You're listening to a Momma mea podcast.
Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Circling a thumb over a perfectly smooth pebble, a mouthful of satin, sticky, sweet salty breeze, the slow smile of someone who gives them away rarely, the unfurling of a pointy green leaf to a tendril, a flower, a fruit, the fur sip of hot tea on a frigid, cold morning, a lick at the salt on a cocktail's rim, a hand that slides inside yours without hesitation, the perfect mango that time your
mum said that was a good day, wasn't it. The giggle of someone with whom silliness is never an eg. The specific pain in your stomach from laughing so hard that breath can't be caught. The way birds fly in that particular pattern, and how your legs shudder in orgasm. I'll take my little joys where I can get them now.
The small ones are where it's at. The big ones, the showy ones, the firework ones that you chase and imagine one day you'll catch and swallow so they'll spread to every corner of your life, setting it all glowing by mid You know that those are the ones that flame high.
And burn out fast.
It's the small ones that make a mid life worth living. A fresh prawn dipped in unfashionably pink sauce, a steaming bowl of soup, noodles with a side of pungent chili, a homemade cake with Smarties on top, mashed potato with a cold sliver of butter and a dusting of spiky saltflakes.
The way you feel after an hour with your closest friend, sustained eye contact with my ridiculous dot, the light on the ocean at exactly five point thirty pm, airport arrivals, arms that wrap all the way around you, winning an unimportant argument, lying in bed with a happy child, lying in bed with a transporting book, lying in bed chocolate coffee, cream, stripped of shame and guilt. It's the little things that bring us pleasure. They nourish us completely. A good life
is made up of those moments. They are life, fleeting, salty, spicy sweet. Looking back at it all, it's what we'll remember. How people made us feel, what we tasted, who we loved. My name is Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife, midfamily, mid meal. Often Generation X can be funny about food. We were down with hedonism before hangers became too high a price to pay. But we were also raised on
a diet of cape moss, cigarettes and coffee. We were happy to talk openly about skipping meals, cutting carbs, cabbage, soup cleanses. We swam in a sea of celebrity diet tips, which, by the way, as someone who used to work on
the magazines that ran those were often made up. I could tell you how many times a year Oprah Letta self eat potatoes, that posh spice would take the cherry tomatoes out of a salad, that the words guilty and pleasure were the only ones permitted to be synonymous with dessert.
But also, we're busy on learning all of this because if like me, you love food and what you're gonna eat next and when and what is one of the things you think about the most, you know that the joy and pleasure and nourishment it brings to a life is not nothing. In fact, it might just be one of the most important things of all. So I'm talking food and the absolute necessity of small joys today with Virginia Treoli. Now, obviously I could be talking to Virginia
a lot of different things. She's one of the most highly regarded journalists and broadcasters in Australia. She's a two time Walkley Award winner, and her voice on radio on television has lent authority and comfort to some of the most difficult moments we've lived through as a nation, which
might be why today we're talking about joy. Because when you've lived till men and you have, as Virginia articulates in her new book, experienced an ordinary or extraordinary amount of loss, disappointment, fear, struggle, you know that it's life's
little things that actually gets us through. That's what the book A Bit on the Side is about, because for her and for me, it has to be said, food is a part of that joy, and allowing yourself to lean into the small pleasures that make a life without guilt or shame is a radical act, really, particularly for women, when we've been taught that self sacrifice and deprivation is
really our life. Slot So here's Virginia Trioli and me talking about food, but also really about love and hard fought pair parenthood and step parenthood and losing your own parents and wisdom and age and work and friendship and pleasure and letting go and those times when you just have to grow up, apologize and eat a shit sandwich. Virginia, I adored your book.
Oh I'm so glad.
And it's probably because it dips into two of my very favorite things and my obsessions, which is food. I am very interested in food. Good to hear and also just the sort of it's not a book that's kind of you're not trying to be a guru and pass off life wisdom in that way, but there are just really beautiful nuggets of wisdom studded through this book in an understated way that just absolutely punched me in the guts at times.
I have to tell you, I'm happy to hear that as songs that you won't left with any major bruising.
No, no major bruising. It was like foraging with a basket and you're like, Oh, that's a restaurant recommendation that I'm going to put on my wish list. That's a recipe I'm going to make green beans. I'm going to make those asap. Excellent and the cocktail, the Friday night fog perfect folded over yumen next to it, and then
also these little bits of wisdom. So I wanted to start out conversation with some of those life lessons, because, as I say, you're not playing guru, but there's kind of a point of why it is.
A bit on the side that's right, yes, and you're right.
