History Day

Sydney, Australia

       Having decided to write up my Australian family history as a blog, as if written by various ancestors at different times, in the language of the day – so great⁴ grandmother Mary Pitt writing in 1800 would have written in the style of Jane Austen for instance, and her grandson in the mid-1800s in the style of Charles Dickens, and so on, which I thought would be great fun to do, which it was, and to some extent still is – I’ve hit a problem.

       It’s one thing knowing your ancestress emigrated to New South Wales in 1801 with her four children and was granted land, thanks to a family connection with Lord Nelson, on the Hawkesbury River. But history is all about detail, and I don’t have the faintest idea what day to day life would have been like for a middle-class but penniless widow in her fifties arriving here in the very earliest days of settlement, at a time when they were still making things up as they went along.

       So when I heard there was a one-day history festival happening at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre in Sydney I went along with great expectations.

       I’ve attended a few writers’ festivals in my time thanks to my job at The Literary Consultancy back in England, but none was quite so fascinating as this was, for unexpected reasons.

       The first session was about ‘The uses and abuses of Australian history’. ‘The dominant history of Australia is colonial, white and male’, said the blurb, ‘so where do Aboriginal people and women fit into the picture?’

       Now I know the teaching of history is a thorny topic – especially in England, because there’s so much of it and you can’t possibly cover it all, so what do you leave out? My history rather oddly finished just before WW2 – and I also know that people of my generation here were largely taught British history. These days the focus seems to be on Australian history, but since the current government believes Australians should be celebrating the achievements of the last two hundred years, rather than punishing themselves for the nastier things they did to the people who’d lived here for tens of thousands of years before that, they (the government) are pumping money into a curriculum that focuses on Australia’s involvement in world wars. It’s as if, said the speaker Henry Reynolds – historian, writer, known to everyone here but again, not to me – Australian History began on Anzac Day, 25 April 1915.

       It seems to me that no matter what one’s views are on the ‘aboriginal problem’ – which of course is my problem too now I’m an Australian citizen (you can’t have the privileges without the responsibilities) – at the very least children should be taught what happened two hundred years ago when Governor Phillip and his band of merry convicts set foot in Sydney Cove in 1788 and claimed ownership of the land from under the noses of its current inhabitants. At the risk of sounding naïve I don’t see why teaching facts should be deemed politically correct, or left-wing, or party political in any way. But I got the feeling that that is exactly how it’s regarded here.

       I’m not about to delve into aboriginal affairs, about which I know very little; but as a periodic traveller to this country over the years I’ve noticed the changes in local concerns. I was here in 2000 when thousands of people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge to protest at the treatment of indigenous Australians, and in particular at the then (and now) Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to say ‘Sorry’ to them for the terrible things the whites have done to them over the centuries – which they have done, and horribly recently too. The sight of all those people (on television) was immensely moving, but I did wonder at the same time what it really meant. I also wondered if saying ‘Sorry’ was anything other than tokenistic, and largely meaningless. I thought much the same the other day when the various chairs began the sessions by saying ‘I acknowledge the traditional owners of this land’. I have no right to say it but I found it a bit cloying, not to say patronising. I wondered what the aboriginal writers present (on the panel, not among the audience) made of it.

       But of course I realise that like everything else, the more you learn about something the more complicated it becomes.

An aboriginal joke – courtesy of Ruby Langford Ginibi, one of the writers at the festival: ‘The definition of an aboriginal nuclear family: two parents, two kids, and an anthropologist.’

Sydney closed

Today, Friday September 7^th, is a public holiday, in Sydney anyway, because of the APEC conference taking place this weekend.

            The APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit features world leaders from all the Asian-Pacific countries, which covers everywhere from America, Canada, New Zealand, China, Russia (a surprise that one, I had to look it up on the map), Indonesia, Japan, South America and several others I can’t remember – more or less everyone that is except Europe, India and the Middle East.

            The security is unprecedented and seems to be causing a mixture of annoyance and amusement to Sydneyites. The streets in the CBD (Central Business District) are barricaded and many of them are closed to traffic. I went into town the other day to take a look and it was empty of almost everything and everyone but a whole lot of police standing around looking faintly bored.  President Bush arrived on Tuesday night with a 10-mile motorcade (maybe an exaggeration, but not much), and this morning I heard him say on the radio how pleased he was to be in Sydney for the OPEC (sic) conference.

