ask a busy woman

Am I doing what I actually want to be doing? Am I writing what I actually want to be writing? Autumn is the season of reflection and I’ve been asking myself these things lately.

I’m always busy. Always saying to friends, sorry we haven’t caught up, the last week / month has been full-on, bonkers. So what do I actually do that makes it bonkers? Am I doing what I actually want to be doing? Am I writing what I actually want to be writing? Autumn is a season of reflection so I’ve been asking myself these things lately.

Doing

I once told my husband to shoot me if I said I was joining another committee. That seems a little extreme when I write it here. It was funny at the time.

Joining committees is not always funny, or fun. Committees can be demanding. But some pull at your heartstrings. The farming women of Tasmania have my heart well and truly. I wrote a book for them and about them and interviewed about fifty women, quietly passionate about the land they live on, in the writing of it. So when they are having a Gathering in my neighbourhood, three days of farm visits and guest speakers and panel discussions, I put my hand up to help them promote it.

All that work is coming to a head and the Gathering, which brings two hundred women together every two years, is happening in late May. I’ve been working with women I love being around, hard-working, capable women, and am glad to do it. But it’s one of the ways I give away time which is supposed to be mine. If you’re serious about writing, you have to stand back and take a narrower view of what you do with that time that is yours.

Writing

The seasons have turned and the walk I take most days with my dog has changed. Where it was dry, yellow and crunchy and laden with the potential for encounters with snakes, it’s now softer underfoot after the longed-for rain and quieter with many birds gone. At either end of the day, it’s shot through with early morning or late afternoon sun which slants through the grasses and colours everything gold.

I’ve been writing about this path, on the nature strip alongside our road, for a couple of years now. It’s concealed from the road by huge gums and so it’s like a place apart, unseen by anyone driving past. Walking here between trees and paddocks brings me up close with the seasons and I love it. The dog, Alice, loves them too. At some point I’ll write about her, a wee piece written out of love, about the noises she makes when running for a ball, the way she tells us what she wants – a shoulder massage, some attention, water or a wee, or a dash around the garden.

Alice keen-eyed at the start of the roadside path

Writing for pay

A slightly surprising thing that I did last Friday was road testing a rather ritzy sports car. It was surprising to others as well, when we rolled up at the Sidelings lookout east of Launceston, with photographers springing from the support vehicle (support vehicle, who me?!) to stand in the middle of the road and snap away. You could see people waiting to see what minor celeb would emerge from the car’s streamlined and darkened interior, and their air of puzzlement when two ladies of a certain age, myself and my friend Rhonda, emerged, me with my newly silvered hair and she in her hand-knitted Scandinavian cardigan. The story of that journey will be in the RACT’s Journeys magazine, winter issue, and is lurking on my desk asking to be finished today. As Bill Bryson says, sometimes we ‘write for pay’.

The test drive - parked up against the panels in Scottsdale which celebrate Tasmania’s farming women

Also in writing, a food column about Furneaux Restaurant and Comptoir, a fine French-style establishment at St Helens on Tasmania’s east coast, where my Other Half and I went for our thirtieth anniversary on the Easter weekend. The little dessert I had there, a Religieuse, took me right back to London and the famous Soho patisserie Maison Bertaux where I used to treat myself to the same pastry. Who knew a little dessert could have such potent nostalgic power! It’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. That piece will be in Forth South Tasmania later this year.

The Religieuse at Furneaux Restaurant and Comptoir

Reading

If you’re reading this you’re probably a memoir reader. I read a beautiful book lately, Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach, a single mother whose sons were grown and so she decided to take a year away from her reporter job in Baltimore to travel in Europe, which she did in considerable style. Steinbach is a Pulitzer prize-winning author, and somehow her writing steals up on you, being both an account of where she went – Paris, London, Italy – but also a deeper journal of this time as an independent woman, about solitude and being content in one’s independence. She’s very good at making connections with people which last an amicable few days as travel orbits overlap. And there is an account of one deeper, passionate connection made with a cultured and sensitive Japanese man travelling for business, a widower. So the book has many levels, a delightful travelogue and a deeply thoughtful reflection on certain passages of our lives.   

That’s what I’ve been doing. They say, don’t they, that if you want something done, you should ask a busy woman. Have you heard that phrase? I can’t abide it! I’m a busy woman, to a fault, and nobody should give me anything else to do. I’m capable of overloading myself.

And I have been standing back and asking myself whether I’m writing what I really want to be writing. I’ve decided, Apple Island readers, that writing travelogue style pieces and travel hacks is probably not it. Instead I’m going to use this Substack to journal about my time here in Tasmania. I hope you’ll come along with me.

Thank you for reading this news from my corner of the Apple Isle. There’s more to come and if you’d like this weekly letter, then please do subscribe, and perhaps share it with friends too – all welcome!

FS