face at some point.

Inviting us to follow His ways of love for the lost, kindness to the lowest, and a heart-posture of constant gratefulness.

Will you take up the offer that His sacrifice at Easter was all about?

By all means, eat some chocolate, sleep in, get together with your family (if they don’t live too far away - petrol is becoming a bit of a luxury!), but spend a moment considering The Message.

The man who came to us to love us and save us while we didn’t even know who He was.

He knows who we are, and He loves us just as we are.

Happy Easter to you and those you love.

What’s your chocolate of choice at this time of year?

Someone at work today mentioned Toblerone and I can’t remember the last time I ate a piece of that triangular nougaty goodness. Maybe it’s time to remind myself!?

Leave a comment

Maggie

Is it just me, or is anyone else scratching their heads and thinking, how did we get here?

At work over our lunch break, my colleagues and I discuss fuel prices, potential energy rationing, potential food rationing, some of our workmates having to cancel overseas trips because the planes aren’t flying there anymore, and as a Christian workplace, how all of this is tottering alarmingly close to Biblical End of Days stuff.

But….

…do I get this right?

All this is happening because two old guys (they’re both over 75 - apologies to the rest of you beautiful people over that age) decided to bomb the crap out of another country because …..

…..

…..

*crickets*

… to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime says Trumpty Dumpty.

…The US and Israel have targeted key sites linked to Iran's nuclear programme - which Iran insists is entirely peaceful

… there’s lots of oil there.

Oh, woops.

After pulling off a vanishing act by removing the leader of Venezuela (who was a nasty piece of work) in January, the USA is now in charge of all the oil flowing from that country.

Now, amidst a thinly veiled cry of ‘we want the world to be safe from toxic leaders’ they bomb the shizz out of another oil-rich country.

But, are these two goons who authorised the bombings, and are responsible for the retaliatory closing of the Strait of Hormuz, really any better than the ‘evil guys’?

And the one thing my simple little chef’s brain just cannot work out - how the heck did they pull the initial bombing off in the first place?

No consultation with anyone.

Didn’t check with experts in the region as to what the Iranian government might do to protect themselves.

Didn’t talk it over with their own Congress and get permission first, before sending in human beings to do their dirty work.

Congratulated each other for the deaths of the Ayatollah and several of his team (who’ve been replaced anyway), and denied wrong doing when they dropped a bomb on a girls’ school and killed over 100 girls.

I just ….

….

…I don’t get it.

Are we all humans on this planet or what?

Aren’t we all made the image of God, created equal, called on to love our neighbours, and seek the welfare of others before ourselves?

I’m just gobsmacked.

I read that Mr Frump is losing supporters faster than warm jelly through a sieve, but it’s too late. All those people who cheered him on and are now sneaking away into the shadows only have themselves to blame.

He’s in office.

The world is in a mess.

We can only pray that more reasonable, peace-loving, forgiving, beautiful people right these wrongs.

People like you and me.

It cost me $70 to fill a half empty fuel tank on my way home today. A month ago, $80 would have filled it from dry.

Grocery prices are inching up.

I’m already noticing a few oddly bare shelves in the supermarkets.

Would you pray with me?

For cool heads and generous hearts.

For forgiveness and friendship.

For a miracle.

Maggie x

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We’ve been going for three years now, and it’s tradition that on the way home we stop at an Ampol Foodery along the way, where they sell freshly baked deliciousness from the Miami Bakehouse.

Baked items of choice this year were a cinnamon-chai twist (kinda like a muffin made from a delicious twirl of cinnamon bun-type dough), a Hedgehog slice, and a (could have been nuttier) pecan pie, and a pack of hot cross buns for later.

As we stood up to eat and drink (we’d been sitting for 90 minutes in the car, and had the same travel time ahead of us, so why sit?), I remembered visiting roadhouses as a kid, whenever my parents and I did a road trip.

I don’t remember what we ate when we stopped at these places; our longest drive, from Adelaide to Perth (or the other way around) when I was around 12 months old, carries the story of me stealing chips from Dad’s plate, and hungrily sucking on a lamb chop.

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After doing a little research on these early roadhouses, I discovered a typical menu from the early ’70s would offer beef croquettes (early nuggets), crumbed breast of chicken, and tomato and vegetable soup. Main courses included fried fillet of whiting with chips, chicken Maryland and Kiev, Wiener schnitzel, (whoever heard of a chicken schnitzel in the 70’s?) a couple of roasts and Scotch fillet or T-bone steaks. There were also burgers (real ones, I bet - with beetroot, fried egg, bacon and ‘the lot’), and desserts. House Specials might include lasagne, quiche Lorraine (such a 70’s and 80’s dish), ham steak Hawaiian and Ham and Pineapple Salad (why ham and pineapple ever went together is anyone’s guess, but it was EVERYWHERE at that time).

You could also get simple things like baked beans on toast, or a mixed grill. Good stuff to keep you going for the next 250kms.

Roadhouses are not something unique to Australia, nor were they invented in the age of the car.

The earliest roadhouses were called ‘Coaching Inns’, and were scattered all over Europe. They consisted of a place to stay and eat for the humans on their way to wherever they were going, and a stable and feed for the horses. The oldest one I could gather info about was one in Wales called The Black Lion, which began trading in 1105. That’s not a typo. 1105. This was the age of the Crusades, when construction was beginning on Notre Dame.

People have always been travelling and needing a place to stop and refresh themselves (and their horses or their cars).

Roadhouses in the USA are slightly more dodgy than the rest of the world because they’re more well known for the serving of beer and hard liquor. Frequented by truckies, and commonly known for their dingy interiors, I’ve actually been in one of these - and lived to tell the tale!

I was on Neville Island in Pittsburgh in 1994, staying in a very old fashioned motel to spend time with a woman named Suzanne, with whom I had been writing letters for about four years. Pen pals - remember them? We had separate rooms, and frequently visited her friend, Jane, who lived in a gorgeous old house on the island. For lunch one day, Suzanne thought it would be good for us to walk across the road from the motel, and have lunch at the roadhouse.

‘Truck drivers eat here,’ Suzanne said, as we dodged across a busy highway and negotiated the carpark on foot, ‘that means this place is good!’

I nodded meekly as she pushed open the door to the place and we walked in.

The place was so low-lit, I could hardly see. Either that or it had been excruciatingly sunny outside. I seem to recall the horror of seeing every person in the joint turn to look at us. Me, a young, slim 23 year old woman, Suzanne, a desperately overweight 60 year old woman, and everyone in the place owning beards of varying lengths.

I swallowed, glanced back at the sunshine and cracked pavement of the outside world, and wondered if I’d ever be seen again.

We waddled over to a table, ordered some pizza and drinks from the gum-chewing waitress, then sat waiting nervously.

We probably talked about something, I got on very well with Suzanne across letters, and I was glad to discover the same in real life.

We didn’t have to wait long for the food, and when the pizza and drinks arrived, we fell upon the food hungrily.

Well, truckies are right, the food was incredible. It was one of the best meals I had in my five week stay in the US, low lighting, dodgy bearded gents, and all.

What’s changed in those decades since I used to go road tripping with my parents in the 70’s and 80’s?

Fast food chains.

McD’s, HJ’s, all the soulless non-food chain ‘restaurants’, where the food is so full of preservatives, it literally doesn’t go off. They’ve all permeated our culture and are literally everywhere we look, including the roadhouse seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Every roadhouse these days is called an Eatery, and is full of similar food offerings to the next one. Stuff that’s quick, ‘cheap’, probably full of sugar, and more than likely not good for you. No real ‘meals’ like the old roadhouses used to serve, on plates, with real cutlery, salt and pepper shakers on the table, and time to actually rest on your journey.

Car trips.

I wonder if they’ll become a thing of the past in weeks and months to come with this latest fuel crisis. The pleasurable act of the family hopping in the car and going for a long drive for a holiday might be in jeopardy. When it’s going to cost over $100 just to drive to work each week, what’s a road trip going to set us back?

Only time will tell.

I’m kind of glad I got to see the Golden Age of the Roadhouse.

Hospitality at its finest.

Any memorable road trip meals you’d like to share?

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Until next week,

Maggie xx

Work is super busy at the moment and I’m a tad tired.

Last Saturday I had such a completely restful day. I didn’t leave the house. It was 41C outside, so that helped me stay indoors with the aircon.

I had time.

Time.

Time to decide what I wanted to do.

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Time to read. Time to do a complete set of my yoga stretches. Time to decide that I might even do a bit of writing on book three. It started horrendously. I re-read what I’d written and thought, ‘What utter trash. Who’s going to want to read this nonsense?’

But I avoided the Negative Nancy in my head and wrote a chapter much later in the book which has been dancing around my creative brain for months. It was great, I didn’t want to stop, but I did.

Then I had more time.

Imagine that!

A total luxury.

So I started a cross-stitch.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I sat and cross-stitched. It must be more than fifteen years ago.

