The kindness of a stranger (2024)

I spent eight days in a cottage by the sea on my own and barely spoke to a soul except my dog and I didn’t go half mad with loneliness.

Holidays can be, I think many if not most solo-ists will agree, a challenge. For a start, there is the practical, the logistical. If you travel on your own, locally or overseas, you must bear the cost on your own; hotels, resorts, Airbnbs, cabins, do not offer discounts if there’s just one of you. A lovely hotel room might be within reach if a couple can split the cost. But for most of us flying solo, it’s not even a thought on a drawing board; even modest accommodation can be a budgetary stretch. (On organised trips, single supplements can put what might be an affordable holiday beyond the reach of many.)

And for some, the idea of travelling alone, especially if you’re a woman, especially overseas, is a nerve-wracking, even terrifying prospect. Can this Uber/cab driver be trusted? Is this a safe neighbourhood? Is that man following me? Will this restaurant/cafe/trattoria/bistro make a solo diner feel welcome? Will I get back to my room alive if I stay out past dark? Can I hike this trail on my own and live to tell the story? What threats do I need to be aware of? (I have huge admiration for my female friends who travel alone without blinking or overthinking+the fearless Sarah Wilson is an inspiration in this too+the Facebook group called Solo in Style: Women Over 50 Travelling Solo & Loving It offers great stories and encouragement from solo women travellers and adventurers.)

But beyond the practical, there is the social. For me at least, when I go away on my own, loneliness can cut deep. My head runs away with me, dark thoughts assemble and assault. (I’m an introvert and need great slabs of alone time but there is something different about being alone at home and alone away … go figure.) If you choose not to holiday alone the question frequently is, with whom will I holiday? Parents, siblings, children are not always an option (nor desirable). I’m not an organised-group-tour sort of person. Friends might not be available or, if they are, not have the same interests, expectations or budget. And often the friend you love to hang out with here and there for time-capped periods might not be the friend with whom you want to split a hotel room and/or spend concentrated and extended periods of time. The issue can apply whether the holiday is an overseas adventure or a collapse-and-chill-with-a-book break locally.

Consequently, way too often, I avoid thinking about the first-world issue of holiday time, put it in the too-hard basket, stay at my desk through long weekends and vacation periods or decide to stay-cation and end up working. Or I see a glimmer of an arrangement with a friend and then procrastinate and dither and worry and find obstacles and reasons not to be proactive with anything (like, do they really want to holiday with me!?). And always, as a freelancer, the pressure of work, the fear of time away from the desk and its net-zero-income outcome, hover.

Welcome exhaustion, burn out, collapse.

A year or more ago, deciding that my life depended on taking a chill-with-a-book break even if I took it alone, I asked you for recommendations for affordable dog-friendly spots on the south coast of New South Wales (an easy drive from Sydney) which I could book for a short break with Lola (although it’s never really a break with Lola!). Lovely people sent suggestions. A couple of friends offered their holiday homes gratis (🙏). Hard to explain why, but I felt uncomfortable about accepting their generosity.

Then another email landed from a woman I did not know– “A”. She wrote:

“This would be the firsttime I have ever writtento a journalist or a person in a personalcontext,without knowing that person. (Although I have droppeda comment or two on your Instagram posts.) You said in this week’s piece you are after a place to crash on the coast.

I am not sure if the timing is right for you, but I am about to get the keys for a little shack I have bought in Hyams Beach. It is extremely basic, just a one-bedroom 55sqm Fibro Majestic, about 150 metresfrom the beach. I am having it cleaned, painted and repaired but after that you would be welcometo stay there for a few days/week for a headspacebreak, gratis.And of course your fur baby Lola would be welcome. I live elsewhere so you’d have the place to yourself.

My intention is just for my children and I to use the house and I want to let people who have helped me through the last few years have a nice time away too. There are a few special peeps I know who don’t have a lot spare in their budgets that I think deserve a bit of TLC/random acts of kindness etc.

