Christina Collins – Page 4

Tenacious Tasmania

One hideously early morning in July we left our fair territory to explore Tasmania. I had been looking forward to it. To my Australian friends (and several of my English ones over the phone), I’ve been moaning a lot about the Australian winter. Fie, woman! I hear you say! Winter days drenched in glorious sunshine, frequently topping 15 degrees? Even the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ubiquitously ‘BOM’ on everyone’s phone, which sounds less authoritative) recommends UV protection for an hour a day in the middle of winter. So what the feck is my problem? And what has that got to do with Tasmania?

We’ve all heard of the phenomenon ‘hygge’ that Ikea’s made a whole bloody industry out of (stick this post into a word doc – you’ll see the Danish word is so much an accepted commercial part of our language it doesn’t even come up as a spelling mistake). The Dutch have a word for it too; ‘gezellig,’ (now Microsoft doesn’t like that one) and these words evoke a very specific kind of notion to their native speakers of blankets, fires, hot chocolate, books, safety, friendship, and smiles. And before the British lament their anaemically deficient vocabulary, the English language has a word for it too: cosy.

I’ve always been fascinated untranslateables, ever since I travelled Europe, and my aunt bought a book about them called ‘In Other Words…’ (which I can’t find; which one of you bastards has it…). I can identify no Italian word that conveys the ‘cosy’ sentiment. But I bet in the rough and aggressive half French sounds of the Piedmontese dialect just south of the Alps, they got a word for it. Any country that habitually buries itself under winter’s grey blanket for a solid sixth months has this need for coziness. It contrasts necessarily to the misery of winter; you need first to battle through rain driven horizontal by 50k/h winds to reach a place of safety where you will curl with relief into a large chair, huddle a blanket over you, drink tea, read books, encourage anyone foolish enough to get up to light some candles and bring more tea, and be happy. The sort of thing where if a beam of sunlight peeps into the red-bathed warmth, you almost regret it. Go away, you think, you’re interrupting the cosy.

People who have winter in their souls wallow in it. It’s the best thing about winter. Admittedly, there are the virtuous days where silver morning frost trembles under a weak yellow sun and you tramp through the forest and see deer capering in the shadows. But then you deem yourself sufficiently exercised and thankfully head home, fully justified to sit about on your arse for the rest of the week. Winter is rest. You can’t be out and about doing things all the time, you hibernate, you don’t feel like exploring and adventuring, and you stay cozy and sit it out, spending more time with friends over pub lunches by roaring fires and congratulate yourself for having achieved even that. And of course, in the middle of it all, piercing the misery, are the winter celebrations (Christmas), where boaters give each other a log from their own store on Christmas Eve, people get together to eat and drink, you’re justified starting on the old bucks fizz at 10am, beautiful decorations cheer us up and we are cosy together while the wind shouts outside.

So how does this all work for a nation that mostly isn’t troubled by winter and even those few states that are don’t have the month-long celebration to welcome them in from the hungry teeth of frost?

Well, they mostly just screw their eyes up tight and wait for it to be over.

So I was looking forward to truly wallowing in winter in ‘deepest darkest Tassie’ as it has been described to me. I was going to dance Morris at the Huon Valley Midwinter Festival and I was going to drink and be merry.

So it rained a lot. That’s ok, gives you an excuse to retire to the pub. But the only time one transfers from cosy to bleak is when you can’t actually get out of the rain, as was rather the case here, which is not what I meant about wallowing in winter at all. The accumulated sides practised the processional dance on a dangerously slight incline behind the shed where we stashed all our stuff at the festival, and several of us took a tumble. Throughout the weekend, there was much falling over in the mud for Morris dancers but all the jigging about does keep you warm.

The festival was really beautiful. Willie Smith’s Cider began four generations ago in the Huon Valley in Tasmania by Willie Smith (whose parents had arrived here at the expense of her Majesty) when he planted the first tree in 1888. Back then, the Huon Valley exported apples all over the empire and was known as The Apple Isle (did you know that? I didn’t know that), and they got creative when markets changed (that’s free trade) and went to making organic cider. Our friends told us something about Granny Smith of this family being the woman who grew the titular apple…we could find no evidence of this on google, but the cider was delicious. I’m not a huge cider drinker, but I loved every drop. The Huon Valley itself is beautiful; sweeping tall hills, forests, mountains and eye achingly green; and the festival site was the best place to enjoy it. Morris dancers, and Morris groupies (!) were provided FREE accommodation for the duration of the festival in a nice little hotel, free buses took us to the grounds and back, and we got magical red wrist bands that meant you could drink as MUCH CIDER AS YOU WANT FOR FREE. This was a staggering boon, and, I hoped, sufficient compensation for Yates enduring a whole weekend of Morris. There were about four tented stages, a feasting tent with splendid food options from curry to fish, cosy little bars and it was all brilliantly decorated. Apples were the main adornment, and I shudder for the people who must have contracted apple-based fatigue from threading hundreds of apples onto single wires that were then hung as beautiful baubles absolutely everywhere. There were little fires around and a dirty great bonfire in the middle. It did rain and it was cold, and there was little getting out of it, but it did not dampen my revels as I capered and fucked up dance after dance (never mind – it’s only Cotswolds), glugged cider and swanned around in an apple haze. The wassailing ceremony is apparently the biggest in the world, and all 50 or so of us processed to the apple trees (4 sort of separated ceremonial little ones at the top of a slope, almost like a stage) carrying torches or eucalyptus branches and sang and shouted to welcome the spirits and scare away evil and I loved every minute of it.

Yates’ experience was, er, somewhat different. He spent much of the day shivering over a book, waiting for bands to start (there were awkwardly long gaps between acts and he even caught himself saying ‘thank goodness for the Morris really…) and the free booze didn’t warm him up as much as the dancing did me. Still. We watched a great act – Ruben Reeves, check him out – and he did a public duty of warming up 100 people in the middle of winter by getting them to do first a circle pit, then a dance off, and we rocked the hell out until the tent was filled with people stripped to their waists with the little pile of jumpers and coats that we all remember from our club days piled up in front of the stage. Awesome.

After the joys of the festival, we packed our mud sodden bells and hankies away and looked forward to a few days of holiday to really soak up the cosy. Away from tents, and closer to solid buildings that serve beverages. I had this conviction that the place we had booked on Bruny Island (beautiful place off the coast just south east of Hobart) had a log burner and I was excited to cuddle up by it. I do miss my old log burner on the boat. We went to Bonorong wildlife sanctuary, laughed at kookaburras, cuddled Kangaroos and stroked wombats and koala bears. Total win. Then we sped off to the Island of Bruny!

It seemed odd to me that after getting off the mainland to explore a small island, we then left that island to explore another, yet smaller island. I had a sort of Russian doll effect – like how many small islands do I have to visit before I find the final one? Anyway, this place is foodie heaven. They got an oyster place called ‘Get Shucked’ (or as I kept calling it in my infinite coolness, ‘what the shuck?’), they got a place really dedicated to whey….and make beer and cheese, they got a honey place, they got vineyards. I was excited. See previous post for my Australian food adventures which had eventually led me to this heady place.

Yates wasn’t as excited as me about oysters (I again refer you to his wry comments on the matter of molluscs recorded in the previous post), certainly not a whole dozen of them, but one set of the 12 was lightly battered and deep fried and what the hell’s not to like about that? I slurped down a couple with great delight, then seized another that was cooked with a little chorizo and a wonderful broth which I slung down my neck – imagine my horror when I discovered it was bloody hot, of course, wasn’t it. The plain, raw ones with lemon were me fav though. Then we hopped back in the car and wheel spun out of there down the (only) road about a k or 2 and got to the beer place where we tasted a cheese so marvellously soft it was making a run for the door, and I generously had a beer flight of 4 so driver Yates could enjoy a sip of each while I tidied the rest. I am all selfless kindness! Then we drove on to the southern half of the island which is separated from the north by a long thin and typically Australian named ‘neck.’ This was epic – sea on both sides of you, Tasmania to the north west and Fuck All till Antartica to the south east. Apparently there is a fairy penguin rookery on said neck as well (this in fact, is not true, they don’t exist) and we sat on a viewing platform as the sun set and we watched the moon rise silvery gold and full over the waves and gild them in glowing pearls and it was beautiful beautiful and I wept and we sat there for an hour and not one fucking penguin did we see. Please see above well researched fact in parenthesis. So stiff and cold with icy bums and dead legs, we tottered back to the car and headed for our little hotel.

Sadly, all the misguided conviction in the world won’t magic up a woodburner if there simply isn’t one. So wallowing in cosy winter was actually sitting in a large, soulless, breeze block draughty bar with a fire that was going out being scowled at by the two staff on duty until we got the hint and pissed off. We did not write them a good review.

But Bruny Island is ubiquitously beautiful: forested in deep green eucalyptus, edged with glorious wild and ravaged beaches that were so shallow, waves crashed up them for miles in white froth, and the gorgeous curve of Adventure bay that poured rainbows off the crests of waves fringed with foreign trees, trod by plover and fairy wrens with wallabies lurking nearby in unspoilt beauty brought home to me more than ever that I Am On The Other Side Of The World.

Then Yates made me get in the car and drive back to Hobart.

