Before coming to San Diego the only things I knew about it, ridiculously, were from Anchorman. It’s actually a wonderful city will friendly locals who smile at you on the street, clean, wide streets and lots of sunshine.
California actually “began” in San Diego. Tourists can visit the Old Town, which has a lot of original or restored buildings from the Spanish colonial years. The stories of people living and working in the fledgling state were amusing and at times, very sad. Plus the Old Town has a beautiful old hacienda with a garden that was especially lovely under the California sun.
San Diego is an important military city as well. There are numerous military bases, including the large Pacific Fleet navy base which most people know about, and, consequently, a lot of handsome military men.
I trekked out to a gargantuan bunch of malls outside the city and bought a new camera, and then tested it out at the famous San Diego Zoo. The entry price is fairly steep ($48) but it provides a whole day’s worth of entertainment. One of my Lyft drivers (it’s a rideshare app that is big in California) told me that his main motivation for visiting the zoo would be not to see the animals, but to check out the people! He had a point. It was Easter Saturday, so Californians in their thousands were enjoying a day out at the zoo. I took some shots.
I picked an extremely interesting time to visit Cambodia. The federal election is on this weekend and while most people believe that there will be no change in government, it’s really buzzing because the opposition now have a bit of extra firepower.
Nix (bestie) and I have been asking locals (mainly tuk tuk drivers) who they support and most say the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP). The opposition represents change. Their leader, Sam Rainsy, was in self-imposed exile until last week and came home after he was given a royal pardon for charges that many believed were politically motivated. Most of the signs and rallies that we’ve seen were for the current party in government, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), so it was extra exciting to see the man himself on our day trip to the beautiful ruins at Angkor Wat. We had heard that Rainsy was in Siem Reap, and it makes sense for him to visit a site with such national significance.
The CPP have been in power for about 30 years and will probably win again. But it seems like they are genuinely nervous about this election. Sam Rainsy must scare them. They have gone all out in terms of campaign presence on the streets and we even heard that they are “threatening” to “take back” the things that they’ve “given” the country – infrastructure, schools, hospitals – if they lose. It’s a pretty heated situation. We are leaving Cambodia for Thailand on Friday but I’ll definitely be watching what happens.
The mayor of Cessnock recognised me on sight. I was amazed, having never set eyes on him before, or so I believed. He went to to explain that his son, who has now graduated from Law, was a friend of mine in preschool.
And so it is in Cessnock, where faces from my childhood still abound and everybody smiles when they see you on the street. I grew up here and am back for a short time to fill in for an absent journalist at the local newspaper, The Cessnock Advertiser.
In my first week I drove around town with a camera, chatting to locals about neighbourhood disputes, new building projects, people winning awards and sporting competitions. The warmth and community spirit of everyone I met and worked with have really struck me.
I never much liked living in a town with only one of everything, where the exciting outside world was only accessible by driving for hours. Trips to the big smoke were like Christmas and left me longing to be in a place where you could just walk out your door and find a nice cafe, or some trendy people, or an art exhibition. Where Things were Happening. I wanted to be Sophisticated.
After six years of living in various cities around the world, I feel differently. As it turns out, there are plenty of things happening in Cessnock. Social problems remain, but the population seems to be growing and surprisingly enough, there is not enough space in the newspaper to fit all the stories in every week.
People still read the newspaper, too. The phone is off the hook with people wanting their stories or community notices to get printed, or booking classifieds for various occasions. The Advertiser has an important place in the town, even if a lot of it is classic “small town news”. And working as a reporter at the paper is a good insight into the glue that keeps the community together.
On the streets in the daytime or out in the city at nighttime, their not-messy hair, smooth complexions and perfumed auras make my heart all aflutter. Sometimes they even want to be my friend! When I start watching movies or TV dramas, I am treated to glimpses of creatures who are barely human – beings of pure feminine energy who could make you melt into a puddle with one wink. It’s the same with magazines. The same with television, fashion photography and art.
But then I switch off or go home to bed, and everything’s ok. I wake up in the same imperfect body and mind, and life goes on. I think to myself when I see a billboard or TV commercial, “Wow, doesn’t Charlize Theron (or whatever angel they choose) look gorgeous in that dress? I don’t look like her, but it’s cool because there are plenty of other things that are good about me.”
