Why we feel so bad for France. Or why I do, anyway.

Up to now I haven't done much ranting here, but feeling frustrated with comments I have seen in social media and heard and hey, that's the privilige of having a blog isn't it? 
The latest horror stories from Paris and Beirut have left many of us with conflicted feelings.  There is, of course, the disgust and pity that any human feels at such horrendous, pointless violence directed at innocent people. But there is also the question of who really is to blame, and, something that worries many of us here in the UK - why has Paris eclipsed other atrocities like the ones in Beirut, Africa, Palestine? Many people are critical of those of us who have changed our profile pictures on facebook to the colours of the French flag (though I would like to point out that it was easy - whereas I couldn't work out how to change my picture to that of the Lebanese flag or any other) Anyone who knows me, knows that I am instinctively drawn to the underdog, (which is why I support the English team in rugby and soccer) but to be honest, this time, I can't help feeling that it would do us all good to lighten up and not beat ourselves and others up for feeling maybe a little more sympathy for the French than we should and this is why:

I for one, know what it's like to live through war. I know what it's like to lie under a table and listen to the whistling of the bombs as they hurtle downwards, not knowing if they will land on your own house or not. I know what it's like to feel the ground shake and heave and to be engulfed in relief that you are safe, this time, but also with the guilt of knowing that someone else is not. I know what it's like to listen to the media and have them belittle your situation; as in reports on the BBC "We have just seen a scud land in the ***** area of Riyadh....oh, no, apparently the scud was hit by a patriot missile whilst still in the air....oh no, apparently it was hit before it came anywhere near Riyadh...oh no, apparently there was no scud missile, this is just another night in the capital...." I know what it's like to watch armed soldiers walk the streets outside, jaws set, eyes glittering with madness. But let's face it, my war in the gulf only lasted ten days and I was only a child, not understanding what was going on in Liberia.
 I don't know what it's like to live a war like that, day in, day out for decades. I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to pack up my family and climb into a tiny, crowded boat and take to an unruly, unpredictable sea, not knowing what I will find on the other side, but knowing that anything must be better than the life I am living.
However, I can imagine what it is like to walk the streets of Paris. Though I haven't been to Paris itself, I have been to many other cities in France and Europe, my parents live in France and my parents-in-law spend a great deal of time there, one of my brothers-in-law is French. So I can imagine only too well, the people sitting in cafes, chatting, arguing, flirting, full of TGIF and wine and laughter. And that is why, in some ways, the bombing of Paris is more real to me. I rather suspect that to many in the Middle East, the bombing of Beirut is more real to them, than Paris. I doubt many people will read this and I am sure that many will be violently disagreeing with everything I'm saying, but I just wish that, with all the other things we have to be depressed about at the moment, criticism against those who have responded so strongly to the problems in Paris as opposed to other parts of the world, could be taken out of the equation. Whilst I think that, as humans, one of the most important things we can do is to try and imagine, to put ourselves in other people's shoes, to remember that, if it wasn't for the grace of luck, or chance, or fate, or God, or whatever you want to call it, any of us could be Jews, or Palestinians or Syrians or members of Isis etc, I think sometimes we need to remember that we are all human, after all.

Autumn

The last few weeks have been somewhat chaotic, due to computer failures, sewage failures and organisational failures – but hey, that's life, eh?

I did want to write something about Autumn, however, before it is blown away by the icy gusts of approaching Winter.

Continuing my thread of being surprised by the seasons, I have, yet again, been surprised by the English Autumn. Not that I didn't know it was coming, of course, but by the fact that a lot of my preconceived ideas of Autumn have proved not to be true. What I can't understand is that I DID live in England before, believe it or not – for nine whole years! Are the seasons in London really so different to those in Buckinghamshire? Or did I walk around blindfold when I was younger?

Of course, we have had all the mainstays of Autumn; stunning foliage, the trees lit by purple and orange and red light, pathways and roads strewn with shiny, fat conkers; hedges strung with blackberries, sloe berries, rosehips and hawthorn berries. The air is full of the smell of smoke and leaf rot, creosote and wet mud. But what I hadn't realised before was that this also seems to be a time for growth.

When the fields were reduced to scenes of devastation back in the summer, I had imagined that they would remain that way until Spring, so it has been a delight to see the furring of electric green grass and the sprouting of other crops appearing in the surrounding fields. I had also remembered flowers as being a strictly Spring and Summer event, but though it is now November, there are still many flowers to be seen, roses and primroses and what we used to call pansies-but-now-I-think-that's-not-politically-correct-or-something- even our water-lilies are blooming in the pond.

