Melbourne

It was never on my radar to go to Australia, but you fall in love with an Australian and look what happens. I’d just quit my job after twelve years in publishing (more of which later) and flying to the other side of the planet seemed a good way to buffer some enormous life changes. We decide to go for 3 weeks and spend Christmas in Melbourne where my partner Oisin’s sister lives with her partner and their seven-month-old baby girl. While the plane waits on the tarmac, my own sister is in hospital awaiting the appearance of my new niece. The last shred of 3G before we are asked to switch off our phones carries a picture of little Penny Jean – healthy, pink and screaming blue-murder. A happy relief before we hit the skies.

Ten years ago my fear of large aeroplanes might have prohibited the trip. I’m much better now, but I admit my stomach flips when I first see the three rows of seats (three rows! THREE!? this thing is too big to fly, IT’S TOO BIG TO FLY!). My advice for flying east around the globe is to have a bad night’s sleep the night before you leave. I re-set my phone to Australia time the minute I get up, so despite having only been awake a few hours it’s time for bed when I get on the plane. With the help of over-the-counter sleeping pills I nod on and off through the first seven hour leg of the journey.

When I come to, I seem to be in the airport sequence from The Fifth Element, also known as Doha airport, Qatar. There’s just enough time to go to the bathroom and we’re back on a different plane where I now have to stay awake until we hit Australia. I find it impossible to read so my well-intended Hilary Mantel remains untouched while Oisín does the sensible thing and chortles through Despicable Me 2. Make no mistake, the thirteen hour leg of the flight is hard work. The trick is to make your world as small and comfortable as possible with blankets and music and movies. It is bedtime when we arrive in Australia. We go straight to bed and sleep well and wake up on Australia time.

First impressions of Melbourne, and specifically Melbourne in December: It is a huge metropolis made up of smaller neighbourhoods, each with its own character, train station and/or tram stop, and if you’re lucky, beach. It feels as if Irish and Asian people have come together to build a city in the sunshine. (Note: in Australia ‘Asian’ is most often used to refer to south-east and north-east Asia, rather than south Asia as it tends to mean in the UK). Christmas is optional and lightly festive, not aggressive and avaricious like back home. In a list where Canadian and Australian cities dominate, Melbourne was found to be the number one most liveable city while not quite ranking in the ten most expensive. These findings seem to ring true. Easy-to-use transport proliferates and there is healthy food (or unhealthy if you prefer) to fill you up all day for a few dollars.

Oisin’s family are, of course, extremely lovely and welcoming. They are Irish/Australian/Chinese/Norwegian, ­which is to say, Australian. They are warm, fun-loving, healthy, culturally savvy, and generous. These things strike me as very Melbournian. Their neighbourhood is Footscray, close to the city, on the cusp of regeneration (though hopefully not extreme gentrification), ethnically diverse, though predominantly home to a Vietnamese community.  Our first couple of days in the city are an exhilarating blend of world accents, Turkish sandwiches, Christmas lights, 28 degree picnics in the park, espresso, gyoza, laksa, grenita. Courtesy of lovely Michael, we head to a grand beach house at Sorrento while I gather up my further impressions: Melbourne feels like it’s growing and filled with potential, not rammed to capacity and panting over the side like London or New York. It feels as if your favourite bar might not have opened yet. Quality of life doesn’t feel hopelessly out of reach. There are too many KFC’s and Nando’s and McDonald’s and it needs fixing. There is more exciting vegetarian food here than you could hope to try. Jackson 5 and Cat Stevens are playing everywhere. We see two enormous poisonous tiger snakes and a dolphin at the wilds of Portsea. I feel extremely far from home and it feels brilliant.

Notable places that we eat or drink are Mamasita, Corte, Journal, Buckley’s Chance, The Plough, Short Round, Ombra, Shebeen, Spicy Fish, Boney, Izakaya Den and the rooftop bar at Curtin House. Rooftop bars are very Melbourne, originally intended to dull the effects of the smoking ban, they are now an essential part of a summery drink.

The 42 degree heatwave dips and we spend Christmas Day on the beach with home-made sushi rolls and wine and friends and family. The sea is warm. We swim and stay until the sun sets.

(Here are some Melbourne photos.).

Tuscany

Tuscany... even the word is a kind of dreamy homophone for ‘dusk and honey’ – and honey is near enough a decent simile for the light too. There’s something about the way the sun meets the earth there that lets you see ‘the shape of the day', as our wonderful host Claudia put it. But the light… it's the light that my Aunt had told me she couldn’t describe, and here I am, not describing it for her…

But first, Rome…

On my previous trip to Rome, the tour guide delighted in telling us that we’d arrived on the rainiest weekend for fifty years.  Everything was sticky and grey, and even the Trevi Fountain couldn’t make itself heard above the torrent. There was a certain romance watching rain douse the sides of the Colosseum but mostly it was a false start for me and Rome.

