A Gorey start to my Fitzroy career

This will be my fourth night sleeping on the floor. I can hear acoustic guitar, so I know Tom must be home, and I smile to myself. Just now, in the hallway, I met Prue for the first time: skinny, dark haired; hugging the faded blue towel she’s wearing with her armpits as she extends a hand in introduction. Everyone wears towels around the house here. Before this I was sitting outside with Sarah, who I also met for the first time tonight, and Mychael, who I’ve met once; we talk about Australian politics and American politics and Pacific regional politics and American bases on Australian soil; and how last week, to Nasa’s inexpressible frustration, the cable being used to transmit an ultra-high-res video of Venus’ transit was accidentally cut into by an old guy shoveling somewhere in the Northern Territory. Megs opens up the lid of the the ash tray and puts his cigarette inside, screws the lid back on, and draws another cigarette out, while waxing lyrical on anything relevant; that guy who threw his daughter off the bridge; the impact of Sharia law on UK families; the time he had to walk home at night through Cairo alley-ways with a pocket full of sharp stones for the packs of feral dogs.

There’s a box of loo rolls in the lounge room with “<3 from Isaac” scrawled on in fluro pink crayon. On my first night here I knock on Mina's door to introduce myself and ask for the wifi password. Instead I'm offered wine by Mina -short for Marina or Minara- and her friend in the middle of their evening’s conversation. Tom walks in to ask if Prue had returned his book, we talk for hours about writing (guess what Tom does) and before you know it I've got his pants off. No, really- he needed someone to darn a hole in his trousers before he goes out for drinks later. Gab in room #2 comes into Mina's lounge at another point- she has a fantastic laugh which goes right through the hundred-year-old walls. Earlier I have read through the fine print of the lease agreement and find clauses about “if we throw a disco party we expect you to invite your friends and to go in on the hire costs of disco equipment” and that you can have a cat but only if you buy it from the RSPCA. These seem eccentric, but not unbelievable, and a lot of the agreement is consistent with a (lower case) communist ideal that I don’t mind trying on for a bit, but I work up the courage to ask Mina if the agreement is steadfast about vegetarians being undesirable because they complain about paying a full share into the kitty for food costs. Mina bursts out laughing- “That agreement? Have you read some of the stuff in there?"; No one’s held to that since before I got here.” Going on eighteen months, first in what is now our room and then in the converted stables, Mina is the distinguished and dependable mother bear.
All together we (legally) occupy The Captains House, “an historical cottage built on the outskirts of urban Melbourne” about a century before you were born. I wake up and walk around the corner to Smith street, blink, look back the way I came. Yup- I live here. Finally. But I’m so excited I don’t feel like ‘finally’; I feel like “already”. We walk around in towels, enthuse about authors, share glad wrap.

I sit on the one piece of furniture I have in my room (I can’t say “the one piece of furniture I own” because I don’t own it) and survey my space, my things. It’s such a luxurious freedom to have so little- everything we have fitted into the back of Mum’s sedan. Somehow having less makes me feel lighter, and feeling lighter makes me feel stronger. I’m cold but I’m writing. I don’t have a lot of money in the bank but I’ve got a lot planned for this week; pick up my Chromantic fixie from Blackburn, tick off another of the “Melbourne coffee review” top 100, dinner in the ‘Grave and watch a violinist friend ply his trade. In fact, I might see him on my top 100 rounds- “As a professional musician, naturally I spend a lotta time making coffee.” This may change soon; after randomly buying an actual big tent, a friend of this friend has head-hunted him to be the ring-master, more or less on the basis of his fabulous mustache.

Right now the immediate future looks like this: I wait for approval to take Honours for my undergrad degree, writing a thesis on the medieval English, middle-English and early modern predecessors of (post/)apocalyptic literature. School’s out (from my job) in three weeks, and I get three weeks of sleeping in, painting and relaxing before school’s in again. Daniel enrolls in a physics degree. We spend all our time acting like we’re nineteen and just out of home, or discussing that fact that we’re suddenly a lot older than that and where did the time go? and does it matter anyway how old we are if we’re living the way we want to live.

I’m going to have a vegan feast/house-warming soon. Megs said “Great! There’s chairs in the driveway, you can push those tables together in the living room and there’s a fire pit under the feijoa tree.”

I’ll bake the cookies- you bring the wine.

