Reflections from the city of ghosts

Sunday Blog 103 – Sunday 24th September

It always takes me some time to “arrive” once I return from a trip. One of the biggest mysteries of travel to me not just exploring new places, but also being once again in places that you were before.

It’s like re-reading a book over time, when you can re-discover who you were when you read it last time, what you missed, what you know now that makes those same words mean such different things now.

Visiting Thessaloniki, (also known as Salonika, Salonica, Thessalonika etc.) Greece’s second biggest city, was a bit part of this trip for me. Last year, on the way out to Heathrow airport I saw a sign advertising Thessaloniki as a tourist destination. I hadn’t seen that before, and I took it as a Sign that my 2023 needed to include Thessaloniki. I had been to Athens several times to catch ferries to islands, but was increasingly disenchanted with how little grace the city seems to have apart from the Acropolis and the excellent museums, and its delicious, overpriced tavernas surrounding this area. The rest seems to me grim and increasingly desperate sprawl of apartments. Sometimes I felt unsafe walking its dark streets.

Besides Thessaloniki was my home for nearly four years, from 1996 to 2000 in the tumultuous years where I became an English language teacher briefly, and then the mother of a half-Greek daughter. I have been back and forth over the years, but not recently.

This year I was able to spend a little time in Thessaloniki separately and together with my husband, my daughter, and my daughter’s father and friends. I also finally read Gail Jones’ Salonika Burning which was excellent. She also left a clue about a history book she had found very helpful when reading it, Salonica, City of Ghosts – Christians, Muslins and Jews by Mark Mazower. I have downloaded its 700+ pages and am only in the early part of it but it is comprehensive and fascinating. The opening quote in the book leapt out at me because it is exactly as this city seems – “the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place”

Take for example this photo taken through the 6 metre deep Rotunda Walls. This 4th Century building has been a pagan temple to who knows which god, a Christian basilica, a Muslim mosque, back to a Christian church and its main use now, an archeological site and museum. You can see through the window the modern apartment blocks of Greece anywhere, slap bang next to it.

Where I chose to spend my final three days right in the centre in Navarinou Square, the remains of the Hippodrome built adjacent to this magnificent rotunda is mainly ruins surrounded again by apartment blocks.

For three days I lived in one of these apartments, finishing off the working holiday with mainly working, a little bit of holiday and a lot of sunshine. Tourists, something I had never seen before, are now common. It is clear money has been spent on roads, on the airport. More ferries are running again.

I loved this idealised and unrealistic three-day stay in the flash Navarinou apartment, so different from my life when I eked out an existence as a teacher. Perhaps what made it so sweet was that I had spent several days with my daughter in her father’s family apartment in the old town. We were joined by a couple of his friends too, and we camped out there together for a few days. That’s what it feels like, as the apartment is about to be rented out and it’s fair to say, it has been somewhat neglected in the last five years. Also I elected to stay on the day bed so I had the run of the place to make a cup of tea in the middle of the night and do my yoga early in the morning while my daughter slept.

Just before I was due to leave, and after my daughter had already gone, (sob) we found the photo albums from her dad’s family. We’d looked for these in vain while she was there. I pored over these, capturing all the images for my her, filing them away for her to enjoy back in Perth. My last time in the apartment was spent marinating in memories of others lives. Zigging and zagging across the joys and tragedies and sadness of loss and change.

My Greek memoir is beginning to brew and take shape…

An Independent Greek Holiday

Sunday Blog 102 – 17th September 2023

It’s there in my Vision Book – “I allow myself to have regular independent Greek holidays with Zoe.” My beautiful half-Greek daughter. This year, finally I have achieved this. And it was absolutely in every way worth the wait.

It’s a complicated life path to here – Greek people want to know why I speak a little Greek, I tell them I lived in Thessaloniki 25 years ago. Then I throw in a half-Greek daughter and it becomes a to-and-fro of “Does she live in Australia?” “Do you live in Australia?” “Where does her dad live?” The answers are Yes, Yes, Thessaloniki. Then when I mention a husband in Perth the whole round of questions start again. It’s complicated.

