Katoomba Winter Festival

Today has been a long day. It's my littlest sister Alex's birthday, and she had decreed that we were all going up to the Katoomba Winter Festival. About a week ago this decree was modified to "I'm going with my friends and you guys can come too if you like" which is the sort of thing where the person clearly has a preference for whether you go or not, but isn't going to tell you which. It always seems like a minefield, that sort of thing, since then you might be all up in their space when they'd actually rather just go out with their friends, or alternately it might be that if you don't go, it makes it seem like you don't really like them and want to see them etc. I know that sounds mad to you, reading it there, in the comfort of your own space, but I assure you that one of those if invariably the case, when it comes to (my?) sisters (possibly all sisters?). Sometimes, if you're very unlucky, the person who's organising is themselves ambivalent, so you can actually sometimes be wrong in both directions at once, which is something.

Anyway, my folks and I figured that it was best to err on the side of caution, and also thought it might be fun, so we all climbed into the car and wound our way up to Katoomba (which was 2 hours by car from Penrith, and allegedly between 4 and 5 hours by public transport from Coogee), dressed in all the warmest clothes we could layer onto ourselves whilst still retaining the ability to bend our arms and legs. (Also I made cheddar and apple scones for in-car breakfast, which was pretty great, although not an effective way of saving time in the morning. It always feels like somehow eating en route must be faster than breakfasting at home, no matter what, but given that making the scones took a good hour and a half longer than wolfing a bowl of muesli would have, it wasn't what you'd call hyper-efficient).

My sisters usually (and I say usually, because we end up going most years, because Alex is allowed to pick what we do on the weekend closest to her birthday, but since her birthday is just about exactly on the solstice, we seem to end up in Katoomba every year, even though it seems pretty much exactly the same to me every time) dress up in corsetry etc for this event. I did too, the first year, but first of all, all my costumery is still in storage at the moment during the Great Maroubra Renovation, secondly, the predicted maximum temperature in Katoomba today was between 0 & 8 degrees minus windchill, thirdly, I've reached that comfortable point in my life where I'll happily dress up if I feel like it, but I really don't feel any need to do so just to impress a bunch of chilled hippies and miscellaneous strangers etc. (And fourthly, seriously, it's cold up there. This is the same as the second point, but bears repeating. Plus, proper costumery involves high or otherwise interesting footwear, and wearing anything but sneakers or walking boots on a day when you'll be standing and walking about for hours on end is for suckers and people with more patience than me, and usually both at once).

There were lots of strange outfits mingling in among the otherwise fairly normally-Newtownish looking folk. Ladies in dinosaur suits, a dude dressed as Jack Sparrow, a red Power Ranger, and a good few middle aged folk in gowns and wigs looking sort of diffusely pagan god/goddess-y. And a higher than ordinary number of people in capes and cloaks or the long-unwashed-hair-and-long-leather-coat combination which is the infallible mark of a dude who's still bitter about people having been mean to him in highschool, and who genuinely thinks that George Lucas is a great storyteller, and has Opinions about dice.

It's a weird thing, the Winter festival. I'm never quite sure what it's trying to be, and I'm not at all convinced that the festival is, either. It's also very very crowded and jostly in the middle of the day. I don't know why, but it's just about the only event where I get that panicky trapped agoraphobic feeling of being absoltely unable to escape the jostlings of strangers. It's weird, I don't know why it should be so, since I have no problem with most crowded jostly places (although I think that live music venues are often a bit like that, and not as pleasant as they ought to be for how expensive they always seem to be). Maybe it's the fact that the crowd of jostlers on days like today is so much more self-absorbed than jostling crowds usually are? Like I said, there's a lot of that defiant sort of young man who tend to be faintly aggressive in that super defensive way familiar to anyone who's ever had to deal with larger groups of undergraduate geeks, and I think a lot of those folk tend to wear being-a-bit-inconsiderate as a badge of honour and a point of pride, having reacted too hard against that vague feeling of maybe being a bit of a doormat which niggles occasionally at everyone who isn't a complete saint or sociopath?

Anyway, for some reason, the Winter festival crowd always seems more than usually tiring, to me. I suppose this could also be because I often end up trying to navigate it with my family. I love my family dearly, but the only one of the 4 of them who is remotely easy to navigate a crowd with is my Mum. My Dad's progress through a crowd is sort of reminiscent of that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle walks through the village absorbed in a book, personally undisturbed, but somehow leaving something of a wake of chaos which makes her impossible to follow. My sisters are not quite so dramatically like this, but I'm confident that by the time they've had as many decades as he's had to perfect their technique, they'll be even more impressively difficult to follow through a crowd than he is.

Anyway, this evening, my uncle and aunt (Dad's brother and sister-in-law) came over for dinner, which was lovely (do I say 'lovely' too much? I feel like possibly I do). They're both really nice. My uncle is funny and fun in a jolly and avuncular way which is a lot like my Dad, and my aunt is quieter (I think maybe she's a bit shy in loud groups like my immediate family?) but also really interesting and nice to talk to. We had one of those evenings where everyone sort of hangs out in the kitchen for the whole preparation-eating-cleaning process and chats and jokes and laughs and holds forth about the state of the country and the global economy, the best route to drive tomorrow, and the difficulty of living in a world where whitegoods which break can never seem to be replaced by new ones which actually fit the space.

Also, for dessert, I made the first strudel I've ever made, and it went pretty well, I'd say, even though I forgot to make sure no-one had decided to freeze the filo pastry, which was nearly a disaster.

Sorry for this journal-style post. I went and saw "Snow White and The Huntsman" yesterday, and I might blog about that tomorrow, since I kept seeing things in it which I wanted to write about (not to say that it's deep and thought-provoking, more to say that there were strange inconsistencies and bits which seemed practically verbatim from other movies) while we watched it.

If there's anything in particular, by the way, you'd really like me to blog about, totally say so in the comments, and maybe I will! I mean I probably will. I'm so close to the bottom of the barrel here that I'm rounding off a post which is essentially "here is exactly what I did today with the enthralling enticement of maybe talking about a movie with Kristen Stewart in it. Obviously I could use help.