so many stuff

magic lamp

2007-10-01T12:55:00.001+02:00

In six hours I am leaving for Heathrow.

This morning in Lily's flat the texture of that first month in London returned to my mind. You know how every little era you live through has its own kind of spirit? As tangible as a smell when you are conscious of it, but very hard to bring to mind just when you want to. If you start something new very suddenly, you are conscious of the change of atmosphere for a few days before you get completely used to breathing it. I felt the is-ness, the now-ness, of that time with all my senses. And today, for a half-hour or so, I got it back, and time collapsed.

There was this Tennyson poem I used to love when I was thirteen or fourteen though I haven't much thought about it since. This girl is writhing around in an agony of anticipation, crushing flowers to her burning breast and whatnot, waiting for a lover to whom she is completely mentally enslaved. She says,

...once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips; as sunlight drinketh dew.

I don't feel like my soul is in my body today. I feel like it is in the custody of the genie that is presiding over my return to Australia. I created this monster myself when I decided to go back, and now it has temporarily taken me over. Don't squirm, it says, a deal's a deal. And now I don't have to perform any more acts of will, I just have to walk through the inevitable steps until it's all effected and done. And when it's done, I will have my self back. At 9:55am on Wednesday 4th October at Charles Kingsford-Smith airport.

And then I'll get to find out if I made a good decision or not.

All my northern hemisphere buddies, goodbye, I love you, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Rug up warm, winter's coming. Goodbye.

westward

2007-09-27T21:37:00.000+02:00

Konya is a blaring, dusty, sun-baked city. I've probably been further from the sea in my life, but I've never felt it. It was a rude shock after sleepy Goreme, and my comfort was not augmented by the fact that its citizens observe Ramadan more strictly than any other place I've been. I had to buy fruit and crackers in the supermarket and sneak a hasty lunch in my hotel so as not to give offence. The upside was seeing the relish with which everyone broke fast at the end of the day. As soon as the muezzins so much as clear their throats into the minaret microphones, you can hear the chik of a thousand cigarette lighters flaring as one, and in the restaurants people swoop on tables laid out with all kinds of food that they've been staring longingly at for the past ten or fifteen minutes.

I went to Konya looking for the shrine of Celaleddin Rumi, 12th-century sufi mystic, founder of the mevlevi whirling dervish order, and cracking good poet. It was gorgeous beyond my expectation. The calligraphy decorating the walls was of a curious form I hadn't seen before. The image was symmetrical, with the words written both right to left and left to right. It had a stark use of colour and blocky shapes that reminded me of kabuki masks. Maybe the symmetry made it face-like, I don't know. There were no photos allowed so I sketched my favourite piece on the back of a receipt--I only had time to do half, though, so you have to hold it edgewise to a mirror to see it whole.

That night I went to a dervish 'ceremony'. I gather that performers were professional dancers (one of them, a kid of maybe seven or eight years old, I dubbed The Littlest Dervish) rather than actual practicing mevlevi. It was staged in the airport-like Cultural Centre on the edge of town and it was all a bit pomo and strange, but the whirling was beautiful anyway, and the sufi music wild and ardent, music to dissolve in.

Next day I went to Pamukkale, and thanked the ancient Romans for situating a spa town right next to those travertine pools and then letting it fall into picturesque ruin, making for the perfect day out 700 years later. The sun was shining, the cypresses were doing their spiky broody thing, and my camera sucked it all up. I kind of expected balloons and streamers to fall from the sky, and some guy in a lamé jacket to step up and say, 'Congratulations! You have just taken the billionth photograph of this site!'--but it was as pretty as if nobody had ever seen it before me. I swam in the Hierapolis thermal spring too, with columns and marble blocks submerged in the pool for that lost Atlantis feel. The calciferous water felt very soft on my skin, and tiny bubbles rose up through it, settling on my limbs and fizzing at the surface. It was probably the closest I'll ever get to swimming in champagne.

After a few days in the interior all I really wanted to do was dip a toe in the Aegean and look at Samos across the water (so I can say that I've been to ten countries, but I've seen eleven). When I finally arrived at the beach at Pamucak, I found a little holiday village of bungalows and caravans all planted out with eucalyptus. It looked like a dozen family holidays from my childhood, and a thought shot through me, 'Not yet! It's too soon!' So that's how I realised that I am grieving the loss of Europe. In a week's time I'll be back in Australia, and I hadn't really been giving the matter much attention. But it explained why I had been so shirty with the touts in recent days and so keen to avoid the standard polite questions--'where ya from?' 'where ya going?' And when I finally worked out what was happening in my strange, opaque little brain, it was a relief.

Yesterday I had a quick look around Ephesus. I was kind of ruins-ed out, and the crowds were stupefying--my memory of Curates Street is a sensation of trying to swim up a waterfall. But I was walking down streets that St Paul and St John and maybe even Mary herself once walked, and I finally saw the point of the apostles writing those letters to the people of this or that city: I felt like I was in a nerve centre of the ancient world, a place where important things used to happen. I skipped the supposed House of Mary, though, and spent the afternoon in the nearby village of Sirince. As it turns out, the lady is said to have spent her last years here, and if so, she chose well. It's just a little patchwork of Ottoman-style houses and cobbled streets in pretty green hills. A kind of Turkish Orvieto. Jam, fruit wine and olive oil, the products of the orchards that surround the town, are on sale in every second market stall. It was good. Energising. It made me really still, and I hadn't been still for a long time.

And today was the eight-hour bus ride back to Istanbul. I like Turkish buses, because they give you tea and biscuits and towelettes in foil packets, and they stop for a food, fag and facilities break every couple of hours (mmmm. 4 a.m. kebab, anyone?). And when they stop, there's no dithering around. Everybody dashes out, sucks up whatever nutrients or stimulants they have been hanging out for, buys a gift box of sweets for whomever they're going to visit, and bolts for the bus again. If somebody gets back late and finds the bus already gone, which happens quite frequently, they just strike out for the nearest corner where they can intercept it. They wave an arm, the bus slows to a trotting pace, the door is flung open and they jump on. And then you get more tea and towelettes.

The best, best, best surprise was the ferry across the Sea of Marmara tonight. I love car ferries. It always feels kind of fantastical to me, that you can drive a car or a bus onto a boat and just keep going forward as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I slung my elbows over the port side and watched the moon making a trail across the water, with the lights of Istanbul all around. Tomorrow I fly out. It was a nice treat before I left, the boat and the night and the fat full moon.

goreme gozleme

2007-09-21T20:47:00.000+02:00

A perfect, orange crescent moon hangs above the Blue Mosque, harmonising with the warm glow of the lights that circle the minarets and spell out the message 'Dunya ahiretin Tarlasidir': sow in this world, reap in paradise. Before electricity they used to write these Ramadan messages in hundreds of little oil lamps suspended between the minarets, and I imagine they gave off a similar yellow-orange glow. Islam's crescent originated here in Istanbul, when the goddess Hecate was credited with thwarting an attempted seige by Philip of Macedon in 340BC*, and to show their gratitude the Istanbullus took her symbol as their standard. Tonight, in a moment of confusion, I read that sliver of moon unconsciously as both the thing itself and the symbol that has been made of it, and it feels like the old gods and the new are blessing this place, and all of us in it.

In my last two days in Istanbul I walked through the streets of the bazaar district cracking the freshest pistachios I've ever tasted, scattering their shells. I had a kip in the emerald grass of the Suleymaniye Mosque courtyard, then wrapped up my hair, stepped out of my shoes, and went inside. The deep carpet under your bare feet and the dome covering you from above make mosques feel so clean and open but so enveloping. In the Suleymaniye I knelt down for a moment to get a better photo of some detail or other, sat back naturally on my ankles, and instantly felt that I could have stayed there in that attitude all day. I remembered a Turkish girl's account of a visit to this mosque during Ramadan, the spellbinding sense of time suspended, the way she found herself swaying to the rhythm of the chanted prayers, as if 'no false note, no discordant gesture was possible.' I've been reading for three years about this city, about the training of the eunuchs and concubines and jannisaries at the Seraglio, about the political forment that focussed around the rival teams of charioteers in the Byzantine hippodrome (an odd prefiguring of football hooliganism, maybe), about the debauched tastes and murderous plots of the emperors, empresses and sultans. But that half hour in the Suleymaniye Camii, in a travel-tired, belly-troubled stupour (come on--of course I have the runs) was the closest I came to the dreamy city I have found in books.

I visited the Seraglio, all impressive state pavilions and warrens of lavish private quarters, and it made the palaces of France look squat, mean and unlivable by comparison. I talked for half an hour with a tile merchant in the Grand Bazaar. he told me that the best tiles, from Izmir, contain 85% quartz. Their white has the blue-white translucency of an eye. Only one artisan in the world can fashion this material into actual vessels, as opposed to flat tiles, and he turns out 30 or 40 desirable articles a year. Each colour must be fired seperately, and every vase, bowl or tile takes seventy days to produce. The Seraglio, along with many of the finer mosques, is fairly coated with the stuff. I found those hypnotically-patterned rooms more impressive than all the apricot-sized diamonds and rubies in the royal treasury. Not that I'd turn one of those down if it was offered to me in the spirit of friendship, obviously.