This time though, the sun is out, and twenty four hours of hot Roman holiday await. Katie and Eddie meet me off the train, already looking like accomplished locals, all shiny and brunette. We are borrowing a beautiful apartment for the night which is stuffed with Proust in Italian translation and shelves of orchestral vinyl. Our street is just by the Michelangelo-designed Porta Pia, a sixteenth-century gate in the city walls that was commissioned by Pius IV. It is a very important gate in Rome because it leads you to the street where you encounter the best ice cream of your life. For me this was mascarpone and latte in one scoop, pistachio in the other, a topping of freshly whipped and sweetened cream that tasted of nougat, and all presented in a crisp, waffle-textured cone that was filled to halfway with warm, melted dark chocolate.

The Trevi at dusk works its magic this time, though the mass of people make it feel like the entrance to a particularly lovely stop on the Metropolitana. Al fresco pizza, red wine and an early night. We’re up bright and early to beat the crowds to the Colosseum. You have to imagine the roar of the throng as you walk through the stone entrance. Inside is both partially constructed and pleasingly derelict. The audio guide is a good way to go about things, especially if you’re adept at reading between the lines…

The history of the Colosseum is also the story of the Empire itself. Current affairs were acted out in the amphitheatre like dramatised newscasts. When a whale beached up on the coast, a wooden whale was hastily built to be paraded around the stage. Before the astonished crowds it opened its mouth and out tumbled dozens of live bears. The subsequent fortunes of the Colosseum mirrored the changing Rome and all manner of bloodshed and worship, theatrics and morality plays,  squatters and gay cruisers (not on the audio guide), found a home inside its walls over the centuries. Preservation and audio guides seem a tame future in comparison.

On the train to Arezzo I start reading A Room With A View. It’s my first (and so far only) Forster, downloaded in a hurry to the Kindle, but it could not have been better chosen. Almost immediately the sensation of being in this part of Italy is there on the page (or rather, on the screen). From the station we drive through lush country and into the hills that border Tuscany and the oddly English-sounding Umbria. The first view of the house is a thrill and I’m already drafting some or other novel about an impossibly spoiled girl and her Italian summer of self-discovery.

In the morning I open the shutters to a fug of lavender and a little hornet bouncing off the window. His buzz gives way to a guitar being tuned somewhere which mingles with the hum of farm machinery from across the valley. Everything is like this – musical and hypnotic. It’s hard to remember ever being tetchy and cross back home. I am very lucky to be here.

Forster fever peaks on a day trip to Florence. We pass the ‘View’ of the title and the probable location of the pensione. I have already learned that our hosts and friends once stayed in the room in Paris where Forster worked on the novel.  Not only that but they are also a family from Tunbridge Wells, as in the novel, though infinitely less prickly of course. The tourists move in packs of forty and fifty through Florence, it is a difficult town to negotiate, but there is more ice cream and coffee to be had, and all the greatest Italians are in the ground somewhere and in the atmosphere.

On my morning run next day I meet a deer that rattles its antlers on the tree when it sees me. When I dive into the pool back at the house to cool off, there is a tiny frog doing lengths. I write the first draft of this piece on the terrace at the back of the house, looking down past the swimming pool and over the fields to the town of Montherci. There is a very precise little lizard poised inside my discarded sandal and the cicada that lives in the tree above has started its mechanical chirrup for the evening. When it goes dark we can see a firefly in the foliage, lonesome and hovering. It is the same colour as Venus, the brightest thing in the sky.

Travel Diary: To London …

I’m packing on a stressful Wednesday night when I realise with perturbation that this will be the longest period of time that I’ve ever been off work. Ever. Packing for two and a bit weeks – four cities, one seaside town – is harder than you might think, especially as everything has to go into one rucksack so that I don’t have to pay any baggage charges when I eventually fly. I decide that the essentials are these: passport, credit card, contact lens solution, dancing shoes. And we’re off…

It’s hot hot hot when I hit London, especially in our tiny student room at the LSE. But it costs half a crown a night and is just a hop from Goodge Street so who’s complaining? We retire to the basement cosiness of the New Bloomsbury Set for Vedettes and on the walk home bump into the eminent Richard Dyer. What a gentleman, and such a perfect Bloomsbury encounter. I sleep hotly but soundly in the comforting hum of central London.

Next morning the sky is cloudy but the BT Tower soars over the breakfast terrace. Down on the street London is branded all to hell for the Olympics. The opening ceremony is this evening and the city is palpably excited, but oddly quiet, almost deserted in parts. On more than one street corner Olympic volunteers outnumber regular civilians. 

First port of call is the V&A exhibition, ‘British Design, 1948–2012’. Really beautiful and beautifully staged, if a little oddly chosen in parts (I suspect the interior of Damien Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ boozer doesn’t seem that important to many people outside London). Hats, furniture, platform games and Concorde all seem perfectly fresh and exciting in a new context, though the typography on the Festival Of Britain stuff is as perfectly executed as anything that came in the fifty years after.

