Home Comforts

During another sort-out of my collection of pointless cuttings, I found this paragraph from a gushing Observer  travel article:

I think the bit in there that I especially love is the 'perhaps' - it sits in that sentence like an eager labrador, its ears pricked, panting, full of hopeless, unfounded optimism and misplaced goodwill.

Harwood's Literary Hoax

Until yesterday, I hadn't realised that Gwen Harwood had perpetrated a hoax almost as successful as the famous Ern Malley one - this is an interesting account of both incidents. Apparently, when Harwood was unmasked as the perpetrator of her own poetic trick, what annoyed her most was the way she was described by the newspapers as a 'housewife', rather than a poet.

I have never thought of her as anything but a poet, although I would have to admit that the poems of hers I am especially fond of often deal with subjects that could be said to be drawn from a housewifely kind of realm. This one is a good example:

Cups by Gwen Harwood


They know us by our lips. They know the proverb
About the space between us. Many slip
They are older than their flashy friends, the glasses
They hold cold water first, are named in scripture


Most are gregarious. You'll often see them
nestled in snowy flocks on trestle tables
or perched on trolleys. Quite a few stay married
for life in their own home to the same saucer


and some are virgin brides of quietness
in a parlour cupboard, wearing gold and roses.
Handleless, chipped, some live on in the flour bin,
some with the poisons in the potting shed.


Shattered, they lie in flowerpot, flowerbed, fowlyard,
Fine earth in earth, they wait for resurrection.
Restored, unbreakable, they'll meet our lips
on some bright morning filled with loving kindness.

Words and Phrases that Make Someone Else Grind Their Teeth

The writer of this week's Diary column in the Spectator is on a mission against the word 'journey' (at least in all but its original context):

I think she is right.

The Discreet Charms of the German Speaking World

I was thinking the other day about an Austrian lake where we stopped a couple of summers ago, during the years we lived in London. We'd been there once before, but the village we'd visited had grown since then. Dozens of hotels had sprung up, all built in the same Alpine style, all offering the usual nonsense of that part of the world - lymph-drainage sessions and bio-nourritur, trachten clothing, some kind of therapy involving hot stones. And every available surface in all of the new establishments - just like the old ones -  was littered with pointless 'decorative' objects that were either covered in cross-stitch banalities or made from woven corn. Winsomeness abounded - even our doonas were folded each morning into the shape of hearts:

(I didn't think you'd believe me, without visual evidence.)

On the first morning of our stay, we walked all down one side of the lake, along a narrow stony track that became quite steep in places and where some butterflies we'd never seen before kept landing on our older daughter each time she tried to photograph anything. After a couple of hours, we reached a place where a ferry stopped. There was a building where you could buy lunch beside the ferry stop and, of course, it was swarming with people.

Anyway, we found a table and got ourselves some lunch and ate it and the thing that struck me was the thing that always strikes me in that part of the world - how, despite the same kind of crowding you get at any seaside resort on a sunny day, there was still a level of civilisation that the inhabitants of the British Isles in particular seem to be finding it harder and harder to achieve in similar situations.

One of the reasons for this was that no compromise had been made about the crockery - no-one had decided that it would be quite all right to serve food from polystyrene or paper. This attitude had extended to the furniture. All the tables were made of wood. Formica was unheard of there. In fact, the whole building was wooden, and, although only built in the last five years, it made no attempt to look modern, (while at the same time not being self-consciously old-fashioned). It was simply put together with a 'this is how we've always done it because it works' matter-of-factness. It wasn't shouting about itself into the surrounding landscape; it was just being there, something some architects I've met seem to think is almost a sin. A building should be making a statement, according to them - and that statement can't be, 'I like the way things are'.

Perhaps as a result of all this - being given decent things to eat from and a pleasant place to sit  - the people around us all displayed remarkably good manners. There wasn't a sense that grabbing the best table and yelling across the room to your mates to come and join you was fine. No-one was so noisy that it was impossible to ignore them. No-one appeared to be drunk. There were no tattoos on view either, although that must have been a mere fluke - the tattoo has spread everywhere surely.

