Coffee anyone?

So ... it's four minutes to six in the morning. I'm in bed, a little unwell and off work. Not at my best but nothing serious. A text message arrives from the UK - a video or photograph - at 5.56 a.m. What matter of great import might be borne in this missive from home? Should one worry? Should one rise from one's sick bed in keen or fretful anticipation of news from the old country? Well ... no, it seems. My brother Joe Herd and Stephanie have arrived at their Trullo in the Itria Valley in southern Italy. Naturally, you put the coffee pot on the stove after a long journey, photograph it and send it to your brother in Australia ... at six o'clock in the morning!. Happy holidays Joe and Steph. It's minus 3 where we are. Minus effen three and still dark and I'm sick and awake, now. But other than that, lovely to hear from you Joe.

Dog Debris in Dooralong

We're visiting Spike's parents at their self-built home in the Dooralong Valley.  When we arrived the soft toys of Fingle and Harry, the dogs, were scattered across the paddock like the collateral  damage of a bomb blast.  Spike gathered together the collection of sheep, cows and a rugby 'ball', ready for games of fetch after lunch.

Roberta Joan Anderson

How long have I been listening to Joni Mitchell; singing along.  Forty years?  Forty five?  According to Wiki (so it must be true!!!) her first studio album was released in 1968 (I was eleven and have no recollection of any track from it).  But a year later cam Clouds and I do know Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now.  I'm pretty sure that BSN caught my attention as a twelve year old, probably as a result of my big brother's record collection.  He would have been 15 going on 16.  He was into contemporary folk - Pentangle, Donovan (but not Dylan, funnily enough), Joan Baez, CSN&Y, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell - as well as - let's think - John Mayall, Cream, Hendrix (of course) and way out there on the Californian edge of blues-based rock n roll, The Doors.  You can see where my tastes come from.  Did we all look west ... to America?  Anyway, I've been listening to Ms Roberta Joan Anderson sing for at least 43 years. Still am.

So I'm sitting here in Sydney, early in May, listening to Night Ride Home (1991).  As I type, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, based on Yeats's The Second Coming, is playing.  Sing on Joni.  Sing along Dougie.

I love the whole album; no track is better than another but this poem / lyric / song never ceases to grab me.  The unanswered question is audacious, irrefutable, unanswerable: Who you gonna get to do the dirty work / When all the slaves are free?



Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)

Magdalene is trembling
Like a washing on a line
Trembling and gleaming
Never before was a man so kind
Never so redeeming

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Ecstasy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

I am up a sycamore
Looking through the leaves
A sinner of some position
Who in the world can this heart healer be
This magical physician

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Misery
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, climb down, climb down he says to me
From the middle of unrest
They think is light is squandered
But he sees a stray in the wilderness
And i see how far i've wandered

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Apathy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, all around the marketplace
The buzzing of the flies
The buzzing and the stinging
Divinely barren
And wickedly wise
The killer nails are ringing

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Tragedy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Skype

I'm joining the 20th Century it seems (the 21st is still a big ask...).  At last, after I don't know how long, I possess a computer (my FABBY wee ASUS T101G Transformer) with front and rear facing cameras and a functioning Skype account.  The world is my oyster.  I am its piece of grit.

Mind you, looking at the photo from earlier this evening, maybe the ASUS possesses me ...

This time he's bringing his mum ...

Photo by Spike

Betty and Spike emerge from the surf.  

We drove from Ashfield to Avalon (me, my mother and Spike) in the Transcendental Transit Van.  It may not be the fastest vehicle on the road but it seems to me these days to be as much a part of me as my beard.

It was the hottest day of the summer maybe so the stiff breeze off the sea was welcome as we sat in the shade, watching the Sydney summer kick-in before our eyes.  Spike took a couple of dips in the sea; fell over more than once in the tumbling surf.  Bracing, might be a word for it.  Two weeks short of her eighty-first birthday my mother walked through the white horses (as she calls them) of the Pacific Ocean.  If I have any determination to get on with life, I know where that inherited quality comes from.

Avalon Beach.  Photo by Spike

After ...

Photo by Spike

Before ...