Since moving back to Perth for good in 2000 with my then one-year-old daughter, there have been trips back and forth to Greece, where her Greek father paid for us to come in lieu of maintenance. That all came to a screaming halt around the Global Financial Crisis of 2009.

Then, it wasn’t until 2016 that I was able to fly the both me and my daughter over to Greece. As my daughter was 16 it was necessary for all three of us to spend time together. A trip to Halkidiki from Thessaloniki was on the cards, but who knew when? Day after day passed in the sweltering city of Thessaloniki with no air conditioning or places to swim. Eventually we hit the road in his hot van, then there would be many puzzling stops, without any pre-warning. We would never know for how long or what the purpose of the stops was for. Eventually we ended up at a Beach Bar where I felt caught in the middle of a frat party. My daughter loved it, but then again, it was age appropriate for her. I was horrified.

I longed to escape the disco thud and get to my booked writing retreat in Delphi. This enterprise was gently mocked, and I was unable to extort any information about how to get there. Not all Greek travel arrangements can be solved by google. The beach may have been delightful, but I was marinading in impotence and frustration. Memories of the eight months I had lived as a dependent mother of a small baby in Thessaloniki in 1999-2000 washed over me again and again.

One of the frustrating days at the Beach Bar, to the backing of the disco beat, I couldn’t stop crying. It was embarrassing, but it worked. Nek minit I was dropped off at a bus stop in the next town, caught a bus back to Thessaloniki, a plane to Athens, a metro to Athens Bus Station. Then a long wait in a profoundly charmless station with a drop toilet, and then, finally, finally a bus to Delphi. It wound around tortuously across half of Greece but delivered me there, late for the first session of the retreat. I felt so accomplished to just get there!

Then there were the Greek holidays I have had without my daughter. Wonderful writing retreats and beach holidays, time with my husband and sister and friends. While independent holidays for me, I couldn’t share them with my daughter. They didn’t allow us to integrate together our connection to this beautiful but frustrating country.

And then this year, after floods and tempestuous rain (the island of Alonissos where I was) and food poising and earthquakes (Marrakech where my daughter flew out the same day as the earthquake) we met up in Thessaloniki. We were transported to a beautiful Halkidiki town of Afitos (10/10 would recommend) where I had booked us the perfect air bnb. I had evaded all suggestions of the friend’s house in (much less charming) Moudania with no hot water.

The Afitos house and the beach – it was just six days of perfection. And then – drum roll – made our own way back to Thessaloniki with only a taxi booking mishap and an unknown bus transfer to make before the 70 minute journey was achieved in two and a half hours. I enjoyed every moment of that bus ride, rolling past the same land but this time independently.

May it just be the beginning of our Independent Greek holidays together!

The Carpet Beaters

Sunday Blog 101 – 10th September 2023

At risk of disappearing into my own navel, I’ve been re-reading letters I sent to my mother and a friend while I lived in Greece intermittently from 1996 until 2000.

In March 1998 I wrote to my mother, while I was living in a very dark and dingy flat in Olibiados Street. It was my second year teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thessaloniki and the school owners had not made good on their offer to get my accommodation sorted. I had been staying with a long-suffering friend, trying to find a place. I looked at the Olibiados place and was a bit uncertain, but when I rang said friend to tell him he just said “Oh congratulations” as if I had decided to rent it and signed all the paperwork. I figured I needed to get off his loungeroom floor sooner rather than later and rented the flat. There was absolutely no natural light at all down in the basement, and the first few nights I was there and woke up in the middle of the night I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, no matter how long I waited for my dark adapted eye to adjust. It was just pitch black. I had been there about five months when I wrote Mum this letter. I had absolutely no recollection of this incident at all, but it’s too good not to share.

I can hear the Carpet Beaters upstairs – Greek women are fanatical about housework and one of the tasks is to take up your carpet from the floor, take it to the balcony and vigorously shake it before setting upon it with a specially designed paddle, beating copiously. Why on earth they don’t use hoovers is beyond me.

On a very similar morning to this, several weeks back I heard the soft “plump” of a blanket which on receiving its ritual beating, had slipped from the housewife’s hands and landed on my balcony. It being a little before my reveille time, I didn’t retrieve it for an hour or so.

