Hello blog!

I've been 

1. thinking that I really should get into this blogging, and

2. wondering if you will help my writing, or

3. end up consuming too much time, and

4. thinking, again, I should give you a go, and

5. wondering how on earth to track down my old password, and yet

here I am.

Wish you could let me know a bit more about yourself, but hopefully I'll learn something over the next little while. Meanwhile, it's nice being back in touch. I'll try not to be such a stranger.

cheers,

Kimberley.

Dear Tooff Fairy

Dear Tooff Fairy

J ate his tooff. He didn't taste it. Does that make it okay? He's a very lovely boy who hardly ever uses his teeff to bite anything (except food) so we think his tooff should be pretty valuable. He promises to give it to you later if it turns up (anywhere). Please let him have $2.00 anyway and he will be especially careful not to swallow his next one.

love from

J's Mummy.

Getting back into things

I'm back in Australia! Have been for a while, and it's taken a while to sort all this out again. So this is just a testing post really. Back with more later (I hope)

mange tout

I'm going home. Back to Australia.

I've been conscious of wanting to leave before the days get too short so it's odd to be asked to leave the day of the equinox. Looking out my front window this morning, I had that feeling of I get when boarding a plane on my way home after a holiday. While I'm away, time seems to stretch out into a new type of life. By the end of a week or two I am in a new routine and home seems to be something belonging to someone else. Then I get on the plane, and walking through the door, finding my way to a seat, buckling in with my book and water bottle within reach, gaing out the window, all these things that are so much a pattern and a part of regular life that they connect me back to everything that's normal and un-holidayish and the time away seems to fold in on itself, to concertina. We've been in London for over a year and our holidays have been going elsewhere. And I'm looking forward to going home. But standing at the window I felt again the way it felt when being here was really new to me. When I noticed the variations in the colours of green leaves on the trees.
 

I notice so much more about things when seeing them for the first time, or the lst time. Colours seem truer when they are strange. Time seems longer in a new place. What was that book where a man, given only a short time to live, stretched that life out as far as he could by sleeping in a different room every night?

Things I've noticed about London:

• people wear parkas, even in summer
• the angle of light is so different. You seem to have a shadow even at midday. It's as though the sun rays brush against your skin instead of bursting through. Greens are yellower. There are birds called magpies but they don't seem to swoop.

Bit of a waste though, to report that I've finally worked out what mange tout is. It sounds so exotic. Turns out it's just snow peas.

Krakow, late May 2008.

Marrakech, May 2008

Avenue Q

I went to see this muppet musical with a couple of friends on the Friday before Christmas (hello John and Nick!) and had a thoroughly good time.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it when the first puppeteer (dressed in grey to indicate that you’re not meant to pay him any attention) appeared on stage, moving orange-skinned new college graduate Princeton into Avenue Q. But once Princeton’s packing boxes joined him in singing What do you do with a BA in English? I knew that these were fabric people I could identify with. Poor Princeton, looking for a purpose, having studied literature, I do so relate.

It’s a very enjoyable show – you’ll like it most if you remember the Cookie Monster – here converted into Trekkie Monster, with an addiction for porn instead of cookies – and Bert and Ernie – here revealed in all the fullness of their sexual confusion (come on, admit it, you always had suspicions about Bert!) and Gary Coleman. It’s a show with a story, crazy as it might seem, about how we live now. There were times I just about cringed. Sometimes when someone has a crush on you, Kate Monster sings, they’ll make you a mix tape to give you a clue. What woman can’t see herself in that? And then there is the cheery truth recognised in songs like Everyone’s a little bit racist, real pathos in the Bert-character’s insisting that he has a girlfriend, who lives in Canada, and perhaps funniest of all, the Bad Idea Bears (two pastel-coloured teddies who pop onto stage with suggestions about what Princeton should do with the last of his money – spend it on beer – and in one outrageous scene, playfully waving a noose at him and sulking off when the temptation is rejected.)

And silly as it might seem, there’s real character growth from the opening song It sucks to be me to the finale where puppets and humans together realise that all their problems are only for now. I’d recommend it to anyone.