The solace of bees

 It has been a strange Christmas for me this year. Maybe it was because we did everything the same way as usual and  because of that I seemed to myself to be older, different, distant and less full of zest. A danger of ritual is that it evokes comparisons, which necessarily have their odious aspects. Added to my slight melancholy our turkey wasn’t good this year.  We sourced it locally and though the butcher said it was free range, I rather doubt it.  It seemed flavourless and misshapen and I had difficulty relating to this bird that had crossed our path to be eaten.  It was probably not free range at all.  But then old age gradually gets less free range, I thought. No blame.

But it is bees I want to write about, not Christmas, which is well behind us now.  My sister Sarah and I both resolved to keep bees after our mother died a couple of years ago now.  Mum was always reciting this very lovely poem by Yeats

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

It seemed a way of remembering and loving Mum.  Sarah enrolled in a course and Grant bought a special Australian invented beehive called a Flow Hive but rather lost heart when he found out it was only suitable for honeybees that sting and not the little native bees we have here.

I’d watched lots of videos and joined a bee club and been delighted by bees.  Holding a comb full of the little furry things suddenly put life in perspective.

Finally before Christmas I drove to Hornsby and bought, with much trepidation, a box of bees with a queen and drove home, quelling all the while panicky thoughts of them getting out.   It was good discipline staying calm when the satnav took against me and had me circling until I used my own inner bee to find my way home.

I tried to find someone to help me put them in the hive but everyone was away or unwilling (notably Grant).  I realized how inculcated we all are with fear of bees.  As a child I had a list of dangers that I thought were ever present possibilities – the Atom Bomb dropping, a train crash, a tiger getting loose from the zoo and biting me to bits, smallpox, and trailing along behind all these, being stung by bees.  I had imbibed a perception of their relationship with humans as essentially an aggressive one.

The box had wire sides and was black and buzzing.  A circular hole in the top accommodated a feeder full of syrup.  I was to take this out and reach in for the queen’s cage attached to the roof of the box and then take the cap off.  The bees would then eat the candy in its entrance and the queen would come out and take her place amongst them.  I was supposed to tie the cage on to one of the frames.  It all seemed very scary.  Nobody was home and I didn’t have an epipen if I turned out to be allergic.

I pulled out the syrup can and put it aside and found the queen cage dripping with worker bees and suddenly I wasn’t worried any more. I felt like a goddess with all these lives in my hands.  Maybe the bees themselves said something to me but I was OK.  I put I the queen and then tipped the black box up and down and the bees fell into their brood box in a series of clumps. Not all of them went in so I left the box near the hive and set up their sugar water feeder and watched as they fussed and buzzed and settled in.

It is a great thing to sit and watch bees.  I did a lot of that in the subsequent days until we had to leave for our South Coast Christmas.  I worried that they’d be OK on their own and asked Fredi, my daughter in law to be, to top up their sugar water.  The crepe myrtles were in flower.  Surely all would be well.

 It is a magic moment when you open the hive and the bees have begun to build combs.  Mine, however, were contrary bees and had built plenteously but crookedly and rather haphazardly.  I’d made my first mistake in not using foundation sheets to give the bees a bit of an idea about how to build.  The Flow Hive is not supposed to need them but there the situation was – combs all cockameemy

Dear Fredi came to help me and we straightened some out as advised by bee people, with rubber bands, but it was a vandalistic process and honey was spilt, combs broken and bees were distressed.  Fredi is Vegan but she coped much better than I did with our violent intrusion into the hive.  “They are resilient” she said, and they were.  One weird thing was the guard bees who normally patrol the entrance to the hive got confused and decided to protect the back of it for a couple of days after that.

They are still tidying up after our depradations.  Three bees were shoving a bit of wrecked comb out this morning.  It must have been like pulling yourself together after the blitz – getting rid of once cherished but wrecked property.

The brood box is about half full now so in another month I’ll put the Australian invention  on top and wait for my honey.  I hope I won’t have to do anything else horrible before that.

We licked our fingers after our intervention, though, Fredi and I, and the taste was delicate and delicious and beyond all expectations. I have lots to learn but oh, I am happy to have bees in my life.  They remind me to be wise and to keep in mind life’s beauty and make me forget the burden of being one aging bee myself.  It doesn’t matter.  There are so many more of us.

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.