Beyond Selidor

I have spent most of this week exhausted out of my mind: either travelling, working in Cambridge (much more frequently and with much more teaching of much larger groups of students than is typical), or suffering the ghastly effects of food poisoning. Today is the first day I finally felt able to catch my breath; I only worked in the morning and took the afternoon off as time in lieu for working two partial Saturdays at workshops/conferences. I taught my class, wandered around Cambridge market doing my grocery shopping, and then caught the train back home at lunch time. I spent the afternoon thoroughly cleaning both bathrooms, doing an hour-and-a-half-long yoga class, and taking a very long shower, and I finally feel relaxed.

Because of all the above, I wasn't going to do any open thread prompt this week (my Dreamwidth-ing has suffered in general and there are several people's posts on which I want to offer commiserations and/or congratulations to various life events — take this as a general expression of such sentiments if you have posted about things which warrant them). But then I saw someone in my Dreamwidth circle using a great prompt in another context, and felt compelled to borrow it:

What are your most memorable or notable travel-related mishaps?

I have many, and every single one of them was caused by my mother.

( Details under the cut )

I'd love to hear your answers!

It rained all week, and then on Saturday, the clouds rolled back, unfolding across the clearest, brightest winter skies. This was opportune and perfect, since Matthias and were joining friends (or, I guess at this stage, friends of friends would be a more accurate description) for their monthly walk. (In line with my aspirations to lead a slightly less restricted, hermit-like existence, this walking group seemed like the perfect, low key way to open up my world somewhat.) On the last Saturday of every month, they pick a local-ish hike, and whoever wants to come joins in.

Yesterday's walk was circular: 8km or so across the fields and woods near Stetchworth. Like everywhere in this area, it was a pretty flat landscape, and because it had been raining all week, it was muddy, soggy going — which made what would otherwise have been quite an easy amble somewhat tough going. My boots ended up caked in mud, and although it didn't feel physically challenging at the time, once I'd stopped moving, I realised my legs hurt a lot — in a good way. I imagine in summer it would be a very different experience, but mud is an occupational hazard in this part of the world at this time of year.

I could not get over the sun-drenched expanses of sky, sweeping above, clear blue interspersed with cottonwool dots of low-hanging clouds. After what feels like weeks of grey, the contrast was remarkable, and really did a lot to lift my mood (which has been very low for what feels like a very long time) — I imagine being out in the open air, with other people played its part as well. This photoset gives you a good idea of the whole vibe.

We had time for a quick drink in the garden of a seventeenth-century pub in Woodditton, trudged back across more fields and forests beneath the setting sun, and made it back to the carpark where we'd started in the last moments of daylight. As we were driven back to Ely, the moon rose, and hung, huge, yellow, and low to the horizon, looming above us as we made our way through the darkening fens, adding to the magical air of the whole journey.

Today was a more typical weekend day: swimming through sunshine first thing in the morning, river loop walk with Matthias ending up in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar eating food truck food for lunch, a challenging yoga class this afternoon just prior to opening up Dreamwidth and composing this post.

It's been another slow week, reading wise (my reading has not been helped in general by my low mood), but I did finish a single book: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), an early 20th-century fantasy classic that I'd always meant to pick up, and had the serendipity to find left out on the front step in a box of books being given away for free by a neighbour down the road. (This is a good street for such things — now that I've read the book, I'll give it away myself once I've gathered together a few more books I no longer want to keep.)

Lud-in-the-Mist is a strange, meandering, fable of a book — it's always interesting to read early fiction with fantasy elements published before the conventions of the genre were established (and indeed before fantasy was perceived as being a firmly distinct genre). It's set in an indeterminate fairytale world whose inhabitants have anxiously banished any thought of the magical and fantastic — to the point that it's a social taboo to even mention them — but, as in many similar stories, the fantastic continues to encroach on the human world, with potentially dangerous consequences. I always love reading stories in which the the otherworld and the human world bleed into one another, their boundaries porous and interwoven, their inhabitants interdependent in spite of their best endeavours. The fairies of Lud-in-the-Mist are uncanny and inhuman in the best folkloric tradition, and the story is told with a resonant, lyrical beauty.

