so many stuff

magic lamp

2007-10-01T12:55:00.001+02:00

In six hours I am leaving for Heathrow.

This morning in Lily's flat the texture of that first month in London returned to my mind. You know how every little era you live through has its own kind of spirit? As tangible as a smell when you are conscious of it, but very hard to bring to mind just when you want to. If you start something new very suddenly, you are conscious of the change of atmosphere for a few days before you get completely used to breathing it. I felt the is-ness, the now-ness, of that time with all my senses. And today, for a half-hour or so, I got it back, and time collapsed.

There was this Tennyson poem I used to love when I was thirteen or fourteen though I haven't much thought about it since. This girl is writhing around in an agony of anticipation, crushing flowers to her burning breast and whatnot, waiting for a lover to whom she is completely mentally enslaved. She says,

...once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips; as sunlight drinketh dew.

I don't feel like my soul is in my body today. I feel like it is in the custody of the genie that is presiding over my return to Australia. I created this monster myself when I decided to go back, and now it has temporarily taken me over. Don't squirm, it says, a deal's a deal. And now I don't have to perform any more acts of will, I just have to walk through the inevitable steps until it's all effected and done. And when it's done, I will have my self back. At 9:55am on Wednesday 4th October at Charles Kingsford-Smith airport.

And then I'll get to find out if I made a good decision or not.

All my northern hemisphere buddies, goodbye, I love you, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Rug up warm, winter's coming. Goodbye.

westward

2007-09-27T21:37:00.000+02:00

Konya is a blaring, dusty, sun-baked city. I've probably been further from the sea in my life, but I've never felt it. It was a rude shock after sleepy Goreme, and my comfort was not augmented by the fact that its citizens observe Ramadan more strictly than any other place I've been. I had to buy fruit and crackers in the supermarket and sneak a hasty lunch in my hotel so as not to give offence. The upside was seeing the relish with which everyone broke fast at the end of the day. As soon as the muezzins so much as clear their throats into the minaret microphones, you can hear the chik of a thousand cigarette lighters flaring as one, and in the restaurants people swoop on tables laid out with all kinds of food that they've been staring longingly at for the past ten or fifteen minutes.

I went to Konya looking for the shrine of Celaleddin Rumi, 12th-century sufi mystic, founder of the mevlevi whirling dervish order, and cracking good poet. It was gorgeous beyond my expectation. The calligraphy decorating the walls was of a curious form I hadn't seen before. The image was symmetrical, with the words written both right to left and left to right. It had a stark use of colour and blocky shapes that reminded me of kabuki masks. Maybe the symmetry made it face-like, I don't know. There were no photos allowed so I sketched my favourite piece on the back of a receipt--I only had time to do half, though, so you have to hold it edgewise to a mirror to see it whole.

That night I went to a dervish 'ceremony'. I gather that performers were professional dancers (one of them, a kid of maybe seven or eight years old, I dubbed The Littlest Dervish) rather than actual practicing mevlevi. It was staged in the airport-like Cultural Centre on the edge of town and it was all a bit pomo and strange, but the whirling was beautiful anyway, and the sufi music wild and ardent, music to dissolve in.

Next day I went to Pamukkale, and thanked the ancient Romans for situating a spa town right next to those travertine pools and then letting it fall into picturesque ruin, making for the perfect day out 700 years later. The sun was shining, the cypresses were doing their spiky broody thing, and my camera sucked it all up. I kind of expected balloons and streamers to fall from the sky, and some guy in a lamé jacket to step up and say, 'Congratulations! You have just taken the billionth photograph of this site!'--but it was as pretty as if nobody had ever seen it before me. I swam in the Hierapolis thermal spring too, with columns and marble blocks submerged in the pool for that lost Atlantis feel. The calciferous water felt very soft on my skin, and tiny bubbles rose up through it, settling on my limbs and fizzing at the surface. It was probably the closest I'll ever get to swimming in champagne.

After a few days in the interior all I really wanted to do was dip a toe in the Aegean and look at Samos across the water (so I can say that I've been to ten countries, but I've seen eleven). When I finally arrived at the beach at Pamucak, I found a little holiday village of bungalows and caravans all planted out with eucalyptus. It looked like a dozen family holidays from my childhood, and a thought shot through me, 'Not yet! It's too soon!' So that's how I realised that I am grieving the loss of Europe. In a week's time I'll be back in Australia, and I hadn't really been giving the matter much attention. But it explained why I had been so shirty with the touts in recent days and so keen to avoid the standard polite questions--'where ya from?' 'where ya going?' And when I finally worked out what was happening in my strange, opaque little brain, it was a relief.

Yesterday I had a quick look around Ephesus. I was kind of ruins-ed out, and the crowds were stupefying--my memory of Curates Street is a sensation of trying to swim up a waterfall. But I was walking down streets that St Paul and St John and maybe even Mary herself once walked, and I finally saw the point of the apostles writing those letters to the people of this or that city: I felt like I was in a nerve centre of the ancient world, a place where important things used to happen. I skipped the supposed House of Mary, though, and spent the afternoon in the nearby village of Sirince. As it turns out, the lady is said to have spent her last years here, and if so, she chose well. It's just a little patchwork of Ottoman-style houses and cobbled streets in pretty green hills. A kind of Turkish Orvieto. Jam, fruit wine and olive oil, the products of the orchards that surround the town, are on sale in every second market stall. It was good. Energising. It made me really still, and I hadn't been still for a long time.

And today was the eight-hour bus ride back to Istanbul. I like Turkish buses, because they give you tea and biscuits and towelettes in foil packets, and they stop for a food, fag and facilities break every couple of hours (mmmm. 4 a.m. kebab, anyone?). And when they stop, there's no dithering around. Everybody dashes out, sucks up whatever nutrients or stimulants they have been hanging out for, buys a gift box of sweets for whomever they're going to visit, and bolts for the bus again. If somebody gets back late and finds the bus already gone, which happens quite frequently, they just strike out for the nearest corner where they can intercept it. They wave an arm, the bus slows to a trotting pace, the door is flung open and they jump on. And then you get more tea and towelettes.

The best, best, best surprise was the ferry across the Sea of Marmara tonight. I love car ferries. It always feels kind of fantastical to me, that you can drive a car or a bus onto a boat and just keep going forward as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I slung my elbows over the port side and watched the moon making a trail across the water, with the lights of Istanbul all around. Tomorrow I fly out. It was a nice treat before I left, the boat and the night and the fat full moon.

goreme gozleme

2007-09-21T20:47:00.000+02:00

A perfect, orange crescent moon hangs above the Blue Mosque, harmonising with the warm glow of the lights that circle the minarets and spell out the message 'Dunya ahiretin Tarlasidir': sow in this world, reap in paradise. Before electricity they used to write these Ramadan messages in hundreds of little oil lamps suspended between the minarets, and I imagine they gave off a similar yellow-orange glow. Islam's crescent originated here in Istanbul, when the goddess Hecate was credited with thwarting an attempted seige by Philip of Macedon in 340BC*, and to show their gratitude the Istanbullus took her symbol as their standard. Tonight, in a moment of confusion, I read that sliver of moon unconsciously as both the thing itself and the symbol that has been made of it, and it feels like the old gods and the new are blessing this place, and all of us in it.

In my last two days in Istanbul I walked through the streets of the bazaar district cracking the freshest pistachios I've ever tasted, scattering their shells. I had a kip in the emerald grass of the Suleymaniye Mosque courtyard, then wrapped up my hair, stepped out of my shoes, and went inside. The deep carpet under your bare feet and the dome covering you from above make mosques feel so clean and open but so enveloping. In the Suleymaniye I knelt down for a moment to get a better photo of some detail or other, sat back naturally on my ankles, and instantly felt that I could have stayed there in that attitude all day. I remembered a Turkish girl's account of a visit to this mosque during Ramadan, the spellbinding sense of time suspended, the way she found herself swaying to the rhythm of the chanted prayers, as if 'no false note, no discordant gesture was possible.' I've been reading for three years about this city, about the training of the eunuchs and concubines and jannisaries at the Seraglio, about the political forment that focussed around the rival teams of charioteers in the Byzantine hippodrome (an odd prefiguring of football hooliganism, maybe), about the debauched tastes and murderous plots of the emperors, empresses and sultans. But that half hour in the Suleymaniye Camii, in a travel-tired, belly-troubled stupour (come on--of course I have the runs) was the closest I came to the dreamy city I have found in books.

I visited the Seraglio, all impressive state pavilions and warrens of lavish private quarters, and it made the palaces of France look squat, mean and unlivable by comparison. I talked for half an hour with a tile merchant in the Grand Bazaar. he told me that the best tiles, from Izmir, contain 85% quartz. Their white has the blue-white translucency of an eye. Only one artisan in the world can fashion this material into actual vessels, as opposed to flat tiles, and he turns out 30 or 40 desirable articles a year. Each colour must be fired seperately, and every vase, bowl or tile takes seventy days to produce. The Seraglio, along with many of the finer mosques, is fairly coated with the stuff. I found those hypnotically-patterned rooms more impressive than all the apricot-sized diamonds and rubies in the royal treasury. Not that I'd turn one of those down if it was offered to me in the spirit of friendship, obviously.

Last night I took a night bus to Cappadocia. We tried to watch the Premiership League on the in-bus telly, but the signal kept flickering out. It would cut to black for a few crucial minutes, and when the signal came back the stadium would be wildly celebrating a goal, or some player would be up-yoursing the ref over some disagreement we hadn't see. We slept, kind of, stopped at Ankara for a 4 am kebab (no thanks) and in the morning we were in another world. There were the salt lakes of Western Anatolia (those so delicate but so intense colours! I remember them, oddly, from the country around the salt lakes of West Australia. The lemon yellow, apple green, flossy pink, god knows where these colours come from) and then the fairy chimneys and soft, ripply dovecotes of volcanic ash that everyone knows from postcards.

I arrived in Goreme, had a shower, a swim in the hotel pool, and the best breakfast I've yet had in Turkey (which is really saying something) and then, well, napped all afternoon actually. At seven o'clock I scrambled up to sunset ridge to see what I'd been ignoring all day. Turned out, I'd been napping in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Towers upon towers, squat and slender, soft-serve-whipped ridges of whitest rock, a million pinks and greens in the escarpment to the east, and to the south a lone mountain changing from purple to blue to deeper blue as the sun does its disappearing act. Call me Lady Muck. Hand me a ripe, glowing fig and let me weigh it in my palm a minute while I look out over some landscape of unearthly gorgeousness and noncholantly bargain down the price of my dinner. Because that's how I roll. Until the holiday ends, anyway.

*Istanbul has seen many seiges, most of them not successful but a few spectacularly so. The Byzantines held out for a long time against the navies of Mehmet II by the simple but ingenious means of stringing a chain across the entrance of the Golden Horn just above water level. He trumped them, and thus converted Istanbul to Ottoman rule, by greasing 10 kilometres of road with pig fat and hauling his warships overland to a relatively undefended point beyond the chain. This patch of earth and water has always been a much contested and desired place.

istanbul night train

2007-09-16T21:05:00.000+02:00

It's going to have to be a series of rushed impressions, but in any case, that's how it felt when I was doing it.

utrecht and amsterdam

Church tower ringing out full-on baroque tunes, glissandoes and all, every quarter hour. Reefs of bikes in every open space, some with plastic foliage wrapped around the handlebars to make it easier to pick out your own rust bucket from the mass at the end of the day. Jolly superimpositions of architectural styles in the houses flanking the canals, somehow managing to show each to advantage. Hanging out with Eefje, a housemate of mine from ten years back. She reflects on what a scatterbrain she thinks she used to be. All I can think is how marvellous it is that she has somehow kept all her good qualities from the age of eighteen and added that calm knowingness that we all assume we'll have by our late twenties but rarely attain to.

berlin

The three days I allowed for it completely inadequate. Bauhaus museum--mmm, utopian desklamps. Checkpoint Charlie museum--many of the exhibits dating back to pre-1989, present tense references to Stasi and snipers. But oh, the glorious escapes! Home-made light aircraft, one-man submarines, girlfriends folded neatly into suitcases, a lot of fast talking. Hurray for ingenuity in the face of despotism. A punk-metal balcony barbecue party with my German friend Kiki, everyone very sanguine and polite as metalheads usually are, trundling out their best English for me on a lazy Sunday night.

venice

A week-long stop with the Zambonis, knocking about from Dolomites to Biennale to beach house to take our minds off how long it might be before we see each other next. Gorging on tuna carpaccio, ricotta cake, grinning, saying how it's a hard life. I do a little leaking from the eyes. Turns out, every time you move to a new place you meet new people to miss. Well it was worth it.

sofia
A day spent in the station and in the fast food restaurant shanty town across the road, waiting for my night train to Istanbul. Everything extravagantly run down, old women suck on their few remaining teeth, young studs slouch in cafes wearing outfits the Zoolander costume department would have rejected as credibility-stretching. I try to teach myself cyrillic, but I keep getting my algebra symbols mixed up. Advertising billboards urgently trying to tell me something, without success. Bulgarian keeps turning into Italian in my ears, must be tired.

balkan express

Not your gaslit dining car, flirting with secret agents kind of a deal. More of a conversations through the wall, passive smoking in your sleep, inexplicable draughts thing. But still! My very own sleeper compartment, night light, fold down bed, sink in corner. Read about the fall of Constantinople, tried to memorise some Turkish phrases.

istanbul

Muezzins do a loudspeaker call and response between the mosques of Sultanahmet. Poor old Aya Sofia all scaffolded up, Muslim calligraphy retained, Christian mosaics restored, looking in its hybrid state as it never looked when it was a consecrated plaee of worship. The hippodrome reduced to a few sad stumps--a raw obelisk that was stripped of its figured bronze plates in the fourth crusade; the trucated column that used to be three intertwined snakes--Mahmet the conqueror broke the jawbone off one of them on his way into town to show everyone who was boss. The imperial cistern, a resounding subterranean space, carp swimming around the ankles of dozens of gorgeous columns. I order a Turkish coffee, find I have to chew every mouthful before swallowing, it grates my stomach all day. An old woman with fine eyes, scarfed head and skull-motif Von Dutch t-shirt reads me a very rosy and non-specific future in the dregs of my cup. After dark the Sultanahmet district becomes a big street party, the nightly kiss-off to the Ramadan fast. The Istanbullus pile out of over-packed cars to find a spot on the grass in the mosque gardens and eat corn on the cob, kebab, a strange gooey toffee sold on sticks. I go about unnoticed in the crush, except by the odd guy who steps out in front of me to unfurl a carpet, calls me lady, asks well if I don't need a carpet then what do I need? A beer, an internet connection, and some sleep, in that order. I'm easily satisfied, really.

craic addict

2007-09-04T18:58:00.000+02:00

The weather in Ireland is great. It switches at ten-minute intervals between sunny, cloudy and rainy. The rain's not so bad--it's just vertical mist, really. By the time you've stuggled into your mac, which in my case is a large piece of cling wrap with a head hole that was given me free with a ferry ticket--it's switched back to sun again. There are places on earth where you'd feel rather silly setting out for a day's walk under a bruised and spitting sky, but here it's just a waiting game.

My first stop was Doolin, a one-street town on a bleak and marvellous stretch of the Atlantic coast, where the thin soil and its carpet of turf often gives way to naked rock. The Cliffs of Moher rise 200 metres out of the sea to the south, and to the north-east, the three Aran islands sit low and flat on the water. I went out to the smallest, Inisheer. It is so densely criss-crossed with stone walls it looks like the locals have just piled up all the loose rocks to keep from tripping over them. I walked to a church so old it is now sunk up to its arches in the surrounding earth, and to a sacred well; I stained my fingers picking blackberries; had a pee in a seaside cave with only an off-shore seal colony as my witnesses. I hope. I also eavesdropped on a couple of jaunting car drivers who were having a long conversation in Gaelic. That night I went to a couple of pubs in Doolin to hear some Irish music. The best was produced by four old guys sitting around a booth, picking up one or another of the instruments on the table--bodhran, fiddle, tin whistle, flute, guitar--as the song dictated, or sometimes just singing in English or Irish.

The next day I set out very early for a walk along the Cliffs of Moher. I had a hand-drawn map given to me by a man in the pub who told me it would be an unforgettable experience. He wasn't wrong. Did I mention those cliffs are 200 metres high? Yeah. Well. The path was a ribbon of yellowy-silver trodden-down grass that insinuated itself along the edge of the cliff, on the outside of the fenceline. For a long while I thought that was awesome. I was in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, savage, bright green deep grey, with the gulls riding the currents around my feet. I was scrambling up and down hillocks of turf so thick and soft it was like a green pelt, scaling rogue bits of fence, and jumping across little streams--well, the tops of waterfalls really. Then I thought, no one will ever believe I did this, I'd better take a photo. Thus:

If you look carefully you can see that the grass stops being horizontal and starts being vertical about a trainer sole's length from where my toes stop. It hadn't bothered me to see that with my own eyes, but when I saw it through the viewfinder I was struck with the sudden and unwelcome conviction that I. Was about. To die. I edged along for maybe another kilometre, gibbering softly to myself, until I came to a point where the path ahead of me had collapsed. There was a neat hole, about fifty centimetres across, where ground should have been. On my landward side there were three strands of rusty barbed wire separating me from a bog and a herd of belligerent-looking cows. I considered the jump. I contemplated the fence. I chose the fence. Hiking my knee up toward my left ear, I managed to get one leg over the wire. Then, folding up like an extremely complicated and terrified clotheshorse, I gymnasticised myself over to safety. I struck out through the field, angry cows be damned, until I found a road where I thumbed it back into Doolin. I sat down in the first pub I could find and put a load of hot food into the strange hollow where my insides should have been, and picked up three mars bars for a chaser. I only intended to buy one, but I absent-mindedly managed to buy it three times. Which says something about the role of chocolate in a crisis. And then I caught the bus to Killarney.

Killarney's the tourist hub of Kerry, a supernaturally lush corner of the south-west of the country, and it seemed kind of tame to me after the wind-scoured County Clare. Mind you, I stuck to the flat land for the most part. Lakeside strolls. A little cycling, with stops for coffee and scones. Nice things. Touristy things. Things that weren't likely to see me plunging to a splattery death. I saw two grey herons and two eagles (that is to say, about a seventh of the eagle population, so I think I was pretty lucky), and some bambi-cute red deer. I later met, leaning on a scythe in a field, an old man who in his park ranger days had done a lot to protect them. He told me all about rangering, and about his niece in Melbourne, which he'd heard was quite a cosmopolitan city, but he couldn't live there because he was acclimatised to Ireland, though he was aware that Seasonal Affective Disorder was a serious affliction for some, and in America they prescribed special mirrors with lights around the edge. He offered to teach me to scythe too, claiming it was excellent for the back muscles, but I had a Dublin train to catch. Plus, he was very possibly mad as a brush, and was wielding a blade as long as my forearm that he claimed was sharp enough to shave with.

He was nice though, as was the farmer in the next field over who marvelled that pretty girls should always be hiding their eyes behind sunglasses, as were the musicians in that pub in Doolin, who gave me their cards and offered me a lift back to the hostel. There's still something about Irish people that I can't quite put my finger on. Something remote behind the affability. It's not so true of the younger people, I guess, but with a lot of people over about forty it's there. Not hostility or falseness or anything like that. Just--something apart. It's like a child of Lir gazing out at you through a swan's eye. And tomorrow I leave, so I'm not going to get to the bottom of it now. Next time, maybe. Maybe never.

the wild swans at bray

2007-08-29T14:40:00.001+02:00

I know, I know, I'm sorry. So, since last time I updated, I have: finished my summer work (hurrah); turned 28 (no comment); been to see the Dali exhibition at the Tate Modern with Flavio (did you know that Dali and Disney collaborated on a short film? I didn't. It was abandoned in Disney's lifetime because it was too controversial, then finished with the help of Dali's sketches a couple of years ago. It looks like... well, it looks like a collaboration between Disney and Dali.); seen, admired and stayed in Lil's new apartment; and got bit by bedbugs in a cheap hotel (Gross. Swelling and lesions. I must be a backpacker again).

I'm in Ireland now, staying with Nik, of somanystuff comments fame. We went south of Dublin on the weekend, following the coast, took a walk from Bray to Greystones. The terrain was kind of an Irish (greyer, flatter, more haystacks) Cinque Terre. We saw dozens of white swans in a peaceful bay, doing a complicated Esther Williams synchronised swimming routine. We went to Dun Laoghaire and looked out across the bay at Joyce's tower, where stately plump Buck Mulligan harangues poor Dedalus for the whole first chapter of Ulysses. But it's Dublin itself that has made the biggest impression on me.

The inhabitants of Dublin are urban civility personified: too busy for nosy over-friendliness, but very happy to show you how dialing codes work, or where to get the bus from. There is decent public transport. There are museums with informative plaques and local designers who are nifty with a pintuck. In short, it looks like the most tranquil, ordered modern city you can imagine. Dublin is, nevertheless, and I would stand up and say so in court, completely class-a off-the-deep-end mental. It's got the lunacy of a new money financial centre imposed like a sketch on rice paper over another lunacy so primal it's impossible to define. There's a scream of mingled passion and rage tearing through the white noise of traffic and modems. I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's the very recent collective memory of poverty and civil strife, maybe it's older than all that. Maybe this patch of earth has had this spirit in it since before the first humans arrived here.

On my first day here it struck me so hard I felt I was going to fall over. It was the more disorientating for the fact that I wasn't expecting it and couldn't see any concrete evidence around me for it. The only thing in the posh, polished centre of town to make you realise that you're not in a familiar world is the Gaelic on all the signs. At first it seemed almost perverse to me to bother finding a translation for a street name, for example. I mean, in Paris you don't direct an English speaker to Green Path Street, but to Rue du Chemin Vert. Or why translate simple daily language into Gaelic which appears to have been developed in modern times to supply a gap in the original, ancient language? Like 'As seirbheis' written under 'Out of service' on buses. But the answer is obvious enough once you become aware of the question: this is how you bring a language back from the dead. So every time something is written in Gaelic, you are making a statement. A political statement, yes, but also something more fundamental, to do with where this culture came from and what it values.

Please don't think I'm claiming that modern Irish people are obsessed with past injury or even past glory at the expense of the present. On the evidence of a week's visit, Irish people are obviously individuals like any others, pursuing their daily interests, doing their thing. But there is something rumbling under the streets here that is bigger and older than any individual. No matter how carefully I studied the map, I kept finding myself walking in the opposite direction to the one I had intended, like Alice in the garden. Little children in the street kept calling out disconcerting messages to me: 'What are you doing?' 'Go back!' before their words resolved into baby German or Spanish. People speaking quite clearly and slowly, with a slight Dublin lilt, had to repeat themselves to me, as if their words were being whipped away by a strong wind. By the time I met Nik in the pub at six o'clock, I felt battered and confused. I tried to explain, thinking he'd call me an idiot. He sipped at his pint. 'Well, what do you think the leprechaun is? Was originally, I mean, before the cartoony image of it. Or the banshee? They're shape-shifters, deceivers, they're out to show you that things aren't as they look. There's something here...' But what? 'Buggered if I know, mate. I've sort of just got used to it.'

you want miracles? i give you the g.b.p.

2007-08-09T19:34:00.000+02:00

I'm sorry, readers. I've had tried, many times, to sit down and write yez something nice. Fact is I'm kind of bushed. I have to concentrate very hard to make sure I don't walk out of my room without my trousers--I'm that kind of tired. Also, there's not much news. Well let me see, last weekend I hired a bike and cycled along the coast for a bit. The first couple of hours went pretty smoothly, except for a near-death encounter with a disappearing pavement and a sewage services van. Then I stopped at Broad Stairs, a very cute town on a little bay, which was basically one big party. The beach was so jammed with happy bathers and candy-striped windbreaks you couldn't see the sand. I locked my bike up to the pier, called a colleague who had wisely headed straight there that morning, and we had an awesome fish and chip lunch. And a pint. Which was a very clever idea, considering I had a two-hour return ride ahead of me.

On the way back I actually tried to phone the bike shop guy a couple of times and get him to collect me, but the fairy of cardio-vascular exercise mysteriously removed all reception from my phone. I made it, anyway, and I may or may not have wheeled my bike up a hill or two, but that's my business. In the couple of days following I experienced pain in the fundament every time I sat down, stood up or otherwise moved, but it felt rather like the after-effects of a thorough spanking, so that was fun.

Anyway, it's been six weeks, and as I say my attention span extends as far as remembering to dress myself, just, and yet I've just accepted one last week of work at some school in Dorset. I want the cash, see. Every pound I earn will soon be blown a jaunt 'round the Continent, so it's well worth it. Nevertheless, I do feel rather like an ageing Bruce Willis schlepping myself onto the set of Die Hard 4.0. I rarely wish I were a bloke, but I do now just so I could scratch my stubble in a weary sort of way and do one of those 'bring it on' eyebrow-cocking gestures. Yippy-kay-ay.

conjugate this

2007-07-27T20:21:00.000+02:00

The wad of chewed gum sails through the mellow afternoon sunlight and plants itself with damp precision in the centre of the window blind.

“Who threw that?”

I repeat the question a couple of times in English, to slack-jawed silence, and finally in French. Elodie raises a listless hand.

“What’s that all about?”

She replies, as she always does, in exasperated French. “Obviously I was aiming for the window.”

“…You what?”

“Allors, you’d prefer I try for the bin from here? That’s an impossible shot.”

And so the weeks pass. They say you should never work with children or animals. Teenagers, aside from being nascent statesmen, philosophers and poets, are occasionally both of the above. You set a rule. They ask why. With a gleam of respect in your eye that acknowledges their natural sense of justice and enquiring spirit, you explain the logic behind the rule. They blink at you, blink at each other, and then: “Yeah, but, like… why?” And you suspect that they are mentally three years old. Of course, both ideas are true simultaneously, like the vase and the two faces in profile. If the faces had liprings and zits.

We had a row on the way back from Cambridge last week, over a quick toilet break and the subsequent getting or not getting of take-away Burger King. There were sharp words and eloquent continental gestures on both sides before we all slouched back onto the bus. I sat down with that morning’s edition of The Independent, and they flopped out on the back seats, got out an MP3 speaker phone and started blasting out the Chilli Peppers. I frowned at the political articles and tried to concentrate, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever walks out of an argument and puts on Red Hot Chilli Peppers is sort of spiritually in the right.

I’m going to quite miss them all when I go.

pick it up, carry it

2007-07-06T14:34:00.000+02:00

The confines of my world have been restricted to a village of two blocks in Kent. And in the village a tiny university campus, and on the campus 105 children speaking rapidly in a half dozen European languages, and more or less haltingly in English. The work is intense, being around children all day is intense, but so far I don’t mind. I’ll never be anywhere so quintessentially English again. No house looks less than a hundred years old and the oldest, with its windows made up of little lozenges of butterscotch glass, its wooden struts and herringbone bricks, looks like its first inhabitants might have gone visits to London to see Shakespeare performing his own work. In the lanes, bunches of red currants the size of cherry tomatoes glow in the sun, and apple trees lean on sticks like old men. There is no cash machine in the village, and the banks are open about six hours a week. A white-haired local striding out the door of the newsagents as I walk in turns on his heel and returns to the shopkeeper. ‘And is there an explanation I can offer my wife?’ he says. ‘Yes sir. There has been an accident on the motorway, so the magazines weren’t delivered today. They’ll be here tomorrow.’ He considers, nods grimly, and strides out again.

In my last week in Italy I managed to get back to Rome a second time. Those pines and arches, arches and pines, you could just walk all day, and I did. Passing big villas overlooking Palatine Hill—I’d be nervous of purchasing a view like that, I’d never want to get used to it. Rome is so beautiful when you’re out under the sky, you could love it even if the interior of every building was just a plain white cube. But of course, you step in off the street any old where and are sucked body and soul into an encounter with the glories of man-made beauty. I spent most of the day in Trastevere looking for mosaics. The best was a 9th-century number in the apse of a church supposedly built over St Cecilia’s house. Christ and some saints all austere, long-limbed, kohl-eyed elegance. Unfortunately the church itself had been made over in the baroque style. I can’t help it—I wish baroque had never happened. It’s not that I object to fanciness per se. I like gothic, for example. Pencil-thin spires with all the sinews standing out on their necks. Especially when its built in pale, pale stone. But when I stand too long in a baroque church, I feel like I’m at the end of a looooong wedding reception, and I’ve been stuck at a corner table all night with a chatterbox maiden aunt, and in an attempt to console myself I’ve eaten far too much wedding cake.

Mostly I just walked around the streets of Trastevere, which is one of those magical suburblets that manages to be right in the centre of everything and still supremely livable and alive. Good, cheap trattorias, skateboard shops, political bookshops with deep sofas, free wifi and wine by the glass. In half an hour or less I had mentally installed myself, identified the exact apartment I would live in (first floor, corner of the block with lots of windows, ivy-covered), the bar that would be my local, the run-down warehouse that I planned to core like an apple, installing a huge atrium in the centre, and turn into a magnificent free arts and sciences museum for children. With slippery dips and little one-person elevators in clear tubes instead of stairs.

In the evening a series of marquees along the Tiber set up shop selling beer and cous cous and roast pig. I found a spot at the prow of the Isola Tiberina to watch the green water purling around the feet of the Broken Bridge, as triumphal an arch as ever I’ve seen, even if it is stranded and crumbling in a river. A quick walk across the Circus Maximus, which I shared with joggers in varying states of fitness and clumps of purple-flowering weed; a scooter-buzzed intersection; a drop down into the quiet of the night metro, and that was it. Back to my final week in Arezzo, to the divesting process, a strange and strangely exhausting reversal of the begging, borrowing and stealing that goes on when you first arrive somewhere. The elated, false munificence of giving away what you could not, in any case, have kept, until your home is the pack on your back, snail-wise, and you’re ready to split.

45th-generation roman

2007-06-11T16:00:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I took myself on a four-hour whistlestop tour of Rome. Four hours, because four hours was what I had. I decided to go late Saturday night, photocopied the guidebook to read on the train. I reeled around from Termini to Trevi to the Colloseum like a bluebottle afflicted by ADD and stendhalism, all agog. Golden light, golden heat, sweat streaming down from beneath my sunglasses like tears. Dome after sky-aspiring dome appearing and disappearing between the palazzi. And the palms, the hanging vines, those wonderful cloud-shaped pine trees. My guidebook exhorts the modern tourist not to forget the other, older city that lies a few metres beneath your trainer soles. Not difficult advice to follow, considering the lumpy-bumpiness of the streets: you’re clearly walking around on top of a bedspread under which a lazy child has stashed all the contents of his room in a half-arsed attempt at ‘tidying’.

The Trevi fountain was sheer silliness, crowding its tiny piazza like a big spabath on a little balcony, some executive’s minor peccato against good taste. The tourists, each having already thrown the single coin they were willing to donate to the gesture, tossed imaginary coins over their shoulders while their friends’ cameras clicked. But spouting away under that benevolent sun, looming so whitely, making everybody so happy, it made me happy too.

