Sometimes being a professional mum feels a bit like this.

I pass this tree on the way to work sometimes. One side is reaching back to the house, one side reaching out to the transport infrastructure on the road. It might look like two trees from certain angles but it's still only one. The weight of the lateral branches might be risky in a storm, but otherwise the tree is thriving.











There is a 'thing' where a small number of women in their 50's, who have been through child-rearing and struggled on part-time and are now back to full attention on their career, have rocketed up various chains of command, apparently out of nowhere, and ended up in high-prominence public, political or corporate spots.

Is this when the two halves of the tree can join around the structural obstruction- when she can put all she has learned over time to grow in one direction?

The Pile (or 'How I learn about all these random things...')

 

Something strange keeps happening to me. People I hardly know give me things to read. Everyone does, in fact. Family, friends, colleagues - even my doctor, and the woman who runs the café in the foyer of my office tower, have all loaned me books. I think that’s how they tell me they like me. This doesn’t seem to happen to other people.

I have also noticed two side-effects. Firstly, I now have working knowledge with a lot of material I have never had actual contact with, including: beekeeping; archaeology; the market for secondhand earthmoving equipment; legal history. Secondly, I have also become the go-to person in many of my circles, for wide-ranging questions like how to fix a leaky toilet, how to choose health insurance, and which are the key differences between Polish and Swedish meatballs.

In my defence, I do read a lot. The stack of books on my bedside table is higher than the bedside table. It falls on me sometimes in the early morning. Current residents of the Pile include a gardening manual: ‘Espalier’; teen fiction: ‘The Mortal Instruments’ series; autobiographies of Billy Connoly and Madeleine Albright; a history of the cure for Smallpox; a book titled ‘Love & Math’ (I don’t know yet if it’s a romance novel or a science book or both, and I don’t much mind!) and a floppy mass of kids’ books, magazines, art books, craft patterns, and clippings. I will get through this pile in a month or so. I have a nifty fold-out cook book holder which I always use when I cook… to hold open whichever irresistible novel I might be reading while I fry the onions.

This morning I noticed that most of the books in the Pile were not my own choice. They are gifts from family, and loans or recommendations from friends and workmates. They find me in the lunch room and say “Oh Alex, I just finished this great book!” and press it into my hand. When we have a dinner party, people bring reading material instead of salad or a bunch of flowers. Then as I’m making the after-dinner pot of tea, I might come out to find them totally absorbed in some other book that I had sitting on the table next to the couch. (Not mentioning any names... you know who you are.... )

When I was 18, I had a crush on my next-door neighbour in the apartment block. He was a violin student, he had surfie-blond hair, he was hotness itself, charming and shy, gangly and graceful but very skinny, not yet filling his 6-foot frame. He hardly spoke to me. But one day, he knocked on my door, and with eyes looking at the carpet he said “I thought you might like this book”, then put it in my hands and fled. The book was Kahlil Gibran “The Prophet” - which, to an 18 year old girl, is itself a piece of hotness packaged in a neat 200 pages. I stayed up until dawn reading it, I cried, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I read it again the next night. When I returned it by sliding it under his door, I included a thankyou note - and an invitation for coffee - on my favourite page. It clearly wasn’t his favourite page, or else he didn't drink coffee. He never spoke to me again. In the hall, he avoided me until he moved out not long after. It was a very old-fashioned love affair – romantic, obsessive, a fundamental incompatibility was detected early, and hardly a word was spoken.

I recently got an e-reader and I love it but it's just not the same. How can a flat square e-reader or tablet compete with the thumbed cover of a precious text? How can a ‘share’ on Facebook or Twitter ever be as rich with human contact as actually sharing an object; of holding the physical weight of a thing someone else has selected, bought, read,  - and then held you and you alone in mind sufficient to lend it to you? What about the intimacy of margin scribbles, these tiny bits of someone’s thoughts to pace and contrast your own reading of it? And the symbolism in the trust they place in me with the care of the binding and corners, not to spill coffee on their book - although in my house, fried onions or lamb curry could be a bigger risk.
I suppose if I get a Kindle, I can also get an curry-proof cover for it.

Meanwhile, I accept every book and magazine offered to me graciously and I read it with care, because of the care that person took to choose it for me. And every month or two, I find that someone has lent me another Kahlil Gibran; another piece of text which pivots my perception, opens my soul, my mind or my imagination, changes my world. So I don’t mind the Pile collapsing on me in the middle of the night once in a while. And if you ever ask me, I might have some really good books to recommend for you.

Memory, and covering up tattoos

There is a terrifically cheesy TV show on TV from time to time: Tattoo Nightmares. One night last week I was home late from work, couldn't think of anything better to watch, and was astonished to be provoked into a long and complicated train of thought.

