Well. That was a very interesting exercise and you all stepped up to the plate in a completely different way from how I was expecting. I thought I was going to be reading about your love for a bunch of places in Canada and the reasons they would be a smashing spot to hang my hat. Perhaps I could’ve been marginally clearer on that one, because I wasn’t actually trawling for you all to just tell me you want me around where you are. You are all either astonishingly nice, generous and kind-hearted people, or hoping to be lined up for some good Australian gift loot when I come back. Maybe a bit of both.
In other news, I spent the afternoon stacking beautiful red, brittle jarrah logs for firewood. Jarrah! I am officially living in a Tim Winton novel.
(ps I am not sure why the most recent comments haven’t displayed. Maybe there is a comment limit, and blogger simply can't believe this many people want to talk to me. However, the comments are still appearing in my email, so I am seeing them, and responding, although mine are also being eaten by the hungry hungry comment gods).
2010 is going to be the year I find The One. And you’re going to help me.
O good heavens no. I don’t mean that kind of The One. No calling up brothers and cousins to beg favours.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been some...relocation, in my recent past. New Zealand. Australia. Saskatoon. I have learnt a lot, taught a little,and experienced and enjoyed many things I would not have done, had I stayed in one place.
But I am ready, now, to find my Place, and make it The One. I am ready to take all the things I have experienced and enjoyed and learnt, and put ‘em all together somewhere that I want to be long enough to make it worth buying Tupperware. Painting a wall. Making a home.
So this midwinter Canada Day, when I have officially less time left here in Australia than I have until I go home to Canada, I pass it over to you.
Where shall I go?
Within certain boundaries mostly dictated by my own caprice, I’m willing to give most places a shot.
I’d give you my list of capricious needs, but I’m at the romance stage at the moment. I just want to hear things about places and imagine finding my Place there. So long as there’s some music (yes, MY kind of music. You know) and some books, the remaining needs can wait until the plans get more concrete. When I pack my bags for home, where should home be (and why)?
Find me The One. I trust you. I know you can do it.
(p.s. 1. It doesn’t have to be where YOU live, though it can be. 2. You don’t have to be Canadian to suggest. Pick a place and send me there. 3. Look! Cake!!)
In summary: English folky John Boden does his bit for ‘social singing’ by recording and sharing an unaccompanied song each day for a year. He starts on Midsummer Day (because that’s the sort of thing that is relevant to Our Kind).
Well, the two of you who are still reading, this is undoubtedly A Good Thing, yes?
It is a particularly trad music thing, the preoccupation with ‘social song’. The reason response songs are so bloody long is because it gives everyone a chance; even what my primary school teachers would have called the Slow Learners’ Group can pick up the line after hearing it that many times. If there’s one thing trad music gigs everywhere have in common – England, Canada, Australia, wherever – it’s that consistent effort to make it seem social, as if, ‘well, sure, some of us are up on a stage amid a bunch of heavy-duty sound equipment, having spent thousands of hours honing this talent, these skills, to bring you these sounds, but really we’re all just hanging out together sharing our songs, right?’
Because that’s where it came from, all this, in the beginning.
Coope, Boyes and Simpson have always done unaccompanied singing. Oddly/ excitingly (yes, to me), one song on their new CD As If employs a Québécois style of foot-tapping in a way that pulls the swing of that sound into a really straight, almost Methodist, pure trad English style. It profoundly anglicises it, tames it, makes it something entirely different.
Five very fine Charbonniers do untamed-and-unaccompanied here:
(this is not a recent recording. Aside from anything, they have all apparently discovered scissors and/or barbers these days, which...well, you know how a fairy dies every time we say we don’t believe in fairies? A little bit of my soul dies every time a Québécois musician cuts his hair. Call me Tinkerbell. Anyway, these boys are still purveying The Beautiful like this; hear them more recently (though not unaccompanied) here).