Am I going to agonise over the fact that society loves attractive people? No, because it was always thus for the last gazillion years. And what about the fact that it just so happens that these last few decades it’s been considered more attractive to be more skinny than my actual self? Am I going to demand that all the fashion houses start employing models who look like me, because I’m a “real woman”? Is that going to solve every problem I have ever had in life?
NO I DON’T THINK SO.
I recently learnt, from watching a certain tedious Dove commercial (hey everyone, Dove is a company that sells beauty products), that not every woman considers herself beautiful, although she totally is because strangers think so. Do I need to list all the actual problems facing women today? The advertisement made me feel uncomfortable the way all the incessant internet talk about “body image” does. The truth is that anybody who derives the majority of their self-worth from their appearance is destined to ultimate unhappiness.
Today, for instance, I read about a new “body image initiative” whereby people can dump their fashion magazines into a box that says “Shed your weight problem here”. The group responsible for the installation say this:
“Your ads and fashion spreads are an inspiration to many girls and women. We look at your ultra thin models and think – if I’m skinny, I’ll be perfect just like her… All we ask is that you think before you cast and that you consider inspiring us with a look that’s both beautiful and attainable.”
Their hearts are obviously in the right place. The thing about beauty and fashion and art, though, is that by being “attainable”, it might lose some of its reason for existing in the first place. Modern-day gals might see Botticelli’s Venus as having a “healthier” body shape than 21st-century supermodels – more “womanly”, as it were – but I’m guessing that Botticelli wasn’t aiming for realism. He, too, was painting a beautiful fantasy goddess, and a work of art that takes us all away from the real world, if only for a few seconds.
Young girls are vulnerable and need to be taught something important – it’s not all about the way you look. It sounds obvious, but something isn’t working if all we are doing is blaming the media for “pressuring” them into disordered eating. Men and women need to be able to appreciate beauty without then hating some part of themselves. As a teenager, I thought I was pretty ugly too. Then I left high school and discovered that actually, people of all shapes and sizes and features are attractive to others. Welcome to the real world, not the world that only exists on pages and big screens. Even those of us who are stunning now might not be forever, and there’s no shame in that. Let’s all move on from “body image” and start really living.
For me, the above video is extremely soothing and induces a feeling which, thanks to an episode of This American Life, I now know the name of.
In a feature called “A Tribe Called Rest” in episode 491 of TAL, “Tribes”, Andrea Seigel tells the story of how she came to join the “tribe” of ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Seigel says that when a childhood friend would observe and meticulously describe small objects to her, such as shells, she would experience a pleasant “tingling” in her skull: “It was like starbursts in my head.” Listening to the school librarian and watching instructional videos about painting would create the same tingles and starbursts. Eventually the adult Seigel was watching hours of similar videos on YouTube and then stumbled upon the term “ASMR“. As it turns out, she was one of many many people who experienced this feeling.
As I listened to this podcast at home in the daytime, my heart started beating quickly. I was amazed – other people felt this tingling as well? I remember vividly sitting cross-legged at primary school during “show and tell”, and feeling soft tingles in the back of my head, spreading down my shoulders. It was like lying on warm sand and feeling the cool ocean coming up under your head, but even better than that. I had never thought that other people would have experienced anything similar, so I was happy to keep it to myself. Teachers tapping their fingernails on hardcover books produced the same results, as did visiting the eye doctor when I was a small child and being told to read out the faraway letters. As an adult, I have often felt relaxing tingles at the beauty salon or lecture theatre. It turns out that I have ASMR, and these situations are common triggers for others like me.
It’s exciting! I am part of the tribe too! And best of all, there are tens of hundreds of videos online that were made just for people like me. This past week I have been falling asleep to role-playing or demonstrative videos like the one above, and it has been blissful. Nobody I have spoken to shares my excitement or my tingles, but it has opened a discussion about other totally legit but hard-to-describe experiences, such as that feeling that you are falling off a ledge just before you fall asleep that jerks you awake. I’m also wondering if there is a word for a tingling in the jaw that happens when a person eats something super super sweet, like pineapple. I need to keep listening to podcasts.
*A different episode of This American Life about “The Psychopath Test“, when combined with knowledge of the personality of one of my ex-boyfriends, was eye-opening indeed!
