The Last Post

Our last day in Perth City was a bit dispiriting .  Maybe it was just me but the place seemed like a  wealthy woman who had gone to her wardrobe and put on the first clothes that touched her hands – no style, no consideration of colour or age.  Big was good however. She liked big.  Huge glass office blocks dwarfed poor little heritage buildings which had been painted nicely, but the colours made them look like Disneyland imitations.  One had a mighty modern building with bold black and white stripes behind it.  Why on earth?

Nice things – a marvellous public transport system, free in the inner city.  A lovely precinct dedicated to the arts with an art gallery that mixed aboriginal art with western art and had some lovely Stanley Spencers on show.

Now that it is a week later I will lift a little of  the veil I planned to draw over the terrible  trip home.  It wasn’t dignified. We had to stuff all our accumulated things (Fleece, paintings, books, silly teacloths, jumpers etc.) into stripey bags and then found they weren’t strong enough and so got huge plastic sacks from the airport people and by the time we’d latticed them up with orange tape they looked like bodies.  Then the explosives lady insisted on cutting holes for her instrument to check them.  It was all too much.  In addition, the latent toothache I had been having for the last few days flared into agony when the plane took off.  Only liberal quantities of Nurophen washed down with whisky subdued it sufficiently to stop tears rolling down my face.  I don’t remember getting home at all.

We are back in Sydney now and I have to say it has taken a while to get used to living in a house again.  It is nice but oh so complicated.  So many possible spaces to sit down. There are clothes to choose from, an oven to cook in.  I feel the panic of a tortoise out of its shell.  The most unexpected discomfort is not being like a conjoined twin any more.  Grant and I got so used to each other’s little ways and expectations.  I’d always read my Kindle while he made breakfast because there was not room for us both to be up.  I’d cunningly fold the bedding whilst still in bed   and then transform the bed into a table for breakfast and he would put the teapot and the toast rack on it with a flourish.  We knew what we expected from each other.  Now we don’t see each other for stretches together and I find myself wondering is he going to get the washing in or is he expecting me to.  Where is he anyway and who’s doing the dinner?  Grant says he’d go mad if he had to live in a van for ever but I think I could be quite happy doing so. 

I was on the bus coming back from the city yesterday thinking how pretty Sydney was looking and vaguely listening to some French people  assertively talking French in the front me rather as if they owned the bus.  I was finding it hard to pick up much, when the old man by my side leant towards me and said with a twinkly eye “Do you speak French? Are you eavesdropping?”  He had an accent I didn’t recognize.  “I am from Slovakia” he said “and do you know one day I was sitting in the bus like this and two girls were talking in my language behind me. One said to the other “If I had a head like that I’d wear a hat”  So I turned around and answered “What kind of hat should I get – an Akubra maybe, or a beanie perhaps”  And that girl went so white!  Payback!”

I sometimes feel a bit like that girl when I write this blog.  I know who some of you readers are, but there are a lot I don’t know, especially in Port Lincoln where there is a puzzling spike in my readership. I hope I’m not getting things wrong or being insensitive and there’s no payback waiting for me.  

 This journey, for me, has not been like a typical holiday that fades into a dream as soon as one gets home.  It is still in my blood.  Like a pilgrimage it has changed me from one sort of Australian - pommie migrant to a more authentic lover of this place.  I feel confident that I belong here.  I understand why people go to Mecca or Lourdes now.  It is purifying to take to the road for a while – to step out of the ever ascending spiral of days and nights and weeks and go linear – just head on from place to place learning as you go and hearing peoples’ stories without entering into them.  And at the end there is a sort of peace.