A grey Melbourne day of dust-wind and mud-rain, all the windows sueded with topsoil blowing over the city from the west. A slight cold leaves me disinclined for anything but sloth and gluttony. The fireplace is sharp and clear and the television is a glittering jewel. Comfort food, footstools, cushions and cups of tea. I cocoon all day and well into the night, watching TV, chatting on the phone or fiddling aimlessly with the laptop. I am the luckiest being in history, warm and fed and sheltered and entertained and surrounded by family.
What are you writing? asks my son after dinner. He is acknowledged lord of the remote control and is feeling indulgent towards me because he has just managed to show me how to do text messages on my mobile. I have felt too lazy to bicker with him about program choices, and so my brain is replete with Big Brother, so popular that I wonder until I take account of what else is hugely popular and successful right now. (Let me think. Hmm. Rainforest destruction going fine, no stopping that one—pass me those disposable mahogany chopsticks; poaching rare and endangered species, yes, invest the super in that one and make a real killing. It’s obviously time to distract myself from distraction.)
The lord of the remote is summarily deposed. He sighs when I insist on watching two ABC previews, Wild West (Thursdays at 8.30pm) and Walking with Cavemen (Thursdays at 8pm). I smile wickedly as he goes off with his cousin to play guitars and talk young-bloke talk. All really fine pleasures feel a little guilty, a bit stolen. What a Catholic I am, to be sure.
And so I watched Wild West with Dawn French as grumpy lesbian Mary, stealing pleasures as well. She was choccing out (only wimps veg out) in front of a nice big TV herself, watching whatever while I watched her. Her pleasures were stolen from the satisfyingly hateable and objectified rich absentee holiday-house owner, who was adding to the drama by racing to her hideaway. Would the squalor left by Mary’s orgy be discovered, or would she get out in time to make the political point she was supposed to be making? It said something sharp about the strains on small communities like St Gweep, the Cornish
backdrop to the story. Moneyed weekend house owners contribute nothing to the place, even doing their grocery