Category Archives: The Natural World

Now is the time

How heart-shakingly moving was Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb which she read at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. For me, it summed up so powerfully and with such grace and eloquence the choices that stand before us in the COVID era. While she was speaking of America, and against the background of the storming of the Capitol on 6th January, her wise words apply to all of us wherever we live. What also stood out for me – and gave me hope – was that Biden is a man of soul, of the heart, capable of compassion and empathy; the polar opposite to the morally-corrupt, orange-faced ego-maniac Reality TV business tycoon who previously held office. I won’t even mention his name.

It’s ironic in some ways that we mourn the pre-COVID world. So much of that world was already broken and unsustainable; the pandemic has magnified the challenges we face with global warming, food (in)security, factory farming, inadequate systems to deal with the rising mountains of waste, inequity on so many levels (the politics of vaccine distribution to developing nations just one example) and power-hungry corporations putting profit before people and planet.

And then the senseless destruction of forests in so many parts of the world. Since 2016 one football pitch of forest is lost every second. Not only are trees vital sinks for carbon, but emerging science indicates that trees are social creatures that communicate and support each other via an interconnected fungal highway. Who hasn’t experienced a sense of soul amid towering trees in a forest cathedral? I read an article in The Melbourne Age this weekend instancing how a tree on the brink of death bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbours. How magnificent is that?

One of the benefits – if we can call it that – of COVID restrictions putting the brakes on ‘normal’ life (and my heart goes out to all those in the UK and other parts of the world faced with wide-scale community transmission, over-whelmed hospitals and high death rates, particularly those who don’t have the economic or social luxury of being able to socially-isolate) – is time to reflect, to slow down, to live more simply, to look out for our neighbours – get to know our neighbours even – to appreciate the small things, and importantly, to revere the natural world that sustains us. And I say revere deliberately.

In a pre-COVID post in February 2020, I wrote that Planet/Mother Earth can do without us and will cast us aside if we don’t look care for her. Recently I watched David Attenborough’s Witness Statement: A Life on Our Planet – on Netflix in which he went through the decades of his life demonstrating humanity’s impact on the planet as measured by population growth and the decline in wild spaces and biodiversity. It’s a compelling call to action. We have overrun the world he says, with nothing to stop us. We are intelligent but not wise, apart from nature, not a part of nature. Since that was filmed, COVID has swept across the world. If COVID doesn’t stop us from plundering the planet, polluting and over-consuming, nothing will. If we fail to clean up our act, more zoonotic viruses are waiting in the wings. Surely, that’s enough of a deterrent?

Now is our chance to change how we live our lives and how we interact with others and our environment, being kinder to ourselves, each other and the planet. Some say we’re doomed – human beings are inherently greedy, corrupt and selfish; history is merely repeating itself. Isn’t that a lazy let-out clause; a way of propping up the status quo?

We mainly read the gloom and doom stuff in the news – and there’s plenty of it – but we hear less about the initiatives to increase sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry, clever waste recycling, renewable energy and rewilding projects or community support schemes (one of my favourites the conversion of a red phone box in an English village into a community food larder). What a lot of schemes lack is the scale and infrastructure to achieve systemic change, but there’s opportunity for that to change. If we care enough and dare enough, we can all be part of that change through the choices, decisions and values we live by.

Tuning into the digital version of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last August, I was struck by the words of film-maker Damon Gameau and his efforts to humanise climate change through story-telling, and his positivity: “we need to reframe the crisis as an opportunity and privilege to be alive at this time” and “Optimism is the basis of solutions for a sustainable future.” Like many commentators he instanced how major global events in the past brought about advancements, from the social changes triggered by the Black Plague to the creation of the NHS and welfare state in Britain after the Second World War.

Hope, like trees in the forest, nourishes the soul. One of my mother’s favourite phrases is: ‘Hope springs eternal’ (from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man). Another of her favourites is the poem Leisure by William Henry Davies: “What is this life if, full of care/We have no time to stand and stare.” With life turned upside down and without being able to plan ahead with any certainty, it’s become a bit easier to live more mindfully and in the moment– with more time to stand, stare, smell the roses and meditate. Even a few minutes of micro meditation can take you out of your head and back into your heart.  The trick, I have found, is to cultivate a practice of gratitude and to trust that there is some grand design behind the current global shake-up.


Lockdown gave me the time, space and single-minded focus to build a freelance practice as a grants specialist. And in a pleasantly organic and synchronistic way, organisations and projects that are close to my heart have found me. At the end of last year I supported five arts and entertainment organisations to win Federal Government grants – such a boost for artists whose livelihoods and performance opportunities have been decimated by COVID. Since then, there’s been youth mental health, environmental education and projects to re-purpose food waste. I feel as if I have found my professional feet and carved out my own niche and signature brand.

As a homebody, lockdown was less challenging for me than some. And that’s where the gratitude came in. Finally, I had time to give my garden more love, and to tackle jobs that had been on my domestic to-do list for years. I didn’t clear out a single cupboard but I did install a Vertical Garden in my courtyard and plant out various cuttings I had collected from friends’ gardens.

I painted my various garage sale and nature strip finds (for non-Australians, this has nothing to do with nudity; the nature strip is the grass verge bordering the pavement where people put out ‘hard rubbish’ to be collected by the Council!). While it’s illegal to pinch things from the hard rubbish, I see it as neighbourhood recycling, and it saves items going to landfill. A win-win. A neighbour, Jill and I, alert each other when we spot see something languishing by the side of the road that is crying out for a good home…

More than ever, I learnt to savour the small things: a cuddle with Bertie, a new green shoot in my garden, the first cup of tea in the morning, cloud formations in the sky, the changing colours of the ocean, the magpies carolling, an engrossing book or fascinating podcast. My home-based staycation over the Christmas holidays was a series of simple savoured moments adding up to quite a feast.

None of us knows what lies ahead. All we can do is to keep caring, keep learning, keep hopeful and keep putting one foot in-front of the other. I’ll leave you with a few lines from Amanda Gorman.

