Woodford. What I forgot is that it is less of a festival, more of a place. Wherever you go and whomever you see, the valley grounds hold everyone up to the sky and in the natural amphitheatre right up back the venerable trees stand watch. It must be ten years since I was there, the farm is becoming a forest. I looked for the three trees I have planted and could not, as ever, recognize them though I know which creek they bed. People streamed past dressed as butterflies, faeries, warlocks, saggy pyjama case bears, acrobats. A girl in a hammock turned her head and smiled the slowest smile. Children who had just learned a skill in a workshop busked it. Last time I was on this land was for the Dreaming, a festival of indigenous cultures from around the world. That was in winter and only lasted a few seasons of massive fire pits attended by volunteers. My MCing friend said It’s a good day to come, the dust has settled yet it’s not actually raining. At the gate I was nervous, a reflex response from the old days when I always had to perform. This was my first festival as a punter. The ease! We saw in the year on a hillside opposite a booming stage spilling execrable local dub (“all the people are here & the people are grooving, we got the music and the music is soothing”) and then, because someone had decided they would book a Hogmanay theme, blithering Scottish dance music. I have inherited Scottish blood but musically, no Scottish soul. It struck me as comical: imagine the Scottish composers composing this music: they’d have been saying to themselves, Well, we’ve got the solid wall of screeching bagpipes. But it’s just not screechy enough. I know! Let’s add in a screechy fiddle or two! And wait, we can also have screeching penny whistles. It’ll be magic!
Quiet on the hillside soaking in the presence of the large, grave, lit trees I was glad when a girl came on and announced, “I’m here to calm you down.” She sang a lovely slow ballad and then everybody across the whole site lit candles and stood or sat together in a three minutes’ silence. I stared into my candle and cried, in silence. The wax burned down leaving little fiery blobs on my palm and I peeled them off, in silence. The flickering silence swept all down the hill and you could hear and more, feel it extended over everybody, not one person broke trust to bellow Happy New Year, everybody “set their intention” as the girl handing out tiny turreted birthday candles had advised and I could feel the piety, the wishes of a dozen thousand all resembling one another. Afterwards the band invited yet more people on stage and in front everybody danced. The set-up between the acts was filled with tap-dancers. Body percussionists led the crowd: “Peace and rhythms!” Oh, bless you, Greg Sheehan. A bare-chested boy tumbled down the hill turning somersault after somersault. A man climbed up past us, almost bent double from the gradient, dressed in a suit made of light bulbs. Five girls stripped off their clothes and danced naked under the new moon, repelling with raised hands the lit LED necklaces with which an infatuated boy wanted to garland them. The grass was filled with tiny creatures biting and climbing, we were barefoot like the moon. The t-shirt I coveted on a bamboo stall had a tiny figure in silhouette standing with a walking stock, head thrown back, among the giant trees that here surrounded us like immense quiet candles and its legend ran along the ground, legend like a snake, Respect Your Elders. Coming down from a noisy dawn in a noisy trail of irreverent pilgrims we rounded a corner and a really drunk man coming uphill said, beholding our two great heights (“Oh look! A giant!”), “Oh. Wow.” Then he folded us into a big drunken hug, a kind of Come here, you, and the three of us murmured into each other’s shoulders “Happy New Year. Yes, You too. Have a good one. Have a great one.”
Blog
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Woodfordian
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now I don’t want you to get too excited
All my life people have been telling me not to get too excited about things. They say, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” And the truth is the thing I have so vehemently looked forward to almost never resembles the picture I have built in my mind. It’s often disappointing. But it feels like I experience the same thing twice: in glorious living freshnicolour in my own imagination, and then the worldly version, frangible in a different way, that arises through weather, and temperament, coincidence and sheer human effort.