And I am sure that the days are getting shorter at a much faster rate than they lengthened, however much science might like to argue with me. By the time school finishes around three, the sky is already glooming.

When I take the dog for a walk in the morning, it is often pitch black. Luckily, there is a lane at the end of the village where we only get one car every twenty minutes, so in the mornings it is busy with people walking their dogs in the dark, dogs and people alike, stumbling along in the light of head-torches - though my Bonnie still wants me to throw balls for her and can run and catch them no problem. The lane leads up a hill to some farmhouses which look out over the fields and, at the moment, by the time I get up there, the sun is coming up and the air is turning rosy, rabbits fleeing, fluffy bottomed from the dog's snuffling noses. So far we have had only one frosty morning and though I HATE being cold, with every fibre of my being, even I couldn't help but be enchanted by the silvering grass in the dawn light, though I have decided that I need to find some shoes that don't leak if I am going to come out of this winter toes intact.

Today is the first anniversary of the day we left our house – the one we built (or at least, the one we paid someone else vast amounts of money to build for us) and lived in for ten years. I feel I should be writing about that, but to be honest I feel a bit sick at the thought, so I won't. But for anyone who might be reading this in Brisbane – miss you guys!!!!!!!!!

Why I have not been writing my blog lately...*

Well, partly, there has been this thing called LIFE.

I am now teaching violin again: in three schools and privately. I run a choir, have started morris dancing again, have just completed a major rewrite of one novel and started major rewrite of another. Am mother to three TEENAGERS, chauffeur to said teenagers, cook and cleaner for said teenagers, single mother (most of the time as Rupert seems to spend most of his working hours staying in hotels in Prague and Zurich at the moment) to said teenagers, sergeant major and counsellor to said teenagers. Added to that I have a very active dog who needs two hours walking a day and I have started on a personal mission to consume every last blackberry in Buckinghamshire. Oh, and there's the gym visits as well, to counteract the blackberries (and maybe the odd glass of red along the way).

But the other reason my blog writing has gone by the wayside is rather more complicated than that.

One of the reasons that I decided to start writing my blog again, in the middle of last year, was because I had heard that quite a few people were moving back to England from Australia. I thought that if there were other families out there considering the move, it might be interesting for them to read about how we were going about it.

I would write with complete honesty, I thought, chronicling our adventures, the ups and downs, the exciting parts, the boring parts, the parts where we made mistakes, where things didn't work quite as intended, the parts that went particularly well. Above all, I would recount it all with the utmost truth so that people would see what it was really LIKE.

And so I started to write, and almost immediately, I started to lie.

Because, of course, it's not that simple.

During those last few months in Australia, there were times when I looked ahead to moving to England and was filled with a wild excitement – but I knew that if I said anything like that, many of my Aussie friends who read my blog would be mortally offended. On the other hand, if I made too much of my real sadness about leaving Australia, my English friends and relatives started to email me and tell me not to come if I was dreading seeing them so much and besides, David Cameron was just as bad as Tony Abbott!

In those last few months there were things that happened in both my personal and professional life which made leaving the country at once more devastating and more of a relief. And I'm still not going to share them, partly because the same reasons stand as a year ago, partly because I just enjoy being mysterious....

And of course it wasn't JUST about me. The children had issues of their own which impacted the whole family and which, of course, I could not share either, but which made life rather more fraught than would have been nice.

Then we came to England and I felt even more conflicted. There were aspects of being in England that I loved – I fell in love with the countryside far more than I had ever expected, it was wonderful to be surrounded by family – even if they were all making plans to leave England asap (well, two of my sisters and Rupert's brother were, anyway). But I didn't want to write too joyfully about being away from Australia – and anyway I missed my friends there (still do!) desperately and still didn't want to offend anyone.

The whole process of packing up our lives and moving our family was physically exhausting – let alone emotionally. There were weeks when I cried so much I couldn't go out, or talk to anyone, weeks when I walked out into the countryside and felt my heart bursting with joy at the beauty around me.

At one point I made a deliberate attempt at being really honest – after it occurred to me that I was maybe painting a rather rosy picture of our experiences - I didn't want people to think that it was all going to be easy and then blame me if it wasn't! So I wrote a blog about the exasperations of dealing with uncommunicative councils and banks and school admissions etc, whilst living in a house we couldn't afford to heat and was promptly attacked on Facebook for being too self pitying.

So I would sit down at the computer, shivering in clothes made for an Australian winter, with tears running down my face because it was months since I'd had a proper coffee and chat with any friends and write a blog about the beauties of hawthorn blossom instead.