Your book helped me through atraumatic marriage separation from my husband who had the same personality disorder as your ex, so I wouldbe very happy to help you in return. My personal sociopath-next-door was clever and successful, so a silver lining to the trauma is to be now financially comfortable. I have decided I would like to share some of that in a way that He Would Never – ie, for no ulterior motive or personal gain.”

A’s message floored me; a rare and most precious thing.

Still, I dithered. A’s email drifted towards the bottom of my inbox. Every so often I would remember it and feel warmed by her kindness, thrilled by the idea of her offer – and feel guilty for my silence. Eventually, a month or so later, I found time to reply. We exchanged a few emails. We met for a coffee. We discovered we had way more in common than malevolent men and that our lives had taken often parallel tracks. A is a talented artist, whip-smart, deeply compassionate, thoughtful, insightful, great company. We had dinner. We started to keep in touch more regularly.

Two weeks ago, more than a year since A’s first email, I finally unlocked the door on her light, bright, beautiful cottage at the glorious Hyams Beach. Lola bounded in. She knew it felt like home immediately. It is modest but A’s warm, stylish and artistic touches are everywhere. And its very compactness is comforting; there was no room for loneliness, the sweet sound of waves at a distance would have washed it away if it had even tried to slither in.

Of course, having Lola with me (and, sigh, my laptop too) helped; we were glued together as I decided not to leave her in the cottage alone (sadly, that meant the national park was off-limits … a small business idea for locals: dog-minding by the hour … I looked at Madpaws but there was no one in Hyams listed who might give me a break). But Lola and I roamed the beaches together (bar Nelsons Beach near Vincentia, all on-leash😢) and I remembered something else …

I can get lost and immersed in nature, in studying a broken cockle shell or wondering about the whiteness of the sand or marvelling at the miraculous opalescence on the inside of a shard of shell. I gather treasures – shells and small shapely pieces of driftwood, the dried holdfasts of kelp like bleached bones. I choose a theme for photographs or videos – one day it is video of waves over kelp forests, another, photographs of leaf litter on white sand – and am washed with contentment as I pursue light and angles and possibilities. My heart rate slows, I breathe, the stress leaves my shoulders, my brain wanders across ideas I might explore, stories I might write, questions needing answers.

This curious treasure for example, a piece of kelp, how could it have twisted itself into such an extraordinary corkscrew shape? Back at the cottage, I send a photograph of my discovery to my new friend A … I know she will be interested because the cottage holds a trove of beach-and-forest fossicked objets. She texts me back immediately. “They’re Port Jackson Shark egg sacks,” she says. “The weirdest things …” Not kelp at all! Research required, a question needing more answers.

In a cottage by the sea on my own, feeling the warmth and kindness of a stranger, a new friend, a treasure, and there is no room for difficult feelings, only gratitude.

Housekeeping

1. Apologies for the delay in getting Vamp out … my bad, please forgive me. As I noted in my last newsletter, I took a week off (see above), then my missive due last Friday was waylaid due to a long weekend away … I had a few days in the country for a dear friend’s 40th (I was the group’s barely wise old owl🦉). I intended to get this out on Saturday but the wi-fi was patchy, I was distracted by great and general hilarity, by food and drink and a pool and naps and a good book and enjoying watching a bunch of Americans visiting Australia for the first time see kangaroos in the wild and eat meat pies and Cherry Ripe chocolate bars and, oh, an excellent parlour game of which I had not previously heard … Salad Bowl (if you could have seen my ungainly and inept attempt to act out being Mr Bean in the charades round … my team-mates failed to guess who I was channelling with my facial and bodily contortions 😫). And, a cultural observation, an aside, something to return to and explore in the future: perhaps I’ve been living under a rock, but my days away with 30 and 40-somethings has given me a new understanding of how pop culture informs and saturates Millennials’ every moment, their banter, language, insights and thoughts, their very experience of the world. Have you witnessed such? I’d be interested to know.

   Leave a comment

   

2. Striving, I am striving, I promise, to get the delivery of Vamp back on track and plan to get the next edition into your inboxes next Friday, October 18.