But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with


Spikes, tights and fairy lights: a bit of lockdown lightheartedness

One thing about the Covid-19 lockdowns (we are in lockdown take two in Melbourne) is that the dog child and I are confined to barracks every evening. And in winter that means possum o’clock begins around 6 pm when the pesky little critters emerge from their daytime resting spots and start scampering about, taunting my spaniel Bertie by using my fence as a runway, and me, by chomping on a few shrubs into the bargain.

possum-nibbled shrub

Bertie is by nature a hunting dog so the appearance of these squirrel-like nocturnal visitors drives him into a frenzy of frustration.  Whenever I hear him squeaking and shrieking, I dash out to find him hopping around on his back legs, hurling himself at the fence. Safely perched at the top of the trellis, the possums stare complacently at Bertie as if to say ‘bark all you want, you’ll never get us.’ Schadenfreude in action.

I’m not so worried about the noise of his barking, although it is pretty disruptive, but more concerned that his efforts to scale the fence are damaging his already stiff back. Even as a pup he’d sometimes limp a bit in his left hip. And he’s always sat with his right leg sticking out at an angle – presumably to relieve the stiffness on the other side. While an X-ray showed he doesn’t have hip dysplasia as such, there is wear and tear in the back and hip area. And if you try and massage that area or apply pressure, he’s not impressed.

Having said that, noise abatement has been part of my game plan. For the last year I’ve had pesky noise-phobic neighbours – renters rather than owners, thank Goodness. The first time I met them the conversation was ALL about them, their health, trials and tribulations.  As if in warning, they said they hoped my dog didn’t bark, and that in previous houses they’d had to write to the Council about dogs that yapped all day. Bertie does have an impressive bark but it’s never continuous, more a response to certain stimuli – a bird on the roof, a possum, a knock at the door etc.

As I write this, I’ve decided to devote a future post to these crazy neighbours who have applied an accusatory and forensic approach to each and every noise – be it my heating, a sporadic Bertie bark, the neighbour’s air-con or occasional loud parties, construction noise or the guy over the other side playing music. They write letters, they climb up on ladders to peer over the fence, and they throw eggs. They are due to vacate – after much wrangling and a VCAT case – in August ­, so watch out for my celebratory blog then. Stressful at the time but amusing and cathartic looking back…

Suffice it to say I’ve had ample motivation to do my utmost to deter the possums and divert them to someone else’s garden. A few years back I installed a sonic possum deterrent– it may have helped for a while but I reckon the possums grew accustomed to it. I re-positioned it recently and at one point turned up the volume. Then I got calls from Mrs Noise Phobe asking if I could hear a strange whirring noise around midnight. Had I got a new possum deterrent? I denied everything, but did turn it down. The minute they move out, I’m going to crank it up again!

Then a friend recommended solar-powered coloured fairy lights as a way of keeping possums away. I duly trooped off to Bunnings, and my hero brother helped me string them along the fence. Clearly, there’s got to be enough solar gain in the day to keep them flashing at night (oh yes, I have set them to epileptic fit-inducing flash). Still the little buggers scampered across the fence, driving Bertie berserk. Next, I resorted to Old Wives’ Tale remedies and, keeping some hair from Bertie’s last groom, stuffed it into a stocking which I suspended from the fence. That only compounded the problem as he mistook the dangling black shape for a possum, and barked at it!

Some nights if I caught the possums red-handed in a stand-off with Bertie, I’d train the hose on them or poke them with a long pole. And please don’t go Animal Rights-y on me. I’m not harming them, simply encouraging them to hang out elsewhere. Suffice it to say, none of the above proved to be sustainable solutions. Back to Dr Google. This time I invested in humane possum spikes 2cm high and 4.5cm wide, which I positioned at strategic points along the fence. That didn’t work either. Perhaps if I had covered the whole fence it would have been more successful, but, then again, the possums didn’t seem to mind to walking on then.

Back to the drawing board and to the possum spike company, who were only too happy to cash in on trying to solve what is clearly my (insert marketing speak) ‘pain point’ as a customer. Taking advantage of the end of year sale, I ordered a different type of spike. Tall, resembling 6-inch icicles, and made of Perspex, these are the real deal. My brother, bless him, came over and put them along the entire length of the fence. For the first few nights it was quieter. But possums are resourceful – I reckon there’s a movie in this along the lines of Wallace and Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit or Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox – and, soon after, I spotted a possum crawling along my fence underneath the spikes, and another using the side of the spikes as a climbing frame.

I reckon they got in through the gaps down the side of the fence adjoining the noise phobes’ garden – so I have strung up netting and filled in the gaps. It is quieter on the Western Front now. Bertie can still hear the possums on the other side of the fence but he’s less frenzied when he’s no longer eye-balling them. It’s only a matter of time, of course, before they discover they can leap from my other neighbour’s gutter onto my shed and along the fence underneath the spikes – but till then we’ll keep on with our spikes, sonic possum deterrent and flashing lights. Never a dull moment over here!

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” (Henry David Thoreau)

The other day as I was walking in my local suburb with the dog child, I noticed that yet another house had been bulldozed to the ground to make way for yet another new build. But this was no ordinary house and certainly not a tumbledown. Well-maintained, it was an elegant and gracious Victorian-style home enclosed by a bluestone wall with a polished brass number plate. In fact, it was smart enough to have statues in the garden. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl – albeit in a Southern Hemisphere setting – I used to peek through the fence, admiring the porch with the tiled floor, the wrap-around veranda and the ornate cornices on the roof. This is the kind of house I would buy if I won the Lottery, I told myself.

Elegant sash windows

I was aghast seeing it demolished and furious at the waste of materials – those lovely long sash windows – and the senselessness of it.  And this during the summer that Australia has been experiencing the worst bush fire season in its recorded history, with over 2000 homes destroyed. One the hand greedy developers and fickle homeowners and, on the other, individuals and families powerless to save their homes from being razed to the ground by ferocious fires.

