“Friends may come and friends may go but enemies accumulate.”
Not a cynical take on life. Cynicism is the child of disappointment. No - it’s a realistic appraisal of the way in which relationships change over time. Friends can just drift away with no ill-will involved whereas conflict doesn’t necessarily diminish with distance in time and space.
The doors to the deck are in place. It was a huge effort. The family have come and gone. The celebration didn’t need the doors in order to ensure a beautiful day although ‘leaping through the window’ would certainly have dampened my spirits. I’m very glad that the building work is basically finished and very happy to have family - difficult though those relationships may have been for all of us to maintain over time. It takes continuous effort - which may appear as self evident but has taken many moons for me to understand.
The youngest member of the family turns one year old very soon and alternated between the ‘trembling lip’ and gurgling delight. The weather was kind and biting insects must have emigrated for the day.
The Bluebells and daffodils are memory. The tiger lilies leap from the garden beds in a profusion of orange and black while the Canna lilies - confined to a large bed because they wander - are risen from the tattered remnants of last years growth to stand like a circle of green and bronze spears, the flowering heads like Standards and Pennants, red and yellow and not quite fluttering in the breeze.
Australia is big enough to swallow the British Isles, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, what was Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and all the smaller countries contained by Europe. It still has room to accommodate the same area again and have almost a million square kilometres left over. Cor!
95% of New South Wales is in drought. This is an area perhaps forty times the size of Wales. Today it’s drizzling and cool in the Blue Mountains - a blessing for my winter flowering Polyanthus which were parched and wilting just yesterday. I’ve mentioned previously that Katoomba is a mile high and that, when you’re here you wonder where the mountains are....... “ Further up.” is the short response.
The Blue Mountains are the front doorstep to much more.
The Great Diving Range is a typically laconic Australian description of thousands of kilometres of length and hundreds of kilometres of width of wild bush, cliff and peak and winding deserted roads. Anything could live in these wild places and who would know? This is the land of Min Min lights and other peculiarities. I respond to these brooding distances.
Running like a rumpled blanket along the East coast, sometimes allowing the magnificence of both mountain and sea and, at other places, leaving a hundred kilometres or so of plains and basin between it and the sea.
I’ve been working in millimetres. Woodwork requires straight lines and accuracy, good eyesight and patience. Just as well that my friend Robert has been able to provide all of the above. Perhaps it’s why I now feel the need to lift my eyes and expand my horizon.
Picked up the guitar and played A minor for awhile. Doesn’t sound like much - one chord - but it’s the rhythm which makes it something upon which to build. It's a different rhythm.