Getting Covid right at the end of the “official” pandemic, when staying home is only recommended, not mandated, has been strange on so many levels.
What’s weirdest for me is wanting to stay close to home. Don’t get me wrong, I love my home, but I adore heading out into the world, hustling and bustling my way around the place. Sticking my nose in here, looking at something artsy there. Eating food and drinking wine and being with people.
It’s a strange in-between time for me. I have hit the six month mark of having joined the great Covid Resign trend by leaving my job. This pause reminds me of 24 years ago when I returned from Europe after a ten year absence, five months pregnant and taking my first break from work for a long time.
Stepping out of the powerful river of relentless working is a strange and wonderful thing. But now I feel stripped of ambition and the will to leave the house. Doing one thing a day is ambitious and I have an almost superstitious need to get back home.
I looked up at the sky and it was completely covered in clouds, not a single bit of blue to be seen. That definitely reflected my state of mind. But it did help a little to remind myself that above the clouds the skies are blue.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Town Team Convergence event held in Perth’s southern suburbs. It brought together people from Town Teams across different suburbs of Perth but also from our Midwest and South West – up to four hours drive away. Town teams are a partnership with community, business and local government to beautify local areas.
Alongside others I painted ugly asphalt–so exhilirating–and made a letter “C” to so we could make out the words “Connection” and “Community” in cardboard letters. We spelled this out over a pedestrian bridge for a moment and photo opportunity. The toots of one or two cars were like a standing ovation.
Today I am at a placemaking event held in a northern suburb of Perth to encourage the development of a piazza in a car park adjacent to a busy road. Children and families are having a turn painting ugly asphalt. There are politicians on hand who are promising follow through on the work required to make the piazza a reality. But none of it would have happened without a grassroots push from people in the community to make it a reality. Many unpaid hours have seen this idea come to life.
Several years ago despite my hectic work schedule I re-joined my neighbourhood association. It was as a form of therapy from the often soulless and ineffective process of creating policies, frameworks and reform reports. The practical reality of doing something at neighbourhood level was and is intoxicating.
“What’s your passion is a stupid freaking question…The question we should be asking ourselves is… “‘What do you do when nobody’s watching? What do you do because it’s part of you?”
The suitcase was completely unpacked, the memory-foam neck cushion had its cover stripped for cleaning, the travel wash was flapping on the line, even the adaptor plugs were stored away.
Why did I feel so discombobulated and not quite here?
Travel is always a bit like that for me – scenes of places I have been flit and flip through my mind, waiting to be sorted into a memory box for future rumblings. Conversations and discussions with people I’ve met and re-met require reflection and integration.
I love to immerse in European culture, experiences and memories, and make new memories with loved ones. I love the feeling of being a “citizen of the world”, able to negotiate different terrains. But the pangs I felt in the arid house at Kew Gardens on seeing Australian plants with their incomparable shapes and smells tells the whole story for me. Australia is my beloved home.
But it turns out that it was not an existential crisis creating my befuddled mental state on my return to Perth. It was the spicy cough, which got me, most likely at Heathrow or on the packed flight home. I have done so many RAT tests over the years, but this time I was right.
I have taken to my bed with a clear conscience to rest and reflect.
I’ve had such wild dreams about this holiday. I’m hoping it will… slough the layer of apathy off the layer of calm, and allow me to look many fears in the face… But I suppose the closer I get to the destination, the more I mistrust romantic notions of a clean sweep I am, after all, still the same person, even the 14-year-old who last trod the moving walkways of Heathrow.”
14th June 1990 – diary entry written in Moscow Airport before I was due to land in London for an extended working holiday.
It’s always rather sobering to read old diary entries. The one written above was in Moscow airport, because in 1990 Aeroflot was a very cost-effective way to get from Australia to London. Obviously we stopped at Moscow airport en route and well I remember the grumpy staff at the airport who refused to serve non-Russians. I sat down to journal some of my confusion and fear while waiting to board the short flight to London.
My early London diaries are full of realisations of the Moscow entry concerns. Was I in the wrong job? (yes) Would I stick to my wellness goals? (nope, but eventually I would find yoga). They are also seeped in loneliness, occasionally interspersed with tales of unrequited love or disastrous romantic entanglements.
How wonderful it has been to come back to London and dabble in the nice things, and celebrate how the difficulties are long, long behind me. What a blessing to acknowledge all the good things London delivered for me. An investment. Career experience albeit completely unrelated to what I do now.
But how quickly London can envelope you in its enormity, and lure you into its embrace of anonymity and loneliness. The best bit of all about this trip to London has been connecting with old friends and visiting old haunts. Giving a nod to the 14 year old me, and the 25-35 year old me across the chasm of time, and letting them know all is well.