It was difficult to start again. Folding the Aida cloth in quarters, starting in the centre, counting back on the sheet of paper, deciphering the code to understand the colour required, remembering to hold the strands of cotton so they don’t just whizz out of the needle. One, two, three across, back two, three, and stop.

I’m not going to show you a photo of the work, it’s a collection of little green x’s on a white cloth at the moment, nothing like the pretty picture of a watering can full of flowers that it will (hopefully) look like in the end.

As I stitched in the peace and coolness of my own home, I wondered what other people do to relax. What’s your go to (or long-lost go to) hobby or time-filler?

No, scrolling on socials does not count!

Something you love doing just for the peace and stillness it brings you.

Tell me!

Leave a comment

Catch you next week.

Maggie x

Part of it is the grief and sadness over the ending of my marriage - which I suspect will often raise its dreary head over coming months and years. One doesn’t walk away from a life of 29 years with someone without some portion of melancholy.

But I’ve also had this lingering sense of ill-at-ease. A sense that someone is doing something they should not be doing. And my body is trying to respond the best way it knows how.

This coming Sunday it’s International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender equality.

What began in the early 20th century as a movement demanding fair wages, safer working conditions, and the right to vote has grown into a global day of recognition, reflection, and renewed commitment.

The most impressive thing about IWD is that each generation has built on the courage of those before it, pushing boundaries and redefining what is possible.

Women can, literally, do anything. Previously banished to the home kitchen and told to bring forth children, women now occupy politics, business, science, sport, and culture, and have changed the shape of all those things for the better.

Women are the backbones of society.

Without our mothers, we wouldn’t be here.

Without our grandmothers, we wouldn’t be here.

Unless women generations ago hadn’t chosen to stand up to the incredibly male biased society of 100 years ago, things would still be the same. I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve had. Women would not be CEO’s of companies and Prime Ministers of countries. Women wouldn’t be doctors or scientists or truck drivers or plumbers.

We women now have a choice. We can be Mums - the most awesome, intense, and overlooked ‘job’ in history - or we can fly to the moon, in the most literal sense. We’re making a better world for our daughters, who will, in turn, make it better again for their daughters.

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But this thing that is niggling in the back of my mind?

This dark, sludgy, suffocating sense of apprehension - where is it coming from?

One word.

And I know you’ve heard a lot about it recently.

I apologise for bringing it up here.

Epstein.

When I read articles about the smallest portion of what’s on those files, when I hear about the way young women, girls, and baby girls were so abused by these wealthy (mostly) men, I feel sick to the stomach.

Gorgeous young lives stripped of their innocence, all for the unslakable thirst of these truly evil men.

And do you know what it awakens in me?

Once I get past that feeling of hopelessness and utter disgust, something else kicks in.

Something powerful.

My Angry Momma Bear instinct.

If you’re a mum, you might know what this is.

In the wild, momma bears will kill to protect their cubs. If you’re out hiking and you get between her and her babies, expect to be eviscerated shortly thereafter.

Human mothers can have the same instinct (except we’ll probably swap the evisceration for a good scream).

I’ve felt it. Someone once tested me - I won’t say who it was - and said something completely untrue and degrading about my sons. The reaction was instant. The unspeakable rage flood my body and I took a step towards this person and said, ‘Don’t you speak that way about my sons’. My voice was low and dangerous, I shook with anger. I felt like gouging the eyes out of this person, or at least slapping them across their face. But I didn’t. I just stood there staring at them. You’ve crossed the line, pal. You’ve stepped in between me and my cubs. Prepare for the worst because here it comes.

I realised the other day that this same feeling is washing through me, with regards to these precious lives that have been (and I suppose hopelessly that are still) being taken.

As a mum I want to stand in front of these mentally diseased men and punch them. I want to have claws like a Brown Bear and slash them, make them feel a tiny bit of the pain they have inflicted on countless female lives over too many years.

How did this happen?

How did girls become available to these monsters?

How did one woman sell her young child to E for a sum of money for which she was ‘grateful’?

My brain cannot fathom such evil, for that is what this is - pure, unadulterated evil. If you ever wondered if the devil was real, just take a look at what was going on on that God-forsaken island and be assured that he is alive and well.

As a Christian, I know that those men will end up in a place from which there is no escape; a place where their money and their name will mean nothing, and their eternal suffering will bring a modicum of peace to some.

But for now, how do I as a mother and a follower of Jesus deal with this stuff? It’s all very well to say these men will get their comeuppance in the hereafter, what about now? What’s the suitable response?

At this moment, all I know is that my inner Mamma Bear is not happy. Those girls are not my biological daughters, but they damnably well feel like it right now. I want to protect all girls. I want them to be able to be beautiful and to shine and to reach their potentials as human beings. I don’t want them to be worried when they hear footsteps behind them when they’re out for a walk. I don’t want them to have to carry their car keys sticking out in between their fingers in case they get accosted in the car park. I don’t want their husbands to drug them and film unspeakable horrors while they’re unconscious.

This build-up of crimes against women that has been going on for generations is somehow reaching a zenith.

Enough is enough.

We Mamma Bears are sharpening our claws.

And God will not remain silent forever.

Forgive me for spilling my guts out (not the best choice of words there) but I hope it stirs something within you, too.

What we do with that is for the future to determine. This International Women’s Day, let’s do our best to make it safe for girls and women of all ages. Let’s stand against this filthy disease permeating society which says the life of a female is worth less than a male’s. We were all created equal, we have equal worth in God’s eyes - it’s about time we accepted that and promoted it.

Your Angry Momma Bear,

Maggie

I didn’t make any of those up, by the way. You can do a quick search on Google to see some of the (even more) crazy things people did in 2025 to try and Get Healthy.

As I write, millions of people are observing Lent, a Christian tradition of fasting, prayer and alms-giving in the lead-up to Easter.

For forty days, people choose to go without something ‘important’ in their lives, and instead of doing that thing, or eating that food, they practice their faith more. How does that look?

Pope Francis describes it this way:

(During lent we should be) “learning to change our attitude towards others and all of creation, turning away from the temptation to ‘devour’ everything to satisfy our voracity and being ready to suffer for love, which can fill the emptiness of our hearts.”

Lent isn’t just about what we’re willing to ‘give up’, it’s also about what we’re willing to ‘take on’.

As I grow older, and my body goes through the wild machinations of peri-menopause (I always think of Nando’s chicken when I read the words peri-menopause), I’m sometimes at a bit of a loss as to how to take care of myself. A blood test I had done late last year (after passing out at a public event - embarrassing!) indicated that I might be eating too much sugar. Having self-medicated with cakes and slices since my marriage ended, it wasn’t an overly-surprising thing to hear. Who else has come home from a hard day at work and got stuck into a strong cup of tea and a piece or three of gooey chocolate brownie? Anyone?

After a routine medical procedure last month required another blood test, which my GP wanted me to make a ‘non urgent’ appointment to discuss, I thought - right, it’s the sugar thing. I have to give it up. Lent is coming up. Perfect. I can give it up for forty days and see how much better I feel.

Because how many cookbooks are there decrying that very thing? ‘I gave up sugar and have a new lease on life!’ ‘I gave up sugar and lost 230kg!’ ‘I gave up sugar and wrote this nonsense cookbook and am making lots of money from desperate people like you!’

(That last one wasn’t real.)

So I started thinking about what I eat. What has sugar in it? What can I control that has sugar in it? I bought a different yoghurt - a natural one that has no sugar (I LOVE yoghurt. I think I could possibly exist eating just that, it’s so good), and I chucked out all the bits of cake and slices I had sitting in my fridge that I was going to get around to eating ‘eventually’. Now I’m on my own, cakes take a lot longer to get eaten, and it’s up to me to eat them. Yikes. The pressure.

I even told my work colleagues about my Lent goal to lose some of the sugar in my diet. I’m doing this thing. I’m not going to stumble over the line into pre-diabetic-ness.

But when I saw my GP, she said everything about my blood test was perfect, excellent in fact, including my thyroid levels, blood sugar, and cholesterol. Great!

But my iron levels - what the actual heck is going on with those?

Somehow my iron level has halved in the past couple of months, which is possibly explained away because I’m a female, but I had a hysterectomy 14 years ago, so have been relieved of the monthly curse for quite some time now.

My GP has come up with a plan to monitor things, and I’ll let you know how it all goes (if you’re interested).

All of this made me stop and think.

I don’t have to give up sugar for Lent anymore, but in thinking about the food I’m putting in my body, it’s made me think about the food I’m putting in my body.

Does that make sense?

We’re all creatures of habit. We all eat and drink the same things, especially in the morning when we know we have to ‘break the fast’ and eat something to replenish the stores of energy and nutrients in our bodies. First the coffee. Then the jam toast. Or the bowl of Cheerios. Or whatever gets you functioning before your day begins.

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I love Just Right cereal. I have liked it for years, and recently rediscovered it, devouring a little bowl of it most mornings because it’s yummy, and at 5am, I’m looking for Easy.

For every 100g serving of Just Right, I’m also consuming 5-6 teaspoons of sugar. Plus the vanilla yoghurt on top. Plus the spoonful of sugar in my Earl Grey. Heck, the sun is barely up and I’ve potentially eaten 8 teaspoons of sugar already.