“A part of me will always belong to you.” (Street art at Mauerpark, Berlin)
By the time I had the necklace, it was too late to find out anything about it. I had never seen my grandmother wear it, but somehow I knew that she must have loved it. An oval pendant with a cut-out design of hieroglyphics, it would have reminded her of dusty bazaar from whence it came, in the days when far fewer people were as worldly as my grandmother was. So then it was my turn to love it, just like she’d loved me.
In the middle of an otherworldly European summer, I was forced to farewell the man I was convinced was my Prince Charming. He went home, and home was on the other side of Atlantic. It felt like being dumped by a cold, heavy wave. I went back to Berlin alone, feeling smaller than ever in the big grey city. “Come to Paris!” said my best friend, who was on a glamorous trip around the continent. I sensed it would be my only opportunity to be so miserable in such a luxurious setting. I went, and wandered around the streets, and the sticky heat and sunshine were surprisingly good medicine. On holiday in the shimmering alternate universe of Paris, I could pretend that I was riding some warm current, ultimate destination unknown, and just drift.
I got my first inkling that the necklace was missing when I arrived in my next destination, the brainy city of Basel. I hadn’t slept and had just shot across the countryside in a super fast train. Everything was new, and the necklace was not around my neck. It must have been squashed in my bag. But over the next few days, it did not reappear. By the time I left, it was making me distinctly uneasy to think about it. I was missing its shape in my hand, the feel of the cold chain on the back of my neck, and just knowing that we were travelling through unknown landscapes together.
But I was in denial. Surely my necklace wouldn’t just be gone. It was much too important an artifact, and it was mine to take care of. I didn’t lose important things the way other people seemed to, did I? Especially when the necklace was one of my last remaining mementos of my grandma Ethel, who had been everywhere, and been everything to us. I could only fantasise about the stories that those little silver-plated Egyptian figures would tell. Everywhere I went, I had had it hanging on my chest. It was my go-to item of glamour, because I always imagined my grandmother wearing it and reminding herself of exciting times. Having been twice left mysteriously at other people’s houses, it had always found its way back to me – but my luck had run out.
It had travelled halfway around the world with me, and now might be left in a Parisian hostel, or in a French train, or somewhere else entirely.
My Swiss hosts hadn’t seen it. In fact, I hadn’t seen it. With a lump in my throat, I lodged a lost property report with the railways, and never got a response. My necklace had left me. Without my necklace, and my prince, I didn’t feel like I had much left to hold onto. I was losing pieces of my life, one at a time.
The necklace and me in happier times. (pic: Kate O’Dwyer)
I felt like even if the necklace turned up and showed itself and told me about all its adventures, I wouldn’t be worthy of putting it back on. My grandfather trusted me with my grandmother’s necklace, and I had let her down – my Big Ma, the woman with a million stories and a heart as big as the whole blue sky.
Switzerland in summer was a Technicolor wonder. And travelling alone had become my cause. But without my necklace I was more alone than ever.
(I put this review and video together last October for The M Word, an online magazine about pregnancy and birth.)
We’ve all eaten baby food, right? The problem is that it was a long time ago. Lucie Robson made The M Word team sit down with some little spoons and jars to taste some different baby foods, and advise mini connoisseurs on what is good for their tastebuds and bellies.
You can watch some of the best reactions of my reviewers and fellow The M Word reporters in this video. We hope you get a laugh out of it – we certainly did!
Round 1
Reviewing three brands of mushy baby food. All these baby foods contain all-natural ingredients. We gave them individual scores out of five.
The verdict: One reporter “really likes it” and would “eat it at home.” It’s a bit sour, and you might be able to picture a baby screwing up their little face, but we have all seen the YouTube video that proves how cute it would be.
Rafferty’s Garden Blueberries, Banana and Apple (+ nothing else!) – $1.82 Photo: Lucie Robson
The verdict: “It smells vanilla-ry, like a dessert!” Seems more natural than the other purple food, although it has a tangy aftertaste. It seems to have real banana. A good choice.
Ella’s Kitchen Spinach, Apple and Swedes – $1.99 Photo: Lucie Robson
The verdict: Not good. “It was as bad as I expected from the smell, but keeps getting worse!” Some tasters complained of a bad aftertaste, and that the food looks dark greeny-brown, like something very unsavoury indeed. “I would never inflict this on my child!”
