Notelet

Nature notelet 

Some skylarks are ascending while singing lustily. Great tits reply loudly from the hedgerow. Soon summer visitors will arrive to enrich our countryside. Fewer blackbirds strut their bravado than in recent years. One was attacked by the local sparrow hawk, leaving a sudden puff of feathers in mid afternoon sun and a chastened owner to hide in the oilseed crop. Ants, small solitary bees and a queen wasp prospecting for a nest site are lured from their winter hideaways. Small nettles are showing and the goosegrass is preparing for a growth spurt to swamp competitors for the strengthening daylight. Trees and bushes unfurl soft leaf and flower buds, an invitation to grubs which in turn will provide protein for new songbird chicks;

 Pinvin is still pinvinning lyrically away, thank goodness, I am glad I thought of checking on them, and not only because of the great tits and the hanging semicolon. I suppose Pinvin has its own darknesses and griefs and flaring absurdities but whoever puts together the parish newsletter is sensible enough to leave them out entirely. Presumably the readers of Pinpoint know all about all of that without needing to be told. This month there is a recipe for Fudge Brownies which is not something I have ever cooked or even considered cooking. I don't think I will give them a try.

On fb last week M said she'd discovered her phone had been silently counting her steps and recording the data in its Health app, so I looked at my phone and it had been doing the same thing; most weekdays for the last month it's been recording somewhere between twelve and twenty thousand steps daily, ten to fifteen flights of stairs and 20km riding. What the phone doesn't know, goddamn its beady little eyes, is I that I also do yoga and try to swim 2km laps two mornings a week. I don't do any of it well or with an appropriate degree of enthusiasm. It does serve to get me out of the house. I'm not going to the gym this year. On Wednesday evening I drank a glass of wine and showed V the liquid way in which the flesh ripples on my upper arm when I raise my hand and wave it. I told her I had videoed this spectacle and given careful consideration to posting the video on my blog but in the end I decided against it. See, I have limits, I told her. No you don't she said. But she's wrong about that. I do.

On Saturday afternoon I went to return my parents' car to their home in Ballarat and as I set off I thought, grow the fuck up and don't put on Google Maps navigation, you've driven to Ballarat many thousands of times and you can find the way there without wasting data. So I took the wrong lane where the road divides just by the Essendon shopping centre which a plane crashed on top of last year and then I decided rather than be bored and annoyed by Ballarat Road I would just drive on past the airport and face the consequences afterwards. So I took myself to the Aircraft Viewing Area

The Aircraft Viewing Area is a site of power and significance almost unmatched in Melbourne's psychic landscape. Normally when I go there it is a gift to myself en route to craft camp or on the way home. It's not just the planes (although they are pretty fucking great) it is the amazing atmosphere of love and vulnerability and peaceful unity among the pilgrims gathered there, in our cars, with our phones, some of us eating kebabs or ice creams, some of us just staring at the sky. The car beside mine was a station wagon with the tailgate up. In the back, on a mattress they had bent and propped against the back of the rear passenger seats, lay two women clasped in each others' arms. In front of my car stood a man and a woman in white djellabas and purple turbans. They photographed themselves smiling with joy as jets landed in the background. Sometimes I have tried to persuade other people to go with me to the Aircraft Viewing Area but never yet have I been successful in this endeavour. It doesn't matter. I have enough love in my own heart and soul to saturate the entire Aircraft Viewing Area with brightness and beauty all by myself.

After I hung around there for a bit I drove on. I was tempted to take the Lancefield turnoff. The light was so good and the air so mild, and I might have found out at last what it's like to go to Lancefield without having anything with you that needs to be sewn. I have not sewed anything at all since last craft camp, you probably haven't sewn anything either in that space of time, but for me it is strange, although admittedly nothing much is normal these days. I actually haven't even worn the garments I did finish.  Having written that sentence I got out of bed and took out of a drawer a silk slip I made in Lancefield and now I'm wearing that instead of my pyjamas, as if I am Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof lol. Well, back to this picaresque narrative. I didn't think of it at the time but there is a very appealing-looking guest house across the street from Sewjourn which I always wonder about when I walk past. But instead of turning right I turned left and took the Diggers Rest-Comadai Road, which winds through eucalypt forests and olive groves and past burned-out pubs and houses painted with the Australian flag, and into which you just have to put your faith and trust for what feels like a very long time, until it eventually deposits you on a high bright plain just north of Bacchus Marsh. From there it's just the freeway.

All my life I've liked the blue roadside signs that tell you what services are available in the towns at the next turnoff. There used to be more with petrol bowsers on them but now it's usually just the crossed knife and fork and the single bed with a rounded headboard. I remember being small and sleepy in the back seat in the dark and seeing these signs flash up for a moment in the headlights, and imagining the places we were not going to, how they were patiently waiting in the unknown darkness for tired travellers who decided to go no further that night, strange, but so comfortable, so quiet and snug, with crossed knives and forks laid at each place around the polished wooden table in the corner by the gently crackling fire, and upstairs the white bed heaped high with cocooning eiderdowns, in a warm dark blue room which lamplight has made soft and warm and dim. I was very hungry as I drove, having hung around too long at the Aircraft Viewing Area to have enough time to stop somewhere and get something to eat. That crossed knife and fork made me think about food and my stomach demanded the attention I needed to give to the road, so I turned up the music and drank all the water I had with me.



I got into Ballarat with twenty minutes in which to drop off the car and get back to the station for the 7:13 train to Melbourne. At the last set of lights I saw the occupants of the vehicle by me looking down at the wheels or perhaps at the door or side panelling of my car and then they were speaking to me. I turned down the stereo, opened the window, took off my sunglasses and said What's up? All four of them seemed at first to be speaking at once then the driver leaned across and said I wouldn't mind going down on you, and they laughed, and I said Oh my god that's so disgusting, and the lights changed and I turned and then I arrived, opened the gate, drove in, went into the house, used the toilet, opened the garage and parked the car, locked everything and called a cab. The taxi came very quickly and I was still shaking. I felt grateful to the driver for being a bored normal person. He said You should easily get there, meaning get to the station on time, and I did arrive on the platform just as the train rolled in.

On the train I watched as fields slid by, animal and trees and houses in them, all of it growing darker as the sky got brighter, then that got darker too. The carriage was almost empty. At Bacchus Marsh three girls got on. Although they were exponents of the style which involves making yourself look as much like Kim Kardashian as you possibly can, and I dislike this aesthetically, I immediately liked all three of them very much because they were so clearly enjoying themselves and didn't give a fuck about anything. The one with the longest ponytail and darkest spray tan reminded me of myself at that age. She was drinking from a can of cider and also applying her false eyelashes. I have never seen this done before and I watched carefully. I don't think I will ever need to put false eyelashes onto myself, although it didn't seem all that difficult, not really. When she was done she put the little tube of glue back in her bag and sat forward to talk to the others. Her left breast fell out of her singlet top, or rather the top sort of drifted off; it was a combination of a not very well fitting garment and breasts that are not big enough to have any gravitas or dignity of their own, something I also recognised from that age and every age since then.  More friends got on at Caroline Springs and I got up and moved away so they could have the seats on both sides of the carriage.

When I got off the train I felt very old but also quite happy to be old, or at least happy to not be going to the places that I suspected all the other passengers were going, and not going there in high-heeled shoes and tight white trousers.  The sense of Saturday Night alienation flooded into me as I walked on the station concourse towards Spencer St. And then as soon as I got onto the 96 tram it vanished as quickly as it had come; here I was; back in the city, back to myself, my silence, my quiet unobserved transit, my life.