Peaks and Geeks

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.” (Yeats)

Possibly because I grew up by the ocean in Bunbury where the tallest natural structure was a sand dune down the road from Hungry Hollow beach, or possibly because I’m contrary, I’ve always been fascinated with mountains. They’re so imposing. So awe-inspiring. So….mountainous. I have no urge to climb them. I just like to look at them. In all their seasons; in shifting light, snow-capped or summer-swathed in green, I am enchanted, mesmerised, compelled and overwhelmed by them.

The bloke and I spent part of our honeymoon ten years ago in the Swiss Alps, which was my first experience of proper mountains. I was beside myself. I was an emotional tsunami of joy. There was an unfortunate incident that may or may not have had anything to do with the gallon of Bacardi and soda I drank at the local bar (‘The Snow Boat’) one late, snowy evening. I staggered back to the hotel, propped up by the bloke, periodically hurling myself into snow banks to make angels and then I stayed up late feverishly crafting a group email to all of my friends. And acquaintances. And my boss. It included such glowing musings as the now notorious: “Mountains, what are they?”. There was something about Heidi and an urge to frolic with goats and drink milk from a bowl. You get the picture. Cruelly, the bloke likes to remind me of my shame now and again, mostly whenever I come over all earnest about anything much. All he has to do is squint meaningfully off into the distance, stroke his chin and say mountains…….

I’d like to say I’ve grown more sophisticated with travel but, well, no. I’m as easily lost to bouts of misty-eyed wonder as I’ve always been. The two months we have spent in the French Pyrenees have been beyond incredible. Leaving aside 17,000 square kilometers of mountains for a moment, the people are delightful, the cheese is brilliant, they squeeze a good grape, and I’ve spent more time frolicking through meadows of buttercups and violets and poppies than is good for anyone trying to maintain some scrape of personal dignity.

Bedous, which is our local village, is tiny and delightful. It’s in the Valley Aspe, surrounded by an array of glorious peaks, with a population of less than 600. There are walks and hikes everywhere you turn. The food is brilliant. Our favourite restaurant overlooks a river with a view of slate roofs, stone houses and a rainbow of coloured wooden shutters. It serves a set menu of whatever the chef fancies is good that day, he tops his rose up regularly from a cask in the fridge and he likes to play records while he cooks. He is particularly keen on jazz fusion. His gloriously elegant wife hosts. Bedous also has a very successful rugby club which has been vanquishing their local rivals all season. I have been hanging out at the pitch a lot but not for the rugby.

One of the attractions in the Aspe Valley and its surrounds is the bird life. This part of the Pyrenees is one of the best places in the world to see raptors and carrion eaters. The mountain ranges provide brilliant nesting spots for red kites, peregrine falcons, and a variety of eagles and vultures. I have been on a mission to spot vultures since we arrived because I’ve never seen one. There are plenty wheeling high over the peaks but I really wanted a closer view. The Pyrenees have Egyptian vultures, the Griffon vulture and the awe-inspiring Lammergeier, or ‘Bone Breaker’ vulture, which eats mostly bone marrow and accesses its dinner by dropping the carcass from a great height onto rocks to crack open the bones. The acid in its stomach is strong enough to dissolve any small bits of bone.

Vultures are scavenging birds, so they only eat dead animals. They don’t have the strength in their beaks or claws to carry live prey. Along with eagles and kites, they were hunted and poisoned into near extinction at one stage, and in the 1960s there was only one small colony left in the Pyrenees. There was also a farming policy as a result of mad cow disease to remove the carcasses of livestock so that took away a crucial food source. There are now programs to protect them across France, which involve new farming practices and nature reserves. It’s clearly working. The place is riddled with vultures. They’re like seagulls. Only bigger.

They are incredible to see. Beasts in flight. They’re over a meter tall and their wing spans are almost three metres wide. So impressive. When they unfurl their wings, you half expect a menacing cry to follow but they apparently only growl like puppies a little when they’re feeding. They glide for up to seven hours a day in the sky looking for prey and use thermal air pockets to stay aloft because flapping those enormous wings takes a lot of effort.

I have spent a lot of time in the last eight weeks trying to track them, including stealthily clambering up mountains, and lying still for hours in patches of wet grass with my camera at ready in well-known vulture hangouts across the valley, to no avail. Once a few loomed low over a paddock containing a couple of sickly-looking donkeys and I nearly saw them properly but I was distracted by a dog scuffle that broke out at my feet at the same time and I missed it.

Long story short-ish, I could have saved myself the trouble and wandered down to the Bedous rugby club on a Wednesday or a Friday morning where the groundskeeper has been feeding vultures and other raptors for some years now. His name is Guy. The local supermarket donates meat past its sell-by date and he sits in his back garden near the railway line, next door to the club and cuts it up the afternoon before.

At least an hour before he arrives, the red kites begin to circle in numbers. I counted roughly one hundred just this morning. Others hang out in the trees that fringe the oval, clearly to get a good spot early. The vulture colony lurks further back on a nearby rocky outcrop and waits. At ten promptly the groundskeeper emerges with his blue bucket and is immediately surrounded by a Hitchcockian cloud of hungry raptors. It’s an all-you-can-eat free-for-all and quite the vision. Of all of the participants, I’m not sure who is the most excited, me or the birds. Honestly, watching these magnificent creatures, hopping about at his feet like chickens is one of the most beautiful and wonderous sights I have ever seen and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I was once again overwhelmed with the emotion of it and burst into tears.

I’m not sure what the mountain folk make of me, to be honest. I think I am becoming a regular sight, crouched in ditches or teetering off high fences taking random photographs of birds and weeds and rocks. To me, it’s all beyond beautiful but must be pretty ordinary if you live here. Maybe not. Maybe you never get tired of the rippling chatter of hedge sparrows and swallows dancing through the air like fairies in flight or the joyful sight of rambling roses and carpets of wild mint and strawberries that scent the air as you wind your way through. There is so much life here, even tiny flowers and weeds find their place in the most inhospitable of beds; crumbling stone walls, steep rock faces, and cracks in roads and fences. They’ll grow anywhere. I love their grit and optimism.

