Rona Riot

While the world goes to shit, you can bet, as usual, that I’ve got an opinion on this too. My blog began as a way of keeping in touch with my friends back home to share my Australian adventures. Now it’s going to come into its own for my Australian friends too.

So we’re all consuming our life experience virtually just now. Some of us are in lockdown, glued to our telly, watching in horror as it all unfolds. Some of us are consuming a lot of… well, things that are well meaningly shared about but probably aren’t true. Just like when The Star tells you incredible northern blizzards are coming at the end of the week!!! and I’m wondering where they get this exciting information; the Met office has barely forecast drizzle, and that’s the definitive source! A useful analogy in these times. And then there are yet more of us who are using the time to binge watch tv and be entertained by more cat videos than ever.

Into the mix of all that, I throw in a little blog for amusement. It’s not like you’re going anywhere or have anything else you should be doing. This shit is happening for a good sixth months whether we deal with it well or not, so here’s my little contribution to trying to deal with it well.

So, I don’t wanna isolate some of the ol’ readership, but lots of my home chums have posted memes about 2020 being shite, and I wanna back up my adoptive home in a ‘Nam-like sorta way; ‘you don’t know man, you weren’t there!!’ First Australia had fires that destroyed huge swathes of landscape and loadsa those guys are still living in tents. Then we had so much smoke we couldn’t go outside, and asthmatics were always two breaths away from an attack. Then we had a positively biblical hail event in Canberra that destroyed things that still haven’t been fixed. Then there were floods. So it’s already been a crap start to 2020 after a shitty summer of fire, smoke, hail and flood, and now we have disease too. But yous all have just had the standard five month winter, so, yeah, that is bleak as well.

And now here we all are. Inside. Now, I am super lucky. Yup, we all want to read a blog about how good I’ve got it, sure. But attention must be paid to the things that are going to make it all alright for a bit. While my employment is totally drying up…balls… I have a lovely Yates. Public servant jobs are secured (for now) so our income is not stressful. We are in jolly good health. We have each other. There are lots of people right now with no jobs, whose homes are precarious, who may not have anywhere to self-isolate (like Win’s post about India), or who are struggling on benefits and can’t get enough food. Women and children, and men, in struggling households of violence. If life is at least not like that, then let’s look forward. Some of my own dearest artist friends, Kunal and Dorota, Ben, Charlotte and Dan, CJ, are looking at insecurity as the gig economy dries up. If you’re not like that, let’s look forward. And some of us who just live alone and may not see another person for months now. Let’s look forward.

I don’t want to preach about being positive. Even I keep punctuating my wafty blithe optimism with tantrums. It won’t all be over by May, so you can’t go to Japan, Chris. Pen jettisoned across the interview room. It won’t be over by July, so you can’t fly home and see your little nephew before he forgets what you look like. Little weepy on the drive to work. You can’t go to work Chris (oh. Oh, well, ok). You can’t sing shanty’s round your friend’s house. Scowl. Floriade has been cancelled. Honey lid launched across the kitchen, right, that is FUCKING IT!!! But between that, there is this:

Yates and Chris wake up at the luxurious time of 6.40 and amble into the living room. Leisurely, we drink a pot of tea, occasionally muttering ‘fuuuuck’ as we listen to the news. We watch the sun come up, and chuckle at the currawong who lands on the balcony wall and cocks its hesitant little head at us. We decide to go for a run or …something, then setting down industriously. We make faces at each other over the tops of our computers. We sally forth (er, sorry Europeans, for now, Aussies are still allowed out) to get a coffee and hot cross bun. We count that essential journey under ‘food,’ and while our favourite cafes, bars and eateries are selling food out a side hatch, we’d better keep them afloat. Cockatoos come and visit us throughout the afternoon, and, between fighting one of the cheeky buggers for a bra I left drying on the balcony, we make up office dramas about our cockie co-workers. Sometimes I tutor a child via skype and we make up poems by creating comparisons and pull out the most perspicacious metaphors you’ve ever heard. I write a poem, or something else. I will ring someone I love, and look at their face. Yates endlessly potters outside to feed the cockatoos and watches them in fascination. We cook dinner, and eat it on the balcony (while nine, yes, nine of the feathery fuckers watch us), watching the sun set behind Black Mountain with a glass of wine. Then on the sofa, we read a bit of Pratchett to each other, stare gormlessly at our phones a bit until one saves the other with a squawk of ‘loop!! You’re in the loop! Stop the loooop!!’ And so to bed.

There’s been a lot of discussion about mindfulness, meditation and …ya know, all that bollocks. But we’re sliding into winter, here in Canberra (exciting! I’m wearing tights!) and I am reminded of the great words of my best friend Becky. Winter is for rest. I thought about this a lot last winter here. And this is my main source of optimism. In isolation, we are forced to rest, to reflect. After a few days of isolation, we feel good, it’s great to stay indoors and not have to go to work. We chill out. Then after a few more days, we get fucken bored and gloomy. Without distraction, stuff comes out your head you didn’t know was there, then how the hell you put it back in. And then when we come out of that, we genuinely start finding things to DO.

In summer holidays gone by, if I wanted to write, I had to dedicate enough empty days in a row to actually get bored enough to just sit down and start. This is the time for us now to find these things to DO, to be creative. And as any self-respecting northern hemisphere-er knows, there is a marvellous luxury to be found in winter, of saying ‘no, ta!’ to the world, and snuggling inside, with cups of tea, with blankets, with beautiful music, with audio books, and enjoy the fact that we are warm and safe. Creatives are relishing this. The sitting in a candlelit room with red wine and Nick Cave, drawing (hi Dorota). Those of us sitting by a log burner with a cheeky whiskey, listening to owl calls and knitting (hi boaters). Snuggling on cushions and shoving the cat or dog away to listen to Terry Pratchett on audio books and draw, sketch, make quilts and cards, bags, knit socks and gloves, paint beautiful flowers on metal buckets (hi Freeman, Freeman’s mum, Lesley the boater, Jane’s bags; boater, Annie; boater, Lottie). Lying on your belly on the floor, leafing through six cookbooks at once, and thinking …oooh…that looks nice and spending afternoons roasting, baking and stewing (hey Brooke, Sinead, Danny). Removing the violin or melodeon, clarinet or guitar from The Slightly in the Way Stand of Good Intentions and playing, singing (that’s nearly everyone else I know from New Moon, Surly Griffin, Huginn and Munin, Red Cuthbert, Canberra/Redfern Shanty Club). Staring out the window or over the balcony wall, tapping your pen, thinking ‘what is that like?’ until you make your metaphors. Reading, and learning. No distractions. Many of us are lucky enough to enjoy this.

Can you imagine trying to explain the internet as a way of getting us through isolation to someone hiding out from the Black Death in the fourteenth century? I just can’t manage it. But we have it. My new good friend Jen said another interesting thing to me on that idea; seeing as we no longer see daily people, we have all our energy open to choose who we want to talk to. Now, it’s just as easy for me to facetime a Canberran Shanty Singer or Writer as it is my English teacher friends. Just spin through your address book and think, ‘who’ll it be today?’ We can reconnect with people because we have time. This is a beautiful thing. And while I want to take your jammr, your bandlab, your zoho, zoom, skype, webex, discord, houseparty, hangouts, messenger, whatsapp and ram them all where the fucken sun doesn’t shine, it was bloody awesome when my phone rang and suddenly five faces were looking at me all talking at once and suggesting we burst into ‘Randy Dandy Oh.’ Or when we cheekily gatecrashed Will and Jen’s facetime with Charlie and Lucy, because houseparty lets you do that. People are being creative at finding new ways to work, socialise, create and party. Best idea yet was Sinead suggesting we all facetime in together and get Danny to sommelier us through wines we all have. Genius.

