Putting out the bin, Marilyn style

For my usually unimaginative street has been quick to imitate those fun-loving Australians reported by the ABC to be donning fancy dress so as to get far more out of the only excursion allowed us now: putting out our wheelie bins.

Welcoming this all-too-rare opportunity to be cross-dressed in public I have leapt at becoming Marilyn and on Tuesdays (put-out-the-bins day) live my life excitingly like a candle in the wind. Some mornings I see and wave to (and they, also putting out their bins, wolf-whistle back at me) Napoleon at number 26 and Prince Charles at number 33.

But as before my mirror I painstakingly transform myself into the pneumatic Sex Symbol my mind turns to this week's Newspoll results. They show the Prime Minister is receiving a huge boost in approval during these bewildering times. Nearly two-thirds of the polled are satisfied with his performance, up a swaggering 20 points since such a thing was last measured.

And as I paint my lips and deftly stick on my beauty spot, I face the horrifying truth that my own hitherto hostile feelings towards Scott Morrison have ebbed. It could be me, there in the Newspoll findings, albeit not so much satisfied as no longer crankily dissatisfied.

Horror! What is happening to me? Have I become just as much of a fickle flibbertigibbet as the average voter? Is this blonde me in the mirror deserving of one of those reprehensible blonde jokes such as "How do you make a blonde Liberal voter's eyes light up? Shine a flashlight in her ears" or "How do you make a blonde Young Liberal laugh on Saturday? Tell her a joke on Wednesday"?

This phenomenon, the way in which leaders become uncannily popular in times of crisis, is very well known and a matter much analysed by political scientists and historians. But what is happening here, now, in this specific Australian case, the balance of our political minds now disturbed by terror?

My diagnosis of the slight thaw in my hitherto permafrosty feelings about our dull, mediocre, unimaginative Prime Minister is that I may subconsciously feel that a dull, mediocre Christian simpleton is just the kind of leader for our times.

Most of the time I pine for an intellectually exciting leader, for someone with sparkle, imagination, virtuosity and aplomb, a magician who says and does things that make one marvel and go "Gosh!"

My Australian prime ministerial model in such things is Gough Whitlam (for younger readers, who won't have heard of him, he was our spine-tinglingly reformist Labor prime minister from 1972-1975). And yet, even if enabled to bring Gough back I'm not sure that a thrilling prime minister is what an already white-lipped and trembling and pulse-quickened nation needs, now.

Meanwhile whenever lately one sees and hears Scott Morrison there is something comforting about how plodding, unremarkable, unfreaky and steady he seems, how lacking in spine-tingling dangerousness. He has done well, too, to suspend the fiscal tight-fistedness that is the hallmark of his dry tribe and, temporarily a socialist Super Nanny, to hurl billions in stimulus spendings at our crises.

And, perhaps his greatest achievement, he has so far resisted telling the nation (in Tongues) what he surely believes in his superstitious Pentecostal heart, that COVID-19 is Almighty God's punishment of us for our wicked ways.

This is the poor, bewildered best I can do to explain my wholly irrational semi-satisfaction with someone I know, when my mind isn't deranged by Covid terror and when I'm not being so blonde, is an awful human being none of us must ever vote for again.

With the hermit life now suddenly forced upon all of us up pops Laura Freeman's advice in The Spectator that "What one needs is a Working From Home hero".

Laura, marooned in her sixth-floor London apartment, reports: "I have set Antonello da Messina's painting Saint Jerome in His Study (c.1475) as my desktop background. Jerome, the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, sits at his desk in a spacious cell in Bethlehem."

"If you have half an hour to spare - and who doesn't?" she counsels, "have a go at zooming over the picture on the National Gallery website. The gift of art is to allow the mind to wander, even when the body may not."

Yes, readers, please do as Laura suggests. These sorts of virtual excursions, with so many galleries now using digital magic to enable us to visit them by figuratively stepping through our computer screens (just as Alice stepped through her looking glass, into the make-believe world beyond) are a godsend in these times.

Why not, since you are unlikely to get a thrilling glimpse of me as Marilyn, take the virtual tour of Tate Modern's Andy Warhol treasures where you will find lots of Warhol's legendary portrayals of the Blonde Bombshell?