This afternoon we went out of the house and walked into the forest. There is ice on the ground. It’s all two colours: the listless copper of dead leaves and the warping green of moss. My favourite plant, each mound of it a tiny city. Tramping in silence we passed several small clumps of people with their dogs. My tramping companion who by now knows me rather well asked casually, “What would you have preferred this afternoon? Walk in the forest? Or a nice coffee shop.” “Oh!” I said, “I would love to go to a nice coffee shop.” These while plentiful in Berlin are thin on the ground in the outback towns. “What if I told you there was a coffee shop in the forest? Would you like to visit there, on our walk?” “A coffee shop? In the forest?” This has been a dream of mine for a long while, I always complain there is no coffee shop when we are out walking. I began to imagine what it would be like. “Maybe it’ll be like a little ski chalet, with an open fireplace where you can toast marshmallows on long sticks.” I was hopping with excitement. “Actual sticks, and then when the marshmallow’s toasted you dunk it in your hot chocolate. The hot chocolate comes in steins.” My partner gave me an old-fashioned look. I said, “Maybe there’ll be Swedish girls with white-blonde hair, wearing ugg boots and onesies. Maybe they serve Glühwein!” I grabbed his arm. “I’m so excited about the coffee shop I can hardly breathe.” “Do you want to see some old ruins, an old castle?” he said. “It would mean putting off the coffee shop a while longer. About a half an hour.” We cut across the main path and took a winding way uphill. As we rose up from road level we could see a couple of triangular German houses built under a clump of willows, with a little brook running past in front. “That’s where the hobbit-folk live,” I told him, “and in the warmer months they put up a maypole and dance around it by moonlight. Those fields are where they grow their magic beans.” “How can you tell?” “Oh,” I said, “you can see it just by the look of the houses.”
The castle is actually an eighth-century farmhouse built within an acre of fields, the whole pasturage surrounded by high stone walls on a hilltop, with round look-out posts on all its corners. The dry stone walls have worn away and remain in only three or four places, but a large sign on the path up the hill shows how it once would have been. It was so cold on the hilltop, with a view of the green countryside all around. The ground was slushy. The wind was icy. The path downhill was treacherous. Not far now to the coffee shop, I thought. “Maybe they’ll serve tankards of ale, warmed by a red hot poker.” “A poker?” We were speaking in English. “It’s kind of a stick made of metal. You heat up the poker in the fire til it’s glowing hot, and then you just plunge it into your mug, to heat the ale.” “Really?” “Yes, in medieval times. Because otherwise, it was so miserable, living in these drafty stone houses. No heating. Dressed in stinking animal furs.” He stopped, grabbing a tree branch to prevent himself careening down the hill. “Look: try not to get too excited about it. I doubt they serve tankards of ale. And they might not even be open.” Indeed the buildings looked medievally dingy and unlit. There is a very deep stream that rushes by in front, with an old earthern bridge trampled over an arch of stone; the mill wheel stands motionless and the water pours past fast and loud. A granary or old barn built on the other side displays its mullioned windows. We went round the side of the third building, which had a series of unlit lamps stationed in its tiny ground-level windows. It looked like an old wayside inn. The side door had thick panes of glass let into it and from inside a faint light was beckoning.
An overweight nun was taking coffee with her family. Our dog growled at their dog. A few growling Germans were seated outside in a kind of glass atrium that had been thrown out of the stone wall and clad, inside, with green plastic astroturf. They were smoking with gusto and beers. There was no one else about, but from the kitchen out the back a sound of clashing pans and shouting came through the green-painted door. It all seemed to have been redecorated with great enthusiasm in the mid-90s. We sat down at a long table made from fake wood and after a leisurely interval one of the men smoking out in the gardenhouse came and asked us, “Was darf’s sein?” He had filter coffee, teabag tea, and apple strudel, served with a distinctly canned custard. There was a real fire burning, in one of those glass-fronted cast iron stoves. I guess it should have been rather disappointing; I guess if I learned to rein in my imagination I would have only the stolid reality to endure, and never the wraithlike phantasy. On the other hand many’s the time the world in its unreachable immediacy has blown my own thought-pictures aside like so many dull orange leaves. I watched the dogs on our way home to the car park sniffing and prancing at each other; the little dozing houses; the burbling stream. I couldn’t work out if it was reasonable to expect myself to apply the control of imagination that I use, say, when someone’s describing a painful operation over dinner and I need to keep eating, to random coffee houses in the German woods. Castles collapse in forests, you know, as well as in the air. All I know is that that chalet with its steaming mugfuls of cocoa is mine and nothing short of Alzheimers can ever take it away from me.
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frauenpower
Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it loudly and clearly in front of her husband and all her grown children, but got mere glassy looks in exchange. “Cathoel is very industrious,” she noted, approvingly, later, to her son. Christmas morning I made the only grandchild thank her after she’d been brought a cup of cocoa when everyone else was drinking coffee. She decided she’d like some once her grandmother had already sat down, and without hesitation the grandmother left her own breakfast untouched and got up again.