❤

Highlands Slideshow

Because I’m too tired to write, please enjoy the 1950’s family holiday Kodachrome slideshow version of the Scottish Highlands, where we were last weekend.

Shoreditch (last day in London)

“I’ve never really been out of Shoreditch” -Vince Noir

The above is a line from my favorite episode of The Mighty Boosh. This happens to be the first episode I ever saw, and at the time I thought that the suburb was made up. Turns out that a lot of perfectly real UK towns and suburbs sound quite made up (I’ll cite “Eglsywyr” here) and Shoreditch is a real place; one of my favorite places in Lun Dun.

Before we even got to London, I marked out Brick Lane on my map, on the advice of a friend, and we walked there from our hostel for a curry one day. Unfortunately, this was a weekend, and we were duly SWAMPED by Hipsters. Europe’s most curry-concentrated street for one half, the other half could well be Europe’s highest concentration of wayfarers, non-prescription eyewear, found-object jewelry and general eye-melting, eating-disorder inducing, cover-gracing fashionistas. It goes without saying that I was intimidated and impressed in equal measure. Eg: I saw a girl whose idea of trousers was stockings with transparent vertical stripes. The reason for this prolifory of frippery is that Shoreditch rings to the sound of vintage cash registers at dozens of trendy second-hand and hand-made stores. This being our first week in Europe, with a looooong Sherpa-less journey ahead, I bought nothing of the über-cool handmade and vintage offerings, but we did buy coffee and vegan cake, surrounded by ironic furs on coat hangers, at a cafe occupying a stall within one of the huge basement vintage markets. I had fun, but there was really far too many people, and I felt like Daniel was politely waiting to go the whole time -“patience is just a mild form of despair”- so we left soon.

Last Wednesday, I was lucky enough to get into the Alternative London tour, which had been booked when we were in London previously. I walked from our hostel in Southwark to our appointed meeting place: “the statue with the white goat outside Old Spitalfields Markets”, and walked up to the very well-dressed gent who was not my guide at all but Andrew29 (google him), looking for a date. Our guide Gary turned up soon after, replete with urban splendor in strangely fitted grey jeans, a black leather jacket and shiny black and yellow hi-top Nikes. But he wasn’t at all too-cool-for-school in attitude, and when I later made a point of how much crazy high fashion there was around he joked back with “I know; some of ’em even ‘ave blue hair!” Gary is a fierce lover/supporter of his home suburb, and especially it’s prolific street art, which forms the flesh and bones of the Alternative tour.

On the tour we saw hundreds of works by dozens of artists, many of them on the level of the Archibald Prize. Instead of blabbing about them all I’ve ripped some images off da interwebz, but they are coming and going from the streets constantly; this organic cycle growth, predation and renewal is a visible and electrifying undercurrent in the subculture. Many of the best and most difficult works of art were done, illegally, by international artists on 24 hour stop-overs. Most are commissioned though, and the majority of uncommisioned works are appreciated by local residents of all classes and professions, not just an antagonistic group of vandals. The London council is currently conducting a shock-and-awe Sturmrang campaign of arrests and hideous gray-washing, against the wishes of locals in preparation for the cashed-up culture sensitive Olympic tourists. I will rant about this further upon request.

As well as seeing all this inspiring artwork we visited some historically impressive sites, including a building which been a Protestant church, a Catholic church, a synagogue and a mosque respectively, and the match factory where Karl Marx’s daughter started the Matchgirls’ fights for fairer conditions in the workplace. A more recent building of importance is an abandoned railway station which has been renovated, rail cars included, into an Eco-village and collective of affordable artists studios. The aim of the project is to provide affordable accommodation and creative space for Shoreditch locals who are increasingly being priced out of their suburb by the gentrification process, and moreover to prove and point out to the city council that such an option is necessary and possible. The facade of this amazing interstitial habitat is covered with a twenty-foot union jack. Look closely and you may discern the anti-English lyrics a the Sex Pistols’ song.

After the tour I was energized and inspired and felt a real sense of ownership in the Shoreditch art culture. I asked Gary to point me back on the direction of a certain wall I’d glimpsed at one point in the tour, and he offered to take me right there once he grabbed his parked push-bike. He couldn’t help explaining more art all the way back; there’s so much that for every piece Gary talks about there’s ten others in the immediate vicinity that you can only glance at and wonder. The pieces Gary showed me last were intricate stencils of homeless people sprayed in colored layers onto the plinths of a car park for well-paid government workers. Gary split and I admired more of the work alone, then went back to the historic Beigel bakeries, and a Swedish cafe called Fika, for a coffee. The cafe smelled amazingly of marzipan and spices- the girl told me the scent was Semla, special buns baked only in February, spicy dough filled with marzipan and whipped cream 😦

I sat down with my coffee and people-watched all the wonderful weirdos, as well as the counter culture of humble shop owners and blue-collar tradesmen who also make Shoreditch their home.