Sometimes the main course of your life can be a hard going and unappetizing thing. Sometimes it can be absolute rubbish. Your working life, your family, global catastrophes, personal tragedies, both ordinary and unexpected, all of it. You can have so little control over any of it, and the only choices you do seem to have are often rather small ones, minor seemingly insubstantial decisions that may add a bit of pleasure to a dense and demanding situation, just enough joy
to get you across the line. Little bits on the side, this is wisdom. Tell me how you came to it.
I think I came to it the same way as many of us come to it, through age and life, but also given the particularities of the last few years and the last decade, has made more and more sense of a thing that it turns out, and I realized when writing it has been a personal philosophy for me at the table and in the kitchen and serving food to people, because that's where my eyes have always gone to,
the little bits on the side. And then it made more and more sense as the bigger picture got worse and worse, and it was something that I can't turn my eyes away from, and my entire working life has
been engaged fully with it. All those years that I was working on news breakfast and getting up at half past two in the morning and having make up artists dabit my eyes at four a. You haven't lived until they've experienced that, and Michael Roland and I increasingly and repeatedly standing at what we came to call the wall of death, because on the really big mornings when we had awful, horrible breaking news, we would stand up from the desk and stand in front of a big plasma
screen and break the news to the audience that another plane had gone down or that there was another terrorist attack. The accumulation of all of that and realizing that really the big picture was beyond my control made me realize that I had an eye for the smaller nuggets, for the glimmers, as I think people call them now, and it just made total sense to me that that was how I was living my life. I was living in the city that was the worst lockdown in the country.
All plans disappeared, and I realized that a diary and the idea of plans is rather like a garden. If you don't have anything planted in there, if you haven't put some seeds in for that catch up with the girls in September and that destination wedding next year, nothing grows. And it was a time where nothing grew. You could open your diary and it was just barren earth from here to next year. And so it may be a seeker of small joys critical actually, if you weren't to
fall over the edge. It was critical.
Because obviously, in your profession, turning away from the news cycle, which is the advice were often given when we're facing overwhelming anxiety, was not an option, as you just said, and you write quite beautifully in the book about the time during Melbourne's lockdowns when you were driving to Present radio every morning and the streets were deserted, and you and your team would talk about food.
Which talks about foods so much.
Which turns us to those small joys, I suppose, and that it was a call from a listener that was sort of began to really form this book for you. Right. A woman called Mary called in and she was very anxious. I love how you say in this book how and I think that a lot of us who work I mean obviously very very different world, but a lot of us who work in a connection business that sounds that sounds terrible, but well in the media.
No, that works.
During that time, you right, I felt like the most underqualified psychologist in Melbourne, but we were in different ways the connectors. For we were during that time the.
Most underqualified but overbooked. I forever had you know, clients in my book wanting my attention, and I had no qualifications, and I kept waiting for the experts to turn up but tap me on the shoulder and say we'll take it from here. And they never did.
And a woman called Mary called you and she was obviously feeling very anxious, and you found yourself guiding her. Tell me a little bit about that moment and how it kind of informed your idea.
It did. It crystallize a lot of things because we had a regular wonderful segment So Young for years, our talkback legal segment where David Whiting, who's kind of like Rumpole of the Bailey, and he would offer legal advice.
But in this conversation, she was calling it for legal advice because she'd been to a local supermarket or in the very early days, distancing rules had been brought in, and she was furious because no one was observing the distancing rules and she'd been thrown out of the supermarket by the police, and she wanted to know, what am I rights here? What can I do?
Well?
What happened? Okay, well, they weren't observing the distancing rules. So I went home and I got the old bless and I got some masking tape and scissors, and I started marking out crosses on the floor at one and a half meter distances. And I could just hear the audience going, oh God, get her off, what a lunatic. Oh Karen, you know, and then the text me to
just start coming through reflecting that. But as she's talking and David was about to launch into, you know, her legal rights or lack of therefore, I just jumped in and I just said, how are your anxiety levels, and she just fell apart. She just burst into tears. She had an elderly mum at home who was dealing with cancer, and so anything brought home to her because she was in the middle of treatment, she was immune suppressed, you know,
could have taken her out. She had a sister who was clearly struggling, and so she Mary had full time care for her sister's daughter, for her niece, and she had her troubles as well, and she had her own life. And she said, you know, and I'm just so anxious, and I said, yeah, of course you are. You know, go home, look after yourselves. You cannot look after anybody else, you know, go home, focus on your own, focus on yourself.
And I did. I felt like, you know, a totally underqualified person to be giving out this sort of life advice. But that's where we found ourselves. We found ourselves really peeled and proximate, really close to each other, leaning on each other in ways that we never thought we would or wanted to, leaning on strangers, being angered by each other by strangers, and this was the place that we were in for so long.