It is still unfashionable to like the German-speaking world, and there is so much about it that is deeply unfashionable (not least the cross stitch and the woven wheat objects). Even so, I have a deep, if slightly bemused, affection for it. I find myself looking back on interludes like that lunch on a wooden terrace beside a wooden building next to a lake as not exciting or cutting edge but exceptionally pleasant and civilised - qualities you usually have to pay for, if you can find them at all, in many English speaking countries.

And, having lived in Austria for several years, I do know that life there is not unadulterated heaven. There is a trade-off for the things I regard as positives: you have to put up with the prevailing civic expectation for 'correctness', which at times you find being explained to you in quite an uninhibited, even aggressive, manner, especially if you are trying to do anything with small children. All the same, the German speaking world - or rather Germany and Central Europe, (and, while I recognise Central Europe contains many non-German speaking countries,  I would argue that they can be included because they retain the influence of a German-speaking culture, absorbed during their time as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) - has still got something that we have at least temporarily mislaid. Or perhaps it is that they lack something - our mania for change for its own sake.

Which is why I do catch myself sometimes thinking about that other world of Germany and Central Europe and wondering  if we/the (I was born a dual national) British have allowed too many compromises to be made in the name of convenience and progress and,  if we have, when, how and, most importantly, given that I don't think any of us have really  benefited, why?

Thoughts on Laundry and Nationhood

One advantage of Australia over the United Kingdom, in my experience (although, in light of the recent 'flood events', as the media insists on calling them, it is possibly not really the moment to notice this) is the speed with which you can get your washing dry - and the lovely smell it has when it's spent a day out in the sunshine. Even that stuff you forgot about that's been sitting in the washing machine since last Tuesday (oh, that's just me, is it - no-one else is that incompetent? I feared as much) and is starting to smell like boils (all right, how I imagine boils might smell - accuracy is everything, I agree) comes out fresh and odourless after a day in the Australian sun.

But before this transforms into some kind of nightmarish advertisement, featuring me grinning maniacally, wearing a frilly sprigged pinafore and holding up a box of all new Omo, I will hand over to Rosemary Dobson. Rather than noticing international differences, she spots the universality of washing in her poem called Folding the Sheets:

Folding the Sheets

You and I will fold the sheets
Advancing towards each other
From Burma, from Lapland,


From India, where the sheets have been washed in the river
and pounded upon stones:
Together we will match the corners.


From China, where women on either side of the river
Have washed their pale cloth in the White Stone Shallows
'Under the shining moon'


We meet as though in the formal steps of a dance
to fold the sheets together, put them to air
In wind, in sun, over bushes, or by the fire.


We stretch and pull from one side, and then the other -
Your turn. Now mine.
We fold them and put them away until they are needed


A wish for all people when they lie down to sleep-
Smooth linen, cool cotton, the fragrance and stir of herbs
and the faint but perceptible scent of sweet, clear water.


(From the sequence, 'Daily Living', published in Collected Poems, 1991)

Have I Lost My Sense of Humour

Although I'm fond of dogs, I still find this repellent:

'Organic wok-tossed salmon pasta with a doggie cappuccino' - am I channelling one of my grimmer Church of Scotland forebears (I'm not actually sure that I had any, by the way) or is this just wrong, wrong, wrong?

Hot and Filthy

One of the big advantages of living in Australia is that in most parts of the country it is hot and sunny for quite a lot of the year. I don't particularly like being very hot but what I do like is the fact that, to counteract the heat outside, you have to draw the curtains and keep the house in semi-darkness. This has the excellent effect of making it very hard to see dust or, in fact, any dirt to speak of. Thus, housework can be put off indefinitely during the warmer months. (This post, of course, should really be grouped with this and this and this.)