Guest Post by Daniel

Rugby weekend. I don’t have the patience for it.

I admit, you can only mentally prepare so much for unknowable evils, but this was something else.

I really lack the grey matter for this at the moment, exhaustion confounds me. I deliberately took mental notes all day, but, the act itself has drained my ability to put these musings down in words.

But here I go…

Magnitude, Water and Lore. And the sheer severity of Skye’s peaks are apparent before you even make the hop, skip and jump over the few bridges to her coal black shoals, the twin mountains black and red Cullin greet you while they silently drink the clouds that stain the sky like a mismatched jigsaw. Their bodies are smooth as if hand carved and each stained with moss giving them their respective colors.

Hmmm… Pretty loud in here.(back in Edinburgh)

People here differ none from any other, the global tide has swept once over I guess. 40 hour weeks and booze to break the loose change. But hey, nifty accent. To be honest It upsets me, I have this weird deal you probably mightn’t understand about fringes, not the haircut, but geographical fringes, psycological fringes the uncrossed, untamed or unmanned and wild fringes of society. And Skye was definitely at one time or another a fringe. A place of mystery and magic, one which would have took on an almost ethereal presence residing not totally within our realm but indeed crossing over.

-Relax dear, they’re just drunk. Everything is funny when you’re with peers, it’s like instead of 4 people with 4 individual brains, 4 people share the one dumb fuck brain.-

Anyway, no more fringes. That’s what I’m on about! No places set aside for anything other then cheap shitty chip board or grass munching, furry cloud rats. And to top that off everything that is somewhat relieved of agriculture is an exhibit… Nature without human interference is now an open bloody museum for buses full of prats with phallic cameras to march around taking pictures of heroic conquering postures as if they had climbed everest and only to annoy their grandchildren those whom I sincerely doubt give a flying fuck.

-Man, here they go again. Re-arrange the whole fucking hostel so you can have your little gang bang and spit cheap beer and chips at each other while you prattle on loudly about whatever the hell tossers who purchase a plane ticket solely to go see men hugging in Scotland talk about. Fuck everyone else, this hostel is just for you guys… Good show.-

Still, Skye does still have magic about her. Eyes widen and hearts quicken as time and time again the land opens up to you revealing scenes for which heaven could not compete. Such play of earth and water an inter-elemental embrace… Like… …. This will have to wait.

This shit is gunna hit the fan…

Into the West…the Isle of Skye!

Yesterday the luverly Lyn drove us to Cullodden battlefield to meet up with a three-day tour that had left Edinburgh early that morning. Lyn sat with us in the car filling us in about the history lesson we may have missed, and talking up her “cuz” Neil (the tour guide) as a “blether” which means he talks too much, but in a positive way. The big white Macbackpacker bus rode into the parking lot, and Neil jumped out in a genuine kilt, bare legged beneath. The FREEZING wind suddenly felt colder, and with one big whoosh threatened to make our introductions far too reveling. He was a great talker, as promised, and at the battlefield I finally wrapped my metaphorical head around the Jacobite uprising. I walked alone over the huge field, site of the last pitched battle on British soil, and was impressed not just by my newfound knowledge of the battle particulars but by the fact that the view all around; grey skies, forest, snow-capped mountain ranges, was just the same as the sights seen by all those men that day, doomed to die; highland warriors. On a lighter note, I got to see some absolutely beautiful period flintlock pistols, and hold a reproduction to get the heft of it. I want one.

After Cullodden we drove down past the Loch again, past the Grampians and Glencoe vale, and over Skye Bridge to the Isle of Skye. All the way our driver Neil told myths, legends, facts and jokes, and played genuinely good Scottish folk and offensive Billy Conolly songs. A military helicopter flew past as e rounded the corner in view of Skye, and it was like Jurrasic Park 2.

