Lifing

Eight years ago on the solstice, my beloved and I found the Thames Path by accident. It was a rare perfect summer's day, and the sunshine compelled us to go outside and just keep walking.

From little acorns. 

We lived in a neighbourhood of Oxford called Jericho, on the Thames. We walked to Port Meadow, an ancient common, and followed the river to the Perch pub and then on to the Trout. We picked daises at Godstow Abbey, as far as we'd ever come before. Then, feeling childishly curious, we slipped through the old wooden kissing gate beyond and just kept going.

What we found was a charming sheep-infested landscape of towering electricity pylons and picture-perfect parish churches. We discovered narrow boats and locks like delighted toddlers finding ice cream for the first time. A timid affection was born in us that day for the little island that had up to that point only managed to impoverish us and piss rain on our heads.

Bridge over the river Frump. 

We met a rambler who explained that we were actually on a well-established path stretching 180 miles from the source of the Thames in a muddy Cotswolds field to the Thames Barrier beyond Greenwich. This was news to us because we'd never even heard of rambling before.

We asked a lock keeper how to find a bus. He laughed and pointed out in charming local dialect that Oxfordshire on a Sunday was "basically total BFE". So we walked all the way home, only arriving at dusk. For some reason our resulting blisters convinced us that this Thames Path business would make a great summer hobby.

Table for two for ten. 

We did it in day chunks, taking the train to the start of the next section of walk, and then home again (avoiding BFE Sundays). We watched the river bloom from small to mighty, tracing a ancient journey through green hills and pleasant valleys. Eventually trains got too expensive and grown-up duties called, so we skipped the end bit from Hampton Court to the Thames Barrier. We returned to the tedious grown-up landscape - a place that transcends national boundaries - and forgot about the Thames for some time.

But this summer, on our tenth wedding anniversary and exactly eight years after that sunny Jericho afternoon, my beloved and I set out to finish the Thames path from where we left off.

Though we are seasoned islanders now, we made new discoveries this time too. We discovered that Chiswick is covered in wiry rowing boys, like the rivers of my childhoods were covered in water spiders. We noticed that some of the lesser-known London bridges look like Victorian wedding cakes designed by three-year olds. We witnessed a Tower of Babel rising over Southark, and confirmed that the Millenium Dome is in fact the ugliest single thing that humanity has ever built (including Las Vegas).

Best of all, we reacquainted ourselves with the quintessential ramblers beverage: ale shandy.

Time and tide. 

There are so many wonderful statues on the Thames Path, like one at Rotherhithe, where the pilgrims departed for America. It is a statue of a pilgrim papa showing his boy a book about America, and the future. The pages show cowboys, space shuttles, cars, and in one instance: a cowboy riding a space shuttle. We left a penny in the papa's pocket for good luck. Pilgrims like us can always use some luck.


It took a relatively brief time to walk through central London, as compared to much longer jaunts through the home counties and the docklands. I find it odd to consider that such a dominant stretch of the cultural landscape is physically dwarfed by Sloughs and Mudshoots. 

Wherever you is, that's where you are.

When we made it to the barrier, we recounted our journey down the river - all the places we'd been to over the years. We found a giant plaque of the Thames on a wall, with all the towns along it marked out. We traced paths to our friends homes, recounting the best pubs and the sunniest afternoons. We picked out both the idyllic and the hideous from the landscape (sometimes one and the same), and remembered all the places where we'd been rained on (this took some time).

We put it on video for the kids. They will never see it with our eyes, nor will we see their discoveries with ours. But I try to leave them stories scattered here and there, like this blog for instance, which turns two today.

At the end, my beloved and I felt rather like Odysseus returning home from sea. We smiled like high fructose corn syrup breakfast champions, and strode into the guest centre at the Thames Barrier.

Here we found a lonely lady in a tea shop. We were the only ones through that day, she said, what with the bus strike an' all. She coughed  and made us tea. We tried to figure out how the heck to get home, having unexpectedly looped back to total BFE.

Crossing the bar.

It was a fitting end to the adventure of a decade on a rainy island, where there have been brief flashes of mighty London, and long desolate stretches of Slough.