Last night I took a night bus to Cappadocia. We tried to watch the Premiership League on the in-bus telly, but the signal kept flickering out. It would cut to black for a few crucial minutes, and when the signal came back the stadium would be wildly celebrating a goal, or some player would be up-yoursing the ref over some disagreement we hadn't see. We slept, kind of, stopped at Ankara for a 4 am kebab (no thanks) and in the morning we were in another world. There were the salt lakes of Western Anatolia (those so delicate but so intense colours! I remember them, oddly, from the country around the salt lakes of West Australia. The lemon yellow, apple green, flossy pink, god knows where these colours come from) and then the fairy chimneys and soft, ripply dovecotes of volcanic ash that everyone knows from postcards.

I arrived in Goreme, had a shower, a swim in the hotel pool, and the best breakfast I've yet had in Turkey (which is really saying something) and then, well, napped all afternoon actually. At seven o'clock I scrambled up to sunset ridge to see what I'd been ignoring all day. Turned out, I'd been napping in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Towers upon towers, squat and slender, soft-serve-whipped ridges of whitest rock, a million pinks and greens in the escarpment to the east, and to the south a lone mountain changing from purple to blue to deeper blue as the sun does its disappearing act. Call me Lady Muck. Hand me a ripe, glowing fig and let me weigh it in my palm a minute while I look out over some landscape of unearthly gorgeousness and noncholantly bargain down the price of my dinner. Because that's how I roll. Until the holiday ends, anyway.

*Istanbul has seen many seiges, most of them not successful but a few spectacularly so. The Byzantines held out for a long time against the navies of Mehmet II by the simple but ingenious means of stringing a chain across the entrance of the Golden Horn just above water level. He trumped them, and thus converted Istanbul to Ottoman rule, by greasing 10 kilometres of road with pig fat and hauling his warships overland to a relatively undefended point beyond the chain. This patch of earth and water has always been a much contested and desired place.

istanbul night train

2007-09-16T21:05:00.000+02:00

It's going to have to be a series of rushed impressions, but in any case, that's how it felt when I was doing it.

utrecht and amsterdam

Church tower ringing out full-on baroque tunes, glissandoes and all, every quarter hour. Reefs of bikes in every open space, some with plastic foliage wrapped around the handlebars to make it easier to pick out your own rust bucket from the mass at the end of the day. Jolly superimpositions of architectural styles in the houses flanking the canals, somehow managing to show each to advantage. Hanging out with Eefje, a housemate of mine from ten years back. She reflects on what a scatterbrain she thinks she used to be. All I can think is how marvellous it is that she has somehow kept all her good qualities from the age of eighteen and added that calm knowingness that we all assume we'll have by our late twenties but rarely attain to.

berlin

The three days I allowed for it completely inadequate. Bauhaus museum--mmm, utopian desklamps. Checkpoint Charlie museum--many of the exhibits dating back to pre-1989, present tense references to Stasi and snipers. But oh, the glorious escapes! Home-made light aircraft, one-man submarines, girlfriends folded neatly into suitcases, a lot of fast talking. Hurray for ingenuity in the face of despotism. A punk-metal balcony barbecue party with my German friend Kiki, everyone very sanguine and polite as metalheads usually are, trundling out their best English for me on a lazy Sunday night.

venice

A week-long stop with the Zambonis, knocking about from Dolomites to Biennale to beach house to take our minds off how long it might be before we see each other next. Gorging on tuna carpaccio, ricotta cake, grinning, saying how it's a hard life. I do a little leaking from the eyes. Turns out, every time you move to a new place you meet new people to miss. Well it was worth it.

sofia
A day spent in the station and in the fast food restaurant shanty town across the road, waiting for my night train to Istanbul. Everything extravagantly run down, old women suck on their few remaining teeth, young studs slouch in cafes wearing outfits the Zoolander costume department would have rejected as credibility-stretching. I try to teach myself cyrillic, but I keep getting my algebra symbols mixed up. Advertising billboards urgently trying to tell me something, without success. Bulgarian keeps turning into Italian in my ears, must be tired.

balkan express

Not your gaslit dining car, flirting with secret agents kind of a deal. More of a conversations through the wall, passive smoking in your sleep, inexplicable draughts thing. But still! My very own sleeper compartment, night light, fold down bed, sink in corner. Read about the fall of Constantinople, tried to memorise some Turkish phrases.

istanbul

Muezzins do a loudspeaker call and response between the mosques of Sultanahmet. Poor old Aya Sofia all scaffolded up, Muslim calligraphy retained, Christian mosaics restored, looking in its hybrid state as it never looked when it was a consecrated plaee of worship. The hippodrome reduced to a few sad stumps--a raw obelisk that was stripped of its figured bronze plates in the fourth crusade; the trucated column that used to be three intertwined snakes--Mahmet the conqueror broke the jawbone off one of them on his way into town to show everyone who was boss. The imperial cistern, a resounding subterranean space, carp swimming around the ankles of dozens of gorgeous columns. I order a Turkish coffee, find I have to chew every mouthful before swallowing, it grates my stomach all day. An old woman with fine eyes, scarfed head and skull-motif Von Dutch t-shirt reads me a very rosy and non-specific future in the dregs of my cup. After dark the Sultanahmet district becomes a big street party, the nightly kiss-off to the Ramadan fast. The Istanbullus pile out of over-packed cars to find a spot on the grass in the mosque gardens and eat corn on the cob, kebab, a strange gooey toffee sold on sticks. I go about unnoticed in the crush, except by the odd guy who steps out in front of me to unfurl a carpet, calls me lady, asks well if I don't need a carpet then what do I need? A beer, an internet connection, and some sleep, in that order. I'm easily satisfied, really.

craic addict

2007-09-04T18:58:00.000+02:00

The weather in Ireland is great. It switches at ten-minute intervals between sunny, cloudy and rainy. The rain's not so bad--it's just vertical mist, really. By the time you've stuggled into your mac, which in my case is a large piece of cling wrap with a head hole that was given me free with a ferry ticket--it's switched back to sun again. There are places on earth where you'd feel rather silly setting out for a day's walk under a bruised and spitting sky, but here it's just a waiting game.

My first stop was Doolin, a one-street town on a bleak and marvellous stretch of the Atlantic coast, where the thin soil and its carpet of turf often gives way to naked rock. The Cliffs of Moher rise 200 metres out of the sea to the south, and to the north-east, the three Aran islands sit low and flat on the water. I went out to the smallest, Inisheer. It is so densely criss-crossed with stone walls it looks like the locals have just piled up all the loose rocks to keep from tripping over them. I walked to a church so old it is now sunk up to its arches in the surrounding earth, and to a sacred well; I stained my fingers picking blackberries; had a pee in a seaside cave with only an off-shore seal colony as my witnesses. I hope. I also eavesdropped on a couple of jaunting car drivers who were having a long conversation in Gaelic. That night I went to a couple of pubs in Doolin to hear some Irish music. The best was produced by four old guys sitting around a booth, picking up one or another of the instruments on the table--bodhran, fiddle, tin whistle, flute, guitar--as the song dictated, or sometimes just singing in English or Irish.

The next day I set out very early for a walk along the Cliffs of Moher. I had a hand-drawn map given to me by a man in the pub who told me it would be an unforgettable experience. He wasn't wrong. Did I mention those cliffs are 200 metres high? Yeah. Well. The path was a ribbon of yellowy-silver trodden-down grass that insinuated itself along the edge of the cliff, on the outside of the fenceline. For a long while I thought that was awesome. I was in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, savage, bright green deep grey, with the gulls riding the currents around my feet. I was scrambling up and down hillocks of turf so thick and soft it was like a green pelt, scaling rogue bits of fence, and jumping across little streams--well, the tops of waterfalls really. Then I thought, no one will ever believe I did this, I'd better take a photo. Thus:

If you look carefully you can see that the grass stops being horizontal and starts being vertical about a trainer sole's length from where my toes stop. It hadn't bothered me to see that with my own eyes, but when I saw it through the viewfinder I was struck with the sudden and unwelcome conviction that I. Was about. To die. I edged along for maybe another kilometre, gibbering softly to myself, until I came to a point where the path ahead of me had collapsed. There was a neat hole, about fifty centimetres across, where ground should have been. On my landward side there were three strands of rusty barbed wire separating me from a bog and a herd of belligerent-looking cows. I considered the jump. I contemplated the fence. I chose the fence. Hiking my knee up toward my left ear, I managed to get one leg over the wire. Then, folding up like an extremely complicated and terrified clotheshorse, I gymnasticised myself over to safety. I struck out through the field, angry cows be damned, until I found a road where I thumbed it back into Doolin. I sat down in the first pub I could find and put a load of hot food into the strange hollow where my insides should have been, and picked up three mars bars for a chaser. I only intended to buy one, but I absent-mindedly managed to buy it three times. Which says something about the role of chocolate in a crisis. And then I caught the bus to Killarney.

