The Great Book Nook Dilemma of 2018

How do you arrange your books?
It's an incredibly important question.
One I've spent many a sleepless hour pondering.

You see, I have a nook in my new study.
Now a nook is nothing special.
It's just a place for the useless overflow of everyday life - baskets of unfolded laundry, old tax files, bicycles with flat tyres, visiting relatives who have outstayed their welcome ...

But this week, a very exciting thing happened. 
Shelves were built and the humble nook was transformed into a book nook.
And a book nook, once stocked with the objects for which it has been designed, is a place of  whimsy and adventure, challenge and learning, comfort and delight.
A book nook is a magical place.

Ooooh. Sends tingles up and down my spine just thinking about it!

But of course, with great blessing, comes great responsibility.
I now had to place my books in the shelves.
And that involved making a Very Important Decision:
HOW WAS I GOING TO ARRANGE MY BOOKS?


HOW
             WAS I
         GOING TO
                          ARRANGE
           MY  BOOKS
                             ?????

Should I arrange them by genre or nationality?
If by genre, what would I do about the books that crossed over? Would a funny travel memoir be under Travel or Humour? Should a historical romance come under History or Romance ... or under  Light and Fluffy, depending on the author? 
If I arranged by nationality, should it be the country in which the author was born or the country in which they lived the greater part of their life? Or should it be the country in which the book is set? And what if the story takes place in multiple countries - like Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days? 

Russian authors.
They just had to go together.

Then I wondered about ranking my books.
I've always loved the idea of arranging my collection from best to worst.

But which book is really my favourite? 
Little Women?
Middlemarch?
The Book Thief?
Cold Comfort Farm?
The Murderers Among Us?
I could go on all day listing options for first place. And then I'd have to choose second, third, fourth.... 

And what about my own books? Is it arrogant to rank them highly? Is it bad publicity not to?

We discussed the ranking dilemma at the dinner table last night. My son said he knew how to make it really easy: 
Imagine there's a gun to your head. You have to choose your top three books. Hesitate and - BANG! - you're dead.
'Okay,' I said, rising to the challenge. 'First: Winnie the Pooh. Second: My Family and Other Animals. Third: The Little Paris Bookshop. No! Hang on! Pride and Prejudice or Emma.'
BANG!
I felt like I was living in a scene from Sophie's Choice.
Ranking, my dear friends, just cannot be done.

So in the end, I compromised. I started arranging my books, loosely, along several lines:

• Nationality of authors - Australian, English, American and The Rest. (Apologies to The Rest, but there weren't so many of you.)
• English text and Danish text.
• Children's books and grown-ups' books.
• Genre.

It wasn't perfect. There were many overlaps and ruthless decisions had to be made. 

Children's books - but this tiny
section also contains Danish,
English and Australian authors and
texts in both the English and Danish
language.

No, it was not perfect.
But it was going along quite well.
Until I decided to add knick-knacks to the shelves.

I love my knick-knacks as much as I love my books. They had to be included.
But where should they go? 

Should the old typewriters be amongst the novels? Or were they more a nuts and bolts sort of thing that should sit with dictionaries, thesauruses and compendiums of well-known lines of poetry and wise sayings?

And shoe lasts - where on earth should they sit? With a book like Tracks or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry? With the Brothers Grimm fairy tales collection because of The Elves and the Shoemaker? Or amidst the DIY-ish books - cook books, gardening books, how to draw books?

And then there were the bird cages. It would be perverse to sit them alongside What Bird is That? Even more perverse near the fable, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.  Perhaps beside The Goldfinch would be better - marginally.

In the end, I opted for a mix of meaning and aesthetics. 

A typewriter seemed to belong alongside
the work of some great old English writers -
and the orange casing tied in sweetly with an
orange book spine or two.

The photo of my father-in-law's dart victory
 and this wooden duck have absolutely
nothing to do with Leon Uris.

At the end of two long days, I was finished. My book nook was arranged to my satisfaction. It felt logical and orderly and looked lovely.
Perfect, actually.