Okay, so I’m apparently not wobbling close to the diabetic threshold anymore, but is eating that much sugar in the morning good for me?

Probs not, right?

So for Lent, I’m taking care of myself for 40 days. I’m giving up my reliance on sugar. I’ve changed my cereal (it was hard - so hard!!!), I’m back to 1/2 a teaspoon of sugar in my tea, and I’m not eating cake every day, leaving it to a treat time on the weekend.

I’m also mindful of eating plenty of iron-rich foods, and drinking plenty of water. Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve stopped making the homemade iced tea I made every single day for 29 years. I now drink mostly water with my meals. Wine on a Saturday night. Maybe.

I’m mindful of my body when it’s aching. Work has been super busy since I went back at the end of January, and my knees, feet, right elbow, and lower back were starting to complain. Are we seriously doing this nonsense again? - says my poor, battered self. Previously I would have just powered on, asking more and more and more of my already over-worked body. So for Lent, one of the things I am taking on is gentle exercise. I’m doing stretches (some of them are basic yoga moves, others are movements my physio worked out just for me), and regular walking. I forgot how good walking is. After striding it out for about ten minutes, your body falls into a rhythm and your brain stretches out. It’s the only way I can describe the feeling of wholeness that a good half-hour walk brings me.

And amidst all this mindfulness and taking care of myself, I am also learning to be thankful for my life. Thankful for this new chapter, for the freedom, for the joy. Thankful that although I don’t know what my future holds, and there are still battles to be fought and hard things to be done, I have a strong faith that allows me to believe that I’m not fighting alone.

God has shown up in my life in very real and tangible ways over the past six months, and I fully trust that He’ll continue to show up in the future. Although I’ll still have dark days of doubt - not because of my unbelief, purely because I’m not in control of a lot of the things I’m worried about - I know that all things will work together for my good. That’s the great and the not great things. The great things will bring me joy and happiness. The not great things will strengthen my faith and teach me to not rely on my own strength.

In the ‘alms-giving’ part of Lent, I am giving my life over to God. Here it is. All the messy, dodgy, uncertain bits. All the comfy, pretty, lovely bits. All the frightened, dark, scary bits. All of it. Take it and use it as You see fit. Because what’s the point of being thoughtful and mindful and healthy and fabulous if I just keep the ‘fruit’ of all of that to myself? What kind of a person am I?

I hope you have a fabulous week!

Talk with you next Wednesday,

Maggie

I’ve been around kitchens for a long time, a very long time. Three and a half decades to be exact. The young woman in the photo above had no clue what her life was going to be like, nor where her career would take her, nor have the slightest inkling of the sheer volume of food she would prepare in her life.

Flavour combinations have always been a bit of a thing for me, in every place I’ve worked, so I thought I’d take you for a walk down Amnesia Lane to explore the interesting, the tasty, and the downright mad ideas of flavour fusions I’ve heard of over the years.

Starting my apprenticeship in a country hospital, the food was pretty staid, healthy, and traditional. Fish and chips on Fridays, roast something on a Sunday lunch. We always had a ‘main’ meal, and a ‘light’ meal, for patients to be able to choose whether they ate well or just a bit. One of the ‘light’ meals we prepared approximately once a month was crumbed lamb’s brains with bacon and gravy. Personally I thought it was a complete waste of good gravy and bacon, but it actually looked pretty good. But then anything looks good crumbed and deep fried. Well. That’s disputable.

After three years at the hospital, I moved to a pub. To split shifts, late nights, and misogynistic chefs. Oh the joys.

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Again, in the early-to-mid 1990’s, things were pretty sedate in pub food. I remember the head chef of the pub making the first tiramisu that I’d ever seen. I’ve made heaps over the years because they’re just so unctuous, but this one was the first. I know you’re supposed to dip the sponge fingers in a syrup or a coffee liqueur (I dip mine in a combo syrup of coffee and cocoa) but this chef I worked with must have emptied an entire bottle of some sort of alcohol onto the sponge fingers. When he let me taste some, I actually coughed it back up because it was so strong. ‘You can’t serve that!’ I said, spluttering. ‘Already have,’ he said smugly. The nineties were also the birthplace of one of the most ridiculous food crazes I’ve ever lived through - Molecular Cuisine. A dish full of foams, spheres and gels leaves the diner wondering if he ate anything at all. Thankfully I never worked at a restaurant which required me to faff about in the kitchen, reducing a steak to the consistency of an egg white!

I spent almost two years in the UK after leaving the pub, and worked at a Christian linguistics school where missionaries came to learn how to break down sounds into written symbols, and then travel out to remote communities around the world and translate the Bible with them. I learned to cook very English food (not surprising) encompassing lots of sausages, floomphy puddings, and the occasional International Day, overseen by the wonderful multicultural volunteers who helped in the kitchen. I never ate them, but I remember seeing a sign for chips with curry sauce. I could never make up my mind if that was a good combination or not.

Upon my return to Australia, and the subsequent thirty years that have passed, I’m pleased to say I’ve tried lots of ‘new’ things that everyone now eats as if it’s always been around. I did the catering for a wedding season at a very trendy winery, and while I was preparing twenty million miniature Russian Blini pancakes, which would later have a dollop of sour cream and half a teaspoon of salmon roe on it (bleurgh…) part of a 300-guest wedding canape selection, in the restaurant kitchen alongside, the chef there was boiling cream and sugar with a mad mix of whole spices. Cardamom, star anise, cassia bark, vanilla bean, (and possibly something else I’ve forgotten) to make chai-spiced panna cotta. Never heard of it before then, but boy, have I made them a few times in the years since? (YES!)

‘True’ flavour fusions of different nationalities is always an interesting mix. It’s nothing new - look at the Vietnamese Bahn Mi - a fabulous fusion of a French baguette with pâté and mayo, filled with the addictive flavours of pickled daikon/carrots, coriander, cucumber, chillies, and fall-apart roast pork (and its crackle omg)

Surely you’ve considered eating a Butter Chicken Pizza? An Indian/Italian fusion that actually works - mostly I think because of the whole naan bread and curry thing, which translates to a pizza base. Kinda.

Tex-Mex is an old combo, where the colourful flavours of Mexico dance around with the heavily meat-oriented diet of the USA.

Have you heard of Korean Tacos? I hadn’t until I started doing a bit of reading for this article. These tacos are filled with Korean BBQ-style meat, kimchi, and spicy gochujang sauce, and they actually sounds pretty good to me.

Odd foods that go together well -

• Cheddar cheese and apple pie

• Avocado in a chocolate mousse

• Watermelon and feta

• Peanut butter on a spoon - oops, that’s just me

Odd foods that no human should be putting near their mouths -

• Vegemite, ice cream and maple syrup on pancakes. Just. No.

• Blue cheese with chocolate cake. Sacrilege. For the chocolate cake. The blue cheese should just go in the bin where all the other rotting food belongs.

• Sardines and custard. I think I’m feeling a bit queasy now.

• Fried dim sims with chocolate sauce. Oooo…not for me.

• Bananas and pesto. Bleurgh…

What’s an odd food paring that you’ve eaten or seen someone else eating? I’d love to hear from you :-)

Leave a comment

Until next week,

Maggie xx

The Book Bit!

The Book Bit was usurped by a recipe last week, but I still managed to finish reading the book I was wading through, and was thoroughly glad I persisted with.

I was given this book last year as a gift at a book swap Christmas in July ‘do’ with my writers group. I started reading it and was quickly swamped by the two narrative timelines - two young women messing around with doors to other worlds. I got mixed up with which girl was doing what, and was seriously considering throwing it across the room putting it aside. But then I persisted and about a third of the way in it was like OH MY GOODNESS ARE YOU KIDDING!?!?! And I loved it after that! January is the name of the main protagonist who goes on an excellent journey of self-discovery and adventure, and who I was literally cheering on by the end of the book.

Highly recommend!

We live a life, we do something the same way every day, and we don’t even think about it.

How do you start your weekday?

Strong coffee? Toasted muesli? Sourdough and smashed avocado? Scrolling on your phone? Purchasing a coffee through a drive-through place because you don’t have time? A yoga class? A run with the dog?

They’re all habits. And they’re only a teensy number of an infinite variety of ways one could start the day.

The habits that I’m developing now are so radically different to those I’d honed over the past couple of decades, I thought I’d write about them. Big Life Events have a way of taking the life we once knew and shattering it, forcing us to recreate our lives and invite new habits.

Then:

For eight years I ran a baking business from my home. The commute was great! Lol. A simple walk down the passageway and I’m at work. However, if I wanted to start early on any particular day, I would have to work around my family who’d be getting their breakfasts before heading out for their respective days away from the home. Once alone, I could open the windows and (attempt to) listen to the birds in the garden over the roar of the stand mixer, the beeping of the oven timer, and the sloshing and clinking of washing the dishes. Most mornings I didn’t eat breakfast, there was no time. I remained inside the house. I never saw anyone unless I’d baked for a cafe and was delivering it to them. Then it was a very quick ‘Hey! How ya doing? Here’s your order! Where would you like it?’ (no cafe kitchen has enough bench space) ‘Bye!’ *scurries back to the kitchen to make more of what she just delivered.