As all of us who have had the misfortune to have ever been trapped around the bad kind will know, the tedium and whininess of unaccompanied English folk singing at its worst can lead you to want nothing so much as to hack your own ears off with rusty shears and feed them to zombie wolves. And never mind ‘social singing’; as far as ‘social skills’ are concerned in that extraordinary brand of fellow whose speciality is the rape-and-pillage ballad, he’s actually the last person on earth with whom you’d want to social-ise.
But at its best?
On my UK touchdown in December, I went to hear the BBC Young Folk Awards, and James Findlay, the kid who won, Had It; the whole thing that ‘It’ is about. He sang and played fiddle, and for the last couple of verses, dropped out the fiddle. In the whole audience, not a timber was left unshivered. He sang again after he’d won the award, and got everyone to join in – in a radio theatre – in the way trad singers all do, to make us feel we’re sharing it, not just being presented with it.
One reason this stuff is important, to me, is that for those of us who live in secular world, we don’t have a good excuse for sharing song. Go to church every Sunday, there’s a reason to lift your voice in the company of other people. In secular world, this is our really good alternative, I reckon, going back to the roots of it like this. One song at a time.
Ah! Hello, winter solstice, longest darkest night of the year! We meet again. Why, it seems as if just six months ago you and I were rubbing shoulders back in the northern hemisphere. Good times!
The local government of Perth has had this whole bell-tower built – not especially for solstice bells, to be sure, but...they could be for that.
And I am here to tell you, I have not run into a single West Australian with one good word to say about the bell tower. It is in fact the very genesis of the question that marks you out as One Of Us or One Of Them: “What do you think of the bell tower, then?”
If you are One Of Us, there is but one answer to this question, and it is the same answer you would give were you asked “What do you think of someone who skins live kittens and eats them raw, then?”
I went to a place recently that had a contraption on the wall that floofed out soapy foam for cleaning your hands with. It had a sign above it: 'Waterless Hand Washing Facility'. Someone had taken a biro and crossed out the word ‘Water’ and written ‘Use’, so it read “Useless Hand Washing Facility”.
Then on the bus home this evening, I saw a sticker in the back window of a car, that read: BREAD + DUCKS = DEATH. And I briefly fancied that same person might come by in the night, and replace 'DEATH' with 'SANDWICH'.
Summertime. Canadians, you’re going to The Lake, aren’t you?
I knew it.
This may be the only thing on which I will always, always disagree with Canada. I have never understood your affinity with The Lake. (Everything else, I adopt and embrace in the way that only a foreigner who has humbly chosen and asked to be One Of You can. Oh, except also, not Ashley McIsaac. Two things).
Y’all know how I love a good seaside. Perhaps it’s originating from an island nation that makes the ocean something that locates me; I know where I am, there where the tide is. The ocean’s the absolute Unknown, but sand under soles, you know yourself.
A decent river absolutely turns my crank too. Rivers are purposeful; they GO somewhere. Like oceans, their history is one of taking things places. Rivers are busy and effective and efficient; they get stuff done. Connect things to other things.
The Lake has no such qualities. It’s so stand-offish, The Lake. It’s got no tides (‘think you can influence me, ‘the moon’, if that even is really your name? I shun you.’). There’s no Unknown; I get that the Canadian lakes are jolly big, but...say you set out on The Lake from Toronto, The Unknown is...Rochester. There’s nothing Kon-Tiki about that.
And it doesn’t DO anything. Off goes the St Lawrence, ‘busy busy, can’t stop to chat, putting in the hard yards, keeping the world running, doin’ my job, 365 days a year’, and The Lake’s just like, ‘oh, you know. I sit here. You can walk along my shore if you like. Or you could sit, too, I guess. I don’t really care, one way or the other.’
I like it not.
What’s yours: lake, river, ocean? None of the above?
I have an important question to ask you, in a few weeks. At the moment it’s exam season and I’m up to my eyes in marking and cannot quite put my mind to important questions (nor, in the interest of honesty, to combing my hair before leaving the house, which, in the interest of further honesty, does not make a great deal of difference to my appearance). But soon.
