The Sun-Herald

Gongs for the good guys

I could tell you who wore the best frock or dated the most eligible celebrity or misbehaved most on the party scene. But I'd rather salute some of 2007's genuinely nice people.

It's perhaps not the most obvious place to search for good hearts, but you do find them while doing this job - some high profile, others flying so far under the radar they're practically subterranean. Here are just a few I encountered this year.

The Givers
This city parties hard, but it gives hard, too. Each year, among the launches, birthdays, premieres and opening nights on the social calendar there's a round of charity bashes which raise mind-boggling amounts of money for excellent causes. This year, their collective haul ran into millions. I salute the volunteers responsible for:

The Chandon Supper Club- Camp Quality children's charity
The Gold Dinner - Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation
Silver Party - Sydney Children's Hospital emergency department
Global Illumination Australia - National Breast Cancer Foundation
Wharfies' Lunch - Variety, the Children's Charity
Karaoke For Heart Kids - supporting families of children with heart disease
Animalia - Sydney University's Veterinary Science Foundation.
Taronga Zoo 'Ocean's 100' launch - the zoo's Great Southern Oceans Appeal
Kyentse Norbu Rinpoche's Buddhist-themed art exhibition - Lotus Outreach Australia for disadvantaged children in Asia
Snow Leopard Conservation Dinner - joint Taronga Foundation and Australian Himalayan Foundation in aid of endangered snow leopards
Gabrielle Pool's Art Exhibition at the Bayswater Brasserie - Oasis Africa, in aid of African orphans

Beyond the call of duty
Some praiseworthy workers I met on my travels in 2007:

Terry the concierge at the beautiful Conrad hotel in Hong Kong. OK, he's paid to be nice, but nothing was too much trouble. As well as securing an appointment with the city's top hair stylist on a busy Saturday so I'd look my best for a friend's wedding, he made this lone traveller feel as if the hotel was my comfortable home from home.

The cabin manager on Thai Airways flight TG613 from Kunming to Bangkok on September 3. While our aircraft was delayed on the tarmac for nearly two hours by a missing passenger she transformed the cabin mood from enraged to entertained with wit and some talented impersonations. Even the grumpiest businessman was still smiling when we took off.

The staff at the Langham Hotel in London. When I had my bag stolen one evening in a bar across town, they were as comforting, compassionate and helpful as friends would have been, offering practical suggestions and soothing words. They stopped the incident from spoiling the whole trip.

Local Heroes

The amazing animal lovers at Sydney Dogs and Cats Home who work tirelessly on behalf of the city's homeless animals, seven days a week, 365 days a year. They rely on donations to prevent unnecessary euthanasia of healthy, loving pets long enough to find them new 'forever' homes. Sadly, post-Christmas is peak time for them and they need help more than ever.

The talented Sydney-based volunteer Tibetan writers who this year put together the first English language magazine by Tibetans in Australia, Tibetan Voice. Most of the team are ex-political prisoners but their optimism and creative spirit remains undiminished. They rely on donations to print the magazine, which is a valuable tool for preserving their beleaguered culture. Look out for it in cafes or bookshops around the city or enquire at gyangbod.@yahoo.com.au

Random acts of kindness

It's a rare and pleasant surprise to receive a real letter on actual paper these days, and all the more so when it's an encouraging one from a lovely mum, like Jamie Durie's. Joy Durie surprised me with a thank-you letter after she enjoyed the feature I wrote about her son for Sunday Life magazine, and it made me smile during a stressful week. Jamie is one of Australia's most likeable and genuine personalities, and it's clearly in the genes.

• by Amy Cooper at 12:47 AM
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No, I haven't done my Christmas shopping

I meant to brave it today, I really did. But the prospect of facing the frenzied, consuming masses and doing battle with mad-eyed mums for the last chocolate snowman filled me with nameless dread. I watched TV instead.

