Parental death, the joy of a blow-dry and other lessons from 2023

This story is part of the December 16 edition of Good Weekend.See all 21 stories.

What did you realise with a thud this year? What books, shows and podcasts were your surprise faves? And what are you most looking forward to over the summer break?

JANE CADZOW

My big revelation this year was … Sicily! For years I listened to people rave about the place and at last I went there to check it out for myself. From the moment I arrived in Palermo with my three sisters – the perfect travel companions – I understood completely what the fuss was about. Sicily is Italy, except more so. It’s as if someone took the most gorgeous country in the world and dialled up the intensity, making the ­colours brighter, the wine headier, the sun stronger, the architecture baroque-r. Then they added palm trees. And lemon groves. And volcanoes. They threw in Norman cathedrals and, why not, Greek temples. Finally, they stood back and made a prediction: a season of the hit series The White Lotus will be set here some day.

The writer (left) with two of her sisters in the baroque town of Noto in south-east Sicily.

My sisters and I made our way slowly around the island, staying in one jewel of a town after another and wishing we could put off our ­return to the mainland. Sicily isn’t perfect. The mafia was murdering judges until pretty recently. The heat in summer is reportedly fierce. Tourists abound at all times of year. But for me, it felt like a life-changing discovery. “To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all,” wrote the German poet Goethe. “For Sicily is the clue to everything.”

I really loved watching … Somehow I completely missed The Good Wife when it went to air between 2009 and 2016. This past February, I read an article recommending it as the kind of TV series you could start watching without feeling you were ­making a major commitment of time or mental energy. “Basically, you’d be able to accidentally skip an episode and still enjoy it while folding your laundry,” the writer said. Excellent, I thought. Exactly what I want. I watched the first episode, in which plucky Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies) joins a Chicago law firm and sets about rebuilding her life after her husband Peter (Chris Noth) is jailed as the result of a sex and political corruption scandal. I decided to watch the second episode, then the third. I looked at my watch and ­wondered if 12.30am was too late to start watching the fourth.

The rest of the early part of the year is a bit of a blur. Seven seasons of The Good Wife were made – a total of 156 episodes. I didn’t skip any of them, accidentally or otherwise. I calculate I sat glued to the screen for 117 hours as I ­followed the twists and turns of the labyrinthine plot. I loved some characters (Will, Diane, Kalinda) and hated others (especially Jackie). When it was over, I missed them all terribly. No laundry got folded.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … I never go to the movies but I intend to make an exception for One Life, which is scheduled to open in cinemas on December 26. This is the story of Nicholas Winton, a mild-mannered English stockbroker who as a young man ­organised for trainloads of Jewish children to be rescued from Nazi-occupied Prague. After the war, Winton kept quiet about his achievement, partly because he convinced himself that anyone would have done the same in the circumstances and partly because he felt bad about his failure to save more children. He was acutely embarrassed when a 1988 newspaper article brought his humanitarianism to light.

Then came an appearance on the British TV show That’s Life, whose producers had prepared an almighty surprise: the studio audience was full of people who owed their lives to him. A clip from that program is available on the internet and, take it from me, it’s impossible to watch without crying. Anthony Hopkins is said to give a knockout performance as Winton in One Life, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. When the lights came up, everyone was in floods of tears. I can’t wait.

TIM ELLIOTT

My big revelation this year was … I am an extremely impatient person. I stare at boiling kettles. I swear at toasters. I rant under my breath at people ahead of me who take too long ordering coffee. I’ve always wondered when life would teach me how to get over this, and so I meditated and practised mindfulness and tried to be more Buddhist about it. But this year I discovered, of all things, bananas. (Growing them, not eating them.)

The writer has become a devotee of Banana Buddhism.

My wife and I grow vegetables but have avoided bananas because someone told us they take over your garden. Then a friend gifted us a baby banana plant, called a “pup”, and we’ve never looked back. The great thing about bananas is that they grow fast but fruit slowly. It begins when a large purple missile-shaped bud pops out of the top of the trunk. Over the course of four months (yes, four months), this bud unfurls, petal by petal, to reveal multiple hands of weeny little bananas – about 140 in all. Over time, these baby bananas grow and ripen, and it doesn’t matter how long you stare at them, cursing silently, there is no way of hastening this process. I still come out and stare at the bananas every couple of days, but now I marvel as they do their thing, fattening up almost imperceptibly and changing colour until they are finally ready to eat. I call it Banana Buddhism.

