My husband is a more secure kind of person than I am, always has been. This is not a value judgement on either of us; it's simply how it is. This becomes particularly obvious when we travel.
Partly, I suspect, this is a personality thing, partly something to do with gender. Partly, it is the result of my having grown up in several different continents; when I was a child I took on the accents of wherever I happened to be - India, Belfast, England eventually Australia. The fact is that, when we are traveling, he is just himself, no matter where we are and who we're with. Whereas I feel like a chameleon.
Immediately we land in, say, England, I adjust my accent accordingly. He says he does this as well, which is true, but it's a simple matter of speaking a little more clearly so that he can be understood. For me but it's a case of involuntarily imitating the people I am with and I do it instinctively, without thinking. My intonation and the phrases and words I use change. When I am in Scotland, I start using words like wee, in the sense of little. In England I say urm instead of umm, and have a different intonation when I ask questions. In Belfast, with my local cousins, I start doing that sing-songy Belfast thing they do there, not just with every sentence but with every phrase. When I'm in Gujarat I start speaking a kind of pigeon English-Gujarati so naturally I surprise even myself. And then I hear myself, in these foreign places, speaking in this odd way and feel a bit silly.
I have been especially aware of this tendency these last few days, when we have been with friends in Dublin. We stayed with them last in 1983-84, when we shared their house - the same house they have now - for a year while my husband did his masters and I earned a pittance as a night nurse and managed to keep the wolf from the door
So the last time I spent much time with them, I was a childless and rather naive 25 year old. They were 10 and 25 years older than me, and to say that I was dazzled by what I saw as their sophistication would be an understatement. I was smitten with the whole family - both parents and their three little girls, who are all now the age their mother was then, with children of their own.
Put me back with these people, and I am instantly an awkward, tense young woman, outwardly poised maybe, but inside a mass of contradictions, resentments and insecurities, gauche and ignorant.
I suspect many people revert to certain types of behavior when they are back, say in the bosom of their family of origin. A capable professional woman becomes a naughty little sister again, or an emotionally intelligent man the slight boor he was at 17. Be that as it may, I would love to be just a little more like my husband, just relaxed being myself, wherever I am and whoever I'm with. And I suppose accepting that I'm not like that could be the first step on being more secure, wherever in the world I find myself.

At home in the UK

Every time I visit the UK I have a slightly disturbing revelation that I forget between times so that it surprises anew every trip. In terms of landscape, I feel much more at home here than in Australia.
The fact is that although I have come to love the bush and appreciate its beauty, this was something I had to learn. It didn't come naturally. 
I have always had an ambiguous relationship with the Australian bush. My first and strongest emotion about it is always fear. The bush is a dangerous place - I completely understand the reaction of early settlers to its mysteries and apparent uncaring vast indifference. I cannot think of anywhere in Australia where I have had an unadulterated sense of delight and ease in a landscape. I have been lucky enough to travel a fair bit down under and have experienced the unique beauty of Kakadu, the Kimberley, the Otways, the tropical rainforest of Northern Queensland, the vast red centre. But appreciating it is always an effort. 
When I am in the countryside in Britain, I don't have to make any effort to respond resoundingly and from the heart to what I see. I am just coming to the end of a week on the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland, and what I have felt every minute of every day of this week is a sense of home coming. 
My body feels right in this landscape. When I am out in the vastness of the mountains here, I feel I could walk forever on the strength of the water and air alone. In the more domesticated parts, I brim over with happiness at the sheer green softness of it all. Here, everything is mossy, gentle, abundant and wet. I feel like a kid let loose in fairyland. In the bush, everything is spiky, sharp, uncomfortable and dry if not downright dangerous. It's no accident that the Brits have picnic blankets while Aussies have Billabong rugs - we need that hard coating as protection, even if we're simply sitting down having a picnic.
Okay, so the weather is a drawback, especially in Scotland. But here's the thing. This week on Skye, it has been pretty miserable - almost endless windy rain. But I haven't cared. Every day I have gone out walking long miles in the mountains, on islands, on little winding roads so narrow they have to have 'passing places' every hundred yards so that two cars can get past each other, not caring about the rain driving in my face and wind whipping me back the way I came. This weather energizes me. 
I realize, of course, that I am always on holiday when I come to the UK, and that I haven't lived here for an entire winter for a long time. Not to mention the recession and frozen pipes and all manner of things that would wear thin if I lived here year round. But this feeling of complete and instant at-home-ness is so powerful I wonder where it comes from.
Certainly, until I emigrated to Australia at the age of almost twelve, Australia was never on the cards as a place I might live some day. We were always going to live in Ireland when the time came to leave India, so that represented the future.
It also has a lot to do with the poetry and literature I was brought up with. The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books, Swallows and Amazons, Richard Hannay striding over the Scottish moors with nothing but a sandwich in his pocket as he fled the bad guys. Not to mention poetry that was all about Highlands and Islands, the Lake District, Henry the VIII and the Tower of London, daffodils in an English summer and walks on Hampstead Heath. Australia just couldn't compete.
There's also got to be something in the gene pool you come from. Of my four grandparents, one was German Alsatian and the other three were Celts. They came from Scotland and Ulster, and one thing I've learned this week is that the Scots and the Northern Irish emigrated between each other so often over the centuries, it's hard to tell them apart. And there's something in my physical makeup that feels comfortable with cold damp weather and soft, damp countryside
I am superlatively happy living in Melbourne. Even if I wasn't, I'm  not about to move, not with almost all the people I love best living close by. But when I visit the British Isles, and particularly Ireland and Scotland, I feel as though I've come home, and my heart, or something in my chest that feels like where my heart ought to be, aches with the beauty I find there and the fact that I can't stay.

