Discover 10 Spare Room secrets next Sunday!

Sunday Blog 108 – 29th October 2023

The Spare Room Stories from the heart fundraiser Sun 5th Nov 5pm

It’s Sunday and I’m reflecting on the very big, ginormous, impossibly long week. Do you have weeks like that? Where you shade your eyes to look across the shining expanse of the previous week all the way back to Monday?

My week went a little like this:

Monday: Bring Mum’s favourite armchair, books, photos, rugs, ornaments etc and take them over to her residential aged care room. Feel happy about how they look. Cry a little bit. Pick up a wheelchair her brother used to use that your cousin is willing to lend you. Fist pump. Cry a bit more. Sleep in old bedroom in crumbling family home.

Tuesday: Put said wheelchair in the back of the car and head over with a sister to pick Mum up from hospital and take her over to move her into her new home. Feel that squeeze of her hand when she sits in her favourite chair, the sun coming in through the window, the fresh, fresh air after two weeks of hospital air conditioning. Her gracious thanks, as always. Tag team and tap out to go back home. Do a 3-minute pitch for the manuscript for the very first time. Immediate no but try someone else. “Tell them I sent you” he says before Zoom snaps off. Keep checking the Messenger thread to see how Mum’s going. She’s doing good. She was ready. Still. Cry a bit more, with sad-happiness and happy-sadness.

Wednesday: Prepare feverishly for Thursday’s meeting that will run from 6am (curse you, daylight saving!) until 2pm. Have another go at the keynote for Friday night. Seems pretty good. Have a look at the material for the call-back interview on Friday. More checking of Messenger thread plus long debrief with family member.

Thursday: Wake 4.30am before alarm. Do yoga, might as well. Online. All day. Collapse in afternoon. Croak out another rehearsal of Friday night’s keynote.

Friday: final, final rehearsal of keynote. Choose and pack outfit. Attend call-back interview session which is a mix of sweaty horror and quite fun. Pop off to do another 3-minute pitch for the book. A bit better this time. Not an immediate no. But not a yes either. Go and see Mum for myself. Feel 1,000 times better. Go back to crumbling family home and choose another bedroom that’s free for tonight. (This resonates with my childhood as I moved out of my first bedroom at 12 years of age and then kept moving when siblings boomeranged home and out and home again.) Get dressed in glad rags for keynote. Deliver key note which is great and am still there at 10.30pm. Way past my bed time.

Saturday: wake up in old bedroom under the stairs. My daughter’s actual 25th birthday and I have invited lots of people for an afternoon tea. Procrastinate and then finally get into action after 11 and madly prepare afternoon tea. Mum comes as one of the guests of honour. She is happy to come but happy to go home. A miracle. More surreptitious sobbing. The modest afternoon tea goes somewhat off-piste with siblings and cousins and friends getting into the champers and reminiscing. Definitely miss my bedtime again, but by a much longer margin.

Sunday: feel very bloody shabby and creep about my day. Another visit to Mum who is more and more at home. Drive brother to airport. More surreptitious sobbing. Finally get onto the Sunday blog.

But wait, there’s more…

As you can see, I love to tell stories. I’m telling one again on Sunday night, 5th November from 5pm at the Irish Club. I’m one of ten story tellers yarning about Spare Rooms – I am riffing about my spare room in my London flat in the 1990s. All proceeds from this event go to Breast Cancer Care WA. It promises to be an entertaining evening in a cosy venue where you can still be home by 8.30pm. I’d love to see you there!

Click here to book your ticket. All proceeds to Breast Cancer Care WA

Outrageous Luck

Sunday Blog 107 – 22nd October 2023

It is perhaps hard to be cheerful at the moment, so here is some dark warmth for your Sunday. This holy water font was spotted on my holiday in a Salzburg church, a ghoulish flourish on the way out. Dip your finger into the skull for a dab of holy water. Make a little cross from head to heart, shoulder to shoulder. Perfectly normal.

At the time this holy water receptacle was created, sex was taboo but death was not. This same church had any number of skulls and other deathly paraphernalia in its many artworks and monuments.

Surely this taboo is now reversed, and death is largely airbrushed out of our day to day life.

