Saturday, May 28, 2016

Crazy Apple Lady - Pt.1


Okay, so I’ve been putting off writing Crazy Apple Lady because people are actually reading my blog (the blatant self-promotion is working!!) and now you’re all going to know how truly unstable I am.

I don’t know why I’ve been worrying so much because I suspect that most of you know already… But the thing is, I can usually kid myself that people possibly don't know because I always have a good excuse. That’s how I got away with being a delinquent in high school and got a prefect badge.

Let me give you an example. This week I volunteered on the kid’s primary school Drop Off/Pick Up zone - but I was staggering around opening car doors looking like I’d polished off the cooking wine and then got stuck into the vanilla essence.

I appeared to be drunk doing the DOZO. Not a good look, as you can imagine.

But I wasn’t drunk, I was suffering from some weird, annoying thing called vertigo. Let me say this now: VERTIGO SUCKS BALLS, it really does, because it’s like having all the bad symptoms of being obscenely drunk - catching your hip on sharp table corners, suddenly falling into walls, feeling like you’re going to puke every time you roll over in bed, without any of the good things - e.g. feeling like randomly stripping off, or thinking that you’re wittier than everyone else, and sexier…

Plus, the only person I’ve ever heard complain of vertigo is my mother-in-law who is 89, so on top of all that I felt really, really old and depressed. I was given some exercises to do to make it go away - it was like doing yoga while you’re drunk. Awful. Downward Dog into a Darlinghurst gutter.

Doing the DOZO always cheers me up though, so even though I still had a bit of vertigo I did it anyway.

My husband is always banging on about what a filthy mess our car is, but doing the DOZO I see MUCH WORSE. It makes me feel instantly happy. The confetti of old McDonalds chips, the bunched up laundry trodden to the floor by kids who get changed in the car on the way to sport or dancing, the multitude of half-empty drink bottles, the equivalent of floating debris in the North Pacific gyre. I’m not alone! One time I even opened the door of a car that had an empty vodka bottle rolling around on the floor. Uh-huh.

Anyway, the point of all that was to tell you that I may have looked drunk on the DOZO, but I wasn’t, even though I was staggering slightly in my high visibility vest and steadying myself every now and then by holding onto small children like some strange overfamiliar auntie - I wasn’t drunk, I just had some freaky old person’s affliction called vertigo*.

You see? I’ve always got an excuse… no matter how bad it appears.

Except, when it comes to the Crazy Apple Lady story. My confession, Part 2, tomorrow.


*NB. I want to make it quite clear that I subscribe to the adage “You’re only as old as you feel" - I don’t want to slag off people who are numerically older than me. There’s a tiny, brown, shrivelled up old lady at Mum’s nursing home who wears sequin tops and dances to rock’n roll music and out plays quoits with Hunter when we go to visit. She clearly feels as young as twenty-something and could give Chris Hemsworth a run for his money I reckon. She’s brilliant!

In my head most days I feel like I’m a teenager still, and probably behave like it too, except when I suffer with vertigo or get depressed, then I feel like I’m about the same age as the Red Woman in Game Of Thrones without her magic necklace. Really. Fucking. Old.

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