Why Men are Necessary and More News From Nowhere

By Richard Glover

A new collection of hilarious stories from Richard's much-loved ABC radio show, THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY, in the style of his previous collections, IN BED WITH JOCASTA and DESPERATE HUSBANDS.
'Full-on, uncontrollable, laugh-till-you-weep stories. Glover has become the indispensable chronicler of Australian family life.' Geraldine Brooks Wickedly funny stories of everyday life, as heard on ABC Radio's thank God It's Friday. Meet the sexy and feisty Jocasta; confront teenage rebellion in the form of a fish called Wanda; do battle with magpies the size of small fighter jets; try to work out which font you use when speaking the language of love; and find out what men really have to offer. In Richard Glover's stories, the day-to-day becomes vivid, magical and laugh-out-loud funny. 'Glover is better than Proust. OK, maybe not better, but how often do you find yourself in a cold bath at midnight still chuckling over Proust?' Debra Adelaide 'desperately, wickedly funny ... Richard Glover has done the miraculous - he's made ordinary family life extraordinarily entertaining ... Go ahead and open a page at random - you'll laugh out loud.' Augusten Burroughs

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780733329159

Richard Glover

Richard Glover has written a number of bestselling books, including Love, Clancy, The Land Before Avocado, Flesh Wounds and The Mud House. He writes regularly for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Washington Post, as well as presenting the comedy program Thank God It's Friday on ABC Local Radio. To find out more, visit www.richardglover.com.au

Book preview

Introduction

I’d like to introduce the characters in this book. There’s Jocasta, a feisty woman with the body of a goddess and the vocabulary of a wharfie. Despite her colourful turn of phrase, she has been rightly acclaimed as a role model to women everywhere.

She is flanked by Batboy, a young man on the cusp of adulthood, and a teenager who goes under the name The Space Cadet.

There is also a male character, heroic in nature, who lives with Jocasta and is the father of the two children. This man — handsome, intelligent, sharp of eye and mind — is based closely on myself. His virtues are too numerous to be listed in this introduction but will become apparent as you read ahead.

Male readers may find something of themselves in this admirable figure, while female readers may roll their eyes in derision and possibly require urgent medical attention. By all means keep a bucket handy as you read.

Many of the stories in this book have been broadcast on ABC Radio’s Thank God It’s Friday — under the title ‘The News from Nowhere’ — or have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. They cover a variety of subjects — from the ways Jane Austen can help bus travellers, through to advice on what font to use when you are speaking.

And if you need help with advice for an eighteen-year-old, a list of principles is included.

Is there a theme? There’s a handful. Love conquers all. The suburbs are stranger and weirder than they get credit for. And there’s plenty of time to be mature and cautious once you are dead.

But there is another project here. Some recent writers have claimed that men — even we drop-dead gorgeous ones — are no longer necessary. Changes in technology, both reproductive and mechanical, have stripped men of the two things we were always confident of advertising on our business card: breeding and heavy lifting.

In the pages that follow, we may crawl crablike over a varied terrain, but occasionally I hope the point is forcefully made: whatever our critics say, men are still necessary.

There are a thousand books about terrible, bitter, dysfunctional families — but not many about the lives most of us live. This is a book for women who, despite everything, still fancy the man in their life, and for men who still take delight in the woman they’re shacked up with.

Who knows? Maybe that’s you.

One

in which Jocasta leaves The List and

Jane Austen gives some travel advice

The List

Every time Jocasta goes away for a few days, she leaves The List, an A4 page of typed notes stuck to the fridge, in which she paints a portrait of me as a domestic incompetent unable to run his own shower, never mind a household.

‘Feed the dog each evening,’ is the opening sally of advice. Then an afterthought in brackets: ‘(To do this you’ll need to get some meat out of the freezer each morning.)’ Already she’s left me confused. If I’m to thaw the food before serving it, why is that the second step and not the first step? Doesn’t she realise I rarely read past the first sentence in any instruction manual? If she comes back and the dog has shattered teeth from eating frozen food, it’s hardly my fault.

Next up, she offers some personal advice. ‘(2) DON’T DRINK ON WEEK NIGHTS.’ This is helpfully written in block capitals, no doubt so I can read it through any drink-induced haze, should I neglect to see the note early in proceedings.

Point three is a blizzard of instructions involving the washing and ironing of school uniforms. I find this particularly galling since I do most of the household ironing and washing. I contemplate sending a letter to Jocasta’s Melbourne hotel room detailing how it’s done and reminding her as to the location of the on switch for the iron, JUST IN CASE YOU EVER WANT TO USE IT. If she’s going to write messages in block capitals, I intend to follow suit.

I also note that our household exists in a perpetual school uniform crisis due to the fact that The Space Cadet only has three shirts and two pairs of pants. I’m unwilling to disclose who is in charge of school uniform purchasing in our family but I don’t think she’s done a very good job. It also occurs to me that she’s organised it this way to maximise the chances of the household collapsing into frothing insanity whenever she’s away.