I couldn’t bear to see how everybody sat down at the long, laden table and started saying, “Some jam would be nice,” and then when she had already returned from fetching it, “Oh, you know what? Let’s have some dark bread as well.” Tonight my partner cooked and I washed up. Afterwards we played cards, just him and his mum and his dad and me. The father got up and got beers. As I got up to go to the kettle I announced, “And I’ll take a cup of tea… does anybody else want a cup of tea?” With slight embarrassment my partner corrected my German: “No, Cathoel, in this case you say ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll take a cup of tea’ is for when you’re expecting a waitress to bring it to you.” “Yes,” I said, primly, “I was making a joke. Because I’ve noticed in this household people just sit there and say, I’ll take a cup of tea, and then your mother instantly gets up and goes into the kitchen.” His mother began to laugh. I’ve never seen her laugh so heartily. She slapped herself across the knees. “Thank you! Thank you!” Her cards spilled and she picked them up and began tucking them back into a handful, wiping away tears. We played on and I drank my tea and they drank their giant beers, and in the end it turned out the two men had trailed behind and the winners, bringing home exactly the same number of points each, were the two of us. “Sieg der Frauen!” I said, victory of the women. “Frauenpower,” she said, and we shook hands diagonally across the table.
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what Jesus did
Christmas edition of the local paper, West Germany. Four pages of articles welcoming the first couple of hundred asylum seekers into the area. Photos of Syrian and Pakistani families lugging their suitcases off the bus and of all the local dignitaries who turned out to smilingly shake their hands and welcome them; photos of the Christmas feast that was put on to welcome the new arrivals: a little Afghan boy says gleefully, “We are famous!” Editorial reminding everybody of the story of pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph searching for a shelter in which their baby, Jesus, could be born, and how this is no different to our communal obligation to offer shelter and a welcome to people currently seeking asylum. I’d like to send a copy to Canberra.
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dinner party from the sofa
I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not really all that strong,” his father said airily. The headache that has been a companion for days now, for almost a week, had sharpened so if I turned my head it brought spasms of nausea. A small disagreement over breakfast had unexpectedly ballooned into a stand-up shouting match in this house where I am a new guest, pain in my belly from the sorrow of it all day. So I succumbed. “Take the other half, too,” he said when the pain did not ebb. Twenty minutes later we were at this party on the other side of the little winding road where the family live scattered in houses like little farms and I started to feel most peculiar. You know that dizzy sweating pressure that comes with acute nausea. Anyway I sat it out and everyone was kind and generous, including the two people who’d yelled at me. What I wanted to say was that the feeling of lying under a soft scarlet blanket on the long sofa in the living room, with a paper Christmas star beaming down on me and a row of red candles in the casement unlit, was so cosy and comforting I felt a whole mess of worries and griefs slowly melt and slide away. The heating was not on in this other room and the chill in the air felt to me healthy and fresh, deeply deeply invigorating. The sounds of communion and chatter from next door were so soothing and a delight. Over the adult voices and faint music I could hear the joyous prinkling of the little girl who was drifting in her seabed of uterine privacy when we were last here, who is thoughtful and nachdenklich, reflective, and has hair the colour of threshed wheat. They brought me a heat pack for my neck, they saved me some dessert. When we came out after our hugs the stars were so clear and so high and the sky had opened itself to the night, the heavens upon us, the peaked white houses standing about like sleeping horses, the night seemed to me sacred and blessed and the row of long needling trees threading the sky along the winding road into the distance led, one could tell, into all good, mysterious things. The white dog made a flickering song of joy along the slick black road as we wound our way home, breathing visibly.
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the little lost letter-dove
One of the world’s sweetest men has been reading me snippets from the local paper. There is a photo of an activist dressed as Santa Claus holding up a sign towards unmoved Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint Bethlehem which says, “Jesus brought us one message: peace, freedom, and justice.” In the section International News comes a distressing story “Brieftaube Geklaut.” He tries to translate literally: someone has stolen a letter-dove. This letter-dove is worth 150,000 Euros. He is under the impression that ‘dove’ is pronounced in birds as it is in entering water. “Despite its value this male bird had still only the name AS-969.” I imagine perhaps we can all agree that ‘letter-dove’ is a far better name for such a male animal than the drear and faintly contaminated sounding ‘carrier pigeon.’