Your love of food has been pretty much lifelong, it seems In this book, you talk about cooking with your mother, one of seven, You were one of seven, one of seven kids, and you write about I think you say, she's a very calm and capable woman, but that was a lot to deal with. And you're saying that the moments of cooking together in the kitchen were a moment
of calm and connection. Yes, which I'm in awe of the fact that cooking for seven can be a moment of Clearly she was and then you obviously became sort of your eyes were open to all kinds of food, from travel, from going to Italy, which obviously is where your heritage is, and traveling around. What I love about this book in particular is it drips with all this love for food and bread and meat and sources and off. But there's no you don't in this book at all
address It's not like guilty pleasures. You don't talk about it in terms of you know, I shouldn't. There's no rules, there's no diet talk. And that is no small thing when it comes to women and food, especially gen X women, because we kind of were brought up in an era where it was talked about a lot, you know, like absolute our weight our food, as we've found it so refreshing good that there is none of that in this book. Was it really deliberate?
I actually didn't have to think about that for once, because yes, you're quite right, that's a narrative that I've learned to. We'll never leave my head, right, And I hear all the great actresses of our times talking about that, about oh the wasted space in my mind. If I could just get rid of it, to stop thinking about the size of my stomach. It's actually easier for me just to accept that it lives there, because like you, and a friend of mine reminded me of this the
other day. We were swapping photographs of outfits and I said, I don't know what you think about this one, and she said, oh god, she said, are we ever going to get out of our heads? That phrase that we were taught so young and has never left us. But is it slimming? Is it slimming? Oh it's not slimming. Oh that's slimming. And I know that Jesse would just you know, roll her eyes hearing this and slap her forhead and then slap me. But I'm sorry, that's just a mantra that is just in my DNA.
Jen Zad's and millennials think that our generation was more firmly marinated in diet culture, so it's just in our it is. Pause. But I always say to her, and I wonder if you I mean, I know, obviously you've got a young but he's probably a little young for this yet. But I would say to her, I don't know that it's gone away. For the young women I work with, they just don't talk about it. So they would never say to somebody, oh, that's really flattery.
And slimmery, really slimmery, you'll ever say that?
But on Instagram theil anyway. Was it a deliberate choice to shush that voice when you're writing about this pleasure? Or have you?
Do?
You think you've got quite a healthy, evolved attitude to that.
In terms of food, I think I pitch backwards and fours as anybody does. And I absolutely have my days of self loathing, no question, and also my days where I say it to myself, well that'll do okay, we really are just doing some grilled chicken for a copp of days here because you've been hard at it. But in writing this book, no, that never entered my mind because this is a book about food and memory as well.
And you know, Mussel Proust was right that that is the most powerful sense, taste and smell and memory and the way it just triggers the strongest feelings for you. You know, your first clear the very first time you went to Paris, your first bowl of pasta, the very first time you went to Italy. I never knew it could taste taste like this. This is how it's supposed to taste, and you spend the rest of your life
trying to repeat that experience. So, because I'm talking about very powerful food memory connections for me and experiences, none of them are associated with guilty.
Yes, and it's also I hope this isn't a judgy word these days, but it's also real food, like this is our food, cooked with love, with great ingredients. And yes, some of it's got a lot of cream in it, but anyway, who has olive oil. I know I'll be back with Virginia Trioli in a moment when she's going to tell me about that time she did have to
eat the shit sandwich, the first little break. The book's about food, Virginia, But then it's also about life lessons, as I've said, and the one about the shit sandwich is really interesting because it's about copying to things, owning them, and apologizing when you need to. And I want you to tell me about the experience that you describe in the book about your first and worst shit sandwich.
I mean, I've had a few, right, and I don't expect them to stop being served to me for the rest of my life. I think they all keep coming. But the biggest one, it was one of my own making, was when I was caught on air doing the twirly looney face finger to barneyby Joyce, who was he was not a sentence and then he was a member of Parliament and a minister, and the camera cut back to me before I knew it was going to and I was mugging for the crew and for everyone in the studio.
I was high as a cart and silly as it wi. All that day. I just returned from another like what felt like round one hundred and fifty two of IVF to try and get pregnant yet again. And we had an embryo that worked, and it had been planted, and this time maybe it was going to work, and I was hire as a cart and I was being really ridiculous and unprofessional all that morning, and the camera caught me. And I remember in that moment just thinking, I've just
killed my career dead. I've killed it. The ABC was at that you know in this from time to time, but that time was really locked in, you know, yet another cultural battle, if you like. We were under attack by the Coalition government at that time. Everyone was on the lookout for perceived, real or bias, and that was seized upon as an example of that.