I found the Pantheon by accident while looking for a nearby church with Filippo Lippi frescoes. My carping maiden-aunt-chaperone of a guidebook had assured me that it would be closed, along with the forum and most of central Rome. It also gave all prices in lire. Yeah, I’m cheap. But oh, that dome. So perfect, so austere. Lozenge of yellow sunlight fracturing against the squares within squares. A recorded announcement ripped through the room, distorted by echo. First it called for silence, in English and Italian. I liked that a lot, since it sounded like the voice of Jupiter himself, and felt much more suited to the temple of the planetary gods it used to be than the awkward-feeling church it is now. Round churches: why? Nothing in the catholic mass is adapted to roundness. They just end up crowding all the (rectangular) pews up in one little sector of the circle, with a discomforting sense of empty space behind. The announcement continued at booming, echoey length with a list of all the noises you weren’t allowed to make, so as ‘to preserve the atmosphere of worshipful prayer appropriate to a Christian church’.

And finally piazza Campidoglio, the forum, Palatine hill. Gah. The fantastical deep perspectives, the harmonious jumble of ruins of various vintages, in various states of repair. Too lush for words. I actually caught myself thinking, ‘Wow, aren’t human beings great?’, which is I guess how you know that a city is doing its job, architecture-wise. Arches and basilicas, the house of the vestal virgins. Wild poppies and marguerites softening the wreckage of broken columns and fragments of ornamented capital. Guides informing their limp, limping flocks of all the lurid goings on in ancient times. Contemplating the bronze doors of the Curia, where the Senate used to meet: frog croaks in the archeological dig behind me, girl grunts in frustration as I inadvertently get in her shot. Palatine hill with its fountains and sneaky secret views between the trees. All of it so gorgeous, so gorgeous.

I sat down by the Colloseum, rolled and smoked a cigarette. Watched a sweltering, plastic-breast-plated gladiator scratch at his scalp with a thumbnail, his helmet upturned at his feet for coins. Then back on the slow train with a tinny of Moretti and a magazine. I had to sit backwards, funnily enough, and on the same side of the train, so I saw exactly what I’d seen on the way over but in reverse: the pillowy gold-green loveliness of Lazio, Orvieto on its geometric limestone outcrop, Lake Trasimeno, bloody Terontola: as if the elastic band that had carried me out to Rome, having reached the farthest point of its stretch, was slinging me back in. Home, blog, bed. Not so much as a postcard to show but hell yes, I heart Roma.

ricordati

2007-05-27T17:38:00.000+02:00

In a month I’ll be leaving Italy, and a couple of months after that I’ll be leaving Europe, and I don’t know when I’ll be coming back. With every passing week my mental picture of Australian life acquires depth, texture and colour, as I unconsciously prepare to re-enter that atmosphere. At the same time, daily life here is also becoming super-saturated, rich beyond endurance. My mind is dividing its attention between the pleasures of the here and now and those to come. The best analogy I can find is the way those great film soundtrack composers—Rota, Williams, Jarre—weave different themes in and out of a score and allow us to hold conflicting allegiances in our minds.

My memories of Europe are parading all their gorgeousness: like a Venetian palazzo with its window boxes brimming with geraniums and pinwheels. I put Interpol on the stereo and I’m hurled almost bodily back into a stifling metro carriage on my way to an English lesson with a sulky Parisian clerk. But then a second later I’m getting off the metro at a strange suburban station and it’s night, and I’m trying to find a cinema that’s rumoured to be showing Sullivan’s Travels for three euros a ticket. Then I’m in Macgregor’s apartment eating salmon he’s poached, and it’s squeaking slightly against my teeth as I chew, and we’re discussing Catherine Breillat, and then we’re at the bar on the corner drinking kir under the liquidambers, then it’s morning and I’m in the same square, at the patisserie, snorting a chocolate croissant to fortify me for another oppressive metro ride to another English lesson with another sulky clerk…

There are a few really important people from whom I know I will feel much more profoundly absent in Australia than I do here, even if they’re in another province, even if they’re in another country. To me, Europe is a place, a single address, and I feel that all these people are within reach even if I don’t see them for a year at a time. Even if things have already changed and, when I see them next, I won’t be the same I nor they the same they. But all those first meetings happened here, and geography is history, and it’s going to be weird to be off the emotional map. Well va beh. When you move to a different place the cost of the ticket is a split life. Definitely worth it, in my opinion.

Here is a list of some things I will miss about Italy, in no particular order:

gesture
My favourite of all time corresponds roughly to the concept of ‘precise’ or ‘correct’: thumb and forefinger delicately pinch together a bit of empty air and draw it downward in a line parallel to the speaker’s body, from the sternum to the navel. This gesture involves an indescribable alteration of carriage, expression, even breathing, as if the gesturer were, for that single moment, embodying the very spirit of correctness. Other highlights include ‘sedate me now’ (slapping the vein on the inside of the elbow, rolling the eyes) and ‘mmm, yummy!’ (pointing toward an imaginary dimple at the side of your mouth: works best if cheeks are distended with a big mouthful of food at the same time).

the scary old people
who run everything and do exactly what the hell they want. For various economic and cultural reasons, it’s very difficult to be an effectual, independent adult at age thirty here. Bureaucracy is king, you have to stand in line for everything, and that includes respect. When your last hair goes grey, you know you’ve made it. People of seventy and eighty dress with daring and panache, groom and tan, stalk the highstreet in precarious heels. Their gorgon stares part crowds of loitering yoof, they have the power to make even a crazy Italian driver stop at a pedestrian crossing. In short, they’re visible. They’re in the shops, in the cafes, they ride bikes, they go dancing. Their presence in public points out Australia and England’s great sin of omission: where are our old people? What do they do all day? If they’re smart, they’ve moved to Tuscany. Or maybe Florida.

talk
Smoothing hand on the rough edges of life. If you go into a shop smaller than a Target, you’re obliged out of etiquette to describe to the clerk what you are looking for. If they have it, they will discuss its attributes and benefits with you before concluding the transaction. If they don’t have what you want, they will fetch out various items that are similar but not right, caressing each one regretfully, and descanting at length on its unsuitability. This one is too this, this one lacks that, this other is not waterproof, or not organic, or in some other way deficient. If you have the good manners to go through with the conversation, they will be as happy when you leave as if they had supplied your need and you had purchased after all.

time made visible
Every street is a babble of history. Medieval crucifixes hang in renaissance churches with electric votive candles that you screw into place to light up. Clusters of towers compete in height, a reminder of a time when important families or guilds sought to describe their status in metres above sea level. They’re still impressive, even if a lot of them are listing dangerously and closed to the public (a vision of New York in 2300: Sears Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, all off-kilter like metronome needles arrested at the furthest point of their swing). Battlements at the top provide hiding spots for archers, the better to take out rivals. These self-important little henges are marred by the odd truncated stump: a bankrupted family’s public shaming.

Fascism leaves its mark in the odd train station or government building. In quiet corners of overlooked villages you can still occasionally find a fascist slogan (live dangerously; Mussolini is always right) carved into a façade. Most have been painted or plastered over but some remain, either where the effort to remove them was too much, or where the new owner felt motivated to remember and remind.

If there is a certain lassitude about things; if the simplest arrangements need to be approached in circuitous ways; if you sometimes feel the chilling edge of non-negotiablity when someone gives you some friendly advice, you have to remember the burden of history pressing down on everyone here. It’s a treasure beyond price, to be sure, but it’s a treasure you have to carry on your back, like Munchausen’s giant. Like trying to walk on the bottom of the sea.

the kinder, softer sun
the luxe of green, the birds that actually go tweet and the bees that bumble. Coming to Europe is like stepping into one of the cartoons from your childhood that you thought somebody had made up. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Australian environment, and how it’s so much bigger and older than us and just barely tolerates our presence. But you’ll forgive me if once or twice I’ve stepped into the hush of a beech forest, and heard the little birdies twitter, and said, ‘Now this is quaint, this is actually quaint.’

tabloid moment

2007-05-18T15:03:00.000+02:00

So, the phone centre that I have been using regularly to call abroad this year has just been busted: it turns out they were selling coke to half of Arezzo. I always liked the place because it was so quiet--there was never anybody using the phones. I guess the carabinieri noticed that too, because they raided it yesterday and found lots of cocaine and the equivalent of four years of my salary in the till. Plus, and this perplexes me, a register of the names of all their clients. I'm trying to imagine how that worked.
'A gram of your finest, my good man.'
'Certainly, sir. If I could just see some form of identification...'
And now I have to find another phone centre. Beh.

get the hell outta town

2007-05-15T14:05:00.000+02:00

Sarah returned from her Grand Tour of the south, of which the best story was when her Pompei tour guide got into a vaffanculo screaming match with another tour guide, and the next day, according to her hostel-mate who went down there, crossed paths with the same guy again and ended up knocked out cold and bleeding. Anyway, flouncing around Amalfi is all very well but in the end she acknowledged her true place in life: in my kitchen, hand-rolling ricotta gnocchi for me when I’m working late. She's left for Rome again now, and she claims she's off to Tokyo next and then back to Australia, but she'll be back. She won't be able to make it without me. Oh yeah, she'll be back any minute.

The weekend before last we went to Pisa on a rainy night and found the pizza to be very good and the tower to be leanier than our wildest dreams. On Sunday we went for an outing with Alexandra (the replacement replacement replacement teacher, who is Virginian and funny and smart). We tried for a thermal spring but missed the bus and ended up randomly in Orvieto. It’s your basic Umbrian hilltop town comprising a gorgeous cathedral and one long street of wine shops and delis. Or so it seemed to us. There may have been other things to see but we were happy barrelling from one free wine tasting to another. Alexandra is something of a wine buff, and knew what questions to ask about soil composition and grape varieties to convince the shopkeepers to fetch out the nicer wines from their hiding spots in the back of the fridge. And there were fruit-infused honeys to sample out of pump-top jars, and plates and plates of lemon-cornflake-currant cookies. We sampled the hell out of that town. I think we’d drunk a good half bottle each and had a coating of sugar around our mouths by the time we went to a bar and actually bought something. Orvieto. Remember the name. It’s the anti-Terontola.

Last weekend we made it to the thermal spring after all, Querciolaia at Rapolano, and alternated swimming in the hot pools with lying in the hot sun. I think there may have been wine involved too, but it’s a little sketchy. We read magazines and rolled cigarettes and frightened the Italians with our mozzarella skin tones. We swam around in the opaque calciferous water and avoided the intertwined couples near the edges: I didn’t fancy an immaculate hot springs conception. We also went to Bologna, ostensibly for a concert, but since we got the date wrong we simply had more time for shopping and eating.

Now Sarah’s gorn. I am sad. There are some photos, however. Want to see them? And do you want to know what Arezzo looks like?

quaint, actually

2007-04-20T16:04:00.000+02:00

in the park, laughing at David Sedaris stories.

Right now I should be lining up summer work and sorting things out for the next school year. With weather like this, though, it’s hard to think beyond the next gelato. It’s a trap of this properly seasonal climate: all winter you sit smoking and thinking, coiled tight around your ambitious schemes with nothing to distract you. Then just as the time comes to put all your plans into action, the sun comes out and the most complex thought you are capable of is gaaaaaah, daisies. My idea of forward planning is ordering limes and mint from my local greengrocer (no shops sell them, he says he'll hook me up next time he's at the wholesale market) so I can make mojitos at home.

Sarah’s in the Aeolian islands now, having volcanic mud baths. Last week we spent a day in Florence. I was late to meet her (noooo, Katrina, you don’t say?) and so she waited at Ponte Vecchio and eavesdropped. A bulldog-faced Texan woman pointed her camera at the Arno and said with pugnacious satisfaction, ‘Ah, now, this is quaint. This is actually quaint.’ Which will of course be our secret password from this day forward.

She’s met a lot of my students since she’s been here, actually—she caught the end-of-second-term restaurant season. It’s distressing how many of my students insist on ordering ‘a large cock’ whenever we practice our restaurant language. I should point out, however, that the way most foreigners pronounce penne means that they are basically ordering a plate of penis. I like the symmetry of that. If you want to avoid the mistake, by the way, be sure to pronounce the double-n with emphasis. If, however, your waiter is cute and you’re up for a little misunderstanding, ‘penay’ away.

hermits, hot springs

2007-04-11T12:51:00.000+02:00

This entry will be a list because, overwhelmed by the volume of doing-stuff that has uncharacteristically characterised my recent existence, I can't get an anecdote together.

Recent visitors with highlight moments:

Lily: Climbing the tower at Siena to see the cypress-stitched fields below and the big bell above, mad nightrider dos resulting from long-uncut hair and high-altitude bluster. Drinks on a balcony bench seat overlooking the main piazza. More drinks, this time in Venice, being glasses of wine drunk while sitting cross-legged on a jetty by the Rialto at night, watching the young couples in matching parkas go by in their outboard dingies.

Lily, queen of the world

Dorsoduro

The boat market

Nik: I'm sure we went places but I don't remember where; we just talked ourselves inside out. All to the good. You can see from the photo that we got as far as the park at the top of the hill.

Jenny and Paul (Reggio) and Sarah S (Australia): Camaldoli monastery and hermitage, sooooo pretty, which made me want to be a hermit. A latin-reading, pottery-making lady hermit. And the procession of the dead Jesus at Terra Nuova. Explanation to follow, probably. Think of it as a mobile passion play.

Lovely Camaldoli

Montepulciano

Don't freak out, it's just tomato sauce.

Sarah S and Fausto, an Aretine friend: Bagno Vignoni, a medieval hotspring resort that used to be such a den of iniquity (men and women bathing naked with nothing but strung-up sheets separating them, gasp) that St Catherine's parents brought her there to tempt her out of her saintly ways. It didn't work. You're not allowed to swim in the main pool anymore, but down the road a bit you can bathe your feet in the gutter that carries the run-off to the river below. Hot waterfall footspa, rock.

Sair the cutey

accidentally terontola

2007-03-06T21:40:00.001+01:00

EDIT [July 19, 2011]: Hi! This is a blog I kept while I was working and travelling in Europe a few years ago. I haven't updated it since 2007, but I'm leaving this note because I've realised that if you google search "Terontola," this blog entry comes up pretty high on the list of results. Who knew? In its heyday this blog had, like, seventeen readers, and three of them were my mum. But now there's this whole search engine debacle where I'm starting to feel kind of bad for Terontola, because this blog entry isn't what I'd call great press for the place.

I'd hope it would be obvious that my hatchet job on this harmless hamlet was (a) exaggerated for my own entertainment and (b) more Trenitalia's fault than Terontola's. But just in case that's not perfectly evident, I think I should clear some travel writing karma and tell you straight up that this town is - sigh - really not that bad.

So - are we cool? Do you feel reassured about your choice of agriturismo or school project topic or whatever it was that led you to google Terontola? Phew! Now on with the snark.

Last weekend I went to the new laundromat which has just opened on my street. The best thing about it was the parade of coiffed old ladies in their fur coats and cats-eye glasses who paused at the window to chew gum and gawk. I must have seen at least a dozen of them stop and stare before one woman got up the courage to come in.

‘I see you’ve opened your doors, treasure. Compliments on your new business.’
I explained the misunderstanding.
‘Well anyway, how does it work?’
In Italy it’s always quicker to have the conversation than to try to avoid it, so I ran her through a little tour of the facilities, being sure to mention the discounts attendant on purchasing a loyalty card.
‘Thank you dear. I must say it’s very impressive.’

I gave the talk a couple more times in the morning, and wondered why I didn’t own a laundromat. It has to be about the only business where you can be off getting your hair done while the money rolls in.

The weekend before was a bit more newsworthy. I went to Perugia with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him new teacher, an English guy with a great MP3 collection and a Gobi-dry sense of humour, who unfortunately was just called back home for family reasons. So I’m meeting the replacement’s replacement’s replacement for coffee tomorrow, and I know I’m going to start mixing their names up, but at least with all the switcheroos I’ve met some interesting people. Anyway, Perugia is very pretty and medieval, plus it’s in Umbria so I’m ticking off those regions one by one, and they did me a good hot piadina, drippy with mozarella and herby green bits, to keep out the February cold. New Guy had prudently packed his lunch, of which I naturally ate half as a chaser for my piadina. We saw the cathedral and the main square and a bunch of Etruscan things but the best things were the windy steep streets.

Our time in Perugia was, however, cut tragically short by an unscheduled three-hour layover in Terontola on the way there. Terontola, as yet untouched by the ravages of tourism, is a tiny Tuscan village whose cultural bounty is only equalled by the friendliness of its inhabitants: which is to say, there’s nothing to do and the people are jerks.

Our visit started with a random passport check by the police. We were worried the delay was going to cause us to miss our connection. Ah ha ha. Ha. I bolted to the announcements screen and failed to find our train. I bolted to the ticket window and hemmed loudly to attract the attention of the ticket seller, who was crouched by the window with his fingers between the slats of the blind, spying on the featureless street.

‘Excuse me. What platform for the 9:40 to Perugia?’
‘There is no 9:40 to Perugia.’
‘Um, yes there is. We bought tickets for it this morning.’
‘It doesn’t run on Sundays.’
‘But the machine sold us tickets for it.’
He grinned the slow grin of a malicious mutant frog.
‘The machine,’ he enunciated, ‘made a mistake.’
‘Well when’s the next one?’
‘Twelve thirty.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Half. Past. Twelve.’
‘I see. Well is there anything interesting to see here while we’re waiting?’
His grin stretched so wide his thin lips disappeared completely.
‘Nope.’
‘Thank you very much. You’ve been so helpful.’
As I turned to go I added, ‘You know, you’re a genuine arsehole.’ That last bit was in English, but he knew, and he was okay with that.

I broke the news to New Guy, who took it very well, and we went to the bar across the road for a cappuccino. I repeated my question about local sights, and the bar tender jerked his head toward the train station. ‘Genuine fascist period article.’
‘Awesome.’ I looked around the bar and saw a collection of brightly coloured posters advertising scratch lotto tickets. ‘It’s my lucky day. I’ll take a scratch card, thanks.’
‘Oh no. We don’t sell those here.’
‘Of course you don’t.’ I turned to NG. ‘What now?’
‘We could go back and tell that guy he’s an arsehole again, but that’ll take up five minutes, tops. If we walk really slow.’

Instead we struck out for the edge of town, which was conveniently close to the centre of town, there not being much town to speak of. Soon we found ourselves among cypresses and brooding hens and crumbling brick houses. An old lady with not many teeth left shot the breeze with us for a while, since she needed a break from carrying a load of firewood home in a bucket. She wouldn’t let us help her. New Guy took a lot of photos of cypresses and crumbling brick houses, the merits of which we compared and debated, concluding that some of them would be very nice places to live, if they weren’t so close to Terontola. We walked up a hill, and walked down it again. We got back to the station in time for another cappuccino and a couple of sudokus before the 12:30 train. On the way to Perugia we swapped MP3 players. I looked out the window at the waters of Lake Trasimeno, milky green under the glowering sky, with lots of little castles standing out on headlands and islands. New Guy looked through the photos he’d just taken. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it looks as if we meant to do that.’
‘I know, right? I’m going to do a big blog feature on Terontola.’

You see I’m a woman of my word.

comunque, hai mangiato bene?

2007-02-26T15:50:00.000+01:00

I remember this conversation with a student from my first month in Reggio.

‘I worry about my daughter. All she has for breakfast is two chocolate biscuits.’
‘Well, that’s teenagers for you.’
‘I know. She should be eating at least five or six, wth a nice big cup of hot milk.’

Breakfast biscuits are an Italian institution. They have an aisle to themselves in most supermarkets. My favourites are shaped like the ABC logo, with cane sugar on top and flecks of something that gets stuck in your teeth. I’m also quite a fan of the ones with the picture of a basket of eggs stamped on top. In Reggio, when I was routinely working fifty or sixty hours a week and flinching every time my boss walked into the room, my daily diet consisted of as many biscuits as I could stuff into my face as I was getting dressed in the morning (quite a lot, as it turns out), and then a take-away pizza at 11pm, washed down with a big bottle of Moretti beer. I never had the spare time or spare change for a lunch break, and my students got used to the rumblings of my stomach, as if they were a family who shared their home with a restless ghost. I was size eight and I had a butt of steel. In retrospect I like to think of it as my ‘verge of nervous collapse’ diet, and am thinking of marketing it to Hollywood.

Now that I have a nice job and time for cooked lunches at home, I am finding I have to rethink my eating habits a little bit. I’m experimenting with strange, fibrous things that I believe are known as vegetables, and am less likely to offer my guests tinned tuna, tinned beans, Moretti beer and breakfast biscuits when they come round for dinner. I’m not size eight anymore, and my butt stops dancing a second or two after the rest of me, but neither is adrenalin churning everything to cement in my stomach. Sometimes I look around my little heated home with its well-stocked kitchen and marvel at how far I’ve come.

I find myself well-positioned to appreciate my successes. Now that I’m no longer surrounded by an artificial world of the super-rich, I’ve become more aware of how hard life in Italy really is. The people I met through the school last year were the type who bought their eggs pre-boiled, and described a ten-thousand euro blow out at Max Mara as ‘a bit of me-time’. In Arezzo I’ve met many people who seem to be closer to the norm. Forty-year-old mothers who work days in shops and nights tending bar in discos; environmental engineers who schlep from Trieste to Reggio Calabria for endless rounds of job applications, in anticipation of the end of their six-month work contracts; law graduates who stuff envelopes in gold factories. I’ve seen the future of enterprise bargaining agreements, and it isn’t pretty.

Financial hardship means increasing numbers of young Italians are living at home well into their thirties. Of course, their parents are rightly anxious about their ability to stay solvent, and generally see marriage as the viable course to adult independence: it goes without saying that a situation like this will rapidly make a society more conservative. Then, of course, there’s the fabled bureaucracy, and the very high taxes imposed on anyone trying to make a permanent legal contract of any kind, from tenancy to employment. The result is that everything gets done through unofficial channels, which rather saps people’s political will to improve the official ones. Most Aretines will never leave Arezzo, and the reason they give me is that the quality of life is so good. If that’s true, I shudder to think what things must be like for the people in all those other cities and towns I’ve breezed through on weekend trips. But then, at least they still have functioning public medical cover.

And at least they know how to enjoy themselves. Last weekend I was invited to dinner by an ex-student of mine, to meet her architect husband and her friends, a pianist, a singer and an ornithologist. There was fondue, there was dessert wine, there was chocolate bread-and-butter pudding (the singer is English, but has an admirable grasp of Aretine—it wasn’t until she cast around for the word for ‘chicken stock’ that I realised she wasn’t a native). It was a proper grown-up dinner party, with dirty stories and b&b recommendations. There was even the boring bit at the end where the most voluble of the guests gets puddly and starts complaining about electricians and planning permits: it was perfect. I think I made my first proper joke in Italian. It was the most fun I’ve had in months.

I’m generally easing into the rhythms of Tuscan socialising, which seem to involve squeezing an equal number of women and men into a few warm cars, driving to pubs and restaurants in other towns which are unaccountably superior to the many pubs and restaurants in one’s own town, getting tipsy, and driving home again. When I want to be around a familiar sense of humour, I spend time with the Brits from the school. When I want to be alone I go and see classic Italian films at the arthouse cinema. It’s not bad at all for a European winter in a small town on a small salary. Aretines love to run themselves down, and are forever telling me how ill-mannered and parochial they are, but I think most of them are very nice. In the next few months I’m expecting visits from several old friends who will love this place, and the trees will soon be budding green, and just as I’m finally decoding those last elusive dinner party jokes, it’ll be time to go.

bulletin

2007-02-19T15:45:00.000+01:00

Find of the month: cheap phone centre that sells ten kinds of beer, cheap. I foresee a lot of international phone calls that tail off into uh LUHV ya, man. Nah nah nah. Nah. Nah, man—uh luhv YOO.

Media moments of the month: Loveline, the five-nights-a-week talkshow dedicated to informing youth that the rhythm method doesn’t work and that foreplay isn’t a golf term, tells us that a new carpark has opened in Bari. It offers individually screened-off parking spaces and charges for an initial half-hour and in quarter-hour increments thereafter. Do Italians live at home too long? You be the judge.

The local national paper (I’m not quite sure how that works) boasts that Italian women are the ‘hottest’ in Europe, based on what percentage of women in a nation are having sex at least once a week (In Italy it’s about 59), and that the most ‘frigid’ are the neighbouring Austrians. I suspect, though that the Austrians might not be constrained to shampoo their carseats so frequently.

Pretty much everyone except the pope wants to decriminalise euthanasia. The pope doesn’t care. Berlusconi, blocking law reforms for de facto couples in parliament, describes de facto relationships as ‘marriage: serie b’. Australia features twice: once with a story of a man who wrestled a shark, and when asked why, replied: 'I was drunk'; and once in an article on the drug Stilnox, which apparently has people getting up in their sleep to run in circles around the living room, binge eat and repaint their doors. Why did no one tell me about this?

New spiritual home: Tequila Wellness Centre. I haven’t visited yet, but just gazing on the promotional leaflet, with its calorific orange block-capitals, suffuses me with a sense of wellbeing.

New actual home: small and perfectly-formed apartment in fifteenth-century palazzo in historic centre, freshly reno’d and ready for me to scratch, grease-mark and spill coffee all over. It’s got white plaster walls and vaulted ceilings in exposed brick, so it’s sort of like living inside a very chi-chi pizza oven. I went to Ikea on Sunday and the pleasure was so intense I almost left my body. Having studied the catalogue at such length that I was starting to hallucinate furniture everywhere (true story: I looked at a husky dog in the street and thought, flokati-upholstered piano stool—genius!) I was primed for maximum efficiency. Elbowing through dithering crowds, testing with my very own behind a selection of kitchen chair covers, choosing with authority the perfect oak-look mini bookshelf, rejecting superfluous picture frames and candles. I don’t care what fantastical objections this landlord might cook up: if he tries to turf me out before my contract is finished, I’m going to go all Charlton Heston on his arse. There’s a rag rug. Theres a wicker chair. There’s emotional investment, is what I’m trying to stay. Move again? Nuh-uh. I'm staying, dude. I'm finishing my coffee.

all lurking minotaurs: please form an orderly queue

2007-01-29T12:00:00.000+01:00

Just look at that column on the left. This blog is collecting some serious archivage. It’s not a travelogue anymore, it’s in a genre crisis, and don’t start with me on the whole narrative structure debacle. I do it, still, because nothing makes me happier. It’s an ariadne thread that keeps me connected to everything that’s happened and everything I’ve been since I walked through a departure gate at age twenty-five with two people’s tears dripping off my chin. In the plane I scrawled a note: ‘Terrible mistake. Don’t want to become the bright, hard person I will need to be.’ Then I took a pill and slept. My memory of arriving at Heathrow is without sound, like my ears were still trapping bubbles of 10 000-feet air. I can’t believe the accumulation of incident between that day and now—but whenever I sit down to write I find the thread still connected: still unspooling out of my hands at this end, still holding fast at the other. And if that isn’t structure, what is?

ern malley says...

2007-01-25T19:29:00.000+01:00

...happy Australia Day.

kat vs the hot tin roof

2007-01-24T13:13:00.000+01:00

After I got back from Venice I spent three days cleaning my new apartment. Between my viewing the place in December and coming back to it in January, I found that someone had left a used condom on the kitchen counter—it’s a mystery who it was, because I doubt it was my 85-year-old landlord whom I’ve only ever seen shuffling silently in the stairwell in plaid slippers. I guess it was a young relative whom he asked to go in and clean the place, which they evidently had not done. The verb scopare has two meanings in Italian, and when this anonymous person told old babbo that they’d been ‘sweeping’, we know what they meant by that. Anyway, I bought a bottle of lethal bleach and scrubbed every surface until I had RSI in my scrub muscles. I was happy to do it since I was so in love with the place. Then I celebrated by having a friend over for dinner and a DVD.

The next day, as I was walking home with arms full of newly-purchased tupperware, the landlord’s daughter called and said we had to talk, and could she come over that afternoon. I put out chocolate biscuits on a plate and made tea and felt very queen-of-all-she-surveys (it’s an attic flat and the windows point straight up into empty air, which only intensifies that impression). The daughter came over, declined the tea and biscuits, and was very embarrassed to tell me that I would have to leave. Her father had decided that he didn’t want to let his apartment to a single woman who invited strange people over. He lives two floors below, so he had seen the guy coming up the stairs. ‘I really am mortified, I realise it’s untenable. I don’t know what’s possessed him.’ I told her I’d be out by the end of the month.

When she left I cried a lot, shot a double amaro and ate the entire packet of chocolate biscuits. Then I found I felt strangely relieved. After the Rita incident, I was worried that I was turning into one of those losers whom bad things happen to because they have attitude problems they can’t see, but this kind of twisted luck is out of human hands. And if I have to choose between being a loser and a strumpet, I’ll pick strumpet every time.

So I’ve spent a lively month looking at apartments. I started at the bottom of the market, looking at cheap privately-let places, and it was kind of demoralising. ‘It’s freshly painted,’ said one woman. ‘I’ve played around with colour a bit.’ I surveyed the aggressive marigold walls and agreed that she had. We stepped onto the rubbish-strewn terrace and she pointed at a plate-glass door on the other side of it. ‘And conveniently enough, I live right there, so…’ The rest of her sentence is lost to history since it was covered by the tire-screech of my departing trainer soles in the stairwell.

Finally I caved and went to a real estate agent, prepared to pay the extra month’s rent that they take as their cut just to get a bit of sense out of someone. That’s how, three days ago, I met Costantino, The King of Rentals. His office looked like a bordello, complete with zebra rugs and gilt mirrors. He himself was Burberry-clad, corkscrew-haired and tanned as a flapjack.
‘Tell me what you want, babe, I’ve got it all, I’m the King of Rentals. I’ll find you something fantastic, your worries are over.’
‘Fine. My landlord crazy has kicked me out, and I’m wanting for a new apartment. I’ve seen many of little purgatories with mildew where should be the windows, and I want a thing nicer so I am here.’
‘You’re awesome, you know that? I can tell you’re an intelligent chick. I can think of three places right off the bat, right off the top of my head, that you’re going to go nuts for.’
‘And the other thing, I’m poor. I’m looking for a place nice and affordable.’
‘For you, don’t worry. Special price.’ This is the only English he knows, and in the three days of our acquaintance I have heard it several hundred times. ‘I’m going to find you the place of your dreams. I know everybody in this town and… you don’t understand a damn word I’m saying, do you.’
‘Every last one,’ I lied.

We crossed and re-crossed the city centre on foot, in taxis and in Costantino’s leather-interior jag, with me rushing back to lessons or tuna sandwich lunches in between. He kept up the banter with a persistence I found quite awe-inspiring. I had little cause or opportunity to respond, and when I did say something it was in limping Italian, which luckily gave the impression that I didn’t understand much. When landlords showed us around places they’d say things like, ‘For a five-month tenancy she can’t expect plates and cups and stuff,’ and my champion Costantino would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ and change the subject, and I’d file the information away for arguing about later.