🎵Mood

God, the chemistry! Amazing. RIP Kris Kristofferson.

Wild thing

“Demi Moore makes an unvarnished career comeback in an exploration of our obsession with beauty,” observes Vamp’s film critic of The Substance. But, he warns, it’s not for the faint of heart. It is, says the BBC, “lavishly gory gonzo horror”. (Esquire actually catalogues it in its “20 Best Horror Movies of 2024 (So Far)”. The film is generating much discourse around the subject of women and body image. Guardian columnist Emma Beddington uses the film as a vehicle to discuss women’s self-image, cosmetic surgery and women’s general dissatisfaction with the size of their breasts: globally, 70% of women dislike the size of their breasts, Beddington notes, while there has been a 64% increase in breast reductions in the US since 2019, many on women under 30. “Women, apparently, want ‘yoga boobs’ or the girlish ‘coquette’ look – a braless life,” she says.

Reading

LIZARD PEOPLE: Huzzah! Would that I could so eloquently satirise the state of things: In McSweeney’s, the phenomenon of morphing into a lizard person when you turn 50: “But of course, after I turn 50 and enter my reptilian era, abortion rights won’t be an issue for me at all. Once I’m living that sweet lizard life, I’ll bury all those cares in the sand and scurry away, much like I will bury my eggs in the sand and scurry away without ever seeing the hatchlings they produce. That’s right, I’ll enjoy the same kind of freedom as a human deadbeat dad.”

HEALTH: In the Harvard Gazette, a horrifying book extract revealing how the medical establishment’s historic sexism continues to endanger women’s lives. “By the time anyone says the words aloud – peripartum cardiomyopathy – it will be to write them down on her autopsy form, a contributing factor to the massive pulmonary embolism that took her life. Paula’s illness had advanced past the point of no return by the time she went to the hospital that night – but it wasn’t just her heart that failed her. It was the system.”

ABUSE: On her Substack, Writing a Better World, English novelist Ros Barber’s powerful and important story about her abusive marriage. “And still I couldn’t name it as abuse, because there was no physical violence. I never had to lie about walking into doors. He looked plausible. I looked crazy. When I said this respectable man was issuing death threats, it looked like I was suffering from some kind of psychosis. What evidence did I have? Just my word. When my word was worth nothing.”

MEMORY: Short and sweet little reflection from New York Times writer Melissa Kirsch on memory. Does a book (or other piece of culture) even count if you can’t remember it, she asks? “Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired?” (And – are our hard drives just too full? … Yes!)

FAMILY: Lovely story about the power of Google Street View, about its place in history and memory. Using Street View’s capacity to look at past images, a man finds his grandfather again: “The trio’s eyes were drawn to that hazy figure at the back of the driveway. ‘It was my grandfather, Joaquim,’ André says. ‘He’d passed away a year before.’ ”

BOOK: ABC broadcaster and journalist Virginia Trioli has released her first book since her feminist first title (Generation F: Why We Still Struggle with Sex and Power, 1996). This time, in A Bit on the Side, the food-loving Trioli writes personally, exploring her life through the prism of food. In her introduction to the book, Trioli writes of how, in the midst of crisis, global catastrophe, events outside our control, the push and pull and challenges of daily life, food and cooking can gift us moments of joy, moments of grace … “hands curled around a cup of coffee made just the way you like it … that first slice of warm cake, stolen and eaten standing up in the kitchen … local prawns eaten out of the back of the car on a remote Queensland beach”… Trioli is a tremendous writer – I loved editing her work when we both worked at The Age years ago; radio and television’s gain was newspaper and magazine’s loss. This book will be good. (Short Sunday Life profile of Trioli here.)

SENSUALITY: Finally, I just adored, adored this graphic story in The New York Times Magazine (worth taking out a NYT subscription for it IMHO). Since breaking up with her boyfriend some years ago, writer Jaime Lowe had “barely touched another body. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was the pandemic, middle age, fear – or all three.” Lowe decides that “something needed to change”. She takes a scuba diving course then dives for sea urchin (which the Japanese consider an aphrodisiac) in an attempt to rediscover her body, her sensuality. (With exquisite photographs, video and illustrations.)