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a small town in West Germany
We came today to a small town in West Germany to stay with family, my out-laws, who are champion collectors. Outside the door stands the Christmas tree, an actual tree cut at the throat and still wrapped in its net bedding, because as mother-out-law promised, “We left it for you both to decorate the tree.” Two years ago we were here for the first time, my first time, and she broke the ice – that winter, actual literal ice – by leaving it to me to coordinate decorating of the tree. The old spun and woven and blown decorations came out in their plentiful boxes. These people live in a house that’s been theirs for generations, something hard for me to imagine, and they have filled it with stuff. I asked the son of the house, my beloved, what the name of their strange street meant. It is the last road before the fields and we saw a pheasant bent forward and clucking to himself crossing worriedly from one shorn side to the other, as though pursued by tax collectors. “Ah,” he said. “Well it means an old execution place of the Germanic peoples; in the forest.” “Gosh, well I am so glad I asked about that. What a bummer it would have been if I had Forgotten to Ask.”
A couple of hours into our visit after plates of breads and cheeses (three kinds of bread, two of cheese, and five kinds of preserved meat) I began to nudge him and wheedle with my toes until he finally realised, “Oh! Wir gehen gerne auf den Weihnachtsmarkt, we’d love to go onto the Christmas market, might just run in there on their second-last night, ok with you? Mamma can I take your car?”
The Weihnachtsmarkt for me is the entire point of our trip. It’s the reason I am in Germany. This is what my partner used to twist my arm into the winter again, when we could have been lying in our hammock in the sweet greasy green southern hemisphere, feasting on mangoes as they fell off the tree overhead. We drove in, on the wrong side of the road, round errant curves each festooned with the needle trees dark and sore which never lose their leaves despite the cold. Several times I asked, “Where are we going?” just to have him answer, patiently, humouring me, “I think we’re going onto the Weihnachtsmarkt.” We walked onto an old town so medievally beautiful that the first time I was brought here through the old arch I burst into tears. As we explored the golden stone lit by street lanterns I forgot the crowded family house where in manoeuvring my suitcase through the door I joggled an unevenly-built shelf and three different hair dryers and four hairbrushes fell to the floor. I forgot all family obligation. I forgot all junk everywhere. We were in the beauty, in the ages, in the kings. Once more. People, mainly couples, drifted dark as feathers down the narrow winding streets, arm in arm. Golden lights, bottle-end window fixtures, deep restful casements and star-bright lanterns. Windows lit with all kinds of crafts and art. Rounding a final corner we came into the burst of flame that is the yearly Christkindlmarkt, market of the little Christ child: people gathered, people standing, people laughing and drinking and stamping their feet. This year it’s not all that cold, I think I must have imagined that last bit. The stalls hung with lanterns wound all round the little cobbled streets where no cars go and people ordered salmon smoked over the flame, white forcemeat sausages and star-shaped bread rolls, gingerbread hearts, eggnog “mit Schuss” (with a shot – of rum, or amaretto); Glühwein. Everyone was jolly and, this not being Berlin, they couldn’t care how cool or uncool they seemed, they were just having a simply uproarious time on the close-packed stones, throwing their heads back, wearing their Santa hats. So much conversation, all in German, some few leafless trees bestowing their shadows underneath the venerable church.
“That one was built in 800 AD,” he said, as I lit into the dream and did not come back. Anyway where is there to come back to? only the eternal present, whereas old Germany presents a time immemorial, something I had forgotten and feel now coming alive along my veins as though fishing lights dipped into me and brought the life swimming to the surface, every Christmas I have had “in which” (I told him) “we ate salad” now fell away and the stars we cut out of quartered paper made sense, the blobs of snow we’d stickytaped on strings hanging from the ceiling in the tropics – cotton-wool snow – all of a sudden had a purpose, everything fell clear. A quintet of young men with brass in their mouths were playing and it was a song I recognised, “no,” I thought, still in my trance, “that is not a song, that is a hymn.” My partner asked, what is the difference, and I sang it to him then could not stop: O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him… it’s not so easy to write a melody that good. “I’m going to be singing that all the way home, I warn you, it is so beautiful like an old wine in the throat, so if you’ve any complaints let us hear them now and then you’ll hold your peace.” “No complaints at all,” he said, bending tenderly round me as though I had been a bell.
