Ten non-stuff things that you could have got your kids for Christmas (not including a World Vision goat)

We got stuff for Christmas. Good stuff, but it's all stuff.
So many people were driving around with so much stuff in the boots of their cars yesterday. And pushing each other at checkouts to get all the stuff they were obliged to buy for all those other people who were going to give them stuff too.
The cost of unwanted Christmas presents in Australia has been estimated in the order of AUD$1B every year since 2010.

SO for next time, maybe don't get them stuff.
Don't simply get them a World Vision goat certificate. While there appear to be lots of happy kids with baby goats, one of the key objectives of Christmas is that your kids are happy too.

Here are ten alternatives.

1. Tickets to live music (anything from the Wiggles to a rock festival to a folk festival depending on the age of your kids)
2. A creative writing workshop, community theatre, a music or painting course (these run for even very young kids, and most people have a latent dream of becoming an ar-tiste of some kind.
3. Hot air balloon ride, glider flight, light plane flight, hovercraft ride, fishing charter etc.
4. Membership of an organisation or subscription to a magazine of interest. "Horrbile Histories" for an 8 year old boy, or you could cover bee-keepers club fees, or pay for a subscription to a rock magazine, New Scientist, or even contribute to their membership fee to a professional organisation
5. A tray of tree seedlings so they could plant and nurture their own forest - either on your land, on your nature strip (choose plants to match the power lines please!) , or in a public or pseudo-public place (see Guerrilla Gardening)
6. Surfing lessons, horseriding lessons, kung-fu lessons, ballet lessons etc. over summer, or for the next year.
7. A cheese-making course, a salami making course, or your local equivalent
8. A trip to somewhere they've always wanted to go. For young kids this might be the Zoo, or the city fire station. Or a museum of special interest. Ring these kinds of places and see what latitude they have for a 'special tour' for a 'super fan'. You could travel further - My 5 yr old wants to go fossil hunting at Lake Mungo in southern NSW. The neighbour wants to go caving at the Jenolan Caves. White-water rafting on a local river is also on his list.
9. Do any of the above as a family. It's more 'bonding' that way.
10. Give them cash. Paper money. In a red envelope for good luck. Not a gift certificate but a nice crisp paper sheet (although paper money is actually plastic with a clear window in it here).

Just a thought.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Five Extremely Dangerous Words

"Fact":

There is a gulf between an opinion and physical reality which few people notice. The frequently-used phrase “... the fact that....” makes our brains feel reassured, calm and comfortable in the confidence of the speaker, but it is so rarely true that the statement ought to trigger at best wariness, and possibly a bit of panic. Physical reality is complex, multi-layered, frequently contradictory, and extremely hard to describe in facts. Even a simple 'fact' statement: “The sky is blue”, is bound to a geographic definition (here, where I am looking at it), a temporal definition (during daylight hours, provided there are no clouds, and air pollution is below a certain limit) and a subjective definition (as seen by my eyes which have receptors for light in the blue part of the visible spectrum; other eyes may not recognise it as 'blue'.).

You can tell when someone really knows the reality of their subject matter, because their phrasing is always buffered by definitions and exclusions, and they refuse to give 'yes' or 'no answers. Top scientists often talk like this, and they often are very careful to avoid the word 'fact'.  This indicates to me that those who are too sure of their correctness either are ignorant of the parameters within which it holds and outside which it does not, or are spouting opinion and trying to make it sound like fact.

