This Canal Life

Many years ago I watched one of those travel shows which featured a segment on British canal boat holidays. Bobbing along in your little floating caravan on quiet waterways from one waterside drinking place to another looked very idyllic.

Since arriving in the UK I have continued to be captivated by life along the canals - and it is very exciting to find myself in my new flat overlooking a real life canal.

Union Canal looking towards the Pentlands, Edinburgh.

Many of my posts this year have been reporting on Edinburgh’s snowy weather - so I am pleased to announce that to coincide with our move springtime has arrived at long last to Scotland. From where I sit the birds sing, the sun is shining,  the wind blows gently in the lush green trees and just a stones throw away the life of the canal burbles happily along.

Union Canal tenements, Edinburgh.

My new commute to work starts out along the canal and my current waddle allows for plenty of time to watch the world go by. Although there are no flamingos to watch on this city waterway there is plenty of non exotic birdlife to keep this amateur twitcher happy.  

Flamingos inside at the new flat

There is a lone swan on a stretch of canal I walk along regularly- and for the first few days I felt rather sorry for this solitary bird. But then one morning I saw it attacking the ducks quite vehemently - which brought back all my childhood memories of being chased down by hissing geese and dissolved my sympathy.

A Union Canal Mallard

The ducks seem quite good at attacking each other - though perhaps springtime in the air is making the male ducks boisterous. Looking up at the bellies of some ducks flying overhead the other day I saw two ducks clip wings, I was close enough to hear the soft sound of feathers colliding in mid air. The bumped elbows jostled for space in the crowded air for a moment and then separated out again.

On the footpath with me there are fast folks on bikes, runners, and daily commuters with headphones and some place better to be; but there are also the meandering folks feeding the birds, children in prams demanding that flowers be picked for them, couples happy to stare into each others eyes and feel the sun on their backs and people sitting on benches reading their books by the water.

The canal boats putter along quietly under the warbling pigeon bridge off towards Glasgow. Once the canal was used for industrial transport - now that trains and trucks have taken up that role the canal is a leisure zone - canal boats are floating restaurants and holiday accommodation - providing waterway wine time. 

Canal boat

As I walk along by the water, or sit in my new lounge room looking down on the world it is pleasant to imagine that things will always be sunny and green in my new canal life - and after a winter which seemed to go on forever who could blame me for indulging in a fantasy of endless springtime - and possibly a few days of summer??

Sunny days on the canal, Edinburgh.

In a Name

I have names on my mind of late. I have often pondered, as girls tend to do getting married - and though the question of whom I might marry has been very uncertain for the last thirty years I've always felt certain that if  such an event took place I would not be changing my name. The tradition in my family of strong women is to retain your own surname on getting married and when thinking of it in the abstract I never felt inclined to alter my initials.

In the hear and now of being newly-wed I am however quite happy about taking on my husbands name - though still entirely disinterested in giving up my own. So Ms S.B is becoming Ms S.B-H, (the Mrs, though I don't mind being referred to as Mrs by my Mr, it is still a little alien to use in everyday life).

The new Mr and Mrs and our piper. Edinburgh 2013.

So I have changed the signature on my email and my name on Facebook... but what next? Bureaucracy is what is next. With my current passport having less than 12 months before it expires I thought that would be the place to start, so with my new marriage certificate in hand I happily set about filling in the passport application form.  According to what I could make out on the form all I needed was my marriage certificate and some other ID with my old name and things would be right as rain.

Then I got a bit further on in the form filling out process and discovered I needed a photo witnessed by a fellow Australian. I had some of those gathered about me for the wedding, but they were long gone by the time I started on the bureaucracy. So I got myself a photo and posted it off to London to one of my high school buddies, stamped - self addressed envelope included to hurry it back.

It arrived and I filled out my guarantors details - scarily realising in the process that I had known her for 17 plus years - turns out we are indeed old. With all the other boxes ticked I printed out the form, read over it, about to put my shoes on to head to the embassy and discovered that she also had to sign the form.  So off it went.

Back it came and I got my shoes on again, got all my documents assembled only to discover that the little photo my friend had witnessed for me was absolutely nowhere to be found. Whether it is a baby brain thing or a packing thing or a general chaos of our lives thing I do not know - but there was a temper tantrum. The husband helped me look - fruitlessly and then he calmly headed off to the post office with another photo and stamped - self addressed envelope while I sat down and Skyped with one of my Aussie mates to bemoan the misery that it was to be me.