I noticed on every unfolding gold-lighted stall that the Germans love kitsch, they just love it! “Don’t you have kitsch in Australia?” “We have junk. Plenty of junk, and trash. But your trash has a kind of sentimentality to it that is all your own.” He laughed low in his throat. We jounced home slowly, gently, through the medieval town under the tall pink facade of the building that more resembles a cake, past the outer streets where cars travel on the cobblestones as rippingly as though they had, or so it sounds, each four flat tyres. I remembered the word and reefed it out, “Reifenpanne,” a flat tyre, and the resurrection of this long-ago-acquired German word touched me and blessed me, as though there were endless space in my mind, as though life stretched on eternally.
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Martin Place
How convenient for our struggling Government that a lone imbecile equipped with a gun has showed up in a Sydney cafe at last. It was beginning to seem no one would bother answering their call. Now perhaps we’ll all fall back into line & stop whining about petty distractions such as racial hatred and climate chaos.
What is the difference between this guy and all the other guys who have held hostages at bay during a siege while they demanded the negotiation of a team of experts? Why is this the one we call “terrorism”? Is it just because the guy falsely claims Moslim beliefs to justify his narcissistic violence? Is it because maybe his ancestors weren’t all Northern European? Is it just because he got himself a banner printed? If IS or Al Qaeda are so influential they can plant well-organised agents on “our” soil (one’s language inevitably waxes purple) wouldn’t they be able to do better than a solitary weapon and sole unbalanced operator? Speaking of which, is our Prime Minister actually visibly grinning at the moment?
I think in the ways we report and digest this event Australia’s media and media consumers can have the grace to want the safe & soon release of the people trapped in the Lindt cafe without rushing to offer ourselves and our hysteria to the service of disruptive cruelty.
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reggae punk
Night walk in the late afternoon. There is a large punk stationed outside the supermarket, asking for coins as people emerge from the light within; he is tall, broad, and mighty, wearing a lycra miniskirt and dark stockings, his hands pouched in the pockets of a worn khaki windbreaker. He has as they say in German few “hairs”, but they are scraped from all corners of his scalp into a wispy but somehow fierce high ponytail.
There are three Polish tourists who ask us where they can find some reggae. My partner remarks afterwards that the combination of “reggae” with the German, Reggaeveranstaltung, “sounds like the death of paradise”. There is a windblown American stationed at the autotellers who speaks slushy, gentle German and is homeless, or on the skids; his calling is to sweep open the doors of the bank’s glass vestibule with a big smile and a grave, deep, “Well, good evening.” He has his dog with him and a large coffee tin into which people sometimes cast coins. He’s always cheerful.
There is a demonstration outside the refugee centre which necessitates the whole street being blocked off by police. Around ninety or a hundred people stand about looking, mostly, like spectators who have wandered in on their way home, around a central tableau in which a huge white banner spread on the street is flecked with flowers and lined with flickering golden tealight candles. Two activists in baggy coats pull a blanket and then several cushions out of a large plastic bag and begin setting up a vantage point beside this shrine, on the kerb.
A photographer is prowling the sparse crowd, attentive but bored. The police all seem like giants in their militant uniforms. They are laughing and chatting. Loud music from a boombox strapped to the top of a van is interrupted by a speech in German-accented English. What enchants me is the two busloads of surplus police officers, waiting in their seats out of the cold, just in case. Their green and white striped minibuses stand parked diagonally across the entrance to the roadway, as an obstacle. At the other end of the barricaded demonstration area five police officers stop us when we would pass: they are jovial and unbudging: even an ID card showing you live in this very street will not get you through unless your apartment building happens to be in this end of the blockaded road. We shrug and turn away, threading our way through the inactive demonstrators to where the police buses parked in the roadway seem weirdly unchanged. There is something so strange about their attitude of waiting. We walk from tail to nose and then nose to tail of the two vehicles slowly, glancing up. Every seat is filled and the seated officers are absolutely motionless, as though underwater. Each has his head bowed and it takes me a moment to work out why this could be. Are they sleeping? Are they praying? Are they each lost in some meditative private world, like soldiers about to go over the top, asking forgiveness, giving thanks? They are on their phones. Each of them curved round the spell of his own little screen. They look monklike and freed from all anxiety.