It's time to restore power and former glory.
Words Lucinda Stump
I left a recent visit to the skin doctor feeling utterly infuriated. I brought his attention to some rough patches of skin on my back. “Benign,” he pronounced reassuringly after studying them through his magnifying glass. “Only a couple of senile barnacles.”
My husband’s helpless laughter when I reported the results to him later did not help my mood.
Only two weeks earlier, on holiday in Scotland, I had trudged no fewer than 28 kilometres over a windswept, rocky coastline and not even felt stiff the next day. I wasn’t having any of this “senile” nonsense. The waters of the North Atlantic were so cold that a plan to take advantage of the reportedly warm jet stream and swim in its pristine waters ended up as a six-second dash before the icy temperature registered with my numbing brain. No chance of catching barnacles there. At home in Australia, I’m a day’s drive from the ocean, for goodness sake, and I spend more time cleaning my pool than actually swimming in it. Barnacles? No way.
I hastily consulted Google. It turns out that the Australian Navy estimates that heavy barnacle growth on ships increases weight and drag by as much as 60 per cent. That made me think.
The truth is we are beginning to show signs of wear and tear. My husband’s balance isn’t what it was, and he sometimes stumbles into things, calling into question his “profiterole vision” as I once heard a local contractor call it after he accidentally drove a too-wide implement through a too-narrow gate. Just before we began sowing our winter crop, our son broke his arm playing a ludicrously dangerous game with a funny-shaped ball. And even the dog is referred to as a “frequent flyer” by the vet. He is on his third “cone of shame” for the year, after another tangle with a kangaroo and a barbed-wire fence.
As for our house, well, it is completely adrift. After a long-undetected leak during the floods of 2023, the drawers in the kitchen began to mysteriously slide open overnight. Now, when I come out in the morning, I find them staring at me open-mouthed, as if caught mid conversation. An orange dropped at the eastern end of the kitchen will roll up to four metres before coming to rest in the west under the fridge. The cornice has moved away from the wall, allowing 150 years of dust and mouse droppings to fall out of the roof onto the floor. To be fair, the house is a lot older than we are, but we are all in need of a bit of attention.
Part of my job description here on our farm (the same one I began drafting 30 years ago, now on its seventh tab on an Excel spreadsheet) is WHS: work health and safety. Yesterday, I rolled a half-empty 44-gallon drum behind the workshop to sit in front of a long piece of iron that I thought someone might trip over (no prizes for guessing who).
You might say WHS is right in my wheelhouse, so it shouldn’t be too hard to restore a bit of order around here. I plan to press-gang the rest of the crew into returning everything to its former glory. We won’t have to look far to find examples of things that are in fantastic nick. The children’s treehouse (they are now in their late 20s and 30s) is one of the most over-engineered structures in New South Wales. And don’t get me started on the loading ramp – it won’t reach its use-by-date for a few hundred years.
So, taking these two mighty structures as our exemplars, we are going to dedicate 2026 to making everything shipshape again, and that includes ourselves. A further Google deep dive reveals that a barnacle also refers to “a component added to a product to correct a defect and improve functionality”. Now that’s a definition I can work with.
