In the heart of the night of travel

On By cjx07sterIn TravelLeave a comment

Bubbles of small pain like the bends rising from the depth of sleep, make me wake. I messed with my neck on a chair the other day ow ! Through the dark wet window are the gumtrees scribbly lines and smudge against the dark misty sky and below the sill line, way below, a shellowing creek rushes along down the rocks and through the fallen trees, grass, bark and creek paraphenalia.

It is the dark heart of the bush out there, and on the roof, slight soft raindrops fall, in the house, the only sounds are the clocks, tick in bathroom, tock in loungeroom, clunk in den.  Clocks, its 3.30am on the quiet bedside digital, the radio alarm has a few hours to wait. I’m awake and the dark heart of the night is time to think over what just happened out there, time to pray for the kids.

A lone bird whoops down the creek and the frogs croak, then go back to sleep.  There are no peepers here, where I live, but I know they used to be there when I woke in New England, no Sydney frogs are a bit different, like the people I suppose.

So here in the heart of the night, with the clocks and the creek, the occasional frog, and bird, and the sounds.  I get a chance to reflect on the things that happened in the last rush of a crazy trip where the minarets cry Allah, and the sands fill your pockets, and the trains go fast, and the limo drivers smile, and the tourists are stressed.

Sand, hot wind and sand, i felt it, brought in from the Kingdom’s Al Khobar’s hot streets and Brighton’s sunny beach, I didn’t declare the grains in my clothes. But what happened to the chalk smooth pebble I found on the beach in Worthing ?

The sounds of the people in Brighton, where the new pier is brightly lit, alongside the old one, burnt out,  with traces of the past still clinging to it.  In England the South Downs looked familiar with green hills and narrow roads, and nice places to get lost, and traffic jams to get stuck in.

But don’t forget Paris, didn’t you go there for the weekend ? Didn’t you meet so many people, etrangere, passer’s by ?

Yes the Eurostar, got on at St. Pancras International, and was fine headed for Paris, under the channel separating Albion from Gaul and not providing the fine view of the chalky cliffs of dover, but then speeding out from ground at Calais and over to Lille, where turning sharp south it travels fast down map into Paris.  At the Gare du Nord, the train pulled in.  Paris, ah, so full of people from all over the map, and so Parisien. I stepped outside the Gare, to use  my phone, and others also were there on their blackberrys.  Salesmen in suits with an earpiece, talking to themselves in the sunshine, talking of gas fields in Algeria, and Turbines, and such. Inside getting Metro tickets in a queue, since the machines don’t like my Australian bank. For this trip I tried the cheapest hotel I could find in Paris, and at 39E + tax for the night it was a good one.  The hotel, out near the Universite Rene Descartes, was a Formule1.  Excellent value really.  So alone for the evening I walked by and by down the rue ‘Porte de Chatillon’ from Metro Porte D’Orlean and checked into my little automated room. Clean, quiet, and a place to call home for the evening.

It was in the evening around 7pm I went walking and got a crepe on the street down to Alesia, and then decided to take it easy that evening and go back to the hotel.  Walking back, on the way to the hotel, I was stopped by a lady, who might have been from somewhere in North Africa.  Initial thoughts on someone stopping you, is they want money, which is generally the case, so I generally prepare a phrase in my mind, that goes, ‘Non !, Merci !’ or somesuch probably quite rude thing to say when you think about it, but you don’t have time to think normally.  Anyway In this case, the woman asked ‘as tu un plan pour la route ver a Porte de Chatillon?’ So I said ‘Non ! Merci !’ and left walking back, and then thought about what she said.  It took a while for me to figure oh okay, she wanted a map or wanted to find her way to the Porte de Chatillon.  I guess I could have helped out really.  I should have quickly pulled out my blackberry, and called up google maps and then showed her how to get there on the blackberry.  Still it was just up the road, so she probably would have made it ok.

The next morning came, and it was my dear son’s birthday, he lives in Paris now, works at the Polytechnique in Palaiseau, so glad to have been there that weekend.  We ate at the restaurants at the top of the rue ‘de la Butte aux Cailles’, in the southern 13th Arr. part of Paris, where the food is great, and the people are Parisien, but not too crowded. The Fete de la commune was having a singing dancing affair that day in the square that saturday, complete with stage, minstrels, hurdy gurdy player, singer and lutes and dancing caroles. 