Seriously, though, Skye is beautiful: I think the Skye Bridge is as close in name and destination to Bifröst, the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard, as I’m likely to get in this lifetime. We drank ale and (Daniel) ate salmon in the Saucy Mary with local fisherman, and I slept in the bed of a Viking King of Norway. Bliss!

Nessie & Northern Lights

Do you believe in God?

So…do you? Well, in that case, do you believe in the Loch Ness monster? I’ll agree they seem unrelated, but I listened to a tour guide make a fairly logical (if not convincing) case that if you believe in one you therefore ought to believe in the other. In the form of a long story about St Columba and a Pictish chieftain and the very first recorded sighting of Nessie back in 500-something.

After two nights in Newcastle we caught yet another Megabus to Inverness. Atypically, this one departed and arrived in the middle of town, at reasonable times. Nevertheless, it was a six and a half hour journey, and after traveling from Pembrokeshire to the Highlands -virtually one side of the UK to t’other- I’ve got a crick in my neck that ain’t ever coming out, and the posture of a veteran coal miner.

We arrived in Inverness at 11pm, and walked through the town to the hostel; town was all very pretty, fairy lights reflected on the river and all that. We walked past Inverness castle: it doesn’t look a decade old- what’s with that? Macbackpackers on Culduthel street was AWESOME. The manageress Lyn is the most capable hotelier I’ve met, making us feel right at home while we smelled scones baking in the oven for breakfast. She was making them the night before so she could have some wine and gin and a sleep in! The hostel felt small enough that we introduced ourselves to all the staff and met most of the guests, but we got a 10 person room to ourselves.
The photo at top is of Inverness in the snow just a few days before we arrived, taken by another guest, Leesa, from a hostel window.

I stayed up late (drinking way too much free coffee and hot chocolate) making travel plans with the wifi in the comfy lounge. It was cold enough outside that you could feel it seeping in by osmosis through the big glass windows, and I ended up crammed like a sultan into all these cushions with my back to the lovely radiator.

Next day we had our fresh scones for breakfast (Best scones ever! Granted, having been vegan for five years, i’m no sconnoisseur), and hopped on a bus to go and see the beautiful Loch Ness. No, we did not see the damn monster. I wasn’t even looking (maybe a bit). But the loch was beautiful; particularly the views we had from Urquhart Castle.

(photos forthcoming)

Back at the hostel, I started reading the Stephen Fry memoirs (wonderful so far) but was drawn into the conversation of the other guests. It started out funny and vaguely interesting, until it was just me and this French guy- I still don’t now his name- who talked with pitch-perfect understatement about cycling alone through -nay, across– Siberia. He talked about Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, about men in the North who drink 5 liters of vodka a day and die in their forties leaving the population of over-fifties almost entirely female, about dog-sledding and northern lights and incredible human warmth and hospitality. He said the most important thing you can have, traveling through Siberian winter in a tent, is a brush. To scrape off the layer of ice that condenses on your sleeping bag overnight.

Before, or maybe after, his trip to Siberia he lived for six months on Finland’s lake Inari, looking after 45 sledding huskies. The French owner of the settlement sounds like a bear; huge and solitary, and apparently talks less than a regular Finnish person. After six months he asked the younger guy, my fellow guest, to stay on, to which he replied politely “f**k off.” The setting, the landscape was incredible; the northern lights were common, and the midnight sun meant that for a month they ran the dogs from midnight to 9am instead of 9-5, but that didn’t make up for the eighty-hour working week and the week-long sled trips without re-supplying. This is a tourism business, but the only one that I’ve heard of that takes tourists out for more than a day, and without a snowmobile as backup. Tourists pay €2500 for this privilege *gasp!*. I know I couldn’t do this winter through to summer, nor afford that fee for just a week, but I’d love to volunteer if I can.

On our last morning in Inverness I went in search if Leakey’s bookstore- a beautiful big shop with a mezzanine cafe all inside a five hundred year old church, with the wooden altar still in place behind the cash register. The order of books on shelves is a study in chaos magic and fractal randomness. I’m sure the only existing order; clumps of books by one author found here and there, are either created by meddling customers or the books just migrate together by themselves. I think this is my innate system; i found four books off my 2012 reading list in four minutes, and had to make a hasty retreat to cut my losses. Iain M Banks, Ursula K LeGuin, Phillip K Dick, and Terry Brooks- take that, 24hour flight back to Melbourne!

That’s right; I’m coming home. It’s an unexpected journey, but as Gandalf would say, sometimes unexpected journeys are best.