Endings involve an inevitable element of sadness. But I reckon they are good for the soul, because endings are a reminder that life is a verb, and it is rapidly lifing past the window.

Best drink those ale shandies now.

Seasonal disaffection

I hate this time of year. You probably do too. You probably hate me for mentioning it. I am likewise annoyed.

Of course we should both remember ducklings and green shoots. There will be Morris dancers and other goofy expressions of folksy joy.

I normally combat January by eating a continuous stream of chocolate biscuits, however I just ran out of biscuits.

So now I'm going to try 'looking on the bright side', a seasonal disaffection technique I read about in an eye-blisteringly bad in-flight magazine.

Brightness item one: Airplane barf bags! Did you know they double as colouring books? They do! Kids love 'em, which means corresponding grown-ups are spared from airborne mental breakdown.

Give the kids some barf bags and pens and presto: they magically cease their campaign of abuse against business travelers worldwide.

Baby kangaroo sold separately.

Plus you get some nice artwork to send off to Grandma, who is contractually obligated to accept such masterpieces with grace and gloat over them without barfing (cheers, Mom).

Of course if Grandma loses composure and barfs mid-gloat, she will now be prepared.

On the topic of barfing and air travel, there is a man at the passport control queue of Heathrow airport who should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I don't know his real name, so I'll call him Super Heathrow Man. He is seven feet tall and probably a mutant.

Faced with a passport queue the length of Brazil last week, Ali reacted like a screaming cat held over a bathtub of lava. I shared her feeling, but managed to reign in my screaming.

Fellow travellers watched us with growing trepidation. The chickens were restless. A ticker-tape of 'I blame the parents' and 'kids these days' flickered across their eyeballs. Suddenly we found them closing in on us like a net.

In dashed Super Heathrow Man, parting the queue like Moses. He quashed a wimpy chorus of 'queue juuuuuumping!' with one swipe of his mighty hand. He scooped up our tired cat-lava family and spirited us away to the 'priority queue'.

Did you know such a thing exists at Heathrow? A passport 'priority queue' for banshee travelers? It does! Hallelujah!

How did Super Heathrow Man explain his kindness and bravery? With classic English modesty: "I hate the sound of screaming kids."

So next time you are in Heathrow, I suggest you morph into a hysterical lava-threatened cat and request to be carried off in the arms of Super Heathrow Man. If you are not sectioned, you will save yourself loads of time and bother.

And good luck with January. Remember green shoots and Morris dancers. Something to look forward to...if that's your thing.

Rolling

My favourite people come in two flavours: the ones I miss because I moved, and the ones I miss because they moved.

A&E Mum belongs to the latter, although I moved away from Metroland shortly after she did. We became friends by giggling, passing notes, and otherwise behaving poorly in ante-natal class while heavily pregnant.

In particular we bonded over a surreal labour induction presentation, which rather unusually was demonstrated on a man. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a successful induction. It escalated into a full-blown cesarean demo, which was also an appalling failure both in medical and demo terms.

I'm pretty sure fake male inductions are a felony in Alabama. But the man in question is now leading a fairly normal life under a new identity.

Innocent when you dream. 

Nothing since, not even childbirth, has been half as scary or bonkers as ante-natal class. So in a strange way it really did prepare A&E Mum and I for having children by increasing our surrealism threshold.

A&E Mum has just reminded me of our early days in suburban babyland, cloistered off from the grown-up world. We ate cake and discussed weaning while our babies scrounged for muddy worms and damsons in the back garden.

This memory has left me alternately giggling and weeping into my Hovis. You see, I suffer from a crippling case of postpartum sentimentality.

Moving on is part of growing up. But I regret that I don't get to watch the A&E family grow up alongside my kids.

There was something wonderfully innocent about our days in deepest, darkest Metroland. It was not so much the babies, but rather us mamas and papas who were innocent. We thought weaning was complicated.

I suspect eventually my children will grow into movers and inherit my burden: they will miss the people they love.

Two years ago I read a piece on being and foreignness that really sums it up: 'It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility.'

