On having more time

As of Friday morning when I filed my weekly copy a day and a half late, I have more free time than I've had since the beginning of December 2009, when I began a stressful, mammoth task that was completed three months later, when I began, the next day (a coincidence), another task three times as mammoth but marginally less stressful. Now the Adelaide book is written and the manuscript is with the editor, with whom I will be conferring for the next couple of weeks and after that it's out of my hands till I get page proofs, to which I must not make any but tiny essential changes, on pain of death.

So what have I done with my time since Friday morning? Slept, faffed around online, had two lovely catchups with dear friends over Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast, and read most of a very good novel by Justin Cartwright about an old English banking family going belly up during the GFC. Of course that means there are still three and a bit more novels to read and write reviews of by the end of Wednesday, but I've been fitting that in around writing a book for the last year, so I'll probably be able to struggle along with it. Writing the book gave me all kinds of pleasures, some of them new and some of them fierce; it was an extraordinary experience. But I'm kind of ready for some nice familiar non-deadlined pleasures for a while.

Adders readers will know, if they saw last week's Adelaide Magazine, that the new tapas place on Semaphore Road (five or ten minutes' drive from my house) is the 'most genuine' in the city and fabulous with it. My friend R and I went for an early Friday night supper and had exactly the right number and combination of tapas for happiness and comfort, plus a glass of Sangria, also for happiness and comfort, and then went for a walk out to the end of the jetty, where we found a strange but harmless man in a beanie who wanted to explain to us why he was kicking dried seaweed back into the water, whence, presumably, it had come.

If you go at exactly the right time, you can listen to the waves shooshing underneath you and catch the little glints of light on the moving water out of the corner of your eye while you watch the sun set into the sea in gold and silver and deep pink and dark blue layers as you walk out to the end of the jetty, and then as you walk back you can watch all the gold and silver street lights and coloured signs and the lights in the windows of private houses coming on one by one against the indigo sky, along the shoreline and back up Semaphore Road. Hadn't done that for a very long time.

Happiness

Finished this week's copy with time to spare; lots of good ideas for the statue-of-Colonel-Light chapter of the Adelaide book that I'll be getting on with writing later this evening; new Kate Atkinson novel to read over dinner and again before the light goes out; positive loving conversations with five different people over the last 48 hours; spaghetti and pesto and a lovely big cold glass of Pike's Riesling for tea.

Oh, and the jasmine's out.

Freesias

This is the First Freesia of 2010.

Not only are freesias beautiful and strong -- they very rarely get chewed to bits by snails and bugs or battered by the weather, and they pop reliably up and flower every year without any help from me -- but they also smell divine. It's probably only a matter of time before we can blog smells as well, but in the meantime you'll have to imagine it.

June 24th, 2010

(Photo: AAP via the ABC website)

Southern Gothic

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally amazing Barry McGuire singing 'Eve of Destruction' at James Bradley's City of Tongues, with James' comment that 'the great ones never date', produced a kind of chemical reaction that sent me hightailing it to Google to find this:





This was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on my brand-new guitar (which I still have, stained with the blood of my fingers) and sing. I've got a particularly vivid memory of a houseboat holiday when I was sixteen, singing this song as part of the after-dinner family self-entertainment in an exaggerated Southern accent while my parents and sisters threw in a lot of Yee-ha and Lord have mercy in a kind of call-and-response approach, but my dad, half-cut and feeling no pain, and if I was sixteen he must still only have been, what, 42, got a bit more creative and started throwing in responses that acted as a kind of subtext to what is already an extremely veiled and secretive song, its drama residing in its silences. So our version, sung forty years ago in the middle of nowhere on a boat tied up to a willow on the bank a river that now belongs to history and myth, was full of things like this:

That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
(Ah hates them preacher men)
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh and by the way
(Here we go, this ain't good)
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
(Ah tole you never go up there)
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchee Bridge
(You in biiiig trouble)

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.

Everywhere you turn, there's another dishy man singing

One of the joys of a regular income is that one can afford to toddle along to various beautiful Adelaide venues whenever the mood takes one in order to see and hear quite remarkably lovely men doing what they do best. Last month it was the legendary Leonard and now it's these two. I've seen them both perform on stage before, David Hobson as a hilarious bumbly Nanki-Poo in The Mikado

(Hobson on right)

and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as a chilling Joseph de Rocher in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.



But this is a simple, straight-up evening of duets from two beautiful dudes with gorgeous voices.

From the blurb:

Two of Australia’s singing superstars, tenor David Hobson and baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes will be touring Australia in March 2009 for Andrew McKinnon Presentations. These will be the most romantic nights of the year with much loved arias and songs from Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter, even Australian folk songs!

Fresh from recording their first album together for ABC Classics (You’ll Never Walk Alone), these two dazzling singers are set to wow audiences with their beautiful arias and songs including operatic arias, folksongs, show tunes and, of course, the duet from The Pearl Fishers, voted the greatest opera moment of all time by ABC Classic FM listeners, as well as a few surprises thrown in. This exciting once in a lifetime concert features two of the hottest names around will be a highlight on any music lover’s concert schedule. Separately, these two stars have carved themselves indelibly into the echelons of Australian musical history. Together, and with Australia's leading accompanist Sharolyn Kimmorley, they will create a night of pure musical delight.

“What excites me most about this concert is the variety of repertoire. In the first half Teddy and I will be singing some of opera’s greatest moments and in the second half we bring things closer to home with some show tunes, folksongs and more contemporary works,” says David Hobson.

Like a box of chocolates

It's always been in the nature of the work I do that bags and parcels and packages of new books have been features of the landscape. The start of a school or university year; the publisher's rep knocking at the door of one's university office; the tidal waves of books for review that crashed into the tiny office of Australian Book Review on a daily basis in 1986-87 and no doubt still do in ever-increasing numbers; the fifty or a hundred books that have been submitted for some literary prize.

And, most recently, the postbags and boxes of them that get delivered by the same bemused Australia Post driver every other week or so since I began regular weekly reviewing for the Sydney Morning Herald, for I get almost twice as many as I end up reviewing, and there's a deep, wide and well-worn path from my house to the nearest Red Cross shop, where the ladies love me to bits, not least because I never take back the sturdy re-usable shopping bags into which I have packed the books, and it doesn't take much to imagine how useful to the staff of a second-hand store a steady supply of sturdy re-usable shopping bags might be.

So you'd think I'd have got even a little bit blasée about it, after all these years. But no. The door is knocked on, the cats take fright, I paddle up the passage and open the door and there's the Australia Post man clutching another bunch of bags of books. I feel my heartbeat accelerating. I drop whatever I'm doing and tear at the tough plastic; can't wait long enough to go get the scissors. And then I lift out the books, voluptuously, one by one.

Which is the routine I followed this morning, after hearing the Australia Post guy's by-now-recognisable rattly and bad-tempered *BAM BAM BAM* on the frame of the security screen door. And here's the third book I pulled out of the bag.