Adieu, Mon Doux Rivage

It is time for us to part. Hence, this heartbreaking title. Which is an aria written by the largely-not-remembered composer Meyerbeer, who once moaned about Chopin. In a very catty way.

It is also the title of one of my short stories, hopefully in a new book coming out at some point in time. A stolen title, that suits the story very well. Hopefully it works.

But now it is time for me to move away from this neglected blog and move to a proper author website, details of which I will post here very soon. In the hope that you might wish to read a little further, not so much of Marilyn or even my own antics in Italy, but more about writing and the creative effort. And gardening and shoe sales and philosophy and hiking and all of the rude things that pin us to this life...

Thank you for reading this far, and apologies if I have hopped off the blogging bus for so long. It was a great ride. I've made genuine friends of some of you - with some of you (you know your names) turning up in Venice for long rowdy wandering staggering train-missing days. Which were great. Talking with writers helps so much. Talking with readers helps so much. Thinking for a second longer about the things surrounding us - are they connected? are we responsible? what must we do? - has always been at the centre of this blog, as much as indulgent wailing about favourite books and lovers and holidays. I think a good time has been had. My foray into 'intelligent' erotica and Italian divorcehood was a lot of fun.

But now it's time to get serious. Ahh yes. This writer is on a new mission now.

And of Marilyn? Our Divorced Lady Living in Italy? I can only tell you that I see her sometimes when she breezes in from Rome or Milan, with or without her lover Arnaud. She speaks the language now - with a Roman twang that can't be helped- and has grown Monica Bellucci-beautiful.

I wouldn't worry about Marilyn being marooned here, or helpless, or in decline. She has truly found herself. As I hope you all do.

Hopping About

This summer has been the wildest one so far. I never knew I could move around so much without going slightly mad. Time zones. Seasons. Languages. Wardrobes. Prior to the great Sydney expedition I took part in the second edition of the London Short Story Festival, four days saturated with short story wonders. I did a workshop with Ben Okri, and heard several of my favourite short story writers read including the original May-Lan Tan (Things to Make and Break, CB Editions - buy a copy and you won't lend it to anyone!), Canadian D.W. Wilson and the award-winning Kevin Barry. More about the festival delights on my Pelt blog this week. If you have a penchant for short stories as I have, you'll understand.

Then of course I spent nearly month in Sydney, mouth open, marvelling. At the beauty, at the rush of the city, at the harbour and her classic icons that fail to look jaded to this ex-Sydneysider. Gosh I will miss those days!

Another plane. Another airport. (I'm starting to feel like Nicole Kidman!) Abu Dhabi-Venice. Followed by an all-important wax before my impending beach holiday. A taste of heatwave northern Italy before boarding a plane the next morning for London, for the Bloomsbury launch of Fugue Vol. II, The Siren Press, and a reading from my kinky contribution 'Three Days in Hong Kong'. I can't believe I wasn't keeling over from jet lag and here I'll share a traveller's secret: melatonin. Take it if you have cross time zones!
 

A great evening and I was quite emotional at the idea this was my first book launch in Bloomsbury, at a swish place, with my pointy shoes and quiet voice and many other writers to admire and chat with. The Siren Press publisher Lucy Carroll has brought together a dark, quirky lot. Again, a full introduction to this volume is on my Pelt blog.

Of course to keep things simmering I had a second reading at Soho's Society Club. This time from my story 'The Book of Bruises', generously introduced by Structo editor, Euan Monaghan, an evening that involved fabulous cocktails and captivating readings. I was truly happy to be there! More coverage of that on my Pelt blog next week.

After surviving these two sessions I flew back to Venice for the grand finale, a week hiking and swimming and eating and dancing on a hippie island in Greece. This writer didn't want that week to end. Ever.

I hope your summer (or winter) moments were just a marvellous!

Now back to peddling stories which isn't so bad after all..

Homecoming Queen

It's been a long while. Unspeakably long. And while I have been catching cheap flights to London pretending to be a writer and swanning up and down the Dolomites in a corduroy skirt, my home city has been growing more and more balmy and glamorous. And glamour is the word that comes to mind when you catch the old bus you used to catch from university to the city. Glamour is the word that forms when you wander around the wintry water's edge watching a freezing Chinese bride on a photo shoot, while on your way to Marina Abramovic's warehouse installation on the revitalised wooden pier.

