Everywhere, temperatures rising ...

Frangipani in a steamy Sydney January, Melania's hat and the US political shit-show, sweaty insomniacs united PLUS – a special Vamp offer expiring soon.

I’m popping back briefly today to say hello and share odds and ends from a most eventful month or so (I’ll return in earnest on February 7). A few things:

Summer in Sydney

Try and spend, if you haven’t already, a summer in Sydney one day. It’s glorious: saturation coverage of frangipani and its intoxicating fragrance PLUS the mushy-stinky-vegetal-ish-truffly smell of freshly cut grass and decomposing Moreton-Bay-fig-tree fallen fruit PLUS big, dramatic, don’t-mess-with-me, angry-thunder-and-lightning afternoon storms PLUS evening sea-pool or ocean swims when the heat has left the sun and which leave a crisp-salty residue on your skin and a soul-filling sense of satisfaction PLUS the excellent frying-onion umami smells drifting from barbecues across neighbourhoods including my own PLUS my sleepy dog’s head lolling into my arm when I finally settle down on the couch PLUS chilled Australian white wine in fine glasses shared with good friends (riesling is my preference, Clare Valley particularly, excellent list of Australia’s top 52 wineries in 2024 here … look for rieslings from the Clare and Eden Valleys or from Henschke, Yalumba, Rieslingfreak, Grosset and Jim Barry).

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Spiders

There will be spiders in a Sydney summer. I am happy to see them. It means that all the sprays and chemicals we use around our homes haven’t completely wiped out the arthropods and insects. There has been a handspan-sized huntsman in my bedroom for some nights now. There one minute, gone the next, then back again. They are welcome … they stay clear of me, I stay clear of them and know that if I went near they’d run a mile. An explosion of newly hatched daddy long legs covers my bathroom ceiling. I gently removed what I think was a St Andrew’s Cross spider from my lounge room this morning. Up a ladder in my courtyard yesterday pruning back a tangle of star jasmine, I was diverted by a web seething with babies of some description (see video below). Meanwhile, I have nightly chats with an industrious neighbour, as yet unidentified (above … suggestions welcome; someone suggested a golden orb spider but my spider is determinedly brown). He/she (or his/her descendants) appears every year and spins their dreams, their food-traps, their gorgeous, glorious, great architectural creations from my kitchen window to my magnolia tree. I am happy to encourage their work, the work of all the rest of them, and, perhaps, hopefully, their appetite for the ever-present swarms of mosquitos which love me with a passion. (OK, I might need to remove, somehow, the daddy long legs – they make such a stonking great mess everywhere.)

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New here?

If you’ve signed up to Vamp recently and you’re wondering what it’s all about, take a look at some of my popular past editions:

Creating other worlds: a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the making of the television series based on my book, Fake.

Memento Mori: Why I’m seeing ghosts everywhere.

An 88-year-old powerhouse: The secret to my mother’s robust good health.

The WhatsApp effect: How the platform fuelled a gang outbreak.

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Political trauma

“It is a ground of heaviness here,” an American friend who lives in Washington DC wrote me this week. “My mind cannot process what my eyes are seeing/reading.” I can’t even begin to imagine how it must feel to be in her shoes, in the shoes of Americans who understand the horrors and cruelties and worse that lie ahead for their country and feel the immense gulf between them and their compatriots who have elected to take this course. An unfolding shitshow. I looked at the faces of those in close quarters to Trump during the inauguration and felt a chill, as though the -4°C DC temperatures that had sent them inside had infected them. The lack of warmth. The hardness. The joylessness. Calculation and avarice and egotism and self-interest and cowardice. And it’s impossible to think that Melania didn’t know, when she chose to wear that missile-defence shield of a hat, that her husband would struggle to penetrate it for a peck. (Do click on the image below to see The New Yorker’s take on that hat!) A relationship that’s just another Trumpian deal, terms never likely to be disclosed.

newyorkercartoons

A post shared by @newyorkercartoons

Of course, über-editor/writer Tina Brown has written brilliantly on the inauguration on her new-ish, must-read Substack, Fresh Hell: “Even without the crowds locked out of the Capitol, Trump played his inauguration address as full-on chin-jutting Il Duce in 1936 declaring a new Italian empire from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome. Trump’s version was a garbage-filled goulash touting new American imperialism – snatching back the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America (causing a hitherto grave Hillary Clinton to burst out laughing), and a Buzz Lightyear moment of American manifest destiny-ing off to Mars (cut to a thumbs up from Elon).”

Thank god for the social media contributions that leaven things just a little:

(via Threads)

(via Threads)

(via Threads)

(via Threads)

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Courage

Meet, if you haven’t already, the hero of the hour, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of her. She had the courage to look Trump in the face (just watch her, above, extraordinary) and say:

“Let me make one final plea. Mr. President, millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara and temples.”

(via Threads)

Meanwhile, Julia Baird has written an absolutely brilliant column on the subject in The Sydney Morning Herald. Of the message the bishop delivered, Baird says:

“It’s pretty much Christianity 101, woven directly from Bible verses. But, watching the reaction, it became clear how many of those public figures who have weaponised religion in the name of their own ideology have forgotten what Christianity is actually about. That Jesus sat with the outcast, not billionaires. That he urged love and forgiveness, not contempt and hate; peace, not violence.”

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Insomniacs united

In my early-hours wanderings through the corridors of Threads and Bluesky (I know, terrible habit, has to stop) I’ve come upon a diverting Threads account. Miranda Parker, who describes herself as “that gray hair influencer” who’s about “style over 40 and memes”, has struck a chord with a bunch of (many apparently menopausal) women. Different time zone, universal issues.

On January 13, she issued this Thread:

Four-hundred-plus comments and, over the next few days, her nightly check-ins have drawn hundreds more, revealing a gamut of mid-life female experience … the funny, the tragic, the wry, the frightened:

Goes to show, now more than ever, we need community, no matter what form it takes.

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Vale David Lynch

Thanks to Rick Morton and his splendid Substack, Nervous Laughter, for pointing me in the direction of this excerpt from a 2014 interview with Lynch during which he says, “We don’t do anything without an idea, so they’re beautiful gifts.” I’m still smiling about it. We need all the smiles we can get right now. (I’m going back to rewatch Twin Peaks; in Australia, it’s free on 10 Play and streaming on Paramount+.)

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A wonderful endorsement

It so just so happened, completely unexpectedly, that I spent quite a bit of time over the Christmas/New Year period with the delightful English writer Ann Cleeves, the author of more than 50 mystery/detective novels including the Vera Stanhope and Shetland series, both of which have been adapted for television to great acclaim. It so passed that Ann read Fake and, without prompting, wrote a wonderful note about it on X. (And told me to put my bum on a seat and fix my eyes on a screen and get to writing my next book … 😳).

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The kindness of strangers

In The Guardian, a little thing I wrote about a special person, a special gift, published a couple of weeks back: I needed, I wrote, “a budget-friendly, dog-friendly place near the ocean where I might take my burnout and my dog and, literally, crash”. (I devoted more words to this story in Vamp last year.)

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Back properly soon …