WPC: Inside

INSIDE (Meredith): We’ve moved. To Sydney. Two months in, and we’ve come a long way (yes, in both senses).

We’ve found and moved into a house. We’ve been reunited with our container-load of stuff (with mixed emotions). We have a smattering of go-to playgrounds, a favourite café (Flood Street Carousel in Leichhardt), a 2015 kindy spot for our elder daughter, a selection of IKEA furniture (hello, IKEA, it’s been a while), a bank account, a preferred supermarket… (What we don’t have is friends, community, or a sense of normality. I know that will come, and I know the things to do to make it happen. But just now, with the first heady rush of discovery behind us and the feeling of belonging still to come, it seems like a long road ahead.)

We were essentially toy-less while our gear was being shipped – so I was working harder than usual to keep our two preschoolers amused, while also trying to conduct a house search. There was a lot more Doc McStuffins and Play School than is probably optimal, but there were also some days where I felt myself growing into my new role of full-time parent.

This was one of those days. The four-year-old and I started out by mixing oil and milk, but things got more exciting when she asked to use food colouring. We soon realised that coloured milk, added to oil, would form coloured globules (which are presumably inverse micelles) – and that we could make bigger or smaller ones by stirring slow or fast. Then we got cocky: we made three separate pots (well, shot glasses) of globules in oil, each a different colour, then added spoonfuls of each to a glass bowl.

I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. We watched as the coloured blobs bobbled past each other like cartoon planets or moody speech bubbles. Sometimes they collided forcefully enough to merge – and their colours mixed, slowly enough to watch.

We made mix after mix, fiddling with globule size and colour proportions to get the most pleasing combination. We stirred, then stared, as the primary colours of the initial mixture tended towards rainbow shades and eventually a smudgy brown, and the large globules became tiny ones – essentially a sludge on the bottom of the glass.

In our short experiment, absorbed in the addictive joy of making something beautiful, we’d explored miscibility, colour mixing and entropy. Not bad for 20 minutes while the toddler slept.

PS The link to ‘Inside’ comes from the fact that the milk globules exist inside the oil, and specifically inside a lipid monolayer that gives them passage, if you like, through the oil. It’s late at night – I can’t decide it this is too obvious to point out or too obscure to be valid!