To a mover, places cease to exist in geography and instead become points in time. For instance, New Mexico is my childhood. California is my youth. Metroland is when I had my babies.

For that I forgive Metroland its various other faults.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are investigating alternative forms of transport. Our research mostly consists of watching E.T. and Star Wars.

She's got it where it counts kid.  

Thanks to the lovely Auntie S, we now have a fabulous Millennium Falcon operations manual to hand.

Motown no more

This morning I drank five cups of coffee and sold my baby.

Reversing. 

By baby, I mean car.

And I feel fine.

I was licensed at 15. In my homeland there are more cacti than people, and with no public transport to speak of you would literally starve without a car.

My long-suffering family taught me to drive in a church parking lot. Being a hypersensitive type from birth, I remember finding the sensation of creeping along at one mile an hour in a huge steel death-trap to be mortifying.

Mr M. didn't help. The man had been teaching drivers' ed. for approximately two hundred years by the time I joined his class. He liked to show footage of lungs and spleens splayed on the pavement, rewinding to watch his favourite bits over again.

But I swallowed my nerves and flew the parking lot. I drove to high school and to assorted teenager mischief venues. I saw scary things out on the open road, had a wreck of my own, but kept my spleen.

I hit 18 and drove out to Los Angeles, a thousand miles. I drove over mountains and alongside the Pacific; through weird old desert towns that time forgot, and past crap gambling towns that time really should write off.

Wheels became freedom and the world opening up. I almost forgot about Mr M. and spleens.

Are we there yet?

A decade later I had to start from scratch in the UK, land of the world's most evil driving exam. After many cups of coffee and lots of complaining, I passed. This left me at the mercy of that great parental aggravation device: car seats.

There are more speed cameras on British roads than sheep and people combined.* There are at least three governmental agencies tasked with regulating the roads. Yet there remain more pot holes on these roads than specks of sand on a beach or stars in the night sky. As somebody who owned the 'hazard perception' part of the UK driving exam, I feel entitled to point this out.

Tarmac neglect aside, it was a car seat incident involving projectile vomit finally convinced me that no amount of coffee will make me enjoy WTF roundabouts. Maximizing coffee consumption will merely increase the need for pit stops.

And so it is with greatest affection for my family that I must confess: I still love route 66 and the Pacific Coast Highway, but I have given up the driving habit for now. It was that or jam.

But thanks for those days in the church parking lot. For thrusting me from the nest and teaching me to fly on properly balanced and rotated tires. For making me steer straight and reminding me to always leave enough petrol in the tank to fly home.

Everything returns to the nest in the end.

*This might be a slight exaggeration. But only very slight.

Jubilee Line over Jordan

A person has gone under the train at Euston.

This is part of urban life. Sometimes delays are due to signal failure. Occasionally it's a person ending. There are about fifty a year.

The announcement is made at every station for the benefit of passengers who have just boarded to explain the snail's progress we are making down the track.

Most people take on a look of sympathy and mild horror. Then after a few minutes of waiting, sadness is swallowed up in impatience.

Shadows of this life. 

A pair of women across from me talk about retiring to Spain. One says the the kitchen re-modelling is taking longer than she would have hoped. You can get used to the food, says the other.

A cowardly part of me wishes that I could do this too: forget about death given enough vitamin D and ease.

A person has gone under the train at Euston: that  concrete tomb in perpetual motion. Where young people have arrived for decades seeking fortune and ruin in the smoke. Steel track and the dust of dreams trod on lightly by blackened mice.

I wish the train driver would name him.

In 2007 a little boy called Peter Connelly was beaten to death by his stepfather. The newspapers didn't name Peter for 'legal reasons'. Peter became known simply as 'Baby P'. This really bothered me because all that remains of the dead are their names. It seems sacrilegious not to name them.

The sound of a name doesn't matter much, be it Harper Seven or Bog Standard Pete. A name matters because it is the first thing you are given, and the last thing you'll ever have.

A person has gone under the train at Euston. My train driver doesn't know his name. Neither does the poor guy who hit him.

I'm guessing he was a he. Perhaps he was a she. Maybe it was an accident. Who knows? Either way, I wish I had the name.

