I'll see your Nunhead Cemetery and raise you a Yarra Bend Park

Yarra Bend Park — the journey. The walk around the entire river bend takes about two and half hours or so, door to door. That's my door, obviously, not yours, so you'd have to factor in your personal location in order to calculate a more accurate estimate for your own purposes.

But why bother? When you can take a stroll with me and Geordie the Golden Retriever. I would call him the Wonder Golden Retriever except I am no longer twelve.

Okay. So we start in the suburban park opposite our house. The city skyline looks remote in the photo, but it looks closer in real life, and it's only a fifteen-minute trip from our house to Flinders St Station in central Melbourne, as long as the train puffs up as soon as you get there. Otherwise it takes four hours of watching actual grown-up people reading Harry Potter books. Still. I mean, aren't they old hat or something now.

A local park for local people.
I wish I knew what it was actually called.

"I feel very thtrongly about law and orderlineth."
[Pause. Miss Schlegel sniffs and looks around a bit. Then she returns the camera to its case.]
"Okay, okay, I did the thing you said. Now get bullthit thith thing off me!"

Firstly we climb high up the banks of the mighty Yarra River.

Then we move meander back down.

By roads not adopted, by woodlanded ways

Which takes us to more lovely parkland.

You can't see the river, but it's just to your left. This path takes us to Studley Park Boathouse, complete with some examples of Karl Popper's falsifications.

Geordie woofs a lot at the falsifications. I try to explain to him they don't actually exist, but I get in a muddle.

Studley Park Boathouse does look tempting, and they can make a presentable coffee there, but Geordie and I disdain to mingle with what I assume must but a bunch of other barren depressos who are supposed to be working from home and their neutered retrievers. Instead, we cross over the suspension bridge, and continue our walk round Yarra Bend on the other side of the river.

When the proper path finishes, we take the secret and treacherous path. This is my favourite bit. It's not really secret. But it is quite extremely treacherous. Note the sign that says Beware of Snakes. Please don't note the sign that dogs should be on leads.

"Oh pleath don't makeme wear my howwid lead, Mith Thlegel. I want to go thwimming and we-tweeve some duckth!
For I am a Golden We-tweever!"

Told you it was treacherous.

A gum tree. I wish I had photos of the gorgeous flocks of black cockatoos, eastern rosellas, red-rumped parrots, wattlebirds, willy wagtails, superb fairy wrens and kookaburras that we frequently see, but I am a crap photographer with a shitty camera and slow-motion reflexes. If you're interested in the birds of Yarra Bend, there is a complete list here. It's just a boring list.

I love birds — colourful, inquisitive, clever Australian birds. When I was writing a big chunk of my book in Tasmania late last year, I watched a family of superb fairy wrens teach their babies to fly. It was wow.

There's a little bit where you have to go up to the road. It's a very posh part of Kew, I think. If I had a gazzilion dollars, and I practically do, I'd buy this house.


And this would be my view.

And this would be mysteep path.


At the bottom of the path, we walk along the banks of the Yarra for ages.



"I wasn't like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree."

Hansel in Zoolander

Till you come to the flying fox colony. It was raining by then, so the pictures is too dark, but the colony is several thousand strong.

Then a bit more of a walk.

Under the ugly but kind of cool and spooky bridge.

Then over the pipe bridge past Fairfield Boathouse.


You can't see Fairfield Boathouse because it's behind those trees. The other day I suggested to Wilcox that we get married there. I like to throw these things at him to ensure he's not in danger of having sudden heart attacks. It seems he is.


Then we go home. I didn't take any more pictures because I got bored of taking pictures.

So. How was it for you?

Oh, and by the way, if you're thinking to yourself, okay, this "Miss Schlegel" must live around the Northcotey, Clifton Hilly, Collingwoody area of Melbourne, she — if she really is a she — is cultured enough to have read E M Forster and quote Betjeman like an ABC-type, yet sometimes sardonic in her approach. Hey, I think the real "Miss Schlegel" might be...

If you thought all that, then I tip my hat off to you, you're right.

Six word memoir

Oh! I forgot! I got tagged for a six-word memoir.

Ok.

How about... no, I just deleted it. I didn't like it. Okay, now I have three alternatives:

1. Like you, but with more freckles.
2. Not totally un-super-dooper, if you squint.
3. Lawks-a-mussy, I forgotted to grow up!
   

Of course these only work if you count un-super-dooper and lawks-a-mussy as one word, which I wouldn't frankly. Anyway, you can choose the one you most relate to, and I'll be that person for you.

