Pancake Day!

It was a Monday afternoon like any other - until the inimitable Ms Crusty came up with the genius idea of a couple of us heading round to hers for Pancake Tuesday (better known to traditionalists as Shrove Tuesday). Wikipedia tells us that, for Christians, this was the date by which all fats and cream had to be eaten up in preparation for Lent, when eating good stuff was forbidden until Easter. Something to do with Christ being lost in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, so we all have to do without dessert too.

My personal view is that this was probably more a church dictate than one of Jesus' own (or even one from that womanhating Paul) - somehow ye olde Christos strikes me as more of an 'all foods in moderation' kinda guy.

But I digress. There was absolutely no moderation shown on Tuesday as we downloaded a recipe from the BBC, mixed up 4 batches of crepe batter and started flipping pans like pros. Some of the pans had pancakes in them - and some of the pancakes even made it back into the pan, cooking side down! A coupla vego savoury fillings and loads of butter, lemon, sugar and golden syrup later and the 6 of us were feeling rather bloated. But happy.

I'm still not convinced that anyone should give up chocolate for the next 40 days, but each to their own.

Me, I polished off my last King Sized Cherry Ripe from Melbourne today...

And don't cook when you have jetlag...

I thought I was doing so well with this jetlag thing. I'd survived my marathon trip home (30hrs door to door) and managed to get through those two days at the office. Slept most of Saturday and thought I had it all sussed.

Nup. Sunday lunchtime I managed to ruin a perfectly good heat and eat pasta, by leaving the stove on low until I had stewed the tortellini and burnt the sauce. In the same pan. Eugh.

The next night I totally destroyed a stirfry. Thought my garlic and blackbean was a simmer sauce, so poured in the whole jar then, when it tasted funny, finally read the instructions and realised it was only supposed to have 3 tablespoons in...

Tonight I think I'll go to the local chippy.

Snacky antipodean goodness.

Running out of annual leave while waiting for visas meant going back to work on my birthday (boo). My cheery workchums livened up the day somewhat with a gorgeous card and abundant good wishes - always good on a first day back.

In honour of these two dubious grounds for celebration (getting older and doing more work than I had in more than a month), I took in a selection of the Aussie snack foods I missed most during my first year in the UK.

So funny to watch people walk into the kitchen and go ‘oooh, what ARE they?’ 'Are these savoury? Look those twistie things come in chicken flavour as well as cheese'. Easy to pick the folk who had actually been to Australia, by their squeals of 'look! She brought Cheezels AND Timtams! Yum!!'

Although personally, I’m more of a Cherry Ripe girl…

A stonking session...

This is my other local pub: the Half Moon in Oxford. It, too, runs a Sunday session that starts around 9pm. Although run by an Irishman, it doesn't actually feature a great deal of Irish music. The main reason for this is that there's far too much damn fine English folk around, and plenty of people who know how to sing it. Learning new material has been one of the best bits about getting to know the local scene here (along with meeting new people, and getting to perform ourselves!)

Last Sunday was my first session back at 'the Moon' and it was, in the words of my friend Lizzy, a 'stonking session'. A stonking session is one where the pub is still chock full of people at 3am, when the licence ends...

Only the English can get away with using words like 'stonking' and not sound like utter twats.

Back in Blighty...

My mad month in Melbourne has flown by, and suddenly, work permit firmly in hand, the time came to fly back to Heathrow and board the bus to Oxford.

My flight felt mercifully brief - I really can't quite believe I killed 24 hours, but sleep, half-decent movies and a few glasses of red did the trick nicely.

Returning feels much less of an adventure than arriving did a year ago. Heathrow is now drearily familiar, with its low ceilings and yellow and black signage everywhere, as is the M40, our major road home. I still don't understand why, when in England, Australia doesn't feel nearly as far away as England feels when in Aus.

But as I pondered over the route back to Oxford, I realised that there are a bunch of British things that I've really rather missed, and am looking forward to getting back to:
- green grassy hills; after Melbourne's yellow and brown vistas, they're a site for sore eyes
- gooseberry fruit fool and timpany rhubarb flavoured yoghurt
- sitting up front, up top, in double decker buses; my pal Crusty Chick and I do it every day on the way to work (or did,until she started driving - traitor!). My Mum gave me Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island' as an early birthday present, and he writes about being able to give new passengers 'that knowing look that says I've just seen the top of your head' from the upstairs seats. I'm not sure it's that - more like the fact that I still flinch everytime we go under the Oxford railbridge on Botley Road, because it looks like we're about to bump heads with it.
- heating one's towell up on the radiator while one in the shower, so it's toasty and warm for drying
- being able to use the pronoun 'one' in a sentence without sounding like a complete twat
- ciders on tap; there's a different one for nearly every pub, although if you find Addestones or Old English you're onto a particularly good thing!