Strolling off into the sunset

My beloved companion has passed on. We rode a long bumpy trail together over hazardous terrain, but I'll have to learn to carry on alone now.

I am speaking of course about the Sweet New Ride, my faithful double buggy. She popped her clogs and has been consigned to the great stroller pasture in the sky.

The Sweet New Ride was gifted to me by a nice lady who'd had it gifted to her. By the time the Sweet New Ride arrived at Chaos HQ, she was probably about two thousand buggy years old. The Sweet New Ride likely carted dinosaur babies around early in her career. She may have witnessed the dawn of the universe, which would explain her infinite wisdom and thoughtfulness - unusual attributes in a buggy.

When the Sweet New Ride first came home, Ana approached her with the sort of scepticism normally reserved for new siblings. So I dug deep into my route 66 lingo and enthusiastically proclaimed her to be our 'sweet new ride'! The name stuck like Gorilla Glue, and from that moment my girls and the Sweet New Ride were inseparable.

All strollers go to heaven. 

I came to rely upon the Sweet New Ride through thick and thin, and over turf that she was never designed to handle.

The hills got harder as Ana grew taller, but in the silver linings department: my stubborn remaining baby fat melted magically away.

I admit with shame that I've maligned the Sweet New Ride on many occasions, mostly halfway up hills.

I used to call her a flotilla. A short person convoy. A death star. A stoopid b*stard. I should state for the record that the Sweet New Ride was (almost) never actually at fault in these situations. Motherhood is challenging turf, and it brings out the foul sailor-mouth in anyone.

Ana has outgrown her buggy days. It's time for her to walk without wheels. I can see that very clearly now that my own crutch has been removed.

Perhaps that's what fate was trying to say when the Sweet New Ride met her unfortunate end - when the rear wheel cracked off with such force that we careened into a brick wall and had to limp home. I remain unconvinced that everything happens for a reason, but when something goes hurtling into a brick wall, there's definitely a reason.

You can't bury a buggy in the backyard like you would do a hamster. Buggies, even sweet ones, don't biodegrade. Such an act would royally freak out the neighbours, who are still feeling a bit queasy about our transatlantic and reproductive tendencies. Anyway this is London, a place where the bathroom tends to double as the kitchen/bedroom/lounge/hallway, and there ain't no backyard.

So we buried her at sea in the city, which is to say we tossed her onto a big pile of junk at the tip. Since we couldn't actually light the pyre without getting arrested, we made do by standing around and solemnly humming the Star Wars theme tune. Ali found it so moving that she developed severe motion sickness and puked all the way home in the car. Which makes me think we may need to offload another set of wheels too.

Projectile vomit aside, there was a great sense of unburdening about depositing our broken wings at the dump. After administrative staffers and aunties, some of the wisest people I've ever met work at the tip. I've come around to the view that freeing people from broken worldly possessions is a spiritual job. But that's another post for another day.

For now: farewell my friend. May the road rise up to meet you.

This week at Chaos HQ

Noted from the underground. 

We are bothering pigeons and annoying strangers. Please check out my post over at In The Powder Room on just that.

August has very nearly handed the reins over to September. School is around the corner and our museum days are numbered. So we are riding the rails while we may.

Today we discovered that the Keats House doesn't cause boredom-induced narcolepsy in small children. It's actually kind of a fun place. Ana reckons it's a lot like the bathhouse from Spirited Away.

The end of summer always feels a little sad. Especially if you're a kid who's been munching on a continuous supply of popsicles courtesy of your slave mama for two months.

But time stops for no man, not even a short one.

And this mama is pretty tired of foraging for popsicles and would quite like a nap. 

Rambling

There is a footpath from Salisbury to Winchester called the Clarendon Way. It is about thirty miles from train station to train station, which means it can be walked in one day if you set out early around the Solstice and walk briskly.

Walking blues. 

Papa and I discovered the Clarendon Way several years ago BC* when we were time-rich and cash-poor, which is very fertile soil to plant the seeds of a lifelong rambling habit in.