And this part of the Pyrenees is so close to Spain. We nipped over the border to Bilbao to visit the Guggenheim Art Museum a few weeks ago. One of the most incredible feats of architecture I have seen. We saw the giant Jeff Koons flower puppy outside, constructed in 1992, it’s a monument to the sentimental, with no other meaning than to inspire happiness. On the other side of the museum, near the river is Maman, by sculptor Louise Borgeous, a huge spider over nine metres tall, inspired by her mother, a weaver. Bilbao is a gorgeous city, well worth the trip. We stopped off in Saint Jean du Luz on the way back to the Pryennes and treated ourselves to a hotel by the ocean in the latter. So gorgeous. Right on the ocean, the swimming pool is heated seawater and you can swim while gazing over the beach to the old Napoleonic fort that guards the coast. Back in the day, Louis, XIV once moved the entire Versailles court down there to marry Marie Teresa.

We had dinner in the hotel and were watching the sunset over the ocean feeling pretty happy with our lives when I had such an unexpected and overwhelming wave of longing for home. It hit me like a train. I think my heart felt it before my brain caught up because one minute I was lovingly holding my husband’s hand over champagne and an amuse-bouche, gazing at the sun setting over the sea when I realised I hadn’t seen an ocean sunset for six months and I completely dropped the bundle. I wasn’t just shedding the odd gentle pretty tear either, I was honking. Obviously, I panicked, and so did the bloke. I tried to make a quick dignified escape to the loo but was waylaid by at least five concerned waiters on the way, who clearly thought we’d had some kind of awkward uptight English bust-up. Anyway, I over-explained the situation in broken French and English, which didn’t help because I was howling too much to be understood in any language. Tres mortifying. For a woman having the time of her life, I have been crying a lot.

But what an adventure. I can’t even begin to process it. Not just the experience of looking out at so many new worlds, but also the six months Glynn and I have spent with each other. We’ve been together every day. We talked about it before we left, we love hanging out but we were also prepared for bickering or occasionally being sick of the sight of ourselves and each other. But it’s been wonderful. I love travelling with him, he is so brave and curious and friendly, always kind, good at meeting new people, and always willing to have a shot, even when he’s apprehensive. I didn’t think I could love or like him more, or that I could learn more about him after fifteen years, but there you go. He’s still my favourite place. He’s been playing some brilliant music too. I asked him to chuck together another playlist if you’re interested. Here’s the link.

Glynn’s Pyrenees Spotify playlist

In the last six months, we’ve been to London, Scotland, Norway, Germany, France and Spain. I might have to stop saying I’m not very well-travelled. I can hardly believe it. In the meantime, I guess this latest post is the French equivalent of my rambling well-sauced Swiss missive but this time I am completely sober, so in that sense at least, I am very much matured. Like a fine French wine. Hic.

What I’ve been reading

I enjoyed Ariadne, if you like Greek Mythology it’s fun. It retells the legend of the Minotaur from his sister’s point of view, but I think its selling point as a feminist interpretation is a bit strong, considering she ends up mooning around after Dionysus on a small island off the coast of Troy. I absolutely loved Lessons in Chemistry which I have been saving for my holiday. If you want a book that eviscerates the patriarchal structures of 1960s America in an easy, fun and charming read, this one’s for you. It’s smart, readable and adorable. I’ve also read a preview copy of the new AJ Betts, One Song and I am SO in love with this book. I think it’s her best yet. Maybe that’s because I felt like she had gone back in time, reached into my teenage chest and torn out my still-beating heart. She has a gift that way. More on that soon so keep an eye out on my Facebook page Gillian O’Shaughnessy or my Facebook bookclub, Reading Between the Wines.

Getting on with it

When I was a kid and my mum had lost patience with the state of my bedroom and insisted I clean it, I had a last-resort technique if procrastination, sulking and tantrums all failed. I think the corporate speak for it is ‘leaning in.’

I was a really messy child so we’re talking substantial levels of leaning in here. By the time my mum put her foot down the state of my room had hit alarming states of disarray. Grotty sheets. Layers and layers of dirty washing scattered haphazardly on all surfaces, including the floor. Mouldy sandwiches under the bed, various dishes, and old drinks long since evaporated into an unrecognisable film of filth growing on glasses. Mum’s patience usually snapped when the crockery count under my bed exceeded that available to the rest of the family.

When there was nothing for it but to crack on, I was good at concocting elaborate scenarios to help me get in the mood. Storylines were gleaned from various books I had read. My particular favourite for cleaning my room was neglected waif at the mercy of a) evil mother, b) evil stepmother or c) evil witch; whatever worked on the day. I’d don a “thin shift” in which to shiver – an old nightie, a threadbare cotton dress, preferably faded, extra points if also torn. From the kitchen, a hunk of rough brown bread and a wedge of cheese for my meagre lunch. I’d romantically channel my inner put-upon drudge and I’d clean. It got the job done. If my mother indulged her nasty habit of poking her head around the door from time to time, to laugh wildly, clap and say, “Exit stage right, Gillian,” well, that’s on her conscience.

I employed similar tactics on regular cleaning days in our house. Whatever else we had going on in our lives, Saturday mornings were religiously set aside for housework. We were all assigned tasks and expected to complete them before hanging out with our friends or in my case, returning to my room to read and add to the ever-increasing mess. If you had the loungeroom for example, it was your role to sweep out the fireplace, chop wood and set a new fire for later. Wash the ornaments, (we owned a lot of Wembley Ware acquired from various swap meets and Fremantle op shops) dust, vacuum, clear away any bottles and glasses and put the records back in their plastic sleeves and their covers and back into neat alphabetical order on the shelf. There were always lots of glasses to clear and records to put away on a Saturday morning. Mum and her boyfriend, Baker enjoyed late-night parties which involved loads of music, no small amount of weed (it was Fremantle in the 70s) and vast quantities of home-brew beer and cheap wine. I was an excellent if not enthusiastic cleaner by the time I was 12.

