I am over New Democracy

My path through the Citizens Jury experience has been a bit of a tortuous one.  For starts it was Grant who put our household into the pool of potential jurors but it was me and not him who got picked.  I could, and in hindsight probably should have declined the invitation to participate.  I find being in groups stressful and am decidedly naïve about the workings of political organizations. Added to this is the fact that we are largely not full time residents of Eurobodalla Shire and spend most of our time in Sydney being grandparents etc..  Although I was assured by our facilitators that I wasn’t a fraud and had a right to belong on account of being a ratepayer the sneaky sense of not being the real thing has never quite left me.

 I decided to make up for my personal deficit by doing a day’s interviewing in Moruya, asking our question “Are your taxes being spent wisely and if not what should change?” to the variety of people I met in the course of my several personal missions – getting my hair cut, having a hamburger and bits and pieces of shopping.  I felt good about having done this and resolved to bring up the issues they raised eg a young girl said “If it rains in Moruya on the weekend there is absolutely nothing to do.” A mother said “The swimming pool hours need to be longer on Saturdays” and another woman strongly objected to fireworks saying laser shows should replace them.  I felt I’d gained a certain authenticity by having these little chats and could make a useful contribution next meeting.

We’d been asked as “homework” to write down ten topics that we thought needed discussion, together with our stance on them.  We were to do this so our papers could be chopped up, leading me to think we would be examining piles of written input on separate topics and perhaps reporting back on them. In the event this never happened and I was a bit aggrieved that my persuasive prose died on the page.

 One of the rules that was explained to us in the first meeting was that we were not to come up with “wish lists” and all suggested extra expenditure by council was to be accompanied by possible cutbacks or “efficiencies”.  On tackling my “homework” I found it was easy to suggest changes but virtually impossible to suggest cutbacks despite the fact that we had been provided with a Briefing Book full of figures as well as a line by line breakdown of what council spent and where they spent it.  I, for one had not the faintest idea what it cost to collect rubbish or maintain buildings and it would take an intensive period of study to find out.  So what could I do?  I decided to make modest suggestions culled from my interviews and add a some ideas (wishes I suppose) drawn from things happening in other places – the Seattle Urban Death project which is exploring composting human remains as opposed to cremation or burial – a transport fleet of minibuses financed by annual membership fees like in the Estonian town Tallinn –  also a state of the art Aboriginal arts and culture centre like the one in Ceduna.  However the more specific I got the more I realized I was straying from the “No wish list” rule.  Specifics cost money and can be dismissed just like that. “Not possible, no money.” The safer way  seemed to be to go with abstractions.  The word “increased” got a lot of work and didn’t require a price tag.  “Increased consultation with the aboriginal community”, “Preserve our pristine environment by increased used of sustainable practices”etc.

Slowly it dawned on me that we, who had allegedly been called upon to process information and indeed ask for any information we needed to create a directive document, were actually being processed ourselves and forced like sausages into a string of harmless abstractions that would bear our name.  It was all very pleasant on one level, like a never ending dinner party with interesting speakers and nice food in the breaks but nevertheless I began to feel disempowered and demeaned and worst of all, unable to do a good job.

Despite an overt ethos of openness and freedom from direction the jury process has turned out to be rather authoritarian.  We are told what to do and timed as we do it.  To some extent this is of course necessary. There are clever strategies for getting us to talk to everyone and not just stick with fellow thinkers. There are good ways of group discussions being amalgamated into an enriched whole. I admire all this and acknowledge the necessity of following a tested method of achieving the New Democracy goal of getting community input.

 However the process is on some level infantilizing.  For example I would have liked to be given a brief rundown on the methodology and the history of the ND organization and how it has come to be funded. Instead we got a promise of an exciting time and a homily on what we as adults know already, that like blind people feeling an elephant (a very old and hackneyed story) we would see things in different ways and should be accepting of differences.  Do we really need to be told how to behave? 

I was surprised how even after five meetings and much mixing we were cautious with each other, like passengers on a 24 hour flight who don’t want to discover too much about the perfect stranger an arm’s width next to them because it is a long haul, and differences are better not discovered.  As luck would have it the ABC program “The Minefield” was on as I drove home from Tuross Heads.  The topic was how it was that statistics and experts almost all predicted the US election results so wrongly.  The point was made that truth has many faces and trying to mine it through statistics was a dangerous game.  The concept of “epistemological humility” was presented which seems to mean not simply accepting that each of us has a different reality but being open to each other’s.  To use the wretched elephant story all those blind folk should shuffle round the elephant a few times before making their pronouncements.  However to have anything like epistemological humility we really need to know each other and for some reason this has been difficult.  I however did have one moment when I think I experienced this humility.  There are quite a few older men in the group who tend to stick together unless forced apart by our facilitators’ manoevres.  They make me a bit nervous.  They say little but seem quite intense.  Anyway I gaily put up the suggestion given to me by the bookshop lady in Moruya that laser displays should replace fireworks and suddenly one of these men almost flinched.  In a few simple words he conveyed the joy of watching the fireworks with his grandchildren.  I felt with him the loss that banning fireworks would mean.  I didn’t exactly change my mind but my understanding of the issue was deepened.  My analogy of fireworks being like the old fashioned and health threatening practice of smoking suddenly seemed a bit cheap.  Reluctant and introverted as he was he’d been generous enough to show a bit of himself and I certainly won’t dismiss him as a “deplorable” (to borrow from Hilary Clinton) again.   In a forum of this kind a trust needs to be fostered so all of us can be known to each other.  The lock step of discussion followed by butcher paper listings somehow doesn’t quite cut it.

There is one more meeting to go and who knows something more than a bunch of abstractions may come together as a report.  I do hope so as the enterprise has been expensive for the council and time consuming for us and in my case rather stressful.