Whatever your views about climate change and its impact on our environment, one thing is indisputable. The way we are living on planet Earth is not sustainable. We rape, pillage, plunder, pump out pesticides and plastic, spend, acquire, amass, throw away and then start over again. And we don’t learn from the past or heed the warnings. Think of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962, considered to be the book that kick-started the global grassroots environmental movement.

And I’ve just read – and very much enjoyed – John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. In 1960 Steinbeck set off in a truck converted to a camper van on an epic journey across America with his standard poodle, Charley, a colourful character in his own right.  It’s a wonderful tale full of rich and lyrical observations of the natural world – especially the giant redwoods in southern Oregon, amusing anecdotes about the different states he passes through, and chats over coffee and whisky with a cast of quirky characters he meets on the way. But it’s also deeply reflective and the themes he raises are still relevant today.He laments the amount of waste (including wrecked and rusting cars) in American cities, and the amount of packaging used in every day life: “I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness – chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea.”  He talks of towns encroaching on villages and the countryside, supermarkets edging out ‘cracker-barrel’ stores. “The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry.” And he encounters political apathy – life seems to revolve more around baseball and hunting than discussions about the respective merits of Kennedy versus Nixon in an election year.  Sound familiar?

Steinbeck died in 1968, just eight years after writing this book, at the age of 66. I wonder what he would have made of the digital era. I suspect he might not have been much of a fan. “No region can hold out for long against the highway, the high-tension line and the national television.” And he rails against trailer homes, a tax efficient form of property ownership with an inbuilt form of one-upmanship as owners constantly upgrade to a better model. Overall, he comes away disenchanted.

“We have in the past been forced into reluctant change by weather, calamity, and plague. Now the pressure comes from our biologic success as a species. We have overcome all enemies but ourselves.”

How prescient, and how uncomfortable, especially given the recent outbreak of Coronavirus. Let’s face it, humans are the problem. Planet Earth can do without us, and most likely will cast us aside – as insignificant specks of dust – unless we learn to live in harmony with the ecosystems that support all life, giving us clean soils, air and water.

Rather than getting depressed and defeated, however, it’s vital that we use the current level of global discontent to campaign and advocate for change to policies and practices that reduce emissions and promote sustainability. And as we do that, let’s not lose sight of the many positive initiatives being undertaken by changemakers, entrepreneurs, inventors and scientists to tackle social and environmental challenges.  It’s not all bad: just this week I read that one of Britain’s largest builders, Bovis Homes, is incorporating “hedgehog highways’ into existing and future housing – hedgehogs walk more than a mile each night foraging for food, but numbers have dropped significantly due to habitat loss and pesticide use. A nice win for biodiversity!

London: Hamming it up in…Ham

My ankle now healing I am now more mobile if not entirely comfortable, and more or less beyond the RICE (Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate) period – at least the ICE bit, not that I could follow that neat little anagram on my travels in France; I’d have needed a lackey to fetch me cold packs or to carry me around in a sedan chair!

So it made me smile when I met up with my oldest and dearest friend Monica last week and saw she was also sporting a bandage around her ankle. She has a bit of a history with ankles – I once pushed her around the Royal Academy in a wheelchair – and this time she’s broken a bone and so her foot is (as one of my nieces would say) well puffy. Puts mine in the shade in fact. Suffice it to say, however, that we were as one moving at the same non-brisk pace, every now and then having a stork-like rest on one foot.

We started our day out at Petersham Nurseries near Richmond in London, an upmarket (shorthand for pricey), artsy, vintage-y nursery surrounded by grassy meadows along the Thames. We had lots to talk about over our artisan tea in the café, the walls framed by cascades of fuchsia-coloured bougainvillea in full bloom.

From there it was a short hop to Ham House, a Jacobean mansion gifted to courtier William Murray by Charles I. Educated with the King, Murray was a ‘whipping boy’ and took the lashings for any of the king’s behavioural transgressions – it was meant to serve by example. Talk about a scapegoat. The least the King could do, later in life, was to make Murray one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and reward him with a sumptuous mansion!

Before visiting the house, we had lunch in the Orangery café situated in the walled kitchen garden, a riot of colour and lushness with purple lavender borders contrasting with the orange nasturtiums and yellow sunflowers. Ham House was considered one of the grandest in Stuart England, and is now hailed as ‘the most complete survival of 17th century fashion and power’. Not only that, it’s reputed to be one of the most haunted too. I was disappointed not to see an aristocratic spectre or even an ectoplasmic footman!

Ascending the intricately carved wooden staircase you come to a series of rooms including the Long Gallery lined with aristocratic portraits including one by Van Dyck of Charles I, a library with a screen made of a double-sided map dated 1743 in which Australia and New Zealand are drawn as one landmass, and my favourite, The Green Cabinet Room, with walls covered in green damask and hung with small paintings and miniatures, one of Elizabeth I dated 1590. Another portrait of note was of Erasmus (school of Holbein) with an intricate frame carved by Grinling Gibbons.

Monica and her husband Jonathan (we met at university) live nearby, and to my delight, Jonathan joined us unexpectedly. By 3.30 pm a volunteer guide started to close the blinds and to shut up the house to protect the paintings – interestingly, the Green Chamber was designed with a curtain rail and protective silk curtains, now restored by the National Trust. Like kids running away from the Bogey Man, we rushed to stay one step ahead.  That was all we needed to revert to our long-standing default of hamming it up – silly faces, voices and giggling – as we sped-read the information cards in each room, here a Japanese lacquer cabinet, there an exquisite monogrammed parquetry floor, here a leather stamped wall, there a bedchamber decorated in honour of Charles I’s wife, Catherine of Braganza. By the time we got below stairs to the servants’ quarters – complete with the Duchess’s bathing room with its round wooden bathtub – we were off the hook. Phew. That’s what I love about old friends; you simply pick up where you left off.

Our final stop was The Still, perfumed with dried lavender and other herbs, the shelves lined with ointments for gout containing pig fat and a bottle of dew harvested in spring this year. In bygone eras, May dew was considered a cure-all and beauty treatment for women, and for men, washing their hands in dew was said to strengthen their skills in knots, locks and net-mending.

