Travelling the Road (again)

Yesterday we went to see The Road. I'd been expecting all sorts of faults, mainly because of the reviews I'd read around the traps. Consequently I wasn't expecting it to be as good as the book, and of course it wasn't, because the book is such a readerly experience, the warmth of it transmitting from the inside of The Man's head to the inside of yours, and a film just can't make that connection. I still loved it.

The one thing that did disappoint me was the ending. SPOILER -- if you care. It was the way John Hillman centred the ending on the nuclear (ha!) family, including dog(! in a world where animals are gone! I know it was a symbol that these were good decent humans who wouldn't eat their pets let alone other humans, but still...) and not about the natural world that was lost, which is how the book ended. Always human human human human preoccupations.

The only concession to the idea of nature as it was came right at the beginning of the film; otherwise any nostaglia was reserved for the woman and things like a childhood home and a can of cola (great product placement, all through the movie). Human things. Yet the book mourns just as much for non-human things like sunlight and fish scales and trees as human things.*

That's my only objection.

When I came home I looked for my post about reading The Road in Tasmania on holiday, and realised with shock that I'd posted it on the now-gone Sarsaparilla blog without cross-posting here. So it's gone! I'm going to repost it now, probably without any of the final tweakings I'd made at the time of posting (I might add a few upon re-reading). Here goes:


Travelling The Road

(originally posted on Sarsaparilla, Dec 13, 2008)

Last summer Sophie Cunningham and I had an excellent conversation in the fresh air of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens about reading whilst travelling and how it influences your travels. We thought a series of short writings on the subject would be wonderful. She had a post she’d prepared earlier, but it’s taken me this long to cook something up.

When I travel I choose books to read without much thought to the impact they may have on the travelling. Maybe they have been saved for holiday reading because of their lightness of being, perhaps they are next on the bedside pile, sometimes they are bought along the way when there is nothing else to do. I didn’t mean to take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with me to Tasmania; I’d already read it, a year before, and had lent it to my sister-in-law. She returned it just before we left and I hadn’t removed it from my daypack.

Reading on holiday is part of the holiday, and I read things that I feel like reading rather than things I should be reading. According to my reading ledger (a Moleskine notebook listing everything I’ve read since July 2000 when I got tired of keeping a diary and decided to record only the things I wanted to remember), I was reading the Philip Pullman trilogy on the boat across the Tasman and the days after our arrival, enjoying the differences between Northern Lights and The Golden Compass. Pure escapism mixed with daily dreaminess: the perfect holiday.

We -- my husband, my ten-year-old son and I -- started in northwest Tasmania, visiting tucked-away Tasmazia in all its faded glory in the depths of Brethren territory and then passed through numerous hamlets desperate to stay alive by cultivating affectations like thickets of topiary or blankets of mural. All of which, in retrospect (I think my favourite way of travelling) suited Pullman’s visions of multiple worlds.

We moved slowly southwest: Cradle Mountain, Zeehan, Strahan, up the Gordon River, picnicking on the Franklin, all the cartime listening to an audiobook – abridged, unfortunately – of His Natural Life, attempting to give the boy a feel for where we were. He was impressed, but unfortunately it also served to show us exactly how little Marcus Clarke knew the territory about which he was writing.

It was about this time, heading back to the east and Hobart, that I decided to re-read The Road. I re-read books constantly, usually after a gap of at least a year or more. I’m also extremely fond of dystopian writing, with particular fascination (Gen X that I am) for post-apocalyptic survival stories, although not so much the type that makes mankind revert to sword-and-shield pseudo-Celtic tribal structures. The first time I’d read The Road (Jan 2007, says the ledger) I remember reeling from the impact, unable to read anything else for a short time, coming down slowly from the sense of heightened insecurity any good post-apocalyptic book will inject a reader with. I was curious to see if, now that I knew what I was in for, the same thing would happen again.



