Timing

I didn't get my timing quite right this year.

It is our custom to prebook just two things on our annual journey and make the rest up as we go along. These are our return flights to London and our Eurostar ticket to France, which we contrive to allow us two weekends with the kids and a bit of time in between to visit other friends out of the City while the family members are off being busy executives.

This year, we landed on a Monday, which was exactly the day after the first weekend we'd hoped to be here for, and booked to leave the following Monday, puzzled at why travel was so expensive on that day. Sure, it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight and a calendar, but we usually eschew both of those things which is why we inadvertently booked to travel back to France on Easter Monday.

This gave us a bonus few days with family of course, but also meant that we had insufficient time to travel to the midlands to make our intended visits this time round, so we are stuck, oh dear oh woe, with filling in our days wandering around Hyde Park and thinking warm thoughts and feeling enormously grateful to our offspring various for giving us the opportunities they have over the past decade.

By choosing as they have to live in London, each in turn, we've been compelled to visit as often as we've been able, and astonishingly when we total our visits, we've actually lived here in the City for five or more months. When we wander along the banks of the Serpentine as we did today, stopping at the Lido for coffee, then across Hyde Park past the Prince Alfred memorial to Kensington itself, it is not as tourists we travel, but as residents,  people for whom these surrounds are familiar.  We are here often enough to notice subtle changes between visits.

We can gauge progress on construction works, see how last year's ducklings are going, or wander among our favourite trees watching as the buds develop on every branch, half-wishing we would still be here for the explosion of colour which will take place in a week or two.

We popped into the Science Museum today mid our meanderings, and quite coincidentally spent an hour or so becoming acquainted with the history of time keeping and clocks. It seems that it is really only since the beginning of the industrial revolution that man has been conceptually bound by time.  Before the invention of the clock, deadlines as we know them simply did not exist.

I am not sure that I believe that entirely, but I like the thought. The concept of living in a timeless state is an admirable one, and we have determined to undertake the pursuit of that state of being with some vigour.

Tomorrow.

If we remember.

Another day another market

We hadn't been to Camden Markets since before the fire that burnt out all the good bits; the antiques and bric-à-brac chaps. On a post-breakfast whim, we, after deciding that we are rather fond of the whim and promising to use it more in our planning this year, determined to make use of what was undoubtedly the last sun of the week, and head off in direction Camden Town.

With a forecast temperature maxing out at a mind numbing eight degrees, we took our jumpers out of the bag, the ones from the outdoor clothes shop back home, and wandered off wondering how it was possible that two people who just two days ago felt quite cool sitting on a verandah as the evening temperature plummeted to twenty-two, could now feel quite comfortable comparatively scantily clad in a climate which would be perfectly placed inside a device used to keep beer chilled.

The markets themselves did not disappoint, full of colour in the broadest sense,  and plagiarised Banksy postcards made to look original by large signs forbidding photography.   Without the Beatles, Princess Di and Banksy, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other well known Brit, Marilyn Monroe, there would be no printed tee shirts and seven hundred unemployed vendors in Camden I think.   It's a shame that such a great opportunity to present original work is squandered in the name of putting food in the mouths of the stall holders children.

Perhaps it's a bigger pity that there are so many prepared to pay actual money for this stuff that the stall holders thrive.  One vendor read the label on my jumper as we wandered past and called me over, "Kathmandu" he exclaimed in a somewhat excited tone, continuing with "Have you been there?"

Alas I explained, I hadn't but it is on our list of places to go, people to see, and I did add by way of explanation that on this occasion the word served merely as a brand for stuff that keep us warm.

He seemed a little taken aback, "It's the capital of my country," he explained, adding in a puzzled tone. "How can they sell out the name of my country's first city like that?"

He could see there was nothing I could do to rectify this travesty, shook his head in disbelief and offered us two Banksy original-copy tee shirts for the price of one.

Three... err I mean TWO!