The Clarendon Way begins where Salisbury dissipates into a farmer's field. The field is splayed across a clutch of smooth chalky hills that fold into woodland at the creases. Hills like these appear strangely symmetrical to a girl from the Rocky Mountains: like those drawn by a child, or the curves of an egg batter folding in on itself.**

The farmer's field leads upward to the ruins of Clarendon Palace on a hill, where cows graze on tall weeds around the few remaining stone walls of the structure. From here the path meanders off off into deep gruffalo wood, where you can easily get lost if you are not paying enough attention.

Eventually the path disappears in a tiny confusing village, where the local pub is a little like the Slaughtered Lamb. The village has a beautiful name: Winterslow. I suspect it means 'place of many lost ramblers' in old English.

Foraging for mischief. 

All fairly bog standard stuff, if you come from England. In fact, you have probably dozed off by now if you are English, or tottered off for a pint at the Slaughtered Lamb. But the first time a Nuevo Mexicana sees such a landscape, she can be forgiven for being filled with wonder and thinking that perhaps she's stumbled upon heaven.

Papa and I both grew up in the high desert, so we were entirely unprepared for what we saw along the Clarendon Way: a gazillion blackberries. The hedges were buckling under the weight of them, and no one else seemed to be stopping or taking notice except for us two. We ate hundreds - possibly thousands - giggling like little kids. Our tongues and our hands were fuschia. Our entire insides must have turned purple. We ate until we could eat no more.

Youthful memories tend to get sealed in saccharine laminate as time goes by - glossed over and folded into the egg batter narrative of life.*** But there are these little moments of intense sensory discovery that stay fresh and really stick to the mind like cockleburs.

Hedgehog. 

We look for blackberries every year now. When Ana came along, she joined the summer pilgrimage, and Ali has been inducted too.

This year we scavenged on the Heath, and turned what remained of our loot (after taste testing) into pear and blackberry crumble.

I have learned that it is dangerous to return to the actual location of your happiest memories. For this reason, I fear the blackberry way has become more a place in time than in actual geography.

So we will forage wherever the wind takes us. Who knows? Maybe the wind will take us back to Salisbury again someday.

Blackberries grow on thorny indestructible vines - essentially barbed wire - with the sort of scary lust for plant life that is only matched by kudzu. And they did so long before riots went digital.

I suspect the organic not electronic form of my favourite berry will long outlive us mere humans, kept company by twinkies and cockroaches.

*Before chaos.
**As a lapsed Lutheran, I can only visualise things in terms of casserole.
***As above, I blame my casserole genes.

Public service announcement

Dear men on the Jubilee line circa 4:30pm last Monday,

WTF?

I was that lady struggling with one buggy, two babies, and three flights of stairs. The one throwing you the ojo for being a bunch of - to borrow from California's illustrious former governator - unhelpful public transportation girlie-men.

Remember, yes?

As I've recently discovered, the tube south of the Thames is a buggy-accessible paradise:  ramps, lifts, angels singing. North of the river, the tube is a syphilitic horse-drawn trolly accessible only by descending a gazillion stairs into the pit of Hades. Sadly Monday found me on the Hades side of the river.

It wasn't that the station was empty. About fifty of you swarmed past me, all fiddling importantly with smartphones because presumably that's what you do when you are a male impersonator with no actual cajones.

But I know you saw me because you stubbornly refused to make eye contact (an activity known in Britain as 'observing'). Finally a fellow mum came to my rescue.

Men on the Jubilee line circa 4:30pm last Monday: WTF? Seriously?

I can only assume that you are the same lot who wouldn't give me your seat when I was eight months pregnant. And I'm guessing you're the ones who go running home to furiously comment anonymously on message boards that if women want to be all equal now they'd better learn to stand on trains and enjoy it.

Girlie-men on the Jubilee line circa 4:30pm last Monday: take an example from my wise other half. He once held the door open for a well-respected professor of ours at university, a woman with famously impeccable feminist credentials.

She turned to him and demanded to know why he'd opened the door. Was it because she was a woman and therefore incapable of opening it herself?

My other half shook his head.