Photo by The Louse ... ASUS camera on wrong setting!!!!!

Sunday in the park with my mum

... and Spike too

I sat by the lotus pond in Sydney's Botanic Gardens, typing a long e.mail to my friend Pat in Edinburgh.  Spike returned from the souvenir shop with my mother who had selected four ... not one or two but four necklaces to take home as gifts.

We lingered by the lotuses, most of which were not in bloom.  Some had seed pods held aloft, perhaps ready to pop (if that's what they do).  Those pods remind me of alien species from 1950's B-movies.  Don't ask me why.  Here and there around the pond, mostly hidden among the vast leathery leaves, there was a splash of bright cerise where some flowers broke through the variegated green.  The brilliant pink of a world that my mother has come to share with us for a while: slightly exotic, often surprising and not at all like anything you would find back home.

The photo (not a little out of focus) was taken with my wonderful ASUS.  Clearly, one has much to learn.

Happy Christmas (from my friend Pat)

SCA Open Day

We spent a large chunk of our Saturday at the annual open day at Sydney College of the Arts.  Spike had roles to play ... guiding prospective students around the glass studio giving helpful talk, lamp working exhibition beneath Mark Eliot's animated film showing on a continuous loop, assisting a little in the hot shop.  I spent most of my time perched on the edge of the hot shop watching staff and students blow various pieces.  It's a fascinating process.  Each piece begins with a single lump of molten glass gathered from a pool in a furnace on a pole.  From that point onwards I am lost.  Usually working as the creative driver in a team of two the glass artist blows, turns, adds more glass, clips, pulls, spins and swings the molten material.  Somewhere between forty minutes and an hour and a half later the initial idea inside the artist's head appears in as near its final form as it will ever be.  No two pieces are the same.  The process has a hypnotic quality.  You wouldn't want to leave until you've satisfied yourself of how it all comes out.

The vegetarian lasagne for lunch left quite a lot to be desired.  Heat was one of them. 

Cecked out the ravens.  Still there.
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Advance Australia Fair?

 Another of those slightly bizarre, quite surreal Citizenship ceremonies.  Spike submitted herself to the final part of the process in a beige / brown room on the upper floor (above the pokies) of 'Club Ashfield' (aka The Catholic Club).

There were rows of well-ordered seats for those taking the pledge (people swearing an oath at the front, those affirming at the back).  Guests like me sat at the side.  The official party - Mayor with chains of office that weighed him down, Mayor's wife, some Councillors, a parliamentary staffer (with regulation ALP-style suit) of the absent local MP (Virginia Judge), the uniformed co-ordinator of the local State Emergency Service, an Evangelical Christian Minister who got to speak about one's right as a free Australian citizen to encounter Jesus Christ, the RC local priest who spoke too but at least mentioned one's right to not believe as well as to believe whatever you want to - all sat facing the serried ranks of soon to be Australians.

People waited patently to be called, received their certificates, posed for photographs then selected a native plant from a group on a table near the door as they left.  It's an odd but necessary ritual.  For Spike, it's done.

Don't even ask who didn't quite take the photo.
.

Jim Davidson

So ... I'm just off the phone to my mother.  It's 10:20 p.m. here, 11:20 a.m. there.  My mother, who sounds tired but well, tells me that she's been out to have her hair done, the clothes she's wearing later have been chosen and she's not long after a cup of tea with a roll and sausage.  There's a layer of snow on Mansfield Road, she says.  Near May's house in Aviemore there is a metre of snow and May's daughter Victoria, who went skiing yesterday, had to brought off the slope by a snow-clearing team because the lifts are closed.  May, George and the girls only just made it south over the Drumochter Pass before the snow gates were closed on the A9.  Yes, says my mother, the flowers arrived yesterday and they are lovely.  I tell her that I'll call again tomorrow.

I guess its natural that we don't dwell on the details of Jim's funeral in two hours time from now.  He died on New Year's Eve, eighty-five years old.  My mother's second husband.  A decent man.  Together they were mad as brushes but they lived happily for almost twenty years after both had buried the first spouse.  Rest in peace Jim.  You've either found the answer or not.