To this point, Tasmania had been wild and magical and lush; the south-west has the potential to be threatening and dour, but had provided enough jollies to keep my imagination at bay. Tourists, including us, have permeated the toughness and softened the inhabitants who have come to know who butters their bread. I began the book during a quick picnic on the shore of the Franklin River, upstream, under a highway bridge, sitting on a boulder, half-listening to my husband talking about the part his brother played in the protests, the boy listening fascinated. Within the first few pages I’d stopped listening altogether, and was totally submerged in a wasted world. When I emerged to keep driving, all I could think about was how lucky I was to be among living things, all those trees, all that living water, all that protest.

We stopped briefly in a town in a valley full of enormous concrete pipes and electricity infrastructure, and I was there again:

What is that, Papa?
It’s a dam.
What’s it for?
It made a lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would generate electricity.
To make lights.
Yes. To make lights.
Can we go down and see it?
I think it’s too far.
Will the dam be there for a long time?
I think so. It’s made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of years. Thousands, even.
Do you think there could be fish in the lake?
No. There’s nothing in the lake. [17]

I initially read the book slowly, allowing myself to be distracted by the charms of Hobart and Port Arthur, putting the book aside in favour of television, local newspapers and trashy magazines. Five days later, we caught a very rough ferry over to Maria Island off the east coast, taking only what we could cart in a human-drawn wire wagon over the car-free roads of the National Park island.

The machine-free silence of the animal-filled camping ground was perfect for losing myself again in the animal-free surrounds of The Road. Twilight seemed long on the island, and it was a fair walk to the toilets. I’d never seen so many marsupials in one spot, and was afraid that if I squatted in the bushes surrounding the tent I’d get any kind of nasty surprise. Wandering back past the convict ruins, looking up at the pristine sky with more stars than human thoughts, looking around at the strange vegetation, looking down at the tent, I could have been living at any point of time.

He wet his finger and held it to the wind. When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was. [41]

When I returned, looking into the tent at my son sleeping with his limbs splayed on his airbed was exquisite.

After Maria Island (not to be done in a day; we will be back for a longer stay), we went north up the coast to Coles Bay, a place I’d been years before on the honeymoon of a marriage that didn’t last. We were lucky enough to get a gorgeous camping spot in an area that is highly sought after and distributed by ballot: getting a last minute cancellation like we did is like winning the lottery. Clean, well-maintained individual spots with personal tracks to the beach and a view over the bay to the mountains called The Hazards.



Sitting on the beach with a torch, the book and the ominous clouds that settle over The Hazards every night without fail, no matter how blue-skied the day has been, I finished The Road on that first night at Coles Bay. Afterwards I put down the book, turned off the torch, and sobbed, watching the lights of the town twinkle to my right and listening to the other campers go about their evening drinking.

Next morning, before the others woke, I re-read the ending and other parts that had stuck with me, and sobbed again, silently into my pillow. I watched them wake. We all went for a bushwalk up The Hazards to Wineglass Bay and back, a full day of walking. I had done part of this walk before, and I may yet do the whole thing again, but I guarantee you, I will never be able do it again with such a heightened sense of emotion.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you. [46]

My husband is fit and strong and likes to walk fast. Normally patient, he becomes exasperated when thwarted in expending his excess energy. The first part of the walk was fraught with tensions as young man loped, older man barked, and I dreamed along in the rear, taking in every leaf, every bird, the shift in blues between the sky and the sea, the occasional lizard or marsupial. Once we’d reached what we thought was the halfway point and had a swim, I encouraged older he to leave us behind, to go at his own pace, and meet us back at the car where he could probably read most of the paper – and do the crossword – by the time we made it.

Once he’d disappeared around a bend, the tension lifted, and my son and I closed ranks and walked at our own pace. For the first six years of his life I was a single parent, and twice in that time he was close to death. Standing over his hospital bed I forced myself to envisage a life without him: bleak, but do-able. Ever since, he has been the most precious gift in my life with every day that he exists. He doesn’t remember much of that time, and he loves his stepfather intensely (as do I), but when we are alone there is an heart-muscle memory of such intensity that we invisibly clutch at each other.

