Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

Christmas 2018, reflection

Christmas, 2018

ON this Christmas Eve, of 2018, in this spacious lounge room, in this moderately sized house, in this fairly large suburb and this fairly highly populated city of Melbourne, in this large country and continent called Australia, as part of an overall tiny little plot or particle of a much bigger world or planet, I sit here contemplating the year I have had and wishing, like Sylvia Plath, I could have more days of inspiration:

‘On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, not seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.’

I look for inspiration in the joy that others give me- the words of Sylvia Plath in poems like ‘Contusion’ and ‘Medusa’, the comfort I feel from listening to ‘Astral Weeks’ and lately rediscovering the joy of Paul McCartney, trying to feel grateful for the prolonged time spent living in England and in my mind recalling the Yorkshire moors and the rugged coastlines of Cornwall and Northumberland, playing netball in the backyard with the family, gazing on my beautiful books through the glass of my treasured bookcase, feeling tired but nourished work-wise…

In terms of heightened feelings of joy or anticipation, or experiencing a sense of wonder, or being moved by the simplicity of a beautiful wave or the colours of a fallen leaf, or that sense of uncontrollable laughter or bliss and breathless awareness or serendipity, joie de vivre, even transfiguration, rebirth, enlightenment, effulgence, epiphany, transmutation… I will be patient and await another year.

Contacting my angel, contacting my angel
She's the one, she's the one, that satisfies
Contacting my angel she's the one that satisfies
She's the one that I adore

In a telepathic message for my baby
In a little village, through the fog
Here comes my baby, I can tell, I can tell
By the way she walks
Said I've been on a journey up the mountain side
And I drank the water from the stream
It was pure, pure water and I got completely healed

I met a presence on the mountain side
And he looked so radiant and he was the
Youth of eternal summers
Like a sweet bird of youth in my soul
In my soul, in my soul, in my soul, in my soul
In my soul, in my soul, in my soul

(Van Morrison)

Tim Winton's musings and meanderings: Island Home

 

I WANTED, very much, to like Tim Winton’s beautiful looking new book about Australian landscapes and Australian culture. I did enjoy aspects of it quite a lot. At other times I felt restless, like I was a bit stuck in a discussion he was creating, one that holds enormous meaning for him, but less significance for me and perhaps other readers. I didn’t feel this way when I read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, the glorious ‘Landmarks.’ Yes, his was personal as well, but less like a diary, less egocentric in some way. They do have much in common, especially the enjoyment and exploration of naturalistic terminologies, for landscapes, birds, flowers and trees, especially.

The best parts of Winton’s book (probably like Macfarlane’s as well) was the beautiful detail. You can see this writing in other works of Winton’s, in his fiction. Perhaps not as lyrical as it is here though. I am thinking of ‘Cloudstreet’, and ‘The Turning’ in particular, my favourite works of his. Sometimes the prose is lyrical here, but often with a kind of contradictory brutal edge as well, and lots of colloquialisms and earthiness, the kind of language that Winton gets in trouble with for ‘intellectuals’ who might prefer Patrick White or David Malouf.

Here is a section from ‘Barefoot and Unhurried’- ‘So often a child’s reveries spring from rhythms present in nature: the lapping rise and fall of birds stirring, settling, stirring anew; the swoon and sweep of wild oats in the wind; cicadas counting off the day in a million disapproving clicks of the tongue…I used to lie in the sun and listen to the metronomic tick of blood beneath my temples. I remember how hypnotic the stroke of my newly mastered freestyle became. There was strange comfort in the hiss of the stick I trailed in the dirt all afternoon, and in my whispery footfalls on the empty beach.’

Wow. The stick and the footfalls. Some of the best sensory writing I have read this year.

Fishing, at Cape Keraudren in 1977, Winton lands an extraordinary fish that is ‘chrome-sleek’ and it escapes his clutches, but not before it coats him with mucus that he describes as an ‘adhesive slime.’ As a result he spends ‘half the hot night scraping the fish’s ectoplasmic smegma from my hands and shins.’ In the morning his ‘fingers are webbed.’ I can only imagine how much people like Ernest Hemingway and Ted Hughes would enjoy an experience like this.