Killarney's the tourist hub of Kerry, a supernaturally lush corner of the south-west of the country, and it seemed kind of tame to me after the wind-scoured County Clare. Mind you, I stuck to the flat land for the most part. Lakeside strolls. A little cycling, with stops for coffee and scones. Nice things. Touristy things. Things that weren't likely to see me plunging to a splattery death. I saw two grey herons and two eagles (that is to say, about a seventh of the eagle population, so I think I was pretty lucky), and some bambi-cute red deer. I later met, leaning on a scythe in a field, an old man who in his park ranger days had done a lot to protect them. He told me all about rangering, and about his niece in Melbourne, which he'd heard was quite a cosmopolitan city, but he couldn't live there because he was acclimatised to Ireland, though he was aware that Seasonal Affective Disorder was a serious affliction for some, and in America they prescribed special mirrors with lights around the edge. He offered to teach me to scythe too, claiming it was excellent for the back muscles, but I had a Dublin train to catch. Plus, he was very possibly mad as a brush, and was wielding a blade as long as my forearm that he claimed was sharp enough to shave with.

He was nice though, as was the farmer in the next field over who marvelled that pretty girls should always be hiding their eyes behind sunglasses, as were the musicians in that pub in Doolin, who gave me their cards and offered me a lift back to the hostel. There's still something about Irish people that I can't quite put my finger on. Something remote behind the affability. It's not so true of the younger people, I guess, but with a lot of people over about forty it's there. Not hostility or falseness or anything like that. Just--something apart. It's like a child of Lir gazing out at you through a swan's eye. And tomorrow I leave, so I'm not going to get to the bottom of it now. Next time, maybe. Maybe never.

the wild swans at bray

2007-08-29T14:40:00.001+02:00

I know, I know, I'm sorry. So, since last time I updated, I have: finished my summer work (hurrah); turned 28 (no comment); been to see the Dali exhibition at the Tate Modern with Flavio (did you know that Dali and Disney collaborated on a short film? I didn't. It was abandoned in Disney's lifetime because it was too controversial, then finished with the help of Dali's sketches a couple of years ago. It looks like... well, it looks like a collaboration between Disney and Dali.); seen, admired and stayed in Lil's new apartment; and got bit by bedbugs in a cheap hotel (Gross. Swelling and lesions. I must be a backpacker again).

I'm in Ireland now, staying with Nik, of somanystuff comments fame. We went south of Dublin on the weekend, following the coast, took a walk from Bray to Greystones. The terrain was kind of an Irish (greyer, flatter, more haystacks) Cinque Terre. We saw dozens of white swans in a peaceful bay, doing a complicated Esther Williams synchronised swimming routine. We went to Dun Laoghaire and looked out across the bay at Joyce's tower, where stately plump Buck Mulligan harangues poor Dedalus for the whole first chapter of Ulysses. But it's Dublin itself that has made the biggest impression on me.

The inhabitants of Dublin are urban civility personified: too busy for nosy over-friendliness, but very happy to show you how dialing codes work, or where to get the bus from. There is decent public transport. There are museums with informative plaques and local designers who are nifty with a pintuck. In short, it looks like the most tranquil, ordered modern city you can imagine. Dublin is, nevertheless, and I would stand up and say so in court, completely class-a off-the-deep-end mental. It's got the lunacy of a new money financial centre imposed like a sketch on rice paper over another lunacy so primal it's impossible to define. There's a scream of mingled passion and rage tearing through the white noise of traffic and modems. I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's the very recent collective memory of poverty and civil strife, maybe it's older than all that. Maybe this patch of earth has had this spirit in it since before the first humans arrived here.

On my first day here it struck me so hard I felt I was going to fall over. It was the more disorientating for the fact that I wasn't expecting it and couldn't see any concrete evidence around me for it. The only thing in the posh, polished centre of town to make you realise that you're not in a familiar world is the Gaelic on all the signs. At first it seemed almost perverse to me to bother finding a translation for a street name, for example. I mean, in Paris you don't direct an English speaker to Green Path Street, but to Rue du Chemin Vert. Or why translate simple daily language into Gaelic which appears to have been developed in modern times to supply a gap in the original, ancient language? Like 'As seirbheis' written under 'Out of service' on buses. But the answer is obvious enough once you become aware of the question: this is how you bring a language back from the dead. So every time something is written in Gaelic, you are making a statement. A political statement, yes, but also something more fundamental, to do with where this culture came from and what it values.

Please don't think I'm claiming that modern Irish people are obsessed with past injury or even past glory at the expense of the present. On the evidence of a week's visit, Irish people are obviously individuals like any others, pursuing their daily interests, doing their thing. But there is something rumbling under the streets here that is bigger and older than any individual. No matter how carefully I studied the map, I kept finding myself walking in the opposite direction to the one I had intended, like Alice in the garden. Little children in the street kept calling out disconcerting messages to me: 'What are you doing?' 'Go back!' before their words resolved into baby German or Spanish. People speaking quite clearly and slowly, with a slight Dublin lilt, had to repeat themselves to me, as if their words were being whipped away by a strong wind. By the time I met Nik in the pub at six o'clock, I felt battered and confused. I tried to explain, thinking he'd call me an idiot. He sipped at his pint. 'Well, what do you think the leprechaun is? Was originally, I mean, before the cartoony image of it. Or the banshee? They're shape-shifters, deceivers, they're out to show you that things aren't as they look. There's something here...' But what? 'Buggered if I know, mate. I've sort of just got used to it.'

you want miracles? i give you the g.b.p.

2007-08-09T19:34:00.000+02:00

I'm sorry, readers. I've had tried, many times, to sit down and write yez something nice. Fact is I'm kind of bushed. I have to concentrate very hard to make sure I don't walk out of my room without my trousers--I'm that kind of tired. Also, there's not much news. Well let me see, last weekend I hired a bike and cycled along the coast for a bit. The first couple of hours went pretty smoothly, except for a near-death encounter with a disappearing pavement and a sewage services van. Then I stopped at Broad Stairs, a very cute town on a little bay, which was basically one big party. The beach was so jammed with happy bathers and candy-striped windbreaks you couldn't see the sand. I locked my bike up to the pier, called a colleague who had wisely headed straight there that morning, and we had an awesome fish and chip lunch. And a pint. Which was a very clever idea, considering I had a two-hour return ride ahead of me.

On the way back I actually tried to phone the bike shop guy a couple of times and get him to collect me, but the fairy of cardio-vascular exercise mysteriously removed all reception from my phone. I made it, anyway, and I may or may not have wheeled my bike up a hill or two, but that's my business. In the couple of days following I experienced pain in the fundament every time I sat down, stood up or otherwise moved, but it felt rather like the after-effects of a thorough spanking, so that was fun.

Anyway, it's been six weeks, and as I say my attention span extends as far as remembering to dress myself, just, and yet I've just accepted one last week of work at some school in Dorset. I want the cash, see. Every pound I earn will soon be blown a jaunt 'round the Continent, so it's well worth it. Nevertheless, I do feel rather like an ageing Bruce Willis schlepping myself onto the set of Die Hard 4.0. I rarely wish I were a bloke, but I do now just so I could scratch my stubble in a weary sort of way and do one of those 'bring it on' eyebrow-cocking gestures. Yippy-kay-ay.

conjugate this

2007-07-27T20:21:00.000+02:00

The wad of chewed gum sails through the mellow afternoon sunlight and plants itself with damp precision in the centre of the window blind.

“Who threw that?”

I repeat the question a couple of times in English, to slack-jawed silence, and finally in French. Elodie raises a listless hand.

“What’s that all about?”

She replies, as she always does, in exasperated French. “Obviously I was aiming for the window.”

“…You what?”

“Allors, you’d prefer I try for the bin from here? That’s an impossible shot.”

And so the weeks pass. They say you should never work with children or animals. Teenagers, aside from being nascent statesmen, philosophers and poets, are occasionally both of the above. You set a rule. They ask why. With a gleam of respect in your eye that acknowledges their natural sense of justice and enquiring spirit, you explain the logic behind the rule. They blink at you, blink at each other, and then: “Yeah, but, like… why?” And you suspect that they are mentally three years old. Of course, both ideas are true simultaneously, like the vase and the two faces in profile. If the faces had liprings and zits.

We had a row on the way back from Cambridge last week, over a quick toilet break and the subsequent getting or not getting of take-away Burger King. There were sharp words and eloquent continental gestures on both sides before we all slouched back onto the bus. I sat down with that morning’s edition of The Independent, and they flopped out on the back seats, got out an MP3 speaker phone and started blasting out the Chilli Peppers. I frowned at the political articles and tried to concentrate, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever walks out of an argument and puts on Red Hot Chilli Peppers is sort of spiritually in the right.

I’m going to quite miss them all when I go.

pick it up, carry it

2007-07-06T14:34:00.000+02:00

The confines of my world have been restricted to a village of two blocks in Kent. And in the village a tiny university campus, and on the campus 105 children speaking rapidly in a half dozen European languages, and more or less haltingly in English. The work is intense, being around children all day is intense, but so far I don’t mind. I’ll never be anywhere so quintessentially English again. No house looks less than a hundred years old and the oldest, with its windows made up of little lozenges of butterscotch glass, its wooden struts and herringbone bricks, looks like its first inhabitants might have gone visits to London to see Shakespeare performing his own work. In the lanes, bunches of red currants the size of cherry tomatoes glow in the sun, and apple trees lean on sticks like old men. There is no cash machine in the village, and the banks are open about six hours a week. A white-haired local striding out the door of the newsagents as I walk in turns on his heel and returns to the shopkeeper. ‘And is there an explanation I can offer my wife?’ he says. ‘Yes sir. There has been an accident on the motorway, so the magazines weren’t delivered today. They’ll be here tomorrow.’ He considers, nods grimly, and strides out again.