My brother's Trullo

My brother Joe and his wife Stephanie own this property in southern Italy. They leave Scotland tomorrow to spend three weeks there. Jon Simpson (who used to own a similar property within 30 minutes drive of Joe's) leaves for Italy with Rosie on Thursday. They'll celebrate Norma's 60th in the north then fly south to visit Jon's old properrty. I've put the Trullo lovers in touch with one another. They may meet up.

Joe sent me this photo today, cc'ed as I am into their e.mail exchange. Enjoy the blue sky, the olives, the wine. We'll maybe make it there next year.

A mixed bag of a day

Porridge for breakfast, which is a sign of some significant change in the way I chart my course through life. Porridge? It came with jam ... so I remain a wuss, lest anyone think I'm wholly transformed.

Porridge came with salt when I was a child eating at my grandmother's kitchen table in Rockbank Street, Bridgeton. I loved my grandmother when I was a wee boy. I even suffered her daily dose of cod liver oil with something approaching forebearance but salty porridge is a taste one has never acquired.

After Spike had left to travel to work at the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association I settled down with a pot of tea to finish reading Angus Calder's 1987 introduction to the work of T S Eliot, which is one of The Harvester Press "New Readings" series. It is a decent introduction, well worth reading although it draws a rather condescending conclusion with this observation:

"I suppose that I have in the past pushed [Eliot's oeuvre's] claims largely because it seemed to rebuke the timerity and insularity of much recent British verse; now that poets neither timid nor insular such as Geoffrey Hill, Norman McCaig and Charles Tomlinson have produced notable post-Modernist oeuvres of their own, Eliot's is no longer so needful for that purpose. He is not yet 'folded into one party' with such adversaries as the Georgians but I no longer feel so inclined to fight on his behalf, in a battle for 'Modernism' against easy-oozy English continmuity."

Frankly my dear Angus, who gives a damn? The end apart, however, it's a decent, even informative read.

After my taking of tea and deconstruction of Thomas, I ventured out into a day of domestic chores; buying stamps at the post office, shopping for milk, fruit juices and tissues at the supermarket, picking-up Spike after work. We took a chance on finding late-night-shopping parking at the Westfield Mall in Parramatta. There, we bought essentials: a new iron, a four-slice toaster and some emergency hosiery. Who could have guessed that all three would be put to use so quickly or so memorably?

I posted a copy of Kaboom to Johnny Geller at Curtis Brown in London. So maybe it was a day of domesticity; maybe a day with a touch of ectasy; maybe a day that the label 'writer' came a little closer. Maybe it was a day including all three, although the latter is still open to question.
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Mothers' Day, UK

Phoned my mum. Short conversation, which is to be expected. My younger brother was with her (Sunday, which it still is in the UK, being Mothers' Day). It was good to catch up, to hear about his recent trip to Jordon as part of a British Council capacity-building and partnerships course and his plans to spend Easter at his and Steph's olive grove in Italy. Joe took the photos here while in Jordan.

The art work was created by a Scottish woman, oddly enough. It hangs in the Darat Al Funun Gallery in Amman.

I don't know where the ruin is located. Good pic though.

Happy birthday mum

Dusk, River Clyde

Cloch lighthouse (photo by my brother Joe)

Life

"The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood."
~ Freya Stark


Sunflowers, by my brother Joe

The Best Read Fish And Chips In Scotland

My father worked by writing words
before our age of cut and paste,
computers and the world wide web.
Hot metal presses processed him

and all he wrote, which he then left
to artisans to justify for readers
of the latest Late Edition, satisfied
that he had made them all he could,

dissatisfied that time did not permit
re-statement before those deadlines
hit the streets, his work troubling him.
My father’s words had clever ways,

now and again eluding every effort
to tame them through his hard labour
of breaking stories that could capture
flagging interests in bored commuters

crammed inside old trains and buses,
heaving with humanity heading home
at the end of dull and ordinary days,
looking for the answers to six across

or twelve down or being disappointed
at tonight’s television or not laughing
with the cartoon strip characters and
much too tired to care for columnists. 
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