Cherry blossom

Blossoms are bursting out all over Melbourne, which puts me in mind of a poem my Dad introduced me to many years ago – part of a cycle of 63 poems published as ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896 by A.E. Housman.

II Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Such an apparently simple poem, but it takes at least a couple of readings to pick up the subtleties of cherry trees ‘hung with snow’ at Eastertide, especially for Antipodean readers.

Then there’s the maths – never my strong point. For a long time, partly because I associated it with my father, I thought this poem was about an old man, feeling wistful that he wouldn’t see many more spring times. When I paid closer attention to the second verse, however, I realised it is about a 20-year-old man speaking – the Shropshire lad (although Housman was 37 when he wrote these lines). Once I’d worked this out, I fell in love all over again with the idea of this youth thinking that 50 years was not enough time to gaze at cherry blossom in the spring. And so, deliberately spending time just mooching around, gazing at beauty. About the woodlands I will go. Sublime.

Many years ago, when I was struggling with depression, I used to write a lot of poetry. Here is one I wrote in 1997, not a depression poem at all, but a paean, really, to the springs of both northern and southern hemispheres. It’s a bit cheeky even putting it on the same page as Housman, but hey, if I can’t do that on my own blog, what’s the point of having one?

Midwinter Spring

Spring in Melbourne

Seems to come

Midwinter almost.

July, and golden wattle

Is everywhere, purple

Happy wanderer.

Not long after

Snowdrops and jonquils,

Then blossoms, pink and white,

And then

It’s on for young and old

Full blown, till springtime

Officially arrives.

Northern hemisphere

All is cold and seeming dead

For endless months

Of barren winter. Then

Suddenly it all happens:

Spring springs there,

Easter is a real

Bursting of life

From the tomb.

I’m grateful for our

Short mild winters

Laced with green and blossom but

Sometimes I yearn

For the sweetness of new life

After a long, real winter,

Like the incomparable taste

Of food after a fast.

My sweetheart and I are about to head for the northern hemisphere for a short while, and I am sad about missing the end of winter here – my favourite Melbourne season. But late summer in the UK and Europe sounds pretty good. While we’re there, we will spend plenty of time with our older lad who is only a few years older than 20, and my dad, who has, happily for all of us, well and truly exceeded his threescore years and ten and we hope will be around for a good few more yet.

To say we are looking forward to this would be an understatement. Life is full of wonder, and I don’t want to miss a single cherry blossom of it.

Olympics? Bah humbug!

Few things succeed in arousing my (not very soundly sleeping) inner grumpy old woman than the Olympic Games.

On the front page of The Age earlier this week, Richard Hinds wrote about swimmer Emily Seebohm, ‘The pain is now so great she can’t imagine it will ever go away.’

Right. Has this young woman just lost a baby to SIDS? Been forced to leave her country in a leaky boat because if she stays she is likely to be tortured? Seen her entire family perish in gas chambers? Tried to recover from an abusive childhood? Fought the demons of severe mental illness? Lost a sibling to suicide?

Er, no. She has won the silver medal in the 100 metres backstroke in a world-class competition.