 An unexpected collective energy experience

All of Sydney seems to be about breathing life into old colonial buildings and primping palms along the waterfront. I haven't really wandered around much, but it feels so vivid and bustling and well-nourished and a little dizzying. A friend has already said she's heard Sydney is like a blonde with big tits, but she likes to add a clever blonde with big tits. Her words, not mine!
 

A chilly day at the ladies' rock pool at Coogee

And then there's the light that has an unhewn, vivid quality, and the sky such a limitless raw blue palette. And have I forgotten the vehement southern trees - all spiky and blue-green? And the cawing birds screeching across the skies? And the water, the intoxicating water of the bay down there, with its clanking moored sailing boats and those glassy villas clutched around every inlet. Such a busy colossal city with its traffic of birds and overhead jets in descent and river ferries cutting the water!


You can tell I've been perving at this city non-stop.

I confess that in all these years I have only written a few stories set in Australia, even though I spent twenty years growing up here. And an age reading and returning to Australian authors, who so often explore the themes of exile and displacement that are dear to me. Take Patrick White, Nobel Prize winner in 1973, whose opus I read almost entirely in my twenties, whose challenging Voss I read a few years back to see how it would play upon my older sentiments. And Christina Stead, whose For Love Alone probably set me off on my journey in the first place. Then there is Shirley Hazzard whose The Transit of Venus I must reread, and Elizabeth Harrower, only just discovered last year, who in The Watch Tower also captured the breezy salty pulse of this harbour.

As I sit here you should hear the birds! Wild things my countrymen will never tame. Last time I remember my mother mentioned a murder that took place in the garage of a building site on the point, and that tale became the Pushcart-nominated story Magaly Park. And this time I have walked more than once past this garage and through the park and around the sandstone point, entering the hyper-reality of the story world I made up; a really strange sensation. I half-expected my two characters - ex-swimming champion Grant and his teasing virgin girlfriend Tai to come slouching along the path. We writers are such scavengers: beware of what you tell us.

Alas! I have just over two more weeks of birdsong and ferries and the smell of eucalypts.

A Winter Love Affair

Anyone who knows me knows where my heart now lies in winter. Yes, there has been a slight displacement. I used to spend winter drooling over boots in shop windows and waiting for prices to come crashing down. I always used to find a good and solid reason to invest in just another pair of shoes. I mean, I needed them, I couldn't leave them. I was certain I didn't have a pair like this.

A dozen years have slipped by in this country. Children have been raised. Pets have been born and buried. Homework has been chewed by dogs (I'm serious: try telling superstar Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'go that the dog has chewed the copy of The Devil on the Cross that your son wants him to sign). Walls have been painted a half dozen colours; pipes have burst, cars have broken down and been driven into the ground (in fact, you raised your kids on Jimi Hendrix and Chopin on the tangenziale di Mestre). Cherries have been eaten and roses pruned and - last week! - the house finally has a heating system that works so that means nearly fifteen degrees in the kitchen!!

A long, good haul.

I'm not trying to be difficult or precious by saying I never wanted to live in Italy. When I was a young student with an Italian boyfriend living in snooty Paris, I couldn't help looking at Italy as a Fellini set, with all characters striving to look like Dolce e Gabbana models. The gesticulation drove me nuts. I mean, just say it! Without waving your hands! Without looking to see if everyone is checking you out. Stop talking over people and listen!

But one subsides, I guess; one becomes less hard-edged. One accepts. One - gulp! - probably even begins to behave like that.

The thing is that while there is a lot of social conformity in this country, there are great differences in region and terrain, which translates to mentality and attitude. In twelve years I have learnt to decipher a little of this, and in doing so I feel as though I have invented my Italy. An Italy that is far from clichéd (wine, pasta, monuments), and brings out the best in this France-loving Sydneysider ex-West African dweller.

Any idea what is coming next? You guessed it: the Dolomites.

Winter has become The Ski Season. It's when we abandon all ties to city life and friends and go barmy for snow, watching the weather, waiting for fresh snow, seeing if we can afford a new pair of skis, hanging out with a fantastic mountain crew. And while global warming will continue to shorten the season, as long as it's on, count me in. There is something so gutsy, so non-cerebral, so mind-blowing about falling in love with sunset or sunrise on a mountain summit, with a sweaty trek up to the slopes and a freezing ride in the chairlift, with filling your lungs with that giddy oxygen. While I can't really write about city life in Italy, I find the mountains inspiring, shocking, laden with tales to be told.

