Desperate Husbands

by Richard Glover

  The Blokes’ Supermarket

  I see that Australian doctors are studying what they call ‘oniomania’, or the compulsive need to shop. I just wish they’d spare a thought for people like me who suffer from shopping reluctance, or to use the technical name ‘tightwadmania’. All around I see my fellow citizens joyfully shopping, their gold Visa cards flashing festively in the sunlight, their shopping baskets full. Oh, that I could join them. Instead, I sit at home, fumbling for my wallet, only to find that my pockets are deep and my arms are short.

  Everywhere I see barriers to my enjoyment of the shopping experience. For a start, have you seen the prices? Since when did a shirt cost $85 and a pair of daks $150? I feel as if I might faint were it not for the excessive price of smelling salts. Then there are the mirrors: they are everywhere. In a particularly cruel move, they’ve even put them into the changing rooms. How am I meant to convince myself to buy an $85 shirt when, right before me, is evidence of how appalling I look in it? Couldn’t they borrow the mirror from Luna Park—the one that makes you tall and blessedly thin?

  But most of all it’s the excessive choice. How am I meant to know what style collar I want? Or which of the thirteen different kinds of jeans? How am I meant to know which of thirty-seven brands of ground coffee I should buy? Or how many pixels I want in a digital camera?

  Shopping, already a complex activity, is getting worse with each passing week. In the supermarket down the road, they’ve added new specialty sections. Where’s the olive oil? It could be in the Italian Section, in the Health Section, in the Gourmet Section or in Cooking Needs. It’s probably in all four, since the idea is not to assist the shopper but to make you browse. By constantly shifting everything around, you are forced to walk through every aisle about twenty times, searching, looking, yearning.

  There is now good evidence, I believe, that Coles and Woolworths are basing their store design on the ancient Cretan Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Vainly do we sacrifice seven youths and seven virgins to the management, yet they refuse to change the layout. And so, every day, you see shoppers unravelling balls of string just so they can find their way back from Dried Soup to Canned Fruit. No wonder they now open twenty-four hours; that’s how long it takes to locate the Cheese Spread Snack Abouts.

  I’ve long fantasised about a blokes’ shopping mall, which would offer good parking, cheap prices and really minimal choice. The supermarket would offer only three products: lamb chops, beer and loo roll. They’d have a whole aisle each. No more trailing up and down the aisles, like the lost souls from Dante’s Inferno, constantly bumping into the same lady, the one who insists on parking her trolley mid-aisle while she endlessly debates the choice between the freeze-dried carbonara or the freeze-dried puttanesca. Doesn’t she realise they put the same salty goo into both packets?

  In the Blokes’ Supermarket, all of that hassle: gone. Into the trolley they’d go—lamb chops, beer and loo roll—and you’d be trundling on your way. The specialty vegetable shop would then beckon. ‘Vegetables, sir?’ the kindly assistant would holler from his shop doorway and, upon one’s nod, a few head of broccoli, his only product, would be tossed into your cart. The practised shopper wouldn’t even slow his trolley, simply signalling his thanks with a few accurately thrown coins.

  At the bakery, there’d be a new product called the mixed loaf—a loaf of which one end would be white bread and the other wholemeal, with a kind of light rye in the middle. Adults could start eating at one end, the kids at the other, and everybody would be happy. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but it would be the best invention since sliced bread. Using a small cannon-like device, the baker would lob a couple of loaves into your trolley as you trundled past; the charge billed to one’s account.

  With all this new efficiency, the shops would be able to drastically lower their prices, at last providing some relief to those members of the citizenry suffering from tightwadmania. With a little help and sympathy, one day our arms may even grow long enough to reach our wallets.

  Style counsel

  I’ve been looking through In Style magazine, which arrived the other day. Every couple of pages there’s a profile of a Hollywood celebrity revealing his or her decorating tips. According to the magazine, every multimillionaire Hollywood star was born with innate style, which was displayed long before he or she became wealthy. The magazine doesn’t disclose why, this being so, each has to hire a decorator to make every decision down to colour of the eggcups—but perhaps the celebs can’t be bothered wasting their innate style on themselves.