The point of this post is not to bag these young athletes who work so hard for so long with one goal in view and then miss achieving it by a fraction of a second. I am no stranger to disappointment – although not quite in the Olympic league – and find it one of the hardest emotions to deal with. The relentless rejection that most creative artists in Australia are familiar with can turn a resilient, dedicated and optimistic writer like me into a frustrated, resentful, jealous, sometimes even bitter person. Athletes aren’t the only ones who work for years to achieve something that may evade them forever.

My point is more that I simply do not get elite competitive sport. Surely the human race – and for all its disasters, it is a magnificent mixture of wonder, glory and the foulest and most spectacular cock-ups – can do better than this, can invent a more worthwhile pinnacle of success.

Some of my nearest and dearest are sports fanatics. I believe them when they explain to me how wonderful it feels and how good it is for humans to pit themselves against each other, to push themselves beyond what seems possible, that playing a team sport is one of life’s peak experiences.

The hype surrounding elite sports, however, means that young people who have performed almost super-human feats are made to feel a failure. This is the opposite of what any sensible parent tells their kid time after time. ‘Just do your best,’ we say. ‘The important thing is having a go.’ 

In competitive sport, somebody has to lose. So why, when our footy teams languish at the bottom of the ladder, do we react by sacking the coach? Why are our Olympics athletes miserable, with ‘pain so great [they] can’t imagine it will ever go away’ when they come anything other than first? There must be some way in which we can produce this effort and dedication without making the outcome so arbitrary and excluding. It’s horrible. It’s like the meanest kind of schoolyard.

There are other things about the Olympics that send my blood pressure through the roof. The money spent on pure spectacle. How many community arts programs and TAFE courses could you fund with what is spent on the opening ceremony? 

The money spent, period. I’d rather money spent on sport than armaments, but only just. And don’t give me that soppy guff about nations coming together in harmony – crazy extravagance, drug scandals, vicious competition and cruel disappointment is more like it.

Okay, end of rant. This week I was planning a bucolic post about the start of spring in Melbourne, but the Olympics got to me. The start of spring will have to wait.

OMG! I'm on FB!

I joined Facebook by accident – okay, okay not quite by accident, but I was trying to access some photos that someone told me they had seen there. Before I knew it, I was in (when was signing up to anything on the web ever so easy? – usually I give up in frustration half way through the process) and ‘friend requests’ were pouring in faster than I could keep up with them, simply because I had indicated where I worked and where I’d been to high school and uni. 

I must confess that at this point I felt physically ill. My first FB message to a mate was ‘I’m freaking out here – what have I unleashed – can I get off this thing? This is my first, and quite possibly my last FB communication’.

Up until late last week I have resolutely refused to get sucked into Facebook. I understand it’s an important method of communication and how a lot of people find out and organise everything from where the Taco Truck is parked to where to meet for a drink, but for me, I always suspected it would be just one more time waster and distraction. I get precious few text messages, but quite frankly, it’s hard enough keeping up with email.

I appreciate modern technology up to a point – the point at which it lets me access information, keep up with people I really want to keep up with, write, redraft and file things with ease, but after those basic requirements are met, I find it becomes a bit of a monster that eats away at my peace of mind. There’s always the risk of it becoming an addiction. Even without Facebook, on my precious writing day, before I start to write, I feel compelled to check my three different email accounts, see who, if anyone, is on my chat line and then find myself wondering restlessly, like someone who has had too much fairy floss, is there something else I can check? I’m convinced it detracts from my ability to be truly contemplative and to write either quality or quantity.

Early last week, I was briefly a visitor at a big meeting in Adelaide. My husband was attending for the whole week. Back home again, as soon as I joined Facebook, I was inundated with welcomes from people who I knew were at the meeting, exercising their multi-tasking skills. And as soon as dinner break rolled around, I had a call from my amused and incredulous spouse – ‘people keep telling me you’ve joined Facebook, but I can’t believe it! 

Over the weekend, before I made a complete ass of myself, I got my youngest daughter to give me the Facebook 101 tutorial, teaching me how to send a message so that it only went to the one person, and not on my wall (wall?) and how to ‘block’ people who I like a lot but can see already post way more times a day than could possibly be interesting. 

And there were lovely things. Within an hour of joining, I had heard from an old school and uni friend I have been trying unsuccessfully to track down for years, saying that she had been attempting to do the same. 

In the end, what stopped me cancelling my FB account was that I remembered one of my sons, when I was wondering how to get more people to read my blog, advising that the best way to really get out there and reach more people was to get on Facebook and this other thing called Twitter. Twitter? Now there’s something I swear I will never get sucked into…