In my last week in Italy I managed to get back to Rome a second time. Those pines and arches, arches and pines, you could just walk all day, and I did. Passing big villas overlooking Palatine Hill—I’d be nervous of purchasing a view like that, I’d never want to get used to it. Rome is so beautiful when you’re out under the sky, you could love it even if the interior of every building was just a plain white cube. But of course, you step in off the street any old where and are sucked body and soul into an encounter with the glories of man-made beauty. I spent most of the day in Trastevere looking for mosaics. The best was a 9th-century number in the apse of a church supposedly built over St Cecilia’s house. Christ and some saints all austere, long-limbed, kohl-eyed elegance. Unfortunately the church itself had been made over in the baroque style. I can’t help it—I wish baroque had never happened. It’s not that I object to fanciness per se. I like gothic, for example. Pencil-thin spires with all the sinews standing out on their necks. Especially when its built in pale, pale stone. But when I stand too long in a baroque church, I feel like I’m at the end of a looooong wedding reception, and I’ve been stuck at a corner table all night with a chatterbox maiden aunt, and in an attempt to console myself I’ve eaten far too much wedding cake.

Mostly I just walked around the streets of Trastevere, which is one of those magical suburblets that manages to be right in the centre of everything and still supremely livable and alive. Good, cheap trattorias, skateboard shops, political bookshops with deep sofas, free wifi and wine by the glass. In half an hour or less I had mentally installed myself, identified the exact apartment I would live in (first floor, corner of the block with lots of windows, ivy-covered), the bar that would be my local, the run-down warehouse that I planned to core like an apple, installing a huge atrium in the centre, and turn into a magnificent free arts and sciences museum for children. With slippery dips and little one-person elevators in clear tubes instead of stairs.

In the evening a series of marquees along the Tiber set up shop selling beer and cous cous and roast pig. I found a spot at the prow of the Isola Tiberina to watch the green water purling around the feet of the Broken Bridge, as triumphal an arch as ever I’ve seen, even if it is stranded and crumbling in a river. A quick walk across the Circus Maximus, which I shared with joggers in varying states of fitness and clumps of purple-flowering weed; a scooter-buzzed intersection; a drop down into the quiet of the night metro, and that was it. Back to my final week in Arezzo, to the divesting process, a strange and strangely exhausting reversal of the begging, borrowing and stealing that goes on when you first arrive somewhere. The elated, false munificence of giving away what you could not, in any case, have kept, until your home is the pack on your back, snail-wise, and you’re ready to split.

45th-generation roman

2007-06-11T16:00:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I took myself on a four-hour whistlestop tour of Rome. Four hours, because four hours was what I had. I decided to go late Saturday night, photocopied the guidebook to read on the train. I reeled around from Termini to Trevi to the Colloseum like a bluebottle afflicted by ADD and stendhalism, all agog. Golden light, golden heat, sweat streaming down from beneath my sunglasses like tears. Dome after sky-aspiring dome appearing and disappearing between the palazzi. And the palms, the hanging vines, those wonderful cloud-shaped pine trees. My guidebook exhorts the modern tourist not to forget the other, older city that lies a few metres beneath your trainer soles. Not difficult advice to follow, considering the lumpy-bumpiness of the streets: you’re clearly walking around on top of a bedspread under which a lazy child has stashed all the contents of his room in a half-arsed attempt at ‘tidying’.

The Trevi fountain was sheer silliness, crowding its tiny piazza like a big spabath on a little balcony, some executive’s minor peccato against good taste. The tourists, each having already thrown the single coin they were willing to donate to the gesture, tossed imaginary coins over their shoulders while their friends’ cameras clicked. But spouting away under that benevolent sun, looming so whitely, making everybody so happy, it made me happy too.

I found the Pantheon by accident while looking for a nearby church with Filippo Lippi frescoes. My carping maiden-aunt-chaperone of a guidebook had assured me that it would be closed, along with the forum and most of central Rome. It also gave all prices in lire. Yeah, I’m cheap. But oh, that dome. So perfect, so austere. Lozenge of yellow sunlight fracturing against the squares within squares. A recorded announcement ripped through the room, distorted by echo. First it called for silence, in English and Italian. I liked that a lot, since it sounded like the voice of Jupiter himself, and felt much more suited to the temple of the planetary gods it used to be than the awkward-feeling church it is now. Round churches: why? Nothing in the catholic mass is adapted to roundness. They just end up crowding all the (rectangular) pews up in one little sector of the circle, with a discomforting sense of empty space behind. The announcement continued at booming, echoey length with a list of all the noises you weren’t allowed to make, so as ‘to preserve the atmosphere of worshipful prayer appropriate to a Christian church’.

And finally piazza Campidoglio, the forum, Palatine hill. Gah. The fantastical deep perspectives, the harmonious jumble of ruins of various vintages, in various states of repair. Too lush for words. I actually caught myself thinking, ‘Wow, aren’t human beings great?’, which is I guess how you know that a city is doing its job, architecture-wise. Arches and basilicas, the house of the vestal virgins. Wild poppies and marguerites softening the wreckage of broken columns and fragments of ornamented capital. Guides informing their limp, limping flocks of all the lurid goings on in ancient times. Contemplating the bronze doors of the Curia, where the Senate used to meet: frog croaks in the archeological dig behind me, girl grunts in frustration as I inadvertently get in her shot. Palatine hill with its fountains and sneaky secret views between the trees. All of it so gorgeous, so gorgeous.

I sat down by the Colloseum, rolled and smoked a cigarette. Watched a sweltering, plastic-breast-plated gladiator scratch at his scalp with a thumbnail, his helmet upturned at his feet for coins. Then back on the slow train with a tinny of Moretti and a magazine. I had to sit backwards, funnily enough, and on the same side of the train, so I saw exactly what I’d seen on the way over but in reverse: the pillowy gold-green loveliness of Lazio, Orvieto on its geometric limestone outcrop, Lake Trasimeno, bloody Terontola: as if the elastic band that had carried me out to Rome, having reached the farthest point of its stretch, was slinging me back in. Home, blog, bed. Not so much as a postcard to show but hell yes, I heart Roma.

ricordati

2007-05-27T17:38:00.000+02:00

In a month I’ll be leaving Italy, and a couple of months after that I’ll be leaving Europe, and I don’t know when I’ll be coming back. With every passing week my mental picture of Australian life acquires depth, texture and colour, as I unconsciously prepare to re-enter that atmosphere. At the same time, daily life here is also becoming super-saturated, rich beyond endurance. My mind is dividing its attention between the pleasures of the here and now and those to come. The best analogy I can find is the way those great film soundtrack composers—Rota, Williams, Jarre—weave different themes in and out of a score and allow us to hold conflicting allegiances in our minds.

My memories of Europe are parading all their gorgeousness: like a Venetian palazzo with its window boxes brimming with geraniums and pinwheels. I put Interpol on the stereo and I’m hurled almost bodily back into a stifling metro carriage on my way to an English lesson with a sulky Parisian clerk. But then a second later I’m getting off the metro at a strange suburban station and it’s night, and I’m trying to find a cinema that’s rumoured to be showing Sullivan’s Travels for three euros a ticket. Then I’m in Macgregor’s apartment eating salmon he’s poached, and it’s squeaking slightly against my teeth as I chew, and we’re discussing Catherine Breillat, and then we’re at the bar on the corner drinking kir under the liquidambers, then it’s morning and I’m in the same square, at the patisserie, snorting a chocolate croissant to fortify me for another oppressive metro ride to another English lesson with another sulky clerk…

There are a few really important people from whom I know I will feel much more profoundly absent in Australia than I do here, even if they’re in another province, even if they’re in another country. To me, Europe is a place, a single address, and I feel that all these people are within reach even if I don’t see them for a year at a time. Even if things have already changed and, when I see them next, I won’t be the same I nor they the same they. But all those first meetings happened here, and geography is history, and it’s going to be weird to be off the emotional map. Well va beh. When you move to a different place the cost of the ticket is a split life. Definitely worth it, in my opinion.

Here is a list of some things I will miss about Italy, in no particular order:

gesture
My favourite of all time corresponds roughly to the concept of ‘precise’ or ‘correct’: thumb and forefinger delicately pinch together a bit of empty air and draw it downward in a line parallel to the speaker’s body, from the sternum to the navel. This gesture involves an indescribable alteration of carriage, expression, even breathing, as if the gesturer were, for that single moment, embodying the very spirit of correctness. Other highlights include ‘sedate me now’ (slapping the vein on the inside of the elbow, rolling the eyes) and ‘mmm, yummy!’ (pointing toward an imaginary dimple at the side of your mouth: works best if cheeks are distended with a big mouthful of food at the same time).

the scary old people
who run everything and do exactly what the hell they want. For various economic and cultural reasons, it’s very difficult to be an effectual, independent adult at age thirty here. Bureaucracy is king, you have to stand in line for everything, and that includes respect. When your last hair goes grey, you know you’ve made it. People of seventy and eighty dress with daring and panache, groom and tan, stalk the highstreet in precarious heels. Their gorgon stares part crowds of loitering yoof, they have the power to make even a crazy Italian driver stop at a pedestrian crossing. In short, they’re visible. They’re in the shops, in the cafes, they ride bikes, they go dancing. Their presence in public points out Australia and England’s great sin of omission: where are our old people? What do they do all day? If they’re smart, they’ve moved to Tuscany. Or maybe Florida.

talk
Smoothing hand on the rough edges of life. If you go into a shop smaller than a Target, you’re obliged out of etiquette to describe to the clerk what you are looking for. If they have it, they will discuss its attributes and benefits with you before concluding the transaction. If they don’t have what you want, they will fetch out various items that are similar but not right, caressing each one regretfully, and descanting at length on its unsuitability. This one is too this, this one lacks that, this other is not waterproof, or not organic, or in some other way deficient. If you have the good manners to go through with the conversation, they will be as happy when you leave as if they had supplied your need and you had purchased after all.

time made visible
Every street is a babble of history. Medieval crucifixes hang in renaissance churches with electric votive candles that you screw into place to light up. Clusters of towers compete in height, a reminder of a time when important families or guilds sought to describe their status in metres above sea level. They’re still impressive, even if a lot of them are listing dangerously and closed to the public (a vision of New York in 2300: Sears Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, all off-kilter like metronome needles arrested at the furthest point of their swing). Battlements at the top provide hiding spots for archers, the better to take out rivals. These self-important little henges are marred by the odd truncated stump: a bankrupted family’s public shaming.