As Monty’s already pointed out, normally this staying inside for two weeks in your jammas, playing board games and drinking is exactly what we’re all over at Christmas, so we have it in us. This is the approach I’m taking this winter.

Hippy dippy three-month duvet time aside, there are probably some other moments of peace we could find in all this. Our world is fast paced and connected, social media gives us forums to compare ourselves and there is always something we could or should be doing. I need more theatre in my life. Why? Erm, because knowing I’ve done something cultural makes me feel valid. I want to go to the pub with all the pretty lights and look like the pretty people. Why? Because then I’ll feel loved and like I’m having a good time. I should be further ahead in my job like that chick I just had dinner with. Why? You weren’t even thinking about that this morning. Because…feminism. I should have children before I can’t have children, and then I won’t even have the chance to think about whether I want children or not. I want that pretty dress so I can go out in it and then show off, post pictures, everyone must know how good my life is. And look, I’m not friends with loads of megaposters because… I find those behaviours tedious. Fuck, I stopped shaving my armpits sixth months BEFORE all this shit. But inside us….ok, inside me, there is a little bit of the pernicious comparing. Is my life successful enough? Interesting enough? Am I loved enough?

Well bitch, the whole world’s in a onesie and bunny slippers so there’s not much comparing to be done. Getting dressed is an achievement. There is now a Great Not Having To. No feeling bad about not having explored your country enough; you can’t for a bit. No feeling bad about not going out on the town to rock out; because you can’t. No feeling frustrated that you still didn’t try that fancy new restaurant only down the road and goddamit you’ve been here 11 months now, because you can’t for a bit. Freedom. Er, not laziness. All the background anxiety about promotion, direction, the world, the ex, forget it. A crisis reminds you what’s important. I enjoyed this on the boat. My concerns were about having sufficient water, enough fuel for warmth, enough space in the pot to shit in, and food. All other things are marvellous benefits. I don’t want to be glib about people who genuinely face real anxiety – and suggesting a pandemic will ‘liberate you from daily anxiety’ is pretty fucken hard to swallow, but it could certainly focus on what things are objectively worth anxiety, and what we have to be pleased about. And what about those of us who never liked going out much anyway? Happy days.

All well and good for us on The Great Underneath. Those of you fatigued by the grey of a long winter, itching in your feet as flowers press through the earth – you’re pretty much over the whole snuggle and the staying inside thing. If winter is rest, summer is action, for living, for doing, frantically, until winter again when you can sit down and think about it all. My attempt at comfort is this. Imagine what a spring it will be. Yellow hammers and skylarks will peep out of the hawthorn hedgerows with held breaths; they will wait and then…nothing. They will fly out, unmolested. Hedgehogs and badgers will approach the tarmac river and waddle slowly across it, unflattened. Carp and pike and bream will multiply unfished, hares will run, cow parsley, trefoil, then bluebells, garlic flower, rosebay will elbow their way out to the sun, trembling and shaking in the breeze unpicked; untrampled, and hawks will soar in skies unstained by smears of engine fuel. Mountjacks, mink, stoats will tumble on the towpaths and live a year without fear. Let them have it. Just this once. I’m sure we’ll re-seize the world after all this is over and carry on fucking it up without a second thought.

I feel close to my home, this time of year. Spring and Autumn are not two sides of a coin but parallel moments of change that line up equally at a point. The sun on yellow buttons here in the gentle autumn warmth is like the sun on cowslips as we dance up the summer. The weather fluctuates, and reminds us there is nothing you can rely on, but change. And we’re in a time of change. Incredible how quick that shit moved, hey. Two months ago, we all couldn’t do enough for firies, we fell over ourselves to donate, to flock to centres, to bring food, clothes and money to help each other. The human was united against Nature, the enemy out there that was pursuing us with its hot fingers. Now the enemy is within us, invisible; we don’t know if our friend we’re walking with is an asymptomatic carrier, or if the person at the checkout is, or if they guy you just walked past has all the bloody bog roll and that bitch has all the pasta, so we regard everyone with suspicion and hate; fight over basic amenities while scorning refugees who want to get off the boat here. Boy were we ever worried about the wrong boat. But in the time of social distancing, everyone, remember to smile and wave at people, in between walking away from them. It’s great for Brits, the naturally suspicious of the world, because a smile now CAN’T lead to further interaction you don’t want, it can be taken just as it is; a momentary connection of kindness. Don’t walk away from each other in your hearts. This is how we’ll rebel against the ‘rona. I’ve smiled at the same old fellow the last three mornings on my run, and today, he was ready; he looked me square in the eye, and said hello.

Made my fucken day.

Christmas Lights

Well it’s the time of year. In between rabid amounts of binging, be it at the table, or in your slippers in front of the telly, humans get reflective this time of year. Like double headed Janus, for which this month is named, we look back at the past twelve months, reflect on how our lives have changed, who or what has come into it or left it, and also look forward to how we will change as the new year starts. And I reckon with all of that, some of you could have been prompted by this blog to remember that, ya know, it’s me, ME; I’m not in your daily life anymore! But something tells me that, beyond the usual cards and yearly reflections, your old pal Chris and that fact that she moved to the other end of the world might be a little further forward in your minds right now.

Because this Christmas, Australia is on fucking fire.

So, Brits, I’m here to give you the inside story, replete with metaphor, sweary outrage and my usual wit. But this is not a news article, Chris blogging from the hot spots (ah shit, poor taste), this is an accumulation of impressions from a British person, living through her first fire season.

Right, so to first demonstrate my true assimilation into a Canberran, it’s not normally fucken like this. Yesterday was our Aussieversary; the day we arrived here last year. I don’t know if it was jet lag, the self-absorption of the homeless or furniture tetras, but I sure wasn’t aware of loads of bush fires this time last year, even though it was, proverbially, hot as shit.

So I’ve spent my year learning. I’ve had lovely walks in Tidbinbilla, reading all the information about how alpine ash and eucalyptus need fire every fifty or so years to promote regrowth. Eucalypts produce new branch buds along the length of the trunk, deeply set under the bark, and are protected from fire which then clears that bark and stimulates those new buds. It also clears a bit of the vegetative competition, enriches the soil and opens up more of the canopy to light. Bloody fascinating right? Back in July I got to scribe an interview for a role in fire ecology. The panellists and applicants all had PhDs and were practicing firies (that’s a firefighter, chaps) and I learned a hell of a lot more then about how local governments balance mitigating fire risk against conservation, and how animals interact with landscapes before and after fires in changing ways over time and regrowth stages. I learned about ‘back burning.’ What the fuck is that? Well apparently conservationists set things on fire on purpose! Indigenous Australians were doing it for millennia. To a Brit, this is unconceivable, we’re all about fire suppression, but controlled careful burns during winter – taking into account flowering seasons of pretty field orchids and hollow bearing trees where native fauna nest – reduce dry fuel and hazards for summer bushfires. Later that week I saw a bit of hazard reduction burning on Black Mountain from the balcony. Shit shit shit I thought, Black Mountain’s on fire, what do I do, I’m supposed to call someone. Happily, my local government has a handy app where you can look up planned burns, and it was just that; planned and contained. And also through strolling the exhibitions of the National Museum of Australia, I’ve come to see some relevance of these burns when faced with a string of ‘blacks’ – Black Friday; Victoria 1939, Black Saturday; Victoria 2009, Black Tuesday: Tasmania 1967. And the 2003 Canberra bush fires where the fire came right up and into the outer suburbs within the living memory of all my contemporaries who were all evacuated, and still wince on hot dry days and run around their gardens clearing gutters, getting rid of dry dead leaves and making sure the areas around their houses are clear. Even now, Tidbinbilla has a plaque commemorating ‘Lucky,’ a Tidbo koala who survived those bush fires and slipped peacefully from a koala nap into the Big Sleep, five years later.