Since December of 2022 I have joined my nonagenerian mother’s care team. My role was cooking. I like to work to my strengths. I had ditched the incredibly demanding day job which meant I could don the apron on Mondays and Wednesdays. Indulging Mum’s every culinary whim was one joy, but talking about All The Things was another. Perspective is something a 96-year-old has plenty of and includes the taboo topic of our society, death.

For example, one day Mum wheeled herself back into the lounge room singing “I will love you until the day I die.” Then looked at me and remarked, “not much of a commitment, though, is it?”

On another occasion a family member came to visit, and asked after her health. “Well, I’m walking around to save funeral costs.” It took a while before the guest composed herself enough to give her coffee order.

I took the creepy photo of the holy water receptacle on a recent Europe holiday where I hoped against hope all would be well. Mum’s health took a bit of a dive, but she rallied before I got back.

She faltered again when I got back home and we’ve been thrust into chaotic, timeless weeks in hospital. My carer’s role has been cast adrift. During my first visit to her local grocery store without a shopping list for her weekly provisions I had to put on my dark glasses so I could weep largely undetected.

And then tonight we dined in her hospital room, picnic style. I’d brought in paper plates and extra forks. We shared potatoes, mushroom gravy, thickly buttered white bread. And each other’s company. A luminous joy moment of being right here, right now.

Precisely the time

Sunday Blog 106 – 15th October 2023

For those readers not in Australia, yesterday was a very sad day in our history. The referendum to vote Yes for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to be enshrined in our constitution was rejected. The outstretched hand of friendship was slapped away.

At 3.3o on polling day, I was still handing out how to vote leaflets in a small school, with my wild acid trip flared leggings on. With the time difference between Perth and Sydney, the vote was really already decided. But still, I kept handing them out. One woman loved my pants so much that she told me, on the way out, that I had changed her vote to yes.

There was so much more I had planned on doing for this referendum, but family circumstances intervened somewhat. And the plain old privilege of being on holiday for much of the campaigning period.

I came from my mother’s hospital bedside to be at the polling station, and fell into an existential conversation with the volunteer coordinator. A chance, precious conversation about life, death, and what it all means.

The woman changing her vote was a small blessing. The conversation with the coordinator was a small blessing.

Political disappointments can break our hearts. But. After this week of mourning I hope we can pick our way forward from this tragedy of political missteps tangling with self-interest, ignorance, conspiracy theories (I mean, no offence UN but you can’t run a bath. You have neither the intention nor ability to take over Australia) and of course, racism.

So as an ally who has been able to dip in and out of this I am sending love and healing for the broken hearts and … writing.

A Short Story

Sunday Blog 105 – 8th October 2023

I blame the travel, but I missed a deadline for a writing competition. For the lols I thought I would make it today’s Sunday Blog. It’s a fictional riff on a real stay in a writer’s cabin.

When I came out for my morning break, I was no longer alone.

I’d booked a cabin at the Katharine Susannah Pritchard (KSP—she’s too cool for a full name) Writer’s Centre, focused on finishing the goddam talk. I was trying to bring together all my ideas on the health system, to find the right words to generate a revolution. It was just so huge, I’d wrestled with it, labouring without end or result. Normally, this was so easy for me. What was wrong? Perhaps a short stint in a KSP cabin was just the thing I needed.

They gave me the cabin next to the holy of holies, KSP’s original writing cabin itself. She’d created this space to carve out time from all the non-writing demands that clawed at her time and creativity like an ivy strangling an oak.

All the cabins have been modelled on hers, with a few very welcome nods to the twenty-first century in terms of plumbing. Three nights it would be mine, and they warned me I would be all alone. 

I didn’t mind. Night one I made my way up in the dark to the Big House, entered the kitchen and rattled around, looked in every cupboard and drawer before sparking up the cooktop to make myself pasta and tomato, green salad, tzatsiki. Took a photo of my dinner just to prove to myself it had happened.

Next night I’ll be able to eat in my room, I thought. It was just a bit lonely, and I was locked out of the rest of the house. I crept to bed, determined to attack the speech with renewed effort in the morning.