Leave a comment

Listening

Caught up on podcasts during all my recent hours on the highway … can recommend these:

On The New York Times’ “The Daily”, Demi Moore discusses her new film, The Substance (see “Wild Thing”, above), body image and ageing. This: “… it’s not about what’s being done to us — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves. The lack of love and self-acceptance, and … we have this male perspective of the idealised woman that I feel we as women have bought into.”

This episode of the podcast “Search Engine” is a few months old and who knows what has changed in that time but, nonetheless, this is an absolutely fascinating, terrifying and I would go so far as to say essential insight into how Google search is changing in the most fundamental of ways. It will have a devastating affect on publishers and the media. It will change what we see when we search for anything. The implications are profound. Plus, some optimism: learn about “a secret new internet you may not have heard of, a paradise to which we may all yet escape”.

If you devoured the 2017 podcast hit “S-Town”, the story of John B McLemore, an eccentric, articulate and lonely resident of Alabama, you’ll be interested in this reflection on the questionable morality of the series. In this episode of his new podcast series, “Question Everything”, S-Town’s producer Brian Reed talks to former editor of The Age, Gay Alcorn, who described S-Town as “morally indefensible”. On Facebook, Gay notes: “Seven years ago I wrote a column for Guardian Australia critiquing Brian Reed’s remarkable podcast S-Town. The podcast was a global hit but I had some questions about its journalism. Out of the blue a few months ago, I got an email asking whether I’d like to talk about it with Brian for a new podcast about journalism, Question Everything, which acknowledges the complexity and compromises of journalism and wrestles with them. Our conversation went for hours. Brian didn’t flinch, was remarkably reflective and I changed my mind on some things.”

Beautiful things 1

I came upon the Insta account of God’s Pocket diving resort on the northern coast of Vancouver Island years ago and have been enthralled ever since … “the best cold water scuba diving in the world,” is its pitch. Says Dive magazine: “The underwater seascape is otherworldly. Phantasmagorical”. I’d love to dive God’s Pocket … but, hurdles ... I need to do a refresher course for my basic Open Water, need to get a lot of regular dives in and then, need to do 100 or more cold water dives (so the resort told me when I inquired). At this stage, I’ll just be looking at pretty pictures of God’s Pocket. And hooded nudibranchs (see beautiful video above)? They’re sea slugs with “a clear coloration, round-shaped hood, and wispy tentacles”.

Beautiful things 2

Anyone who has spent any time on Threads, the Instagram/Meta/Zuckerberg interpretation of Twitter/X, knows that Threads clickbait is all about asking questions. Ask a silly or provocative enough question and you might hit comment/viral pay-dirt. It worked for New Zealand “fitness professional” and author of My Menopause Memoir, Tracy Minnoch-Nuku (aka @sexyageing), when she asked the question above. The responses, 1.7K of them, flooded in, among them:

Plus:

“Mushrooms, highly recommend.”

“I went back to uni and learned coding at 52.”

“Relearning how to walk with a prosthetic leg at age 52.”

“Nothing crazy, but went out with a guy almost 20yrs younger ... Had a BLAST!!!”

“Currently travelling the country and sleeping outside the vehicle in a swag. There is no way I would have done this 10 years ago.”

“Learned to kite-surf.”

“Filed for divorce.”

