The hippos danced their rolling dance

On my birthday at the San Diego Zoo, the day was hot, like no day we'd had all year in Europe. A day to really warm the fibres.

A beautiful zoo, right from the flamingos at the front gate, to the last skyfari ride of the day, with my 3 men, large and small, singing me 'Happy Birthday' as we drifted and dangled over the top of the gorillas and spider monkeys in a slanting sun.

Sushi and lemon tart to finish the day, perfect in California - and for this mermaid-girl. What a year I've had, from the first day at Kinsale Harbour during the Kinsale Festival to the very last just now, at the San Diego Zoo. I'm not sure it summarises into a phrase, but it certainly feels wonderful to have so many experiences that I really WANTED to actually look back on now. Less yearning, longing for anywhere-but-here now.

Those hippos were dancing just for me.

It's here - Spencer Tunick looming up in Cork

Next week, and unknown number of people in Cork will be taking part in a massive photo shoot with Spencer Tunick - taking all their clothes off, staying very close together, keeping quite still. From other photos at his site, it looks as if it's a silent activity, almost devotional, in an odd way: to large public spaces, to our common humanity, to our collected assembled bodies as an articulate medium in their own right.

I'll be there. For me, it's an occasion for a last hurrah, a treat on my own account to celebrate a year living here in Ireland, being part of the great mass of European humanity. This is my birth too, the collective unconscious of my own mind. And in view of the fuss about nude bodies used in Bill Henson's art in Australia these past few weeks, it seems highly appropriate - let's please not have a new age of prudery.

In my work, I've been involved with creating ephemeral activities for large crowds in public places, with Live Sites, in a role which required clothes on at all times! This is another way to participate in that work to blur the distinctions between a) formal public places and b) memorable artistic experiences - to change our views of a space and place - of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, even!

The organisation of large crowds is fantastic, the detailed email which arrived is brilliant people management, and all a big secret until the day. (UPDATE: NOT. LMM heard all about it at work one night, with 3 days to go. Confidentiality is a loose notion here in Cork.)

Fun. Can't wait, will reveal more in due course. Ha ha.

Two lives, three lives

What a dual life I lead here.

I travel with my family, Leathermanman, The Bean and the Pumpkin. We do incredible trips, the kind of thing which I've saved up for, looked forward too, longed for. It's been about one a month. And little excursions here in between, as visitors come and go. I'm sociable, travelling light, talking with precious friends and family, or meeting new people.

August - England by car.
August - Germany by plane.
September - Spain and France by hire car.
October - Irelend by car, with visitors.
December - Germany, England by plane.
January - Amsterdam weekend, by plane. SOLO
February - Austria, by plane and hire car.
March - Turkey, by plane and bus.

Then I'm home, being a housewife (dang!), cleaning (yes it's small, but high rotation), shopping (usually at Lidl, also the English Market or Dunnes, Tesco), washing (drying it all on one small rack, inside all year) reading online (papers, blogs, emails), knitting (sometimes, not enough), dropping and collecting children to their (minimal, really) activities. And being a lot silent, in a weird kind of solitary confinement. And speaking to other mothers from school, my tribe, a lovely group, what will I do without them? But it's one perspective on a place only, not the work-one I'm more used to.

Then there's our third life: our house in Elizabeth Street, the garden, the studies, the friends and family we have there. The steady, child-rearing, steady-being road ahead, the road behind. The road I'm in no hurry to resume, but know I must.

Wayfaring Stranger - as in...

..travelling through this world alone...That bright bright land, to which I go...I know dark clouds will gather round me, and I know my way be rough and steep... The beautiful fields lie just before me.

...the lyrics of Natalie Merchant's ballad stops me in my tracks, still and always.

I have companions along my way yes of course, close ones, treasures. And yet, there's an element of solitude in every life. Making my ways around the globe, through many lives, often a stranger. In the French way, like foreigner, not the English way like strange/weird/unknown. I've been one of those all my life: since I said eggs-eier at the age of two in England, learning my first English words.

Then to Malaysia, thankfully learning English there from another fair-headed girl who lived across the road, and in a Montessori pre-school. On to Australia, where at 7, I was told I must know about Hitler 'because you're German'! More strangeness. A childhood of wayfaring with my family, travels overseas to relatives and new shores across Asia and the Pacific, unlike many Canberra children at the time.

