personal political

elsewhere

I've been busy getting ready to leave home, leaving home, travelling and arriving. Now I'm in London and have a new blog describing life there. You can email me (email address can be found on this page) to get the URL.

[I'm not sure how often I'll be posting in this blog, if at all, over the next few months.]

en zed

I spent last week in New Zealand. (You'd never know this if you only read my blog. I'm constantly aware of the huge holes in this blog. I'm not sure what that's about.)

island pictures

Here are a few pictures of our holiday. (The formatting below the fold is probably a mess...) This is a rainbow on the Tasman peninsula. (The rainbows there really did look fatter. I wonder if it's something to do with the latitude?)  

island travels 1

Tasmania: it was good to be away from home and even though we had a television in most places we stayed, so that we kept in touch with the news in a rudimentary fashion, it was a relief to be away from the electronic media. It was good to be reading novels and out in the fresh (very fresh) air most of the day, talking and thinking. As soon as I returned to computer-use, various muscular-skeletal problems I've had recently, returned. I'd like to work out how to restrict computer use in my daily life - I'll have to practise some tough parenting on myself!

thoughts about postcards

Thoughts to self about new postcards series for this blog: what does it mean that a blog called Personal Political is now going to feature a series on domestic postcards?

child traveller

[I wrote this the other day in Hong Kong but didn't get the photos loaded in time to publish it.]

I'm sitting by the side of the ugliest pool in the world. Our day in Hong Kong got off to a slow start - I woke at 10.30am, after 12 hours sleep. Then we woke Olle at 11.30am. He'd been awake for two hours in the middle of the night (co-parent dealt with that). We have to check out later this afternoon so had only a few hours to sightsee. We caught a tram to a market which wasn't very interesting. Olle began to complain about shopping so we gave up on 'seeing Hong Kong' and came back here so he could swim.

He's put up with adult activities with great patience on this trip. It helps a lot that he's very adaptable - he'll eat just about anything, he enters into play with other, unknown, children very easily. He often goes to sleep on the couch at various of our friends' houses in Sydney when we've been to their place for dinner. Even at age seven we can carry him sleeping to the car and he doesn't wake up. This came in very handy in England where we might be eating at different houses three or four evenings in a row. Though we also achieved some stability - weirdly, we know six different households who now live within 10 minutes walk of each other in north London (they haven't all lived there all the time we've known them, but have coincidentally all moved to that area.) Three of these six households have children, so there was a regular supply of kids for Olle to play with. We stayed in this little 'village' for most of our time in London.

Olle has been to London before - at 10 months and again at three and a bit. It was strange being with him in places that I'd been with him before and he couldn't remember them at all - not even the grandparental home. He will remember  this visit, but I'm sure his memories will be very different from my memories. I asked him yesterday what the highlights of his trip were - he said "Legoland and Gabe". Gabe is a 10 year old boy who has a Playstation - star attraction!

One big new thing from this trip was the Beano. He was lent some copies by a nine year old girl and was hooked. The Beano doesn't appeal to me at all, but at least it's not offensive. He now has a treasured copy of the Beano 2006 Annual and even branched out to the Dandy at the airport newsagent.

This is my first ever Typepad photo album, featuring the edited highlights of Olle's holiday. (We did take pictures of people and places other than him, I can assure you - they'll come later.)

hong kong

Last night of our trip and I finally manage to get my laptop connected to the Internet! I'm in a hotel in Hong Kong. We flew overnight from London (across Siberia and Mongolia - even though it would make no difference which country we were flying above, it does excite me to see these places on our location map). Once settled into our room (it took a while), we had three hours sleep, then a swim in the hotel pool - Olle finds it exciting to be in any pool anywhere, oblivious to the fact that this pool had the world's ugliest surroudings - it was on the rooftop of a six-storey building, surrounded on every side by 20+ storey buildings, straight up and featureless and grimey. We're on Hong Kong Island this time, just for a change - last time we stayed in the YMCA on Kowloon: I'd recommend it. This was the view from our YMCA room, a month ago. Our current room looks onto the back of another building.

We caught the ferry across to Kowloon, walked around for a bit, came back and had one of the best dosas I've ever had (Maya in Cleveland Street in Sydney does the best dosas in the world - and I've eaten them in five different countries, including India) - I had a rava onion dosa and it was sensational.

Soon it will be time for me to try and get some sleep. We have the day here tomorrow then an overnight flight back to Sydney.

I realised tonight that it's 25 years exactly (it was late July, 1981) that I spent three days in Hong Kong. Half my lifetime ago - an amazing thought. I didn't enjoy it then, as I'd just been in China and HK was pale in comparison. I'm still not crazy about it, though it's fine for a stopover. Here's a pic of a nearby road at sunset today.

climate changed and other observations

It was 35C here today, a day we spent at Legoland (a theme park) with two kids and three adults. We spent what seemed like the large part of the day standing in queues in the hot sun, despite which we had a fab time.