As it turns out I have found three nice places for the same price, all privately advertised, so I don’t think Costantino will be getting any money out of me. However, a new teacher arrived yesterday who doesn’t speak any Italian and on Saturday I took her around with him, looking at places for herself. She liked a little bedsit that I’d seen with him beforehand. It was the place where the guy was carping about providing plates. He told us beforehand,‘I’ll get you a good deal here. Five hundred plus bills.’
‘You joke, King of Rentals,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice, but it is a box for to put in a pair of Nikes.’
‘Yeah, but it’s centralissimo. That’s a good price.’
While Costantino took a phone call, Gill told me to ask the landlord about the price.
‘Ooh. All new fixtures, central location. Say, six hundred all in? Bills included?’
‘That’s too much. Thanks anyway.’
‘Okay, five hundred all in.’
‘ And plates and cups and saucepots and stuff of this genre within the kitchen, I pray.’
‘Okay, no problem.’
Costantino got off the phone and we told him we’d reached an agreement. As we were walking back to the car I asked him what he was going to take as a commission. ‘For you ladies, obviously, special price.’
‘It’s normally a month’s rent, isn’t it?’
‘Industry standard.’
‘Let’s say about the half of this, then. Finally, we negotiated the price while you is chat with the phone.’
‘You’re forte, you know that, Katrina? You’re wasted as a teacher, you should go into business. Then you could have a car like mine.’
‘I can marry with you, and then I would to have your car.’
‘In a heartbeat.’
‘You lack the breathing when you going up the hills anyway, I notice. I marry you, and I to have the sexy jag, and you to go by feet in healthful fashion.’
‘Forte, forte. It’s a deal.’

I called around to Gill's place on Sunday night. She was temporarily billeted with the nice chocolate-loving signora with whom I spent the month of December. All that was left of her was a ‘thank you’ note, a hundred-euro bill and some yoghurts in the fridge. She had told me on Saturday that she was worried about the salary here and was having second thoughts. Apparently she doesn’t mess around. Um, anyone want a teaching gig in Italy? To start tomorrow, preferably, because I’m covering extra lessons. In the mean time I have to choose one of these three apartments I’ve found, and hope in the face of experience that one of them works out okay. At this point, however, I feel I could stop bullets. I like to think that I’m prepared for the worst. If I find myself living in a cardboard box in a carpark, I’ll still be working on keeping my dignity intact. I am that harridan who blatantly has people over for dinner and negotiates in Italian. Don’t mess with me, that’s all I’m saying.

eel stew and a bottle of tears

2007-01-09T14:35:00.000+01:00

Christmas and New Year with the Zambonis. Lord, how I ate: eels in the pot; cream of cod; teeny tiny clams in shells as delicate as fingernails. Marina’s big cookbook written all in Venetian dialect. I sat in the kitchen and read out the titles of recipes to her, just to hear her correct me. I love to hear Venetian spoken. It’s kind of somnolent and twangy, more like Portuguese than Italian, and full of x’s and z’s where you don’t expect them.

The proper topic of conversation at meal times is food. Which dishes call for white pepper and which for black. How bad the pasta used to be during the war. The nagging conundrum of farfalle (I’m not the only one who gets annoyed that either the pleated nub in the middle stays undercooked, or else the crimped edges get soggy and collapse). Between meal times, on the other hand, the conversation at Casa Zamboni always tends toward the random, and often ends in the consultation of reference books. I walked into the middle of a brisk argument in the lounge room one day, and the first sentence I heard was, “That’s all very well, but I still maintain that phonemics is essentially banal.”

Venice in winter. Wrapped around in rags of fog. The tiny, straight-backed old ladies in their furs and their stilettos, showing a few inches of vulnerable stockinged ankle in between. The poor futile gondoliers, yodelling out their sales pitches to exactly no-one. The Calder mobile in the Guggenheim—how a few cantilevered wafers of steel swinging in space can be so beautiful, so beautiful, you just want to get on an intertemporal telephone and tell the artist, bless you. The place names that I never get sick of: Peron Hotel? Cross Tit Bridge, head straight down Drunken Tinker Street and take a left at the Devil’s Square. You can’t miss it.

I go to a quarter of Venice that’s known for having very few tourists. I establish myself smugly in a little coffee bar to watch the theatre of Venetian daily life unfold. An Australian comes in and asks for a post box. An American dragging a huge bag of dirty laundry tries to change a twenty euro note into one euro coins. Finally a humungous French family bundle in, distribute themselves around three tables and order hot chocolates. ‘Excuse me,’ says the mother. ‘Do you have a… ummm…’ She mimes stirring a teaspoon in a cup.
‘A teaspoon,’ says the waiter. Cuchiaino, that is.
‘Yes. Cocaine,’ says the mother.
‘Teaspoon.’
‘Cocaine.’
‘Teeeea spoon.’
‘Cocaaaaaaine.’
‘Whatever you say, lady. Your cocaine.’
‘Tiens,’ the woman turns to her husband. ‘Bit by bit, one improves one’s Italian.’

If I really want to meet locals, I spend time with Flavio and Sara’s friends. Piero, who speaks in entertaining and utterly impenetrable monologues, and always has a new entrepreneurial scheme on the go: last time I saw him, he had just bought half a pig. The price was irresistable, but having acquired it, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was looking at giving it to a prosciutto maker to get it cured, and then sell it in pieces to his friends—but he couldn’t bear to charge his friends what it was really worth, as slabs of prosciutto go, so he wasn’t sure how he was going to make a profit on it in the end. Ale, a real estate wunderkind, who’s got a velvet coat and a fine, calm brow and a dramatic ovoid of glossy hair that does the heart good to see. His girlfriend Adriana, with an epic mane of her own, who spent the new year in London trying to enact all her Neopolitan new year rituals on foreign turf. ‘You take a big bottle and you fill it with water. It stands for all the tears you’ve cried in the past year. You throw it out a window and smash it, and that’s all your suffering over and done with. Trouble was, it was all lawn. The English are mad for lawn, aren’t they? Took me ages to find a single rock in that garden, and then…’ She mimes narrow-eyed, concentrated aim, lobs an invisible bottle: ‘Poum!’ I say that sounds like an encouraging omen. She takes my arm. ‘Katrina, I’ve suffered so much. No more. This year is going to be my year.’

That gave me pause for thought. How much suffering, exactly, is so much? How much will be asked of us? On the phone to a dear friend halfway around the world, he tells me his city’s been so transformed by vulgar new commercial developments that it doesn’t feel like his home anymore. All his favourite streets and buildings—the places that had been quietly, without fuss, holding his personal history in trust for him—have been disfigured beyond recognition. And I say, isn’t it funny how all the sanctuaries get taken away from us—how we keep losing things that we had assumed were ours to keep. Maybe the point, if there is a point to it, is that we are divested one by one of all our external refuges until we’re left with only ourselves. Not so that we can say, ‘it’s me against the world’: rather, that we turn finally to our internal resources, and from these, we start to make our own world.

It's not inconsiderable, the things human beings can make out of apparently nothing. Consider Venice: some centuries ago, a band of exiles, chased off their fertile ancestral lands by war, arrived at the edge of a godforsaken marsh. I can see them standing there, with the mud sucking at their boots and the mosquitoes whining in their ears, gazing across the mirrored surface at a bleak little cluster of seagull beshitten islands, clicking their tongues, and saying, 'Alright. It's got potential.'

got the reckless bug?

2006-12-30T12:52:00.000+01:00

It was ages since I'd read Sydney Morning Herald, but how richly I was rewarded when I dropped in for a visit the other day. Happy new year everyone. Party like you've got toxoplasma.

up for air

2006-12-17T16:18:00.000+01:00

I've been staying very still and quiet, moving and speaking as little as possible. You know how it is after a brush with chaos: you resolve not to be the butterfly that causes the next hurricane. Now things are looking up, so I can tell the story in the past tense, where it belongs.

So. Rita threw me out on the street at two a.m. with all my stuff. I called a taxi, slept in the school and moved into a new place, which thankfully I had lined up already, the next morning. I was kind of expecting something like that because, unfortunately, I've encountered people like Rita before. When someone is unbearably miserable, they occasionally fix on another person whom they can blame. Everything that person does becomes evidence of their guilt, and--ecco la--the misery guts has found an external object for their unhappiness.

Problem is, the other person doesn't always cooperate. And if the misery guts sees that their victim's hour of escape is getting closer, they tend to kick their aggression up a notch, out of desperation. After all, if you go, and their life still sucks, they've lost their excuse. So if they can't stop you from getting out, they'll do what they can to ensure you don't get out unmarked. She stole my money, and she called me names, and she put me out on the street--two nights before I was due to leave anyway. No big surprise. I've written off the lost money, which wasn't so much in the end, and I've found a lovely new apartment, and success is the best revenge, and all that.

As for Rome: I went back to Reggio last weekend and saw my friends there, two of whom are enormously pregnant, hurrah, and did exactly nothing except eat and drink and watch TV. Bumbling my contented way home, I made the mistake of taking the advice of Italian train guards, and got on a train to Rome instead of to Florence. Not the nice, big, central station, mind you, from whence I might have made a nice little Before Sunrise sortie into the town, but some abandon-all-hope place in the periferia constructed out of chewing gum and lavatory tiles. I stayed awake and read The Good Soldier, which I enjoyed very much (I should read more tragedy, it's--well, you know--cathartic), and got home on Monday morning, with time to prepare my lessons and all. Wouldn't mind going back to Rome, though: I'm not sure I experienced all it had to offer.

Anyway, as I said, after Rita bade me a fond farewell I moved in with this excellent old lady who billets students all the time. I got through my first morning with the help, oddly enough, of the dialogue from chapter one of my Teach Yourself Italian book. I hadn't studied it since that day in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with Macgregor. Ah, sigh. Well at the time it made me laugh: 'It is a lovely room, signora. Very light. And there's even a shelf where I can put my books.' 'Indeed. It isn't large, but look: there is a fine view of the cathedral from the window.' 'Thankyou, signora. Now I can put away my things.' Luckily, it turned out to be exactly the conversation I was required to have that morning, right down to the cathedral spire that can be seen if you open the window and crane your neck.

Today, on the other hand, we sat in the kitchen having espressos and chocolate truffles for breakfast (she's as golosa as I am), and gossipped about all the crazy people we've ever known. She told me about the junkie who stole everything from anybody he lived with and was constantly in and out of prison, all the while dressing in tailored suits, cashmere coat and silk socks (worn longish, to cover the track marks around his ankles when he crossed his legs). 'Twenty years on junk,' she said, 'and--you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but I swear he looked just like Marcello Mastroianni.' 'Get right out of town.' 'No, really. Cosi' raffinato. Just goes to show.'

In other news, most of my classes have invited me out to Christmas dinners this month, which is very nice, and I'm looking forward to the holidays (English teachers don't have that pesky life-reevaluation pressure at new year, since our contracts, our post codes, our furniture and many of our friendships last exactly from September to June) and I'm planning a little trip to Ikea. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good year: you bloody deserve it.

hear ye, hear ye

2006-12-01T15:30:00.000+01:00

I'm out of casa Rita. Short of being able to drop a house on the witch, moving house seemed like a pretty good option. I'll tell you more later.

so tuscan it hurts

2006-11-27T21:38:00.000+01:00

I spent last Saturday picking olives in the hills with friends of a friend. I was grateful for the opportunity, not least because I was far too hungover to comtemplate doing anything else. How you harvest olives is, you spread a big net out under the tree, tucking it up all cosy around the trunk, and then you go over every branch with a sort of plastic comb, with teeth spaced just right to collect all the olives but let the leaves pass through unharmed. There is something gentle and hypnotic about it, just as if you were combing some great creature’s hair. As you rake off the fruit the tree releases its oil, surrounding you in a spicy, citrus-pungent cloud, and the olives drop into the net with a sound like rain, and the leaves whisper as they path through the teeth of the comb.

The couple who own the trees are also in possession of a very charming two-year-old and an alsatian big enough to put its paws on your shoulders and lick your face. When one or another of the nets got good and full they would take turns rolling around in the purple-green piles, mixing in a goodly portion of slobber and mud. Despite the best efforts of these two, we collected 250kg in a day. The olives were pressed on the Sunday, and that night I ate the new oil, gorgeously green and sharp, with my dinner.

sergeant major is my name

2006-11-20T20:21:00.000+01:00

I have met an Italian teacher who wants to swap conversation lessons with me, and she tells me that I’m at roughly intermediate level. I’m not convinced, but I’m deeply pleased with the idea of achieving an intermediate level of proficiency at absolutely anything, and it reassures me that my somewhat eccentric approach to language acquisition is paying off. Fluency in the face of gross inaccuracy is my motto. I mangle Italian grammar beyond all recognition, and I have a disturbing tendency to fill the gaps in my vocabulary by just making words up. On the other hand, sometimes the words I make up actually exist. And when I need to, I find that I can do things like report a stolen bicycle (the policeman, with his silly moustache and silly cape, takes down my details, asks, single or married? I say single. He says, ‘Single as in you don’t want a boyfriend, or single as in you can’t find one?’ I say, ‘Wow, there are separate boxes to tick for that?’); establish that the bike rental shop wants a hundred euros for the stolen bicycle; consult a lawyer about fines for stolen bicycles; and tell a bike rental guy that if he thinks I’m paying him a hundred euros, he can go and do unspeakable things to himself.

When you arrive in a country not knowing how to pronounce your own phone number and expect to get by, your language skills tend to develop haphazardly, but they do develop, lessons or no lessons. I’ve never had a ruler over the knuckles for misconjugating an irregular verb, but I have known the shame of being taken for a junkie because I spoke too slowly when asking for a light. So I tend to prioritise social functionality over footling details such as, you know, grammar and vocabulary.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t hit my students over the knuckles with rulers.

And when I say I have been taken for a junkie, I mean it happened yesterday.

The latest development is that my internal monologue has taken to haranguing me in Italian every waking hour. It’s not the first time my brain’s created nonsense sentences, but it’s never been so damn pushy about it before. I think it’s a strategy I’ve developed in order to train myself to think in Italian instead of translating everything as I go. It’s getting to be a pressing issue, because after a while your ineptitude stops being charming and starts being merely humiliating. So I’ve evidently got in touch with my inner despotic prig, who screams at me with the stubborn persistence of a bush doctor trying to prevent a tsetse fly victim from falling asleep. ‘A return to Valdarno!’ ‘I’ll have the tuna salad!’ ‘Thank you, I’m well, except for the jaundice!’ In conversation this is a quite useful, as it really does keep you on your toes. When, on the other hand, you’re just trying to pair your socks or scrub the bathtub in peace, and your brain’s still bellowing, ‘I’d love to go to the opera! I’ll get the tickets! We can bring our friend the robot! He paints mice! What’s that you say? The crack baby’s eaten all the candles? Come let us tickle him to death, that mouldy, abject little saucepan!’ it gets really wearing.

from soup to nuts

2006-11-03T21:01:00.000+01:00

Casting around for something to read tonight while I ate my home brand spaghetti with bottled red sauce, I settled on The Nuovissimo Big Cook Book (1982 edition) from my housemate’s collection. Its 840 pages include recipes for: rice with frogs; milk soup; stuffed tripe; mushroom conserve; whiskey risotto; pheasant with truffles; and a dessert called dead man’s bones—but my favourite chapter is the first in the book, entitled The art of receiving. Some excerpts follow.

Six rules for dinner parties:
- Never serve two courses that both contain cooked cheese
- Absolutely never serve two courses that are both stews or broths.
- Don’t serve two courses in the same meal that are both fried.
- Don’t serve pasta and rice in the same meal, no matter how diversely prepared.
- Don’t serve two courses with an egg base.
- Don’t serve the same vegetable prepared in different ways, no matter how far apart.

On dessert:
In a meal of a certain tone the dessert should never be missing; that is not to say that only ‘fancy’ meals should finish with a dessert. Dessert, if well managed, is even more desirable if made by the housewife herself. It is good etiquette that the hostess, as for the other courses but especially in the case of dessert, does not brag that ‘I made it with my own hands,’ nor discourse at weary length upon the recipe.

From a section entitled At table with the Ancients, an authentic menu from a meal eaten by Petrarch (who was from Arezzo, by the way) in 1365, in the home of Bianca di Savoia in Milan (the bits still in Italian are the words I can’t be bothered to look up):
Baked meat, fish and sucking pig; fritters of pike and hare; veal and trout terrine; quails and partridges on the spit; ducks, herons and marsh birds; ox meat and capon fat; beef and eel pie; bovine gelatine and fish; kid on the spit; hare and kid; venison and oxmeat in iron pots; capons and chickens; peacocks with savoy cabbage and beans; salted tongues; roast peacocks, swans and ducks; junket and cheeses; seasonal fruits; candied fruits and raisins.

From the Culinary Disasters and handy tips section:
- A soup or stew has ended up too salty? Peel a potato, drop it in and stir it around. After ten minutes the excess salt will be absorbed.
- The boiled beef has turned out too tough to eat? Add three spoons of grappa to the cooking water for every kilo of meat.
- Parasites infesting your dried legumes? Add two spoons of salt to the container.
- To ascertain that a cauliflower is fresh, be sure that it is not covered in a face powder-like dust.
- To avoid crying while cutting onions, simply stand near a pot of boiling water.
- To make an excellent vinegar at home, it is enough to preserve in a bottle, day after day, the lees of your table wine—providing, of course, the wine is of good quality.
- A highly efficacious de-greaser for dirty dishes—better than any commercial product—is the water in which potatoes have previously been boiled.

The owner of this book is turning out to be a mite high-strung. She tells me in great detail of her digestive disorders, yells at me for using too much hot water after a four-minute shower, and only likes me to have guests one night a week, when she is out of the house. She’s also moved on from descanting on her own character (she’s the sort of person who is always saying ‘I’m the sort of person who…’) to making rather presumptuous comments about mine. ‘I’ve been observing you closely. I’ve noted that you put up walls. And you’re quick to get annoyed. Whereas I’m very easy-going. I mean, we’re both strong characters. I’m probably stronger than you… [a pause ensues that may or may not involve a minor staring competition] …or not, you know, it’s not important. The point is…’ The point is, though her fits of pique are quite amusing and I’m learning lots of Italian psychobabble, I may decide to pack up and move again. I’m scheming to smuggle that book out the door with me. I’m the sort of person who’ll compromise my morals pretty seriously for the perfect mascarpone cream.

Page 465:

Let 300g of mascarpone cheese stand for a while at room temperature. Lightly beat two egg yolks. Put the mascarpone in a bowl with 4 tablespoons of sugar and the egg yolks and stir with a wooden spoon. Add a small glass of brandy to the mixture a bit at a time, continue stirring until you have a dense and consistent cream. This may take a while. Put it back in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving with a dusting of cocoa and a few biscotti.

mr anguish and the sins of the throat

2006-10-13T11:09:00.000+02:00

Well, the reprieve may be temporary. My new housemate is grating my cheese at the moment. I don't wash up right. I don't mop the floor right. Whenever I want to have someone over for dinner, apparently it's not the right time. I have them over anyway. Well, she asks, could I possibly confine my guests to my bedroom as soon as we've finished eating? Because she needs 'just a little bit of space for herself'. Like... every other room in the house?

And she had a friend of her's over for dinner, and as soon as he got me alone, he went into this monologue about 'poor R-- (that is, my housemate), who has a big thing for him and wants to have his baby, but alas, he doesn't feel that deep connection he so requires from a woman,' and so no joy for poor R--. He said he was a poet. I asked what he wrote about. 'Anguish.' Then he told me he felt we had an amazing spiritual kinship, even if we had just met, and he would be glad to loan me some books if I were to come over to his flat. When he left, my housemate said, 'Ah, M-- and I... there's a sort of electricity between us. Something transcendental. Did you sense it? You must have noticed.'

Sigh. I'm racking my brains for male acquaintances over thirty who might like to visit Tuscany for the weekend and get in some serious nookie with her, because I feel that might solve her man troubles and my neurotic-housemate troubles in one fell swoop.

This weekend, the town is turning into one great market. Every street is being quilted over with marquees, with just enough space to squeeze between them and regard the mountains of dried tomatoes and olives, the stacked loaves the size of sofa cushions, the sausages like tree trunks from which one's order is carved by the slice. It's going to be a very fun place to be.

I walked past a fast food joint yesterday and noted that it was called Sins of the Throat. Just thought I'd throw that out there. And a bit of trivia for sneaker lovers: the Italian word for 'throat' is Gola. The Italian adjective 'goloso' (throaty) actually means 'having a sweet tooth and a slight tendency towards gluttony.' One can imagine an age-broadened maiden aunt admitting wistfully that she has always been a little 'golosa'. It's one of my favourite Italian adjectives.

in bocca al lupo

2006-10-07T13:27:00.000+02:00

I’m so excited. I feel like Lucky Jim at the end of Lucky Jim. It’s like this. I got the job at Arezzo, the One True Job, for which I was saving myself in the face of several very sensible offers, watching my money run out (it’s still running), not knowing what exactly I was waiting for. It was this town, this school, I know now. There was still the question of where to live. The school, because they are great, had found two places for me: a place on the edge of town with a big window opening onto a busy road (no), and a big apartment in the very centre of town, sharing with one studentessa seria, as they are described in the rooms-to-let ads here.

Now this apartment was indeed huge, and centralissimo and all that, but this studentessa was a major major slob. I stayed in the place for a couple of nights to test it out, and the state of the bathroom and kitchen made me feel physically ill. Enter the mamma of this creature, who apparently flies in once a year from Sardinia. She came in cursing, calling this girl cretin and stupid and exclaiming at the filth of the place, and started cleaning. And telling me what to do. Not to go in bare feet in the house. To dredge the blocked bath drain with a plunger (blocked with long, dark, curling hairs that bore no resemblance to the brush bristles on my bony scalp) and then scrub with bleach. Not to use her daughter’s plates or forks. What a mamma. And what a daughter. A frowsy, sexless thing, stuffed toys all over her bed and saints all over her walls. She showed me her ‘pet’, a terrapin she kept in a half inch of water so filthy it stank, and it was all I could do to resist taking up the poor thing and dashing its brains out against the wall so as not to see that sad existence prolonged one second longer. This girl, and the house that was her exoskeleton, breathed out that unbearable sadness of being forever peripheral, of not distinguishing oneself or standing up for oneself in any particular. I don’t like to loathe people, and I especially don’t like to loathe harmless people for their weakness. It makes me feel dirty in my grain. And so, obviously…

Me: ‘It’ll be fine. I’m sure it will work out. Tell the landlady I’ll take it.’ (Why? Why do I do these things?)
My boss: ‘Are you sure? I could put her off for a day or two.’
Me: ‘No, tell her I’ll sign.’ (Genius.)
My boss: ‘Okay, I’ll call her now.’

Cue sleepless night on a narrow camp bed that smelt like someone had died on it (and I fervently hope I was mistaken, because nobody should have to draw their last breath on such a meagre, threadbare thing).

Me the next morning: ‘I’m really, really sorry, but I can’t take that apartment.’
My boss: ‘That’s okay, don’t worry about it.’
Me: ‘But I’ve put you in a tough position, since you called her and accepted already.’
My boss: ‘No, I didn’t.’
Me: ‘Why not?’
My boss: ‘We have this expression, right? The night brings good advice. I never make a decision before I’ve slept, and I wouldn’t let you do it either.’
Me: ‘How do you say you rule in Italian?’
My boss: ‘More importantly, what the hell do we do now? You have to sleep somewhere.’
Me: ‘In fact.’ (This is a sentence in Italian)
My boss: ‘There’s this one other place. I dunno. I’ll call her, see if it’s still available.’

It was, I went to see it. No tasteless junk, not so much as a plastic jesus above the (double) bed. My housemate: a woman a bit older than me, with the open face, untouched by gravity, that comes from doing what you love. A photographer from Rome. A clean, loved, well-tended home, with her darkroom in one corner and her photographs all over the hall, a cosy kitchen that directly overlooks a ruined Roman amphitheatre. She said, ‘you have an interesting face. I don’t know. I get the vibe. If you’re happy, I’m happy. Move in tomorrow. Oh yeah, do you mind if I smoke?’

Cue the wildly grateful dance of the reprieved.

vedremo, vedremo

2006-09-23T20:25:00.000+02:00

On Saturday, in a a street market in Florence, I saw a thief running away from a leather stall, shrugging on a jacket, the price tag still dangling from the lapel. Well, he was jogging really, and I was impressed by his insistence on keeping on smoking as he went. It was the most relaxed getaway imaginable.

I've been in Tuscany interviewing for jobs. I found one--the right one--in Arezzo on Friday. It's the town where they filmed La Vita e Bella, and the whole place is so mellow and Tuscan it'd make your teeth ache. I like them and they seem to like me alright. They want me to have a National Insurance number and I don't. I'll have to call the UK tax office and find out if this can be managed. I don't want to talk about it anymore just now.

I set myself up in Florence in a tent in an olive grove next to Piazzale Michelangelo. I took it on a miserly impulse--a camp bed in a tent city was seven euro cheaper than a corner of a six-bed dorm, according to the competing spruikers at the train station. I negotiated in English so I could hear what they said to each other in Italian. A leather-tanned old man offered me a room (no view) for 35. I asked him about hostels instead, and he asked his companion.
'Don't tell her about the competition, you lunk.'
'What can she do, poor thing? She can't afford my place.'
'Ah, shitwhore. You're too kind to the tourists.'
'It's true,' I put in. 'I'm poor. I can't pay thirty-five.'
'Ah, never mind, sweetheart,' the cursing man said kindly.

It was a nice tent. It filtered in green light and there were shadow-prints of fallen olive leaves across the ceiling. Does a tent have a cieling? It's kind of all ceiling. At night I listened to the night sounds--the traffic and the shushing branches. I felt exposed, almost too exposed--inside and outside at once. It suited my mood, here still without a job secured, watching my euros and cents, rolling my cigarettes.

I spent the last couple of weeks in London in the high street (winter clothes--it's 1979 in H&M right now, which is very exciting. I told my mum and dad recently that I wished I could go back in time to when my mum was pregnant with me and meet them, at a dinner party or something. Beef stroganoff, brandy alexanders, Pink Floyd on the stereo, pink and grey screenprints on the walls. If I could do it, I would now have just the outfit for the occasion) and in the National Gallery. In the mornings I read about the paintings, in the afternoons I went to see them. I can tell a Michelangelo from a Raphael now, and I can recognise the saints by their props--the Johns and Jeromes, the Annes and Catherines (smug hand propping up a broken wheel). I am hopelessly in love with two young men who have been dust for centuries, but my real obsession is with this painting--gnostic rather than pious, sinister even--Leonardo writes of standing one day at the mouth of a cave, thrilled and terrified at the thought of what he might find inside.

Back in the world, though, and in the flow of time, I'm much preoccupied with bureacracy and solvency and stuff. At nights I cooked for Lily and we talked--we talked more than we used to about what we weigh, what we earn, what to put in the pantry--how to keep earning enough so we can keep weighing enough, not to much though, middle-age-spread ahead--but I see a happy pattern in her efforts--she's working so hard, she's conquering that town inch by determined inch--something that rises above the quotidian worries, and she sees a pattern in mine. We see for each other.

Now I'm back in Reggio for a few days, staying with friends (that is to say, ex-colleagues). Every day I hear new outrages about the school. They ask me why don't I come back? I ask them, why don't they leave? They have nice apartments though, and big televisions and no money for moving vans. I tell them they can come and live in my cupboard in Arezzo. If I get to Arezzo. Vedremo.

bizniss trippin

2006-09-11T16:52:00.000+02:00

I landed in Brescia on a grimy, sweat-yellow Tuesday and I wasn’t at all sure the interview would be worth the fuss. But the afternoon cooled off as the train got into the foothills, and me along with it. The track started following a narrow valley between limestone ridges. The steep hills on either side threw everything into a sort of premature twilight, blue and melancholy—even those places still in full sun were suffused by it, as if the rays had retained their light but not their conviction. I got into Bolzano around five. It’s a compact city that fills a little stelliform valley. It's circled in a cosy sort of a way by high, fir-forested hills. And beyond these I caught the odd glimpse of the Dolomites themselves—mad, jagged, vicious looking things, bare as the moon.

The city, like the surrounding South Tyrol area, is an elegant jumble of Austria and Italy. Italianate palazzi stand next to Germanic constructions topped with spires, green-tiled and glossy as dragons' tails. People talk with their hands, but stop their cars at pedestrian crossings. Their universal capacity to switch language mid-sentence is frankly unnerving. The area was only ceded to Italy after World War One, but this resilient biculturality seems to have endured much longer than that, regardless of where the borders were pegged out after this or that scuffle. It was fun to visit. In the city itself, the dominant language is Italian. In the hills—I took the cable car—the balance tips towards the Germanic, all poppyseed pastries and toddlers in lederhosen, and I had to rummage for my bittes and danke schoens. I took the narrow-guage railway that rattles between a half dozen villages along the ridge, and watched the Dolomites revolve in the changing perspective, like turning a paperweight around in the light to see the design inside.

And the prospects? The whole thing looked a lot like last year, with a business class upgrade. Same size city, same degree of wealth, same proportion of foreigners. Nicer apartment in a nicer part of town, more spending money, nicer parks for frisbee and nicer paths for cycling. All very nice. The question is, do I want to live inside a souvenir paperweight? The place was quite delightful, but it struck me that I would get more pleasure from showing visitors around, and seeing how much they approved of my choice, than I would from actually living here, because it’s not what I want now. I think I could spend a very enjoyable year living in Bolzano—but not this one. I’m about to send an email turning down the job, and I shudder at this wilful rejection of a perfectly good and comfortable situation. But I shudder more when I think about a life of seeming contentment at the expense of the genuine article.

domestic with william carlos

2006-09-02T14:16:00.000+02:00

this is just to say

that I was saving them for breakfast
to share with you at breakfast
as thoughtful people do

and I hope that they were sweet enough
and cold enough at that
to warrant three nights on the couch
coz that's in store for you my dear
that's what's in store for you.

Well anyway, cathartic as the gratuitous character assassination of my previous post was, it's time we moved on, eh? I don't have any big news, so what can I tell you?

Lily and Den are toilet-training their cat (or, as the instructional video puts it, torletting their cat). It's very exciting.

The skies of London are really huge. Why is that? People say Perth skies are the biggest on earth, and it's supposed to be the flatness of the land that does it. But maybe it's the deep, dramatic perspectives you get here, with buildings and monuments rising up one behind the other. As I walk around the place I feel sort of borne aloft, like Nelson.