I took it to the flat upstairs from, figuring this tenant must own it. I was rather taken aback when the woman who answered was the KinoKrista Woman. She prowls around asking for money off inhabitants for keeping the light bulbs going and splashing a bit of water on the hallway every month or so. I’d been avoiding somewhat sedulously.

Anyway after I told her I had no KinoKrista, I offered up the ‘kouverta’ – blanket – as a kind of burnt offering substitute. She seemed cheery enough with this but explained it wasn’t her blanket. She left it on the hallway for collection and I returned to my flat with a mixture of relief and good deed-ism.

Shortly thereafter, a woman rang by bell, asked for ‘kouverta’ and I mimed my way upstairs to show her its resting place. She was most thankful and returned all smiles to the fourth or fifth floor.

I was just relaxing into my second cup of tea when the doorbell rang and… ANOTHER woman wanted to know the whereabouts of her errant ‘kouverta’. Egads! I couldn’t explain, not knowing the Greek words for “give/ already/ someone else”. However, I think she just wanted to see how The Foreigner lived, because she asked to see my balcony, necessitating a walk through my flat, then told me some cock and bull story about living in the next block of flats and a freak wind carrying her kouverta over to my balcony. At least I think that’s what she said.

After she had told me her story, she started shouting up a few floors to see if she could get hold of the woman who’d taken the kouverta.

Now you hear these carpet beaters call “ThespinAAAH!” or “MaRIIAA!” etc as they try to attract each other’s attention, a sort of morning echo from balcony to balcony. But I’d never seen any of these disembodied voices, much less stood next to one! Talk about surreal!

Anyway, she seems happy enough with her survey of my life and our broken conversation. The real ownership of the kouverta is shrouded in Greek mystery, but fortunately there have been no reverberations since.

Letter to my mother, 23rd March 1998

Island dreams

Sunday Blog 100 – 3rd September 2023

This was a postcard I sent to my mother in 1997, re-photographed by my own fair hands this holiday which accounts for how skew-iff the image is. I sent it to her when I had all but finished my first year of teaching English as a Foreign language in Greece. Counting the weeks down from September to Christmas, Christmas to Easter. Once Easter was finished, the weeks of penance left until the end of the school year could be counted on one hand.

“See?” I crowed to my mother on the back of the postcard. “Wasn’t all that hard work worth it, to get to visit Skopelos?”

Too bad that it was April and the sea water was still bone-achingly cold. Much too cold for swimming – and the rain fell harder and harder as the week progressed. The triumph of having survived and made a mediocre holiday stop was something to be wildly celebrated in 1997.

This time of my life – as I edge closer to sixty – feels like a contradiction of the saying “the almonds of life come to those who have no teeth.”

I can now come to Greece while the weather is still good, and without having to endure eight months of slogging it out in the classroom. And I can still manage all those stairs.

Time to shovel in a handful of almonds and chew them with gratitude and full awareness of how bloody lucky I am.

Holiday in Brussels?

Sunday Blog 99 – 27th August 2023

Several decades ago when I worked in London, a colleague shared a birthday with me, albeit she was a few years older. It was one of our many points of connection. She was a character in so many ways but her staunch dislike for committing to a relationship was interesting and refreshing to me as a thirty-something woman keen on starting a family with no Mr Right in sight.

“If you want to go to Paris, and he wants to go to Berlin for a holiday, then you have to compromise and go to Brussels. And who wants to do that?”

Whilst it was a little unkind to Brussels, I could see her point. But I was not hardline enough in maintaining singledom. A decade and a half later I got married, and the holiday conundrum is an ongoing first world challenge I have to negotiate.

Our first overseas holiday together was in Bali, a short three hour flight from Perth. I didn’t adequately plan ahead for the reality that while I can never get enough sitting around the pool reading and writing time, darling husband can do that for tops one morning.

And so, nek minit I found myself up in the air in a para glider, which while it was pleasant enough, did leave me wondering about the health and safety aspects of coming in to land. I had also undertaken a sweaty and exhausting riverside walk before ending up in a canoe. The photos show me smiling but really, I just wanted to be reading a book.