            The most interesting event of the week so far has been a bunch of TV comics called ‘The Chaser’s War on Everything’ (a kind of five- or six-man Aussie version of our Mark Thomas) managing to drive through two security check-points in a hired car bearing Canadian flags. The police were only alerted when a Bin Laden look-alike stepped from the car wearing sandals and a (fake) beard. The perpetrators were arrested, charged and released on bail (pending further action) and a lot of fun was had by all except the chief of police, who did not think it was funny.

            I did think it was all a bit much for my adopted country to allow such an event (the summit I mean, not the stunt) to interfere with people’s everyday lives to such an extent – closing all the streets, diverting public transport, declaring all the roads within a fifty or so mile radius ‘clearways’, insisting everyone take a day off work – whatever next? The Opera House has been closed all week! And what of all those poor traders, café-owners and so on, whose businesses have suffered so badly many of them have been forced to close for the week. Will they be compensated?  And as for the street closures – such a thing would never happen in London!  (Or would it? Come to think of it I can’t remember an event involving so many globally important people taking place in London, not ever. And true to say London is that much bigger so the odd road closure would probably go pretty much unnoticed.)

            The saddest part is the weather. It’s miserable. Cold and wet. Just like London.

  

Macquarie Street barricade

A common language?

 

Generally speaking I think Aussies and Brits understand each other pretty well (unlike Americans, from whom we are definitely divided by a common language); generally speaking we do ‘speak the same language’, which means we use similar words to mean similar things, and through the years we (that’s us Brits) have absorbed quite a few Aussie expressions into our language – such as ‘whinge’, ‘no worries’, ‘a big ask’, not to mention (because it is such a horrible word, and to be honest I’m not totally sure it is an Aussie word but I certainly heard it here first, and it sounds Aussie, in meaning at least) ‘wuss’; and the other day I heard someone on the radio in England using the word ‘shonky’ – and for all I know Aussies have absorbed some expressions from us, but I wouldn’t necessarily know what they were. (‘Gobsmacked’ I think is one.) Nonetheless as a new Aussie citizen I have found myself coming up against the odd language difficulty.

       When I first arrived in Australia in my previous incarnation 39 years ago I presented to my cousin (a different one), with whom I was staying, by way of a thank-you, a bunch of gladioli, at the sight of which she burst out laughing. I hadn’t realised of course that as long ago as 1968 Dame Edna (aka Barry Humphries) as part of his/her stage act habitually showered the audience with ‘gladdies’, thereby transforming them, in Australia at least, into a laughing stock.

      The other day I was discussing the business of internet access with Libby and her (Australian) boyfriend. In London recently I was introduced for the first time to wireless internet, otherwise known as ‘wi-fi’ (I’m not sure what the ‘fi’ stands for – ‘fidelity’??). I discovered, through a fair amount of trial and error, that by acquiring a wireless adaptor and simply plugging it into my laptop I could log onto the internet using a neighbour’s unencrypted wi-fi signal. This was wonderful, because I use the internet a lot.

      I tried doing the same here but it didn’t work. So I told Libby I needed to find a computer shop so I could buy a wireless router, at which point both she and her friend burst out laughing.

      Now I do know this: the word ‘root’ in Australia means the same as ‘rut’ (and is quite probably a corruption of it, or vice versa), and is widely used to mean as much. So for example, an Aussie joke that is meaningless anywhere else is the definition of a one-night stand as a ‘wombat’, who ‘eats roots and leaves’. You get the picture?

      So a wireless router, a perfectly harmless expression in England, is known here as a ‘rowter’, pronounced in the American way with an ‘ow’ in the middle. When I pointed out to my friends here that that made no sense, since the word router has its roots (excuse the pun) in the word ‘route’ to mean a ‘way’, and Aussies don’t talk about the ‘rowt’ from Sydney to Melbourne for instance, as Americans would, I was told that is how it is pronounced the world over (except England), so what’s my problem?

      My problem was that I could no more go into a shop here and ask for a ‘wireless rowter’ than I could row across the Atlantic. Perhaps it’s because ever since I became an Australian citizen I perversely feel myself to be more British than I did before. So I found myself having to go into the shop and ask for an item I was unable to actually mention, which meant I was reduced to asking for ‘something that will enable me to pick up a wireless signal’, which in turn led me down several false and confusing alleys until I finally swallowed hard and asked to see wireless routers (English pronunciation), at which the young salesman had the decency not to laugh out loud.