And I now know that if ever I see a group of blind people in a room patting an elephant to hotfoot it out of there sharpish!

PS The last meeting was peculiarly distressing and convinced me that the whole process was misconceived.

Being a citizen

Australia seems  a rotten place today.  Why? I ask myself do I say so? The sun is warm and tiny zucchinis are in place next to my  little heart shaped tomatoes. The peas have yielded enough bounty for a lavish accompaniment to the scallops mornay I plan for dinner tonight. Whence the discontent?

Last night I watched Four Corners from Nauru where eloquent and intelligent teenage refugees cried out for liberation from their three year captivity on that horrid island.  They are there only because they survived a dangerous boat journey and didn’t die like so many others.

 My sister in England forwards, somewhat smugly I think, a letter from her from her local MP celebrating the arrival and ongoing concern for  unaccompanied refugee minors living until now in Calais’ Jungle camp which is being disbanded.

How can I enjoy the simple and complex pleasures of gardening on my roof and putting Tung oil on my beehive while my government and my opposition are so lacking in pity and there is nothing democratic or even criminal I can do to right the wrong being done in my name?

New Democracy time is coming close again and in the light of the rights and wrongs of the world at the moment at first it seems a Liliputian endeavour.  Why fuss about pathways and tourism and youth when those poor kids are being imprisoned on Nauru? 

 I think back to our last meeting which I have to say I rather enjoyed.  It reminded me of an energetic dinner party darting and diving between topics and giving what you could to each one.  The twenty eight jurors are beginning to differentiate themselves and the seeds of respect for some people which were sown last time have grown up while others strengths still sleep underground until their season.  The jury is a sort of garden after all.  Will there be fruit, I wonder.  Will there be pathways snaking through the shire, and wealthy but thoughtful foreign tourists making a beeline for the Eurobodalla Aboriginal Culture Centre in order to understand a world not based on acquisition and property development?  Will our faeces and urine become a bounty for the starved earth?  Will our empty council buildings buzz with volunteer associations doing good works?  Will our youth (at least) find all the fun and fulfilment that is its right?

I don't know really but at least we are talking about doing something and the old elephant council seems to be doing the same bless its heart.  We learnt today that it too is being processed like us and given green dots to stick on issues to prioritise them.

Is it different, I wonder, to be a citizen than the person I was before, doing my gardening, watching my grandchildren grow and minding my own particular business?  All I can say is that I think it is a slight consolation in these beastly times to be doing a little something.  Maybe it is fiddling while Rome burns but better to fiddle than just hang about in despair.

Thoughts on being a jury member with the New Democracy Forum

 I got on the New Democracy Jury panel by accident .  My partner Grant who likes that sort of thing had sent back the invite with my name on it as well as his and was well pleased to find he had been selected only it turned out it wasn’t him but me and was non negotiable.

I should have said no, I thought, as I built a fire in the stove.  It’s not my sort of thing at all.  Apart from the odd demonstration I avoid groups and parties and stick to one on one human contact or better still solitude.  But that First World War poster with a finger pointing came to mind and I thought, yes Julia the time has come to do your duty.  Eurobodalla needs you.  And retired as you are, what other justification do you have for consuming your daily bread?

I sat back with a glass of red and thought about death as one sometimes does at my age (70).  Would I have the courage to do it nicely when my turn came?  My mother had courage when she died at age 98 but had not been specially nice.  She’d laughed wickedly and said “Crocodiles are my favourite animals.  They are fierce and they bite”  Those were her last words and were oddly comforting to me at that point.  The New Democracy Forum was by no means as fearsome as facing death and I’d got to stop being such a sook about it.

I began to realise at this point that perhaps I was not alone in my little house.  There were the usual noises the fire makes – the bang of the iron chimney as it heats up and the whisper of the kindling as it tumbles to ash under the logs. But there was a new sound – an arhythmic  tapping and dragging.  I saw something dark on the edge of my vision – there and gone.  Perhaps madness and the beginning of blindness would be good enough reasons to abandon my jury role I thought hopefully’.

Then it came out, confident and investigative – a big black rat.  It nosed its way towards me as I sat still and fascinated by my visitor.  It looked at my patchwork and sauntered off to under to potato and onion rack.

I was a bit indignant.  This was my house, not terra nullius.  And it was clean too.

At that point my son Eddy rang unexpectedly from Japan and I told him about the rat.  He’s lived in all sorts of strange places.  “You’re not going to like this mum,  but if it’s a clever one like they are in Vietnam there’s only one way….He went on to describe a method involving a deadly sticky paper trap and waiting for the squealing and then using a brick.  I had no idea that my gentle son had it in him.  “They nibble the wires and cause fires in Vietnam” he added apologetically.

I might have to face the forum tomorrow and no doubt death will come in its own time but as for killing a rat with a brick I definitely don’t have it in me to do that.

I slept fitfully waking to rat noises and dreaming of being in a group of scornful knowledgeable people and not being able to hear a word they said.

I got to Tuross Heads and suddenly am glad I’ve come.  It is spring and the country is so beautiful.  I’m glad I’m on my own and have to drive myself for once and I’ve finally sussed which gear is which and the running is smooth.

We are registered and sort ourselves into tables.  Of the older ones like me, men tend to stick with men and women with women in an old fashioned way. I wonder why.

Our facilitators tell us what a good experience this will be and the old elephant and the blind men story is told.  “Everyone sees things differently” we are advised. Looking around it seems unnecessary to warn us of this.  We are all so different. Old, young, grey haired, fat and thin.  One long beard and a nice flamboyant woman with piercings, one in her tongue too.

My thoughts stray to the elephant scenario.  What does the elephant think about all these impertinent blind people prodding it in perhaps private places.  I wonder if the elephantine council is going to be impatient with us blind citizens pontificating on things we know nothing of.  At least it can’t tread on us if it doesn’t like it.