As we walked from Paddington Station to Bayswater this morning, clattering our bags across the cobbles, even through our fatigue we could not help but notice the delicious liquorice monochrome of the trees, still leafless, almost as they were when we left them six months ago.  Once again we succumbed to an overwhelming feeling that time has simply stood still in our absence, as though we were returning the day after we left.

This feeling is neither deja vu nor surreality, perhaps it's between the two, as though we live in two parallel worlds instead of being conscious of the fact that we are actually living a string of consecutive experiences.

Jetlag has much to answer for.

Two, quite coincidentally I'm sure, is also the number of minutes it takes after boarding an aeroplane for me to remember how much I really don't like being encapsulated in that particular manner, and as it happens it is also the number that exactly represents the temperature when we arrived in London this morning.

Despite rumours to the contrary, spring has definitely not arrived, there is decidedly no heatwave and the blip on the records which showed a twenty degree maximum for a day or two last week was just that, a blip.

Perhaps one of the benefits of experiencing the numbness that jetlag brings, is that it leaves our senses oblivious to the temperature, or maybe that was due in part to the jackets that we had thoughtfully carried with us as we boarded to be used in the unlikely event of a thirty degree drop in temperature.

April Fool's Day

Suddenly, the banging together of our heads has stopped.  We are packed, we have left, we have said our goodbyes and returned the rental car.

We have passed the gates which signify that we have left Australia, are sitting quietly in no-man's land, watching the almost empty international terminal below, and a familiar but surreal emotion engulfs us, as we pinch each other and wonder if the last six months actually happened.

Tomorrow when we leave the silver tube that will have been our home for 24 hours, we will be in London, living a life we left behind in late September.

We feel jetlagged and dislocated at the very thought of it all.

Perhaps it's just an April Fool's Day joke

Take a deep breath

One last sunrise over Moffat Beach for the summer, and really there was nothing left to do, just bung a few things in a bag, run over the pace with a mop, and pop down to the big smoke to mind the littlies for the night.

How on earth could those simple tasks have taken more than twelve hours of non stop, if not frenetic activity?

Twelve hours to pack two bags and sweep, and write last minute notes, and clean the car, sort out the battery charger, get the tools away, perhaps wash just a few more things, and see the neighbours and........

Will we ever learn?

Jumbled mess

Somehow, all of the stuff on the table has to make it into the carry-on bag, but before that happens, there is the plethora of banks and government departments to convince that we really did move address a year ago.

But it's a different sort of baggage that's kept our minds occupied other than on the job in hand over the past few days.

Despite our repeated advices, demands, and now begging, it seems that every time we lodge a change of address it miraculously changes back the day before we depart.

So far this week we've experienced this phenomena from a bank, two government departments, one of whom advised that they have never had our residential address and still don't and were simply unable to explain how the cheque I was holding in my hand had come to be addressed in bold type to that very place, and then.  Perhaps our mistrust of all things bureaucratic  reached something of a crescendo when this very day, our medical insurer announced that I owed $1800 in back-payments because it had made a significant file error in recording my date of birth and wasn't I pleased that they had only gone back six years.

I suppose I should have been and maybe in different circumstances I might have been.

Oh well, back to the packing.

A bit rocky to write

About five decades ago, the elder of the two of us received the above postcard from her grandparents who were, at the time cruising somewhere near Fiji, on the "trip of a lifetime".

It says in full:

"just going to lunch must hurry give my love to Mum & Dad.  a bit rocky to write."

And that, dear readers pretty much sums up this blog for the duration of our small hiatus which is from this day, over!

Without dwelling too much on "busyness" it seems as though our spare beds and even floors have been mostly occupied by friends, children and grandchildren various for pretty much three months, and when they haven't, we've been occupying beds in some other location thanks to the generosity of  friends, children and grandchildren various.

It's pretty much been a roller coaster ride that had to come to an abrupt end a day or two ago, just so that we could get stuff stacked away, banking finalised, and things packed for the next leg of our own "trip of a lifetime" and that is exactly how far at least for now, we intend to make this journey stretch - our lifetimes!

We're back,so snap on your seatbelts and come for the ride, because as usual this blog will happen whether it's rocky or not!