I got some work transcribing academic interviews through an acquaintance, and it's quite fun. The best thing is, all the files I've done so far relate to this exhibition, so you'll hear a mumbled phrase, and you'll have to go back and listen to it two or three times before it finally resolves itself into 'animatronic penguin'. Excellent.

displacement rant boogaloo

2006-08-30T19:41:00.000+02:00

Honestly? I’m a little tense. I’ve done three job interviews in the past two days, and some school in Bolzano has summoned me over for an interview next week and booked my flights there and back without so much as a how’s your father. I’m sitting on the phone morning and night trying to sound chatty and yet independent, caring and yet professional, and all the while I’m straining every nerve trying to suss out the bodgy operators. Whatever I do, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m about to sign my soul over to a particularly nasty devil-I-don’t-know.

I feel a rave coming on. It's been that sort of week. Imagine that I’m drawling my words a little, lazily picking over the first couple of chords of my next tune while you lean forward in your seat, waiting to see if it’s one of the songs you like from the cd you do your washing up to, or if it’s one of those shapeless numbers from my ‘difficult’ second album (the one you booted off your iPod when it started getting full, and don’t deny it).

So when I’m not on the phone being charming (blik blik bling) I’m making my daily trip to the dvd store/netcaf on the corner (diddle ding), trawling the job sites and writing chatty yet independent, caring yet professional emails to yet more schools (diddly diddly dum). And you know what doesn’t make my day? The mandatory encounters with the staff of the place, whom I have dubbed Team Indie. Hey! Grandpa pants! I’m talking to you! (power chord)(oh good, it's one of the washing up ones. Sing along if you know the words)

I’m not impressed that you’ve got everything Michael Moore and Richard Linklater ever made, and not a single Fellini title.

I do not love you more when you make a tired office worker feel small because they are looking for a Kate Hudson comedy.

I am not tickled pink by the big TV screens in every corner playing yet another toilet-humour-shock animation series in which animated slackers sporting animated tattoos make jokes about Belle and Sebastian and animal sex.

Do not expect a wan smirk of recognition from me when you follow up an hour of tedious shoe-staring lo fi with an hour of ‘ironic’ and yet equally horrifying country and western. That thing you were playing last Thursday? With that guy keening tunelessly about oatmeal while twanging a rubber band against a shoe box? I know you went home that night and sat around drinking ‘real’ absinthe and talked about how you would be so disillusioned if he ever sold out. But he won’t. Because selling out would necessitate a willing buyer. Timbaland is not going to swoop down and add some catchy bass lines and splash his single over the closing credits of next summer’s action blockbuster. Because. he. sucks.

I know you dream of that raven-haired girl from your Philosophy of Mind tute drifting through the door and asking what you’re doing this Friday night. Give it up. I got stuck in a lift with her once and we passed the time with girl talk, and she told me she wouldn’t so much as flash her bra to anyone who hadn’t read A Thousand Plateaus at least twice. In the original French. Including the footnotes.

And when Lily went in there you were mean to her.

And you call yourselves a cyber café and you don’t even sell coffee.

And your goatees are sparse and unconvincing.

What do you want, some sort of hipper-than-thou medal? Why don’t you go knit one out of tofu and name it after your great-grandmother, you over-charging, under-nourished, condescending, lanky pieces of dick.

Except that guy who loaned me a pen and gave me ten minutes extra for free that time, you’re alright.

mind a very opal, age likewise

2006-08-22T15:38:00.000+02:00

I’m holed up in Lily and Denise’s new flat. There’s a Rousseau poster up, and beneath it a zebra-print armchair and a spiny plant, as if the jungle were climbing through a chink in the wall, filling out and becoming realer as it spreads across the room. This new joint is in West Hampstead. When I got to London a year and a half ago Lily was living in Hackney. She used to have a crack den down the road from her house—now she has a gardening centre. If she continues this meteoric rise she’ll be installed in a Richmond mansion by my next visit. I’ve spent the morning reading The Edible Woman, which is pretty good but shows its seams—I can see how Atwood built it and why, and it gives me that twinge of mingled satisfaction and disappointment of discovering how a magic trick is done. Still, she captures something of being in your twenties, and I like to be reminded of that fraternity that spans the ages and makes all 27-year-olds a bit like all others, whatever decade or century they are being 27 in. I’m being it now, and I don’t mind a bit. If you’ll allow me to go a bit synesthetic for a moment, it’s peacock blue (the two) and bright yellow (the seven), with the factor three pulsing through, for some reason, in shades of grass green. It’s an appealling number, and it’s mine for a year.

I’ve been here over a week, but it doesn’t feel like it because I haven’t had to make my own fun—people have come to me instead, bearing hugs (thank youse orl). I went to the Heath with Nik one day, and we talked writing, and I went another day with Pete, and he made me drink too much, and I thought I was going to have to lie down in a ball on the train platform on the way home, but it turned out alright. We were talking about the time when I first got here as an epoch past. Returning to London is like getting back to Narnia. I feel like no time has passed and I expect everything to be the same, but I find everyone’s living in new digs and working new jobs and getting married. What a bustle. I like to make appointments and meet people and do things because when I sit around too long I swear I can feel my bank account depleting with that alarming London rapidity, and my body itself feels like it’s dissolving along with the cash.

It’s worth it, because Lillian is here. Maybe it’s the mountain air (she’s just back from an alpine holiday in a relative’s summer house) or maybe it’s love (she and Denise are smitten enough to voluntarily spend a Sunday in Ikea together, and that’s saying something)—but anyway, she’s just gob-smackingly beautiful. Her hair sort of floats around in great girly swathes, like she’s constantly underwater. We’ll be down the pub, all engrossed in serious discussion, and suddenly it’ll strike me again, and I’ll be like, gaaaaaah... that’s my fwend. I’m so so so so so soooooo so proud of her, of how she’s been living in London for two whole years without getting eaten by a rat or turning whiney and brittle or giving up on the things she wants. And I’m grateful for this: that we can always untangle the other’s thoughts and see them in their perfect completeness, just as if we weren’t mad, neurotic, patchwork-brained things. I was getting depressed for a bit there, what with having nothing to do and no settled work commitments ahead of me. It came as a surprise because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it since I’ve been abroad. I’ve done incandescent rage, fist-gnawing boredom and lingering sadness, but not this. It rustles around in its dusty skirts, clicking closed all the doors in my mind. Lily nods thoughtfully, says the right thing, and sets about opening them all again. It’s a marvellous arrangement.

You’ll excuse me if I go and check my bank balance for my summer pay cheque. This work --> get paid thing is also a marvellous arrangement. If only one didn’t have to keep on re-arranging it all the time. I have a plan. I shall find a lovely school that offers a generous salary and paid holidays, and I’ll fit the premises with wings and a big propeller so I can just move it around the world as the mood takes me. See if I don’t.

the bournemouth club

2006-08-12T14:10:00.000+02:00

The other night I woke up at 2 am to find that one of the French students had wrenched his bedroom door of its hinges in a fit of rage. The Russian kids in his apartment had posted an invitation to a pizza party under his door. When he was too snooty to reply, they took the initiative and posted through an entire ham and pineapple pizza. Next time I tell you I’m applying for a residential teaching job, will you beat me repeatedly around the head with a wet towel? I like teenagers—I like that they still know stuff we’ve forgotten, I like that they have an unerring radar for the transgressive (17-y-o Russian guys simulating fellatio with bananas on talent night… sooooo many kinds of wrong, and yet, you know, startling in its artistry), but I’m not so good with lifting their faces out of puddles of booze vomit and confiscating their bongs. It’s all very well to want to be their catcher in the rye, but you can’t actually expect them to like getting caught.

Big props to the people I've worked with who actually get teenagers. Like Russian Ivi* who explained the whole emo thing to me, who kept me up to date on all her students' love lives and who genuinely seems to like them more than she likes adults. Me, I feel kind of tongue-tied around them. They’re so worldly. They radiate all this personal power, and are given so damn little outlet for it. Thank god for cheesy music. I’ve been listening to their iTunes collections on the sly, because they’re all hooked up over the college internet. The perfect pop song is like a fire work: its only function is to detonate, release some energy and give way to the next one. It’s one thing about which they are surprisingly un-jaded. Take them to Stonehenge and they’ll complain that the gift shop is too small, but three hours in a sneaker-stank-filled gym with a karaoke machine is absolute gold. Tomorrow I leave this job and this town to laze around in London for a while, and I’m looking forward to getting out of this adolescent reality so that I can eulogise it in distant safety. I’m thinking microwave popcorn and a rented copy of Pump Up the Volume. Jesus, I feel old.

the chavland diaries

2006-07-10T01:20:00.000+02:00

On Friday night, after teaching, I took a budget bus down to Bournemouth to do the main bit of my summer’s teaching work. It was actually an old London red bus that had been repainted but not refitted. I was tired and dreamy, and the whole thing resembled the fantasies I have often had, while sitting on a city bus, of the driver deciding just to shut the doors, disengage the bell and keep on driving out of town.

So, Bournemouth. Some first sights:

Men in polyester trousers, sharply creased, cut to bag out womanishly at the thighs and hemmed too short, exposing a centimetre of sock.

Lairy lads pushing a wheely bin under a restaurant’s sign so that one of them could stand on it and bat the sign with his hand, to the sound of cheering.

Several half-empty jugs of a neon blue cocktail standing on a sticky table by a rank of poker machines. Bouncers with little black earsets screwed into their shiny bald heads.

Numbered changing huts in a row along the sea front, all painted different colours, some with little curtains.

Big signs on the pavement saying KFC -->

English refectory food; pimples resulting from a week thereof.

Krazee golf in the park.

A delirium of high street chains packed with cute ten pound sun dresses—after a year in a city where all clothing was out of my price range, two-bit-whorish or indeed both, I feel like I’ve been blessed by some kind of shopping goddess.

Swings and roundabouts.

a king prawn balti and a bathtub of coffee

2006-07-03T17:49:00.000+02:00

I've returned my apartment key, cleared out my files and left Reggio. I know I spent a year there, because they built a bridge

and I have more grey hairs, but all that seems to remain of the year is a few disconnected memories shushing round my brain like receipts in a shoebox. Weekends away in Bergamo and Cinque Terre and the Venice Lido, poverty-struck weekends in the park with cards and a frisbee, my apartment terrace covered in snow. My last week was pethadine-peaceful. A strange bliss descended, like that cherub had arrived after all. The pizza shop people toasted me for a lucky journey, gave me their address and asked for a postcard. Two of the teachers I went to Lake Orta with gave me an album of some of the nicest photos, which threatened to make me cry. I got taken out for nice meals and given thoughtful little presents. It was too hot to sleep for that last week, so I stayed out drinking in the squares or watching old dvds in my friends' better-ventilated apartments. I walked home every night as the pastry chefs were going to work--Mamma, che calda, I'm just off to heat myself up a little more in front of a sodding pastry oven!--then got up a few hours later to do full days at work. By the time I left I was so tired I looked like I'd been punched in the face, but that suited me ok.

On Friday morning, a few hours before my flight, I went to clear out my bank account. The teller said that my salary hadn't been paid in yet, that my landlord's cheque for the apartment deposit hadn't cleared, and that I was 500 euro overdrawn. I cried for an embarrassing length of time while trying to do sums on my mobile phone calculator and apologising for my incoherent state. Then my special banker, the friend of my boss' who set up the account, came back in from my coffee break, sat me down and promised to sort it out. He made a couple of phone calls, received a fax from somewhere, managed to clear my landlord's cheque. Then he made another phone call. He wrote a very large sum of money on a post-it note and traced over and over it meditatively as he talked to someone--I was too tired and upset to care who. I wondered vaguely if it was some extra debt I hadn't factored in. He hung up the phone, smiled, and explained that in Italy you get an extra month's wages in your pay cheque when you leave a job. Hadn't anybody told me about that? That fat sum had a plus in front of it, and it was mine.

The soundtrack in the car on the way back from the bank? The Streets: A Grand Don't Come For Free.

Now I'm set up in a rather lush college dorm room in Mile End, since the campus is being used for a summer school. I tested the kids today, I start teaching them tomorrow. They're adorable. According to their oral test, they all like Shakira and 50 Cent, and if they could meet Bob Marley, they would ask him where he gets the inspiration for his songs, and they are sad because people say he is all about the marijuana cigarettes, but it is not true, this thing.

I was free on Saturday afternoon so I walked around Soho and shopped for a birthday present for Lily (ok, her birthday was in February. Better late than never) and watched the England game through the windows and doorways of the pubs, and I had a ludicrously large and tremendously hot British coffee in a cafe full of Italians. I dawdled over the coffee, watched the football on the telly and eavesdropped with all my soul, because I've been away for three whole days and I have a chamois-thirst for that bobbly, bubbly, babytalky language and it hurts to be able to understand everybody I pass in the street. And on Sunday I went for a curry in Brick Lane with the Lilster and a teacher from the summer school and heard all her news, and went home to my little room, and it's--all--fine------another change, another strange room, and it's all better than fine.

three euros well spent

2006-05-24T17:34:00.001+02:00

I went to the bike shop to buy a new bike lock, because I lost the old one. The guy at the shop, who is little and white-haired and has a permanent coating of grease (and therefore also has my undying admiration) showed me the selection.

Him: 'Do you want red, blue, black or yellow?'
Me: 'Black, I suppose.'
Him: 'Too bad. It only comes in red or yellow.'

At this point, a proper Reggiana in capris, linen shirt and Gucci shades interrupts.

Her: 'Have you looked [at my bike]?'
Him: 'Probably. I'm forever looking at something or other. I have eyes, you see, so I don't really have a choice.'

Then he turns back to me. I choose a red lock. He spends five minutes spraying WD40 on the it, and locking and unlocking it a few times until he's sure I know how the mechanism works (if you're curious, it goes: (1) insert key; (2) turn).

As I'm walking out he turns back to Ms Reggio and says, with no apparent irony: 'Madam has left a bicycle here for repairs?'

the big catch-up

2006-05-08T14:30:00.000+02:00

Season's shifted, time to blog. The trees aren't carrying that tentative idea of green anymore, they're brash with it. This little paved town is sprouting more grass than it knows what to do with--it bursts out of gutters and chimney pots like hair in an old man's ears. Wild poppies are coming up in ones and twos along the roads at the edges of town--they're that headfuck red that seems like a source of light, not a reflection of it--like a light shining through from another place.

I spent Easter on an alpine lake with the other teachers. Beauty in all directions, with the mountains rising and rising around us, far too high to be real. After winter, we've all got too much energy in us--do you realise how much fun it is to throw stones at a pylon--little waves lapping around--and hit it? Ting! Tung! It's not from the wrist--you have to throw with your whole body.

On Easter day we had the idea of going to mass on the ancient church on the island. There were so many nuns--really young nuns, hunched old nuns, all singing. We four squirmed guiltily in our pews, eyeing the patch of sunny sky we could see through a single clear pane--when they started communion we snuck out and ran twice 'round the island in sheer relief. It was a week of frisbee and guess-that-film parlour games. We drew cartoons of everyone we work with. Paul's picture of me was of an indistinct shape hunched over a laptop behind my locked classroom door. Appunto. We ate violet-flavoured gelato and got sun stroke playing mini golf. We opened tins of beans with kitchen knives and ate them with the plates propped on our knees, lying on deckchairs.

I like having frisbee- and parlour-game-partners. I like that any walk through my town takes me past a few friends' doors, and that I can actually ring the bell and find them home. I have spent the year comparing this town unfavourably with Sydney, but things like this could reconcile me to small-town life.

There's an Australian girl living here, a dancer. We met in the doorway of my hostel when I first came to town--I held the door, said prego, and she picked my accent. She dances with a company called Aterballetto. Last week I managed to see an open rehearsal, and felt very sneaky and privileged. There was no stage, no proscenium, just the wide, white room with barres running down opposite walls. They'd run through a piece, intent, moving like cold honey, or like warm honey, or like metal grinding against metal in a busted machine. Then they'd break to work one move over and over, mugging when they screwed it up, pacing it out in their minds and then flinging back into it again. In breaks they lounged on the walls or drifted absently like dust in the sun, scratching elbows, rolling the balls of their feet against the floor. Francesca got me a ticket to the premiere--it'll be spectacular, but it won't have that fly-on-the-wall frisson.

is there an exorcist samurai in the house?

2006-04-07T14:38:00.000+02:00

Whenever I get a new Business English student I spend the first lesson getting them to draw a diagram of the structure of their company and their role in it. I assure them this is a valuable vocabulary-building exercise. It also happens to be far easier for me than reading the corporate website for an hour trying to work out who the hell they are. Giulio works for a major fashion house. In my first lesson with him I sat patiently while he explained all the subsidiary companies and the departments and stuff, and then I asked him to point to the little box which represented him.

Me: ….Oh.
Giulio: Yes.
Me: It must be very… bracing. Having that kind of responsibility.
Giulio: (rolls eyes heavenward with messianic stoicism)
Me: So, um, Sir. What do you do exactly?
Giulio: Blah blah terrifying high finance jargon blah blah…
Me: Mm-hm. Interesting. Is that your Rolls in the carpark?

For the first few weeks he was a pain in the arse. He had me googling bizarre share market terminology and labouring through the finer points of the third conditional passive even though he would still answer the question what are you doing tonight? with I am tired so I think I just come in my bedroom.

Now he just tells me stories like this.

His company has dealings with a Japanese corporation that require frequent business trips. He carries around a treasured business card for the best ribs restaurant in Roppongi, which he insisted on photocopying for “the next time you go in Tokyo.” Yatta! Anyway, in 2004 several of his colleagues were over there giving a presentation. One of them was addressing a crowded conference room in Italian. Well, to be specific, one minute he was speaking in Italian, the next he was speaking in old Japanese. The entire building was evacuated, and they called in the General Manager of the company, a Mr Nakayama, who spent the next seven hours exorcising a spirit from the unfortunate Italian fashionista. The possessed man had no recollection of it, but his colleagues who were present remember it perfectly.

Nakayama, who is a friend of Giulio’s, later explained that his company’s headquarters were built on top of an old Shinto cemetery. Objects frequently move from room to room, sometimes observed in motion and sometimes not, and occasionally somebody gets possessed. If the ghost is a good sort of ghost, work goes on as usual. But if it’s a nasty one, they clear the premises and bring in the General Manager. Luckily, this man is one of about 150 people in Japan with the power of exorcising such spirits. He only retains this power by, as Giulio put it, “living in a particular way.”

“How do you mean? He’s a vegetarian? He doesn’t drink?”

“No, he must to follow the… come si dice? Le regole dei Samurai.”

“He lives by the code of the samurai.”

“Appunto.”

“Like with the sword and the haiku and…”

“He practice the aikido all the week and he lives the code in every particolar. And so he can esorcise the fantasme.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Cosa?”

“Non posso crederlo.”

“Anchio, I cannot believe this but I must to believe this.”

Cool.

the foolest month

2006-03-28T20:02:00.000+02:00

Nearly April. Every little patch of grass is spangled with daisies and dandelions. The end of my contract is flying to meet me, looking a lot like a cheeky cherub with a drunken giggle and a shit-eating grin.

It’s been an insulated sort of an existence, this year. No TV, no movies, not much getting away—most of the time it's been me, and my apartment, and a dozen paperbacks. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect. Chiefly, I seem to have been getting very cosy with my own shortcomings. I think I've been reading too many excoriating nineteenth-century novels. Satire was cosier when I was sixteen and, by my own assessment, blameless. Well, anyway, I hope I am a smidge the better for all this hard thinking, but I wonder if there is such a thing as too much self-examination. Thank goodness for those dreamy weekends at Cinque Terre and Brescia and Bologna and Venice, and thanks again to the excellent people who shared them with me.

And the work’s been interesting. The kids are amazing—their faces are full of swift thought and they open windows into new ideas every time you look them in the eye. The work with adults has been good for getting to know some locals. The worst thing about this job is the emotional head-messing. It would be one thing if I could say I was above it, but, wow, am I not above it. In all, I’m about ready to leave.

I’m looking around for summer work and the big what-next, and I feel pretty optimistic. I can feel the good luck spreading out like warm electricity along all filaments that bind us, me and all the people that I love. Lily and Matt have got great new jobs, Luke’s got a boyfriend, Jenn’s settled in Melbourne. If you’re reading this and you need a lucky break, look lively: it’s on its way.

kamikaze doocing 1.1

2006-03-22T18:03:00.000+01:00

I just wrote a very angry post about my job and deleted it again, because unless you live on a garbage tip with your twelve brothers and sisters, it's hard to make your complaints about work sound compelling. And there's nothing more irritating after airing your grievances than failing to receive abundant sympathy. Suffice to say that my boss is, as the Italians put it, proprio in fuori. Wild mood swings, garbled demands, and, the latest installment, the malicious and excessive docking of a teacher's pay for a simple mistake, meaning that the rest of us will be finding every possible excuse to feed him next month rather than letting him starve.

Some people have noticed, and I love you all, that it's been over a month since I posted. This whole thing with work has me so knotted up and nauseous that I have lost my will to blog, and that makes me mad. Until I have something coherent and generally grateful to say, let me report that I had some people to visit, we went to Venice and Cinque Terre and they are still beautiful, and I have never embarked on a job hunt with so much relish. It's amazing how your fear of the unknown just melts away when the known is so execrable.

Here's a treat for sitting through my silence and my whingeing. If you go here you can get yourself a gmail account, and I cannot recommend this highly enough.

more on the mysterious children of r

2006-02-16T16:49:00.000+01:00

I've found some links to explanations of this educational approach that are actually quite readable. Anything translated from the Italian tends to look like the oracles have inhaled too much swamp gas. There's a one-page synopsis written by Carnegie Mellon University, though, which makes it pretty clear.

If you want some idea of the role of aesthetics, look at this article. It's particularly vindicating for anyone who remembers thinking they might gag if they saw one more cut-out of a cartoon bumble-bee sellotaped to their classroom window.

Lastly, here is an astonishing series of photographs--never mind the Italian text around them--showing a baby's mental process as she forms connections between pictures of an object and the object itself. My favourite is the last one, where she leans close to the pictures of watches to check if they are ticking too.

acolyte

2006-02-07T16:48:00.000+01:00

I want to tell you about this famous early childhood education system I keep hinting at. It originates in this very town, and any description of it must necessarily contain quite specific jargon--this combination makes it highly googleable. And I don't really want a lot of traffic from people looking for information sites, because I don't want to get dooced. On the other hand, it is this pedagogy that is the reason I decided to stay for a year, despite the shitty winters and the expensive rent and the 90210-style social claustrophobia (my students always answer 'true' to the statement 'I live in a big city', and it makes me want to cry). Now that I have finally scored a teaching gig in a pre-school that follows this approach, I want to try and explain it.

The schools here get hundreds of visitors every year. There are schools modeled on them in Sydney and California and I don't know where else. My workplace employs a pedagogista (I use the Italian term because there isn't an English one) to help us dovetail our English language classes with this approach. I didn't know anything about this when I took the job, but I actually like this philosophy of education very much. I've only done a little reading on it so far, but here are a few basic principles:

Children are learning constantly. They assimilate new information at a great rate. Even as infants, they are always forming connections between what they already know and what is new to them. For this reason, it is beneficial to allow children to return to the same subject many times and explore it from different perspectives. They are encouraged to put forward their own propositions about a subject, rather than being immediately fed the 'right' answers about things.

Children communicate in a 'hundred languages', including speech, touch, the gaze, visual art, movement and music. A good educator will spend years developing the skill of listening to children.

Learning proceeds not according to a pre-determined syllabus but in a series of projects. Educators reflect on the children's past projects, think about where their learning might go next, and formulate a new project. They give as much weight as possible to the children's interests. A project might be on 'music', 'horses', 'texture' or any number of topics. It will last for months and will involve exploration of the subject through as many possible modes of expression.

One of the founders put it like this:

"We oppose any prophetic pedagogy which knows everything before it happens, which teaches children that every day is the same, that there are no surprises, and teaches adults that all they have to do is repeat that which they were not able to learn."

So that's the theory 101. What does that mean in reality? Well, I can think of a few things that wouldn't have happened if I'd gone to a Reggio school.

In kindergarten, we were each given copies of a reader (what the hell kind of word is that? Like the book, the knowing machine, is forcing your lax, passive brain through some edifying and vaguely horrific formative process. Like the book is reading you). Anyway. We sat in a circle, and we took turns to read a page aloud. This book had a single word, the same word ('Look!') on every page. I felt like our intelligence was being insulted, so I complained. My teacher called me a smarty pants and locked me in the stationery cupboard to think about my attitude.

In first grade I spent every lunchtime for half a year in detention. We were given 'art projects' (ahem) which were essentially colouring-in exercises. Not only were we all given the same picture to colour in, but the teacher put up an example picture with all the colours pre-allocated. We had to follow the colour scheme, or we got detention. We had to make the crayon colours bright and opaque, which involved pressing so hard on the paper that our six-year-old wrists got tired, or we got detention. The tedium of this exercise ensured that I would fail to do it 'properly', so I spent my lunch hours doing it over again. I didn't mind too much--it was normal. One day the cleaner came in to empty the bins and saw us all (I remember there was always a few of us in there. I wonder that the teacher didn't value her lunch breaks more.).
'Aren't they good kids, working away like that.'
'No,' my teacher corrected him, 'they're naughty children. That's why they're here.'

Now, I was the most insufferably compliant little swot that ever breathed, so I can only imagine what it was like for the kids with some capacity for independent thought.

Here is what happens in a school like the one I've started teaching in. Say, to take a well-documented example, the current project is 'horses'. The kids have drawn horses, made clay horses and I don't know what else. They decide they really want to make their horses move. They think maybe if they make photocopies of their clay horses, this will make them move. The teacher doesn't tell them it won't work, she just helps them set up the clay models on the photocopier and stands back. The kids discover this won't work, but they decide the answer still lies with technology, so they get the atelierista (art facilitator, I guess is the expression) to help them scan their drawings into the computer, then they turn their drawings into animations.

If you want to see the animations, they're the little things across the top of this webpage, I think. In fact, go there and look at the other drawings from kids in these schools. It was seeing these images for the first time that really won me over to this approach. They don't look like the thin, scratchy, tentative affairs you get when you tell a kid to draw a cloud (and oh look, here is a 'proper' picture of a cloud for the kids to attempt to copy and feel inferior to) and then take the paper and pens away after five minutes because that's the time alloted to the activity in the lesson plan. When a child in one of these schools draws a cloud, you know they are really thinking about the cloudness of a cloud. They are really trying to get at some sort of deeper understanding, because they know their efforts to do so will be respected. You think I am talking nonsense, I know, but go and look at the drawings.

There is a mountain of specialist jargon built up around this pedagogy. It reminds me of looking back over my second year sociology essays, and not being able to understand a word of them. I submersed myself in that language, babbled ecstatically in it for a year, and then left it behind and forgot it all. Is this more of the same? Like any small group who feels that they guard a special knowledge of the world, we converts encounter the delphic oracle problem--are we visionaries, or are we merely wrapped up in a collective hallucination? But I go into the classroom with the kids, I observe their capacity for enquiry, the richness of their artistic expression, and most of all their dignity, and I can only say that whatever these school are doing, it works.

baby meet

2006-01-21T21:13:00.000+01:00

This week I taught four kids' classes. Three of them were inaugural classes with a pre-school. This town is actually world-famous for its early childhood education programs (the Australian contingent are around town this week, but we get thousands of pilgrims a year coming to see the kids be all, you know, progressive) so I wanted to make a good impression. My co-teacher has never taught kids who don't speak English before, and I've never taught kids, so our goals for the first week were pretty much along the lines of 'Nobody falls over and starts crying--yay.' I am pleased to report that nobody fell over or started crying, that a few kids said 'hello,' and one precocious fella was repeating all the elements of 'heads, shoulders, knees and toes' back to us after we said them. They are fabulous kids. They just shine and shine with curiosity. And though I know some of my loyal readers do not share my love for the song Rock Lobster, I have to tell you that three-year-olds go sick for it. That, and Buzz Buzz Buzz by Jonathan Richman and Baby Meet by the Cruel Sea. I aspire to including a gross motor skills session (which is to say, jumping up and down to a selection of rock, blues and punk classics and yelling incoherently) in every lesson. I'm not sure my co-teacher will see my point of view on this one, but we can try.

I also had my second kids' reading group tonight. They were all supposed to read 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar' and Paul Jennings' 'Spaghetti Pig-out', and I had lots of great ideas for things to do with those stories, but they came to the school, ran straight for the puppets and started pitting them in duels to the death. I tried to interest them in the things I'd planned for about five minutes, and then ditched all that and decided to go with the puppets thing. In the two hours before their parents came to collect them they managed to put together a puppet play with backdrops, musical interludes, some striking comic moments, and, naturally, a puppet duel to the death. Plus, we had pizza.

Witch: Tell me again what you're going to do.
Brigand: I'm going to steal the queen and bring her back here.
Witch: And what will I do to you if you don't?
Brigand: You're going to... give me a prize?
Witch: No! I'm going to broke your bones and throw them in the castle lake and the fish will eat them!
Brigand: I will not fail!

On the morning before the first pre-school class I went up onto the school roof to drink my coffee and watch all the horizontal planes turn white. Parking lots, construction sites, the roof of the roller skating rink. The snow was falling all around and settling on my coat in patches. Everything felt clean. I remembered something my mum told me years ago, after she went to see a clairvoyant for fun, and asked about her kids, as mums do. 'She's in white. There's white all around. A lab researcher or something? No, not that. Oh, I've got it--she's going to work with kids.' Quoth I, over a tuna mornay dinner, in the ad breaks of the Jimeoin show, 'yeah right'.

merry thing and a happy whatsit

2006-01-09T17:24:00.000+01:00

My Christmas was spent with Lily, who cooked beautifully; Den, who washed up; Den's housemate Frank (not his real name) the Mancunian electrician, who got me pished on Chrismas Eve, told me how much he missed his closeted boyfriend who was Christmassing with his oblivious family, complimented my boobs and warned me not to get between Den and Lil cuz they're sooch a nice couple (I get this a couple of times a year. It's flattering, really. A little tedious, after a decade of friendship, but flattering); and pseudonymous Frank's six-year-old, who received many, many presents that bleeped, flashed, and flew randomly at my ankles and acheing head. Little angel.

My new year's eve was spent at a rather posh house party (there were crudites) populated entirely by beautiful women. I felt prettier for being there, because I figured they had some kind of door policy.

The new year in quotes:

"I like Madonna because she's fucked her way to the top. And I don't care what anybody says: that's a form of emotional intelligence."

"What's so good about progress? There used to be cobblestones all along my street. Beautiful. And they make the cars go slow. Then they ripped up the cobblestones and put in speed bumps."

"What was up with the meatloaf scene?" (History of Violence at the Prince Charles: four pounds; Viggo Mortensen talking like a Philadelphia gangster: priceless.)

I also spent two days on Charing Cross Road buying a tremendous many secondhand paperbacks, including two Lawrence Sternes, a Rabelais and several chunky nineteenth-century epics. Hurrah.