So I'm signing off. Now you know where to find me on these last winter weekends. Doing telemark curves on my favourite slope. Reading on the couch in an exhausted stupor. Drinking grappa al carrugo in some bar. Or just watching snow floating down out the window.

In fact, until April, this author has snow for brains.

How Fragile We Are

I was going to write a sombre-toned post-Charlie-Hebdo blog post about this winter's work mission to fashion week in Paris. You know, grey rooftops and the Eiffel Tower glittering in spite of all that horror. A jitteriness in the air that we may well have been imagining, jittery ourselves. And this contrasted with the wild and rewarding disco night we enjoyed, crowned with countless glasses of champagne. For Paris - she has lived revolution, siege and warfare - is licking her wounds.

But no. I came home from the tragic city to a small-scale family emergency. A child of mine in an ambulance. Everything thankfully resolved hours later in a local hospital. Then a day of follow-up in the wards of the massive hospital in town. Hours of standing, waiting, wishing for food, praying no one would jump the queue, finishing my book and nagging said child, as one does. A long day through which it all came home, how fragile we are. How we think we are steering our destinies but, in the grand arc of our lives, we are not. How we can try so hard to be healthy, to keep our dear ones healthy - and fail.

Like most of us I view hospitals as locations of dread. Awful nights of agony or the agony of a loved one - which you wish you could bear yourself. Mostly, these are relatively minor things which provide stonking stories afterwards: the time that guy crashed into your son and he was carried down the slopes on a stretcher; the time you put on snow chains halfway up the pass coming back from Agordo with your daughter's cracked arm in plaster and sling. But then there are the traumatic moments of fear, tests.. trying to read the doctor's face. The waiting. The knowledge that apart from childbirth or routine checkups, you are never going to be here for an innocent reason. It will always be because something it's wrong or if it isn't now, it will be one day.

Australian Tim Winton grew up 'In the Shadow of the Hospital' and wrote this stirring piece for Granta. 'No wonder so many great novels have been set in hospitals.. Hospitals make rich fictional settings because from the inside they are such chillingly plausible worlds themselves. They have their own surreal logic, their own absurd governance, their own uncanny weather, and the impotence and boredom they induce is hard to match anywhere by prison or the military.'

Once I finish reading my book I spend numerous hours looking at everybody around. There's a real cast of characters. Old creaky folk on stretchers, a pregnant African lady I can see is in pain, a labourer with blood running down under his cap, listless babies wrapped in scarves. Everyone is exposed, at some extremity of emotion. As Tim Winton says: '..in the lee of the hospital social camouflage slips away.. Where else do people bear their narratives so openly? Body language is heightened, almost balletic..'

Eight hours later when we go outside to the car park it is dark and colder. My son can walk now. We are both starving and glad of our release into the real world. But is it the real world? Or just a reprieve? Still more people pour over the bridge to the main entrance, an endless stream. Hard faces, each of them; fast paces, big coats. Nobody wanders into a hospital.

That night I remember dancing half-drunk in Paris just days ago, and the long drive home through France and up into the mountains, rain thrashing the windscreen, trucks passing outside the Psycho Hotel where myself and my colleagues hardly slept a wink.

I am grateful.

Heritage and Hipsters

This weekend, in a rather masochistic mood, I decided to clean out. I mean, The Big Clean, the one I promised myself I would attempt over the summer. These are the things that slip behind while what we call 'life' goes on, right? 

You may not know this but in my house I have many wooden trunks. I used to collect them. You may also not know that I moved around quite a lot in the early years (I was even going to say 'self-defining years', but when does one ever finish defining Self; we are all works-in-progress). So, in these many wooden trunks I have been stashing letters, photographs, kids' drawings, unwanted jewellery, beads, more photographs, beady-eyed sculptures, torn diaries, for years and years. 

I need a drink before I can open them. 

As I began I remembered something that a friend once wrote to me - in a handwritten letter!- that stuck. She spoke about the moment that she was putting out the rubbish and she looked back to the lights of her house, where her family (since split up, re-partnered, split up) had just finished dinner. She said that in that moment, she saw her life, and she realised she was content.