It was these skills that were brought to bear this week when we arrived at our overly rustic French gite in the Pyrenees for a stay of eight weeks after spending almost three months in a charming newly renovated apartment in the old town of Montpellier. The mountain gite was less charming, more rodent-infested dust trap. It had clearly been shut up over winter and smelt like Nosferatu’s armpit. We spent a night panicking, trying not to turn on each other, apologising, trying not to turn on each other again, wondering how we could cut our losses, gamely attempting to sleep and simultaneously holding our breath in order to avoid inhaling centuries of murk. Then we decided to make the best of it. Spurred on by both the world-class mountain views outside and the fact that we had invested the remains of our travel fund into two months’ accommodation here and didn’t have much choice.

To be honest, things didn’t look much better in the morning, from the inside at least. The house was still dusty, manky and there was still mouse poo in the toaster. But every time we started feeling a little overwhelmed with the task ahead we nipped outside and copped another look at the startling landscape. Mountains for days. Snow-capped, stony-peaked mountains. Rolling green mountain hillsides. Trees. Burbling brooks, roaring rivers, so clear you could count the pebbles on the riverbed from a distance. Cows wearing bells gazing at us placidly from our front garden. When the clouds cleared, there were mountains behind the mountains. And more after that. So, so beautiful. One-dollar house, million-dollar views.

We started to think we might have a shot at making this work.

We have since cleaned the place within an inch of its life. Bedding, kitchen stuff, ornaments. Man, there are some weird ornaments here. I’m not sure what would win, the coconut monkey couple or the antique cow-bell complete with bone donger dangling from the ceiling. We scrubbed the oven with dishwashing tablets and steel wool, (I’d read something about the dishwashing tablets, maybe in the New York Times which I mostly visit for Wordle. Anyway, it worked. Huzzah.) Happily, there are plenty of cupboards so once cleaned, most of the knick knacks could be put away, clearing some surfaces and giving the place less of the air of an abandoned, overcrowded barn.

And believe it or not, underneath decades of dust the place isn’t all that bad. You might even call it beautiful. The oven is definitely circa the 1970s and an ugly mission brown but the colour of it hides the dirt we can’t scrub off, so, you know, out of sight, out of mind and all that. And it works really well. The stone walls of the gite are actually very charming and the fireplace is big, open and inviting.

Random things are inexplicably clean. All the windows are sparkling. Some of the rooms are lovely. Our bedroom is plain but clean and very comfortable. The bathroom could almost claim to be modern. It has a deep bath with water hot enough to make tea if you fancied doubling up on the washing of your person and a four-fruit herbal. Plus, there’s a view out of the bathroom window from the bathtub across the mountains. Mind you, every window and doorway here has a view across the mountains. You could say the local vista is showing off.

One of the piles of strange paraphernalia we found stacked up in a corner of the loungeroom turns out to be garden furniture, so we drag out two tables, a few chairs and a lie-low and give them a wipe. An outdoor umbrella is so crusted in grime we lather it up with dish soap and hide it out of sight behind the shed waiting for the next rain shower.

We take a run into the nearest large town about half an hour’s drive away and pick up a few essentials. Wine. A new toaster to replace the one riddled with mouse droppings. Wine. A new kettle to replace the one that wasn’t supplied to start with. Wine. New white pillowcases, white tablecloth and fresh tea towels. Wine. And cheese. Sorted.

We stuff everything else we don’t like in the spare bedroom and shut the door. Arrange our new things in the house, Glynn chops wood and sets a fire for later while I spend a wonderful afternoon picking flowers in the garden. We have buttercups, daisies, grape hyacinths and something called ‘Siberian Bugloss’ which is a tiny, cornflower blue flower with a bright yellow centre. The flowers that grow wild here in paddocks and on roadsides are joy. I have stuffed old glasses and jugs full of them and laid them out over every surface and windowsill. The sills are gloriously deep here. You could easily sit in them. If I owned this place, and I’m increasingly wishing I did, I would make window seats everywhere.

The seeds of a new storyline have been sown, and I can feel the green shoots of them peeking through the surface of the soil, turning their faces to the sun. In this story, I’m not so much of a spoilt Australian grumbling because our holiday house deep in the Pyrenees in rural France wasn’t as clean as I’d have liked. In this story, I’m a cross between a farm wife and an older French version of Heidi, with maybe a touch of Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music where the music swells and she sweeps into sight, arms outstretched revelling in a spring mountain morning.

Not to say there’s still nothing to be concerned about. More for the locals obviously, than for us. I’ve started eyeing the neighbour’s cows, wondering how I’d go at milking them. Or making my own bread. Churning my own butter. Frolicking about the hillside. Increasingly, the cows seem uncomfortably aware of my scrutiny and are starting to look slightly alarmed. We have named them Bonnie and Clyde.

What I’m reading.

I’m reading Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood. This book is a joy. I’m halfway through and I’ve started slowing down to make it last longer. There is such a wild, sparkling range of stories here, from an Octopus-alien, tasked with entertaining imprisoned humans by retelling old fairy-tales, a young girl trying to work out if her mother is a witch and a wonderful conversation with Atwood and George Orwell, channelled through a medium. They’re interspersed with stories about a married couple in their later years, Tig and Nell, and these are beautiful. Margaret Atwood is 84 now, and her husband and life partner, Graham Gibson, to whom the book is dedicated, died as the book was being written. Death is threaded through these stories and it’s deeply sad and raw, but it frames grief as a lens through which to measure love. A kaleidoscope of ordinary moments both before and after loss, that together offer insight into what it means to love across a lifetime. It’s the most perfect collection I think I have ever read. I can never decide if I think Margaret Atwood or Helen Garner is the greatest writer ever born, and with this book, I am tipping slightly more toward Margaret. I know that will change the second I pick up Helen again, but I love the tussle.