Kilts, fjords and fairies

As you can tell immediately by the title, Skye is awesome. I woke this morning to a crisp silver-white sky over the Atlantic, lapping at a stone wall merely two meters from my bedroom window. Across two or three hundred meters you can see another thin peninsula dotted with white cottages, and to the left the Skye Bridge, curving up gracefully from the mainland to touch down nearby.

(^not my photo, obviously)

and it just got better. God, I can’t even remember everything we did today! We were on the bus by 8:30 and drove out to the mountains Red and Black Cullin. On the way we heard about the story behind Saucy Mary; an entrepreneur who used to tax sailors coming into the harbor, and for an extra tax would perform a castle-top striptease. Then Neil told a fantastic tale of Cú Chulainn chasing and fighting a mythical heroine, locally aka Skiath. The river is supposed to be full of fairy magic that gave this fearsome lady her strength and long life, and we took up the challenge of putting our faces in it for seven seconds. As you can imagine, i was very awake after that.

We drove to Dunvegan Castle, the ancestral seat of the MacLeod clan, and inhabited by that family in an unbroken line since the twelfth century. The castle is closed to visitors for the winter, but contains a silk tapestry/scarf/flag called the Fairy Banner. The banner was given to the clan by the fairyfolk father of the wife of one MacLeid chieftain, and is said to be able to call the fairy powers to the aid of the clan in a time of dire need.

We had sweet potato, chilli and coconut soup, plus coffee at Skye’s main town of Portree, then drove off again through more ridiculously beautiful peninsulas and mountains. All the towns here have very bizzare Scandinavian names like trottenish and uig.

We walked up Storr rock, meaning ‘big’ in old Scandinavian, where every film ever has been shot, including highlander, stardust, and the new Aliens movie (with Charlize Theron and the Swedish actress who played the Girl wtdt). It was a steep slippery walk and in a few places huge rocks had fallen onto the path, causing us to divert and look fearfully overhead at the spires you can see in the picture. The clouds enclosed the east side of the mountain in opaque mist, and hooded crows soared beside us making strange ‘p-lop’ calls that sound like drips echoing off stone. To the west, the sky opened out further and showed shreds of blue. From atop the Storr we could see vast distances either side; the shoreline curved each way into folds and fjords of high green or golden hills and sheer black cliffs.

Our next stop was one of these, named Kilt, after the giants’ causeway-like formation of rock that gives the cliffs a tartan pattern. Neil had a kilt for the occasion, for dress-ups. One of the other Aussie girls on the tour said laughingly to me: ‘omg, have you seen the medieval club that meet every week at Melbourne uni?!’ I said: ‘what do you mean the medieval club; the SCA, the Varangian guard, or MARS? Or maybe the fantasy society?’ and without giving her a chance to draw astonished breath, I rocked that kilt. It’s an old fashioned brave heart kilt which is literally also a big blanket.

After the kilt cliff we drove to a sheltered valley in the middle of a wide mountain-ringed plain. Within this valley is the weirdest patch of land I’ve ever been in. It’s believed that fairies have always lived here in Skye, and the remaining fairy population live in a castle in this valley. The valley is much greener than the surrounding plain and contains about 100 strange small hills, like a miniature himalayas or something, and little groves of tiny trees that are in appearance full grown but shorter than me. There is hill taller than an the rest, with a broad rocky head on top of it, which could be a castle in keeping with the miniature scale. Remember; fairies in Celtic mythology are much more like Tolkien’s elves than tinkerbelle. And they can be dangerous. One part of the myth tells of a man who bought the land ad built his house on it, moving in with his wife and children. He dug up peat from the glen to burn on his fire, but was warned fiercely against this by other locals, who said ‘you might have bought this land, but you don’t own it.’ But this man didn’t believe that the fairies had any real poer to drive him away, and persisted in burning the peat from the glen. Gradually his cattle sickened and died. The vet could find no cause nor cure. Then his children; the physician couldn’t help. Then his wife. Depending on the version of story, the man threw himself off a cliff or perhaps only moved away, but I’ll tell you what I saw:

There are the definite remains of a house in Fairy Glen, walls two or three foot high. Through these walls; ie through the actual middle of the thickness if the stones, are about seven big trees, much much bigger than the quaint stunted trees all around everywhere else. These trees look exactly like they have been intentionally planted underneath the stone walls to bring the farmer’s house down; there are no trees growing in that area that are not coming from inside a stone wall. Supposedly in addition to the sickness of the farmer’s livestock and family, the fairies caused these great trees to take root inside his walls and destroy his house from inside out.

