To Do List

The hot topics this week? Rudd’s health reform, planes unable to fly to London, and those pesky asylum seekers invading our shores (again!). How do I know this? The six o’clock TV news. For all the newspapers that pile up on my kitchen table every week, very few do I even flick through, let alone actually read – especially these days. I’ve long thought myself a conscientious news consumer but it’s a delusion. I don’t even read the front page anymore. And even the online paper only grabs my attention if the headline lures me – just the way the editors manipulate it! I’ve become a typical supplement reader, going straight for the glossy magazine inside the paper, the easy read. So while I’ve often fancied myself spending long, languid weekends reading the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald cover to cover, it just doesn’t happen.

However, I can usually manage the Spectrum and the Good Weekend. I glance through the former, picking and choosing morsels depending on time constraints. And I’ve been known to make the Good Weekend last an entire week. This week I approached both like a high-achieving fifth-grader with a book report due. It seems Sydneysiders are too up themselves to be on time for anything. A movie entitled Hot Tub Time Machine isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds – 3.5 stars. Another movie is out about the love affair between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Might have to see that one. Luke Nguyen’s noodle bar at Star City Casino is a dud. And both Lionel Shriver and Yann Martel have new books out to follow the runaway successes of We Need To Talk About Kevin and Life of Pi. Jodi Picoult is on the top of the bestseller list (again!). And there’s a whole lot of really great theatre on in Sydney at the moment that I’m not going to get to see.

I wish I had more time for newspapers and all the things they inspire me to read and see and participate in. I’ll add it to my list of things to do - study German, take tap-dancing classes, learn to play the cello, read the paper every day.