We walked. He whistled. I laughed at the dark patch of sand-stain on his white swimming shorts. We entered a part of the landscape full of dead fire-blackened trees and grey dust, bleak and twisty. My imagination went into overdrive.

There were times when he sat watching the boy asleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all. They squatted in a bleak wood and drank ditchwater strained through a rag. He’d seen the boy in a dream laid out upon a coolingboard and woke in horror. What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return. [110/111]

I watched his tall, thin, fragile frame walk in front of me in the grey dust, the trees obscuring any part of the real world, and thought about a short story I’d once read in the New Yorker: a woman living in an apartment block thinking about how she would manage in a post-apocalyptic New York, whether she would have the guts to fight the woman in the next apartment for water, whether she would be resourceful enough to find what they needed in the streets around them. Written before 9/11, the story has haunted me with its questions about personal resilience and I wished I had kept a copy. I took out my camera and took a photo.




Before I could put the camera away from taking the above shot, my son suddenly began a series of what I think of as his ‘battle moves’: pretending he’s fighting some invisible enemy and winning.



They usually make me laugh, because he’s such a chicken in real life, hates the sight of blood, animal guts, won’t clean up messes because they’re messy. This time they touched me; he is so vulnerable, so open, so precious. What would happen if I wasn’t there?

And then we emerged from the dead wood into sunshine, pink rock, butterflies and sea sparkle. He would cope. He has his fathers. And he has this beautiful world. For now.






[*This, for those who don't know, is the ending:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. [241]

A cut-out to the view and a voice-over of that para would have perfected the movie.]

Swash capital

I can hear a river, running hard behind me. There are urgent voices discussing something in a language I can't understand. I seem to have a fur hat on. The river is loud, and getting louder. The voices just don't stop. My hat is hot. I put my hand up to adjust it, maybe take it off, and it uncurls and stomps on my face.

I wake. The cat jumps off the bed. It's dark, but the sound of the river persists. I'm not sure if it's really heavy rain, the sort that I'd driven through very slowly the day before, or if it's actually a river. But I'm at home, of course it couldn't be a river.

The voices are still urgent, and I still can't understand them. I sit up in bed and look out the window at the street. I can hear the water, but until I reach for my glasses, I can't quite make out what is happening. Has the street flooded again?

Sort of. Once I got up, and staggered down to the other end of the house, I pieced together the weird scraps of information. The water main on one side of the corner on which our house sits had exploded, or at least burst, and was gushing enormous quantities of water out onto the road, which was then rushing past our window into the nearest stormwater drain. Our verge is awash, muddy water swashing all over the road. Some Asian neighbours, out for a midnight stroll, as they often do (thankfully!), have rung ACTEW, the local water people, and are standing on our corner, watching the amazingly shameful waste of water and chatting urgently to each other. It is about 1:30am.

Best Beloved, always aware of our culinary needs, checks our tap water and finds it sluggish, so fills a number of plastic bottles in case we're cut off for a long time. I could never have thought of that; I'm sitting in my undies & singlet, watching through the loungeroom window in the dark, fascinated by the sound of the water.

Suddenly a couple of monster trucks roar up and mount the kerb and our driveway. Flashing lights, beeping noises, men huddled in groups: everything activates and gains urgency. BB dons a dressing gown and goes out to see if there's anything we have to do. We're told to go back to sleep if we can, but there'll be a bit of noise throughout the night, and they start ripping up the footpath near the gushing.

We do our best to sleep, despite the truck noises, the water rumble and the seemingly persistent voices of our neighbours, who seem to want to stay and witness the event all night.

The next morning I am woken by the sound of the truck driving off; the silence is deafening. I go outside, and all I can see is mud, and tire-tracks. It wasn't a dream.





The gum tree on our corner has had the watering of its life, and will probably double in size this year!




