Lifestyle

Hello, my name is Emma Jane and I am A Very Bad Mother. Not because I neglect my four-year-old daughter – but apparently because I don’t neglect her enough.

If you have offspring, you’ll know that being called a “helicopter parent” is the insult du decade.

It implies that you hover over your kids like a whopping great Black Hawk, and has been blamed for everything from childhood obesity to weird new European balloon laws.

Continue reading "Neglect, not helicopter parenting, damages kids" »

When I was a teenager, there was nothing I wanted more than to move out of suburbia. I grew up in a place so nondescript that, after performing there, John Cleese remarked that if you wanted to kill yourself but lacked the courage, a visit to my home city “would do the trick”. (Locals had the last laugh by naming the municipal dump after him.)

The city itself wasn’t the problem – solid agricultural attitudes and a bit of civic symmetry rather please me – it was the stultifying ordinariness of life in suburbia. The predictable pleasantness of everything from progressive dinners to neighbourly sugar sharing. My best friend and I even coined the term ‘subby dip’ for the onion-soup-mix and sour-cream confection routinely served with Jatz crackers. Our derision was to be expected. We were 19.

We wanted to be, as our favourite band sang, “making love on the edge of a knife”, not on the floral bedspreads or in the lavender-scented gardens of our boyfriends’ parents.

Continue reading "You have to leave suburbia to really, truly love it" »

Four friends were dining over lunch in a swish Adelaide restaurant last weekend when a woman at the next table pulled out her chair and proceeded to change her baby’s nappy on the floor.

Can you believe that? The four friends couldn’t. They were so stunned they decided to phone The Sunday Mail.

“It was just so unhygienic and inappropriate,” said one. “Luckily it was only a wet nappy – imagine if it had been really messy.”

No thanks, ladies. Might put me off my own lunch. But talk about taking the new mums’ cause back 20 years.

Continue reading "Houston wee have a problem" »

Every morning I attempt to do well by the countless articles relevant to maintaining a healthy balanced diet. By the afternoon, all my good intention swirls down the throne due to a momentary lapse in judgment.

Processed sugar, the supposed poison, became something I habitually consumed to remedy the three-thirtyitis. Fine occasionally, but when I needed it every day, I began to think I had a problem.

At first I blamed boredom and a juiced up sweet tooth for my daily indulgence. This erroneous conclusion was purely based on the fact that I am one of those sorry sods who head to the gym at lunchtime to feel better about my dietary choices. And then make a bad choice because I went to the gym.

Continue reading "Confessions of a sugar junkie" »

Michael Carroll, UK binman, won $15 million and blew it all in eight years on drugs, cars and women. He’s now scraping by as a tradie.

His is a sad tale, and reading it made me think sanctimonious thoughts about how we need to support people through such drastic life changes, particularly those with vulnerabilities like alcoholism.

But mostly I just thought: Shit yeah! I’d love to squander stacks of cash in one big disgusting binge. I’d like to roll around naked in piles of dirty, stinking cash, bathe in French champagne, live a rockstar lifestyle.

Continue reading "$15 million buys a lot of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll" »

Butter is made by the simple act of churning cream.

Margarine is a fake food that originated in a laboratory as a result of food science. It commonly contains a lengthy list of ingredients, like hydrogenated vegetable oil and artificial colours and flavours, to control its taste, texture and colour. In fact, margarine is pumped full of artificial colouring agents so it looks yellow like butter (we’re so easily fooled).

There were once laws against dying artificial foods to look like natural foods. These days our governments are rarely bothered by chemically altered concoctions posing as food. We trust science now.

Continue reading "I can’t believe it’s not splutter" »

I like technology.  I like the fact that technology allows me to be an actor for a living.  You see, without technology like television, I wouldn’t be where I am today. 

Yet there is something sinister about the way technology is changing our lives. 

I sometimes think that each new marvellous technological invention gives us yet another reason to spend less time with each other.

Continue reading "The joy of unplugging from our tech-stressed lifestyles" »

It would have seemed like an innocent enough question.

Standing at the supermarket checkout, struggling slightly with a bulging belly as I hoisted heavy bags into the trolley, with no children in tow: ‘Will this be your first baby?’

The answer should be simple. If a one word response will suffice, I’ll have no problem. No, this is not my first baby, my first pregnancy. It is my seventh.