Well, it’s not going to happen. Everything is in hand. Two clean shirts are already on hangers in his cupboard. I’m sober. Dog food is currently defrosting on the draining board.

Point four is again in block capitals and says: ‘DON’T HAVE AN AFFAIR WHILE I’M AWAY.’ I assume this is meant to be a humorous aside, since offers haven’t exactly been coming in thick and fast over the past 30 years. As I spend all my time either at work, commuting or running around trying to keep the household afloat, I wonder exactly when I’m going to fit in a steamy affair. If anyone is interested, I have about five minutes free at about a quarter to seven each morning.

We then get on to food and it’s as if I have never prepared a meal in my life. ‘There are lamb chops in the freezer,’ The List says, before adding the witheringly dismissive detail: ‘These are on the shelf, not to be confused with dog food in the freezer drawer.’

How insulting is that?

The trouble about The List is that it paints an all-too-vivid picture of the person Jocasta believes she lives with — an incompetent dipsomaniac who is unable to pick the difference between a lamb chop and a chicken neck. It’s clear what she thinks: if it weren’t for The List, the boy and I would be sitting around the kitchen table, him in stinking rags, me pissed out of my mind, gnawing our way through a plate of frozen dog food as I try to allocate the quarter-to-seven spot between my various girlfriends.

I’d love to go away for a few days myself, just so I could stick up my own copy of The List, detailing all the household tasks of which Jocasta knows nothing. There would be tedious instructions about bill paying, garbage removal, compost heaps and the laundering of delicate fabrics.

The most offensive thing about her List is constant excursions into the bleeding obvious. With my copy of The List, I’d like to return the favour.

‘In order not to die, pot plants require the occasional application of water.’

Or: ‘Rubbish goes into the plastic stinky thing with the wheels just outside the back door.’

Or: ‘Wash clothes using the washing machine. It’s that big, white, shaky thing in the bathroom.’

The List, I have realised, is not meant to be helpful; it’s more a statement of claim, a thorough documentation of one partner’s domestic utility, a reminder during their absence of just how important they are.

And so The List continues: point seven is the piano teacher’s address, point eight details a shortage of olive oil, and point nine turns strident, again using block capitals: ‘DO NOT WATCH ANY EPISODES FROM THE DVD OF THE WIRE UNTIL I GET HOME.’

The List pleasingly radiates Jocasta’s feisty personality, despite her physical absence. And yet there are limits to its power. I choose to turn my back on it and pour a small, defiant glass of shiraz. It’s a tiny indulgence for when a chap is momentarily listless.

A study in opposites

Stu vac — study vacation — has not even begun and already Batboy is demanding eggs. ‘Could I have fried eggs for breakfast?’ he asks his mother, fluttering his eyelashes. ‘I think it would help me study.’

For the past seventeen years, Jocasta has greeted such requests by letting loose a string of invective and flinging a copy of the Commonsense Cookery Book at the head of whoever was doing the asking. Now, under the gun of the end-of-school exams, she hops to it.

‘And would you like a bit of bacon with that?’ she asks with a maternal smile. ‘I could fry it so it goes all crispy.’

I haven’t seen a greater transformation since Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Next she’ll be darning his socks.

It’s not only the exams, it’s the fact that within a few months he’ll be leaving home. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ Jocasta whimpers as she pushes the eggs and bacon around in the pan.

Batboy eats his breakfast with relish and then retires to the couch. He picks up the Spanish textbook that’s lying on the coffee table and begins practising the grammar. He’s there for at least half an hour repeating the irregular verb endings. The only problem: he’s not doing Spanish in the HSC. He’s doing German. Or to be more precise: he’s avoiding doing German. The Spanish textbook belongs to Jocasta. I wonder if, in some other house on the other side of Sydney, some child who is supposed to be studying Spanish has been entranced by her father’s German for Beginners.

Batboy jumps onto the computer. He checks out the unofficial student website, and then logs onto the sites of various universities. If he gets this mark he’ll be able to go there and do that, but if he gets that mark then it will have to be here to do this. Batboy’s knowledge of the various entry marks is dazzling, complex and precise. If only all this mental agility and effort could be channelled into actually getting a mark.

‘Is anyone making tea?’ the Young Prince shouts from his keyboard, and Jocasta sparks to attention, rather like a mother springbok sensing the need for sudden action. ‘Tea? Of course,’ she says, gambolling towards the kitchen, ears alert and eyes shining. ‘Darjeeling or Assam?’

Actually, she doesn’t ask him which kind, on account that we only have Bushells, but I imagine she wishes she could. Why should the Young Prince have to make do with Bushells? ‘Maybe he should just live at home forever,’ she says to no one in particular as she ladles in the sugar. ‘I think that would be great fun.’

Batboy settles down with his books on the kitchen table and I leave him to it. An hour later I walk in to find him studiously reading the label of a Fanta bottle. He looks fascinated. Perhaps it is one of his ‘related texts’.