Beyond that, I've been finalising my Once Upon a Fic signup (in the end, I went with the same fandoms as last year, since I still feel there are good stories to be told in those for which I've already received gifts, and some are fandoms which I've requested before without luck), and gearing up for the upcoming work week. I'm hoping the joy and light and hope of this weekend will be enough of a drastic reset to carry me through — the start of a springtime of the mind, as it were. For now, I'll build up some kindling in our wood-burning stove, turn on the string lights, and light some candles: warmth and cosiness, shining through from the end of one season and the tentative start of the next.

Overall it's been a quiet and restful weekend by my standards. Saturday was spent mainly at the gym in the morning for my two hours of classes, then at the market (the stalls on the Saturday open air market rotate on a fortnightly basis, and the iteration this particular weekend is better than what we'll get in a week) picking up vegetables, Greek deli items, bread, etc. I started today off with my usual early morning swim, and then Matthias and I bought some pastries from my favourite bakery, and hung around in the house for a few hours. I did a yoga class, finished my book, stewed apples for next week's breakfasts, washed laundry — all the usual Sunday morning stuff.

Then we hopped on a train for about half an hour, and got off in one of the villages along the train line between Cambridge and London. After a half-hour walk (not particularly exciting, and half of it was alongside a motorway, but at least the whole thing was on a footpath, which is not always a given in this part of the world), we ended up at our destination: provenancekitchen, a restaurant I've been meaning to try out for years. Back in the day, they had a food truck that used to pop up at various outdoor events in Cambridge, and I remembered enjoying the food then, but since they bought the permanent location the food trucks have only come out for private hire at things like weddings or corporate events. And somehow I'd got it into my head that their restaurant was inaccessible except by car.

In any case, I managed to figure out that it was perfectly possible to walk there, we booked a table, and we had a great lunch. On Sundays they only do roasts — the quality of which can always be quite variable (I've had some awful pub roasts comprised of dry meat, soggy, overboiled frozen vegetables, and a tiny suggestion of gravy insufficient to flavour the whole meal) — which were excellent examples of the type! They came with a platter of roast potatoes, fresh roast vegetables (parsnip, carrot, fennel, beetroot, kale and beans), all with rich earthy flavours and perfect textures — plus a huge gravy boat filled to the brim, and fresh, handmade Yorkshire pudding. It was delicious food, in a lovely atmsophere, the trains were all on time, it didn't rain, and we returned home with a smug sense of an outing well-planned, in which everything had gone perfectly. On the return walk, I was better able to appreciate the scenery, which was the usual sweeping fenland panorama of flat, water-drenched soggy fields, hedgerows, clusters of snowdrops and daffodils, little villages with church steeples piercing the sky, wind turbines, and the first hints of sunset starting to bleed into the silvery-blue air.

It was possibly just slightly too much food, though, and I can't imagine needing to eat any dinner at all! That suits me just fine, though, as I have zero desire to cook, and would rather spend the next few hours slowly winding down, as the weekend draws to a close.

I hope everyone's been having equally enjoyable weekends.

I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

In the spirit of breaking routines and habits that no longer serve me, this is going to be the last time I do this meme in its entirety. I think I've been using it as a year-end summary every year since I joined Livejournal in 2003, and I've been feeling for a while that many of its questions are more appropriate to a teenager, or an undergraduate student in their early twenties, and their answers don't really say anything fundamental about the shape of the year when the respondant is closer to forty than fifteen. Twenty years of this meme seemed like a good point to stop, and as of 2024, I'll cannibalise its questions and keep only the ones that I feel are relevant to my life.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I had one day of leave left to use up by the end of September, and so I decided to make this a long weekend, and take Friday off. I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to go to London with Matthias to celebrate a friend's birthday at a party that had been organised in a very last-minute manner.

We made a London day trip of it, catching the train down in the late morning in order to have lunch at one of my favourite restaurants — a Malaysian one in north London — enjoying laksa and various shared snacks while watching the world go by. We then travelled out to an exhibition of contemporary African photography at Tate Modern, walking across and along the river in the afternoon sunshine, before heading over to the birthday party in the evening.