My sister and I in London – on the left in 1979, on the right in 2022Me and Fi in London, on the left in 2006 on the right in 2022
Recently I stumbled across this interview with Hilary Mantel from a couple of years ago where she asserts that writers can be productive by carving out just two hours per day. Admittedly these need to be golden hours where your energy is high and you’ve had enough time to warm up to your writing project. So not two hours with 25 tabs open and a regular check of your facebook feed.
I have lost count of the number of times I have read articles that tell me I have to write every day. I have baulked at this advice even though it has meant me dragging out my current writing project for seven plus years and umpteen drafts. It was not until The Mantel set it out in her interview that it just resonated for me and at last I was committed.
As I was on a self-guided writing retreat last week I decided my key focus was embedding the habit of my two golden hours of writing per day. I was pootling along very well (and who wouldn’t with the incredible surrounds of Hydra and the house we were staying it??) Then came the shocking news that this multiple Booker Prize winning author died suddenly of a stroke on Thursday – at just 70 years of age, with so many awesome books to be written.
I just have to stick to this new routine now. Do it for Hilary!
Me and my sister in London in 1979, and 2022 – a mere 43 years in between….
Last Sunday was blog day, only I had just arrived in London the day before, and was due to head off to Paris the next day, and what with one thing and another, it just wasn’t possible to get the Sunday Blog done. (There were some cheeky work deadlines in there as well I will just bleep over, because no, I didn’t get everything finished before I left Perth for this trip!)
As James Clear says though, missing one day of your habit is not a deal-breaker – but never miss more than one. So here I am, Sunday Blogging, having been to Paris, Rouen and now safely landed in Hydra, Greece since last Sunday.
Transition days. They’re a lot. Yesterday’s transition day involved a donkey too.
Hydra Donkey
There is something so mysterious to me about travel. That me, my body, my personality, can be back it the same place perhaps many years apart. Am I the same person, is it the same place? Is it possible to step into the same river twice? Apparently not, but it feels like a vast and endless mystery that I am able to come back to a place and meet myself or selves from when I was there before.
I first travelled overseas at the age of 14, spending time in the UK and Europe. I went with my sister who was 15 nearly 16 – we are pictured at the top on our first morning in London, looking over the London rooftops. I know I was experiencing a great awakening from a very sheltered and suburban Perth childhood. Travel pushed out the walls of what life looked like and what it could be.
It would be another 11 years before I would return to London as a 25-year-old and make it my home for six years, working at Greenwich Maritime Museum for that period of time.
But it was another 43 years before my 14 year-old-self was once again joined in London by my sister. Here we are on the right at Embankment, London, me on the left, she’s on the right. We just had about 48 madcap hours to wander through London together before heading to France and now Greece, talk through the hours, the days, the years, the decades. Inside I feel 27 but outside time is marching…
After making London my home, as much as anyone can make that vast city a home, I in 1996 aged 32 and moved to Greece to teach English as a foreign language. I left Greece for good in 2000, by then a mother of a beautiful half-Greek girl. It’s an understatement to say there had been many twists and turns between 1996 and 2000.
To be back in Greece today once more is a complicated joy. It’s fair to say I have mixed feelings about Greece. I will never forget having my beautiful daughter’s plump baby’s cheek squeezed by a woman at an incomprehensible wedding I found myself at with my daughter and her father. He was never much given to explanations so I didn’t really understand who the relatives were but I was under no illusion how punished he felt by having to attend the family event. He sulked and raged as he put in an unfamiliar formal outfit. This woman (presumably a relative) said to me in Greek, “Never mind, you’ll have a boy next time.”
She didn’t know it, but she was part of the fuel I needed to leave the very unhappy life I was leading in Greece and bring my daughter back to Perth for good to raise her in my home country. Perfect it’s not, but there is more of a place for women.
I made lentils for lunch today and found myself signing a song I wrote a while ago about my daughter’s YaYa and her son and their dynamic — she cooks him lentils for lunch. He eats, ignores her and leaves. But damn those Greek lentils are good.
No matter how mixed my feelings are about Greece I always want to come back.
You read right, Sunday Blog 52 – which means I have been writing Sunday Blogs for one year of Sunday! I was initially inspired by the quote from the Seth Godin book Shipping the Work which is all about the concept of getting your creative thing (whatever it is) out into the world:
We don’t ship the work because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship the work.
Seth Godin, Shipping the Work.
This week I shipped a video of a song I had written recently, accompanying myself on my awesome kangaroo skin drum that I made since I finished up my Executive Director role at the end of March this year. Back in those early weeks when I swam around luxuriously in all the spare time I had. When I posted the song I noticed that wow, videos do resonate. I have only read that about fifty million times in every single social media course I have ever taken. Blow me down if it isn’t right.
So I thought I would celebrate my one year Blogiversary with a bit of a flash back through all the images I have made for my 52 blogs. Since I drew my line in the sand on 29th August 2021 and committed to Sunday blogging. To sharing musings, podcasts and books, the stumbles and the wins. Turning pro.