I looked up the origin of the word hamming it up as I thought it might be Shakespearean but my research indicates that it means “overacting inferior performer,” dates from America, circa 1882,  and refers to ham fat used to remove stage make-up. Who knew!

But I did get a double Shakespeare fix, once in the British Library, repository of the Shakespeare’s First Folio dated 1623, and then at an open- air production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regents Park with my sister and brother-in-law. Booking an al fresco event in England is always a gamble but we hit the heatwave week, perfect for a sumptuous picnic accompanied by a fine English rosé wine, and then watching the play with the setting sun as a backdrop. What a treat to see mischievous Puck, Titania in her fairy bower and the elves on a stage fringed with reeds and surrounded by oak trees. And one of my favourite lines spoken by Helen to Demetrius (who scorns her): “And even for that do I love you the more. I am your spaniel.” Seems spaniels have a long history of being faithful and adoring!

Today my niece and I are off to see a wartime comedy by Terrence Rattigan at Richmond’s Orange Theatre, a theatre in the round. Heatwave permitting, we also plan to do a guided tour of Sandycombe Lodge, one of the houses designed and built by J. M.W. Turner in Twickenham, amid the Thames-side landscape that inspired him.  My long-cherished plan of making the most of my self-awarded time-out in the European summer is going to plan!

Wandering down Memory Lane

It’s been a week of reminiscing – meeting up with two university friends after a gap of 32 years and visiting Oxford, my home from 1997 to 2002.  The amazing thing about meeting Victoria and Charlotte (la otra Carlotta – we all read modern languages at Bristol) was that we just picked up where we left off. And, yes, we’ve all aged but, conversely, we all looked exactly the same. What had changed was our choice of food and drink. Prosecco wasn’t the drink du jour back then, fancy grains like quinoa hadn’t come to the West and spiralized didn’t exist as a verb and certainly not when teamed with vegetables!

I received the warmest of welcomes from my friends Hilary and John in Oxford. Freshly picked roses and a selection of hand creams by my bed, a kettle and a supply of herb teas in my room along with a stack of interesting books including Rose Tremain’s memoir, Rosie. How I love my creature comforts! Drinks and nibbles in their stylish garden followed by a delightful dinner was the perfect prelude to a good sleep.  Breakfast the next morning was beautifully laid-up with gluten-free cereal and bread, sliced mango and pomegranate and a pot of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. Luxury.

On Saturday morning Central Oxford was heaving with shoppers, tourists, students, day-trippers, school kids, buskers and performers – you name it. I met Juliette – I worked with her husband Giles at the Wildlife Trust and she and I used to sing in the same choir – and we wandered, chatting ceaselessly, through Christchurch Meadows where traditional England was in full swing: green striped lawns; punts gliding by; students in full regalia hurling themselves into the Isis to celebrate the end of exams; a cricket match in progress and cows grazing. We crossed over Magdalen Bridge and walked up a good stretch of East Oxford’s Cowley Road, known for its more Boho and multi-ethnic scene, to a park where Giles was DJ-ing between bands. I wish I had had more time to hang out at the Florence Park Festival and tap into the earthy, folksy, eco-friendly, funky vibe. I caught a bit of music over some polenta chips before bussing back to Central Oxford to give myself a little break before the next chat fest.

Another delightful dinner with friends Tom and Annemarie that evening, this time in Kidlington. And in a belated celebration of the summer solstice we sat outside after dinner overlooking a scruffy field, a donkey sanctuary (I also spotted a fox slope by), warmed by a crackling fire with the occasional bat flying over.

On Sunday I caught up with two girlfriends, Anne and Michele, and in the afternoon we all went for a walk through the fields (one of the things I miss most about living in Australia) starting in the village of Stonesfield and ending in Coombe. The walk so carefully planned by Anne ticked every box and more: green fields with red kites wheeling overhead; hedgerows dotted with fragrant elderflower and dog rose; a gently flowing river; country cottages adorned with blowsy climbing roses (lots of these); AND the ruins a 4th Century AD Roman villa in North Leigh, once one of the largest in Britain.

And the highlight: a section of a surviving Mosaic floor complete with patterns of leaves, knots, stylised pots and a swastika or ‘Greek Key’ pattern possibly serving as a maze to ward off evil spirits. The colours of the stone tesserae have faded, but it’s easy to imagine the original blues and reds and the wealthy Romans lounging around on couches, enjoying the underfloor heating.

I could have done with underfloor heating in my Oxford terrace, a rather hotchpotch house full of quirks and wonky angles, and not nearly as light and airy as my house in Australia. The energy always felt a bit stagnant – not helped by rivers of condensation that poured down the north-facing front window in winter. I recall an alternative health practitioner – Dr J – who I consulted in my digestive disaster days attributing my health imbalances to geopathic stress! Something to do with  underground nuclear testing since the Second World War causing splits in the earth’s crust. He said it was often present in people with syndromes and illnesses that failed to respond to other treatments, and who were living in damp or mouldy houses, plagued by wasps, bees or ants.  That was my house to a tee including invasions by wasps and bees nesting in the attic in summer.

Driven by an overwhelming urge to visit my old house – lifting the lid on the past is seductive and is maybe a subconscious desire to take stock of the present – I knocked on the door on Sunday afternoon. Sadly, I had just missed the current owner but I managed to peek through the window and saw that she’s put in a new kitchen and got rid of the cat-scratched carpets and replaced them with polished boards. I caught up with the neighbours on each side, both still living in Islip Rd, and found out my house has also had a loft conversion.  One can only hope that the makeover has driven out any geopathic radiation and ushered in feelgood vibes!

My house is/was the first on the left

Returning to my mother’s house talked out and ready for a rest – it gets very intense jumping into so many people’s different lives and absorbing and integrating information – I went to make a cup of tea after lunch only to find the kitchen windowsills teaming with ants. Geopathic Stress?! Probably not, I’d put it down to Climate Change and the strange weather and humidity. I am off to Paris this weekend where the temperatures are going to be in the late 30s, quite a change from today’s cloudy 19 degrees!