On Saturday I had to go into Cambridge for a couple of errands, which was made more complicated by a total rail strike (meaning no trains at all), which necessitated going in and out by bus. The buses between Ely and Cambridge only go about once an hour (sometimes only every two hours), and my past experience has been that if they're having to cope with rail commuters as well, they quickly become extremely crowded and delayed — so I was dreading the journey. In the end, I needn't have worried — both bus trips were on time, and I sped through the fields, watching the landscape unfold through the bus's top floor front window. Normally when I need to go into Cambridge on the weekend, Matthias comes with me and we go out for a meal at one of our old favourite restaurants or new places that have sprung up since we left, but because of the public transport complications we were too anxious to do that (and in any case the last bus leaves at 6.30pm), so instead we went out for dinner at the Turkish restaurant here. The meals at that restaurant are always massive, meaning I have lots of leftovers!

Today was my typical Sunday — swimming, cooking, yoga, household chores, and lots of reading. I've been working my way through a series of books I loved with fierce intensity when I was in my early twenties but haven't revisited since then (the arrival of all my childhood/teenage/undergrad library from Sydney after fifteen years apart has sparked a desire for endless rereads of old favourites) — Sara Douglass's epic fantasy Troy Game series. This four-part series has an amazing premise — the legendary settlement of Britain by Trojan refugees fleeing the catastrophic consequences of the Trojan War, interwoven with the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, magical labyrinths whose colossal power can be harnessed by trained individuals to protect (and destroy) cities, and the history of London from Iron Age times to the twentieth century. Each book features the same characters reborn at crucial periods of British history (the mythological founding of London in the wake of the Trojan war, the Norman invasion of England, the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, and the first years of World War II), locked in an endless cycle of shifting alliances and betrayals of each other, the labyrinthine power, the city of London, and the elemental powers of the land, doomed to be reborn until they've managed to settle their differences and make common cause. This central premise, and Douglass's seamless weaving of it with weird and forgotten corners of London's history, architecture and landscape, still hold up really well, but I hesitate to recommend the series due to the characters themselves. I used to think — when I read the books for the first time — that Sara Douglass was a bit of a misogynist, but now I honestly just think she was a misanthrope. The books are a ridiculous soap opera of murder, sexual violence, incest, and abuse: Game of Thrones has nothing on them! I kind of treat this like I treat mythology in general — it's stories of non-human and inhumane supernatural beings who are so detached from human morality that it seems pointless to try and apply it to them (the characters in the books start off human, but have become something very different as time goes by, picking up vast and varying supernatural abilities and identities as they go). But if you need characters who behave in a compassionate and admirable way in order to connect with a story (or if you just have a — perfectly reasonable — problem with endless fictional depictions of abuse and sexual violence and women falling in love with their abusers) I would urge you to stay away from these books!

I'll wrap up this post by linking to the five old newspaper book reviews I've managed to transcribe/back up on my long-form reviews blog this past month:

Reading war's unsung songs

Humour behind the absurd

Cruising through a sea of history

Seeing life in inspired ride on the wild side

Telling the stories of survivors before it's too late

I'm making fairly good progress with these, which is pleasing.

Saturday was a day of motion, today is a day of stillness, which to be honest is my ideal division of the weekend. It suited the weather perfectly: yesterday was baking and cloudless — one of those days that feels like the last gasp of summer — while today has been covered with a thick blanket of greying clouds.

Saturday morning was spent in yoga at home, then two hours of classes at the gym, after which point I met Matthias and we walked into Little Downham, a village a couple of kilometres away, following hedgerows covered in blackberries, and newly-harvested wheat fields. Our destination was one of the village's two pubs, which is run by a Thai family who make really nice Thai food — a great change from standard British pub fare. We ate lunch outside in the garden, surrounded by flowering rosebushes, marigold plants, and chili, tomato and capsium plants covered with ripe fruit. Every so often, people would ride past on horses.

Today, everything was sleepy and slow — crepes with tea and coffee, a visit to the bakery to pick up fresh bread, and lazy hours reading in the living room. I did a 45-minute yoga class focusing on the upper body, and finished off a whole book in an hour. Dinner will be something slow-cooked, with chicken stock, and rice, and garlic and ginger: the return of autumnal food.

