Good morning and welcome to The Galah Fortnightly, a letter from Galah’s editor Annabelle Hickson. Subscribers to the Galah print magazine are normally the only ones who get this email, but if you are a paying Substack subscriber, I’ll send it to you too.
My niece B, who lives in the top house (I live in the bottom house), has turned three. This means she is now old enough to go to the closest preschool which is 60km away. To get to this preschool, she catches the school bus with her brother, my daughter Harriet and the other children the bus driver Rob picks up along the way to town.
There was some hesitation about accepting a three-year-old as a regular passenger on the bus, which is technically for school-aged children. Harriet diplomatically suggested a “trial period” and then my sister offered to buy a car seat for the bus, primarily as a device to restrain B, with any safety features or fulfilled legal requirements being an added bonus. This was enough to get Rob across the line. And so now B with her big bag and tiny legs commutes to school two days a week. She hasn’t looked back. My sister and I don’t know what happens on the bus, vis à vis B and her mood swings, but Rob has not complained. Well, not to us anyway.
Meanwhile, over at boarding school on the coast my oldest daughter has started rowing. For reasons I cannot comprehend, if you do rowing you have to do it four times a week, mostly before the sun comes up. What is even more remarkable is that each morning a group of parents also turns up to the river, to cook breakfast for the rowers. I don’t know these people, but there they are, on those cold early mornings, frying eggs for my daughter and her zootie-clad peers.
And then yesterday, at a wonderful lunch organised by the Digital Publishers Alliance which was all about media brands connecting with advertising agencies, a guy called Deepak from a mega-agency that only deals with big companies like News Corp spent ten minutes giving me strategy tips for my much smaller media business, from which he will never make a cent. "We are literally only set up to deal with the big guys," he said, before laying out what sounded like a very sensible plan for Galah. He then had to "bounce" to pick up his kids from school – no bus driver Rob down here – and I went to the bathroom and texted myself a dot point summary of what he said before I forgot it all.
I am not sure why I am telling you these things, other than perhaps it's because I'm feeling grateful for all the people who do things they don’t really have to do, for people they don’t really know, but just because it helps.
Annabelle
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