It's in the bag: 5 things I can't leave home without

Living in Dubai has changed many things in my life, ranging from the obvious to the surprising. I expected that my days would be different (no job!), but didn’t expect I would spend them mostly driving (my least favourite activity in the whole world, behind even watching sport). I thought I’d dress differently, but didn’t know that would mean my jeans would go unworn for a year. I expected we would eat differently, but how could I have anticipated such things as cinnamon buns that come in cans?

And I gave no thought to what would become of the contents of my handbag. Of course, my wallet, phone and sunglasses are still there. Ditto the occasional discarded muesli bar from the kids and about a thousand receipts.

But there are now a few things I never leave home without, things that rarely featured in my handbag at home. Fortunately, it is a generously proportioned and capacious receptacle, with room for:

1. A water bottle, preferably filled. In Australia, there’s always a tap or a bubbler handy. I’ve long been a big hater of paying for bottled water (it’s about scrooginess as much as environmental responsibility), so would happily cup my hands under the nearest tap. And to be honest, I didn’t regularly spend whole days away from home/work/a friend’s house, where water was always available. Now that I roam the malls and streets of Dubai for hours at a time, I have to byo water or pay for it (the tap water here is iffy) and contribute to one of the worst recycling problems in the world. And if I don’t, the possibility of actual dehydration is very real. Bloody desert.

2. A scarf. Moving, as I do, from blasting desert heat to glacially arctic interiors, I often need protection from either the evil Dubai sun (scarves can shade your head as well) or the evil Dubai air conditioning. And there’s no predicting where you’ll get funny looks for daring to bare your shoulders.

3. Serious moisturiser. I’ve finally found it – the face cream that’s cheap, effective and doesn’t leave you feeling greasy. Nivea Crème. It’s so dense that it’s a bit like rubbing Sudocrem into your face (that’s nappy rash treatment, in case you don’t know), but it’s solved my lizard-lady problems like nothing else. Now it travels with me in case of a dry face emergency.

4. Talcum powder. The less said about this the better. All I can tell you is that heat rash can strike here at any time and talcum powder has proved a powerful weapon.

5. Small change. Oh my goodness. If I had a dirham for every time I was asked if I had a dirham… For some reason, everyone from the supermarket check-out chick to the assistant at the most upmarket fashion store (like I shop there all the time – ha!) is desperate for my small change. “Do you have coins, ma’am?” has to be one of the most common phrases uttered in this city. Get it together people.

Has anything changed in your handbag as your life changes around you?

Everything in moderation. Or not.

I am not a very balanced person. If you know me at all, you might have already come to that conclusion for your own reasons, but what I mean is I’m not very physically balanced.

I have the right side of a slightly bigger and more muscular woman, and the left side of a smaller, weaker one.

I have one foot a half a size bigger than the other, one leg longer than the other, one arm longer than the other and the difference in my hands has to be seen to be believed. (I would have supplied a pic so you would believe, but unfortunately, it's impossible to take a photo of your own hands while holding the camera with your knees. Apparently your tongue cannot activate the 'take photo' icon on the touch screen. Who knew?)

Some of it can be explained by just my right-handedness or my right-footedness (good to know for all those times when I might plan to kick a ball). My right forearm and bicep are stronger because of all those times I lifted the shopping, walked a dog, held a tennis racquet (it’s true, I did, once) or carried my school bag in my right hand.

But some of it is just a quirk of being human. There’s no other reason for the fact that in photos my right eye is just slightly more open than the other. Freaky.

In any case, I’m pretty sure I don’t have a case of hemihypertrophy (a congenital disorder where one side of the body is bigger than the other), because that’s really serious and I’ve managed to survive fine. Good word, though.

It even carries on right to the top – I’m telling you right now that I’m firmly right-brained. Try this cool test. I sat there for ages trying to and failing to get the dancer to turn the other way. In fact, I find it hard to believe that anyone could possibly see her go the other way. So if you do, you must be really weird.

So I’m unbalanced. That’s okay. But I’ve been thinking lately about our cultural obsession with balance. We talk about it, we strive for it, we complain when we don’t have it.

But is balance always a good thing? Is it okay to be a little bit (or a lot) out of kilter?