This thought crystallised as I started to open envelope after envelope of images. Just-born babies, kids in trucks, first-day-at-school shots, art shots, nudes, road trip reports, ceremonies, a friend who told me he would kill himself, (and did); more breastfeeding shots, a new baby, a tableful of family, bedraggled kids on a beach, sandcastles, my hero Youssou N'Dour..

And then, at the bottom of the trunk, face down, I saw love. Oh geez. That knocked me for six. You remember it. You wanted it so hard, you fought for it so hard.

And you lost, by the way.

Initially your kids are such unknowing and generous beings, prepared to love you unconditionally as you do them, but if they knew. If they knew how messy it all was then, all the high drama, would they have traded you in or begged to be adopted out?

I wonder. And yet, looking at these innumerable photos, you see moments where it worked, where there was harmony, deep and fundamental harmony or snatches of it.

Years ago, when my kids were young and we had come to live in this house, I used to go outside in the dark with a cup of tea and look up at the bedroom lights glowing. Even then I knew I was holding onto it, that these moments were vast and finite. Now, most of my kids have moved out to study and I rather enjoy walking up to the main road with the rubbish, along the unsealed drive between the vineyard and the green winter wheat, with the dark villa on the rise looking like Arnold Böcklin's Island of the Dead. It isn't a long walk, but it's enough to allow a few thoughts to wriggle loose. On the way down the hill - always - I see the house lit up, less than in years passed, and I think Yes, this is happening now, this is what it is.

Not a bad thought.

* 
In other wild and alluring news from the ranch I spotted a pair of hipsters at my local country supermarket. I began a sneaky pursuit. Were they real hipsters who had moved here to grow cherries? Were they on a visit to some confounded farmer - a family relative? I followed the girl's blue hair and the guy's cropped beard and tattooed neck and rolled-up jeans until they cottoned on to my crooked trolley full of dog food.

It remains a mystery.

The Divorced Author's Guide to New Year's Resolutions

1. Don't bother about saying you are giving up coffee. You never will.
2. Don't bother dressing up for work.
3. When in doubt about your current project, go for a drive listening to Rachmaninov. You will realise the smallness of your concerns.
4. Try and food shop for your offspring
5. Do not buy another Moleskin for your writing notes. It will join the fifteen empty ones in your drawer.
6. When depressed, try cleaning the house. Remember it makes you feel useful.
7. When doubly depressed, swim a hundred laps and watch Law & Order eating a huge spinach omelette. You will feel strong and righteous.
8. Decide what you're going to do about the mouse in the attic.
9. Who cares about the story order in your new unpublished story collection?
10. DO NOT talk to non-writers about the order of the stories in your new collection.
11. DO NOT ask your adult son to read new short stories with embarrassing sex scenes.
12. Accept that impoverished writers do not require countless pairs of gorgeous leather boots and Dolce e Gabbana stilettos. Yet.

13. Fill the damned fridge!
14. Don't bark at your offspring when they hungrily ask for an Italian lunch. At 4pm.
15. Stop screaming at hunters in the fields just because they are killing doddery pheasants and you think they are cruel beings. Remember they might take a potshot at the wild foreign woman dressed like a Sherpa.
16. Get off Facebook. Try and understand Twitter.
17. Don't eat ALL the Pierre Marcolini chocolates in three days.
18. Try and remember one good joke.
19. Blog regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly.
20. Feed the cats.

Good luck and a marvellous 2015 to all you divorced authors and more balanced people as well!

The End of Love: What if Anais Nin and Henry Miller had Skyped?

I had a thought. Young Diva Daughter (who doesn’t read this) spends much time with her Beloved on Skype. They are bewitched. Captivated. If not Skyping, they are furiously typing on whatsapp. Everything is short and furious and oh-so-immediate. No chafing at the postbox and ripping open envelopes with foreign stamps. No scribbled-on sheets of paper to clutch to the heart.

It makes me think of love letters. I mean Love Letters.

Did you ever write reams and scrolls and reams to your Beloved? Hell yeah. (And I didn’t pick up any of them online either.) Ahh, it’s going to sound very old-fashioned to say this, but Weren't Those The Days…

I honestly remember twenty-page intercontinental letters (the girl was verbose; and I couldn’t blog!) and I’m talking about twice a week. I remember notes scribbled after making love, when another Beloved had fallen asleep. The first thing he would read when he got up to go to work! Written with – yes! – a biro on paper. Bits of poems copied out (not copied and pasted). Queasy declarations in bad French or Italian. Collages of dumb photos.. metro tickets.. 