  For instance—I get this from the current issue—John Travolta lives in a fairly doozy pad in Los Angeles with his wife, Kelly Preston. Travolta gets paid $10 million to $20 million a picture, and has hired the decorator Christopher Boshears to rip out and refit the house. Yet it turns out neither Travolta’s huge wealth nor the expertise of Mr Boshears has any real bearing on the fact that his place now looks great. Travolta has innate style that doesn’t require money.

  Here’s Travolta: ‘My intent has always been to inspire others to do the same thing I’m doing, regardless of income, because I lived well when I had no money and also when I did have some money.’

  At this point in the article, In Style quotes a friend cooing about the couple’s ‘aesthetic of living’. She says that Kelly, even when poor, would never drink out of a paper cup. Even if she could only afford to have one china cup, she would buy just one high-quality china cup. You can imagine dinner parties at their place: ‘Hey, John, pass the wine would you and maybe I could have a go with the cup sometime soon? Plus how are you going with the knife and fork?’

  The idea is that to possess humdrum Kmart objects reveals that you are a humdrum Kmart sort of person. It reflects not your income level but your very nature. The quality of the soul is divined through the possession of expensive objects. Not that I believe John or Kelly ever lived like this—with the one teacup and the one tasteful wine glass. It’s a myth, of course, but one which seeks to underline the moral message: even a small income does not excuse any of us from buying stupidly expensive things. And how convenient that the advertisers are there on the next page to satisfy the hunger thus created.

  The reality is that the person who fusses over the brand of their dinner plates or the quality of their glassware is generally a person without innate anything. Rather than ‘stylish’ and ‘aesthetic’ they are boring, shallow and materialistic. We all know this to be true, probably even the magazine’s editors know it to be true. Yet if a magazine confessed the truth—that it is words and actions that tell you most about a person—its advertising would quickly dry up. ‘Talk about interesting things! Read books! Be interested in other people! Be passionate about ideas!’ Each is a useful slogan but not one that would lead to a lot of high-margin retail sales.

  Truly interesting people don’t have much time for objects at all, that’s the truth of it. They don’t decorate, other than shifting the couch every ten years, and they use cheap glassware with gay abandon.

  Writing newspaper profiles, I used to spend days hanging out with various astounding people—writers, thinkers, activists, musicians. I rarely mentioned the brand names of the objects they possessed and wore because the objects were so ordinary. The truly fabulous are clothed by Target, with kitchenware by Kmart and a car by Toyota. Their favourite restaurant is the local Chinese. They don’t care about the set design of their lives; they are interested in the downstage action.

  In the face of the intimidating style-fascism of most magazines, I now regret that I didn’t mention the mundane surroundings of those fabulous people. I may need to go back through some newspaper profiles and insert a few Ihad-thought-obvious facts.

  ‘Mr Mandela, wearing a 50/50 rayon/cotton mix shirt and black pants, purchased from an outlet whose name he can’t recall, pulled a notepad from his pocket. Covered in genuine plastic, this useful pocket diary cost $4.99 at his local newsagency.’

  Or this: ‘The Australian poet J
udith Wright throws open her kitchen cupboards. She has chosen Laminex doors, which have become charmingly distressed with the passage of time, and stocked the cupboards with an eclectic mixture of china and plastic, in which not one piece seems to match any other.’

  ‘Was such a mixture planned by the feisty poet? “Not really,” says the cardigan-wearing bard. “I’ve never noticed up to now.”’

  We could call it Out of Style magazine. We’d have less advertising but really fabulous profiles. And, after being inspired by the people within, you wouldn’t feel the need to buy a thing—except for another copy of Out of Style.

