Tag: spirit-of-tasmania

Last of the Party People

Or: How We Farewelled the Spirit by Being Asleep for Most of It

There is a particular kind of person who boards an overnight ferry, finds the bar, and treats the whole of Bass Strait as a nightclub that happens to float. I have seen these people. I have admired them from a distance, the way you might admire a bird of paradise doing its little dance: with wonder, a touch of envy, and absolutely no intention of joining in.

Jo and I are not those people. Jo and I were in bed by half past eight.

I want that on the record because I suspect it will be used against us later, and I would rather confess it myself. Half past eight. The sun had barely finished setting. Somewhere above us, people were no doubt ordering their second drink and solving the world’s problems, and there we were, tucked in like a pair of Victorian invalids, having a lovely time.

It was, in our defence, a very good crossing. The Strait was on its best behaviour, which is not something you can say about it often, and the old girl rolled along so gently I barely noticed we were moving. Which brings me to the slightly sentimental bit, so bear with me.

This may well have been our last trip on Spirit One. With the new ships coming, the old Spirits’ days are numbered, and I found myself getting a bit misty about a boat. A boat! I have walked those carpeted corridors more times than I can count, usually hauling a bag that was too heavy and full of things I did not need, and there is a strange comfort in a place that never changes. The same slightly chilly cabin. The same hum of the engines coming up through the floor. The same announcement at some dark hour of the morning telling you, very cheerfully, to get up. I am sure the new ships will be shinier and better in every measurable way. But I will miss the old one, and I will not apologise for that.

There is one thing I will be lobbying for, should anyone at the shipyard be reading, and that is the showers. Please, I beg you, keep the showers. The Spirit’s showers have the kind of water pressure that can blow you clean across the bathroom if you step in unprepared, and I say that as someone who has stepped in unprepared. More than once. And when you turn the tap to hot, you get hot. Not lukewarm. Not the apologetic tepid dribble that most of the world’s plumbing seems to think is acceptable. Actual, honest, scalding hot. They are, without exaggeration, the most satisfying showers I have ever met, and yes, I said met, because a shower like that is less a fixture and more an acquaintance you look forward to seeing again. If the new ships come with some sad little eco-trickle, I will be writing a strongly worded letter. Possibly several.

So we said our goodbyes in the most fitting way we could think of, which was to sleep soundly through most of it. I like to think she would have wanted it that way.

Now we are on the road, and here is where the arithmetic gets humbling. From here to Queensland is roughly eighteen hours of driving. Eighteen. I have written entire chapters in less time. I suspect that before we reach the border I will have plotted several books, abandoned two of them, and developed strong opinions about every roadhouse sausage roll between here and there.

The plan is to stay with the aunt. Jo, being the better person of the two of us (this is widely acknowledged and I have stopped arguing), is staying on for the month to give her a hand. I, being the one with fifteen cats, a Highland bull, a lovesick sheep and several books that will not write themselves, fly home on Saturday. Jo will be doing genuinely useful and kind things for a whole month. I will be doing a few days of being fed and then leaving. We each play to our strengths.

I will say this for Jo: she has the patience of someone who has listened to me narrate an entire plot out loud across half the mainland and still agreed to get in the car with me. She does the perplexed little smile she saves for the weirdo creatives, nods in the right places, and occasionally asks a question so sensible it unravels a whole subplot. Every writer should have one. Mine is currently in charge of the snacks.

Back home, I am told, the menagerie is carrying on without me, which is both a relief and mildly offensive. I fully expect to arrive on Saturday to a round of pointed stares from the cats, who will want it known that the service in my absence was not up to standard.

But that is Saturday’s problem. Today’s problem is eighteen hours of bitumen, a car full of luggage that is somehow heavier than when we packed it, and the quiet satisfaction of being extremely well rested.

The party people may have had the better night. We, I suspect, will have the better morning.

More from the road soon, assuming I survive the sausage rolls.

Where I’ve Been (Or: One Boat, Six Days, And Twelve Hundred And Forty Cans Of Cat Food)

Hello. Yes. I’m still here. I know it’s been quiet — a fortnight of quiet, in fact, which I’m told is long enough for people to start wondering. In my defence I wasn’t gone the whole time. I was gone Saturday to Thursday. The rest of the silence was just me, here, not writing anything down.

I’d love to tell you I’ve been off doing something glamorous. A writing retreat, perhaps, in a stone cottage with a view and someone bringing me coffee at respectable intervals. A research trip. A festival. Something with a lanyard.

No.

I went to Victoria to buy cat food.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it deserves your full attention. I crossed Bass Strait. On a boat. Like a person with purpose. And the purpose was tinned meat.

Now, in my defence — and I would like the record to show that I have a defence, and that this time it comes with numbers — there are fifteen cats living at this stationhouse. Fifteen. That is not a household, that is a small municipality with opinions. Add to that the chickens, the ducks, the geese, and the guinea fowl (who I remain convinced are simply feathered alarm systems that occasionally lay), and what you have is less a home and more a fully operational feeding regime with a writer attached to it.

Buying for that lot in the ordinary way — a few tins here, a few tins there, whatever the local shelf has decided to stock this fortnight — is a slow bleed. It’s the kind of expense you don’t notice until you look at it properly, and then you sit down for a bit. So somebody said we should just do a big run, and somebody else agreed, and neither of us stopped to ask whether “a big run” ought to involve a vessel with a car deck.