What Glynn’s playing

Glynn’s in charge of the fire and our Pyrenees playlist so here’s a selection of what we’ve been listening to.

The Broken Circle Breakdown Bluegrass Band: Wayfaring Stranger

Francoise Hardy: Le Temps de L’Amour

Jacques Brel: Ne Me Quitte Pas

Yusef, Cat Stevens: Lady D’Arbanville

Serge Gainsbourg: Bonnie and Clyde

The Liminanas: Maria’s Theme

Dinah Washington: What a Difference a Day Makes

Simon and Garfunkel: April, Come She May

The good, the bad and the ugly

It’s been a bit of a week. We left the city and our beautiful bright apartment in the old centre of Montpellier, arrived in the Pyrenees ready for our rustic, rural retreat and things have not gone entirely smoothly.

We had lots of plans to farewell Montpellier. We loved it there so much. We envisioned something romantic, like champagne in the park or wandering soulfully around the Antique Quarter, or perhaps a glass of rose on the Place du Marches Aux Fleurs. We end up carousing instead, late into the night with four new French friends we met by accident after stopping for a quick one at a local bar a thirty-second walk from our flat. They were generous with their company and their wine. And they loved Jimmy Barnes so were delighted to meet Australians and bond over pub rock. We staggered home around two in the morning after doing shots and singing Working Class Man and other classic Cold Chisel hits loud enough to rattle the shutters all up the Rue L’ecole. So our last day in Montpellier was not spent wafting wistfully around favourite haunts. It was spent lying in bed, holding our heads, emerging gingerly in the late afternoon to stuff four months of accumulated belongings into two suitcases and clean.

Still, when we left we were looking ahead, not behind. We had eight weeks booked in the Pyrenees, in a rustic gite perched on the side of a mountain near Sarrance, about an hour’s drive from the Spanish border. No plans except walking, reading and watching the day go by on the terrace. After four months of work and travel, we are both happily exhausted and ready for a big shift in lifestyle. This is why we came away, it’s all been leading to this. When we left Fremantle, we were heavy with grief after the death of our beloved labrador, Huey, burnt out, and excited to travel, explore and have a proper break at the end of it. Glynn’s work has been fantastically successful, we have been to Scotland, Norway, Germany and France and had an incredible time. But now we needed to switch off, rest and let the views and the mountain air soothe our ragged souls before we leave for home and get back into the usual routines of life.

We arrived in the Pyrenees slightly bug-eyed with tension from the six-hour drive there. Glynn is yet to get completely comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road and I am yet to get completely comfortable with watching him learn. Especially when it involves skidding precariously around vast drops on mountain passes so narrow and steep even the goats look nervous. Or squeezing through tiny roads that wouldn’t pass as laneways at home, trying to avoid cars, trucks, and the occasional tractor careening gaily around with the easy insouciance of those who grew up in these parts. All right for some. I left some of my heart in Montpellier and the rest of it was now in my throat. Full marks to the bloke for taking on the driving. If I were behind the wheel, I’d still be curled up in a ball by the side of a lonely French road in the middle of nowhere, crying for my mother.

It was still a beautiful drive, we stopped along the way to stock up on wine and cheese at the biggest supermarket I’ve ever been lost in and we were feeling pretty set to chuck our bags in a corner in our new home, crack open a red and settle in just in time for sunset over the peaks. The bloke, who has been clinging on to sanity by what’s left of his fingernails for some time now is beside himself with anticipation of a glorious and restful mountain retreat. He instructs me to video our entrance into the property so we can record this glorious moment as a highlight to look back upon fondly in our old age. To remind us of simple times, when life was easy, the days were gentle and the air was pure and fresh and as clean as only mountain air can be.

And so it was. Outside. Inside, things were a little more rustic than we planned. We opened the door and were thrown back several paces from the force of the thick cloud of dust that billowed out. We clasped our shirts to our mouths and noses in a vague effort at self-preservation, coughed and peered tentatively inside to be knocked sideways again by wave after wave of a deep and vicious must that screamed from within like a host of trapped banshees, released at last. This place had clearly been shut up since last summer, if not longer.

I opened a cupboard and was showered in a rain of mouse droppings, also alarmingly evident in the ancient toaster. No sign of anything like it in the kettle, because there was no kettle. The ancient oven was coated in thick grime. Every surface was jammed with a motley array of cheap knick-knacks, covered in thick layers of dust and the odd dead spider. We clutched each other in horror and started composing our message to the owner demanding our money back and wondering how we are going to scratch together the energy to find a hotel for the night in the middle of nowhere, let alone somewhere else to stay for two months.

We washed two glasses and dried them on our t-shirts to be safe, poured ourselves two large glasses of wine and escaped to the safety of the terrace.

And we step into the most glorious view. Breathtaking. We see snow-capped peaks crowding the skyline all around us. We are in the heart of the Pyrenees. We hear the river flowing below and the trees that line the lower reaches of the ranges are all colours; dusky purples, palest greens and soft browns. Granite rocks and the winter skeletons of the deciduous trees that line our long driveway are smothered in lichens and mosses. Bright yellow buttercups and riots of small white daisies speckle the grasses outside. Early songbirds are calling and the sound of windchimes turns out to be two belled cows that wander the pastures of the farm below us. Our tired hearts lift.

We decide to sleep on it and see how things look in the morning.