Now:

I wake at 5am to the gentle plinkity-plinks of the Sencha ring tone on my phone. At present, the morning sunlight is just visible in the sky, and the birds are yapping and tweeting across the road at the park. I get up, make a cup of Earl Grey, and have a small bowl of cereal (home made Granola or Just Right) or a crumpet slathered with butter and some sort of spread. [as an aside, I recently discovered blueberry and lemon jam - exquisite!] as I do my morning Bible reading. During this reading I am reminded of my value and worth, and that God in His grace has given me a peace which transcends understanding. Once I’m dressed and the bathroom ablutions are complete, I grab my lunch from the fridge, walk to the garage, start the car, and head out on the road. It’s amazing how much traffic there is at 5:50am, but it’s all flowing well (most mornings), and I feel like one of thousands of little platelets inside some great artery, all of us rushing towards separate destinies. By this time, the sun has rounded the edge of the horizon, and the butter yellow morning light makes the Salmon gums’ trunks look like apricot flesh. The scatterings of birds in the sky doing their morning laps (or whatever it is that they’re doing) is missed by most motorists. As I arrive at work, the groundsmen are out with their leaf blowers, making the schoolyard tidy for the kids.

Then:

By eleven o’clock my cooling table is full of cakes and slices, with more baking in the oven(s) and more being made at the bench. My Bake List has lots of things crossed off, but depending on the day, even twice as much cake left to make. I probably would have had a cup of tea and something to eat while I was working by this point, and stared longingly out into the garden where the Honeyeaters and Wattle birds battle for supremacy in the pollen of all the different flowers. I am perhaps answering emails about cake orders, and am already sick of washing up.

Now:

By eleven o’clock half my day is over. At the school I work in, the kids have just finished recess, and the dazzling array of food we had on display has vanished as if a swarm of locusts just flew through. Earlier in the day my colleagues and I made baguettes, sandwiches, salads, wraps, toasties, etc, etc. ready for lunch. I most likely haven’t washed a dish - that’s up to the casual staff member rostered on for that task. I might have even spent the morning catering for a function (my job title is Catering Coordinator) which is always fun and new. At eleven it’s break time, and I get to take off my apron, wander down to the lovely staff lounge, sit down for half and hour, and rest. I check messages, emails, and maybe a bit of scrolling. That half hour lunch break goes at warp speed and before we know it, it’s time to head back to the kitchen and get ready for the lunchtime onslaught.

Then:

By four o’clock the worst of the baking is done, it’s just all the cutting up and icing and decorating to do - sometimes the most time-consuming part of the job. Members of the family are coming home, and being the wife/mother/caregiver that I am, I make them all a warm/cold drink and offer them some delicious home made baking that I made especially for them. They rest up while I continue on, cleaning the kitchen, and tidy things away, before heading to the office to do invoices for the cafes, and to do the never-ending task of keeping up with what markets are on where, who do I need to pay by when, and what’s the weather going to be like this weekend because that will influence the baking I take to market with me.

Now:

By four o’clock I am home, sitting with my feet up, sipping on a cuppa, possibly with a little slice of cake I’ve made because that’s the one I want. The lunch rush at school is a mere memory, the hour clean up afterwards flashed past quickly, and the slightly longer drive home (thanks to ‘rush hour’) all in the past as I sit and enjoy some time to myself before I think about dinner. I might use the time to write - driving allows lots of time for plot-planning - or I might have a nap.

Then:

Dinner is sometimes a direct flow-on from my bake day. I remove the last cake from the oven, and a chicken tray bake goes in. Or I get the pasta sauce burbling away before I do the office bit. On a particularly bad/busy day, I’m still cutting up cakes and decorating by the time dinner is ready at 7pm (a pre-ordained meal time that must never be changed for any reason). I might have to wait until after dinner to do the office part of the day, once the dishes are done and the kitchen is clean. If I have the will power and energy, I might write a paragraph or two of my current work in progress. If this was later in the week, it was day three or four of this busy-ness; the never-ending cycle of baking and washing up and baking and washing up and baking and washing up. I would stagger off to bed completely exhausted, my feet throbbing. My back aching.

Now:

Dinner is quiet. It’s usually just me. I eat what I feel like, when I feel like it. I might have a glass of wine. I might have a glass of water. I might have a salad with a little tin of tuna on top. I might have a full-blown roast dinner (usually on the nights when my now adult sons dine with me). My evenings are spent writing or watching something on TV. I go to my writers group once a fortnight. I help out at a Community Kitchen when I can. I have my Bible study group on a Thursday. If I’m feeling happy and energetic, I might dance around my lounge room to brilliant music from the 1980’s. By 9:30 I’m getting ready for bed, reading for as long as my eyelids will stay open.

Weekends then:

Up before dawn sometimes, my car packed the previous evening with the marquee, weights, tables, cake domes, signage, all the market paraphernalia. I collect all the cakes I hope to sell, pop them in the car too, then drive off to wherever the most promising market that weekend might be. It might be less than ten minutes away. It might be an hour away. Set up the marquee on my own (I got very good at it by the end) display the cakes, ready the Square payment system, strap on my market apron, and beam a smile of welcome and hope I don’t take too much food home tonight. When I get home later on, I’m cooking dinner as I’m washing up all the market stuff from the table. Counting the cash takings just before dinner’s ready. Saturday nights are movie nights and my sons and I take turns to choose the evening’s viewings. Sunday nights it’s just packing stuff away, and everyone’s quietly getting themselves psyched up for the new week. I ache from head to foot, but I say nothing. It’s my job and it’s all I can do, so I do it well. I wish for change as I collapse in bed.

Weekends now:

Saturdays = sleep in. However, a sleep in for me is 7am :-) so I get up, make myself an Earl Grey, and hop back into bed to do my daily reading. I’ll probably get a load of washing on, might read a bit, should get up and do my stretches. Brekky is leisurely. Quiet. I might spend the day mooching at home. I might bake something. I might do an opshop hop looking for books and bargains. My sons will join me for dinner Saturday night. We might watch a movie afterwards. We might play a board game. We might go for a night walk. We might just sit and chat. One might sleep over. Sunday morning is a leisurely waltz to get ready for church. Hug my friends. Catch up with friends. Listen to how good God is and sing worship songs around the gratitude welling in my throat. Lunch might be with a friend. The afternoon might be spent writing. Or walking. Or at a ladies’ afternoon tea. I think about the week ahead and make something for my lunches. I go to bed feeling blessed and at peace, ready to enjoy another work week.

Notice a change between then and now?

Back then, I thought that life was all I was capable of. Slaving alone in a kitchen where I didn’t see anyone, didn’t speak to anyone, stood for up to 10 hours a day, and felt lost in a marriage where I felt unseen and unvalued. How could I change that? Who wants a creaky, broken 50+ year-old chef? How could I find a better life, one which was full of blessings and gratitude?

Now, thanks to the goodness of God, I have that life. I have choices. I enjoy my own company, and enjoy the company of my friends. I sleep alone and I sleep deeply. I buy trinkets for my home because I like them and they’re pretty. I invite people for dinner. I have a job that is so me-shaped, it could only have come from God, and for that I am eternally grateful.

The new daily habits I am forming now were, a year ago, nothing but a distant and long-hoped-for future. I am virtually living my dream.

Do you have habits you wish you could change?

Adjust the small ones first, and the larger ones will follow.

Don’t be a slave in your own life. Enjoy every single day. Find joy every morning. Be thankful every night.

I know I am.

Maggie x

I did a bit of a video on Instagram the other week, showing a cake I made, and promising the recipe. Without further ado - here it is!

The novel I am (still) wading through, which has improved upon continuing reading, will be revealed next week (hopefully), but the one I’ve been dabble-reading is a Christian book titled ‘If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat’. Basically it’s about wanting to Do The Thing, but being afraid to take that first step. The example used is when Jesus called Simon out of the boat to walk on the water, and even if you’re not a Christian, you’ve probably heard that story.

Stepping out of the boat is something I did about five months ago. I’ve written snippets about that time and how stepping away from the familiar into the unknown was very frightening. I have simultaneously been told I’m ‘very brave’ for stepping out, and also been told that it ‘was easy for you’ - two vastly different opinions, neither of which are particularly true. I don’t think I’m brave; I’d just had enough, and as that final straw settled on my shoulders, it was no longer a matter of ‘if’ I’d leave, but ‘when’. Conversely it was definitely NOT easy to leave. Even though it seemed I walked into an environment where people offered me their homes and granny flats to live in for the first 3-4 months.

Now things have settled a bit in my life, I’m thinking more about my ‘calling’, and what that actually means. Some ‘callings’ are made on our lives as a whole, but I think most callings are made via how we spend the largest portion of our time - i.e. work.

‘What’s your calling?’

When was the last time someone asked you that question?