But mostly words words words. Written words where you had to get a flow going and edit yourself as you flew along (no auto-correct or spell-check or any form of self-editing). These words were raw and full of flight, they were scrawled high or crinkled in the corner, cramped along the sides of the page.

Do you remember? Do you remember word love?

And now imagine this. Some of last century’s great lovers (or the most show-offy ones, probably) have just spent an amorous afternoon together. The man – the sexy/sleazy Henry Miller – rushes home to his poor digs and he logs on, and here is Henry looking worse for wear filling up Anais’ screen with his crooked bookshelves on the wall behind. Would we ever have been handed down words such as these to savour if Nin and Miller had skyped??

Don’t expect me to be sane any more. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes – you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous… You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old – you are a thousand years old… I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible..

Quelle fever!

Now do yourself – and the Beloved – a favour. Get out your pen. Find some beautiful paper.

And write a Love Letter.

Women and Rage

There is a lot of sh** in the air lately. I mean that seriously. The farmers in our area are fertilising vacant and weedy fields before ploughing and sowing their winter crop. Up and down the poplar-lined roads you smell the cowshit they spray over these fields. Close all windows please. Do not inhale.

You know, the problem with smartphones and the whole system of texting and whatsapping that has been become our staple, is this: we just can't shut up. Screen diarrhoea, I would say. There is always a text to send, or one to reply to, add to, copy to another friend. When your loved ones are far away, it's wonderful to send or receive a warm thought, isn't it? But when it comes to the big emotions - Love, Anger, Sadness, Throbbing Good News - don't you think that texting is the most unreliable way to convey important stuff?

Let's take Anger. Now. Anger is best delivered in the heat of the moment, face to face, hopefully without plates thrown. No? And then once the angry party expels his or her sentiments, the other party responds/justifies/or just yells back. Doors might be slammed. There could be some rash declarations. If all goes well there might be a cooling off period and perhaps - in time - an apology and renewed understanding.

Agreed? Now let's think about what happens when the angry party uses a smartphone message to convey his or her sentiments. What might have been yelled in the heat of the moment is now recorded within a little machine (I realise that sounds a little Fred Flintstone), before it flies out to another little machine, and it texted out further like a virus to the insulted party's friends.

It exists forever, just about.

Over the past few weeks (yes finally I am getting to my point) I have had a couple of seriously angry text messages out of the blue from a couple of seriously angry ladies. At first you think: oh gawd, hormones! (Truly, you could have knocked me down with a feather.) How nasty! How silly! How petty! What Was She Thinking? The thing is, you realise that people who vent their anger in this way usually have other darker issues they can't address, and you end up feeling sorry for their plight. And worst of all, unlike words cast into the air whose edge will fade, these words are able to be reread, shown to others, even laughed at. Out of context, anger becomes pitiable, and an angry faceless message must be the pinnacle of weakness. (Cheeky grin: story material!!!)

Sigh. Get nastiness out of your life. Please. Bad energy is not a trifling thing and it will send colonies all through your body and your life. Ladies, by all means express your anger, spit it out on the plate.

But don't be silly enough to write it down. Or if you do, send it to a trusted friend who squeezes your hand and makes you cancel it!

Love Song with Cello

Faces in places: Marais girl, Paris

I caught a plane home the other day. Just a short, cheap flight. Which means a long wait and a long, unruly queue. As I stuffed and restuffed and pounded and squeezed my bag closed, I realised that my book (Alison MacLeod's 'Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction' which will give you a jolt and a buzz) was deep in the bottomless depths and I would just have to sit down and people-watch. Which I did.

But departures are never as dramatic as the great, stirring fanfare of lovers reunited, or families made whole; young children clinging to fathers or women wrapped in lovers' arms with shaky smitten smiles. The departure lounge is different. Emotions are low-key. People are tired and anxious to be at home. There will always be a chatty Italian who will soon have a crowd of listeners with flying hands. Or kids sticking their heads under tired Dad's T-shirt; African grandmothers who wished they hadn't even come. Or the Hell's Angel guy staring at you. Or the ancient twins from Greece with Nefertiti eyeliner. Or the young things baring just about all as though the airport were an extension of yet another beach party at the ratty end of summer..

