Glory

A very faint rainbow around our plane’s shadow on the way back from Melbourne.  The phenomenon is called a glory. This photo has had its contrast stretched to within an inch of its life to bring out the colours, we weren’t really flying over a Bill Henson theme park.

I’m starting a new job on Monday: blogging will probably be sporadic for a while. There are two Shakespeare plays in the queue.

Canberra

Standard criticism of Canberra	Why I like Canberra
Planned city	Planned city
Politicians, public servants	Politicians, public servants
“Lacks soul”*	Lacks “soul”*
Modernist architecture	Modernist architecture
Dagginess	Dagginess
Boring	Great bookstores**

*”soul” here is used as if it’s some quality of all other Australian cities; but as no Australian city can be said to have “soul” in the sense in which, say, New Orleans or Paris have it, this must be a special restricted sense of the term, perhaps denoting “ocean views”, “cynical nihilism” or “decaying infrastructure”

** admittedly, one of the bookstores I visited was in Berrima. But I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Berkelouw’s book barn is half-way to Canberra.

Mount Wilson

I didn’t take as many photos of Mount Wilson as I would have liked to: it was raining, and I was mostly driving. We saw Withycombe, which was built by Patrick White’s parents, and many beautiful autumn trees. I have hardly been anywhere in the Mountains away from the highway – the Zig Zag Railway once when I was a child is about it – so I was most impressed by the scenery from the Bells Line of Road. And at Bilpin we found some lemon melon spread.

The previous evening we had a civilised afternoon at friends of C’s at Katoomba. We tried to get a drink in the Carrington but it was too crowded because of a wedding reception; the faces of the older male guests, set against with the faded colonial gilt of the hotel, were putting me in mind of The Tree of Man, but more on that when I’ve finished it. Then we paid café prices for a delicious restaurant meal (kangaroo saltimbocca, veal scallopini) at Zuppa.

I also got a copy of R A Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers in Chekov’s Three Sisters; but more on that when I’ve finished it.

Absent

I was in Brisbane for OSDC07 this week, and at the last minute decided not to take my laptop; a good thing, as my slick laptop envy would have been much worse if I’d had my big old clunker with me. But that’s why the sudden dropout. Back on Monday.

Returning

Arrived in London again at around 6pm. Catch the Tube instead of the Heathrow Express, not so much for reasons of economy as because I just want one more ride on it. Get a decent dinner at a mildly touristy Italian place in Fitzrovia; only a little more expensive than the same meal would be in Leichhardt, and on average a bit tastier, plus there are longnecks of Peroni. The owner is shocked by two girls with pink hair hanging out on the footpath and starts a bit of a rant about how all these kids are on the drugs. I nod along with a mouth full of saltimbocca, the way one does with restaurant owners. I’m impressed that there is anyone left in the world who is shocked by girls with pink hair. Back at the hotel, watch a fascinating and rather moving BBC documentary about dance hall singer Al Bowlly.

In the morning I walk to Paddington so that I get to walk around London again. Not a soul on the streets apart from a policeman near Regents Park. There are no Patrick O’Brian books for sale at Heathrow, and if I buy any duty free Scotch it will be confiscated at Singapore because I can’t get to my hold baggage, so I give a long, lingering look to a shelf with more different kinds of whisky than I have ever seen before in one place.

I am surprised to find that I really had no idea just how far away Australia is, until I had to fly back to it. It’s a very long way.

Stop grumbling: fifty years ago I would have had to travel by ship, an idea that may seem charming until you consider that the cost in travel time would have made a trip like this impossible for almost anyone.

Oscars and Yeatses

I can’t decide if the Wilde statue in Merrion Square is so tacky that Wilde would hate it, or tacky enough that he would like it. Which may be the point.

Speaking of Oscars, the final question in the literary pub crawl quiz was: which of the Irish Nobel laureates also won an Academy Award?