 

Winton’s observational skills are extraordinary, more so than even Sylvia Plath with her Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, and the crabs’ ‘glittery wisp and trickle’ in that particular poem. Here he is wandering at low tide, observing ‘thin strips of water’ busy with ‘crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves.’ Further on there are ‘wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms.’ Winton notices- and to me this is extraordinary- how the beach ‘looks lifeless’, but in fact ‘pops and sighs and rattles.’

Seven years later, Winton is at Mitchell Plateau, and driving a LandCruiser across a rocky terrain. So, ‘…trundling blindly through the head high spear grass…’, Winton charts the extraordinary insect life he encounters as he rolls the window down: ‘As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragonflies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair, sucking the perspiration on our faces, catching in the gaps in our teeth. The air is soupy. The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea.’

 

‘Soupy’, ‘choking’, ‘chug’, ‘sluggish’, ‘druggy.’ Winton having fun with words. These seem to me to be very Australian notions. This is one of any number of bits that celebrate the wildness of Australian life: ‘The thickness of the air. I have just returned from camping. Bushwalking in 35 degrees heat and being mauled like this by flies, some of them those awful heavy march flies, a runnel tunnelling across my face and into my ears, desperately thirsty, trying to suck down a bit of my sweat before I brush it away with a cruel, impatient swipe of my hand.’

Perhaps the strangest, and most pivotal, and mythical moment in his book, occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Cape Range, 2009.’ Winton is alone, looking for endangered rock-wallabies, and comes across a cave. Then there’s this: ‘The cave is the size of a child’s bedroom. Its rear wall is tawny where the ceaseless southerly has reamed it. When I see the roos folded down on their joints in the chalky dirt I give out a little squawk of surprise. But they did not stir. They lie curved against one another, pooled head to haunch in a rest that seems regal, even holy. I pause a few moments, taking it in. Then I step up and squat before them, peering closely. They really do look as if they’re sleeping. But their hides are translucent, like the vellum of medieval manuscripts.’ (192).

Their bodies, it seems, have been ‘mummified by the high desert air.’ Winton’s notions are very dreamy and romantic, but beautiful. The roos are ‘keeping vigil’, high up near the bluff, ‘even in death.’ All this is a world away from his vernacular style of many of his ‘characters.’

He also spends time discussing philosophical issues away from land and nature. Aboriginal issues and what it means to forcibly take ownership of land, and then what he calls ‘The Gallipoli Myth’, both explored in the chapter ‘Paying respect’: ‘…Anzac has been coarsened by the politics of political regression’ (a phrase that, for some reason, makes me think of John Howard); he refers to Gallipoli as a ‘bungled adventure’; images of the first war don’t conjure up ‘nationalistic charge’, but rather ‘tragedy and blind waste’; ‘a life squandered by jingoistic nonsense’; and then, on our fairly recent past, ‘…I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples, shame for the despoliation of their lands and a kind of national shame, too, for the mess my nation helped create in Mesopotamia in recent years…’ This is about as far as you can get from the rhetoric of today’s far right, like Messrs Bolt and Abbott, and completely in tune with the Left, like Phillip Adams and others, who, incidentally, gave a lovely interview with Winton on Late Night Live recently. Winton also, as you might expect, offered a scathing critique of the major parties’ asylum seeker policy on the same programme.

I would love to have a similar attachment and reverence for the land and the sea, like Winton here, like Macfarlane is his beautiful books about Britain and elsewhere. Sometimes I feel I am getting close. Times like when it is dusk on the Great Ocean Road, and I am facing the black sea. Or driving along a winding path in autumn with its rivers of leaves (what Hopkins calls ‘wanwood leafmeal’). Then there was my first time in what has become the land of my heart. I was staying with friends, in winter, at Port Isaac in Cornwall. The little cottage was yellow and was called ‘Wave’s End.’ It was right on the harbour. I would race down, at dusk, bucketed and billowed by roaring winds. Down the cobbled hill, turn right, along an escarpment, down to the raging harbour, waves smashing onto the concrete path, next to an old rusted anchor. And just standing then facing the rising seas, feeling like an old Norseman, seeing the hills on either side, enriched and totally enchanted.