  Lip service

  I don’t know if you have noticed but the lips on American TV stars continue to grow bigger. On shows like CSI and CSI Miami, the lips now appear larger than the face onto which they are attached. With everything else immobilised by Botox, the actor has become a life-support system for the lips. Hollywood now awaits the birth of its dream woman: a woman with lips wider than her waist. It’s the culture’s way of saying: ‘You see, I’ve got a mouth big enough to eat anything I like, but enough self-control to choose starvation.’

  Go to an event like the Logies and it’s like being at a Chupa Chups convention: everywhere the same body type—big head, big eyes, big mouth, all set onto a tiny, perfectly formed body. I went to the Logies a few years back and felt I should tread carefully, lest a couple of game show hosts be trampled underfoot. Wear a pair of open-toed sandals and you’d be picking out bits of weather presenter all night.

  Already the TV stars remind me of Billy Bass, the battery-operated singing fish, in which nothing moves but a set of giant lips. Soon there’ll be awards for the actress who can support her lips with the least visible strain. They already have the title: Best Supporting Actress.

  Meanwhile, millions of people are using Botox, a paralysing agent which is injected into the face. Since the muscles are frozen, it becomes impossible to frown, and thus one’s wrinkles begin to disappear. That’s the idea. The question, though, is why you’d want a face that could no longer frown. George Orwell famously said that ‘by fifty, everyone has the face they deserve’, which presumably should now be rewritten: ‘By fifty, everyone has the face they can afford.’

  Personally, I love the subtleties of The Frown. Each frown is made up of a hatchwork of lines, mostly verticals and horizontals, yet their precise alignment can convey anything from aghast horror over politics to uncertainty about a piece of dodgy fish. This tiny ideogram, located in the centre of the forehead, has all the precision and eloquence you could hope for and is readable across cultures and generations. Imagine a spoken language that could do so much with such delicacy and in so tiny a space. And imagine, given such a language, that people would willingly render themselves mute. But that’s the glory that is Botox.

  Of course, the grass is always greener. If human beings had never developed The Frown, someone would have tried to. Imagine the advertisements on late-night TV: ‘Amaze your friends. Learn how to express your emotions through your face. Tell a boyfriend he’s not behaving properly without having to spell it out! Put the pressure on a child to do his homework without a big verbal showdown! All this could be yours with The Frown (copyright pending). Be among the first 300 callers and we’ll also throw in instructions for The Dirty Look, The Glare and The Scowl.’

  Part of the problem, of course, is that frowns leave marks. As do smiles, dirty looks and expressions of surprise. Thus Orwell’s aphorism about having the face we deserve. Spend your life scowling—even in private—and in the end everyone will know your secret.

  Not that I’m ruling out plastic surgery for myself. If God, or Charles Darwin, had done the job properly, all this fiddling around would not be necessary. I have long admired, for example, the concept of baby teeth. I love the way, at the age of six or seven, kids start to lose their baby teeth—and then get a whole fresh set. It’s such a great idea. It’s as if God, or Charles Darwin, realised that kids are not responsible enough to look after their first set of teeth and needed a second chance. You get one set of teeth to mistreat and misuse as a baby; then, when you’ve become a bit more responsible, you get a whole new set.

  It’s a good principle and one worthy of extension. I’d like to see God supply a third set of teeth, some time in late middle age: after all, even Ikea throws in a couple of extra bolts. With the maturity of my forties, I’d look after the third set. After that, God, or Darwin, could address the matter of our internal organs, in particular the liver. The new liver could be delivered around one’s fortieth birthday. The Liver Fairy could drop two bucks on the bedside table and take the exhausted old one away.

  A second chance with the belly would also be good. As with the teeth, you only start making an effort once you’ve got the problem. And by then it’s too late. There’s the moment, again in one’s mid-forties, when the old belly starts to get a bit wobbly and loose. With a first tooth, that’s the signal the old one’s about to fall out. Same principle would work with bellies. Once it starts wobbling, you should be able to look forward to it coming loose and revealing the new flat belly below.

