Shiver me timbers

Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day and also my 450th birthday. In order for my day to have meaning, I’m harnessing the power of celebrity (raising teenagers and eating their two-minute noodles will do that to your brain). Growing up near Crows Nest I was obviously born to plunder. Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum, hoist the mizzen.


I share a birthday with Twiggy, Mama Cass and my spiritual guru, chocolate maker and philanthropist George Cadbury. I work for a charity that was sponsored for years by Cadbury chocolate. As Oprah would say, I found my destiny; I was born to consume chocolate, preferably the expensive stuff.

aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I’m no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.” Kathy Acker


Fool’s birthday

It’s my 29th birthday and I don’t look a day over 45. I’ve had lots of messages from 100 imaginary friends on social media, nothing from my family and my kids punched each other over breakfast.

It’s also International Talk like A Pirate Day and I want to scream, “ARRRRR, FORKEN, FORKEN, FORKEN, ARRRRRRRR.”

Tony Abbott may have gone (early birthday present), but it seems that a 1950s Catholic committee are still running the asylum that Australia has become. Anti single mothers, anti-women achieving anything other than housework, pro-coal mining, big business destroying the environment, I can’t wait to get rid of these philistines. This lot couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery.

Malcolm Turnbull needs to appoint 10 single mothers to his cabinet, then he’ll achieve something. Single mothers work quickly to get everything done before we have to dash to pick up kids, then home to make dinner. If Joe Hockey needs to find money for the budget, hiring single mothers would mean a budget cut of about 40%, we work cheaply.

Really all I want for my birthday is a new order. Two years of the fascist boys club running our country and Australia has become the laughing stock of the world. Sigh.