He has a black mantlepeice in his small apartment in Paris, not far from Glaciere Metro.  Thats where the chalk pebble is now,. I remember I put the round white grey thing down carefully arranged.  It looks good there now, along with Gabrielles bit of polished gumtree wood beside.

On my return to the UK, and at the Gare du Nord, an american tourist from San Francisco was out of breath, panicky, and lost at the Eurostar terminal.  A french lady was trying to help her in english and figure out where she should go.  I joined the conversation and the french lady spoke to me in french on behalf of the american, I replied in my best French and this was then translated to English for the American.  I said ‘hello’, the french lady said ‘merci bien, tu parle en anglais ?, ‘oui madame, je suis Australien’.  The french lady didn’t mind but smiling back, left me to the help out the American, who badly needed a smoke, in a non smoking Gare.

Flying is so convenient of course, but my Saudi visa said in small arabic writing, that I could only enter the Kingdom by land.  I guess my booking clerk didn’t do the figuring right, and couldn’t read the visa, so I got stranded, had to be driven over instead.. lovely Bahrain..Al Khobar,..mysterious kingdom of oil under the sands, where in the streets the women wear dark, and the men wear bright.

So here in the heart of the night, in the dark, and in the morning, it is evening in Brighton where the lights are still burning with laughter on the pier, and it is later in Paris, but the bars are still full, and it is even later in the Kingdom, where the oil still bubbles up like nitrogen into the pipes to power the planes that get me around the place, and the Gare du Nord is still busy with tourists lost and stressed no doubt about it… en francais, en anglais and other lingua.

Still the heart of the night here in Sydney is restful, and dangerous, because the creeks can flood, the gums can burn, and the wind can blow.  So I am thankful that it is still tonight, and I am home again. A kookaburra starts the dawn.

Za’atamite Toast – Innovation 17

On By cjx07sterIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Something new and quick for the midnight to dawn shift ?

So I generally don’t get into cooking… just ask my wife and kids, but when a concall happens before sparrow’ I have to improvise.  So improvisation is just using ideas that you pick up and trying things out, to see how this and that fits.  Anyway for a non-chef to engineer something so crazy as za’atamite toast, you got to wonder right ?

So here is the very carefully thought out [scratch that] experi-mental recipe…

Take some old french stick left over from the day before. Then , take your sword, and cut it like Zorro, alongways in two, and turn on the sandwich maker.

Get some of that spray on olive oil and then spray both sides of the sandwich maker..

Take care to remove any old crumbs stuck on it and left behind by the kids…

OK so you got the sandwich maker on at last,… wait till the green light comes on…

Then a quick spray of olive oil .. Fresh from the can mind .. Doesn’t matter about the virgin level..

OK then get the french stick you cut in half, and lay it out on the sandwich maker..

Close the lid.. And put pressure on it while the bread toasts.. It will gradually compress the bread while it is cooking.. This approximates flat bread, but still with that nice baguette taste…, and increases the overall heat capacity which will come in useful later..

OK when toasted and before smoke comes out.. Take it out and lay it on a breadboard… side by side.. Mmm.. Don’t eat it yet.

Quick before it cools down… Spray a dash of olive oil on the toast..Then get your jar of oregano… sprinkle that on the still hot toast.. If you did it right, it sticks to the oil and the heat from the compressed toast somehow blends it all nicely..

Then get your handy jar of vegemite and spread vegemite on the toast.  Spread it right on top of the oregano, this way the oregano doesn’t fly off when you try to eat the toast.

 

Then get some fresh black coffee or green oolong tea to the side..

Take a moment to thank God for innovation and life, before the dawn and the concalls start.

Yabbie Dam Dreaming

On By cjx07sterIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Dreaming out the window close, and onto the frosty misty oval, with the emply flagpole post,  at my desk, always a mess inside, and with a burly teacher on a chalkboard neat writing, and information being offered in lines of text verbose for us all to take note.

Perhaps we could escape from class, after, and go up to the yabbie dam to yabbie with string and meat. The muddy water glistening in the sun, with at the shallow end, a glimpse  of a yabbie crawling up to catch a bit and then yanked out by the claws and jaws, with yabbie on string and into the bucket in the mud. Cries of joy of course, having caught a Yabbie, dang the cold, the ice and the wet.