The Gym

To my surprise, I'm managing to get to the gym twice a week, but it's still early days yet because uni hasn't gone back. I'm hoping not only to maintain a biweekly visit, but add some sort of class to get my aerobic fitness up. I'm happy with my progress so far; I realize that I'm never going to be willowy slim, and my upper arms are never going to whittle down from their slab-like peasant appearance so they might as well be firmer, and I can see the improvement already. Plus my neck and back are feeling stronger, which is very important for my pain management, especially if I want to keep using heavy drawers of type in my art practice.

The thing that keeps me amused at the gym -- a very important component to keep me going -- is watching all the 'gym faces': the wild grimaces that people make as they lift something heavy. I can't decide if they're doing it to be seen (many strut around to make sure you can see them before they start) or they think that no-one is watching. Either way, it's hell-a-fun, to quote Cartman.



Starting School

I'm really proud of Bumblebee, he weathered the first week of high school very well, coping with the complete paradigm shift like a trooper.



He's trying to look confident here, on the morning of his first day, but he still looks a bit nervous. Check out the size of his feet, ay ay ay...

He's got a teacher he adores (o wot joy, it's a science teacher!), a teacher he can't stand, which is always a great foil and takes the heat off the other teachers; he loves the fact that they have a dedicated year 7 quadrangle, and he finds the varied classrooms and period times makes it easier to focus his mind on the relevant classes.

Phew! How happy am I? They've already had their school photo, and they've got vaccinations and camp coming up before the end of Feb. I'm starting back at uni in a couple of weeks, and then we'll all be focused on study, since BB has started a Masters in something governmental. I'm in the early days of considering a PhD, so it may be that next year will be even more intense than this one, but we'll see...


Duckling

Last week I had the first proper studio visit by one of my studio residency winners, Natalie. She came armed with ideas and once we'd discussed some of the practical considerations, she got right down to work:



It's early days yet, but here's a sneak peek at her efforts so far:



Yee-haw! This is going to be fun.




Watching


BB took advantage of our first child-free weekend today and saw Precious, which was quite an intense experience. BB always gets excited about cats in movies -- we have a family rule that a movie is extra-good if there's a cat in it -- and got grumpy with me when I told him that I thought the cats were there as a metaphor for the selfishness of Precious' mother and to highlight the fact that she could care for cats more than her own flesh and blood.

"But they were such lovely cats," was all he could say.

I'm a bit sad that he didn't come to see Bright Star with Bernice and I, because it has a wonderful cat called Topper who almost steals the show.

Tomorrow I am going to up the intensity by going to see The Road. I love that book so much that I am a bit nervous about the film; will it match my inner vision of it? I'll let you know...

...tied up with string

OK, let's try that again, with more words.


A few months ago I ordered some fresh type from America! From San Francisco, to be precise. Via Monash University, who also needed some, so we thought we'd pool our resources a bit & share freight. It didn't work out to be any more efficient, but it was a nice thought at the time. The type ended up in Melbourne, and then was generously couriered up to Canberra by my colleague's daughter, who was visiting Canberra to sing at a meeting of uni choirs (and the sound coming from her rehearsal when I met up with her was DIVINE).

So that's the long story about these exotically battered boxes. They had been the long way around, and were holding lovely packets of type that looked like this:



Here are all my lovely packets of type, with my feet included to provide a sense of scale, because that's how humans like to see things. They are most charming, no? (The packets, not my feet.)



Closer up, you can see their labels a bit better. I bought a heap of Garamond English, and a few packets of Gill Sans to supplement the sizes I already have. They are my 'house' fonts. For now (read on, Macduff).



And when you open them: AAAAHHHH! Shiny! New! Freshly-cast! Clean! TYPE!!!!! This is the equivalent of seeing Van Gogh only in badly-printed reproductions all your life and then standing in front of an original VG painting (an epiphany I had in the early 1990s, and common to many Australians who went 'back home' to Europe). The difference is stunning. Each packet has beautifully packed letters; the yellow packets are lower-case with some punctuation, and the green packets are upper-case and numerals and some punctuation (one makes you smaller, one makes you larger :) ).




