Woman Confidential

If I were to choose my favourite hour this past week, it would have to be the evening spent catching up with Ash, over whisky and bites. There is something to be said about good ol' conversations that bring your life back in equilibrium.

Reminiscing about how young and reckless we once were in uni reminds us, ironically, that we are no longer young and reckless. When you have shared a house, a room and one bottle of vodka too many, you kinda develop a connection best summed up as "I take your shit, you take mine". I like it that with these kinds of people, no matter how seldom you meet and how different your lives, the conversation immediately falls into place, without preamble, without small talk.

Conversations are something we busy, driven adults seldom have nowadays.

Someone recently said, we have so much talk, so little real conversation. We talk over meetings, with an agenda, with a purpose. We fill up the space during business lunches with small talk, as if silence were a bad thing. It is not. It takes two people who are comfortable with each other to enjoy the patches of silence in between words, like enjoying the space in a Chinese painting.

Looking back, some of life's moments of clarity, of "oh my god, you're right", of "how come I didn't think of that?" are had during these sessions over wine and coffee.

So here's to the conversations in our lives. Ones that challenge the intellect. Ones that made us change our minds and sometimes, the course of our lives. Ones that reinforce our choices and inject them with courage and fire. Ones that chart how far we have come. Ones that look ahead at how far we have to go. Ones that already happened. And precious ones that are yet to come.

Sushi Bar at the End of the Earth

"The fact is, sometimes it's really hard to walk in a single woman's shoes. That's why we need really special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun. " - Carrie Bradshaw

Example #138 that we are and always will be suckers for the things we cannot get: Holidaying in the southern tip of Australia, where an ocean separates us from Antarctica, what do I crave for the most?

Ahem, Japanese food. After days and days of the best Mod Oz beef, duck and sticky date pudding I've tasted, and orgasmically thick coffee, what I would have killed for is some sushi.

And guess what? Driving to an obscure beach called Emu Point in Albany, we found it. There stood, in all its wooden-screened glory, a half-decent Japanese restaurant.

It was next to a milk bar, amid rows of holiday chalets. We were hyperventilating. A sushi place at the far end of the world. Never mind that the sushi and sashimi were probably the ugliest-looking in the southern hemisphere, or that the service was so slow that any slower would mean that the waitresses moved backwards, or that the tiny meal cost us AUD88. There it was - proof to my theory that Japanese is one of the three great "world cuisines" that travel everywhere, the others being Italian and Thai.

Tis a good do-nothing carefree holiday. Now back to living in 1984.

The smog is getting truly bad. I am yearning for Christmas already. Dammit, know what I really really want now? Sticky date pudding.