Monthly Archives: January 2016

Bird, Beaches and Balmain

I started writing this post at the weekend sitting outside on the deck surrounded by subtropical rainforest with a soundtrack of bellbirds, whip birds, scrub wrens, finches, kookaburras, catbirds and yellow-tailed black cockatoos echoing around me. I was staying with my friend Nicki, who moved from Melbourne to the New South Wales (NSW) Central Coast earlier this year, for the Australia Day weekend.

Having been in Melbourne all over Christmas and New Year I was more than ready to get away, and NSW very much delivered. Nicki had an unexpected family commitment in Sydney on my first day and offered me the choice of staying home with her delightfully playful and engaging young cat, Maya, or catching a ride into the city. I decided to go into Sydney but wasn’t up for touristy stuff, crowds, shopping centres or sightseeing.

Maya

Maya

I just wanted wander without any fixed agenda. Nicki used to live in Balmain and suggested that it could be a good place to nose around. It sounded suitably village-y so I took the ferry (‘ticking off’ – from the relaxed distance of the boat – a few of Sydney’s iconic landmarks on the way) and got off at East Balmain.
I’d only walked a short distance up Darling Street when I found a small shop called Home Industry selling vintage items, linens, glassware, china, soft furnishings and cotton reels in jars. I bought a non-vintage, but charming, small white bowl with an embossed dragonfly on the rim – it’s already in use as a butter dish – and got chatting to the two sisters who run the business about cushion cover sizes. As you do…

Further up the hill I came to St. Andrew’s Church where there’s a weekly market. I browsed bric-a-brac and jewellery and then spotted a Chinese massage stall. Something to do with the early start the day before and Jetstar failing to get my luggage on the right plane had left me with a cracking headache. I negotiated $15 for a head and shoulders massage and the guy worked wonders, pinpointing the areas of tension and hammering away at the knots.

Feeling clearer and lighter I walked on to a café where I enjoyed an extended cup of tea and the papers. I got chatting to a few people, even a good-looking man, but it started to spit with rain (it’s hair-curlingly damp in NSW this summer) so it was time to move on. Part of the fun of hanging out in an unknown area is observing people, their houses, gardens, kids and everyday comings and goings.

Balmain was once a working class suburb and home to coal mines, shipbuilding, metal foundries, boiler making and soap factories. The tiny cottages lining many of the streets were originally built for the workers. Now, of course, it’s undergone a process of gentrification – hence the smartly groomed samoyeds and standard poodles walking head-in-the-air with their owners and the boutique-style shops, but I’m happy to say that it’s retained its soul and character.

I browsed a few shops and ended up buying a hand-made damask duvet cover with matching pillow cases in a knock-down sale in a pop-up shop. At only $70 including postage to Melbourne, it was an irresistible bargain. In a men’s clothing store, I got some ‘designer’ shaving balm as a birthday present for my brother, and then met Nicki for lunch at a wholefood emporium called About Life, a wonderfully earthy place with a sustainable/paleo focus. We had planned to visit the Brett Whiteley studios in Surry Hills but it got too late. Next time. Less is more.

We picked Sunday, the only totally rain-free day of the four days, to go to Pearl Beach. We walked from one end of the beach to the other looking out over northern Sydney and Pittwater Basin. We tapped back into that slow, leisurely holiday vibe and swam, sunbathed and read the papers watching pelicans flying overhead.

Dodging the rain, we managed a couple of bushwalks over the weekend too. We got a bit lost on one of them and negotiated a steep slope by slithering down on our bottoms, collecting a few leeches in the process. Like sticky, super-glue sticky slugs, leeches cling to your skin or shoes and take some prizing off. Yuk! On another walk we laughed at a laryngitic-sounding kookaburra surveying his territory, as we enjoyed views out over Brisbane Water.

Nicki looking out over Brisbane Water

Nicki looking out over Brisbane Water

In between bushwalks and outings I enjoyed reading on the deck with Maya cuddled up close by. I started Ruby Wax’s A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled while, for once, feeling anything but. In her inimitable humour and with soul-baring honesty she explains really clearly what mindless rushing around and constant multi-tasking does to our bodies, brains and neural pathways. I decided to follow her 6-week program and started then and there by attuning all my senses to the birdsong on Nicki’s deck. Let’s see what happens when life speeds up again back in the Metropolis and world of work!
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Hoovering, holidays and tents

Even though I returned to work on 4th January, I’m still tapping into the holiday vibe as much as I can. There’s such a frenzied build up to Christmas Day and a pressure to get everything done that I’ve begun to really cherish the peace that comes afterwards when everything and everyone calms down.

