Fifty_To_Fifty

 Leanne has been a fantastic, fairly new addition to my friendship circle. I can't remember exactly when I met Leanne but she married Big Kev, a mate of Lulla and Moodge . Big Kev was an IT specialist so I had a bit to do with Kev when I used to work in IT. He even came up and consulted on some work I was doing for OEG once. Leanne was working in the city when she met Kev and then she ended up being the web developer for the PCOS society for a while and then she had two children with Kev - the eldest, a boy, being the same age as my youngest, also a boy. When our boys were babies we both took up knitting. I used to go to a knitting group that was all grandmothers or women who would have been. Leanne's knitting group was much younger and used to meet in Greensborough at a licensed café for a glass of wine and a knit. Both of us were on Ravelry , what was originally a beta website for knitting and crocheting enthusiasts that became hugely popular the world over, either looking f...

Mick is the aboriginal bloke who lives in our street. The first time I met him he scared the heck out me, knocking on my door. We'd only just moved in. Mark was at work, I had Jared and Cindy at home with me. I don't think he realised that we'd bought the house because it was a private sale, no real estate agent sign ever went up out the front.  I didn't open the door, I just slid open the kitchen window and asked how I could help. He said, "can you call me a cab?". He must have had this arrangement with the previous owners of our house I presumed. So I did, every week he needed a cab. Eventually, my fear of Mick went away primarily because Carrots confirmed that he was harmless. I then found myself inviting Mick inside on hot summer mornings or cold frosty days or when it was teeming with rain until his cab came. Sometimes, I spared him a fare and just invited him to hop in my car as I was on my way to the library for storytime with my kids or some other rand...

Lissa is my godmother. Lissa for a long time was my adopted mother too in that I probably related more easily to her than I did to my own mother. She's Dad's sister. She lives in Albert Park in the most gorgeous little Victorian era cream weatherboard home that sides on to a laneway and has a huge liquidambar growing in the backyard which must not be that great for the foundations. She lived with an arsehole for ages known as Richard but whom the whole family referred to as "Tricky Dicky" because he cheated on her and she kicked him out. For a while she was single then she met an amazing South African man called Greig. He was a marathon runner, worked for Kraft in a middle management role and was well respected by lots of women for his impeccable manners. He was also very handy around the home, always tidying up and super organised, something most of Dad's family are not known for! Lissa was a librarian for a large corporate library, she had the most exquisite tas...

  Aunty Jean wasn't really my Aunty Jean, she was my great aunt, Mum's aunty. Like my grandmother, she married late - fiercely independent were the Jarrett girls - and then she was widowed. Mum had lodged with Aunty Jean when Jean was single and Mum was studying to be a teacher at Prahran teacher's college so she was very close to her.  said her husband was the best thing that happened to her because she had been very prim and proper before then and he had taken that stuffiness out of her. Mum said the telltale moment of the change was when she rang Aunty Jean and asked how things were and Aunty Jean said, "We are both well but it is absolutely pissing down here".  Aunty Jean worked all her life. She was a chiropodist which these days, we just call a podiatrist. She rather shockingly chopped off one of her dead toes. She told me she became a chiropodist because she was forced to wear hand-me-down shoes all the time and that caused her to have many problems with he...

Uncle Chris is my dad's older brother - a fraternal twin to my uncle Jeff. When Chris was a toddler my grandmother accidentally left a pot boiling within reach of him and he pulled the pot down upon himself and was so badly scalded that he had a really bad scar down the right side of his face including an eyebrow that was raised taut from the scar. This scar affected his confidence throughout school and for a lot of his life he has been rather reclusive. Chris never married. He lived with my grandfather at Greenlaw, the former home of Lord and Lady Knox, in Ferntree Gully, and cared for him right up until my grandfather died at home. After Grandad died, Chris' siblings decided to sell the property. It was worth a fortune to developers and after the usual amount of . He did not cope with the idea of leaving Greenlaw. He flitted between his sister and his brother's homes for a little bit until it was made patently clear that he needed to find a place of his own. Interestingly...

