A birth, seasons and getting older

 There is a moment on my return to England when I first feel the English air.  It is usually happens on entering the grim walkway coming off the plane where there’s no aircon and the raw breeze sidles in through the joins in the tube.  It is  cool and moist and conjures up the life I abandoned all those years ago. I wonder if all migrants feel there’s just a whisker of treachery in swapping countries when they come back under a new passport.

Anyway it has been a wrench this time to leave Sydney because a little grandson, Callan, was born just a week and two days ago and to leave him in his sweet newbornness seems a shame.  But our six week trip has been long planned and I know it will do me good to stop doing complicated knitting and listening to audio books and have an adventure or two.

Before setting off though, we all got together to add Callan’s name to the Births page in Grant’s big American Bible.  It is a huge volume full of pictures and has a page for signing the Temperance Pledge in it.  (Nobody  in the family, however, has ever taken this drastic step.)

We discovered we’d not been attending to the Marriages page properly and Ed and Jun couldn’t recall the date of their marriage in Tokyo.  Grant, who was wearing a Mongolian gown and for some reason, a colonial pith helmet, went into his records to sort that out, and Ed left handedly smudged the entry in the august volume.  Finn and Fredi put their more recent wedding in too and we drank to little Callan’s health with flutes of Moet et Chandon.   Caiden,, Callan’s three year old brother (and I’m already realising the confusion those two names are going to cause in my aging brain)abandoned all his nice Japanese decorum and cavorted with his wild Australian cousins up and down and round the Marrickville flat.

It was a happy afternoon with two of  my in laws being there as well. Noriko, Jun’s mum had been at the birth and Helen, Fredi’s mum was still recovering from her fiftieth birthday party from the night before.

DAYS LATER

I’m in Malvern now after three days in London with  Julia and Frank and perhaps for the first time I was an old person along with them.  Frank is fifteen years older (and Julia a bit less) than me, but I am 72 so in a sort of way we are all in the same boat now.  He and Julia both, while frail, have the beauty that old age often confers and it is very good to be with them.  Frank works fiercely  at his painting just as he’s always done and Julia and I talk  of all sorts of things.  I have promised to make a steak and kidney pudding and so we head to Sainsbury’s to get the fixings.  I am a little nervous as I have been told that since her stroke she’s not a good driver but I quickly see that’s not true.   She’s slow but ever so careful and sure of what she’s doing which I certainly wouldn’t be in the London traffic where the roads require, from time to time, that one driver pull in to the side to let the other one by.

I made a cauliflower soup which I wasn’t ashamed of and my pudding was OK but not my best on account of steaming it in a slightly too small steamer.

Frank took us out to a superb breakfast before I left.  I had avocado on toast and two perfect orbs of poached eggs on top.  I told them about the snarky connotations of “smashed avocado” in Oz but I don’t think they got it. In England an avocado is an avocado is an avocado.

I caught the train to Malvern Link and as I waited for Judy to pick me up in her new electric car I had a moment of grieving interruptus.  It is over two years since mum died but now I am in her place again and she’s not here. Tears well. But it is very beautiful in early summer in England. Roses load the branches of the bushes in the country gardens and a blackbird sings with a delicacy that is strange now to my Australian self. Fumitory and valerian break out from rocky walls and everything seems new and energetic with the ancient Malvern Hills green and lovely in the background.

It crosses my mind that seasons don’t confront in Australia.  They remind one of eternity if anything.  Young and old alike are trivial in their context.  Little dry flowers last forever.

 Here the seasons seem close and personal.  Spring is young and blooming and calls up an awareness of one’s own late placement in the life cycle.  But its mockery comes with an uplifting sense that no matter about ageing and frailty the show will go on and there will be spring after spring and I’m glad of that.

We had a rather horrid curry in a restaurant in the Link.  It was Monday which is not the best day here to go out for a meal.  Bearing in mind the unsatisfactory steak and kidney pudding I made for Frank and Julia, it seems my attempts to reciprocate great hospitality have fallen short.  Never mind. It’s the thought that counts isn’t it.