Then Sydney, making my way into adult life. Travelling again, now more to Asia between work and studies. Never making the gap year trip, never taking a big flying leap into the true unknown, always aware of needing to provide for myself, make something of myself.

Often a stranger, speaking German in Europe to avoid obnoxious Australians, French in Thailand to duck under the radar of the Germans or Australians there. Speaking all three with a cousin on a road trip through Vietnam, just to entertain ourselves and others. Because we could.

Then more ways, across Australia, with a new husband, then two surprising boys - treasures, perfect, so different though we made them both. Travels as the wife of a medical student, student life for him, motherhood and full time work for me. And a big decision to take it all to Newcastle, to settle, be responsible to our family. Another new start, a house, a garden, and always this restless stranger-self. Always from here/not from here.

And always the music, always songs, always searching out new tunes for the soundtrack of my life. Afro Celt Sound System, Buddha Bar, Natalie Merchant, Michael Franti. Again now, in Ireland, searching for new sounds. Kila. Michael McGoldrick. O'Death.

Blown Away in Amsterdam

Winter weekend, my ONLY weekend without children, away away. Very excited as I pack - a 40th birthday party, a weekend in Amsterdam, not much money to spend, but time, precious time alone! I intend to get to the birthday dinner, maybe spend a bit more time, but then take days for me, to wander and discover what it is I actually look at when I don't have the Bean and the Pumpkin at my every step.

Well. I got sick. The weekend became something quite different from those expectations. Got more than I bargained for. I guess.

Picked up at the airport by BigX, and there's another old friend, just in from Canada too!. Wow, I'm going to trip down Memory Lane this weekend! Whisked into town, past canals in whipping rain and wind, to my hotel: like the brochure, up incredibly! steep short steps to the rooftop room, it looks over the canals and those incredibly picturesque Amsterdam houses alongside. Those steps have to be walked to be believed. (I remember that the first time I was in Amsterdam, in '95, I thought I'd landed in a complete dive, on account of the steep steps. Not so.) Off to a GREAT Indonesian restaurant, of course!, and then BigX's wife also joined us, fresh off the road from a meeting in Germany. Oh this is Europe now. Wonderful. This is just how it is - you get excited about other stuff when this is the baseline of your experience.

Then, I got sick... Woke up at 3.30 in the morning, CONVINCED that it was 8am, got cranky when my breakfast didn't arrive, wrote in my journal mad night thoughts, then looked at the watch again: 4.30am! Howling wind outside, screaming around the edges of the roof and across the canals below. Couldn't sleep. Dreadful guts. Cloudhead.

So the weekend became instead about turning 40 - we're all about there now - and evaluating the First Half. Planning the Second Half. Others in the group had made some concrete actual changes for their Second Half - I admire that, need to apply that sort of time-horizon to my own life. Steps to take now to secure the Second Half? The First Half had so much experience and roaming and discovery in it. Wonderful trip down Memory Lane, and also very real now experience of a great city, wonderful place.

Everywhere there are people on bikes, the most incredible types of bike-contraptions. A Bucks-Fizz is a transporter, for children, even under plastic, or dogs or shopping. LMM would love this human-scale city, this physical vibrancy in the people on account of much cycling, the Nine Streets shops, Albert Cuyp market with tonnes of the food we want to eat, not just the Irish selection-by-distance..and multicultural, people from everywhere. Just, how do you get to work HERE, without any Dutch, without being married to one, or descended from one?

I DID NOT stride across the city in glorious solitude, speak to attractive strangers in bars, or shop for a precious, personal treasure for life. I DID reflect on this group of friends, fellow travellers, my cohort, and that we're all at a similar place - much perspective, much left to do. And that we are not alone: there are lots of people with mixed marriages (in the sense of coming from different countries) different roots. All of us travelling the globe, comfortable in lots of places, drawing rich lives by being slow-mo-mobile, adding languages and possessions to suit the country we're in. And good it is.

Suddenly this Country Speaks to Me

After 5 weeks away in Europe-proper, the dread grey is hard to take. But visitors are coming, Leathermanman has some days off - so I'll take off out Kerry way for 3 days, 2 nights away.