Back the photo came, arriving on a Saturday when the Embassy was closed, still I opened it up happily enough, finally things could go forward... only to discover that my friend had miss-spelt my husbands surname. I am pleased to say that at this point I managed to laugh rather than throw another tantrum. I pondered - would the bureaucrat look closely at it? Could I alter it to the right spelling? Should I send her another photo? Should I give up the whole notion of a new name?

Sunday night I was sitting up in bed writing some notes to myself in my little notebook and what should fall into my lap but the original, correctly named photo.

I put on my shoes and caught the bus to the embassy with a light heart on Monday morning, certain that my new name was within sight. Unfortunately the very nice embassy lady informed me that although the British wedding certificate signifies to the Australian persons who care about such things that I am married, it is insufficient evidence for an Australian to change their name on a passport. I must send of a pile of papers to the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages in the state I was born in and apply for a legal change of name before I can be Ms S.B-H.

So it was back to the paperwork for me.

At least the guarantor signatures on my passport application form remains valid for six months - and I am storing it in a safe place.

a moment of calm

As evidenced by my lack of blog posts this year life has been rather hectic. It is hectic in all of the best ways - life is brimming with unforgettable happenings.
Over Easter there was the wedding of friends to attend - which took us from Edinburgh to London and then across the channel to France - with a day or two in Germany on the way home. Much eating and dancing was done and sleep was distinctly lacking.

After that it was home to Edinburgh to finish planning my own wedding - and while the Easter celebrations set the bar very very high I think our happy day was a pretty good follow up - and from the perspective of the princess in the white dress I have to say I loved every minute.

bride and groom in Edinburgh's Old Town

Somewhere in the middle we went to see Paul Kelly perform in Glasgow, and had the second ultrasound on my growing bump - getting to see Paul Kelly and our healthy, acrobatic baby within the space of a few days was a very special lead up to our nuptials 

Even though I was something of a dead beat bride and did very little in the way of a hens do I was still pretty happy with my pre-wedding outings. The Edinburgh hen tradition of going out with a squealing gaggle of girls and vomiting in the loo's in a pub in the Old Town was not really an attractive option for me, though the girls at work did manage to get a sparkly tiara and veil combo on my head for a meal out.

... and we have been flat hunting, doing rental applications, started packing, had my mother visiting, had lots of lovely other visitors for the wedding and been skyping with all the folks in Oz. All this on top of working and getting stuck into the paperwork involved in new passports, name change, visas and plotting a celebration down under...

It can all make a girl rather breathless -
The lists of things to do have been raging on the edge of out of control - and no sooner has one event passed us by than there seems to be another one chasing us down. I wake up in a cold sweat rather often remembering than I still have not sent out any thank you cards - and don't even get me started on the fact that I have not had time to see the inside of the flat we are moving into in a month.

All the chaos is the glorious stuff of life and I remind myself every now and again that I am not the first or the last girl to be having a baby, getting married, moving house, holding down a job whilst living on the other side of the world from many of her nearest and dearest -  but it is the first time that all of these particular stars have aligned for me and I try to squeeze in the occasional moment of calm so as not to miss the excitement of it all in the midst of the busy blur.

I had thought that when I sat down to start this blog before running off to work - and am finishing it now on my return home that I might be reviving out one of those extinct moments of calm in my life - but actually I think it has just reminded me how harried I have been feeling of late - oops.

 Perhaps... perhaps I will sneak off and have a bath this evening and leave those thank you cards for another day...

Turn on - Turn off

I have had a few conversations recently with folks about how much computers dominate their (or their spouses) lives. I don’t tend to go through a day without using my computer - it starts with breakfast - I like to listen to the radio - which I stream on my computer and since it is on I tend to check in with my personal email, the work email, facebook and blogger. Occasionally I even take a glimpse at the world beyond my own little microcosm and check out the news.

When I tear myself away from the breakfast table/workstation I can still be plugged in; though my phone has much less ease of access as others I have seen, so I don’t tend to spend nearly as much time down that particular rabbit hole as other people.

I occasionally manage to perform tasks in my life without the aid of a power point. I am pleased to say that on Sunday, knowing I needed travel across town on the bus later on, and knowing that Sunday bus times are infrequent - I made my way down the stairs, out the front door and walked the two meters to the bus stop to check the bus times. All this without even a pedometer!

I could have used the online bus tracker thingimy and saved myself from going out into the cold before I needed to, but this way I got some exercise, gauged if I had enough layers on to brave the blustery day and took out a load of recycling - and thus spent two minutes achieving what would have probably taken me five had I tried to negotiate the zoom in and out map bus tracker timetable thing. I admit that other people probably manage to negotiate the bus time table technology much more quickly than I do - but they are probably sitting amongst piles of recycling and never going out their front doors to play in the snow.