I've read three books this week:

Moon Dark Smile (Tessa Gratton), which I somehow missed was the second half of a fantasy duology, but was comprehensible enough on its own. It's the story of an imperial heir, who sets out on a coming-of-age journey, accompanied by the palace demon (to whom her family owes its authority), which she has allowed to possess her so that it's able to leave the palace. It's also about cycles of revenge, the power of names in shaping identity, and finding confidence within yourself by understanding others. I'm always drawn to stories of consensual possession and weird love triangles (particularly those that involve three people but only two bodies), and Gratton writes these things so well here.

Red Smoking Mirror (Nick Hunt), an alternate history novel in which Islamic Spain (i.e. Al Andalus) never collapsed, and instead went on to 'discover' and colonise the parts of our world that became the Americas. This book is set some time after the initial voyage and colonisation took place, and an uneasy equilibrium has been reached by both old and new residents of the region — but the seeds are there to rupture and then shatter this state of affairs. The narrator is an ageing Jewish man, and the emphasis is very much on minorities, people on the margins, and people who translate and move between cultures.

Goodbye Eastern Europe (Jacob Mikanowski), a social and cultural history of that part of the world, mainly focusing on the nineteenth century onwards, and drawing on strands of thematic commonalities across regions and/or countries, rather than focusing on the political history of individual places. I found this to be a refreshing approach, as it emphasises interconnection rather than looking at individual countries (or regions) in isolation.

I might have time to pick up another book this afternoon, but I suspect that will be it in terms of completed reading for the week.

I feel as if the whole month of August just ran me over like a train, between my mum's visit, trying to cram in a huge amount of work into a couple of weeks, two major renovation projects on our house (requiring dealing with contractors, etc), and then another holiday with Matthias. I've barely been around on Dreamwidth, and when I have logged in, I haven't felt I had the energy to comment on people's posts or reply to any comments that a post of my own might prompt. But now, finally, I have time to catch my breath — after returning from travel yesterday, dealing with the mountain of work emails that accumulated while I was away, and putting out various small fires caused by my own distractedness at work prior to the holiday. I've made a series of lists, which always makes me feel a whole lot better, and now I can sit here, and write about where I've been over the past week.

Matthias and I always try to have a holiday of at least a week together, away from home, doing something that's not visiting family (when both halves of a couple are immigrants, leave allocation often swiftly fills up with trips to visit family, since unlike people who live in the same country as their families, we can't very easily drop by and see our parents for a weekend). I've had an aim for quite a while now of travelling to at least one new-to-me country per year, although this is the first time since 2019 that that's been possible; while I travelled a lot last year, it was always to countries that I had visited before.

Matthias and I also have two friends who live in Vienna — and we last visited them in 2019 as well. We decided, therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, and go on holiday somewhere new-to-us that was reachable by train in a day from Vienna. After researching our options, we picked Slovenia, and booked a four-day stay in Ljubljana. We made our way there in fits and starts — an afternoon train trip to Brussels, a stay overnight in a budget hotel near the station, a day travelling across Belgium, Germany and Austria by train, and a weekend with our friends L and V in Vienna, during which time we wandered around the city, taking breaks from the heat in various cafes and restaurants, and took the train out to a village near the city, where we walked through vineyards and had lunch (and wine from those same vineyards), and finally a slow, six-hour train ride along rivers and mountains dotted with vineyards, sheep, and cornfields to Ljubljana. (We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)

The weather in Ljubljana was unfortunately not conducive to our preferred holiday activities — walking around an unfamiliar city, chatting with each other, and pausing for meals, coffee, or glasses of beer/wine — since it rained torrentially for the first two full days we were there. We made the best of it, however, and visited two contemporary art museums, walked along the river on both sides and in both directions whenever there was a break in the rain, and tried out almost all the restaurants, wine bars, craft beer bars, and cafes that had come highly recommended. My highlight in this regard was probably this cocktail bar, a tiny jewel of a place doing incredibly strange cocktails (or any classic cocktail on request) with exquisite attention to detail.