      It may be a small thing, but I don’t think Aussies realise how American they have become. Before you know it they’ll be talking about ‘pants’ rather than trousers and ‘lines’ instead of queues. (Come to think of it they already do.)

      But rather more importantly, how far am I prepared to go, now I am a full-blooded Australian citizen, to prove I am a true-blue, dinky-die Aussie (and a Sheila to boot)? (And I see my computer has automatically put a capital ‘S’ on the front of that word, so that’s something else to contend with.)

 

The joys of flying

I don’t know why anyone chooses to fly if they can avoid it. There’s the hassle of getting to the airport in the first place, long queues at the check-in desks and even longer ones to get through security. They’ve introduced new regulations since I last flew to Oz six months ago, not all of which seem to make a lot of sense. In addition to the liquids/gels/ creams-and-lotions-in-a-plastic-bag rule, there’s now the one-bag-only-on-board rule, which means packing your handbag inside your take-on-board bag at least as far as the security gate, when it can come out of the take-on-board bag for the duration, and once you’re through to duty-free you can then weight yourself down with limitless bags of booze, perfume, electronics, cosmetics, clothes and whatever else have you. So it can’t be for reasons for space. Still, I was chastened by the affable young Japanese American guy who sat next to me while we put our shoes back on and remarked how much safer he felt thanks to having to remove his shoes for inspection.

      A cab driver who does a lot of airport pickups was telling me the other day that Heathrow has become such an unpopular airport for business travellers they rarely go near it any more (they go to Europe instead). I said considering the amount of traffic it has to cope with coming in to the airport is remarkably easy and quick but going out is another thing entirely. And as I was sitting reading The Times in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to be called the lead story was about the general awfulness of all the London airports and how much worse they are all going to become, Heathrow especially, due to planned staff cuts (in all areas other than security) which will mean even longer delays, God help us, and you’re already expected to arrive 3 hours before your flight if you are flying intercontinental. Forget carbon footprints. Soon flying will simply become so impossible nobody in their right minds will want to do it.

     I was thinking I was sitting on the plane watching the little toy plane zigzagging across the map of the world on the on-board screen, following our route – across Europe, zigzag right at Russia and straight on over Saudi Arabia to India (stopping at Dubai), zigzag right again at Malaysia and on and on in a more or less straight line across northwest Australia past Alice Springs and Ayres Rock (sic) to Sydney – how absurd it is to be travelling halfway across the world and not to be stopping off at some of these places. In all the journeys I’ve made to Australia through the years I never have stopped off anywhere. I’ve usually been travelling on my own and I suppose I’ve thought it isn’t worth the hassle of offloading your suitcase, getting it through customs, loading it into a cab and travelling all the way into town unless you can spend several days there, and I didn’t know that I wanted to do that on my own; not to mention getting back to the airport, going through check-in again, then security (again), and so on. But it does seem a shame.

      Anyway, here I am in Oz again, thanks to Emirates (good service but awful food), safely landed more or less on time and met by an old and very dear friend at the airport and an hour later sitting at an outside café drinking coffee looking over the Pacific Ocean in the sunshine. Could be worse, hey?

 

GOODBYE (AGAIN)

 

So here we are, off again.

            21 hours in the air, care of Emirates. I’ve never flown Emirates before. People are often asking me which airline I prefer; that seems a very sophisticated question – as far as I am concerned it’s the one that gets me there intact, and if it leaves on time and arrives on time that’s a bonus. The food and facilities seem much the same. On Qantas you get jokes. On Singapore you get sexy ladies in figure-hugging uniforms, if that’s what turns you on.

            The prospect of the journey – not to mention security regulations, every tiny pot of cream or liquid in a plastic bag, and not just any plastic bag – is such a nightmare it’s difficult to get excited about going. But then come to think of it I’m not, not really. Excited. I’m entering Australia this time, for the first time, as an Australian citizen, which feels weird and faintly fraudulent. I don’t really know why I’m going. It’s the same every time – I don’t like leaving places. I don’t like leaving people. I don’t want to go. I do want to go. Oh dammit, I’m going.

            The Guardian did a piece about my travels a few weeks back. http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,2140019,00.html They called me a ‘nomad’ and planted a backpack on the sofa next to me (provided by the photographer – I’ve never used a backpack in my life). The fact is I’ve stayed put here for the last 3 months, which is not what you’d call nomadic.

            No matter what you leave out of the suitcase there’s never enough room. And only one item of hand luggage, which includes a handbag. Can’t understand the regulations, they make no sense.