And speaking of Yeatses, on my final morning in Dublin I went to the National Gallery (cloaking bags till the flight to London) and got very lost looking for the Jack Yeats section. Jack was William Butler Yeats’ brother, and I mostly knew his work from it being used for the covers of 70s Penguin editions of Dubliners and so on. The paintings, especially the later, more expressionist ones, are glorious in real life: they do not reproduce well at all. Despite that I bought a small print of “Grand Conversation Under the Rose” at the shop. The painting depicts a clown and a female stunt-rider having a conversation over a cup of tea backstage at a circus; normally I don’t like paintings of horses or clowns but this one is an exception. I think it’s the way the clown is sipping his tea.

Last night in Dublin

My last full day in Dublin: the Guinness storehouse tour in the morning, which was like Willy Wonka’s Porter Factory. I quite like how they manage to have a rather anemic safe-consumption-of-alcohol exhibit, juxtaposed with an entire floor of the old-fashioned “Guinness Is Good For You” advertising.

Lunch at Phoenix Park. I now know what the mysterious act of indecency committed by HCE in Finnegans Wake was: presumably he’d got sick of looking for a toilet, and, finding that the tearooms were closed, went behind a tree.

In the afternoon, I went to the Book of Kells at Trinity College. It’s beautiful, but the Long Room upstairs is better, and the smell of old manuscripts is intoxicating.

For dinner, I met up with yatima’s old friend D – having been introduced via email a month or so earlier – and went for sushi (featuring the admirable concept of all you can eat in 55m; does anywhere in Sydney do this?) and a sample tray of beers at the Porterhouse.

Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough

The mist, winds and choppy waves of this lake cured my hangover.

The dark brown waters and creamy sand of this lake reminded me of how I got the hangover in the first place.

This lake is at Glendalough, the site of the ruins of a monastery founded by St Kevin, a prince who took to monastic life in the 6th century.

I wonder if any princes ever retreated from the temptations of the world to mullock heaps or ditches or any other places that were not heartbreakingly beautiful.

On the bus tour our driver got lost, thanks to a road closure. Irish detour signs say “DIVERSION”, not “DETOUR”, and it was in fact a diverting diversion. We also got to pick mushrooms in an alarmingly dark forest.

The rest of the Wicklow photographs.

Things I learned while travelling

• There is good coffee in London – go to the Inns of Court. I don’t know if this follow-the-lawyers rule works in other cities but I reckon it’s worth a try.
• When staying at a B&B where your room comes with a separate, private bathroom, and you’re visiting that bathroom, for whatever reason, never put down your room key or leave it anywhere other than in a pocket of an article of clothing which you will be wearing when you leave the bathroom. I can’t emphasise this one strongly enough. Although stairs and hallways in Scotland are warmer than they are in Australia (they have this funny thing where they heat the whole of the inside of a building) they are still not very comfortable places to spend a couple of hours at night. I was rescued by the brother-in-law of the owner when he got home from the pub: thanks, Don, and also thanks to the lorry driver staying in the room next to me who told me when he’d be back.
• It’s always a good idea to have lunch in a pub which has a statue of Phil Lynott out the front of it.

Half-way thoughts

Here I am, about exactly half-way through my trip, in the function room at Òran Mór, looking at the Alasdair Gray murals and feeling very happy. While I was overseas, I missed my daughters, I missed my girlfriend, I missed my family and friends and workmates, but I didn’t miss being in Australia at all. Something was absent from my consciousness while I was in the UK and Ireland, and it took me a little while to figure out what it was, as when a wind drops or a machine stops running in the next room and you’re aware that something has changed before you’re aware of what it is that has changed.

What I was missing was a sort of inward sneer, a background hum of cynicism which had become so familiar to me that I’d stopped being aware of it. Is it me? Is it Australia? (Or just Sydney? It could be a side effect of me discovering that public transport is actually a solved problem, not an arcane lost art of the ancients.) Is it the interaction between the two?

J blamed John Howard, but I don’t think he deserves the rap for this one. I’ve been a pretty cynical person, slightly above the average in a nation of cynics, for most of my life; less so in the last ten years, as I’ve been actively fighting against it, but, still, it probably is me. Did I just really, really need a holiday?

I’ve been trying, with some success, so far, to stop it coming back.