Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: traveller

higgle & piggle, hither & yon

Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up to pay I realized I had left my bank card lying on the desk at home. I could see it: scarlet, round-sided, shiny. The guy serving had made me the richest hot chocolate of my entire winter and didn’t look as though he wanted to call the police. We spread all my coins on the counter and sifted them. Australian cents with bandicoots on them, or are they bilbies? Or tiny wrinkled dugongs? A coin from the United Arab Emirates – on a long flight you pass through so many airports. There were three flattened rusted bottlecaps, valid in my own personal parallel universe, a shard of blue-painted china thrown out by the sea, and a badge which says Without Me You’re Just Aweso-

I turned over the docket and grabbed his pen. “Can you draw me a mudmap so I can find my way back here? These little tiny streets. I’m not used to them.” He did, with much head-scratching, and then we both looked at it: a long, wavering straight line with a dot on one end (the cafe) and a dot on the other (an intersection I would recognize). “This is a terrible map,” he said. I said, “It’s a great map. And it has your address on the back so I can ask someone. See you in two hours, max.” Probably his name is not Max but I daresay we understood each other.

April 2, 2013
structural violets

Group of academics at the breakfast table, they are five women and one man. “So it involves all of my areas of interest,” says one, “gendered language, and… I’ll be doing some structural violence…” She rolls her hand to indicate these topics are known and need not be enumerated. “Oh, interesting,” says her nearest neighbour. The group is companionable and everybody is talking at once. But as soon as the man’s voice is heard (“I did my thesis on that. ~My first thesis,”) everybody shuts up and when I look up they are five women listening in silence, clasping their cups to their bosoms in two cases, gazing at him as audience. In the tiny elevator I encounter one of the women and tell her what I saw. We ride up through the building in peels of laughter. She is clutching a muffin in a napkin, minutely nibbled. “Oh,” she gasps, “thank you, that’s really interesting! Oh, I’m going to reflect that back to the group.”

March 31, 2013
you sneak up, & I’ll sneak

Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books.

In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had a four-year-old boy and he and I fell in love. The grown-ups strolled on ahead down the wickety dunes, talking and idly watching the seagulls wheel overhead, and the two of us scampered and bolted, climbed under and hid. We found things in the sand which have no name. We found soft glass and seagrapes, rusted and tasting salty.

We burst back onto the roadside with its sparse traffic, three heads disappearing far out in front. In a rush of inspiration he turned to me: “I know! How about, you sneak up on your daddy, and I’ll sneak up on my daddy!”

I remember the feeling of protective love that washed me in that weird warm moment. I was so frightened of seeing the hope and ambition, the trickery, fade from his eyes and their expression subdue and dim. I was frightened he might suddenly realize: Ach no! You’re one of Them! But we did it. He sneaked up on his daddy. And I sneaked up on mine. Ambush!

March 30, 2013
street friendships

I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the tribe of people ~ who are poets, and deeply sensitive & reflective, and are peace-loving activists, and like to laugh and dance a lot, and care about the world and all who sail in her ~ find their home?

So this was not a moment too soon. I’d come out of the Underground and was tramping through the snow which has mounted so rapidly all day today. A woman beside me suddenly spoke. “What? Is this Christmas?” She indicated the white sky, the buried trees, the white-piling pavements. “Yes,” I said, “and I was just noticing, I have never seen these kind of tiny snowballs before – they’re not really flakes – they are like drops of water.” “Stimmt,” she said, musingly, gazing at the tiny white balls crunching underfoot. She is a yoga teacher and teaches art therapy. We reached the snowy markets and parted. There were all kinds of activities this weekend, she said, to celebrate Spring – such as it is – and would I like to have coffee in this gallery cafe her mate runs and go for a wander. Well, as it happens yes, I very much rather would. Thank you, snowboat universe.

March 19, 2013
through snow

a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

March 10, 2013
København

København magical, sunken in the deep, dark water like a turtle from the undersea land, and all of these strangers (to me) riding the waves on its back. The water stretches away into the dark, black and pulsing with lights. Candles in the windows, restaurants which opened in 1694, boats creaking in the wind which have sailed past the horizon, although the horizon keeps moving and we know it. It is our own. At the rim of the sea equidistant, seemingly, all the younger lands I’ve known in this dark and troubled lifetime, where everything I touch turns to silver like leaves. At the rim of the world darkness falls away, falls away but here it is so dark the stars crust the harbour sky like satellites. Creaking of the trees, creaking of the hawsers, creaking of the wind. *@,)

March 4, 2013
finally, in Europe

I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than lush Queensland.

How I got here was, hopped on the wrong train on platform 14 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was carried several miles into the region of Whereonearth as I slowly realized my mistake. Went pale and sweaty with panic, leapt off at Whereonearth and scampered back to Berlin in a cab. The blessed Deutsche Bahn which runs on time like oil on water was blessedly late; forty minutes late! hooray, got on the right train. Travelled all day through increasingly Protestant countryside with this dark soil like crumbled bread and then, so exciting, the whole entire train drove very slowly onto a huge ferry and we all got off and rode in silence across a featureless expanse of water, greeted by waving wind towers on the Nordic shore, sky white and hanging low, out into the fresh cold misty Danish countryside. The coins are so heavy and beautiful when I was given change I had to hold them in my hand and turn them for long moments. I found a restaurant with a wall of old glassed bookshelves where they flame crepes at the table. I found a park where the sweet gates came up to my knees. I found the harbour. The haven. København.

March 4, 2013