Conclusions: The food that mixed savoury and sweet elements was not at all delicious. But babies can’t live on sweet food alone, can they? Do they even like it? This study from May 2012 might suggest otherwise.
Round 2
Comparing two banana custards from Heinz: “Simply,” which contains no additives, and the regular “Smooth” banana custard. Reviewers are blindfolded.
Heinz Simply Custard with Banana, without additives ($1.89), and Heinz Smooth Custard with Banana ($1.27) Photo: Lucie Robson
Three out of four reviewers, some with flecks of custard on their jackets (sorry) thought that the “simply” custard was the one laced with additives and sugar. This contradicts the suggestion of the labelling. One reviewer suggested that the “smooth” custard had hints of pistachio. Both custards were deemed to be on the yummy side. One reviewer took the rest of the jar home to eat later!
So why the confusion? A look at the back of both packets shows almost identical ingredients listed. Water, full cream milk, sugar, cornflour, unsalted butter, banana (in almost identical proportions – 1.5% for theSimply, 1.7% for the Smooth), cream and natural flavours. So, mother, we’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s worth making a switch.
The verdict: Reviewers can’t tell the difference on taste alone.
Round 3
Heinz Apple Custard versus Only Organic Apple Custard. Can blindfolded reporters tell the difference between fancy organic and (comparatively) el cheapo baby foods?
Only Organic Apple Custard ($1.35) and Heinz Apple Custard ($1.27). Photo: Lucie Robson
By now my lovely guinea pigs were turning against me for shoving little spoons of mushy food into their mouths. But this test was enlightening: three out of four reviewers correctly identified the organic apple custard. These eaters much preferred the organic option – it was nicer, more creamy with a better texture, and did not “taste manufactured.” The unfortunate competition was labelled by one taste-tester as being “like toothpaste”. Delicious.
The verdict: Only Organic wins, and actually tastes “organic” too.
Here we come to the most exciting part of our taste-testing. By “most exciting”, I mean “most unappetising”. We decided to blind taste-test two popular rice cereals: the standard Farex brand ($2.19), and the more upmarket Bellamy’s Organic baby rice ($3.77). I am not sure how different these two products can be, considering that the main ingredients are rice and water. And more water in a mug, the way that I prepared it for my subjects. There was no discernible difference in taste or texture (unfortunately) between these two cereals. Comments such as “it tastes like cardboard”, “I think cardboard would actually taste nicer”, “yuck yuck yuck” and “Lucie, did you feed us Clag glue by mistake?” speak volumes. Sorry, babies. It won’t be long until you have teeth.
The verdict: We’re sure it’s good for you, baby. But that’s all.
Our Conclusion:
From an M Word reporter: “I’m not a fan of baby food.”
By Lucie Robson
Please note: All prices were obtained from a local Coles Supermarket and are indicative only.
I had a few weeks left. At the end of these few weeks I would sit down in a plane and wave a teary goodbye to Berlin, the city of my imagination, the only place to truly be young and nocturnal and full of thoughts.
I woke up every day in a sharp melancholy, calculating how many more mornings I had of looking out on my snowy courtyard, holding a warm coffee mug. I spent the days looking at people on the street, feeling a bubbling jealousy – how is it that they were able to stay, when I had to leave? At night, usually for the whole night, I drank Weißbier with fellow foreigners as we all wondered when we’d see each other again once there were continents and oceans between us.
Some friends from Sydney were in town, and wanted to see some Berlin bars. I met them on a quiet, dark street behind Schönleinstraße. One of them had found out about this bar online – it was modelled on The Black Lodge. Like always around this time, I had a little lump in my throat that got bigger when I looked at anything at all.
We found the address of the bar. Silence, and nobody around. “Well, it said on the website that it’s meant to be open tonight,” said my friend. “It’s new.” She didn’t sound very disappointed. She was on holidays, and everything was equally exciting, I guessed. But I could count on my fingers the number of nights I had left to visit a bar like this. Soon I would be living my old life again, and it would be as if all of this never happened at all. So I was definitely disappointed.