As I settled down with my favourite show, Seconds From Disaster (it works as both entertainment and life metaphor), and noted with delight it was the one about the Hindenburg, free-floating anxiety kicked in. My house seemed to suddenly lack many essential items; scented candles, holly wreaths, jolly festive figures ... and presents for other people. "You should be shopping," intoned a spectral voice above the dying screams of the Hindenburg's passengers. It sounded a bit like Cliff Richard. "Shut up!" I yelled. "Leave me alone!"
But it didn't. "You haven't even put up your tree...." boomed Cliff.
All right, I haven't put it up. The tree and I have a troubled relationship. It's one of those artificial ones that you unfold and bend into shape and as a result it's always left in the wardrobe until the very last minute and erected with unseemly haste, often on Christmas morning while my visitors are parking their car outside. One year it fell over as everyone arrived, because there was a lipstick wedged underneath.
Another year, in my wilder, single days, I went out on Christmas Eve and as wild, single girls do, brought home a man. "Do you actually celebrate Christmas?" he said, looking around at my unadorned house. "Actually yes,"I told him, and to prove it fetched the big box containing my neglected tree. Bless that bloke, he put the tree up and decorated it - and it looked nicer than ever before. (It turned out he'd once been a window dresser.)
I don't bring elves home anymore and it's a shame, because every year I leave it all until the last minute and then resent the late scramble of people who've done the same thing and resist joining their collective hell until it really is the eleventh hour - and then panic.
It's a familiar cycle for those of us who quite like a bit of yuletide but just aren't into it enough to embrace it early and with military precision. We're too busy and too indifferent to spend December decking our halls and making our lists and checking them twice, but we're also just susceptible enough to the Christmas spirit to start feeling wistful, under-candled and tinsel-challenged when the big day is upon us. There's that sense you should have tried harder, that you're missing out on the full festive experience. This can compel you to rush straight to the nearest shops and overcompensate horribly by buying a set of holly-patterned napery and a mini nativity scene with moving parts. The road to Christmas Day is littered with those unsightly impulses, and entire industries are built upon them.
I did try harder this year. In late November I bought a family-sized tin of Quality Street from my favourite purveyor of vice, the British Lolly Shop. This would do nicely for my gathering of mainly British 'orphans' on Christmas day, I thought. Within a fortnight, I'd eaten every last chocolate, thus ensuring I had to begin my post-Christmas fitness regime one month early.
So there I was, watching the Hindenburg but haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Presents and resolutely resisting the urge to run out and buy a gross of reindeer antlers when the phone rang. It was my boyfriend, who lives overseas and comes from a culture that does not celebrate Christmas.
"Hello darling. Have you put up your tree yet?" he said.
Argh!" I replied, and dropped the phone like a hot mince pie.
Luckily the shops were closed by then. But there's tomorrow and Monday and a whole lot of kitsch awaiting. There will be no escape.
Meanwhile, I'm pondering this interesting rumination on Christmas kitsch and also preparing my New Year's Honours List. This will consist of quietly heroic people I've come across this year while working, and I promise none of them will be included for wearing fabulous frocks, shagging celebrities or doing anything in any way grand.
All suggestions welcome, and a happy Christmas to you all. Take care.

• by Amy Cooper at 10:13 PM
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Wanted: a toyboy for the tree fairy

Every Christmas, I ponder the march of time. It's been happening for a few years; right around now, the same unwelcome thought pops up like a stray credit card bill in Santa's sack and suddenly I'm wondering why the decades are hurtling by so fast.