What I’m reading

I’m reading Jenny Colgan, Sunrise by the Sea. This is peak Colgan. It’s about a young woman, Marissa Rossi, who is struggling with grief that won’t heal after her grandfather dies. She moves to a remote island off the coast of Cornwall to recuperate, and meets Polly, who lives in a lighthouse, runs a bakery and has been adopted by an injured puffin called Neil. Marissa’s next-door neighbour is a piano teacher and a huge bear of a Russian who is also running from grief, in the form of a ballet dancer who rejected him in favour of someone more exciting. They bond over Italian food and music. It’s light, charming and easy. A perfect book if you’re looking for something gentle and engaging without being in any way challenging. I love you Jenny.

Switching off

Books. Coffee. Saucepan. Grater. Playing cards.

I’m going through my list of essentials to pack ahead of eight weeks in the Pyrenees in the south of France, where we plan to be mostly offline and almost completely isolated.

It will be the final two months of our six months away and I am ready for some quiet time. We have rented a small, rustic cottage about 40 minutes walk from the nearest village, in the heart of the mountains. We won’t have internet, and at this stage, we’re not even sure we will be able to access wifi in the village.

I’m not going to lie, I’m a little nervous. This part of our trip is mostly about unwinding for Glynn, he’s on long service leave and needs a good break and he’s keen to get back to work refreshed. So the offline bit was his idea. I want to support him, I think it would be so much harder for him to manage if I were constantly ducking off to post or scroll. But I think I need it too.

Even two years out from working in the media full time, I think I am still de-stressing from burnout and online addiction. I still find myself reaching for my phone to check newspapers at least twice a day. My morning ritual is two coffees and four newspapers. My evening ritual is herbal tea and four newspapers. In between that, I check Twitter, Instagram and my beloved Facebook reading page, Reading Between the Wines, email, Whatsapp and my other Facebook pages. I think it’s fair to say it will be good for my brain and my heart to try and have a decent break.

We are only three hour’s drive from Bilbao in Spain, so we do plan to nip over to see the Guggenheim, ( I am just going to pause here and say THAT aloud a few times to let it sink in) but otherwise, we plan to read, hike, amble, talk, play cards and stare at the scenery. I also have grand plans to make bread so if anyone has any recipes, feel free to share them. Especially if you have a recipe for bread in a cast iron pot. I have also bought a box grater so I can make potato rosti, (I just can’t get my head around those flat ones) and I have happy visions of red wine and rosti in front of the fire or on the deck watching the sunset. It’s funny the tiny plans you make when you have visions of a different life.

We have to get ourselves from our flat in Montpellier to the car hire at the airport so not sure the large book stack is a good idea in terms of weight but we don’t want to be caught short and I think I’d rather read hard copy books than my e-book for this trip. We have tried to choose a good range but we were a little limited by the offerings at the local English bookshop. It’s pretty good though! They got me in the new Margaret Atwood in only a few days.

I will miss Montpellier more than I thought was possible. I never thought I’d miss anywhere that isn’t Fremantle. Which I suppose translates to thinking I would never feel at home anywhere other than Fremantle. This is the first time I have ever ‘lived’ outside my city. Well, there was an uncomfortable few months in a squat in Saint Kilda when I was 18 and rebellious but I mostly sat indoors sulking and refusing to admit I missed my mum so I don’t think it counts. I didn’t travel more than that when I was young, because I had a baby at 20 and I worked. So this is new. And wonderful. Challenging, exhilarating and deeply, deeply interesting. Even when I have been homesick or desperately missing my family or tired or a little over trying to make myself understood in another language, I have still been really fascinated by the process. There is so much freedom to be had in curiosity. And the difficult moments have been so rare. Mostly, I’ve been having enormous fun.

The people here are very friendly. We could not have felt more welcome. I have no idea where the tired notion that the French are arrogant or insular comes from. Obviously you get a range of personalities in every country but I also think some of us born in English speaking countries think we are the only ones allowed to feel pride in our language and our home. When we barrel about assuming everyone speaks English it’s ok but the same assumption made in France is arrogant? Yeah, nah.

People will literally approach you in public and introduce themselves, invite you to dinner, join you for a drink, offer help, and go out of their way to be completely adorable. I feel like we have made friends already, and that if we were to settle in France, we’d have no trouble fitting in. It’s a gentle, beautiful vibe. Unless of course, there’s a strike or a protest, in which case, it’s feisty as you like. I love it. I love the fierce defence of rights. I love that half the shops in town are closed on Sundays and Mondays because people want to spend time with their families. I love they are holding on hard to the right to have a life, to retire in their early sixties. I wish there was more of it in Australia.

I do feel extremely grateful for the chance to live my own life now. I can’t wait to curl up in the country with my bloke. I feel so lucky that we have been able to spend this time together already, four months of seeing each other every day and we are still excited to cut ourselves off even more from other people and hang out alone. I don’t really know what to expect. Maybe we’ll hate it. Maybe we’ll hate each other’s company. Maybe we’ll be bored in a week and creeping off to civilisation but we’re going to give it a shot.

I’ll let you know how it goes! If we fall off a ravine or get eaten by bears, know this. We’re ok with it.

Just kidding. That would really suck.

Au revoir Montpellier, merci beaucoup et bonne journee. Tu es la plus belle ville. Je t’aime.

Highway to flamingo zone

Oh, my HEART. I have seen FLAMINGOS. They are GLORIOUS.

And I tell you what, it was a palaver all round, it nearly cost me my marriage and my sanity. But worth it.

Just two weeks ago, we had a disastrous trip to the Camargue in the South of France, near Arles. In as much as a trip anywhere in the South of France can be disastrous – as in not even a tiny bit – but I was tetchy about it at the time. Flamingos are native to the area, in summer there are flocks of thousands and thousands. They migrate in winter but there are some that stay year-round because it’s not that cold these days. But this isn’t summer and I wasn’t going to be here in summer so we went anyway. Even one flamingo would be fine with me. My whole bird-loving life has led me to this point.

