[first published 11.05.2026 Substack]
So, time slides by…
… and here it is autumn: misty and damp today but the last few days have a been a run of gorgeousness – blue skies, warm sunshine, no wind, beasts and birds all busy with their own concerns.
Yesterday my neighbour and I (we are pretty much each other’s only neighbours) had one of our occasional long discussions where we climb straight into the deep end of the psychological swimming pool. We paddled around in there for an intense forty minutes or so, and emerged invigorated. At least, I felt that way – like my mental cogs had been sprayed with WD-40 and were turning again with a pleasant smooth hum. I hope she felt something similar.
Speaking of swimming pools, in the last few weeks I’ve lowered myself into the chlorine stink of the local indoor heated pool for swimming lessons. I can swim well enough to cool off in the nearby creek in summer but not well enough to swim laps, and I feel the need for a type of exercise I’ll be able to keep doing into my ancienthood. I admire lap-swimmers and I’d like to be one. However, in the swimming lessons at the stenchy pool I can’t (yet) get my head around the freestyle breathing pattern. Despite the instructor’s best explanations – hard to hear through earplugs and cap – and his good-humoured chivvying, I can’t seem to find the rhythm that suits me best. I have too much air in my lungs or not enough, I get water instead of air my mouth when I turn my head, I splutter and cough and start thinking about all the bacteria I just ingested.
Stan, the instructor, says to practice between weekly lessons. Each week I have good intentions to do so but the lanes are all booked up at the pool or the nearby seawater pool is battered by big swells or it’s some kind of holiday and all the pools are crowded with relaxed-looking people who already know how to swim and breathe properly or don’t care and are just having fun. Someone who writes beautifully about her swimming life is Elizabeth McCracken – at ‘Release McCracken’ – a beautiful water-themed title!
Yesterday, after the deep dive conversation with my neighbour, I did one my favourite things – had a long bath in the middle of the day. For someone brought up on a strict diet of no leisure activities during daylight hours, no lying around when the sun is shining, and no retreating to privacy except when you are asleep – midday baths seem like the height of indulgence. And it was Mother’s Day – so, I celebrated by doing what my own mother would, as an activity, disapprove of but, as a kindness to one’s self, applaud.
In the bath I read Susie Bright’s post on Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ and maybe it was the bath – the luxury, the reward – or the conversation, but Woolf’s prose never struck me as so beautiful and so adroit. Look at this:
“People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe.
They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.”
Oh that old leather football! As I lay in the bath, emotional for all of us old leather footballs and the lovely surprises of writing, I tried to remember where else Virginia Woolf had cropped up recently. It was in a radio interview with Lucinda Holdforth, who was talking about her book on the dramatic increase in life span for many (but not all) people in Australia and the negative impacts that increase has on society, the economy, health… the whole kit and caboodle. Holdforth (what a name for someone whose gigs include speechwriting!) said that when her parents died, after a long period when she had been their carer, she eventually came to realise that she no longer had to be ‘a daughter’ (ie: a gooddaughter). She remarked that Woolf had said something along similar lines when her father died, that were he still living there would be ‘no books, no writing’.
When my father died, it was very clear to me that I had gained my mother – gained access to her that I hadn’t had since before she returned to fulltime work when I was small. When she died, eighteen months ago, I couldn’t feel that anything had been gained – all was loss.
Last night, I watched a documentary about Joan Baez – ‘I Am a Noise’. I tuned in after the beginning set-up, so was expecting a straightforward music doco – Dylan, protests, folkies – but it turned into an investigation into Baez’s (and her sister’s) struggles with depression (she didn’t call it that – she talked about it in terms of ‘darkness’ and ‘demons’ and ‘craziness’) and a long term engagement with therapists over the childhood abuse alleged to have been perpetrated by their father, and possible others. Baez’s public commitment to a politics of hope and pacificism seemed both more powerful and more poignant knowing that she battles crushing hopelessness while all the while trying to understand how her own mind works.
Looking up Baez’s birthdate on Wikipedia it made me so sad to read that there was a Saturday Night Live skit called ‘Make Joan Baez laugh’ – it’s not easy to be lighthearted when you’re battling the demons of a dark childhood.
At the heart of ‘I Am a Noise’ a mystery remained – what really happened? Each family member had a different version and now Joan is the only one still here to talk about it. She’s no longer a daughter.
All this is to say, again, that coincidences are more powerful than algorithms. Thank goodness. And, as Stan the swimming instructor said when I asked him what I was doing wrong after another embarrassing coughing attack in the pool, “you’re over-thinking it”.