Did you realize it in the moment that it had gone to air? Yes, yes, because I could see them, I could.
See the monitor and it was I was I remember the entire studio just stopped. We all saw it and there was absolutely no way around it.
So what was the advice for how to deal with that? And how did you decide you knew you had to deal with it.
I came out of the studio just knowing that there was one thing to do here, and that was to pick up the phone immediately until apologized to varnerby Joyce. There was a slight suggestion from another quarter that maybe it be handled another way, and I remember there was a little voice in sign be going don't don't. It seems an easy option, an easy way out. Don't take it.
And I rang for some editorial advice from our head of Editoral Standards, Alan Sunderland, who's one of the most calm under fire people you'll ever meet, who said, well, you just call him and you apologize. And I did, and he accepted my apology straight away, and he laughed about it and said, yes, sometimes I do say things are a bit ridiculous, which is awfully gracious of him. I think he accepted my apology before he'd actually seen
the replay. I think he recruited that in time. I didn't call you back then They're like, hang on a minute, I don't know you were doing that. And I know he was crossing me for a long time afterwards. But then then the shit storm began, because of course it was all over the media. The news limited papers had a field day with me for weeks and weeks and weeks. I had people calling for my head and my resignation. And I did one smart thing. I just did not look at any of it. I made sure I didn't
read it. I didn't see it, because I'm the kind of person that if it's in my head, I'll it'll never leave me. I won't get it out.
And that's very disciplined. It's hard to do.
Had to had to do it. I just knew I had to do that. And then the next day I made three apologies on air, one in the six o'clock hour, one in the sex o'clock hour, one in the eight o'clock out And for each apology, I remember my co host would get up and leave the couch and go and stand over there behind the camera while I sat on the couch all my and I never felt so alone in all my life, and read out my apology again. But I just how do you eat a shit sandwich?
You eat it, you eat it, and you don't complain about it.
It's interesting because it doesn't feel that there's a lot in our culture at the minute of trying to avoid the shit sandwich.
I heard your discussion just the other day about Ellen's de generous and the three way argument that you guys had about it on out loud, and I've got to say I'm with you, Holly, because it would seem to me that a lot of what goes on and is often decried as unfair. Cancelation is actually consequence. Yeah, we keep saying cancelation. There's another C word there, it's consequence. There was a consequence for what I did, and I did not argue with it. It was unprofessional, it was wrong,
it was stupid. I broke every rule. Every rule in a live studio is you behave all the time as if everything is live. Every microphone is hot. I knew that. So if I was prepared to play fast and loose and I was caught, then I've got a copy it. And I don't get we're using the ll An example, and I know we're segueing, but I think it's interesting.
It's illuminating here. What was the consequence? So the show was acted after many, many mighty years and great success, and now she's got a highly paid Netflix show where she gets to turn it into content.
Of course, you're one hundred percent right, there's a consequence. But what comes with the criticism now is can feel and can be so personal and so outsized, Like I'm sure that there were plenty of so called enemies of the ABC who were saying horrible things about you during that time after the Barnaby Joyce incident or that are personal, that are violent, that are brutal, and so I think that it feels like people saying, do I deserve all that?
As well? Do I deserve all that hate? It seems to me that the way that you're illustrating the shit sandwich is incredibly mature, responsible exactly how it should be, which is, you made the call that I'm sure was very hard to make. You did those messages to camera that I'm sure you were dying inside. Is real, and that's the right thing to do. But the wave that comes at you after a while, I think that's why people start to say, really, I deserve this too? Is that fair consequence?
I think you're never going to be able to gainsay or control other people's responses. Dickets have always been out there. If they weren't going to talk to me on social media, they would have been writing me letters. And back in the day when I started in you know, old form journalism, they did and I got those letters. They're the ones with the writing that usually goes up the side and in the margins. They're just more ways for them to come at me. I'm aware, like you of you know,
excessive excessive outrage and that's usually about something else. You know, that's just someone. The mob has always existed, You know that the mob goes a long, long way back, and you can easily whip up a mob. But at the same time, I feel like we cry unfair and we sort of want to be insulated from the consequences of what is just foolishness. And foolishness is not a it's not a death sentence. I didn't I didn't die. It was pretty awful, and others don't as well. But there's
there's got to be a price to pay. And I actually thinks that's the important part of that chapter, is that I talk about all my years of sitting in those chairs for radio on Sydney or Melbourne or Late Line or seven point thirty or and A and being well aware that sitting on the table between us is a shit sandwich, right, that politician has to deal with it, that chief of Army, that CEO, that MD and they've come on because this is the thing that they've made,
and it's sitting there and I'm looking at it, going well, are you going to eat it? Yes? And they're wrestling and writhing and trying to find them and I'm like, oh my god, you're not going are you kidding me? Well, that's going to sit there now for another week and then another week, and it's going to get even worse. And I know you should know it's going to have
to be consumed at some point by someone. And I think it goes to a question about how we raise kids to make sure they understand that they actually We talk about, you know, staks and how you learn, but are we really reinforcing with them. Look, you actually can. Not only you can. You should make a mistake, step into the moment, own it, apologize it, and I will show you how the world won't end for you. Oh shot, you may have to deal with my anger, that's a concert.