I call myself a writer. Many of us do. And as writers supposedly we look for stories everywhere. We see an interesting face and imagine an entire life.We imagine love stories and stories of loss and gain and hope and voyage. (Do we? Hmmm. Well, I must be the laziest writer about because I rarely do this. I mean, I am looking and borrowing - even stealing - but goodness knows where my stories come from!) And then just when I had spent several hours deciding that the whole of Europe (including myself) was hooked on phone screens and iPads and there was not an interesting face or couple or family among them, what do I see?

I saw the most touching scene I think I have seen in ages, maybe years.

Sweet chords and rabbits

Two wheelchairs. Two old folk. One cello in a case. They are taken to the head of the queue by two young men with ID tags who chat above them, these guys are wearing twin navy sweaters.

The old lady's face is gentle. Her lips are full and she has a wide round face and eyes that are deep brown and placed wide apart on her head. She has rings on her fingers that dig into the flesh. A cello rests against her legs and it is clear this shape is a part of her life, her body, her sound, her dreams. It is the oldest part of her. She is still strong, she bears a flashing life force, she has shared this with others; she is generous, when she is alone she is never alone.

Next to her is the man I imagine is her partner, the man she has loved for decades. Perhaps he stood tall once, without the kink in his neck that makes his head droop low, makes his eyelids seem half-open, makes him seem beaten, overcome. He is a large stable man, though he looks around like a small boy; he has an expression of vacant happiness. His eyes are small and rubbed with emotion.

There are two things that I notice. Two things that I take home with me on that cheap flight.

1) The old man's hair has been cropped recently. There is an unwavering line of hair above his ear. He has a pretty good head of hair and somebody has made sure that line was straight. 

2) The old lady leans across her hand which is thick with rings and she grasps his yellowy, finer fingers within hers. He doesn't look at her, he is a bit doddery. But still this lady looks across at him with so much smooth and binding love that I am warmed and astounded.

Travel safe. The voyage is neverending.

* * * *
My short story 'Enfolded' is a shortlisted finalist in the Love on the Road Short Story Competition and will appear in next year's anthology, coming out with feisty independent Malinki Press of Dublin.

I don't wanna go home

It happens every time I go away. Not just away like for work even if it is in a cool place. It's not that. It happens each time I go on my annual camping trip to Corsica. You see, once I get into the rhythm of it, I really don't want to go home. I want to stay on there in my shorts and bikini with my bag of books and my beer bottle. I don't care about writing about work about the house, about school about the rest of my summer plans I just don't care.

It's not even an easy thing to explain. I mean, the place is nothing really that special. There are other more glamorous islands in the Mediterranean, and we stay in an extremely non-sophisticated camping ground which can be crowded and noisy. Plus it's a long haul across Italy, on the car ferry then across the top of Corsica. So what is it then?


Could it be the early morning swims out to the last buoy when the small beach is empty?

Could it be making a strong coffee after said swim on your camp stove?

Could it be wearing the same thing every day, feeling so sandy and salty in your bare feet?

Or drinking local chestnut beer in the wooden shed bar on the beach?

Or wandering along the rocky coast and finding a spot your umbrella, having a few nude dips?

Could it reading for hours each afternoon, book after blessed book, salty swim after salty swim?

Could it be the endless pebbles and crashing waves of Nonza beach?

Could it the computer-ipad-screenlessness of your days?

Could it be the smells of summer as you hike through villages inland?

Could it be drinking Pastis in bars along the coast?

Could it be the sultry, star-fringed nights and not knowing what day it was?


I dunno, I'm clueless. What do you think?




* * * * *

Now back on the ranch I received an intriguing Twitter feed email inviting me to follow Pope (Papa) Francesco. It seems that Papa Francesco has a gazillion followers but how many people does the Pope follow? How many would you say?

Well, it's just 8.

Doesn't that make you crawl in your seat wondering who those eight people might be? His cousin in Argentina? Obama? Shirley Bassey? Who??

The Best Things in Life

Spot the cat!

After a van breakdown on the perilous A4, a twelve-hour driving stretch including burrowing under the scary Mont Blanc tunnel and charging through central France, your bed-and-breakfast falling through, a night-time unloading of an entire summer collection and staggering about with boxes/racks/hats, the discovery that your hotel is like a tiny pre-fab caravan and the downstairs McDonalds - you are too tired to take one step further - closes its doors in your face and you go to bed foodless...well... that's when you tend to look at the good things around you.