            I feel quite depressed.

            Okay, here goes. Goodbye England, again. See you in December.

Happy 100th birthday

Today would have been my mother’s 100^th birthday, if she was still alive

            My mother was quite a star of screen and stage in the 1930s. She gave herself – or maybe some studio did – the stage name of Nancy O’Neil, which I suppose was a tad catchier than her real name of Nancy Smith. I didn’t know she’d been a star until I accidentally came upon a scrapbook of her press cuttings caringly put together by her younger sister Lorraine.

            I was amazed to see pictures of a pretty, sweet young woman with sparkling eyes and a lovely smile. She was obviously quite something in those days; she did all the celebrity stuff (other than acting of course) like making ‘star’ appearances at carnivals and balls. She appeared altogether in around twenty films and half a dozen West End plays, always playing the lead. For a decade she never stopped working. The reviwers loved her. They made a big thing of her being an Australian, which is ironic really, considering the first thing she did on arriving in England was to get rid of her Australian accent (via RADA), and the second thing she did was to hardly set foot in her native country again throughout her life.

            It’s a sad truth that our memories of our parents are of old people. My daughter could not believe the ‘rather grumpy’ old woman she knew was ever a ‘sweet young thing’. I never knew mum in her star days, so the person looking out from those old newspaper cuttings is unfamiliar to me too.

            She was not a very happy mother. I think she only had her children (my brother and me) because it was what was done in those days. From the word go we were looked after by nannies and au pairs, and we were sent off to boarding school at 7 and 8 years old respectively. She had a mantra, which she repeated often, that ‘they couldn’t wait to get rid of us’. Today that sounds pretty cruel but again, it was the sort of thing they said (and to some extent thought) in those unchildcentric days.

            Needless to say we had a spiky relationship, especially when she tried to tell me how to bring up my children. I always felt mum was a far nicer, gentler and more compassionate person than she allowed herself to be; or perhaps that prevailing fashion allowed her to be. Prevailing fashion said you suffered your children and the very worst thing you could ever do was spoil them; that’s ‘spoil’ as in praise, make much of, enjoy, and listen to. I used to pity myself for being her daughter but since having children of my own, I pity her that she did not allow herself to enjoy us more.

            Still, she had a good life until my father died, and she got old. There are one or two of her films still floating about, which means she exists for posterity.

            I remember playing tennis with her one day, a long time ago. I was still at the age when the older generation would sometimes give the younger generation the benefit of the doubt and let them win the occasional game. I hit the ball and it was in but she swore it was out. I presumed she would do the honourable thing but she absolutely wouldn’t. We stood there arguing for around ten minutes, while my father quietly looked on, and in the end as I remember I stormed off the court with the worst grace I could muster.

            I guess that summed up our relationship.  It’s a shame. It wouldn’t have taken much on either side. But that’s mothers and daughters for you.

Happy birthday mum.

 

LIFE AFTER SIXTY

Turning sixty has positive advantages.  Free travel throughout London, concessions at cinemas and galleries, no national insurance and a small (in my case very small) but welcome pension. With luck nothing creaks yet, you feel no different to when you were half this age and since you are now famously ‘invisible’ you no longer have to cross the road to avoid building sites (I haven’t had to do that for a while, admittedly). For all of which I say, hooray.     

      The children have left home and are doing okay. The husband has gone as well. So now what?        

     There are no rules for people over sixty. The rules that applied to our parents don’t apply to our generation. We are younger and our expectations are different. We have maybe a third of our lives ahead of us and we don’t intend to spend them sitting quietly in front of television (or anywhere else).  We think and feel half our age but we know, clearly, we are not.  At half our age we had not had kids, seen them through school and university and out into the world while trying all along to be supportive but not suffocating, at the same time looking after elderly and increasingly frail parents, doing our best to keep the balance between family, motherhood, wifehood, daughterhood and career; we feel we still have the energy of a thirty year old, if not even more because we are less likely to waste it getting into a paddy about things beyond our control such as stalled trains that will deliver us to our destination ten minutes after the curtain has gone up or the vital interview or the meeting was supposed to take place.        

       We make good workers because we are experienced and calm and enjoy the work for its own sake and not because of what it will lead to.  (Convincing employers of this is another matter of course since most of them will be half our age and may not like telling someone twice their age what to do.)  We are concerned with the here and now rather than the what-might-be-when because, frankly, life is getting shorter.  