So I got to work. I've had a book commission waiting for the new type, so I wasted no time setting some blocks of lovely 10pt Garamond. Fresh type doesn't make your fingers dirty! Unfortunately the dirty old spacing does, so I still had grot on my hands by the end of it. The hardest part of fresh type is putting the ink on it, because you know that you'll never see it so clean and shiny ever again. Still, I steeled myself and rolled it up. Lovely, crisp print. Sigh.



Here's my desk, covered in workings. It's a book of poems by Sarah Rice, a colleague at the school of art, with images by Patsy Payne. The hands you can see were printed using lithography, and after the text is printed, they'll have graphite drawings pounced on top of them. It's going to be exquisite.



The string from the parcels gets used again; each piece will have a long, fruitful working life as it ties up blocks of type waiting to be printed. The tying up of blocks with string is a very important letterpress skill, and not to be underestimated. You don't just wrap and tie a knot, there is a special technique to be learned (and passed on!) that involves no knots and the ability to pull the string off again easily.



This is me comparing the type proof with the original computer mock-up. Same font, same size, but much nicer printed with type. You can see the mocked-up graphite pouncing in this shot.

Since last week I've printed half the book, and will spend today setting and proofing the other half. I love uni holidays, they're so long, and I can get so much backlog cleared. I've finished printing the Garth Nix short story ('Endings') as well (now my collaborator has to make the images and then we can collate the little book we're making) and next is my Book Art Object attempt. Must get back to it!


OOH! Forgot to mention (although you can't really tell that I've left and returned, such is the magic of blogs) that I've now been offered an entire collection of type, for a very decent price, which I will be carting into my studio by the end of the month. This means that (apart from constantly scouting for wood type) I officially have enough type. What a concept! It also means I have to move on some of the dud type I already have. My house fonts will be Garamond, Gill Sans and Baskerville. So happy. SO HAPPY. Oh, I feel the urge to go and get my hands dirty, right now. Bye.


PS: Bumblebee is loving high school: PHEW. I'll come back to that.

brown paper packages...

Just running out the door to visit the Aged Poet, but thought I'd better leave you with something before the weekend runs away with me. Here's a little photo-essay about my exciting letterpress week:

















(images by Patsy Payne, poetry by Sarah Rice)

I'll come back & explain later -- running late now!

A glorious weekend

Q: What do you get when you cross a Train with a Harley?
A: Transports of delight, also known as a blissfully married couple.

Here's proof:



We (Best Beloved, Bumblebee and I, sadly leaving the cats at home) travelled down to the Victorian alpine region of Bright and surrounds this weekend, to attend the delightful nuptuals of Lexicon Harlot and Tim Will-Type-For-Food, two of my favoritest bloggers.

This is not the first blog wedding I have attended, but it is the first where both parties are bloggers, and actually got to know each other through blogging, despite persistent rumours that they went to the same university at the same time and did all the same courses. University unischmersity, this was a clear instance of like minds meeting each other in a thoroughly contemporary way, and the world can only benefit from it.

The last bloggy wedding was quite surreal in all its fun and beauty, due to the swiftness of my travelling, but this time we drove, and took our time, and enjoyed the journey as much as the destination.

We left on Friday night after BB finished work (Just in case you're wondering, Mr Rudd, he works long hours for you but tries not to let his work interfere with his family life... yah boo sucks to you.) and we headed down the Barton Highway, merging with the Hume Highway, to a MYSTERY DESTINATION. I had asked BB to book something cheap and cheerful to break up the long drive, and he was being coy about telling me where we were going, which made the drive interesting.

We ended up here, at a farm stay accommodation smack bang on the freeway between the Snowy Mountains Highway turnoff and the Sturt Highway turnoff. It's far back enough from the road to be blissfully quiet, and there were fun things to do like patting enormous mud-wallowing pigs and tiny fluffy doe-eyed alpaca. It was monstrously hot, but there was air-con, and nice Ikea furniture including a king-size bed, so we were as happy as the pigs outside in their mud. Good call, BB!


Cabin. All our water was recycled to use on the garden, which was good to know


Piggie-wigs.

