Bubble, bubble ...

... toil and trouble*

My new sourdough starter; haven’t been so pleased with myself forever.

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Should have been writing this week, finishing a piece for Good Weekend, but the chaos in my study was overwhelming. Anxiety bubbled. Shoe boxes of expenses receipts for tax and bills and cobwebs and stacks of paper and documents and rolling dust balls like western-town tumbleweeds and lists to the ceiling and emails needing answering and I couldn’t possibly see my way to forming coherent thoughts until some order was restored. Days later, multiple bags of paper to the recycling later, and I’ve cleared a small path towards sanity. Things have been crossed off lists. The tax return material is close to being shipped off to the accountant. Bills have been paid. Pet and physio insurance claims submitted. Invoices sent. Mum-admin handled to a point. Essential calls made. Stuff sorted.

Anyone who is self-employed knows that admin hours are not billable; that’s a week without income. More anxiety.

Aside from that, the process has reminded me of two other things:

First, subscriptions (to news sites, other Substacks, streamers, music providers, transcription services, fitness apps etc etc etc) will break me, they are time thieves – keeping track of expenditure on them, cancelling them, checking they have been cancelled, checking no more charges have been incurred. Plus, in the course of going through credit card statements, I discovered that two subscription services I thought I’d cancelled before free-trial periods ended were still active – one to a new AI transcription service (fireflies.ai; because Otter.ai’s upload limits are mean-spirited) and another to a potential Spotify alternative (Qobuz; because Spotify rips artists off, but I didn’t like Qobuz) – and, as a result, my card was carrying about $500 in uninvited annual subscription fees. Trying to claw some cash back from the two services is a work in progress, more hours of my life lost.

It’s the 21st century model, right, I get it, and I rely on it here on Substack to earn a little money for my work, but subscription fatigue – it’s real.

Second, ideas … I have too many of them that bubble up, go nowhere. As I organised this week, some returned to the light: I cleared some Google docs out and felt unwell as I scrolled by the ideas files I’ve created over years and forgotten – fiction ideas here, a children’s book idea there (plus the children’s book I’ve already written but which a publisher suggested needs revision), not to mention the non-fiction idea that is now two-thirds of the way to finished book proposal stage.

I went through an old notebook that’s been sitting on my desk for years and tore out dozens of pages on which, over months once, I’d recorded ideas for a novel. … A solitary old woman meets a young woman at a cafe and a friendship develops. It’s told through a series of flashbacks to the old woman’s troubled life, the reveal – god knows how it would resolve itself on the page – is that the young woman is a figment of the old woman’s imagination – she has been talking to herself all along. I scribbled: “We all contain multitudes – the frightened child is the beautiful young woman is the frail old woman.”

I transferred my scribbled notes into another Google doc for another day.

Ideas might bubble but they are meaningless until time and effort is expended to build form around them.

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A sourdough starter is bubbling in my kitchen, only six years late. Through the pandemic I baked no-knead bread in my cast-iron Dutch oven using dried yeast but went no further. Ten days ago, I lifted the lid on an old yoghurt container pulled from the back of the fridge and a cloud of mould spores rose into the air. My first thought – after reflecting that I should clean out my fridge more often – was that perhaps the floating spores might contribute to the development of a sourdough starter. I scrambled to mix flour and water in the vicinity of where I imagined the spores might be wafting.

I’ve since learned that a starter needs a completely different type of fungi to activate and that the sort of mould that yoghurt might emit is likely to have a deleterious effect, but, nevertheless, my starter is alive! I’ve fed it every day and it is a living, breathing, beautiful thing. (What magic – flour, water, plus yeast and bacteria from the air, and a bubbling mixture is the result!)

Last night I baked my first loaf of sourdough using the starter. Hmm, yes, well, the less said the better. I’ve sped this GIF below right up so you see my failure in a flash and hopefully will forget about it as quickly.