YOU ARE IN PARIS, something that excites you every time.
There is free champagne for exhibitors for four days.
There is a great Turkish thing going on outside on the main strip.
You get to wear great clothes and shoes for four days.
You eat wonderful food after work and tear across central Paris in a taxi yawning after midnight.

Bliss. Even that rainy walk to work every morning. Such a change from story submissions and revisions and disappointments piling up. And trying to keep the wisteria in check which is more fruitful than your imagination.

Blue Mosque - polaroid-style

You all know I work at fashion week in Paris twice a year and it is a blast. Not that I see a single clothes shop or museum or view of the Seine or trendy nightclub... We go to bed like tired chickens each night, fighting off the alarm and dragging ourselves to the shower. Matchsticks keeping apart eyelids at breakfast.

What do I wear today??
I don't care! Wear anything!
Whose idea was it to drink five glasses of champagne?? 
Yours!
Yours!

Turkish tea bags

The Bubble Card!!!

And the next day in between taking orders you are back again, an addict queueing up, sticking out your pink bubble card, listening to conversations behind and in front of you, watching an old French perv chat up a sweet young thing with glorious eyes, watching the super-tanned gay guy selling ripped dresses in his Ray Bans and bandana, watching the Indians eating food from home and the Japanese in sharp clusters, watching the giraffe-like models glide about in flowing gowns leaving men and women gobsmacked in their wake.

Fashion, baby. I'll take six glasses..

The Constant Gardener

Photos : Mariarosaria Valente

There are two constants in the summertime here. Shoe sales and gardening. Now that might appear to make for a very brainless summer but let me inform you that this writer is heading off to two short story conferences this summer - with barely an inch of time to work on her tan or check out the shoe sales. 

Just joking. Tanning is the last thing that happens in my life. By chance it might occur when I am mowing in a big hat and my bikini. Or on the famous Corsican camping holiday when I swim out to the buoys at 8am.

In the meantime there is gardening, drinks under the willow and walnut trees, summer parties, pruning roses, reading in the hammock, good friends and concerts. To tell the truth I have just ordered The Constant Gardener, having seen Fernando Meirelles’ brilliant film several times (one of my favourites) without having read the book. Summer is a huge endless part of the year in Italy. After months of fog and heating problems and beanies and frozen hands, the temperature is in the high aching twenties and the sky is still haze-free and the sun is blazing. I was at the market yesterday looking at my cheap clothes stand and the ladies were saying, But this would look good with a tan, Oh but think of this once I get my tan!

Of course for an Australian with pre-skin cancers being cut out of her back and shoulders on a regular basis, I’ll be buying long-sleeved floaty kaftan tops thanks very much. Or my beloved heels..

On Sunday I was driving along the Riviera Brenta which is where the Venetians built lovely airy Palladian villas to escape the stifling heat of the lagoon. They used to retire there for the summer surrounded by sumptuous gardens with roses and labyrinths and secret paths and the cool breezes after summer storms over the surrounding fields. The villas are startling, one beauty after another, topped with writhing naked sculptures in stone. Of course the son I was picking up had done an all-nighter at one of these. I entered to find Signor and Signora of the manor working a floor shiner on the terrazzo floor, and a bunch of bleary-eyed boys about to roll out the Persian mats. The garden swept down to the river where on the next bend was the massive palace – Villa Pisani – built for the Venetian Doge Alvise Pisani elected in 1735, once owned by Napoleon I, and used by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in 1934 for their first uncomfortable meeting (supposedly Adolf raved on and on about Mein Kampf, Benito whose German was crap grew bored. Gawd, if someone had taken them both to the bottom of the river that day…)

All too much history for this weary mother on a Sunday morning. On the way home I spotted another site I know I’m coming back to scout. It was the Fratelli Rossi Space. You’ve got me – the best heels there are to be had.

And here are some more shots taken by an enthusiastic friend around this humble pile and jardin.. No treaties signed here. Perhaps a plate thrown in my old pre-divorcée days…

A Cherry Saga

It has been neverending. Cherry after cherry after cherry. I'm not complaining. Substitute breakfast snack with: Cherry Snack. Substitute coffee break with: Cherry Break. Substitute lunchtime fruit with: Lunch Cherries. Substitute afternoon tea with: Cherry O'Clock...

Get out your ladder girl, and get some Cherry Belly.