Then, of course, there's the big stuff - the historical bits that so fundamentally shape daily living, the live music scene in Oxford and the opportunities this community has given us. And last, but never least, the friends we've made. It's good to be home again.

Sundays at the Dan

This is my local, the Dan O'Connell Hotel in Carlton. I've been hanging out here for more than 10 years. The most excellent Mikko used to say that the best pubs are the ones that feel just like your loungeroom at home, only bigger, so they can fit more of your friends inside. By this measure, the Dan is the best pub ever.

This is a session. Sessions at the Dan happen on a Sunday, from about 9pm. I met the lovely Anthony at one such session, almost exactly two years ago.

This is Ants being daft... big drums like this sound silly played with a tipper...

Life doesn't get better than Sundays like this.

Random Melbourne Pics

There's no particular story to most of these places, just that they were part of my everyday world when I lived in Carlton and worked in town, and they're the sights I needed to see when I spent a day in town playing tourist...

Federation Square

Flinders Street Station...

the MCG across the Yarra... Southbank ...
the Block ...

and Chinatown.

One thing worse than losing to England

There’s one thing worse than going to the MCG, with my dad, to see my one game of cricket for the summer, only to lose to England - in the last over.

Knowing that next week I have to face all my English mates...

The Wave is banned...

The Mexican wave has been part of 'halfway through the second innings of a day/night match when the crowd gets bored' ever since I can remember. After years of training (and the infiltration of subversive types of my own age) even the staid and proper Members' stand goes up as the wave rolls around the ground.

Not any more.

Thanks to a bunch of idiots who throw heavy things up in teh air, not just their arms - including 'cans of piss' - and no, they don't mean beer, the wave is banned.

Didn't stop us sending it around for another 3 laps after this notice came up though....

Williamstown

What to say... a shop in Willi lays claim to the biggest range of ice cream flavours of any shop in Melbourne. Not sure they win hands down, but it was a lovely detour on our way back from Geelong, it was a hot day, and I'd never seen Melbournetown across the water looking quite this cool and groovy... but man, when global warming does things to sea levels, now I understand that Melbourne is stuffed!

I've also never seen me looking so lilywhite in the middle of summer - this was AFTER 2 weeks home!

Shopping with hippies

A child of Warrandyte and a motorcycle maid (such as I have been) really shouldn't see 33 summers before making it out to St Andrews Market. St Andrews lies on Melby's north-east fringe and is reached by some of the best surfaced, most delightfully winding roads that I've ever had the pleasure of putting two wheels over (although on this particular day, we took my cousin Sam's car, a burnt orange Corolla nearly as old as I am).

The town (village? hamlet? these words don't work outside England!) in its entirety comprises a pub (recently rebuilt after a fire), a bakery, about 10 houses and community hall beside a big open space that features the weekly Saturday morning market. If only it could be reached by public transport, it would indeed be indie hippy heaven.

My cousins (including the adorable Oliver, below), my husband (!!) and I spent several lazy hours wandering through stalls full of silk skirts, second hand clothes, home baked cakes, curries and lentils, funky gemstone jewellry, drought resistant native plants, second hand tools and even didgeridoos! Buskers played beautiful music and artists propped on rocks or fallen trees to sketch their surrounds. Apart from the frantic half hour where I lost the only surviving key to my cousin's car - it was found and turned in to a stallholder- it was a perfect way to spend a day.

A little bit about coming home...

I've been back a couple of weeks now, and England feels a long way distant - much further than home feels when I'm away in Blighty. We've spent our days catching up with many of the people we love best - friends and family alike - at endless bbqs on terraces and patios, with fish and chips on the beach (actually, it was cold and threatening rain, so we didn't make it to the beach, but the fish and chips were fantastic), and scoffing home-made garlic sausages washed down with single malts with re-enacty friends in Geelong.

In between lazy afternoons drinking wine in my mum's spa, I've also been trooping into town to stock up on foods I've missed and pressies for folk at home. It's funny to see Melbourne through the eyes of a tourist, knowing I'm here for such a short time, when so much of it is already so familiar.