On waking I prowled around the cabin, determined to make use of all the writers’ toys—the whiteboard was marked with the connecting ideas of my talk into some kind of frame. The magnetic word game lacked so many letters it wasn’t much use. But I sorted them out anyway, like I sort my Tarot cards, so I never get a reversed card in a reading.

So when I walked out of my cabin, at the very same time, KSP was walking out of hers. I stopped short. She waved me away as if to say, “Come on. No big deal! Apparitions and ghosts are how we roll around here!”

She lit a cigarette, exhaled almost violently.

“That bloody Bill Mountjoy!” she said as we watched her fug of smoke expand out into the sweet air and disappear.

“Are you working on Communist Party stuff?” I couldn’t quite keep the judgement out of my voice. “I thought you’d be working on a novel.”

Her deep sigh came from the earth itself.

“Touche” she said.

“I mean, I didn’t mean to sound critical or anything,” I scrambled, back pedalled.

“No, no. The cabin should only be for creative writing. I quite agree.” She blew another cloud of smoke out.

“Also.” I said, but stopped before testing out the next sentence. It was a branch on a tree that might hold my weight, might not.

She looked at me in her quizzical, earnest way. Invited me to blunder on.

“I feel I should let you know that I’m related to Bill Mountjoy.”

Her laugh bounced off the trees and valley, startled one of the crows and encouraged it to shift branches. “You have my sympathies.”

“Well, full disclosure. I never actually met him. He was my grandmother’s brother. I don’t think she liked him much either. He was the one that made it back from the First World War, but not all of him, perhaps. He lost his brother Johnny and gained a rage and a thirst that no amount of wine could slake.”

She listened. Nodded.

I started again, wanting to fill in the gaps between me and my miscreant relative who would go boozing with undercover cops and unintentionally undermine his beloved cause of communism. “I suppose he mustn’t have been the same after the war. And they were a poor family. His dad was a real bastard.”

Still, she said nothing, but there was an unmistakable click in the air between us. This was a skerrick of material she may use elsewhere, and her recorder was on while I talked.

“Last night, I found myself thirsty for wine. The kind of thirsty that is intrusive. Annoying. Shall I have the wine? Wouldn’t it be better to not drink? Isn’t everything I want—a svelte shape, healthy sparkling eyes and a lifestyle free of any cancer-causing habits—on the other side of alcohol?”

“Oh I know that horrid track,” was all KSP said.

“Anyway, Google maps sent me to the bottle shop just up the road, but it was obviously out of date. It then sent me down the hill, around some quiet streets and then bam!”

She startled just a little at the “bam”, which was in truth much louder than I’d meant it to be.

“Mountjoy Street.”

“Like a family street?” she suggested.

“I guess. Its placement next to the bottle shop seemed apt.”

Her laugh peeled out, rich and strong.

There was a silence as she smoked. She held out the pack to me and even though I’d quit smoking over forty years ago, my body just walked me up the ramp to where she stood, holding out the pack. My hand just reached out to the pack like an automaton and plucked a cigarette out. Just for a moment, I wondered if the neighbours were watching me pluck a cigarette out of thin air. But she was surprisingly whole and robust.

“Yes, surprise. Not just a ghost your hands pass through,” she commented.

Offered me a light, and I drew in the smoke, deep and rich.

“I shouldn’t smoke” I protested. But it felt so wonderful. My insides crumbled, resistance melted away. The cloud of smoke suddenly grew alarmingly and cloaked me entirely. Then it disappeared, leaving me standing there, alone.

The sounds of the bush pushed forward into the emptiness. Suddenly, I saw the shape of my talk dissolve on the while board and reappear in the form required. Before this phantasm could disappear, I bolted back into the cabin, erased the white board and traced the compelling new pattern from the lines in my mind.

And I sat down and finished the bloody talk.

I made sure I acknowledge KSP in the talk. Maybe I didn’t fully explain the nature of her assistance that had unfolded in the magic between the cabins. But I made sure not to waste the crumbs she left me. I could at least do that.

