Friday 25th Janaury

Friday 25^th January

We have just moved offices – yet again.  This time only from the 4^th to the 2^nd floor, and no major furniture upheaval was required.  Moving is always slightly fraught with difficulty and confusion.  I have a nice new desk, a view of Victoria Street, and a second filing cabinet which is dear to my heart (I love filing things out of sight…).  I also have – no phone!  This is quite wonderful; if I have no phone NOBODY CAN RING ME.  They can still send me emails, but…no phone calls, which require to be answered NOW NOW NOW!!!

A lot of our office things are still upstairs, so I am living a confusing sort of work life, very similar to my confusing home life, where my things are divided between Pete’s house, Pete’s Unit #1, 2XS, and Katy and Jeff’s house.  So many possibilities for losing things, putting things in the wrong place, leaving important and valuable things behind.  I am sure all of this is very good for continuing exercise of my brain!  I don’t need to be doing crosswords or sudokus to keep the synapses synapsing…

India

         

I don’t think I have mentioned before how lots of the people we met on the trains, and around the traps generally, in India, couldn’t guess our ages accurately.  They were routinely amazed to discover, for instance, that Pete was sixty.  “No!” they would shout.  “You mean fifty!”  Pete found this perplexing; “This looks like sixty, doesn’t it?  What are they on about?”  But Raj…well at some stage while we were having our cup of tea with John, Raj asked how old Pete was.  “What would you guess, Raj?”  I asked, expecting the routine answer of “fifty.”  “Well, he is about seventy five.  And you,” staring at me appraisingly, “are a bit younger.”  I asked him why he thought this, and he said, “Well Pete has told me that he was here about forty years ago.  He must have been in his thirties, to be able to afford to travel.”  It made me realise, once again, how wealthy we are in Australia.  Pete was in fact in his very early twenties the first time he went to India… Young people in Australian just do this, go off around the world at the age of twenty two, without it being anything extraordinary, whereas Raj at the age of thirty four would get no closer to a plane than taking passengers to the airport.

Thursday 24th January

Thursday 24^th January

MONAFOMA  removed

India #75

Pete and I had a day and two nights in Jaipur to wander around and be what Raj called “a lovely couple.”  He was such a nice young bloke, we really enjoyed his company and his point of view.  We decided to go with the flow and take his advice on good things to see and do in this big (2.7 million, well not that big by Indian standards…) city.  Our first experience of the day was a quiet, out of the way place with some beautiful mausoleums made of three different sorts of marble, with exquisite, delicate carvings.  Nobody else was there at all, just a weary looking guide who was happy to show us around for a hundred rupees or so.  He had a big stick with him and we soon discovered that this was so that he could chase off the other inhabitants of these beautiful mausoleums – families of beautiful silver langurs lolling about in the banyan trees, and a whole tribe of boys racing around the ramparts.  These boys were gorgeous, full of life and fun, tearing around the high walls, leaping across the high platforms, intent on some fabulous game.  What a great place to play – trees, ruins, monkeys, a guide with a stick after you!  They caught sight of us and stopped playing so intently and beautifully: we were suddenly their focus and their prey, they wanted MONEY, chocolate, schoolpens, whatever we could give them.  Secretly I was glad we had a guide nearby with a big stick… Cute as these boys were I rather suspect they would have mugged us most fearlessly if we hadn’t had a chaperone.  They had a very Lord of the Flies look about them.  The mausoleums, so the guide told us, were built by one of the maharajahs of Jaipur, who had 122 children, all of whom died in childhood, of malaria and typhoid.  A cheery tale!

         

Raj had many enthusiasms.  One of them was for an Australian, John Stark, who runs a textile factory and shop.  He was certain that we would be interested to meet John.  “He used to be a social worker, and he has lived here for a long time, at least twenty years.  But you will see, he still looks SO like an Australian social worker!”  I found this quite astonishing.  How would Raj know what a typical Australian social worker looks like??  Even more astonishing – he was quite right!  John is a very nice man, with the exact look, clothing and manner of his former profession.  Loose Indian clothing, casual wavy grey hair, a warm and sincere way of talking.  The whole kit and caboodle in fact!  He set up the factory all those years ago to employ Untouchables, who otherwise would not have been employed at all, or only at the very bottom of the food chain in India.  We went over to the factory to watch people industriously screenprinting bolts of silk, dusting them with gold powder.  John invited us to have a cup of tea in the shop.  And yes ofcourse we did buy a few things, but he wasn’t in the least bit pushy.  While Raj was outside doing something to his autorickshaw he told us we were very lucky to have chanced upon this particular driver.  He said that Raj came from one of the very nicest, most hard-working families in Jaipur. 