 Carrots and Amanda have been our neighbours down the street for over ten years. We are number 20 and they are number 19. You would think logically that their house would be opposite ours but it isn't. Oddly our side of the street starts with a house numbered 8 (and lived in by a Chinese family) so Carrots and Amanda live four houses down from us. We first met them when we were out walking our respective tribes of preschoolers and toddlers. Then one day Carrots and his son Liam were out on the front lawn of his house and we bumped into them both on the way back from a dog walk. We introduced ourselves and realised that our sons were the same age and our daughters were too. Pretty soon we saw them everywhere we were: dance lessons, kindergarten, at the pool, at Auskick.  Amanda and I were on committees together and Carrots, a press photorapher, was snapping our kids at various arts, culture and other events. They are like aunts and uncles to our kids, brothers and sisters to us...

Sonny was my one true horse not to be handed down to any sisters or ridden my mother. I got him when I was 13 or 14. I remember because Mum had threatened to take him off me. I had been really recalcitrant in Year 8 History and she said if I didn't pull my socks up she would sell him.  He was a Thoroughbred cross with a Morgan Horse. A Morgan is an American breed of horse bred purposely for harness i.e. pulling carts etc. He'd been trained to be in harness too. He originally belonged to the Claney family out near Caniambo. They ran week long riding schools during the school holidays and that's were I first got to try him out. He was a gelding and had a completely different temperament to the chestnut mare I had been riding. He was exceptionally quiet (meaning well broken in and not easily startled) and he loved people because he'd been raised in a stable as a foal from a young age. He would whicker when he saw you and run up to fence for attention. He was brown with a ...

 Stobes is another one of my besties. I met her when I was working at the Outdoor Education Group. I owe her a lot. At the time I met Stobes was the asthma instructor and also a groupleader. She is a qualified nurse who used to work in the emergency department of a Melbourne hospital. She would have been very good at that job but the stress got to her in the end and she ended up with Bell's palsy and one side of her face had a mini stroke and has now dropped. She was super skinny and fit when I met her. She had a non-committal boyfriend at the time who used to be a mercenary in Afghanistan and would disappear to do that kind of work. Her nursing background meant she diagnosed him with testicular cancer well before perhaps he realised he had it. They were both cyclists and somehow or other Kate got me signed up for the Audax Alpine Classic. If it wasn't for her insistence that I go riding her all the time I may never have been fit enough for the 120km ride from Bright to Mount B...

 Alec was my first experience of a charlatan. In the late 90s my fiancé got a job working for a "shrimp hatchery" in North Queensland. I came along for the ride and got a job as the office manager. We lived in Bingil Bay, a short walk to the beach covered with the most gorgeous, tiny crabs you ever did see  and with Dunk Island visible across the sea. Alec had been engaged by a family of investors to set up a shrimp hatchery (where prawn larvae would be cultivated) to onsell to prawn farmers to grow out for the seafood market. He was the classic, stereotypical loud American. At the time there was an ad running on TV which reminded me of him, it was for insurance and it featured a loud, know-it-all man, telling a younger man "I know boats" and then he stepped off the jetty and his very large body broke straight through the base of the boat. Alec was dodgy as. It wasn't just the loud, look-at-me personality that gave it away. He drove a large racing green Nissan f...

Judy was a friend of the family. One of the regular friends of Dad's who would visit at least once a year during the school holidays. She was the widow of his best friend. A man to whom Dad had been best man; a man who had died at the hands of someone inexperienced in hospital thanks to a dose of the wrong medication. Many years later Dad was best man again to someone else and that man also died; he died in a tragic accident riding his motorbike into a powerline that had fallen on to the road overnight. Dad said he would never be anyone's best man again after that. Judy never remarried. Her sister, who was a buyer for Myer, and dutifully came and lived with Judy in their enormous Californian bungalow on Whitehorse Road on the Kew boundary and helped raised their three children; two girls and a precious boy who from what I can gather was the spitting image of his dad. One thing I always recall about Judy is that she was never, ever on time. Mum would start the day by preparing a...

  Betty was a very dear neighbour to us. We've been living here a little over ten years and Betty was our neighbour until she passed away late last year. She had a special rapport with my youngest, Jared. He had just turned one when we moved in next door to Betty. Betty would come up to the side gate near the sandpit where he played and put her hand through the wire and hold his finger and talk to him for ages. She would also randomly emerge through the fernery on our adjoining side fence and try to start up a conversation with us. It soon became apparent why the people who lived here before us had gone to such lengths to make the patio private and grow great big hedges wherever there was a gap in the fence. Our nearest relatives live four hours away so Betty was the closest thing my kids had to a grandmother. She certainly went out of her way to be that person for them. She would regularly give them $50 for their birthdays, always leave chocolate Easter bunnies at the front door s...

