My generation’s talkin’

“The Silent Generation moniker (C8) doesn’t apply to my 93-year-old mother who Zooms in from Scotland every Monday on her tablet,” writes Pauline McGinley of Drummoyne. “Last week as her lovely face came into view, her very first words were to alert my husband that a button was missing from his shirt. She doesn’t miss a trick and is happy to let you know about it.”

They’re baaaaack: “There is a colony of brush turkeys living near me on a very busy road who regularly use the pedestrian crossing,” notes Vicky Marquis of North Sydney. “What I can’t work out is why they need to get to the other side?”

John Greenway of Wentworth Falls says, “The discussion about naming Sydney’s great universities reminds me of a story, maybe in Granny’s Column, about the man who got into a taxi at Sydney Airport and said: ‘the University, please’. The driver asked: ‘Kenso or Chippo, mate?’”

“Moving from tertiary to secondary, in the 1960s, I attended Balgowlah Boys High near Manly,” reflects Jim Rogers of Byron Bay. “Its habitues lovingly called it Bally Hai, after the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Private school students from the area though gave it the derogatory moniker of ‘Shacktown’ as the school still retained numerous buildings from its days as a Naval depot.”

Col Burns of Lugarno knows it: “Even though I attended the unfashionable, sandstone-deprived ‘Kenso Tech’, the real social sorting was based on my high school. Among work colleagues from the likes of Scots, King’s and Knox, I discovered that ‘PHS’ was the perfect response when asked where I’d gone to school. It was vague enough to invite generous assumptions. Peakhurst High School, on the other hand, raised eyebrows immediately.”

Still at school, George Manojlovic of Mangerton thinks “the idlers who used Classic Comics for their exams instead of reading the actual novels (C8) must be grateful the Choose Your Own Adventure books weren’t part of the syllabus. They would’ve been too lazy to have one.”

While David Sayers of Gwandalan reckons the Tuncurry curry house called “Tuns of Curry” (C8) highlighted by Heather Harman, is clever, he still gives the tip to noted eatery “South West Woks”.

Along the same lines, Tom Pinkey of Newtown advises that “there is a stall in the Oxford Markets in the UK called ‘Nothing’. The stall next door is named ‘Next to Nothing’.”