Never?

It just doesn’t get asked of us anymore. The question asked of us these days is more likely to be:

‘Where do you work?’

‘What do you do five days a week?’

Shouldn’t the precious one third of life we devote to working in order to live and eat, also be our calling? Or is that frivolous?

Think about it though.

You drive through traffic every day, or sit scrolling on over-stuffed public transport, to go to a place you don’t even like, to work with people you would never usually speak to, and do a job that is so soul-destroying that by 10:30am on Monday, you’re already dreaming of 5pm on Friday.

This is OUR LIVES we’re talking about here.

Our lives that we’ve learned how to talk and walk and read and write and eat and drink and drive and love and then BAM! You lock yourself into a deeply unsatisfying job purely because the paycheck is good.

Now, I don’t have my head in the sand, I know we’re all doing it tough financially at the moment. People are working two, three jobs to keep a roof over their’s and their family’s heads, and put food on the table. The rich are getting richer and the rest of us are struggling to get by - don’t get me started on that topic!

But if we can at least enjoy our jobs - wouldn’t that make life more pleasant?

In some cases, work has become a new religion - the thing we spend the most amount of time, energy and thought on. Family, faith, and friends are scheduled in, if we have time, and it makes the world feel like it’s spinning faster than ever. I mean it’s February already! I’ve heard so many people say that it feels like Christmas was last week.

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I want you to think about what it is you’re good at.

Go on - just take a minute. Are you good at maths? Do you like helping people? Do you like driving? Are you good at baking? Is solving complex community issues something you like to get your teeth into? Do you like dabbling in laboratories and asking ‘why’? Do you create art - in all its forms? Are you great with little kids? Are you always there for your friends? Is fixing things something you excel at?

Because often - not always, unfortunately - what we’re good at is actually what we should be doing.

We all have a ‘calling’ on our lives, whether you choose to believe that calling is something God anoints you with, or whether you feel it’s more to do with what sort of person you are, we’re all here for a reason. Sadly, a lot of people die having never spent a moment even thinking about what that reason was, or even knowing that there was a reason for their lives.

I was born to cook.

I have no hesitation in saying that at all.

When I was a kid, playing in my little tin shed cubbyhouse, the most often role-playing game I played was pretending to be a chef. (I may have told you about this before - this is for the more recent folks who’ve subscribed :-)) My parents would dutifully sit either side of a rough tabletop my dad wedged into the lower branches of the almond tree which grew beside my cubby. I served them the same thing every time (how patient are parents?) which was ‘steak’ (actually pieces of willow tree bark which I sprinkled with water so it looked like meat) (obviously I had no clue what a steak looked like when I was a kid), served alongside some ‘chips’ (which were yellowed willow tree leaves) and ‘salad’ (green weeds and probably some sour-sob flowers for decoration). I felt such joy in serving this inedible repast to my Mum and Dad (who pretended to eat it and say how lovely it was), I think that’s why I started wanting to cook actual edible stuff when I was a little older.

Cooking is all about serving. To want to prepare food, in all it’s delicious, glorious concoctions, to people you love and/or care about is one of life’s most rewarding things. I’ve spent thirty-six years working in commercial kitchens of all shapes and sizes, and it’s quite unusual for me to still be doing it in my (almost) mid-fifties.

In my decades in kitchens, I’ve met people with a passion for cooking seemingly as great as mine, and yet most of those people aren’t ‘in the game’ or ‘on the tools’ anymore. I’ve met others who’ve just applied for the job and are working there because ‘there’s nothing else’ - always a bad idea! If you’re not committed or called to cook for a living, it’s one of the hardest jobs you could ever imagine.

It’s like teaching. I now work in the canteen of a fabulous private school, where there are - obviously - teachers. Now there is a calling. I could no more stand in front of a group of kids who didn’t really want to be there and teach them something they probably don’t want to know, than I could jump out of a plane with a parachute.

Nursing is another career that I’m pretty sure is a calling. Taking care of other humans at their most vulnerable times, cleaning up after them, calming them, reassuring them, and getting paid nowhere near what they’re worth.

So, the question is - are you ‘just working’ or do you ‘have a calling’?

Even if you’re that tireless person who brings together all the shopping trolleys lazy bums people leave in the car parking bays - you have a calling. You like order. You like things neat. You’re willing to do the thing that a lot of other people don’t even think about.

And the weird part about it is - you love it.

You mightn’t love it all the time. I know there have been a few times (twice if I’m honest) that I’ve thought to myself - I can’t do this cheffing thing anymore. There’s gotta be something easier. And I did actually get a job that was kind of kitchen-adjacent about twenty five years ago. But as I stood there watching the chefs in their (uncomfortable but nevertheless iconic) chef jackets and checked trousers, moving about in clouds of hissing steam, shiny knives, and stainless steel benches, I knew in my very core that that’s where I should be. That’s where I belonged.

Because hospitality is a calling for me. Making people feel loved and appreciated whether it’s in my home, at church, or in whichever commercial kitchen I’m working in gives me such joy.

And when your job gives you joy, it doesn’t matter what time your alarm goes off in the morning (mine’s at 5am), because you can’t wait to get there and do the thing you love all over again.

I really hope you have a job that fills your cup. If you don’t, maybe it’s time to step out of the boat and find the joy in your calling.

Have a great week.

Maggie

The Book Bit

As I mentioned above, I’m still going on my current read but I did have the opportunity this week to watch a movie I’ve been wanting to see for years. I love the works by the English historical novelist, author Philippa Gregory, and found the series she wrote around Henry VIII’s wives particularly interesting. I think the first book I read of hers was ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ and the richness of the descriptions of English court in those days was particularly wonderful. The movie was but a dull reflection of the novel, however, although it was better than I’d been lead to believe. The way daughters were treated as bargaining chips for men wishing to elevate their estates and titles was sad and sickening to see. In this case, the book was way better than the movie. A trim and fit Eric Bana as Henry wasn’t quite how he looked according to history, but Scarlett Johanssen and Natalie Portman did a great job of playing the sometimes complicated roles of Mary and Ann Boleyn. I bought the DVD from an opshop a while ago, and I’ll pass it on so someone else can give it a go.

One of the points I made (and I’ll share the notes here when I’ve presented it) is that we should celebrate our writerly achievements. Most of them will only be small - finishing a particularly difficult chapter, writing yourself out of a plot twist that wasn’t supposed to happen, or even - a biggie - finishing your manuscript.

So I thought that this week I might write about My Achievements in January, and not just the writing ones, which is good because there weren’t really that many of those!

I kept promises to myself

An odd topic to start with, you might think, but after all I’ve been through in the past six months or so, I thought I’d treat myself to something, and I think I was testing myself to see if I’d do it.

After a visit to Albany in December, where I saw a few single women wading out into the stunning waters of Middleton Beach and swim as if they belonged there, I thought to myself - why don’t I do that? And I promised myself right there and then that during the month of January, I would go to the beach once a week. And I’m very pleased to say that I have kept that promise to myself. I didn’t necessarily swim every time - I’m not a fan of huge waves and strong undertows - but I’ve enjoyed the sand, sea, and sunshine either on my own, or with friends, pretty much every week. Just because I’m returning to work tomorrow doesn’t preclude me from continuing this refreshing new habit, either, but I mightn’t have enough energy to visit every week. But I intend to keep going to beach as often as I can during the summer.

I filled my home with furniture

Yep, we all love furniture! This place looked very bare and, to be honest, lonely, when I moved in in late November last year. But after lots of searching, some very generous souls, and people getting rid of stuff on Marketplace, this unit is now my home. It seems my favourite colours are green (in the lounge) and dusky pink (in my bedroom), and I love looking at furniture made of real wood (hello little bookcase and buffet & sideboard). To get it all fitted out in the six weeks I had off was a challenge with a small budget, but I got there. Many thanks to my friends who’ve helped me cart stuff home, and to my sons who’ve helped me put things together (hello IKEA stuff). I can return to work now, knowing that I can relax in a comfy chair of my choice when I get home. What more does a girl need?

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I learned stuff

I did two courses during January, and the first one was a Barista Basics and Latte Art course, so I can help out making coffees at work when there’s no one else to do it. First up - I don’t drink coffee. I KNOW! HOW AM I EXISTING?? But I know gabillions of people do drink coffee, and it’s very important to serve good coffee. So I went and learned all about how beans are roasted, why the grind size and pouring time is important, and how to froth milk (the best bit). My latte ‘art’ ‘skills’ leave a lot to be desired, but I was getting there in the end.

The second course I did was the practical part of a First Aid course, run at my workplace, where we had to demonstrate our bandaging skills, what to do if you find someone unconscious (DRS ABCD), and our knowledge of CPR, which we displayed on mannequins of adults and babies. I tell you, CPR is brutal, but I guess we’re trying to manually force the blood around the body with these chest pumps, and if they’re not fierce enough, the blood isn’t going to get back up to the brain to keep this person alive. It’s all good to know, but I sincerely hope I never have to do it! At the end of the day, all the ‘sleeping’ mannequins got zipped up in bags, even the baby ones, and I had to stop myself from singing a lullaby while the zip slowly covered their little bodies. Creepy.