And then, my son came in and asked for some book recommendations ... AND TOOK THEM AWAY!!!!

And now there are gaps.

And THEN I realised that there are a few books on loan that might not fit into their appropriate place when returned.

And there are books on order.

And there will be books for birthdays and Christmases.

And suddenly, my tightly organised book nook  seemed not so cleverly organised after all.
AAAAAAAGH!


How do you organise your books?

Consulting the weather pig, Google and other experts

I have a weather pig. He's big and fat and shiny and points his snout into the wind. He looks very wise and I spend a lot of time staring at him, willing him to share the secrets he holds deep within his porky breast. 

Weird, I know. 
I do realise that inanimate objects don't talk, but I can't help standing by the the pig and waiting.
For words of wisdom.
For a pun. ('Piguliar weather we're having today.')
For titbits of gossip.
For a compliment on my stamina in mowing a firebreak around the house with a push mower in 35 degree heat.
For information about all the things I need to know, now that I am surrounded by paddocks and wide open skies.

So far, the weather pig hasn't revealed much, except for the current wind direction. 
But I live in hope. 

In the meantime, I've had to resort to Google and the friendly advice of others more knowing than me. Others more vocal than the pig.
For instance:

How fat can a blue tongue lizard get without bursting at the seams?
(Subquestion: Do blue tongue lizards have seams?)
I found a real porker in the lower paddock today. She looked more like a football than a blue tongue and was extremely sluggish. I complimented her on having a greater girth than the weather pig, then left her in peace once more.

My fat little friend.

According to Google, blue tongues grow prodigiously fat when pregnant.
And then - this astonished me - they give birth to live young.
LIVE YOUNG!
So much for the reptile-egg-laying thing I learnt in school.
Click on this link below to see a video (unless you're eating while reading this):

BLUE TONGUE GIVES BIRTH 


Is it true that blue tongue lizards keep the snakes away?
And if so, would one blue tongue lizard of prodigious girth be enough to keep 24 acres snake-free?
According to Google, no. 
And no (implied).
Same response from a friend in the environmental field.
I didn't like this, so I returned to the weather pig. But the pig just stared sagely into the wind as if to say, 'You can't pig and choose your answers to such questions.'
Darn Google.
Darn the learned friend.
And darn the pig! If he's going to make puns, surely they should be better than that! 

Do roos have loos?
The answer to this has been harder to find.
Google has taken me on a fascinating journey through the finer details of scat identification (for both fresh and fossilised poo!), but has failed to answer my question.
I suspect the answer is no, given the vast quantities of kangaroo poo scattered indiscriminately all over our land.
But I  came across an interesting sight this morning that has me still wondering - a pile of roo poo in a secluded little nook amidst the blackberries. 

If this isn't a roo loo, I don't know what is!
It's even round and the grass is flattened so it doesn't
poke uncomfortably upwards during use.

The discreet side of the roo loo.
Not even visible from this angle.

And why wouldn't a kangaroo like a bit of privacy like the rest of us?
Feel free to respond. All new knowledge and ideas gratefully received.

By the way, western grey kangaroo males have a strong curry-like smell. Just a bonus fact find I thought I'd share.


Is it stupid to poison your blackberries before the fruit has ripened?
Google doesn't know. 
According to the Great Dane, any time you can kill a blackberry bush is the right time to do it. Blackberries are noxious weeds and deserve to die.
According to my mum, all blackberries should be loved and nurtured and never ever sprayed because one of the great delights in life is to make blackberry jam and blackberry pies.
I pondered the issue before the weather pig and thought I heard a rumble from within his porky breast, then realised it was coming from my tummy. Must have been the thought of blackberry pie...
I love blackberry pie.
But I hate noxious weeds.
And so I'll have to agree with both my husband and my mother. I'll keep spraying the blackberries on our property and will pick fresh fruit in a week or two from the enormous bushes along the side of the lane.
And then I'l make pies!