Then we get down to business and it is explained that this session and the next will be informative and not for cogitation at all and I begin to be impressed at the way things are managed.

Three people come in the morning and talk to us about really interesting things.  A farmer talks about potential for recycling amongst other things, a remarkable young man talks eloquently about youth issues.  After lunch we have more people – a hotel manager who wants a think tank on innovations that will reinvigorate our three big towns, a man who really makes the issue of paths interesting.  Gradually the complexity of the council’s job becomes apparent and we get lots of statistics – the balance of young and old, the extraordinary tide of people that swells the population in the holiday season, the need for tourism and work for the young, the need to cherish what we have. 

We learn that Eurobodalla has an over four percent indigenous population – more than most places, and a woman called Ros comes to talk to us.

It seems to me we are lucky to have so many aboriginal people in the shire and surely their culture could be a huge asset for attracting visitors. So many people, especially overseas visitors, want to know about the aboriginal world and its spiritual take on life. 

 But it’s not easy.  Already, Ros says the new signage has not taken the opportunity to acknowledge the original owners of the shire and asks why there isn’t an aboriginal member of the jury.  Someone asks if one would come if invited and she says probably not as her people don’t feel comfortable in such settings.  There are obviously deep issues not easily addressed.

When I visited Ceduna on a trip across the Nullarbor there was a wonderful  gallery and book shop run by kind and proud women who cheerfully dealt with the huge problems that their people faced in the town as well as running the gallery with its resident artists.  I wonder why it’s different here.  There is so much I don’t know.

Our skilled facilitators make us mix ourselves up and talk in circles to the visitors and note our questions.  What more do we need to know to have useful discussions?  I suddenly realise how much I’ve learnt in just one day and I begin to see that this process can turn a mixed bunch of informed and uninformed into a potentially useful body.  A lot of people know lots about things already and tell us, who don’t, all about them.  Our naivety alerts them to the need to share what they know.

Driving home I realise I am looking at the shire in quite a different way.  I stop for a toilet in one of the slightly dark and sinister seeming rest spots beside the highway.  Before I would have assumed it had sprung up, a bit like a mushroom by itself.  Now I gratefully think how good it was that it was proposed and discussed and funded by our lovely council.  And I see everything else in the same way – the signs, the barriers that stop us veering across the road.  All the little facilities and protections that I used to take for granted.  I think how rarely one is grateful and not grumbling about council doings

Home again by my stove I slurp up a packet of noodles and my rat comes out.  I wish there was a way we could solve our cohabitation problem without violence and murder.  I can perfectly see it from the rat’s point of view. No blind men and elephant issues here.  But are there not some conflicts of interest that no amount of sweet reasonableness can resolve?

The proof will, as they say, be in the pudding as the next five meetings of our jury come and go.  May the force be with us.

Making oneself feel better

We are in Durras, on the south coast, and it is a very damp world here.  The fire is resisting my attempts to light it. Some poor little flames spring up when I pump in air with the bellows but then they cark it again when I stop.  I’m not sure I can be bothered.  I need someone to use bellows on me today, I feel so flat.  And yet there’s a measure of menace in the air that makes me shiver, a horrible shooting of several police by a sniper in the USA, a slightly hung parliament right here..

 The Chilcot enquiry has decided that the Iraq war was based on a mistake and two (and maybe three) major politicians are little short of criminals for what they did.  And what’s more, on the way down in the car what do I hear but Philip Adams, a favourite atheist broadcaster hosting a discussion on prayer and saying he doesn’t like poetry and it should have subtitles.  The world is going squew whiff and who is looking after us all?

 Last night I went to visit friend Jo in her newly finished house next door which is lovely.  We sit and talk in front of her fire. She laughs at me for going to England to say goodbye and coming back all mixed up and uprooted from this country upon which I have now grafted myself.  We both consider ourselves absolutely Australian now, she having come as a teenager and me in my twenties.  We love this place but nevertheless we talk about the curious nature of being immigrants.  How even after being away from the birth country so long, there one can stride head held high with blind confidence, but here we tend to look about us as though checking for something.  We experience a tiny deficit in our identity.

I look down and see the head of a leech waving on the side of my shoe.  It is fat with blood. I salt it and it falls off.  I toss it into the fire.

I went to the first rehearsal of Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony on Thursday.  The Festival Chorus is a huge choir working up to its centenary in 2020.  I am a newcomer, having only performed once before, in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town. On joining I observed with some amusement how bonded the various little groups of sopranos, altos etc were and how people had their people they sat with.  Some members are being honoured this year for their longevity as choristers.  This quirky and varied community would indeed merit an anthropological study. I was a bit more deaf than usual on Thursday and found it difficult to catch the words of our brilliant choirmaster who uses wit and deft remarks to play us like an instrument.  We do anything he wants. Peals of laughter follow his wry reproach when we thump out the rhythm of a line or two of the Walt Whitman words without the music.  It did sound doleful.  But I can’t quite hear what Brett says.  I laugh like the others but I’m just imitating.  It’s what one does to fit in.  I realize that in England I would not care about this little bit of inauthenticity but I feel unnerved here in Australia about not being true blue.  How much of a fraud am I?  Do I belong in this choir? In this country?  Anywhere?

It is evening now and the fire is burning brightly.  My mother used to say when I got sad and anxious “you need to pull your truss up”.  There must have once been a lot of herniated people around for such an expression to have come into being.  But I did it (metaphorically) and went into Batemans Bay to get new batteries for my hearing aids so I can hear properly at next Thursday’s rehearsal. 

How curious it is though, the way words can push us into action when we hardly know what they mean..  And how odd that some people, the French for instance, don’t need words that English speakers do, even if we are only half aware of the need. 