I had a mini holiday within my holiday

What?

Well, I went to Mandurah for a few days, and stayed with my parents. It’s been many (many, many) years since I slept in the same house as them, but it was lovely to hang out with them for a few relaxing days, and even sneak in a shopping morning with my Mum (yes, we both got some bargains). I took public transport from my place to Mandurah, a 90km journey, and was pleasantly surprised at the smallness of the price - $2.80. I caught the bus from just around the corner to Midland Station, from there a train into Perth City, from there a walk to the underground and the train to Mandurah. It took twice as long as it would by car, but I was on holidays and it didn’t matter. The return journey a couple of days later was just as pleasant, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again.

I went to a live show, had an endoscopy, and saw an aurora

…but not all on the same day. Lol.

The live show I went to with a friend was at The Camfield pub in Burswood (apparently the largest pub in Australia, smack bang right next door to the Optus Stadium) and was a singalong to West End vs Broadway musicals. I didn’t know a lot of the songs, but let rip when they played hits from Mama Mia, Wicked, and a few other ones I knew.

The endoscopy was just a five-yearly check-up and apparently everything was okay. Done at Kalamunda hospital (had no idea there even was a hospital there) which I can highly recommend - beautiful staff and great facilities.

The aurora was magic! I randomly heard about a severe geomagnetic storm happening in the heavens above us last week, and quickly assembled an interested party to drive out to Lake Leschanaultia to check it out. What we could see with the naked eye was very subdued, but my friends had much better cameras than me, and managed to capture some stunning photos.

I saw a movie

On my own.

:-)

Right at the beginning of January I went to see The Choral, a very quiet little movie about a choral society in Yorkshire, England, trying to put together a show during the carnage and horrors of the Great War. I don’t remember the last time I went to the movies on my own. It’s always been a bit of a social thing to do. But similar to going to the beach alone, there’s something very empowering and self-affirming about taking myself out, just because I want to. While I was there, I saw the trailer for the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I read that book as a young woman, and have lost count the number of times I’ve read it since. So naturally I’ll have to go see that one when it comes out in February, too.

And I think that’s it!

I did other stuff, not really worthy of comment here, and I’ve managed to not melt during the swathes of disgustingly hot days we’ve had this summer. The east coast of Australia seems to be having a visit from the furnace, with record high temperatures all over the place. Here in Perth we’re about to get scorched once again this week, with temperatures in the mid to high 30’s for over a week. Urgh. Bring on summer.

No Book Bit this week as I’m still wading through my current novel - hopefully I’ll be finished it next week.

Until then,

Happy days

Maggie

p.s. what are some of your achievements this month?

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You only have to type the word ‘summer’ into Mr Google’s pages, and be delightfully bombarded with photos of pools, beaches, ice creams, watermelon, glorious sunsets, coconuts and thongs (for the feet). What’s not to love?

Lots.

As I write this blog today (Tuesday 20th Jan) the temperature outside is marching boldly towards an expected top of 40C. That’s just here in Perth. Further north, in the inland desert regions of WA, temperatures will be flirting dangerously close to 50C.

Unless grass patches have a regular water supply, they’re dead. Large swathes of land look like a perfectly cooked piece of toast; golden brown and nice and crisp. When the hot wind blows, it brings dust, pollens, and that oddly ‘hot’ smell that makes you crinkle your nose and hurry back inside.

Plants wilt, looking like they’re shouldering the burdens of the world. Huge limbs drop from ancient trees as they desperately pull back the moisture in the branches to save the trunk. Birds sit in the the shade with their beaks open, their ebullient songs paused in the dryness. Livestock huddle together under the shade of whatever they can find, their flanks twitching to disturb the ever-present flies.

And we humans just go about our lives as if nothing much has changed.

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We wake up in air conditioned homes, travel to whatever occupies our day in air conditioned automobiles, our workplaces are (mostly) air conditioned, and some of us arrive home, decide that it really is too hot, and swim in our pool.

But a lot of people don’t have any of those things. Some people don’t have aircon, for whatever reason, and rely on fans. They work in hot places, where cooling systems aren’t an option.

Being a chef, I’ve worked in some pretty uncomfortably hot places. Kitchens aren’t renown for their comfortable atmosphere in any form. Heat, stress, and pressure make for a very volatile and sweaty environment, and I’ve worked in plenty of places overflowing with all of those things. Places where I sweat so much my clothes adhere to my body. I drink so much water, and yet pass a teensy dribble of yellow water in the loo. Step outside after a shift like that to a day that was in the high 30’s, and it feels like I’m stepping into another oven. I get home completely drained of lifeforce and energy, wondering yet again why I didn’t choose an office job for a career.

I’m incredibly grateful that my present job has the most amazing aircon. Although I’ve been on a long break, I’m not dreading going back next week because I know I’ll be as cool as twenty cucumbers, and I reckon I’ve earned that.

When it’s hot, it’s not just the temperature that changes. Although I recently moved, I lived in the Perth Hills for 13 years, and summer puts all Hills residents on high alert for bush fires. As soon as there’s smoke, the inner panic lifts. Where’s that smoke coming from? Is it close? Do I have to enact my evacuation plan? Do I stay to defend my home or leave it to burn? Some people don’t even get the chance to make that decision. They’re away from their home when a fire ignites, swallowing up all that dry grass, consuming the water-starved trees and turning everything in it’s path to ash.

People seem to have ‘shorter fuses’ when it’s hot. Their tolerance levels drop, their ability to put up with stuff decreases, and the discomfort and sweat and seemingly never-ending heat somehow makes us angrier.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I guess.

Summer has the best fruit.

Peaches. Strawberries. Nectarines. Raspberries. Plums. Grapes. Mangoes.

All my favourites. Although I love winter, the fruit available in the colder months is pathetic; oranges and apples and pears. Yeah. Wow.

There’s nothing better than tucking into a bowl of chopped up stone fruit with a generous slop of yoghurt (or ice cream). Or munching on a peach, letting the sweet nectar run down your chin, feeling that slightly furry skin on your tongue, and the gentle crunch of the just-ripe flesh between your teeth.

I love roasting plums. Quartered, very lightly sprinkled with olive oil and pepper (yes, pepper), scattered with however much brown sugar you feel comfortable with, and maybe a little cinnamon. Baked for about twenty minutes, or until the flesh feels ‘loose’, then cool completely. Serve chilled with those blood-red juices that came out during the cooking over some really good vanilla ice cream. You can thank me later.

Early last month, when I was in Albany for the launch of a project my youngest son had been working on, I went for an early morning walk along Middleton Beach. It was a stunning day. Sunny, cool, and a brisk fresh breeze with the promise of sunshine - no heat. I noticed a few women separately head down to the beach and go swimming. Just on their own. For their own pleasure.

What a brilliant idea, I thought.

Right then, I made a promise to myself that during my break, I would go to the beach once a week, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve kept that promise. I’ve been to a beach every week - over New Year I went twice. I haven’t always been for a swim, but my feet have always been in the water. Yesterday I swam in the afternoon at South Fremantle with a friend. The water was just the right temperature, the waves were incredibly gentle, and the sky was a ridiculously enthusiastic sapphire blue. Afterwards we sat on the sand to dry and watched someone attempt kitesurfing, which would absolutely scare me to death. I’d be afraid the wind would drag me out to the middle of the ocean and I’d never be seen again.

So maybe summer isn’t so bad.

Maybe I just needed to discover how to enjoy it. To embrace the summer lifestyle and take advantage of some of the world’s best beaches right here in Perth. To embrace the ‘house dress’ - a delightful, shapeless linen garment which makes me feel like I’m not wearing anything at all (but I am). To embrace summer dinners of cold meats and salad - a bit of prep beforehand, but in five minutes, dinner’s ready! And to remember during heatwaves, like the one escalating outside my window right now, to keep drinking water, be kind to myself, and know that this too shall pass. There’ll be cooler days coming, and the extreme heat of summer will be a memory.

Stay cool.

Maggie x

The Book Bit

The History of Mischief by Rebecca Higgie was a book chosen by my writers group to read together and comment on at one of our meetings. Some of us (i.e. me) hadn’t quite finished reading it by the time of our meeting last week, but we did chat carefully about it - no spoilers - and we all agreed that it’s a gorgeously written book. The history of the apparent emergence of the book was fascinating, little snippets of side-histories of people creating ‘mischief’ and how the book went from person to person over hundreds of years.

We all agreed it seemed mis-placed in the YA/Pre-teen genre, because a lot of adults are missing out, thinking it’s a book just for kids. It won the Fogarty Literary award in 2019, and is well-known in the WA Writing community.

However, I have finished reading it now, and I have to be fully honest and say that the ending disappointed me. I won’t say what happens because I do truly believe you should read this book if you haven’t already, but it finishes with a kind of ‘and then she woke up’ ending (in my opinion). I won’t say anymore - please do read it. If you have read it, what are your thoughts?