The autopsy: Despite the bubbles in the starter, the dough didn’t rise at all – ChatGPT told me that if I poked a finger in it, a well-risen dough should spring back slowly. My finger-poke holes stayed right there, as if to mock me. Nevertheless, I decided to proceed, as an experiment, I thought, and baked the “bread” in a cast-iron Dutch oven in my gas barbecue. The indented circle on top of the bread you might spot in the pics above is not some interesting design feature but instead the imprint of the lid of the Dutch oven – I had to turn it upside down so the barbecue lid would close; it didn’t occur to me that that the bread might rise while cooking and hit the lid (after all, it hadn’t risen during proving). Oh yes, the black bottom, not an interesting design feature either; despite having the barbecue’s central burner off, evidently the heat was still too intense. And finally, clearly, the “bread’s” texture is lamentably wrong – dense and heavy, not open and irregular.

I ate some of my “bread” afterwards and again today and feel now as though a cinder block has settled in my stomach.

Bro, if you had a grievance against me you could put me in a sack and throw me in the harbour and there wouldn’t be a fat chance in hell I’d ever bob back up to the surface.

Somewhere I read that every baker delivers at least one brick, one cinder block, before they start to find their way, and I’m just going to hang on to that message hard.

I’ve now taken delivery of a 5kg bag of proper bakers flour. For a while at least, there’s no turning back. Bricks and more bricks, cinder blocks and more cinder blocks ahead.

I’ve just fed my starter again and it’s looking lively; new bubbles are forming, it seems to be rising up in the jar. I hope the friend who is coming for dinner tomorrow night is up for my next effort. And I’ll use my dodgy kitchen oven for round two, not the barbecue.

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The dog-walkers of my neighbourhood have not been so animated since the illicit lockdown picnic affair of 2020.

We have a new park, a gorgeous new public open space: gorgeous green fairways stretching for miles, gorgeous greens so soft and springy that you want to lie there in the sun all day and the dogs just roll and roll across them in delight, copses of lovely trees and quiet glades and gentle slopes and curving sand bunkers which delirious puppies have turned into sites for excavation.

After years of debate, plans, submissions and politicking, after years of golfers’ anguished cries and back-room meetings between various levels of government and the Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust and stakeholders, eight holes of the former championship-level, 18-hole Moore Park public golf course on public land have been sliced off and given back to the people as a new 20-hectare public space.**

But – there’s a but. The new park area has been declared an on-leash area for dogs. Sandwich-board signs placed at intervals down the fairways show a map pinpointing the location of a small, mean, flat, tree-less, feature-less, off-leash caged area for dogs – at the farthest end of the park from the direction most people seem to arrive.

For dogs to roam free, to run and chase each other and balls up and down hills and in among the trees, to roll and sniff delightedly where they will, their owners must engage in civil disobedience, flout rules, risk the wrath of officious park rangers tootling up and down the fairways in golf buggies waiting to catch them out.

Many heated words have been shared between (responsible) dog owners and rangers. I’ve had words with the rangers – like, “I know you’re just doing your job, but give us a reason!?”. Black humour has settled over the spot near a formerly notorious bunker where once frustrated golfers cursed and dog owners and their loved ones now assemble. Lookouts scout for the approaching enforcers, leashes and grim defiance at the ready.

Meanwhile, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore herself, a local, has been spotted on multiple occasions walking her dog in the new park – off its lead. A couple of days ago I pulled her up to ask what she was doing about the silly on-leash rule. “I’ve been tipping over the signs,” she said, her dog waiting, off its leash, beside her, “I’m working on it, I got this land back for the people, I’ll win this.”

Clover is nothing if not a pugilistic self-promoter.

But if the dog walkers are peeved, the golfers are bubbling with rage.

One acquaintance, an enthusiastic member of the golf club and a dog owner too, stalked past me the other day on a path overlooking a section of the new area. He refuses to enter the lovely new park on principle (I know his dog, I know his dog would adore it). Wearing his fury like a heavy winter overcoat, my acquaintance scowled at me and muttered, “a $300 million dog park!” (I have not done my homework to establish whether his figure is correct and, besides, see ** below, there is much more to come). Then, in disgust – “and the rangers aren’t even fining people for having their dogs off-leash.” He stormed off.