And I went to see some Italian Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery, because I can't afford to see them in Italy.

And I spent a day in the British Museum with a grouse individual called Luke. I met him at one a.m. in a pool hall in Hackney called Efes Entertainment Centre. I generally assume that anyone I meet in a room with more than two pool tables wants to punch me, but he only wanted to rave about the Peloponnesian War and discuss the various knaveries of John Howard (he travelled to Australia last year and chose to engage with local current affairs rather than, say, eat big steaks and hug barstools at the Coogi Bay). His reward was to accompany me to the Enlightenment room and show me the astrolabes and the stuffed toucans and the apothecary chests with compartments for human skull bits and mummy fingers. Can you imagine seeing all these stuffed animals for the first time? No wonder they thought the platypus was a fake.

There were other meetings with lovely folk whom I saw just long enough to make me really miss them afterwards. Good luck at AFTRS, Macgregor. Pete, I hope the hat worked. Everybody else, in London and elsewhere, I wish you were here. Have a great 2006.

picked up a paper...

2005-12-14T15:17:00.000+01:00

Well, I knew there was some sort of head-kicking going on in Sydney, but I hadn't realised how serious it was. Those anonymous texts are creepy. It seems silly to let this pass without comment, but what is there to say? "Stop it, ya boofheads," comes to mind, but that doesn't really cover it. And I'm not sure if I'm talking to the inciting media or the socially-divisive government or the kids swinging bats, or all of the above.

I've seen homogeneity, it's not so great. I like our hotch-potch country and I like that it is relatively peaceful so just... just stop it, ya boofheads.

coming on all greta garbo

2005-12-14T14:59:00.000+01:00

I’ve found myself in a little world where the guiding impulse is to cosset, to bundle up and blanket and enfold. Even the hard-faced matriarchs go about dressed in eiderdowns—pneumatic puffy coats or masses of fur. Watch them wrapping babies into scarves and mittens, each burbling to the other in this low-slung, vowelly language. This polysyllabic tendency to elaborate, interspersing everything with lilting qualifiers—secondo me… purtroppo… magari… This mad profusion of soft furnishings—anything that stands still long enough will be draped in two layers of damask and hung with a tassel.

Out of the babble of brocade and lace and elaborate phrases arises a sharp unifying theme: the banishment of the meagre; the final repudiation of all lack. There is a history-hardened core to it. It’s not something you want to cross. Don’t be fooled—the north of Italy isn’t all dolce vita. This region was squeezed by Mussolini’s fascism on one side and Hitler’s on the other. It’s people were fodder for canons and camps, livelihoods were destroyed in the economic chaos, and they haven’t forgotten. You will eat the panetone you are given, and you will offer your gifts of expensive chocolate, exquisitely wrapped, because these little gestures are all perpetuations of this endless, mesmeric dialogue: we affirm luxury and comfort; we deny their opposites. It’s the secular version of crossing yourself when you pass someone unfortunate in the street.

For a foreigner from a less troubled place, who once found the collectivist spirit of Italy quaint, it can leave you feeling, well, a bit bilious. Two visitors from the Outside World came to open a window and drag the stuffy covers off my head—my sweet, skeptical sister who’s seen it all and doesn’t mind it too much; and Macgregor the expert expat, who knows a culture clash when he sees one. “My god—it’s Japan: the sequel!” We swapped Japan faux pas stories—the “trinket box” (actually a funerary urn) that I brought out to show at the dinner table, announcing brightly that it was “for a friend of mine”; the staffroom showdown between a Macgregor and a senior teacher which, a century earlier, would have seen one or the other of them dead from shame.

He’s right—this place is more like Numazu, Shizuoka than it is like Sydney. The Japanese have no word for privacy—they’ve borrowed ours—and the Reggiani are equally confused by my desire for solitude. It’s a small town built on small business, and friendship is a network of interdependence and reciprocal favours. In the event that I am not involved in some promotional venture for the school on a Saturday night, I will at least be expected to render an account of who I was with, what we ate and whether we had a nice time (we did, of course—this is integral to the Saturday-night-report genre). These people are not bullies. For the most part they are funny, generous and stoical—they are just discomfited by what they don’t understand: chiefly, me. I got taken for a shop lifter the other day, presumably because talking like a five-year-old and constantly consulting a dictionary is shifty behaviour. On another day, three times in an hour, I was addressed in French. They don’t know what I am, but I’m not them.

Happily, I get on very well with all my students, and most people in the town are very friendly—friendlier than Sydney people, that’s for sure. I just get defensive sometimes because I feel like this mania for collective experience is rubbing out my solitude, and that’s the place I write from. It’s also the place I empathise from—I need time to reflect or I become oblivious to everything. When I shut the door behind myself or decline a dinner invitation, it’s because I need time to remember who I am, so I can be sane enough to give a damn who anybody else is.

this is what i get

2005-11-26T13:59:00.000+01:00

for not speaking Italian.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

what, no skull-shaped bong?

2005-11-25T15:46:00.000+01:00

When learning a new language, it helps to have specific goals to work toward. At the moment, I am composing an occasional address to my new landlords, to be delivered on the day when I drop off my key at the end of my lease. I am still tweaking it, but it will go something like this.

Landlords:

I despise you with the intensity of a thousand suns. I hate your preppy spiky hair and your interminable small talk and your bovine gum-chewing. I hate you for telling me I could paint over your tasteless, knotty-pine-panelled walls (I don’t like my home to stare back at me, thank you) and then changing your minds. I execrate you for being the only landlords in this town too tight-fisted to provide basic kitchenware. I revile the ancient washing machine you provided that flooded my bathroom. I challenge you to sleep one night on that feral tesselation of rusted springs you have the temerity to call a mattress.

May your children's children be born with tails.

It's good to have projects. In the meantime, though, I find I am starting to get fond of the place. It’s a good size and it's on the top floor. The glass in the exterior door is cracked all over, but the door does lead out onto a vast, private roof terrace. The terrace is almost certainly made out of asbestos, and sags alarmingly, but if you walk on the joists, you’re set. The tap water leaves a burning sensation in your mouth, but there is unlimited free heating.

Even the paneled walls are kind of adorable. Somebody actually chose them, and that is touching. It’s like a sleepover in your dad’s den, only you get to stay there every night. Most people who’ve seen the place suggested in wobbly voices that a few Impressionist prints would cheer it up no end. Belligerent B proposed some pictures of smoking dogs playing pool, and a chenille bedspread, which is rather closer to the mark.

I’m living in a Martin Parr photograph.

got my head checked

2005-11-16T20:39:00.000+01:00

Okay, yes, people have started razzing me for that spurious twice-a-week claim, so at least I know somebody is checking up on me. I spent the weekend in Brescia and Bergamo with my mate Flavio. We saw Roman mosaics and medieval church frescoes. My favourite was the disembodied midsection of San Sebastian—the stucco had come off the wall in patches, leaving only his little pot belly and a loin cloth that looked very much like a pair of saggy y-fronts, all stuck through with arrows. We ate gnocchi with blue cheese, apple and chestnuts in a hilltop trattoria, and toast with nutella in the hostel breakfast room, watched by a pair of piranhas. It’s not every day you see a fish tank with a big yellow and black ‘danger’ sign on it. If you want to know what piranhas look like, they look like fat, sullen bastards.

Best of all, we saw a huge exhibition of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It had examples of their earliest work, through to the Arles and Tahiti paintings. I’ve never really thought about these artists that much. I started out in that complacent, drowsy “afternoon at the gallery” zone. I wasn’t expecting to see so clearly the development of—what can I call it? The word vision has been hijacked by car advertisements. If they were writers, I would call it a voice—and that was the real jolt of it, to see what I haven’t been able to see before in the work of visual artists: a shining, singular consciousness, the mind of the auteur.

Both of them struggling through high Impressionism (yuk, those stifling canvases full of figures cut in half by screens, cows straining through fences to reach water, figures dissolving in nauseous pointillist dots…) on their way to finding their own visual languages. Van Gogh’s colours dissolving in light, full of tenderness. Those self-portraits, where his left eye is looking straight at you, but the right is gazing softly out of the frame, as if he was seeing two realities at once—two differently-visible worlds. Gauguin’s colours, on the other hand, condensing in to obsessive blocks of pigment that hover over the canvas and do strange things to your head.

Both of them wanting to get at the core of things—not rendering them as they look, but as they are. Placing consciousness at the centre, but not consciousness as a recorder of sense impressions—rather as a desiring, wondering, knowing thing. Both gnostics in their different ways. They so desperately wanted us to understand. For god’s sake, the answer’s in that distant-gazing right eye—not in a mutilated ear. Skip the gift shop and the tut-tut pop psych. Just look, and look, and look, and try to see.

hemingway felt this tired

2005-11-06T19:09:00.000+01:00

I've been working sixty hour weeks. The problem with a new business is everybody gets the burn out at the same time, and they all start talking in strained and long-suffering voices, and opening conversations with such red rags as: 'Katrina, could you do me a favour?' Yes, almost certainly, but your chances will be better if you avoid prefaces like that.

There is, however, a world outside the office. In it, I have recently seen:

A very, very small child with a very, very large umbrella. Looking a lot like a toadstool, if toadstools wore gumboots.

Persimmons glowing like little suns on leafless, rain-blacked branches.

Bicycle lamps through the poplars and the gathering fog as I ride the path along the river at the end of day.

A puppet show. Where I work, this is called research. So my job is still classifiable as good-to-excellent. I am starting a reading group for bilingual boys soon. I'm thinking Paul Jennings, Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Gillian Rubenstein. What do you get for the kid whose voice hasn't broken, but who has already completed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

And I have played coin soccer, coin rugby and a Spanish card game I don't know the name of. And pictionary with an Italian word deck and a Swede, a Spaniard, a Belgian, a Brit and a Sicilian. There were four dictionaries on the table at once, and loud maledictions in as many languages, but we did get words like 'regatta', 'suburbia' and 'infiltrate'.

dimmi

2005-10-24T16:37:00.000+02:00

The title is what waiters say to you when they are taking your order. It literally means tell me, which I like, because it is delivered in a brisk tone like a friend demanding that you spill the gossip. Who would have thought a café normale and a canolo could be big news?

Right. I've neglected this blog terribly. I find it hard to write when I'm bunking down in a room without a door in a house shared with two of my colleagues and my boss--I come home to find three teachers talking shop until eleven at night, people walk in on me getting changed, I can't pee after eleven at night because everyone's asleep and the only bathrooms in the apartment are en suites. I haven't had any private time to turn all my psychic pockets out and see what I've collected. But yesterday I went for a ride around deserted, Sunday-afternoon Reggio and thought about all the reasons things aren't that bad, really, and I got The Shame, and I decided I have to give you something to read twice a week at least. Here is something to read. It is a list, I am afraid, but it has comments and everything.

Watching: The Straight Story. David Lynch makes a film where a vulnerable man makes a lone road trip, encounters a succession of strangers and... they all turn out to be really nice people. Who's funding this one? Oh right, Disney. Props for the deer-killing scene and the war memories, but if the protagonist is too blind to have a drivers licence, why is half the screen time taken up with lingering shots on corn fields and forests so sharp you can see every individual leaf?

Reading: Gravity's Rainbow, about which I can't yet say anything more sensible than 'it's not as hard as I expected it to be'; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which I'm considering for the nine to 13 year-olds' book group I'm starting; and a serious candidate for the best blog in the world.

Hunting: for an apartment, as usual. Last potential place was in a sixteenth-century palazzo with a lot of original features and cathedral ceilings... except in the attic room with the broken window where I hit my head on the door frame on my way out. And I would have had to walk through another lodger's bedroom to get to the toilet. And the other lodgers were a middle-aged man and two mouse-coloured girls (all-over mouse-coloured, hair and skin and eyes) who stood side by side in the lobby and said 'Welcome. We hope you would like to live with us.' Well, when you put it like that.

Overheard in staff room at school: 'Who would you back in a fight: Pavlov's dog or Schroedinger's cat?'
'I'd go with the dog. At least you know for sure it exists.'

Comments by the international drinking community on Australian culture:
'And then at parties you eat little pies. With, like, meat in them.'
'I thought you'd be more, sort of... tanned.'
'What do you mean, who's Nicolle Dickson?'
'Who's that guy, you know, that basketball guy. Oh wait, he's South African.'

radio italy

2005-10-17T14:30:00.000+02:00

My Italian is coming along quite quickly. Half of it is cuss words, but even so. I am not making as much conscious effort as I did with French, but my unconscious mind seems to be running its own program. This week it is doing the passato prossimo tense. Whatever I’m doing, whatever the time of day, my brain keeps creating nonsense sentences in this tense. ‘You have looked at a head’ or ‘I have forgotten the boots’ or ‘That baby has eaten the computer.’ It’s odd but it doesn’t really bother me, and I am certainly producing the passato prossimo more smoothly than I did a week ago.

My listening comprehension is slowly improving too. I hadn’t really noticed it until a couple of days ago, when I realised that I was understanding snatches of conversation as I rode through town. Eaves-dropping is something you take for granted in your native language—you pick up five-second fragments of other people’s lives everywhere you go, like it or not. Take yourself out of your native language and suddenly other people’s conversations fade out like white noise. Lately, it is like the radio is tuning back in. My comprehension is still on a delay, so in my head it sounds a lot like this: blah blah incomprehensible blah blah but my wife can’t cook for shit. It’s actually a bit spooky.

cold october rain

2005-10-06T21:50:00.000+02:00

It’s getting very cold. They’re roasting chestnuts on the corner and selling them in brown paper bags. Unctuous, floury, a little bit sweet, and very warm. The chestnut people have a little shack set up next to the barbecue. It’s clad in fake wood paneling and inside it has floral carpet, a calendar with photographs of district views and a small television. It looks like a living room from a Martin Parr photograph. All this outside a flashy supermarket on the main street of this wealthy little town.

I’ve never worn a puffy jacket inside city limits before. I look like a geezer. I’m waiting for Matt to send me my The Streets album so I have a soundtrack to match my look.

There is a roller-skating rink next to the school. When I am here at night I can look in through their windows and see the kids making slow circles around the floor. I can’t hear the music. The school is in a brand new commercial complex. Most of the offices and shops are empty, but some of the top-floor apartments are rented. From the balcony I can see in to a white-walled, harshly-lit kitchen. Through the venetian blinds I can see a mother and a child, both of them walking distracted little figure-eights around the room, each talking on a mobile phone.

girl in clover

2005-09-29T15:30:00.000+02:00

I spend my days in this pristine, empty, brand new school, making myself useful and surfing the net on about a fifty-fifty split. We have a dedicated chocolate drawer, a very, very large TV (good for after-hours Twin Peaks sessions) and wireless everything. I am surrounded by teachers I respect, for their pedagogical know-how and their capacity to hold their whiskey, and we are building a school together. A school the likes of which this country has never seen.

It's all so shiny and bright. There are no defeated-looking old hacks sloping around the hallways telling you that 'we don't do it that way here.' We are making up the rules as we go so, yes, if I do it that way, then that is the way it is done here. You know what the first month of a job feels like, when you are straining every muscle to 'show initiative' in the middle of a stack of bureaucratic procedures that haven't made sense to anybody for the last five years? I feel like all of that confusion and irritation is getting its pay-off now. Say I have a project to do, like make a written placement test (it's only going to get teacher-geekier from here on, I warn you). I talk to the others about it, and they say things I haven't thought of before. Then I think about what the ultimate written placement test would be to me--the one that is better than all the annoying, inadequate placement tests I've ever seen. Then I make it. Then everyone is happy, and we go and eat pizzas the size of monster truck wheels, and then we drink a lot.

It was really very hard to take this job. I was schlepping around Italy on my own, trying to evaluate towns for liveability without knowing anyone or any nice places to eat, sharing hostel rooms with crazies or cheap hotel rooms with my neurotic self. I had a tremendous urge to return to Sydney. I was making frantic teary calls to Matt, Lily and anyone else who would listen, from phone booths where I couldn't hear the person on the other end properly for all the mopeds burning past. My parents were AWOL in Morocco. Whose parents go missing for two weeks in Africa? Freaks. It is a matter of family legend that I never take advice, but it's amazing how much suspiciously advice-like information my parents can impart in a half-hour phone call.

It seems quite a miracle, therefore, that I've landed up in about the best job I could have hoped for. Assuming the school gets some clients. I think my boss is quietly worried about it (I have had many opportunities to observe her psychological state, since I am presently crashing on her floor, along with three other teachers who are yet to find apartments--everyone tells me that people live in each other's pockets in this town, but this is ridiculous). But Kathryn and her husband seem to know everyone in Reggio, and word of mouth among their friends alone could keep us going for the first three months. I'm still not sure how long I want to stay here. I'm mentally divided between Reggio and Sydney. But I am starting to recognise the feel of the days here--it's the life that people have been describing to me for the past five years: their season on The Continent. In fact, what with all the Jeff Buckley playing in the bars, and the seedy clubs on the edge of town with late-nineties electronica, and the fashion, it feels like Europe has waited five years for me to arrive. Me, solipsistic?

the italian job

2005-09-23T12:43:00.000+02:00

My new boss dropped my laundry off at my hostel this morning. She apologised that one of the shirts was still damp--it hadn't washed clean the first time 'round, so she went ahead and washed it again. My underwear was folded and the socks were paired. I was still a bit groggy from being out with her husband and another teacher the night before. They only go to excellent restaurants, and two bottles of wine are considered reasonable with dinner. Nobody ever produces any cash--they just have running tabs with all these places. Kathryn's out of the office today, so I thought I might buy my own lunch, but she thoughtfully left 30€ under a paperweight for me.

I'm in a town called Reggio Emilia. It's near Parma: the graffiti on my bunkbed says 'let's grate the Parmesans' and underneath, in a different hand, 'Reggio Emilians are hairy oafs'. A more realistic demonstration of the campanilismo concept, I suppose. I had an interview here a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't sure about the place. I called the director to turn down the job, and she asked me to come back and see the town again before I made my decision. I've been here since then. Kathryn's setting up a new school. She has a resources cupboard that would make an ESL teacher weep. Any time you want a new book (or CD-Rom or DVD or laminator or whatever) she buys it. Reggio seems like a moneyed town, and she's providing a very good, pricey service to people who can afford it. She's committed to making everything absolutely perfect. I balked at the nine-month teaching contract after all, so she's got me doing contract stuff--producing lesson plans and handbooks and stuff. So far it doesn't feel like work, which is excellent. Excuse the reportage but, unfortunately for the cause of literature, there is actually stuff to report at the moment.

I have a bike and everything, so I guess I'll be here for a little while. Bikes are great. I haven't ridden one since I was in Japan ten years ago. I was terrible at it then, and I'm marginally worse now, but I still feel like a kid in a Spielberg film, rattling along the cobblestones with that satisfying sense of speed. I keep waiting for it to turn Fassbinder as I hit a rock on the pavement and veer out in front of a maniac Italian driver (score one for the clichés).

So. Reggio. I saw a lady cop yesterday. She looked like she'd been recruited from Central Casting and styled by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Her gun holster matched her jaunty white cap. Yes, she did have mirrored aviators on.

I saw a man yelling into his mobile phone while he was parked in a service station. Ten minutes later a woman pulled up alongside him, and stared at him meaningfully through the window. He glared straight ahead, all sulky, until she sped away in rage. Still later, though, she turned up on foot and calmly got into his car. That's amore.

At the train stations, they don't announce which platform the train will be on until a minute before it arrives. So all the people in the station congregate in front of the announcements board, all eyes expectantly raised, like citizens waiting to hear Ceasar's latest speech at the forum. When the platform is announced, the room clears. All of those people, lugging bags, kids and bikes, have to squeeze themselves at high speed through the underpass and emerge on the platform just as the train is pulling in. It adds a certain frisson to the whole train-catching experience.

The only person I know in Reggio of my own age is another teacher from the school. I call him Belligerent B. He's a literature grad from Torquay. He's very professional and the kids adore him--he spent the better part of a day colouring-in and laminating a frieze of The owl and the pussycat for the kids' classroom--but he nevertheless has The Rage. 'This country drives me fucking nuts, thank Christ. I mean, you've got to have something to fight against, don't you? Well I do, anyway. I'm English. Put me on a tropical island with beautiful girls and coconut cocktails and I'd be slitting my wrists within seconds. Yeah. I'm thinking of going down south next year, Sicily or something. It'll give me a whole new set of things to hate.' There's a story there, but there are stories I'll steal and stories I won't. Even a blogging hack has some standards.

mysteries

2005-09-11T17:02:00.000+02:00

When you need a loo you have to buy a drink at a bar--it's a sort of tourist economy perpetual motion machine. So I'm in a cafe in Verona, squirming in my seat because I need the waiter to take my order before I can go. There he stands, not five metres away, looking everywhere but at me. After a small eternity I break a cardinal rule and go up to him, make my salutation and ask for the toilet. He swivels his head, eyes me coldly and turns away. I dash for the loo thinking, oh great. Here's some Italian ragazzo waiting for a friend, looking very smart in his white trousers and salon-bleached flicky hair and strap-on manbag, and I've ruined his day by mistaking him for a waiter. I get back from the toilet, sit down as casually as I can, and the dude brings me a menu.

So now I have to tell you the story of The Man Who Wouldn't Serve Nick T. Nick is a writer, director, student of everything and very nice guy. In other words, just another prodigy out of that hothouse of fabulousness that is Perth (is it the isolation? do they put something in the water?). He used to go with Matt to a bar in Perth called Caffe Sport. It had cheap pasta and cheaper red wine and was open late, so they went there all the time. There'd be four people, say, and they'd all give their orders to this one guy, who would return with the goods soon afterwards--minus Nick T's order. There'd be three glasses of wine, three plates of pasta, and a sad, empty space where Nick's food ought to be. He never found out what this waiter's gripe was, in fact not a word was ever said about it on either side. His friends just took to ordering extra portions for him. But cutlery? Forget about it.

another departure

2005-09-09T18:31:00.000+02:00

i campanili e il campanilismo

Or, in the less elegant translation: bell towers and parochialism. The two things drawing me back to Italy. I love that the Italian word for 'parochialism' is related to bell towers. There really is a tower in every little community here (or every few blocks in a bigger town), and I like to think that people cluster around them, making little worlds for themselves. I like to see the towers rising above the rooves, and I like to think they signify something I might find here. I am a bit scared of being lonely, you see. That's why I'm not looking for work in a big cosmopolitan centre like Rome or Naples. While I speak only rudimentary Italian, I want to be somewhere manageable where I am less likely to slip through the cracks. Searching for exactly the right town is difficult--too small or too large, and I could feel too isolated. It's a delicate balance and I'm relying on gut instinct to tell me when I see it. Wish me luck.

I started out in Trieste, that little top-right corner of Italy that is practically in Slovenia's pocket. I like it a lot--it's a working port town on the lake-smooth Adriatic. By the water's edge it looks a bit like Bondi, but the people and the sea are equally calmer. No dice there so far, though. I had a big interview set up that I was very excited about, but it turned out nobody had told the director I don't speak English. She suggested I take an intensive (read: expensive) Italian course and call her in a month. I had a suggestion for her, but I didn't share it.

I've just been offered a job in a little town in the middle of northern Italy called Reggio Emilia. I like the director a lot, but I'm not sure about Reggio. It's really very small. And I just visited the next town over--Modena, of the vinegar--and I have fallen in love with it. It's like getting a new boyfriend and then discovering you like his big brother more. I have a few days to decide what to do.

It's strange when you're standing on the edge of a decision that will affect your happiness for the next year to come. It's stranger still to be trying to make such a decision while you are completely stripped of context yourself. Here I am in a country where I don't speak the language, bumping around from one drab, neutral hotel room to the next, and trying to keep some hold on my sense of self. Thankfully I have chosen some good companions for my trip: my iPod, which is full of add-on personality to keep the cheap hotel blues at bay (I am not this bland, nothing space: I am Guero, I am Abbatoir Blues, I am Rachmaninoff’s 3rd); and Moby-Dick, which is subtitled or, The Whale, but which might as well be subtitled or, How To Live. If call-me Ishmael isn’t enough to inspire with his cheerful stoicism, there is his friend Queequeg, the cannibal prince:

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.

Anyway. My last few days in Paris were very sociable. I had some quality time with Macgregor before he left for a holiday in Berlin, I saw Hellzapoppin’ (which can only be described as wacky) with David and Angie, and generally had a nice time. Below are some stories to commemorate my Paris apartment, which was the scene of many good meals and conversations with funny Australians. It is so, so weird how quickly we peel off our old experiences as soon as we are thrust into the new. Already I feel like this was another life.

rear window

I said bonjour to a guy in the hallway and he responded with, “You live on the fourth floor, right?” Mmmm? “Me too, across the way.” Oh. “You work late, don’t you?” He mimed typing. I guessed that was true. “Me, I play guitar.” He mimed this too, somewhat redundantly. “Ah. You play very well,” I lied. “You sticky-beaking weirdo,” I didn’t add.

on doit se souvenir

I guess it’s built in, not to be constantly astonished, or else we’d all blow some sort of circuit. But when some place really captures you, you should remember it and be glad. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont did it, Venice did too. Port Stephens still has a hold on me, where my family used to go for holidays when my sister and I were really young. When I leaned out Macgregor’s window on hot nights it reminded me of Port Stephens. The warm wind, the sodium lights with their yellow dandelion halos, the ugly white eighties apartment blocks (the eleventh arrondissement harbours some of the vilest buildings inside the peripherique, I keep forgetting to mention that. When Pete arrived, primed from reading my blog, he could only say that he’d thought it might be more… picturesque). And there’s the two lines of parked cars that look, from up on the fourth floor, like some parallel-or-not-parellel perspective puzzle. It is only a small leap to add in the shushing of the little wavelets from the beach that ought to be two streets away, and the Pancake House with its white mayonnaisey mornays and chocolate fudge sauces, the catamarans for hire and the frangipani trees and the happy safety of it all.

chungking unimpressed

The other night Macgregor and I looked out the window and saw a fire truck in the street, with a lone fireman out front. A few people came out of our building coughing. I told Mac to call down and ask them what was going on and he wouldn’t do it, and I refuse to yell out a window in bad French, so we were left guessing. There was no smoke in the stairway or anything. We went back to our magazine reading. When I looked out again a quarter of an hour later, there were five fireys, and they had been joined by a group of girls in triangle bikinis and very small denim skirts with gold thongs on their tawny-tanned feet. Everyone just seemed to be milling and flirting, and I thought it was impressive of the teenlets to have appeared so quickly after the arrival of men in uniform. Mac and I watched the firemen for a few minutes, trying to decide which one was cutest, but nothing was happening. Then maybe half an hour later we could hear them all out in the central courtyard of the apartment block, and the fireys were breaking into a ground floor apartment.

I had other things on my mind, though, because I had just mentioned to Macgregor that I had some nasty mosquito bites and I didn’t know where I could have got them. He asked me if they were new since I got back from London, I said yes. Then he told me that his friend Sebastian, who crashed in my bed while I was away, had come from a stop-over in Hong Kong, where he had stayed in the Chungking Mansions, and that he’d had nasty welts on him for the rest of the week. We pulled apart my bed, inspecting it layer by layer, and under the mattress cover we found a great many furry caterpillar things, crawling around and having a party and generally looking drunk and bloated on human blood. So we ran down four flights of stairs with the mattress protector and tried very ineffectually to shake it out in the dark courtyard.

It was about that point that the police turned up and checked out the apartment that the fire fighters had broken into. I hissed to Macgregor to ask the police what was going on, since he’d chickened out of asking the firemen, but he wouldn’t do it. I didn’t have the guts either. We gave up on the shaking-out plan, which was a bad plan, and decided to leave the offending article by the apartment door until morning and pray the little furry bastards wouldn’t crawl far. But all the bustle in the courtyard had woken up the scary old lady who lives directly below us. As we got back up to our landing, she stepped out of her door and yelled “Who is that in the stairwell?” We both froze and Macgregor motioned to me to be quiet. We thought she’d give up, but she called out again. We don’t like this scary lady—Macgregor because she’s bossy, and me because she rants at me in French long after any socially-adjusted person would have noticed that I wasn’t understanding one word in five. Still, we should probably have said something. I was making emphatic gestures to Macgregor, opening and shutting my hand like a glove puppet and then pointing through the floor at the crazy lady, which is charades for “say something, damn it!” but he seemed to be having a sublimely uncommunicative evening, and just shook his head. To be fair, being over seventy isn’t really an excuse for yelling at people after midnight and demanding to know what they’re doing in their own stairwell. When she followed up with, “You don’t want to answer, unh? Unh?! What kind of games are you playing?” we just tip-toed into our apartment and locked the door.

We still don’t know what was up with that ground-floor apartment, but all that incident must have disrupted the chi of the entire building, because people were up clattering plates and watching bad telly into the wee hours. As for the bugs, I still don’t know what they were—google let me down this time—but I put the mattress protector in a hot spin dryer and that seems to have done for them. Damn those Chungking Mansions.

my contact details

2005-09-02T14:47:00.000+02:00

I am including my email addy so that people who want to get in touch with me even if they don't want to leave a public comment on the blog. I love emails! The spaces are in it so I can't be contactible by any random who googles my name. Yeah, I wrote the Anais Nin Review. Yeah, Kirsten's my cousin, I'm very proud of her. Yes I know I share my name with what is widely regarded as the worst movie ever.

So here it is (remove the asterisks obviously):

k*a*t*r*i*n*a.z*a*a*t*@*g*m*a*i*l.c*o*m

Or friends can phone/text me on: +33 675 313 012 (France) or +39 340 856 0510 (Italy)

Don't be a stranger.

on the case

2005-08-29T13:00:00.000+02:00

I have started making follow-up phone calls about the job applications I sent to various schools in Northern Italy. Before I began, I prepared a speech with care. Okay, I wrote it myself, and okay, I only looked in the dictionary twice, but those three or four sentences pretty much used up my entire stock of Italian, so I was stuffed when I was called upon to have an actual conversation (something I ought, arguably, to have anticipated). Think of it like this: it’s one thing to read a passage of Chaucer aloud, but it would be another thing entirely to have a good old chat with the Wife of Bath. So after a flood of incomprehensibility that began with Ah, si, si, certo… I had to stutter that I um didn’t um understand, and the confused secretary switched obligingly into English. Given that I may have to leave for Italy within the week to begin interviews, it seems I am a little under-prepared. Let’s see: if I cover a chapter of my Italian in Three Months book every day, I will be up to “object pronouns”, “likes and dislikes” and “ordering a drink” by the time I arrive. So at least I’ll be able to greet cutey Italians with: I like you. Let’s get a beer.