Fascism leaves its mark in the odd train station or government building. In quiet corners of overlooked villages you can still occasionally find a fascist slogan (live dangerously; Mussolini is always right) carved into a façade. Most have been painted or plastered over but some remain, either where the effort to remove them was too much, or where the new owner felt motivated to remember and remind.

If there is a certain lassitude about things; if the simplest arrangements need to be approached in circuitous ways; if you sometimes feel the chilling edge of non-negotiablity when someone gives you some friendly advice, you have to remember the burden of history pressing down on everyone here. It’s a treasure beyond price, to be sure, but it’s a treasure you have to carry on your back, like Munchausen’s giant. Like trying to walk on the bottom of the sea.

the kinder, softer sun
the luxe of green, the birds that actually go tweet and the bees that bumble. Coming to Europe is like stepping into one of the cartoons from your childhood that you thought somebody had made up. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Australian environment, and how it’s so much bigger and older than us and just barely tolerates our presence. But you’ll forgive me if once or twice I’ve stepped into the hush of a beech forest, and heard the little birdies twitter, and said, ‘Now this is quaint, this is actually quaint.’

tabloid moment

2007-05-18T15:03:00.000+02:00

So, the phone centre that I have been using regularly to call abroad this year has just been busted: it turns out they were selling coke to half of Arezzo. I always liked the place because it was so quiet--there was never anybody using the phones. I guess the carabinieri noticed that too, because they raided it yesterday and found lots of cocaine and the equivalent of four years of my salary in the till. Plus, and this perplexes me, a register of the names of all their clients. I'm trying to imagine how that worked.
'A gram of your finest, my good man.'
'Certainly, sir. If I could just see some form of identification...'
And now I have to find another phone centre. Beh.

get the hell outta town

2007-05-15T14:05:00.000+02:00

Sarah returned from her Grand Tour of the south, of which the best story was when her Pompei tour guide got into a vaffanculo screaming match with another tour guide, and the next day, according to her hostel-mate who went down there, crossed paths with the same guy again and ended up knocked out cold and bleeding. Anyway, flouncing around Amalfi is all very well but in the end she acknowledged her true place in life: in my kitchen, hand-rolling ricotta gnocchi for me when I’m working late. She's left for Rome again now, and she claims she's off to Tokyo next and then back to Australia, but she'll be back. She won't be able to make it without me. Oh yeah, she'll be back any minute.

The weekend before last we went to Pisa on a rainy night and found the pizza to be very good and the tower to be leanier than our wildest dreams. On Sunday we went for an outing with Alexandra (the replacement replacement replacement teacher, who is Virginian and funny and smart). We tried for a thermal spring but missed the bus and ended up randomly in Orvieto. It’s your basic Umbrian hilltop town comprising a gorgeous cathedral and one long street of wine shops and delis. Or so it seemed to us. There may have been other things to see but we were happy barrelling from one free wine tasting to another. Alexandra is something of a wine buff, and knew what questions to ask about soil composition and grape varieties to convince the shopkeepers to fetch out the nicer wines from their hiding spots in the back of the fridge. And there were fruit-infused honeys to sample out of pump-top jars, and plates and plates of lemon-cornflake-currant cookies. We sampled the hell out of that town. I think we’d drunk a good half bottle each and had a coating of sugar around our mouths by the time we went to a bar and actually bought something. Orvieto. Remember the name. It’s the anti-Terontola.

Last weekend we made it to the thermal spring after all, Querciolaia at Rapolano, and alternated swimming in the hot pools with lying in the hot sun. I think there may have been wine involved too, but it’s a little sketchy. We read magazines and rolled cigarettes and frightened the Italians with our mozzarella skin tones. We swam around in the opaque calciferous water and avoided the intertwined couples near the edges: I didn’t fancy an immaculate hot springs conception. We also went to Bologna, ostensibly for a concert, but since we got the date wrong we simply had more time for shopping and eating.

Now Sarah’s gorn. I am sad. There are some photos, however. Want to see them? And do you want to know what Arezzo looks like?

quaint, actually

2007-04-20T16:04:00.000+02:00

in the park, laughing at David Sedaris stories.

Right now I should be lining up summer work and sorting things out for the next school year. With weather like this, though, it’s hard to think beyond the next gelato. It’s a trap of this properly seasonal climate: all winter you sit smoking and thinking, coiled tight around your ambitious schemes with nothing to distract you. Then just as the time comes to put all your plans into action, the sun comes out and the most complex thought you are capable of is gaaaaaah, daisies. My idea of forward planning is ordering limes and mint from my local greengrocer (no shops sell them, he says he'll hook me up next time he's at the wholesale market) so I can make mojitos at home.

Sarah’s in the Aeolian islands now, having volcanic mud baths. Last week we spent a day in Florence. I was late to meet her (noooo, Katrina, you don’t say?) and so she waited at Ponte Vecchio and eavesdropped. A bulldog-faced Texan woman pointed her camera at the Arno and said with pugnacious satisfaction, ‘Ah, now, this is quaint. This is actually quaint.’ Which will of course be our secret password from this day forward.

She’s met a lot of my students since she’s been here, actually—she caught the end-of-second-term restaurant season. It’s distressing how many of my students insist on ordering ‘a large cock’ whenever we practice our restaurant language. I should point out, however, that the way most foreigners pronounce penne means that they are basically ordering a plate of penis. I like the symmetry of that. If you want to avoid the mistake, by the way, be sure to pronounce the double-n with emphasis. If, however, your waiter is cute and you’re up for a little misunderstanding, ‘penay’ away.

hermits, hot springs

2007-04-11T12:51:00.000+02:00

This entry will be a list because, overwhelmed by the volume of doing-stuff that has uncharacteristically characterised my recent existence, I can't get an anecdote together.

Recent visitors with highlight moments:

Lily: Climbing the tower at Siena to see the cypress-stitched fields below and the big bell above, mad nightrider dos resulting from long-uncut hair and high-altitude bluster. Drinks on a balcony bench seat overlooking the main piazza. More drinks, this time in Venice, being glasses of wine drunk while sitting cross-legged on a jetty by the Rialto at night, watching the young couples in matching parkas go by in their outboard dingies.

Lily, queen of the world

Dorsoduro

The boat market

Nik: I'm sure we went places but I don't remember where; we just talked ourselves inside out. All to the good. You can see from the photo that we got as far as the park at the top of the hill.

Jenny and Paul (Reggio) and Sarah S (Australia): Camaldoli monastery and hermitage, sooooo pretty, which made me want to be a hermit. A latin-reading, pottery-making lady hermit. And the procession of the dead Jesus at Terra Nuova. Explanation to follow, probably. Think of it as a mobile passion play.

Lovely Camaldoli

Montepulciano

Don't freak out, it's just tomato sauce.

Sarah S and Fausto, an Aretine friend: Bagno Vignoni, a medieval hotspring resort that used to be such a den of iniquity (men and women bathing naked with nothing but strung-up sheets separating them, gasp) that St Catherine's parents brought her there to tempt her out of her saintly ways. It didn't work. You're not allowed to swim in the main pool anymore, but down the road a bit you can bathe your feet in the gutter that carries the run-off to the river below. Hot waterfall footspa, rock.

Sair the cutey

accidentally terontola

2007-03-06T21:40:00.001+01:00

EDIT [July 19, 2011]: Hi! This is a blog I kept while I was working and travelling in Europe a few years ago. I haven't updated it since 2007, but I'm leaving this note because I've realised that if you google search "Terontola," this blog entry comes up pretty high on the list of results. Who knew? In its heyday this blog had, like, seventeen readers, and three of them were my mum. But now there's this whole search engine debacle where I'm starting to feel kind of bad for Terontola, because this blog entry isn't what I'd call great press for the place.

I'd hope it would be obvious that my hatchet job on this harmless hamlet was (a) exaggerated for my own entertainment and (b) more Trenitalia's fault than Terontola's. But just in case that's not perfectly evident, I think I should clear some travel writing karma and tell you straight up that this town is - sigh - really not that bad.

So - are we cool? Do you feel reassured about your choice of agriturismo or school project topic or whatever it was that led you to google Terontola? Phew! Now on with the snark.

