Lamington: A type of Australian sponge cake – usually pink and frequently served with a cup of tea over which bored housewives will engage in conversations with little or no informational content, but with the metacontent 'Hey! Look! I'm not dead yet! Yay me!'.
I learnt to use the word lamington to mean 'meaningless chitchat' when I was 18 and living with my family in Australia. I don't know if it's a standard phrase or just a quirk of my Aunt's, but it stuck in my head like used chewing gum.
Sometimes, I wonder if weblogs aren't a form of lamington. I am pretty sure that this one is, at times. It's just my way of saying to the world, 'Ooh, still not pushing up the daisies! Go Suw!'.
This is not to denigrate lamington – it forms the same social purpose as, say, grooming amongst meerkats or baboons. It's an important bonding process. I'm just not sure what blog-lamington is bonding me to.
UPDATE: I posted this, and then suddenly thought 'Oh dear, that sounds a bit maudlin', but I'm from the never take a post down school of thought, so I'm left wondering where this post came from, and why, and what I should do about it. Because, honestly, I am far from feeling maudlin at the moment, quite the opposite in fact.
Maybe it's knocking round in this house on my own with none but two cats to talk to that's done it. Maybe it's the comedown after the Shatner-induced huge enormous traffic spike. Maybe it's listening repeatedly to Wolfman and Pete Doherty's For Lovers, the most heartbreakingly beautiful song I have heard in ages, knowing that Pete's genius is in danger from his own inability to clean himself up, stuck as he is on the scag.
I am left, however, thinking that my attempt to lighten this post up a bit has just massively backfired on me.
I think I'll leave it here then.
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