So the show itself is not very complicated.
It centers around a shop where these three tattoo artists specialise in covering up bad tattoos. In the process - and in the spaces between torturously placed ad breaks - the stories of the acquisitions of the tattoos emerge.

So in the episode the other night, there was a man who came into the shop with a home-done bad tattoo of his friends' names on his bum - the artist turned it into a giant, and very colourful, alligator. There was a woman with a dark cross on her inside wrist - she got a flamenco dancer instead. There was another guy who lost a sporting bet and had to have the name of the rival team tattooed on his belly. Of course they stretch a few clients out across a whole episode, and never show you the final result until the very last second. The hosts are very engaging. There is quite some artistry, and substantial technical skill, in the recovery of a bad tattoo, particularly the very dark ones. It was a good night's cheesy TV.


But the hypnotic thing about this show is the terrible stories that go with the bad tattoos. Every one of these people seems to have been pressured or manipulated into getting a tattoo by 'friends' or their too-powerful partner; often while drunk or in love or very late at night; and the person who did the bad ink in the first place was also manipulating them, and/or drunk or stoned. Over and over again. And after years, sometimes decades, they find their way into this specialist cover-up studio on Miami desperate to get their tattoo fixed and their life or sense of identity back. For the intervening time, these people have been carrying around a permanent mark of one particular time their 'friend' tricked them, or forced them, into getting a tattoo. And they are so grateful to the artist who provides them with their own mark in the place of the mark where someone else marked ownership over them.

I don't know very much about tattoos. Good ones can be spectacular. There is one woman whose son is in the same group as mine at kinder, and she has amazing, brightly coloured art right down one arm from shoulder to wrist. There are shops around the place, and machines, and ink colours, and different types of designs in different contexts. I would not know how to find a good place to get a tattoo done, other than going up to someone with a good one and asking them which artist they used.

But there are terrible stories too. The Nazis were notorious for using tattoos to barcode Jews, Gypsies, gays and spies. Some Nazis collected the skins of tattooed people from the concentration camps and used them for 'study', as well as lampshades and book covers. They targeted Gypsies, because the Romani were specialists in skin ink and marked things from the places they travelled - and Jewish law does not allow tattoos. Also disturbing is that if you search "nazi tattoo collection", Google provides page after page of bald and grouchy looking young men with swastika ink, clearly modern Nazis who indicate their membership to a larger paramilitary group by getting that ink.
  

There is an artist who had six pigs tattooed in some detail (they were under general anaesthetic at the time to maintain animal welfare ) and later had them stuffed and sold to the MONA in Tasmania. Every time I try to think too much about this, my mind slides away quickly. I wonder if you have the same reaction.



People with tattoos can't donate blood to the blood bank, because of the risk of as-yet-unidentified pathogens transmitted by needle. After the Tattoo Nightmares stories of home tattooing, I am starting to think that this is quite a reasonable restriction.

But my big question about tattoos is - what would be worth getting?
At best, anything meaningful enough to get tattooed at one point in a lifetime may be much better forgotten later, or just maybe time changes, memories fade, and it's not important anymore. At worst, for folks like Tattoo Nightmares' clients and those swastika-carrying guys mentioned earlier, when life does move on, you can't forget bad decisions, humiliation, belonging to a group which you would never want to admit to, let alone continue to remember.

The nice thing is that tattoos can be changed, although unlike the way your memory re-writes itself to make you the hero, it must be done by conscious choice. Maybe that is the fascination of Tattoo Nightmares' work.
One woman I know had a large and very detailed puma on her shoulder blade done when she was younger and in . A few years ago she decided the puma was too aggressive and she wanted it changed to be more middle-aged, so she went back to the same artist and had it made sleeker and fatter, like stretching in the sun rather than attacking. It is beautiful - and very specific to her.
This is not a photo of it, but this is also a dramatic and beautiful coverup

 

Some of the clients coming in to Tattoo Nightmares have symbols or names from sporting clubs, or old love affairs, in one case a man bought his wife a breast augmentation and she wanted him to tattoo the new cleavage on his arm, well surprise surprise they got divorced, and his new wife - and now his children from his new wife, and the other parents at the childcare centre - would really prefer for the giant breasts to be covered over.
OK I admit it. That one was funny.
He got a fishing scene instead (yes a river, a fisherman and a trout on the line)!
The cover-up was even funnier.
But happily for him, it is congruent with his life stage. It will probably remain relevant to him throughout his retirement.

After looking at lots of tattoo pictures online for the last 45 minutes, I think the best way to get a tattoo is to go big, with a well-reputed artist, and preferably in a place you can't see. Go by yourself when you are sober. Take two paracetamol first. Pay good money. Go for lots of colours, or detailed black work. Don't go half-baked: really good tattoos seem to be all-out or not worth doing.