You may have to deal with your friends being pissed off with you. That's a consequence. You won't die, but it will feel awful, and feeling awful won't kill you.
I love that. I also think it's so in the example of the politicians and the people in positions of power and influence. I mean, you can look at American politics, the people who refuse to ever eat the sheet shit sandwich, pretend it doesn't exist, think that it's a badge, of honor actually is to double down on it. I mean, we all need a few more of them anyway, away from the smelly thing.
Yeah, they are nicer things to consume than that.
And your husband, Russell, there is a beautiful chapter in there about you falling in love and the first time you go to visit him and he's working in Japan. Yes, and you describe in the most beautiful detail the first day he picks you up and you basically go and eat about five meals and drink all these amazing drinks. And then the next day in his kitchen, you're right, we ate to get He makes you past her because you need something to soak up all the booths I
assume exactly. We ate together in the soft winter sun of his kitchen, all matters of the heart decided for all time. That actually made me cry that lot.
Oh, I'm so glad, thank you in a good way.
But I knew write about the importance of your Friday night dates and the house. I mean, when I was reading this, I was thinking, imagine if she'd fallen in love with some guy who just ate macas like, it just wouldn't work. I don't think I would have what's is it still a really binding anything for you too.
Because there was a pivotal moment in that kitchen of his when I'd fallen in love with him and we both worked at the age, but he was obliged and wanted to take up his posting in Japan, and I thought, you know, was it just one of those things or was it something that I'm going to go and see. And so I booked a flight, said I'm coming up to see you, and I went and saw them. We had that wild first day, and at the end of the day he said to me, I want to cook
you eggplant. And I looked at my watch and I was like, we've done the huge day in Tokyo. It was half past nine at night, and I thought, oh no, there's two possibilities here, and they're both terrible. You know. One is that he knows how to cook an eggplant properly, which is to peel it, cut it, salted, drain it, rinse it, dry it, cook it. And I'm not.
Getting fed and it takes a lot of time and.
I'm starving and I'm miserable. Or he doesn't know the right way to prefer an eggplant, and I can't ever see him again, because that would make him a barbarian of the worst sort. And of course he did know how to cook it properly coarsey blood he did, and away we went. I look, I can imagine being with someone, I can imagine being with someone who was a you know, a mac and cheese kind of person. But then I would set about, you know, subtly and carefully trying to turn them around.
And do you still you know, it's cooking for him, with him him for you? Is that still a big part of your relationship and what brings you pleasure?
Yeah? And it really is. Yeah. We don't share a kitchen so much anymore, though He's become a much messier cook than he was as the years have gone on, And I do find myself sort of, you know, resentfully sous cheffing behind him, like, you know, wiping that up and putting away and sort of mushing under my breath. You know, can't you clean as you go? Clean as you go? It's the rule. So we'll sort of mostly do it rather than in tandem these days, except for
a few specific dishes. We'll do it, you know, for each other. But yes, it's the center of our relationship. We love it.
And you also write that it also helped you binding your relationship with your step children, because when you and Russell got together, he had three kids yep, twin boys and a girl. Yes, and you write about and I love this too, because I think that with hindsight, you write about how you weren't anywhere near as sort of nervous is the wrong word, but maybe as concerned as you might. I should have been absolutely about getting into
relationship with about three kids. And you write, again, beautiful words. A pounding heart can drown out so much. I just thought that was great and thank god.
Right, yeah, but that the pounding heart in love is like, oh, it'll be fine, we'll manage that. But I'm sure that if someone can into my life right now, exactly in Virginia's situation that I was in, I would take them aside and say, girlfriend, we need to talk. Oh, I'm sure he's wonderful and you love him and ye and all of that, but let's have a proper conversation because it was such a serious thing to do. I do
remember right about this as well. I do remember thinking the job was serious, that I was jumping into these young kids' lives when they had no need of me. They did not want me, they did not call for me, and they just come out of the situation they had and oh, here I am, you know, in love and blah blah blah, and they didn't need that in their life. So I knew that I had to and I wanted to tread carefully.