We have two words “do” and “make” whilst the French cover all bases with just one “faire”.  I remember from my teaching days how very difficult it was to explain why one made a mistake but did the washing up.  The best I came up with was that the terrible twins were a sort of circus act. “Do” made things disappear whilst ‘make’ conjured them up.  Once the washing up was done there were no more dishes, homework done equaled no more homework. But once made, a cake or a mistake were there for all to see, for better or worse.  A student once said “What about a bed? You make a bed, you don’t do it” and I had a rather beautiful thought.  Birds make nests and actually isn’t that exactly what we do when we make a bed? Or at least we used to when there were sheets and blankets and coverlets and not just a doona to toss straight.

Anyway, aside from all that I ask myself in this time of personal confusion if there is a clue for me in the make and do dichotomy.  It seems that “doing” is conservative and requires previous social knowledge – hence “Do the right thing” on our rubbish bins.  Until recently charladies would “do” for their gentlemen – but how did they know what to do?  Doing good requires knowing a lot as well.  And there’s a nasty side to doing.  You can do someone in, do someone down, do your worst.  "What have you done?"  is a menacing accusation. Making on the other hand has a sort of innocence to it. You really want an answer when you say "What have you made?" You make a mistake simply because you don’t know enough.  You make war when innocence decays into naivety.  You make love. (Imagine doing it!) 

I suddenly whether that leech was making or doing yesterday when it filled its body with my blood.  I suppose doing.  Doing its feeding.  I don't suppose it made a decision about it.

 When insecure one flails about doing as best one can.  Doing one’s duty, doing the laundry, the cooking and the shopping, doing one’s best and never quite doing enough to make oneself feel good and safe and adequate.  But perhaps this is all wrong, especially if you are out of your element, transplanted without knowledge of the nuances of your new world. (And god help the migrant who doesn’t even know the language.)  Perhaps the answer is to give up on doing and embrace making and damn the consequences.  Make friends everywhere, make whoopee, make believe if need be, make a noise and be damned, make an impression, make a night of it and don’t give a damn.

I’m exhausted at the thought of all this.  Maybe I’ll stop now and do my knitting. Do my knitting.  What did I just say?

    

Getting home and the blessings of myopia

Coming home after a long trip back to England is never easy, that I know, but each return presents its own special tangle of thoughts and feelings to come to terms with.  I wonder how soldiers and sailors manage their dislocations.

The flight around half of the globe is a sort of monstrosity – leaving the roses and meadows where the sun is smiling and arriving twenty two hours later to a sullen Sydney winter. The flight is more horrible than ever now that it is split into six hours to Dubai and then fourteen to Sydney. I gobble nasty food, hungry for no reason and even eat a Mars bar poked at me by a flight attendant in the depths of the night and hate myself for doing it. When I go to the toilet I look back at the ranks of people strapped in their seats, eyes fixed to their little screens with silent flailing shapes on them.  It seems an ugly mindless way of being human but then there is nothing else possible up there in a plane. Perversely, though, back on the ground I feel a tiny bit panicky and wonder, now I have all this space, where to put myself.

Our crepe myrtle in the garden has shed all its leaves as usual.  Grant jokes. “It’s a dead tree” and I do the pet shop parrot joke “It’s just sleeping”  But it does look dead and indeed everything seems a bit dismal and  bleached.

Politics are in chaos here as well as everywhere else and I visit 91 year old Betty over the road who says with some satisfaction “It’s the end of the world” I laugh and in some funny way her pessimism cheers me up.  Mum used to say on the phone when told of terrible things going on with the kids.  “It’s not the end of the world” and I take a leaf from her book. Whatever Betty says it’s not the end of the world.  I just have to find my way back into this side of it and get on with living.

Home is lovely, especially as son Finn and girlfriend Fredi have been staying here and doing good works, making a set of steps, swapping our ancient bed for a better one and other things too.  I go up to the roof garden and pull all the beanstalks out as they have done their dash.  In my morbid mood I dwell on a great big bean that never got picked and is crispy brown with fat seeds inside.  What a waste. Or is it? I could plant those beans I suppose.  For some reason the row of tiny red beetroot seedlings and green threads of onions are exactly as I left them.  Maybe they’ve been waiting for me.  I shall prick them out, as I think it is called, tomorrow and give them space to grow.

Then Ruth rings up and says “Do you mind if I don’t ask you about your trip and all that but tell you about something weird that’s just happened?” and I laugh and bless her from the bottom of my heart.  I so want to hear about the weird thing.  She’d been with Jacob at Leichhardt Mall and seen a man in black track pants carrying two guns.  She called the police. “Was I stupid?  He was probably a security guard”  I absolutely agree with what she did.  Whoever he was, carrying two guns was over the top, especially in these troubled times where it takes next to nothing to scare us.. Indeed it’s more indecent than being stark naked which would immediately bring the law down upon you.  She was right to call the police.

We arrange for her to come round with the kids in the afternoon and it is so good to see them – Jacob, who is six, making adult remarks as usual and Ethan, now three rather mute and baleful towards me.  He’s still of an age to take offence at grandmothers going away for extended periods.  I marvel at how much children change their characters.  Not so long ago Ethan was the epitome of sunny joyousness with not a complicated thought in his head.  Now for some reason he sneaks into the cutlery drawer and tries to get away with two cheese knives.  What is he thinking, I wonder.  Both kids go off and discover some cardboard tubes for posting maps and such.  Jacob comes back with his arms stuffed in two of them and talking like a robot.  “But you’ve got no hands” we cry in mock distress. Still in a robotic monotone he says “I am a robot with a human inside me. I have hands.”  I am touched by his need to reassure us.  Ethan comes in half dressed and also with tubes on his arms and won’t let us repair his disheveled state.  Eventually we get the tubes off them both with glorious farty noises and they all head off.