 

 

OUR STREET

 

I HAVE the misfortune to live in one of the most unfriendly streets in Melbourne. Sure, we know our neighbours on both sides, and they are both polite and have been in the house on the odd occasion and they are approachable and make you feel safe and offer you reassurance that they will help prevent burglary or arson of your property. However,

oh, there is the woman across the road who sometimes knocks on our door to bring food from the church, and she is comforting as well, and she doesn’t have to do this, and she seems to like us,

there is also the small matter of the people down the road a bit, on the corner opposite who run a small business, and work incredibly long hours and are never home. We visited once when we had the fanciful notion that we might get to know the people in our street when we purchased our house. We had a lovely time, they were in good spirits, I think it was around Christmas, at any rate a rare day off for them but I don’t think they have had a day off since, we never see them,

well anyway I walk up and down the street a lot to catch the bus that runs down the busy street at the end of our street. I walk up the street most mornings at about 7:30 and I walk down the street most nights around 5:00. I rarely see anyone. All the houses are like the houses in the Ray Bradbury story I’ve just read- The Pedestrian- where everyone is shut up inside watching television, and grass f=grows on the footpaths and there’s never a soul around because walking’s not the done thing to do,

and I know that people do still walk. I’ve seen this happen in other streets, even close by here. As I said I walk up and down a lot and never see anyone. Even worse, some of the paths are obscured because of low hanging branches from overgrown trees in people’s untidy backyards. There is rubbish on people’s lawns and cracks in the pavements and many of the houses have a kind of dishevelled look that doesn’t inspire confidence. And when there is no house with a jungle in the front yard and depressing overhanging branches, it’s an ugly block of flats that have sprung up everywhere like mushrooms and you can’t help but think of twenty or thirty closed doors instead of just one, and how people in the flats are probably suspicious of each other and have never been in each other’s lounge…

we have quite a wide street here, bookended at both ends by a busy road. We have, potentially, as the Irish might say, quite a grand spot. It could be a lovely street. As I said it is quite wide, and it is set back a bit from either end of the busy streets, and there are a few houses that are quite lovely to look at, the one next door in particular that should be heritage listed. But it is those damn front doors that are perpetually closed, those shutters that block out any light, those people on the other side who stick to themselves and don’t want to know you, or slip in and out like they worry they’re under some sort of surveillance. There are even kids across the road, and I’m not exaggerating if I say it seems like we’re invisible. There’s no curiosity, no warmth, no interest. You feel like ringing door bells to shake them out of their slumber. This is not what I bargained for. I dreamt. Of….

street parties. We all go to Dan Murphy around the corner. We congregate in the middle of the street and the police block off the road. Everyone wears some sort of funny hat and each of us has a book under our arm, or have a funny story to tell. There is a little microphone set up where you can share your story. People even sing, like they do in Ireland. Someone has a machine that’s got a backing track. You all belong. You all share something important. You are all members of the same street. You feel free, and comfortable, and you launch into ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and the lovely woman across the road sings ‘You’re My World’, and the older one you know already from Lebanon knows some Lebanese music and that’s great, and the students you didn’t even know about are interested in the ARIA’s and you learn something new, and there’s even a Doors fan somewhere e=down the road, and you chat, just the two of you, for two hours about each other’s collection, and you are in a world of your own before you slip back into consciousness and get to know more kindred spirits, other people who have been transported mysteriously to your street just like you have. Towards the end of the night. No-one wants to leave. People pair off-

not in that sort of way. The ones who like poetry talk more in the encroaching shadows. There are two or three plumbers who promise to share each other’s tools, the two mechanics query each other over the size of their garage. Two men and two women from separate houses have all been jilted by somebody and never knew that they weren’t actually quite alone. Then there’s the kids. They might be friends for eternity. Any spare time they have in the future will be spent doing unfashionable things, like playing cricket or Cluedo, or ‘hit the gutter’ or four square at each other’s houses, and suddenly the iPad or the Nintendo will gather dust and won’t be used again. One day,

everyone will decide one street party every now and then isn’t enough, and these people won’t even feel they need to know anyone from the outside world. The houses are never sold, so none of them are turned into flats. Maybe, just maybe, the people in the existing flats might be invited. It might take years, but people will start trading and bartering and grow shared crops. Doors will remain open at all times. There will be no overgrown weeds and overhanging branches. Front fences will be torn down just because it is easier. And milestones and big news items will be shared and celebrated and there might be a big cricket match like the one in the novel ‘The Go Between’ and romances will occur, harmony maintained, and animals and birds will share the common humanity. Right now though,

I will wake up tomorrow, leave the house, the street will be silent and creepy, with not even a Boo Radley anywhere about, people will go about their business in the safety of their homes, those wandering about, few and far between, will have their heads bowed, and I will try one last time, because I can be incredibly patient, to catch the eye and smile at the guy who I see standing at the same bus stop every morning, catching the same bus.