I have video filmed with my iPad of us driving into the Fairy Glen: I can’t post it here but I can email it. You get to hear our great guide talking too!

We all walked around by ourselves like we were on mushrooms and came back quiet and starry-eyed to the bus. Then Neil surprised us with a present for the ninety minute drive back to our village; whiskey! It lasted shamefully briefly between eleven of us, swigging and passing up and down the bus. We came back home in excellent cheer and I cooked for 12 of us with £12.70 worth of groceries. The gang have all gone back to Saucy Mary’s.

Bath & Oxford

(Delayed post)

Bath

A week ago we took three busses and two trains to get from the twee Welsh village of Llandissillio to Bath, England. Bath is the original tourist town, populated with gorgeous Georgian architecture and aristocracy from Jane Austin times, Medieval cure-all entrepreneurs before that, Romans before that, and before them, according to legend, King Lear’s uncle.

After a mind-numbing day of travel and the critical introduction to Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley’s *The Last Man,* we arrived in Bath at nightfall. The hostel we stayed in -St Christopher’s Inn, had a white staircase leading up three storeys with each flight of stairs smaller and narrower than the last, so that I felt like Alice in Wonderland by the time I arrived at the top. Petite French and Asian girls completed the Illusion. The architecture was uniformly beautiful, as expected, but unexpectedly so was the smell! As a tourist town for the moneyed up and coming, with a centuries-long reputation to uphold, Bath is brimming with cafes and restaurants, delis and even one Cheesemonger. You would love this town, Martin! The other tourists here are idiots like tourist throngs the world over, but here they’re idiots in the sense of the £500 cuff links we saw for sale. Anyway, we walked around and saw enough fantastic looking eateries that you could have every meal for a week at a different one and not run out of top-notch stuff. I saw the first specialty coffee maker’s since leaving Melbourne, which I dragged Daniel into both days. They offer three -or maybe six- different blends every day, in very cool surrounds and nice cups, and actively frown upon the use of sugar.

There were soap and perfume stores calling to my vanity and my purse, but swiftly shrinking as that is, I didn’t indulge. I even saw a Lush! It’s silly and capitalist, probably, but seeing branded stores like Vodafone and Lush, which I used to see in Melbourne, give me the warm and fuzzies just a little. Also we saw fire twirlers in Queen Square; I miss fire twirling.

The first morning we took a free walking tour, during which the guide forgot what he was rambling on about at least four times and mentioned something he saw on morning tellie about Australia in 1983. But we got to see Royal Crescent (below), and found out that John Cleese lives in one of these with his Mini parked out front.

After this we were all set to go for a dip in the Roman Baths, but- how disappointing; they’re not for use anymore due to being priceless ancient relics. There is a modern swimming pool running off the same hot springs, but it costs for two hours the same as two nights’ accommodation, so we were priced out of the upper class lifestyle there. We did, of course, pay to get into the original baths, even if I only got to put my hand in the water.

-the head is Roman, after the goddess Minerva who was associated with the holy spring,
and the stone shows a Roman name carved into it: can you read it?-

Then we sat in some city parks, and we walked down to the river Avon via the very cool Tulpenny bridge. On the way home we passed the enormous gothic Abbey in the centre of town, and despite the abbey being dark and closed someone was raging on the organ (I think it must have been practice for an approaching Bach concert). Even from outside with nary a door ajar, the sound was incredible, and I stood staring up rapturously at the vaulted windows.

The next day we went into (and quickly out of again) the Jane Austen centre, I FINALLY bought a uk sim card and promptly called my grateful mama, and we visited the humble but interesting William Herschel museum of astronomy, in the house where Herschel lived in the early 1800s. Herschel was the proverbial star-gazing professional musician, but found that the telescopes he could buy were not good enough, so began to make his own. He made dozens, discovered Uranus and some comets, and became the astronomer-to-the-king. Bee-tee-dubs: did you know the Georgian period refers to a time in English history when four king Georges in a row ruled? (between 1720 and 1840) There was supposed to be a king Frederick in the middle, but an act of God prevented him from kingship and from mucking up the nice order.

