A Day on the Prime Meridian

Greenwich. The name already stops me dead, after filling me with lo-o-nging for years. I just wanted to be there, stand on that zero point, where all space is measured from, in a way.

I first read 'Longitude', by Dava Sobel, a few years ago, but saw the Jeremy Irons TV show about it even longer ago. And living in Australia, a country which is founded in part on a reliable clock, just gives the place a very personal resonance for me. One of the earliest clocks was given to Captain Cook, on his trip to watch the Transit of Venus in ?1770 - he was considered a good seaman, someone you could trust with a clock, someone you could trust to take readings of longitude with it.

So, onto the train to Greenwich on a pale, bare Sunday morning. The Bean reading the Tube stops, the Pumpkin climbing the seats, me just humming at the prospect of making this pilgrimage on my personal map of the world.

Across the grounds of the Maritime College, into the Maritime Museum. Wowowowowow. Passing through the Titanic, opening cupboards on the marine uniforms, the Pumpkin wondering where the person talking about their uniform got to before he could open the door to see them. Nelson's coat, complete with hole from the day he died. Maritime histories of slave movements, waves of migrations in red arrows around the globe. My journey is part of one of those red arrows too. Shiny propellors, ship decks, a lovely cafe ( I could paint my walls that colour, stand a palm like this in my house!) and a playground - what more could we want. A toilet, poor Pumpkin has the trots, the same intense kind which Bean had over Christmas in Stuttgart, cramping. I get snapped with a statue of Captain Cook, only right. We toil on up the hill, to the Observatory. I feel I've reached a summit. More toilet stops.

And then, weaving with my boys and the queues, past the telescopes, the rooms inside, to the octagonal observing room, the living quarters and the clocks themselves. It IS a pilgrimage: I pay silent respects, and could cry for how moved I am to be with them: H1, H2, H3. The Bean is fascinated by a great interactive display, the Pumpkin heavy in my arms. I sit in the semi-gloom, the Pumpkin sleeps, the Bean opens and shuts doors, I reflect on this journey to this point in time. It is something I wanted, not about them, but made the more precious to be doing it with my two treasures, made so far away, over on 171 or so, not 0 as here. I feel triumphant as we ask another tourist to snap us right on the line, our feet on the Sydney point. We made it! Maybe the ancient mariners felt like this when they thought they'd fall off, get lost, run aground - and then didn't.

A loud, freezing, BRILLIANT high point racing on the ferry back to Tower Bridge. The boys screaming at the loud rushing water, me snapping, laughing, roaring at what IS possible for a mother to do with her young boys, at where it's possible to BE. Away upriver, along the old wharves, past the docks, past the new Canary Wharf stockbroker sheds, along the way they came back in after sailing bout the world, there's the Tower Bridge, the Gherkin, the Tower of London.

Did I tell you boys, I nearly fell out of a window there, before I was even two? The circle turns. The day ends with more Tube travel, a show - Marianne Dreams, more Tube travel, dinner with friends, a hooge day, but wonderful life.

Making a Winter Fair

The school has changed its format for the midwinter, Christmas, event. This year, it's to be a market like a European Christmas market, with entertainment, food, things and the traditional room for the kids to sell off their own old toys before Christmas. It'll be held in the school, on a Sunday and the hope is that more fathers and parents who might not often be at the school - will drop by.

In a burst of nostalgic rightness, I volunteered German christmas baking, and telephoned Omi for her recipes. Baking delicious aromatic spices when it's dark and cold outside, perfect! Not what I'd ever do in Australia, part of this whole year's thang. A delightful book arrived full of Swabian gutzl-recipes and history, with Omi's handwritten recipes (and margin notes re the costing of same!), some of aunt M's own recipes with her very pragmatic, hilarious notes. Treasure. So I set off and baked a practise batch of something. One day, The Pumpkin and his small friend O made a round of 'staghorn buttons', with currants for button-holes, the dough rolled in cinnamon. Great. And icing the cutouts was most of the fun.

Then, in an interminable meeting one evening, it became apparent that there were just too many biscuit bakers already underway. So, in an easy sideways leap, I went savoury. As is my want. I decided to do three relishes, which could conceivably be part of an Australian christmas dinner, and might be interesting here too: caramelised onions, a pineapple chutney from Queensland and watercress pesto. Relish Australia is born.

The boys cried on the sofa - as I sliced enormous Spanish brown onions on 3 evenings, and spent hours caramelising them with sugar and vinegar in Stephanie Alexander's recipe. Somewhere, there is a photo of my mascara running black down my face, and a big wide, winter-white skinned smile!Our little room ponged of onion for days! LMM chopped cashews and watercress all over the kitchen, green specks, and I whizzed them with garlic, olive oil, parmesan and lemon. A search of ABC North Queensland's site gave me a recipe which worked well with tinned pineapple from South America.

With an enormous vase of eucalyptus leaves on my table on the day, I was one of the few savoury types (!) in a room with divine cakes, pastries and miles of gorgeous biscuits. Crepes from Madame I. The day was a flurry of people, conversations, children, the crowd all really into this event. The Pumpkin had a sleep with his narni, under the table; the Bean scooped a pair of moon boots. And Relish Australia sold out by 1pm.