        We are as sexy as we ever were, with the added advantages of experience and the freedom of knowing we’re not going to get pregnant. We are realistically if regretfully aware that the face that looks at us in the mirror no longer represents the thirty year old we still are, that sleeveless dresses and short skirts are beginning to look doubtful on us but jeans and dropped-waist trousers are still perfectly okay; we are trying to strike the balance between middle-aged fuddy-duddy and ‘cool’ – which is a word we probably wouldn’t want to use naturally if only because it makes our kids wince.  We are up to speed technologically, just about, we can socially network like the best of them (though we may be unsure about whether or not to register for Facebook; the answer to which depends partly on how much we want to avoid embarrassing our kids, who in their turn are invariably watching carefully to see whether their ageing mother is turning out more like the Queen Mum or Barbara Windsor).        

         Somewhere along the way some of us have parted company with our partners, probably through our own volition. Having  done so we are now looking for replacements, on the internet or elsewhere (though where elsewhere?), and finding little joy because the men of our age seem so old, and the whole prospect of starting up a brand new relationship from scratch, whether or not sex is involved, is terrifying.  We probably have our own homes and are reasonably financially independent so we’re not looking for breadwinners, or someone to father our kids. We want companionship and a good laugh, but dammit, most of the men of our age are out there chasing women half our age. 

          We are still working and will have to keep on working till we drop, because we have spent our lives following ridiculous professions like writing and acting, earning what we can when we could, which was usually not much – hence the small pension – and never able to save much; or maybe we gave up work for the kids and to look after elderly relatives (hence again the small pension and lack of savings).  Still, working keeps us actively in the world and concerned about the world, and that has to be a good thing.        

           But most importantly, we are sixty and we know it. We know we feel fit and young now and that in ten years’ time we may not. Whatever it is we want to do we have to do it now. It may seem a selfish way to think but it isn’t always possible in life to be selfish, which is another reason to indulge now.        

Which is why I am doing what I’m doing.                     

London theatre

I was walking back along the South Bank the other day from the Globe Theatre. It was 11 oclock at night and there was a crowd of people peering over the railings by Gabriel’s Wharf down at the beach below.  There was a man sitting there on a sofa, a table in front of him and a table on either side and on them a bowl of fruit and candles. And everything but the candles was made out of sand.

            I walked a little further and there was another crowd, this time outside the National Theatre, watching a full-scale opera, with full sound effects, explosions and gushing water.

            There was also a weird haunting sound coming from what may have been a (stationary) boat on the river, or even Somerset House. It was strange, ambient stuff, not the sort of thing you’d go to hear at a concert. Maybe I imagined it.

 

It’s good to be back in London. 

 

  

The Thames beach outside Gabriel’s Wharf

 

The theatre

Each summer, with a bit of luck, I get to teach a course on live theatre to American students visiting London. I choose and take them to see a mixture of shows – large, small, West End, fringe and of course, the Globe.

            It is a wonderful job. If I can be totally serious for a moment, there is no other city in the world to compare with London when it comes to theatre.

            Theatre gets knocked about a bit, a lot, mostly by the critics. I know theatre needs them, not so much as they need theatre of course, but every month you read of “theatre’s demise”, or “the death of the West End”. I gather four out of five shows in the West End do not recoup their costs, which is an amazing statistic – no other business would survive those sort of figures; but then theatre is not like any other business, it’s not really a business, not at its heart.

            When I see this city and the theatre through the eyes of the visiting Americans I am so proud I almost grow feathers. I could teach for fifty-two weeks of the year and still not find the time to take them to see everything.

            Then there is the Globe. The Globe has its detractors, many of them from the theatre biz itself; but if you have ever been with a group of American students, or I suspect any students, who arrive there with a deep prejudice against ‘boring’ Shakespeare because they’ve have been forced to study him in the classroom, and then seen the look on their faces three hours later, after three hours of standing on solid concrete, you would, I promise you, think the Globe the most amazing theatre in the world.

            It’s true some of the productions are crowd-pleasing, and the ‘Merchant of Venice’, for me, was one of them. I do sometimes wonder if there are any depths to which they will not stoop to get a laugh.

            But it is such a special place, you’d be churlish not to enjoy simply being there. There is at the Globe an atmosphere of such goodwill, the musicians – usually the first people to step onto the stage – get a round of applause before they’ve even blown a note. If such an atmosphere could be bottled and sold all West End productions would recoup their costs.

            The Globe transforms Shakespeare for young people, or at least for my young people. How did we manage without it?  