The highlights of the trip were definitely the restaurant in one of the turrets of the castle above the city, where we had a tasting menu with wine pairings (another thing we like to do in every new-to-us city), and the trip out to Lake Bled which we did on the one day in which there was no rain forecast. We walked around the lake (a flat paved trail of about 6km — easy walking, although quite crowded with families, tourists, and groups of cyclists), pausing to swim in the sparkling water, with the clouds and craggy mountains mirrored beside us — had lunch in a lakeside cafe, and made it back to Ljubljana in time for dinner. (If anyone is thinking of doing something similar, I'd recommend travelling by bus rather than by train as the train station is an hours' walk from the town; the buses leave every hour and are pretty cheap, although be warned you'll need to pay in cash.)

I took a huge bunch of photos on the trip, particularly of the lake, the water of which is full of the most unbelievable colours and textures. If you have an Instagram account, you can see them at ronnidolorosa.

The return journey was a quite a bit more stressful due to chaos and cancellations on behalf of Deutsche Bahn (the cursed corridor between Cologne, Aachen and Brussels seems to be a particular problem, as exactly the same thing happened to my mum in exactly the same area on her train trips to and from Berlin in early August), and although it used to be possible to travel from Vienna to Cambridge(shire) in a single day by train, I now wouldn't recommend it, and indeed wouldn't recommend trying to do any trip that involves train travel through Germany and a Eurostar connection in a single day. We will not make that mistake twice, and will always stay overnight in Brussels or Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar the following morning. Eurostar changed our booking without charging any additional costs (my advice here is to follow what we did and not try to rebook yourself online/through the app, but rather go to the Eurostar gate and explain the situation; the staff member rebooked us immediately and didn't ask for any payment of any kind) and we should be able to claim back the cost of the hotel booking necessitated by DB's chaos, but it made what had been — up to Cologne — a relaxing, chilled out time zooming through central Europe on fast moving, on-time trains into a tense, anxiety-inducing nightmare.

In any case, that was a long digression about trains, which was not the note on which I meant to end things! The holiday itself was lovely, and in general it's just been so wonderful to be able to travel internationally again. I feel incredibly lucky.

I've had a very busy (by my standards) few days, to the extent that in some ways it feels as if the weekend was four days long, even though I had to work two of them. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I've ended up working in the library in Cambridge for three consecutive days (Wednesday-Thursday-Friday), and will be working another three consecutive days next week (Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday), whereas I normally only work in person on Wednesdays. I have no idea how I used to manage to work in person five days a week, week in, week out, because just three days in a row now feels incredibly draining.

On Thursday evening, Matthias and I walked the 8km or so out to Littleport, a village to the north of us along the river, and had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had been recommended to me by a colleague. It was still pretty warm and humid, so the walking felt effortful, even at 6pm. The food at the restaurant was great, and incredibly cheap (less than £10 for a main course), and the waiter was what you might describe as 'a character,' discouraging people from ordering certain dishes on the menu, and chatting endlessly with the Irish family at the next table over. It's definitely the best place to eat in Littleport, so I'll certainly be back the next time we walk out there.

On Friday evening I met Matthias in the centre of town, where there was the monthly food truck event happening. We had dinner, and then ended up at a '90s silent disco in the cathedral. The place was full of people mainly our age and older (and, as usual when events involving nostalgic '90s music take place, seemed to have attracted every Polish person in the region), although with pockets of zoomers whose presence baffled me given they weren't even alive when most of this music was a thing. There were three different DJs playing the three different channels on the headsets — '90s pop, '90s alternative, '90s hip hop — I flicked between the channels according to the song and my whim, danced my heart out, and generally had a wonderful time.

On Saturday, we did another walk — this time around 8km through various villages into Haddenham, which was hosting a beer festival/community fair on the village park. The walk took us through the usual kinds of fenland landscapes — lots of flat fields of wheat, paddocks full of horses, hedgerows and brambles under skies filled with low-hanging fluffy clouds. I'm not a beer drinker, so beer festivals in general aren't hugely interesting to me, but I love these kinds of village community events from a sociological perspective, and had a great time sitting out in the open air, listening to some rather dreadful local music acts, and people-watching.