He engages me in conversation and we have a lively discussion about tinned sweet corn and how they get the whole kernels into the tin. It’s hardly necessary to point out that tinned sweet corn is not on the syllabus. After 40 minutes I realise I’ve been tricked into helping him waste his time and stomp from the room.

‘Does he want more tea?’ asks Jocasta, who is sitting reading. She has banned us all from watching TV so as ‘not to disturb him’. Or should I say Him?

I start worrying about the time when Batboy leaves. Based on Jocasta’s behaviour, I imagine her collapsed in the hallway. Our son will have a suitcase in each hand, a pack on his back, while Jocasta lies face down on the floor, weeping. He’ll go to step over her, at which point she’ll grab hold of his legs, wrapping her arms around them. His final moments at home will be spent pulling his prone and sobbing mother along the hallway and thence down the front steps — thoomp, thoomp, thoomp — as she hangs onto his legs shouting, ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave us.’

I emerge from my reverie to see Batboy is wandering the room. ‘I think I’m ready for some more food,’ he says to his mother. ‘I don’t suppose you could whip me up something?’

Jocasta looks up and narrows her eyes. By this point she’s pretty involved in her novel. She considers her options. ‘Maybe you should get it yourself,’ she says finally. ‘I mean, what’s the story? What do you think those things dangling down from your bum are? That’s right, sport. They’re legs. Why not try using them? Or have they atrophied from lack of use?’

Ah, a warm glow fills the room. The old Jocasta is back. And finally, I understand the point of the end-of-school exams. It’s to make them push their luck so far it will be a relief when they finally leave home.

Spring offensive

The glory of an Australian spring begins at seven o’clock one Saturday morning when you stand at your back door and marvel at the beauty of the season. It finishes two minutes later when you notice the first weed pushing up between the paving stones. The plant pokes up its head, looks around and signals that conditions are right for the invasion to begin. It’s as if a whistle has been blown; the rest of the forces roll in. Within minutes there are bindies in the lawn, bats in the trees and a squadron of flies swooping into the house.

‘Hang on,’ you stutter. ‘I was quite enjoying being here on my own…’

The weeds grow knee-high. Moths appear in the pantry. A family of mice sets up house near the compost bin. This is all in the first 20 minutes.

An hour on, your house is thrumming with life. It’s worse than a teenager’s party that’s gone viral on MySpace. Already there are cockroaches copulating in your pot drawers. This is one thing even teenagers won’t do.

What happened to that moment in mid-spring when you could sit outside, the sunshine warming your pale skin, the season still too young for flies and mosquitoes? Well, you missed it. It happened yesterday. Lasted five minutes. You were at work. Bad luck. Now it’s party time for every other species in the neighbourhood.

Someone has put a honey jar back in the cupboard, a dribble of the sweet stuff snaking down the side. It happened only three minutes ago but already a colony of ants has heard the news and is heading in from outside. This I find a little freaky. How do the ants know about this single drip of honey, hidden on a dark shelf in our kitchen? Are there enemies within — informers in the food cupboard ready to report the latest in sugar-spill or honey-drip news? Is that packet of two-minute noodles a secret broadcast station?

Outside, cockroaches the size of small dogs are lurking around the barbecue, hoping for a dropped sausage. The larger ones bring a couple of slices of bread and their own tomato sauce. The magpies are the size of compact fighter jets. The mosquitoes sit behind a screen of bushes, checking their watches, rolling their large eyes, as they remark on how long it is till dusk. ‘Frankly, I’m starving,’ says one, staring at a juicy section of your thigh. ‘Just wait until five,’ says his companion. ‘You don’t want to start drinking at lunchtime.’

It’s like life on the Serengeti after the first rains of the season. You half expect David Attenborough to emerge from behind the impenetrable thicket of onion weed, which, so soon, has the house surrounded.

I decide to mount some resistance. I race to the hardware store and buy enough chemicals to create a biological desert for years to come. I’m thinking of the sacking of Carthage and then some. I install cockroach traps in the saucepan drawers and nail mice baits behind the compost bin. I encircle the ants with a glistening river of toxicity. I salt the fields and burn all outlying barns. Nothing works. The mice throw the baits down like cough lozenges. The ants frolic in the ant-killing goo like kids under a sprinkler. The onion weed gurgles as it skols its glyphosate cocktail, nodding its multiple heads as if to say, ‘More, please.’

I return to the hardware store. I ask the man what to do about the onion weed. He stares at me balefully and delivers his verdict: ‘Sell up. Burn your possessions. Move to Adelaide. Leave no forwarding address.’ I buy another ten bottles of glyphosate. If it doesn’t work on the onion weed I can always drink it myself.

By night-time I’m exhausted and a little frightened. Jocasta and I huddle in the bedroom, sleepless due to a family of cicadas that has moved to just outside the bedroom