"The Truth":
Truths are multiple and often contradictory, and are also bound to geographic, temporal, cultural and subjective definition. But truths can be slipperier and more dangerous because sometimes, very occasionally, they can be true. And when they're not true, they are almost impossible to disprove.
Inside a truth is part fact, part personal perception. And it is such a heavy, ponderous, heart-stoppingly important word.
Today I happened to overhear a mother telling off one of her children, which is not a good template for how to resolve sibling arguments, but it neatly encapsulates the problem with truth.
"You stole that from your sister. Give it back."
"No. She gave it to me." 
"Don't lie to your mother. Tell me the truth." 
"The really true truth is she gave it to me."
"I so did not give it to him. He snatched it."
"You gave it to me, you did, you truly did."
"Stop arguing you two, or the truth is that I will make sure you both regret it."
Three different people, four different truths in two minutes. This is pretty typical. And at the core of the argument was a physical reality (the transfer of an object from the girl to the boy) and an accidental or deliberate misunderstanding of posession.
So when the legal system decided to abandon the search for truth, and constructed the idea of "beyond reasonable doubt". it was one of the best strategic moves in the development of credibility for any profession. (Up there with the Hippocratic Oath, anyway.)
It is not a new philosophical idea to abandon the search for The Truth when you recognise the multiplicity of relative truths. But outside theoretical philosophy we cling to Truth. We are just not very good at perceiving and enjoying and using the diversity of truths out there.

"It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault":
Don't we love having somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong! There must always be someone at 'fault'. Let's look at a compelling use of 'fault': motor vehicle accidents in Australia.
According to a Big Ideas on ABC radio national, in 2012 and 2013, only 45% of fatal accidents and 10% of non-fatal accidents included alcohol, drugs or speeding. A high proportion of all those other accidents were failures of the driving system: road infrastructure, environmental conditions, car technology, road rules, human limitations. At some point some human usually does something sub-optimal right before a collision, but the underlying cause is usually a property of the rest of the system, which was set up in a particularly disastrous way.

Punishing the guilty is fun. Crime stories, courtroom dramas, talkback radio, decades of research into monkey psychology and human economics, and now FMRIs and blood/saliva hormone tests involving the above show that our brains really do enjoy enforcing social norms by targeting and punishing those who break the rules. We get a dopamine hit from blaming somebody. And another one from punishing them ("Off with her Head!"). A dopamine rush feels very nice, and it is addictive. This is why it is so easy to hook us on the trigger for the dopamine. Even very young children like to play the game: "It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault".
Fault can be real, but it is not always the important thing to look for. We are far too quick to blame - and some of us to take the blame - when the important question should be "What does this mistake represent?" "How do we not make that particular mistake next time?" and then  "How do we change the particular system to move away from this bad configuration?"

Just about every time there is somebody at "fault" - bad driver, financial embezzler, serial rapist, mother whose child died in a hot car - the structures around them had more to do with 'causing' the events than they did. The use of the word "fault" indicates that the speaker is not interested in prevention or improvement of the underlying structures. They just want a dopamine hit and someone's head on a plate.

"Insight":
This is a new dangerous word, but it's becoming more popular. Having more or less rejected 'closure' as not particularly useful, it seems we are collectively hankering after 'insight' instead.
To have a moment of insight is to stand on the cusp of change or discovery. This is the moment when you see that your world, or another person's world, is not as you imagined it. It feels profound. The trouble with 'insight' is fourfold:
1) Psychotherapy created the word 'insight' and has successfully marketed it as an end in itself, which journalistic media has picked up nicely. Psychotherapists are primarily interested in helping someone traverse a cusp, and turn around their mental or emotional pathway to achieve whatever change they needed when they walked into the therapist's room, getting to 'insight' is in fact a goal of psychotherapy. It is not any kind of goal in life. It is only an intermediate step towards understanding, and eventually wisdom.
2) Insight feels better than wisdom or understanding. Insight feels like a profound change, a pivotal moment in your being when the world opens up a set of new possibilities. But when the 'insight' perspective is actually integrated into your being (ie understanding) and you are in a position to use it well (ie wisdom), it feels like nothing, because it is normal now. So much import is given to the possibility of change, none to the hard work of ongoing adaptation that brings the change into your being.
3) A moment of insight is hard to hold onto. It is an aberrant set of synaptic loops (an engram) which your brain structure isn't conditioned to accept. We need to get many moments of the same insight in order for it to stick, that is, in order for the engram to get strengthened. It is quite normal for a mind to test out thousands of observations and ideas at any given time subconsciously, and discard most of them as not-useful. That magnificent wash of 'insight' is simply a neurochemical bookmark for an idea: "Oh that might be handy, let's watch to see if we can use that again". And if you don't, no big deal, your brain will just re-wire any spare synapses to something more useful, eg flirting or looking for food.
4) When applied to other peoples' experience, insight can be a convenient proxy for empathy or inter-human understanding. Making statements like "That gives me an insight into what you might be experiencing" are much easier than if you actually allowed your sympathetic nervous system to feel the feelings that the other person's experience evokes. It's an intellectual rather than an empathic connection, and a very neat way to cut off the confronting conversation - leaving the other person feeling a bit more understood. But they're not understood. 'Insight' gets used to fob off the hard people and things to understand.

