From our nation's capital

A few days in Canberra. A few photos.

In Praise of the Long Lunch

Lunch at Bella Vedere in the Yarra Valley this weekend. 

Bread made on site, with Australian sparkling.

Stuffed pork trotter with lentils

Chips fried in duck fat with fried runny eggs.

In Praise of the Short Break

Just returned from a four-day escape to beautiful Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. The first time we went was this time in 2005, and it snowed. Not quite that lucky this time, but still a good way to escape - the fact that we had been there before was a big part of the appeal.

There is a lot to be said, too, for taking that short break out of range of a phone signal, for taking walks among the hauntingly majestic King Billy pines and around Dove Lake, spending hours in the spa, and consuming some wonderful food, cheese and Tasmanian wine, particularly from these labels: 

• Holm Oak (pinot noir)
• Josef Chromy (pinot noir, ZDAR pinot noir, Pepik sparkling)
• Frogmore Creek (iced riesling – excellent with roquefort)
• Delamere (pinot noir)
• Clarence House (merlot)
• Tamar Ridge (riesling)
• Chartley Estate (sauvignon blanc)
• Bay of Fires (NV sparkling, and a very good unreleased 2009 pinot noir)

Flight Diary, SQ 218, 8 May 2010

And I didn’t get a bathroom door that looks like part of a wall by being bad at business.

Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

It’s amazing how many of my fellow travellers reek (really reek) of inexpensive beer.

Recline all the way, will you, woman in 32C?

She reclined her seat into my view of 30 Rock, then pressed back some more to see if would go further – it did. Another centimetre. Cow. Later, she moved it back up – at the request of the stewardess – for the meal service (she didn’t take a meal, I did), but how many times did she look back to see whether it was time? Once, twice, three times, then four, five and six. Every little while, a check-back.

Scotch in a plastic cup.

Johnnie Walker’s neat.

2.30am Melbourne time

This strange sideways turbulence can be rather disconcerting because it’s rarer, I suppose, than regular up-down (vertical!, that’s the word) turbulence.

5.00am Melbourne time

The man I had thought for most of the flight was an uncaring chauvinist husband was in fact a perfect stranger to the woman sitting in the seat between us, and called her ‘bizarre’ as he stepped over her to get past to go the bathroom – the only reason being that she had her blanket over her head to keep out the light. I don’t smile as he passes me, my subtle expression of disapproval. 

Edvarcl Heng

The author of an article in the SilverKris magazine. This must be what’s wrong with Singapore society, I thought. Or the layout person can’t spell Edvard (because a boy with a Teochew heritage can still be named after a great Norwegian painter). But then, his name appears in two different places in the magazine: EDVARCL.

5.45am Melbourne time

My Singapore Girl is Japanese. She bows slightly as she speaks.

It’s breakfast service, and the choices are frittata with a chicken sausage (I’m sure it’s vile) and braised noodles with beef. I choose the noodles, but when I unwrap the alfoil, it’s the frittata. I asked for the noodles, please. You want to change the meal? Yes, because I asked for the noodle. Wait a minute. They’ve run out of the noodle on this trolley, so she sends her colleague down to the galley. He returns. Who wanted to change their meal? he asks. Gah! I ordered the noodle, but I only scream in my head.

More of that sideways turbulence. I can’t lift my coffee cup straight or put it down properly, so I keep it suspended in mid-air, looking to all the world like I’m swirling my airline pot-coffee as if it were pinot noir in a giant crystal glass.

In typical SQ fashion, the Flight Path indicator is showing that arrival will take place at 5.12am Singapore time, or 48 minutes ahead of schedule.

The whole point of keeping it real is to take it to the next level.

Phil, from Modern Family

I adjust my watch, so it’s now:

4.45am Singapore time

It’s a full flight. I walk down the aisles to get to the aft toilets. Not a spare seat on the thing.

We land at 5.13am. Pull up at the gate at 5.20am, and I’m at the Hilton by 6.05am.

I watch the sunrise over Singapore.

At home, in Delhi

Hotels tend to promote themselves with ‘home-away-from-home’ connotations – telling guests about the available comforts, the conveniences designed to make their travels easy, and, most of all, the friendly, personalised service. Sometimes, guests leave testimonials to the effect that ‘the hotel staff were like my family’.

And if you watch closely, you’ll often see guests making too-intimate conversation with the waiters and other staff, in a unilateral effort at connection in faraway places.