As I shut the front door I see a plane in the sky presumably full of people like me.  I am so glad  to be back, up close and personal with my world and the people and plants in it.  I don’t like the sense of perspective that travel curses me with, the knowledge that I am a speck on the globe which is itself a speck in the universe.  Who needs to know?  Myopia is a blessing and thank god I haven’t got to go anywhere else for a bit.  Just get the shepherd’s pie made and put the peelings in the compost heap.

The question of bees

I was really tired on my last day in England. We’d been doing so much for so long and in England the dawn comes up at a merciless 5am at this time of year and sleep is difficult afterwards.

 And my packing wasn’t done and I couldn’t see how I could ever sufficiently tame all the crap I’d acquired and make it fit into 30 kilos worth of suitcase.  Such silly things there were – shards of pottery picked up from the muddy pebbles by the Thames.  Really silly presents. Postcards that never got posted.  A bowl with olives on it.  A clever collapsible garden hose.  A bottle of olive oil and Greek spices.  An empty Golden Syrup tin with 90 and “Happy Birthday Your Majesty” on it. I told Sarah I was so tired I could cry, thinking maybe she’d let me off going to her bee meeting that night but she said I could sleep on the plane – and I’m so glad she did.

We set off in the car to Twickenham over the narrow streets cluttered with parked cars and punctuated by bone shaking speed bumps and we got stuck in traffic which made Sarah faster and more daring in her driving.  She cunningly took back roads which other cunning people had already gone up and so it didn’t help at all.

Maybe it was my tiredness or the stress of the journey but arriving at the bee place seemed like reaching a paradise complete with angels. The peace was palpable. The bee people didn’t have wings but wore white suits and had nets over their heads. We were a bit late, what with the traffic, and they were already going about their business in the garden.  One person was burning ferns in a smoke puffer.  Everyone emanated a caring, absorbed attentiveness as they worked around the stacked wooden towers full of glistening unquiet bees.  There was love and a measure of awe as well as expertise.  It felt a good safe place to be.

Sarah and I got into white suits too and she nobly gave me the one she usually wore and put on a slightly small one that left her black sweater showing at her wrists.  We donned special protective gloves and joined the group on the grass clustered around the furthest hive. They were easing out the honeycomb frames one by one to see how they were progressing and if the verroa beetle had got in.  Bees were flying in and out their of their entrance and I warmed to them because of their perturbation and turmoil which had earlier been so much part of my own state of mind.  They seemed like kin and yet seeing them had changed me into something else. I’d joined the throng of angels and I was calm and happy. For a little while I had left my own colony and was looking down from a higher place on to the diminutive confusion and frenzy that I knew so well from when I was there.  I loved the bees for being like us and allowing me to feel so good.

Suddenly I heard Sarah’s voice, panicky, saying “Can someone smoke me.  I’m being stung badly”.  And she was too.  Bees are attracted to black and thanks to her giving up her suit to me, her sweatered wrists were exposed. Lots of bees picked on her, making stinging bracelets. She was smoked with a puffer and made light of it. “Just like sticking your hands in nettles – no worse”  I stopped being sentimental then and got out of the flight path but I was impressed by the fierceness of the little things too.

My turn came to use a hive tool to ease a frame full of bees out of the box and it was a stirring feeling to have so much life, so many little houses in my hands, some of them with roofs on and inhabited by the white grubs, bees to be.

The next frame had the queen in it – a bigger bee and the heart of the colony.  I was told that she had once been just an ordinary worker, selected and fed royal jelly by her colleagues.  She had then become fat and fertile and gone on a mating flight. Now she will create more bees but never take flight again. For some reason St Paul’s Cathedral and the Blue Mosque come to mind. We humans make our gods too and feed them a sweet diet of hymns and incense so they grow huge and special and require a lot of dedicated servants but they don’t come out amongst us any more except for that odd exception Jesus.  What kind of bee was he? 

There is excitement round the hive.  A nasty wax moth has been discovered and disposed of and we have reached the level of the eke, a shallow box with no frame in it and I learn something rather horrible.  We are to witness what is known in the trade as a “drone sacrifice”.  We have reached the level of the “eke”, a shallow box with no frames in it.  Some bigger waxy cells had been built there in a freehand sort of way.  They were drone cells, lawlessly constructed outside the normal honeycomb foundations and were permitted for a special reason.  Verroa beetles love big drone grubs above all else and are lured away from the main frames to feast on this disposable clump of cells.  Our teacher hacked off the outcrop and autopsied the cells to show us grubs, dead and alive being munched by verroa.  Bees born to die for their colony, it seems.

Verroa amongst the bee larvae

So many things in this micro world seem to echo our own.  What was Brexit but a badly managed swarm after all?  Nobody saw the signs or made proper provision for the restless Leavers and it all ended in tears.

Just as we finished  checking the hive it began to rain and everybody was glad it had held off thus far because bees hate getting wet, just like cats.  We went into the club house and had a cup of tea and talked bee talk.  I was told not to fall into the error of thinking of bees as individuals. “It is the colony that is the individual.  People who have a weak queen feel bad about killing her and getting another one, but the truth is no one bee is anything on its own.”  Getting a new queen is like a heart transplant I suppose.  A bunch of bees squashed in the inspection process is less than a bruise would be to a person.  A little nagging part of me thinks “From whose point of view”

All this was both unnerving and exhilarating and I had fallen under the spell. I myself am going to have a hive up on the roof to watch and talk to and get solace from.

Sarah was taking pleasure in all those bees having stung her to so little effect and I hoped that I would have her genes when I got stung as apparently everyone does sooner or later.  We went home and opened a bottle of wine and promised to share news of  the hives we were going to set up on either side of the planet.