Of course, in the light of the refugee problems in Europe I can see that I do sound disgustingly, horrifically self pitying. We are incredibly lucky to be in a position where we can choose to live in another country just because we wanted to be closer to our family and think it is better for our children's prospects. (And doesn't include Tony Abbott, of course.) Incredibly lucky to step onto a plane and fly over and that's that.

However, knowing that you are lucky doesn't make you miss friends and dogs any the less, I'm afraid - and I'm not sure that it should, but that's maybe for another blog post altogether...

But what I have discovered is that writing, in a public forum, about your life is one way of becoming severely conflicted. Or at least, that's how it has been for me. I would read my own words about hawthorn blossom and wonder if that's how I really felt? It didn't help that I already felt as thought I didn't know who I was any more. Rupert still had his work, the kids had their schools, albeit different ones to what they were used to. But I didn't have any of my pupils, my string quartet, my orchestras, my friends. I couldn't try to get work for a while, because I felt my energies were needed at home. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to play the violin again, wasn't sure that I would get any work even if I wanted to.

I got to the point when I was afraid that I no longer knew how much my blog was reflecting my personality and how much my personality was reflecting my blog.....

….and now it is up to you to work out how honest this post is and how much of it is just me wanting to be mysterious again....

*assuming you have noticed - or care

Sand, Sea....and Rain

“Look, the sun's shining, let's go to the beach.”

“But there are thick black clouds, they're coming this way – it's pouring with rain!”

“Well it's cleared now, let's go to the beach while the sun's out....oh, it's raining again.”

“Look, there's some clear blue sky, let's go to the beach.”

“But it's just about to pour!”

“Oh sod it, let's just go to the beach!”

So we did, driving to Newgale, ten minutes away, through a landscape of undulating GREENESS. Pembrokeshire is not the Wales of jagged mountains, deep valleys and male voice choirs that some of us might identify with. It is a gentler scene, of wide GREEN pastures, speckled with black and white and red cows and the odd square farmhouse, threaded with roads so narrow that, in the unlikely event of meeting another car, one might have to reverse two miles, before being able to pass it. On either side of the roads, are high banks, feathery with ferns and the odd foxglove, or wild geranium, hedges grumbling along the top so that, for the most part, you can't see where you are going and it is a surprise to come out at the top of a cliff and see the great expanse of the sea in front of you, the road winding down to a long brown-gold beach.

We parked, picked our way over the broad band of painful pebbles to the sand and did the normal Bignall thing of walking for ages along the sand, laden with bags (crisps, apples, water, towel for dog, ball for dog, more balls for dog) for no apparent reason until we felt that we had arrived at “our spot”. Put down the bags and it poured with rain.

“Come on, let's go.”

"But we've only just got here!"

"Yes, but it's raining!"

"The rain's just stopping!” 

"But just look at those clouds heading this way!"

"There's a tiny bit of blue sky following on...."

"With more black sky behind it...."

"Oh sod, it let's just stay!"

Lydia was the only one brave enough to bring swimmers and she headed off into the sea while Sam mooched off to sit and brood on the rocks and the rest of us tried to distract Bonnie from stealing other dogs ball's. (as in tennis and football, before anyone gets too smart)

The sun even came out enough so that were able to strip down to thermals and jumpers and I pondered again on the fact that the weather must be the only thing that saves this corner of the world. Here in the last week of August, there was only a scattering of people and dogs, brave surfers, children in wetsuits, on this long stretch of beach. And yet, the sand was sandy, the view of the surrounding cliffs stunning, the water itself no colder than the Pacific ocean in Queensland's mid-winter.

When Lydia was satisfied that she had paid enough homage to the Gods of Pneumonia and Hypothermia, we left the beach to walk along the cliff tops. The footpath wound amongst the purple spread of heather, spotted every so often with gold wildflowers, with glimpses of GREEN fields beyond, shining brilliant in the beams of sunshine that poured from gaps in the lowering black clouds overhead. On our right was the vast sheet of creased, tinfoil sea, washed with silver and gold and black, and below us, jagged rocks plunged into foaming white spray. The air was full of the smell of heather and wet earth and salt and I was just thinking how incredibly lucky we were to be here at this time, witness to this beauty, when a certain sixteen year old, who shall remain nameless, turned to me, hunched into his raincoat, frowning against the wind and said: “Now you've got to admit that this is horrible, haven't you?”

As the mysterious “they” say, I guess you can't please everyone all the time.

Wales, Wales, Wales!