Last weekend I went to the new laundromat which has just opened on my street. The best thing about it was the parade of coiffed old ladies in their fur coats and cats-eye glasses who paused at the window to chew gum and gawk. I must have seen at least a dozen of them stop and stare before one woman got up the courage to come in.

‘I see you’ve opened your doors, treasure. Compliments on your new business.’
I explained the misunderstanding.
‘Well anyway, how does it work?’
In Italy it’s always quicker to have the conversation than to try to avoid it, so I ran her through a little tour of the facilities, being sure to mention the discounts attendant on purchasing a loyalty card.
‘Thank you dear. I must say it’s very impressive.’

I gave the talk a couple more times in the morning, and wondered why I didn’t own a laundromat. It has to be about the only business where you can be off getting your hair done while the money rolls in.

The weekend before was a bit more newsworthy. I went to Perugia with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him new teacher, an English guy with a great MP3 collection and a Gobi-dry sense of humour, who unfortunately was just called back home for family reasons. So I’m meeting the replacement’s replacement’s replacement for coffee tomorrow, and I know I’m going to start mixing their names up, but at least with all the switcheroos I’ve met some interesting people. Anyway, Perugia is very pretty and medieval, plus it’s in Umbria so I’m ticking off those regions one by one, and they did me a good hot piadina, drippy with mozarella and herby green bits, to keep out the February cold. New Guy had prudently packed his lunch, of which I naturally ate half as a chaser for my piadina. We saw the cathedral and the main square and a bunch of Etruscan things but the best things were the windy steep streets.

Our time in Perugia was, however, cut tragically short by an unscheduled three-hour layover in Terontola on the way there. Terontola, as yet untouched by the ravages of tourism, is a tiny Tuscan village whose cultural bounty is only equalled by the friendliness of its inhabitants: which is to say, there’s nothing to do and the people are jerks.

Our visit started with a random passport check by the police. We were worried the delay was going to cause us to miss our connection. Ah ha ha. Ha. I bolted to the announcements screen and failed to find our train. I bolted to the ticket window and hemmed loudly to attract the attention of the ticket seller, who was crouched by the window with his fingers between the slats of the blind, spying on the featureless street.

‘Excuse me. What platform for the 9:40 to Perugia?’
‘There is no 9:40 to Perugia.’
‘Um, yes there is. We bought tickets for it this morning.’
‘It doesn’t run on Sundays.’
‘But the machine sold us tickets for it.’
He grinned the slow grin of a malicious mutant frog.
‘The machine,’ he enunciated, ‘made a mistake.’
‘Well when’s the next one?’
‘Twelve thirty.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Half. Past. Twelve.’
‘I see. Well is there anything interesting to see here while we’re waiting?’
His grin stretched so wide his thin lips disappeared completely.
‘Nope.’
‘Thank you very much. You’ve been so helpful.’
As I turned to go I added, ‘You know, you’re a genuine arsehole.’ That last bit was in English, but he knew, and he was okay with that.

I broke the news to New Guy, who took it very well, and we went to the bar across the road for a cappuccino. I repeated my question about local sights, and the bar tender jerked his head toward the train station. ‘Genuine fascist period article.’
‘Awesome.’ I looked around the bar and saw a collection of brightly coloured posters advertising scratch lotto tickets. ‘It’s my lucky day. I’ll take a scratch card, thanks.’
‘Oh no. We don’t sell those here.’
‘Of course you don’t.’ I turned to NG. ‘What now?’
‘We could go back and tell that guy he’s an arsehole again, but that’ll take up five minutes, tops. If we walk really slow.’

Instead we struck out for the edge of town, which was conveniently close to the centre of town, there not being much town to speak of. Soon we found ourselves among cypresses and brooding hens and crumbling brick houses. An old lady with not many teeth left shot the breeze with us for a while, since she needed a break from carrying a load of firewood home in a bucket. She wouldn’t let us help her. New Guy took a lot of photos of cypresses and crumbling brick houses, the merits of which we compared and debated, concluding that some of them would be very nice places to live, if they weren’t so close to Terontola. We walked up a hill, and walked down it again. We got back to the station in time for another cappuccino and a couple of sudokus before the 12:30 train. On the way to Perugia we swapped MP3 players. I looked out the window at the waters of Lake Trasimeno, milky green under the glowering sky, with lots of little castles standing out on headlands and islands. New Guy looked through the photos he’d just taken. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it looks as if we meant to do that.’
‘I know, right? I’m going to do a big blog feature on Terontola.’

You see I’m a woman of my word.

comunque, hai mangiato bene?

2007-02-26T15:50:00.000+01:00

I remember this conversation with a student from my first month in Reggio.

‘I worry about my daughter. All she has for breakfast is two chocolate biscuits.’
‘Well, that’s teenagers for you.’
‘I know. She should be eating at least five or six, wth a nice big cup of hot milk.’

Breakfast biscuits are an Italian institution. They have an aisle to themselves in most supermarkets. My favourites are shaped like the ABC logo, with cane sugar on top and flecks of something that gets stuck in your teeth. I’m also quite a fan of the ones with the picture of a basket of eggs stamped on top. In Reggio, when I was routinely working fifty or sixty hours a week and flinching every time my boss walked into the room, my daily diet consisted of as many biscuits as I could stuff into my face as I was getting dressed in the morning (quite a lot, as it turns out), and then a take-away pizza at 11pm, washed down with a big bottle of Moretti beer. I never had the spare time or spare change for a lunch break, and my students got used to the rumblings of my stomach, as if they were a family who shared their home with a restless ghost. I was size eight and I had a butt of steel. In retrospect I like to think of it as my ‘verge of nervous collapse’ diet, and am thinking of marketing it to Hollywood.

Now that I have a nice job and time for cooked lunches at home, I am finding I have to rethink my eating habits a little bit. I’m experimenting with strange, fibrous things that I believe are known as vegetables, and am less likely to offer my guests tinned tuna, tinned beans, Moretti beer and breakfast biscuits when they come round for dinner. I’m not size eight anymore, and my butt stops dancing a second or two after the rest of me, but neither is adrenalin churning everything to cement in my stomach. Sometimes I look around my little heated home with its well-stocked kitchen and marvel at how far I’ve come.

I find myself well-positioned to appreciate my successes. Now that I’m no longer surrounded by an artificial world of the super-rich, I’ve become more aware of how hard life in Italy really is. The people I met through the school last year were the type who bought their eggs pre-boiled, and described a ten-thousand euro blow out at Max Mara as ‘a bit of me-time’. In Arezzo I’ve met many people who seem to be closer to the norm. Forty-year-old mothers who work days in shops and nights tending bar in discos; environmental engineers who schlep from Trieste to Reggio Calabria for endless rounds of job applications, in anticipation of the end of their six-month work contracts; law graduates who stuff envelopes in gold factories. I’ve seen the future of enterprise bargaining agreements, and it isn’t pretty.

Financial hardship means increasing numbers of young Italians are living at home well into their thirties. Of course, their parents are rightly anxious about their ability to stay solvent, and generally see marriage as the viable course to adult independence: it goes without saying that a situation like this will rapidly make a society more conservative. Then, of course, there’s the fabled bureaucracy, and the very high taxes imposed on anyone trying to make a permanent legal contract of any kind, from tenancy to employment. The result is that everything gets done through unofficial channels, which rather saps people’s political will to improve the official ones. Most Aretines will never leave Arezzo, and the reason they give me is that the quality of life is so good. If that’s true, I shudder to think what things must be like for the people in all those other cities and towns I’ve breezed through on weekend trips. But then, at least they still have functioning public medical cover.

And at least they know how to enjoy themselves. Last weekend I was invited to dinner by an ex-student of mine, to meet her architect husband and her friends, a pianist, a singer and an ornithologist. There was fondue, there was dessert wine, there was chocolate bread-and-butter pudding (the singer is English, but has an admirable grasp of Aretine—it wasn’t until she cast around for the word for ‘chicken stock’ that I realised she wasn’t a native). It was a proper grown-up dinner party, with dirty stories and b&b recommendations. There was even the boring bit at the end where the most voluble of the guests gets puddly and starts complaining about electricians and planning permits: it was perfect. I think I made my first proper joke in Italian. It was the most fun I’ve had in months.

I’m generally easing into the rhythms of Tuscan socialising, which seem to involve squeezing an equal number of women and men into a few warm cars, driving to pubs and restaurants in other towns which are unaccountably superior to the many pubs and restaurants in one’s own town, getting tipsy, and driving home again. When I want to be around a familiar sense of humour, I spend time with the Brits from the school. When I want to be alone I go and see classic Italian films at the arthouse cinema. It’s not bad at all for a European winter in a small town on a small salary. Aretines love to run themselves down, and are forever telling me how ill-mannered and parochial they are, but I think most of them are very nice. In the next few months I’m expecting visits from several old friends who will love this place, and the trees will soon be budding green, and just as I’m finally decoding those last elusive dinner party jokes, it’ll be time to go.

bulletin

2007-02-19T15:45:00.000+01:00

Find of the month: cheap phone centre that sells ten kinds of beer, cheap. I foresee a lot of international phone calls that tail off into uh LUHV ya, man. Nah nah nah. Nah. Nah, man—uh luhv YOO.