Tomorrow seems to soon to take up our separate lives again and though I long to go home I shall miss my dear sister bee, and who knows when or if our flight paths will cross again.  I bracingly think, however that we are just two small workers and our earth colony is not such a big place.  I will not be so very far away.

A brewery and its aftermath, voting at Australia House and an emergency at St Paul's Cathedral

Back in London again, now with the chequered flag of my personal satnav well in view.  I will be back in Sydney in less than a week. For slightly absurd reasons I am staying with my sister Sarah and Grant is staying with my nephew Francis and Jo his wife, a ten minute car ride away. G and I feel a bit odd after all this time in each others’ pockets but it’s nice for me and Sarah to be sisters on our own.  Like an aged and tubby Romeo and Juliet, Grant and I greet each other fondly when we meet.  Sarah and Grant have an long standing enmity which, bless them, they are trying to remedy with olive branches of one sort and another.  Grant invited Sarah to join us for a curry in the famous Brick Lane.   “But I don’t like curry.”  Her ploy was more cunning and successful “I want to shout you a tour of the local brewery just round the corner.”  Grant of course could not resist and that was how we all three set out like cats in a bag on a rather fascinating tour of the family brewery that makes umpteen million pints of beer a week which are drunk all over the world.  We crumbled hops in our fingers and went up and down staircases and saw amazing tanks and a machine that spewed spent barley.  We were the only three in the group and our guide was a gruff ex-school teacher who believed in discipline.  Sarah being a local knew a bit already.  “That is the oldest wisteria in England” she said.  “Older even than the one in Kew” And it was a remarkable creeper, smothering one side of the brewery.  Our guide grudgingly acknowledged that perhaps that was the case but when she also mentioned that the withies in the river were still picked by people for their Christmas wreaths he stifled his annoyance. The next opportunity he had he said snarkily “Our local friend will probably know this ….” Sarah didn’t and so he was on a bit of a winner and told us about the OH and S rules for our tour. “It can all be summed up like this “Don’t be an arse”, hoping for a frisson of shock from us two ladies with our posh accents.  I said musingly “We don’t have that word in Australia.”  He explained and I said “Ah you mean fuckwit”.  He recovered after a moment and joked with a barrel man who joked back.  “Lots of banter in this place.  We are like family here.” He boasted “What’s ‘banter’ in Australian?” “Bullshit” I said sweetly and he hastily led us up yet another steep staircase.  It was at this point he noticed that Grant was wearing sandals. “Sorry” he said. “You have to be wearing covered shoes” and dispatched the 17 year old work experience lad to fetch some plimsols for him.  Grant doesn’t ever like being told what to wear and has avoided visiting temples for years on account of having to take off his shoes but what choice did he have deep in the heart of this brewery with sinister vats of bubbling stuff all around.  He protested that his feet were too big for any normal human shoe but the guide won that round.

He’d slightly offensively hinted all the way that we were only here for the beer tasting at the end and we were to remind him when it got near to twelve o’clock, our allocated tasting time.  Sarah happened to look at her watch around ten to twelve “Ah, not long now.  The bar’s soon”  “Actually I was thinking about the parking meter” Sarah replied coldly. Yes, I thought, one to us.  In fact I think party West/McCall got the last laugh as the guide kept glancing at his watch while Grant insisted on tasting this beer and that and asking arcane questions.  His desperation mounted as Grant said “I won’t try that one because we can get it anywhere (scornful emphasis) in Australia but that one called 90.  I have to taste that.  We knew that was a special beer for the queen’s 90^th birthday and Grant despises the monarchy. It would be like drinking her blood. It was a perfect chance for a lecture from our guide but he despairingly let it go, time having marched into the timeslot of the next tour.

I was sort of relieved to be out in the street after all that even though it was raining.

Next on the agenda for Grant and me was voting in the Australian election as we would be in the air on Saturday when it was to happen in Oz.  Amazingly it seemed we could just rock up to Australia House and vote, even without ID, which was just as well as I discovered I’d left all mine in a safe place at home being so prone to losing it.

On the tube to the Strand I started to feel the effects of all the little gulps of this beer and that at the brewery and thought.  Good, we’ll be at Australia House soon, almost like home and they’ll have a loo.  Elaborate arrangements involving cordoned off sections of pavement and frisking stations had been set up at Australia House.  There was one way in and one way out.  My handbag was searched more intrusively than I have ever known it to be.  My private spare knickers pocket was unzipped and felt in.  The French lollies I had bought to get rid of my last Euros were sniffed.  I suppose they could have been teeny weeny packets of gelignite.  I got in and immediately asked a nice Aussie lass “Where’s the toilet?”  She threw up and her hands and said sorry there wasn’t one.  I was outraged.  The meanest MacDonalds has a toilet and Australia House doesn’t?  And I’m Australian too and not the pommy I sound like, as if that made a difference.  I thought of abandoning voting altogether but remembered Brexit and the need to be responsible and deployed mind over matter and picked up my voting papers an went into a little cardboard booth with a pencil on a string just like in Sydney.  I unrolled the endless senate sheet and despair enveloped me.  I only had to find six above the line but which six? I knew who would get my principal vote but after that?  Who wasn’t doing dastardly deals with whom? Whatever happened to just a number one?  And the small green sheet required ten   characters to be ordered,  only one of which I was sure was not dodgy.  I did it all but did not enjoy my democratic right as much as I’d hoped and hastily left the building.  Across the road was a square brick edifice marked Public Convenience.  Thank god, I said to myself but when I looked there were four little lights Vacant. Engaged, Cleaning and Out of Service.  The last shone red.  I hit the building with my fist and turned to go when I heard a voice “Miss!  Miss! and turned and saw an alert but shabby figure sitting on a step at the end of the building.  “There’s a ladies toilet behind that church but you’ll have to pay fifty pee”  “Thanks” I said “And could you help me.  I’m homeless and I’m trying to get seven quid together for a bed for the night”  “Well, you’ve helped me a lot” and I get him a pound coin and hastened to the back of the church.  Sure enough there was an old fashioned  staircase going into the ground with black railings round it so down I went.  I put my 50p in the turnstile and went in noting absently that it smelt horribly of urine and there was a long row of urinals in front of me.  All very unisex in modern London I thought as I went into a cubicle.  Must be the European influence.  And why not?  I came out and a middle aged man gasped as he saw me.  I knew then I had transgressed.  “I think I must be in the wrong place” I said.  “That’s all right love” he replied kindly as he scarpered into a cubicle.  I was panicked now by my inappropriacy and general incompetence and couldn’t see the way out.  Without a scrap of dignity I crawled under the turnstile that I had fed my 50p into.  I felt all right once out in the street, relieved in more ways than one.  It was only later when Sarah told me that the particular loo I had trespassed upon was a popular cottaging spot that I wondered if I had really been alone and when I had uttered “Praise the Lord” in my cubicle.  Maybe there were couples in the other cubicles who had frozen like Greek statues in shock.  I hope I didn’t cause too much bother anyway. 

