balloon

Getting a haircut

2010-07-04T17:14:00.002+10:00

The ancient shop in a gloomy arcade where I get my hair cut every couple of months is a piece of history cut out of the 1950s, like a black and white magazine clipping, turning yellow around the edges. The two old Italian gents who take turns to crop my hair with their #3 and #2 grade clippers (I’ve been warned off the #1, told severely it would make me look like a Marine) wear ties and smell faintly of tobacco. They have lived in Canberra since post-war migrants from the European war built the Snowy Mountains Scheme and they’ve cut the hair of the best of them.

There never seem to be many people in the shop. I suspect they are still wandering around trying to find it in its hidden time warp around the corner from the hurrying 21st century. I’m sure the tiles on the floor contain asbestos and the ‘barbicide’ liquid with the combs and scissors floating in the glass jar on the bench in front of me is probably still killing germs from the 1950s. All the customers, including me, are old and we exchange meaningful conversation with the gents about weather and cars and how easy life is nowadays.

I’m convinced that one day I’ll hurry down for my haircut and find the shop gone, as though a rift in the universe has sealed and the wormhole in time and space connecting me to the 1950s will have closed forever.

Cures for the common cold

2010-07-04T17:10:00.002+10:00

Even in the heart of the modern world, down in the deep streets of contemporary urban life, folk medicine is still strong. Have you noticed when you mention you have a cold, how everyone within listening distance starts to list off the various fool-proof remedies which are certain to cure you, or at the very least make you feel human again. Honey and lemon, brandy and hot baths, a lie down and a cup of tea or mashed poultice of toad and sparrow, it’s all there continuing to cure after several centuries of use and abuse.

Which is just as well because thinking with a head cold is like walking through tar – each thought struggles to break free for a moment and then is sucked back into the bog. The sediment in the head threatens at any moment to set like freshly poured concrete on a building site. Honey and lemon, brandy and hot baths, a lie down and a cup of tea.

Planting an olive tree

2010-04-05T09:47:00.004+10:00

Olives have appeared on our balcony – surprising given that the olive tree is quite new. Olives are not supposed to produce fruit this quickly. Olives symbolise peace for the very reason that they take such a long time to grow and bear fruit. No-one planted them unless they expected a long period of peace, so new olive trees were a reliable indicator of widespread expectations about a lengthy era of stability, tranquility and lack of turmoil.

This is not why we have planted an olive tree but it makes a strange sort of sense. Perhaps by planting an olive tree we have actually engendered a peaceful period in our lives.

Life in the sky

2010-02-10T20:40:00.005+11:00

Living in an apartment high up in the sky (or at least on the fourth floor - quite high enough for me), I feel like I'm on some giant airship. When I see films of the great zeppelins suddenly appearing silently out of the clouds I think about life in the sky.

This apartment has a long side balcony and walking the length of it makes me think I'm a passenger on an ship. The awnings which I wind up and down on sunny days reinforce this because I feel as though I am trimming the white sails of a yacht.

Perhaps I am naturally an apartment dweller and living somewhere like this is the logical outcome of all my values, taste and history.

I was standing on the balcony and a single black feather dropped out of the gum tree opposite and then drifted slowly down and across, then rose steadily in the sky until it disappeared.

it’s like living in a tree house. I look directly across to the top of a massive gum tree at the same height as us.

I live in an apartment which has featured in an architecture magazine and when I travelled to Berlin stayed in a hotel just of Kurfürstendamm which featured in an exhibition about cutting edge architecture in the nearby Berlin Art Gallery. I often think that buildings are often more interesting than the contents they house. I wonder if that’s true about my apartment building.

It’s still dark and I just went outside and leaned on the metal rail on the balcony – I shivered as it was very chilly after a night in the open. Winter is coming, if ever so slowly.

Wearing hats

2009-12-30T22:51:00.000+11:00

When it's 40 degrees Celsius and the sun beating down at midday hurts on your skin, your mind seems inevitably to turn to hats. I am always amazed at how few people wear hats now. In a country like Australia where the sun does real and lasting damage, hats are a necessary item of clothing.

The good thing is that hats look good as well. I'd like to see a return to the habit of wearing hats which was so common in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. It was a fashion accessory which was a real loss, especially for men. It seems to survive in Melbourne, where it is least needed and struggle elsewhere. I take my hat off to hats.

Feast of Stephen

2009-12-30T06:28:00.001+11:00

A friend has her birthday on Boxing Day and laments that no-one remembers or celebrates it because it is so close to Christmas. I always remember it, partly because I write it in my diary, but mainly because Boxing Day has always been a favourite day. It's a time when the crazy rush to finish the work of the year and to prepare for the holiday - buying presents, travelling to see relatives, sending greetings - comes to a halt.