I first met Moodge in high school. He went to Wanganui High and was good mates with Lulla who went to Shepp High with me. I'm not sure why Moodge didn't go to the same high school as us. Wanganui was the hippy, newer high school and Shepp High was the historic and perhaps prestigious one. Lulla and Moodge had grown up together in commission homes. Moodge used to joke that the best thing about growing up in commission homes was that you could walk into any of your mates' houses and know exactly where to find stuff.  Moodge was tall and skinny and had, I'm sure, a dark monobrow as a teen. He was also a smart-arse so he got as good as he gave out from me. And he talked filth a lot of the time so he got that back from me too, initially because I knew he didn't expect it as I didn't look like the kind of girl who would do that. Poor Genevieve was regularly accosted by Moodge. Moodge had no desire for Uni and ended up working for Telstra, squirrelled enough away to bu...

Christine and Craig were friends of my Aunty Lissa. Christine was French and Craig was a Kiwi. My aunt put me in touch with Christine because I had just got back from France and she thought I would appreciate the connection. I did. Christine and Craig lived on the very top floor of an apartment opposite the cinemas in Bourke Street.  She was super chic: very short, thick hair, trim figure and immaculately dressed in Chanel like suits always. She had a special role as concierge for Novotel. Christine was friends with the French managers of Rialto. At one point I was asked to look after their son. He was cute and they insisted he be bilingual so I was called in to babysit him and speak only in French. Apparently, at kindergarten he would get quite cross that no-one, especially the teachers, would not speak back to him in French. Eventually, I stopped looking after their son because I was paid ridiculous money to do it, something like $3 an hour cash in hand and honestly, as a student...

Nan was my maternal grandmother. She was one of five children, married late, well back then 29 was old to be getting married, apparently after some pressure from her family to do so.  She married a farmer in Gippsland and being the era when Australia rode off the sheep's back, they did very well for themselves. My grandmother apparently was wealthy enough to lend money to others. She had three children, my two uncles followed by my mum when she was 40. She lived for most of my young years a short pony ride from the farmhouse they gave to Mum and Dad. She had an immaculate and modern white brick home having moved from the original property at Winton to a hillview over the Avon river. Recently her home was up for sale by the new owners so I got to step into it again with a virtual tour. Unfortunately, the new owners had completely destroyed the feel of the home. There was now a swimming pool embedded in the front yard instead of a gorgeous floral garden and inside all the fancy 1970s...

Peter was my boss shortly after I moved to Queensland. I had been working for Musden Emergency Mums - a middle class nannying firm - and very nearly got deployed to central Queensland to look after a publican's kid but then Peter's job was advertised in the paper.  It was an export role and they wanted someone bilingual. They didn't specify what language but I had fluent French and enough conversational Italian to get the job. Peter had just left a food technology role with the Queensland government and had a Master of Wine qualification. The job was actually two-fold. Half my time would be spent supporting his export startup and the other half of the time would be helping a cooperative of nursery owners (plants not children) thanks to a government grant, to export to the world. I spent the majority of my time setting up a database of contacts from trade shows Peter had been to e.g. Bangkok and also scouring Computel for possible lucrative export opportunities of which ther...

When I was 20 I headed off to France to be an au pair girl. Initially, I was living with a family near Chamonix who had a 4 year old and a baby but the couple's marriage was ending so my au pair company found me a new family with triplets. These triplets were three. Three three year olds, can you imagine. Chloë, Coralie and Manon were there names and they were non-identical. I never asked but I suspect they were IVF triplets. We lived in a very ordinary looking house supplied by the host father's workplace in suburb called Feyzin.  We lived next door to a black man who was married to a white French woman. They had older kids. The triplets were fascinated by him and would regularly go to the boundary fence, just wire grill and Manon in particular, the cheekiest by nature, would put her index finger through the fence and try to touch him and when he moved away she would giggle. I always wondered what happened to these girls and then I found them again on Facebook and collected th...

 After Ruben was born things got tougher and tougher for Mark on the trout farm. Assistant managers kept leaving which meant he was carrying the responsibility of millions of dollars worth of fish, weekly harvests for market, weekend tourists, round the clock work and eventually he decided it was time to resign and reassess his future in aquaculture.  We couldn't stay living in Eildon as the house on the farm was part of his package so our options were completely open. We decided I would work and he would study financial planning and look after Ruben. This meant I was going to back to working in IT so I went down to Melbourne to speak to a very fancy specialist IT company and they told me they had a helpdesk contractor job going at Mars in Ballarat. I spoke to Mark about it and we agreed Ballarat looked like a good base, close to Melbourne and the beach. I got an interview the next week and thanks to my good relationship with OEG I managed to do it via video conference using t...