"The Only Option":
Don't tell me that anything is the only option. There are always other options. Always. They may not be good ones, or they may be much better ones hidden in plain sight. "The Only Option" is a way to keep me obedient. People who routinely see the other options are visionary, or from the other perspective too powerful and too dangerous. Just see:
Mahatma Ghandi (satyagraha), Mohammed Yunnus (microcredit), Nikita Kruschev (social, military & economic reforms within Russia plus a fabulous political tap-dance during the Cuban Missie Crisis).

But other options do not have to be big to be confrontational. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls presented a nifty TED lecture about crowdfunding their albums, which she tried after she refused to take the 'only option' of signing with a record label. I am still looking for a link to back up this marvellous story that a reality TV show was made about bride kidnapping (with consent from all families), which, when screened around villages in central Africa (you get a lot of "oh somewhere in central Africa" when asking white people in mostly-white single-nation-continents like here) caused a crash in the cultural approval for, and incidence of, kidnap-marriages. I wish I could find it. It is such a clever idea to bring a personal experience of bride kidnapping into public scrutiny by making it reality TV.

If you're in a tight spot, are you really out of options? At any point, you can break off mid-sentence and start singing a Puccini aria or get up and dance to 'Campdown Races'. Sometimes this actually helps, like when I tried it with 3 kids under 5 in a long supermarket queue on a particularly hideous Easter Thursday evening. Possibly not so useful in the traffic queue for the police breathalyser after New Years Eve, if you're driving a bit drunk. Opera in an engineering meeting? Could work. Ever thought to try it?

The greater your decision-making responsibility, the more people there are with vested interests or fixed habits who would seek to convince you that the "only option is...", but paradoxically, the greater your financial resources, the greater your degrees of freedom.
Consider the following large-scale options. Some of these may not be palatable or executable for a number of reasons, but they are alternatives which exist. Stop illegal refugee boats arriving by setting up the Coast Guard to set up a discount ferry service for refugees - cheaper, more effective, more humane. Want to increase public transport use? Bulldoze key arterial roads, or else hire male and female models to be "railway hosts", serving beverages and offering headphones to passengers. Their mere presence will make people feel safe (hey, it worked for air travel....). Want to eliminate homelessness? Provide extensive shelters for short-term homeless and buy houses for long-term homeless. I am being glib, of course, but even glib options are options.
Here is the risk. Sweeping revolutionary changes have poor track record when executed as government or high-level organisational policy (Mao's GLF and Cultural Revolution are classic examples). Outside options have quite a good track record when developed and refined in small areas in context, by people who know the terrain. Examples include Bromley-By-Bow community entrepreneurship, or women holding sex strikes over a particularly important local issue, or even the September 11 2002 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Maybe we all have much broader degrees of freedom than we see when it comes to "other options".
But don't ever tell me that anything is my "only option". I might start singing opera at you.

Learning to draw

I could cry for places where weeds don't grow - but that doesn't mean I am encouraging weeds everywhere

I love weeds. They are the rebels of the plant world. I love their relentless tenacity, their live-fast die-young lifestyle, I even admire their "f- you" attitude to the rules about where
to grow, their disregard for the presence or absence of things like soil and nutrient, I am fascinated by their diversity of shapes, colours, textures, spikyness. But above all I love the complex insect and bird life systems that weeds bring.