Cambodia was another holiday where largely I was in the clear because it was a dental tourism visit for him and he was mostly out of action. However, there was the tour of Angkor Wat. What I really wanted to do was pop down in a tuk-tuk at dawn and see the incredible temples in the dawn light. What we actually did was a bike tour of the Temple. Run by a well-meaning NGO, the tour started with a cycle around the drainage areas, a whizz through a village where some poor family had to put up with us milling around awkwardly and asking stupid questions. Then more cycling, and yet more cycling.

Generally, Cambodia is very hot. This day was no exception, and a migraine started to emerge every time I got back on the bike and peddled between stops. By the time we arrived at Angkor Wat itself, I was a broken woman. I limped around the temples as best I could. There would be several more hours and many more stops after this one. But Angkor Wat was a major tuk-tuk junction and I could act on the desperate escape plan I’d been hatching as I peddled along with my thumping head.

I chose freedom and the tuk-tuk ride of shame. The negotiations with the driver were swift and sure. There was room on the tuk-tuk for the bike and me and I left without a backward glance. He drove me back to the offices of the earnest NGO where I could return the detested bike and then walk the short distance back to our hotel.

I will never forget the exquisite relief of air conditioning, a shower and an enormous bed to loll about on. The headache immediately disappeared and I went back to reading my book, writing and generally enjoying myself.

As happens in Cambodia, a violent rain storm erupted and I spent at least two more happy hours alone, while darling husband was still at it, peddling in stifling, now very wet heat. When he finally returned he conceded that perhaps he was a little tired and wet but maintained stoutly that he’d enjoyed himself.

But I learned from Bali and Cambodia. I’ve hit on an almost perfect compromise which is not exactly Brussels. So here I am in Salzburg while darling husband is cycling through the villages and mountains of Austria to Lake Bled. I eluded all suggestions of getting an electric bike and joining him and his formidably fit siblings for this escapade. They are definitely not on e-bikes. One must feel every hill and incline!

I will be popping onto an air conditioned bus and will meet up with them all at the end of the grand cycling tour, in Ljubljana. We will then make our way to Greece by airplane and ferry where they can churn around the islands, swimming up to five kilometres per day while I do my yoga and waft around the hotel on my own, reading, writing and leisure-ing.

Closing out with a picture of me on the Sound of Music tour, which darling husband was particularly keen not to have to participate in.

Malevolent bed clothes

Sunday Blog 98 – Sunday 20th August 2023 (It’s still Sunday in Frankfurt!)

He was trying very hard to be diplomatic, in the face-to-face interview he was conducting with me for my final recruitment process to become a shelf stacker at Woolies. This was in 2022, when I was still trying to get the right balance between earning enough money and retaining enough time to write. It was just after I had finished some consultant work which then took up all my writing bandwidth. Which defeated the purpose of me quitting the day job to finish the damn book. Shelf stacking seemed the ideal solution.

I had sailed through the earlier recruitment stages but at the interview he gently pointed out that perhaps my CV didn’t reflect a very – ahem – physically active job history. Being a non-profit health leader has its challenges and requirements, but physical strength is not one of them. Wisely he told me to sleep on the decision. Overnight the scales fell from my eyes. I rang him to decline. On reflection, shelf-stacking wasn’t quite the answer to my conundrum of having enough regular income without ending up working too hard to actually get the writing done.

Yes, my work experience has not usually put me at physical risk. Over my career, Work Health and Safety presentations were often a slightly painful and embarrassing effort from the presenter to think about likely hazards at work – a paper cut perhaps or a stapler accident. Not that I am trying to make light of the topic. There can be very unsafe workplaces from a mental health perspective.

I guess I am thinking more about the very risky work some people undertake where a lapse of judgement can have catastrophic consequences. I have never worked in one of these.

In fact, I am always inclined to ease whenever I can. So this week, I returned to bed after making a morning cup of tea, feeling very grateful and excited that I could snuggle in to do some editing. Only my ring finger somehow became caught up in my bedclothes, twisting the knuckle in a way it wasn’t supposed to. Darling husband had already left to go cycling but returned for something just at the point where I was still groaning in pain and thinking I might vomit just a little. He couldn’t quite fathom how such a sedentary position could cause any harm. Darned malevolent bedclothes.