You do write really beautifully about that, and again you say that cooking with them and for them was part of it. But there'll be lots of women listening to this who are in blended family relationships or even getting into them. From where you sit now with the hindsight, what is your best piece of advice?
I think actually one of the first princes has I think remained strong and true. And I don't know if everyone will necessarily want to hear this or will agree with it. But they were young, the boys. Rebecca was sixteen and the boys were at fourteen when I met them, and I remember thinking very deliberately their relationship as a family unit came first. You know, I was an independent woman. I had my own income, I had my own career.
By then, I was well on the road, and so I just had to be pretty you know, mature about this and say I can look after myself and I can also make a choice about, you know, who I choose to be with. So it was very important that they stayed fast and strong together. So it actually was about putting myself second, which I know is probably not
a popular thing to say, but that worked. You know, that really did work because it wasn't about I met a woman around about that time who came to me in anguish because she was starting to go at the bloke and he had a boy about eleven, and he wanted to spend a lot of time with his son, and she was resentful of that, and you know, where's my place and I can't. I remember saying to her, well, then walk away sweeter, because it's not about you, you know,
it's really not. They came first. It's a kid, and I do feel very very strongly about you know, the interests of the child need to be looked after. I mean, even if you are dealing with you know, a meddling ex wife or the complexities of that, if you can put a bit of effort into making sure that they're as well connected as they can be, helping to support that connection, it actually finds you find a place that works for you and fulfills you in the end as well.
You don't have just subsume yourself into it. You know, you keep your your separate friends and your lives and things that you need to do to sustain you. But it's very important, I think to think of the kids you have.
Obviously your son. I think our sons are the same age twelve twelve. Yes, my son believes twelve too.
I started very very late. It was a long, long battle for me. I tried things people have never even heard of.
You do. I mean, you talk about that a little bit. You touch on it lightly really in the book. And as you've mentioned before, and now that he is twelve and he is, I've seen you write about parenting a little bit. And it's interesting to me that there is a chapter in the book about you as a teenager. Yes, you were an intensely independent teenager. Yes, it was a different it's a different time. She says it was a different times makes her sound like so old, But you.
I don't care. It was a different time.
You were clearly, it's like you found your people at school to a point, right, you come in this big, busy family, and you're obviously very smart, and you've got an intellectual curiosity and you follow it and you find your people at school and teachers, and you write about going away camping with your teachers.
I mean, that's a whole other story, but scandalous.
But I was thinking about that as you now have a son who's on the edge of that level of independence. You write about letting out the rope just far enough and being able to pull it back. Do you think something's lost from it? Was another time, the level of independence that we all had, which was kind of like be home before it's dark, off you go. I mean, how do you feel about it? And how's the letting out the rope going? Oh?
Look, I would let out far more rope if I could. He's just not as independently minded as I was, or as we were expected to be. I mean, we were, you know, chucked out like bye and go out and play. And you never even asked, you know, where or with who. You just disappeared. I don't want to romanticize it, but that's really what it was. And no one said to you at the end of the day. They were too tired and busy with seven kids to say, how was your day of virgina and what did you do?
No one asked me did you go camping with your teachers?
Exactly? I mean, it kind of amazes me now that my parents didn't turn around and go, no, you're not. I just told them I was off, I'm off, I'll be off, you know. And if my fifteen year old son turned around and said, oh, these September holidays, I'll be off camping with I know that I wouldn't have the same reaction. I'd be no, you're not, and who are they? And also I want to be with you and I spend time with you. My parents didn't to spend time with me. Our parents did not want to
spend time with us. That generational change in one generation, I think is the really remarkable thing, because every other generation up until this one parents and I think we were the last gen X parents were parents and kids were kids. It's really enmeshed now, which is lovely and I love spending much more time with my son than my parents did with me. But I see the downside of it. Were probably disabling them in a way that you know that we weren't.
Yeah, and I think I've seen you right, about how we were a very independent generation Generation X, and I feel that deep in me, I'm saying, I saw I left home as soon as I could. Yep, I traveled across the world. I saw myself as a very separate ANTITYP In my family.
You wrote home a couple of times, you might have made a reverse charge call once, but otherwise they didn't hear from us for months.
I've been months, and so you'd think that letting out the rope would be easier for us because that was our experience. But do you think that we have just completely realigned our ideas about what's safe when and what parenting is like?
What's No, I don't think it's about safe for me. It's not about safety because I know that the streets are much safer now than there were then. There's no question about that. A child who puts their hand up and says he touched me is going to be believed now. If I said that back in my day, I would have been considered a little liar or you know, a bullshit artist, or I wasn't that bad, or I just
wouldn't have said it actually, and we didn't. All of that has changed, and you know, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child changed everything, and I'm glad that it did. I think it's also our need as well, and maybe it is a reflexive response to the way that we were raised. But we like being with our kids. I do. I had a child because I wanted to spend time with him, you know, And I'm probably the one yearning for more contact with him than he's with me.
