Transports of delight

One thing that's very different about Sydney, compared to Hong Kong, is the amazing proliferation of street art. In the area where I live, Chippendale, everywhere I look there seems to be a mural, or graffiti, or a subtle little stencil like the one shown (seen in Pine Lane). Sites like Acid Midget document street art all over Sydney. Some of it can be crass, or vulgar, and occasionally there's heavy-handed political posturing; but then I'll see something like this one, which is a little secret message from the artist to the viewer. (I used to ride a Vespa around London so I have a special fondness for scooters.)

(Thanks to elj, who captures street art around Newtown, for prompting me to photograph this little vision.)

Stuck in a moment

Perhaps partly because I've just been reading a novel about a WWII Russian spy by Alan Furst, and also because I've always been interested in that era (Gitta Sereny's majestic biography of Albert Speer, Hitler's Willing Executioners – which I read, incongruously, on a beach in Fuertaventura – If This Is A Man, Stalingrad and, absurdly, Wolfenstein), I was struck by the beauty and mystery of this picture, taken by Mark Hogencamp in Marwencol, the miniaturised battleground he built in his own back garden while recovering from a beating that left him brain-damaged. His tragic story has been turned into a documentary.



Found via the website Look At This Little Thing!

Call the cops

When I was about 8 years old, I had a crush on a boy called Derek, who was in my class at primary school. He was tall and thin, with swept back blond hair and a cynical look which I found wildly attractive: he was a romantic hero straight out of one of the too-old-for-me books I was fond of reading. He was an extremely fast runner, to add to his allure; my short-lived career as a runner (third in the East Lothian Schools' 200 metres in 1977) may well have been founded on (and certainly foundered on) an attempt to either emulate, or impress, Derek. Of course, he didn't even know I existed.

Not long afterwards my brother and sister and I were taken out of school to continue our schooling in a more maverick fashion, and I never saw Derek again.

My mum just emailed me to tell me that two policemen had arrived at her front door. She confessed to thinking "What have I done now?", having all too recently had an absurd brush with the law involving a knocked over bollard in a supermarket carpark, an off-duty policeman and jobsworth, and a summons to appear in court; but they were just following up on a local burglary. One of them asked after me and my sister; it turned out to be my very early hero, Derek, who's now a local copper. And somehow – perhaps because I still, risibly, harbour a secret yearning to be a police officer myself – that has really impressed me.

Amazing cakes

From Black Star Pastry in Newtown. In order of appearance: Persian fig, orange and pistachio cake ($6); salted chocolate and caramel tart (seen in a slightly dishevelled, but still beautiful, state after the ravages of a journey back home in the basket of my bicycle) ($4); and elderflower and pistachio cheesecake ($6). They tasted as good as they look. Apparently Black Star Pastry also does extremely good pies - including an award-winning lamb shank pie which I am already dreaming about.

What do I get?

“My mother once said, ‘We were too poor to be photographed.’ And there began my life’s fascination with the medium.”
Linder Sterling

Wings of desire

When I was about 8, I was unlucky enough to participate in an exercise with a group of other kids, both younger and older, where we were asked in turn what we wanted to do when we grew up. Bearing in mind that this was the antediluvian days of the mid-1970s, and despite the fact that these were the kids of my parents' friends, artists, hippies, musicians and the like, and perhaps should have been a bit more enlightened (having said that, from experience this often turns out not to be the case: people who pursue what they regard as an alternative lifestyle can often be surprisingly conservative), when I said that I wanted to be a pilot, peals of mocking laughter rang out. Clearly it was ridiculous for a girl to want to be a pilot, because that is a man's job.

One of the other kids played to the gallery with his answer which was "shoplifting, gluesniffing, stealing". This got the laughs he was after (although it may have been as accurate a prediction as anyone else's).

About 15 years later, having gone on an entirely different career path, I had a flying lesson from RAF Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. Despite the excitement of taking the controls for take-off and landing, speaking on the two-way radio, flying over my childhood home, and circling over the Forth road and rail bridges, it quickly became apparent that the career I had dreamed about would not have been a smart choice for someone who gets violently airsick.

A woman who had drifted around the edges of my parents' group of friends came to our house for the day, not long after the career path humiliation ritual. She was a bit of an old, sad figure in my view (horrifyingly, I realised on thinking about it that she was probably younger than I am now), a slightly bulky woman with bleached blonde hair, an oversized baggy mohair jumper, and a miserable expression on her face. She didn't seem to know what to do with herself. The porous clay mug from which she drank her tea was so throughly imbued with the reek of her perfume that it didn't wash off for months. My sister and I cruelly dubbed her "Shoplifting, Gluesniffing, Stealing" and the poor woman has no name other than this in my memory.