And so we continue in our exploration of this country of ours that I hardly know.
At the weekend, we drove the four and a half hours (according to google maps, six hours in real time, including wee and lunch breaks) to stay in Rupert's parents house in Wales. Waking up at home on the Saturday - to the first day of glorious sunshine we'd had in weeks, we began to have our doubts. We have actually been to the house in Wales before - September 1999, when for the entire week, waterfalls of rain were thrown from the sky by a vengeful god, turning the house grey, damp and cold, the country lanes to muddy quagmires so that it was impossible to take our seven month, teething baby anywhere. We were stuck in the house for seven days, Sam screaming the whole time, Rupert and I taking it in turns to sleep whenever we could. So when we woke up to see that our first hollyhock was flowering, the sky overhead a deep blue, it was with some trepidation that we loaded the car and set off.
The first half of the journey was idyllic, driving along winding, sun dappled lanes through golden Cotswold villages, full of roses and hollyhocks, village greens glowing emerald in the afternoon light. (Yes, it took us all morning to drag the kids out of bed and into the car. "Where's my deodorant?" "who's stolen my phone charger?" "Are you sure we won't be able to fit five big suitcases and a dog into the back of a Prius?" "Should I bring my bathers?")  To give them their due, the kids have now got to the age where they can play on iPods and sing and even talk to each other in the car without it turning into bloodshed and mayhem, so Rupert and I were able to talk and exclaim at the beautiful countryside we were passing through, like normal people.
Until we hit the Severn Bridge. The moment we passed onto the bridge the clouds rolled over and as soon as we hit Wales on the other side the rain started to pour down in solid sheets.
It has rained on and off ever since, showers and drizzle and pouring, thunderous rain, but, in between there have been wonderful moments of sunshine.
Of course the weather is probably what has saved this corner of Wales. People talk so much about the overcrowding of Britain, how the beaches here are nothing but people and pebbles. But Fishguard, one of the closest towns, turns out to be a disgustingly pretty little town, with a harbour lined with jaunty  houses painted in fresh pinks and blues and yellows, window boxes bursting with flowers, and all clustered along the foot of rearing green hills. We went when the tide was out and the boats were all aground, a forest of slanting masts and green-haired hulls, the seagulls circling overhead. The air was fresh and biting, full of the scent of salt and seaweed and freezing, freezing, cold, but there were still children playing in the water  - albeit clothed in wet suits. (though apparently there was a girl in a bikini as well, thank you Lydia.)
The next day we went to the Cathedral and Bishop's palace in St David's - a famous tourist attraction at the height of the tourist season and yes, there were a fair amount of people, but we had no trouble finding parking. Nor did we have to queue to get into the Palace itself and, but for the odd couple or family, we almost had the place to ourselves - and such is the sense of peace in this place, I think there could have been a crowd of hundreds and it wouldn't have made a difference. The ruins of the palace, grey-purple stone walls rising out of thick green turf, of Great Halls, of churches and chapels, dungeons and wine cellars, were serene and filled with an ancient calm. The palace dates from the 6th century, when it started life as a monastery, was ransacked innumerable times by the Normans and, of course, the reformation, the destruction of the Catholic church etc. But, though it has seen its fair share of bloody deaths, the gore of battle violence and spewing hatred, one can now escape, for a moment, all thoughts of 21st century religious intolerance, whilst walking its paths on a sunny summer's day.
I was going to write much more, but Lydia is reading over my shoulder and correcting my grammar, which I find REALLY irritating, and I have dinner to cook. So will sign off now, and hopefully get to talk heather and beaches tomorrow. 

The Three Seasons.

Now I realise that this makes me sound particularly cretinous, but the changing of the seasons, here in England, so far, have been a complete revelation to me.

Of course, that doesn't mean to say that I don't miss the Brisbane spring with its glorious jacaranda and poinciana blossom, the warm evenings filled with the scent of jasmine. And one of my favourite things in the world was sitting out in our sun room, watching the summer storms rolling, in all their black, thunderous, roiling violence, up the hill. But there weren't quite the stark differences in old Brisvegas - maybe not in Ealing and Uxbridge, my previous homes in England either – as there are here.

When we arrived in December, the fields were crusty and brown, the hedges grey and dry, the leafless branches of the trees like cracks against the eggshell sky. Walking in Ashridge forest we kicked our way through drifts of crunching brown leaves, or sank into soggy wet paths of freezing water. It was hard to imagine that the earth was still alive, that it could blossom and thrive again, through the deadness of winter.