Hobart is not as beautiful as Bruny Island. It’s not as beautiful as Canberra for that matter. Not a lot of trees or parks. Certainly no cycle paths, and there is a madness of 4 lanes per narrow road. The good gentleman described it as ‘like a shitty regional English town.’ I mean no disrespect to our dear Hobartians. The harbour was splendid, there were lovely old buildings and lovely old (but still draughty) pubs with fires. We spent a hell of a long time in the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery and I got all enraged about Aboriginal murder and dispossession (endlessly) and then we visited the Penitentiary museum and I got equally enraged about the depraved treatment and enslavement of convicts. God. I’m tired of my soap box when there is so much cruelty that continues in the world. But fucken….whipping people to death or at least until their skin rots and maggots wriggle in their very backs and they vomit at their own smell, and the Black Line where indigenous tribes were routinely wiped out…genocide and cruelty is our history in this country. And we disengage and think oh well people are all dicks and hide in the forest, but climate change is coming for those too and they’ll all burn because of the aforementioned assessment about people. Australians proud of their white heritage, that through immeasurable fortitude and endurance survived the sheer miserable cruelty inflicted upon them through the horrors of greed that turn humans into slaves must, surely must agree that greed is the enemy, greed is cruel and never, never seek to visit that on others and become the thing that is despised. Go in love my friends. Always find out first what we like about each other, before you find out things you disagree with. Because then, ah-ha, we can’t be lazy, we’re stuck, we already like each other and are forced to take a more nuanced approach to untangling and hearing each other’s stories.

After all that education about the misery of what one human can do to another and reflecting that world wars never ended it either, we had to cheer ourselves up with whiskey. Lark Distillery on the harbour front, while not having a fire, was lavishly wood panelled and had real green chesterfields so we curled up and drank whiskey and brooded on the evil of man until we were drunk enough to giggle like a pair of dickheads over other things, then Pia from Sydney’s Black Joak Morris joined us and we drank and drank and gassed away about travelling, Italians, food, Morris bitching and whatever else we could stuff into the evening.

The Tassie trip ended in the dreary rain and I have left out the caprices of MONA gallery, dinners with Morris dancers, wines on Bruny and a hundred other little things. But we’ll go back (in the summer next time) when there will be more to tell; meanwhile I will sit with tea watching clouds rampage across the sky over black mountain, huddle a blanket to me, and write!

If Food be the Music of love…Eat on…

I have already written in passing of the beautiful food in Canberra. That was in the summer and the brightly coloured, sharply felt descriptions make me smile now as I nestle by a fire in the middle of winter. Banish thoughts, dear chaps, of cosy small stoves and feet on the hearth. This is Canberra, and my fire is a somewhat peculiar pile of stones in the middle of the room three metres away circled by a chaise longue style of cushioned stone bench in a swanky hotel.

I ain’t complaining.

I have always judged the sophistication of an eating establishment by the prevalence of nouns or adjectives in the description of a dish that I don’t understand. Back in 2009, I was impressed by the promise of initiation into the secret, sensual world evoked by ‘jus.’

So when I sat down for breakfast last month at Industry Beans in Melbourne, I had to re-evaluate. Contemplating between avocado smash with beetroot dust, or juniper berry sous vide salmon with Japanese (please) seaweed, edible sand and sea foam, it was clear that cuisine poncery had aggressively ratcheted up a notch.

To date, I still have no idea what most of that means. But I can tell you that it, and surprisingly, toasted black beans and puffed quinoa (what?), are bloody lovely.

There is a book by Richard Glover; The Land Before Avocado that explores Australia in the seventies; debunking some of those nostalgia myths about ‘the good old days’ (poverty and inequality are always shit, even when you’re young), and tracking the country’s modernisation in culture, transport, leisure and style. And as the name suggests; starting with a reflection on the ubiquity of iceberg lettuce (there was no other kind – sound familiar, countrymen?), it charts Australia’s education and debutante ball into the world of flavour appreciation. But if there indeed is a bad cooking skeleton in Australia’s closet, it’s more repressed than whatever Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed. Australian food has had its therapy and has sprung into the world fully adjusted, and open armed to wonder.

I don’t know if it’s the company I am lucky enough to keep. Let’s not forget Brook who freestyles Ottolenghi; chums who genuinely fight over Swedish moss in world class Danish restaurants, and creative Morris friends who make their own sauerkraut and kimchee. But there is a real appreciation of ingredients, of cultivation and origin that I’ve not seen since Italy. But with a real love of multiculturalism that is treated as a specialisation. In Britain, I think of our multicultural cuisine. Where your Thai is a plate of beige fried stuff, outdone in colour and vibrance by the blue and white crockery it’s served on. Your Indian has been sanitized; new dishes like Tikka Masala invented to appease the bland British palate. And any restaurant you go to, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

In Rice Paper Scissors (huh!), a charming Vietnamese restaurant on Melbourne’s Brunswick street, I got food that blew my mind and changed my life. From now on, all I ever want to taste is lime, coconut, chilli and coriander. I have found perfection – why go back? And paired with beautiful white wines. Wine pairing is a fancy unreachable thing in Britain; only comes on taster menus that are £100 a head and you’ve been meaning to do it for your birthday for years, but never got round to it. Here, it’s standard, and your young, trendy waiter will be able to tell you which will go best with what. A far cry from being asked what a courgette is by your checkout kid in Tesco. They’ll also accurately memorise the entire order from a table of five, while I twitch and reach for my notebook, imploring them to write it down. Young people here snack on rice paper rolls for lunch, dosas and banh mi (it’s a filled roll, it’s a fucken roll) in the way that the average teenager back home clings to Gregs for comfort and familiarity. I’m not saying Australian kids are better than British ones. Just that they have better palates. Sweepingly. In Canberra. Probably.

Yates and I have eaten in Taco Taco. These are also amazing. It is now the year of the Taco in London (I know because Daily Mash told me), but I agree with the satire of the article, that being three months ahead of the food-fashion curve don’t justify the house prices, and I reckon it’s better here anyway. And it’s cheap. We’ve also had a wonderful evening at Terra (which is very helpfully next door to Taco Taco), with the help of its ‘taster’ menu. Yeah, I dig that. I’ll pay you, and you just keep bringing me out dishes of your choice and I’ll trust you. Because you can here! Yates loved that. Great charcoal cooked meats, eggplant salad, roasted cauliflower, seared greens. And a charming shiraz to wash it all down. We also had a less successful, but very delicious, meal at the unpronounceable Mocan and Green Grout, which prides itself on having local artisans hand make the plates they serve ya food on and that sort of shit. It’s beautiful; all wood structures, snuggly little corners and fun metal coat hooks in the shape of little hands. We ate miso eggplant; crisp, fresh zucchini with pickles, cous cous and tahini yoghurt dressing, pork belly, roast quail. I had an oyster. It was wonderful. In my birthday joy, I turned smiling to Yates, lyricising on the flavour of fresh, sea air. He looked at me sardonically and sighed a rabbit sigh. Yes Chris, that’s exactly what I don’t want from my food. For it to taste of fresh air.

Which is what pretty much summed up the evening, because despite five eye-wateringly expensive tapas plates of delight, we left feeling a bit peckish and Yates got up to eat Weetabix at four in the morning. We grimly reflected on the part of Good Omens where Famine gleefully watches a fabulously wealthy (and hungry) model enjoy a first course of lavender scented air. Was a bit like that. There are plenty of places about that will serve you Yates-insufficient quantities of very delicious food.

Then there’s the other side of it all. Maybe this is a throwback from the pre-avocado times. Surprisingly, Australia is the country of pies. Everyone raves about ‘little bakeries’ in ‘little country towns’ where people queue out the door to buy pies for lunch. I have literally seen this. I waited in that queue. It was a really good pie! These country towns are fucken weird; they remind you of pioneer frontier shit out of wild west films; square buildings with corrugated iron roofs and a rickety veranda that surely ought to be filled with red petticoated prostitutes or something. And in the local bakery (it’s not glamorous or anything), you can get hearty, no nonsense little pies of pretty much any meat and combination. And they’re bloody good! I’ve never been a pie fan, really, but as a sort of developed-and-more-nutritious-sausage-roll, they’re pretty damn sufficient. I mean, Australians gotta do weird shit like eat it with ketchup and argue over the best way of applying it, but you know, they got good hearts.

Adoption of European words for food is also as interesting as it is utterly random. Rejecting the Italian term ‘Milanese,’ any breaded food product is ubiquitously a schnitzel, or ‘schnitty.’ Which is charming. But in an obscure reversion to Italian, there is your pub grub classic; the ‘Parma.’ Its full name is ‘Parmagiana’ but there is not a fecking melanzane in sight. Imagine my dismay when spotting it on the menu and thinking ‘oh, how lovely,’ to be warned by an Italian heritage friend; ‘oh no, Chris, it’s not what you think.’ So what is this? Well if you’re used to a charming lasagne style layering of sugo, melanzane and mozzarella, get to destination fucked because this is an abomination. It’s a chicken schnitzel (see above), with a layer of tomato sauce, then a slice of ham (what now?) and cheese.

Right.

Why it persists in being called a parmigiana is utterly mysterious. And apparently, your choice of abbreviation to either parmA or parmI says a lot about ya. Quite what, I don’t know. It doesn’t come up because I don’t eat the fecking thing. But you must understand that’s only because I was expecting the delicious construction that Raffa makes me, not chicken and ham. But if that actually sounds delicious to you, then you won’t be disappointed because there’s always a lot of it. So go forth!