Wednesday 23rd January

Wednesday 23^rd January

More MONAFOMA…

• After the lullaby-soporificfest Pete and I went to Liverpool Street and stood in a cheerful queue for quite a long time.  Why, I hear you cry?  Why – to get into FAUX MO.  We had no idea what this was or what it would be like but…if you build it they will come, and there we were.  The queue didn’t move at all so we gave up.  (Pete’s house was rented for the duration of MONAFOMA by some of the organisers and participants in the events – specifically the FAUX MO workers, so we did have a slight extra interest in having a look at what was happening in and under Bidencopes Lane.)

• Our next performance was in the beautiful Town Hall upstairs venue, with its gloriously painted ceiling, full of chandeliers, wrought iron lacing, intricate blue and cream and pink paintwork.  Another very soporific hour…Elizabeth Anderson, playing the harpsichord, which is a very tinkly, sleep-inducing instrument.  It was all very pleasant, although it was hot and lots of people seemed to feel the need to have their eyes closed and their heads nodding…

• After this we raced, in Pete’s trusty WRX, to pick up James and Bron and to sit on the lawns at Moorilla to listen to a wonderful US guitarist, Richard Giliewitz, who told charming, soothing stories, and played three different guitars in turn, like a virtuoso guitar-playing angel.  This was all very pleasant.  Pete had, at some stage, as he rushed about during the week buying parts for the 2XS toilet pump, bought two little folding chairs, low to the ground.  They have Australian flags on them so we looked extremely patriotic… So nice to sit on the lawns in comfort!

Speaking of Pete and the toilet… On Monday morning, first thing, he went to the pump shop, where he was greeted, with a smile, by the ever-patient owner of the business.  Pete said, “I bet when you woke up this morning you did not think to yourself, Oh goody, I hope my week begins with Pete Headlam walking in, again, with a toilet pump problem!”  Well no; it possibly was not his dearest wish, but he was, as always, kind, patient and helpful and maybe at some stage the toilet problem on 2XS will be fixed permanently.  We can only hope, and dream…

India #74

Pete and I moved from Shapura House to a slightly less expensive but equally lovely place in Jaipur, where the bed was SO comfortable I couldn’t whinge at all – how much of a relief for you this is!!  No backache!  The Madhuban was remarkable for a few reasons.  One was that it had quite a large population of indolent dogs lying around panting gently in the heat.  There were at least two Dachshunds (one ancient, one young) a German Shepherd and a Spitz.  They were totally useless, these dogs.  In the middle of the night Pete and I had a water emergency.  No water at all, not from any tap, not in the toilet.  This was NOT good.  We really needed to flush.  I won’t go into details but you can imagine… This was India…. Pete went out, full of grim resolve to get some water.  He prowled around the Madhuban, tripping over sleepydogs every few steps.  He also passed many staff members who were also snoring gently on every available horizontal surface.  Did any of them wake and give the alarm, or come to his aid?  Not bloody likely!  That brings me to the second remarkable thing about this particular hotel – the staff were grumpy and unhelpful.  Very unusual.  They hung around us, when they were awake, whingeing gently about each other and about the management and touting for tips.  We told Driver Raj and he was not impressed, said that they are renowned there for not working co-operatively.  His advice was don’t give them any tips individually, put it in the box in the manager’s office where it will be distributed fairly.

         

There was a beautiful pool at the Madhuban.  We had a lovely swim, but were a bit puzzled by the line of birds sitting along the wall watching us intently, and, we felt, rather crossly.  What was so fascinating about us??  When we got out, they all dived for the water, splashing about and drinking and squawking – we had obviously interrupted their afternoon ablutions!