Now there is one more line to draw in the sand. Daily writing. As Hilary Mantel said in this excellent article:
I feel shy of saying this, because to non-writers it sounds so lazy—but if, seven days a week, you can cut out two hours for yourself, when you are undistracted and on-song, you will soon have a book. Unoriginally, I call these “the golden hours.” It doesn’t much matter where I find them, as long as I do.
The sound of my darling husband emptying the dishwasher always puts me in mind of this description. The bashes and crashes of the mugs being returned to their spots, the plates slid into the drawer all summon up visions of chipping. (I know, just shut up already, he’s emptying the bloody dishwasher!)
But hear me out. When we married nearly 14 years ago I was gifted a set of six wine glasses and a matching water jug from my workplace at the time, and within six months every single one of the glasses had been broken. To be fair, the set had been bought by the Executive Assistant who barely knew me, but still.
I first heard this description of someone’s dishwashing abilities in 1979, when my eldest sister spent some time in Ireland living with our Irish grandfather’s relatives.
I have been watching my social feed awash with images and stories of Ireland as a friend of mine has been touring there this Summer. I’ve been reminiscing.
Back in 1979 my sister was staying at the ancestral farm with our second and third cousins twice removed or something – I can never keep track of these things. She was 22 and single at the time, and our relatives were casting around for potential suitors for her in their small town. A diminutive 50-year-old man with not much in the way of beauty or charm was suggested by one of them. It took some creative embellishment to dream up a selling point for such a bizarre (and ewww) pairing. But with some confidence, my sister was advised that “he has a fine hand with the delft.” She was not convinced, and it was not to be.
As a young person, this anecdote to me was just screamingly funny. But over time, (and my match-making relative was mature and so presumably had some life perspective), a find hand with the delft seems to be something not to be so quickly overlooked.
But on reflection, I didn’t like those wine glasses that much, whereas the husband, who perhaps does not have a fine hand with the delft, is a keeper.
The month was November, the year 1997, and in Thessaloniki, Greece’s biggest city where I lived at the time, it was already getting bleak and cold. Many people find it hard to picture a cold Greece but believe me it was – and November was the beginning of months and months of winter. I was struggling with the technology – a phone card and a stubborn phone box – to ring my eldest sister for her 40th birthday. So often I would traipse down to the phone box and find it wasn’t working. Or that my phone card would run out of money just when the conversation was warming up. Or the phone card I had just bought didn’t work.
I was well into my second year living in Thessaloniki, and this was one of the many moments I wondered at the wisdom of returning for a second year. I Missed My Family. I missed the milestones, the get-togethers, the regular birthdays that would mean a family meal, hugger-mugger in my parent’s house, a cake, candles and a harmonious warbling of the Happy Birthday anthem from my many relatives.
It is now almost inconceivable to imagine life without a mobile phone, but that was largely the norm in the 1990s. So for those living abroad in the sort of places like Greece where a home phone connection was not feasible on an English teacher’s salary, there was only one option – The Phone Box. The birthday call to my sister was limited in time to the amount my wretched phone card allowed for. It was too far away, too short a time, too poor a substitute for being there to mark her birthday. I hung up the phone and sobbed.
I look back on the dark times of Greek phone boxes and telephone cards and am weak with gratitude that I have so many ways to connect instantly with people anywhere in the world. By video if I want! As we speak another sister is currently holidaying in France. She can call me as I wander around Bibra Lake for my evening constitutional and I can share the evening’s beauty with her and she can show me the charm of lunchtime Rouen.
For all the dreadful faults of social media and mobile phones, this gift of communication is, well, a gift.
I met a dear friend for coffee on this crazy full moon Friday. It was not me who said this, but it very well could have been. I had to say “me too, me too”. We both solemnly agreed that it wasn’t in fact the job, it was our own lamentable propensity to say yes to everything that meant we had once again pushed writing to the margins.
With painful irony I saw a journal entry this weekend that I had written in my diary of February 2021; “You can in fact only do one thing at a time. That is difficult for me with my weighted-down to-do list. Perhaps a forced exit from this role is the only thing I can do to truly interrupt this pattern.”
I left this laden-down role in March 2022 and enjoyed several blissful weeks, almost amounting to 2 months, of feeling foot loose and fancy-free. But like the poor old Ancient Mariner, the albatross of not being able to say no has followed me to the other side. And here I am, too busy again. A freelancer with no free time.
Wherever you go, there you are.
But my friend and I clinked coffee cups and agreed that we would exercise and write before doing any freelance work, and if that meant we didn’t get to our desk before ten, so be it!
Another writerly friend and I had coffee on Saturday and she advised me it is actually a lot easier if you just work on the damn book every day, rather than on the weekend.
Something in this just made sense, so this is me, day two of working on the damn book every day.
It will be late, but that goddam book will be done!!