My own lawn is small and messy. We have bindi. We do not plan to eradicate it. The TV series Gardening Australia has a forum on how to eradicate bindi. Check out the mutagenic sideaffects of the chemical solution proposed, MCPA. Urgh.
We also have tiny blue and orange flowering weeds which fascinate the children.
And dandelions and nasturtiums. I put them in salads.
Did you know how many edible weeds there are? Several of them are in my lawn.

Our city council is a bit slack in the mowing and poisoning department right now. Our nearby highway verge has nifty spiky little roadside weeds and idyllic meadows of golden dandelions on the nature strip, for kilometers. And the weedy, overgrown grass hums quite loudly, louder than the cars sometimes. Native bees harvest nectar and pollinate. Grass flies rise in clouds. Cicadas leave their brown husks on the grass stalks and sing and beat in stereo. Birds gorge themselves on insects in these weedy verges. And most magpie nests have managed to raise 2 or 3 chicks on the insect feast this spring.

A funny aside about the cicadas. One hot day, a week or so ago, I was with my two younger kids in a very cicada-noisy place, and we were having a blast collecting the dirty brown vacated shells from all the trees. I had a plan to spray-paint them silver to decorate the as-yet-unsolved Christmas tree problem.
I saw a tangle of waving green cicada-y legs at the base of a tree. "Hey kids, come and see a living cicada!" I shouted over the very noisy white noise. The kids trundled closer. I put my hand out and the gently waving legs grabbed it. (Cicadas don't bite in my area, although their feet have hooks and tickle a bit.) And out of the bark came.... the front half of a cicada. My middle son came out with "Oh look mummy, he has no bottom, what happened to his bottom? And is that dark stuff his blood coming out all over your hand?"
I had to explain that a bird found this fellow first and bit him in half, and ate up his bottom, and now he can't sing anymore. My youngest laughed and laughed, and kept saying "Bottom!" and pointing to mine, then the cicada, and then mine.
We put the half-cicada back on a tree, and in a few minutes found another one - a complete one this time - which obliged us by singing like a chainsaw on my hand. The kids didn't see when a crow hopped over to the previous cicada and crunched up the rest of it.
Later at the shopping centre, my middle son took delight in telling everyone he saw about the cicada that had its bottom bitten off by a bird. And my youngest would punctuate the story by pointing at my backside and saying "BOTTOM!". The lady at the deli and the butchers' apprentices thought it was hilarious. The passers-by on the street looked a bit bewildered.

So back to marvellous weeds.
Weeds grow almost anywhere and they grown fast. They flower fast, and keep flowering throughout a season, either on a single plant or in a few generations. They provide food for bees. Especially wild bees.
And bees are so very important to us.

Long grass provides home for grass flies and caterpillars and all kinds of small beetles and soil invertebrates.
These provide food for skinks and larger lizards and frogs.
My garden has skinks and larger lizards and frogs in it. Most gardens in my street do. There is an annoying cricket that makes popping sounds like a tin roof expanding in the heat, who lives near our chook shed and has been known to scare the b'jeezus out of me by suddenly singing on hot nights.
Our garden is alive and you can tell because it is noisy. The highway verges are alive and you can tell because they are noisy.
Have you listened to your garden? Have you got weeds? Is it noisy? Have you seen a lizard in it?

Or do you live in a weedless, skinkless moonscape which you must maintain with either herbicides and pesticides or an obsessive weeding regime? Are you a lawn person?

I just discovered this book and although it might be a little extreme, it has a point. It proposes that the ownership/leasing and maintenance of a property with a lawn change who you are.
That the pressure of a social expectation to keep turfgrass weeded and mowed and groomed and monocultured can actually cause individuals to use chemicals which they know their dogs and children have allergic reactions to, which they know contribute to the poisoning of the ecosystem and that means killing weeds and directly or indirectly also killing cicadas, bees, worms, lizards, frogs etc. That owning a lawn predisposes your brain to blindly trust Big Business and its marketing with everything, inclusing your safety. That maintaining a lawn well is symbolic of your virtue as a contributing, hardworking, properly behaving consumer, a good citizen in an increasingly anxious and prescriptive Americanised society. That within that society, a Nature Aesthetic is defined by uniformity and flatness; not function, resilience and diversity. That this prescriptive aesthetic can infect the rest of your life and make you crazy in your pursuit of order and symmetry, and intolerance of metaphorical weediness, in other parts of your life.