The book I really loved reading was … I’m a pathological late adopter. I don’t see the point of Slack, was late to Apple Pay, and I still don’t have Uber. Same thing with Australian author John Purcell. I knew, through journalism, that he worked for years as a bookseller and had maybe written a novel or two, but this year I came across The Lessons, and realised what I’d been missing. Toggling between the early 1980s and the 1960s, The Lessons is an insightful, cleverly plotted exploration of love and betrayal, focusing on a series of seamlessly interlinked, and uniquely complicated, relationships. We have Jane Curtis, a prickly and amoral author whose transgressive novels have made her a literary sensation, and who is carrying on an open affair with a pallid acolyte named Simon. There is Jane’s young niece, Daisy, who, neglected by her well-to-do ­parents, falls in love for the first time with a country boy named Harry. Perfectly paced, the book is full of lust and lies, not to mention languid settings, ­including a sunny month spent in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, where Daisy has a ­catastrophic introduction to adulthood.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … When people go on holidays, they often say they are looking forward to ­getting fit or catching up with old friends or reading all the books they didn’t get around to that year. I get that. Books are good, and it’s fun to see friends. But one of the things I relish about going on holidays – at least when I stay in a resort or a hotel – is not packing and/or unpacking the dishwasher. I know. But before you say to yourself, “What a small life this man leads,” I need you to admit that you too have that one chore, that one little task (and it’s always a little one) that comes around every day on the domestic ­carousel to remind you that you are not in The White Lotus. It could be picking up after the dog, or making the bed. For me, it’s the dishwasher. It’s like digging a hole and filling it in again. But when I’m away and I eat in a restaurant, say, there is no dishwasher, or certainly not one that I’m packing. After eating, I just sit there, reposing, and when I’m done I simply get up and walk away. It’s a small thing, but somehow, in a way I can’t fully explain, it makes me feel like minor royalty. And it leaves more time for all those books I haven’t read.

MELISSA FYFE

My big revelation this year was … I’m known for my ambivalence towards sport. In Melbourne this risks total social ostracisation, yet I sometimes revel in it. I like to snootily put my nose in the air and say, “Are you talking about sportsball again? How boring.” And then return my nose to a book. This works a treat on AFL fans, who are insufferable in their belief that they follow the best code. And I have to say, despite my tepid enthusiasm for team sports, I broadly agreed with this view. That was until Mary Fowler kicked her goal in the Matildas friendly against France in July. I was off the couch, screaming (sorry neighbours) and crying for joy like I’d just won Lotto. I never realised soccer could be so thrilling! I caught Matildas fever like the rest of the nation, but it was particularly special in our house because it was my nine-year-old daughter’s first season playing soccer. Every Sunday we watched the Matilda Effect in real life, as her team bounced like excited bunnies onto muddy soccer grounds in Melbourne’s inner-north with Sam Kerr in their hearts. The beautiful game had won me over.

Mary Fowler scores against France – and Matildas fever kicks in.Credit: Getty Images

I really loved listening to … I’m a rock chick from way back so it’s a big-time reputational risk to admit I love Taylor Swift. I’d never really thought much about her before this year. I’d given the brilliant Folklore album such a lockdown hammering in 2020 it’s now almost too triggering – evoking, as it does, memories of home-schooling tantrums and taped-up playgrounds. But this year we’ve had 2019’s Lover on high rotation. I adore her feminist anthem The Man. But something’s gone seriously wrong with me: I can’t get enough of all the gooey, swoony love songs, either. My two girls and I all have our favourite hits. My six-year-old’s is the banger from 2012’s Red album We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. Given this little human believes in an imaginary world called Cuteball Land, it’s hilarious to watch her belt this one out. We’ve watched the Netflix documentary Miss Americana. We went to the cinema for the nearly three-hour Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (though the six-year-old has some Swifty limits: “Mummy,” she asked 30 minutes in, “When is this going to be over?“) Recently I found myself at a party of about 10 women making bracelets with letter beads spelling out Taylor Swift song titles. The women around the table included corporate high-flyers and several doctors. I felt seen.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … My mum Lucy loves the annual Tasmanian Craft Fair, a wondrous exhibition of all things handmade, held in the beautiful little town of Deloraine, west of Launceston. This November she bought at the fair a one-kilogram, cloth-wrapped plum pudding tied with a sprig of purple and gold tinsel. It was for our Melbourne-based extended-family Christmas lunch. She put it in the fridge and, several hours later, had a serious stroke. After a series of further bleeds, we tragically lost Mum. So Dad will pack this special pudding in his ­suitcase and bring it to Melbourne. I will ­provide the brandy custard (possibly store-bought; the family was worryingly sceptical of the suggestion I could make it). And we will share it with everybody and think of Mum.

