The boon of Zoom has a gloomy side

Now, with flesh and blood face-to-face meetings impossible, some of us find ourselves using Zoom, adapting to it with aplomb. University of the Third Age (U3A) groups in particular are finding Zoom a godsend.

One is grateful for Zoom but for some people of my age (carbon dating shows me to have been born during the prime ministership of Ben Chifley) Zoom has a disadvantage.

It is that while one is using Zoom one is looking into the computer screen's living mirror reflection of one's face. For those of us who are no longer pretty to look at (I have long since learned to avert my eyes from myself when I am shaving) this is an ordeal.

There is some brilliant poetry written about our tragic relationships with our mirrors. My Zoom experiences remind me of Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror. In it the talkative mirror reports:

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Yes, every time I use Zoom I think of the smooth-faced, flaxen-haired, dimpled Adonis who used to be in my mirrors but who is now replaced by the terrible, wizened, bald, shark-like fish which must have eaten him.

I have had enough of this. And so have bought several celebrity masks (they're just $7.90 each from lifesizecutouts.com.au) to wear when I am Zooming.

Clothing of the body is forbidden by my U3A Nude Poetry Reading Group but masks are OK and next time I shall participate with the young, pleasing face of either Jacinda Ardern or Meghan Markle.

Meanwhile the necessity of being banged up in the dungeon of one's home has been the mother of invention.

And one invented pastime, fun to do and strangely mind-improving has me and a poetical friend (I am in the aspirational leafy inner south and she is far away in pioneering Gungahlin) using the miracle of e-mail to write and exchange limericks that use the names of Canberra suburbs.

It all began when she sighed how difficult it was to find any word to rhyme with Gungahlin. Rising to that challenge I rattled off this:

A lovelorn young man of Gungahlin

Tinder-wooed a fayre damsel of Talinn;

But COVID's travel ban draconian

Made flying to meet the Estonian

Unthinkable for that swain of Gungahlin.

I followed up that blockbuster with this:

A language purist of Gungahlin

Forbade cowboys to address her as darlin'.

"When you cowpokes leave off your Gs

It causes me great unease,"

Snapped that polished sheila of Gungahlin.

My friend bounced back with Gungahlin limericks of her own (all much better than mine) and then turned to the challenge of rhyming my suburb's name:

A decaying old journo of Garran

Found his garden increasingly barren.

Climate change was to blame

Now nothing's the same

Since Garran was rezoned Saharan.

Then I branched out into Belconnen, with:

A shocked Pentecostalist of Kaleen

Received a sext she found deeply obscene.

Her legs went quite weak

And her hitherto pink cheek

Was left bloodlessly isabelline.*

From there my friend and I played a spirted game of limerick tennis. She won. I'd reproduce more of her limericks here but am too much of an only child to share my column's writing with anyone.

But I commend our game to readers as an infectious creative challenge that may appeal to lots of you marooned at home, your inner-versifier bursting to emerge.

Don't restrict yourself to your own suburb although if your suburb has a hard-to-rhyme name, like Yarralumla, the challenge is especially exciting. And whatever your suburb's name's rhyming potential you will enjoy the sensation of giving your suburb its first ever literary mention.

And if, like me, malice comes easily to you don't feel your limericks have to be bland and kindly. One of my most satisfying ones opens "A vile millionaire NIMBY of Forrest ..." while another begins "An anti-light-rail zealot of Duffy ..."

Of course we all associate limericks with schoolboy/undergraduate vulgarity (there are a thousand blush-making ones about people of Nantucket). And somehow I've noticed this tendency trying to assert itself in me.

So for example I keep coming up with opening lines such as "A haggard old onanist of Banks ... " (I shudder to think what word I was lining up to rhyme with Banks) and "A promiscuous Young Liberal of Bonner ..." and then having to fight Satan's urgings of me to go on and filthily complete these muckworks.

Wrenching myself away from those indecencies I get to work instead on family limericks about an amateur herpetologist of Bonython crushed to death by his very own python, about that early morning jogger of Hughes who encountered a stampede of gnus.

Then there are my political limericks such as the one about how a lifelong Liberal voter of Moncrieff had prejudices that beggared belief.

Then among my adult lyrics there is my acclaimed erotic masterpiece (based on a true story) about that unorthodox sex therapist of Fadden who taught lovers novel ways to pleasure and gladden.

So go for it Canberra versemongers,

Indulge your poetical hungers.