Post modern

My sister's art school boyfriend (Ben), in the 1980s, tried at one time or another to send her the following items in the mail:

- an arrow (for Valentine's Day)
- a hard boiled egg (it cracked)
- a toffee apple (it "ruined 20 pieces of mail" said the postie, clearly very satisfied by being able to impart this news)

Looking back, it's amazing the patience with which these items were processed. History does not reveal how many missives were unsuccessful (but Ben might).

I saw a book somewhere of letters which someone had posted to herself with puzzles (crosswords, word games, join the dots etc) instead of the address. If the postie solved the puzzle (and they often did) the address was revealed. It's a clever idea and it seemed as though some of the posties really quite enjoyed the challenge, although I'm sure quite a few of the letters got binned in exasperation.

(Thanks to My Rusty Sieve for sparking this off with a post about W. Reginald Bray, "The Human Letter", who was a pioneer in the field and a wild experimenter. He posted a turnip, a bowler hat, a bicycle pump, shirt cuffs, seaweed, a clothes brush, and a rabbit's skull. Following those triumphs, he posted first his Irish terrier and then himself .)

Streets of your town

Sometimes Sydney will unexpectedly remind me of Edinburgh: a certain slant of light, or an old building, or the texture of the stones. I usually think of Melbourne as being more akin to Edinburgh, as Sydney is akin to Glasgow: the former genteel, maybe a little smug; the latter brash, sometimes full of itself. Walking down Bridge Lane in the CBD, the first half of the alley was glistening with plastic bunting as part of the Art & About festival. There was a nightclub, apparently called FAKE, at the corner. And a beautiful archway led to Bridge Road, and the light coming through it, and the fact that Bridge Lane seemed like a secret known only by the people walking through it, made me imagine for a moment that I was in a close in the Old Town of Edinburgh, somewhere near the Royal Mile.

Doors of perception

Ever since I was a kid I've loved secret gardens and hidden away places: my imaginary house has a wooden gate with a little door in it, through which you enter a garden with overhanging trees and a winding path to the front door (this is based on a vague memory of a flaking cream-painted wooden doorway in the town where I was born, Haddington, East Lothian, which led to a potter's workshop and not to a mysterious garden, but I have adapted it for my own purposes). I see myself, fancifully, wandering barefoot through French windows into the dewy grass in the morning with a cup of coffee in my hand.

Hong Kong's urban landscape, being very new, for the most part, has a low quota of surprises; in Sydney, I've been enjoying the ancient buildings, many of which are now being refurbished as the areas around the city centre rapidly gentrify. This doorway is contemporary, but has gracefully met the challenge of its surroundings and is also blending in beautifully; blink and you'd miss it. There's an enigmatic stairway behind the gate and no sign of what's beyond.

Turn suburbia upside down

I went to a fancy dress party for someone's birthday a couple of years ago. The theme was "Rock stars" so I went as Debbie Harry (and judging by the photos, unfortunately I looked, in my blonde wig and silver top, more like Debbie Harry now than Debbie Harry then). Someone else had also come as Debbie Harry, with a very similar wig. On reflection she may have been unwilling to acknowledge that we were both (equally unsuccessfully) trying to look like Debbie in the glory years circa "Parallel Lines" (at which point she was already 33), or perhaps she was just a bit doolally; in any case, her first reaction on seeing me was to gush "Oh! You've come as that Toyota!"

She meant, of course, Toyah: the middle class poster girl for punk, whose risible hit "I Wanna be Free" must have struck fear into the hearts of sixth form common room prefects and Home Counties G&T-drinkers everywhere with its stirring refrain "I'm gonna turn this world - UPSIDE DOWN!" and, sensibly, "I don't wanna be told what to wear - so long as you're warm, who cares?". Toyah was on the front of Smash Hits, suspiciously perfectly made up with sky blue skin and tiny birds circling above her eyebrows. Toyah hadn't actually shaved her head; she'd gelled the sides. It's a mystery, indeed, how Toyah ever got taken seriously. Even as a credulous 12 year old I was a bit suspicious of her. Even I could tell that the threat to "crawl through the alleyways BEING VERY LOUD!" was a bit pathetic.

And so it came to pass that Toyah became an actress, married Robert Fripp, and was most recently to be seen campaigning against the construction of a centre for asylum seekers near her village in Worcestershire.

And in case you wondered: yes, I was both offended and amused to be mistaken for Toyota.

Kind of blue

Dresses by London-based designer Osman Yousefzada for his Osman line, also worn here by Anna Friel (it's a beautiful dress, and she looks great in it, though I'm not entirely sure about the legs akimbo look). Victoria Beckham was so impressed with Osman's column dress that she borrowed the dress and then, ahem, paid homage to it with a dress in her own collection. Dresses from Matches (and they are reassuringly expensive too).