Another day I spotted a man in shorts and bucket hat standing on a major nearby intersection waving signs vigorously at passing traffic. Initially I thought he might have news of the apocalypse and be urging us to repent before it’s too late, but when he thrust his signs in my direction I saw they bore rabid messages damning “crooked” Clover Moore and Labor Premier Chris Minns and demanding his golf course back.

Unsurprisingly, cheered on by the right-wing Daily Telegraph, the conservative state Opposition is demanding an inquiry be held into the decision-making process behind the “hatchet job” on the golf course. “We’re not going to accept this, and we will continue to fight for an inquiry when parliament resumes in September,” the Opposition planning spokesman raged to the paper.

What a glorious collision: On one side, happy dogs, their (generally responsible) owners, and the tens of thousands of residents, mostly apartment-dwellers, in an area becoming denser by the day. On the other, a small group of privileged substantially white middle-class men who never before have had to deal with such a setback, such an affront.

I haven’t, so far, been able to locate my tiny violin. It’s here somewhere, I’m sure, just where did I put it?

Meanwhile, I have to dash: Lola wants to go to her new park.

We’ll keep dodging the rangers. Lola particularly enjoys the green on the old 9th hole.

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Last week I moderated a session at Leichhardt Library with author Lucinda Holdworth, the author of Going On and On: Why Our Longevity Threatens the Future (she was a riveting interviewee on ABC Conversations recently; her argument is that prolonged old age can be lonely and painful for individuals and deeply damaging to society at a broader level).

Lucinda and I roamed widely in the discussion; she talked about her own experience with ageing parents, about what she has seen of the horror of nursing homes, and about the link between consumerism, narcissism and social anxiety and the phenomenon of wanting to live for as long as possible no matter the cost. Then we went onwards to the dreadful stats she has learned – including that, on average, in Australia, people have 12 years of atrocious health and suffering before they die.

The audience was small but deeply engaged. I picked up a sense of anxiety about the future bubbling in the room.

It wasn’t a talk about voluntary assisted dying which, at this stage in Australia is restricted to people with terminal illnesses. Nevertheless, I asked the audience: “Could I get a show of hands – who among you would like voluntary assisted dying to be available if you don’t have a terminal illness but are old and unwell and perhaps isolated and have had enough?”

Every hand went up.

One woman then stood up. She appeared to be about my age … middle-aged, bright, sparky, smart, well-dressed, articulate. She shared her name. She spoke, to the audience, to Lucinda and me. She had, she said, been diagnosed with dementia only a few weeks earlier.

She is single, has no children. She has no idea what her future looks like.

Her fear bubbled fiercely.

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*I know, I know, misquote.

**A couple of years ago the trust called for public comment about how the new space should be used: “Wilderness,” I wrote, “please let it become a totally wild space in the heart of the city for everyone (including dogs).” (I wish I’d thought also to suggest a swimming pond in the manner of Hampstead Heath’s natural swimming ponds.) A forlorn hope for wilderness. Instead, to come – nature playground for kids, running, walking and cycling paths, a sports field, sports courts and outdoor fitness equipment, toilet blocks and picnic blocks and food kiosks. Urgh.

Housekeeping

I was surprised by the results of last week’s poll – more than half of you still turn to hard-copy recipes, either in cookbook form or clippings/old scrapbooks – and go you! Less than a quarter of you rely on online systems (eg, the Paprika recipe app or some variation of online bookmarking). And – 14% of you spurn recipes and cooking altogether … I do hope that means there’s someone else lovingly preparing meals for you (I wish!).

And now, to this week’s …

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• A call out for sources: For a Guardian article, I’m returning to an old subject I’ve explored frequently before – the exercise/act of love/labour of clearing out a parent’s or parents’ home, perhaps even one you grew up in. Please email me if this is something you are enduring now or have endured recently. Happy to discuss how I can protect your identity if that is what you would prefer.

• Plus, short this week: I wanted to get something out to you tonight rather than bubbling in angst over it through the weekend!

Stolen words

“My advice? Get back out there. Live life to the fullest – and stay for the whole damn show. It’s amazing.”–Nick Cave on his The Red Hand Files