Finally, we spent the middle of the day out at 'Aquafest,' a local fair thingy that involves various food and drink and tat stalls, fairground rides, and a race of homemade boats/rafts on the river. As we were walking home, I could see a group of four people struggling to stay afloat on their sinking craft, with one oar drifting away down the river, which probably gives you an accurate idea of the vibe of the whole thing. We ate soft tacos, wandered around for a bit, and then headed home.

I've been so busy this week that I don't have any new books to log here, which is strange for me, but I suppose if you take all the above into account it's not all that surprising.

Another weekend, another attempt to spend as much time as possible outdoors in the summery, sunlit air. The bakery was doing a wine-tasting event on Friday evening — all slightly sparkling, natural wines — so we went there for dinner, and nibbled on cheese and charcuterie and sipped wine in the courtyard garden. It's light until nearly 10pm here now, so we were under clear blue skies for most of the evening.

Yesterday, the plan was to head off to Waterbeach, which is a village between here and Cambridge. Normally this would be very easy — just ten minutes or so on the train, of which there are plenty — but it was a train strike, meaning we were limited to the hourly buses, the last of which leaves Cambridge around 6pm. On top of this, Cambridge was hosting its annual Strawberry Fair event, which always draws in lots of people, so everyone who would normally have been on a train (which have between 4-8 carriages and go to Cambridge three times an hour) was crammed onto a single bus, which only runs once an hour. The bus going there was late by 40 minutes, and the one coming back was 20 minutes late, and very crowded.

We were going to Waterbeach to visit the taproom of a beer brewery which only opens up for retail customers once a month. It's out in an industrial estate and isn't particularly pretty — all concrete and steel — but with a food truck, and a bunch of people sitting under umbrellas, and sunny, breezy weather, it ended up feeling pretty pleasant. I'm not a beer drinker, but I'm definitely a food truck appreciater, and this time it was a pizza place with a woodfired oven, which was very welcome.

Our neighbours had their barbecue going last night, but the only nod to the outdoors at home that I've managed this weekend is hanging the laundry outside. We do have a terrace with a table and chairs, but even with the umbrella it's in full sun for most of the day, which is too bright and glary for me.

After all the travelling (which really wasn't that far away, but took ages and was a bit stressful due to the aforementioned bus nonsense), it's been good to have Sunday at home, and catch up on reading. I gulped down an entire trilogy by Charlie N. Holmberg, who is an authors whose premises always sound like exactly my thing, but whose execution always seems to take a lot of the sting out of ideas that would work better if they were given just a bit more darkness. (I think she's just too timid and conservative to do so.) Her general thing is to set up a situation in which a young woman is being exploited in some way that is a) incredibly physically painful to her and b) erodes her sense of self in some manner, with a rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold love interest who ends up trying to save her in spite of his more mercenary impulses. (In this Numina trilogy, for example, the young woman is indentured to a criminal gang-leader who forces her to become possessed by demons.) The trouble is, I'm always entirely uninterested in the roguish love interests, and more interested in the heroine's relationships with the demons, monsters, and vengeful, implacable gods who are trying to possess and/or marry her. At this point, I've read at least five or six books by Holmberg, so I know what I'm getting in for, and try to read around the edges of the story actually there on the pages, and imagine I'm reading something else.

Beyond reading and wandering, it's been a pretty standard weekend, with the usual chores and physical exercise, and a good mix between movement and stillness. I'm still not feeling great mentally, but at least the things I can control are generally happening in the way I want and expect.

After a 36-hour journey from door to door, involving an inevitable rail replacement bus, and a train full of drunk, singing football fans, I've returned from my trip to Australia, sleepy, restored, and a little bit melancholy. It was my first time back in five years, due to the pandemic, and it was a very packed schedule, filled with family events, various bits of long-postponed life admin, and lots of communing with the ocean. I was in Sydney for the most part, staying with my mum and sister #1 (who has moved back after five years in Melbourne), apart from five days in Woodend in rural Victoria with my dad, stepmother, and all my sisters.

I felt it would be easiest to summarise the trip under various subheadings.