So if you’re a poncey eater, like me, or you dig the more bog-standard no nonsense of meat and chips, you can get it all here in Canberra. But what unites us all is wine.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on two wine tours. They are glorious heady trips of joy, unmatched anywhere. I know Piemonte advertises itself as a wine region, but I just don’t think you can jolly about it drinking in the same way. There were some fantastic tax laws in wine making which may have led to the prevalence of purpose built ‘cellar doors,’ where the wine maker is always on hand (who the hell is harvesting or making the stuff then, remains a mystery) to pour out dribbles of wine to half drunk, smiling enthusiasts who then part with huge sums of money to take it all home. But a day out wine tasting is wonderful. The first time, dear Ed drove and I always go back to the charming vision through the window of ‘Helm’ wines; Ed and Paul striding purposely through the vine bowered garden to set out a glorious picnic with deliberation. We ate smoked trout, pate, breads and cheeses, stuffed peppers, tempura. The second time, lovely Amy drove the fun bus (put your seatbelt on Yates, it’s not that fun) and we drank wine all day, finishing for food in a cosy old restaurant with roaring open fires. All day, drinking wine and smiling and talking about the soils and the climate, and the grapes and the flavours.

So if you want to get on any of this shit, come and visit.

What the Folk?

I’m sure that pun has been done before. But I have been getting my folk on over the Merrie Month of May and it has raised thoughts and questions that I’m pondering through. Thus I need to write it out and see what you think!

Easter weekend, I danced Morris at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. A five-day folk festival, and incredibly, one that was a fifteen-minute tram ride from me house and had absolutely no mud. Hard for an English girl to get her head round – surely you’re supposed to get up at the crack of dawn and spend four tense hours in the car crawling past Stonehenge on a single track road to get to a festival in time for the first set, and woe betide anyone who forgot their wellies. Mud is such a feature of British festivals that a whole couture has sprung up in designer rubber footwear. So imagine a purpose built festival ground. Not a farmer’s field that gets churned to shit and swamped in so much rubbish that whole eco systems are destroyed annually, but one with logical paths between stages; purpose-built exhibition buildings with stages in them, bars and so much seating. It was so clean!

Unlike me who was dressed in black and sweatily capering about in what they said was 24 degrees but dammit, felt like a hell of a lot more.

So what’s Morris like down under? Well.

I must first say that at the National Folk Festival, Australia mustered up a whole five sides. My Australian Morris friends correct me here – the purpose of the folk festival is to showcase regions, so they specifically invite certain sides from certain states (yeah, and make them largely pay for their own tickets); this year was Big Fella and Little Fella, so (a) side from the enormous state of Western Australia and then Surly Griffen from little ol’ Australian Capital Territory. And of course, the sides from Brisbane, Sidney and Melbourne that won’t be discouraged from any opportunity to get their jig on. So I get that…but after festivals in tiny places like Rochester, Wimborne, Oxford, Swanage with close on a hundred sides with their varied costumes, colours and pageantry, Australia’s festival lacked that immense diversity.

But it did mean everyone knew each other. They all camped together, ate together, drank together and there was a lovely, close family atmosphere. Er, here I must say honestly that it was a family atmosphere if you were in the family; coming in as an outsider to these extremely nice and friendly people was a little harder. I think I personally mistimed me drinking. That early afternoon high of bombing a couple of pints, then the evening dip after pausing. ALWAYS carry on through! But these lovely chaps had grown up together, danced together, known each other for years, and as some of them are separated by the miles of mountains and desert between Melbourne and Brisbane, at festivals they’re very preoccupied with catching up and hanging out. Of course they would be. Ya know, next time will be better.

Now Australian Morris is really into Cotswolds. Hmm. It’s never been me favourite style. And as I often take a sort of ironical approach to any earnestness in Morris dancing, pointedly glazing over when someone starts telling me about villages in Northamptonshire (about which I frankly couldn’t give two shits and it seems particularly ludicrous ten thousand miles away), and I find Cotswolds dancers take themselves very seriously. For a bunch of chaps with bells on. But my my, can the Australians dance it. Watching the likes of Bell Swagger (freakin’ great name) and Black Joak, this must have been what it was like in England in the old days! Vigorous leaping, shouts, strength, grace, my god did it make me want to join in. The old fellas in England would be trembling their bells to hanky-needing climaxes if they had seen it. It’s exactly what they’re talking about as they heavily lean their rotund bellies over my chair in pubs to tell me all about the dance form I’ve been doing for four years.

Or is it? Because these sides have women; tall, strong, beautiful Australian women who add a uniformity to the set by their height and strength and they kick and leap about on light feet better than any man I’ve ever seen in England. Most of the sides were a rough fifty-fifty split and just dispensed with all that nonsense about women not being allowed because Morris here started after Emancipation, instead of before. And it’s a much smaller crowd, so they just include everyone who has the folky interest. And because they all know each other and because they are slaves to the Cotswolds traditions (about which they know far more than me…see above note in parenthesis), they can all join in each other’s dances, which is quite lovely indeed.

So I came away from the folk festival actually wanting to learn hanky dances which was an extraordinary turn up for the books. But only so I could dance them in Australia. But to reflect on it all, there did seem to be an almost crippling self-consciousness in the clinging to the older Cotswolds traditions. I’ve always found that to be the more sanitised side of Morris; the kind that goes to church and won’t necessarily be found in the dark brandishing flaming torches (does one ever do anything else with a flaming torch?), drinking heavily and communing with some kind of more ancient, less definite thing. Where the hell was the border Morris?

I am assured that Border exists in Australia. When I attend the Huon Valley Midwinter Festival (gleeeee!!) in July, I expect there’ll be a lot more of the burning shit and creepy costumes. Border has always seemed to be the more progressive – even the name suggests it is the pushed aside, marginalised people that have had to forge a space of harmony between things. Well look, that’s my interpretation, and yes, I know about bloody Wales and protecting frontiers. Border sides mostly always have women, do more painting and costume (if it’s about disguising yourself with paint and rags so you can hide not only your face from your employer as you beg for money, why not your gender?) and there is a more pagan, earthy feel to it. It’s also the way Morris is progressing in England; you can be a catch-all for the folkies and the goths and more young people are interested in that style of dance. It’s the style (in England) of the young, and more Border sides are started up that Cotswolds.

Cut to England and I wake up on a narrowboat with the croak of an owl at four in the morning on May the first. Into the blue light in our bells, we step off and I’m drowning in the song of blackbirds and I have forgotten how beautiful they are. Driving towards the beacon at the end of the ancient Icknield way, we encounter a large deer on the lane, then arrive on Pitstone hill amid the yellow glow of a carpet of cowslips and New Moon Morris dance and sing the glowing red ball of light up. I can feel spring.

In Rochester that weekend, a hundred sides in different colours, ribbons and feathers are celebrating the May-o and diversity and colour are the sign of English Morris. Ok, not proper diversity, Morris dancers are still resoundingly white and English, but there is a huge mix of styles and colour. The immense percussive orchestra of the Witchmen boom out across the streets and you find your legs running towards the sound to see what’s going on and you are not disappointed. But my favourite discovery this year was a brand new Morris side called Hugin and Munnin – a pair of dancers and one musician who dress as crows (after the Norse myth of Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munnin that follow him in battle and fly out around Midgard each morning to bring him news from across the worlds) and did some crazy shit with sticks and shields, and god knows what was going on with the big black bollock balloons that came out and ate people’s heads.

But this is what Morris is about for me. Two people starting up a new side in whatever tradition they fancy, bringing in whatever ancient mythology floats their respective boats, thinking about the spectacle, and incorporating a bit of heavy metal into Morris. Fuck yes dudes, fuck yes. Folk must grow and follow the folk and their culture. Otherwise it fossilises into the elite or the useless.

And Australia seems to have not got there yet. Perhaps it’s still establishing and then when it’s secure, it will move to the next phase. You know, like after the rise of capitalism, there is the inevitable rise of the workers. Yeah, just like that. There are new sides arising in Australia – I had the privilege to witness the birth of one at the Folk Festival. But it was a side of garland dances. Sigh. I can stick a garland dance even less than a hanky dance. But bloody hell, this was amazing! Imagine in May, the frothing of hawthorn over the hedgerows and young, lithe, beautiful girls gather blossoms and weave them into garlands and into their hair and dance. What could be more beautiful? Well, when done by ancient women in a grey town centre, which is the only way I’ve ever seen it done, a hell of a lot could be more beautiful. But in Canberra on that special evening, with fire circles giving light and heat, out stepped an amalgamation of young girls and men from several sides wreathed in green and silver with gold fairy lights in their hats; they danced beautifully and I thought I was on the bankside in a cowslip’s bell where the bee sucks and all the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were dancing for Titania. It was beautiful.

Australia is reviving Morris and doing it properly. But now it needs to grow. It needs the courage to start something new. Miles Franklin found that her niche as a writer was not regurgitating the castles and grey moors of Europe. It was ‘off her own hook,’ by making something new, embracing her landscape. So Australian Morris; that is your next step.

Secret City (hiding the Secret of its soul)

I have, of course, joined a book club. And our first book is the above titled Secret City; a thriller about political subterfuge and scandal in Canberra. I imagine the Brexit equivalent would wilt in comparison. The verdict? In a nutshell: pile of wank.