 

Looking for Joni

 

 

IT was in the stillness of the car, driving along Bell Street, where something happened to cause me to take a sharp, inward breath. A was rustling in one of the back seats and I had the radio playing. The afternoon news. Half listening. Drifting slightly, but still concentrating. The speaker on the radio mentioning something about Joni Mitchell. Joni is never mentioned on the news. It suddenly hit me that she might be dead. Then it registered. No, not dead, but ill, in hospital, some sort of a collapse, like fainting perhaps. It sounded ominous in its own way- it was big enough news to make it on Melbourne radio, after all- but at least it wasn’t fatal.

I spoke to A in the back seat. A, although she is only six years old, has her own special connection to Joni. She listened in her own vague semi-conscious six year old way. She understood I was feeling stressed and concerned and wanting to tell other people, adults, right away. “Oh my God, I thought he was going to say she is dead.”

Naturally, after this, in fact for the next few weeks leading up to today, April 22, I have been, in a sense, contemplating life after Joni. The quietness about what has happened is extraordinary. No-one is saying anything. Joni has been in hospital at least three weeks and no-one knows anything. Every day I look at newspaper reports across the globe. These are either infrequent or are saying the same thing. Privacy is a wonderful thing, and in a way it is extraordinarily good that the whole world is dumb about this. But on the other side of the coin, for me, it is troubling. I would just like to know. I would like to be there, or at least send a message. Is Joni dying? Or is she really recovering ok as www.jonimitchell.com would have you believe.

Joni feels like some kind of relative. I have thought of her every day during this ordeal. The self-portrait of her wearing her heart on her sleeve on the cover of her orchestral album (Both Sides Now) is on my screensaver. Her songs are in my head. I fancy that I know her or have met her…

The closest I ever came, and ever will come, to meeting Joni Mitchell was when I was in London in 2002. I heard somewhere that she was leasing George Martin’s AIR studio in Hampstead for this aforementioned record. i soon discovered that I was two weeks too late. The man in charge saw that I was dejected by this news, so he took me to the vocal booth where she had sung so many of her songs just days earlier. “See”, he said, laughing, “you can still smell the smoke from her cigarettes!” I then met one of the mixing men, who explained that the songs were still in the stage of being finished. He played me the orchestral beginning of one song, but I couldn’t make it out. “I must be tone deaf”, I said. It turned out to be ‘The Circle Game’ which should be fairly recognisable.

So I play her songs like I have, often, since about 1978. Discovering new little things along the way, reading the book by Katherine Monk called ‘Joni’, which was ok but a bit disjointed and a bit gossipy, hearing the song ‘Man From Mars’ in a new way, knowing now that it is was written about her missing cat, Nietzsche, who appears on the ‘Taming the Tiger’ cover, and generally waiting and waiting, and hoping for good news, and wondering about the silence, reading about Morgellon’s disease, thinking that ‘there’s comfort in melancholy, when it’s so hard to explain.’

 

FINAL HOURS- A MEDITATION ABOUT THE SEA

 

I saw a photo recently that captured my attention. An elderly woman lies on a bed in an art gallery- as it happens it is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She is mostly obscured, but the viewer can see the tell-tale wires and medical supporting paraphernalia attached to the bed. The sheets and pillow are of that creepy blue hospital colour. She is flanked by medical people and a woman who looks a bit like a gallery guard or curator. Their backs are to the camera and they are looking intently at a famous Rembrandt self-portrait. There are floorboards on the ground and the painting sits on a barren slate-grey wall. The woman’s bed is organised in the way hospital beds can manage it, with the back half of the bed raised so the woman can receive a good view of the picture.