Perhaps it's because Christmas consists mainly of things you see just once a year, and everything looks older after 12 months hidden away. Then it's only a small step from the box of fading tree decorations to the mirror, and wondering exactly how many of your own Christmases are starting to show.
"I hope I'm ageing gracefully," Mum said to me recently. "No-one seems to, these days." She reckons no-one's willing to surrender their youth any more and soon real young people won't be able to enjoy themselves because their clothes, music and culture have been hijacked by the world's growing army of ageing 'kidults'. You know, the ones who read Harry Potter and buy streetwear well into their second half-century. And the forty-something man who lives near me and rides a skateboard to work. (I don't care if he's in a creative industry - it looks daft. I work in a creative industry too, but I don't feel compelled to ride a pink tricycle to work.)
And yet forty-somethings and teens buy the same labels. More men than boys will find Playstations under their tree next week.
In my thirties, I frequently ask myself: am I ageing gracefully? You can very easily take your eye off the ball and before you know it, people are muttering 'mutton' as you totter past in something small from Dotti. Last week I reached for a hot pink hoodie on a clothes rack and a teenager beat me to it. I like the same music as my 13-year-old cousin. She's been eyeing off my MAC lipsticks.
Down at her end of the age spectrum, ageing gracefully just means doing it as fast as possible. When I could still count my years on two hands I remember believing that really, I was old enough to wear heels and make-up and catch George Michael's eye (of course, I had no idea this was an ambition best left to the little boy two doors down who liked Barbie). Back then, just like now, I had two ages: the real one and the imaginary ideal. We all do.
These days, though, they're the same thing. That's what's disturbing Mum; the old yardsticks for charting our progress through life have gone. Marriage and kids don't date you the way they used to, and besides, they're just one of a zillion choices available during that extended window called life. Demi Moore may raise eyebrows, but with her definition-defying mix of kids, career and toyboy husband, she's flying a proud flag for our century's latest phenomenon: ageless living. Whether you call it your prime, peak or even 'kidult', it's simply where you happen to be at, and it isn't measured in numbers.
One of the saddest poems about ageing is TS Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, about a man mourning his lost youth. He ogles young beauties and sighs: "they will not sing to me." Well, these days they'd hand him the Viagra and bear his children. Even better, their younger brothers could be dangling off my arm when I'm Demi's calendar age.
There are pitfalls to ageless living because we're still learning how to navigate a life without landmarks, but on the whole I'm glad those landmarks are disappearing. Agelessness can be confusing, but it's liberating.
Besides, those Christmas baubles don't look so bad. The fairy on my parents' tree is the Goldie Hawn of decorations; keeping it together with her abundant blonde hair and two-centimetre waistline. You wouldn't know she hasn't been young since the sixties, or that she's had work done - a ballpoint pen under her skirt in place of legs that dropped off years ago. I think she should have a toyboy this year, because it's lonely at the top.

• by Amy Cooper at 06:53 PM
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'Tis the season for folly

This time of year is peak season in my job, and life's tapestry is never richer. This week I have mingled with eleven Britney Spearses, innumerable pixies, the Three Amigos, a human ecstasy pill, the Pope, some ghosts, Robert Mugabe and the genuine Lionel Richie. And it's still early days.

For any eager observer of human behaviour, Christmas is the gift that keeps on giving - a bottomless stocking crammed with the entire spectrum of spectacle. Everything is heightened, amplified and dusted with a light coating of icing sugar to create one big juicy cake of craziness. And it's all thanks to the festive season's greatest joy: excuses.
One of my wildest friends, whose most mind-boggling antics are reserved for Yuletide, once said: "I love the festive season most of all because in the name of Christmas, everything is justifiable."
And it is. We're at the annual amnesty on ill-advised sexual exploits, binge-spending, inebriation on a grand scale and any other act normally attributed to grave moral weakness. Santa gives us noble reasons for silliness. I often wish he worked full-time.
Then again, no. For starters, I'd be broke from constant shopping so frenzied that if the stores were people, they'd be left feeling naked and violated. At Christmas you can pillage willy-nilly under the guise of benevolence, with only your credit card to witness that most purchases are "a little treat for me (it's been a tough year)." At other times, labouring under a mountain of bulging shopping bags screams indulgence and spend-aholism. Right now, it says 'Santa's little helper'.
Imagine, too, if festive passion was for life and not just for Christmas. I've seen friends' goodwill extend to taxi drivers, a lingerie sales assistant (particularly inappropriate, considering the perpetrator was buying undies for his girlfriend at the time) and an Elvis who looked more like an impressionist painting of the King than the real thing.
As a teenager, I worked in a balloon shop one Christmas vacation and fell for the boss, briefly. I think the helium made me delirious. He knew how to make those animals from bendy balloons and perhaps it seemed erotic at the time. I don't know. All I do know is that the bubble - or rather the balloon - burst when January came and customers grew weary of festive fun. He said I wasn't flogging the Valentines Day helium hearts hard enough, so I said he had an inflated ego (all right, I didn't think of that at the time, but I wish I had). He's a memory best left in the cupboard with the decorations: wonderful to bring out every year for fun, but nothing you'd want to live with.
There's always an exception. One friend met her husband at a Christmas party. It was a fully-fledged shocker of an office bash - hats were worn, underwear flashed, and grudges aired. There were incidents in cupboards. She'd just joined the company and he was visiting from a regional office, so neither had come as an elf, a Christmas pudding or a Santa. Instead, they bonded while others self-destructed. I remember them holding hands on the stairs, while the financial director plummeted past with what appeared to be a mince pie spot-welded to his head. It was like a wartime romance, and it's still going strong.
For the less successful, there's plenty of post-festive damage limitation literature, providing everything from holistic hangover relief to debt management to legal help and post-traumatic stress counselling. Which is useful if, like me, you've seen a loved one climb a public Christmas tree, drop his pants and sing Last Christmas, wearing antlers and a flashing Rudolf nose.
Even in the name of Christmas, some crimes are inexcusable: Cliff Richard, for example. But most will be forgiven. We're prepared to accept that everyone means well, and the off-target gift, the mistletoe fumble and the party sideshow are all part of what happens when people try hard to connect. Christmas is like love in that way; a hit-and-miss business with an addiction to kitsch, that makes optimistic fools of us all.