If I could paraphrase and rip one off from someone who said something like this in a review of a Quentin Taratino film once, I'd say:

An embarrassment of riches, without riches.

Hi ho! Hi ho! It's off to Zoloft we go!

I am trying not to go on about things, you know. But it would be true to say that I am not really getting any better. Feeling very tearful and missingy of children not to be had. I try not to go on about it because in the infertility crowd you always had to be careful of the "it's worse for us" types. No matter what happened to you — no follicles, no embryos, no pregnancy — it would always, for some reason that didn't really matter in the scheme of things, be worse for them. I guess they're they types who, if they have children, think that is harder for them than it is for other parents too. These people exist.

Still, it's good to share. It does me good. Here are three things I'd like to share with you.

1. My friends actually are the best friends in the world.
Recently, my friends have:

• offered their eggs to me
• bought all the favourite snacks I mentioned in an earlier post (crisps and mixed lollies and etc) and left them on my doorstep
• come over to my house and cooked me an amazing dinner and didn't let me do anything except sit in the kitchen and drink wine
• left a complete meal, including wine and chocolate, on our doorstep
• offered to borrow me their dogs
• booked us in for a massage
  
• rung me up and not got offended when I haven't rung back
• listened to me cry a lot
• made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

YIPPIE-AYE-AY FOR THE LADIES!!

2. My medicine cabinet has changed.
It used to be full of IVF drugs and pregnancy vitamins and hope.


(Actually there aren't any IVF drugs there cause I already threw them all out.)

Now it is full of Valium and anti-depressants and sad-nods.

Yeah, I've plunged the anti-deppresso plunge. It's better, I think, than too much wine and Valium, which was how I have been self-medicating. Oh, it worries me. It worries me that it'll dull my UNBELIEVABLY INSPIRING AND GENIUS LEVEL creativity that — I know, I know — smooths the cotton bedclothes of your nights and spring-in-your-steps your days. I heard an interview with Edna O'Brien the other day in which she said, "Only unhappy people write." (I also heard an interview with Umberto Eco in which he said he wrote The Name of the Rose because, "at 48, you either run off with a chorus girl or write a novel, and my wife expressed a preference for the latter".)

Wilcox actually wrote an article about this once. Anti-depressos and creativity I mean. He came to the conclusion that while it may be true that unhappy people write, they don't usually write when they are very unhappy. They know despair, but they do not write when they are in despair.

I take comfort from this.

3. I found some more cool street art near my place.











Yes, I know. There's one missing.


Now what would you would like to share with me?

More street art

Recently, we've had a guest from Canberra staying with us.

I don't know what it is, but there's something about Melbourne that brings out the inner artist. Our friend, Geordie, has discovered a talent for street art, man. Here he is posing in front of some of his creations*.





* I made up the bit about him doing the actual painting.

Three humungous artworks

ONE
The clever and cultured Badger, one of my favourite bloggers, took these incredible photos of the Tate Modern Street Art exhibition.




God I wish I lived in London. If you could bottle all the me wishing I lived in London, you could make it power a rocket that would take me all the way to the moon. Which would be slightly irritating, because I would rather the bloody bottle rocket could just drop me off as it passed London. For a start, I don't think this exhibition will be showing on the moon.

The other weird think about me wishing I lived in London is that everyone I know who lives in London seems to hate it. For e.g., one of my old school friends I've just got back in facebook with has been living in London for over a decade but now she's coming back to live in Melbourne. Whereas everyone who lives in Melbourne seems to love it. Indeed, paradoxically, I am one of those people who lives in Melbourne and thinks it's absolutely pretty much pretty bloody perfect. I moved halfway cross the country and halfway cross the world to be here. I think it genuinely is the world's most livable city. And I live in what is objectively** the best part of it.

AND, more's to the actual point of the post, Melbourne is is hardly a stranger to the spray can, and in fact may be considered the street art capital of Australia. See Geordie's work in the post below, which was just some bloody anonymous alleyway we happened across in Collingwood.

When I was younger — say 30 — it was very fashionable in my crowd to be tired of London in order to prove you were NOT tired of life. Oh, it was all New York New York then. It was all Bristol and Bangkok. It was Saigon, where I lived for two years myself.

But I was always loyal. I loved London then, and I love London now.

Badger's posts always make me love London. Specially this one.

TWO
Meanwhile, look at the first photo from the Tate again, and then consider JR, a French photographer, and his rendition of Otis from Liberia. There's something neatly symbiotic about the two artworks — as if they're pointing at each other. According to JR, his work "mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, beauty, freedom, identity and limit. He is an artivist, extract of artist and activist."

You know how most artists are full of shit? JR isn't.