Giving Up The Ghost

Sunday Blog 104 – 1st October 2023

While I was away on holiday, I took two actual physical books. One of them was a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, which details her struggle with endometriosis. I was too mean to lend it to my husband after he finished his one and only book, and I was rewarded with my selfishness by leaving it behind in one of my hotel rooms – possibly in Ljubljana. I had to buy the kindle version as I need to have a copy about me. It’s a slim book by her standards, but packs such a punch. 

Just like last year’s European trip, I thought of Hilary often. In 2022, I was obsessed by her writer’s advice on finding just Two Golden Hours every day (see image). It was my daily writing holiday mantra. And then, just like that, she died. The Two Golden Hours became an important tribute to this author, who clearly had many more books in her. The least I could do was to tap away for two hours while I still can.

Hilary was the very first author I saw appear on Zoom rather than in person at a writers festival. This was well before Covid, when online appearances were unusual, especially for keynote speakers. At the time, I was slightly miffed, but got lost in the richness of her responses in the interview and felt she was in the room. Her health status was mentioned as a reason for not putting herself through the long haul flight ordeal to come to Perth in person. Reading her beautiful memoir, it’s clear life handed her an exhausting laundry list of health issues which she eventually succumbed to at only seventy. 

Giving Up the Ghost made me think of all the women who struggle with this hideous, often misdiagnosed ailment. As she says;

Endometriosis is a gynaecological condition with a dazzling variety of systemic effects. It is not rare, though mercifully it is rare for the disease to run on, unrecognised, for as long as it did in me…It is always hard to diagnose, for a doctor who doesn’t listen and doesn’t look. It is comparatively easy if you are the patient, and get into your hands good textbook with a comprehensive account of its effects.

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, page 145.

Today is one year on from Hilary’s death, and I wanted to write a little blog in tribute to her, and to plug this wonderfully sensitive memoir.

The ghost she’s giving up on is the daughter Catriona who she would never have due to endometriosis-induced infertility. Here’s to her Two Golden Hours she made such good use of-and a toast to Catriona, the daughter she never got to have.

Reflections from the city of ghosts

Sunday Blog 103 – Sunday 24th September

It always takes me some time to “arrive” once I return from a trip. One of the biggest mysteries of travel to me not just exploring new places, but also being once again in places that you were before.

It’s like re-reading a book over time, when you can re-discover who you were when you read it last time, what you missed, what you know now that makes those same words mean such different things now.

Visiting Thessaloniki, (also known as Salonika, Salonica, Thessalonika etc.) Greece’s second biggest city, was a bit part of this trip for me. Last year, on the way out to Heathrow airport I saw a sign advertising Thessaloniki as a tourist destination. I hadn’t seen that before, and I took it as a Sign that my 2023 needed to include Thessaloniki. I had been to Athens several times to catch ferries to islands, but was increasingly disenchanted with how little grace the city seems to have apart from the Acropolis and the excellent museums, and its delicious, overpriced tavernas surrounding this area. The rest seems to me grim and increasingly desperate sprawl of apartments. Sometimes I felt unsafe walking its dark streets.

Besides Thessaloniki was my home for nearly four years, from 1996 to 2000 in the tumultuous years where I became an English language teacher briefly, and then the mother of a half-Greek daughter. I have been back and forth over the years, but not recently.

This year I was able to spend a little time in Thessaloniki separately and together with my husband, my daughter, and my daughter’s father and friends. I also finally read Gail Jones’ Salonika Burning which was excellent. She also left a clue about a history book she had found very helpful when reading it, Salonica, City of Ghosts – Christians, Muslins and Jews by Mark Mazower. I have downloaded its 700+ pages and am only in the early part of it but it is comprehensive and fascinating. The opening quote in the book leapt out at me because it is exactly as this city seems – “the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place”

Take for example this photo taken through the 6 metre deep Rotunda Walls. This 4th Century building has been a pagan temple to who knows which god, a Christian basilica, a Muslim mosque, back to a Christian church and its main use now, an archeological site and museum. You can see through the window the modern apartment blocks of Greece anywhere, slap bang next to it.

Where I chose to spend my final three days right in the centre in Navarinou Square, the remains of the Hippodrome built adjacent to this magnificent rotunda is mainly ruins surrounded again by apartment blocks.