 

 

 

 

 

From the Dreamliner to the Dales

I decided to change things a bit this year and booked Qantas Flight QF9, the Dreamliner, flying non-stop from Perth to London. I loved it and am a convert! The door to door journey from one continent to another shifted my perception of the distance, reducing it to more of a hop than a long haul. And what joy to avoid the hassle of a stopover and getting off the plane – often at an antisocial hour when sleep beckons most – and shuffling back through security, belt off, laptop out, liquids in plastic bags.

Boarding at 3.15 p.m. in Melbourne, I enjoyed a celebratory whisky and light lunch on the way to Perth and read the papers cover to cover.  Getting out at Perth airport is a breeze and there’s an open-air lounge where you can re-oxygenate and even hear birds flocking.

The next 17 hours flew by – literally. A couple of hours’ reading and then dinner before settling down for the night. I am always frazzled by the time I get on a long-haul flight, job or no job, which makes me nicely tired. I slept on and off – am I the only one to get a stiff neck?! – and didn’t check my watch until we were six hours away from London – nearly there then, I thought to myself. A bit more snoozing then I foot-tapped to a video of a Coldplay concert filmed in Sao Paolo before the plane landed in London.

Cut to a few days later when I got whacked with a bit of delayed jet lag and wanted to crawl back to bed as soon as I got up. Instead I spent nearly all day cancelling a long-planned trip to Wales with Mum (just too far, too complex and too exhausting at Mum’s stage of life and for me as the driver) and booking an alternative, more local, trip to the Yorkshire Dales. Endless conferring with my brother who lives in Yorkshire, viewing accommodation on Booking.com at crazily slow internet speeds, and phone calls to see if we could get rooms next door to each other etc. We decided on two locations: one night in the spa town of Harrogate and then three nights in a more rural location in Nidderdale.

We went through more chopping and changing, booking and cancelling – but I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that we booked into a Premier Inn in Harrogate, one of those impersonal, functional places that lacks soul. Dinner – charred to a cinder chicken and chorizo skewers and gloopy, rubber cheese lasagne for Mum – was inedible. Perhaps as subconscious karmic revenge, I managed to set the toaster on fire the next morning with my gluten-free bread! Thankfully, we had been to Harrogate institution Betty’s Tearoom for lunch and enjoyed a succulent and tasty kedgeree. And somehow – without a Sat Nav or detailed map, I had managed (with a few wrong turns) to negotiate the one-way system and found my way to a dress shop I had read about that specialises in 1950s dresses. Purchasing the dress of my dreams – a full swing dress complete with net petticoat and turquoise silk jacket to match was one the trip highlights! And we managed to get Mum to Marks & Spencer, hard-to-find parking meter, slippery wet pavements, brollies and shopping bags notwithstanding.

Mum at Betty’s

There were a few lowlights too. Arriving at our second destination, a country pub in the small village of Wath – accessed by a tiny humpback bridge reminding me of the Three Billy Goats Gruff song – we both sensed the place had a strange vibe. There was no reception but we located someone in the kitchens and she led us through a labyrinth of ramps, steps, swing doors and passages to our rooms. Red Flag number one: this place was not Mum friendly! While our rooms looked comfortable with their four-poster beds and chest-of-drawers, the old-style bathrooms only had showers over the bath. I had requested and been re-assured there was a walk-in shower for Mum. They apologised for stuffing up the booking and we agreed to move on.

We made a few calls to other places only to get a ‘no room at the inn’ response. Rather than panic, I resolved to trust that we would find somewhere and we drove over the moors to the popular village of Grassington, where we secured two rooms at a nice country hotel overlooking the square. Mum’s room was small and full of hard edges – tea tray, wooden bedposts – and an unpredictable shower that propelled me into overprotective mode. We drove each other mad at times! However, by 5 p.m. we had made a pot of Earl Grey in our room and enjoyed an energy-boosting complementary mini chocolate brownie. Dinner – wild halibut – was excellent too even if Mum’s hearing aids magnified the other diners’ voices and the clatter of crockery…

Rested and refreshed by the next morning, we woke up to sunshine – at last – and had a memorable day. We drove through narrow, twisty lanes bordered by green, green fields, ancient churches and moss-clad stone walls to Parcevall Hall.

The oldest part of the hall dates back to 1600 but the garden was created by Sir William Milner, a refined gentleman of Arts and Crafts sensibility and strong religious faith, in 1927. A series of stone terraces, beds brimming with summer pinks and purples bordered by immaculately cut yew hedges looked over out the vast expanse of Wharfedale and beyond. We sat in the Chapel Garden and listened to the soundtrack of birdsong and bleating lambs. Glorious.

Lunch afterwards in Appletreewick’s historic Craven Arms pub, full of fascinating memorabilia and collectibles – from old miners’ lamps to postcards of the Queen and a sample 1910 menu – rounded off a wonderful morning.

Our last day was a bit of a wash-out as the rain came down inducing a feeling of Cabin Fever. We got accommodation in Skipton at one of the only places with vacancies on a Friday night, a canal-side 1980s hotel with lots of exposed brick and endless fire doors. Dinner in the conservatory overlooking the canal gave rise to a few giggles: the wine waiter confessed to not knowing about, or even liking, wine, and the waitress described the salmon as coming with avioli – I think she meant aioli – and ‘loadsa other stooof” in her thick Yorkshire accent. The food when it came wasn’t bad at all, and we loved watching the ducks, swans and occasional barge passing by.  Nevertheless, when we got home at lunchtime on Saturday, it was a case of home sweet home!

The Republic of Words 3 of 3: Writing, dogs and the meaning of life

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a book about writing and the relationship between animals and humans, was another perfect fit for me. It’s a novel but I thought it was a true story as it reads like a memoir and is, I discovered, the most autobiographical of Nunez’s book to date. It is a simple story but one that is multi-layered and full of literary allusions with an animal as the central character. It’s about a woman in New York – the narrator – who reluctantly inherits a dog – a Great Dane – when its owner, her friend, a womanising professor who has been married three times, commits suicide. Nunez, like the female narrator, both teaches and writes.  She has no social media accounts and leads a quiet life: “I became a writer because it was something I could do alone and hidden in my room.” She is an ‘old school’ writer who views the craft as a vocation and was surprised to find herself in the limelight as the winner of the 2018 National Book Award.