Two months into a new job, this year’s yuletide season proved quite a marathon. My workload started to intensify at the end of November and, from the beginning of December, life became a seamless blur of grant-writing and deadlines, social stuff, choir rehearsals and practising new songs (I’ve joined a smaller choir and we did a couple of pre-Christmas performances), putting on a garage sale, co-hosting my first dinner party for about two years – typically, it turned out to be the night (a late night) before two morning choir gigs, one of them in an aged care facility. What joy it was to sing (even if I was a bit post party croaky) new versions of old favourites such as Away in A Manger and Silent Night to the oldies.

Deck the Halls...

Deck the Halls…

The week before Christmas I went up to Brisbane for a couple of days of work and play. After a day and half of strategizing followed by a long and lavish staff Christmas lunch, I raced off to the Powerhouse to see a show by Cocoloco, a madcap duo consisting of a university friend from Bristol and her Australian husband.

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I spent my last day wandering round GOMA – the Gallery of Modern Art – before squeezing in another show at the Powerhouse, having a quick chat with Helen and Trevor, and then travelling straight to the airport from there. It’d all been fun but exhausting and I had a sense of humour failure when I got stopped in security because the funky fish-shaped corkscrew I had bought for my nephew had a foil-cutting knife on it. What?! I’d been in too much of a whirl to notice. Amazingly, I was allowed to go back out to the Qantas desk and post it back to myself. Even more amazingly, it arrived in time to go under the tree!

I got home late the Saturday before Christmas and on route to a lovely Christmas lunch the next day, I managed to hit my head on a shelf, drop a bowl I was given for my 21st and then scrape my car along my carport wall. Not a good look, any of it! Things continued apace until Christmas Eve when I spent all day cooking two complicated desserts (and this from the woman who is 90% sugar free) to take to my brother’s. Dinner was at 7 p.m. and at 6.30 p.m. I was still hoovering and mopping the kitchen floor. I just couldn’t bear to leave it dirty; Christmas, for me, is also a time for renewal and reflection and I didn’t want to kick off with a crumb- and dog-hair-strewn floor.

Talking of hoovering – it’s not just the Brits, some Kiwis also talk of hoovering – reminds me of my trip back to the UK in August. My hoover is a Sebo (yes, I know that’s like saying my Mazda is a Toyota), a German make, which travelled the seas with me from England in 2004. It could probably do with a complete overhaul but my mission in England was to track down a spare part. Now the small market town in Nottinghamshire where my mother lives is no retail Mecca – at best, you’ll find Dorothy Perkins, Primark and Poundland, but it is exactly the place to find a store specialising in vacuum cleaners. Near the train station, in a residential street, is a shop that looks just like the one in the BBC show Open All Hours with Arkwright and Granville. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mTxaK1AHMc

The shop is delightfully cluttered, dusty (don’t think they ever hoover it) and a bit dark. Somehow it’s escaped the digital age completely and there’s not even a computer anywhere in sight. An older man in brown overalls (Arkwright without the stutter) explained that the shop started life in 1946 when his father was one of the first approved Hoover dealers in the area. He, in turn, now works alongside his son who will inherit the business. Helpful as they were, they didn’t have the spare part I needed – my Sebo is now so old as to be obsolete. However, visiting the shop was quite an experience. As we were leaving, a curious-looking man with a pot belly, lank, dyed blond hair and a generally dishevelled appearance strolled in and greeted us with a rather affected and effeminate “Helloooo!” The son explained it was his brother and quickly ushered him next door to a rather run-down house. All I can say is that if this bloke wasn’t the inspiration for Little Britain’s “Only Gay in the Village” sketch I don’t know who is.

Anyway, back to the Christmas holidays – once I had farewelled English and interstate visitors on the 28th, I sat in the garden with my feet up and got stuck into a fabulous novel about a Special Operations Executive parachuted into France as a spy in World War II. But the real hero of the holiday was a sun shelter tent lent to me by friends. I feel so blessed to live near the beach and really made the most of it. There’s something magical and healing about swimming in salt water and then lying on warm sand and sculpting it to your body shape. It’s as good as a massage. Without phone calls, emails, chatter and the normal day to day stuff, it was pure bliss and the tent meant I could stay for longer and not get burnt. Just me, the birds, the waves, the wind, the sun and the sea.

All the World is a Tent

All the World is a Tent

I even let myself off the hoovering – well almost. All that time on the beach – whether alone in my tent or walking Bertie adds up to quite a few grains of sand on the floor…

Bertie sporting sand and salt sculpted hair...

Bertie sporting sand and salt sculpted hair…