The joy's of going outside in Edinburgh

When we got home from our recent trip to France the  fiancé announced

that next time we go on holiday he is making me get an e-reader. Despite my love of flipping through the pages of books I sadly had to agree that carrying four paperbacks, one hardcover book, a diary, two notebooks, writing paper and two magazines did make our journey from Scotland to France on the train rather more painful than necessary.

Traveling light across France

Still we did almost use all the paper based reading and note taking materials:

Vanity Fair made good train journey flicking.

I wrote two letters which have since arrived to two happy post enthusiasts.

Bloke - by Bruce Pascoe got read by both J and his pal Nobby - thus spreading the word on good Australian writing.

Wintering - Kate Moses - read by me.

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney - was read by me.

I will admit that the hardcover edition of Ya-Ya’s in Bloom by Rebecca West only got opened on the very last leg of the return journey and my book of Emily Dickinson poetry remained

unopened.

Still on the technology side of the bulk we carried about there were:

laptop charger and laptop - two of each,

phone and charger two of each

my digital camera and charger

his go-pro (which plugs into the computer)

my ipod and charger

plus adaptors to make Australian and British plugs fit European sockets.

My two notebooks - one recently filled and one fresh one were used in the aid of my current writing project. I do develope a lot of my writing projects on my computer but sometimes a girl just needs some paper and a pen to get things going and keep track of the miscellany of things she comes across as she goes along.

One of the things I like to keep in my notebook is a page devoted to a word list  - sometimes this list contains words I have newly discovered, sometimes it is ones whose precise definition I had to look up in order to make sure I was using them correctly and sometimes I just write them down because I like the feel of them on my tongue.

One of the many things that could not be transported on my journey from Australia (and consequently could not be taken to France for a week) was my rather hefty dictionary - purchased to celebrate the start of my Honours year in Creative Writing - and driven home by my friend Seb. I have a little paperback dictionary that sits near where I work, but it often lets me down and I am forced to look up word definitions on online dictionaries.

And so my tug of war with the computer goes on... meanwhile as you sit at your computer reading this here are a few lovely words from my word lis. I hope they make your heart sing as much as mine -

languorously: without exertion, lazily

contralto: lowest of the three female voices

gloaming: evening twighlight

nostrum: medicine whose effectiveness is unproven - a favourite but usually ineffective remedy

alouette: a device for inducing sleep by tiering the eyes

A snow blind outing

sunny day in the French Alps - February 2013

While we were in the French Alps recently I read a book that contained very graphic descriptions of a woman suffering snow blindness. Set in the wilds of Canada in 1867 one of the characters eyes are:
’...red and weeping. Flashes of red and purple cross my dull vision. There is a throbbing pain behind my eyes. I know I should have covered them on leaving yesterday, but I did not think of it...’
The Tenderness of Wolves, Steph Penney

In the Alps I could readily understand the brightness of sun on snow, we had day after day of clear skies and sun shining down on diamond bright ski slopes. Every time I went outside during the day I wore my sunglasses - and the ultimate fashion accessory if you are a true snow bunny is a ski goggle suntan. 

man and dog in the French Alps 

Back at home in Edinburgh we had the beginnings of spring, flowers were peaking out and I had hopes of being able to retire my leg warmers. Then yesterday I opened the curtains to see snow on the ground. Through winter there were bits and pieces of snow but it did not really stick around in town. Today when I looked out the window I was expecting it all to have melted away, but the landscape was whiter than it had been all winter.

I had an errand that would not be put off by my desire to stay snuggled up inside, so I got out my leg warmers and waterproofs and headed out into the snow flurries. Somehow in the time it took me to get down the stairs the skies had cleared and the sun came out and I found myself blinded by the white light. 

Edinburgh street scape in the snow - March 2013

Rather than heading back upstairs to fetch my sunglasses I put my head down watched out for ice patches and soldiered on - alternating between squinting and closing one eye and then the other as I made my way down the road. 

With the right gear sunshine and snow make for great outdoor conditions - as attested by the mummies doing their aerobic workout in the park and the family with their sled on the hill. Meanwhile for me it was a relief to find myself in shadow and to see the sky going from blue to grey.  

In the time it took to enter the shop and complete my transaction the weather had turned again and I found myself outside in the midst of a different type of snow blindness - this one caused by heavy snow swirling through the air. 

white out in the park - Edinburgh, March 2013

Walking back home through the monochrome world was actually more comfortable for my sunglasses free self, but the sledges, work out mummies and even my footprints from fifteen minutes previous had all vanished in the white.

white out on a familiar street scape - Edinburgh, March 2013 

self portrait dedicated to all my Aussie friends and family sweltering away in 40c conditions.