The finger began to swell (and bruise ever so slightly) over the next few days. To the point I thought I would have to google the detergent and fishing line method of removing a wedding ring from swollen fingers.

But the gentle emergency receded without further incident. But I have been warned. Bedclothes can be dangerous!

Creativity tobogganing

Sunday Blog 97 – Sunday 13th August 2023

Forgive me because I can’t easily lay my hand on the link – but etched onto my memory is Liz Gilbert’s description of the creative process. Imagine being up the top of a steep incline, a cardboard box or a toboggan your only tool. Creativity is egging you on. “Do you want to slide down? Do you?”

You do. And down you go. Whistling at a reckless speed, always moments from wipeout. Just at the end of the steep incline you hit a bump, become airborne and crash land with no actual injuries, but shaking from head to foot.

“Wasn’t that FUN?” Creativity asks. “Do you want to do it again?”

Creativity takes you on a journey where they PROMISE it will be interesting and fun. Creativity however offers no promises of how it will all end up. Will you end up bleeding or with spinal injuries? Maybe. Maybe not. But won’t it be FUN?

After eight years, endless false starts and an Emerging Writers Program opportunity I have finished the damn book. But, I have had my first rejection from a publisher. I am rising from the snow, shaking from head to foot. Will I head up to the top of the slope again?

You bet.

Plus, how I loved this quote from Flaubert I read this week.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeoisie, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Flaubert

Creativity never promises certainty. Just variety, challenge and something new.

I’m in.

Not the day, not the hour

Sunday Blog 96 – 6th August 2023

I began the week with two cousins born in the same year, same month as me, and ended it with one.

On Wednesday I was looking after my mother as per usual and heard the phone ring. As she always has it on speakerphone, I usually get to hear most of what’s going on. She was in another room altogether, but even from such a distance as that, I knew it was bad. Real bad.

It is not for me to post more details about another’s life, another’s death. But there are still all the feels to wade through, the memories that leap out at you. The nagging twinge of guilt that although she was my age, she and I weren’t buddies like I was, am with her younger sister. That we didn’t see each other except for big family occasions.

Grief for me often feels selfish, and a sudden death of someone almost exactly my age reminds me – again – that life is precious. That experiences need to be sought and savoured and leaned into.

A walk around the lake. An intimate acoustic concert to feel all the feels. Candlelight yoga. A full moon visit to the local labyrinth. Talks with family. Watching Barbie and her existential crisis with darling husband and a rum and raisin chocolate bomb.

For Clare. Vale.

What are you going to make that mean?

Sunday Blog 95 – 30th July 2023

This Saturday I took time out to sit with my 2023 Vision Board I created in January with my Yoga teacher and a group of women. She had promised us a mid-year catch up to reflect on our year so far. Saturday was the day of reckoning.

It’s fair to say I had started the day in a less-than yogic state, trying in vain to log onto an online writing group I clearly hadn’t visited for way too long. Around and around in a loop I went. Re-setting my password. Trying it but it still telling me the password was wrong. Typing in the email and password over and over again. Batting away my phone’s kind offer to plaster my address details over the username and password in an AI fail at being helpful. As I was home alone, a few shrieks of frustration rendered the air as I got ready for my yoga class.

Yoga worked its magic but I could feel the frustrated toddler ready to re-emerge at the slightest provocation. It was a build up for sure. Last weekend I discovered a screw wedged deep into a tyre, so I have my spare tyre on the car and a never-ending flashing light on my dashboard. Then in a synchronicity of bastardry, a headlight bulb has gone on my car and you have to deconstruct the entire vehicle to slip in a new light bulb, so that task is still undone. Another flashing light on the dashboard for that.

Perhaps my dashboard impersonating a Christmas display to alert me to the lack of balance this week – aka no time for writing. Also, things going wrong with the car throw a spanner into my financial works so my business account balance was looking very anaemic while my dashboard was far too colourful with all the warning lights.