I’m enjoying my last few weeks in Paris. I keep finding new cafés to love, like the L’Industrie where you can nurse a black coffee for as many chapters of your novel as you like, and they don’t serve breakfast but they let you bring in a croissant from the patisserie across the street. I spent a fun night playing anagrams with Gideon, David and Macgregor. Any word nerd would love this game so it’s worth me telling you the rules, but it’s hard to explain so I’ll put it in a separate post that you can click on at leisure. I also went shopping with Macgregor in the Marais, as a celebration of his completing his film school application and my having applied for many jobs. We bought beautiful things packaged in fancy bags. It’s a funny thing—the cost of that carry bag must be added to the cost of your purchase. If somebody came up to you in the street and said, “Would you like a cardboard bag with rope handles for two euros?” you would say something impolite. But if you’ve shelled out for the self-striped classic white shirt with lacing detail on the cuffs, you’re going to feel let down if you don’t get the fancy bag.

Yesterday I went with Macgregor to the park, because the weather was proper August weather again and we wanted to be out in the sun. We chose Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Belleville, as I hadn’t seen it before. It is on one of the two hills of Paris. If I hadn’t been able to see Sacre-Coeur on the hill across the way, I would have thought I was in an entirely different city. Clusters of huge trees and green hillsides full of picnickers, and because of the slope, kids are always doing acrobatics and stacking it spectacularly on the steeper bits. French kids don’t seem to cry when they fall over, they just right themselves noncholantly and saunter off, as if it was part of the trick. This park was one of those places that seem to have a distilled aura of happiness around it. I’ve never loved Parisians so much, each on their patch of sunny lawn. The park itself was very beautiful and dramatic, but I think it was the modernist tower blocks all around that gave the place its particular loveliness. One does tire of the same-same Haussman-style buildings all over Paris, and it was perfect, in all that sun, to see the clean lines and jaunty red sun-shades of the ocean-liner-style apartment blocks. Like being in a Jacques Tati film, but less cloyingly quaint. It was all real, and all joyous. A man near us on the hillside was meditating, and I didn’t understand how he could keep his eyes closed on such a day, in such a place. I listened to contrived, educational conversations in Italian on my iPod, Macgregor read a David Sedaris book I bought him.

The birthday presents keep on coming. Matt sent me a great stash of music, including Nick Cave’s recent double album, which makes all the hairs of my scalp stand on end in tingly revelry, and a lush, moody album from The Woods Themselves, a Sydney band he has just joined (why did you have to have your rock n roll renaissance after I left, M? I always wanted to be a groupie). And I have a wonderful new pile of books beside my bed, distracting me from my Italian study. It comes courtesy of Tania, who had to listen to me whining loudly about the cost of books while she was over here for a Women in Engineering conference. Hurrah for Tania! Permit me a couple of quotes:

Here is Primo Levi in The Periodic Table, writing about his first exercises in chemical analysis at university (I have chosen a quote about chemistry, rather than about his incarceration in Auschwitz, though he writes with equal lucidity and care about both. After all, he chose his vocation, and his love for it survived his ordeal along with him):

One way or another, here the relationship with Matter became dialectical: it was fencing, a face-to-face match. Two unequal opponents: on one side, putting the questions, the unfledged, unarmed chemist, at his elbow the textbook by Autenrieth as his sole ally… : on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter, with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentously rich in deceptions, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx.

From Henry James’ The Europeans, this single exquisite sentence:

If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia’s virtues should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the rapid movement through the wild country, and in a companion who from time to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow’s flight, over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a great many things that she might ask him.

And finally some Flaubert, writing letters home from his travels in Egypt in 1850, years before he produced Madame Bovary:

When I think of my future (that happens rarely, for I generally think of nothing at all despite the elevated thoughts one should have in the presence of ruins!), when I ask myself: ‘What shall I do when I return? What path shall I follow?’ and the like, I am full of doubts and indecision. At every stage in my life I have shirked facing my problems in just the same way; and I shall die at eighty before having formed any opinion concerning myself or, perhaps, without writing anything that would have shown me what I could do.

So much for that. Reading Flaubert makes me wish even more keenly that we could travel in time as well as space. That’s my second reference to time travel and now you all think I’m a geek who has watched Back to the Future dozens of times. But the Egypt he saw and luxuriated in and wrote so delicately about is gone gone gone. How sad. Thank god he at least paid attention and took notes.

how to play anagrams

2005-08-29T12:58:00.000+02:00

You turn all the tiles from a Scrabble bag upside down on the table, minus the blanks. You turn up one tile each in rapid succession, and everyone scans all the upright tiles for words of four letters or more. If you find one, you call it out and take the letters, and form the word flat on the table in front of you. Everyone keeps turning up new letters and snatching words.

Here’s the tricky bit: if you can make an anagram of a word somebody else has snatched, you can steal it from them. You can also steal a word if you can make an anagram of a pre-existing word by adding new upturned tiles. You can’t steal a word by adding an ‘s’, and you can’t form an original word that is a plural, but you can steal a word with an ‘s’ in it by forming an anagram that is a plural. You can also take new upturned letters to make anagrams of your own words—because if you don’t, somebody else will.

So this is how it works out: when somebody finds a word, they immediately yell out every anagram of it they can think of, often including several words that do not exist. e.g. “Atom! Moat! Um… Amot! Toma!” to prevent it from being stolen. And people start to sweat: if you have a word like “axle” or “gate” or “meet” you get very, very nervous about an ‘r’ turning up, knowing some bastard’s going to nick your word if they see the ‘r’ before you do. Play it once, and you will see how this game can easily steal hours of your life. Much like blogging, except you have to actually interact with other humans.

up and up in paris and london

2005-08-24T21:42:00.000+02:00

Having spent a week in London, making a dick of myself by tacking an automatic s’il vous plait on the end of every drink order, I’m back in Paris, dealing with the reality that it takes me five minutes to read a slogan on a poster. I’ve seen both cities at their best recently—in Paris I’ve had visitors to make it all shiny, and in London I got to spend time with people I’ve been missing and find that everyone’s doing well, which is always nice.

In fact, I had an unexpected reunion with some girls I haven’t seen since we used to share a house in second-year uni. It was odd to be reminded of that time. I was in an imploding relationship, eating a no fat, no sugar, no carbohydrate diet, watching my hip bones protrude and collecting amethyst crystals. Amy and Eef were trying to plan a trans-continental move, experimenting with compost and meeting strange people in bars, who would subsequently ring our doorbell whenever they found themselves in the neighbourhood. At three a.m. And we were all being fleeced by a beautiful, intelligent heroin addict who was crashing on our floor (we all wondered why she was always falling asleep with lit cigarettes in her hand, why her parents would buy her groceries but refused to loan her twenty bucks, and, in the end, where our rent money was disappearing to). Now these two are happily established in the Netherlands—Amy is doing a physics degree, and researching nuclear fusion at Oxford on her summer break, and Eef is channeling her formidable joie de vivre into the final year of a photography course. And I still don’t really have a clue what I’m doing, but I hope soon to be clueless—and gainfully employed—in Italy. It all seems sufficient. Fortunate, even.

summer in paris with jenn and pete
The bars of the eleventh are in top form, and groups of happy, beer-drinking young couples have booted the old men off the petanque courts. It’s a fun time to be in Paris, and Pete and Jenn had the energy of people on a short vacation, so we did lots. I don’t normally hold with paying to climb tall things—I find most cities look sort of forlorn and pointless when seen from high up. But from the towers of Notre Dame we could spy into all the little apartment courtyards and narrow streets, and for a moment I felt the hard shell of the city crack open, and reveal a wink of its vivid, dense, chattering past. Gotcha, I thought. Afterwards we went for drinks at a barge café that was moored nearby. From there, we could people-watch at leisure. As each cruise boat passed Notre Dame, all the people on board would hold their cameras aloft to it, silently, simultaneously, as in prayer.

We went to the catacombs too. In the late 18th century, when several of Paris’ over-crowded cemeteries became a public health risk, the bones were disinterred and moved to abandoned quarries under the 16th Arrondissement. In the 1850s, all the skulls and femurs were arranged into pretty patterns along the tunnel walls (there’s five or six million skeletons down there, so that’s a lot of material to work with—Matthew Barney would surely have sold his firstborn son to be in charge of that project) and the catacombs were opened as a tourist attraction. We enjoyed seeing the bones in their heart and crucifix formations, all interspersed with improving quotes about mortality, but I was most impressed by the hoard of confiscated bones at the exit. I asked the attendant had they really been stolen. He tapped his fingers over a skull and two femurs. “This morning, yesterday and… last Tuesday, I think. Bizarre, uh?” But he didn’t really seem that surprised.

We made three attempts to crack the August queues at the Eiffel Tower. After the final unsuccessful effort, we cheered ourselves up with some second-hand English book shopping. From a listing in Pete’s guide book we found a place called Tea and Tattered Pages, which sounded like it would fit the bill. The American woman who was staffing it talked ceaselessly at us while she made us some cream cheese bagels. She told us she’d been in Paris since ’67, so I asked her about the ’68 riots. Unfortunately she was on a short holiday in Norway when they happened—the thought of the fun she’d missed still made her grimace and pull her hair, 35 years later. She also explained to us that Parisians used to be smaller than they are now, because oppressive parenting techniques stunted their growth. She demonstrated these techniques with verve, swatting the air and barking instructions at imaginary down-trodden little Parisians of yesteryear. When I told her her theory seemed a little bit far-fetched, she conceded they probably didn’t drink enough milk in those days either. Then she made Peter change his tea order from English Breakfast to Lapsang Souchong (“otherwise I could die of boredom just watching you drink it”) and then asked him to help her pump up a flat bicycle tyre, and he obliged.

in london
on the other hand, there was the Fox Reformed, a wine bar in Stoke Newington. I asked the proprietor, who was squeaky-voiced and tufty-haired and wore big moony spectacles, for a glass of beaujolais. He asked me if I wanted it chilled or at room temperature. I was a bit disconcerted, so I asked him what his preference would be. “I should think it has bugger all to do with me, and everything to do with you,” he squeaked. His girlfriend leaned across the bar to me. She seemed to be one of those perfectly normal women who marry intense, under-socialised nerds out of affection and a vague wish to protect. She whispered tactfully, “The beaujolais can be a touch soupy on very hot days, but I don’t think you need have it chilled just now.” So I didn’t.

London is sprawling and magnificently ugly compared with Paris, but I like it very much. I like its tough, aggro energy and its tar-black sense of humour, and its free museums and its red buses and its public notices. In fact, I sometimes think it wouldn’t matter if every place I went to was like that big, white, featureless room in THX-1138, as long as there were signs around to keep me amused. A breath-takingly irresponsible ad for an online casino urged me ‘never to let a defeat have the last word.’ A notice on the bus said it was licensed for 17 ‘standees’, which annoyed me at first for its grammatical inaccuracy, but then I got thinking about what a ‘standee’ might be. I imagined an important-looking man lying prone, grimacing, while a woman teetered on his chest in stiletto heels, and that enlivened my journey no end.

Then there is Lil’s street sign. Her new house is on a pretty street called the West Bank, in the Orthodox Jewish part of town. Go figure. It’s a great area. Lots of trees and nice cafés, and cute kids running around in yamulkahs, their forelocks still too short to curl. And Lil has a beautiful, big room with space to paint and play guitar, and a pear tree out the back that’s taller than the house. She also has a lovely new girlfriend. Lily and Den are now officially, delightfully, an item. Den has a new house too, and she has got rid of a lot of the spirits who were bugging her, both of which things she’s very pleased about. I said it was a pity I hadn’t thought to ask them who killed JFK. “They still drop in every now and then, I’ll ask them.”

Later that night when we were all going to sleep, Den yelled across the room to me. “It was Archibald, Kate.”
“What?”
“Who killed JFK.”
“You mean Oswald?”
She was quiet for a second, presumably in consultation.
“That’s it, yeah.”
“Oh jeez, Den, that’s what everybody says. Get some sleep.”
There was silence for another long moment.
“And Jack the Ripper was some bloke called John Hewitt. An American, apparently.”
Now that was news to me.

I also went to see Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern, which had most of her major works so I didn’t mind the ten pounds’ entry. Best of all was her self-portrait against a yellow ground. I’ve seen it lots of times in books, but on the wall there was a direness, a sort of stricken dignity that I’d never seen in it before. I wonder why that is with some artworks—like there’s a spirit in the paint itself that can’t cross over into reproductions. And I passed a happy birthday evening watching a super-8 film festival. My favourite was an amusing one with a dog in. I got a DVD of Don’t Look Now from Pete, a cute notebook and some new drawings from Lily, and a tin whistle from my sister. Excellent.

And I applied for some teaching jobs in Italy. I can’t be doing with this drifting forever, I need to belong to a place again. In the metro I see scowling boys dressed in camouflage carrying big machine guns, and I want to march up and demand, what country are we living in, for god’s sake? Except that I can’t say that properly in French, and I’m not really living here, am I, it’s more like a long pause than real life. Or I see a street name that I should remember from history class, but I don’t bother to look it up and find out why. Or I see a photograph of Beckett sitting in a left bank café, and I wonder what attracted him so much to this place. Unless I learn French, I will probably never really get it. It’s been fun, all this idle speculation from the outside, but I need to be somewhere long enough to get beneath the surface a little.

revisionist history

2005-08-06T20:38:00.000+02:00

Lah-di-dah (I saw a Woody Allen film last night; all the French people were laughing before I did because sub-titles are known for their terseness and Woody Allen is not). If you keep a diary, or indeed read the newspapers, you'll know all about revisionist history. I have just deleted a post from this blog, because I didn't like having it here. It was written at an unhappy moment, and it felt like a betrayal of what I've tried to make of this blog. With it went some lovely, friendly comments and some others that would curl your toenails (Nik, please think of the children) so I expect a lively debate about censorship of self and others to follow, unless, in fact, people have more interesting things to do.

charming and cheesy

2005-08-06T19:29:00.000+02:00

signs

On a shop front:
Open in August!

In the unisex toilets of a corporation I taught at:
Out of respect for other visitors, please urinate in the bowl, not on the walls.

Poster in the metro:
[IN ENGLISH] Paris offers you a warm welcome!
[IN FRENCH] For the good of your city, encourage tourism.

In an ad for a wonder cream:
Shed kilos and bronze at the same time.

All over the city:
J’aime mon quatier; je ramasse

To ramasse is to pick up, as in your dog’s shit. But a certain intertextuality suggests itself, especially in the accompanying cartoon of the man with the shovel hovering behind his dog. I love the way French public notices are often in the first person: perhaps they want the words to pass directly into your internal monologue, or maybe they are meant to be the words of an encouraging friend, a role-model type. Do you ramasse? I know I do.

commerce on the traffic island in the middle of boulevarde menilmontant

A shed full of arcade games, with Rastafarian plush dolls dangling from the ceiling.

A beige caravan like your nan and pop might have in their back yard, with posters in the windows offering tarot consultations.

A news stand that sells maps of Pére Lachaise cemetery and Jim Morrison t-shirts.

A guy who has made a barbecue out of a shopping trolley, an upturned tin bucket and a primus stove, and is barbecuing corn cobs.

Benches where men sit at night with beers in their hands and blankets of trashy jewellery laid out on the ground in front of them. Once I saw a car drive over a whole blanket load—oh boy, was there some gesticulating.

things on the banks of the seine in summer

A tiny sunken amphitheatre on the very edge of the water where people come to tango in the evenings.

Buskers playing Ticket to ride, Ma vie en rose and, inevitably, No woman no cry.

People pashing.

Cruise barges with banks of floodlights along their sides, so they can light up the banks like a police raid and give their passengers the best possible view of Romantic Paris by Night.

Three kilometres of fake beach with boardwalks, sand, deckchairs, palm trees, and a lending library.

easily amused

In fact, they were digging up all the footpaths around our house last month, creating holes a man could stand shoulder-deep in. Macgregor speculated they were shipping all the sandy dirt over to the Paris Plage. An irresistible thought. Under the cobblestones…

vagabond madeleines

2005-07-23T02:01:00.000+02:00

onzieme

I live on rue Merlin. My room is on the fourth floor, it is white with white curtains. My window opens onto an internal courtyard that echoes around with the sounds of other lives. There are often two or three different albums playing at once—Neil Young, Arabic dance music, Colette (the ring-my-bell Colette, not the writer whose house I am yet to visit). Kids arguing, people coming home late, laughing, after a night out. Sometimes an argument rips through and is immediately forgotten. There is a bad accordionist and a good violinist. The roofs frame an oblong of sky which is crossed and re-crossed by pigeons and swifts. The pigeons flap around the eaves and coo in frothy voices, sounding just like their feathers look when they fluff them out to impress each other.

At the end of Merlin is rue de la Roquette, which roars loud and vulgar through the middle of the eleventh arrondissement from Pére Lachaise cemetery to Place de la Bastille. Merlin is at the mellow end, where nobody bothers to watch their laundry in the laverie. This end has the park where old men and little boys play petanque, and it is frequented by a better class of bum. They pour their early-morning wine into plastic cups, with steady hands. Our local is Bistro L’Artiste, where I drink kir and Macgregor drinks pastis because the French drinks are cheaper. The chairs are ranged in lines facing the street, in the Parisian fashion. I wonder how many people fall in love with the back of someone’s neck here. It’s a good arrangement. Everyone can watch the scooters and the dogs, and wonder about the guy who brings his laptop out to the public bench at night to play solitaire. Sometimes we have to wait ages for the waiter to bring us our bill—he walks all around us, stacking up chairs, bringing in the pots of bamboo, and when we catch his eye he grimaces in acknowledgement and leaves us alone for another fifteen minutes. We make up things in French to say next time. Do you want our money or not, monsieur? It’s free today, is it? A Quatorze Juillet special! But we don’t want to mess with L’Artiste, and we don’t mind sitting out on the street a little longer. It gets dark around eleven and the heat of the day is fierce enough to drive you out of doors and keep you there.

The Bastille end of Roquette is all bars and alimentations—general stores with methuselah vegetables and tins labeled in Arabic. If you walk down around here at night, everybody wants something from you—loose change, or a kiss, or five seconds of your attention. This is where the lovers pin each other against walls and shake their anguished heads. Non, non! The girl pushes her beau away and stalks down the street, smouldering. Don’t walk away from me! he sulks. Then he catches her up—she dawdles to make it easy. He takes her roughly by the shoulders—people really do that here—and whispers some magic words. They walk off together, kissing as they walk, gripping each other’s faces in their hands to keep them steady. Lots of little streets flow into Roquette at this end, lined with import-export shops selling nylon clothes, bande-desinée bookshops and bars where the music is never too loud. There is the Watercolour Tobacconist advertising Paella Thursdays, Pause Café where they always bring you water without being asked, bars with no names and the Bar With No Name, where they do free tarot readings every Tuesday. I went with Mac to Place de la Bastille on the eve of Bastille Day, which is not called by that name here, to see a Brazilian concert. The crowd was huge and well-behaved. It felt more like a Carols by Candlelight than a mad knees-up. The only things breaking the mood were the little fire-crackers that went off around the square all night. They looked like half-smoked cigarillos and hardly sparked at all, but they made a tremendous, very irritating noise. At midnight a spotlight shone on the gilded Mercury in the centre of the Place and I looked around the mellow crowd, trying to imagine shouted slogans, heads on spikes. Under the pizza vans, the prison. My imagination failed me.

Now that I’ve explored the eleventh a bit more, I am glad to have found a part of Paris that feels like it belongs to the present moment. So much of Paris is a shrine to itself, to culture long dead. You didn’t carve the Venus de Milo yourselves, I want to yell. What’ve you done lately? I came hear hoping for A bout de souffle and found Le Charme Discret. It’s a money town, after all. People have nannies and summer properties. Before I got to Paris I didn’t realise that Bunuel was a comedian, or that Surrealism was a political movement. Now the New Wave is a prized relic, Existentialism is a café with bad service and Jean Vigo is the name of a cinema that screens dubbed blockbusters. But like all shrines, Paris attracts pilgrims. I’m thinking of Alison, the New Yorker of the sultry ukulele, or Gretchen from New Mexico who is on holidays from a college where the curriculum is just a chronological ramble through the classics, from Homer to Einstein and Lacan. "The end of second year is a rough place to be," she says. "We’ve traded Ancient Greece for Descartes and we’re so saturated with doubt we’ve stopped being able to talk. Everyone in my class is in the same dilemma, so it gets pretty awkward."

la vache espagnol

It recently occurred to me that I have been in culture shock in Paris. It hasn’t happened to me for most of my trip, though I anticipated it, but now it has arrived. Even here I am well cushioned by Macgregor, his visiting friends and mine. I am hardly ever called upon to speak French, which is handy because je parle francais comme une vache espagnol, as Anton says. In fact I find it very soothing not to understand most of the conversations around me—it’s all just human noise. But I am beginning to have questions about the way people think here, and I can’t find answers because I can’t read. Unfortunately the language of advertising is very simple, so I am here trying to understand the culture and the only thing getting through is the nastiest dregs of it. I can read the titles of books and magazine articles, almost without registering them as French, because they are full of latinate abstract nouns. So I can see immediately how interesting they are, what an insight they might offer me, and I try to read on and find that I can’t. Bookshops, especially film or literary bookshops, give a jab of pain. It’s frustration, der. I should have expected it sooner or later.

I have been drifting through the days like an expat wife— married to myself, the one who wanted to come here. Like a good expatriate I have been sticking to my own. On Saturday I went to a weekly writers’ group at Shakespeare & Co. It was fun, they’re good writers, and it led me to discover the reference library on the first floor of the shop—great news, as my budget can’t keep up with my reading in a country where Penguin classics are ten or fifteen euros each, and not much cheaper second-hand. I go to see old and new American films at the tiny cinemas that charge five euros. The French that I do know has mostly been reduced to a series of passwords to get me through the Metro gates or into the movies. I can still feel the language centres of my brain sparking off—I’ll hear the same word a few times and realise it is a grammatical building block—I know that if I learn it I’ll improve instantly. But I don’t bother learning it, and I feel almost proud of my indolence. Well, I’m not being entirely slack. I’ve circled session times in my Pariscope for some Italian and Danish films, which means I’ll have to deal with French sub-titles. Every now and then I have a meal with some of Macgregor’s French friends, and if I can’t contribute much I can at least understand the gist of the conversation, and nod and laugh at the right times. Every now and then I put in a whole sentence. "Australia is the more and more make a culture of work, work, work." Coruscating. In any case, finding English bookshops and films and meeting people has made me love Paris, even without understanding it. I keep seeing madeleines, the proper little Proustian seashells, scattered around the platforms of the Metro. As Mac’s friend Leisa said, they look as if they’ve escaped from a biscuit tin somewhere and are making a dash for freedom. How can you not be charmed by that?

and now to the finance news

I got my first piece of real finance world dirt from my bankers yesterday. I’ve been discussing international business dealings with two financial analysts, and when I say "discussing" I mean trying to get a word in edgewise, but not trying very hard because I’d rather listen to them talk than drill them on modal verbs. They tell me that their bank has recently released an internal report about the shady dealings of banks in different countries. Australia has been "red-listed," which sounds bad, for being very lax about checking into the origins of the money it takes from certain investors. We are notorious, apparently, for welcoming terrorist money. My students think it’s because Australia is so keen on quick expansion, it doesn’t want to ask tricky questions where big investments are concerned. With recent events in London, I sometimes catch myself wishing that militant groups wouldn’t bring their dirty business into my world, as if the ordinary people of Israel or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else deserved it any more, and of course the question arises—has there ever been a time when the Anglo-Christian world hasn’t been deeply implicated in this dirty business? This is a tiny planet and the money runs around and around in it, busy as the devil himself.

jane and the time machine

Can I tell you about the wonderful books I’ve been reading? I’ve had a bit of a first and last things festival. It’s amazing to see how writers’ styles and projects change as they mature, as they try more and more relentlessly to say a really true thing. This quest to rid ones work of every false note, every attractive inaccuracy or almost-right word—it’s the life’s work of a really good writer, for whom ethics can’t be separated from aesthetics. So I like to see their first and last things. Carver’s first collection of stories. Forster’s first novel. Capote’s last book of stories and journalism—his last book, in fact, since Answered Prayers never did materialise. I’ll include in my list the gorgeous Mrs Dalloway, which I think appeared right in the middle of Woolf’s career but, since it is about looking back from middle age, counts as a sort of Last Thing, in a philosophical rather than biographical sense. God, the terrifying compassion in it. But that’s me, that’s me! I shudder in my seat on the metro. Me with all my mistakes behind me instead of ahead! How can she lay it all out so clearly and calmly on the page?

And I’ve just finished Persuasion. It’s a devourable book, but apart from the satisfaction it gives in its own right, it also offers firm proof that somebody went back in time to visit Jane Austen. I always thought she’d be the first person I’d visit if the opportunity arose—not so I could observe her genius at work, although I’d like to see her being relentlessly polite to a boring aunt. Really, I just want to tell her things won’t always be so bad. I want to tell her about equal opportunity employment and birth control and de facto relationships, about a time when women are allowed to test out a few people before they decide what they want out of a life partner. Having read Persuasion it seems clear that somebody did visit Jane, and I think it happened just before she wrote this novel. Here is a heroine who, eight years after a bad decision, long after her first bloom of youth is gone, gets another shot at happiness. Judging from the tone and the layered, compromised characters, I think her visitor brought back some modernist literature and maybe some writings on psychoanalysis (Nabokov snorts at me from beyond the grave). The traveler definitely brought a film and the means to play it, because in chapter fourteen Austen cuts on a soundscape. Clever woman! One moment you are in the Musgroves’ drawing room sourrounded by the noises of four children in high Christmas spirits, and the next you are rumbling into Bath in Lady Russel’s coach. Robert Altman couldn’t have done better.
Ha, I’ve just noticed what I said. Twenty-first century and all, I still fear making a major stuff-up. I wish older people wouldn’t try and shield me from disappointment. We do look around, us twenty-somethings, we know plans don’t always work out. Still, art is a major consolation, and so are my Italian books. Macgregor cracked the whip on me and I’ve finished chapter one. I can now say "But Washington, too, is a beautiful and famous city," with barely a stumble, and I’ve just about mastered the definite article.

blog news

2005-07-21T18:02:00.000+02:00

My sister has started a blog. My favourite bits so far are the Croatia posts. She's becoming ludicrously well-travelled. Go read it.

What do you know, I've been blogmarked. Thanks Gaijin, whoever you are.

I am on the same blog provider as Salam Pax's excellent Baghdad Blog. OK, so many thousands of people could claim the same, but I'm excited about it anyway.

heavy weather

2005-07-10T13:12:00.000+02:00

I am thinking mostly of the people I love in London, all of them alright, two of whom were closer to that viciousness than anyone should ever have to be. For the rest of it--well, things have shifted again, this time I'm too close to the dislocation to think or say anything sensible about it. Horrible, horrible. Lily tells me everyone's taking it pretty calmly. Most Londoners remember the IRA, a lot of them remember the blitz. My admiration for London, which from the first was stronger than I had anticipated, has grown as I travelled around. There's an unostentatious toughness in Londoners--I hope it's serving them well now.

A sleepiness has been on me since I got to Paris, which is perhaps a form of resistance. I'm not interested in the gilded monuments and the little daily aggressions of this city. Queue jumpers. Unhelpful bureaucrats. All that energy expended on asserting oneself. I drift through it, detached. I have spent the past few months alone with my will, testing its dimensions, its elasticity and other properties. This vagueness may look like passivity, but I'm not so easily fooled now. There's volition in everything. The weather since I got here has been either very hot or very cold; the teachers in the office flap their shirt fronts or draw their cardies around their shoulders and declare it un peu de trop, as if the weather were committing an error of taste, but I like the extremes; they make my new, ordinary-again life seem like a bit of a game. Without feeling a part of Paris at all, I take my pleasures from it. The white wonder of Sacre Coeur. Shops full of tapestries and butterflies on pins. Couscous restaurants and chanson bars. A brasserie with a mosaic floor, crammed with people reading, writing, eating and, invariably, smoking; a table full of Brits and Americans, slipping effortlessly between English and very good French, answering a mobile phone in German. When I get up to leave I want to say that it's been a pleasure eavesdropping on them.

I've enjoyed my encounters with polyglots almost more than anything else in Europe. I sought them out in hostels, trains carriages and clubs. It's thrilling to see the processes of consciousness laid bare, the resourcefulness of people who are struggling to make meaning. One Portuguese guy I met used the word 'substrate' correctly, but had to say 'the opposite of late' because he'd forgotten the word 'early'. A boy from Quebec who had grown up bilingual (not as common as you'd think--you need to prove that your parents grew up speaking English to be allowed to speak English at school) had completely different personae in French and English. He'd veer from louche mec, all flat vowels and slack lips, to personable college quarterback in the space of a sentence. Everyone teaches you their swear words, giving weird insights into the taboos of different cultures--Quebecois blasphemy revolves around the names of the sacred objects in a church; in Northern Italy it gets right to the point with crude suggestions about the morals of the holy family; in Portugal you praise someone's cooking by telling them their mother is a whore.

Most wonderful of all, people speaking in a second language become poets. I think it's because they have a different stock of metaphors to draw on. The most threadbare cliché can glow with a revelatory light when it moves from one language to another. Expressions from your own language that you long ago stopped hearing are mangled into newness. And a language learner has a limited number of structures that they use over and again, substituting vocabulary as necessary. This produces lovely symmetries of rhythm, and lends itself to aphorisms. I was trying to make a simple statement about Australia while I was at lunch with some French people. I laid the words out in my head, laboriously: "In Australia, white history is short, but white memories are shorter." Not bad, I thought. I wish I were so concise in English. Proud as I was of that sentence, though, I couldn't show it off--by the time I'd shunted the words together, the conversation had changed. I dearly want to be a polyglot, a proper one. I want to live freely in that in-between space of thought.

Serenissima

2005-06-25T13:46:00.000+02:00

I'm back in Venice enjoying the last days of no-permanent-address-ness before I start a summer job in Paris. Two great luxuries of travel are leaving a place, and coming back to a place. You never know how you're going to feel when you come to a new town, but leaving one always has the thrill of a decadent act, like smashing a plate just to hear the sound it makes--all those museums still unseen, views still unphotographed, and you flit off, unconcerned.

Backtracking is a more dangerous pleasure--a luxury, because it is a rejection of the novel--Bad tourist! You've seen this piazza before! But it is hazardous if you loved the place the first time you saw it, because a shift in the light or a rude encounter might make you love it less the second time around. Venice, I had to see twice. It took two visits for me to realise that the happiness I feel here is not just a response to the miraculous beauty--it's the happiness of feeling at home. I know, it's bizarre. It's like strolling into the Emerald City and shopping around for a bedsit and a Casa Mia doormat. Now I have this idea, what will I do with it?

Actually I just came back for a weekend break from the job junt, which wasn't going so great. I threw myself on the mercy of the Zambonis, just hoping for a few kind words and a place on the sofa bed. Their kindness is too big to be contained in words and a change of sheets, though, so they set about calling every language school and university in northern Italy to find me a job. Within a day, the offer came through from Macgregor in Paris--a room in his apartment, and a job at his language school--but I can't help thinking it was the efforts of the Zambonis that generated my luck. Good will is electric.