He is moving into real independence now, and so when I propose something, he'll say, well, yeah, but can I bring a friend? Or but I'd rather go and see him or you know. And I'm not the be all and end all anymore. And I keep reminding myself that's how it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be that way, and he's supposed to go off into the world.
I know it's supposed to be that way, and it is that way, and yeah, I wrestle with it too, but but I do think, yeah, yeah, I don't really know what I think, except I know that my fourteen year old girl, I put her on a train because we don't live in Sydney anymore. We live to our south, so we're beginning for her to make that journey on her own and the whole time she's on the train, I'm just looking at my phone.
I'm going, oh, I hope she's gonna.
And why you know it's it's safe for the net's ever been. But I think we've it's just all changed.
But I think also because you have the possibility of knowing it's true. See our parents, there's no way they could know. But there's your phone, and there's find my phone, and you've got it turned on, and you've got the family all connected, you've got family sharing, so you can do it. If you can't know, then you don't know, and it's what you habituated to. And so we have that habit. Now we can go on instau and see that our friend is online and immediately nab them. You've
got the potential to do it. But I also think it's something about desire. I do think gen x is in particular. I think we missed having parents who were really very interested in us. Actually it would have been nice, that would have been nicer, And I think we want to change that for our kids. And I think we are closer to them, more connected to them, more interested in them, And I think that's a nice thing.
I'll be back with more with Virginia Tree early in a moment, but first, here's a.
Little brain.
I wanted to ask. There was a little piece in here about aging and wisdom that absolutely flawed me because I've actually never heard someone say this before, because I don't know, how are you feeling about aging? By the way, I don't mean physically, I mean in general, it's shit. It's shit, isn't it. It's shit totally.
And I reserve my riot to do anything that I could possibly can or could afford in order to make myself feel better about the inevitability of aging. So there you go. It's good.
One of the things that I'd always talk about on this show is this kind of dichotomy between as you get older, you get wiser, but then somehow the world sees you as a little bit sadder, a little bit less relevant, and it's like, hold on, I know more than I've ever known, which is very much evidence by this.
But there's a chapter in this about how as you age your skin gets thinner, like not a chapter of passage, And I loved it, and I just want to share it with people because you have, as you said at the beginning, dealt with some very serious moments in your journalism career, nine to eleven and COVID and all of the things in between. And you write this about when
you're covering nine to eleven. You say, I recall feeling stereely cold, with anxiety about getting the fat right, doing the story justice, and most importantly, not putting my own feelings at the center of an event that had ruined the lives of so many others. Today, I wouldn't get through the introduction to the story without breaking down. And anyone who has shed ordinary life like mine, relationships that have failed, those that have thrived, births, deaths, losses, and
little triumphs would feel the same way. Experience strips you of your armor. Skin doesn't thicken with age, thins, and age returns you to a tenderness you've not felt since you were a child, always on the edge of a storm of tears. Yes, it does. I feel so much more for everything, everything. It almost is counterintuitive, because we've also survived a lot of things, little losses and big losses. And as you describe, you think you'd be tough. We should be tough as old boots, Virginia.
I know it was It was a counterintuitive moment of revelation for me to realize the skin's getting thinner, and the tears are close, are always closer, you know, A tissue commercial can tip me over the edge now whereas before I be rolling my eyes And I like that. I like that and I embrace that. And that's actually that's the humanity in a job like mine. That can help me connect better to the person I'm speaking to, That can help me connect that story better to the
person who's listening or watching. And so it's a golden thread actually that connects us all. So that that's the part of the thin skin. I embrace, Yes, and I agree with that.
I think the empathy that we have it makes us better at our jobs. It makes us better communicators, It makes us better adjudicators in confrontations and disagreements. But it could also be quite debilitating at times.
Yes, and sometimes you need to really invest in some expensive skin care in order to deal with a thinny skin.
You do. What kind of really old woman do you imagine yourself being?
Oh? What a great question. Well, I can tell you something. A week before this book was published, my mother died.
Oh I'm so sorry.
But honestly an extraordinary coincidence. If you put it in a novel, your editor and'd say, oh, take it out. You can't have that. You know, one chapter closes and one opens. But that's just how life always turns out. Ninety four and this is why you don't see me in a mess, because you know, she'd lived a long, long life ninety four and by the end of it she was utterly sick of it and saying, I'm totally tired of this. Let me just go, and so she did.