So I get it, Australia is ecologically evolved to incorporate fires; to survive and benefit from them. And I’m learning about …ehh… Aussie spirit, when it comes to gritting your teeth and living with fire as a reality. People have insurance for it (hopefully it’s more effective than the U.K.’s during floods), families have fire plans; they spend their summer with all their essential docs and a travel bag by the front door in a cruel parody of expectant parents. People seem to live rather nonchalantly with the idea that their house could be destroyed, and they’ll just have to build a new one.

Then came spring. We last had rain of any significance on 16th October. Since then, five-minute dribbles on four occasions. Everything was green and beautiful, and Floriade was glorious. Do you remember how lovely I told you it was?

But still no rain. And raising temperatures. The bush fire outside Sydney raged and covered Sydney harbour with smoke and continued to swell. When the wind blew from the sea, it cleared it away, and right over the mountains to us. We’ve lived with smoke in Canberra since the middle of November and I’ve been routinely using it as an excuse to not go running. (Oh, well, you see…) I went on a lovely writing retreat near the coast on the 29th November, and I can tell you, the sunsets were cracking. We stood with wine on the veranda to admire it…with a background discomfort like the characters in Don DeLillo’s White Noise admiring the sunsets presaging the end of the world. Koalas don’t move very fast.

Ok, and then I found out that Rural Fire Service – those heroes you’ve heard about that are on the ground, fighting fires, saving koalas and people alike, banging on doors in the middle of the night and telling people to get out quick, clearing roads, dodging falling trees – aren’t fucking paid! To a man and a woman, they’re volunteers. Voluntarily putting their lives at risk, with no compensation, no pay, no pension, no provision for families if killed in action like every other goddam service in which a person is required to risk their lives. And often, having to fork out themselves if they need to refuel the fire truck, issued only one set of kit that they are wearing daily, with sometimes ineffective breathing apparatus and not enough water. Time off work to fight fires is granted, but not paid.

I need to take a deep breath here before I literally explode with righteous indignation and exclamation marks, because if you combine here the deep knowledge, understanding and experience Australia has with fire because it is so much part of the environment, with the obvious conclusion that fire-fighting is therefore an essential service like, well, being a doctor, or a teacher, or a policeman, and they also risk their lives…how dare you not fucken pay them?!?! There, see, punctuation explosion. And it is questioned by the media and the Prime Minister that volunteers want to be there, and if you pay them, there’s an argument for paying all volunteers and that removes people’s right to give charity. But let’s not go into people’s further rights not to need charity.

So in the middle of this choking shit storm, Beck, Ted and the Screwben arrived for Christmas. And this is what this blog should have been about – a comprehensive list of lovely days, and it was, but always in the shadow and smoke of fire.

For a start, Christmas was very nearly ruined. Since November we’d been watching the south coast fire get closer to Pebbly Beach where we’d booked to go camping for two nights back in January. The King’s highway was closed, then open, then closed for backburning, then open, then closed again. Eventually it was fully confirmed, Pebbly Beach had gone on holidays to Destination Fucked and we’d have to find somewhere else to escape Canberra’s smoke and forty-degree temperatures. We were lucky. We found a cabin in a holiday park in Moruya Heads, on the coast. We’d have to drive the long way for four hours, but we’d break it up. So Christmas was saved, and we balanced our days carefully with indoor, air conditioned activities, risking smoke occasionally to go outside in the morning, soaking up Commonwealth Park and the Botanic Gardens on clear sunny days, and always back by three to make sure we spent the least time in hellish heat. We worried about Reuben a lot, he’s nine months – is he getting enough fluids? will he cope with only a bit of smoke? And always staring anxiously out the window at Black Mountain to see how grey it was to judge the smoke, and every evening we’d watch it vanish beneath a suffocating shroud. No glib metaphor here.

But Christmas was great, we drove over Brown mountain, we found cool, clear air, we splashed in the sea, we drank some wine and beer, we played in the pool with the Reubinator, we ate a lot, then returned on Boxing day, when smoke set in.

Just as we’d got back to Canberra, everywhere we drove through caught on fire.

Fires joined up and became the size of Norfolk. They raced through and destroyed whole towns in half an hour. Unpredictable winds had them travelling hideous speeds in random directions, and places that had never suffered bushfires in living memory were razed. Small villages were completely destroyed; the whole of South Coast tourism economy has disintegrated and tourists who would normally spend two or three weeks of the summer holidays there, fled. Residents were evacuated. Australia now has a quantity of Internally Displaced Persons comparable with countries in conflict.

And in all this, finding the smoky air a bit bothersome, the Prime Minister fucked off on holiday.

This gave rise to the marvellous #wherethebloodyhellareya? as his office committed blunder after blunder by not telling anyone he’d left the country; then denying that he had; then outright lying, then he eventually came back a day early. He then spent a week painting the bush fires and smoke as cool and normal and that only young people are upset because they’ve not seen this yet, while seventy-year olds shook their heads, saying never; never like this. Then Victoria’s fires began developing freak new weather patterns called pyrocumulonimbus where the heat is so intense that it changes air pressure several kilometres up creating a storm, in which the rain is evaporated by the fire’s heat long before it gets near the ground and the lightening strikes cause more fires. Wind can blow embers full kilometres ahead of the fire front and spread the fire with sickening speed. Still dear ol’ ScoMo did nothing beyond saying this is definitely nothing to do with climate change, because it’s all very normal.

Then a fire front burst through a holiday camp in Mallacoota which was evacuated to the beach and four THOUSAND people waded into the sea on New Year’s Eve, chased by a hideous wall of red and black. While they sat there in forty-nine degrees heat under a black sky, the Prime Minister had a garden party for the Aussie cricket team, addressing the nation to say we should look to them for resilience in getting through some of these fires.

Now thousands of people are without power, thousands are displaced, thousands have lost their homes, and a hell of a lot of people are still on that beach in Mallacoota. And it’s only 7th January. This is normally when bush fire season begins. It shouldn’t have been raging for two months already. The Aussie PM finally got on board, called in the defence forces to evacuate Mallacoota by ship and has continued pissing people off by forcing residents to shake his hand when he finally turns up to affected communities to try and look like he cares. Hey, and google his cute little video ad about all the stuff he’s done since finishing his holiday; deploying Army reservists to help with the bush fires. It’s peppy. You can find it on twitter and youtube. Too bad he didn’t bother telling the NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner first.

Then to start 2020, the first two days, then the fifth and sixth were so thick and clogged with smoke that New Years Eve celebrations were cancelled, the Australian Post was cancelled, major services and buildings shut, and Canberra was a ghost town with its people entombed in their houses, trying not to breath while the ghosts and white wreaths of smoky death stalked the streets instead. I’d have written a gothic ghost story about a town covered in smoke, but it’d have been too implausible. There are no fires in Canberra – the nearest is fifty kilometres away, but fires the size of Essex are to our East, West and South and we are reminded daily by breathing in the black, grey and orange deaths of twenty three people and half a million animals.

Four and a half years of laying my own fire, and watching the flames behind the glass stove door while listening to the owls. And now I look at huge Wassailing ceremonies with their flambeaus on black English nights and find myself flinching. My mind fizzes with ‘fire ban,’ ‘embers,’ ‘kindling.’

My relationship with fire may have been changed forever.

What’s Up in Manjimup

I have been languishing under the virility of my first Australian cold which has left me the time (although less the acumen) to ponder on the hedonism that has led to this recent drop in immunity.

Following the onset of a glorious spring where all was right and glittering with the world, we went to Western Australia. People told me it was lovely; not least Helen Waterhouse who used to live and work there (shout out) but I was unprepared for how devastatingly different it was from here. Ya know, I shouldn’t have been; it’s a five hour flight so about the distance from Stansted to Istanbul (oh, is it different here?) but then there is also the ubiquitous eucalyptus that homogenises Australian landscapes to some extent. I was also unprepared for the sort of emotional connection I had. Bear with me.

I have grown up with the knowledge that ‘Grandma was born in Australia.’ But I have never mythologised this. I have never felt drawn by the intrepid adventure of my ancestors to follow their pioneering footsteps. In fact, I’d never have bloody come here if Yates hadn’t got the job. And I don’t think Perth was high on my list beyond bagging all the capitals.

‘Grandma was born in Australia and left when she was two. She lived in a place called Manjimup.’ I have always known these things like you learn your family’s birthdays and how they have their tea. But I did not romanticise them. However, we were thinking, well, New Zealand’s still cold in spring, so we’ll go to Perth and I might as well get to Manjimup – Canberra Conversations: there’s a great truffle and wine place down there so while I’m at it, let’s look up second cousin Laurie…

So I wrote to this chap mam had met years ago on her own Australian trip and he sent me a couple of pictures I’d seen before of my great grandparents. And bugger me, there they were, surrounded by eucalyptus trees (and not a lot else), grinning and squinting in the sunlight and suddenly a dry flash of lightening threaded through the years between them, turning up and thinking ‘faaack, it’s hot – and look at them trees!’ all new and hopeful; and me, doing just the same ninety years later. And it suddenly did make me feel connected to a woman I’d never met who I heard made great cakes, and an old man I barely remember who used to give Beck and me rides on his mobility scooter.

So misty eyed (and thoroughly grumpy – I do not recommend getting a Murray’s bus to Sydney at midnight to get a 7am flight, that’s a shit idea), we landed in Western Australia, hired a car and began hurtling south. If you look at Western Australia on a map, there’s (implausibly) a really really green bit. We drove through miles and miles of orchards. Banished was the brown red landscape with stones and scraggy grass – we drove past apple orchards, hazelnut orchards, pears, cherries, peaches…espaliers, olives…it was glorious. My eyes were fixed to the window drunk on green and wide open space. Pretty little towns celebrating their apples, had bright (and slightly tacky) apple shades on the streetlights, and consisted of nothing more than a row of shops (keeping to the traditional frontier chic – corrugated metal roofs, large verandas….yet still the tragic absence of saucy women in red petticoats) on one side of the street and some sort of memorial garden; and the all important loos, on the other, all surrounded by orchard. This may not be the place to slip into rhapsodies about Australia’s enlightened attitude to public conveniences with which the U.K. has thoroughly dispensed and still insists it has no money, despite the obvious fortunes recouped from their upkeep…but we’ll let that spasm pass.

Manjimup has a very grand entrance…comically so. The town itself did not inspire me terrifically, but the little outdoor museum was marvellous; merging play areas with picnic park space, event space, lakes and strolls with old buildings gathered from around the area and erected there to rest. Here I found the real actual police station (about a room and a half big) where my great uncle William was Chief of Police and thwarted a bank robbery back in the 30s. This enlivened that legendary story for me, which mam had brought back from Australia eight odd years ago.

We then headed to Pemberton, which I am told is actually where Grandma was born. There is a hospital there; didn’t look like the original building grandma was born in (although I’ve rather skipped over the existence of this modern convenience in a recent piece of fiction for dramatic effect) – and as my pop pop apparently had farmland, I assume their little homestead wotsit was a bit further out of that. ‘Pemby’ was even smaller. Again, row of shops on one side of the street; loos and memorial garden on the other. Streets of houses criss-crossing behind up the hill. We stayed in the Pemberton Hotel and I had a fabulous supper of locally cooked trout. Then bed at 8, as we’d pretty much been up 38 hours, and later woke to our first Western Australian morning.

WA doesn’t get behind daylight savings. Eastern Australians have strident opinions on this, but I kind of liked it at the time. It starts getting light around 04.30 (not dissimilar from the U.K. in June), so you wake up a little after that, all refreshed and adjusted because the sun’s been gently whispering in your eyelids for quite a while. And it’s 6am. So you get on with the day nice and early, and are back in bed before 21.00. I’d say that keeps the wholesome population of WA out of trouble! I awoke to the sound of a kookaburra gleefully ecstatic at the morning and sat on the balcony while it rained softly (rain!! Blessed rain! Imagine an Englishwoman welcoming rain!) to engender all that voluptuous verdance around us. Later we strolled down to the little tram; Pemby’s main tourist attraction, which takes you on an hour and a half little ride through the immense forest which it used to be instrumental to managing, and er, cutting down. We bloody loved it. The deal about that part of WA is its forest of giants; Karri trees (a type of eucalypt) are the third tallest trees in the world, after the American Redwood, and Mountain Ash (predominantly found in Victoria and Tasmania) and grow up to 95meters. Thus it was great to actually get in it, properly. This little tram was for transporting logs to Pemberton’s sawmill and forest had been cleared up to 40m either side of the track. Now in 2019, the forest has a fight with the passengers through the open sides of the tram. It was great, you’re brought up in the U.K. being told by headshaking, grieved looking men that you must never lean out the window of a train, followed by horrific legends of decapitation (to which the noxious verb ‘bounced’ is often applied) and here we just merrily leaned out and dodged branches. The forest was carpeted in beautiful flowers, tall bells that rise sort of like fresia or foxglove…dunno what they’re called though, in pink, white, dark pink, orange, and then purple tree hovea that has little flowers a little like bleeding heart, there was native wisteria and even some wattle still, in a softer cream yellow than that in the east. I was in Wordsworthian rhapsodies. You only had to stare at the sky patiently for a little while before great black Carnaby cockatoos flapped across the canopy, or green ring-necks flitted like powered leaves from branch to branch. We stopped at the cascades; a beautiful clear river tumbling over rocks, we admired the white blossoms on the thin leafed peppermint eucalypts, slowed down over perilously high and rickety looking bridges to admire river after river, trying to spot trout or marron in them, and the driver provided such a hysterical commentary that Yates and I laughed the whole way through. Oh it was the best thing ever. And it was great seeing that landscape – here, in this green, British/Irish like green and rain, where my great grandparents had lived, working that forest, struck by that landscape, perhaps with the same wonder as me. I hope so. I hope they loved it.

After that, we drove to the outskirts of Manjimup to the Truffle and Wine company, where we had a splendid lunch of poncey things like salmon mousse, cheese with truffle oil, prosciutto and so forth. Bought some truffle oil. Then whizzed north to Margaret River.

I loved this place too. Again, green as … fuck; cool, sea, hippy little shops, lovely birds, I ate more fish and we booked ourselves, at the expense of $115 each, onto a wine tour. This was bloody amazing, and worth every penny. For this sum, we were driven around all day to four different vineyards, a chocolate place, an Italian sauces place, a brewery, given lunch, tried about 35 different wines, did a fun little science thing of mixing cabernet with shiraz to make personalised blends for lunch, and got dropped off at a bar where we were given shots. Fecking amazing. We were on the fun bus with two Danish sisters, a couple from Switzerland, a couple from Sydney and another British couple. Who after 35 wines and a pallet of beer, still couldn’t crack a smile. Bloody hell. But everyone else was fascinating and wonderful and I dizzied around blurrily loving everything. Beautiful vineyards in green fields stretching off towards the sentinel wall of eucalypts, smiling ironically at this European imposition. But who doesn’t like wine, right?

Apparently I was hard work on the way home. I can neither confirm nor deny. The next day we drove to Perth and met second-cousin-once-removed, Laurie – grandson of the bank robbery thwarting policeman who was older brother to my great grandfather. And even though this sorta long lost relative thing is very much not Yates’ bag, and I didn’t really think it was mine either, I loved it. Cousin Laurie is an incredibly cheerful fellow, upbeat, feisty, full of jokes, and his wife Lorraine just the same. I felt faint shadows of regret that we didn’t grow up part of those lives. Again, would grandma have been as irrepressibly cheerful and open hearted as her cousins if she’d run around barefoot with rosellas in her eyes in a place where remoteness deregulates so many of the social rules of 1940s London? If she hadn’t come back? She was a great woman in a crisis – would the struggles presented by that landscape have developed her better? Well, they say the unpopularly irritable women accused of witchcraft in the old days were often suffering pain from what are now preventable afflictions, and grandma suffered arthritis all her life. Not that grandma was a witch. But I reckon the pain she lived with would corrupt a lesser woman to warped misery, never mind the capacity for the huge expanse of love she gave us as children. So I don’t know how differently grandma’s life would have turned out, but I did feel a marvellous and uncanny affinity with these people who shared genetic material with me; particularly as I have never met or knew any other members of grandma’s family.

Then we went to a fancy restaurant in the Nedlands suburb of Perth where we drank a fabulous bottle of SSB and I ate a Balmain bug. The next day we hit the beach at the amusingly named Cottesloe…got nuclear burned but at least England won the rugby. The last day we took the ferry to Rottnest to see the quokkas; look up pictures if you’ve never seen them; but Rottnest seems to base its whole tourism strategy on instagraming selfies with quokkas. And they’re little and cute and stupidly brazen, so when you arrive on the settlement, they’re everywhere. You’re not supposed to touch them as multiple signage instructs you, but sometimes they fair rub against your legs like cats trying to pick up crumbs. There were kids stroking them like puppies, and everyone shoving things in their faces; bits of food, leaves, cameras. So yeah nah, decided to just watch them from a respectful distance. But if you’re hovering by a bush, another family strolling by realises you must be looking at a quokka and come running up with their phones and there goes respectful distance.

So I’m looking forward to the first quokka-ravages-a-toddler story in the news.

Full list of recommendations: McHenry Hohnen cellar door (in Margaret River, Steve’s restaurant in Nedlands, Perth), Hay Shed Hill, Brookwood Estate, The Truffle and Wine Company Manjimup.

JOKER – A Review

My interest in Joker was, obvs, artistic. I’d finished a workshop on writing negative and positive character arcs and having seen adverts for the film around, it was the first solid example I could think of. This stunned Yates when I suggested we go as I’d never before shown the least interest in the whole Batman franchise, and he’s right; implausible, one dimensional, predictable superhero action movies hold utterly no appeal for me. However, dark retellings with alternative perspectives and reinterpretations, as my love of Angela Carter testifies, very much do.

Still reeling, Yates gave me a heads up on some of the reviews which my appropriately woke approach would find important. So I read some reviews about incel calls, shooter glorification, anti-feminism, racism and then the alternatives that call for robustness instead of humanity for a well loved villain. And here’s me throwing in my two pence.

For a start, it was great. I have no interest in superhero films with all their fecking explosions because the characters are boring. Joaquim Phoenix wasn’t boring. Nor was his development. You watched throughout, empathising uncomfortably, and wondering when he was going to crack. That is way more interesting to me than tense car chases and fights. And the music’s cool. And the dancing. Which unavoidably make a great film. A personal favourite moment is when Arthur Fleck, on a real downer, just gets in the fridge. Yup. Opens the door, pulls out all the food and shelves, and just gets in. You know those times when you’re feeling rough? Get in the fridge.

Flippancy aside, a lot of the articles you’ll have read will discuss how it glorifies the loner who goes on shooting sprees, revealing justifiable motivations. Pretty distasteful in the light of the (most) recent shootings in the U.S., and the rise of the crazy incel online movement where maladjusted blokes who don’t have girlfriends spew on about how they’re going to kill everyone who won’t have sex with them. So did I think it romanticised the lone wolf, helping the audience to understand that the world really is against him and totally deserve to be killed in the face?

I guess there was a bit of that. I don’t reckon those murderers genuinely do perceive the world is against them. Arthur Fleck is badly educated (as obvious from his appalling spelling in his journal, from which the audience get frequent half-obscured glimpses of sinister looking pictures), has a mental health disorder and a shit job. He’s a full-time carer for his crazy mother. This is all outside of his control to a degree. He also has a shit load of bad luck. Being beaten up by a load of people who are delinquent or drunk or just assholes is not his fault, or the bullshit get-the-audience-all-fired-up-about-the-unfairness disciplinary for losing a sign at work…because he was beaten up. Combine single carer with poverty, poor education, mental health issues and loneliness with a load of bad luck and you genuinely do have a lot of difficulties that few people have the resilience to overcome. Sounds like a regular description of any kid on a List in UK schools, or crime factors the world over.

Then come the bad choices, like taking a gun to a kid’s hospital, which actually was so farcical when it falls out his clown trousers while he’s dancing for the under tens leukaemia ward that it’s just hilarious. Here’s where we have to examine where systematic factors run out and personal responsibility comes in, sure, but also, I’m watching the Joker, and I know he’s a bad guy and I’m waiting to find out when he becomes the joker. Convenient for me I guess, to suspend belief at the point when the social issue gets complicated. 😉

So yeah, when he starts shooting drunk abusive rich kids and stabbing people with scissors, you do feel like he’s taking some control over his life and question yourself about why you think that’s acceptable. There’s a beautiful scene after shooting dudes on the subway when he locks himself in a toilet and dances. Not jolly clown dancing, but slow, euphoric waltzing to compelling cello music. Which, by all accounts, Hugh Grant found unpleasantly noisy. But it does challenge you to examine why, as he develops in self-assertiveness, and …joy, you’re rooting for him because it all sounds a bit stroppy. ‘Yeah, you’re all bastards so I’ve bloody shown you, now!’ Can I identify with that?

Some of this wilful teenager-ish behaviour is validated by very teenager-ish daddy issues – wishing Tom Wayne would accept him. The one time I couldn’t follow him all the way was his cringy outburst when invited to the Murray Franklin show where he whined about being abandoned by society and tipped over from frustration to blame. Seeing as it was all shot with a TV screen frame, it’s now showing us perhaps how the rest of the world sees the fantasy existence Fleck has built himself. Perhaps as his grip on reality loosens, his increasing madness is what is actually gives him the feeling of power and joy more than murder.

But it ultimately worked for me because he did seem justified striking out at an unfair society. I don’t know if I’m being duped here because I’m sure that’s what righteous film makers would also assert as justification for his actions, but sometimes the means of production must be seized by the workers in any way possible. Ok, I picked up on this because the social ills of a capitalist society is my background and may not be the overriding concern of other people’s human experience.

On which, I did notice the black thing straight away. Why were most of his early aggressors were black women? That’s a director’s choice! It’s a black woman who holds tight-lipped, disapproving ‘therapy’ sessions in a miserably cramped and messy office who looks like she just wanted to get him out the room, and totally fails to show any compassion or practical help. It’s a black woman who chastises him aggressively on a bus when he smiles at her little boy. Other reviews have pointed out that the murders of black women were invisible, hinted at offscreen as the women aren’t important enough to have their deaths made explicit.

But I’ve also read lots of articles that condemn the amount of screen time given to vicious acts of violence against women. The Fall was guilty of sexualising violence against women in its split screen shots, despite foregrounding the immense charisma of Gillian Anderson’s character who is surely a portrayal of female power and agency. So…what’s it gonna be? Have the makers of Joker decided to not join the long line of film makers depicting brutality against women? Or did they leave it out because black women have no voice even in death?

In my ignorance of the lived experience, I’m not sure. There are a couple of wonderfully sympathetic black characters. There are also a lot of arseholes who are white. And it seemed more to me that if you combine mental health issues with the poor education and humiliating poverty that is found in systematically unfair societies where power and wealth is in the hands of a select few who make no effort to understand the experience of the masses, nor use their wealth and power to alleviate it, then you will have …well, crime. And we do. We have it in the U.K. and Australia where we don’t have guns or the lone gunman figure.

Fleck makes the point to one ex co-worker clown, David that he was the only one who was ever nice to him. He doesn’t kill him. In the hilarious scene, he gets up from the corpse of another guy, covered in blood, to let David out of the locked apartment with a friendly kiss on the head. The audience, holding their breath, wait to see if he’ll flip out again and murder this guy too. But he doesn’t. He’s not completely mad. This guy was kind. Fleck repeats the sentiment throughout the film that ‘what’s wrong with a little human decency? And kindness?’

So who’d have thought? Compassion for each other, kindness, inclusion and a fair and just society are essential for a well-adjusted public? Maybe we should ask governments those questions before condemning directors for glamorising gunmen. And fucking ban guns.

Spring is Here, Life is Skittles, Life is Beer!

I have been thinking much lately of the sparkly eyes of Martin Lindridge, multi-coloured hank-ied and braceleted, singing this song half conspiratorially and definitely mischievously as the words have inevitably frothed into my head every time I have seen blossom of late. And regardless of context, be it my own blog or my canal contribution to a parish newsletter, I can never resist talking about spring.

Spring arrived in Canberra in a white dress and has been merrily playing tennis with winter for the past two months. Pear and rowan blossom erupted in late August (think February, you northern hemisphere-ers) and in the sunshine one bravely left one’s coat at home and stepped out, squinting in the sunshine. It gathered pace, then the first of September broke, which is Wattle Day in Australia. Wattle is a glorious golden tree or shrub with little yellow puffy balls of flowers in huge clumps and there are numerous varieties. I’d been wondering what the hell all this yellow stuff was on my morning frosty runs in August; hatted and gloved, then on the First of September, when we climbed the mountain at Camel’s Hump in the Tidbinbilla range and enjoyed the first t-shirt day of the year,  he sun shone and golden wattle in full sun smiles choked the blue hills and grey trees. Another colour to Australia’s palette.

Giddy with excitement as cherry, then apple blossom and then wisteria swelled in pinks, whites and purples, I continued through Canberra with that sort of …stomach smile you have, when you are perfectly happy and all around you is so glorious that a face is not enough to smile with as the joy pierces down deeper. Floriade – Australia’s largest flower festival – opened, and as I wandered through purple tulips and pink petunias, I was veritably drunk on fragrance, weeping and throwing my head in the beds.

Chaps; to imagine Floriade, combine the following. Take an English Stately Home of either the National Trust or English Heritage variety and pinch out its glorious planting of formal beds and kitchen gardens. Now double your quantity. Make some of the designs and patterns playful (like a ‘daggy knit jumper’ – google that) and then homages to nature, like reflecting the shape of the blue Murrumbidgee river in forget me nots and pansies. Now add a music festival, complete with stage, numerous food stalls, varieties of bars and pretty stalls that sell glorious hippy Indian silk skirts, and mix together thoroughly until you have a riot of colour and pleasant seating from which to enjoy it. Add craft stalls. Serve on a platter of a local town park with sweeping views down to the lake and Mount Ainslie, Mount Majura and Black Mountain, and some bats in the trees. Scrape off the National Trust charge of £22.50 per fecking adult and some grumpy woman in the café selling you overpriced dry sandwiches, so entrance to the whole event is free and you can go in and out as often as you want. Allow this to continue for a month. And there you have it! A Floriade!

I felt very luck to enjoy two springs in a year. I went home in May and was drunk on bluebells, singing and dancing in the May-o at sunrise with New Moon Morris and thoroughly proud to declare ‘this is the one thing about being English that is not tainted or divisive!!’ I danced up the sun in England, then inquired about doing such a thing in Australia. Now our first of May would equivocate to the first of November. By which point it would be hot as shit. Wattle day at the start of September – equivalent of the first of March is still a bit dicey, weather wise. So instead, Surly Griffen hoped on Canberra’s sixth month old light rail to give it its proper christening and dance in the spring in every suburb off Northbourne Avenue.

We gathered in Gunghalin, at the top of the line. Dressed in black, with our brightly coloured green and blue baldrics, noisy bells and eye contractingly white hankies (washed clear of Tasmanian winter mud), we attracted attention. Remember, despite the National Folk Festival happening right here in Canberra, it’s behind a paid fence and we are the only Morris side in the Territory. Surly Griffen don’t dance a lot round the city. Our pubs aren’t accustomed to us turning up to dance of a weeknight, there are precious few greens, and we haven’t invited other sides to mob our town centre and dance with us for national events. All this merely suggests the scope we could yet do, which would be marvellous. But overall, dudes with bells and hankies outside your local shops, is not a common site. We danced, and we did it vigorously, then we hopped on the light rail. Someone overconfident with their balance began playing melodeon, which farted to a wheezy halt the minute the train set off and twenty four sets of bells jingled in startled unison as we all lurched aside before grappling at bars and straps to hang on to. This was very funny the first time it happened; hysterical after the fifth as we never seemed to learn to hang on to something as the train took off. And then at the appropriate stop, we would shuffle and jingle out, line up on the platform, and do a couple of dances before the next train.

This all went marvellously until we got arrested.