A hush fell. Boys cowered. Girls looked on for guidance in the manner that my toddler does when she's trying to decide if she should kiss her sister or punch her in the kisser. Then my other half delivered a response that  sent boys and girls alike scattering along the corridor, holding doors open for each other willy-nilly.

My other half said: 'I did it because my mother taught me to.'

This week at Chaos HQ

We are counting our blessings as per some old bit of Lutheran wisdom I just made up.

Our blessings are as numerous as stars in the sky or flowers in the urban field.

Especially this week, as we wait for three of our beloved ones to land.

They are crossing a cold sea and braving the perils of Heathrow as I type.

Without our beloved ones, we would only be wandering stars or flowers lost in the urban field. 

As any sufficiently lapsed Lutheran will tell you, it pays to count your blessings. 

We welcome them in out of the cold swim with open arms: Grandma, Uncle Rice, and Auntie A. 

Fear of flying (with short people)

You may have noticed that last week was a quiet one around Chaos HQ. This is because I went offline for a spell to hang out with the real world's cutest little boy: my nephew. Spending time with Neffe is one of my heart's true joys. Flying with kids, however, is one of my biggest fears. Unfortunately getting to Neffe involves planes, trains, a gazillion flights of stairs, and an entire galaxy of pacification devices (mostly LULAS).

Cousin airlift. 

Neffe is growing up in Berlin, a magical city where nobody has a proper job and graffiti takes the place of magnolia paint. Visiting from London is a great shift in perspective. Wealth inequality isn't such an awful glaring beast in Berlin, and consequently people seem more relaxed and less preoccupied with money - a nice change.

Ana loves to fly. Nothing could ruin her excitement, even the discovery that her airplane wasn't purple, as requested. Ali took more convincing. But she proved herself to be an excellent judge of character at passport control, where she screamed like a banshee (which is frankly what I always feel like doing). 

Wandering around over the weekend, Tanta and I came across a beatboxing/freestyle rap duo at a flea market. The rapper took thematic suggestions from a rather kid-infested crowd, so his ditties wound up being about ice cream and toys in outer space. The little kids danced in circles at his feet and the grown-ups laughed at the word play. It was wonderful to see kids and grown-ups both having fun at the same thing, mingling freely and naturally.

Faith, trust, pixie dust.

I had to compare this experience to some of my lonely early motherhood afternoons spent cloistered off from the world at the local bounce and rhyme. Those afternoons were like eternities suspended between lunch and teatime in a roomful of other sleepless mamas, all mumbling in monotone about that most soul-crushing of words - ROUTINE - while taking on an increasingly pithed look with each round of 'Wind the Bobbin Up'. 

Perhaps those dark days would have been better spent at a Berlin flea market, mingling freely with all sorts. To this day, I want to scream like an Ali-banshee whenever I hear 'Wind the Bobbin Up'.

Tanta took me to Tempelhof, of Berlin Airlift fame, which ceased to be an airport 2008 and is now a park. But instead of going to the trouble and expense of converting it into an actual park, the local government has simply left it as is and you have to use your imagination. So people have BBQs on the grass in front of the terminal building, and windsurf down the runway with kites and skateboards.

Ant flies into the great wide open.

I love the idea of Tempelhof Park: the notion that you can recycle anything no matter how humongous it is and how broke you are, just by employing collective imagination. Funny how concrete things can become fluid if we agree to see them differently.

The physical landscape at Tempelhof is unchanged: the buildings, the runway, even a couple of airplanes. The only major new addition is a biergarten - which seems sensible enough - beer is tricky to conjure up in your mind, and crucial to the enjoyment of a sunny afternoon in Germany.

Walking down the runway - a habitat normally reserved for giant winged things - is a strangely intimidating and invigorating experience. I felt like an ant. An ant sadly bereft of wings and lots of other stuff. But an ant who could do just about anything, given a little time just a lucky break or two.

This week at Chaos HQ

Vamos

Snakes in the grass

My time on this island began in Oxford nearly a decade ago. I arrived in my early twenties with my beloved by my side and not much else.

