by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman
PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND
I
am old enough that I remember unstructured time, when weekends were vast, slothful, stupefying wastelands of nothing to do. Back in Perth in the 1980s the weekend was such a nothing that petrol stations closed on a Sunday afternoon. Ruminate on that for a moment. If you weren’t at home in a boredom-induced coma and needed fuel, there was a roster system for servos. There would be a couple open, in a random opaque roulette that changed weekly, and you drove to your closed local petrol station to read the typed list of which ones were open. You’d then consult your UBD street directory and anxiously head off on a road trip. To the airport, perhaps, or somewhere else nowhere near where you needed to be, hoping against hope that you’d get there before your tank ran dry. Not infrequently the list was an old one. Oh, how we laughed. You could argue that if there was nothing to do on the weekend, why not spend half of it tooling around WA looking for petrol, but I speak on behalf of all sandgropers when I say that it was deeply shit. Still, are your weekends unstructured now? No, no they are not. Weekends are chockers, mate. Farmers’ markets, brunch, meeting up with friends, Tinder dates, parties, kids’ parties, kids’ sports, kids’ violin lessons, theatre, visiting your parents, art galleries, friends’ bands, dinner parties, dance parties, dance classes, birthday parties, renos, films, trips to Bunnings, a spot of laundry, a trip to the regions, op-shopping, cheese tasting, wine tasting, whisky tasting, beer tasting. And this is just normal, 9 to 5, regular-life weekends. If you work in hospo you’re fitting everything in around your weird demanding weekend hours. If you work freelance, which due to the gig economy is most of us, ditto. If you’re a performer or any kind of non-corporate public-facing human, Friday to Sunday is your working week, and you have multiple fairy parties/couples to marry/weddings to
DJ/stand-up gigs/matinees to perform/drag shows/spoken word readings to slam. This, btw, does not include festivals, which elevate the entire caper to a fourth dimension. So. Riddle me this 2021: why, WHY do diaries still insist on shoving Saturday and Sunday together on one line, down the bottom of the page? As though those days are worth half of Monday to Friday instead of twice as much? As though everyone’s weekend is just “nothing nothing church?” It has not been that way since Perth in the 1980s, and even then, frankly, weekends were only less busy because we couldn’t buy fricking petrol without packing lunch, a compass and a sleeping bag. It’s infuriating. Nearly all week-per-view diaries do this. Lured by availability and its tactile red cover, I bought a very sexy brand of diary for 2021; I’ll call it a Badgerskin to keep legal happy, and roger me sideways if it didn’t do this very thing. Oh my God – you market to creatives, what is the MATTER with you? The weekend is relegated to squinty little boxes. I can’t fit my life into those. I can’t fit my mornings. No-one can. Are diaries meant to be symbolic rather than practical? Am I just meant to wanker‑signal with my Badgerskin that I’m “cool” and a “deep-thinker”, rather than actually organise the threads of my complex life? Do the people who make diaries never actually use them? Just. Gah. If you’re not on board right now, you are either a “day-per-view” person, or someone who enjoys Google calendars. To the former I say, “Yeah but you can’t get a sense of the whole week,” and to the latter I say, “Under no circumstances will I spend more time thumb‑typing onto small devices”. It is no longer 1980. Just. Fix. The. Diaries.
Fiona is a writer and comedian who’s working for the weekend.
26 DEC 2020
Dear Me, Diary
The weekend is relegated to squinty little boxes. I can’t fit my life into those. I can’t fit my mornings. No-one can.
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Fiona