• by Amy Cooper at 12:15 AM
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My night as a Frenchwoman

This week I found myself on a boat with 500 Europeans from the various Sydney chambers of commerce. Now there's a small-talk challenge.

To help us cross cultural barriers everyone wore a badge with their national flag on it. I wore a French one, partly because the French Chamber had invited me and also to make more friends. Wearing the English flag, I've often found, can be the social equivalent of an impenetrable stutter and tends to result in weather dialogue, laboured jokes about sport or - among fellow ex-pats - musings on the best road route from Birmingham to Hastings. In short, we English are not widely considered the life and soul of the party and in international social gatherings English-ness is something best concealed, like your bum crack.
So, disguised as French people, my friend and I roamed the vessel. Introductions were easy thanks to the labels (I'm now an advocate of name and flag badges for all social events. Imagine it - no more 'do you know who I am?') and as we mingled it struck me not only that people love talking to alleged Frenchwomen, but also that our lack of a common language was an advantage, not a barrier. You tend to skip the small-talk and cut straight to the point. To make yourself understood, you can't avoid speaking clearly and candidly, you think about what you're trying to say rather than the social niceties and you listen properly, too. Communication becomes beautifully candid and succinct.
It made me think about my friend Stewart, who likes his women the way he likes his cars: imported from Europe. His girlfriends never speak much English, and Stewart's foreign language abilities are confined to ordering drinks and asking where the toilets are.
I asked him recently how he manages. Isn't male-female communication challenging enough, what with men and women coming from different planets, one sex able to read maps but not park cars and all those other obstacles described in mating manuals about talking to each other?
Stewart was frank. "It levels the verbal playing field," he said. "I've been out-argued by women too many times. I seem to have more success with ones who don't know 20 English words for 'upset.'
Ah, minimalist compatibility. I remember it well, from a long-ago and completely superficial encounter with an Italian waiter on holiday. He spoke no English whatsoever and my sparse Italian, acquired from childhood piano lessons, consisted solely of phrases like 'fast,' 'slow', 'softly' and 'smoothly'. This vocabulary, as you'd expect, suited the nature of that relationship perfectly.
The problem with some languages is they're pretty enough to make even a cretin appear eloquent. I'm still saddened by the discovery that although his voice is pure poetry, and he has the face and body of a Roman statue, my favourite Italian soccer star is considered a dim-witted peasant by his compatriots. My waiter was probably the same. But it's easy to overlook someone's defects if his every mumble sounds like opera.
In today's over-complicated mating game, no shared language could be a serious relationship asset - not just for pragmatic blokes like Stewart, but for we women, too. Instead of agonizing over what a man really meant by "I'll call you," you can wonder if that's what he said at all or if he was just trying to tell you the name of his dog. Without the language skills to infer, conceal or over-analyse, you remove a whole layer of complexity from your dating dialogue. And if you say something you later regret, you can just tell your partner you meant something else entirely and blame the idiosyncracies of the English language. It's a bit like blaming booze, but more sophisticated.
It's strange, how once you start pondering a subject, it pops up everywhere. After speaking to Stewart I read a newspaper report saying the average woman has a vocabulary of 23,000 words, twice as large as the average man's. Also, the part of men's brains ruling speech gets blocked towards nightfall and their verbal ability falters. It seems that neurology, rather than beer, is to blame for all those stunted conversations in bars after dark. And with that handicap I guess you can't blame a bloke for wanting to level the playing field.

• by Amy Cooper at 07:33 PM
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