It's set me to thinking about the things I've missed most while I was away. A surprising amount of it has been food-related, but the list in its entirety looks something like this:
- fat t-bone steaks and massive king prawns, both to be had for less than a fiver (sterling) per kilo;

- really truly fresh fruit and veg - watermelon, pineapple, canteloupe, tomatoes, avocadoes, basil... I could rave forever;
- ricepaper rolls from any of the hundred or so Vietnamese cafes on Victoria St - the best bit is that I don't have to make them myself;

- and Asian restaurants that assume you will use chopsticks (where they would never dream of asking 'would you like chips instead of rice with that', as Chinese takeaways must do in England!)
- Australian wine, at Australian prices;
- antipodean snacky goodness - cheezels, twisties, cherry ripes, timtams, witchety grub lollies and boiled sweets and rock from the lolly gurus at Suga (below);

- the taste of truly clean water that has sat in a reservoir being filtered by nature for two years, instead of passing through seven other people on its way down the Thames;
- public seating, public toilets, and rubbish bins in the streets - we clearly don't have the same fear of tramps or terrorists here!

- open spaces; our roads are wider, and they come with sweeping verges instead of narrow hedgerows (which are quaint, but slightly claustrophobia inducing); our pubs have higher ceilings and feel light and airy after England's dark and smoky haunts; and even the streets have fewer people in them;
- riding in the front seat of a taxi, talking (about cricket) with the driver and paying with my credit card. You can’t do any of that in English cabs.
- and, of course, trams.


All good for a laugh, but last of course, there's the big stuff. I left Melbourne knowing it was time for a break - so much had happened here in such a short space of time and I needed to head off, see the world and heal some old scars. I've come back to the happy realisation that, although I'd like to keep exploring elsewhere just now, Melbourne will always be my home town and there's much here to be proud of. It's a beautiful mix of old things and new, gloriously multicultural, with a little bit of something for anyone who cares to go looking.

I grew up here. I built a couple of different careers here. I loved and lost and found new love (those last 3 all in the one pub!). It's where my family and most of my oldest friends live, and now that I'm back, I'm not sure how I managed without them. It's good to be home, and I'm gonna miss you when I leave, in a way that I didn't miss you last year.

Cafe culture moves up two floors...

One of the biggest differences between Europe and Australia is that old European buildings are still lived in and used in everyday life, while Melbourne's oldest buildings often seem to have been reserved for museums, or condemned to crumble into obscurity.

In the year or two before I left last year, that started to change, as Melbourne started to preserve its significant heritage buildings and rediscover its gorgeous past by putting old spaces to new uses. Witness the exotically restored Forum theatre (IMHO the best place in the world to see that most eclectic yet together of Melbourne bands, The Cat Empire), and the redevelopments of the old police station D-24 and the Herald Sun building.

Some of the best new cafes and bars in Melbourne have been installed in formerly derelict offices above central city shops. Places like Cookie, Madame Brussels and upstairs at The Lounge all do a fine and slightly quirky line in food, drink and fun, balconies opening onto leafy green vistas that make the street-level chaos below seem a long way off.

Yes, they can be damn hard to find, but that just adds to their allure - there's nothing like sitting smug with your mates in a suite of battered antique couches, knowing that two more friends are lost in the laneway below, trying to find the door.

I dunno who dreamed up this revitalisation of Melbourne's 'balcony' culture, although I wouldn't mind betting it was someone who lived in a big ol two storey terrace house, sharing a battered couch and some old milk crates with 3 or 4 housemates...

O Beautiful Day...

Planned for many months, yet when it came, circumstances bent it into shapes we hadn't at first imagined. Nevertheless, the day Anthony and I wed was just beautiful as any we could have dreamed up.

We exchanged our vows in one of Melbourne’s oldest buildings before just two witnesses – thankyou Glennee and Kate! - promising to hold the other ‘beloved’ until the end of days. Then we joined those family and close friends who could be with us on stoopidly short notice and feasted on prawns, salads and sunlight. Our lovely pal Josh took some excellent pix, and so did my cousin KT, on my camera.



As day became night we went back to where it all began, rejoining the merry band of musicians at the Sunday ‘session’ at the Dan, very nearly two years to the day after we first met there. I have never shared music with another as I do with this one: its power has held us strong through long and sometimes difficult months over this past year, and it flowed around us both that night as we celebrated with old songs and new.