CITIZENSHIP (again)

 

July 1^st

Today’s the day the law on Australian Citizenship by Descent changes. Today is the day I may, or may not, find I am eligible. The change in the law is misty, but seems to imply my age may no longer be a barrier to my applying for citizenship; all this on account of my being born before 1949 – the year Australian citizenship first came into existence – to an Australian mother who had already decamped from Australia some years before and worked hard to completely eradicate her Australian accent (they don’t have to know that).

            I download the form. There are new stipulations about guarantors and endorsers of photographs, who have to belong to one in a list of ‘respectable’ professions such as lawyers, doctors, accountants and so on – always a problem for someone like me whose friends are artists, actors and other vagabonds. The photograph cannot be taken in one of those photo booths because the dimensions differ by something like 5 millimetres and the crown of the head – the crown of the head rather than the top of the hair – must be no more than x millimetres from the edge of the photo, and so on.  Crikey. 

July 7th

            I get the photo done in Snappy Snaps (to my surprise they seem to have done this before), with some effort I find a university professor to endorse it, I gather together all my documents, originals only, I’m then told I’m supposed to send ‘certified copies’ of said originals verified by someone from the above list of respectable professions, in addition to the originals, which makes no sense to me so I just send copies endorsed by myself. I package the whole lot together and send it off Special Delivery, heart pounding because my whole life is in that envelope. And then I wait.

July 9^th

            Two days later I get a phone call from a nice young man from Australia House asking me some probing questions about my mother, whether she ever went back to live in her native country (no), how and when she became a British citizen (I don’t know) and so on. My mouth goes all dry as I answer the questions as vaguely as I can and he says he hopes to have it all sorted by my birthday.

            My birthday? Why that’s barely a week away! And I was always told it would take up to six months!

July 11^th

            A Special Delivery package arrives, they’ve returned my original documents – that was quick – and along with them …

            My certificate of Australian citizenship.

            I am now an Australian citizen.

It’s hard to describe the feeling. After all these years of confusion, anxiety, frustration and downright despair, I am now a fully-fledged Australian, entitled to live there, work there, vote there (I’m not sure about that actually), buy property there, and I don’t even have to learn the words to ‘Advance Australia Fair’ or swear allegiance to John Howard.

Hallelujah.

  

London

 

I am back in London again, staying with a friend near Twickenham. Thank God for friends.

            My own flat in north London is still let out to tenants, so I can’t actually live there. I went back to collect some things from my attic the other day and found myself asking if I could use their loo. Their loo?  Why it’s mine!  Except it isn’t.

            I love my flat. Believe it or not at my ancient age it was the first property I had ever bought, decorated and furnished all on my own, and I wasn’t half proud of it. Friends could not believe I was so willing to have other people living in it, and I think I was a bit surprised myself, but needs must.

            They seem to be looking after the place, the young tenants, which is a great relief.  In fact touch wood it has all been so far totally trouble-free, this letting.  They have been there now since February and although they are using my furniture, seeing the place with their things in it, their pictures on the walls, their bedcovers, actually doesn’t feel as strange as I thought it would. If they stay there for the full year they’ll have lived there almost as long as I have.

            Sometimes the prospect of possibly never being able to live in my own place again – which usually occurs around two or three in the morning – gets to me.

Will I ever be able to afford to live in London again? Will I ever afford to live in my own place anywhere?  Or am I doomed to roam the world for the rest of my days?  Let’s not think too much about that.

            Meanwhile, it is surprisingly good to be back. It’s wonderful to see my kids again, and my friends, and to learn they are still okay. Still doing much the same old, which is strangely reassuring.

            And London, here it still is, just as wonderful and twice as weird. There’s grass growing up the walls of the National Theatre and men standing on the roofs of buildings on the South Bank.

            I feel as if I’ve never been away.

In a few days’ time I will be paying host to a group of American university students coming here to study for a month. I have to switch my mind from 19^th century Australia to 16^th, 17^th, 18^th, 19^th, 20^th century London. (Being a tour guide must be much easier in Sydney.)  I have to mug up on my knowledge of London. Who designed Somerset House, and when?  Exactly how old is St Pauls? Who designed the National Theatre (and why)?  When did the current Globe Theatre open?  Who was Edmund Kean? What’s the story behind the Millennium footbridge?  Where did Shakespeare live when he was in London?

            And so on.

It is very good to be back. 

But what happened to the weather??