But so it did – first with a peppermint flush over the fields and then, quite suddenly, the sides of all the roads were alight with drifts of daffodils and snowdrops, tulips, brilliant bursts of sunshine celandines. The hedgerows frothed with pink and white hawthorn blossom, foamed with lacy cow-parsley and of course the air was full of the sound of mewling lambs, lowing cows calling to their offspring, birds a twittering.

Then came the early summer, a fountaining of thick green leaves and thicker green grass and the roses – all the houses in the village dripping with white, pale pink, hot pink, coral pink, scarlet, crimson, purple blooms. Briar roses took the place of hawthorn blossom in the hedges, blowsy pink and white flowers, tiny blackberry blossoms starring the leaves beside them. Ashridge Forest exploded with a lushness of leaves and brilliant green grass, triffid foxgloves marching across every glade. The wheat in the fields grew two feet over night and turned from green to gold.

Now the roses in the village are thinning, the briar roses have gone, but in their place are fat red rose hips and the hedges gleam with blackberries, wild apples are swelling amongst the leaves.

I had a week off walking my poor little girl, who has just been spayed (Bonnie/Snoop, not Juliette or Lydia, don't worry) and I took her into the fields for the first time today. But it was something of a shock to climb over the stile and into the wheat fields to find a wasteland of scorched earth, scattered over with straw and sprinkled with sea gulls, the hawks circling above. But there was a beauty in the turned earth as well, even under the grey sky, an Armageddon bleakness.

Though I dread the return of cold days, I am already looking forward to Autumn, to see the leaves turn once more. And, courtesy of the Tax Office, we may be able to have a fire this year!!!

Six months?

So, it is now over six months since we left Australia and I was going to pontificate about our journey of discovery, how we were all adjusting to living without vegemite and Timtams etc (yes, I know you can get vegemite here, but why would you, eh? And rumours of Sainsbury's selling Timtams have yet to be proven) but I'm afraid I just can't be bothered.

Suffice to say that, though it has not, by any means, been all Pork Pies and Cider with Rosie, Brisbane itself often seems like a distant memory, though we still miss our friends and my pupils, more than I can say. And the Sitar. And the Ceylon Inn. And the Scheherazade. Not that you can't get a good curry here, of course, but emigrating has been an expensive business, plus I have not yet started work, so luxuries like takeaways are also a distant memory.

But who needs takeaways when living in this part of Buckinghamshire, eh? The longer I live here, the more I realise how true it is that, in England, man can live on bread, (or lentils in our case!) alone, IF one lives in the country. If we lived just twenty minutes away in certain parts of Milton Keynes, or back in Uxbridge or Ealing, where we used to live, we would NEED the takeaways and the cinema trips and the new clothes, especially in the crappy weather we have had up till now. But when it rains here, it doesn't seem to matter so much. The paint might be falling off the walls in the damp, but when there are fields and woods and rutted country lanes brimming with roses and honeysuckle to walk through, who cares?

I have had a friend staying for the last two weeks and we have explored the area even further, going for walks in Ashridge Forest – a magical landscape of green shadows and sun-mottled paths, winding 'neath the whispering trees; where herds of deer lift their heads to watch you (or run out in front of your car as the case may be) and the air is alive with the twittering of tiny birds and purple foxgloves give haven to the wiggling bottoms of bees. The air is full of the smell of green things and leaf mould and sunlight, and as you walk, your ears can't help but catch the echo of pounding hooves and jingling harness, or, from the corner of your eye, you may glimpse a silk skirt or the feathery tips of a quiver, disappearing around the spreading torso of an ancient oak.

Yesterday we took Bonnie/Snoop/Miley Cyrus for a walk through the gardens at Stowe. I had not been before, though they are a ten minute drive from our house, but I will be going there again as much as I can, I can tell you. Stowe is a massive, ridiculously ostentatious old house-now-school with 250 acres of grounds. We had intended to see the house as well as the gardens, but got so sidetracked by a tiny portion of the grounds that we never got that far. I won't bore on with details of the history, as Bill Bryson does it much better in At Home, but the gardens are a sheer delight of old follies – Greek temples set amongst cedar trees, ruined Roman bridges spanning lilied lakes, the towers and archways of crumbling Gothic churches rising atop the brow of a hill. One minute you are walking through a field of sheep and then you find yourself on the shores of a lake, communing with the swans; you walk further, into a manicured garden of irises and roses, and then suddenly you are walking down a path lit by wild orchids and clover. And with membership of National Trust, which I was given when I left Brisbane, this is all free – I think the gardens are free anyway, not sure. What price takeaways for all that eh? I could go on, but I have washing to hang, bathrooms to clean, floors to scrub, before an evening of gossip and Mendelssohn piano trios with more visitors from Brisvegas....