Belated Berlin Photo Blog ...

Berlin Part 2 ...

Near the apartment the Zionskirche emerges ruddy and defiant from behind bushels of leaves that were nowhere to be seen last time I walked here, frozen and looking for eats with Katie. Mitte and Prenzlberg are splendid in September sun, even if it doesn’t last all that long. While it does last we decide to head to the top of the Fernsehturm. The elevator only takes a handful of ear-popping seconds. The city was snow and ice monochrome last time I saw it from this height. Today it is blue and brown and bustling. As soon as I see the kitschy cocktail bar sign at the top I’m reminded of the film idea we devised on my last visit about a Fernsehturm barman who has worked in the tower before and after the fall of Communism. He eventually dies from the bends or something, or that’s what it seems like, perhaps it’s a broken heart. It is 1,605 kilometres to Moscow.

Back on the ground, the Radisson Hotel houses the AquaDom where thousands of tropical fish swim ceaselessly in a million litres of water suspended in the hotel foyer. It sounds strange, and it is, but it’s also grand and soothing. Next visit I will take the glass elevator that climbs up and down the centre of the spectral blue tank. It’s a little bit whale-y for my liking but I’ll manage.

The Humboldt Box is a temporary information and exhibition space overlooking the rebuild of the Stadstchloss Palace at Museum Island. I was going to try and discuss the debates surrounding the project, but I’m pretty sure I don’t get a vote. The Palace was a royal residence, a symbol of perpetual violence to the people by the Prussian Kings, built in a religious style to boot. Whatever degree of cultural vandalism you consider the GDR’s demolition of the Palace to be (and it was already in near-ruins following the bombings in WWII), the rebuilding project, even if it resurrects only the frontage, resurrects things some people might think were equally as inhuman as short-lived Communist oppression: christianity, militarism, royalty. I don’t think twenty-first century Berlin needs it. I don’t think they ever did. But then, Humboldt Box does a mean apple strudel and coffee and the building project will only get more enticing to watch as the months go by.

The ‘Mother and her dead son’ memorial is one of the saddest and loveliest pieces of public art I’ve seen. It’s raining a little when we’re there and she shelters her grown son’s head from the water that falls through the skylight above. People contemplate from a respectful distance but there’s really no need, it pays to stand close and see the grief on the dark bronze faces. From here I take an inevitable sad turn. Humboldt University courtyard over the way houses its own memorial, a set of underground bookshelves that stand empty to recollect the book burning that Goebbels held here in a futile attempt to murder ideas as well as people. Bullet holes in the pillars of the Alte Museum hypnotise me a bit. A man plays classical music on an electric piano nearby. There should always be music around, especially where there are bullet holes.

Berlin Part 1 …

From October, easyjet will fly direct to Berlin from Manchester so this ought to be my last schlep to Liverpool for the privilege. My dear friend Matthew and I get to the airport in plenty of time but somehow we almost miss the flight so our names are called out and we have to slope onto the plane like naughty children who’ve brought the wrong shoes on the school trip. We can’t get seats together, we are separated by a party of leather boys and daddy bears, amongst whom we blend seamlessly.

A mighty tail wind gets us to Berlin twenty five minutes early. No sooner are we reunited on the tarmac at Schonefeld but we get separated again when we accidentally get on separate trains. It’s like Carry On Germany. Before I know it I’m knee deep in commuters on the worst labelled platform in Europe. Alone. I weep with gratitude when I eventually reach Alexanderplatz where Matthew and Geordie are impatiently waiting for me. But these things come in threes. After we’re shown up to our fantastic fourth floor apartment on Christinenstrasse we head out to stock up on groceries but can’t get back into the flat again because neither of the keys work (clarification: we can’t make either of the keys work). Cut to us sitting at a stranger’s dining table while she bathes her two children next door and we wait for the apartment manager to arrive. Best to get these things out of the way on the first day I suppose …

Everyone knows that foreign crisps and balconies are the two best things about any holiday, and we have both in abundance. ‘Erdnussflips’ are basically peanut flavoured Wotsits. I’m not kidding. They’re vile. I eat just short of a kilo of them. Our balcony has a beautiful view of a bright bone-white moon and the silver space station on a spike that is the Fernsehturm. It looks just like a tower in the underwater city I drew for an art competition at school. Reader, I won that competition.

It’s already late so we head to a low-key neighbourhood bar for Krombacher and Berliner Pilsner and Schofferhoffer and lots of laughs, lots of laughs. Our street borders the two districts of Mitte and Prenzlauerberg and it takes a while before I realise it’s just a couple of streets from where I stayed last time. The city was feet-deep in January snow then, it looks like a completely different place in September. Next day I wake to fresh coffee and ‘King Of Limbs’ and square windows instead of round ones. I am far away from home and happy.