(Honestly. It's in the e-book. I've just summarised. They've jumped the shark. It's not me.)




At this point I want to point out that my love for weeds is not unconditional.
There are identified introduced plants which have growth habits that are highly destructive to aspects of the rest of the ecosystem.
The department of primary industries has a list of noxious weeds.

A large number of them, like star thistle, are classified as weeds because they compete with pasture grasses on marginal land, so they are noxious primarily from the perspective of the farmer and her ruminant animals. Fair enough. But I'm not totally convinced that they are evil. Many of these are great for bees and insects, they live fast and die young, and they tend not to thrive on good pasture anyway. Here was a very beautiful star thistle near my work.

A number of weeds are truly noxious. These have been helpfully marked "State Prohibited" in the list.

For example, Water hyacinth chokes waterways, killing off native plants, leaving no room for native fauna like fish or platypus, and encouraging mosquito larva.

Giant knotweed and Japanese knotweed cover creek beds and eliminate other vegetation. When the leaves die back over winter, the now-bare slope erodes.


Giraffe thorn is a large, extremely spiky, fast-spreading African tree species which is only really food for giraffes. It could be quite invasive here and we have no giraffes.

I do not love these kinds of weeds. There are others in the list which I do not live.


Nonetheless, I feel that the definition of 'weed' requires a social re-think. What is the designated weed actually harming? A suburb of lawn peoples' obsessive urge for symmetry and conformance - or can you identify measurable damage to the whole ecosystem? What might the weed actually be helping? Is it preventing erosion on marginal land, or causing it? Does it harbour and protect insect and animal life, or does it poison it?


Near my work, there was a fenced-off carpark and building site which had earth heaped up on it. Weeds had been growing there for two years. It hummed. I was pleased that whoever owned it had not built another glass and steel high-rise. And then, just as the flowering gums were growing buds, a bulldozer came and took away all 'my' weedy dirt.
I was pretty disappointed.
"Oh that's much better, it's so much neater," a colleague said to me, as we were looking down from the 7th storey glass wall of our corporate cube. That made me furious as well.

Now two weeks later, the architecturally sanctioned gumtrees are flowering and there are no bees. There is no sound.
There are tiny brown finch-type birds in the area. They were busy in the weed field, and I located one nest in the tree near my carpark. Yesterday there was a dead almost-fledged chick on the ground under the nest. I tried not to wonder if it had starved because the insects had gone. The adults are still around but they travel further each day. Maybe they are migratory, and would move on anyway.

Where there are no weeds, I guess life moves on.

The seasons, according to our family

From the shortest day of the year, we count the seasons like this:

• Getting Sick season, or Big Windy Storms Rolling In from the South season
• Navel Orange Season
• First Spring Flowers Season HOORAY!
• Mega Hayfever Season
• Nut Season, which is also Spring Lamb Season
• Queensland Strawberry Season
• Start of the Sailing Season HOORAY!
• Start of Victorian Strawberry Season
• Stone Fruit Season HOORAY!
• Christmas Party Season which is also Summer Bogun Season
• Christmas/New Year, or Commissioning Season #1
• Beach Picnic Season, which is also University Grant Season and Music Festival Season and Blackberry Season HOORAY!
• Fresh Apple Season, which is also Corn Season HOORAY!
• Easter, or Sacred Music Season, or Commissioning Season #2
• All the Summer Boguns Leave Us Alone Season
• Are there Mushrooms Yet? Season
• End of the Sailing Season
• Wild Mushroom Season HOORAY!
• Cold and Wet and Tired Season
• Travel to Somewhere Where it's Not Winter? Season

and back to the shortest day of the year.

It is funny when people ask my kids about the seasons and they reply "Corn season" or "Blackberry Season". But is this not a more interesting and intuitive way to count the season?