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  Virginia Taylor - Author

 

Things and things and things.

25/3/2015

2 Comments

 
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Makeover TV programs are my addiction. One of my current favourites is 60 Minute Makeover, and English show.

The show takes on one interior designer, who is either an overtly gay man with a funny accent or a good looking young woman who wears knee length dresses over slacks, and a mess of a house. Add fifty or sixty competent tradespeople and see what happens in an hour. It’s not pretty. They knock over paint, trip over each other, run with sharp objects, and hey presto, the messy house is transformed. It’s like The Block only faster.

Because I’m such an avid viewer, I think I can pass on a few decorating hints.

First, wallpaper at least one wall in every room. Seriously. Use a different, noisy pattern for each.

Always use a glass-topped table in your dining room because the see-through effect makes the room look bigger. Don’t worry if the sound and feel of china on glass puts your teeth on edge. Your room looks bigger and you can always eat in front of TV if you want to be sensitive.

When you remove your built-in robes, replace them with wardrobes containing less than half the hanging space you had. This also makes the room look bigger.

Make sure each made-over room is a separate entity with no relation to the adjoining rooms.

Ignore carpet underlay, skirting boards in strange colours, and purple painted ceilings. Don’t worry about having red or yellow doors opening into a blue room or vice versa. No one notices.

If you have a room with a beautiful polished wooden floor, cover it with a stone patterned lino. This is because you need a change.

Buy thirty more cushions than you can ever possibly use and then toss them all over the beds and the chairs. This brightens any décor you might be unsure of.

Where you have wall space, hang a picture of anything. Too many anythings are better than one fabulous picture.

Always, always, pattern your curtains in the same colours as the wallpapers. Never use plain fabrics in any room. Ever. Not even for cushions and throws. More is more and less is boring.

Black is back, especially for every room as long as you balance it with a bright colour on a feature wall as well as wallpaper.

Buy lots of things. Things and things and things, like a painted bird-cage with a cactus inside to put in a lost corner, candles, stones, shells, or a beaded curtain in the kitch-in. That’s how you say kitchen in England. This makes sense when you see how to load a kitchen counter top.

Don’t keep your fridge in the kitch-in if you have an adjoining room, and make sure the washing machine is near the kitch-in sink.

Oh, and don’t forget that little girls have pink rooms and little boys have blue and black. Did I mention you can’t have too much black?

We’re so boring in Australia. I can’t speak for everyone but I’ve always had white skirtings, door surrounds, and doors. I have never thought of separating each room by a different coloured carpet. I think fridges are quite useful in kitchens and I like my washing machine in the laundry. I know. I know. I’m a Capricorn and we’re not very imaginative.

I wish we could get this team here to compete on The Block. The English already know about sea-grass wallpaper and things and things and things. They’d beat the East Coast trendies here hollow.



2 Comments

The Mystery of the Missing Cat

9/3/2015

1 Comment

 
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The traumas of parenthood escalate during your children’s teenage years. By her fifteenth year, number one daughter had crawled out of the swimming pool and into bed, now deciding to challenge the world sleeping record. On weekends, she didn’t surface at all during the daylight hours. We left food offerings outside her door, which kept the cats occupied in trying to open the mercy bundles.

Burmese can open most things including doors unless they’re securely locked, but I think a couple of our cats were secretly working on key mechanisms. That’s an aside. We didn’t open number one daughter’s door because none of us really wanted to see the chaos inside, but for health reasons we’d come to an agreement. Once a week she would clean up and take her sheets and dirty clothes to the laundry room. I would then wash her things and hang them out in the sunshine. My hero would bring everything in, fold, and iron. Ironing got him points that he wasn’t willing to give up, and trust me, by the time our daughters were teenagers, he needed husbandly points.

So, because number one didn’t participate in our family life, she didn’t know that our newest lilac Burmese had disappeared. We’d had a lot of problems with our cats wandering. They’re great adventurers. My favourite cream Burmese had once been trapped on a neighbour’s roof for days, and that particular cat had a car fetish. She insisted on doing the shopping with me because she loved being seen in my car. She looked good in red.

That’s another aside. Back to the main event. When the newest cat didn’t come home, my husband went on a search of the neighbourhood, but the cat hadn’t been seen. After three days, we had Gemini on the missing, presumed dead list. On day four I was sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea, and I saw what looked like a stunned cat staggering down the hall to the back door. He walked with a dragging limp, and his fur was filthy. I went into freeze mode, shocked. I didn’t know where he had appeared from and I didn’t know where he had been.

He clearly wanted water and so I filled a bowl and stood watching. He could barely stand and didn’t seem able to lap. By this time tears were streaming out of my eyes. I gathered him up carefully and took him to the vet. He had a broken jaw and a broken leg. He had to suffer the jaw but he had his leg pinned. A few weeks later he took out the pin with his sutures, sigh, but he recovered perfectly anyway. He’d been hit by a car and had come home to recover. However, I didn’t know which day he had come back and I didn’t know where he had been until then.

Meanwhile, I noticed that number one daughter’s clothes, recently dumped in the laundry room, looked too familiar though I had rarely seen her during the past week. I’d only noticed the signs of her presence, slammed doors and treats missing from the fridge. With dawning suspicion, I went into her bedroom. No, I’m not brave. I knew she’d gone out. The few clothes she kept in her wardrobe were dirty and lying crumpled in the bottom. Apparently she’d been letting us recycle the same clean unworn clothes again and again, this being the epitome of teenage efficiency. By missing the middle step, that is, wearing the clean clothes, she saved time and could sleep longer.

Her bed was a crumpled mess and clearly hadn’t been made since the last time I’d changed her sheets. In a flurry of annoyance, I stripped the bed and found a mass of blood and hair. At first I felt a thump of fear, thinking she’d been injured but the hair was cat hair. This led me to realise that Gemini had chosen a teenager’s bed to die in or recover from his injuries. Number one daughter had slept with the poor little creature for three days without noticing she had a sick cat in her bed.

Teenagers. Because she didn’t socialise with us, she hadn’t heard he was missing. She assumed that he opened her door to sleep with her each night because he liked her. In the fullness of time, the story is funny, and illustrates teenage behaviour perfectly.

Perhaps the cat was fortunate he chose her bed as the proper place to die, because she didn’t disturb him until he recovered enough to get help. In my Pollyanna moments, that’s what I think. Normally, though, I can illustrate what I think by raking my hair on end and shrieking.

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The cat and daughters number one and two some years after the incident when all was forgiven.

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    Author

    Virginia Taylor is an Australian writer of contemporary romantic comedy, romantic suspense, historical romance, short stories, and children's stories.  

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