For three days I lived in one of these apartments, finishing off the working holiday with mainly working, a little bit of holiday and a lot of sunshine. Tourists, something I had never seen before, are now common. It is clear money has been spent on roads, on the airport. More ferries are running again.

I loved this idealised and unrealistic three-day stay in the flash Navarinou apartment, so different from my life when I eked out an existence as a teacher. Perhaps what made it so sweet was that I had spent several days with my daughter in her father’s family apartment in the old town. We were joined by a couple of his friends too, and we camped out there together for a few days. That’s what it feels like, as the apartment is about to be rented out and it’s fair to say, it has been somewhat neglected in the last five years. Also I elected to stay on the day bed so I had the run of the place to make a cup of tea in the middle of the night and do my yoga early in the morning while my daughter slept.

Just before I was due to leave, and after my daughter had already gone, (sob) we found the photo albums from her dad’s family. We’d looked for these in vain while she was there. I pored over these, capturing all the images for my her, filing them away for her to enjoy back in Perth. My last time in the apartment was spent marinating in memories of others lives. Zigging and zagging across the joys and tragedies and sadness of loss and change.

My Greek memoir is beginning to brew and take shape…

An Independent Greek Holiday

Sunday Blog 102 – 17th September 2023

It’s there in my Vision Book – “I allow myself to have regular independent Greek holidays with Zoe.” My beautiful half-Greek daughter. This year, finally I have achieved this. And it was absolutely in every way worth the wait.

It’s a complicated life path to here – Greek people want to know why I speak a little Greek, I tell them I lived in Thessaloniki 25 years ago. Then I throw in a half-Greek daughter and it becomes a to-and-fro of “Does she live in Australia?” “Do you live in Australia?” “Where does her dad live?” The answers are Yes, Yes, Thessaloniki. Then when I mention a husband in Perth the whole round of questions start again. It’s complicated.

Since moving back to Perth for good in 2000 with my then one-year-old daughter, there have been trips back and forth to Greece, where her Greek father paid for us to come in lieu of maintenance. That all came to a screaming halt around the Global Financial Crisis of 2009.

Then, it wasn’t until 2016 that I was able to fly the both me and my daughter over to Greece. As my daughter was 16 it was necessary for all three of us to spend time together. A trip to Halkidiki from Thessaloniki was on the cards, but who knew when? Day after day passed in the sweltering city of Thessaloniki with no air conditioning or places to swim. Eventually we hit the road in his hot van, then there would be many puzzling stops, without any pre-warning. We would never know for how long or what the purpose of the stops was for. Eventually we ended up at a Beach Bar where I felt caught in the middle of a frat party. My daughter loved it, but then again, it was age appropriate for her. I was horrified.

I longed to escape the disco thud and get to my booked writing retreat in Delphi. This enterprise was gently mocked, and I was unable to extort any information about how to get there. Not all Greek travel arrangements can be solved by google. The beach may have been delightful, but I was marinading in impotence and frustration. Memories of the eight months I had lived as a dependent mother of a small baby in Thessaloniki in 1999-2000 washed over me again and again.

One of the frustrating days at the Beach Bar, to the backing of the disco beat, I couldn’t stop crying. It was embarrassing, but it worked. Nek minit I was dropped off at a bus stop in the next town, caught a bus back to Thessaloniki, a plane to Athens, a metro to Athens Bus Station. Then a long wait in a profoundly charmless station with a drop toilet, and then, finally, finally a bus to Delphi. It wound around tortuously across half of Greece but delivered me there, late for the first session of the retreat. I felt so accomplished to just get there!

Then there were the Greek holidays I have had without my daughter. Wonderful writing retreats and beach holidays, time with my husband and sister and friends. While independent holidays for me, I couldn’t share them with my daughter. They didn’t allow us to integrate together our connection to this beautiful but frustrating country.

And then this year, after floods and tempestuous rain (the island of Alonissos where I was) and food poising and earthquakes (Marrakech where my daughter flew out the same day as the earthquake) we met up in Thessaloniki. We were transported to a beautiful Halkidiki town of Afitos (10/10 would recommend) where I had booked us the perfect air bnb. I had evaded all suggestions of the friend’s house in (much less charming) Moudania with no hot water.