Nunez/the narrator has a dig at the proliferation of writers and quotes the deceased friend as agreeing with Garrison Keillor: “When everyone’s a writer, no one is,” a sentiment Nunez traces back to the pre-digital era: French critic Sainte-Beuve said in 1839: “To write and have something published is less and less special. Why not me too? everyone asks.” What would have Sainte-Beauve have made of self-publishing and blogging?

Anyone who has tried to write a book and bumped up against the self-doubt, angst and feeling of being a fraud will take comfort from learning that John Updike always felt he had got away with something when he saw his books in a store. For Virginia Woolf and Isak Dinesen the act of writing helped to ease pain and sorrow, whereas Philip Roth found writing frustrating and humiliating. And how surprising to learn that prolific writer Georges Simenon described writing as a vocation of unhappiness.  The most pertinent quote for me was from Rainer Maria Rilke: “If you were forbidden to write, would you die?”

I certainly don’t feel compelled to use my time out from work to write a novel, memoir or best seller – not at the moment anyway. For now, I am content to blog for the love of writing and to maintain the practice of crafting words. Although I do rather love the image of tapping away at a  book n a house by the beach with my dog at my feet…

The friend in the story refers not only to the deceased professor but to the Great Dane Apollo.  This is no saccharine story of puppy love, however. At first an unwelcome burden, the dog is a wise old soul who gradually becomes central to the narrator’s life – she even reads to him (something a holistic vet suggested I do to calm my dog Bertie!) – and manages to persuade her landlord to let her keep him in her tiny New York apartment. Much of the book is about the relationship between humans and animals: “They may know us better than we know them.” I also loved this: “I like that Aborigines say dogs make people human.” The Friend also references famous people who have owned dogs such as J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967) editor of BBC magazine The Listener. While he took a rather unhealthy interest in his dog’s heats and bodily functions (there’s a chapter in his book My Dog Tulip called Liquids and Solids), he spoke of his relationship with Tulip as a 15-year marriage, the happiest of his life. In similar vein the narrator in The Friend quotes a passer-by as saying: “Better a dog for a husband, than a husband who’s a dog.” Hear, hear, I say!

Although a fictionalised life lesson, I also enjoyed The Why Café by John Strelecky, partly because I read it in German – Das Café am Rande der Welt ­­– and tapped back into the language, and partly because it never harms to ponder the meaning of life! The narrative construct is that a stressed advertising executive runs out of petrol and finds himself in a café in the middle of nowhere. On the menu are three questions:

Why are you here?
Do you fear death?
Are you fulfilled?

Through conversations with the café owner, waitress and a patron, the book encourages readers to challenge their thinking. Are we being true to ourselves or doing what others wish us to do? Are we slogging away to earn money to amass belongings that we think will makes us feel happy? Are we keeping madly busy because we haven’t found our purpose or our calling? Are we waiting till retirement to do what we love? Do we swim with the tide or against it? What is our life purpose?

I sometimes wonder if writing is my calling or just something I love to do. Maybe dogs are my calling – or animals. Or maybe it’s writing funding applications to support animal welfare and conservation! I certainly find great solace in nature and love being away from screens and devices, chatter, noise and distraction. Walking out across the fields in Nottinghamshire yesterday, bright red poppies dotting the landscape and foamy cream hawthorn blooms bordering the path, I stood and ‘chatted’ with a cow, who stopped his meditational chewing and turned to look at me, its eyes full of knowingness. Mindful moments like those remind me how wondrous it is to be alive. And, for all the self-help and psychobabble, we don’t need to have all the answers. Another brilliant quote from The Friend by Rilke: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart… live in the question.”

 

 

Here we go a-truffling

When I booked onto a truffle hunt with my dog Bertie, I pictured him scampering around in the orchard and sniffing out a mature Tuber Melanosporum aka a Perigord Black Truffle. That’s because Field Spaniels – Bertie is half Field and half Cocker Spaniel – are being bred specifically for the truffle industry. Field Spaniels are renowned for their hunting skills and exceptional noses. When Bertie was a puppy and we attended puppy pre-school at the vets, he quickly located where the treats were. While the other dogs wriggled around on people’s knees, Bertie maintained a hypervigilant eye and nose on the prize.  His olfactory system never sleeps – even a short trip around the block will usually yield an edible find. He once shot off across the beach­ – leaving me panicked that he would run onto the road – hot on the scent of a sausage sizzle hosted by a party of Rotarians. He would have made an excellent sniffer dog. In fact, he could have excelled in many different nose-based careers.

As it is, he is a much-loved and over-indulged pet. Which is why we booked onto a Truffle Hunt organised by a company called Gourmet Pawprints offering ‘pawfect’ food and wine experiences for people who like to take their dogs along for the ride. As befits a canine-centric business, the dogs are guaranteed a window seat on ‘Bella the Bus’ (Kerry, the owner of Gourmet Pawprints, not only runs the business but also drives the bus!) and are greeted with a goody bag of treats. Bert sat across from Penny, a skittish but adorable Dalmatian (one of two on the trip), and Iggy, a well-behaved black lab. At one point, Penny barked which lead to a Mexican wave of barks across the bus, reminding me of a classic read from my childhood, The Starlight Barking by Dodie Smith.

I once dreamt that Bertie accompanied me on a trip back to Britain. In my dream there were sofa beds – you know the ones with the pull-out metal frame – and the dogs slept underneath.  Wishful thinking on both accounts; you’d only find a sofa-sized bed in First Class (dream on Charlotte) and from a cost and quarantine perspective, taking Bertie on holiday to Britain would be totally impractical. I do love to imagine him, however, running across babbling brooks and green fields criss-crossed by dry stone walls in somewhere like Derbyshire (where I was born) or Yorkshire.  But travelling up to Daylesford by bus – Bertie kindly let me share his double seat on the way back – on a Wuthering Heights-type wet and wintry day came a close second.