And then we caught the bus to Oxford…

Oxford

Dumped our bags and went out to grab a burrito. On the way there we passed the “FACULTY OF HISTORY” building and I nearly fell over a bike chained to the fence. We sat facing the windows and Oxford really is choc-full of professors. They’re everywhere in the streets, and fly down the roads on their bikes with their wizard beards and burberrys trailing in the wind.

The next day we went on another free tour, but this one rocked. The tour guide was younger than me, if you can believe it, and a Townie. He took us around some of the colleges like Balliol, Trinity, Christ Church, Rhodes and Merton Hall, through to the Radcliffe Camera, the Balliol Library and the menacing Examination hall.

He pointed out Blackwell’s Bookstore, whose three joined shop fronts are impressive enough, and informed us that beneath all of these -and indeed the road we were standing on- is the Guinness World Record’s largest single room selling books. I bought *Lyra’s Oxford* by Phillip Pulman, and then found the lit crit section and swapped it for Tom Shippey’s *J R R Tolkien: Author of the Century*. Tolkien lived and taught in Oxford, and we bought tickets into his old college of Merton for a snoop. The chapel was neck-braking and serenely empty, paved with ancient tiles set between gravestones from the sixteenth century.

On the way home we found an enormous installation of the sawn stumps and felled root systems of 40 meter old growth trees from African rain forest. The exhibition was in Trafalgar square and Copenhagen previously, and is called Ghost Forest. I remember reading that the artist Angela told an old Oxford artist friend about her plans before hand and he said “it can’t be done; Don’t try.” at the time, he was installing a seven foot bronze of himself, naked, on the roof of his own college.

Is that Seamus Heaney’s Chimney?

Drafted 29.12.2011

After a few nights at Suzie & Mike’s family home, and another five in the Carraig Dulra yurt, we were temporarily “rescued” to stay a night with Suzie’s friend and local biodynamic/permaculture mentor, Wendy, and her husband Richard. We loved Wendy and Richard separately and instantly but they have the most charming couple dynamic. There’s a lot of love and intelligence and wit and happiness in the household, with Wendy’s homey clutter battling for territory with Richard’s idea of order. Richard happens to be a prominent Irish ecologist -so his friends proudly told me- and an excellent conversationalist. We had loads of interesting chats and debates over the kitchen table, and when he offered to give us a lift to Cork I was gladder for the chance of more conversation than for the free ride.

Wendy and Richard live on the south side of Devil’s Glen, on part of what was the old Synge estate (cousins of the literary Synge). Their house is beautiful and old and well worn, very familial, with a big square kitchen that is a thoroughfare at the east side where the door comes in, and at the west (far) side are glass double French windows that lead out through a herb-lined walk to a raised lawn and a big gnarled “earlies” apple tree. The tree is hung with feeders that Wendy makes to attract robins and chaffinches and blue tits, but the apple buds that bloom at the top of the tree are always eaten by bull finches. Wendy said she could put up a fake bird of prey in the apple tree but that would scare off the birds she likes to look at. In front of the house is an eightfoot arched gateway fence made of stone, hollow inside for keeping horse food and firewood; between this and the road are trees and an untended lawn. Between the arch and the house is a tended lawn, where ducks are fed, and robins fight over scraps, and to the left of this, and all down behind the house’s south wall, is a lovely sorawling vegetable garden; very good for wandering. We walked first through Wendy’s little wood of hazel and ash and ivy- covered birch, sycamore and elm. This is bordered all round with berry bushes: raspberry, loganberry, blueberry, black current and more. Most of the trees in here, twenty or thirty feet tall, we’re grown by Wendy from seeds. Back out again leads to dozens of open beds and six poly tunnels. I’ve never seen such loving cultivation or prolific vegetables; this explains Wendy’s freezer, which we helped relocate, being choc-full of clear full bags of the most beautiful looking cut fruits and vegetables. Everything in her fridge and pantry is organic or homemade; ten types of honey, tahini, peanut butter, twenty types of herbal tea, crabapple jelly, blackcurrent jam and chutneys. Her son Derry had made Harissa of fresh chopped chillis, with parsley and mint; it smelled wonderful and instead if Harissa he had written Hot! Hot! Hot! Beware! on the jar.