Hyperbole is such a wonderful technique. There was indeed an announcement over the platform radio stating if we persisted dancing, the police would be called, which was followed by another stating that they had. We took this all in jest, until a chap in a hat came over and said, no really, it’s not safe to take up so much room on the platform. Er… They say Australia is the nanny state. After that we got a two man escort for the rest of our expedition which marshalled us on and off the carriage (we invariably went in and out of whatever door we felt like instead of where we were told), still couldn’t make us hang on when we departed platforms, and also walked us over pedestrian crossings to safe dance spots.

This was all very amusing, and next time we’ll know to put in an official application and see if we can get a horse guard. But it was all good fun! Our squire was good enough to focus on a few of the Cotswolds and border dances that I know, so we did Tides a-Flowing, Vandals, Highland Mary (that’s a vigorously self-identifying hanky dance) and even an Upton stick. We left off at last to do what all good Morris dancers do, which is go to the pub and ate and drank heartily, then finished up at the last stop on the light rail to be sure we’d brought in the spring at both ends. I don’t know if it was really a spring tribute, rather than celebrating a geeky love of trains, but it was a lovely day and the blossoms smiled. I’d have felt more the pagan folk of spring if we’d burst into hal-an-tow, but perhaps I can only do that in green lands.

So how does it compare to England’s green fields? A bit less pagan, yes. And while I love me winter tatters for their added gravitas, I do miss the flow of my wine red skirt and shaking ribbons in people’s faces, panting between skips that if one touches them, it means they’ll fall in love. All this does bring home to me how unique New Moon is, because despite Morris dancing for four years, it’s entirely not prepared me for… Morris dancing. But I do love that New Moon make up their own dances, based on border, north west clog, garland dances and whatever the hell else they feel like, with a broom. It is lovely to join in another side and dance with them; hence I’ve begged to perhaps learn a bonny green garter to pay just one tribute to Cotswolds, but I agree, you don’t want to make a habit of it. I jest, but when New Moon take the street at Rochester, Tring, St Albans, Oxford, Swanage, Kimpton and Wimbourne, the audience are going to see something different. Perhaps that is it – English Morris is for the audience, for the performance. Australian appears to be for the dancers. Across the whole continent, we learn the same dances and dance them together. We hear the bells far off and gravitate towards each other across deserts and dry creeks and hold hands, dancing for ourselves, to remind ourselves we are strangers in an ancient land, whose people, marked in white ochre, watch in fascination as we paint our faces green, plant apple trees and march slowly towards the saplings with burning torches to shout at them. What must they have thought, the first time they saw it.

Morris over: the BBQs arrived. Then a spring bank holiday, but on the 7th October, if you can imagine – it’s the equivalent of our early April Easter weekends which are invariably shit, in which the weather reached 27 degrees! And what a glorious weekend it was! Yates and I started with Nightfest at Floriade, watching live bands, drinking beers and eating tandoori chicken. Then a super industrious Saturday took us to Epic farmers’ market in which I, at least, enjoyed breakfast oysters, then a trip to Mount Majura vineyard for an incredibly generous wine tasting, in which we bought…a fair few deliciously rose petal hinted bottles of Riesling, then strolled leisurely along the lake under the trees and watched England win the rugby in a pub. Sunday, we both chased our respective running goals, Yates beasting himself up Black Mountain – which sounded brutal, and me merrily cantering around the park – turns out I’ve been doing a 4.3K run for months. Then I put on a BEAUTIFUL silk skirt and spent the afternoon lingering in the sun at Floriade, with a glass of wine, listening to the music. Later that evening we went to a friend’s house for literally THE NICEST chicken I’ve ever eaten and watched a possum in their cheery tree, while we drank wine. On Monday we cycled around the Eastern loop in the dappled shade and entered Jerrabomberra wetlands, that in between marking books in E6, I would stare at longingly on googlemaps in the Aylesbury winter before we moved. We stopped for a picnic of fine duck and pistachio terrine, smoked salami, bread, apples, home-made guacamole and a very fine cheese that a cheeky fucken raven stole from us. Saw an egret, watched an eagle. After five solid days of smiling, which, incongruously, began in an unlikely little garden in a bus depot in Tuggeranong while I ate my lunch in the sunshine with little blue fairy wrens capering at my feet and wattle birds and rosellas flitting above me, my face was quite sore, and relief came on Tuesday when it rained, and a more gentle, background contentment settled in my intestines in place of all this heady, dizzy joy.

But I must take you back to an amusing observation I made on the Sunday. As I perched on a stool, in a hat, with my pretty skirt and glass of wine, I watched all the pretty people. Floriade draws people from all over Australia and whole extended families flock to Canberra, dressed in their finest, to gape at the flowers, ‘looking where the lilies blow,’ and picnic on the shady banks of the lakes. It makes you realise Canberra is not as diverse as you think, when whole families in gloriously beautiful saris spread out tangy scented feasts on the grass. And while looking about for my next favourite sari, I saw some lovely looking ladies in a variety of beautiful dresses, some even in high heels.

And I …tensed. See, I’m British. I apologise often, but I can’t help it. And I know bloody well, that if you have a gloriously sunny day that is getting rather on the warm side, lots of wine and beer readily available, and people dressed up to the nines at a free event there’s only one thing that can come of this.

A fucking fight.

So I winced. I tried not to look at the pretty dresses, or unwittingly attract attention with my funny eye that could be misconstrued. I waited for hostility to vibrate in the air. But it never came! I’m in a country where people can bloody handle the sun with their drink. This isn’t the moat of Rochester castle on a warm Spring Bank Holiday where shit is kicking off in three directions at once and the safest thing to do is get your bells off the street and go down a bottle of wine in the Italian so you can re-emerge as the new scariest thing in town that night. This isn’t an Essex rural pub garden with a little beer festival on, where everyone’s got their guns out and won’t put sun cream on or drink a bit of water between pints, until you’ve already nearly got caught up in one fight on your way back from the loo and you’re about to enter another as you lunge for the taxi you booked that some idiot is trying to get in. This is a nice place. With nice people.

I’m happy here.

Poetry Review: Even Curses End – Catherine Garbinsky

Flicking through the titles of Garbinsky’s Even Curses End, I began by lunging for my copy of Angela Carter’s book of fairy tales before settling into the sofa reading joyfully from simultaneous piles of open books.

Garbinksy has opened the chest of the European tradition’s fairy tales and picked spools from the iconic to the obscure to weave her collection. Her choices remind us that the fairy tale was rarely princesses being rescued, but every day folk battling with a world too vicious to be believed real. Violence links these poems, and in the footsteps of great writers of the genre, she reminds us that envy, cruelty and blood were the fabric of these stories before Disney got hold of them.

Well, re-imaginings of fairy tales have been done. Garbinsky sets a different pattern in her loom by playing with narrative perspectives; merging them to trick our sympathies – is the character addressed in ‘Little Red’ the wolf or the eponymous girl? Is ‘The House on Chicken Legs’ a window to Baba Yaga or the innocent girl sent to her for light? In doing so, Garbinsky weaves what for me was most crucial; shining a light on the symbolic outcast/outsider figure and giving them a voice. The maligned and lonely witch is given the chance to tell of her ‘robin’s egg heart’ beneath the ‘crooked branches’ of her body; we weep with the beast dismayed that its solitude is lifted at last by someone who ‘did not flinch.’ And this I found poignant. Many a schoolchild has been called upon to use the fairy tale to learn empathy and kindness; to imagine the wolf hungry and alone. I felt Garbinsky went to the heart of the matter, recasting today’s marginalised that are feared and hated like beasts and witches; the homeless, the immigrant refugee, the man or woman of a different faith, into these timeless universal characters. To show us what we have in common.