I quickly discovered the particular fish-out-of-water-feeling that comes with landing on foreign dirt - like that first cold step outside after a swim - a lonely, shivering kind of uncomfortable that starts at the pores and ends up in the bones. Thankfully (somewhat) temporary.

Travel with me alone towards Iffley. 

Like many before me, I discovered that England is expensive. Especially Oxford. Especially since we were already broke. So my beloved and I cultivated free hobbies, like walking.

One day we left Jericho and wandered into Port Meadow, an ancient common northwest of Oxford. We passed The Perch, the Trout (pubs), the ruins of Godstowe Abbey and kept right on walking. Quite unplanned, we walked 35 miles that day. By chance we bumped into a self-proclaimed recovering journalist called Linda Ellerbee who was trekking the length of the Thames for her 60th birthday (and later wrote about it). She walked with us for a while before hitching a ride on a narrow boat. It was from her that we got the bonkers idea to walk the length of the Thames, which we later did.

Return to dust. 

Iffley lies down the Thames Path in the other direction, south of Oxford, past Christ Church Meadow. There is a 12th century church there called St Mary's. It is so old that the faces protruding from the stone have returned to blank slates. Accross Iffly lock, there is a meadow, and in the springtime the meadow is full of an unusual-looking native flower called snake's head fritillary.

Rose by another name.

We spent our two Oxford springs searching out snake's heads in the grass; skint, foreign, blessed with companionship and sturdy feet. A less lucky twenty-something called Keith Douglas wrote this about Iffley four years before he died at Normandy in 1944:

What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle and I will hear
and come another evening, when this boat
travels with you alone towards Iffley
as you lie looking up for thunder again
this cool touch does not betoken rain
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly. 

This ramble into yesteryear's photo album was inspired by Flashback Friday, hosted by the lovely Cafe Bebe.

Paradise

I left my copy of 'On the Road' in New Mexico. Which I regret, because I'm on a travel moratorium until Chaos and Destruction learn to wear seatbelts for more than five minutes without screaming.

Off the road. 

And yet my feet itch, so I'm glad Kate Takes 5 brought up the subject of places. Although Johnny Cash is the master in this regard, here are mine:

1. Monterey, California
2. Taos, New Mexico
3. Berlin, Germany
4. Cozumel, Mexico

My mind is in Monterey, gazing out at the big blue Pacific (where the tide pools teem with life), searching for the ghost of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. My spirit is in Berlin, running through the Tiergarten in autumn, giggling at nude sunbathers, drinking pils with my sister. All of me pines for snow on yellow aspen leaves in Taos. And for a pair of coronas on a shoddy Cozumel balcony at sunset, after a day of dodging barracudas at Chankanaab reef.

The beaten track.

In body, I am a sidekick and food-flinging target to a pair of short people. Funny how this makes my memories of paradise seem all the more vivid. 

Ode to the road

To my beloved open road,

It's been a long four long years since I last hit you.

Of course I meant to return to you sooner, but a mountain of nappies grew between us. You see, travel is kryptonite to kids. Actually kids find kryptonite in almost everything under the sun, but travel is high on the list.

Something in the way.

Sometimes when I can't stand missing you any longer, I jump in the car and drive up the tallest hill around just to look out at the horizon. Often this makes things worse because usually all I can see is Aylesbury and a bit of fog. But on quiet nights I can hear you purring seductively out on the London Orbital, so tantalizingly close.

I can remember heading out on the highway like it was yesterday. Papa and I drove like the wind through endless rolling plains, past countless dodgy truck stops, up sky-scraping mountains, down lonely scenic byways into the wilderness, past town after crappy town. We lived on the fly; all we knew was that the fuel tank would flatline too soon, and that there would be at least one toothless, oil-stained dude at whatever gas station it was that we stopped to fill up at.

Out west we pitched camp under the bright Milky Way at night. In sleepless awe we listened to crickets sing into the big empty. And to grizzly bears rummaging for midnight snacks in rubbish bins. And to rain drip-dripping right through our waterproof tent and straight onto our foreheads. What joyous comfort it was to rise with the sun and return to strong steel arms, to the gritty smell of petrol exhaust, to the smooth old reliable tarmac.