There is a Foxtel series based on this book. And no doubt it’s very compelling; I’m looking forward to watching some of it myself. Because by watching scenes of Canberra, filmed with well timed lighting, with real people to represent characters, you can engage your own emotional responses where the writers’ choice to not really bother describing anything frankly failed to do so.

Canberrans who have seen bits of this show do find it a bit of a chuckle. It portrays our small little town (beautiful and remarkably well designed, but little nonetheless) as somewhere glossy, sophisticated and impeccably suave. Which from what I’m gathering has about the same impact on a native as a show about the suave and imperatively important life of a bunch of people working in Chelmsford local council would. The writing does the same; name dropping places with the carelessness of a toddler with lego, adding adjectives to help you out because no one really knows Canberra – ‘prestigious,’ ‘stylish,’ ‘sophisticated,’ ‘exclusive.’ Which conspires to kill your very imagination and effort to find a bit of soul in the place. The descriptions of places are done without heart, without love, just bland one-worders that create a half-hearted image of somewhere cool and interesting. Like when you walk past an All Bar One after a long day at work, and think it looks all fun and stylish with people drinking cold wine in nice shoes and there are fairy lights and warm wood surfaces…but it quickly passes because you remember the atmosphere is about as barren as a salt field and you congratulate yourself on a lucky escape; nice shoes and tall wine glasses are not for you and you retire thankfully to your local that smells a bit and get a pint of warm ale. Because it has soul.

Soul in a place is important and I am worried this book has killed my poetic imagination of soul in Canberra.

I like to read about places. I like to immerse myself; building a construct, a sense of beauty and wonder about a place that I can romanticise is half the anticipation of travel. It’s how I connect to place. These two writers; ex political journalists, must have been excellent headline writers with their sassy verb and adjective choices, but they are not great writers. Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, even fucking Lawrence (and as you may know, I have a lot of opinions about D.H. Lawrence, but damn me, at least he creates a sense of place) actually bother to inspire you with a bit of love in a setting. These two didn’t. And to be great literature, writing must do that, as people and place are tied intrinsically, constantly referring to the other to create the human experience.

Perhaps I’m totally over thinking the thriller genre. Great Literature is not its scope. It just makes me cross that good writers wouldn’t bother. And Henning Mankell made a better job of creating atmosphere and engendering the whole scandi-noir genre, so there’s no excuse. Now: the nitty gritty. The book was hideously formulaic. Every new character introduced had a one paragraph fecking CV; description of their degree and previous ten years, peppered with adjectives like ‘high flying,’ ‘razor sharp mind’ and ‘holy roller’ so you get the idea that, you know, this guy’s a big deal. After that, nothing else they either did or said did a damn thing to develop that one dimensional character any further. Sloppy. So imagine my surprise when I read the blurb for the third book (yes, it’s still not fucking over) introducing ‘loveable journalist Harry Dunkley.’ He wasn’t loveable!! He was a bland bloke whose love of ‘chasing down a good yarn’ and ‘getting the papers in the morning’ was described at least four times in exactly the same goddamn way as if that sufficiently constitutes a personality. An effort to give him depth was the throw away mention of his estranged daughter who occasionally he’d miss a bit but couldn’t be fucked to do anything about it for 784 pages. If anything, he was a bit of a dick. He had a girlfriend, right, which was supposed to be a bit of a tension riser isn’t it, because now he’s got something to lose as he closes in on stuff he’s not supposed to know, and he could never get over the fact she was twenty two years younger. He mentions it three times. It must have been written explicitly for screenplay because there were these periodical recaps and I’m like, Harry? Have you forgotten you told me this already, 300 pages ago? I know, it was a long time. *It felt like it for me too.* Then when the young girlfriend goes off in an unconvincing childish strop and the inevitable attack happens (we saw it the minute he got with her, chaps), she dumps him, and later she tries to ring him, and he ignores her call!! She’s taken a knife to the throat for him, and he gets a bit wrapped up in himself and is now too busy for her, despite being gutted about being dumped and ‘racked with guilt’ as he kept saying. Well, not that guilty.

The Pencil of Rage came out with the portrayals of China and the Chinese. I’ve been reading books on China since these two journos turned up in Canberra as green little reporters twenty five years ago; you know, there’s a lot there what with thousands of years of culture and history and a billion people and I’ve never read such boringly obvious portrayal of a Bad Guy. A character defects, overcoming a life time of carefully tuned ‘education’ because….ooh, we need something emotional to make it convincing…er….fuck it, dead mother. Again, not developed enough to suggest why this character would defect in this circumstance when thousands of others wouldn’t. Lovely bit of world building in ‘Beijing’ ‘a Chinese melody drifted in the background.’ Who needs research eh? And a Chinese woman was described as ‘delicate’ no fewer than three times on one page, confirming all negative stereotypes about the submissiveness and mutability of Chinese women.

Then there was the needless transvestite. I don’t really understand why one character had to be trans. It added nothing to the story. But it was made a big deal of, so it’s not just a general diversity of some characters are black, some are Asian, some are trans. In fact, apart from a couple of Chinese, conspicuously painted as sinister or subversive, there was a complete lack of diversity. And this is the point for me.

Because all these people, swelled with power, feeding their greed and arrogance by dashing about the city at high speed were essentially dicks who demonstrated, despite all their qualifications in economics, no understanding of the real world and its struggles at all. The effects of poverty. Mental health (despite the ‘Mental Health Plan’ the fictitious government unsuccessfully tries to get through the house of representatives, mainly to show the Prime Minister is ‘a good guy,’), the ostracization of first nation people. As an immigrant outsider whose qualifications seem to count for shite, having daily battles with getting out of bed and the wine, it was quite depressing reading. Like I should have tried harder in my career to be important high fliers like these dudes. More assurance from Australia that I’m not good enough, from terribly constructed not-real people.

It is fascinating ear-wigging conversation in this town. Walking past people on their phones or those strolling in pairs (invariably young, athletic types in brown shoes and blue trousers; no blazers) you do catch snippets of Very Important Sounding Things. But is there a disconnect between them having coffee and important conversations (soooo different from teaching where you GET in your classroom, STAY in there, DON’T come out for seven hours, BE inspiring, NO you can’t leave to piss) and the real people they serve?

Look, like the aboriginals. The big elephant in Australian society who are miraculously unrepresented in this city. I have never seen such a white city. Lots of young east Asians at the university and, it seems, applying for hideously boring accounting systems jobs, but apart from that, very little diversity. And this troubles me. Before finishing the crap book, I read a great one about Noongar people of western Australia; struggling with their disenfranchisement and the bad choices they make based on their…lack of choices. Drugs, alcohol, abuse. How to reconnect with an ancient past that is spiritual and beautiful, solace against the modern world that probably many also want to engage with; combining success in modern Australian society through education and inclusion with celebrating traditions. These people were returning to their homeland as traditional owners, but now there are fences, a certain area is a holiday caravan park and the owners don’t have much sympathy for their free movement. After visiting the aborigine exhibition at the national museum, I was quite appalled and upset. How can white people live on the land, daily staring in the face of those they stole it from? Even in America, they wiped out most of the first nation peoples so used the place as a blank canvas to construct their national identity. Which is something Australians struggle with – a sense of belonging, constructing their identity out of ANZAC day – bloody violence and war. That’s not a cultural identity. I’ve had many discussions about this with Morris dancers, who feel connections with the village of their ancestors in England (I did mention this was merely inbreeding, and not meaningful), who know more about regional dances than I do and sort of sometimes miss the point of it being ‘folk;’ of the people, who change and grow. Australian identity is something that is still growing. And I think it should. Because, being a remainer, right, I’m quite into immigration. I am one. And after considering, then rejecting the idea that we can’t send all the white people in Australia back (I would revolt if someone said the reverse in England), there has to be a way for first nation and immigrants to unite over their love of this land. Because we do love it, I love it. I love beaches and emus and kangaroos! Anyone who doesn’t has no soul. And that is something that can bind us. Love, of course.

Which brings me back to finding soul. Apparently the hill where Parliament sits is a significant site for the Ngunnawal people – it is a woman’s mountain and important for their rituals. Not so easy to wander up there anymore and continue your culture. It’s like there was soul here, but perhaps nasty politicians took it all. And in looking for soul, I see it more in the trees and the hills than I do in this city. So I’m still looking for it. I’m finding it in odd little alleyways, cluttered with parked cars, murals painted on the wall and a load of bins…which is the secret entrance for a funny little windowless cocktail bar. I’m finding it under the trees at a cheap taco place round the corner from my flat, where they always seem to have secret meat you can just ask for. (Not a euphemism.) And I find it in the brilliant Smiths Alternative bar and music venue that doesn’t get a look-in in that stupid book because its ripped up, weathered sofas that render the pavement a hazard under the arcades of the Melbourne building is the sweet home of the Lost. Students lie on sofas all day, homeless men and women take their rest and drink the free water, smoking and reading the books; hippies resolutely not wearing shoes will play the piano and there is a particular smell. And, marvellously, good wine.

There we go.

Bugger Blogging

There has been an absence of blogs for over a month. But Chris, how is your giddy life of sunshine I hear you cry! The initial striking in the face of newness and comparisons wanes into a routine of regular life which is pretty much the same for people anywhere, and therefore giddy life is completely wasted on chumps that get to live in beautiful places and have the temerity to not tremble with excess joy at every second.

I have not written a blog because I have not been ready to get to grips with Things. So, I begin now by throwing myself into just a bit of honesty and integrity – that human quality I have recently been lauding much in myself in my greatest works of fiction to date: my recent job applications.