Almost harvest time. What to do?

Will wedge-tailed eagles prey on a whippet?
You know what? I'm happy to stand by the weather pig and wait patiently for his reply to this one.
Because I'm scared of what Google might say... or what it might show when it takes me to YouTube.

Olive the whippet or a sitting duck?
I don't want to know so don't share your ideas on this one, thanks.
But I'm keeping her inside until those two wedge-tailed eagles that have been soaring around the hills have gone elsewhere for their dinner. 

I have moved to the Country with a capital 'C'

Merry Christmas!
I'm writing this from my new home in the hills south of Bendigo. 
I have, at last,  moved to the Country. Yes, Country with a capital 'C', because we travel up 3km of gravel-and-dirt-and-dust road to get to our property, we have tank water, the house runs off solar power and we have so much land that mowing the lawn involves borrowing a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep.

'I am moving to the country!' I've been telling everyone. Even the people who couldn't care less. 'I am moving to the country!'
It sounds like the name of one of those lifestyle shows on TV: 'Tune in at 7.30 pm on Friday for our new series, I'm Moving to the Country.'
And, stupid as it now seems, I imagined that the entire transition from town life to country life would run just as seamlessly as an episode on the telly. There'd be a slight hiccup or two, just for laughs, but by the end of an hour (perhaps only forty five minutes once we fast-forwarded through ads), we'd be settled and smiling. My house would be looking like something from the cover of Country Style magazine and I'd be sitting on the veranda, sipping tea from a stylish Marimekko mug while dinner roasted in the oven - a leg of lamb, pumpkin and rosemary potatoes. Heck! There was probably a self-saucing pudding in there too. Chocolate. With a baked custard on the side.

Oh deary, deary me.
There are disadvantages to having a fertile imagination.
Unrealistic expectations, for starters...

We moved on a weekend where State Emergency Services were forecasting monumental flash-flooding. It fizzled to an inconvenient drizzle but the lead-up to the move was a little stressful. Especially when they were telling everyone to stay indoors and keep off the roads. Didn't they realise we had a piano and six thousand boxes to shift?

In unpacking our boxes, we unleashed a plague of earwigs that would have done Moses proud. The earwigs have since been joined by a plague of millipedes. These nasty little critters seem to be vying with each other for the best places in our beds and underwear drawers.

On Day 2, the pump had a hissy fit, depriving us of running water. I went without taking a shower or flushing a toilet for quite some time - far longer than is socially acceptable, even in the most relaxed circles.

The fly-screens aren't yet finished (which goes some way to explaining the ongoing supply of earwigs and millipedes). Nor are the bookshelves, the solar-power system, the access to the shed or the drainage behind the house.

I spend my mornings spraying poison on blackberry bushes half the size of our house, rather than running through the hills singing like Julie Andrews.

A tornado-type storm blew through  two days ago, felling a large branch across our across our driveway and multiple branches across the lane way. It also blew one of the shed doors off its tracks and put out telecommunications in the region for twenty four hours.

And it was many, many days (not just an hour!) before I had the time to sit on the veranda. When I did, I flopped, moaning and groaning, into the chair, squashing dozens of earwigs into the wicker beneath my bottom. I didn't even care - about the carnage or the stain on my shorts. I settled down to listen to my bones creak and felt a pang of regret that  we didn't even have the makings of a Vegemite sandwich in the pantry. And I drank wine because, frankly, tea seemed ridiculously inadequate.

Reality versus fantasy.
It's a killer.

But don't get me wrong. It hasn't been all plagues and storms and unflushed loos.
Despite the hiccups - or maybe because of the hiccups - there have been many wonderful things for which we are grateful.

The big move (furniture and boxes) was made light and cheerful by the help of faithful friends - those happy to sacrifice a precious weekend and work up a sweat. Just for us. That's priceless - and practical! We feel very blessed. Very loved.