Another season passes by you

It sounds trite, but I find that one of the interesting things about Australia is that when you look at the sky, you know you're in a big country. There's something about the sheer scale of the land mass which seems to impact on the clouds which always seem so much higher in the sky than they are where I grew up, in Scotland, where louring, rain-filled, threatening clouds of slate-grey hue sometimes seem close enough to touch. Even in countryside north of Sydney, in the Hawkesbury Valley which is farmland like the landscapes I'm used to and has similar contours, there would be no waking up from a long journey and mistaking it for East Lothian.
This picture was taken from the balcony last night. It's spring, the days are sunny but the nights are cool, and the moon beamed through the clouds above the city.

Another country

I've moved cities, from Hong Kong to Sydney. I have a bit of time in hand before I start my new job and have created a new blog, A Place A Day, to give me an incentive to go out every day and find somewhere new. It's been a satisfying experience, although I find that as usual I have put pressure on myself to complete it every day; during a week I was spending at work, I only managed one post and felt strangely guilty about it. I'm so used to working full time in a proper role; I'm in a strange limbo where I no longer have any responsibility for Asia and have yet to take on any responsibility in Australia. It's taken a few weeks but I am beginning to enjoy it.

In the meantime I am also enjoying sitting in the sunshine on the balcony every morning with a takeaway latte and a (terrible, on my first attempt) homemade muffin; buying flowers (beautiful ranunculus and straight-as-a-die tulips); and cycling along civilised streets on civilised cycle paths looking for interesting places.

Vo Vo voom

At work this week, I attended a meeting of the managers of one of our government contracts. It took place in a drab government office with awkward chairs and yellowing sellotape still stuck to the wall from long-gone admonitory posters. The managers, who'd moved from Castlereagh Street bringing their giant desks with them, were apparently much more well behaved than usual because I was there; and to top it all off, someone had very thoughtfully bought a packet of Iced VoVos which were served on chipped plates. The Iced VoVo is an old-fashioned kind of biscuit, which was described to me as being "the kind of biscuit that old ladies have when you go round to see them". I'd never come across one before and was quite delighted with them - so much so that I ate four. It's a thin biscuit topped with a stripe of jam, banked by two strips of sprinkled coconut. Colourful, tasty, and satisfyingly old fashioned: coupled with the surroundings, I could have been in a meeting in 1975.

Swayed

Tabitha Simmons Clodagh wedges. Seen in Lane Crawford; picked up, tried on, sighed over. Over $1000? Never.

Simple pleasures

A planter box full of lavender on a sunny Sunday morning.

I am beautiful and clean

These beautiful, and beautifully wrapped, objects arrived in a parcel from Singapore this morning. From Vice and Vanity. I love the witty little skeletal arm on the perspex necklace, and the uncompromising uniqueness of the golden half-moon. Objects to display as well as wear.

A day to remember

Kirsten Owen 2000, by Corinne Day, 1962-2010

The Furniture

To things we are ghosts, soft shapes
in their blindness that push and pull,
a warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer,
a face glancing by in a mirror
like a pebble skipped across a passive pond.

They hear rumors of us, things, in their own rumble,
and notice they are not where they were in the last century,
and feel, perhaps, themselves lifted by tides
of desire, of coveting; a certain moisture
mildews their surfaces, and they guess that we have passed.

They decay, of course, but so slowly; a vase
or mug survives a thousand uses. Our successive
ownerships slip from them, our fury
flickers at their reverie’s dimmest edge.
Their numb solidity sleeps through our screams.

Daguerrotypes Victorian travellers
produced of tombs and temples still intact
contain, sometimes, a camel driver, or beggar: a brown
man in a galabia who moved his head, his life
a blur, a dark smear on the unchanging stone.

John Updike

Vigorous anonymity

The Healing of a Lunatic Boy (1986), Stephen Conroy

The first time I think I felt really excited about art was at an exhibition at the then newly-opened Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Belford Road, Edinburgh, in 1987. Entitled The Vigorous Imagination, it was a showcase for contemporary Scottish artists, many of them painters such as Stephen Conroy, John Bellany, Adrian Wizniewski, Ken Currie and Peter Howson. I was particularly taken with Stephen Conroy, whose painting above was used for the poster, which I had a precious copy of for years. I remember feeling such a sense of amazement, walking round the new, expansive space, taking in ideas, that I could hardly breathe. Before then, paintings and sculpture and installations had never really spoken to me, even though I grew up in a house where art was all around me; I had an appreciation of it that fell short of real engagement. The mystery and majesty of Conroy's paintings, as well as his undeniable skill, had a profound impact on me. I longed to own one.