This again may be a reprimand to all those that gleefully celebrated my opportunity to be a ‘lady of leisure,’ digging me conspiratorially in the side despite my extended withering looks. The trouble is, you can’t create and celebrate a touchy feminist among you, then try to exult the joys of an Edwardian life style. And Purpose, dear friends, Purpose, must not be underestimated in the well-being of a social human. Now I am, of course, for a period of six luxurious long weeks a year, able to fuck around purposelessly, drinking daily, strolling and writing very happily. Purpose here is not denied me. There is certainty in the length of time allotted for such fuckaboutery and Purpose is re-asserted in September, the knowledge of What I Do Is Useful is there throughout. Take it away, and the sunshine fades, the red, greens and blues of rosellas are melancholy and the glorious smells of coffee and avocado in cafes frequented by purposeful people merely mock.

So this is, blates, a first world problem, to wit, Chris gets to go live in Australia at Her Majesty’s expense in a beautiful apartment with her lover and drink wonderful wine and eat gorgeous food and hike in breath-taking landscapes and all this is in danger of meaninglessness because She’s A Bit Bored. I stand here, head hung, ashamed. I walk passed homeless people on my way to buy fennel, and sit in cafes to write capricious fairy stories. Existential crises in such circumstances can frankly fuck off.

Forgive me. But here, for your general edification on the South Pacific, may I open this up to its wider context. There has been a lot in the news in the last few weeks about refugees in the South Pacific seeking asylum in Australia that have been held in a detention centre on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea. Now the detention centre is actually referred to as a ‘processing’ centre, in full Orwellian charm, which already treats those people fleeing their homelands as criminals. Now the centre has closed. There are other islands used as holding pens of uncertainty, Nauru, and Christmas island all in similar positions. Men have been left there and their physical and mental health is deteriorating. Medecins Sans Frontieres have been campaigning to get these people off the island limbo and treated, there have been marches in Sydney on the matter. All medical professionals have been removed from the island and the men are sinking into the depression of uncertainty and purposelessness and their suicides are causing a national outrage.

Uncertainty and purposeless kills people. This is the same for a refugee who has lived in England or Australia most of his life, but now education has finished and his status as an immigrant is uncertain, he is unable to work or move on with his life. Intelligent young people, with great potential to contribute positively to society sinking into depression and being wasted. It is the same for a dispossessed aboriginal who has lost their culture and community and don’t fit the white norm around them. It is the same for a person who is unemployed in England on low benefits where working leaves him worse off, who sinks into depression and then homelessness. It is the same for those fleeing war zones who hover in camps; Rohingya, Syria, Yemen, Libya, the jungle at Calais. Only two hundred years ago, these people were the people who society believed to be witches and tortured and executed them in droves, and we all condemn society’s ignorance and misogyny without reflecting for a dark moment that if we were there then, we may well have joined the mob. Sixty years ago, that was the Jews and again with historical hindsight, we pride ourselves on having helped those fleeing the holocaust because our education tells us in uncomplicated black and white: Nazi = bad. We ignore that we resisted Jewish immigration for years, deploying emotive strawman arguments about our sons dying in the war, we ignore that the Dutch helped them far more, and we were plagued with our own anti-Semitism. Apply it now. It applies in today’s context to Syria, to Afghanistan, to Yemen, and yes, it applies to our own citizens who foolishly left to live in ISIS dominated areas in Raqqa because if we turn our backs on human beings, then we are no better than those we condemn as ignorant savages.

So in the wider scope on an objective level, here’s why we should help people out of the limbo of purposelessness even if they don’t seem miserable and pathetic enough, because they have homes and food, or they chose to go to that place, so it’s not that bad.

Well there’s the social and political bit. Back to the microcosm, please be reassured I am in no means in Drastic Circumstance because of the malaise of being purposeless. I did what I often do in these situations, have a word with myself, climb a mountain (wasn’t that high), sink a bottle of wine with Yates, thrash it out and resolve to Cheer Up. And meanwhile we have had a housewarming, (because the flat now has a sofa – the correct number), I’ve been to the cinema to see two films about female friendship with sapphic overtones, been to watch a rugby match, had my aunt and uncle come to visit, seen a platypus, a bandicoot and a poteroo, been on more bike rides round the lake, written lots and had a lovely weekend at Kosciuszko national park where we climbed the highest peak of Australia in an hour and twenty minutes (well, we started from 1400m, then got a chair lift another 500, but it was still a 7K uphill walk) and had a lovely dinner out.

A little more on Kozzie (of course that’s what it’s called!), there was a tarn! Love a glacial tarn, that’s how mountains are formed where I’m from! None of this millennia-of-erosion leaving inexplicable, perfectly rounded rocks. I can understand what a dirty great freakin’ glacier does to a mountain! This particular lake (Australia’s highest lake) had a beautiful name that I’ve not learned to pronounce yet, (you have a go: Cootapatamba) but it meant ‘the place where the eagle drank’ (or rested, or nested, or something.) Anyway, it’s all charged with legend; apparently this eagle brought fire to the south east of Australia. Nice of it! You can’t just tell this story though (well, they did on a plaque by the lake), you have to have an extended several-day telling by only certain people with lots of dancing and songs to tell it properly. Come to think of it, a little sign does seem rather short shrift.

We saw beautiful and delicate white flowers on the mountain side, sort of like snow drops, but without….dropping, and glorious mountain streams with little fishies in them. And the smell! I don’t know what it was, but this wonderful, herby, intoxicating sweet smell that was like heather and lavender (I saw neither of these before you become facetious) and thyme all mixed together. I stuck my face in numerous bushes, much to Yates’ horror, to try to ascertain the cause, but no, it is just the pureness of the air or something, or the left-over smouldering, flickering down the centuries from the time when the Eagle brought fire. There are also lots of snow gums, beautiful bone white forests with no leaves, rippling through the green eucalypts, and as we followed a shimmering, rushing waterfall (waterfalls will insist on rushing, there is no dissuading them) down the mountainside (we coulda taken the chair lift, we just didn’t wanna), these ivory white branches were the perfect seats to throw the giddy colours of rosellas into focus as we chased them down the hill.

And I really enjoyed the wine.

Parallels and Perpendiculars

A really great thing about Australia is how it rewards its fine people for their hard work with numerous public holidays. There are about ten, spread nicely throughout the year, as opposed to England’s stingy eight with the spring glut, then famine the rest of the year. I say about ten, because different territories have different ones; as a Canberran, I get to enjoy Canberra day, which is nice. Significantly, Australians get the Queen’s birthday off, which even the British don’t, so someone should certainly start a facebook petition; I hear they’re the most effective way of lobbying politicians. But in Aus at Christmas (and remember, it’s full summer then), you of course do what we Brits do and take off a few days in between Christmas and New Year because there’s no point doing a three day week…and when all that fun is over and you’re just getting back into the swing of work; you get another long weekend for Australia day!

Australia day is pretty controversial – I’d never heard of all this, but it is celebrated on the day of the anniversary of the first British fleet arriving in Sydney Cove. Hooray for us. So naturally, the Aboriginals (and many Australians) refer to it as Invasion Day. So the compromise for your left winger is to celebrate everything Australian, the wonderful youth of the Western population and its optimism, kangaroos and kookaburras, the moth harvesting festival of young aboriginal men, but continually suggest that perhaps it would be more politic to just change the day, fellas. I have to agree with this. I don’t want to celebrate the day my ancestors rampaged over yet another foreign land and was stunned with shock that the peoples they found weren’t total savages, but then kidnapped and stole from them anyway. The good old days of British politics of empire. But I do want to celebrate this beautiful country and every lovely person who has said ‘welcome!’ when we told them we were English. Even though I apologised instantly.

But it makes me think; the fact that that debate gets air time in the run up to the holiday each year, the fact that Australia’s president in 2008 issued a detailed and unreserved apology for the treatment of aboriginals since the arrival of us Brits, the fact that there are memorials to reconciliation in the city and all information right down to council adverts acknowledge the custodianship of the indigenous people, well it seems like a damn good place to start. A lot of people have said to me that the collective white guilt and the history is so terrible that they barely know where to start and much of what is done in redress is polite lip service. It probably is. But I’ve not seen the British government apologise to Jamaica for overrunning it in the seventeenth century and filling it with West African slaves. They’ve not even managed a heart felt apology for deporting accidently those same people after inviting them to England. Nor has America acknowledged its original brown people, despite native American culture’s popularisation and mass export. Seeing these steps and frank admissions from people daily living with the weight of their history makes me optimistic. Like the self-deprecating apologetic English, but better. My usual conflict about nationalism; I’m a bit embarrassed to belong to the monolinguistic, vastly unequal, conquering race of Britons, but I totally think French and Italians should celebrate their culture and be proud of it. They’ve got loads to be proud of! Great food and wine, family support. Australia; amazing landscape, national eccentricity, ALL FOOD is wonderful. What do we have? Morris dancing. Which I am proud of, but it isn’t cool. But often the people I meet abroad who are the most measured, kind and open are not nationalistic. I think what I love is a people’s love for their landscape, their respect of it, their love and craft of the food it gives them. All very earthy, innit. Nationalism in moderation I think, or, as a radio 4 documentary said, it’s a slippery slope from folk dancing to barbed wire.