If you’re one of the few dozen people in the universe who hasn’t seen this film, it’s about a kid named Marty McFly living in the 1980’s who - in the first movie - ends up in a DeLorean Time Machine and gets hurled back in time to 1955. He almost brings about the demise of his own existence by stumbling into his parents, and having his mum fall in love with him instead of the man who would eventually become his dad.

There are three movies in this franchise (and a musical - although I’m not sure about how I feel about that) and the central theme to all of them is the quandary the characters find themselves in when they’re in the wrong ‘time’, and the very real damage they can do to their own futures.

It brings up that prickly question - if you could go back in time and warn yourself about some impending upset in your life, would you do it? Would you try and shield yourself from that drama?

Or would you realise that the going through of those tough weeks, days, months, years, has helped create the person that you are now?

Would knowing what’s going to happen to you in the future erase worry?

We often think about these things on a global level. Like, how could we change the course of history by shifting the Big Things. Taking down certain political leaders who’ve caused untold suffering in history. Maybe even trying to configure the universe so The Bad Things don’t happen. We’ve probably all thought about it.

But the thing is, everything starts with us.

In the second Back to the Future movie, Marty McFly ends up in the future, in 2015, and buys a sports almanac full of all the sports and race winners in history, thinking he can take it back to 1985 and ‘place a few bets’. ‘Doc’ challenges him on his morals, and Marty throws it in the rubbish, only to have the book picked up by the baddie of all the movies, ‘Biff’, and him stealing the DeLorean Time Machine, and giving it to himself in the past.

That paragraph might be hard to follow (lol) but in that one act of trying to make his own future better, Marty manages to stuff up the timelines of his entire family, and the rest of the movie shows us how he manages to undo it.

So again, would knowing about some future event help us at all? Would we live carefree lives knowing that thing is or isn’t going to happen - all future worry is taken care of?

Unfortunately life always has surprises. Our lives are full of troubles and woes.

Even Jesus understood this. In the Bible, in Matthew 6:34 it says

Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble on its own.

Amen to that, right?

Each day has enough trouble on its own. That is so true. Today’s trouble might just be how you’re going to word a difficult email. Yesterday’s trouble might have been getting to work in peak hour traffic. Tomorrow’s trouble? It’s just not worth stressing about.

If we spend too much time worrying and trying to control things so tomorrow turns out ‘just right’, we miss today. The gifts and treasures and time we’re given in abundance today - right now - can become forgotten and overlooked when we’re worrying too much about the future.

Now, I’m not saying we don’t have to consider the future. If we don’t take it into account when we’re planning things - well, I guess we just wouldn’t plan anything. We’d get to old age and have no money. We’d never take a holiday. We’d never catch up with friends. We’d pretty much never do anything. So obviously we need, to a certain extent, to plan and consider our futures and those of our children and their children. We want to leave a habitable planet for them to live on, and we want their futures to always be better than ours was.

But it’s the worrying that nibbles away at us. Only a few months ago I was totally freaking out, not knowing where I was going to live, knowing I had to find a job, but how was I going to do that, how in the world is this all going to work out?

As I often do, I opened my Bible during that time and was fortified by this:

Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Luke 12:25

Does worrying about the future make us live longer? You only have to ask Dr Google what the signs are of worrying and stressing too much.

Headaches.

Overeating.

Angry outbursts.

Chest pain.

Fatigue.

Avoiding friends.

Sleep problems.

The list goes on and on.

The future is an unknown to all of us. There’s that old saying:

How many of us waste precious time in the Present, here in the gift of today, worrying about the mysteries of tomorrow? I know I did. But after learning that I can trust my future to the Creator, knowing He only wants good things for my life, I began to worry less.

Note, I didn’t stop worrying AT ALL. It’s a human trait to worry about stuff, and when we’re worried about friends and family, I guess it shows we really care about them. But spoiling today by worrying about tomorrow and ferreting over things you have no control over? Pointless. And raking over the coals of the mistakes you made yesterday instead of taking today to start all over again? Also pointless.

Every day is a gift. A chance to better ourselves. A chance to make things right in our own little sphere of influence.

I’m slowly learning that I have little to no control over where I end up in five, ten, or twenty years. Sure, I have dreams, I have plans, I have a vague idea of where I’d like to be. But in order to get there, I have to live today as best I can. Every day step up again to a life of gratitude and thankfulness, trusting that each day is a step towards my mysterious tomorrows.

Not worrying about the future is hard at the moment, with the world in such turmoil and upheaval. Hate and fear spill out everywhere, and it’s hard to avoid.

Be the kind one.

Be the one who listens.

Be the one who has the faith to believe that while tomorrow mightn’t look much different from today, every day is a step towards a brighter future, and only you can take those steps.

Maggie x

The Book Bit.

I just this week I finished reading this little romance anthology published in 2024. I don’t usually read a lot of romance, but enjoy Pamela Cook’s podcasts on writing, and her Substack Writes4Women. I enjoyed the fact that all the stories were written in the outback, although there wasn’t a lot of reference made to the weather (all of them were set in the lead-up to Christmas), and after the 4th story of the bad-boy-turns-good situation, I guess it wore thin. But that’s romance. Maybe, also, I’m a little cynical about romance. But that’s just me. :-)

I’ve had multiple Substack articles flood my inbox over the past couple of weeks about New Years Resolutions and whether we should be bothered making them anymore. I’ve been asked by friends what my New Years Resolutions are, and have been ever-not-so-gently been encouraged to think about it.

I’m not a resolution maker. I don’t make a list in January encouraging myself to run 10k’s every week, drink green smoothies, and join a gym, because I know myself, and I don’t want to do any of those things.

When people ask me ‘What’s your new year’s resolutions?’ I usually fob them off with some comment like, ‘Oh, I never bother with that nonsense,’ or ‘I know God’s got me, He’s in control of my future so why should I make a ‘wish list’ of things I know I’ll never achieve?’

There’s already so much change going on in my life that I didn’t plan, do I want to actually start thinking about the things I do want to see change in?

Now I think about it, heck yeah!

The one thing I really, really want to be more purposeful about this year is my writing.

The past four to six months have taken their toll on the creative side of my brain, and any regular writing I may have dabbled in previously is all out the window. I have written a couple of thousand words over that time, which in itself is quite the miracle, but usually I pump the words out, purposefully setting aside chunks of time to steep in whatever story I’m writing.

2024 was a good writing year for me. I entered a few short story competitions and won one (click here to read it), and got a placement in another. I powered through writing like a weight lifter with barbells. It was easy. The inspiration flowed. Stories came out of my head like soft serve ice cream out of a dispenser. I went to book launches, author talks, and writing festivals. I was an active member of the best writers group in Perth, enjoying giving and receiving feedback, and discussing writing. I even had some fabulous feedback from one of the Big Five publishers about a novel I wrote - unfortunately it wasn’t of the popular genres of the moment (apparently ‘everyone’ is reading Romantasy and Crime), but her words of encouragement were like a tonic to my writing. I can do this! My writing doesn’t suck!

But the later half of 2025 was tough. Evenings where I would normally have been happily tapping out words on my computer after doing the office portion of my business, I’ve more recently been searching for a job, minding other people’s homes, and finding a place to live. All on my phone because most of the time I had no way of using my computer because there was no internet, or I didn’t even have my computer. Yes, I’ve made copious notes on my phone, but for me, nothing beats sitting at my chair, hands on the keyboard, letting the ideas flow from my brain to my fingers and seeing what comes out. Long form writing is another option, but I can’t keep up with the words tumbling from my brain, and in no time at all, my writing is illegible.

Also, opportunities in which I would have stood in the moment in my favourite deep-thinking places and let inspiration find me are gone. I’m disconnected from my usual places of motivation - mostly the bushland around where I used to live - and haven’t had the time to settle into a new place and find another spot.

I still attended my wonderful writers group, but submitting writing and doing the whole feedback thing was so overwhelming that I just stopped participating for a time. I felt like a shell of my writer-self. Yes, it’s still me, but the writing part of me felt like it died off from lack of use.

But now I am settled.

I have a little rental of my own.

My computer sits on a tiny desk beside my bed.

As I write this post, I’m waiting for a technician to come and connect the place to the NBN so I can have proper internet and stop using the personal hotspot on my phone.

The physical place to write is here. It’s my computer, in my room, in my house, and it’s my time.

It’s a new year at my writers group, and I’m actually looking forward to getting back into submitting my own work, and reading and critiquing other’s work. I feel excited to get going again, to chat about the challenges of writing and publishing and all the things.

Now I just need inspiration.

It still comes, in spurts and dribbles. Usually only after I sit here at the computer, open the manuscript, and put my fingers to the keyboard.

So this is my New Years Restitution.

I’m using restitution instead of resolution because the word restitution means:

the restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner

The restoration of something lost - the restoration of my joy in writing, the refreshing of my spirit so I can find inspiration in new places, and the reconnection to the wonderful writing community here in WA.

Let’s go!

Maggie x

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p.s. The Book Bit.