Next day, yesterday, the wedding day, we kept driving, and discovered how many fab antique and junk shops there are in Holbrook. The antique shop on the Melbourne side of the sunken submarine is one of the best I've ever been to, with reasonable prices and a really interesting emphasis on textiles, thanks to the owner's hankering to have been a textile designer but having apparently missed all the opportunities to do so. She had a few unopened vintage boxes of 'swan-bill hooks', which are apparently the hooks used for corsets, something that fascinated me but I didn't buy a box. Now I wish I had because they'd make great book fasteners. She also had beautiful needle cases and Victorian crochet and other sewing tools. I managed to find a bookbinding hammer head without a handle (I'm hoping Bernice reads this and thinks "I can make you a handle! me! me!" :))

Then we followed our very careful directions through the Yackandarah and Myrtleford and so forth until we arrived at Porepunkah, where the Ovens and Buckland Rivers intersect, and where we'd booked an unpowered tent site (months ago!), which was the ONLY scrap of accommodation for miles, since there was a huge Aust. Day bicycle event happening in the region. This had seemed like a bit of a bummer, but it turned out to be wonderful because we were given a site right next to the Buckland River, so that once we had the tent up, we could get our togs on and go down the embankment to sit in the river and still see our tent.

I sat almost in the centre of the river, on a comfortable stony riverbed, with the water running over and around my legs but not covering them. I was in the shade of trees, and next to me was a lilo run that had been made by generations of regular campers. Upstream was a larger, marginally deeper part of the river, then there was a loose rocky dam that had a central opening that then had long snaking rock 'walls' forming the lilo run. As I sat and enjoyed the sound and feel of the water, kids and adults were scooting down the run on lilos and other inflatable shapes. (If you don't know what a lilo is, it's an inflatable single mattress, with bed and pillow section included.)

As some of you from hot dry areas will appreciate, the sound and feel of running water is quite possibly the most luxurious thing in the world. I could happily spend a week sitting in that river, just listening to it. It looked like others were doing just that, setting themselves up in pockets of shade with camping chairs, their bums and feet dangling in the water, drinking beers from a floating esky and reading their books while the kids played. Now that is my idea of holiday heaven, and I now know what I want to do next summer. I felt richer than any millionaire, just enjoying the coolness and the silky burbling water.

It was very hard to leave the water, and if it wasn't for the prospect of a life-affirming event starting soon down the road, I would have stayed there all night. But we managed to dry ourselves off and put on our glad-rags, and we got to the wedding on time, cheered by the sight of myriad purple and green origami creatures festooning the front of the house.

The wedding was hosted by Alexis's parents in their amazing house up in the hills of Bright, with a view that provided a setting better than any chapel. I love a wedding that is simple and creative, and this was not a disappointment. I can't understand why people need to spend a quarter of a million dollars on an event that will stress them out if it's not perfect, when they can keep it simple and meaningful and enhance the love rather than stretch it.

Here are the simple and creative things that made this wedding amazing:

-- There were bagpipes, and a wonder-beagle who ensured that all were entertained (and that cleaning up afterwards didn't involve any food scraps).



-- there was real, meaningful poetry, actually written by the bride and groom! Serving suggestion only, should only be attempted if you feel confident with your word skillz. In this case they were poems that brought tears of joy to the eye, not tears of pain, and each poem reflected the aesthetic of the writer, so A's poem was seriously beautiful, and T's poem was comically touching.

There was also fun poetry, in the form of The Owl and The Pussy-Cat, which made the pigs from the night before mean more to us as a family, and also made us all hold hands as we listened, because Bumblebee read that aloud at our wedding.

-- there was handfasting as well as ring-exchanging, just in case no-one had taken the situation seriously enough. It was impressive.



-- As you can see above, there were no meringue-shaped expensive dresses nor hired suits. The bride rocked a green sari and magenta top hat, and the groom looked (fittingly) like he was taking a break from his vaudeville act and was due back on stage at any minute. Everyone else followed orders to dress "casually smart, for the weather".