At last, exhausted, we retired to a gorgeous hideaway – the generous gift of my darling cousins and ‘Ant Dee’ – to celebrate on our own, and break our fast in the morning of the first day of 'ever after'.

If I have learned anything these last 3 years, it is that the marriage of true minds succeeds not because the two are perfect, but because they are perfectly matched. Together they give all to see the beauty that life holds even on dark days, and lend one another grace and strength when it is needed, to make each stronger than either was before. We have travelled far to arrive at this beginning, but it has been a good beginning.

Nothing like leaving things to the last minute...

Beneath all our recent travels has run an undercurrent that I dared not describe until we knew the outcome. But today I can. Anthony was just two days away from returning to Australia alone, when the happy news came that the Work Permit my employer has been seeking to enable me to stay on had at last come through!

We’re still not sure whether we are on our heads or our a*ses, but our bags are packed and we are bound for the 2am bus from Oxford to Heathrow, and thence to Melbourne. Marriage and more paperwork await, but we hope that in 3 short weeks we will both be back in the UK, having caught up with the people we love. Needless to say, dear readers of the Antipodes, there will be a bed for you all whenever you desire it!

Croeso y Cymru (that's Welsh for 'Welcome to Wales'... I think!)

Ants and I decided to start the new year as we intend to continue it, with a weekend exploring somewhere new. The Welsh border is just 2 hours from Oxford, so on Friday night we packed a hire car and trundled down the M4, past Bristol and over the massive Severn Bridge which, at 3 miles long (5.1km) puts Melbourne's humble Westgate to shame, and serves as a metaphorical, as well as literal, gateway to Wales.

I've learned a great deal about the English side of my heritage since I've been here, and been panned by some of my English chums for always siding with the Scots and the Irish. So please don't take this as yet another anti-English rant.

But there is no better word to describe southeastern Wales than 'denuded'. Mined heavily for coal and metals, barren misshapen hills rise above the motorway, bare of trees or even buildings, the soil exhausted, spent, infertile. Massive processing plants dot the coastline between (or even right beside) brightly lit towns: Cardiff, Swansea, Port Talbot.

We stayed in Cardiff (Caerdyff), which, since the re-convening of the Welsh Assembly, bills itself as "Europe's newest Capital". It certainly feels like a city in a hurry to go somewhere - extensive construction zones litter the inner city. There's a juxtaposition of old-beside-new that reminds me of a lot of Australian cities - although while we have grandstands to rival Millennium Stadium, which rises beside the river Taff, we've nothing to match their gorgeous castle.

Found some lovely foodie spots and some cosy Victorian-ish pubs that were just lovely, but our real adventures took place out of town....

My Lord Earl of Pembroke

When we finally arrived, Pembroke was well worth the drive.

It's not cool to love the Normans too much in this part of the world, but my favourite Norman - William Marshall - was Earl of Pembroke, and built much of the castle that still stands on a massive promontory overlooking the town. His father-in-law was Earl before him - an infamous fellow named Richard de Clare, better known as Richard Strongbow - the fella who claimed Ireland on behalf of the English, lies buried in Dublin and gave his name to an international brand of cider.

Loads has been written about William Marshall, who served King Stephen, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and King John in succession and after more than 50 years in the saddle, was never unseated in a joust. He's often thought of as one of the first men to embody the ideals of courtly behaviour, and his marriage to Isabel de Clare, daughter of Strongbow and a Princess of Leinster (whose father invited Strongbow to invade), is thought to have been a happy one, even though they were cursed and their bloodline had all but died out within a generation. You can read more about them here, here and here, so I won't bore you with further details.

As for the castle... wow.

Two things strike me about the castles of Wales I've seen. First, Wales was weeks of travel away from the Norman strongholds in places such as London, so they tended to be fortresses in their own right - the two we saw this weekend (more about Caerphilly later!) both had massive moats - made from flooded rivers and dozens of metres wide - even bigger than in the movies! Second, their very remoteness (and the tendency for English lords to hold several titles and therefore have multiple residences) meant that many of the Welsh castle/fortresses weren't much used after the 13th century - so apart from maybe being blown up by Cromwell and put back together again in the 1800s (as this one was), they haven't changed much. Anyway, William Marshal built the most fantastic fat round tower, four tall storeys high, right next to the great hall and living quarters completed a generation before by Richard Strongbow. Much of it still stands - rising above the massive cavern that once served as a water entrance and before that was home to neolithic people for some 12,000 years.

