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