The Afitos house and the beach – it was just six days of perfection. And then – drum roll – made our own way back to Thessaloniki with only a taxi booking mishap and an unknown bus transfer to make before the 70 minute journey was achieved in two and a half hours. I enjoyed every moment of that bus ride, rolling past the same land but this time independently.

May it just be the beginning of our Independent Greek holidays together!

The Carpet Beaters

Sunday Blog 101 – 10th September 2023

At risk of disappearing into my own navel, I’ve been re-reading letters I sent to my mother and a friend while I lived in Greece intermittently from 1996 until 2000.

In March 1998 I wrote to my mother, while I was living in a very dark and dingy flat in Olibiados Street. It was my second year teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thessaloniki and the school owners had not made good on their offer to get my accommodation sorted. I had been staying with a long-suffering friend, trying to find a place. I looked at the Olibiados place and was a bit uncertain, but when I rang said friend to tell him he just said “Oh congratulations” as if I had decided to rent it and signed all the paperwork. I figured I needed to get off his loungeroom floor sooner rather than later and rented the flat. There was absolutely no natural light at all down in the basement, and the first few nights I was there and woke up in the middle of the night I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, no matter how long I waited for my dark adapted eye to adjust. It was just pitch black. I had been there about five months when I wrote Mum this letter. I had absolutely no recollection of this incident at all, but it’s too good not to share.

I can hear the Carpet Beaters upstairs – Greek women are fanatical about housework and one of the tasks is to take up your carpet from the floor, take it to the balcony and vigorously shake it before setting upon it with a specially designed paddle, beating copiously. Why on earth they don’t use hoovers is beyond me.

On a very similar morning to this, several weeks back I heard the soft “plump” of a blanket which on receiving its ritual beating, had slipped from the housewife’s hands and landed on my balcony. It being a little before my reveille time, I didn’t retrieve it for an hour or so.

I took it to the flat upstairs from, figuring this tenant must own it. I was rather taken aback when the woman who answered was the KinoKrista Woman. She prowls around asking for money off inhabitants for keeping the light bulbs going and splashing a bit of water on the hallway every month or so. I’d been avoiding somewhat sedulously.

Anyway after I told her I had no KinoKrista, I offered up the ‘kouverta’ – blanket – as a kind of burnt offering substitute. She seemed cheery enough with this but explained it wasn’t her blanket. She left it on the hallway for collection and I returned to my flat with a mixture of relief and good deed-ism.

Shortly thereafter, a woman rang by bell, asked for ‘kouverta’ and I mimed my way upstairs to show her its resting place. She was most thankful and returned all smiles to the fourth or fifth floor.

I was just relaxing into my second cup of tea when the doorbell rang and… ANOTHER woman wanted to know the whereabouts of her errant ‘kouverta’. Egads! I couldn’t explain, not knowing the Greek words for “give/ already/ someone else”. However, I think she just wanted to see how The Foreigner lived, because she asked to see my balcony, necessitating a walk through my flat, then told me some cock and bull story about living in the next block of flats and a freak wind carrying her kouverta over to my balcony. At least I think that’s what she said.

After she had told me her story, she started shouting up a few floors to see if she could get hold of the woman who’d taken the kouverta.

Now you hear these carpet beaters call “ThespinAAAH!” or “MaRIIAA!” etc as they try to attract each other’s attention, a sort of morning echo from balcony to balcony. But I’d never seen any of these disembodied voices, much less stood next to one! Talk about surreal!

Anyway, she seems happy enough with her survey of my life and our broken conversation. The real ownership of the kouverta is shrouded in Greek mystery, but fortunately there have been no reverberations since.

Letter to my mother, 23rd March 1998

Island dreams

Sunday Blog 100 – 3rd September 2023

This was a postcard I sent to my mother in 1997, re-photographed by my own fair hands this holiday which accounts for how skew-iff the image is. I sent it to her when I had all but finished my first year of teaching English as a Foreign language in Greece. Counting the weeks down from September to Christmas, Christmas to Easter. Once Easter was finished, the weeks of penance left until the end of the school year could be counted on one hand.

“See?” I crowed to my mother on the back of the postcard. “Wasn’t all that hard work worth it, to get to visit Skopelos?”