This week I read a book written and self published by one of my writers group friends. Ivy Bazley has written a series called The Burned King Legacy, and book one - Born Of Fire - is available now on Amazon. You can buy it here.

I admit I read an early draft of this book as a Beta Reader, and I loved it then. But now - Ivy - you have created a masterpiece. I inhaled the book in a short space of days, loving the rich setting, the great dialogue, and the very real characters who all come alive on the page. I don’t usually read a lot of fantasy (something that will change this year!) but this book was an absolute joy to read. Highly recommend. :-)

*gets distracted by cashew fudge and almond biscotti*

I digress.

I like to think I’m a responsible human being.

I put my shopping trolley back in the bay when I’m finished with it.

I recycle, and shop at second hand shops.

I conserve water, and have even been known to collect the water from the night’s washing of dishes to pour on the garden.

I used to compost, religiously keeping ‘anything that came from something that was living’ in a separate container.

But you know, that’s yet another thing I find difficult as a single person.

In 2023, Perth rolled out a third bin, in addition to the two other ones we all had.

Yellow-topped bins are for anything that can be recycled - cardboard, glass, cans, etc.

Red-topped bins are for household waste - your usual rubbish bin.

The green-topped one was dubbed the FOGO bin (Food Organics, Garden Organics), and what a kerfuffle it created when it was released onto the streets of Perth Suburbs. Not only was there another bin to be remembered on bin day, but the red one, which used to be picked up each week, would now only be emptied once per fortnight. The FOGO bin would be picked up each week, the yellow one on the fortnight that wasn’t the red one. People seethed! People went nuts!

I understood both camps. People - families - create a lot of rubbish. Especially if you have kids and dogs and cats and the whole shebang. They would have needed to have their rubbish bins emptied each week because it would have been full. But the idea is that we be mindful of what we’re putting in the bin. Food scraps don’t compost when they’re mixed with plastics. They just rot without oxygen, (anaerobically) and make greenhouse gases like methane, which are deadly to our already fragile environment. And landfill isn’t a satisfactory solution for the future of our habit of making rubbish. So something had to be done.

Where I used to live, in the Perth Hills, lots of people are ‘self-sufficient’. They have rainwater tanks, solar panels, vegetable gardens, and chickens. In the winter they burn all their garden rubbish, the piles of sticks and branches growing ever-larger after each big wind storm. I remember the outcry of disbelief that people were being issued a bin into which they were supposed to put all the stuff they don’t have. Their chooks get the food scraps, or they compost for their vegetable garden, and as they gather all the windfall from the latest storm for a bonfire while they wait for Western Power to restore electricity, they glare at the stupid green bin sitting there waiting to be filled.

When I lived in the hills I used to compost - I even went to a composting workshop when I lived back in NSW to learn how to do it. I was taught the ‘lasagne’ method of layering food scraps with shredded paper, so the whole thing didn’t end up in a congealed gloop of rotten slime.

The FOGO bin was a great idea, in my opinion. I used to work my way around the big garden, trimming and tidying, putting all the trimmings and tidyings in the green lidded bin, along with my two or three compostable bags full of kitchen scraps, and every week, the big truck came along to take it all away.

What I didn’t realise until I had my own little place, here in the foothills of Perth, is that every household got a green-lidded bin. Every. Household.

I am now considered a household. As are my three neighbours, two of whom are also single people (one’s a FIFO), and one is a retired couple. We all have one massive green FOGO bin that’s supposed to go out on the kerb each week.

I had good recycling habits, and I brought them with me. I even brought my little compost bin with me, and a new roll of compostable liners to go inside my little bin.

But I am one person. I don’t create that much rubbish. My recycle bin has been full of cardboard of late because I bought a few things from IKEA - see my previous post for adventures with my ice cream scoop hammer:

But food waste? Not that much. I don’t even have a garden. The front area of my unit has two little Moses-in-the-cradle plants (Tradescantia spathacea), and my rear courtyard is fully bricked in, with only the drying husks blowing about of some weeds I pulled out a week ago. I will get some pot plants in there soon, it’s just so hot in Perth at the moment, and I’m still learning where the shady spots are in the courtyard.

However, I had trained myself well. Pop all food waste in the compost bin, then take the little soggy baggy and drop it in the FOGO bin. But it’s not worth dragging the huge bin to the kerbside with two rockmelon-sized bags of food scraps lolling down the bottom, so I let it go for two weeks. Four bags is better than two.

Unfortunately the flies were overjoyed with my decision, too, and set to making a pleasantly putrid nursery for all their baby maggots. When I got home the day the garbologists had emptied the bins and leaned in to check the bags hadn’t stuck to the bottom, the inside was filled with what looked like chubby, off-white grains of rice. None of them moving, thankfully.

I will have to wash that bin out at some stage, but I’ll have to gather a lot of intestinal fortitude before hand (and not eat before, either).

Then I realised it was taking me so long to gather enough to even fill the little compost bin in the kitchen, that when I took that out the other day to empty it, it too was full of chubby, off-white grains of rice - wriggly ones this time.

GAG!!

Urgh.

I had to put my Big Girl’s Pants on and get rid of the compost bag, then scrub the little bin out with strong floor cleaner and leave it to dry in the laundry. Then go and wash my hands four times.

So what’s the solution?

I understand our predicament. As a race, we cannot continue to just trash the planet which supports our existence. We have to change the way we’re doing things. We have to stop throwing everything into landfill. We have to stop using coal (despite what dithering leaders in the USA say). We have to find another way to fuel our way of life, or else face its very extinction.

But is giving every single household a FOGO bin really the way to do it? I don’t often see anyone else in my units put theirs out each week. Across the road from where I live is a very ‘compact’ community of 45 houses huddled close together like penguins in the arctic. On bin day, the entire side of the road is taken over with wheelie bins, but rarely do I see a green one.

In Sweden, they burn waste to generate electricity and heating, and households separate their rubbish into ‘multiple’ categories, and they have the enviable figure of less than 1% of rubbish going to landfill. In South Korea the rubbish is weighed, and you’re charged based on the weight of trash you generate, plus they also have a ‘rigorous’ mandatory food recycling programme. Switzerland also have a ‘pay-as-you-throw’ programme, and comprehensive recycling initiatives. All of these countries have lots of community involvement, and hubs to dispose of toxic and/or hazardous waste properly (no more rubbish trucks bursting into flames because yet another lithium battery has exploded deep in the bags of trash).

I’m well aware that all of the countries I mentioned above are teensy-tiny compared with Australia - our country is 17 times bigger than Sweden, and I’m pretty sure out there in the desert we have salt lakes almost as big as South Korea. But that doesn’t absolve us from being responsible humans. Somehow we all think the little patch of land we live on ‘doesn’t matter’, that it’s ‘just me’, or ‘I just can’t be bothered sorting the rubbish’. But if thousands of us think like that, it’s a problem.

I want to put my vegetable scraps in the right place, but I also don’t want to be the dubious owner of a blow-fly nursery, either.

One trick I did learn when I recently worked as a cookery teacher with OzHarvest for a short time, and will obviously have to put into practice, was to freeze vegetable scraps. Carrot peelings, droopy celery ends, onion skins, parsley stalks, the lot. Keep a small container in your freezer specifically for these scraps. Then, when your container is full, and you’ve perhaps had a roast dinner and have a partly-meaty chicken frame in your fridge, bung it in a large pot with all those scraps, bring it to the boil and let it simmer for one hour. Strain it, season it, and hey presto - you’ve got awesome, homemade chicken stock. Which you can go right ahead and freeze again - in one or two cup amounts for easy using.

And those food scraps you used to make the stock? Pick out all the bits of chicken (if you didn’t already do this when you had the roast in the first place) then it can go into your compost bucket, and then into the FOGO bin.

If you have one.

If you can fill it enough to put it out every week.

Urgh.

Anyone got any other tips for using up kitchen waste? Besides chickens and home compost systems like Bokashi and tumblers, and doing your darndest to not make a blowfly’s dream ecosystem?

And hey, Happy New Year, too!

Tonight sees us all tossing old calendars & diaries away and opening new ones. New promises will be made, health regimes reimagined, and a blank slate looms.

Make 2026 a good year, folks. Be kind. Go gently. Think often. Be thankful.

I look forward to journeying with you.

Maggie xx

p.s. I might start telling you what books I read, as I read them. It seems to interest a lot of people [shrugs] although I don’t always read the latest book by any author, I buy them second hand and read what I like.

At the Christmas dinner for my fabulous writers group, we buy second hand books, wrap them, and we pick them out randomly. I was gifted ‘Salt River Road’, by Molly Schmidt. I’d wanted to read this book since it came out, because it caused a lot of commotion, and it won the Hungerford Award. If you’ve not read this - please do. It has a very Tim Winton feel about it - a very raw and yet gentle voice - and is about grief and healing and family, and is set in the beautiful coastal WA town of Albany. Presently I am sorting through all the books I own because I no longer have a massive bookshelf on which to store All The Books. I shall be keeping Salt River Road, however. It will sit on my shelf proudly, and I already look forward to reading it again.