-- There was a *killer* view, provided by Mother Nature, of forests and sky and house tops and clouds. It was a dreamy view, often hindering conversation during the evening.

-- There was a vegetarian feast of nibblies followed by a dessert fest. The cake was green, topped with two ceramic kissing beagles. Perfect!



-- Guests were given lolly-bags upon their leaving: hand-sewn, with Scrabble-piece brooches pinned to them. We got to choose our letters. I seem to have a collection of Scrabble jewellery now: I have a 'G' pendant set in resin within a silver spoon, and at Woodford I bought a 'C' wooden letter pendant. Now I am the proud owner of a 'Q' brooch, since the points might bring me luck next time I play Tim (or Byrd, both of whom flog me regularly).

Added extras at this splendiferous event:

-- catching up with Ms Lucy Tartan and her offsider Arty Fufkin, whose wedding was my first blog wedding experience.


Not a particularly flattering portrait of LT, but the best I could manage with my iphone and a glass of wine or three. Bumblebee is standing behind her.

LT looked amazing in her 1950s dance attire, complete with black & white saddle shoes and her new black glasses. It turns out that we have very similar eyesight, but my optometrist (when I was 7) insisted upon my needing glasses, and all her optometrists insisting until recently that she didn't have to unless she wanted them. And so she has only recently realised that trees have leaves, and clouds have texture rather than just mass.

-- Going down to the cellar and meeting Harriet and Beatrice, whose adventures I have avidly followed since their adoption by A. They are larger than kittens (but small compared to my two black beasts) and very fluffy. And gorgeous. Beatrice seemed much more relaxed than Harriet, who seemed eager to join the party/ torment Wilbur.

I am very grateful to have been asked to such a wonderful and special event. I cannot stress more fiercely how marvellous it is that two such singular people should find each other and recognise each other's qualities. I expect extreme happiness to radiate from their respective blogs, and mayhap they may even create a new merged blog in the spirit of their collaborative poetry performances. I wish them every happiness in their brave new world.

I went to sleep in the tent at Punkepore listening to the sound of the river. My only regret of the weekend is that I didn't take a photo of it, but I suspect the aural memory will stay with my all the stronger for the lack of visual stimulus.

Today we cruised back to the Hume Freeway via Beechworth, telling Bumblebee all about Ned Kelly and the gold rush, two things his woeful primary school didn't teach him anything about. We revisited a bookshop in Holbrook, and a junkshop in Yass, where I picked up some old pianola rolls for $3 each.

When we got home I called in upon Zoe, who was entertaining a posse of pals including Nabakov, Iconophilia and Pammy Faye. I only stayed a while, just to check that all was right with the world, and then came home to type this all up before I forget about it.

So all is right with the world, and life goes on, a little bit happier than it was before.




(Finally, I came home to find this link, which I hope will make everyone, except the vegetarian newly weds, even happier. Unless the thought of meat being used for something besides eating makes them happy. Snaps to Poppyletterpress for the pleasure, who ironically needs clients who spend a lot on their weddings!)

Running away

I ran away again. Always to the same place, Depot Beach, far away in time. And again, we left Best Beloved behind to his work and his study (he's starting a Masters in something governmental) and the cats.

Usually when we go to Depot, we camp at the wonderful National Parks camping ground, or we hire a cabin from the same place or from the posher private cabins complex next door. This time, however, we were offered a stay in a house that looks like this:



Architect-designed, it was like something from a magazine. My friend Wazza has access to it, it's a family-owned thing, and it's heaven on a stick, so to speak.



This is the view from the main section of the house. You can open up the big glass doors to make the living room and balcony one big space, and in winter you can roll the roof back to let more sunshine in.



This is the view from the guest bedroom. I could have the window open all night to let the sea breeze and the sound of the waves in. It was divine.

Bumblebee has stopped being resistant to the idea of us hoping to sell our house and get a bigger one one day (over the rainbow). I don't think he realises that we can't have one like this, but he now knows what it is like to have SPACE around you.