Continue reading "Invisible loss: What I learned about tragic pregnancy" »

[Editors’ note: This is in response to an article published in The Punch on Monday about 10-hour, four-day working weeks. Michael Honey’s business does just that.]

The indignities of modern working life are many, and one of the most onerous is the grind of the five-day working week. Two days of play after five days’ work is inadequate to renew our enthusiasm for life:  we barely recover from the quintuple routine of waking to the alarm, commuting to work and back (to say nothing of what transpires in between), dining with our weary family and crashing to uneasy sleep; than we have to confront the thought, on a Sunday afternoon, that it all will begin again. A five-day work week leaves insufficient room for us to develop our sensitive natures: it makes us dull and cranky.

We run a small design studio with four fulltime staff. When we started up the place, one of my aims, as a refugee from the advertising agencies where I built my career, was to build a kinder, gentler, more humane organisation.

Continue reading "The good and bad of working four-day weeks all year" »

I have taken unto myself a motorbike and it is a beautiful and joyous thing. For others it is a sign of my mental collapse and advanced desperation.

There has been a procession of arched eyebrows and the diagnosis of a mid-life a crisis from those who believe I should be confining myself to inspections of nice retirement villages.

I acknowledge that I am north of 50 and a shortish commute to 60, but it is foolish to make sweeping statements about an age group. (Gen Y does it all the time). And I’m having too much fun to worry.

Continue reading "Get your motor running, even if it’s slow to warm up" »

Enforcing a blanket ban on advertising certain foods to children is not the answer to solving Australia’s obesity problem.

Activists and some politicians bleating for a ban on advertising high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) foods on all media before 9pm need to get real.

Arguing that television adverts for HFSS foods are almost totally responsible for making people overweight, especially children, is an extraordinary leap of logic.

Continue reading "Changing ads on TV won’t tackle the obesity epidemic" »

Read it here.

I’d like to think I would be yacht shopping this morning, wearing a cravat, and being followed around by someone I’d hired specifically to top up my champagne flute.

But they’ve gone to work! According to a Lotto spokesperson:

When they got the call this morning solidifying their winnings, they said ‘I was hoping to hear from you this morning’.

They’re a Gold Coast couple so based purely on postcode there’s an increased likelihood $53 million isn’t all that life-changing. But I doubt it.

I’m especially happy for the other guy, who’s being playing Lotto for 20 years and plans to give some of the money to charity.

What would you be doing? Would you be at work?

If one’s face can’t register an orgasm, is the climax still as good?

Startling as it may seem, I feel liberated by the decay of beauty.  It’s a bold statement, but in this era, when the glorification of all that is youthful is paramount, I hope that I look like the mother of my eldest daughter, (who for the record is almost 24,) and not at all like her sister. I don’t want to be in competition with her, or my younger girl, who is only eight. I want them to take up the mantle of their own prime years and have me cheering them on from the proper place - as the more senior female of the clan.

Our society so abhors the discussion of ageing and death, that we have embraced a whole new industry of psychological touchstones involving chemicals and knives and a race to look 10 years younger in 10 days. I don’t castigate or object to anyone making personal choices regarding cosmetic procedures, nor do I rule them out for myself if I feel I want them. But I am concerned that so many of my friends, acquaintances and even other people in the media are beginning to relinquish their unique expressions of emotion and life experience at the point of a needle.

Continue reading "Cosmetic work can make you mistake chit-chat for orgasm" »

In our body-image obsessed world, being told that you can be thinner by the weekend sounds delicious.

That was the hook Grazia magazine used in publishing the latest US diet craze in its “Thin by Friday” feature in the June issue.  NOVA 96.9’s newsreader Kristy Warner has also shared her experience of the diet on-air.

Continue reading "Medical mag calls out glossy on potentially fattening diet" »

I can’t remember a time when the decimal point was more popular.  Apart from the usual uses in maths, finance and software, we’ve now got things like Web 2.0, PR 2.0 and even Participation 2.0.

I clearly remember the first time I heard the term Web 2.0. I was shocked and confused. “But I’m just doing Web.  What the hell is Web 2.0 and how did I miss Web 1.0?” I thought.  Likewise when I heard that PR 2.0 was the real deal when I was still fumbling around with plain old PR.

Sometimes I wonder when the 3.0s will arrive and who will decide when they do?  And in 10 years, will I be doing PR 8.0?

Continue reading "Life 2.0: Finding the point in a world full of decimals" »