Tuesday 22nd january

Tuesday 22^nd January

So now MONAFOMA.  This is such a huge event, so weird, so out there… I didn’t get to many of the performances; Pete saw a lot more, and was mightily impressed, and occasionally bemused.  What I can absolutely say, with great confidence, is that it was a great success and that Hobart was heaving with cool hipsters from all over Australia, and probably from all over the world, all of them saying variations on cool, man. 

My experiences included:

• An exploration of Princes Wharf No #1 shed, divided and transformed.  Pete and I climbed several levels in the first “room”, where there were installations of various sorts.  We stuck our heads up into large sound cones, each of them emitting a peculiar whine or drone, and looked into dark little rooms, all mystifying.  On the top level there was a large foil tent thingy, into which about ten (bemused) people crowded, making happy crinkling sounds with the foil.  A lovely young MONAFOMA employee came up to us and said, “have you been to the bottom two levels?  If not, go there first otherwise this won’t make any sense.”  Ummm…he was right, it didn’t make any sense even though we had been to all of the levels in the correct order…but we just nodded sagely and thanked him.

• We moved on to the next area, with a huge sound stage, and listened to a heart-stopping (LOUD!) band called Dirty Projectors for a while.  Not for a large amount of time…it really was LOUD, and I couldn’t see anything at all.  I watched a father with his little girl, similar age to Zoe, ie three.  She HATED it and was covering her ears and sobbing into his shoulder as he beamed proudly and stayed in the venue with her in his arms.  If he had had Zoe with him she would have turned into Zoe Of Fury and he would have HAD to leave… 

•  We left this noisy venue and went to a very different one…the Baha’i Centre, where there was a concert of lullabies, played on violin by Anna McMichael and on piano by…oh dear I didn’t write her name down.  There were a few beanbags around the edges of the room, and quite a few of the beanbag inhabitants were soon, appropriately, zizzing away contentedly.  Two of the lullabies were very beautiful and melodic; most of them were just a bit odd.  The Axeman’s Lullaby, for example, was not particularly soothing.

On Sunday we had a big MONAFOMA day.  But I think I will pause now and gather my thoughts a bit before I launch into any sort of description…my ears and my brain are still ringing from the Bushfire Relief concert last night – the Hoodoo Gurus, as the closing act!! 

India #73

At 12.30, after our Amber Fort adventure, it was time to go to the airport with the Sharmas.  They were off to Mumbai to do family things.  Their plane was due to leave at 1.20 so we had plenty of time, the airport is not far at all, just a few kilometres.  But oh dear…every road was jammed and gridlocked.  Raj, our driver, was a true hero.  He ricocheted the little van down one-way streets the wrong way, veering over nature strips, and went all the way to the other end of the city and out the back end.  He got us onto the highway with the wind in his hair.  It was actually all quite stressful.  There is a strict speed limit on the highway and he seemed to be crawling along the road.  He was adamant that he couldn’t exceed the speed limit - there is a heavy fine.  Vish leaned forward to Pete, who was in the front seat being Raj’s helper, and whispered, “Tell him to go very fast and I will pay the fine!”  I think Pete was the only person who was totally convinced that we would get to the airport in time.  Hana had completely given up and sat despondently beside me trying to work out alternative ways of getting back to Mumbai by the evening.  We got there at about 1.15 and all three Sharmas left the van as if it was the start of the 100 metres hurdles at the Olympics, with their packs and bags dragging along behind them.  Pete, Raj and I got out of the van and strolled about, waiting to see if they were in fact allowed onto the plane.  Miraculously all was well, and we three heaved big sighs of relief just as I imagine the three Sharmas were heaving sighs of relief inside the Mumbai-bound plane.

21st January birthdays

I have three other birthdays on my 21^st January reminder list on my cleverclever iphone:

• Melissa Agnew Scott, Pete’s niece cleverclever niece who is a chef, a personal trainer and now also, I think a webpage designer.  Oh and the mother of three dear little children.
• Steve Mason, Pete’s (slightly distant) cousin and a sterling member, on and off of the 2XS crew.  Steve and Margaret were extremely kind and hospitable to us on Flinders Island and we are very happy to think we might be getting Steve’s company on the boat again this year.  (No not Margaret…I don’t think she is a BoatGirl, unfortunately.)
• Harry Headlam, Pete’s grandson, nine years old today and full of fun and affection.