The weather was cool, the sea was glorious (not that I actually swam, I didn't feel like it this trip) and the walks were lovely. Wazza and I made good food, drank lots of G&Ts, and wrangled the kids. Plus did lots of reading, or at least, I did. I was reading the first of the Millennium trilogy, given to me by my mother-in-law, and I'm not much of a crime fiction reader, so I was struggling with it a bit.

On the first night at the coast, I woke up in the night and decided, since I didn't have the sleep princess with me, that I'd read myself back to sleep. Suddenly I hit a really exciting bit of the book, and the next thing I knew, it was dawn and I had no idea how much or little sleep I'd had... So I'm a Larsson convert, and I'm well into the second book, which I'm not actually sure if I am enjoying after all. It's all getting a bit bitsy, and that always annoys me, but I'm sure he'll put it all together soon.

If you're reading this, Wazza (when you get back yourself), thanks so much for the chance to breathe before the year gets crazy!

In other new year news, I have joined the local gym, and since my startling assessment, when I was gauged to be fitter than I thought I was, I have been twice and am trying not to feel smug, since I know that the newby enthusiasm will wear off fairly soon.

Also! I have a shipment of brand spanking new type arriving today, and I'm very excited. And two books lined up to use it, so it's work ho! from hereon in.

Also also! the countdown is on for Bumblebee's new high school experience, starting 1 Feb. He seems calm enough, and excited that they'll have a camp in the first few weeks, but I haven't told him yet that before camp is... vaccinations. Yeek!

nostalgic guff du jour

My cousin scanned an old photo album and put the images onto facebook. There were many that made me wistful, but this one just makes me smile wryly.

We have a few photos from this particular series, and the occasion is Colonel Duck's graduation from military college back when he was Cadet Duckling. There's one photo that's always been on the mantlepiece, of just Colonel and Lady Duck standing together, skinny he in his uniform and her, dewy in her white satin dress. Woof, they looked young and hot.

Isn't mum gorgeous in this photo? I used to think that the mantlepiece photo was their wedding photo, and until I was old enough to understand, my mother didn't disillusion me, because it's probably the closest thing she got to a wedding celebration anyway, since they'd been illegally and secretly married for eight months already (and she'd done the deed in a hot pink mini-suit, which was really much cooler than a white satin dress anyway) and at the end of this big swanky grad do she had to go home and hang out with me, who was with one of my usual family babysitters. So I'm guessing she enjoyed this evening as the last time she'd ever have to hide my nappies on the hills hoist (apparently she would peg them to the line on the inner rings and then put vast amounts of the family washing -- mother, father, three sisters, grandfather -- around the outer rings to hide them), and after this night she'd actually be able to cohabit with my father. Back then, cadets weren't allowed wives & kids or cars; these days they can have anything they want, and they can even live off-campus with their wives or husbands. Tuh! What is the world coming to?

The other thing that makes me smile wryly is my grandmother, on the left. This is the famous Nanny Annie whom I invoke when I clean my house furiously. Today my father and I worked out that in this photo she is only one year older than I am today. That is a sobering thought. My grandmother always seemed OLD, and I can't relate to her ever being my age! The three of them look a bit tense; it's probably been a long evening...

LATER: I keep noticing little details. Check out Nana's hands, curled into fists: she was a miner's wife from dusty Kalgoorie, and I'm sure she was nervous about such a ceremonial occasion. Also mum's wonderful black satin gloves. I wonder if she still owns those? And Nana's gloves -- I'm presuming they're also black gloves, unbuttoned and curled back? Were black gloves a requirement or did my family decided to be co-ordinated? So many questions! Time to phone home again :)






My pillows should be on their way home today. I can't wait for a good sleep, my head feels claggy. For those who are interested, I rang Lady Duck, and apparently the brand is 'Aussie Pillow Fibresoft' -- it's a microfibre pillow that I bought at Domaine (or Domain, or however that chain of homewares stores is spelled). The pillow itself has a satin seam around the edge of the pillow, and it's a slightly cheaper alternative to duckdown or goosedown. It might be available in other stores, and there are probably other brands that are similar...