We thundered back to the present with pints at 'The Cromwell' before winding our way back to dingy Cardiff, certain that we would have to see more of the 'real' Wales on Sunday.

Sunday - St Fagans and Caerphilly

After a quick brekkie and checking out from our hotel, Ants hit upon the fantastic notion of checking out the outdoor Museum of Early Wales at St Fagans, about 4 miles from the centre of Cardiff. The weather was looking doubtful, but we decided that this open-air museum was worth a shot. We were right. The museum comprises several dozen buildings, ranging in age from 1500 to 2001 that have been painstakingly moved from their original locations and rebuilt in the grounds of St Fagan's castle (below)- which is more of a manor house really, built in the grounds of an yet another Normal keep, and surrounded by the old fort's original 12th century walls.

The old houses range from a reconstructed Celtic village, tiny16thC farmhouses on 'real life size' plots of land (made from clom - a mix of clay, straw and pebbles, and complete with pigsty, box beds and smoky chimney) to an entire shop and a row of workers cottages. Replica furnishings and implements adorn each, along with solemn Welsh guides all too happy to impart their knowledge of each building, how its tools were used - and even a few words in the local tongue.

Ants was a little disappointed by St Fagans Castle though ( little more than a 16th century manor house now, although the 11thC outer walls from the original Norman fortress still encircle the grounds.

So off we went in search of more, 'proper' olde worlde grandeur. Enroute, we managed to lose ourselves on several of the massive roundabouts that feed into/off the motorway (these babies are HUGE, hundreds of metres across), cutting a full lap round some of them before we found our way, arriving at last at Caerphilly CastleWow. This monster was built by Gilbert de Clare, who I think was a brother of the legendary Strongbow. He planned on making his castle impregnable, so built these massive water defences (see above) around it. These proved great at keeping out the local natives, but not so flash when proper seige warfare took hold, and the castle stood for barely a century before being captured and sacked. It never really recovered, and, to add insult to injury, was well nigh blown to pieces by Cromwell in the Civil War (he did that to a lot of places - the rotter!). Even today, parts of towers stand at precarious angles. Never truly restored as many others are, it's still a cracking example of an unadulterated Norman castle, and if the age blackened stones and open roofs don't make it appealing as a residence, they do add a great deal to its old world romantic appeal.

Well satisfied, we headed home to Oxford, with even Anthony confessing that he's all castled out for a bit...



Please note, all pix on this entry reproduced from the official websites mentioned above

Sorry, Brit cricket fans, I can't help it

Many of my English friends have lately and gratefully ended nights at the pub with ‘oh, and thanks for not mentioning the cricket’. It’s actually hard to be smug about flogging the poms at cricket when your mates follow the losing side. However, I couldn’t let the greatest sporting whitewash in 85 years go by without mentioning it just once. Oooh ahhh, Glenn McGrath. Hurrah for Michael Clarke’s stunning debut, and that heroic last bastion of fair play and wicked wicketkeeping named Adam Gilchrist. Three cheers for that understated British newsreader who said ‘Shane Warne... oh how we’ll miss him’. The look on the faces of my workmates Will and Pete … priceless. ‘Nuff said.

New Year's Eve, and 'Christmas... the Sequel!'

New Years Eve always carries expectations (nay, compulsions) that everyone MUST have a cracking good night and do something amazing. We figured the best way to guarantee it was to wander in to the regular Sunday session at the Half Moon with our friend Lynne, (who also joined us for orphans Christmas.)

Quite a late one, as nights at that pub often are, but a happy time, lots of singing and general laughter. Cider, whisky, Baileys, and a cab home at 4am. Bliss.

New year's day was one of my happiest ever, I think... went over to a friend's place for brunch - arrived to find Barnes absolutely ratted and giggling on the couch, while Sal and Alan ('nother music mate) stood in the kitchen with guitar and melodion in hand, writing a song about how it must feel to be Barney when he's hammered.

As always at their place, the food was abundant, and gorgeous - smoked salmon with lemon juice and fresh crusty bread, scrambled eggs, oven roasted tomatoes, wild boar sausages, and bubbly. Yum.

It was hard to tear ourselves away from there, but we had to then get away for "Christmas - The Sequel", an annual dinner that my workmate Z and her partner Marc hold at their place, involving baked ham and turkey with all the trimmings, cheesecake, some very blokey blokes from the local rugby club, drinking games and some Little Britain. So glad to have had the day off today...