My odd likes

I have a thing for middle-aged women.
I can't explain it. It's not a nanny complex. I don't want to have sex with them or dress up in nappies and have them spank me or anything. I just find middle-aged women very sexual. Very attractive. In the same way the French do, I suppose. I'm not one of those people who thinks women at 35 are on the scrap heap. Actually, I think that's when they're becoming their most attractive. In full bloom, if you will... until they're about 45 or 50.
At which point they aren't suddenly unattractive, you understand. It's just that particular age range that seem to attract me.
I just wanted that on the public record.

I also have a thing for old men.
This is definitely not a sexual thing. I just like the fusty-mustiness of them. The crazy clothes they can wear to the shops, as if it doesn't matter that 40 years has past since they bought the suit and wore it to their kids' weddings. It's still good.
I love how they're set in their ways and cantankerous. How they talk about how things were "in my day", as if my era is somehow deficient. I love their stories and worldly advice. I love their misunderstandings of technology and how things work in MY day. I love their eyebrows. And I delight in looking at their hands and the way you can read a lifetime's work in them.

I like pepper trees. They remind me of the coastal holidays of my childhood. Sunshine. Caravan park cricket. My four wonderful years in Albany. My good friend Kerry... who will tell you they're called Agonis flexuosa and proudly has the only Agonis street tree on her stretch of Middleton Road, the escutcheon of which is lined with plain trees. There is one out my bedroom window, in the neighbour's back yard, and it fills with birds and in the morning the sun shining through it plays shadows into my bedroom.

I like chooks. Chickens, if you prefer, or hens, more specifically. Red ones, white ones, black ones. Pure breeds and hybrids. I love the way they cluck and busy themselves. I love watching them bobbing for bugs and seeds. Dust bathing. Cleaning the nose holes in their beaks with their claws. I especially love it when they sneeze. And I delight in the tame ones plucking up the courage to come visit you, meandering into the house, facing off with the cat or the dog, eating the cat's food, or eyeballing it out. Watching the dog round them up. Hearing them cluck triumphantly after an egg is laid.

I like the sound of the cello.
So deep and mournful. Melancholy. Sad. Joyful. So very definitely the sound of my soul, the way its harmonics and mine resonate. I adore seeing the cellist wrapped loving around their instrument, as if it were alive, human, a lover, and so fluidly yet precisely caress the strings with the bow. I love Elgar's Cello Concerto. I love the adagio best. I love hearing a cello in pop songs. I love artists who use a string section. I like hearing music I like orchestrated.

I like the words.
I like the way some words when thrown together conjure up such delicious imagery. Crystal Palace. That's a good one. Why did they have to pull it down? Cock. I don't know why, I just love how it sounds coming out of my mouth. Sure it's dirty, but a word which exercises your cheek muscles that much to say it can't possibly be all bad. The Resistance. Perhaps too many war movies as a kid. The Resistance. It's up there with The Gestapo. I could have belonged to either of these organisations because their names are so good. What do you mean they're polar opposites? Chipping Sodbury. It's a place in the UK. I didn't get there when I went for a visit earlier this year, but it sounds so edible somehow that one day I will have to go there and just stand under the village sign and absorb its glorious mixture of letters.

I like the following people, because they have such good names.
Lisa Curry-Kenny
Helen Demidenko-Darville
Nova Peris-Kneebone

I like narwhals.
I had completely forgotten about these creatures until I saw them on a documentary last weekend. I was one of those kids who was fascinated with animals and knew perfectly well the difference between turtles, tortises and terrapins. I had a book with a picture of a narwhal in it. It intrigued me endlessly. Like a unicorn, but a whale.

I like things that unexpectedly remind me of my childhood... which is more and more becoming a distant memory. Kids at school now look back on the eighties in exactly the same way as I looked back on the sixities. So long ago. So not a part of my life but long enough ago to be endlessly fascinating. The 80s, people! It's hardly ancient history. I like seeing kids in supermarkets in my old school uniform. I like seeing jersey cows. I like that I'm going to the Royal Show this week, where I spent so much time in the cattle lanes as a kid. I like the Wombles. Multi-stripe carpet. Brown corduroy. Faded photographs of my grandma and I on the farm. I like the quilt my mum made me. I like the fabrics I chose. I like the box brownie a friend gave me for my 21st. I like a lot of people I don't see any more.