Monday 21st January

Monday 21^st January

Today’s birthday girl is – Zoe Thomas, aged three!  She has requested, for her birthday feast, a nice bowl of boiled noodles with tomato sauce.  Her poor older brother and sister have tried, quietly and persistently, to get her to choose fish and chips, but she is adamant.  Boiled noodles with sauce, and maybe a jellybean or two thrown in.  Zoe is a wonderful little girl, full of fun and good cheer.  She is extremely obedient and compliant – All right then, she says, happily, when redirected from some dangerous or faintly heinous activity.  Except…when she isn’t extremely obedient and compliant …and then she is Zoe Of Fury and no amount of reason or logic will sway her.  She is much loved.

This weekend we had guests on 2XS – Hamish (12) and Angus (10).  They showed us quite a different aspect of marina life… They explored up, down, around and under, clambering, exploring, fishing (unsuccessfully) and rip-sticking in the almost empty carpark.  Pete and I played quite a few rounds of Sequence with them and I am afraid to say we were roundly trounced; I think the final score was 5 to The Boys and 1 to P & M… Oh deary me…and we really did try!

We also spent a lot of the weekend rushing about from one MONAFOMA event to the other.  No not with Hamish and Angus; they would have loathed it all, we were not so unkind! My head is buzzing, not altogether pleasantly, so I will try to settle my impressions and write coherently about this amazing festival over the next few days.

India #72

Raj took us to the Amber Fort the next morning, all five of us jammed into a rickety old taxivan he had borrowed.  I had my heart set on doing this the traditional way, ie on the back of an elephant.  Until recently the elephants at the Amber Fort have had a hard time.  They have trudged up and down the steep ramparts from morning till night, carrying up to six people at a time.  Recently their lives have been transformed.  They only work 8-11am and carry only two at a time.  I asked where they go for the rest of the day, and was shown a large paddock with a small lake in the middle; this is where they have their siesta.  All very satisfactory; under these circumstances I was more than happy to pay 550 rupees and ride my beautiful elephant.  Nobody else wanted to join me, they preferred to walk up and up and UP in the stifling heat.  We did, however, persuade Mary that she should ride up as well; she still wasn’t all that well, and it really was hot, and steep.

         

(I have already put the story of Pete And the German on this blog but…here it is again, in its original form…)

The elephant loading areas are very old and designed specifically for the purpose of getting onto the back of an elephant with minimum injury to one’s dignity.  Mary and I joined a large queue and started up a set of stairs to the top of the loading platform.  Pete accompanied us to make sure we didn’t totter over the edge in a foolish manner.  When we got to the top there was, very suddenly and inexplicably, an unseemly commotion.  A thin elderly German tourist was shouting and gesticulating at us, saying that we had pushed in and that it was HIS turn to get on before us.  Mary and I just stared at him in wonder; why all the fuss, there were plenty of elephants, plenty of places on elephantbacks.  What was the matter with the silly old geezer?  He was quite apoplectic and shaking his fist at us.  Pete was incensed.  His eyes flashed with rage and he made menacing gestures, and said, in unequivocal terms that it was a LONG way down.  The German didn’t speak a word of English but he understood all too clearly that he was in danger of being thrown from elephant height.  It didn’t stop him from shouting and waving his arms about in an intemperate fashion.  In the meantime, the two young Indian elephant loaders had quietly and efficiently plucked Mary and me from the queue and placed us gently on our beautiful elephant, Poonam, and we were away.  The German, we saw to our satisfaction, was quite a long way behind us.  He was part of a tour group, all of whom looked mightily embarrassed to be associated with him.

         

After all of that, did we enjoy our majestic ride up to the Amber Fort on the back of Poonam?  Well yes it was just lovely!  We were a bit bemused to find people dangling things before our eyes as we progressed up the hill.  From elephant-height windows in the ramparts there were desperate street sellers –“buy this dress/t-shirt/sarong/carved elephant-with-baby-elephant-inside!”  “Why yes!” we felt like shouting.  “Ofcourse we want to buy dresses!  We will try them on from our comfortable seat on the back of Poonam!”