Another disconcerting thing happened before the day was out.  We decided to visit St Paul’s, a place where I wrote a nice poem in my twenties which still consoles me.  There was to be a sung eucharist for St Peter at five so we could only wander round the back and see the memorials to brave generals and captains who’d fallen (a vivid word) in battle.  We’d just left when everybody else came pouring out too – lovely little choirboys in robes and black upstanding collars, lots of clergy people including two women rather unexpectedly in scarlet surplices.  A faint alarm bell was sounding in the cathedral and I was surprised at the calm all around me.  No panic here.  Just standing around chatting instead of praying properly inside.  If it had been me (and I suppose in a way it was) I would have been putting some distance between myself and the lovely cathedral.  But maybe it was a fire drill and they knew it.  Perhaps the ladies who had red silken surplices were wardens and wore them to stand out like office people who have red helmets.  I puzzle still about the propriety of a fire drill in the middle of eucharist.   Maybe the lord himself was having a bit of fun setting off the alarm just as his opposite number had directed me to the Gents

Goodbyes

The bit of this journey I was rather dreading was returning to Malvern, the place Mum lived for 35 years and where for at least a decade I’d visited her every year for about four weeks. Her cottage was (and still is) high on the side of Old Wyche Hill and commands a view of four counties.  When there are floods they glitter silver on the horizon.  On a cloudy day the valley below is full of cotton wool with the pale sky above.  The sun rises plumb  in the middle of her living room window which mum in her day would toss  open with energy and joy. She was a London girl through and through but she found peace and satisfaction in the Malvern Hills with her various dogs, Norman, Hattie, Jeannie and Polly, all of whom had their trying little ways.  Norman hated anyone in uniform and Polly had a thing about cars and thunder.

After Mum's funeral two years ago, Grant and I shot off to eastern Turkey where we'd arranged to be before Mum died and we had our curtailed holiday there.  There hadn’t been time to say goodbye to the hills that had been friends to me through the thick and thin of Mum’s aging and before that too. I hadn’t gone to the Holy Well either, an annual ritual visit to the curious little chapel you could only find if you concentrated and took the right forks in the paths. I’d walked those hills like a ship in full sail when pregnant with Finn. Once I’d brought the children back to Mum’s cottage on a night train when we’d been in Cambridge on Grant’s sabbatical and he and I had had a blood curdling row.  He came to make peace next day and we stayed on with Mum.

 There was a winter visit where a perfectly constructed igloo had been built at the little school at the bottom of the road.  Winter had its challenges.  The road up to mum’s cottage is steep enough to make the fittest person stop and puff and in winter requires snow shoes to navigate.  Day care people who minister to the needs of the aged residents too obstinate to move on to the level, regularly have small accidents in the snow and ice and are unsung heroes.  Stupid delivery trucks taking short cuts do it at their peril.

It was Grant who made me go up there again.  His questing soul was driving him to get some Malvern Water from one of the many wells that perforate the hills.  At these places water runs willy nilly from spouts into drains and it troubles my now Australian spirit.  So much waste.  I wish I could turn off the taps.  On the other hand it bespeaks a great earthy generosity and interesting things happen at these springs.  I heard tell, while saying at our B and B in Malvern of a group of Muslims who once undressed and ritually purified themselves, perhaps for some feast day.  Other people swear that any other water with whisky is sacrilege. As for me, though, I had said my goodbyes and was ready for the next staging post in our long journey. A can of Sprite would have done the trick but it was not to be.

Despite all my fears, my goodbyes were not too difficult.  I realised that my friend Judy and fairly new friend Kevin and his son Alex had their own tomorrows, their own lives and there was the internet anyway.  My brother Michael and his wife Olya were on their own paths and while it was good to cross ways – ultimately we each had our own.

What I hadn’t bargained for was the heart squeezing nostalgia and memory soaked scent of the hills themselves and most of all Mum’s absence from them.  Is grief for the dead just selfish reluctance to accept mortality?  I don’t know.  All I do know is some part of me was calling out “Where are you Mum?”  I knew there was no answer. She seemed everywhere and nowhere.  I wasn’t sure she was OK and yet I knew that was a silly worry. It is so much harder to say goodbye to the dead than the living.

Brexit

“I am sick to my stomach” said my long time friend Judy on the morning that the Brexit poll results went public.  And she looked so sick too as she had to sit down with the tray with our coffees on it. She was in pain. “My heart” she said as she patted her chest and tried to make light of it.  She’d been up since six am fielding calls from distraught friends, mostly young, who felt their identities and futures as Europeans had been stripped from them overnight.  