The reason I was thinking about it was because I had come to the conclusion that I had an addiction. It’s quite a nice addiction – it’s not physically reckless or unhealthy, it’s quite good for me and, because it’s not heroin or cream buns, it has actually garnered me quite a lot of approval over the years.

I just read a lot. By which I mean, an awful lot. Not a balanced amount at all.

Now, I read quality literature, of course, not rubbish, and I could argue the advantages of a good book for the rest of the day, if you like. Other people already have - see here, for instance. And because fiction has always been at least tangentially related to my area of study and work, I always have had a good excuse to pick up a book. Not that I ever needed an excuse.

But because I am using a second-hand bookshop to feed my need here in Dubai (yes, that’s House of Prose at Dubai Garden Centre. Tell them I sent you and I might get even more of a discount!) I am more aware of how much I’m reading each few weeks or so, since I have to lug them back in to swap them over for more half-priced goodies.

And it’s, frankly, embarrassing.

Even I don’t know how I manage to read that much. The bag of books doesn’t even include my Kindle purchases (which is another new way of keeping track of my reading.)

When I had my addiction met by freebies for review or borrowing from friends, it was less obvious how serious my obsession is.

And I guess I have to ask myself if there are better ways to use my time. Should I have a more balanced life?

Which leads back to my first question. Is an imbalance necessarily bad?

I know the eager athlete who gets up before dawn to hit the track or the pool would argue it is not. Ditto the artist deeply fixated on their work. Or even the mother absorbed in her new baby. From obsession comes greatness. Not always, but sometimes.

But what about the day-to-day, garden-variety, not-so-great obsessions? Am I wrong to feel (just slightly) guilty about my reading habit? I promise I get all the other big things done first (well, most of the time). I put my book down when the kids need me (usually with a sweet, loving, motherly smile on my face), I get dinner cooked (oh all right, occasionally with a book in my hand that does not contain recipes) and (back when I had a job) I didn’t read when I should have been writing (even though – with a pile of review copies on my desk – I so easily could have).

See how I justify myself?

I’m sure I’m not the only one whose guilty pleasure makes them a very unbalanced individual. What are your obsessions and how do you fit them into your life?

I shop therefore I am?

How do you define yourself?

Are you a gung-ho executive? Do you like to cook, to read, to play tennis?

Because no matter your hobbies or lifestyle, you can find a My Family sticker that sums you up in its own special, stick-figurey way.

There is no minority overlooked. There are farmers, soldiers, mums in wheelchairs, even a wild-looking lady with a wine glass.

Which begs the question: given the options, why is it that so many women, in fact, the overwhelming majority of My Family sticker-owning women (scientific research conducted by me from my car window), define themselves as… shoppers.

Over the last few years, since the My Family stickers exploded onto our roads to distract us during long car trips, I have been puzzling over this phenomenon. Most of the mothers in the family line-up are clutching shopping bags. I don’t think they are supposed to be representative of boring, old supermarket bags either. There is a joi-de-vivre about this figure that suggests she is on a spending spree at the mall, not buying the weekly family supplies.

I think what most disturbs me is not just that a lot of women like shopping. It’s that they feel comfortable proclaiming to the world: this is me.

And it’s not just in Australia. This majority holds true even here in the Middle East. (Although, I suppose if I didn’t want to hang around a bunch of women who defined themselves as ‘shoppers’, I shouldn’t have moved to Dubai.)

Evidence from the My Family website supports my observation. Shopping mum is their number one selling product, rated even higher on their website’s ‘most popular’ search than the generic ‘My Family’ sticker that goes underneath the figures on your rear window.

Interestingly, cats and dogs are more popular than any of the various children, although that may be because children have more hobbies than the average Rover or Fluffy, thereby splitting the sales between several common activities. Maybe we should lobby for stickers showing ‘dog catching ball’ or ‘cat on roller skates’, just to be fair.

Among other mothers, shopping mum is followed by two plain mums doing nothing, then one holding a laptop and phone, and then one with a pile of books (finally!).

Among the dads, the one at the barbecue (holding a beer) takes line honours, which I think is an encouraging sign that men are sharing the cooking at home (ha!). After that is a generic, do-nothing dad, then a home handy-man figure, followed by one holding a laptop. You gotta laugh – the laptop mum also juggles a phone at her ear but the My Family manufacturers must have not wanted to confuse poor laptop dad with too many things to do at once.