So I saw a version of aging, which was really interesting to me because right up until a few years ago, she was an incredibly vital, very energetic, and optimistic woman who said she wanted to die face down in the violets in her beautiful garden that she tended for years. But the last few years made her very angry and very bitter and very focused on herself on what was
going wrong. And so I take that as a little bit of advice about what not to do, because it seems to me that we're all born into this world with varying degrees of physical ability and prowess. And I think anyone who's born with any kind of challenge or disability is the interesting example here. You don't need to be able bodied, you don't need to have any of that. You can have missing limbs, you can have challenges with your site, with your vision, but still go on to
live a positive and connected and affirming life. And that's the thing that I took from it was that, Okay, the body is going to deteriorate and that's going to break down, which means and that's just inevitable. And the world has been full of people who have had those challenges anyway from the beginning. So the whole game is a mind game. Aging is entirely, it seems to me, a mental game. How am I going to wake up and face the world today? What mood am I going
to be in? What attitude do I choose today? And I'm not trying to undermine or explain away people who live with chronic pain or with genuine real challenges. And some of those painful aspects of aging are crap, and I know it because I have them in my life. But I know older people who are miserable bastards. I know I know older people who are not. And so my choice is to be the not yes.
And the small joys are going to help with.
That, and they're the only thing that are going to get me through there, because, yes, I know, I used to say to Mom, you know, you're ninety four, have a whiskey. Don't have a whiskey at five o'clock, have a whiskey at midday. Yes, you know, to start in the morning. What does it matter? Who cares?
It's so interesting because my mother is a devotee of small joys.
She always has been.
She's always said to me, a series of small treats is the secret happiness, which is kind of what your book's about. I love your mother, I know, but as she's aging again, I think it's exactly what you said. I think there's a sort of depression about the state of the world that they're leaving, where she's sort of we didn't fix everything, you know.
Oh yeah, I know, I get that.
And there's dealing with the loss of your circle and the people around you, and it is the mental game is very tough.
It's being very tough. And I don't say that to suggest that it's easy, but that's where I'll be putting my focus. So you know, I'm doing everything I possibly can. I exercise. I try and eat well. You know, I do strength training and resistance training and all of that, and I like to stay as physically able as I can. But I'll be putting my effort into the mental game of optimism. Of connection. It's actually all about and in
the end, that's what my book is about. Connection. Connection only connect as Ian forced it wrote all those years ago. And if you're not connected, I think you're in trouble.
We were talking about how cooking with your mother was one of your ways of connecting. What will you cook in her memory now that she's not with us.
I think every time now that I make an eggplant parmigiana, I'll be thinking of her, because oddly enough, my mother was not Italian. I learned to cook that from my grandma, who was Dad's mum, and Mum learned to cook it from her too, So Grandma and my mum they connected very strongly in the kitchen as well. And you know, there's often blow ups from time to time, but great love there as well, and she ended up cooking We all agree the best eggplant parmajana in the family because
we all do them. I do it, Peter does it, John does it, Angela does it, and I, you know, not too competitively, but maybe a bit. But no matter who's serving it, someone will always say, yeah, Mum is better, though, so I'm not quite sure what a secret was. She made sure it was never too was never too wet, It wasn't She was really judicious with the use of sauce. I think I think it was the smart thing about it. I'm very generous with the Partamejana, and that really helped.
So I think from here on in now, now that we don't have her, the eggplant parmigana will be hers. I think, so Mum wins friends.
Since that conversation, I've eaten Virginia's grandma's green beans more than months. I've made her Friday night fog cocktail, and I've thought and thought and thought about her insight that our skin and gets thinner, not thicker with age, So you know, little things and big things, which is entirely appropriate response to the conversation about small joys. If you want to buy Virginia's book, a bit on the side, and I couldn't recommend it enough, particularly if you've got
a foody lurking inside you. There's a link in the show notes, and if you want to go and eat some breeze right now, I entirely endorse that choice. If you want another conversation about how our attitude to nourishment and what we might cause self care is shifting, please scroll back in our feed to the chat I had
with the hilarious Helen Thorn about bodies and exercise. And if some of this talk about wine and cocktails has not been helpful to you, please listen to the conversation I had with the remarkable Shanner one from Sober in the Country. And if you love mid please meet me back here next week for a conversation about dickheads and how not to be one with the most Undickheady Casey Chambers. Thank you to our team, to our ep name of Brown, whose favorite comfort food is hot fresh bread.
With loads of butter and salt.
To our producer Tarlie Blackman, who's all about pumpkin soup, Tom Lyon on sound, who's a pizza person when he needs it, and I hope Tom's eating a bit delicious pizza right now because he needs it. We're dedicating this episode to his wonderful dog Andy. Bye.