Media moments of the month: Loveline, the five-nights-a-week talkshow dedicated to informing youth that the rhythm method doesn’t work and that foreplay isn’t a golf term, tells us that a new carpark has opened in Bari. It offers individually screened-off parking spaces and charges for an initial half-hour and in quarter-hour increments thereafter. Do Italians live at home too long? You be the judge.

The local national paper (I’m not quite sure how that works) boasts that Italian women are the ‘hottest’ in Europe, based on what percentage of women in a nation are having sex at least once a week (In Italy it’s about 59), and that the most ‘frigid’ are the neighbouring Austrians. I suspect, though that the Austrians might not be constrained to shampoo their carseats so frequently.

Pretty much everyone except the pope wants to decriminalise euthanasia. The pope doesn’t care. Berlusconi, blocking law reforms for de facto couples in parliament, describes de facto relationships as ‘marriage: serie b’. Australia features twice: once with a story of a man who wrestled a shark, and when asked why, replied: 'I was drunk'; and once in an article on the drug Stilnox, which apparently has people getting up in their sleep to run in circles around the living room, binge eat and repaint their doors. Why did no one tell me about this?

New spiritual home: Tequila Wellness Centre. I haven’t visited yet, but just gazing on the promotional leaflet, with its calorific orange block-capitals, suffuses me with a sense of wellbeing.

New actual home: small and perfectly-formed apartment in fifteenth-century palazzo in historic centre, freshly reno’d and ready for me to scratch, grease-mark and spill coffee all over. It’s got white plaster walls and vaulted ceilings in exposed brick, so it’s sort of like living inside a very chi-chi pizza oven. I went to Ikea on Sunday and the pleasure was so intense I almost left my body. Having studied the catalogue at such length that I was starting to hallucinate furniture everywhere (true story: I looked at a husky dog in the street and thought, flokati-upholstered piano stool—genius!) I was primed for maximum efficiency. Elbowing through dithering crowds, testing with my very own behind a selection of kitchen chair covers, choosing with authority the perfect oak-look mini bookshelf, rejecting superfluous picture frames and candles. I don’t care what fantastical objections this landlord might cook up: if he tries to turf me out before my contract is finished, I’m going to go all Charlton Heston on his arse. There’s a rag rug. Theres a wicker chair. There’s emotional investment, is what I’m trying to stay. Move again? Nuh-uh. I'm staying, dude. I'm finishing my coffee.

all lurking minotaurs: please form an orderly queue

2007-01-29T12:00:00.000+01:00

Just look at that column on the left. This blog is collecting some serious archivage. It’s not a travelogue anymore, it’s in a genre crisis, and don’t start with me on the whole narrative structure debacle. I do it, still, because nothing makes me happier. It’s an ariadne thread that keeps me connected to everything that’s happened and everything I’ve been since I walked through a departure gate at age twenty-five with two people’s tears dripping off my chin. In the plane I scrawled a note: ‘Terrible mistake. Don’t want to become the bright, hard person I will need to be.’ Then I took a pill and slept. My memory of arriving at Heathrow is without sound, like my ears were still trapping bubbles of 10 000-feet air. I can’t believe the accumulation of incident between that day and now—but whenever I sit down to write I find the thread still connected: still unspooling out of my hands at this end, still holding fast at the other. And if that isn’t structure, what is?

ern malley says...

2007-01-25T19:29:00.000+01:00

...happy Australia Day.

kat vs the hot tin roof

2007-01-24T13:13:00.000+01:00

After I got back from Venice I spent three days cleaning my new apartment. Between my viewing the place in December and coming back to it in January, I found that someone had left a used condom on the kitchen counter—it’s a mystery who it was, because I doubt it was my 85-year-old landlord whom I’ve only ever seen shuffling silently in the stairwell in plaid slippers. I guess it was a young relative whom he asked to go in and clean the place, which they evidently had not done. The verb scopare has two meanings in Italian, and when this anonymous person told old babbo that they’d been ‘sweeping’, we know what they meant by that. Anyway, I bought a bottle of lethal bleach and scrubbed every surface until I had RSI in my scrub muscles. I was happy to do it since I was so in love with the place. Then I celebrated by having a friend over for dinner and a DVD.

The next day, as I was walking home with arms full of newly-purchased tupperware, the landlord’s daughter called and said we had to talk, and could she come over that afternoon. I put out chocolate biscuits on a plate and made tea and felt very queen-of-all-she-surveys (it’s an attic flat and the windows point straight up into empty air, which only intensifies that impression). The daughter came over, declined the tea and biscuits, and was very embarrassed to tell me that I would have to leave. Her father had decided that he didn’t want to let his apartment to a single woman who invited strange people over. He lives two floors below, so he had seen the guy coming up the stairs. ‘I really am mortified, I realise it’s untenable. I don’t know what’s possessed him.’ I told her I’d be out by the end of the month.

When she left I cried a lot, shot a double amaro and ate the entire packet of chocolate biscuits. Then I found I felt strangely relieved. After the Rita incident, I was worried that I was turning into one of those losers whom bad things happen to because they have attitude problems they can’t see, but this kind of twisted luck is out of human hands. And if I have to choose between being a loser and a strumpet, I’ll pick strumpet every time.

So I’ve spent a lively month looking at apartments. I started at the bottom of the market, looking at cheap privately-let places, and it was kind of demoralising. ‘It’s freshly painted,’ said one woman. ‘I’ve played around with colour a bit.’ I surveyed the aggressive marigold walls and agreed that she had. We stepped onto the rubbish-strewn terrace and she pointed at a plate-glass door on the other side of it. ‘And conveniently enough, I live right there, so…’ The rest of her sentence is lost to history since it was covered by the tire-screech of my departing trainer soles in the stairwell.

Finally I caved and went to a real estate agent, prepared to pay the extra month’s rent that they take as their cut just to get a bit of sense out of someone. That’s how, three days ago, I met Costantino, The King of Rentals. His office looked like a bordello, complete with zebra rugs and gilt mirrors. He himself was Burberry-clad, corkscrew-haired and tanned as a flapjack.
‘Tell me what you want, babe, I’ve got it all, I’m the King of Rentals. I’ll find you something fantastic, your worries are over.’
‘Fine. My landlord crazy has kicked me out, and I’m wanting for a new apartment. I’ve seen many of little purgatories with mildew where should be the windows, and I want a thing nicer so I am here.’
‘You’re awesome, you know that? I can tell you’re an intelligent chick. I can think of three places right off the bat, right off the top of my head, that you’re going to go nuts for.’
‘And the other thing, I’m poor. I’m looking for a place nice and affordable.’
‘For you, don’t worry. Special price.’ This is the only English he knows, and in the three days of our acquaintance I have heard it several hundred times. ‘I’m going to find you the place of your dreams. I know everybody in this town and… you don’t understand a damn word I’m saying, do you.’
‘Every last one,’ I lied.

We crossed and re-crossed the city centre on foot, in taxis and in Costantino’s leather-interior jag, with me rushing back to lessons or tuna sandwich lunches in between. He kept up the banter with a persistence I found quite awe-inspiring. I had little cause or opportunity to respond, and when I did say something it was in limping Italian, which luckily gave the impression that I didn’t understand much. When landlords showed us around places they’d say things like, ‘For a five-month tenancy she can’t expect plates and cups and stuff,’ and my champion Costantino would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ and change the subject, and I’d file the information away for arguing about later.

As it turns out I have found three nice places for the same price, all privately advertised, so I don’t think Costantino will be getting any money out of me. However, a new teacher arrived yesterday who doesn’t speak any Italian and on Saturday I took her around with him, looking at places for herself. She liked a little bedsit that I’d seen with him beforehand. It was the place where the guy was carping about providing plates. He told us beforehand,‘I’ll get you a good deal here. Five hundred plus bills.’
‘You joke, King of Rentals,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice, but it is a box for to put in a pair of Nikes.’
‘Yeah, but it’s centralissimo. That’s a good price.’
While Costantino took a phone call, Gill told me to ask the landlord about the price.
‘Ooh. All new fixtures, central location. Say, six hundred all in? Bills included?’
‘That’s too much. Thanks anyway.’
‘Okay, five hundred all in.’
‘ And plates and cups and saucepots and stuff of this genre within the kitchen, I pray.’
‘Okay, no problem.’
Costantino got off the phone and we told him we’d reached an agreement. As we were walking back to the car I asked him what he was going to take as a commission. ‘For you ladies, obviously, special price.’
‘It’s normally a month’s rent, isn’t it?’
‘Industry standard.’
‘Let’s say about the half of this, then. Finally, we negotiated the price while you is chat with the phone.’
‘You’re forte, you know that, Katrina? You’re wasted as a teacher, you should go into business. Then you could have a car like mine.’
‘I can marry with you, and then I would to have your car.’
‘In a heartbeat.’
‘You lack the breathing when you going up the hills anyway, I notice. I marry you, and I to have the sexy jag, and you to go by feet in healthful fashion.’
‘Forte, forte. It’s a deal.’