But yesterday Jacko wanted to build a raft, with a couple of logs, and rope, to float out on the icy Yabbie Dam.  So we dug out some sucky logs and slimy bits all over, went slip sliding along the muddy bank in school clothes already grey, and now wet and a mess, with our jumpers all slimed up from the algal on the logs, so slippery.  But still we made the logs fast together with a rope, but not stable to stand on.  Our limited engineering, although environmentally sound, was not for the faint hearted.  We managed to drag it around, and if you lay on the slippery slimer logs, you could paddle across the frigid dam in the cold rain from above, and look down through the green into the Yabbie kingdom below.

Still, we enjoyed the secret break from school, with enough risk to exercise our imaginations, and cunning.  How to avoid being caught by prefect-ures and dominating curly teachers, who would whip a cane out as soon as look sideways at the bedraggled students coming in, just fresh from the Yabbie dam, with a bucket of Yabbies, we might get the chef to cook on the side, so they turned all red like a poor students lobster.

Now back to history, the history of the civil war, the anthropology of mesopotamia, and still we wonder on it, with the chalk and writing, and having to copy it all to learn it.  No one ever wrote nothing about how to Yabbie, and how to build rafts from logs and twine, and how to catch them with meat on a string.  You just knew, and without ever having written it down, I could do it all again tomorrow, without a refresher course.

His chair in the canyon…

On By cjx07sterIn Sunday Posts, TravelLeave a comment

Down in an orange county canyon, there was a bar not far from the foothill towns. I was with a local, we had got some  beers in the afternoon, and now with the sun setting beyond the darkening hills, and the bar, noisy with a few people, dressed in leathers, where there are mountain lions, and cougars, and panthers, which give an air of danger, the possibility of an insecurity, not felt, or perhaps not imagined in the city around about.

It might be more dangerous with the humans around.  Who can tell a foreigner, in a strange place.  I have walked into bars in Boston, with closed windows and dim lights, where on enquiring, “do you know the way to route 93”, there will be a sideways look, a shrug, and not a word is spoken.  It is then you feel the danger, and the naivety of a stranger wandering into somewhere, other wise local people would never tread.

In the canyon bar, with the bikes in their heavy chrome jackets out there. Something wild, like from before, perhaps before the goldrush, or before the strip malls came, but wild all the same.  After the first beer, and you get to look around.  Enough sense of security to make eye contact, and read the notice board, and listen to the conversational hum, outside and in.  The engines and the leather, and the noise of the Harley’s arriving one by one, in groups of two or three.

In the middle distance, against the fence, just near another table, a chair with stencilled in red paint “Security”.  The chair was unusual,… it was the only metal chair out in the dusty courtyard, it was a nice design – polished alumium, with an art deco flair.., but it was there, heavily secured to the fence, with a padlock and a chain. The padlock, like most padlocks in the universe, had probably not been opened for some time, perhaps the key was lost.  The chair like the key, looked unique in the courtyard, populated by wooden tables and other things under the sun.

We wandered around the courtyard, looking over the bikes, chatting to the owners.  On returning to our bench, I noticed an older guy had turned up drinking beer in a large black leather tankard. Had sat himself down in the chair stencilled “Security”. Not talking, but secure in his position and role in the courtyard.  While all the younger people on bikes and in the bar, were talking and making life, here he was sitting on the secured designer chair, like he owned the place, if not for himself, for the security of the place, and I thought of a place in singapore, there was a guy there, who came in each evening, to play pool.  He was thin, and keen of eye, but possibly well into his eighties, and this guy could beat anyone at pool, and he drank a stack of beer, big schooner glasses one by one.  He would carefully place the beer on the side of the table, take aim and then pull the pool queue and let go, changing the universe once again with the successful sinking of balls, one by one.  Never said a word, never smiled, just played pool, with a kind of happy look in his eye.  He had his place, he came there every night… he probably still does…

There is something about having an older wiser guy, who’s lived through life, seen it all, and happy to not chatter away, making noise, but still keen to be there among the younger people who do, perhaps making the place a bit more secure, like a guardian angel in a way, a guardian about to become an angel of sorts, with old thoughts, and old ideas, of a world gone by. Thinking, drinking his beer, like everyday, sitting in his unique metal chair, with his name on it, in the yard, in the canyon, with the sun going down.