I stepped up to the door of The Black Lodge and peered through the glass panel at the dark interior. It was definitely closed for business tonight, without explanation. A single light bulb was switched on somewhere inside, illuminating a narrow doorway and a few black and white tiles on the floor. It was authentic flooring from the TV show, and I imagined the dark red curtains that must have covered the walls in there, and the armchairs, and the people who would quote all the lines and talk about the chewing gum coming back into style and try to figure out how Twin Peaks could still give them nightmares. But I could only see that single patch of light.
It made me feel slightly, and strangely, afraid. There on that silent street, I suddenly felt the stillness of the night and the crispness of the cold air acutely. I imagined that just as I was looking into the frosty glass of the door, somebody was looking at me, from a window up above. It made me shiver.
“Do you think that this is a real bar?” I asked my friends. “I’m getting a weird feeling about it. Like, maybe it’s actually an art project.”
My two friends chuckled. “No, really!” I protested. Just then under the streetlights, it seemed true to me that somebody in Berlin would set up a bar’s façade sure to attract a certain type of young person, and then revel in that person’s disappointment while filming the whole episode with a fancy camera, all in the name of art. Stranger things had happened – were surely happening right now, a few streets over in Neukölln. And for a David Lynch-show-themed bar – it was too perfect.
Or maybe it was the cobblestones on the street, and the night in the city that was slowly eroding my logic. It was all too big and unfair. I couldn’t explain how it felt to know that I would soon be looking at the same night sky but on a different street, with different scents in the air, wearing sandals.
We gave up and walked into the night. Later, at home in Sydney, I heard that my friend had gone back to The Black Lodge and found people drinking inside. I couldn’t help but hate all of them.
Epilogue: I looked for The Black Lodge and found that there is nothing at its domain name. IT’S JUST TOO WEIRD.
Well, not him exactly. Rather, in defence of Vincent Kartheiser’s performance. Am I the only one who thinks this? It’s spine-tingling.
As we all count down to when we can dive in to the world of Mad Men again, I’d like to make a tribute to a guy who doesn’t seem to get many tributes.
There is nothing unsettling about Mad Men – the unbelievably good acting and writing, the bright colours and perfect skin, the crispy sound design – except for the show’s strong undercurrent of pure, privileged misery, which is best personified in Pete Campbell.
I’ve read descriptions of Pete as a “villain”, or a character you “love to hate”, but in the Mad Men universe nothing is that simple. Pete is an antagonist, for sure, but he’s far from shallow – in those blue eyes we see all the shades of hatred, but also of despair, and it’s amazing to watch.
It’s not just Campbell’s ridiculously pompous sense of entitlement, a consequence of a a life spent getting everything for free, being a descendant of a gilded New York governor. His sneering insults and tantrums, delivered in that slimy WASP voice under his slick hair, can make your skin crawl. It’s not even his crippling jealousy of Don Draper in Season 1, his inability to reconcile his own lack of manliness and gravitas while someone he sees as unworthy gets all the praise and the ladies. Later, in Season 5, Pete tries out expensive infidelity for himself, trying to emulate the masculinity he sees in Don. It doesn’t make him feel more like a man, and Don is indifferent. I couldn’t help but feel Pete’s shame along with him.
What really sets Pete/Vincent apart is the big void inside of him, that money, status, women and a family in the country can’t fill. He has everything he could ever want, but it means nothing. He comes to hate the world, and himself, and it’s illustrated so perfectly. Kartheiser even says in this video that he imagines Pete Campbell committing suicide before he reached old age. This video below must be one of the best examples of the whole point of Mad Men – the ultimate nothingness of materialism and the futility of the American Dream. And who better to demonstrate this, than Pete Campbell.
(P.S. If a better television sequence is ever made, I don’t want to know about it.)
“We need costumes, of course we need them,” they all said. Dressing like a normal group of young women wouldn’t cut it – for Oktoberfest we needed to be squeezed into tight-bodiced Dirndls with bright gingham aprons and frilly white blouses that skimped on coverage around the bosoms. My lady friends turned out to be right about the necessity of dressing up, Bavarian-style, to match all the strapping young men in their Lederhosen – the theatre of Oktoberfest, which takes over so much of Munich for a buzzing, otherworldly few days, is as intoxicating as the litres-upon-litres of beer.
My Dirndl was on the traditional side (dark brown, skirt down to my knees) but I still managed to burst out of the top of it.