Until I find that bûcheron who’ll come home from a hard winter at the chantier (circa 1840) and lift me up in one hand while making me tea with the other, well, I’ll just be content to knit myself the girls’ version of the socks he’ll be wearing when he does.
I have the crazy sock gleam in my eye for these, the one that leads me to write sentences longer than a whole paragraph should be. I cannot begin to describe how beautiful and miraculous this yarn is. It is from Bilby Yarns, a local producer.
This is the quintessential voyageur yarn. It’s rough (in the best way) and honest; springy and even and clean; it feels good in your hands and smells good, and it makes the warmest socks I have ever produced. These are socks that could only be worn out by a thousand days on the hardworking feet of someone with a sincere and loving heart. I know for certain that socks made with Bilby Yarn are worn by every wholesome woodcutter, every good farmer, every truthful man in every folk tale or fairy tale ever written or sung, in any country, in any language, ever, primarily in northern hemisphere ones where there is real winter. (I don’t know how they got it from here to all those places back then, but dudes, it is le fact).
Photos never do colour justice, and I can only imagine the dyes used on these yarns are distilled from nothing less than the quiet and happy souls of those who did small kindnesses, who built bridges, who did not hurt, who laughed long, who sang loudly, who loved deeply. They are beautiful.
The pattern is from a hardcover book (deetz below) that I could not bring all the way to Australia with me. I did photocopy this one pattern, though, because I already had a skein of Bilby Yarn and knew this was the pattern it had been yearning for all its life.
As we all know, it’s better to be happy than to be right, but being right is cool too, especially when it coincides with also being happy. And I was so right. They were made for each other.
I have two more skeins of this yarn already. I am so not done. I may never knit anything except these socks with this yarn for the rest of my life.
(For the knit-interested who need to know, the facts: the book is Handknit Holidays by Melanie Falick; it recommends knitting these on four needles but I usually use three until I get to the foot, when it gets bulky on three; these are made with a double-strand of Bilby 4-ply on 4mm needles.)
Because if I didn’t mess everything up much of the time, there’d be nothing to write about, right?
Yesterday I bought a big ole handful of fresh prawns, and thought, I’ll do this properly, and use the shells and legs and brains and stuff to make stock for soup.
Quite why I decided to undertake this shortly before I was to leave to get the bus to get the train into the city for a friend’s Very Massively Important exhibition opening, I do not know. Anyway, I threw the shells and legs and brains into a pan and started boiling away.
After a while, I removed the shells and legs and brains, and put potatoes into the stock to boil. Then I took the shells and legs and brains outside to the bin.
It was when I came back inside that I realised the whole house boomed with the smell of prawn shells and legs and brains.
Didn’t think this through.
I had that moment of...can I get away with it? Because what with the fourth-quarter decision to start the prawn peeling and stock making, I was already in a might-need-to-put-your-foot-down-a-bit place vis à vis getting myself out of the house in time to make the bus.
Good sense, in the form of realising I’d be the person on the bus and the train and in the gallery about whom people whispered, ‘Crikey, that woman reeks of fish’, prevailed. I poured the stock and potatoes into the blender to soup them up, and hopped in the shower.
Tick tock, tick tock. Out of the shower, poured the soup out, filled the blender jug with dishwater to soak. Sat the blender jug on the counter.
Aha! I see you got there before me! If only you’d been here at that moment, instead of now, to remind me blender jugs don’t have a bottom.The blender blade bit just sits underneath with a seal. Setting the thing down on the blade bit makes it pop up inside the jug. A tidal wave of fishy water slapped into my front in the manner of a perfectly executed Soak the Bloke booth at the village fete.
Tick tick tick tick tick.
I wiped down, dressed up, threw towels over the fish-flooded floor, and got the heck out.
I’d checked my route on the public transport website. I’d typed in the street the gallery was on, and it told me which train station was closest. At no point in the process did it occur to me to think, “Gee, I wonder if Aberdeen Street is by any chance the longest street in the city, encompassing two different train stations?”