Our first meal in our new home was not a roast with all the trimmings, but something far better - a picnic, brought to us by a dear friend and eaten, mid-move,  with the other dear worker-ant friends. We nibbled and chattered and giggled amidst dusty boxes, mountains of scrunched newspapers, bubble-wrap, homeless crockery, earwigs, muddy footprints and half-assembled furniture. The mood was happy and relaxed and celebratory. I cannot imagine a better way to host our first dinner party.

The seeming catastrophes of pump and storm and creepy-crawly plagues have made us realise that, unless someone is hurt or in imminent danger, it's okay. Take three deep breaths and smile. We live in a civilised country and stuff gets sorted ... eventually. Showers. Who needs 'em?

And we are, at the end of the day (and all day long, in my case), dwelling in paradise - in a beautiful home on the side of a hill, with magnificent views, rich bird life, mobs of kangaroos, peace, quiet and fresh air. Because the pump now works and we can flush whenever we like!

Stay tuned for Katrina's Adventures in the Country - coming to you in 2018.

Home is where the heart is ... and the soul ... and the personality ... and a truckload of nude scultures.

I love houses. 
Apartments. 
Homes.
Because home is where the heart is.
And all the stuff that's unique to the residents of that particular home.

I'll admit that I might be a little obsessed with homes at the moment  because we're building one and trying to sell another. But, honestly,  I've been house-happy for a long time. 

When I was little, I didn't like dolls, but I loved doll houses. I built my own doll house when I was ten and spent every precious cent of my pocket money furnishing it with fine timber furniture. 

One of my most precious possessions is a house plan drawn by one of my Grade 2 students a number of years ago. He sat down beside me and explained that it was designed for himself and his future wife. He pointed out every detail, including his bedroom on the ground floor, the solar panels on the roof and his wife's bedroom two storeys up. And then, as though offering me the crown jewels, he said, 'You can keep it if you like.' I did like and I will keep it forever and always.

I doodle houses and draw houses and paint towns full of houses all the time. It verges on the obsessive. (Maybe I'm being soft on myself by saying 'verges'!)

I love looking at homes and often drive to a new suburb to walk the dog. Just so that I can walk past a whole new set of houses. 

When I travel to other towns for work, I spend my free daylight hours walking the streets looking at houses. 

When I'm overseas, one of my favourite ways to explore a new town or city is to walk the back-streets, away from the touristy sites, and look at houses. Houses reveal so much about a culture and climate.

And when I'm walking the streets on a house-gawk,  it's an absolute bonus if there's a naked window through which I can see the lounge room, kitchen or bedroom.  Not because I'm hoping to spy on people, but because I want to see how they arrange their personal spaces. The interiors of houses are even more telling than the exteriors. Looking at a lived-in room is like looking into a person's heart and soul. 

My favourite part of the weekend papers is the article in Sunday Life that features someone's home. My favourite magazine is Country Style. 
I love the articles that feature homes that are quirky, even slightly weird, but a true reflection of the owner's life and passions: the horse-lover's converted barn with saddles and harnesses hanging over the back of the couch; the ceramic artist's kitchen full of daggy pottery jugs and vases - the kind we all tossed out once the seventies were past; the antique collector's living room with moose-heads and railway clocks and dark-and-dirty  oil-paintings hanging from every inch of wall space.

Homes are wonderful. 
Because homes tell a story.
A fascinating story about the owner.

I love it when I enter a person's home for the first time and have an 'Aha!' moment.

'Aha! That's just what I expected their home to look like - stacks of books from floor to ceiling, a heart-shaped box of chocolates on the side table, an open fire filling the room with warmth and welcome.'

'Aha! They stuff their dead pets and display them in the lounge room.  I didn't expect that, but it explains a thing or two.'

'Aha! Purple floral curtains and orange shag-pile carpet. And it's all brand new. Bold. Interesting. And a little disturbing... Even more disturbing than a menagerie of stuffed animals.'

Once, we visited a couple whose home looked like a display home. Everything was completely new - even the crockery from which we ate - and there was not a single personal item on display. Not even a photo or a dog bowl. I felt like they were hiding something. Or, even worse, that they had so little personality that they had absolutely nothing to hide.