I brought all my petty frustrations into the Vision Board reflection session in the afternoon and had a soft space to land, as well as a chance to be challenged on where I didn’t feel I had reached my vision.

Being a freelancer, as I am now, finances ebb and flow. That is completely normal. Especially when car snafus are thrown into the mix. When lamenting about the anaemic bank balance, my Yoga teacher asked me, “What are you going to make that mean?”

Naturally I am going to make that mean that I am a hopeless freelancer, lazy, unfocused, yada yada yada. Her powerful question interrupted this for me. In the space created by the interruption I could accept the ebbs and flows of freelancer income and avoid falling into the troughs of despair that often seem to assail me.

We closed the Vision Board Review session with a beautiful walk in nature as the sun was waning. So many beautiful sounds and sights soothed me, and some of the nature pics made it into the image for this post, spelled out into 2023. Time to rejoin the fray, the ebbs and flows and hold steady in my sense of self.

Privacy or Secrecy?

Sunday Blog 94 – 23rd July 2023

This week I had the chance to give a talk about privacy from a consumer perspective, specifically about our state’s Privacy and Responsible Sharing Information Project and the forthcoming legislation. This legislation is yet to be revealed, much to my chagrin. I had a fantasy that drafting this important legislation would be more of a consultative process with the West Australian community (ha ha ha ha! No wonder they call me Pollyanna…)

Privacy is a dry topic, I know, and I attempted to spice it up by trying to argue that privacy is not the absolute, only thing that citizens care about. We care about openness too, and honesty. Heaven forbid, we might sometimes think that governments citing “privacy concerns” are just covering their own butts.

Case in point. I debriefed the episode of Australian Story where Corey White, author of the wonderfully titled (and written) memoir The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory went on Australian Story. He and his sister used a national television program to further unpack their experiences in Australia’s out of home care system. Queensland’s Child Protection Department had this to say the next day after the episode aired:

The Act prevents us from discussing individual cases…

But Corey and his sister had swapped out their privacy to attempt to create change. What I would have loved to have seen was something like this; “Our whole team watched the Australian Story and spent time reflecting on what has changed, and what is the same since Corey’s childhood. We thank Corey and his sister for their bravery in telling their stories. We heard them. We have re-committed to implementing Recommendations from previous Inquiries and to advocate to Treasury to provide the funds we need to keep children safe.”

I know. I was really riffing.

For people who are desperate to access a service, or to create positive change to help make meaning out of the suffering they have endured, privacy may not be the most important thing.

I also reinforced the radical notion that data about us, should be owned by us everyday citizens. Not government agencies playing God as Data Custodians, arguing the toss about who has the most power while data that is not shared or linked (especially health data) can mean actual lost lives.

And our data should not, heaven help us, be owned outright by companies. We know that data is the new oil, and how it is extracted, refined, repackaged and on-sold is where the money and power is at. The biggest companies in the world now are trading data, our data.

We also take part in the playacting of accepting privacy policies that are thousands of unread words long every day. That is the cost we pay in order to be able to access an app, a service. Our only other choice is to say no and be barred.

So yes, privacy is complex and important. Companies in particular need to be collecting less data about us and destroying that data once it has done its job. Letting us know when they have sold our data on (aren’t we are all familiar with that rash of dodgy texts received a day or two after clicking “accept” on privacy terms on some website somewhere?)

Government agencies need to use the data they are custodians of to follow the trail and work out what services and programs are working. We the people need to be part of the ongoing digital revolution, able to participate meaningfully in discussions about what data is collected, how algorithms are put together, how they are assessed as effective over time.

Or as this interesting Washington Post article says:

We the users want transparency, so we can understand how technology is shaping our lives — and correct course when it goes off the rails.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/12/we-the-users/

I have joined the revolution by reading The Digital Mindset. I think I can boast a wobbly fluency in the key concepts and feel more empowered now – it’s definitely worth a read.

We need to be part of the conversation of what data is collected – “what is counted ends up counting” as the book tells us. As a patient advocate I know how essential it is for us to be at the table ensuring that the data patients and carers think is important is also counted, not just what the surgeon thinks is important.

Viva la digital revolution.