Nature is really stupendissima. We are given these gifts every spring, year after year, despite doing not a thing. No pesticides, no pruning. And they stand so helplessly bare all winter, bereft. The fog is so thick here that you can just make out the one furthest from the house in a blur of cotton wool. Then, come March, you have blossoms. Beautiful white blossoms shimmering in the air. And in May, in time for your spring appetite, these red treasures.

Living in the country is hard work - yes! Try getting teens to push a lawnmower or help prune the pines. Or clear the side fence of grapevines scooting every which way. But isn't it good for a child to see a tree grow, to know the journey of a tiny piece of fruit? I remember an American teacher of friend of mine taught horticulture to rich American kids sejouring in Florence. She asked them, Where does lettuce come from? They looked at her blankly. They did not know.

Ahh I love my cherry trees. I've become such a cherry snob I look at cherries at the fruit stand and wrinkle my nose. Bah! Old wares! Give me something I can sink my teeth into and swivel around in my mouth. Let me choose between the top branches with dark burgundy fruit, or the lower ones with red rich cherries - still a little tart but give them a few days... Then let's do jam for breakfast, jam for cherry summer flans, cherry vodka, cherry grappa for when next winter rolls around.

Does anyone else have a cherry fixation?



In other local news two different men on bicycles tried to pick up this jogging writer who was actually THINKING UP HER NEW STORY LINE AS SHE JOGGED. How could they not see I was still 'working'? Why oh why did I throw on a pair of shorty-shorts instead of my baggy cut-offs that were in the wash?

Salve Signorina, You have a good pace going there. You know you are fast.
Yes the supermarket is about to close.
Will you be here again tomorrow night? I live just by here.
Yes. With my three sons !

Next time I will be jogging in a tent.

Lemon Loving in Italy

I have a weakness for lemons. Perhaps it is because we never had a lemon tree, but used to pinch them from the neighbour's tree. While I adore lemons in pots and look after mine like children (wrapped in scarves in the old chicken shed through winter), lemon trees in the ground send me into ecstasy. Imagine my daily thrill when I recently went to southern Italy, south of Sorrento in fact, and walked through lemon orchards to the sea, saw them bobbing over every fence, fraying delicately in every garden. Bliss for moi.

I took the night train down from Verona, cruised through Rome at dawn, and arrived in boisterous Naples mid-morning. Not my first time. As a young au pair I was dragged off by a rich Milanese family to their holiday home on Stromboli.. just as the story goes in Peltand Other Stories. Before catching the ferry I slept in the station with my cropped hair and knapsack: the NZ guy next to me had his wallet sliced out of his jeans. 

But last month I was heading out of Naples towards Sorrento, then up to a village high above the coastline with the swish island of Capri plonked in front. Seafood was enjoyed, everybody’s favourite bitter green cima di rapa was devoured, the coffee was divine, much wine was thrown back and the company was very, very good. 

Funny, it seemed that everything we ate or were offered was to be washed down with the local drop limoncello, which you may or may not have tried. Imagine a smooth lemon juice going down like a sweet sunkissed syrup. It perks you up quick smart. I can’t believe I gave my bottles away and will face the hot summer without them! It seemed there was a lemony idea for every moment of the day: fresh lemon juice for breakfast, tangy lemon biscuits; and lemon drizzled over your squid, your octopus and your grilled fish thanks. 

And of course limoncello at any hour... 

Every morning skeins of cloud would fade away to reveal Capri on her silver platter of sea. Most of the time I was dumbfounded. I confess I didn’t manage to go there, preferring a lazy day on the beach and not so keen to mingle with the tourists. Lots of big pebbles and a long walk. It wasn’t even warm, but this Australian decided to have her first Mediterranean swim of the season. Picture this skinny writer in a borrowed costume working up her strokes out to the moored boats – and half-dying of hypothermia afterwards. Limoncello required.

I wanna go back!

We also savoured Sorrento from her most marvellous vantage point. The bar on the jetty under the cliff. Far away from the tourist throng. Close to the lapping of the water. Seafood to die for. An afternoon I didn’t want to end. I would do almost anything to be back there..

Lastly, for all you lemon-lovers out there, this is from Pablo Neruda's A Lemon. It is sublime.

So, while the hand

holds the cut of the lemon,

half a world

on a trencher,

the gold of the universe

wells 

to your touch:

a cup yellow

with miracles,

a breast and a nipple

perfuming the earth;

a flashing made fruitage,

the diminutive fire of a planet.