AMANDA HOOTON

My big revelation this year was … I have never been one of those people for whom a blow-dry is a ticket to deathless glamour. I have very bad hair – thin, fine, prone to limpness – and it always looks more or less awful. These days I am so sure of the inevitably flat, Nana-Mouskouri-in-a-rain-shower result that I no longer even own a hairdryer. Then I was given a voucher to one of those blow-dry-­specific salons. It felt pointless, but the Danish Valkyrie stylist seemed oddly confident. She sprayed my wet hair with product like she was crop-dusting in the 1980s, then worked about half a tonne of a second product in with her hands, then did stuff with an unbelievably hot hairdryer and a straightening tool. And ­suddenly I had a full head of unbelievably volumised, bouncy curls. I felt, exactly and in the best possible way, like Miss Piggy. Not only was that day magnificent – when I didn’t feel like Miss Piggy, I felt like a Charlie’s Angel in a wind tunnel – but so was the next, and the next. Over time the curl dropped, but the body (read, chemical residue) remained, so that after three days people were still asking if I’d “done something”. Yes, by god, I had: if only I could go on doing it twice a week, forever.

Gore Vidal’s “glorious” novel: a message of hope from American history?

The book I really loved was … In these dark, no-money-even-for-miracle-blow-drys days, local street libraries have become my bookshops. Earlier this year I came upon a copy of Lincoln, by Gore Vidal. Beyond his wonderful confession, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a ­little,” which makes me laugh every time, I’d read ­nothing by him. I thought Lincoln might be a biography, but instead I found a glorious novel. Contrary to Vidal’s reputation as a grudge-bearing misanthrope, this story – of Lincoln’s presidency from the outbreak of the Civil War to his assassination – is full of warmth, wit and humanity. It’s also a reminder of the astounding nature of American history: of how, in moments of ­existential crisis, remarkable men have stepped forward and done not simply the expedient but the extraordinary thing. Something to hope against hope for in presidential election year 2024.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … It’s not quite Laura Ingalls Wilder weaving hats or making cheese, but I cannot wait to do the online pickling course I got for my birthday. Even better, I am going to do it with my mother, who will be in town over the holidays, and my 11-year-old daughter, thus tripling its value and the quantity of pickles we can (theoretically) produce. Not all my fermentation/preserving-type adventures have gone completely to plan in the past, usually because I can’t be bothered to properly sterilise the jars, but hope springs eternal. My mum is a careful, perfectionist cook, and my daughter believes she can do ­anything in the kitchen (or anywhere else), so my plan is to let mum sort the jars and my daughter choose the vegetable combinations. I, meanwhile, will be waiting with my martini glass poised, ready to replace an olive with … a gherkin? An onion? Who cares.

KONRAD MARSHALL

My big revelation this year was … My son Charlie enjoys team sport. Training with his mates. Putting on the uniform each weekend. Pie nights and pizza parties and ­participation trophies. But until now, taking to the field or court meant largely watching the competition unfold, following the contest without engaging, enthralled yet adjacent to the action. It meant waiting for the ball to be given.

Konrad Marshall’s son Charlie shoots and scores.

But something changed last month at under-12s basketball. There’s no telling how or why. Additional father-and-son visits to the local half court? Encouragement from a coach? A minor one-on-one victory at training? Whatever the cause, something clicked in his sporting psyche, and he began to understand that the ball was as much his as anyone else’s.

In fits and starts he began calling for it in space, jostling for it under the backboard, chasing and intercepting, passing it off, taking the occasional dribble, and just last week, grabbing it in the key, spinning off a step and hurling it skyward. It flew swiftly and fell softly, dropping like running water through the hoop – swish – for his first big solo basket, in the first minute of the game. His teammates roared and he turned immediately, finding my face on the sidelines. Our eyes met and I knew what we would be talking about the entire drive home. Windows down, elbows out, in the drive-through at KFC, we would talk about his shining moment – the one he grabbed for ­himself; how he plucked it out of nothing, and took it from the world.