That's why the idea of Boxing Day sales leaves me completely cold. This year I made the mistake of going into the city during the sales. It was early but, despite that, all the shops were packed. It was like one of those puzzles made up of moveable squares with only one empty square and to move anything you have to move everything. In the womens shoe section as I passed there were queues to try on shoes 15 deep.

The other reason Boxing Day is so memorable is that it is the Feast of Stephen. For years I wondered about the line 'Good King Wencelas looked out on the Feast of Stephen' in the old Christmas carol I knew from my childhood. I finally checked and found that it was a traditional Saints Day Feast on the very day I was so fond of. It's not every day a feast has your name. Now every year I look forward not to Boxing Day but to the Feast of Stephen.

Hiding from the heat

2009-12-26T19:32:00.004+11:00

In Mildura, like refugees from a bombing raid we seek shelter from the heat in the wine cellars of the Grand Hotel. I had always admired Stefano de Pieri and the way he championed regional Australia and local produce so I wanted to eat in his restaurant, which as it turned out was below the Grand Hotel in Mildura where we stayed.

The Grand is like a small economic incubator, a rambling art deco building, added to before and after this period, surrounded by small businesses, trying to find a place in the sun for regional economies.

Crossing four states

2009-12-26T19:20:00.001+11:00

At Christmas time the whole of Australia seems to relocate, criss-crossing the continent to visit their mother. To get to Adelaide we crossed the borders of four states (okay, one was a territory, but let's not get lost in the detail). After a while when you step out into the 39 degree Celsius heat you become grateful that cars nowadays have air conditioning. You comment happily that at least we aren't in Adelaide yet, where it's not 39 but 42 - everything is relative. You drive so quickly through Hay - a country centre with four museums - that you don't get to see any of them.

Chocolate espresso cake

2009-12-15T18:32:00.004+11:00

I just cooked a chocolate cake, something I don't do. It was from a fabulous book called Old Food by classic chef Jill Dupleix channelling Elizabeth David. She says 'I swear I will put this classic French flourless chocolate, coffee and almond cake in every cook book I ever do, just in case there is one person out there who doesn't already know it. I first came across it in Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking, immediately doubled the chocolate content and have been pathetically grateful ever since.'

I was shocked at how much butter I had to shovel into it and separating five eggs without spilling traces of yolk in the whites required some technical assistance and a repeat performance. It was all worth it though - the cake brought serious praise and it has shrunk almost to nothing.

Broken glass

2009-12-12T21:07:00.005+11:00

I used to have a battered cardboard box of around 12 hand-painted glass Christmas balls that first decorated a tree in the 1950s when I was born. They were from Europe in the days when such things weren't found in Australia. They had been given to my father by the Poles who came out to Australia after World War Two to work on the great nation-building hydro electricty projects like the Snowys Mountains Scheme and the dams scattered throughout the Tasmanian Highlands. The Poles were still organised in their army units and wearing their uniforms when they arrived.

There were a few balls missing when I got them and over the years they have slowly but steadily diminished through breakages as I have moved around Australia. For the last year or more I have been reduced to four balls but last week I dropped two on the concrete floor in the basement and they shattered into thin slivers - only two left now. I suppose that's not too bad a record, about one loss every four and a bit years. Still that makes two breakages in one week look very negligent. Concrete and glass are a bad mixture.

Postscript: How unreliable family memory can be. I found the label off the cardboard box, which had been long since discarded. It confirmed that the balls were Polish but that they had been imported into Australia by a firm in Melbourne, so they were found in Australia after all.

Crossing Sydney Harbour Bridge

2009-12-12T16:29:00.007+11:00

For the 12 years I lived in Sydney I never ceased to be excited as I drove up onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge to cross Sydney Harbour. Long after leaving Sydney behind me I still have the same sense whenever I go back. The approaches from the south side lead up to the span of the Bridge itself at an angle so as you approach you see the Bridge partially side on, rising above you.

Boiling an egg

2009-12-05T13:55:00.003+11:00

Every time I boil and egg I am reminded of my father ringing me once when my mother was ill in hospital to ask how to boil an egg. Strangely enough I do it so infrequently that I always have to check how long to boil it for. Talk about the blind leading the blind - or is that the pot calling the kettle black?

Sign at work

2009-12-01T20:03:00.006+11:00

For the last few weeks signs have started to appear on the side of the streets near me saying 'Men at work'. I've waited to see some activity but nothing has happened. I was starting to think the signs should say 'Sign at work' instead. Finally something seems to be happening - new signs have appeared saying the work is finished, even though there's no sign it ever started.