Please watch the video.

OTIS - LIBERIA // LONDON
Uploaded by JR




THREE
Okay. You've all seen it. But it's humungous. And it is beautiful. But I'm poor and haven't got the moolah to pop over yet. Soon, but.



* Or near enough. See here.

** If by "objectively" you mean "subjectively". I'm going to take you some photos of where I live in the next couple of days. I'm going to prove something to you. You're going to be impressed. Prepare.


P.S. For all of youse wondering why I don't just go the fuck to London, it's VISA — you got it? Can't get a GODDAMN visa.

Which is more comforting?

Wilcox's brother thinks that you cannot feel unhappy listening to The Banana Splits theme song. Yet I find The Wombles theme song far more comforting. Sure, it's more modest in its ambition, it's less showy, yet isn't it more soothing? Or not?

So here they are. Which one do you prefer? Which best nurtures your inner Grade One-year-old? Which will you hum on your death bed, to the affectionate bemusement of your clueless grandchildren?

Message to my man

EDIT: I should have credited this. You can make words with Flickr letters too — here.

Tuck my tag in will you?

I have tagged myself for this meme that I saw on Lorraine Crescent as I've never been tagged before and I want to feel like a proper blogger. Also it's been all doom and gloom around here lately and I thought it was time to cheer youse guys up a bit. Look at your droopy little faces.

Here it is:

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world

Smiths plain crinkle cut chips

Hot chips

Milky Bars.

Pate

Mixed lollies. But no Clinkers. Mostly milk bottles and bananas.


Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

Little tins of salmon

Navel oranges

Little tins of tuna

Lupini beans

Rice crackers


Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Live in the UK — one house in London and one in Wales.

Give lots away to people who needed it.

Buy the best digital video camera in the world and spend my entire time making mini-documentaries about interesting things I come across with no pressure to make them interesting enough for other people to choose to view.

Buy Wilcox a plane ticket and concert ticket to see Bruce Springsteen in the country of his choice. Wilcox's choice, not Bruce's choice.

Live alone in my private cinema and collect my wee in jars.


Five jobs that I have had:

Packing show bags for the Royal Easter Show in Sydney.

Teaching English at the University of Ho Chi Minh City.

Teaching bureaucrats how to write like human beings. I did this for years.

Acting. I was in a production of The Crucible in about 1995 in Hobart and made $67 after a three week run.

Standing in the middle of Sydney Exhibition Centre with a chambray shirt knotted at the stomach smiling at people and offering them no help in navigating their way around whatever exhibition it was (I've forgotten) whatsoever.


Three of my habits:

Drawing people's attention to birds.

Going for long walks along the banks of the Yarra River and crying.

Drinking.


Five places I have lived:

Darlinghurst, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Swansea, Wales

Spreyton, Tasmania, Australia

Melbourne, Centre of the Universe

EDIT

Whoops! I totally failed to cut and paste the first question. It was:

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Living at my friend Stan's house in Chippendale in Sydney, preparing to go overseas in July. I'd just finished my Cambridge certificate in teaching English as a second language. I was going to Thailand first, then Vietnam, where I thought I'd stay a couple of months. Instead, I stayed a couple of years. It kind of feels like that was the beginning of my real life. I was just about to turn thirty.

I was obsessed with op-shopping in those days; I had the most enormous and fabulous (I thought) wardrobe. Before I left, I invited all my girlfriends round, dumped all my clothes on the living room floor, and let them fight over them. I remember sitting in an armchair as they scrambled and shreiked and tried clothes on over clothes and ignored me. I was watching them, loving them, wondering what was in store. There's a part of me that wishes I could just stand behind that armchair and whisper in my ear, It's all going to be heaps of fun, but there's a bigger part that's glad it was a surprise.

From bad to worse

Infertile women will understand that it is hard to hear friends are pregnant. Particularly just after hearing you never will be. I (or we) got a card today, from a close friend and even closer colleague, who, with his partner, has been on IVF even longer than us. It's twins for them. So good for them. I am happy for them.

Then I took three Valium and drank a bottle and a half of wine and cried more tears than I thought I could possibly contain.

Grief is real and deep. Some people get addicted to grief, but I do try just to understand that there's something to be respected in grief's grip and tenacity. I don't want to get off on it. I understand that it allows for levity, although it will not let you be flip.

I hang fast to beauty. I know I'm being a wanker, but it strikes me that grief is pretty weighty with beauty. This is my favourite poem about beauty.

Assault

I

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

II

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Here are five other things that are helping me tonight.