Winter Writing

It is a snowy day in the Highlands and I am sitting at the Red Squirrel Cafe just after opening - watching the Squirrel’s eat their nuts. I still have my coat on, plus two hats and despite my thermal socks my toes are cold. A writing day is the plan. After some fussing with the computer I have shut it down. It is being more of a distraction than a useful tool. For the time being I will stick to my notebook. I watch the world go by and try to focus, not fidget. Birds come in to take seed, their bellies are plump, eyes alert - Disney cute. I look back to my page and try to return to the fiction... 

Disney cute Winter birdlife - Scotland

A while later most of the squirrel’s have moved off to other things, all except one - which sits eating and eating. It is the hoarder. Perhaps it knows what it is to go hungry. Perhaps it has a brain injury and does not know that the friendly folk at the cafe feed it’s kind twice daily. Down below the ducks are nosing in the snow for food. From their tail waggles I can only presume that they are finding a bounty. Their low slung bodies brush the top of the snow - adding an extra disturbance to their footprints - whose trails track this way and that amongst the trees searching for a woozle... or perhaps just a worm.

The sun catches at the very top of a high grey cloud bank - tinting it white. Hinting that up there someplace there is a brilliantly sunny day. God light points the way to heaven up beyond the grey. Down here it adds brilliance to the scene - lights the shadows. But then a few moments later the sun breaks through more thoroughly - and I realise that up until now we have been in the dark. The sun is addictive at the moment - I see it so rarely that when it comes out I have to stop myself from stripping naked in it’s presence. Instead whenever I am outdoors and I encounter it I turn the only uncovered piece of skin too it - my face - and bask.  
My brain begins to fog a little  - and as the sun is out and the day is clear I pack up my notes and head out to walk. 

Walking the path to Aviemore

Walking with a thin layer of snow underfoot is a curious sensation - closest approximated to walking on firm sand - a bit of give and a squeak with each footstep. At first my path takes me along virgin snow, but soon enough I am sharing the path with dog walkers, joggers, cross country skiers and fellow amblers. The loch is on my left and the hills are on my right -and every now and then the sun comes out and the world sparkles.  True this might not be the best scenery to inspire the story I am working on - a tale of an Australian childhood - but a walk in a winter wonderland sure beats taking a break to do the laundry. The muted silence of a snowy landscape must surely help the brain to percolate.

Sun and snow in the Highlands - January 2013

Back inside I read and write, notes flowing sometimes - sometimes things go haltingly and I stare out the window at the distant hills. A muted pallet spreads before me - a black and white world with just a tincture of dark green where the foliage peeps through. Around four pm the cars begin to roll down the road from the Cairngorm ski centre. Light is fading and the snow sport enthusiasts are calling it a day. I write on, slightly distracted by wondering what adventures have come to those up on the hills. People drift in with tidbits of news from the world beyond - higher up it seems things were all a blur of wind and snow - those of us who stayed lower had a different climate from those who ventured higher up.
Later, in conversation I am noted that I am an oddity - people don’t come to this part of the world to stay inside, ‘A lazy day then?’ I am asked.
‘No.’ I reply, ‘It did not feel like one to me.’

View near Glenmore, Highlands January 2013

Reading List

I had a project towards the end of last year - a 30th birthday present for my brother - and it kept me distracted from writing towards the end of the year. It was a bookish project that involved creating a poster filled with images of my books that I miss - and which my brother and his girlfriend very generously store in their home. When I skype them at their house they usually take me on a little tour so I can mentally pat my books.

Alice in Wonderland detail from the poster

Luckily to keep me from too much book-anguish there has been plenty of new reading in the last twelve months.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - a must read for any steampunks out there.

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson - very beautiful love story.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson - a good sci-fi tale of adventure in a future gone awry.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding - Julia Strachey - random library pick based on looks - that I loved.

Virtual Light - William Gibson - a good sci-fi tale of adventure in a future gone awry... again.

Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights - Sophie Dahl - bio / cook book what is not to love.

Breath - Tim Winton - sun, surf, drama done as Winton does best.

Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson - love and history all wrapped up in a mystery.

Bird Cloud - Annie Proulx - a bio focusing on home and nature by this superb American writer.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Murial Spark - a must read for any new resident of Edinburgh.


If anyone has any book recommendations for 2013 I would love to hear them.