I had spent a small fortune on a camera with a built-in zoom lens because they’re shy birds, like most, and they don’t come in that close to shore. We booked a hotel, hired a car to drive to the Camargue. Side note: is there anything more stressful than hiring a car in a foreign city, where they drive on the wrong side of the road AND you have to start the car with an app on your phone AND you have to find your way around a city relying completely on GPS AND you’re running out of phone charge AND petrol at the same time…well…ok, this is a rhetorical question. Is there? No. There isn’t. It is a testament to my marriage that we survived the trip. There was shouting, gritted teeth, white knuckles and eyes bulging with tension, a lot of WHICH WAY, WHICH WAY and I’M TRYING, I’M TRYING and OH MY GOD WE’RE GOING IN CIRCLES and DIDN’T WE JUST PASS THAT BUILDING and STOP SHOUTING AT ME and I’M NOT SHOUTING, YOU’RE SHOUTING and a moment in a carpark at the end where we ran into each other’s arms and leapt about crying and laughing and hugging like we’d narrowly escaped the apocalypse. Want to test your relationship resilience? Or your personal resilience? Rent a car in a foreign country.

Anyway, Arles was gorgeous and the Camargue is divine. It’s a UNESCO-protected area of hundreds of kilometres of salt marshes and lagoons on the Rhone delta, home of the famous Camargue red rice, the “wild” white Camargue horses, bulls and flamingos. We hire a guide and are thrilled with our luck when we find we are the only couple on the tour because of the time of the year. We are not very fussed to learn the wild horses of legend are in fact only a bit wild, and are actually all owned by breeders. No matter. We, at least, I, am here for flamingos. We stop at a paddock to pat a horse on the nose and I ask about flamingos, before whipping out my camera to get a shot of a rather large water rat sunning itself in the pampas grass.

It’s at this point I realise I have a tiny issue with my camera battery. In that, I forgot to check it was charged. This is evidenced by a large flashing light on the display screen which says, battery exhausted. It takes me a minute or two to absorb this devastating news. Ok, it takes me a good 45 minutes to absorb this devasting news. The bloke, who I should mention has very little interest in flamingos, is as exhausted by this stage as my camera battery. He manfully distracts the tour guide with questions he doesn’t want to know the answer to while I get a grip then resign myself to experiencing the beauty of the region with my eyes rather than through a lens. Tres disappointing. We did see flamingos. I think. There were certainly some pinkish blobs out on the water but they may have been shipping buoys. I take some snaps with my phone camera and that’s that.

On the drive home, when we were still recovering from the trauma of the experience and I am planning our next trip back there, we skirt the coastline near the outskirts of Montepellier. I am gazing wistfully out of the window thinking of what might have been, when I notice out to sea some familiar pink blobs gathering just off the shoreline near the highway. That’s right. Flamingos. Flocks of them. It turns out the coast of Montpellier is riddled with flamingos and we could have simply wandered down for a day at the beach if we’d wanted to see them.

So, armed with a camera and a full battery, I set off on my own today. The Gods of Flamingo Spotting clearly did not intend to make my life any easier this trip than the last. It was supposed to be a fairly straightforward 40-minute one-change tram ride to the coast, but they’re doing a bit of work on the lines, which involved trams that weren’t going where they said they were, replacement busses, more trams and a six-lane highway to somehow traverse.

There were helpers at each stop but they didn’t speak English and I don’t speak French. But I was not going to be thwarted again, so I managed to find my way via the medium of waving my phone map about, broken French, and charades. It was the beginning of a great adventure. I got there at last. Et viola!

I could see across the silver sea, not one but two large flocks of flamingos in the distance. Hundreds of them. But no way to get there. Apparently, the locals aren’t as enamoured with access to the native birdlife as I am and there was no nature walk or bike path or any conceivable way around the shore to get to them. Undeterred I went the other way, around the back of some houses jammed right up against the shoreline. After clambering through old fishing nets, a boggy marsh, knee-deep in rotting seaweed and mud, I found, let’s call them a “flock” of ….. three flamingos! Maybe some teenage flamingos getting away from the olds, or the olds getting away from the teenagers. Who knows.

Reader, I married them. Ok, I didn’t but I did fall in love very, very swiftly.

My camera was charged. The light was beautiful. The flamingos were glorious. Oh, you have never seen anything so perfectly delightful. They were an absolute joy to watch. They are cartoonish, elegant, gangly, goofy and all ruffles and beaks, and very, very pink. And white. They wave those long stilt legs around all over the place, I think their knees bend both ways at the joints, I must find out, it certainly looked like it. One of them appeared to be moonwalking backwards for no discernable reason. Another loved to scratch itself above the beak by arching its neck in a kind of reverse loop, then rubbing the top of its head on its back. They are mesmerising. A wonder.

It has been the most wonderful experience. As they say, the journey and the destination. It has been thrilling. I am utterly, utterly dans le rose.

Flamingo facts

A group of flamingos is a “flamboyance.”

There are four species of flamingo, and they are native to the Americas, including the Caribbean, Africa and parts of Europe.

The name “flamingo” comes from the Portuguese or Spanish, flamengo or flame coloured.

Their beaks are adapted to separate mud and silt from what they eat and they use them upside down.

Their colour comes from carotenoids in their diets, which is plankton. The French flamingos are not as red as the American flamingos because there isn’t as much pigment in the plankton they eat.

They honk.

And then I heard the call of home

“Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

There’s a scene in The Wind and the Willows when Mole, despite all his exciting adventures with Ratty and Toad and Badger, is unexpectedly reminded of home, and then that’s all he can think of. Badger’s Wild Wood and Toad’s Hall lose their shine. He just wants to go home. He longs for it. But his travelling companion Ratty is distracted by something new and Mole loses his chance. It’s wrenching; both because Ratty realises he’s inadvertently broken his friend’s heart and for the violence of Mole’s grief.