So Australia day was wonderful and hey, we went to the free festival and you could bring your own beer without some high-vis wanker telling you it’s an anti anti-social zone, and the music was cool, and the food stands were great and the fireworks were the best I’d ever seen. They were over the lake and framed the Library, which I thought was wonderful, the illumination of knowledge, and I could see despite being short and I didn’t hurt my neck and no firework shells landed excitingly close and I wasn’t freezing a bollock off or being charged for it. So this another way Australia is better than England.

Another was a bit close to home. Two weeks ago in the early hours of a Monday morning, there was a fire in an apartment block in Melbourne. The flames spread up five storeys very quickly, and if this is sounding horribly familiar, yes, the building had the same cladding as Grenfell tower. Lots of differences though, perhaps the time of day, a little before getting-up time, the building was twice the size, it wasn’t social housing, but most importantly, nobody died. Now this has got to get a person thinking. Fires can happen everywhere right? So can car collisions, falls and so on. They’re accidents. But the mark of a developed country is that fewer people die in accidents. Systems are in place, laws regulate to increase safety, money is spent to minimise risk; your corrupt minister for transport isn’t taking the pot-hole budget and building a lavish swimming pool with it and getting away with it because the government is equally corrupt.

But increasingly, people die in England. And it’s the poor who do. They die in fires in social housing that they repeatedly campaigned to their MP was a likely and serious danger. They die because people with long term illnesses are suddenly assessed by non-professionals that they are fit for work and their benefits are stopped. They die because the focus is driving out the scourge of the poor and demonising their poverty, rather than asking uncomfortable questions of the rich. And despite dramatic verbs in the news like ‘tore’ and ‘ravaged’ and ‘devastated,’ (and remember this building was twice the size of Grenfell) everyone in the Melbourne block on Spencer Street got out safely.

Pfft. So this was a depressing perpendicular with Britain to consider. We’re like a third world country now. But Australia has problems enough to occupy it instead of fire fighting corruption. Mainly, fighting bush fires. The Australian fire risk rating has six levels. The first is LOW, but the second is HIGH and it just gets increasingly catastrophic from there. There has been a bush fire raging on the island of Tasmania for about three weeks solid, and there have been at least two in a week nearby that have got in the way of picnic plans. After a charming stroll around Tidbinbilla nature reserve, reading EVERYTHING, I have educated myself of the evolution of Australian fauna to harness bush fires to reproduce; it is an essential part of Australian ecology. Eucalyptus trees are high in oil which blows up pretty nicely, ignited by losing their bark in merry tinder-like streamers and are actually rejuvenated by fire, sprouting new shoots and dispersing pods. Fire also destroys their competition. Fires every fifty years or so are bang on; when young trees have established themselves. Of course, people will build houses between all these trees and smoke in them. As I’ve mentioned before, not a lot of people smoke in Canberra. And now, looking at all the eucalypts that shade the streets, it seems pretty irresponsible and even more justification for coughing ostentatiously when jogging past smokers huddled furtively on pavements.

And while the south of Australia burns in forty degree heat (a cute thing about Canberrans is their fervent insistence about nearly everything that ‘it’s not normally this bad’), the north is drowning in monsoons. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about this in the British media (because I’ve still been hearing way too freakin’ much about Brexit – I mean whaddyahavetodo….10,000bloodymiles) but a small place called Townsville on the north east coast up in Darwin is drowning. And what happens when rivers, streams and coasts flood in north Australia? Crocs happen, that’s what, crocs get everywhere. I heard a news anchor ask, ‘so in those floods that are, what, chest high in places, are people still managing to get about?’ ‘Well no,’ the correspondent countered, ‘not really, because the crocs are now prevalent throughout the streets.’ JESUS CHRIST!!! Some fella looked out his upper story window, there was a bloody croc on the roof of his car pool. Keep that window closed mate. Shit. Can you imagine that? So, ok, England’s not coming out of this analysis too well, but when the Somerset levels flood, and the Ulls water river destroyed Glendridding and the Derwent destroyed Cockermouth and the tides submerged Boscastle…at least we don’t have to deal with any fucking crocodiles. Ya know. Just mud. And power cuts. Not an aggressive reptile climbing in through your goddamn bedroom window.

So I shall continue to enjoy the glorious sunshine, breath-taking sloping eucalyptus hills, open and kind socialists, great wine and creativity with avocados. You guys enjoy Morris dancing. That’s for you.

The Secret Lives of Wives

So this month, while I have been largely ‘Stephen Yates, analyst of this parish, and Christina, his wife,’ we’ve had a bit of a week led by my social schedule! Which has done much for my sense of self, and meeting people who don’t ask ‘what do you do,’ leading me to confess my unemployed immigrant status because it’s obvious – here I am a dancer, a writer, a singer, is pretty good for the frustrated little feminist in the corner.

I am sure Andrea will be overjoyed to know that I have joined a writer’s meet up. It’s a crit meet up which is helpful, but Yates laughed at this, chuckling something about ‘you’re great with criticism…’ I don’t know what he means. At least five of the fourteen were vocally positive, (never mind the pointedly silent nine), adjectives like ‘beautiful,’ and ‘great world building’ were lavished upon me, as well as helpful things like make my sentences more balanced; too many long ones, then an inconsistency in the plot. See, I’m great at taking criticism. So I’ve now been hastily writing to get it finished by bloody Saturday in time for the next meet up. The thing is, all these guys are actually published. Which is either intimidating or encouraging; their criticism might help me get somewhere. If nothing else, they’ve got a list of publications they’ve all successfully submitted to that I could try, so we’ll see how it goes.

That was invigorating. The rest of the day we shopped, I bought a ridiculous lamp, Yates bought trainers, everyone’s happy. The next day was the cricket! Now I have always found cricket cripplingly dull. Any sport that has built in lunch and tea breaks, apart from being incorrigibly British, is also quite obviously not a high-tension pursuit. And no, I am not entertained by the inane chatter of the slightly racist old Yorkshire commentators about the landing of pigeons near the pitch or building cranes in the vicinity. Not even when polishing brass tables or my boat’s air vent mushrooms. But actually sitting in the sunshine, with a beer and a faint buzz of excitement around you fuelled by whole-stadium Mexican waves and your choice of what bit of the game you want to look at, well it turns out I can get behind that. It was quite a pleasant day, and when I’d had enough of thirty five degrees, I retired to the shade with Pickwick. Poor Yates, despite slathering on factor fifty literally every twenty minutes, took some damage and had pretty red legs. Turns out the effect of the pore-clogger brand is to just make inevitable sunburn less bad. So it didn’t hurt him, nor did it last long before fading to brown, and it’s not peeling. In fact, in the words of Enid Blyton, he is ‘brown as a berry’ and I must say, it suits him rather well. The gentleman is looking very fetching in this climate.

By late afternoon I’d had rather enough of cricket, so I went Morris dancing. Mother dear, with the power of google, found me Surly Griffen Morris (it’s a hilarious pun on Canberra’s lake – Burley Griffen. The American architect who won the competition to design the city of Canberra. The fact that Surly Griffen practise next to another lake entirely is just an interesting aside) back in the summer, and I sent them enormous letters of introduction, including earnest questions about feathers. They had spotted by this ‘ere blog that I was in town and had the goodness to get in touch with me to let me know when practice started. So I went! Obviously after all day in the sun, I was overjoyed to learn there is no air conditioning at the scout hut; but they managed to get a bit of the old Bernoulli’s Principle going with all doors and windows flung wide, which gave a pretty lovely view of the lake to inspire you.

So how does Antipodean Morris compare to English? Well. It’s pretty much exactly the same really. Which is highly reassuring ten thousand miles from home. The side had representatives of the whole range of ages; the youngest are a ‘young miscellany’ nostalgia of ten year old twins, there’s a young millipede-ologist who is in her early twenties, then me, then everyone ascending tunefully up the scale. There are melodeons, played with deliberation. There are even English people. We learnt a new dance – a sword dance. Those things are long and bloody heavy – it’s not wrapper dancing, that would be easier. I forgot the figures as we went. I made huge learning progress by not decapitating anyone and god knows what happened when we made an arch in a circle, then weaved through it; I think I did something different every time. I can’t remember the dance, I don’t know its name so I can’t look up the figures, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up in a few repetitions! Then, because this side hold practice on Sunday from five thirty till seven, I went and SOCIALISED with my new side! Which was wonderful and what I’d always missed out on with New Moon, save those perhaps no more than three occasions when we had practice during a half term and I would turn to you all with a dreamy, benevolent smile, all radiance, asking ‘who’s for the pub!’ Ah, happy days. But they are all kind and generous and cheerful and I can’t wait to learn all the dances, collect me ‘cockie’ feathers (now how’s that for an abbreviation!) and perform with them at Easter.

And then the next night was sea shanty night! There is a splendid old pub in Canberra called The Old Canberra Inn. It pre-dates Canberra (which was only finalising the designs from the competition in 1912) by a good thirty five years and we’ve been going there for ‘Trivia’ (pub quiz, it’s a pub quiz) with a great bunch of chaps every Tuesday. But Sea Shanty night (first rule of sea shanty club: tell everyone about sea shanty club) was amazing. It’s sort of like a folk session, but no melodeons 😉, only it’s been running for a while so everyone knows all the songs, and the first half is sort of led by a group of (wait for it) YOUNG chaps. About six people who have stonking great voices, they sing filthy and hilarious songs, get everyone to join in and it’s just fun. After the interval it seems there is more of the anyone-else-want-a-go sort of thing but there were so many people, so perhaps I’ll have a go another time with that good ol’ crowd pleaser Whitby Maid. Anyway, the most surprising and wonderful thing about Sea Shanty club is that Yates came with me and freakin’ loved it, laughing through all the filthy sentiments and taking the whole song to just about nail the chorus by its final iteration, just like me. Then the heavens opened and we all had to finish singing the last song standing really close together in the middle of the room as the pub completely flooded, swamping two rugs, drowning several handbags and we were all singing while hastily stacking chairs onto tables. We, er, sang up a storm.