         

We were a bit sad to get off our lovely elephant but it was time to go and explore the wonderful Amber Fort.  It is a very extensive structure and is surrounded by twelve miles of solid stone walls which go up and down the ridges of the steep surrounding hills.  It must have all been very daunting for the marauding forces rushing around in the heat trying to raid and slaughter.  There were lots of tourgroups “doing” the Fort.  A flock of gorgeously-clad young Indian women from a college seemed to be on the same track as we were.  They were so funny, all totally besotted with Hana.  They would shriek and giggle when they saw her, “Hana!  Hana!” they would shout, clapping their hands with glee and watching her with wide admiring eyes.  It was as if Paris Hilton had descended upon the Amber Fort!  (Oh dear and oh no…I’m so sorry; Hana is MUCH more impressive and wonderful than Paris H… I was just using her as a measure of young female pulling-power!)

Saturday 19th January

Saturday 19^th January

My latest taxi driver story is a bit sad…

I clambered into one of the big maxtaxis recently, and recognised the driver, Rob, immediately.  Last time I had been in his huge vehicle he had only been driving it for a few days and he was quite enthusiastic.  He had been made redundant from an IT job which he liked very much, and he was hoping to find similar job satisfaction driving maxitaxis.

A few months down the track…not so much.  Taxi drivers don’t earn much money at all, and there is a lot of boredom involved, waiting in taxi ranks only to get a small fare, just a few kilometres, just a few dollars.

I said, “Oh I remember you, how are you going?” and he looked very wary.  I told him where I was going, in South Hobart, and he just said, “Mmm hmmm,” noncommittally.  I don’t expect drivers to remember me at all, but they usually do remember the narrow country road we are aiming for.  The old codgers allay, “Oh yes, I used to ride me billycart there when I was a boy!” while the younger ones say, “Cool, man!  And the newly arrived immigrant drivers look terrified as they negotiate the potentially icy bends and the plethora of hoppity wildlife.

Rob warmed up after a bit of chat, and said that he no longer lets people know when remembers where they live, or where they might be going in his taxi.  Recently he picked up a young woman and said, “Hi, how are you, are you going to Boa Vista Road?”  She froze and looked terrified and asked to be let out at the next corner.  Now when she comes up to a taxi rank and sees his cab, she makes a wide detour around it and looks all hunted.  He said, plaintively, “Do I LOOK like a stalker?”  Well yes maybe he does; maybe we all look like potential stalkers!!  Poor Rob…

India #71

We had dinner, our last meal with the Sharmas for a few days, in the rooftop restaurant of our resplendent hotel.  There was a bit of a floorshow.  I think there were two lots of Rajastani dancers.  They have a particular style of dancing which involves lots of twirling around, wearing colourful skirts and balancing an ever-increasing number of pots on the head.  As well as dancing there was a puppet show, done by a man with his two young sons, who gave it all their very best.  We watched and clapped and enthused, and Vish and Mary, good people that they are, bought several beautiful string puppets.  The performers were very happy with us, because we not only applauded, we also put money in their hat.  We were not impressed with some of the other diners who seemed very rude, didn’t watch, didn’t applaud, talked loudly through the performance.  It only went for about ten minutes; they could have been less offensive. 

It actually reminded me of a Tupperware party I went to once about 25 years ago in Margate.  One of my neighbours had only just started selling.  She wasn’t very confident, and decided to try out her skills on the women of Nierinna Road.  About 15 of us gathered and sat around sipping tea and watching her demonstration.  All except for one in our midst, who obviously thought that Tupperware was far beneath her.  She sat with her back turned to poor Sue  telling long stories punctuated with shrieks of laughter.  Because she was such a dominant person in our little community, most people smiled and laughed and listened to her, while Sue held up salad bowls and egg slicers to an unresponsive audience.  I could understand that maybe Tupperware wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but in that case why come at all??  Our rudeperson could just have stayed home with a select group of friends to listen to her stories and laugh loudly; why inflict it on poor Sue?  I felt the same about the puppet show audience; we were well and truly warned that there would be a floor show, and if we hadn’t wanted to watch it, there were lots of other restaurants in Jaipur we could have gone to.