Family and friends

Lots, and lots, and lots of family dinners in Sydney with various combinations of aunts — at Mum's place, at my aunt's place down the road, at cocktail bars and restaurants in the CBD, etc

A daytrip to have lunch with my dad's two sisters and their partners and one of my cousins in Thirroul, which is about an hour away on the train

Visiting anya_1984 and meeting her younger son, who had not been born the last time I was in Sydney

Easter weekend in Woodend — the first time all five of us sisters have ever been in the one place at the one time, in freezing temperatures, with the fire going nearly constantly, various dogs and cats slumbering on our laps, catching up with one of my cousins, meeting his new partner (who gamely came along to an Easter Sunday dinner hosted by one of my stepmother's brothers, with about forty people there, mainly her relatives, but also random people that my stepmother's mother had met at the pub and invited along, etc), chatting chaotically around firepits, eating too much food and drinking way too much wine

Cocktails and dinner with anya_1984, who has known me since we were twelve years old, plus a gang of people with whom we went to uni, which ended up being an oddly intense experience due to the passage of time, and everyone's various private griefs and struggles being aired

Getting the unexpected chance to see all of my cousins apart from the one who lives way out in Sydney's west and works irregular hours and the one who lives in South Korea and the one who had just gone on a trip to Spain the week before I arrived

Life admin

Sorting out various banking and superannuation stuff that inevitably accumulate if one is a migrant who has spent half her working life in one country and half in another

Going through all the books, documents, paper diaries, old high school report cards, boxes of photos, primary school artworks etc which I had been storing in my mum's flat since I left Australia in 2008, and finally throwing away the stuff that had survived five purge attempts since 2002. The remainder is in the process of being shipped over to the UK, now that we finally own our own house and live somewhere with an adequate amount of storage

Food

Just generally revelling in the fact that Australia is really, really, really good at food. I always say that the UK has improved massively in this regard since I first moved here, and that's true, but Australia really is in another league, and my mum lives in a part of Sydney that is particularly good in terms of cafes, bars and restaurants (and within easy reach of other parts of the city), so we ate very well

I ate a lot of fish and other seafood. The UK has good seafood, but it's generally different types of fish, and prepared differently, so it was good to sample all the stuff I can't easily eat in the northern hemisphere

Australia also generally has better East and Southeast Asian food, so I was keen to eat that at every opportunity — of which there were several

Two tasting menu dinners at high end restaurants — this one with Matthias, and this one with sister #1 as a birthday present for the past five years of birthdays

Cafe breakfasts. Just Sydney cafe breakfasts

All that land and all that water

Various walks and swims with Matthias around different bits of Sydney Harbour — catching the ferry to Manly and then walking from Shelly Beach up North Head, and returning to swim, walking from my mum's place to Barangaroo, walking from Nielsen Park along the harbour all the way home, with a swim midway, and shorter walks to any available body of water I could reach

Lots and lots of swimming at andrewboycharltonsydney with my mum, and sometimes one of my aunts, with the smell of the cut grass on one side and the harbour on the other, watching the naval ships drift by, under the broad sweep of the sky

I read a lot of books during the plane trips there and back, but while I was in Australia I stuck to rereading my old childhood paperbacks, including Rain Stones and The Secret Beach by Jackie French (a short story collection and standalone novel collection respectively, both with French's usual focus on family history, memory, and the Australian landscape), Hannah's Winter by Kierin Meehan (preteen girl spends three months in rural Japan with an eccentric host family and — together with a couple of other kids — must solve a supernatural mystery quest), and Shadowdancers by Sally Odgers (a portal fantasy in which people from our world have doppelgangers in another, with whom traumatic experiences can force them to trade places — one of my very favourite books when I was a teenager, absolutely read to death, to the point that the paperback is extremely battered and had been dropped in the bath at least once).

The trip itself was wonderful, but emotionally wrenching in weird and unexpected ways due to the passage of time, and the near constant reminder that migration and building a life overseas causes the space you occupy to close up behind you. I made that choice, and I don't regret it, but it is confronting to be reminded that life goes on without you in places and among people that once felt like home. It was my own choice, but it was a choice that was not without weight, and consequences.

My Instagram — ronnidolorosa offers a rather incomplete record of the trip, heavy on the sea and sky, since those were — apart from the people — the thing I missed most, and which are so, so different to the sea, and the sky in these northern parts of the world to which I transplanted myself.