The girls’ stickers show ballet girl as the most popular among the little kiddies, which is fine (better than fine in my opinion), but the biggest selling older girl takes after her mum, with a phone and a handbag (uh oh). Talking and shopping are things we all do, to a greater or lesser degree, not a hobby. Someone should tell our daughters.

And what do boys do most? Well, apparently more of them play xbox than anything else.

Does anyone else find all this worrying?

When I was a kid, my mum painted in oils, my friend’s mum played tennis and I knew another mum who played guitar. None of them made shopping their principle leisure activity, nor did they eschew the whole of human culture to define themselves by what they could consume.

Personally, I don’t have My Family stickers on my car, but if I did I would like to design my own. I would have several arms like Shiva, holding books, a Bible, a paint brush, a coffee cup, a gardening fork and a mixing spoon, as my body strikes a yoga pose while standing on a beach. Confusing? No, just the fully rounded human being we all really are.

Don’t sell yourselves short, ladies.

Thoughts?

Home and away

I realized this morning that I have lived just a touch more of my adult life outside of Sydney than in it (assuming I was an adult at 18, which is debatable).

Other than our hometown, Graham and I have lived in Old Bar (Mid-North Coast, NSW), Perth (WA), Cambewarra (South Coast, NSW) and Dubai (UAE). In Sydney, we lived in four different homes, and spent most of our childhoods there, which means we have a fair breadth of diversity even within Sydney.

Most of the years that I have lived outside of Sydney I have not missed it for a second. That’s the city itself, of course. I have missed my loved ones who (inexplicably) continue to inhabit it. But I have not really missed Sydney town, per se. 

Yes, it has excellent coffee, but so do Perth and the South Coast. Yes, it has beautiful beaches, but so does the rest of the country. Yes, it has great shopping, but so does Dubai.

And in none of those places does it take 60 minutes to travel 10 kilometres at peak hour.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else in the world that makes my otherwise rather low blood pressure reach steam-out-the-ears point other than a Sydney traffic jam. That’s because the narrow, meandering roads were built for horses and carts in the mid-1800s and all the red tape in the state keeps them that way.

And the Spit Bridge is just too stupid to talk about.

But, until this year, I have always lived at visiting distance from Sydney, and maybe I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed reconnecting with special little bits of it from time to time. 

Now that I can’t, I know what they are. Here are three:

The harbour

Well, that’s obvious. For those who haven’t been there, it looks like this.

Now that's a harbour.

Every city should have one. Stunning, hurt the eyes, gob-smackingly beautiful. When I lived in Manly and travelled to work on the ferry, it was a daily blessing to suck in that salty air and enjoy one of the prettiest commutes in the world. I miss the slap of waves on creaky, old jetties, the cold, sandstone walls that line the harbour and even those pesky seagulls, noble rats of the air.

The parks

Makes you want to climb it, don't it?

I’m talking about the old parks, cunningly crafted into quirks of geography around waterways, or spread out majestically on prime land that in other cities would be full of highrise apartments. (As is often the case, the things we love about Sydney contribute to its dark side – if all the parks were full of buildings and modern roads, there’d be no traffic jams and a zero off the end of house prices. Oh well.) 

It’s the trees, particularly, that I miss. Oh my goodness, the trees. Those enormous, eminently climbable Morton Bay figs in the Botanical Gardens, which could house a family of tree-dwelling hippies with ease. And those stately, old-fashioned rows of date palms in Centennial Park. As a child, I thought date and canary island palms were Australian natives, they were such a feature of old parks and gardens in established suburbs of Sydney. Now that I live in the Middle East, I still get the occasional pang when one of them reminds me of home.

The magpies

This one is a little more personal, and very specific. No, I don’t miss the way the magpies swooped my head in spring. What I miss is the sound of magpies in the afternoon, particularly a late autumn afternoon. Maybe it’s rained, there’s a chill in the air. It’s that tender time of evening when the bruise of darkness is just beginning to bloom over the sky. The air smells of camellias and the damp crush of liquidambar leaves underfoot. I don’t know what they’re doing – calling each other home to bed? – but the magpies sing this warbling, ecstatic song for half an hour or so that is better than Mozart. Wherever else I’ve lived in Australia, it is not the same. It’s a very Sydney moment. 

Sob!

What do you love about your hometown?