I called around to Gill's place on Sunday night. She was temporarily billeted with the nice chocolate-loving signora with whom I spent the month of December. All that was left of her was a ‘thank you’ note, a hundred-euro bill and some yoghurts in the fridge. She had told me on Saturday that she was worried about the salary here and was having second thoughts. Apparently she doesn’t mess around. Um, anyone want a teaching gig in Italy? To start tomorrow, preferably, because I’m covering extra lessons. In the mean time I have to choose one of these three apartments I’ve found, and hope in the face of experience that one of them works out okay. At this point, however, I feel I could stop bullets. I like to think that I’m prepared for the worst. If I find myself living in a cardboard box in a carpark, I’ll still be working on keeping my dignity intact. I am that harridan who blatantly has people over for dinner and negotiates in Italian. Don’t mess with me, that’s all I’m saying.

eel stew and a bottle of tears

2007-01-09T14:35:00.000+01:00

Christmas and New Year with the Zamboni family in Venice. I ate and ate: eels in the pot; cream of cod; teeny tiny clams in shells as delicate as fingernails. Marina’s big cookbook written all in Venetian dialect. I sat in the kitchen and read out the titles of recipes to her, just to hear her correct me. I love to hear Venetian spoken. It’s kind of somnolent and twangy, more like Portuguese than Italian, and full of x’s and z’s where you don’t expect them.

The proper topic of conversation at meal times is food. Which dishes call for white pepper and which for black. How bad the pasta used to be during the war. The nagging conundrum of farfalle (I’m not the only one who gets annoyed that either the pleated nub in the middle stays undercooked, or else the crimped edges get soggy and collapse). Between meal times, on the other hand, the conversation at casa Zamboni always tends toward the random, and often ends in the consultation of reference books. I walked into the middle of a brisk argument in the lounge room one day, and the first sentence I heard was, “That’s all very well, but I still maintain that phonemics is essentially banal.”

Venice in winter. Wrapped around in rags of fog. The tiny, straight-backed old ladies in their furs and their stilettos, showing a few inches of vulnerable stockinged ankle in between. The poor futile gondoliers, yodelling out their sales pitches to exactly no-one. The Calder mobile in the Guggenheim—how a few cantilevered wafers of steel swinging in space can be so beautiful, so beautiful, you just want to get on an intertemporal telephone and tell the artist, bless you. The place names that I never get sick of: Peron Hotel? Cross Tit Bridge, head straight down Drunken Tinker Street and take a left at the Devil’s Square. You can’t miss it.

I go to a quarter of Venice that’s known for having very few tourists. I establish myself smugly in a little coffee bar to watch the theatre of Venetian daily life unfold. An Australian comes in and asks for a post box. An American dragging a huge bag of dirty laundry tries to change a twenty euro note into one euro coins and is rebuffed. A humungous French family bundle in, distribute themselves around three tables and order hot chocolates. ‘Excuse me,’ says the mother. ‘Do you have a… ummm…’ She mimes stirring a teaspoon in a cup.
‘A teaspoon,’ the waiter says. Cuchiaino.
‘Yes, cocaine.'
‘Teaspoon.’
‘Cocaine.’
‘Teeeeaspoon.’
‘Cocaaaaaaine.’
‘Whatever you say, lady. Your cocaine.’
‘Tiens,’ the woman turns to her husband. ‘Bit by bit, one improves one’s Italian.’

Realistically, the only locals I'm likely to meet here are Flavio and Sara’s friends. Piero, who speaks in entertaining and utterly impenetrable monologues, and always has a new entrepreneurial scheme on the go: last time I saw him, he had just bought half a pig. The price was irresistable, but having acquired it, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was looking at giving it to a prosciutto maker to get it cured, and then sell it in pieces to his friends—but he couldn’t bear to charge his friends what it was really worth, as slabs of prosciutto go, so he wasn’t sure how he was going to make a profit on it in the end. Alessandro, a real estate wunderkind, who’s got a velvet coat and a fine, calm brow and a dramatic ovoid of glossy hair that does the heart good to see. His girlfriend Adriana, with an epic mane of her own, who spent the new year in London trying to enact all her Neapolitan new year rituals on foreign turf. ‘You take a big bottle and you fill it with water. It stands for all the tears you’ve cried in the past year. You throw it out a window and smash it, and that’s all your suffering over and done with. Trouble was, it was all lawn. The English are mad for lawn, aren’t they? Took me ages to find a single rock in that garden, and then…’ She mimes narrow-eyed concentration and lobs an invisible bottle: ‘...Poum!’ That sounds like an encouraging omen, I say. She takes my arm. ‘Katrina, I’ve suffered so much. No more. This year is going to be my year.’

That gave me pause. How much suffering, exactly, is so much? How much will be asked of us? On the phone to a friend halfway around the world, he tells me his city’s been so transformed by vulgar new commercial developments that it doesn’t feel like his home anymore. All his favourite streets and buildings—the places that had been quietly, without fuss, holding his personal history in trust for him—have been disfigured beyond recognition. And I say, isn’t it funny how all the sanctuaries get taken away from us—how we keep losing things that we had assumed were ours to keep. Maybe the point, if there is a point to it, is that we are divested one by one of all our external refuges until we’re left with only ourselves. Not so that we can say, ‘it’s me against the world’: rather, that we turn finally to our internal resources, and from these, we start to make our own world.

It's not inconsiderable, the things human beings can make out of apparently nothing. Take Venice: some centuries ago, a band of exiles, chased off their fertile ancestral lands by war, arrived at the edge of a godforsaken marsh. I can see them standing there, with the mud sucking at their boots and the mosquitoes whining in their ears, gazing across the mirrored surface at a bleak little cluster of seagull beshitten islands, clicking their tongues, and saying, 'Alright. It's got potential.'

got the reckless bug?

2006-12-30T12:52:00.000+01:00

It was ages since I'd read Sydney Morning Herald, but how richly I was rewarded when I dropped in for a visit the other day. Happy new year everyone. Party like you've got toxoplasma.

up for air

2006-12-17T16:18:00.000+01:00

I've been staying very still and quiet, moving and speaking as little as possible. You know how it is after a brush with chaos: you resolve not to be the butterfly that causes the next hurricane. Now things are looking up, so I can tell the story in the past tense, where it belongs.

So. Rita threw me out on the street at two a.m. with all my stuff. I called a taxi, slept in the school and moved into a new place, which thankfully I had lined up already, the next morning. I was kind of expecting something like that because, unfortunately, I've encountered people like Rita before. When someone is unbearably miserable, they occasionally fix on another person whom they can blame. Everything that person does becomes evidence of their guilt, and--ecco la--the misery guts has found an external object for their unhappiness.

Problem is, the other person doesn't always cooperate. And if the misery guts sees that their victim's hour of escape is getting closer, they tend to kick their aggression up a notch, out of desperation. After all, if you go, and their life still sucks, they've lost their excuse. So if they can't stop you from getting out, they'll do what they can to ensure you don't get out unmarked. She stole my money, and she called me names, and she put me out on the street--two nights before I was due to leave anyway. No big surprise. I've written off the lost money, which wasn't so much in the end, and I've found a lovely new apartment, and success is the best revenge, and all that.

As for Rome: I went back to Reggio last weekend and saw my friends there, two of whom are enormously pregnant, hurrah, and did exactly nothing except eat and drink and watch TV. Bumbling my contented way home, I made the mistake of taking the advice of Italian train guards, and got on a train to Rome instead of to Florence. Not the nice, big, central station, mind you, from whence I might have made a nice little Before Sunrise sortie into the town, but some abandon-all-hope place in the periferia constructed out of chewing gum and lavatory tiles. I stayed awake and read The Good Soldier, which I enjoyed very much (I should read more tragedy, it's--well, you know--cathartic), and got home on Monday morning, with time to prepare my lessons and all. Wouldn't mind going back to Rome, though: I'm not sure I experienced all it had to offer.

Anyway, as I said, after Rita bade me a fond farewell I moved in with this excellent old lady who billets students all the time. I got through my first morning with the help, oddly enough, of the dialogue from chapter one of my Teach Yourself Italian book. I hadn't studied it since that day in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with Macgregor. Ah, sigh. Well at the time it made me laugh: 'It is a lovely room, signora. Very light. And there's even a shelf where I can put my books.' 'Indeed. It isn't large, but look: there is a fine view of the cathedral from the window.' 'Thankyou, signora. Now I can put away my things.' Luckily, it turned out to be exactly the conversation I was required to have that morning, right down to the cathedral spire that can be seen if you open the window and crane your neck.

Today, on the other hand, we sat in the kitchen having espressos and chocolate truffles for breakfast (she's as golosa as I am), and gossipped about all the crazy people we've ever known. She told me about the junkie who stole everything from anybody he lived with and was constantly in and out of prison, all the while dressing in tailored suits, cashmere coat and silk socks (worn longish, to cover the track marks around his ankles when he crossed his legs). 'Twenty years on junk,' she said, 'and--you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but I swear he looked just like Marcello Mastroianni.' 'Get right out of town.' 'No, really. Cosi' raffinato. Just goes to show.'

In other news, most of my classes have invited me out to Christmas dinners this month, which is very nice, and I'm looking forward to the holidays (English teachers don't have that pesky life-reevaluation pressure at new year, since our contracts, our post codes, our furniture and many of our friendships last exactly from September to June) and I'm planning a little trip to Ikea. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good year: you bloody deserve it.

hear ye, hear ye

2006-12-01T15:30:00.000+01:00

I'm out of casa Rita. Short of being able to drop a house on the witch, moving house seemed like a pretty good option. I'll tell you more later.