‘I went away and forgot all about it–and then I smelt it suddenly–on the road, when I called and you wouldn’t listen, Rat–and everything came back to me with a rush–and I WANTED it!–O dear, O dear!–and when you WOULDN’T turn back, Ratty–and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time–I thought my heart would break.’

Mum used to read this book to my sister and me when we were kids and I found it completely devastating. It imprinted itself on me as one of literature’s great tragedies at the time, and it has stayed with me. But I’ve had my own problems this week. Overnight, I went from flitting gaily through Montpellier, bonjouring anything that looked in my direction including random pigeons, to curled up in bed wracked with homesickness. I cried. Told my husband I wanted my mum. Cried again. Stuck my head in the bag of lemon-scented gum leaves my sister sent me for Christmas for so long that I nearly asphyxiated. Read old books. Not The Wind in the Willows, obviously. I’m not a masochist.

I embraced the sensation as passionately as I had embraced being a visitor in a new and beautiful city only the day before. But even as I pined, I felt a little bit embarrassed. There’s a kind of insubstantial air to the whole idea of being homesick in my case. I’m not young, leaving for the first time. I have a home to feel sick about, I can leave by choice and know it’s there to come back to. I’ve never been displaced or uprooted, home has never been too far or too dangerous to return to. My daughter is grown up and my grandkids have stopped wanting sleepovers. My husband is here to offer his shoulder and top up my champagne.

Homesickness for people like me, well steeped in comfort, brings to mind insipid things like, ‘having the vapours’. In my mind’s eye, I might as well be wafting about in a tie-dye singlet dress, pining for a pie and sauce, reading Tim Winton wistfully on a park bench, hoping someone who speaks my language will happen by and coax me into a game of footy or pour me a large glass of wine. White with ice, please.

I’ve noticed it doesn’t take much to set me off on a bout of mal du pays. Especially in a new country where I don’t speak the language and people I meet don’t speak mine. The following incidents reduced me to a wreck this week;

A young boy working at the supermarket laughed in my direction while I was packing my shopping bags. (Here, clearly I was doing something foolish in his eyes, when I had been trying so hard to either fit in or be politely invisible. What an ill-bred tosser. Laughing at a vulnerable old lady. His mama et papa would be mortified, no doubt.)

A woman in a fabric shop emitted a definite air of being annoyed or at least not effusively thrilled to see me when I walked in and wandered around browsing. So much so, that I approached the counter so she wouldn’t think I was a time waster, babbled something and mimed in a kind of hacking motion with my hand – do you sell cheese knives? She said coldly in English. No. We don’t. Which, to be honest, I took as a bit of a slap in the visage. And then when I left I accidentally banged the door really loudly on the way out, so in an effort to be conciliatory I pushed it open and shouted pardon! she didn’t wave or smile or in any way acknowledge my largesse. (Speaks for itself.)

The Irish man at the local we have begun to frequent because, let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t feel like trying, politely asked us to sit somewhere else because we were blocking the service counter at the bar. (This was the worst. When one of your own turns on you. Likely he was hoping to insinuate himself into the affections of the locals at my expense. I’m onto you matey.)

The combination of all the above was enough to tip me over the edge. The uncomfortable whiff of someone not too far from where I’m sitting being tres sensitive doesn’t help. It only makes me more snivelly than I was to start with and adds a day or two to my recovery. Someone has to feel sorry for me and I have endless patience for the job.

Happily, previous experience has made me aware I’m vulnerable to both homesickness and a tendency to lean in to even benign misery and I had done some preparation in order to get mon tete out of mon cul. Before it set in too firmly.

Far from my romantic visions of self drifting through French flower shops smelling the imported wattle and shedding the odd elegant tear in response, homesickness makes me nervous as much as anything else. I think I underestimated how tiring it can be to brace yourself for everyday tasks, well, every day. Once the novelty wears off, it gets to be a bit of a slog. It becomes more of something that’s good for me and I have to do, unless of course I don’t want to eat or I’m happy to let my husband treat me like les enfant. So setbacks so minor they could be mistaken for entirely fabricated become wearisome.

I indulged myself with tissues and sleeping in and calling my mum but I also noticed other side effects, nothing fatal, but certainly more insidious. I was feeling anxious about going outside, tackling the tram system, going to a shop I didn’t know, trying to make myself understood, preferring to stay in. The idea of facing the market I’ve shopped at most days, felt, if not terrifying, a bit of a bridge too far. The Post Office, ok, definitely terrifying.

A friend at home, who is very well-travelled, unlike myself, tells me homesickness comes in waves, and just when you think it’s unbearable, it changes and turns into something new. My oldest friend, who has been living in Germany for several years now, takes the same approach. And my mum once described childbirth in a similar way, just before I was going into labour with my daughter, and it helped me then too. If you aren’t managing, hang on for a bit and things will change. There’s a lot to be said for pushing it a little bit. Not trying to do everything, but also not giving in to the urge to do nothing. It’s not about feeling completely comfortable or completely uncomfortable. It’s about trying something small to get going. Even when you don’t feel like it much. Especially when you don’t feel like it much.

So, after a fabulous start to my travels, then a tiny, ok big, bout of homesickness, today has been good. I took the tram for the first time on my own to shop, I had a lovely chat in broken French and broken English with a woman at my favourite fruit and vegetable stall and I braved the dreaded Post Office and bought a box and stamps. Huzzah! I couldn’t make myself understood well enough to find envelopes but to quote the great philosopher, Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another day.

I miss you beautiful Fremantle. I miss my loves, (my other loves). I can’t wait to sit on my back deck at home under a high Western Australian sky and breathe the salted air. It’s where I always feel safe. How brilliant right now though, to be a little scared, sometimes.

“Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

Going where I’ve never been

Today I cried in Oslo. I was surprised, and then I remembered that I’d done this before. I’ve burst into tears on bridges in Paris, making snow angels in Switzerland, clambering over the rocks on the shores of Kinagoe Bay in Donegal and at the southernmost tip of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. Mostly, I just well up, but it doesn’t take much to tip me into proper tears.

Despite the overwhelming emotion, Oslo is not what I expected. It’s much more industrial. It has a whole lot of Nordic Noir vibe going on, offices, apartments, towering hotel blocks, bus stations and vast landscapes of train tracks; it’s a grey-and-white city of ice and shadows. The fjord is either frozen or the surface is like oil, it’s thick and moves in slow pewter ripples.

We arrived just after sunset around 3.15pm. The bloke on high alert as the train pulled in, deeply worried I would not be able to step from the train onto the platform without skidding and falling on my arse. It wouldn’t be the first time. In my defence, growing up on sandy beaches has left me ill-prepared for icy footpaths and we had a hair-raising time in Switzerland on our honeymoon trying to walk the 50 metres from the train station to our hotel, him manfully attempting to hold me up and carry both our suitcases, me clinging to his arm while my feet skidded under me every which way like I was drunk and auditioning for the Christmas blooper reel on Strictly Come Dancing.

Happily, Oslo heats the sidewalks. It’s the most civilised practise I have come across since I discovered a swimsuit-drying contraption in a Nottingham hotel pool last week. I can walk unaided here, at least on the main drag, though I still get around even on well-gritted paths at a slow shuffle, staring desperately at my feet while cyclists, small children and the elderly zip smugly past.

We made it to the hotel with me still standing and the bloke only mildly bug-eyed with tension. Headed straight out again for New Years Eve awash with excitement because small clusters of fireworks had started blooming across the sky from late afternoon. We had strong expectations as a result, but they were quickly crushed when we overheard a barmaid incredulously asking the couple ahead of us what they were doing in Oslo for New Years. It’s apparently not really a thing here. That’s despite the later night efforts of a group of lads who threw a clutch of bangers into the foyer of our hotel which caused no small amount of noise, smoke and general alarm. They were sharply apprehended by local police who caught them so quickly they must hover outside hotel foyers expecting this kind of thuggery. It wasn’t exactly the peak of the crack criminal masterminds I’ve come to expect from the aforementioned Nordic Noir but it was still exciting.

What is a thing here is swimming. Inexplicably. Given the forecast is between zero on the warm days and minus ten degrees when it gets serious. Along the fiord just outside the Opera House – an unmissable architectural triumph, all clean lines and high glass windows, plus you can walk on the roof by the way – anyway just past that you come across what looks like a series of small wooden boathouses which are actually sauna pods. Tourists and locals alike gather in these to sweat themselves silly then plunge off the dock, literally cracking the ice as they land in the water. Then they climb out again, everyone around them cheers and takes photos and they stand there shivering and looking incredibly proud of themselves and invigorated. It’s almost enough to make you want to have a go yourself, but we went and bought wine and four-cheese pizza instead and were ok with that.

In Oslo, it is both very very cold, and very very expensive. I think it must cost a lot to heat those pavements and I for one am all in favour of doing my bit to support that end of the economy. A basic beer costs around $15 – $20 and a standard burger will cost you $30. The food is delicious though. The pizza was the best I have eaten anywhere and there’s nothing like crushing poverty to make you really savour one glass of wine all night long.

The cold is fine, I fancy myself well-placed for chill weather with the exception of the whole walking anywhere business. I’m remarkably good with cold weather. Even for a girl brought up on the coast in Western Australia, where peeling the skin off your sister’s sunburnt back was a weekly ritual because Bunbury in the 70s was more a reef oil and face foil than hats and sunscreen kind of town. The sun puts me to sleep and cold weather wakes me up. I love it. Still, today I wore the bloke’s Long Johns as pants with tights and socks and tomorrow I’ll be wearing more socks.

There are white swans here as well as England and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them. They are both pretty and weird. And the seagulls are enormous and very dignified compared to our gulls back home. There was no sign of any ungainly squabbling over chips. The bloke offered one likely prospect a small piece of his baguette, but it just stared at him and sat there, clearly bamboozled as to why a giant hairy puffball was tearing off bits of his sandwich and hurling them on the footpath. And yes, I did tell the bloke bread is terrible for their digestive system but apparently when I’m around birds I get all full of facts and apparently quite dull so he stopped listening years ago.

Oslo is beautiful. It’s austere, and a little grim in the promise of an exciting seedy underbelly kind of way. But I read a lot of Jo Nesbo, so I am probably just getting carried away.

The art is insane. It’ll melt ye face. Norway clearly values art and funds it. Oslo is alive with art. I’m particularly obsessed with the glass shipwreck in the fjord outside the Opera House. It’s a sculpture called She Lies by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini, it’s enormous and it looks different from every angle, in every light and half light it offers a different vista.

She Lies – the glass shipwreck by Monica Bonvicini

It’s also the home of many more copies of The Scream than you’d think; Mr Munch has his own museum here plus a good part of the National Gallery down the road reserved for his work, and apparently he quite fancied his own work in The Scream himself so made more than one. It’s based on a friend’s expression as he walked over a Norwegian Bridge and there are various studies of a similar expression. The Munch Gallery itself promises at least one of the three they alone own will be on display while the rest are locked up safely in the dark. The gallery is astonishing. He was prolific in his painting, sketches and woodcuts.

At the end of next week, we take the train to Bergen and I think it very likely I’ll howl again. There’s something about mountains and snow and landscapes I did not grow up with that fills me with emotion. It creeps up on me and before I know I am welling up and clutching the bloke’s sleeve and needing a sit-down. Or at least a moment to stop and absorb.

Because, I will never get over the fact that it’s me, here, so far away from home, seeing things I never thought I’d see, with a love I never thought I’d find, and a life I am no longer always too busy to enjoy. And besides, the world is beautiful.

I am utterly overwhelmed.