Our destination was Black Cat Truffles just outside Creswick, and we were greeted with oozingly rich truffle-infused d’affinois cheese and a glass of sparkling wine – just an hour earlier we had had chocolate brownies and coffee in Ballan! We learnt that truffles are the edible fruiting bodies of fungi that grow underground in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of host trees such as hazlenut and oak, most typically in low nutrient soils with a high pH level. At Black Cat the orchard is planted with French and English Oaks and the truffle dog is a trained Labrador named Ella. She had already sniffed out where the mature truffles were located, and the owners Andres and Lynette had marked the trees with a ribbon.

Thankfully the rain let up and ushered in a brief sunny spell just long enough for us to get up close and personal with the truffles. We were invited to kneel and sniff the soil before digging up a few spectacular specimens; mine was the size of a cauliflower and would have commanded a price of about $1000 on the market.  It’s hard to capture the distinctive aroma of a truffle in words; it’s strong, woody, earthy, pungent, heady and sticky sweet.

Needless to say, none of the dogs got a look-in when it came to walking around the truffière. The environment in the orchard needs to be carefully controlled and protected – we had to dip our boots in disinfectant. Instead the dogs got their own special treasure hunt in an adjacent paddock and had fun unearthing treats.

After sampling and/or buying truffle butter, truffle salt and truffle honey in the shop, it was time to move on for lunch at the Farmer’s Arms in Creswick. The entire menu – bar the wine – was truffle-infused from the charcuterie platter to the main course of barramundi or beef cheek. But it was the honey truffle panna cotta with a berry coulis that stole the show. The sweetness of the honey and the earthiness of the truffle shavings (spot the black dots in the photo) were perfect foils for the cooked cream.

While we had been feasting, the dogs were treated to massages and edible treats on the bus. With the dogs relaxed after their pampering session, and the humans sated and soporific after rich food and fine wine, there was much dozing on the way home. That’s what’s so enjoyable about a tour; it’s all done for you and you can sit back and let the day unfold – no map-reading, thinking or organising needed. Pawfect indeed.

Blind Dates and Silent Movies: 36 hours in the Barossa Valley, South Australia

Could I trust him? Take him at his word? Or would he lead me astray (not again, I hear some of you murmur)? Even though – let’s call him George – spoke nice RP (Received Pronunciation) English, cut glass diction is no guarantee of reliability. George, you see, was very much a blind date.

Although just about everyone else I know – bar perhaps Mum and other octogenarians – uses GPS navigation to get them from A to B, I am a bit of a Luddite and still use hard copy maps and the Melway. It’s part silent protest at the increasing digitisation of our lives, and part preference for following a route across the pages from end to end. So here I was in my rented Toyota Corolla, a sat nav virgin, with George the GPS my co-pilot.

My brain wiring isn’t used to screen, voice, road and dashboard interactivity – there was no way I could listen to the radio as well as tune into George and take heed of the endlessly changing speed limits (I jumped the first time George beeped with a road safety camera warning). What would have happened if something went awry with George’s wiring and I ended up in, say, Port Lincoln, rather than Tanunda in the Barossa? You really have to trust the technology. To be fair to George, he got me to Tanunda although I had to ring the B&B where I was staying for directions for the last two kilometres as he took me in a big loop beginning and ending in Seppeltsfield Road.

I arrived after an afternoon meeting in Adelaide about 4.30pm on Friday, just in time for a quick sunset walk. My original plan, had I left in the morning, had been to drive via German/Australian artist Hans Heysen’s (1877-1968) studio, The Cedars, near Hahndorf.  Instead I spent a very enjoyable hour and a half in the Adelaide’s Art Gallery. The permanent collection in the Melrose Wing is divided into themes and combines some European classics – think Rodin, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud – with Australian artists such as Sidney Nolan, Hans Heysen and members of the Heidelberg school. And alongside cabinets filled with 18th century bonbonnières, scent bottles and snuff boxes are some arresting modern pieces, one of them titled We are all flesh, a sculpture of two horses made from horse skins (acquired from a tanner in Brussels) suspended from the ceiling.

We are all Flesh by Berlinde De Bruyckere (2011-12)

Saturday was my only full day in the Barossa so, as is my wont, I rather packed it in – barrelling around in more ways than one – as I had two fixtures shaping my day: a 2 pm cookery demonstration at Maggie Beer’s Pheasant Farm and a 7.30 pm silent movie night with live organ accompaniment in Tanunda. With George stuffed in the glove box, I started my day at the Mengler’s Hill Sculpture Park admiring the sixteen or so sculptures, most of which are hewn from local marble and granite, and enjoying views over the verdant Barossa Ranges.

Chateau Tanunda was my next stop, a family-owned winery and bluestone estate built in the late 1880 by migrants from Germany – as is the case with so many of the Barossa wineries. As well as sampling some oaky reds and a botrytis (dessert wine), I enjoyed looking at the vintage photos of when the estate had its own railway. Next up was a trip to the Barossa Bush Gardens, a volunteer-planted native garden with prolific bird life and a backdrop of laughing kookaburras and screeching galahs and parrots. In the neighbouring nature reserve there’s an open-air chapel with a huge gum tree acting as a kind of altar and pews hewn out of tree trunks. I had a mini contemplative moment or two,  but wanted to get to Maggie Beer’s so I’d have plenty of time for tastings in the Farm Shop before the cookery demonstration.

For those who don’t know of her, Maggie Beer is an Australian national treasure – a bit like Britain’s Mary Berry. In fact, she wasn’t around on Saturday as she was resting in between filming the Great Australian Bake Off in Sydney. She pioneered the use of Verjuice (green juice from unripe grapes) in cooking and is also big on Vincotto (cooked wine made from non-fermented grapes). After wandering through the shop sampling delicious pâtés, salad dressings, jams, pickles, dark chocolate and vincotto paste, salted brandy caramel and passion fruit curd (I had thirds of the last three), it was time for the demonstration.  Simple but delicious, we witnessed and tasted how much zip a bit of verjuice can add to sautéed mushrooms and roasted vegetables.