In February 2008, I was at the Hyatt Regency Delhi, when I sat facing a man who really needed to connect:

A man who looked like Freud, nursing a red wine in the Executive Lounge, is showing the waiter photos stored on his phone.

My son and his girlfriend, he says.

My other son and his girlfriend. Neighbour’s daughter. My mother-in-law, he says with a mixture of affection and amusement. Travelling in Canada.

He shuffles through a few. My daughter is in the wedding … my daughter and this girl are good friends.

This is today, here in Delhi, he says more loudly, awaiting the waiter’s reaction.

Yes, yes, Delhi, says the waiter, happy to see the familiar among these family shots.

He scrolls on: Here’s my backyard, that’s an owl.

Snow … this is near where I live.

This is my neighbour. The girl who got married, this is her house.

Oh, said the water.

We had a party for Valentine’s Day, I don’t know if you have Valentine’s Day …

Yah, eh, February … February 14, the waiter says, as if to prove that he knows it.

The men get together and cook a meal … for the women.

The waiter nods politely.

My brother-in-law … this is in New Hampshire. This is a party there … his daughter is getting ready to go to college.

My nephew.

My brother-in-law.

My wife. My son. My father.

The waiter asks after his father.

He’s, uh, 81 – he’s old, the man says as he scrolls on.

What kind of dog is it?, the waiter asks when the next photo appears.

It’s a pug. P-U-G.

This is behind my house … sunset.

Business trip I took to Minnesota. Back to my mother-in-law’s house. I think this is Christmas time. My in-laws have a small cottage on a lake … it’s beautiful.

Again, The waiter nodded politely.

It was cold … we all got up and had coffee on the dock.

An associate of Freud turns up, watches the proceedings for several moments before he interrupts … Excuse me, he says to the waiter, before turning to Freud: Weren’t we meeting in the restaurant?

Freud looks up briefly: I think we’re meeting here. We’re here, he says as he goes back to showing the waiter his photos as the other man comes to sit opposite him … it’s an antique, he says, even as the waiter turns to the other man to take his drink order.

The first man shifts his attention to his associate. They eat at 8.00, 8.30 here, he says. So did you go to surgery? How’d ya do?

In praise of the weekend away

These happy snaps were taken on a Saturday-to-Monday weekend in Daylesford. Lazy brunches and coffees, getting around the lake and the Sunday produce market, and a quick wander through what's showing at the Convent. And facials at Mineral Spa, and a long, delightful dinner at Lake House. Hard to beat.

Attraversiamo

Of all the books I read in 2009 – and, admittedly, I did not get through nearly as many as I’d have liked – the one that perhaps struck the greatest chord was – wait for it – Eat, Pray, Love. This is a big admission for me: during the year, I read beautiful poetry (if I did read anything, it was part of a poetry binge of sorts), some interesting novels (you know, highbrow literary stuff the enjoyment of which I don’t need to explain) and other non-fiction (John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe – another three-word, three-comma title – that perhaps figured second in the 2009 greatest chord-striking stakes), but it was this book that got to me, that stayed with me.

This book that I bought so reluctantly, that I baulked at because of its immense, folksy popularity, and the author’s voice of which I had already presupposed I would not enjoy. Well, many times I really didn’t enjoy Ms Gilbert’s voice. Often enough, she grated, she whined, she stubbornly didn’t help herself or see the rut she was in for what it was.

But then, there were things like this:

… I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

And this: ‘Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognised yourself as a friend.’

There were things like India, like bel far niente, like Ketut, like Richard, like Liz telling Wayan: ‘But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favourite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.’

And this: ‘Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.’

There was all this chatty profundity, all this stuff that was – hey – true. And perhaps it was all the stuff I was going through, perhaps it was all about the timing, but it resonated with me (and, it seems, the millions of others who also bought copies). I read it quickly, and more eagerly than I have many other books – I read it with emotion rather than intellect, and took notes because I was worried I would forget. I would stop in places, and pick it up weeks and weeks later, and read slowly or again eagerly according to some cosmic instruction.

And finally, I recognised not only the sadness, the searching, and the providence in the parts I quoted above, but also this:

Somewhere in me I am able to recognise that this is not my melancholy; this is the city’s own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it.

And this:

I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late – through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures – into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person – the magnification of one life – is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.

The Journey

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque