Resolutions for 2011

This time last year, Toby and I were still in England. On New Year’s Day, we walked through the snow in Leatherhead, Surrey and talked about what we wanted most for 2010. Among the usual small hopes were two important ones: a successful debut for Solace & Grief, and a chance to come back to the UK. It’s taken a lot of hard work, but we’ve achieved both those things. The Key to Starveldt is due for release this year, and in just five days, we’re moving to Scotland for a minimum of eighteen months. It is thrilling, terrifying, wonderful. We worked hard for this, and the reward of actually getting it is monumental. And now we’ve crossed the threshold of another new year, and we get to do it all over again: more work, more plans, more effort and hope and sheer hard yakka, because both of us have the kind of dreams that are easy neither to achieve nor dismiss.

I want to be a professional writer. Toby wants to be a professional academic. In bald terms, we already are these things, but there are no laurels to rest on for being able to claim that much, and even if there were, I doubt we’d be content to do so. Stories are the blood in me, just as my husband breathes philosophy. We understand and love that about one another, the degree to which who we are cannot be readily separated from our aspirations. This year, we have a real chance to make something of ourselves in the ways that matter most to each of us. We have come this far, but the aim is to go much further. And I think – I hope – we can do it.

Beyond all that, I still want the same small things for 2011 that I want every year: to eat healthily and exercise regularly, to pay off our debts and live within our means, to try new things while reconnecting with old passions. It might seem repetetive and futile make the same resolutions each year – or at least, it would do, if any of them were finite achievements. The point of such things isn’t to find some magic, perfect level of successful compliance and declare yourself done, but to constantly look for improvement. This past year, my domestic skills have started to be worthy of the name, not because I suddenly woke up one morning with a desire to be tidy, but because I spent months telling myself that I needed to be. Because in a lot of ways, the biggest change of 2010 – and the one I’m most keen to uphold in 2011 – was the realisation that I could set goals for myself and reach them, even if they were difficult.

Maybe I’ve just grown up. But I hope not. I like having room for development.

Happy 2011, everyone!

Election Blues (And Reds)

Dear Australian Labor Party,

I’ve never voted for you.

And I only just realised it.

This is my third election. Ours is a two party system. I cheered when Rudd got in, and booed for years at the failure of Howard to fall in a well and die. But until I came back from the polls today, I hadn’t actually realised that every vote of my life – local government, Senate and Representatives, above and below the line – has been for the Greens.

In 1975, my mother – who was then the age that I am now, give or take a few months – protested the Whitlam dismissal. As a teenager, I found the shirt she wore to those rallies stored in a trunk in our attic. It’s bright yellow with black lettering that says: REJECT FRASER’S COUP D’ETAT: VOTE ALP. When the Liberals introducted VSU, I wore it to the protest rallies. One man of my mother’s vintage raised his fist in solidarity, grinned and told me to maintain the rage, just as Whitlam once did to their generation. I said I would, and feel as though I have.

But you are not my party. You have never been my party.

Because in my lifetime, you have never been sufficiently left-wing.

Possibly you should have taken notice when, earlier in the year, Gordon Brown’s Labor Party in Britain lost government to a hung parliament, which was resolved by a groundbreaking and very weird deal between Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats and David Cameron’s Tories. Tonight, even as the TV pundits are yet to call a firm result, it is clear that the same thing is about to happen here: a hung parliament, wherein the traditional Labor vote has been crucially splintered by a smaller, left-wing party that can never hope to take government.

Splintered, in other words, by voters like me.

I do not want Tony Abbott to be Prime Minister. Although I have only ever voted Green, should he triumph at the end of tonight – or tomorrow, or Monday, or however long it takes Canberra to sort itself into some semblance of order – my mother’s shirt will once again be brought out of retirement. I will go back to waving my fist at The Man, for all the good it does, and protesting the inevitably hideous decisions he will make. Should that future eventuate, the fault will, in part, be mine. I was content for the election to be decided on preferences. I voted Green.

But in all good conscience, I couldn’t bring myself to vote Labor.

It’s not just Conroy and his ludicrous internet filter. It’s not just the party line against gay marriage. Had she had any policies worthy of my enthusiasm, I would have welcomed the chance to vote for Australia’s first female Prime Minister. But I will not vote for the semblance of progress at the cost of its tangible equivalent, even if the cost is something worse. The Labor Party has forgotten that it is meant to be left wing, and by slowly sliding more and more to the centre-right in order to capture a handful of Liberal swing votes, they’ve completely abandoned a key voter base: actual left-wingers.

The swing to the Greens isn’t about Kevin Rudd, or even Julia Gillard. It’s about voting for what we believe. And right now, what the Labor Party believes is just a little too compatible with Liberal Party policy for my taste. Yes, I’d rather Gillard than Abbott any day of the week. But on the basis of policy, I’d sooner the Australian Sex Party ran the country – not least because they (a) actually have policies that (b) make a whole lot of fucking sense.

I understand that the buggery of politics is compromise. But not every whore has a heart of gold, and right now, the Labor Party has taken on a foolish sheen. When the supposedly major left-leaning party is competing for votes and seats with a smaller left-leaning party to such an extent that neither is fighting the right-wingers, perhaps it’s time to redraw the party line? Politicians are whores so that the rest of us don’t have to be, but if the Labor Party thinks we’ll vote for them out of respect for their pragmatic efforts to move further and further towards the right, they’ve got another thing coming.

Well, actually, we all do. Because there’s going to be a hung parliament.

I just hope someone learns from it.

Yrs sincerely,

Foz

2010, The New Year & Doctor Who

So, it seems that 2010 – the dawn of a new decade which may or may not be called the tens, teens, tweens or tweenies – is finally upon us. Huzzah! This was the first New Year’s Eve I’ve ever spent overseas, and the only one where it’s been cold. Toby and I put forward a few suggestions as to how we might celebrate, but in the end, a 24-hour virus/flu on his behalf saw us stay in by ourselves and have a pleasant, if very quiet, evening of geekery. I bought us a box of Indian food from Sainsbury’s, which actually wasn’t bad, and courtesy of our hosts – or, more specifically, their DVD collection – we watched Stigmata, which was very 90s, but not unenjoyable, paused to have a discussion about the apocryphal Gospel of St Thomas, and then watched The Lawnmower Man, which was sort of hilarious, but which made up for it by featuring a young, sometimes shirtless Pierce Brosnan wearing hot glasses and an a gold earring as the Rogue Scientist. Then we caught up with a bit of the classic Doctor Who we’ve been watching recently – Tom Baker in Pyramids of Mars – and went to sleep. Also, I may have done some writing.

Speaking of which: the first draft of the Ambush Novel is now complete. There’s one more scene I want to add in, a made-up word I want to change and a conversation to be fixed, but these are all little things, and otherwise, I’m extremely happy with the results. So if nothing else, I’ve managed to achieve my crazy goal of finishing it before we returned to Australia. Yay!

Finally, re my predictions for the second part of Doctor Who: The End of Time, I was right about some things, and wrong about others. I’m happy with that. It was, by and large, a good episode, although in all honesty, I’m keen to move on from the schmaltz of Russell T. Davies and see what Stephen Moffat can achieve – especially given that he’s been responsible for all my favourite episodes.

Rock on 2010!