Update: There have beeen frequent winter walks along the Dinosaur Park, aka Lee Fields, with the Bean on the moon boots, the Pumpkin oh his pedal-less bike, me with i-pod, walking briskly! We are approached about the moon shoes every time, they're an absolute cracker.

I believe in this life, everything is possible..

...sang the entire contents of the Cork Opera House, along with Amp Fiddler, during Cork Jazz Festival.

We had visitors in town, Stockbrokerman and his new gal from London, keen to show off eachother and their entirely free, financial wellbeing. We took them to all sorts of gigs, not jazz, but part of the Festival nonetheless. What a venue Cypress Avenue is - Vivienne Long, you rock!

Then to Amp Fiddler, in the Opera House. A Detroit man from the funk'n line, got us on our feet, singin and dancin. The singing is no surprise in Ireland, the dancing is: it's a reserved place, really that way.

And then to the finale: EVERYONE sang that line, over and over, until we all could think nothing else, believe nothing else. A crowd, on key, anthemic. Transformational.

So ends a month of visitors into our wee shoebox every weekend. Great times. Mon-Wed: I rearrange, tidy, wash. Thursday: shop. Friday collect next visitor from airport, away we go again! To walk Cork, see the shop streets (disappointing to most our visitors, thrillingly fresh to most Corkonians, who remember the bad old days, 10 years ago.)

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.

The Look of the Irish 2

What's with the fake tans, heavy fake tans? Someone said tanarexia to me, I knew just what it was immediately now!

The cheap tracksuits, the tonnes of makeup, the dreadful shoes, the completely too-cold clothes, the stretched-flat and tortured hair. They end up looking all a bit the same. There's a strange aesthetic among the girls, from about 15-25 here - looks cheap and slutty to me, not even stylish-slut. And yet, there's so much of it out there, they must love it. Is it just Cork?

In a rare escape to a pub in the evening, we walk home, in our jeans, boots, yes lipstick and perfume, coats and scarves. And encounter girls in way too short skirts, way too high heels, no sleeves, falling in and out of the pubs off Oliver Plunkett on the way home.

We didn't even do that when we were in our 20s: me in Sydney, she in Munich. We're cousins, so maybe there's something of a family value set after all. We were just glad of our good sense. And we were chatted up in Crane Lane, by a French man then, who thought VERY highly of her marvellous profile! Off to Paris modelling for her, he said.

The View From My Window 2

Sitting at the computer, the desk is behind a wall of glass the length of the room. So it's a perfect light room for an Australian family, top floor - which is great for us. I'm sure our noise travels to the floor below...

I look out and see an ancient stone wall, with some of the window arches bricked back in, weeds growing in the cracks, old corrugated iron on the roof. The owner of this building tells us that they excavated lots of bodies when he built this building about 20 years ago, exhumed them and took them away. We're just outside the city wall, so there are many burial grounds nearby.

I see a courtyard of white houses with grey slate roofs, and into lots of windows - probably 8 different places over there that we can see. LMM points out how many bathrooms we can see into, I notice the women cooking at the other windows, at the same time each evening as I am. There are satellite dishes, pot plants, lampshades, clothes airers. Sometimes clothes on a line, wet for a week.

We're all in our own versions of Rear Window, a hidden courtyard life, separate from the much more cheerless streets around us. It's neighbourly, we're part of a place with other people's lives nearby. It's never isolated. But no-one waves or speaks across it - that would be intruding.

UPDATE: In early June, the entire wall is green and pink, in wonderful flower. The sky has often been blue.

Dirty Veg from Caroline

We're back from a big trip, so it's time to settle now into another kind of life here: school, making lunches, dropping and collecting both boys (I'm off the 24/7 shift, hooray, that WAS a hard 2 months), getting to a workout often if poss, and shopping local.

Caroline's pesticide-etc-free vegetable stand at the Coal Quay every Saturday is pure pleasure. A request for a handful of spinach gets me a boy's backpack FULL, and then throw in some carrots, beetroot, cucumbers, salad leaves: with the dirt still on. She is definitely the gardener, with the dirt deep in her hands: I admire them and her, it must be a hard life, growing here in Ireland with this weather that won't really play nicely.

So I get home, wash dirt off and plan what to make with all this indigenous stuff - soup's good, parsnip goes with most everything as it turns out. Multi-veg mash is another Magic food: boys eat parsnip, celeriac, zuchini, carrot and potato, and I'm happy. Magic. Not all at once, but they all go in. Under sausages, it makes a regular appearance as dinner. Spanakopita. I love it. They all taste so damn alive, different from one another, like a true vegetable should! Makes me think of my father standing in the garden in Canberra, dirt on his hands, colanders full of the latest abundance. He grew, and still grows, most everything.

A thread right through from my Saturday mornings here in Cork, to my father's sensational plots in Canberra, with echoes too, of all the grandfathers that had their gardens in Bohemia long ago.