I was so in need of fresh air, wind, space from endless boy-drudgery, out to endless open spaces where I can feel some magic. And we found them. Wild country, orange and dark grey. Muckross House. Steel grey stone hunting lodge, by the side of the lake, light piercing the skies and clouds, as if the angels were just sitting up above. A scene almost monochrome, the green lawn barely green, the water slatey grey.

Inside Muckross House, it's a timepiece, a journey into Victorian England. With Nora, one of the best tour guides you could ask for. We were led behind the scenes, as if the families had just left, as she told us the history of the house, the people, the romance, the hopes bound up in it all. Almost as if someone might turn up, if we hesitated too long on one of the staircases.

Imagine getting a gift like that as a wedding present! And, before that, the hopes tied up in renovations and extensions and endless gardening expansions - in view of a visit from Queen Victoria. So she came, she stayed, walked up to the waterfall, slept in her camp bed on the ground floor in a room with a custom-built fire escape (she was terrified of fire), no doubt dined on the finest - potatoes and roast and who knows what other heavy Victorian fare in the heavy Victorian dining room. And then she left, no doubt with good intentions. But Albert had the temerity to die soon after her return, and in her grief, the thoughts of knighting her good host at Muckross just fell away. I really felt the colonial past of this house - the expat nature of those living here.

And, by holding the land as one large holding in private hands for hundreds of years, the land could become Ireland's first national park, when the republic was formed and the English landlords were sent packing. If it had gone into Irish hands, it may have been broken up into countless tiny holdings, and not preserved the richness of the forest around these parts. The house stood shut up and empty for years - imagine! - and has since been painstakingly restored. Some photos from the British Museum were used to make new curtains and wallpapers, fitting Victorian times. Did they call it Victorian times while she was queen?

I LOVED walking through the arboretum, alone, in damp, green air, collecting chestnuts for small children, but not hauling one by the hand. (I know, still thinking about them, even when away from them ... but it makes all the difference sometimes!)

A wonderful place to bring visitors from Berlin, all citied-out as they can get. Autumn trees, ancient yew, rain falling by the lake, gold and red and orange leaves. We walk in it anyway as the pram has a cover, and we're rigged up.

A Day Alone

I'm on a bus all day today, from 10am to 4pm, across the top of Spain. I've got water, food, a book, maybe half a dozen words in Spanish.

Then I'll catch a train over the border, get to Biarritz airport, collect my husband off the plane, after he's finished a run of night shifts, and drive: in a hire car, on the wrong side of the road, in the dark, all the way back to Celorio, near Llanes, and our holiday will really start!

The boys meanwhile, are at our house, overlooking the Atlantic, a Spanish holiday house. The house has a lovely garden, parking, two bedrooms upstairs, two down, a kitchen fitted out with all sorts of stuff including an electric spaghetti fork, a fireplace, and the view over the sea! Lovely, very glad to have it. The boys will have a whole day with my cousin and her family, a beach day. I was going to take Alex on the bus because, at 7, he's a big step up for her, with her 2 kiddos, who are a) more peaceful and b) younger, almost 3 and 5. But they talked it over, and I'm off alone. What a treat, even though I fret.

I think of Race Around the World, and this is not it. But I'd love that degree of adventure, race, with one other person. And settle on the bus. So I look out at the summer orchards of fruit trees, sparkling coastline with hills rising straight off the coast, one timber Spanish house after another, one town after another. And read.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville. I brought it, to read about the Hawkesbury River - where I celebrated my 40th, spent a week on the same river. A book with a new perspective on Aboriginal history in Australia, but a writer who knows her words! I could see the gum trees there, as I looked over the gum trees by the side of the road in Spain - they're more spindly, smaller here. I could see the river, feel the anguish of early Australia, the endless journeys. Feel the heat, the sense of others gone before, feel a deep understanding of this book and its country. Not a strange book to me at all. Which it might be to others in Europe reading it.

And I was glad to be here, right side up, this side, not that remote, harsh, mysterious far side of our globe. Odd. I thought I'd get homesick reading the book. Instead, I grew calmer, didn't fret so much about this big day on the bus, needing to find a connecting bus in Bilbao and then the train at Irun to France. This, I can do.