I'm wondering what our home says about us. 
Is the story it tells true?

Our house has just gone on the market, so there'll be a string of strangers wandering through in the coming weeks. 
What will be the first thing people notice when they come through our front door? 
Will they think it odd that I display old leather cricket balls and lawn bowls in a tray, like some people display fresh fruit? 
Will they wonder at the stacks of ancient prayer books and hymn books? 
Will they cringe at the pitchfork in the corner and wonder if I use it to discipline my children or if my husband uses it to keep me at bay?
Is it strange that I hang lanterns and gourds from the kitchen ceiling? That I have many birdcages but no birds? That I fill glass jars with doll furniture, sea urchins, bird nests and garlic flowers?
Will people think it rude that the garden is filled with sculptures of naked ladies? 
Will they laugh at the photos of my husband with a pigeon sitting on his head?

Will people see creativity or insanity in my home? Order or chaos? Good taste or bad?

Maybe they'll see all these things.
Because, after all, home is where the heart is.  
And the soul.
And the personality.
And a truckload of nude sculptures, home-made but artfully displayed amidst the trees.





A sample of the photos, just in case you were wondering...

Wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi. 
Now there's something I can truly embrace.
No, it's not a Japanese soup or a new breed of fluffy white dog.
It's a way of life.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese idea that says imperfection is beautiful. 
In nature. 
In household objects.
In people.
In life.
We can find loveliness and contentment in what we have, here and now, rather than aspiring for a life filled with new, sleek, perfect things.
Sounds good, doesn't it? 

I read about wabi-sabi in the weekend papers and have read a few articles online since.
I may have over-simplified it in my mind - and in my description above.
But I don't really care. 
I just love the idea of not only accepting imperfection, but recognising it as truly beautiful.

The idea, of course, is not exclusive to the Japanese.
I believe many of us practise a form of wabi-sabi every day:

• The gardener who delights in the fallen autumn leaves littering the grass and the self-seeded jonhnny jump ups invading the gravel path.
• The woman who won't let her husband paint the chook shed beause the peeling paint looks so pretty.
• The man who sees beauty in his ageing wife's wrinkles and grey hairs.
• The op-shopper who gets excited by worn wicker baskets, chipped jugs and warped wooden tennis rackets.

I got the wabi-sabi bug. I started thinking about the things in my own life that are imperfect and truly lovely. Things both big and small, inanimate and living...

Old books 

I have old prayer books and hymn books from Sweden, Norway and Australia. They belonged to our great grandparents and feel like treasure. The ones I love most have leather covers worn as smooth a silk. 

I have faded Astrid Lindgren picture books with Danish text that were read to my husband as bedtime stories when he was a little boy. 

And I have battered old editions of Seven Little Australians and We of the Never Never that fill me with awe every time I touch them. (I know. It's weird, but true!)

Our leather lounge

Bought when the children were babies, it's had everything spilt on it (and tiddled and spewed on it!). The cushions are squished out of shape. The nubuck leather is worn shiny on the seats and armrests. And there's a cluster of holes in a flap of leather at one end where our pet rat, Scampers, made a meal of it. Really made a meal of it. She didn't even ask for the salt or the tomato sauce. She just hoofed in. 

I love this lounge. It still looks fabulous in a squishy, friendly sort of way and it records some of our family history in its scars.

Freckles

Freckles is home-made and has been a part of my life for forty-six years. My mum knitted her. She's not sophisticated by today's dolly standards. She doesn't cry or blink or wee or speak. She doesn't have a boyfriend called Ken or a shoe collection to rival that of Imelda Marcos. Rather, she oozes old-fashioned charm with her embroidered freckles, wiry wool plaits and faded silk ribbons.

Freckles snuggling up to Honey Bear.
Old toys are the best toys.  

Old boots

The ones I wear in the garden. They're tough and rough and comfy and have a lovely patina created through years of contact with sand, soil and horse manure.

