The Thousands

Octogenarian lady of letters Mavis McKenzie came out of zine retirement especially for Sticky Institute’s Feed The Animals fundraiser and the result, namely The Life and Times of Mavis McKenzie #42, is as charming and warmly amusing as ever.

I like to think that Mavis is an elderly relative of Ken McKenzie, the bloke who used to tell all those preposterous tales back in the eighties, and that this is her most recent scrapbook of equally outlandish newspaper cuttings and oddly believable correspondence. Even when sending letters of complaint – informing Qantas that a sniffer dog has eaten some muffins out of her suitcase, for instance – it’s still a lot more good-natured than zine contemporary Nerf Jihad, and feels less piss-takey than Robin Cooper of The Timewaster Letters.

What’s more, the responses are quite interesting in themselves. The reply from Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco is the only one to dare suggest Mavis is fake (“Are you serious? I don’t believe for a second that you are”), while a letter to Melbourne Cemetery complaining that a stranger’s body has been buried “crossways” in her family plot reveals a lengthy story of “unacceptable practices …requiring police involvement” dating from the 1970s. Blimey. I just hope she continues to wield a pen in her arthritic hand for a few issues more.