The article tells us that the woman is visiting the exhibition as part of a final wish that has been granted to her. A Dutch charity has been helping people realise their final wish before they die. In the case of the woman in the picture, she has terminal cancer.

It got me thinking about final wishes. I think the idea of seeing great pictures for the last time is a great idea, or would be for me. I would choose a final visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, or the Munch gallery in Oslo, or perhaps the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

Maybe for me it wouldn’t be about pictures at all. It might be to meet a famous person I admire, if they would allow it. Drinking tea in Joni’s kitchen in Bel Air Los Angeles, or beer with Van Morrison in a pub in Orangefield. Visiting a place I have always wanted to see. Where Lawrence lived in Taormina, Sicily. Perusing the Sylvia Plath manuscripts at the Lilly Library in Indiana. Closer to home, Katherine Mansfield’s treasures at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.

I went away this last weekend with the family. It was to a YMCA camp at Anglesea. I thought about the picture when I went for a run. I ran down to the main back beach at Anglesea, just at the back of the big car park there. I was almost alone. The weather was cool but invigorating. Not swimming weather, but great running weather. There were two forlorn life-saving flags at one end of the beach, mostly uninhabited. Some people wandered along the coastline taking photos with their dog. A few people were scattered in the water wearing wet suits. I ran along a stretch of soft white sand at the east side of the beach. The landscape curved around there a bit like the mouth of a bay does. The tide was coming in, fast. I had to jump the incoming water after the waves crashed. I watched the water unfurl as it landed on the flat, like a flower slowly turning. The sky was grey and slightly moody, and it was reflected in its coldness by the surface colour of the sea. I thought briefly of the famous picture of ‘A Monk By The Sea’ by Caspar David Friedrich, and then that photo with the Rembrandt painting again. Standing there, breathing heavily and filled with sweat, I was also thinking about the Van Morrison song ‘Coney Island’, and how it ends with ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’  Here is one of the great views of our time, as good as anywhere in the world, and it is only about two hours from my home. I stood marvelling at that encroaching water, that cool blue-grey sky, and the surf endlessly unfolding, the pale yellow sand, the colours and music of the sea, and felt so much in awe and so incredibly free.

 

  

Resisting The Urge

 

                          

Social media. It’s hard to know how to take it. You don’t want to appear old and reject anything that’s new and popular with young people. Then again you feel like there’s better things to do than ‘speak’ to a bunch of people on Facebook, get into a chat room or begin an Instagram.

Sometimes I think to myself, ‘am I possibly missing out here?’

I went out the other night with a friend of mine. We ate a pizza in Lonsdale Street in the city. He had his phone within easy reach all night- a special expensive Apple one. In fact, he used it a lot of the night. He sent his wife a picture of his dessert and she promptly texted him to ask for him to save some for her. He took a photo of the two of us and posted it on Instagram, and within twenty minutes over a dozen people he knew sent him a message saying that they ‘liked’ the photo (which gave him a real buzz). Next he talked about some items he recently sold on eBay, as well as some items he bought, including a plastic Barbie kit for his young daughter which shipped from somewhere near Sacramento. After  conversations and laughter, or even during conversations and laughter, he scrolled down his phone to check whether or not any ‘friends’ had posted anything,  people within his own immediate circle, as well as female models who happen to be partners of Australian rugby union players.

I spoke to a teenage girl recently- she is about fifteen- and asked her if she read anything during the recent holidays. She said she was busy reading all the time- (encouraging) - and told me it was in the form of text messages- literally about a thousand of them (discouraging). And then I thought about how social she must have been, and how being in a stuffy room brooding in your pyjamas and staying up all night reading or playing computer games would be decidedly less healthy.

I sometimes hear people say ‘I will chat to you later tonight’ and wonder what they really mean by ‘chat’, and whether or not that term has totally changed meaning. People of all ages on public transport get sore necks from bending their head over their phone for hours on end. They almost crash into you on the footpath because they are not looking where they are going.

I know adults who are on Facebook and would never want to give it up. It keeps them in touch, they say, with all sorts of people they would never normally be in touch with, and it serves the purpose of quenching their curiosity about what these people on their margins of their social world might be up to. Instagram seems to be popular with almost everyone. I can see how it might give you a real buzz to see where famous people might be in the world, or what Cindy wore to the races at Caulfield racecourse last weekend.