1. You've probably all seen this before, but Phillip Scott-Johnson's Women in Art video is a perpetual comfort to me.

2. This poem.

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice

3. This video, which I shamelessly copied from Elberry, after giving him a lecture about feminism, which he didn't need, because he's one of those irritating perosnages who is younger than one, yet smarter than one.



4. Australian wildlife. Particularly with loved members of my family forming a backdrop.



5. And, more than any other, this poem.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of a wood:
They never forgot
That even dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry.
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

Infertility

It strikes me that there's a few folk here from NaComLeavMo who probably wonder whyfore this blog, given that most of the NaComLeavMo are infertility blogs and this chick just keeps crapping on about "fascinating" things she's read online like I've never seen the internets or something, who the hell does she think she is "discovering" things like street art which I was pretty familiar with actually, thank you very much, not being a complete philistine, as seems to be being suggested.

Jeez, bit over-sensitive, aren't you?

It also strikes me that in my last but one post I was a little unfair in alluding to high drama and not coughing up. I can only imagine the knuckle-curling frustration and quivering uncertainty with which you have been madly checking this blog in anticipation of, in the language of Extreme Makeover, The Big Reveal.

(Although it your collective blog-checking doesn't seem to be showing up on my stat counter — weird. Must be something wrong with it.)

So, to be clear, the parent blog of this blog was an infertility blog. Wilcox and I are infertile, barren, our cupboards — both of them — are bare. For this reason, about a year ago, we went on IVF. We weren't very good at IVF. I began to have a Pavlovian response to the word "scan" and the rather corporate waiting area of my specialist's rooms — honestly — I would walk in and start crying, even if it was just to pick up a script or something.

The drama of last week or month or whatever it was — a bit of a blur was what it was — was that our (lovely) doctor told us we should stop with the IVF, cause it ain't going to happen for us, and that our chances of ever being pregnant with our own genetic material were less than 1%. (Very specific, I thought. How did you work that quite specific percentage out? Then I realised she meant we have no chance. Bar a miracle.)

This left us with several options:

1. I could have a mental breakdown.
2. We could think about the possibility of donor eggs.
3. I could have a mental breakdown.
4. We could give up on having children and focus on other stuff, on having full, creative lives, of making books our babies, of doing our bit for kids in other ways. The book I've just written and am still editing is about a kid who was a ward of the state — he's dead, but sometimes I feel so close to him I think that maybe he is a pathway that leads to a picnic ground that leads to a tap that I could turn and release the flow of my need to mother.
5. I could have a nervous ... oh, but jeez, you can't cry forever, right? I so refuse to be bitter. These days, seeing children makes me cry. But it never makes me angry, and I want to keep it that way. My brother says, "It just seems to unfair." But I've never thought about it that way. Life is neither fair nor unfair, is it? It just does its thing. Do you know A. D. Hope's poem "Death of a Bird"? The final lines are: "And the earth, with neither grief nor malice / Receives the tiny burden of her death". With neither grief nor malice.
   

When I was in the middle of IVF, I remember seeing a flock of sparrows, and thinking, If one of those sparrows is infertile, which I suppose some sparrows must be, what does it possibly matter? Perhaps that sparrow, once a year, has some instinct akin to frustration or confusion. But the flock keeps on, sparrows are still born. Sparrowkind prevails.

All of you who reach this post through NaComLeavMo and are infertile will get what I'm saying. We have that bond thing, huh? Even those who have babies after infertility get it. While I've not been a really active member of the infertility blogging circle — I was too cowardly to face other people's pregnancies — I feel we share an experience that easily fertile women do not have. Amongst its otherwise very ordinary prose, Ben Elton's book Inconceivable expresses this feeling, I think, in quite a lovely way.

... every mother and child I see begs that question, a simultaneous moment of exultation and despair. Every pregnancy is a beacon of hope and also a cruel reminder that for the present at least there is nothing inside me except the longing. And perhaps there never will be. I don’t know why it is that women feel such a deep need to create life from within themselves, to yearn for a time in which their own flesh will bring them comfort, but I know that they do. That’s the one experience that women who have children easily miss out on in life ... The intensely female grief which accompanies the fear that those children might never exist.

The problem with infertility is that the end — when it is not the delightful gift of pregnancy, after which all is forgiven — is excruciating. I quoted Tim Winton in an earlier post: "The day you finish a book is simply the day you decide to finish. For everybody's sake."

Today is not the day we've decided to finish. But it's close, and, like any endurance race, desperately sucking oxygen into cramping, spasming muscles in those few final metres is not fun, not fun at all.

My bottom bone's connected to my cunt bone...

Some Engrish to entertain you...