In the entire 10 years I lived here, there were about two days of equivalent hotness, whereas most of the past three weeks have been what the tabloids would describe as "a scorcher". Climate change has already happenned.

Cars here don't seem to have caught onto that fact - they don't have air conditioning. I'm not complaining about that - I complain often about the prevalence of air con. I'm just noting it as a factoid. Cars here seem to have very good heating systems, but not even cool fans. (I'm making this sweeping statement based on co-parent's father's newish Rover, which we're using.) Coaches also don't appear to have air con - I've been in one and seen another one where the driver opened a window to let in a breeze. Not something which would happen in Australia, where interiors are chilled.

Other details noted by me: runners (ie persons who jog) don't wear fancy running gear. They often run in long sweatpants, even on hot days. And ordinary old t-shirts. I assume this is because they are used to mainly running in cold weather. Runners in Australia tend to wear lycra-ish shorts and sleeveless vests with sporty logos on them.

The same with cyclists. It's wonderful to see the range of people on bicycles here. I immediately noticed how many older women (my category now) were to be seen on bikes. I'm lucky if I see two other women a day in Sydney. And all the men there are in Tour de France lookalike gear. (I'm not.) Here people cycle in their ordinary clothes as it is an ordinary activity. I like that a lot.

Perhaps I would also notice this at a theme park in Australia (I don't often - actually never - go to theme parks there, so I don't know), but there were a lot of large people at Legoland. I begin in comparison to feel quite slender (which according to my BMI, I am not.) (Actually, I'm at the high end of a normal BMI. So not slender, but not large either.) It seems that the obesity epidemic has already happenned too.

Legoland is at Windsor, which prompted Olle to say that the name comes from "a windy day, so you fly a kite which soars".

london

We took Olle to a matinee of Mary Poppins in the West End yesterday. It's the sort of production I"d never have gone to just for myself but I found it enthralling.

Later we were in co-parents' parents' garden and he was dancing along to a rendition of Supercalifragilistic etc, a dance which involved him rolling across the grass - suddenly he sat up and began rubbing his shin and then called out "I've been stung" - sure enough he had a bee stinger in his skin. It was upsetting to see him so upset, crying with the pain for about 10 minutes. I was stung several times by bees and wasps in my childhood and remember it as a horrible sensation.

Today I went with a friend to the Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate Modern. The pictures 'in the flesh' are much more vivid than any reproduction can convey. My friend had to rush off to collect her sons from school so I was alone for the first time in three weeks. I'd been thinking that in my decade living in London I'd never been inside St Paul's Cathedral, although I made it onto the steps once. So I decided to walk there across the Millenium footbridge. I arrived at the door to St Paul's at five to four, just as they were saying that visiting time was over for the day. Oh well, I seem to be fated not to see inside.

I'm aware that I'm here at an unrepresentative time of year - it's warm and light - and that I'm not having to work and deal with the humdrum of everyday life, which in London can be grim. Even so, I'm loving London and loving being here.

the cracks/the seaside

The footpaths - or what the British call the pavements - in Australia are usually made of slabs of concrete, set into large squares, or not even squares, but long grey slabs. Sometimes they're made of a seamless stream of springy black tarmac. There are very few dividing cracks.

But in London and Dublin, the pavements are made of small stones. And then there are cobblestones, which are more common than you might expect.

From the point of view of a seven year old Australian boy, there are a lot of cracks. And every walk becomes a dance of avoidance. Cobblestones require tiptoes and take a long time to traverse.

I wonder if seven year old Londoners do this? I haven't seen anyone else dancing down the streets. Maybe the 'not stepping on the cracks' phase is out of their system by a much younger age.

We went to the seaside just south of Dublin. It was a grey morning, the beach was largely pebbles though with some sand at the shoreline, the water was so cold that even Olle only went in up to his knees. A large party of Irish children, aged around 10-12, were on the beach, some in costumes, the rest in skimpy summer clothing. Only about four of them went into the water. The others were very busy with buckets and spades, making sandcastles and other sand structures. This is not something you'd see 11 year old Australian children do. I've been to two end-of-year beach picnics with Olle's school and seen how it pans out. Buckets and spades are for little children. Older ones would be in body surfing or larking about with friends.

Part of me thinks 'oh those poor kids, this is all they know of the beach'. (And if my grandmother and great grandparents and great great grandparents had not left Ireland, this could have been my life.) The other part of me notices how rarity imbues any acitivity with excitement for children. For adults too.