I'm having trouble with this post, but everything will change again when I fly to Paris tonight, so I'll tell you what I can.

venice
Names. Way of the Hundred Stars. Street of the Dead. The Broad Road of Proverbs. Bridge of the Beautiful Women. There are tiny squares in Venice with names so long you can't even say them in the time it takes to cross from side to side.

Gondoliers between jobs kick a football around a sun-baked piazza. People carry bottles to a marble well and fill them with the good, cold water from deep underground.

Men selling knock-off handbags spread out their wares on bedsheets in the street. A scout yells from the top of a bridge, and they bundle up their stuff, a dozen Louis Vuittons looped over each arm, and scatter. The police arrive a minute later.

A vaporetto glides along a brimming canal in the evening, its passengers reading newspapers or staring blankly out the window, looking like tired people on a bus anywhere.

Ravel's Bolero rings through the backstreets, sounding unlike any man-made music, as if it's emerging from the marble itself. I turn a corner and find three men playing on crystal glasses filled to different levels, and on panpipes made of the glass tubes of fluorescent lights. I have to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from shouting with laughter, and the solemn, big nosed pipe player makes eyes at me.

lagoon
I take a vaporetto out across the lagoon to see the islands. I pass an island full of cypresses, walled all around with apricot brick--the cemetery. Boys set their dinghies against the swell and gun the outboards, sending the prows shooting into the air. A lobster-coloured man driving a freight boat takes his hands off the wheel to yawn and stretch lazily, as if he were in his loungeroom. A yacht sails by, reminding me of Flavio, in his nautical striped tee-shirt, correcting his navigational charts. I love those strange, inverted maps. The land is an undifferentiated yellow, and the sea is a mass of lines and figures indicating depth, markings for buoys and coral reefs and no-fishing zones. The first time I saw one, I had the uncomfortable sensation of seeing Australia, the place which has contained most of my life, as an inconveniently large blob of stuff you can't sail through.

On the island of Murano, water taxi drivers play cards under a tree. The glass-blowers in their workshops stare balefully at the tourists behind the railing, or work on unconcerned, turning out vases and lampshades, flicking their spent cigarettes into the furnace. On Burano, kids fish from the path that runs around the island's edge, and a man in singlet and thongs dabs ineffectually at his boat with a stiff old paintbrush dipped in Yves Klein blue. All the buildings on the island are painted in gelato colours--mirtillo, pistachio, fragola, limone. It should be tooth-achingly naff, but I love it with the unreasonable affection I have for everything in Venice. Burano has its own leaning tower, a bell tower with a spire on top. It looks like someone has stuck a pencil into all that gelato, and it's started to tilt as the stuff melts in the sun. The tower's bells still ring, you can hear them all around the island, you can hear them across the lagoon from the vaporetto that's taking you home.

prego

2005-06-16T11:09:00.000+02:00

lucca
It's raining hard in the weird, affluent little town of Lucca. Two days ago it was all golden Tuscan light, but now it's grey, grey, grey. Everything has softened and become more mysterious.All around the town are dozens of square towers. Most have bells, one has several mature trees growing out of the top. A lot of the buildings have open galleries or pergolas in their upper storeys, so the sky is forever showing through in unexpected places. The paths along the tops of the old city walls, where sentries used to walk, are deserted. When the rain stops, and leaves behind that shadowless, good-for-nothing glare, the joggers will come out in their two-piece lycra to trot up and down and perform crunching manoevres that pleat up their flat, brown tummies.

Yesterday I stepped into a dark little joint called Super Bar to escape a lightning storm. In my fourth new language since I started this trip I tried to order an apple turnover. Pomodoro? Pomme? Ok, I said. Adam. Eva. I picked a forbidden fruit off an invisible tree, the proprietress laughed, and I learnt a new word: mele. It's a small but real grief to have left France and, with it, the French language. All that hard work, the getting to love the sound of it and the expressions, and now I have to start all over again. Italian crowds into my mind, demanding attention and constant use, and already French feels like a game I devised myself to fill a quiet afternoon--does anyone really make those sounds? It's sad, but as David the Canadian set-builder said to me, C'est la vizzle, yo.

I went with Dave to see an exhibition showing reproductions of Leonardo Da Vinci's codices, alongside full-size or scale-model reproductions of the designs. There were lots of genuinely nasty weapons of war--I hadn't realised they were such a big part of his corpus, but then he fought with the Medicis in a few campaigns. There was also a perfectly familiar-looking bicycle, various flying machine prototypes, and ingenious cog systems for converting perpetual motion into alternating motion or lifting heavy weights without danger of dropping them. It was a thrill to see the scribbled designs in Leonardo's own hand, and then to turn a handle and see the machine in action. I wish you could've seen it too.

There is a music festival in town, and the high-ceilinged hostel resounds with the practice sessions of opera singers and clarinetists. It's not always easy to fall asleep in a dormitory--one cannot pretend that sleep is a happy accident, incidental to repose, when in a bland, cramped space dedicated to the impersonal work of sleep-getting. One night I preferred to fall asleep on a couch in the common room, listening to a solo violin on a crying jag. Oh, alas, alas, it sang, and it made me calm.

i'm getting used to this life
Everything in one bag, little compartments for jewellery, for pills, tissues in pocket for paper-deprived loos, laundromats. The summer is coming, and in every train carriage a hundred swaying straps hang down from the bags stowed in the overhead racks, making a kelp forest. We swim through it lazily, the other travellers and me, dreaming our MP3, travel journal dreams, toward our various destinations.

politics
Everywhere I've been, I've arrived at a time of an important national decision. It's been almost too neat, as if I were on a package tour of 21st century European politics. In London, it was the election. The conservatives were running a Pauline Hanson-style billboard campaign. Their slogan was Are you thinking what we're thinking? and it accompanied earnest 'hand-written' posters saying things like, Isn't it about time we put some limits on immigration? They weren't taken too seriously. Blair won, despite a pretty complacent campaign, and despite fears that protest votes against Blair's involvement in the WMD ballyhoo would split the left. Billy Brag wrote an open letter in the Guardian urging people not to do a Gore, and it seems to have worked.

In France, they voted against accepting the EU constitution. The document they were being asked to ratify was either 300 or 3000 pages long, I can't remember which, and it was full of ambiguities. The French decided that the increased clout of joining their economy more closely to the EU wasn't worth the loss of autonomy, and soon afterward the Dutch decided the same, and it looks like we might have to go back to changing our money every time we cross a border, and I'll have to get a work visa just like every other bugger.

In Italy they just had a referendum about 'assisted procreation', and as it involved tinkering with embryos the Catholic Church asked people to boycott the vote. Not even to vote no, but to boycott it entirely. They didn't make a quorum: so much for that. And in Lucca, they are waging their own little war against cars. Placards saying Basta traffica! and Cars kill! are propped in ground floor windows all over town. I can see why. One nearly gets run over here twenty times a day. France has tiny, narrow streets just like Italy does--the difference is, people aren't forever trying to force their cars through them, pedestrians be damned. Lucca doesn't need fewer cars, it needs more footpaths.

there were no cars in venice
Or motor scooters, or ambulances, or garbage trucks. Too many bridges to allow for anything on wheels. Try to imagine the quiet, the loveliness of that. My strongest impression of Venice--I want to write about it, I have to start somewhere--was its miraculous lack of ugliness. No cars. No advertising. Hardly any logos. Only old buildings. Around the edges of the lagoon cluster a chemical plant, an airport, sundry modern horrors. But Venice looks inwards, sees only itself, its own beauty. Venice is entranced with itself, and I was happy to be complicit in that trance.

When I was a kid, I used to be devastated by ugliness. Living in trim suburbs, where all the houses babble their own versions of the Australian dream to each other, I was surrounded by it. Painted concrete Aborigines in place of garden gnomes, extraneous finials, leadlighting sold by the metre, tire swans. Seeing it all from the backseat car window on the way to netball practice or German class or physical culture, it used to turn my brain to oatmeal. When you're a kid, your environment seeps into you, you think it is you. What saved me from all that was discovering the concept of kitsch. In high school art class I saw for the first time the paintings of Geoffrey Smart, David Hockney, Howard Arkley. That it was possible to relish this concensus ugliness from an ironic distance! That was a very liberating idea. Having read Kundera on kitsch, I see that concensus is the key--this homogenous bad taste is a sort of innoculation against the greater terrors that come from a lack of homogeneity. Better to have a speed boat like your neighbour has, better to be in agreement about the small things, to reinforce your agreement about the big things.

From that moment I found myself running toward the little uglinesses around me, revelling in them. They were moving, because I could see them as expressions of longing and anxiety. They were no longer toxic, but an odd pleasure--like Japanese puffer fish that's had its poisonous innards expertly filleted away. And yet, and yet--to be in a place where such semantic games aren't ever necessary, to be where beauty is valued and defended, where everything is pleasing to the eye and ear--it was a luxury I could've gotten dangerously attached to, if time had permitted.

italia

2005-06-12T12:12:00.000+02:00

service

Italian service takes a bit of getting used to, especially after the meticulous attention you get in France. You can try in vain to attract their attention while they continue a conversation, argument or joke with a co-worker, and when they finally do address you, they make you feel like an inconvenience. But within a minute or two they're calling you cara and disappearing out the back to find you a cheaper brand of pasta than the one you got from the shelf. It has a charm of its own, but Cinque Terre is a tourist area, and it drives the tourists crazy. In the black corner, masses and masses of hungry, internet-craving, toilet-needing Americans and Germans. In the red corner, the harrassed locals who serve them. The tourists always forget to say buongiorno before they ask for something, and the locals can take fifteen minutes to produce the bill at the end of a meal. You can see the two sides shaping up to each other, making faces and snarling inaudible asides. But as in some inter-tribal battle ritual designed to diffuse aggression, just when you think someone's going to draw blood there is an exchange of balls of gelato and wedges of pizza for fluttering euro bills, and each side retreats, pacified.

Really, it's all Americans and Germans here. Even the signs are in Italian, English and German. Do you think all the pretty places of the world get together and divvy up the tourists by nationality? 'You can have the French. They're so whiny.' 'OK, but you take the Americans. They want everything yesterday.' 'Fine, we could do with the tips.' 'Right. Who wants the Australians?' 'Ooh, exotic.' 'Yeah, they're slobs, though, and they don't buy souvenirs.' 'That's ok, we've got the Japanese for that.'

ageing
The number of grey hairs on my head has tripled or quadrupled in the past two months. I think I'm going to get those dramatic white streaks that sweep back from behind each ear, like an opera singer or the undead vamp from an Ed Wood movie. In a gelato shop in Florence, the waiter called me bella ragazza. Then he changed his mind: bella donna. I had to object. Non sonno donna! Sono ragazza. Ragazza! The gelato man shook his head, with the serenity of those who've formed their conclusions and are sticking to them. Maledetta to that.

pace
The word is written on colourful flags that hang from balconies all over Italy. They were put up at the start of the second Iraq war. Now they are faded and tatty.

A guy from Serbia describes the divisions and sub-divisions of territory in the Balkans since WW2. I try to be attentive, as I know it's not often I'll hear the story from this point of view, but somewhere around the mid-1980s I excuse myself, cross-eyed with trying to assimilate so many horrible and ridiculous things.

Ido from Israel tells me he cannot travel around the Mediterranean unless he manages to get an EU passport, because so many places would turn him away or just make too much trouble.

A kid from Maryland who has 'studied' in Milan for six months without picking up any Italian speculates that the Arab guys who hang around his local kebab stand could well be terrorists.

In the streets of Italy the bells burble around you until they pick you up and carry you along. Little shrines built into cliffs and walls and bridges bear fresh flowers. At a bar overlooking the Ligurian sea, kestrels draw arcs and a distant yellow umbrella flutters around the edges like a sea cucumber. All of this existing in the same world. I take back what I said about the unsatisfactory nature of pleasure-seeking. It's a privilege and it's an art--the art of savouring the beautiful, in the face of ugly facts.

the old masters

I wasn't prepared for the depth of the colours, the expressiveness of the faces. A thousand Marys, prim, joyous, sad. The infant Jesuses, watchful, benificent, imbecilic. The shadowy Josephs, the Magdalenes hot and defiant even in their piety, and the young John Baptists, with their crucifixes of reeds, who always seem to know what's coming. The Holy Family themselves seem to have jumped outside of time. They're not the naive young family with all their troubles still to come, but already the celebrities that history will make of them. In some paintings their smiles are almost smug, like the Beckhams receiving the media. They are unamazed that royalty has travelled across the world to see them. The child Christ hardly ever has a child's face.

It makes me worry to think of them trapped in that eternal return, their pain always behind them, always ahead of them. A ruthless circularity like the logic that needs Judas and Pilate to play their parts, but condemns them for it all the same. I keep coming back to Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola, which is an exception to my rule. From a distance the mother and child look as imperturbable as all their other selves, but up close you can see them flinch a little, and hold each other tighter. Jesus looks out of the frame to the right, the direction of the future. Well, there's nothing to be done.

this is how I travel
Missions: I give myself a mission in every town, like finding a second-hand English bookshop. I am lifted on the wings of purpose out of the gelato-slurping fanny-packing throngs into backstreets where half the shutters are closed for a long lunch, and forty-year-olds in Adidas try to interest me in weed, and I have many diverting conversationoids like,
'No, this is a women's bookshop. Women. (hands describe an hourglass in the air.) JD Salinger is a man.'
'JD Salinger, yes?'
'No, women.' (again with the hands)

I get lost: hobgoblin, trickster Florence, blocking my views and scuttling my bearings with high walls on winding back roads. I met a man, old, German, who was also lost. He sweated and leaned on a cane, looking for his tour bus.
'Are you alright?'
'Ehrr.. no.'
He wouldn't turn back with me, or look at my map. He was mock-turtle sad. I hope he found his bus.

I make mistakes: like missing my hostel curfew and accepting an offer to take the spare bed in a friendly American guy's hotel room. He's as gentlemanly as he seems, and I pass a quiet enough night, after handing over fifty euros to the sneaky concierge who intercepts us at reception. Funny--I'm sure he said 'forty' until he realised I had nowhere else to go.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good. Can't ask more than that.

I have a lot of luck, mostly good
It deserves a stronger word than that. I'll write it in Italian, so it doesn't sound so Louise Hay.

I miei miracoli:
Just when I am getting lonely, Matt Douglas blows into Barcelona from hot climates, bringing news of cities full of dust and orange trees and ancient Moorish buildings so delicate you mustn't even brush against the walls. Teaching me, through example, how to be a good traveller. Being patient and optimistic and curious. Laughing at my jokes.

Just when I am sick of the road, I meet the Zamboni family. They ensconce me in their beachhouse on the Adriatic and feed me risotto and tiramisu. And son Flavio, the yachtie, shows me and Matt D around his luscious, improbable Invisible City, which I can't write about because I loved it too too much for eloquence. A concert of Vivaldi in a church by a canal, the hard sun striking sparks off the crenelations of San Marco. That's the best I can do. He helps us find the best local bars, and defends us fiercely against the rip-off merchants of Venice. Blessings on your next voyage, Fla.

Just when my eyes are hollowed out with looking, I find a painting in the Palazzo Pitti by Giovanni da San Giovanni, of Saint Catherine wedding the infant Jesus. Mary dandles him on her knee and looks on encouragingly. It has the richness and strange calm of amazing events that come to you in dreams. It's like all the best dreams I ever had, and everything is new again.

All this luck, this reaching out! I light candles at the little shrines, try to remember to curtsy and cross properly, linger over books of ex voto paintings. I stand by the word I've chosen, but some people might prefer a more secular one. Flavio sees the word serendipity on a sign and asks what it means. Well, I say, to give you some examples...

playing catch-ups

2005-06-06T18:13:00.000+02:00

I'm in Bologna today. I've covered a bit of territory since I last wrote, so this post will be south of France, and the next one will be Venice, and hopefully somewhere in central Italy I'll be writing about the place I'm actually in.

From Barcelona I went back to the south coast of France to meet up with Macgregor and his partner Anton, who were down from Paris for a few days. We met up in the space-age medieval town of Montpellier. Trams and electric mini-buses zoomed hushly around the town centre. The few cars allowed for residents' use got in and out thanks to remote-operated retractable bollards set into the cobblestones. We were just there to eat and drink and ogle, really. Montpellier's a student town, but not as we know it--there was nobody sharing jugs of warm beer or customising their Cure t-shirts in scruffy cellar bars--all the casually coiffed, tanned young things went gliding back and forth between little tables under big umbrellas, carrying aperitifs and violin cases.

The boys shouted me lots of delicious local food, lots of drinks with heart-shaped swizzle sticks in, and sundry other good things. Thankyou Anton and Macgregor! To recover from our debaucheries we ambled around the medieval university gardens for a few hours. Montpellier's arguing with Genoa as to who has the oldest gardens in Europe, apparently. There were medicinal herb beds and frogs in the ponds and a small observatory. Then we had more drinks with swizzle sticks.

I had thought I'd go straight from there to Venice, where I was due to meet up again with Barcelona Matt. I discovered it would take about 24 hours on the train, rather than the seven or eight I'd anticipated. Moreover, for obscure bureaucratic reasons I wasn't allowed to book a couchette. I was supposed to get on the night train and ask the conductor if there were any beds left. Umm, no. So I stopped for a couple of days at the Cote d'Azur. It turns out these movie stars and media magnates are really onto something--it's gorgeous. It was soothing to be by the sea after so long away from it. Yes, there are pebbles instead of sand at Nice, there are cute little ripples instead of breakers, and there are odd patches of beach cordoned off and planted with corn-straight rows of umbrellas and deck chairs, to rent by the day or for the season or gratis to hotel guests. But there are also familiar things. Kids leaping, writhing piscine in the air, off the ends of piers. Fishing rods by the water's edge, half-attended by men holding beers. People in groups, with guitars and dogs, or alone and peaceful, with books or cigarettes or their thoughts for company. Travelling alone one doesn't often find other solitary people except at beaches and parks. A bit of Nature seems to grant some sort of reprieve from socialising.

I day-tripped to Cannes, which was worth it for the train ride. The road and train tracks are seperated from the sea by a thin strip of sand, and I saw sun bathers dotted along it in ones and twos, flashing past the window like a code I couldn't read. The town itself was a bit manic--the little pockets of beach not claimed by the umbrellas of the five-star hotel enclosures were shared between a few pleb bathers and some parked bulldozers. Europe seems to be almost entirely under construction--whether this is in preparation for High Season or a constant thing, I don't know, but those bulldozers in the sand, with their prim little yellow and black no-entry skirts, were a first for me. So I abandoned the Cannes script, sat in a park next to a billboard-sized photograph of Sharon Stone in diamonds, and tried to toast my pastey legs while reading a book. It was short stories by someone whose name I can't remember--I abandoned the book in Nice--and he had some nice Obs on Human Condition stuff going on, but he used that leaves-in-wind-look-like-shoal-of-fish simile, which was disappointing. And he used the word 'rebarbative' too often.

I also had a moment with one of those eerie self-cleaning toilets. I put in my forty cents and all that, but I freaked out at the hydraulic airlock noise the door made as it was closing, and jumped out again. I had to hold it in all afternoon because people kept directing me back to the hateful things and I couldn't say 'I don't want to drown in disinfectant' in French. Life really does revolve around toilet breaks and clean clothes when you backpack, but I'll spare you the anecdotes.

Oh, oh, oh! I nearly forgot the most amazing place I saw in France. I had to stop over in Marseille for a couple of hours on my way to Nice. I stepped out of the station, which is on a hill looking over the town, and was hit by a blast of excitement and malice I've not met since London. Maybe moreso. Even before the first smelly crazy person asked me for money or the meaning of life--and you can be asked many times in two hours--I could feel the hot, rank breath of the place on my neck. It's very beautiful. Rocky red hills all around, and in the hollow in between, a huge grid of grime-blackened, battered city. I made a little sortie but, mapless and on a time limit, I could only go so far as I could safely backtrack. My backtracking plans were scuttled by a man--yes, a smelly one--who slipped his arm around my waist and tried to steer me toward a group of sketchy characters. Finally, a chance to use my battle French! Mais quest-ce tu veux? Degage! Which worked fine, but then I couldn't walk past him again, so I beat it back to the station by the simplest alternative route I could find. But the place really appealed to me. I'd like to come back and explore it properly, perhaps with a couple of sane locals and/or a bodyguard. It was just so alive, it made the rest of France look like a theme park. Is that why I liked it so much?

Have to catch my train to Florence, I'll tell you about Venice soon.

cinque terre

2005-05-30T12:42:00.000+02:00

I know Jenny Fitz went there, I don't know if any of the rest of you did. If you want to be my travel guides, send me a comment.

duende

2005-05-24T20:11:00.000+02:00

This entry is now a few days old! I told myself I'd give it a proper edit and never did. Here it is, rough as guts and twice as shiny.

Matt Douglas is here. I took him back to that vegetarian organic restaurant, and he too swooned at the muchos vegetal goodness. And this time there was chocolate mousse. Matt speaks and reads a little Spanish, quite enough to get by. It makes such a difference. I am by turns excited and annoyed by the fact that here I'm surrounded by not one but two languages I don't understand. I am probably mixing up Catalan and Castillian every time I try to produce a sentence. I haven't said anything yet that doesn't end in por favor, being still firmly in phrase book territory.

Yesterday when I was looking for La Pedrera, a Gaudi apartment block, I took a wrong turn on one of those endless avenues. At the corner I turned at, there was a confectioners that sold sugar figurines for the tops of cakes. Girls in pinafores, boys in football outfits, couples holding flowers. There was also a phone booth, and a woman crouched at its foot. She looked at me with stricken eyes and wailed and wailed a constant, musical lament. I don't know what language she was speaking, but it was perhaps hardly speaking and hardly language. Or a language pared back to the most basic sounds of grief. I gave her a euro, more out of shock than anything else, which she clamped in her fist without pausing for breath.

A few doors down I realised I'd made a wrong turn and had to backtrack. I crossed the street so I wouldn't have to pass the wailing woman, and headed back the other way. On the next corner, though, I found the strangest thing. The same confectioner's shop, with the same figurines, the same phone booth, and again the wailing woman. I looked back at the opposite corner in confusion. There was the first shop, the first phone booth. I looked closer at the woman now in front of me. Her wail sounded the same but her face was different. Weird. Looking-glass land weird. Maybe a city in this curvaceous, organic country has to buck against these long, straight avenues. You can rake out a straight line, but you can't stop the spirals and folds, the repetitions like a tile border on a facade.

I've enjoyed the Gaudi buildings I've seen. Having seen photos and taken a quick look around his Park Güell, I guess I thought of him as a decorative artist who embellished 'normal' buildings with whimsical mosaics. After visiting La Pedrera and the museum inside it, I see that his vision is not confined to the surface, but goes right through to the bones of the building. He made ingenious light wells to channel the sun into every corner of a place. He needed an excellent understanding of structural forces, to allow him to remove as many walls as possible and open up a space. Every stone in the unfinished Sagrada Familia church, has to be cut by hand, because most of them are not cubic in form, but shapes complicated enough to hold up the weight of a cathedral while perfectly resembling a graceful tree.

La Sagrada Familia is the most joyful church I've ever been into--and being a backpacker in Europe, I find I've been into a lot (from Barthes' Mythologies: "Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches"). Other great churches seem sublime insofar as they represent the human mind's attempt to convey the greatness of God. But La Sagrada Familia glorifies God's creation, and expresses the worshipper's joy that God created all this in the first place. It's a reaching upward of gratitude, rather than a bending down of God's abstract greatness. If that makes sense. Knowing next to nothing about either architecture or Christianity, let alone Christian architecture, I'll just chuck my two cents in.

Postscript: Matt left before me, so I spent my last night in Barcelona with two American girls who had smoked a lot of hash so their sentences took a while to come out but they were very friendly. We went to a club in the Barri Gotic looking for acid jazz, but for some reason it was one of those traditional Spanish bands instead, with the blarey trumpet and the flamenco guitar and all that. Lovely! Then the guy on trumpet said "Blah blah blah blah Yugoslavia blah" and the band launched into the music from Kusturica's Underground. Why not? I'm on the Cote d'Azur now, but I'll tell you about that later, I'm starving.

roses and rabbit eyes

2005-05-22T22:53:00.000+02:00

I went looking for a vegetarian restaurant today, and found a street market where every stall sold red roses. They were jammed by their dozens into plastic buckets and trampled in the gutters, petals everywhere. Next to the square was a church and a queue of people--hundreds of people--waiting to go in. Most of them had bunches of roses in their hands. A man in the queue told me that it was a special church holiday today, and people were waiting to leave offerings of roses and red candles and to pray for impossible things.
'Milagros?'
'That's it.'
I wished him good luck.

I found the restaurant and had a four course organic bonanza. Having moved from a country where butter is considered a sandwich ingredient in its own right to a place where breakfast is traditionally deep-fried, I could have wept with gratitude. This afternoon I went to perhaps the most beautiful park I've ever seen--Parc Montjuïc. It´s a series of wild, woody gardens, cut across by elegant paths and terraces. It´s full of beautiful museums and cascading fountains that drop hundreds of feet down the hillside, and you can see across Barcelona to the sea. I first saw Barcelona from Gaudi's Parc Gruell yesterday. It was startling to see it from above after walking in the streets. It´s like two different cities. At street level if feels--I want to say it feels human. Human-scale, and dedicated to pleasure. I had imagined that Gaudi was an anomoly--a random stroke of genius that had been visited on the city, and tolerated or adored depending on taste. But the fleshy curves and coloured ornament on his buildings feel like a natural extension of the endemic style of the place. London's gilded spires ring like a cash register. Barcelona's buildings, with their continental garlands and iron work and their mystical islamic geometry, hum mysteriously. But from above, the city is sprawling and tatty. Like somebody raked a big, neat grid through a rubbish heap. Sagrada Familia and other grand buildings standing up out of it like thrown-away toys. It's quite bizarre.

I spent my first two nights in a pensión on a gorgeous palm-treed square, which rather made me feel like everyone was having more fun than me. No hostels I called had rooms, and a pensión, especially one with no common area, is no place to meet people. Last night I was feeling a bit lonely in my room, and I could hear the party in the street. Tonight I've moved to a nice little hostel. It's right near the cathedral, and on Saturday I saw a crowd of people gather there to do traditional Catalunyan circle dancing--lovely! Being in a hostel is a more sociable arrangement. And, to my surprise, I found that Matt Douglas has booked the same place for tonight. Yay Matt! We are going to have some serious fun. I think I'll settle down somewhere and take a job soon. I don't know about this solo travelling business. I see amazing things, but I'm always aware of how much more fun it would be if I were here with people I cared about. Or at least if it were a well-earned break at the end of a working week. What do you know? Pursuing no goal but your own pleasure day in and day out starts to get strangely unsatisfying. Don't let me sound complainy, though. I'm doing fine, it's just that I've been doing this for a while now and I suppose I'm taking stock of things, wondering if I'm doing what I want to be doing with this time, which is full of the lushness and the responsibility of being free. I had two nice phone calls today, with Matthew and Luke (the fabulous and entirely handsome fashion designer who has now been officially mentioned in this blog, hi Luke).

Oh, there's a wonderful covered market just off La Rambla where I'm staying. Olive oil shops, stall after stall of perfect fruit, acres of cheeses, whole rabbit carcasses, flayed and trussed, but with their eyes still in. I've never seen such a temple to gustation. This hostel has a kitchen. I'm going to town.

bring it on

2005-05-19T20:16:00.000+02:00

Oh, the summer, the summer! Finally, at the tail-end of May, some Contiki weather: 18° to 30° and frisky as hell. All my little nerve endings are waking up again, carrying my self back out to the skin, where I can connect with the world properly. I took a rent-a-Peugeot out to the medieval fortified town at Carcasonne today. All around, mediterranean hills like--ok, not like white elephants--but like something alive and sleeping, wrinkled and muscled and mangey. And beyond that, the iceberg Pyrenees, half-unreal. The medieval town was so sun-struck and lazy that I could almost have wished that I lived in the moyen age--until I visited the museum of torture. An unforgettable experience. Believe me, I've been trying all afternoon. But, wow, today felt like a total holiday. I thought about all the kids in school who would rather have been strolling around a castle seeing where they used to shoot the arrows from and where they poured the oil. When I was eight I thought that adulthood would mean being able to go where I pleased on sunny days, hire cars and eat ice-cream. I felt my eight-year-old self looking out of my eyes and going, whaddaya know, it's true! (I'd of course like to shelter my little self from details like the way a career doesn't automatically materialise at the age of 22, and boring things like telephone bills and rent--but if she did find out, she'd probably say, so what? At least you're not sitting around in a damn quadrangle every day eating vegemite sandwiches and wondering what a stimulating conversation feels like).

What else? Well I walked around Narbonne a little more, enjoying all the details in the buildings here, where France starts phasing into Iberia. Lacework balconies jutting from walls painted pink and yellow and white, and everywhere those charming hacienda half-pipe tiles. Right, I just used the word charming: I have officially lost the plot, and need to go and have a cup of tea and a lie down and wait for these fits of bourgeois travel-lit rapture to die down. Barcelona tomorrow. Wish me luck.

so,qnystuff

2005-05-18T14:24:00.000+02:00

I spent my last night in Paris at an exquisite open mic night in a hole in the ground. The place oughtn’t to have held fifty people but somehow it did. There was a compact, intense woman from New York playing flamenco ukulele, and a band that was sort-of Velvet Underground does Queen (and who wouldn’t pay to see that?). They even had their own Nico, with big flat vowels and one of those bowlcut-mullet hybrid dos that all the cool kids are wearing these days. There was also a French guy who couldn’t speak a sentence of English but who managed a creditable cover of Hotel Yorba.

Paris was crabby and out of sorts the day I left. The story, as best I can make it out, is: Parisians all leave Paris for the month of August. While they were away last summer, a massive heatwave killed a lot of neglected old people, and they weren’t discovered for weeks because everyone except the neglected old people was in St Tropez. So the government decided they needed lots of funds to help lonely old people, and planned to generate these funds by asking people to give up one of their scheduled public holidays. That is, everyone would work that day; and donate their pay to the aged. Some French people are behind the plan, but many of them are unimpressed—in a display of spectacular bad taste, one group of concerned citizens wrote to the UN claiming it was forced labour and a breach of the Humqn Rights convention. Anyway, Monday was the day in question, and nobody knew if they were on holiday or not, and shops were unexpectedly open or shut, or half-open and half-shut—at the post office a woman stood behind the couter all day telling people she couldn’t serve them. Bon. I bought a Bulgakov novella from Shakespeare’s, met Mac for a coffee and got the hell out of town.