Then there is tweeting, or in other words the ‘twitter sphere’, which has always seemed to me to be too ridiculous for words. Then last night I became curious and impatient for a new MJ Hyland novel, so I looked at her website, and saw she is tweeting about this and that. For all I know, Sylvia Plath, at the age of 83, might be doing the same thing if she hadn’t decided to commit suicide all those years ago. Jim Morrison and John Lennon, too, and Melanie, who is still alive, does do it, although I’m pretty sure Joni Mitchell doesn’t.

So tweeting is definitely not for me. But there are days when I am sitting around looking at my lovely books, or going for a run, or driving the car somewhere, or reading The Age online, when I think to myself ‘am I missing out on something here? Am I so totally disconnected to the ‘real world’ that it is at a personal cost to me and preventing me from living a more fulfilled life?’  I wonder about this, and there are days when I would like to invite myself into the world of cyber gossip and see what all these people everywhere are up to. I could throw away the old clumsy and outdated Nokia phone I rarely ever use, the one where it is getting ridiculously difficult to read the smudged numbers and letters, and replace it with an Apple 6, 7, 8 or 9, with instant internet access.  I might suddenly increase the number of ‘friends’ twenty, thirty, even a hundred fold.

Aaahh, but what’s the use? When would I ever get anything real done?

 

 

 

September exercise

 

YOU leave the place where you work, fairly exhausted. It’s Friday afternoon and it’s such a relief.  In your mind the weekend is like a beacon of cool, clear water in the middle of a burning desert. In reality it’s only two days but two days of space and reflection and leaning and passivity is something.

You close the black wrought iron gate behind you and make your way to the Mt Alexander Road roundabout. You have to find the Essendon Traffic School, an oasis for kids who ride their bikes amidst mini traffic lights and mini roundabouts, supposedly learning to navigate the big, bold rules of the road. There is a party there this afternoon, which you must attend.

You cannot remember the exact location of the traffic school. You will need to ask. There is something about the air this particular afternoon. There is a weak sun streaking down around you, so it is neither cold nor warm. You are sometimes prone to OCD in stressful situations, but on this occasion you cannot be dreamier or more at ease. It is a luscious feeling. You ignore the cracks in the concrete and the mirrored reflections from shop windows. The position of your body in relation to the oncoming car is of no consequence. Later you are unable to recall the linguistic make up of advertising signs and street names. You are unconscious of: your breathing, cigarette butts on the pavement, the temptation to feel fence palings, the way you sometimes bite down on the inside of your cheeks left right left right left right, obsessive useless mental arithmetic, scratching your left arm and compensating for it by scratching your right arm.

There are young people in school uniform scattered around in small groups. You begin by asking this first casual group near the tram stop where Essendon Traffic School is. Their response is warm, and not very helpful in its vagueness, but somehow delightful all the same. At 7-Eleven you organise a self-help cup of coffee. You inadvertently fill a two dollar cup and pay just a dollar. Smilingly, the man behind the counter asks for a further dollar, and his smile broadens when he sees that you weren’t aware of your mistake. This time you receive more accurate information about where you need to go and decide to catch a tram as it is advancing just at that moment when you need it, and it will apparently take you half way there.

Some young people on the tram vaguely know you and they acknowledge you before you properly see them with another warm smile. The tram stumbles and clanks its way down Fletcher Street and you disembark about five minutes from where you need to go.

It has been a perfect beginning to another weekend. The sun is now somehow brighter and warmer. There are a lot of parents and kids at this traffic school. You watch, sometimes fascinated, with the juvenile comings and goings of bikes flashing past, red light rules broken, kids randomly moving and merging in different directions. Parents are having earnest conversations and watching their offspring at the same time. Some seem to be more worried about their child than others.

The evening is beginning to get cooler. The onset of dusk is beginning to invade the playground. The onset of early evening is somehow making you feel melancholy. You hear a shriek emanating from some dark place, somewhere. This animal-like sound sets off a trembling in you, like an intolerable memory of anguish from long ago. Somebody close to you is screaming. You can see splashes of scarlet blood over her body. It is evident her arm has become almost detached from the rest of her body. The sight makes your stomach unsettle and you cry amongst the frightened children.