  Slip the old one under your pillow and then the Belly Fairy would leave you two bucks and spirit the wretched thing away. It could then be sold to Hollywood for use in some Chupa Chups starlet’s lips. Think about it: in a few weeks’ time, your old beer belly could be locked in an embrace with Brad Pitt.

  Recipe for disaster

  Seventies food, I’ve been told, is making a comeback, with dishes like duck à l’orange and carpet-bag steak making regular appearances on restaurant menus. A couple of very fancy joints are even serving prawn cocktail—a dish that I assumed had been hunted to extinction by the early eighties. Yet if people want to recreate the authentic taste of the seventies, it’s important to follow the rules of the time. It’s no good just grabbing a recipe for steak Diane or apricot chicken; you’ve got to adopt the correct seventies sensibility.

  This is where I come in: I was taught to cook by my father in the two days before I left home at the end of 1976—the high point of seventies cuisine. The two recipes I learnt to prepare were steak Diane (for fancy) and Welsh rarebit (for day-to-day). I have flipped through some modern recipe books and none of the recipes as printed bears any relation to the way I was taught to do it.

  Steak Diane, for instance, was far from being a complex dish involving cream, chopped parsley, cognac and garlic. Instead, it consisted of a piece of steak thrown in a frypan with a good wallop of Worcestershire sauce to finish. Welsh rarebit, far from being this thing involving milk, mustard, beer and a double boiler, was suspiciously similar to cheese on toast. ‘Take the cheese, son, put it on the bread, then pop it under the griller,’ my father would instruct, ‘…and voilà, Welsh rarebit.’ My father’s breakfast special—a raw egg cracked into a glass of milk and then swallowed as one rushed out the door—was similarly dignified by the term ‘eggnog’.

  Another problem. Modern cookbooks blather on about ‘using the freshest ingredients possible’, but this was not the authentic seventies way. The steak, for a start, had to be frozen and then defrosted. For reasons that now remain unclear, everyone was absolutely crazy about buying meat in bulk and then freezing it. If you didn’t have half a cow slung in a chest freezer in the laundry, you hadn’t really made it. You could have butcher shops on either side of you, and you’d still buy three months’ worth of meat at a time and store it under a mountain of frozen peas and beans, as if you were living on the outer Barcoo.

  Meanwhile, for reasons which again remain unclear, both potatoes and sweet corn were cooked in the oven wrapped in aluminium foil. ‘We can’t afford to have the house clad in aluminium but at least we can clad the spuds’—that was the line of thinking.

  Over at the house of my school friends, things were even more sophisticated, if that’s possible. Many and varied were my encounters with the canned pineapple piece. The rule seemed to be: when in doubt, toss in a can-full, whether it’s de
ssert, main course, breakfast or lunch. I try as I write to fight off memories of the lamb chops with pineapple sauce served regularly at one friend’s house.

  After I’d completed my father’s two-day cooking course, I set out for my new home, the garage out the back of a friend’s place. Two weeks later, I realised my diet consisted of nothing but steak, cheese and Worcestershire sauce. Alarmed that death might be imminent, I acquired a copy of The Vegetarian Epicure—a book which consisted of a hundred recipes in which one would take some form of vegetable matter and then dump half a ton of cheese on it. With particularly disgusting vegetables, more complex recipes were required, in which you would make sure the vegetable was dead by further drowning it in sour cream.

  As the years went on, things became ever-more stylish. I particularly remember the great Cooking-at-the-Table boom of 1977, in which butane burners were placed on the tabletop. All manner of fondues and dishes of browned bananas were prepared, much to the delight of everyone, normally with Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman playing on a stereo nearby.

  But, of course, every golden period must come to an end. People got rid of their chest freezers after a spate of power blackouts resulted in them having to eat a whole cow over a couple of sittings—a task that could really do in one’s supplies of Worcestershire sauce. And the Cooking-at-the-Table boom ended after some very nasty incidents involving nylon body-shirts, ruffled chest hair and bottled gas.