Old Relatives

They have grey hair and wrinkles.  They fear the cold more than they fear tsunamis, snakes and nuclear missiles. They slip into their jarmies and dressing gowns at 5 pm no matter what's happening in the evening. They have gammy hips and dodgy hearing and complicated boxes for their medication. They wear each other's glasses and wonder why the newspaper's blurry. And they're fabulous. 

Old rellies have lots of love and lots of time. Time to chat. Time to ask about your joys and successes. Time to listen to your deepest darkest problems and tell you everything will be okay and make you truly believe it. Time to go for long drives in the country. Time to have that second glass of champagne.  Time to give you goodnight hugs and kisses. 

Morning lie-in with two of my gorgeous aunties
and a book of cryptic crosswords.
Old rellies also have time to help with crossword clues
you just can't get, no matter how hard you try.

And so I say: Go forth my friends and wabi-sabi yourselves stupid. 

It's far more relaxing, enjoyable and attainable than aiming for perfection.

What are the wabi-sabi wonders in your life?

Ramblings and meetings and greetings - tasting the country life

I'm excited.
Truly ruly excited.
We're escaping to the country. Or, given that we already live in a small regional town, I should say that we're escaping to the even-more-country.
I think I've mentioned it before.
Perhaps a hundred times.

But I'm mentioning it again because stuff is happening.
You see, up until now, everything has looked like organised piles  of dirt and blocks of concrete and stacks of timber with a fetching port-a-loo sitting to one side.
Now, however, it looks like someone is building a house.
A real, live, grown-up house.

There's a complete skeleton with walls and roof.
The builder calls them frames and trusses. But I always think of criminals when I hear the 'frame' and hernias when I hear the word 'truss'. 
I don't want to think about crime, unless Inspector Barnaby is nearby. 
And I certainly don't want to dwell on hernias. (Or dwell under hernias, as the case may be with roof trusses!)
I want to think of a sparkling new house with a view across the hills and the cows.
And now I can, thanks to the fully formed skeleton.

It's incredibly exciting to wander through the skeleton, naming rooms - bedroom, study, kitchen, servants' quarters...
It's even more exciting to see that  our plan is looking quite sensible. 
We have discovered only one design fault so far, and that's to do with the doggy door. It's a tad high. And when I say that it's a tad high, I really mean that our whippet, Olive, will need to take up pole vaulting if she wants to let herself in and out of the laundry. Or we could install an itty-bitty doggy escalator. Which could be quite fun. Although a little unusual.

We're getting to know the neighbourhood. We've tramped along country lanes, ogling dead trees - they might make good firewood one day soon! We've waded across grassy paddocks, spotting flame robins and pardalotes. And a few weeks ago we went for a hike around Mount Alexander. It's glorious - granite boulders, fern trees, towering gums, rock wallabies and stunning views across the central Victorian landscape.

'Spotto! There's our house!'

We're enjoying the seasonal changes - the golden-grey grass greening up as the weather cools down, the ewes giving birth to fresh white lambs, the cows growing their fluffy winter coats, the chilly days where the fog hugs the hilltops until noon,  the port-a-loo listing to one side as the winter rain turns the soil to mud.

We have a growing cache of friends in our new neighbourhood - salt of the earth locals and fellow paddock-changers like ourselves. And there are rumours of other fascinating folk dwelling amidst the granite rocks, who we will surely meet one day - the one-eyed water diviner, the fully sighted cheese-makers and the nudist.

But best of all is the aaaaah-moment that we experience every time we step out of the car and set foot on our soil.
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, look at that view!'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, free from suburbia!'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, smell that fresh country air with a slight essence of manure.'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, the dream is becoming reality.'

On top of our hill, breathing in the fresh country air and looking
out for friendly cheese-makers and water diviners that might be
 scuttling between the he rocks.

Having a cuppa in the study.
Solid walls and ceiling still to come, but the floor
and the vision is there.