The train journey crossed most of France and was luscious of course. The best bit was a strange, spindly mountain range about half way down, which I can’t identify on my map. An old student of mine met me at the train station in Narbonne. I used to tutor her in Business English, if you can imagine. In two years of high school commerce I never once balanced a budget, and I passed torts at uni with 51%, so we did a lot of designing interiors for department stores and ‘networking’ conversation skills. I’ve seen a little of Narbonne these last two days. There’s a gargoyle-riddled gothic cathedral and a pretty canal with L’Atalante barges. There’s also more bad architecture than I saw in the big cities, but it’s festively bad, in the way of small towns in warm places. It looks like a composite of a chi-chi watercolour of Languedoc and a Greetings from Sunny Kyama postcard. In short: adorable.

In other news, I got a hep shot for free. The doctor turned the syringe over in his hands as if he’d never seen one before, read the instruction leaflet at pensive length, and then drove the needle home. When I went to pay, he found my galaxy of credit and debit cards unacceptable and refused to let me go and withdraw cash. ‘C’est un cadeau,’ he said, and settled for a handshake.

I’ll have more photos up soon, and hopefully I’ll find a normal keyboard. Sorry if this entry doesn’t scan for shit; I know I shouldn’t let my writing implements get the better of me, but I’d rather go ten rounds with a mugwamp than deql zith this biwqrre qnd unfqtho,qble keyboqrd; see zhqt I hqve to put up zith?

new york herald tribune

2005-05-15T18:58:00.000+02:00

Today was my last day in Paris. I bought a Herald Tribune, lit a candle at the grave of Jean Seberg, crossed the Champs-Elysées and went to the Musée Rodin. Just as Bath makes you wonder how anybody could draw attention to a spinster aunt's straitened circumstances at the tea table, Rodin makes you wonder how anybody restrains themselves from ripping their duds off and pashing the nearest gorgeous creature. All of Rodin's characters writhe in the extremes of human emotion--the last moments before their execution, the first act of an epic erotic union, the anticipation of eternal punishment. It's a stirring vision of humanity, but it already feels out of reach. The nouvelle vague, with its miscommunications, broken attempts at intimacy and sense of helplessness in the face of fate--c'est dégueulasse, maybe, but it feels more like home. That's why I went to visit Jean, I suppose. I didn't have time for Sartre and de Beauvoir, but I did eat at their old hang-out, Le Deux Magots, the other day. The wait staff weren't exuding any unctuous bad faith while I was there--they were expressing their conard natures as sincerely as one could wish. Much nicer are the proprietors of my local laverie and internet café. They act tough, but they're big softies really.

Tonight I'm going to a creperie with Macgregor, and an open mic night of some sort with his housemate. Coming back to the Marais in the afternoons is starting to feel like a home-coming. A nice thing to experience before you leave a place. Tomorrow I'll be in Narbonne, in the south. I'll keep you posted.

fluctuat nec mergitur

2005-05-14T17:42:00.000+02:00

Je suis content maintenant, donc je peux faire mon blog. Everyone is forever getting it on in this city. It really is all passionate embraces on bridges and street corners and in crowded restaurants and in the queue at the ticket office for long-distance trains. The museums offer no escape--even the statues are in eternal pash-offs. It's not a good place to be love-lorn. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed myself, especially the last couple of days.

These are some of the things I've seen: the coffin of Paris' patron, Sainte Genevieve, in a glass case into which someone had insinuated a little hand-written note (all I could decipher of it was donner-moi, which is the way of it for dead saints, I guess) and a seperate little casket for her finger--under what circumstances it was detached, I don't know. Another lobster, at the Musée Picasso, in the hand of a little boy in a painting. Many streets of gorgeous shops. All the waifs of Shakespeare's Books returning like a flock of sparrows to the shop at a quarter to midnight in a flurry of flirtation, socialist blague and tweed coats. One million ads for creme minceur--apparently a normal woman rubs this gunk into her thighs and becomes sixteen, stick-thin and decidedly photoshopped. Beaucoup de places that Hemingway lived, wrote, drank and inspected F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis. The apartment where Joyce edited Ulysses (this required some satisfying naughtiness, ducking into a key-operated gate just behind a resident, only to spend some anxious minutes working out how to get out again). Chateau de Fontainbleau, where Napoleon abdicated and where I was extravagantly sad in the garden watching all the promenading couples--it was all very Last Year at Marienbad. Many nice bars. A fantastic bookfair of small publishers, with gems like famous letters of history printed looseleaf and sold seperately in envelopes and little books of quirky cartoons--I was admiring one book, an illustration of Sinbad's adventures without any text, and the girl behind the counter told me the artist was the guy sitting at the bar. And, randomly enough, many people who look like Nick Tapper or Tegan Bennett. Are you two following me around?

I've met lots of nice people at the Mije hostel. My favourite is the hilarious Brazilian girl I walked around with this morning. She spoke no English, only Portuguese and French, and given that I can still enquire after a hairdryer by saying "Is there a hot wind for the horse inside this eggplant?" you can imagine the time we had. Still, we compared the women of Switzerland, France, Australia and Brazil, decided that the French need less creme minceur and more raw food in their diet, bought umbrellas, fruit and phone cards while she complained about her lazy friends in Paris who wouldn't collect her in their cars, and I bragged about mon chou, le plus résolu et intelligent metteur en scene. Not a bad effort.

Like everything in Paris, this post is costing me a big shiny stack of euros, so I'll go soon. Keep posting comments, you guys are great. I had a funny experience while I was backpack-pruning this morning. You know that scene at the end of Labyrinth where all the puppets turn up in Sarah's bedroom mirror and then they all have a little reunion? I hope you do. Anyway, it was like all of your faces flashed through my mind's eye in a slideshow of appreciation. I wasn't even homesick or anything. I leave for the south of France on Monday, where an ex-student of mine is full-on organising a week of amusement for me. I hope to meet up with Matt Douglas (of MHS fame) in Spain after that. I have a mobile number for France now: 0675 313 012.

Cést tout pour ce moment. Get back to work.

non, je ne comprendre rien--and I can't spell either

2005-05-08T22:34:00.000+02:00

Oh, man, I live for my blog comments! Poets all, my lovely buddies. Some announcements:
1) Love youse all
2) My new email is (removed for privacy reasons, sorry. -ed.) but I'll keep checking the old 'un for a while yet
3) My UK mobile doesn't work here; I am sans mobile for now (that was French, right there)

And now I'm in Paris. I am staying at a lovely hostel called Mije in the Marais district. I emerged from the metro onto an oversized traffic island supporting a carousel, some trees with twittering birds and a magazine stand. I bought gum and asked the shop guy Est-ce que je peux prendre un taxi ici? and was very proud of myself. He replied, blah blah blagh emphatic gestures something something beaucoup, which neatly demonstrated the limitations of my French, and then I turned around and saw the taxi stand.

The cab driver was very angry because he didn’t know the street I wanted to go to, and then he yelled a lot through his window at another cab driver, including many improper suggestions and cuss words I was pleased to recognize, while I found the street in his street directory (presumably he keeps one around for ornamental value, or good luck). Then he was very angry again because the street was ten or fifteen metres away, but subsided into crabby magnanimity after a few repetitions of je suis desolee, vraiment, which probably isn’t even a sentence. It was a tremendously enlivening introduction to Paris. Then Macgregor, my Sydney expat mate, cooked me a yummy omelette and took me to see on a surprise mission—the best possible thing for one’s first night in a city—to see the Eiffel Tower at night. It really was romantic and gorgeous and, you know, big. It was decorated with huge candles, for the feast of the ascension, or the assumption, or whatever it was yesterday. I thought it looked like a glamorous oil rig—or, as Mac put it, “Oilrig: the musical”.

Yesterday I walked around with a girl from Boston called Lisa, who is also twenty-five and traveling alone. We went to Shakespeare’s books but got there too early, so instead ogled the façade of Notre Dame and wondered about the lobster that was among the religious symbols carved into the left hand door frame. Theologians? What’s with that? First credible answer wins an all I got was this lousy t-shirt t-shirt. Then we walked to Montmartre and ate quiche and patted people’s dogs and asked directions a lot. Then we found Sacre Coeur, as one does if one walks around in Montmartre, and it was beautiful. The mosaics inside are like none I’ve ever seen, in books or anywhere. I don’t know anything about Sacre Coeur, but I gather it was built quite recently, or at least the mosaics were done recently—late nineteenth, I think. They were so luscious and expressive. My favourite was the dome above the altar. It has a big Jesus, blessing with arms outstretched a crowd of saints and other figures. He curves to fit the inside of the dome, and with his calm, blissed-out face and his forward tilt, he looks ready to launch into some crowd-surfing

among the congregation—and he resembles you a bit too, Nick.

I’m not sure what I’m going to see in Paris. I don’t feel very attracted to the art museums right now. I like Kerry’s suggestion of going to see where Colette lived—and, why not, Hemingway and Miller and Nin and Pound and Eliot and so on. And I might go and see the street where Modigliani used to live, which is also the street where Godard shot the last scene of A bout de soufflé.

Hello to all you beautiful Londoners, including the ones who didn’t make it into the blog. Thanks for being troupers and farewelling me on a school night. I’ll be back to visit. I know I’ll meet lots of nice people in my travels, but they won’t be you.

Had a fantastic last week in England. Pete and Lily played their first “real” gig, if you don’t count the open mic where they were also great. The open mic was held in the upstairs room of a pub, while Chelsea played Liverpool on the big TVs downstairs. Every now and then a sulky poet would be interrupted halfway through some tortured jeremiad with bird-of-prey metaphors, as the crowd below rumbled out that most soccer of sounds—the noises of building anticipation, and then the collective groan as the ball misses the goal. Anyway, the proper gig was in a red room underground in Islington, and they played wonderfully, and I had to drink a lot to calm their nerves. Even after they’d finished. I also went to see The Lion King with my sister Jenn, to celebrate her birthday. It was exotic, dazzling and spectacular, in the fullest Barthesian sense. The puppetty costumey things were cool.

And of course I went to Bath, and claimed I’d write about it later. Well—the symmetry of it defied my sketching hand. I can do jumbles of chimney pots and listing Jacobean hovels with humorous signs out the front, but those perfect, sweeping crescents slid out of my grip. I went to a museum at the end of the Royal Crescent, which was a fully restored Georgian interior. As with the exteriors of such buildings, every line was placed in such a way that I couldn’t imagine it being put anywhere else. Words like “gracious” and “dignified” arise inevitably in the mind. I think I understood Plato’s ideal forms better in Bath than ever before. And as a writer’s pilgrimage it was surprising un-naff. It was illuminating to see the spaces that Jane Austen’s characters poured tea in, and promenaded and danced and embroidered in. It seems utterly scandalous that anyone could be surrounded by such an aesthetic of calm restraint and still behave like a Mr Wickham or a Mrs Elton.

Lasting memories of London: the clocks chiming out their truncated tunes on the quarter hours, like an absent-minded friends who forgets to finish their sentences; public toilets with a few gold sequins on the floor and ashtrays fixed to the cubicle walls; a band with its own dancer, Happy Mondays-style, who wore an outfit made of rubber gloves; the gorgeous, gorgeous Londoners I met through Lily… stay in touch.

the inadvertant burger

2005-05-01T14:11:00.000+02:00

I should be telling you about my trip back to Bath, but I want to do it properly and, damn it, I'm temporarily exhausted by the necessity of "searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought" (thankyou Nabokov).

So I'll tell you about signs here instead. There seems to be this sharp divide between a tone of polite diffidence and one of dire emergency. The buses and trains have little notices saying things like, "please consider other people's musical tastes and keep personal stereos on low volume" or "please avoid eating or drinking". I like the choice of the word "avoid" here--as if it were a matter of ongoing vigilance, and if you dropped your guard for a moment, you might find yourself suddenly consuming a double beef burger and strawberry thickshake that had appeared out of the ether. On the other hand, death by fire or electricity is something of a signage obsession. And there are pictures. Electicity substations have big yellow signs declaring DANGER OF DEATH, with a picture of a man writhing under a bolt of lightning. A banner advertising smoke alarms asks HOW WOULD YOU ALL GET OUT ALIVE? in letters two feet high. A box of matches says DANGER: FIRE KILLS CHILDREN. This is a reasonable statement. The picture of a stick figure child with an open wailing mouth and staring eyes, its right arm consumed entirely in yellow flames, seems a little gratuitous, however. If you ever wondered where Radiohead got ideas for their sleeve art, wonder no more.

I will tell you about Bath, I promise, and I'll post a stack of pictures of Brighton, too. I've become umbilically attached to my camera, after all. They'll make a tourist of me yet. I have to go now and cook up a planetload of fried eggs for my second breakfast (the first was fruit salad and low fat greek yoghurt, so it cancels itself out) in honour of this morning's phone call with Matt, and of a certain film currently in cinemas.

with the feet of its myriad bipeds

2005-04-20T15:24:00.000+02:00

I've been trying to watch Zero de conduite all morning, and I keep pointing the remote at the telly and pressing buttons, but it remains unmoved. Apparently the electricals here go on the fritz from time to time. The internet's working, however, and so is the coffee grinder. I'm going to keep writing until I feel like doing something else, so you may want to read this in shifts.

So what shall I tell you about? I've found I haven't absorbed all the contents of my big fat Europe: a history by osmosis, so I am gathering scraps of information as I go. At the Victoria and Albert museum, I saw some lovely frocks from the wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway. Whether she was assisted by some major undergarment engineering works or not, I don't know, but she stayed teeny and hourglass shaped until well into menopause, so she got to wear gowns like these. And I got to go and look at them, and make cooing noises, and then go and eat slabs of brie and chevre at Gordon's Wine Bar, and say a prayer of thanks to the feminist movement.

I also saw, in the Jacobean gallery, a portrait of an aristocratic lady, and next to it, the actual jacket she wears in the portrait. Can you believe that? The painting had recorded it perfectly accurately. The museums here are beautifully presented. I guess they have an embarrassment of riches--straying into the British Museum on my delirious first day here, I found room after room of Assyrian and ancient Egyptian bas reliefs and sculptures. I don't want to stop being amazed by the wealth of beautiful things here. I'm rationing my museum and gallery time to that purpose. It's worth sparing a thought for how all this stuff got here--I hadn't really considered the way great monuments and objets d'art get shipped around the world in dizzying quantities, mostly the result of war, political maneouvering and plain pilfering. I've concluded the best way to keep a treasure where you left it is to take it to your grave, although that didn't do a lot of good for the pharaohs.

leos out of their element

Which brings me to Highgate Cemetery. One of Lily's friends, Yoav, invited me on a tour there--it's the only way to get in, as you can't go in to the old section on your own. The highest ground in the cemetery is occupied by the grave of Julius Beer, a self-made German Jew who responded to snubs from London Society by converting to Anglicanism and constructing the most magnificent mausoleum in the place. The guide, who was a nice old man in tweed, said the statues inside were sought after by every museum in Europe. I wonder how long they'll last. My favourite grave was of George Wombwell, London's first menagerist--he began his travelling zoo with a pair of boa constrictors. He took them to pubs in a box and charged anyone who wanted to see them a penny. A statue of his pet lion sits on top of his grave.

The newer section of the cemetery, not being exclusively Anglican, had a greater variety of names, obviously including many Jewish ones. Yoav translated the Hebrew on one grave. In English, it only gives the deceased's name and the date of her death. The Hebrew records that her parents died in the holocaust. Yoav said, "She probably wanted their names on her grave because they didn't get one of their own." These reminders of profound cruelty all around are another thing I hope I never, ever to get used to.

That day I also went to Hampstead Heath, a wilder, less tulip-studded place than the other parks in the city. The views from the top of the hill were beautiful, perhaps nicer than those from the London Eye, which I went on a few days before with Jenn, against Den's advice to "jist blarg yer way up the top of a tall building instead."

I want to tell you everywhere I've been, but it's sort of inescapably banal, this listing. Collecting. I took a bus tour to Stonehenge and Bath--don't hate me, I thought it would be my only chance to see them. Which is probably true of Stonehenge, not having access to a car, but it did warn me of the dangers of tour travel. We had fifty minutes to walk a circle around the stones, with an audio tour on a phone-style handset. It was a strange sight, a stream of people silently walking their anti-clockwise route, holding black objects to their ears. Afterwards at the kiosk you could buy a sandwich and a "megalithic rock cake" for £5.50. It was still impressive to see, but I took a couple of photographs despite myself, and it was amazing how they drained the reality out of it. But then afterwards I was glad I had them.

Recording experience splits it--it's something I discovered with my diaries. When you are in an experience, you are mentally recording it, and you thin it a little by doing so--but the energy you've stolen from the lived moment gets poured into the record of it, and I'm happy to have it then. I suppose it is best to be discerning in how you record things, to be sure it was worth splitting reality in half that way. I bought sketching paper to take to galleries and museums. A photograph merely collects an object, and somehow neutralises its force, but drawing something actually brings out its beauty more sharply to the eye. Anyway, here's the offending article. It's quite nice, isn't it?

I don't like climbing back into a soporifically heated bus after I've seen things, either. Everything gets blended together into a lazy dream. The only way to put the life back into things, after you've drained them by ogling and photographing, is to walk and walk. There was a walk through a field of ancient burial mounds half a mile from the stones, but we weren't given time to do it. I must try and make friends with thoughtful people who own cars.

I've been lavished with chances to meet thoughtful people, actually. Lillian has made a great life here. Her friends are just the people I'd hoped to meet in Europe, and I'm grateful for the human connection. I find myself being charming, the way a snake charmer charms a python, so that I can keep looking at these people, drinking them in, as long as possible. Not that I always do a great job. I'm blunter than most English people, and sometimes I don't know where I've offended until it's too late. I do my best, from outside the weave of local society. I'm a traveller now. The English say "What are you like?" I'm like a train window, the world flows in as I move. I am here to receive impressions. I was afraid of this emptiness before I left. I couldn't bear the thought of being merely receptive--I told myself I'd analyse and form connections to suit my own mental projects and make it mine. I'm sure there's an element of that, but I have to be receptive anyway--travel leaves me no choice. I don't remember why I was so wary of it.

Lily and tulips

You know how I wrote earlier about how monolithically impressive all this architecture is when you are walking around beneath it? Well, from up high--and for £12.50 I got about as high up as you can get--entrepreneurism and democracy once again go hand in hand--it looked sort of scruffy. These buildings weren't designed to be seen from above, they were meant to tower over. And I think about the people who would have looked down, not up, before the London Eye was constructed, and the decisions that have been made from rooms high above the streets, and I think about power.

Engels puts it nicely:
"This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hudnred-fold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there. This great population has made London the economic capital of the world...

It is only later that the traveller appreciates the human suffering which has made all this possible. He can only realise the price that has been paid for all this magnificence after he ahs tramped the pavements of the main streets of London for some days and has tired himself out by jostling his way through the crowds... It is only when he has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of civilisation with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused, in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them." [The conditions of the working class in England 1844.]

He is right about walking in the streets, and you feel it when you want to get somewhere quickly--everyone is out on their own business, seemingly ignoring you, but in some subtle way, they're all also ready to start a fight, if you want to give them cause. I brush past a man and he drops his mobile, and it flies into pieces dramatically as dropped mobiles do. "I'm sorry." "You knocked it out my hand. It wasn't me, it was you." He's very tall. He has friends. I find myself squaring my shoulders, and I say again, "I'm sorry, man", but this time it means, "Back off."

But to be fair, many people come to London because the size of it means that opportunites cluster here, and from what I can see, many people have made great things out of the struggle of daily life here. Anyway I'm not sure life is so very bucolic in sedate little towns where the line between looking out for your neighbour and policing them can be a fine one.

And, while I'm quoting, I have to include Henry James, because when I read this, I felt, not as if he were reading my mind, but that London really does have its own will and character, and it's acting on me in an uncannily similar way as it did on him. Maybe it's an element of travel in general. I'm not sure yet.

"London is on the whole the most possible form of a life. [That sentence!] I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life...

Have now been in London some ten days and actually feel very much at home here--feel domesticated and naturalised in fact, to quite a disgusting extent. I feel that in proportion as I cease to be perpetually thrilled surprised and delighted, I am being cheated out of my fun. I really feel as I had lived--I don't say a lifetime--but a year in this murky metropolis ... up to this time I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London--its inconceivable immensity--in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details. This is gradually subsiding; but what does it leave behind it? An extraordinary intellectual depression, as I may say, and an indefineable flatness of mind. The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bypeds and quadrupeds. In fine, it is anything but a cheerful or a charming city. Yet it is a very splendid one." [Selected Letters]

Two days ago I was thinking of taking a job here, because I couldn't bear to leave before I'd seen so many more things, but I've felt that brooding and stamping. London's there in my head, saying, "If you're a tourist, your time is nearly up--and if you're staying, you've got one hell of a thing coming to you." Okay, okay, I'm going. In a few days. There's still some stuff I want to do.

Dim sum at Spitalfields

update on posting comments--new, simple method for lazy people

2005-04-17T19:13:00.000+02:00

Okay so I'm a luddite, but while looking for other information entirely I found the page where I can allow anyone to comment on my blog--not just registered users. So now you don't need to go through the process I told you about in that earlier post. You can just click and comment. Hint.

gerwools and geezers

2005-04-16T12:45:00.000+02:00

people I've met
Peter likes real blues and loaned me the annotated Lolita. When he gets into a topic, he tucks his wine glass under his arm so he can gesture with both hands.
Kerry calls in sick to go to the British Museum sometimes. The only things she argues about are art and history. She offered to get me work doing gardening in Notting Hill. I'm thinking about it.
Yoav I met at Fifty Foot Wave. We leapt straight into big conversation. He has worked on every continent in the world.
John has an uncle who used to have a shop on Carnaby Street in the sixties. He recommended a wine bar to me that I'd already been to, and I pretended I'd never heard of it, and thanked him for the recommendation, and later a mutual acquaintance totally sprang me.
Suzie and James are warm and welcoming. They've been husband and wife, and business partners, for 31 years. They have an art collection, a house in the French alps (James wants to put a python in the roof to keep the pigeons under control, but the housekeeper refuses to feed it) and an awesome knowledge of cheese. They are the sort of rich people who make me want to be rich.
Den is a former prison guard with a fetish for white trainers. She has loaned me a London for free book and a pair of jeans. When I told her I was a bit sick, she said, What is it? Maybe I can help. One day she walked into a spiritualist church for a lark, and walked out with voices in her head.

Den says
I never asked for it, yer know. It's annoyin. They're like those people who hang around you because they have no friends, and they're really borin. Then she scowls and rolls a cigarette. God is loov, and loov is God. It's that simple. God's not judgin us nearly as much as we think. That's why I hate religion. Half these people wouldn't be botherin me except they think God's angry with em, and they won't move on. They're so full of guilt they can't think straight. There's no tellin em. She licks the edge of her rollie and looks exasperated. I don't know how I know this stuff, I jist do.

how to post comments to this blog

2005-04-12T01:15:00.000+02:00

A bit of housekeeping, dearies. It seems you have to be a blogger member to comment. So you are now all blogger members. Your user name is KatrinaReader, your password is Europe. Just use those to post your comments to my blog. Click on the link beneath the post youa re commenting on that says "0 comments" (or "1 comment" or "54 comments" depending on how controversial I've been). Log in using the dodgy fake user name and password supplied above and post your comment.

I had to create a blog for you too, so it's Erehwon2.blogspot.com. You may as well get on there and create a post. This could be bigger than all of us. A babel babble of different voices, all on one website nobody is ever going to read. It's so postmodern it hurts.

penny dropping

2005-04-12T00:33:00.000+02:00

travel like
I bliss out on people’s smiles. Everyone here is a pleasure to see, because each face is one I might not have seen if I had not come. Each corner I turn is a revelation, like a new layer of scenery in a Restoration play, because just think if I had never rounded that corner. This feeling is familiar. A chance meeting on the street on an unhappy day. A tramp bearing red lilies, a dog in a jacket.

stamps
I found a small shop, with a sign out front saying stamps. Inside was a wall of dark wood pigeon-holes full of yellow paper and lever arch files, and a man behind a dark wood desk. He was large and flaky-faced, with a navy suit and a walrus moustache. I asked him for stamps to Australia. He explained that stamps had just gone up yesterday. The day before yesterday, said an equally barrel-form man in red beard and brown cardigan who swept in from another room. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, they wondered and dithered together. I said I would take five, at the new price. The handlebarred man opened a clothbound book and a slew of stamps of all denominations scattered out. What’s all this, he blustered, and sorry, I was interrupted in the middle of something, said redbeard. The first man busied himself with tweezers, organizing the stamps back into their paper-banded rows, finding my five 37p stamps. I remembered I had no cash. He directed me to a post office five doors down.

penny dropping
A little knowledge, I know I know, but I don’t have a lot. What else has a person with a dinky, complacent liberal education got to work with? All I can do is synthesise disparate facts like mad, and take wild guesses, and hope to fill in the gaps as I go. How does one “do” Europe? I want to see a play (I can only afford one) and I can’t decide between Euripides’ Hecuba, or Tristan and Yseult or The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. And that, there, is a pretty good illustration of my dilemma. But to consider the twentieth century alone: for the greater part of it, people must have felt like dice in a cup. Every time they thought they knew the world, and their place in it, and what you can expect of human decency, they were swept up and rolled and spat out again. “We didn’t trust anybody who hadn’t been in the war,” says Hemingway of Paris in the twenties. Understandable—could they even be seen as the same species, people who hadn’t had their sense of meaning tested that way.

I found a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery of a woman I’d never heard of, a painter called Anna Zinkeisen. It’s a self-portrait in a modernist utopian style. I think she’d made herself resemble Artemisia, her painting smock looked very Renaissance drapery. Anyway, it was grand and beautiful. The picture was painted in a disused operating theatre. In the mornings Zinkiesen would nurse soldiers, and in the afternoons she would paint their wounds for the Royal Academy of Surgeons. The paintings that came before and after this portrait don’t bear thinking about. And in the same gallery was a display of photographs by Lee Miller. As a model she was a photography icon in her own right, but as Vogue war correspondent in World War Two she was among the first to photograph the atrocities of the battle fields and, eventually, the camps. It’s the combination of her status as a great beauty and her photo journalism that get to me. Because how some people saw what everyone saw then, and could still find beauty and art important—I wonder at that commitment. Pitching the best of human culture, the love for fineness in the world, against the stupidity, cruelty, crass politicking of it all.

I don't know if non-Europeans can understand that. Can I paraphrase you, M? You said that Australians and Americans didn’t understand Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful. We saw them and thought, well, it wasn’t all bad. Some people did good things in a bad situation, and that makes it all ok. Europeans saw those films and said, nothing can ever neutralise what happened, but we can acknowledge some people’s attempts to transform it. Here, the darkness of the wars of the twentieth century is an immediate fact. It suffuses everything. If any poetry is possible after Auschwitz, it must always be an antiphonic response to those horrors. I can't go to a gallery, or open a book, without it being there. It's important to know that.

under dreaming spires

2005-04-08T23:08:00.000+02:00

Shop signs along the 38 bus route #1: Mummy’s Love Business Centre --- African movies to buy or rent --- internet --- international phone cards

The first day in London I just walked. Everything new to the eye, such a sharp pleasure—the narrow, scribbled streets out in Hackney, where I’m staying, shop signs small and high up on their facades to be read from the top deck of a red bus—the buildings getting taller and grander towards the hub of things. And then a day of walking through the burroughs around the West End with my mouth hanging open.

The architecture feels both organic and sublime—it looms like canyons and mountains loom, to make you catch your breath. And in every line of it is the human mind. Somebody made all of this, for our pleasure and purposes. I guess Europeans must necessarily have a different view of the importance of human culture, because they live their lives under these domes and spires and other metaphors for transcendence. At least, that describes the large public buildings. The scrappy, slangy architecture of the pubs and cafs and townhouses also feels full of humanity. Ornament! Centuries of it, piled together in an archaeology of taste—chimney pots and finials and odd-shaped tiles. Damn, pardon my lyricism, I’m absorbing all these gargoyle curliques and extruding it in my prose. But listen: I don’t know how I feel about the grand public buildings yet. They’re wonderful, wonderful candy for my brain, but then they have nothing to do with me really. What do they mean to Londoners? Do they inspire the highest human endeavour, or are they self-congratulatory folly? People commonly get paid £5 an hour here, and a McDonalds lunch costs £3. What’s Christopher Wren to them? Alright, alright, Marx researched Das Kapital in London, I suspect someone’s covered this ground before.

For me, the reveling tourist, it’s all exciting. I’m sheepish about not having been interested in London before I came. I thought it wouldn’t be exotic or challenging enough—but how colonialist of me, to assume the green and pleasant land would feel too homey to be interesting. In fact, it doesn’t feel like home at all. All I want to do is rove around and take in the strangeness of it. The freedom I have merely to walk and stare feels like decadence. I keep expecting somebody to tell me to stop it. I’m extending the rebel-rebel feeling by being as Scroogey as possible in this grossly expensive city—hurrah for 75p soup and roll. It would be asceticism if I wasn’t gorging myself on art all day. And if I wasn’t seriously wanting to buy every single thing in this shop.

I haven’t done anything particularly touristy yet, except for looking above head level in the streets and carrying an umbrella (smug me, with my vinyl canopy while locals turn their collars up to better channel the rain down the backs of their necks). I did browse through the Transport Museum at Covent Garden. The gift shop was selling g-strings printed with a map of the Underground. For anyone still looking for the clitoris, it’s at St Paul’s. And I walked through Soho playing my best Britpop and Swinging London mental soundtrack, but it didn’t make all the Gap stores go away. No, Soho is fun, and a marvel of compactness—I keep walking in and trying to explore it, only to find that I’ve popped out the other side again, like those fist fights under blankets they used to do in vaudeville shows.

What else? I’m being totally looked after, with my sister in town to hang out and with a cosy bed at my friend Lily’s house. She lives in an area known as Murder Mile—apparently they’re all drug gang slayings, and if it was good enough for the Hacienda, it’s good enough for Hackney. It’s the cuddliest ghetto I’ve ever seen. Everyone has a little garden with a falling-down fence and a garden shed. There are squirrels and daffodils and twittering birds, and the locals pass each other in the street and say orright dawlin? Lily feeds me and hugs me and plies me with brochures. She lives in a household of lovely lady nerds—one’s an Industrial Arts teacher and blues enthusiast, one’s an aeronautical engineer (she researches metals for aeroplane bits, with a focus on which ones are less likely to corrode or fall out mid-air—she got on the internet the other day to google the elasticity of iron, which I find disturbing) and I’m not sure what Den does, but when she got sick of waiting to find out what happened in the end of Fingersmith she asked “the spirits”—-so somebody on the Other Side is reading lesbian historical fiction, or maybe just watching the BBC series.

Post a comment to say hi, or to request my UK mobile number or email address.

If you know anyone who might want to read this and doesn’t know about it, please let them know. I’ve been very, very bad about keeping in touch with everyone.

testing one tsew, one tsew

2005-04-02T04:13:00.000+02:00