I really loved listening to … I remember reading a study once ranking vocations according to personality type. It said journalists are among the most defensive and egotistical careerists in the world, just ­behind lawyers and just ahead of doctors. If you’ve ever been partner to a newspaper writer and stuck at one of their parties listening to self-aggrandising shop talk, this will come as no surprise. We’re fundamentally too interested in what we do, and make the grave mistake of thinking that everyone else will be, too. That’s why the long-running podcast Two Writers Slinging Yang has been such a godsend. Hosted by former Sports Illustrated writer and New York Times bestselling author Jeff Pearlman, it indulges a weekly conversation on the craft, without boring innocent bystanders. Pearlman is a skilled host, drawing out the backstory of his guests (full disclosure: I was on the podcast in May), before drilling down into their every arcane method for reporting and interviewing and writing. It’s basically a deep navel-gazing dive into the craft of journalism, which makes it equal parts instructional, aspirational and, at times, inspirational. It also serves a niche need that podcasts are better equipped to meet than almost any medium: they allow you to escape and drift, learning by blissful osmosis. I listen while I run, switching off from my professional life while remaining tethered to it, connected by insights into transitions and transcription, anecdotal leads and inverted pyramids, and killing your darlings.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … Sometimes it feels as though we’re only just stepping out of the pandemic haze, doesn’t it? And yet we ground to a halt all the way back in 2020 and 2021. By 2022 we were largely free of its grip; even more so in 2023. But now 2024 ­beckons. For me, that means it’s finally time to reawaken a COVID-dormant ­annual event: my Southern BBQ Birthday Bash. I’m a child of January, a water baby and sun lover, and for many years I celebrated with a big ol’ bar­becue, American South-style. (I lived there briefly and fell hard for its cuisine. Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever quite shaken the kilograms I gained that summer in Jacksonville, Florida, when I discovered beef ribs and cornbread.) I’m looking forward to bringing that back this summer by firing up my smoker at midnight before the party the next day, filling it with mallee root charcoal and chunks of wood cut from the apple trees and hazelnuts and plums around our house. The resulting spread – I can taste it now – is peppery beef brisket sandwiches and pulled pork with ­homemade barbecue sauce, mac ‘n’ cheese and Cajun coleslaw, grilled peaches and “funeral” potatoes (greasy goodness, brought to comfort people in hard times), all washed down with sweet iced tea or an old-fashioned. It’s alchemy and indulgence. I’ve missed it for too long.

GREG CALLAGHAN

My big revelation this year was … I’m sorry, but those annoying little domestic crises – a clogged drain, a piercing fire alarm that keeps going off, jammed doors expanded by the wet – just don’t rate for causing household misery quite like a stubborn, leaking roof. I made the mistake several years ago of being persuaded by an overreaching, trust-me-on-this architect to get a butterfly roof on our ­extension. Only when my partner and I were sitting in our living room surrounded by half a dozen buckets, accompanied by a tick-tock ­orchestra of drops of water plunking into them, did I think of Googling “butterfly roof”. “Fantastic choice for getting leaks”; “leaks waiting to happen”; “don’t f---ing do it” wrote a long list of fellow butterfly-roof mugs on Reddit. Reader, I called a roofing engineer, who after lifting up a section of boxed gutter, shook his head and said, “Sorry mate, you’re going to have to replace the whole roof structure.” Estimated cost: $50,000. So what followed were years of Band-Aid work by a hapless handyman (that would be me) trying to fix the multiple leaks, which had a maddening habit of moving about the room depending on which way the wind was blowing. The good news: this year I found a builder with a special genius for pin­pointing and fixing leaks. The better news: in 2023, through a number of heavy downpours, we enjoyed a bone-dry ­living room for the very first time.

Sarah Lancashire as Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley.

I really loved watching … Season three of Happy Valley was one of the most highly anticipated shows on British TV when it first aired at the beginning of this year, seven long years after the last acclaimed ­series. We last saw Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), a divorced police sergeant with two kids living in a gritty, working-class town (a happy valley it is not), put the deeply evil-arsed Tommy Lee Royce behind bars. This new series begins with Cawood raising her grandson Ryan, who was the product of her daughter being raped by Tommy Lee (her traumatised daughter later took her own life). Apart from this, life is back to being relatively normal for our Catherine. Until it’s not. Tommy Lee escapes from prison and tries to insinuate himself into Ryan’s life, via smarmy phone calls and clandestine meetings. But the best scenes in Happy Valley are actually between the tough, spiky Catherine and her hapless, naïve sister who, unbeknown to the sergeant, had been taking Ryan, now a teenager with daddy issues, to prison to visit his ­father. This new series of Happy Valley winds up with Catherine retiring from the force (no, no, no, we say) but this is a show that always leaves you wanting more.