I helped Wendy feed her horses in the field across the road, and we took her Wicklow Collie dog up to the line of oak forest that crests it. An enormous lone oak stands several metres into the field itself, with an old rope swing on it like something out of Winnie the pooh. At the top Wendy pointed down to the large estate home to which all the surrounding fields once belonged. Her own house, over there to the right, was built two hundred years ago for one of their household staff, and gesturing straight down beyond the main demesne she pointed out the smoking chimney of another outlying house; home to the poet, Seamus Heaney. (His modern English rewriting of Beowulf is widely acclaimed. If I remember correctly it’s a loving rendition of, rather than a direct translation of, the original.)

I’m sorry that there’s no picture of the Hundred Acre Wood or of Seamus Heaney’s woodsmoke; it was an unexpected pleasure and found me without a camera. This last picture looks out, from a bedroom on the upper floor, in the opposite direction. What a view though, eh? The cottages and fields…I can’t remember but I think part of that indistinct background blue is the ocean.

Newcastle

Nice city, Newcastle. Loads of bridges; I don’t know why there are so many here so close together, it’s like they cost nothing…and -perhaps due to Newcastle’s history as a ship-building town- they old ones are all astonishingly tall and grand, and the more modern one’s are the fancy type that open up.

Newcastle was especially impressive after our painful 24 hours in Coventry, and the bleak bus trip through some of the Midland cities like Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds. Actually Leeds seemed like it had some nice areas and a good thriving subculture or two, but what we saw of Man and Birmingham was the endless broken grey of industrial parks and housing estates, and it was easy to imagine their interiors like Coventry’s: a mismatch of severe post-war architecture, wide ring roads that totally disrupt the city centre and got us lost at least three times, all the shops closing early and perhaps a tenth of them closed for good, their windows reflecting blackly with their emptiness or Closing Down Sale! posters fading gently in the pale sun…

sheesh. But Newcastle is much nicer! Lots of coffee shops and hostels and vegan-friendly cafes and weird bookstores which had me fawning over comics and Daniel ogling the latest expansion of Magic: the Gathering. Daniel literally pulled me out of tue store by the arm. The local events list is full of exciting shows and interesting exhibitions. There’s a potentially good night out in our very street with some dubstep, and Skrillex is playing a sold-out show tomorrow night. I had only heard vaguely of Skrillex before Daniel shared with me this hilarious trolling article: http://christwire.org/2012/02/skrillex-uses-satanic-and-homosexual-influence-to-win-grammys/

Hadrian’s Wall

Or as iPad would say, Hardpan’s Wall. It’s a nice quick trip on the bus out of Newcastle and into the gleaming countryside: the light fantastic, creating that fingers-of-heaven rays of sunlight thing, but the clouds had altered and the sun dipped almost to the horizon by the time we got to the wall. We got off the bus at a village called Heddon-on-the-Wall, instructed by two lovely elderly locals who sat at the front of our bus. All the little lanes of houses were called Marius avenue or Antonine Way and such; Hadrian’s Wall begins just metres from one if the small-holdings, drizzling down the meadow like a length of giant rope or a desiccated snake. At only about 150 metres long, this is one of the longest remaining stretches of the wall that was built at its thickest, 3 metre-wide, dimension. At the beginning and end of the stretch of visible wall the ancient stones are only one piece high, and sometimes only one wide as well; in the middle the stones rise and fall, filling out the wall to five or six stones high, and then back down again. Daniel says the wall would have been up to seven metres tall, originally, and pointed out the two metre deep ditch that ran parallel a few paces from the wall. He demonstrated where the pike fence of wooden spikes would have been laid, and parodied a Northern barbarian rushing the up to the wall. We walked up and down and discussed whether we’d rather travel into the past or the future.

Then we noticed signs of insidious moles which the Romans were ineffectively keeping out of the Empire. Then we kicked some molehills.

Out of interest, I think that the Viking age and the early 19th century, for example were definitely interesting times and remain fascinating to study, but daily life not so much. Fatally tedious or outright deadly, really. I’d much rather travel forward into the Culture, where I could live for two hundred years, change my sex, gland any drug I feel like and slowly skim the galaxy on a giant city-ship.

Alnwick castle, a magnificently intact 15th century castle surrounded by tended gardens, was unfortunately closed until March -it might even be the 31st of March I think- and our only option was to tour the grounds and FREAKING AWESOME treehouse, but it’s a two hour round trip and would cost probably £40, and it’s probably really disappointing in person…that reminds me: today Daniel cryptically said “rotten berries” in response to some opinion of mine. After a while we worked out he meant “sour grapes,” but far be it from me to stifle his linguistic creativity.