 Chrissi, the woman who gave me the world's worst-ever hangover. God how I miss you. Regularly. Not for the hangovers. Chrissi was the first person I met when I walked up the long winding steps to The Outdoor Education Group National Hub in Eildon for a job interview to be OEG's IT Manager. She gave me a big grin the moment I walked in, asked a few pertinent questions to place me in the district. A few month's later she confessed, "I told Claude to employ you, I knew you'd fit right in straight away". Thanks Chrissi, one of the best workplaces I've ever been in. She cultivated a kind of hybridized farmer's wife/pub tart/cabaret singer persona. She was a "how ya going mate?" straight talker with an "I've been singing in a smoky bar all night" husky voice, office apparel up top and workboots on her feet and her hair was always dyed a fiery red apart from the one time she tried cultivating a grey, hippy bun look.  Chrissi was known...

 My Grandad was one of six children and raised in a very strict Methodist family. His mother, driven mad by her children (according to my 3rd cousin) but potentially schizophrenic (according to my aunt) was sent to Sunbury Asylum when he was eight years old and was not released for another 35 years.  Grandad was very creative and spent some of his life as a draughtsman until his male boss took too much of a shine to him and eventually started sexually harassing him to the point where Grandad, heterosexual, had to leave. He had four children with my grandmother and they lived initially in Surrey Hills. A set of fraternal twins, my dad and my aunt Felicity. He loved acreage and dreamt of being a farmer and took to the land with his older brother Harry until they didn't get on about whether the farm houses should have electricity or not. He eventually bought the former home of Lord and Lady Knox in Ferntree Gully. We loved visiting him there. It had a circular drive, two forests ...

 At some stage in the middle of Year 11, I met a boy called Greg. I am pretty sure we met at an interschool cross country. We then worked out that my school bus stopped at the bus interchange between North Tech and Shepp High so we could start seeing or "going with" each other. This basically just meant flirting with each other at the bus stop. It was all pretty innocent. One day Mum drove me in to see him in Shepp and Greg and I went for a walk and lots of kissing happened down by the river. Nothing else Mum!  Just before term 4 ended Greg's dad was reported as missing. It didn't take the detectives long to work out what had happened though and to discover the body. Greg was arrested as the prime suspect. I hadn't been privy to any of what followed. I was only finding out what happened vicariously from his friends and what I read in the local paper at the high school library. At the murder trial Greg claimed his dad, who taught metalwork at North Tech, and by all...

 Lulla and I have been mates since Year 11 when I changed high schools so I could study both French and Physics. Trust me. That's a dumb reason. But the change of high school was great for me. He's a gentle giant with a loping walk. By the time we got to Year 12 and the dress code was free dress he spent the entire year in a selection of flannelette shirts and footy shorts. Even in winter! He was a bit of a smart arse and we had the same sense of humour and we were instantly great mates. He loved thrash metal and a bit of punk so we didn't really click there. The furthest extreme of my taste in music is probably The Cure. I could never understand how he managed to concentrate on his Maths homework in the library while listening to Thrash full-bore on his walkman. He was brilliant at Maths and I was hopeless at it. He was mates with a Chinese guy at school called Sui, also brilliant at Maths, who ended up getting Dux and becoming a filthy rich, differentials trader. Lulla ha...

 Geneviève has been my best friend since Uni. She's from Mauritius, a French-speaking island off the east coast of Africa, and her family migrated to Australia when she was in her final years of high school. I met her in Third Year French class. She was a fluent native speaker and I had just come back from a year as an au pair girl in France so I automatically wanted to test my fluency out on her and any of the other native speakers in my class. She's very exotic looking and curvaceous: the epitome of femininity. Brown smooth skin, curly almost black hair, the most beautiful almond eyes and a great big beaming smile that steals the attention of everyone. She's also very gentle and demure and puts everyone's interests before her own so most people love her to bits. I have really enjoyed getting to know her over the years: being introduced to her family - mum, dad, brother, the occasional aunt or uncle visiting from Mauritius - all gentle people. But the thing I loved mos...