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … Can I share a magical Christmas moment? It happened many, many years ago outside a department store, when I was approached by a well-dressed, middle-aged woman who looked slightly distressed. Her son – her only child – had driven her into the city, fulfilling a promise to take her out to dinner for Christmas, but had instead left her here, with no money and no means of getting home. Something about this stranger resonated with me: being an only child myself, I couldn’t imagine doing anything crueller to my recently widowed mum than leaving her stranded in the city at Christmas. So, I promptly handed this woman $20, earnestly hoping it was enough to cover her lonely taxi ride home. She held the note thoughtfully for a moment, tucked it in her purse and gave me a big hug. Gosh, what is humanity coming to, I thought to myself, walking away, when kids treat their parents in such a callous way? An hour or so later, realising I’d forgotten a present for a close friend, I returned to the department store only to see the same woman tugging on the heartstrings of another gullible passerby with her sorry tale. Well, far from feeling a sucker, I smiled to myself: her Oscar-winning performance was so convincing, it was surely worth 20 bucks. I was a young man at the time, un-partnered and with no children. Christmas then consisted of a quiet dinner with my mum. Now, Christmas is frenetic, with grown-up children and my partner’s exuberant Scottish family. I love every moment of it. Let’s face it, with the state of the world today, Christmas cheer is more important than ever.

KATRINA STRICKLAND

My big revelation this year was … My father died at the end of August and I ­finally understood the truism that you’re never quite prepared for the loss of a parent. It was neither sudden nor early, yet I’m still floored – shocked, even – that he’s no longer here. Something else became newly illuminated to me, too – how differently we all react to the same information. Where my sister saw a man in agony, who needed better pain relief and greater attention from the nurses, I saw a man dying. She was all action, getting things done to improve his comfort. She couldn’t bear to see this person she loved in pain and her ­instinct was to do as much as she could to ­mitigate that. She was in great distress herself a lot of the time. I, by contrast, was quite ­passive, mostly tearless. Zen, even. This process before me, I seemed to conclude without fully realising it, was just what dying is. It’s not pleasant for the person, nor for those around them. I found it difficult to gauge his pain levels when he could no longer communicate. Was that pain or was that just the body shutting down? Barring sudden accidents, I deduced that it’s actually difficult to die; the body fights it to the bitter end. Particularly a body like my father’s, which could never cope well with being still. It wasn’t a case of my sister being right and I wrong, or vice-versa, and thank­fully it didn’t cleave us apart. What it did do, though, was drive home to me another truism: that until a situation presents itself, you have no idea how you’ll respond. Nor what role you’ll play in the family grief ecosystem.

Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul.

I really loved watching … My husband called Breaking Bad the blackest TV he’d ever watched. Naturally, he couldn’t get enough of it. I watched one or two episodes and decided it was not for me. Unpleasant ­people in ugly situations – what’s to like? He finished it on the nights I wasn’t home. So when the prequel Better Call Saul came along, and he wanted us to watch it, I figured I’d sit through a few eps then ditch that, too. But here’s the thing: Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), aka Saul Goodman, the shonky small-town American lawyer who’s always grifting, grows on you. As does his beautiful sidekick, talented lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn). I was reminded through this show of the power of a series which takes over ­multiple weeks of your life. How utterly invested you become in the characters, and how ­totally devastating it is when bad things befall them. How can films, lasting only a couple of hours, compete with that?

Over summer, I’m looking forward to … Turning my phone off. Having no willpower, the only way I can do this is to go on a multi-day hike in an area with no mobile reception. So after Christmas I’ll be heading to Tasmania for a four-day hike with my husband, some good friends and a raft of strangers who booked the same trip as us a full year in ­advance, knowing you don’t secure a slot ­otherwise. I love that anything can happen in the world while you’re out there, sans internet, and you’ll have no knowledge of it. You just trudge on. Nobody’s humble-brag Insta post will infest your mind, no world events will rock your sense of security, no family or friend ­post-Christmas explosions will require your intervention. People could die and you wouldn’t know. It’s utterly liberating. And here’s the thing: more often than not, when you return, nothing big will have happened anyway. Which is both reassuring and slightly deflating.

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