Another brand new social phenomenon we have taken part in together is Eurovision. Yeah, Australia loves that shit and it took a lot of edging round the elephant in the room to get to the bottom of that one. Basically they love it so much and begged so often that Eurovision just let ‘em in. Now every year I always know someone who is putting on an ironic Eurovision night to watch it and laugh and get drunk, but this was a very earnest evening. We all voted! Even me! This ridiculous opera singer won dressed as fucken Elsa from Frozen with a bloody woman in black on a giant stick throwing herself around behind her like a sinister incongruous metaphor. I was not a fan. But before all this we started with HIGHLY civilized drinks and snacks, and I have met some bloody good cooks. This one lass Brooke, not only cooks a killer Ottolenghi recipe. She freestyles Ottolenghi. And it’s magic. We made ourselves pretty welcome with our first ever stab at arancini, and Sinead made sausage rolls with FENNEL in them which were wonderful, and Jamie back home can take his ‘secret ingredient’ sausage rolls and go home.

I’ve also beguiled the time with a cycle over to Ainslie to enjoy a spiced hot chocolate with a lovely Morris dancer, been over to another ‘wife’s’ house for a cheeky lunch time drink and a giggle, visited the National Museum and had about seven encounters with delivery/tradesmen. So these are the things that wives do when their husbands are at work. Tomorrow I’m off out with some girls for pizza and dildo racing. Crack on!

A Frolic with Furniture

Well so much for space, because that didn’t last long in the little flat. I have been assured that this most recent caper will be a great humorous pub anecdote; so prepare to be entertained to a high pitch of hysteria.

After a week of having two small chairs, two bar stools and a mattress on the floor with books piled into tables, we then were embarrassed by a sheer frivolity of places to sit. On Thursday last week, we took no less than three leather sofas, two more bar stools, a smart little office chair, a chest freezer, an air conditioning unit we can’t use, a capriciously capacious wood framed mirror, three lamps and four beds. Splendid. We were grateful for the washing machine and the book case, but the bed didn’t actually have any screws to put it together; but a mere trifle for our intrepid and pioneering spirits which was quickly overcome.

This was then generously augmented the following Tuesday with a sofa bed, an enormous fridge, two bedside cabinets, a tv unit, two drawers, a large dining table with six smart chairs and the middle corner section of what was previously an enormous corner sofa; the rest of which couldn’t fit into the lift, leaving us with a huge and rather odd, but very comfortable chair. You’re right, I hear you think, that’s bloody hilarious. I’ll leave it to your own good discretions how to count the sofa bed; if five beds and three and a half sofas or four beds and four and a half sofas is most mirthful. Nonetheless, without even counting seating for a total of nine on the sofas, there are thirteen chairs.

Needless to say, this is somewhat superfluous to a two bedroom flat and a curmudgeonly couple who have no children or dogs and entertain infrequently. So no sooner had we got it in, then we began hasty arrangements to get it all out again, and while the gratifying date for its removal was confirmed to me as I sat down to write this a few days ago, all our bloody shipping arrived right in the middle of it all.

Now I feel somewhat ashamed of my little self-righteous diatribe the other week about Stuff. Because bugger me, have I gotta lot of it. The two shipping chaps completely covered the aforementioned large dining table with our whimsical numeration of tea pots, glassware, interesting pottery, broken wine bottles with candles shoved in the necks, Venetian masks, art work and little ornaments most often in the shape of rabbits. And this was as well as the prodigious coffee table sized pile the other chap had fashioned out of all the books I’d not got on the bookcase. And all the stuff you can hide on a boat that I’d frankly managed to avoid looking at for years, like the scrabble, a comprehensive collection of Azimov, tools, ski boots, weird metal pokey things that Yates assures me are necessary for the bikes, about twenty different rucksacks and holdalls. Well now. Amid this chaos I was joyfully reunited with the Book Guardians who are now back on the shelf (you are welcome to peruse to the left for a more expansive account of their adventures), and, far more usefully, about eight pen knives which the three of us made good use of on all the boxes. But it was pleasant to have bits of our own Stuff that was familiar….and has all those little stories attached that I mentioned before. We feel more at home now, despite the wealth of seating.

Into this carnage Yates returned from work, sucked his teeth at it all with stern deliberation, then grabbed my hand from somewhere under a mountain of clothes and scarves, spun on his heel and dashed out through the rain to buy enough beer to cope with the situation. We fell to those, and the unpacking with great alacrity and have now managed to stuff most of our belongings in some sort of order in cupboards. Then the excess furniture departs tomorrow; a new dishwasher arrives the same day and a new sofa we actually want comes Friday!! But this boon of fortune was all too much for the little flat and the washing machine, wanting to redress the balance, has begun pissing water from a pipe, so hurrah hurrah, I do get lonely without daily visits from workmen.

How To Cope With Moving Off A Boat

Habits form surprisingly quickly.

I plaited and pinned up my contraband blue hair for a few days at the start of term – that habit then persisted uninterrupted for four and a half months. In Australia, in attempt to cheat the sun of my tender scalp, I experimented with side partings – that’s been it now for three weeks.

I have long been a creature of habit. It is a family joke. Cite the Dairylea Caper: 1989 – 1997. But a new thing can become a habit with me after only a couple of repetitions. And I have gotten used to living without space.

Six years ago while strolling through London with my chum Adam, I found myself ignoring his chatter while I gawped in shop windows at Stuff. The twenty first preoccupation with acquiring Stuff (not the charming, harmless preoccupation with ‘portable property’ of the innocent, castle building Dickenzian Wemmick) is a danger I’ve sought to stave off, since basically grunge music and my sixth-form Politics teacher told me to. And I could see their point – particularly that day in London when I found myself prioritizing a fixation with shiny things over my meaningful friendship. All of these things, and a strong pinch of whimsy, geared me towards moving onto a boat.

Narrow boats are the answer to a hipster complex about consumerism. This may seem ludicrous to anyone that’s ever been on/lived on a boat and seem them stuffed to gunwhales with things to look at, but absolutely everything fits into the old Morris adage of ‘useful’ and ‘beautiful’ (or you believe it is.)

Now I must labour the point that any TV shows or interviews you’ve heard that harp on this minimalist shit and only keeping things that ‘bring you joy,’ are very much late to my anti-consumerist party. A narrowboat’s interior could never be described as ‘minimalist.’ There are no white, wide, open spaces, free of mind-cluttering….clutter. There’s coal dust. And if there was a space, I’ve used it to stash the cheese grater. I should have bought a kindle and downloaded the whole National Library, but we insisted on stuffing one hundred books in what space there wasn’t.

But I could sit on my boat with my feet on the raised hearth, and my gentleman’s feet all over the rest of the floor with everything pretty much in reach – well – the sort of arm’s reach that requires that mix of a shriek and a groan when you lunge for it from a sitting position. And everything around me was meaningful. A gift from an old, lost friend. Something with a story. Small, hard things you can hold in your hand, and would fit on a regular shelf altogether. I was pleased with this.

I don’t want to get into the argument of aesthetics and art for art’s sake – cruising that ever-anxious line between beauty/art and excess. Mainly because I’ve not really resolved that yet. Significantly when I wander round the glorious highly skilled, highly beautiful, utter excess of the Philip-Patek museum. But having moved into a flat with four rooms, I’m staring at all this carpet we’ve now got to hoover and catching myself thinking ‘I need a tall vase to put gladioli in and a fruit bowl for apples we won’t eat just to fill the space.’

I suppose I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the whole Ikea generation precisely because some of the stuff is pretty quirky and looks unique but it isn’t – and you can see what can be paired with it (obviously a mint coloured wool throw and eight cushions at great expense) and basically buy your whole damn personality out the catalogue. And now I’m catching myself doing it because now we don’t live on a boat – I seem to want to be a person that owns a salad spinner and a collection of pottery cups. I’m wandering round department stores (expensive by nice….or poncey), charity shops (individual and cheap), Wilko (cheap and nasty…but looks alright) trying to get that balance between quality, taste and originality. Which sounds like an advert for a goddamn sofa in itself.

How does one navigate by their convictions in a materialist world, post-boat? How can I strike this balance in this big, empty flat? I found myself giddily running through the twenty-five metre squared room in Ikea thinking this shit is perfect – once again backing into a small safe space surrounded with only the necessary and no choice about vases.

So for now: a manifesto for non-consumerism. Don’t buy everything in Ikea. Wait. Enjoy the space. Get used to it. Do a cartwheel in it. And only spend money on what you know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.

The Perks of the People

Is it just anthropologists that are interested in people? Can any coffee drinker with a keen ear, nosey disposition and romantic notions about ‘people watching’ that they picked up in some gormless guide book to Paris be interested in people? Are we all anthropologists? Or are all people just interested generally in all people?

