Some girls are so detached

all the vegetables in the fridge's humidity drawer are not fresh but rrrrrotten. I always thought that this drawer had magical abilities to extend the life of yer fresh produce but the floret on the broccolini has gone distinctly yella. Sink me and whatnot.

Humidity drawers and humidy cribs, so confusin', for several years in my long privileged life as a child i thought they were the same thing.

Mater smoked throughout all her pregnancies, as you did if you were a smoker, perhaps, ignorant, never, during the 50's and 60's? , i was, however, the only of her numerous children directly affected at birth by the smoking, and was slightly sick and somewhat of a weakling, my how things have changed. So from the time i cried "hello world here's the song that i'm singin' " until i was about 4 weeks old i was in a humidy crib.

Not very long and definitely not a big deal. I was a very "lively", accident prone and healthy child apart from the standard bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis, oh, and the legendary foot and mouth disease pandemic. "You blue eyed Sydney borns must never smoke, you've got weak chests.", mama used to advise my younger sister and me, with ever constant cigarette in mouth or in nearby ashtray. Apparently it was open slather for a woman with grey eyes and her offspring who had brown eyes and were born interstate. Ohwuh, they got away with everythink.

However, when I was a child I did seek confirmation from my mother that coventry in the humidy crib was no big deal and would not have affected my start in life, as she would have still been nursing me every day, checking that I had human contact, (several years earlier, i'd dealt with and sadly dismissed the adoption hypothesis and was now looking for a new angle, for which I blame Jan Brady, and really should have just been focusing on my schoolwork rather than my navel, a lesson that i'm yet to learn), and she replied,

"oh, of course there was lots of contact, Sister Sharp often picked you up. Don't get a complex. " uttering the term "complex" in a curious fashion, as though it was a relatively groovy term for her, despite living in a fairly chaotic household with several force of nature personalities hell bent on developing or giving someone a complex of some shape or form.

Sister Sharp indeed! The name conjures up such a warm, loving, and maternal being, not dissimilar to that of say, Nurse Ratchet or Sister Scott from the Young Doctors.


A word from Didactic Drawers: Cornelia Francis played Sister Scott in the Young Doctors and really was magnificent. Apart from also playing Morag in Home and Away, and tstern principal /host of Australian weakest link, and a slew of other groundbreaking performances in Australian entertainment, Cornelia Francis also happens to be the niece of Michael Powell, as in Pressburger and Powell. Not many people know that...............