Sunday Blog 53 – 18th September 2022

Last Sunday was blog day, only I had just arrived in London the day before, and was due to head off to Paris the next day, and what with one thing and another, it just wasn’t possible to get the Sunday Blog done. (There were some cheeky work deadlines in there as well I will just bleep over, because no, I didn’t get everything finished before I left Perth for this trip!)

As James Clear says though, missing one day of your habit is not a deal-breaker – but never miss more than one. So here I am, Sunday Blogging, having been to Paris, Rouen and now safely landed in Hydra, Greece since last Sunday.

Transition days. They’re a lot. Yesterday’s transition day involved a donkey too.

There is something so mysterious to me about travel. That me, my body, my personality, can be back it the same place perhaps many years apart. Am I the same person, is it the same place? Is it possible to step into the same river twice? Apparently not, but it feels like a vast and endless mystery that I am able to come back to a place and meet myself or selves from when I was there before.

I first travelled overseas at the age of 14, spending time in the UK and Europe. I went with my sister who was 15 nearly 16 – we are pictured at the top on our first morning in London, looking over the London rooftops. I know I was experiencing a great awakening from a very sheltered and suburban Perth childhood. Travel pushed out the walls of what life looked like and what it could be.

It would be another 11 years before I would return to London as a 25-year-old and make it my home for six years, working at Greenwich Maritime Museum for that period of time.

But it was another 43 years before my 14 year-old-self was once again joined in London by my sister. Here we are on the right at Embankment, London, me on the left, she’s on the right. We just had about 48 madcap hours to wander through London together before heading to France and now Greece, talk through the hours, the days, the years, the decades. Inside I feel 27 but outside time is marching…

After making London my home, as much as anyone can make that vast city a home, I in 1996 aged 32 and moved to Greece to teach English as a foreign language. I left Greece for good in 2000, by then a mother of a beautiful half-Greek girl. It’s an understatement to say there had been many twists and turns between 1996 and 2000.

To be back in Greece today once more is a complicated joy. It’s fair to say I have mixed feelings about Greece. I will never forget having my beautiful daughter’s plump baby’s cheek squeezed by a woman at an incomprehensible wedding I found myself at with my daughter and her father. He was never much given to explanations so I didn’t really understand who the relatives were but I was under no illusion how punished he felt by having to attend the family event. He sulked and raged as he put in an unfamiliar formal outfit. This woman (presumably a relative) said to me in Greek, “Never mind, you’ll have a boy next time.”

She didn’t know it, but she was part of the fuel I needed to leave the very unhappy life I was leading in Greece and bring my daughter back to Perth for good to raise her in my home country. Perfect it’s not, but there is more of a place for women.

I made lentils for lunch today and found myself signing a song I wrote a while ago about my daughter’s YaYa and her son and their dynamic — she cooks him lentils for lunch. He eats, ignores her and leaves. But damn those Greek lentils are good.

No matter how mixed my feelings are about Greece I always want to come back.

Sunday Blog 51 – 22nd August 2022

The sound of my darling husband emptying the dishwasher always puts me in mind of this description. The bashes and crashes of the mugs being returned to their spots, the plates slid into the drawer all summon up visions of chipping. (I know, just shut up already, he’s emptying the bloody dishwasher!)

But hear me out. When we married nearly 14 years ago I was gifted a set of six wine glasses and a matching water jug from my workplace at the time, and within six months every single one of the glasses had been broken. To be fair, the set had been bought by the Executive Assistant who barely knew me, but still.

I first heard this description of someone’s dishwashing abilities in 1979, when my eldest sister spent some time in Ireland living with our Irish grandfather’s relatives.

I have been watching my social feed awash with images and stories of Ireland as a friend of mine has been touring there this Summer. I’ve been reminiscing.

Back in 1979 my sister was staying at the ancestral farm with our second and third cousins twice removed or something – I can never keep track of these things. She was 22 and single at the time, and our relatives were casting around for potential suitors for her in their small town. A diminutive 50-year-old man with not much in the way of beauty or charm was suggested by one of them. It took some creative embellishment to dream up a selling point for such a bizarre (and ewww) pairing. But with some confidence, my sister was advised that “he has a fine hand with the delft.” She was not convinced, and it was not to be.

As a young person, this anecdote to me was just screamingly funny. But over time, (and my match-making relative was mature and so presumably had some life perspective), a find hand with the delft seems to be something not to be so quickly overlooked.

But on reflection, I didn’t like those wine glasses that much, whereas the husband, who perhaps does not have a fine hand with the delft, is a keeper.

Sunday Blog 50 – 21st August 2022

The month was November, the year 1997, and in Thessaloniki, Greece’s biggest city where I lived at the time, it was already getting bleak and cold. Many people find it hard to picture a cold Greece but believe me it was – and November was the beginning of months and months of winter. I was struggling with the technology – a phone card and a stubborn phone box – to ring my eldest sister for her 40th birthday. So often I would traipse down to the phone box and find it wasn’t working. Or that my phone card would run out of money just when the conversation was warming up. Or the phone card I had just bought didn’t work.

I was well into my second year living in Thessaloniki, and this was one of the many moments I wondered at the wisdom of returning for a second year. I Missed My Family. I missed the milestones, the get-togethers, the regular birthdays that would mean a family meal, hugger-mugger in my parent’s house, a cake, candles and a harmonious warbling of the Happy Birthday anthem from my many relatives.

It is now almost inconceivable to imagine life without a mobile phone, but that was largely the norm in the 1990s. So for those living abroad in the sort of places like Greece where a home phone connection was not feasible on an English teacher’s salary, there was only one option – The Phone Box. The birthday call to my sister was limited in time to the amount my wretched phone card allowed for. It was too far away, too short a time, too poor a substitute for being there to mark her birthday. I hung up the phone and sobbed.

I look back on the dark times of Greek phone boxes and telephone cards and am weak with gratitude that I have so many ways to connect instantly with people anywhere in the world. By video if I want! As we speak another sister is currently holidaying in France. She can call me as I wander around Bibra Lake for my evening constitutional and I can share the evening’s beauty with her and she can show me the charm of lunchtime Rouen.

For all the dreadful faults of social media and mobile phones, this gift of communication is, well, a gift.