People-interest oscillates between those noble, benign feelings towards humanity one has when you invariably don’t have to interact with them, like on a country walk in the early morning, or when you’re feeling very generous with just your friends down the pub; and then the deeply felt misanthropy that surfaces when other people’s children throw shit fits in supermarkets. I am guilty of all these oscillations and naïve good intentions. But so far, the Australian people interest me deeply. Having just finished writing a satire of D.H. Lawrence’s collected works, I hesitate to make sweeping generalisations on an entire population throughout thousands of miles with the sagacity of a fortnight’s experience. But the people I’ve spoken to are delightful.

First, the lexicon of the Australian people (people-of-Canberra-Barton-well,theonesItalkedto) is quirky and highly endearing. That’s patronizing. What I mean is, I can’t help just smiling whenever I hear an Australian talk. My first experiences were superficial interactions in shops and bars. But my GOD they’re polite. Having endured service by untrained muppet teenagers who have never seen a pumice stone and wouldn’t know a courgette if 10kilos killed their mother from a great height, or who are clearly too busy flirting with their colleague or whoever just walked in from school, I have to admit we’re not great at service in England. It’s very different here. The standard salutation in these circumstances is ‘Hi, how’re you?’ which is really, unnecessarily nice! One can’t help launching in to a familiar discussion of your day’s movements (since you asked me for a tale…). One woman in a jeans shop pulled this one on me; after I stammered my reply and reciprocation, she told me her name and instructed me to let her know if I needed anything. I nearly gave her my number and asked if she’d like to meet for coffee because I’m new here and don’t have any friends yet and… Confusing friendliness for an Englishwoman. And I must stress, this is not the hollow, robotic blandness I have seen in America with its infamous ‘have a nice day!’ (keep smiling or they’ll take you out back in a bag!), but genuine.

Consider the only time the English interact with strangers. The country walk – you pass another couple out at their leisure, they stop their conversation as you approach and each of you gears yourself up for the altercation. Then there is the awkward spasm where you only have to say ‘morning!’ but manage to confuse the starts of words and and for god’s sake, don’t look at them. Our standard greeting is ‘alright?’ which succeeds in uniting two syllables into one vowel-y grunt, and the super effortful reply of ‘yeahyou?’ also manages to be a several toned single syllable. Here, if I encounter someone in the street or on a walk, they look me square in the face and offer their communication so clearly, so comfortably, so genuinely that I have to stop myself from hopping off my bike, grasping them warmly by the hand like a Dickenzian Pickwickian and telling them what a lovely day I’m having.

There are two incidences I’ve noticed where friendly human exchange is not forthcoming here. One is during your morning walk or jog. I find in England there is such profound respect and admiration for anyone that can be determined enough get up at six and march their arse at pace round the field/lane/block through the frost in the damn dark that my panted ‘mornings’ (I can now pant two syllables while running) are always met with slightly pitying but very encouraging responses. And solidarity amongst other mad bastards doing the same. Like a little pact. I find this hugely gratifying. Here, everyone is healthy so just get on with it and don’t expect wild praise just because you got your heart rate above sedentary.

The other incidence of the absence of warmth is flat hunting. It’s a very surreal and highly competitive scenario. You have fifteen minutes to view a flat, at the leisure of the estate agent. You gather outside in your guerrilla groups; couples sizing each other up – who looks like the better earner? – students with their wealthy parents, pairs of friends. You start counting how many there are. They’re all your competition. You go inside and all thirty-six-odd of you rampage around the place, getting in each other’s way, opening doors into each other, having muted conversations about the things you like, as Yates phrased so beautifully when he described it. You say loudly something negative about a cupboard, then run home as fast as you can to put your online application in, always clocking those that left first, wondering ‘what the hell is their game?’ It’s pretty freakin’ brutal.

So after two bloody weeks of this, we finally have a place. It’s an apartment in the city centre, cute little split-level affair with the two bedrooms, main bathroom and en-suite down a short flight of stairs. Then one large room with a smart little open kitchen on the right with an island unit. It’s very professional middle class and I can’t wait to start pretentiously arranging ikea blankets and display fruit. Balcony’s a bit shabby but hopefully plants and umbrellas and stuff will soften the brickwork. We move in this week. I am surprisingly tired of meals out, although the prospect of cooking the eternally popular ‘snausage gnocchi’ in forty degree heat doesn’t thrill me.

Other charming phrases we’ve heard in the last week are the abbreviations. If you can take a longer word, chop it in half (or preferably just down to its first syllable) and stick an ‘o’ or a ‘y’ on the end, job’s a good’un. Now this is not wholly unfamiliar to boaters, after Cow Roast is ‘Berko,’ I like to walk round the ‘ressy,’ are you going to the festival in ‘Ricki?’ So I’ve slipped into this quite readily (my favourite is ‘eggs benny’ – I’ve always found the phrase ‘eggs benedict’ needlessly pretentious) and I enjoy the squirm of pleasure I furtively observe Australians doing when they feel they have assimilated another pom. I also love the phrase ‘heaps of,’ and ‘get-go.’ Also ‘ks’ instead of kilometres. But the favourite has got to be wheeler-dealer Dean’s judicious and heavily frequent use of ‘Look’ every third sentence when he was selling us a car. It’s an alright car – ford focus, automatic, bit squeaky (then turn the goddam radio up), white… but we have a car now, and a running joke, so we’ll take that.

It’s been a bit of a funny week, seeing as I have been alone applying for jobs and piffling away at my silly writing while Yates goes out and earns. Not sure how I as a feminist feel about that one. Ironically, unliberated. I have been acclimatising to the heat because after three days of barricading myself into the hotel room, I realised life can’t just stop because it’s hot, so get out there, get sweaty, stay in the shade, drink water and commit to your twice daily shower. It’s a shame not to look at this blue, green, white and gold world. I went to the art gallery. Educated myself on a bit of aboriginal art. So a lot of what you see is called dot painting, and apparently, it’s what the desert looks like from above. There’s method in there. There are symbols mixed into all those shapes, for rivers, campsites, kangaroo tracks. Not just random colours and triangles yo. Lots of the pictures had names involving dreaming: woman dreaming, fire dreaming, egret dreaming, naughty boy dreaming (perplexing). On investigating this, I was told dreamtime is sort of all history, as well as the mythical creation of the world. This is, I gather, because of the oral tradition of the aborigines, everything from before your grandparents (Chris interpretation – I suppose then, the last people that can tell you stuff about a certain time) is ‘dreaming.’ Sort of beautiful.

Then it was the weekend, and we could do more exploring! We had a lovely time at the botanic gardens. We saw lizards! And we found a tinder party on the eucalyptus lawn…. And kangaroo tea towels. Then on Sunday we went to Tidbinbilla!

This is one of those unfamiliar words carelessly pronounced at me in the first week. I had to get the chap to write it down to make sure he wasn’t joking. Apparently it was great for all your standard Aussy wildlife. We’d been up into Namadgi park (just approaching the Australian Alps) the week before and I caught myself thinking, well it’s bloody hot, and we already walked around in glorious eucalypt covered hills last week. Tidbinbilla is amazing though, and I am vetting and spotting most places for Teck appropriateness and where I will take my family.

Tidbinbilla is an enormous nature reserve that you drive round. But there are loads of places of interest, where you park up, get out, use the loo (there are lots, but check under the toilet seat!) and then go for a walk. You can do 11k walks around the place, and lots of little ones…which easily add up to that. So it’s the sort of place you wanna pack a picnic for, take a ball or frisbee, a book and spend all day. Do some walks, chill out, have some lunch, do another walk. It was beautiful. And as we strolled around this enormous open site with nine thousand metre, green cloaked mountain peaks all around us, and yellow ragwort-like flowers adorning the grass, it occurred to me at once that I could see no one. There is not a damn spot in the whole of the vastness of the Lake District where you can’t see the little bright red figure of the gortex-wearing hiker somewhere on a ridge or against a sodden hill, but here, no one. Just Yates and I, and thousands of these funny little cricket things that had beautiful patterned yellow wings that could properly fly with them. Thousands of them in the air, how I imagine our butterfly population used to be a hundred years ago.
We finally saw kangaroos too. Scratching kangaroos, lying down kangaroos, hopping kangaroos, baby kangaroos. It was awesome. And swamp wallabies. We hunted for platypus very patiently, but didn’t see any. We visited the koala enclosure and saw some sort of displayed, like in a zoo and they are bloody cute, and we spotted one up in a tree. We heard kookaburras. We saw turtles and swallows, cormorants and a musk duck. It wasn’t forty degrees, it was shady and breezy and it was incredibly beautiful. I can see why a culture of respecting the land has persisted here for millennia; why my ancestors who travelled to western Australia battled isolation and hardship to stay here.
And when we thought there could be nothing more lovely on earth, we went to Gibraltar falls, which is the most end of the world freaking beautiful place on the planet. It’s a waterfall with gentle little streams and rock pools weaving their way down to the larger drop, in the palm of the mountains that rise up above it on all sides. And despite all the tiny yellow signs saying ‘danger, drop,’ it’s a local goddamn swimming pool. Loads of people in swim stuff luxuriating in the cool streams and pools and always with the beautiful blue, green and white of the bush to look at. Heavenly. I thought a place like that only existed in films or on the internet. So grab a picnic, a couple of beers and a book, and stay there till it gets dark.

In other news, I gave a killer karaoke performance last weekend too. Pub quiz again tonight, and I’ve been swotting.