After a cup of reviving chai and a quick flick through the papers in a café in Tanunda, I had just enough time to return to my B&B, shower and change for the evening. Tanunda is the kind of place where restaurant kitchens close at 9 pm so I needed to get dinner around 6 pm to make the silent movie show. And what a highlight that was. Built for Adelaide Town Hall in 1875, the magnificent Hill & Son organ, the oldest concert organ on the Australian mainland, is now housed in the Barossa Regional Gallery. The evening included a selection of 1920s silent film classics ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Felix the Cat. Accompanied by David Johnston, considered Australia’s finest exponent of silent movie accompaniment, it was a gem of an evening. What skill it is to play the soundtrack to those slapstick silent films and get the timing, intensity and nuancing right. My favourite was Felix the Cat: with just four main characters the laundry-washing mother; the piano-playing boy; Felix; and a bunch of cheeky mice, it’s crisp, funny and deceptively simple. What a treat.

Walking back to my car I passed a wine bar with live music playing. Savouring a glass of smooth Cab Sav named Audrey (making me think Hepburn, a bit of a pin-up of mine) I caught the last quarter of an hour of music and got chatting to some interesting locals, one of whom I met for coffee the next morning.

After coffee on the Sunday, my belly full of an enormous B&B breakfast, I drove back to Adelaide via a few more wineries: Langmeil (long mile in German) was once a small village which extended over a mile (hence the name) from the site of the winery to the church. Here I sampled some delicious reds, my favourite the 2015 Valley Floor Shiraz, and then I walked up to a small boutique winery, David Franz, with wonderful views over the hills. Here I tried and bought a rich, syrupy Shiraz liquor – rather like a young port. Then it was time to rehabilitate George and let him get me back to the airport, which he did, and on time. All is forgiven. I might even take him out again.

Weaving the story of a Witness Tree

A few weeks ago, I was sitting under a Canary Island Pine tree (Pinus canariensis) weaving three-stranded pine needles through a re-purposed children’s trampoline safety net. It required great focus and flow, feeding the needles through the correct holes to maintain the pattern of what would become an 8-metre wall hanging. Sheltered from the wind on one of those less kind late summer days, I was taking part in a community art project known as Refuge. Created by artist Carmel Wallace from Portland, Victoria, Refuge celebrates and pays homage to trees as silent and enduring witnesses of the past.  The Canary Island Pine is in Brighton’s Billilla Gardens, an English-style nineteenth century garden with lawns, trees (many of them non-natives), flower beds and a water fountain surrounding the Art Nouveau mansion built in 1878. Now owned by the Council but leased to a Jewish Orthodox school, the gardens are open to the public.  Other ‘migrant’ trees include two Bunya Bunya pines and a Canary Island Date Palm. Before the Suez Canal opened, the Canary Islands were a stopping-off point for sailors to the New World. Hence Carmel’s reference to trees as metaphors for Australia as a “nation enriched by displaced and transplanted peoples.”I have wandered many a time in the lush and leafy gardens, sometimes with my dog Bertie, or on summer days I sometimes go alone and lie under a tree with a book with just the rustling of trees for company. You can’t fail to spot the iconic Canary Island Pine with its distinctive shape. From the side it resembles the bustle on a Victorian dress with its backward curve. I love the way it commands the space. Sitting on a deep carpet of pine needles and weaving a row or two with Carmel, I discovered that the tree owes its singular form to a lightning strike in 1918 and that it is listed on the National Trust Register of Significant Trees.  You can see the scars where the tree has lost branches, but I’d never lingered long enough to notice the jewel-like beads of sticky resin.Standing under the broad canopy of the tree and looking up offers a quite different perspective; the mosaic of sky peeking through the gaps in the branches, the sparkling droplets of resin sparkling against the reddish bark and the vivid green of the pine needles.

Chandeliers made from spectacle lenses and electric cable

Carmel is  part of Bayside City Council’s Artist in Residence program and worked from one of Billilla’s studios – formerly one of the property’s outhouses. She uses variety of media in her work and often incorporates cast-off or recycled materials as part of an exploration into environmental awareness and ethics. Her studio is a magpie’s den of salvaged bits and pieces: spectacle lenses suspended on copper wire like chandeliers; a collection of drinking glasses and goblets from charity shops; wood, branches and leaves.  The glasses are part of a work inspired by Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra (1743-44) which represents Cleopatra wagering with Mark Anthony that she can stage a more lavish feast and outdo the latter’s excesses.

Eighty people from the community took part in the weaving, sharing stories under the tree, tapping back into the oral tradition of pre-literate societies. The process was timeless, meditative and encouraged contemplation, respect for nature and connection to the earth and community. Trees don’t rush, don’t judge, don’t gossip, complain or engage in conflict and warfare. They stand the test of time and bear witness to man-made and natural events.

The week of the launch of Refuge at Brighton Town Hall, I watched a program called Judy Dench: My Passion for Trees. One of the things I remember most is the story of a 1500-year-old yew tree in a churchyard in Surrey in the UK. Hidden inside its immense, hollowed-out girth is a cannon ball most likely dating from the English Civil War. The tree predates the church and would have been revered by the pagans and druids as a symbol of life and longevity. At the launch Carmel quoted from British author Robert McFarlane: “Witness-tree:” originally a tree that stood as a record of property boundaries, marked as such by scores in its bark. Now broadened to mean a tree that has seen remarkable things, that stands as “a repository for the past.”

It was a privilege being part of the work and seeing it unveiled at the 5th May launch.  Mixing with artists, arborists, neighbours and curators, we drank toasts to the tree and to Carmel with Prosecco, and even better, vodka that had been infused with a green pine cone. I can thoroughly recommend Vodka canariensis! For more information on Carmel visit www.carmelwallace.com