Leave a comment

Food

BRUNCH: I was charged with Sunday brunch responsibilities for my friend’s birthday weekend from which I’ve just returned. From Gourmet Traveller’s 43 brunch recipes to start the weekend right, thanks Emma Knowles … I chose to cook baked wholemeal crêpes with ham, leek and Gruyère. It was an intense process (would not repeat for such a head count); white sauce at dawn, seemingly hours at the stove frying crêpes! Great dish but, in quadrupling the recipe for the 12 of us, the crêpe batter became a temperamental beast (not helped by the accommodation’s dodgy frying pans and, I suspect, quadrupling the volume of beer in the batter). I added an extra egg and that helped, as did a screwdriver or three, and, after cooking 30-odd crêpes, all things, including the crêpes, started to look better. And thanks to my assistants, the Americans, Wei and Bridget, two of the greatest single sheilas you could ever meet! 💕 (We made it a point to share as much Australian vernacular as possible with them – plus, Vegemite toast!) (Photo by Chris Court courtesy of Gourmet Traveller.)

SWEET POTATO: Miso-glazed on garlic yoghurt … I’d suggest that, if you’re not a vegan and/or don’t have vegan yoghurt and butter to hand, there would be no shame in substituting the dairy versions of the ingredients mentioned.

PROTEIN POWDER: Well, food, possibly not, anyhoo … a couple of weeks ago I asked you if you had any protein powder recommendations. A few of you, thank you, responded:

“I use Coles Wellness Road unflavoured whey protein powder (relatively inexpensive) which can be added to all sorts of foods and drinks – I stir it into porridge, Weetbix or muesli and add milk/yoghurt/fruit.”–Ali

“True Protein is good and came recommended by my dietician.”–Yeesum

“Totally agree, True Protein is great and doesn’t have the weird after-taste that I’ve had with many other powders.”–Natalie

Reader Fiona though, came back with an alternative view – “I think we listen to the scientists on protein powders – food first!” – and shared a link to a Harvard Health Publishing article noting its “hidden dangers”, including the fact that there is limited data on the long-term effects of protein powders and that some may contain added sugars, even toxins.

Home and garden

For T, The New York Times Style Magazine, Australian actor Melissa George throws open the doors of her 17th century mansion in the Provençal village of Visan, revealing … flea market finds, tapestries, a bibliothèque and enough plates for 300 people. “The guest rooms, mostly on the upper floors, are filled with their discoveries, including baroque sconces and hand-painted Italian twin beds. But the actress’s online searches were sometimes the most fruitful. ‘I am the Leboncoin Queen,’ George says, referring to the French equivalent of Craigslist. Her triumph was an intact Art Deco bathroom with floor-to-ceiling oak panelling and a matching wood-clad bathtub, bidet and massage table, saved from a demolition site on the Côte d’Azur,” notes the T article, which includes many more images of the mansion.

Fangirling over David Beckham’s farmer persona. “I tell you what’s doing very well over here, kale, look at that!” And … “Nice little cobweb.”

And, this, a lovely little video, a 90-year-old gardener.

Socials

(via Substack Notes)

(Via Facebook. NB: Ginger Gorman is the author of Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and Its Human Fallout. She originally posted her question on X where it has had the most extraordinary response – 5.2K comments, 23K likes. Typical of the comments – “every goddam day”. All great material for Ginger’s next book which will be, she tells me, “a strength-based creative non-fiction book about the inner lives of older women for Harper Collins called Flying not Falling”.)

(via Instagram Threads)

(Via Instagram: “Long before her #Oscar wins … #MaggieSmith was a sylph-like British talent carving out a stellar reputation on the West End stage. After some 70 years in the spotlight, there isn’t a genre she didn’t conquer, an emotion she failed to capture, or an acting legend she didn’t work with.”) Also, in The Guardian, a lovely little reflection: “Every evening in India the old actors would have dinner together. Every morning Maggie and Judi [Dench] would swim in their Victorian swimsuits. And every day we would all laugh and laugh. She had two laughs, Maggie; a dry cackle, and a genuine, head-back roar” … the writer of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Oliver Parker, on working with the great actress. Plus: amazing clip of Smith in the 1969 film, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

(via Instagram Threads)

(via Instagram Threads; story here – Fox Solomon’s book is called “A Woman I Once Knew” …)

(via Instagram Threads)

Leave a comment

Stolen words

“One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have so little to communicate.”–Father Richard Rohr in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (via Brené Brown)