Super

Credit: Ramona Barry



As Oprah would say I have not been in my "right mind" this past fortnight. Stevie Zee caught a superbug during fairly routine and minor surgery and before you could say Methicillin-resistant Stapylococcus aureus, he had clocked up twelve days in hospital (released yesterday, he's now convalescing at home).

My altered, high stress state may have influenced the abnormally excited reaction I experienced at the new Carlton Court Brunetti's. I had naturally heard about its imminent opening, followed the visa kerfuffle in the local paper (importing real I-talians to bring the right amount of strut to the service).  None of this prepared me however for the encounter which was rapturous. I almost wept, though that might have been because it was my first night off round the clock child care duties in one hundred years.

I saw mirrored cabinets with tortes, a twenty meter long coffee bar, and elegantly suited waiters with FBI-like ear pieces working in concert on a raised platform. The bold scale, high-ceilings, luxurious surfaces in terrazzo and marble, not to mention the dizzying circular construction, had me enthralled.  The theatre! The grandeur! I felt like a lowly peasant who had travelled from the French provinces sometime circa 1888 and caught sight of one of those new things, department stores.

I understand Yuri Angelé and his partner have a few years in the business under their belt, like 38 years. They've learnt a thing or two along the way about creating an impression.They've finessed their vision in Singapore and Dubai. But honestly, on this one I felt they'd sat down with an espresso and a napkin and sketched out the pyramids.

Everybody was there. I saw Italian mammas and their formally attired offspring, fusty academics, stylish queens and gen Y hipsters. In a tribal town like Melbourne this felt like some kind of triumph. I felt glad to be a city girl, glad to be out after dark, glad to be alive.

Influenza plus bronchial infection

image: my bedroom curtains and my recent view

This is the first time I have opened my computer in six long days, some kind of record, I'm sure. As the title of this post explains, I have been unwell. Unwell is too benign to describe my condition. Those that know me well know this about me: I am not prone to paranoia or hysteria about health matters. But I've been so sick I actually saw the doctor on three separate occasions, on one of those occasions fainting in the surgery (not crumpling down but actually falling back flat like a plank). On previous occasions when I've been sick I've wondered whether I would be better served by a hospital. But this flu has had me thinking about death, like 1918. Every so often when the fevers have abated for a few hours I've been flicking an eye on my iphone and checking in with my celebrity friends. I only remember them when I'm sick, for some reason. I didn't know Eva Mendes was going out with Ryan Gosling. What was I doing watching a clip of her on American day-time show host Ellen? I also caught up with her on The Conversation (Amanda de Cadenet's "revolutionary" show where she talks candidly to successful American women about their lives). I learnt that Eva Mendes is an Independent Woman most proud of her financial independence much like the host. Apparently they "manifested" their wealth (a Wikipedia search told me that de Cadenet married John Taylor from Duran Duran at 16). Finding new ways to torture myself I have been back on Goop seeing how Gwyneth Paltrow is doing. She's doing great. I particularly enjoyed her brother-inlaw's renovation of his three-storey family home in London. My place? On the days I've been home alone, it feels like a sad, neglected residence, not exactly a junkie squat but possibly somewhere a person with dementia might live. As always I focus my resentment on the abject bathroom. I've been fantasising about calling in a professional cleaner to scrub down this one offensive room. My instructions would be really simple: it needs to be end-of-lease clean. 

Suffering

I occasionally daydream about being bedridden, a period of enforced convalescence, where I have a view of a garden, a matronly attendant and some hospital food. In this fantasy there is always soft, dappled light and I have a sketchpad/notepad in my hand. My thoughts drift without effort or intensity yet they are vibrant and alive to possibility. Projects reveal themselves fully formed through breathe alone.*

What I now realise has been absent in this fantasy – which has become apparent 8 long days into a particularly bad sinus infection – is pain. If I am convalescing, there has obviously been some illness. But the nature of the illness, and its friend pain, has never figured in my fantasy. On reflection this is a fatal flaw in my imagined scenario since when you have a blocked nose, throbbing jaw, painful teeth, and erratic temperature its difficult enough simply breathing. In this state nothing reveals itself to me, there are no acts of effortless creativity, just suffering plain and simple.

* I think this is a variation on easily distracted writers imagining that prison might be a good for a stretch – you know, meals taken care of, a small desk, them and the page. Some, like Lord Jeffrey Archer, lived that dream.