Too bad that it was April and the sea water was still bone-achingly cold. Much too cold for swimming – and the rain fell harder and harder as the week progressed. The triumph of having survived and made a mediocre holiday stop was something to be wildly celebrated in 1997.

This time of my life – as I edge closer to sixty – feels like a contradiction of the saying “the almonds of life come to those who have no teeth.”

I can now come to Greece while the weather is still good, and without having to endure eight months of slogging it out in the classroom. And I can still manage all those stairs.

Time to shovel in a handful of almonds and chew them with gratitude and full awareness of how bloody lucky I am.

Holiday in Brussels?

Sunday Blog 99 – 27th August 2023

Several decades ago when I worked in London, a colleague shared a birthday with me, albeit she was a few years older. It was one of our many points of connection. She was a character in so many ways but her staunch dislike for committing to a relationship was interesting and refreshing to me as a thirty-something woman keen on starting a family with no Mr Right in sight.

“If you want to go to Paris, and he wants to go to Berlin for a holiday, then you have to compromise and go to Brussels. And who wants to do that?”

Whilst it was a little unkind to Brussels, I could see her point. But I was not hardline enough in maintaining singledom. A decade and a half later I got married, and the holiday conundrum is an ongoing first world challenge I have to negotiate.

Our first overseas holiday together was in Bali, a short three hour flight from Perth. I didn’t adequately plan ahead for the reality that while I can never get enough sitting around the pool reading and writing time, darling husband can do that for tops one morning.

And so, nek minit I found myself up in the air in a para glider, which while it was pleasant enough, did leave me wondering about the health and safety aspects of coming in to land. I had also undertaken a sweaty and exhausting riverside walk before ending up in a canoe. The photos show me smiling but really, I just wanted to be reading a book.

Cambodia was another holiday where largely I was in the clear because it was a dental tourism visit for him and he was mostly out of action. However, there was the tour of Angkor Wat. What I really wanted to do was pop down in a tuk-tuk at dawn and see the incredible temples in the dawn light. What we actually did was a bike tour of the Temple. Run by a well-meaning NGO, the tour started with a cycle around the drainage areas, a whizz through a village where some poor family had to put up with us milling around awkwardly and asking stupid questions. Then more cycling, and yet more cycling.

Generally, Cambodia is very hot. This day was no exception, and a migraine started to emerge every time I got back on the bike and peddled between stops. By the time we arrived at Angkor Wat itself, I was a broken woman. I limped around the temples as best I could. There would be several more hours and many more stops after this one. But Angkor Wat was a major tuk-tuk junction and I could act on the desperate escape plan I’d been hatching as I peddled along with my thumping head.

I chose freedom and the tuk-tuk ride of shame. The negotiations with the driver were swift and sure. There was room on the tuk-tuk for the bike and me and I left without a backward glance. He drove me back to the offices of the earnest NGO where I could return the detested bike and then walk the short distance back to our hotel.

I will never forget the exquisite relief of air conditioning, a shower and an enormous bed to loll about on. The headache immediately disappeared and I went back to reading my book, writing and generally enjoying myself.

As happens in Cambodia, a violent rain storm erupted and I spent at least two more happy hours alone, while darling husband was still at it, peddling in stifling, now very wet heat. When he finally returned he conceded that perhaps he was a little tired and wet but maintained stoutly that he’d enjoyed himself.

But I learned from Bali and Cambodia. I’ve hit on an almost perfect compromise which is not exactly Brussels. So here I am in Salzburg while darling husband is cycling through the villages and mountains of Austria to Lake Bled. I eluded all suggestions of getting an electric bike and joining him and his formidably fit siblings for this escapade. They are definitely not on e-bikes. One must feel every hill and incline!

I will be popping onto an air conditioned bus and will meet up with them all at the end of the grand cycling tour, in Ljubljana. We will then make our way to Greece by airplane and ferry where they can churn around the islands, swimming up to five kilometres per day while I do my yoga and waft around the hotel on my own, reading, writing and leisure-ing.

Closing out with a picture of me on the Sound of Music tour, which darling husband was particularly keen not to have to participate in.