Metamorphosis plays a huge part. Fairy tales have always centred on change, growth, sexual development and these poems can also stand for the metamorphosis of how fairy tales translate from the land of myth to the real world, as ‘The Grey’ seal woman shows us ordinary girls struggling in smothering relationships (in an extraordinarily structured poem that can be read differently downwards and sideways), and lazy girls justly punished by Mother Holle become those too crushed by depression to contribute in the world. Most importantly, many of these poems made me think of love, of human relationships and the transformation love can enact on us. My favourite poem ‘Loving What is Wild’ shows us that the Beast is just someone we don’t yet understand, who is as afraid of our anger and rejection as we are of its difference. The fear is dispelled by kindness; openness unravels the myth, and the curse ‘like an old rug/ Like a tapestry tugged at over years’ falls away and the beast is now a brother. In the perfectly named poem ‘Beauty,’ love redeems the beast, ‘a ritual of hope,’ showing us it is love’s beauty that transforms.

And from this acceptance, more grows. From love comes strength, power, solidarity. The poem ‘Seven Years of Silence’ offers a volta to the collection that gives it its name – a curse finally expires because even in fairy tales, they cannot last forever and the silenced protagonist now shouts ‘like church bells,’ to summon others to hear her herald change, redemption; liberation from trauma. Strength arises in ‘Healing is a Hiding Place;’ the abused Cinderella defiantly invites her persecutors: ‘Let them come. Let them see…I will not shatter,’ life’s traumas will eventually ‘crack…softly like an egg.’

The poem ‘What Desire Can Do’ stood for me as a symbol for the collection. The witch teaches Rapunzel to use ‘not my body, but my voice,’ – she becomes the poet with the tool that allows her to create a love that is beautiful and illuminating; that enriches instead of devours and crushes. Love that transcends hate and fear and transforms bears and beasts into humans, by giving them a voice. The resolution sought by fairy tales.

And life.

I don’t actually know if Catherine Garbinsky was aiming for some big metaphor about prejudice in society and the redemptive power of love – admittedly references to Islamophobia may have been a bit of a stretch. But when I read them – I was woven an image of the incredible potential of love to make a beast a man and give a witch her life back. And I liked that.

An Ironic Homage to J A Baker, from Canberra

18th September

Up early but headed out late, after the commuter lull. The morning was white and limpid, flushed blue at the edges of the wide sky. The light green of new trees glows even when there is no sun upon it and makes the stomach curve upward, glad. Plover thrum on the lake like engines turning over in tense indecision and rosellas smear their beaded blood red on the branches. I creep by, trying to sidle up close enough to see them without frightening them away in ghastly animal misinterpretation. But they can read no benign intentions in our looming forms. Even the magpie that learns to recognise the human that scatters it seeds and swoops to collect them, will eat as if in spite of us. No terror outweighs the of the death scent of man.

The strange metal poles of parliament squat beyond the lake like a deformed giant spider. I think of the tercel then, where it eats its prey somewhere there, manipulated by man to scare away magpies and ducks and keep the seat of order and coal policy clean of bird shit. What its golden eyes see of the territory from the gold zenith higher than the geometrically incorporated hills – thousands of feet higher in the stillness of air above undulations of clouds and wind stratospheres. I fling myself up with the peregrine then, where the human taint is bleached out by the burning purity of nuclear white light.

Down to the lake and dawn floats on the tides. This place is wide and exposed, with its lake, rivers and tree shrouded hills in silver mist trembling away into the hot heart of the centre. An incomparable wideness that lifts off the top of the head then slams it down again with the weight of space. The lake throws the violent blue of the sky up and swells the chest and arms until the land is the sky and everything is birds flying on it, our atoms scattered on the wind of so much room. On the edge of the lake I find the first kill. A grey pigeon at the side of the manicured path on a dark smear of blood; a mess of white and grey feathers haloed around. It has a perfect hole in its stomach cavity, a gaping cave. The scolding pee-wees wing clear of its omen. I look up to the flag of parliament again, my eyes sewed to the sky like buttons straining against the bulging desire to see the peregrine. He did not come.

To Feed My Woodland Bones

[A Changeling’s Tale] by Kate Garrett – Poetry Review

What makes this collection so captivating is its duality. There is the magical element; the image of the changeling: unwanted, misplaced, caught between worlds and doing its best to manage. Looking at each poem with this mirror reflects this surreal and fascinating character, the ‘merry wanderer of the night’ which so captures the imagination. But this is overlaid with the autobiographical mirror, stories of abuse and survival are transposed over the top of the mythical and both reflect each other. Reality and magic in this collection are woven together, like two eyes you can swim in, both different, both true.

A magical and unreal world is created as a backdrop for every real and traumatic moment. This leaves the reader in a state of suspense, always on the edge of horror, but soothed and kept at arms’ length by a childlike mystery. The poems ‘This Mortal Coil,’ ‘Changeling,’ and ‘An elf turns inside out for the dragon’ speak of very real human loss, isolation and despair. In the first, voice is given to the grief that ‘makes your solid shape unbearable;’ poignantly encapsulating that familiar sensation of wanting to give up; lie down and die when we are bereft. The speaker in ‘Changeling’ is ignored and alternately unliked and unloved by her mother, contrasted with the instinctive nurturing of the mare to her foal. This mother figure ripens eventually to the titular dragon picking ‘drive-thru-visit hoards’ from her teeth with the speaker’s ‘toothpick legs’ – the lair is set and strewn with bones which solidify into the starving ‘skeleton’ of this poem.

But between horrors, and even within them, the world beautifully glimmers. A woodland garden is incanted into being with purple valerium, playful duelling spiders, midnight moon temples, tentacle-waves and razor clams, will o’ the wisp and honey rain. The imagery enchants and weaves magic into the every-day, the changeling from faery walks into the human world trailing glowing beams of spells. The senses are drenched, and we drift away into this bewitching folk land. Garrett decorates it and plays dress-up with her metaphors; ‘an elf summons/ a storm/ and wears her windblown/ water evening gown’ and harvests ‘the sparkle off a slug’s back’ for ‘gemstones.’

And for me, it is this slug sparkle that stands as a major image of this collection – it is a work of transformation. And much of that transformation is just about how you look at things. These poems are of the bravery and strength of surviving – as a changeling exiled from the otherworld or as a human battered in, and exiled from, our own. The changeling is not only exchanged but changes; transformation is the essence of these poems. Darkness is transformed to swirling stars, horror to magic, trauma to birth; power and strength are seized and the elf pixie actively summons storms and songs and makes new life. The recurring motif of the crescent moon in the final poem, the woman’s symbol of growth, birth-magic and love represents the survival and change. The collection culminates with a tumbling prose paragraph of heady, breathless, hardly-daring-to-believe happiness in love, in children, in acceptance of the past and making change for the claimed future. This is the magic we can all strive for and Garrett leaves us this beautifully hopeful image of renewal. Look at the slug and see the finger gemstones.

I have no idea if my highfalutin interpretation is what the poet meant at all. Any active assertions of what these poems ‘are’ or are ‘about’ are my own thoughts, what I loved about them, and what I took from them to keep for myself. This will always be influenced by my own context.

But I loved them.

Kate Garrett’s chapbook is published by Animal Heart Press.

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.