Hit the road in tooth and claw. 

Planes, trains, broken-down automobiles, blistery hiking boots: so many forms, but always my one true. I no longer care about the right side, the left side, California stops or WTF roundabouts—I can't deny what is between us. The sedentary life simply ain't my bag.

A rolling stone can't sit still forever and I know we'll be together again. Till then my heart will pine after your broad shoulders and your smooth curves; my lead foot will yearn for your high speed limits and your wide open straightaways.

Much love and a little gas money,

~M

PS: This sappy billet-doux was inspired by Honest Mum's far more eloquent love letter to London, and it is accompanied by Polish Mama on the Prairie's dedication to her beloved Wroclaw.

Voodoo child

My autumn garden is full of spiders. Yesterday I watched a fly go from creature to cadaver in the skip of a heartbeat and the twitch of eight legs. Webs loom everywhere I walk, ghost-like apparitions right at head level. My face has been snared a few times and I suspect it might be me, not the flies, they are after.

Tonight I put on my shoe and felt something soft and leathery squish up against my toe. My brain said mouse, but reaching inside I discovered it was just a shrivelled, slightly fuzzy chunk of green pepper. I recognised the bite marks and the modus operandi. 'Don't mess with me Mama,' the pepper implied in Ana's voice, 'I know where your shoes live.'

Garden-variety Shelob

Ana is an old hand at threats. When she was 18 months old we drove to an old fisherman's cottage on Anglesey for a weekend. In the evening she slept like an angel in her travel cot, while Papa and I watched little fishing boats cast their nets into a peaceful sea. A tentative sense of calm crept back into our lives; we decided that everything was going to be okay and that travelling with kids could even be fun. But it only lasted until the following afternoon. Halfway through nap-time I heard a loud smack from Ana's room, followed by an angry roar. A moment later, vengeful toddler footsteps thundered down the hall. Papa and I were trapped in the sitting room, mugs of tea still in hand as a shrieking, wild-haired toddler came for her revenge like something out of a horror film.

Travelling with Ana was out of the question now that she could shimmy out of a travel cot head-first and pursue us to the ends of a holiday cottage. Naively, we thought she could still be contained behind the trusty wooden jail-bars of her cot at home. Not long after the Anglesey incident, I went to Germany for a weekend, leaving Papa home alone with Ana. My first morning away, he rang to say that Ana escaped the cot and woke him with a very sweet 'Papa thirsty?' and a very cold cup of water in the face. Ana got a proper bed and a gate across her door after that.

We don't get too many Houdini-style escapes these days, except when a very sleep-deprived Mama forgets to shut Ana's gate. Tonight I put the kettle on for peppermint tea and tried to forget about the shoe-pepper threat. I turned around to get a teabag and nearly dropped my mug in fright. There stood Ana in the middle of the kitchen floor, grinning cheekily with her plastic Halloween pumpkin in one hand. 'Hi', she said with menace. Then she turned and slunk silently back up the stairs to her room. I followed and shut the gate tight.

Ana doesn't fully understand Halloween yet, but her prankster instinct has been on override for weeks. This year she will trick-or-treat, rather appropriately, as a crocodile.

It's a trick

My good childhood friend, OneArmGirl, has just reminded me of our childhood candy-missions. A lovely French lady down the street (our neighborhood's sole European representative) used to call us 'the Halloweeners'. The thing I really loved about Halloweening (and can only admit to now as an adult) was that on one trusty October night every year, us big kids got to re-enact the magic of being little. Candy was the excuse for all the dressing up and childish larking about. It was the act itself that was magical--heading out into the wood-smoky darkness, painted faces pressed against the cold car windows, wide-eyes focused on distant candy-beacon porch-lights in the black rural night, bright and remote as the stars.

I find that one side-effect of having kids is that my brain likes to revive dusty childhood memories like this from the mental attic and replay them to a sentimental score on my internal nostalgia-projector. For me, the season of 'pumpkins ripening toward the knife' (Ray Bradbury) has been one of birth, death, upheaval, love and migration. The stuff of life, good and bad. Certainly no shortage of memories to mull over as the light closes in for winter.