It took me ten minutes (with two false starts; I have no inner compass) to walk to Aberdeen Street from the station. I reached it at number 189. The gallery was at number 12.
TICK TOCK.
I missed the speeches, but on the plus side, nobody was heard to remark that there was a strong smell of prawn shells and legs and brains in the vicinity. And today, I’m having soup.
I bought a cup of lemonade and a bag of popcorn for forty cents from a little girl and her mum who had a stall in their driveway.
They had gone to a LOT of trouble for the forty-cent lemonade and popcorn combination deal. They had a proper little stall, and had even cut fabric up into flags to make bunting.
I made my purchase and stood passing the time, drinking my lemonade and waiting for my change (what do you think is the etiquette on this? I had a buck, and dithered between just-give-her-a-buck-because-she’s-making-some-pocket-money-and-it’s-only-a-buck, and mum-is-trying-to-teach-her-maths-so-you-should-let-her-figure-out-change). Anyway, at this point their second customer of the day approached, and you can believe me that this dude wasn’t necessarily in absolute command of all his faculties. He had either been very drunk last night, or was drunk right now. Or both.
And mum, without missing a beat, said ‘Now. This lady needs her change, because she gave us a dollar, and this gentleman needs a cup of lemonade. Because he has a hangover.’
Careless, careless, careless. But it’s definitely slipped down the back of the radiator in the last few years, and I haven’t put my hand down there, because it is a haven for dust bunnies and stale biscuit crumbs and fear.
I can still read French pretty well. And in my head, practised and re-practised, I can have a decent conversation (because I know exactly what the other person is going to say). But out in the world? My French is too fragile to survive.
Example: I spoke French to someone the other day, because he was struggling to find one or two of the English words to formulate the question he was asking me. When he’d heard me answer, he responded. And I panicked, because he wasn’t in my head, so I hadn’t made up what he was going to say.
All it was, was ‘Ah, whereabouts in Canada are you from?’ and I didn’t get it.
This proves two things: one, having once been fluent, I would barely pass my Basic Listening French GCSE these days; and two, I obviously still quack like une vraie Québécoise.
I just recently went to Fairbridge Festival, and I was half-inclined to avoid the Canadians (Genticorum, James Keelaghan, Hugh McMillan) because I figured hearing them would make me homesick and sad to be here, and I am not at all sad to be here, but music can be sneaky that way. In the end, I didn’t avoid them, and they did make me cry like a baby, but in a good way, and anyway some Yahoos, and others, reminded me of what I would miss were I back in Canada, so it was okay.
Pascal Gemme of Genticorum is, weirdly, a dead ringer for Michel Bordeleau circa 2001, whose leaving of La Bottine Souriante I never quite got over, and thus got a bit out of the habit of listening to them. But my festival experience (complete with camping in this jolly SWAG, natch):
made me wheel out some French-Canuck tunes when I got home. I had to write a bunch of articles right off the bat when I came back, and my brain was right in that place, concentrating really hard on fact-checking how many flights were cancelled in Europe and on whether a quoll is a marsupial, when I suddenly realised my lips were shaping themselves unhesitatingly around the words of every single song that came out of the speakers. Jeunes filles mariées aux (dreary) avocats;jeunes hommes qui sont des premiers marins; even one with a pun, where the joke is that ‘trop petit’ (too small) sounds like ‘rôti’ (roasted)- a joke that’s possibly a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiit too laboured to bother explaining here. It was as if the French was the motor part of what I was doing, while my brain was otherwise (dis)engaged.
Frankly, no, being fluent in 19th century chansons à repondre is not spectacularly helpful to my communication skills. But it is a bit comforting to know it’s still in there, someplace.
C’était une fille en Australie
Qui a fait du camping dans un swag
(Répétez: C’était une jeune fille en Australie
Qui a fait du camping dans un swag)
Et elle l’a trouvé bien jolly
Même qu’elle n’a eu ni un jumbuck ni un tucker bag.
