Transition

I woke up to the sound of rain on the roof and now the front porch is slick with water. Strangely, it all feels cozy and somehow right that it should be wet outside and the light falling through our kitchen window is filtered and dozy.

Lately, I've had this desire for soup with pearl barley and potato and celery in it, wanted to light candles in the evenings. Felt slightly odd that it's been humid and 27 degrees outside. I have this feeling of autumn, even though it's coming towards summer here, if I were in the UK now it would be autumn and frosty and beautiful leaves everywhere and soup would be just right, for now.

Funny that I went to the UK wanting to get under its skin, somehow to understand what it is to be English. And instead, it made me realise how truly Australian I am and crept its way under MY skin. Funny how things don't always happen in the way you would expect.

Cinque Terre

A cool evening with the breeze wandering through Biassa, sitting in a little local place eating thin thin pizza with just tomato, mozarella, basil and a beer. Hair still wet from swimming in the sea, sand between my toes. Looking out and down to the harbour. Walking home past a church and some Italians tending their gardens, windows open, the smell of vines in the air.

Sunday Morning

Vanilla soothing black tea; Silver stars in a whiskey sample bottle

Heat

Me at Saadien Tombs, Marrakesh, photo by Lauchlin

Marrakesh, height of summer.

You are surrounded by crisp dry heat just like when you've done your washing and hung it out on a particularly sunny summer's day. You bring the washing in and it's superdry all crispy in your arms. Heat-soaked all the way through.

Your clothes, before you put them on in the morning, they feel like that. Hot already, right to the core.

Clothes and walls and rooftops and roads. Wind.

All of it is hot.

Five Minutes, Friday

Near Flinders St, Melbourne

Midnight. I was standing, waiting for the tram. It was drizzling lightly, falling in whorls, in flakes like snow. Thinking about beer, tiny shoes, conversations with new people whose names are already blurring. About how strange it is that, with some friends, time stretches so almost-three-years feels like not-that-long-at-all.

Spain

I'm taking a break from writing endless job applications to daydream, as usual, about being somewhere else, somewhere with windy coastline and amazing old palaces.

This is what I remember: long dry dusty roads, strangely lush olive groves, wind farms looking small and then looming huge from below. Weird signs on the roadside from a long ago iconic ad campaign.


The road near Cartejima

Rounding a corner to see a white-washed, tiny village hugging the hillside with barely room for cars. Ducking my head to fit through a doorway squashed by several hundred years. Eating cherries marinated in some kind of spirit, five would tip you into silliness.


Cartejima


Window at the Alhambra

Dusty hot hot day at the Alhambra, walking slow, looking and looking at tiles and carvings and patterns on patterns.

I put a slideshow here if you want to swoop through Spain for a bit - the photos are in chronological order so it's a bit like a little tour.

Sunday

I took the slow tram to st kilda
had a chai latte with josie & dooley
can't stop loving the height and incredible blueness of this sky.

Crossing

I'm curled up in an "ocean-view recliner" with a yellow blanket snuggled over my jeans, reading Burning Chrome. Half-listening to the man wheezing as he crosses the room to sit near me. "I suppose you'll never get old," he says, when he catches his breath. He smiles when I tell him "Probably." Tells me he's 84. I'm watching the night get deeper, feeling the thump of distance as the sea disappears beneath us. Wondering if my generation will be able to choose to live forever.