Somehow the seriousness of the situation – the possibility of the Leave vote getting the majority had not been apparent before that horrible morning.  The people who wanted to stay in Europe seemed quietly confident that sense would prevail, that the clouds of xenophobia and nostalgia for tough little Blighty who beat the Germans twice would disperse when the moment came to choose.  The strings of  fluttering Union Jacks in the High streets generated a party mood, the jubilation of a jubilee which has now taken on a bit of the flavour of a dance of death.

Losing a referendum is not like losing an election when there is wrath mixed with disappointment but no damage had been done – yet.  We consol ourselves - maybe the buggers won’t be as awful as we fear.  They may improve, who knows, especially with effective opposition. But disappointment doesn’t cut it when it comes to losing a referendum.  The damage is all done and there’s just a gun to look down the barrel of.  

A disturbing revelation is the fact that the majority of Leavers were apparently the older generation.  A bitter young woman on the radio said more or less “What right have those who won’t be here that much longer to decide for us whose lives have just begun”.  I can see her point. Having money in the bank has always conferred power, but perhaps having years in the bank should count for something too.  

I don’t know all the arguments and until recently was barely aware of Brexit let alone its ramifications.  I’m sure I’m not alone in that.  Now, though, it all seems such a ghastly mistake to let what amounts to a national fit of peak threaten the power balance of Europe creating barriers everywhere.

Enough.  I am upset like so many others here and probably everywhere else.  And England is so very beautiful at the moment. Warm sunny days, lanes with hedgerows full of flowers and little creatures.  Green grass that’s been let turn into meadows.  All so lovely and so vulnerable.  Along with the Union Jacks in the High Street here are other strings of flags. Red crosses on a white background.  I last saw one of these at a performance of Henry V being upheld by a standard bearer on the field of battle.   The flags of the rest of the United Kingdom joined it to make the sporty little number that the British flag is now.   Is that really what people want – a denuded flag, a denuded England, just cheddar and no camembert or bratwurst?

There is a petition on the go for a second referendum on the grounds that yesterday’s was almost fifty fifty to say nothing of the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland were heavily pro Stay.  Maybe given a second chance the dice would fall differently.  Let’s hope so.

But after this no more referenda.  Just thoughtful government to take responsibility for what is to happen and voters on guard and ready  to argue if we don’t like what it says.  That arrangement makes me feel more or less safe.

Family Ties

Our next stop was to be Kings Langley, a village close to London. We are going there as a consequence a Christmas card I’d received a few years back from a very old distant cousin.  It had a letter written in tiny handwriting in it covering all of the white space of the card. It began “You won’t know me from Adam, but Adam is my name”. In fact I did know him a bit from when I was a young girl. My great aunt Bobby took me and my brother Michael to visit him on his farm called Hellions. He’d been a rather fierce and dashing Devon farmer. I had a vague memory of wearing unsuitable transparent knickers when being hoisted up on the combine harvester.

 But the Christmas card was troubling.  As an old man he seemed very uneasy about how life had turned out for our family. Our father, his cousin, had drowned when my sister and I were tiny.  A posthumous child, a boy called Michael after his father, was born nine months later.  We survived by renting out rooms in our big Earls Court Road house but it was pretty chaotic, and mum with her bohemian ways was not drawn into the bosom of the my father’s respectable middle class family. I remember the atmosphere of opprobrium well.  We reluctantly used to visit an Auntie Minnie who lived in Kingston and she used to say to Mum  “We all need to make sacrifices Stella, even you.”  What could she have meant, I wonder now.

But Adam’s Christmas card made me sad. He’d got some things wrong and I thought he shouldn’t go to his death feeling bad about anything.  I wrote and told him about us all - how we had thrived and not to worry.  I never heard back.

Some time later I got a letter from Kings Langley saying Adam had died and he, John West, his nephew, had found my letter pegged on a string.  And so a friendship seeded itself in the muck of the long gone past.  Unlike my sister I have never taken much interest in family connections and had perhaps inherited a wariness  about the family of the father I never knew .

The next time, when I was visiting Mum in the UK, John organised a family reunion in a country pub. My sister Sarah and I drove there.  She was going on to Cornwall to see her kids and I hadn’t realised that the pub was miles from anywhere and I hadn’t a hope of finding somewhere to stay the night. John and Peggy, his partner took me in as they had booked rooms for themselves and her children, a little boy called T and a girl Natalie.  It was such a kindness.  Peggy and her kids were born in Zimbabwe and John comments wryly – who would have though it – a confirmed bachelor like me ending up with a family.

We all went for a walk next day and little T took photographs of the tiny golliwog called Little Eb that Sarah had given him.  I was a bit disconcerted by this gift as golliwogs have long been decidedly politically incorrect but T loved it and Little Eb had his picture taken by a stream, up a tree, in amongst the buttercups beside the path.  I promised that next visit Grant and I would take them out to dinner, but Mum died and we never did.

 So this year we met again with a booking at the local pub. John and Peggy had a   wedding last year and I sense a contentment in the family. “The wedding day went by so quickly” said Natalie.  “If only it could have gone on longer”

 T is a beautiful young man now and Natalie a decidedly attractive young woman and both are at different agricultural universities – a particular English phenomenon with echoes of the USA, horrible hazing rituals including dark passages with dead birds hanging from the ceiling.  Drinking clubs where downing sixteen pints of beer is considered a poor showing.  I dunno, it all seems a bit much but I am sure they are up to the challenge.

I like this  family so much for their warmth and toughness and indeed they do have their difficulties.  The middle class part of England that they inhabit is still quite xenophobic.  Peggy and Natalie are fierce and forthright when they encounter racism but T deals with it in his own confident and laconic way.  A dead fish slipped under a door gets his message across. 

I think as I write this, how pleased Adam would have been if he’d known what links and friendships his Christmas card musings had brought about.  I shall drink to him tonight.