Reader, we booked the boat. My sister came with me, and we took two cars. That should tell you everything about the scale of ambition at play here — we did not go over there hoping to fit things in. We went over there with capacity.

I’d forgotten what the crossing is like. There is a particular kind of person who sleeps beautifully on the Spirit and I am not that person. I lay there in the dark listening to the hull doing its thing and thought about the fifteen cats at home, presumably staging a coup, and the poultry, presumably fine, because poultry are always fine. Then Devonport again on the way back and that first proper look at the Tiers, which is the moment I always know I’m home, no matter how far I’ve been or how ridiculous the errand.

Now. The arithmetic. Because I know some of you are already composing a very gentle comment about how this cannot possibly have been worth it, and I would like to get in first.

One ferry crossing. Four nights’ accommodation. Twelve hundred and forty cans of cat food and forty bags of litter.

And after the entire cost of getting there and back and sleeping in between had been taken off the top — the boat, the beds, the lot — we were still one thousand six hundred and eighty-seven dollars ahead.

One thousand six hundred and eighty-seven dollars. I have read that figure many times now and it has not stopped being funny. I did not go on a holiday. I went on a procurement operation, and it paid for itself and then handed me change.

And then, having established that we were already there and already had two cars and had frankly stopped being sensible several days earlier, we went to Costco.

I don’t want to talk about Costco at length because I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I will say this: I came home with six months’ worth of baking ingredients. Six months. Flour, sugar, the lot. I have never in my life been six months ahead on anything, including deadlines, and yet here I am, structurally prepared to bake through whatever comes.

I also came home with forty-eight rolls of toilet paper for fifteen dollars.

Fifteen dollars. Forty-eight rolls. I showed our housemate when we got home and she made a noise I can only describe as reverent. There is a stack of it in this house that you can see from the hallway and I am not moving it, because I want to look at it.

We also, while we were over there and clearly beyond saving, bought clothes. Warm ones. Properly warm ones — coats and thermals and the sort of fleecy unmentionables that a person does not buy in Tasmania in August unless something specific is coming.

Something specific is coming. We’re going to Canada in December.

I’ll write about that properly another time, because it deserves its own post and because I suspect if I start now I won’t stop. But it does mean that a not insignificant portion of a car that was supposed to be full of cat food ended up full of thermal underwear instead, and I regret nothing.

And then — because apparently we hadn’t yet located the bottom of this particular barrel — we went to IKEA.

For flatpack furniture. Because who doesn’t love a good flatpack.

I want to be very clear that I typed that sentence with a completely straight face and it is a lie in every meaningful sense. Nobody loves a flatpack. Flatpack is a thing you agree to at a distance, in a warehouse, in a good mood, and then live to regret in a hallway at nine o’clock at night surrounded by dowels while somebody reads step fourteen out loud in an increasingly clipped voice. I know this. I have known this for years. I bought it anyway. There are boxes in this house now, waiting patiently, and we both know how that ends.

Both cars came home riding low. And I mean low. There was a moment on the ramp where I did some quiet mental sums about weight limits and decided, in the great tradition of this household, not to think about it further.

I should have thought about it further.

One of the cars — the one carrying the bulk of the cat food, because of course it was — got stuck on the ramp coming off the boat. Grounded. Immovable. Sitting there with a queue of vehicles behind it and me in the driver’s seat performing the internationally recognised sequence of Trying It Again But More Confidently.

A stevedore came and got it off for us.

He did not laugh at me. I want that on the record, because he had every right to and he did not. He simply assessed the situation with the calm of a man who has seen many things come off many boats, got in, did whatever it is they do, and delivered my car and its enormous cargo of cat food safely onto Tasmanian soil. Then he handed the keys back and said something kind about how full it was.

Sir, if you’re reading this — and you are almost certainly not — you handled that with more grace than I did, and I have thought about you several times since.

Here’s the part that got me, though.

I was gone from Saturday to Thursday. Six days of not being sat on while I try to write, not being woken at ten past four by a cat with a theory, not having to check every chair before I sit in it. And I came through the door expecting — I don’t know. Something. A greeting. A parade. Some acknowledgement that the woman who crossed an entire strait on their behalf had returned.

They looked at me.

That was it. A brief and unimpressed survey of my person, an assessment that I had not brought anything of immediate interest into the room, and then a return to whatever they’d been doing. One of them yawned. I want you to understand that I saw it happen and I have not recovered.

Then, of course, the cartons started coming in, and suddenly I was the most beloved woman in the southern hemisphere. Fifteen cats materialised from fifteen separate hiding places like they’d been summoned. Absolute devotion. Total loyalty. Deep, abiding love — for approximately as long as it took to open the first can.

So that’s where I’ve been. Not writing. Not particularly resting. Just moving an enormous quantity of tinned meat, kitty litter, flour and unassembled Swedish furniture across a body of water, because I have made a series of life choices and this is where they’ve deposited me.

Normal service resumes now. There are words waiting, and a manuscript that has been sitting quietly with its hands folded, being very patient with me.

And somewhere out in the shed, enough cat food, litter, flour and toilet paper to see out a modest siege — with an allen key on standby, in case the siege gets boring.