Still, I think that the original one I had ordered from a confusing German online store would have been more eye-popping. I’ll never know – upon my return to my little apartment in south-east Berlin I had a knock at the door and was delivered the unforunate dress, wrapped up neatly but many days too late. It wasn’t the store’s fault, apparently – the website displayed a warning that at peak times, Dirndl deliveries might be delayed, and this was the most important time of year for lovers of German paraphernalia. Not to worry – the store offered full refunds, 48 Euros that could be put to good use by this particular foreign student. All that was necessary was to return the Dirndl by post.
Torstraße was far from my home, but a place I used to visit a lot – a wide street split by tram lines, and full of small rooms that would come alive at night, packed with interesting people drinking interesting things that they didn’t pay much for, all with the special spark in their eyes because they were in Berlin, the greatest city on Earth, with the extra good fortune to be young at this most excellent time in history. I think on this day I must have been drinking mint tea at St Oberholz, a café where a certain type of young person (with black-rimmed glasses) came to set up their laptop and procrastinate with their magnum opus. I took a detour to a yellow Deutsche Post, my unwanted Dirndl wrapped up in the bag that it was delivered in, with a makeshift label stuck on one side.
this package did it right
Time ticked on infuriatingly while I stood in the line. There were many things about the German postal system that I did not understand. Every post office was also a bank, for example, and parcel notices were sent out in advance, so it was actually possible to arrive too early for your packages. But at least they were open on Saturdays. I was finally called up by a grey-haired matronly Frau at the far end. She took one look at my bundle and said “Das geht nicht.” It doesn’t work like that. “Oh, so how does it work?” I asked. Apparently I needed an official box to send things in. “Danke,” I said and smiled. The woman did not smile.
I found a stack of bright yellow boxes that evidently needed to be assembled. I picked up one which in its squashed state was very long and wide. It appeared to come with drawn instructions but these were worse than useless. There I was, wrestling with a huge flat yellow piece of cardboard almost as big as myself, my face growing redder by the second. I looked around. Nobody was surprised to see this happening – nobody was even looking. It didn’t alleviate my embarrassment. I hid into the most secluded corner I could find and eventually managed to force it into a useful shape, get my squashed-up package inside and stick my label on the top. I lined up again.
I waited for another short eternity. I looked out the windows at the grey, windy street and thought of all the grey, windy streets beyond it, stretching across the sprawling city and into the grey, windy countryside, and eventually to the cold sea. There wasn’t much warmth left in the air and every day brought us all closer to a winter that I was getting afraid of.
I was called up again, to the same woman. She frowned anew but there was a little smirk somewhere on her face. At my expense, of course. My package still wasn’t acceptable – home-made labels were nicht erlaubt. There was some official form among all the other official forms in the place that I needed to fill out. I felt a bit forlorn, with my package still in hand. My eyes suddenly stung. Why was it all so hard? Is this what delayed culture shock felt like? How ridiculous that I needed to bring a friend to the damned post office for moral support! That dreaded thought was showing its face: “This wouldn’t have happened back home!”
I had now spent more than half an hour at the post office, and it had gotten me nowhere. Some kind of resentment at the pointlessness of leaving home that day was surfacing, but I frowned hard to keep that feeling down. In the same way that I always tried to reassure myself that (almost) nobody ever died from the cold in Berlin (surely a lie), I told myself that plenty of ordinary Germans use the post office every day, and none of them have gone insane.
With the correct label finally stuck on the box, I approached my new nemesis again. I kept my eyes on her and tried to look like a person with serious intentions, not some clueless traveller who at this moment, was afflicted by acute homesickness and a malaise brought on by seeing too many stern faces in one room (especially when any resident of Berlin should have been used to the latter by now). She had another question. Where were the pieces of sticky tape that came with the box? I drew a breath, but didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, she could see that I might cry, and relented. Her smirk returned: “Ok, we’d better get your package on its way, hadn’t we?”
I imagined the post office woman sniggering to her colleagues over black coffee and stupidly sweet cakes later that day. I did my best to slam the post office door behind me, zipped my jacket up to my chin and marched down Torstraße for my mint tea.
Before coming to San Diego the only things I knew about it, ridiculously, were from Anchorman. It’s actually a wonderful city will friendly locals who smile at you on the street, clean, wide streets and lots of sunshine.
Lucie Heather Ethel 