Mary Warwick

Economically disastrous as Covid-19 has been for most, some industries have thrived. Sure, supermarkets have had to employ more packers and home-delivery drivers, but has anyone thought about the publishing industry? Self-imposed isolation was just what I needed to deal with the two years’ worth of books precariously stacked beside the bed and, when they were read, I began a fairly frequent tour of Booktopia and Book Depository websites. The Australia Post lady struggled to keep up with deliveries as I maintained a steady three hefty books a week.

Now the restrictions are less stringent my activities have expanded into other areas, but I still have a problem with teetering towers of books. Not being one to pay a great deal of money for yet another bookshelf – and having no more space to house one – my research turned up a cleverly designed herringbone bookshelf with a teeny-tiny footprint. As tall as me, its base actually measures a mere 12 x 10 (that’s inches) and holds a considerable number of books. The beast came with the usual flat-pack problems, as expected, none of which were insurmountable.

Unfortunately the instructions were incredibly small, so a magnifying glass was required. I kid you not, the diagrams were minuscule. Almost no words of instruction (or even encouragement)were offered, so several sections of the project had to be deconstructed, reversed and reconstructed. As with any chipboard project, you really only get one go at screwing it together; at the second attempt the screws tend to get fed up and just go round and round with nothing left to grip.

Never mind, eventually the bookshelf was completed and, though shaky, is doing the job. Undaunted, my thoughts on the efficacy of flat-pack furniture remain fairly optimistic and I suspect this is one industry that will not only survive Covid-19 but will thrive along with the book publishing industry.

What a blessing in disguise a bit of self-isolation has been. With Covid-19 came a dramatic dropping off of drop-ins and the perception that I didn’t have time to “do” things became a meaningless excuse for being lazy.

What a perfect opportunity to polish up the typescript of my love-in-war novel… but I didn’t. I also passed up the chance to really get stuck into those boxes that never got unpacked when I moved in over two years ago.

Instead I wallowed in a massive readathon. I exhausted the parcel post lady with my online orders, some of which were quite weighty volumes, usually arriving in batches of three or four. I realised I was creating another problem when I was forced to stack books from the floor up. Corners were filled in double-quick time and every horizontal surface had a pile or two stacked upon it so that dusting became a major project of stack-shifting.
As a Band-aid solution I invested in a Kobo e-reader and loaded it with yet more books, so the reading went on.

The day dawned when I knew I had a serious storage problem on my hands and I went online to the Dshop website where I was offered a huge selection of bookshelves at very reasonable prices. Yes, all were d.i.y. assembly but, hey, it can’t be all that difficult to screw A into B while holding C in position… can it? Thus the storage problem remains until someone drops in.

On the subject of Writing, which has become a big issue with me, I’m quite ashamed that I have done very little of late. It isn’t that I have nothing to say – I’m a woman, after all – it’s that I seem to be drowning in “more important things”. Perhaps, Heaven forbid, it’s an age thing. Well, I freely admit it takes me all day to do a fraction of what I once achieved in a couple of hours.

So I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself as I stare down another of those annual milestones that are better ignored. Still not a famous author. Not even a minor one. Whilst I never was much of a quitter, I have to face the reality that, if I’m remembered at all, it won’t be for my writing. Perhaps the site where they chuck my ashes will be marked in some way? How about a plaque that says: Mary Warwick, No Famous Author, But A Well Intentioned One? Nah! With luck those ashes will be borne away on the breeze, much as I would wish to be. Just 10,000 feet will do.

Why then, on such a fabulous winter’s day, with a cloudless, boundless blue sky and a gale blowing, have I come to the conclusion that what lies ahead is a diminishing future with insufficient time remaining to do meaningful things? What brought me to this point? A morning when pain prevents clear thinking, that’s what. Getting old in itself is not a problem, after all, we all get old. It’s the pain that spoils everything.

We’ve all made excuses for not doing something at some time or another. You know the sort of thing, ‘The dog ate my homework’, ‘I had other, more pressing issues to deal with’, ‘It was too hot/cold’, etc., etc. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone make an excuse for doing something, so imagine my surprise when, six months after quoting for my new kitchen, the builder arrived to start work.

‘It’s too wet to pour concrete and it’s raining too hard to do any roofing today, so I thought we’d make a start on your kitchen.’ That was at the beginning of March. Two days later the rain stopped, and so did work on my kitchen.

Seven weeks into a project that was to be a ‘two or three week job’ we’re approaching Anzac day and my kitchen is about half way to completion, an achievement I am proud to attribute to my unashamedly prancing about on the lawn doing my version of a rain dance.

Sadly, there’s only so much rain dancing an old chook can do, so I’ve resorted to prayer, calling upon divine intervention to encourage further work on the kitchen.

 

Progress, no matter how slow, brings such joy to the heart, but if only these steps in the process were not so tiny and so far apart the ongoing disruption would be easier to bear.

Now, which of the boxes in the dining room holds the magic Oxo cubes…?