Misty-headed

I don’t know if I can still write. Writing requires at least a modicum of free headspace, small pockets of time that can be carved out of busy schedules. To create something new necessitates thinking and reflecting and pondering and appreciating, all of which have felt about as futile as wobbly jelly, carried in my bare hands. I am misty-headed.

I intended to start a book this year, but I only got a short way in before Life - in the form of parenting, a new full-time job, a home renovation, a house-guest who stayed seven months, and an unexpected and forced move out of home that lasted six months - declared it had other plans. I haven’t given it up though. It’s a book I began thinking about during Lockdown, because Lockdown was when my husband and I turned into our parents.

We entered the Covid Years reading intellectual, philosophical, literary fiction and political biographies, and entertaining ourselves in the downtime with over-the-top, fantastical television like Game of Thrones, Vikings, and The Last Kingdom. We emerged on the other side of Lockdown reading stories about old women in department stores and tea-rooms, and biographies of gardeners, and having watched our way through the entire back catalogues of Antiques Roadshow and Father Brown.

No longer did I want to write anything challenging, anything troubling, or anything world-changing. After Covid, all I wanted to write were stories that inspired gentle happiness.

So I began plotting out a cosy mystery about the loveable members of a guerrilla-gardening club in a historic part of Melbourne, who may or may not be hiding nefarious secrets, which would be uncovered by the hapless new owners of one of the centuries-old houses in the neighbourhood. If you can imagine a story that combines historic-home renovation with quirky characters, beautiful Melbourne, a community garden, and a mystery or two to be solved, then that’s the book I’m writing. But I’m only short way in, because, Life.

We are in Bath. We arrived yesterday, and already I am, predictably, in love. There are three dove-grey Persephone books on the kitchen table of our Air BnB, I have blisters on my toes from walking 20 kilometres through town and up around the Bath Skyline, and the children are playing a game they created called “Regency Bingo,” counting the number of people we can spot who are dressed up a la Jane Austen (the current tally is 24).

I want to tell you all about it, but it seems I have forgotten how to write. You don’t want to hear me say “We went there,” and “We did this,” I’m sure. I have forgotten how to tell you the deeper stories underneath the places, the small moments that mean something, the funny anecdotes, the connections we make, and the ways that travel has changed us.

Those things are still happening on the inside, but I don’t know how to write them any more. My words are wobbly and rusty, like an old man who discovers a cobwebby bicycle behind the shed and decides to ride it six blocks to the milk bar, after decades of only walking.

Give me time. I will keep peddling.

And in the meantime, let’s take a stroll around Bath.

(The photograph above is of a “dream house” we came upon after emerging from a remote field. You may have to zoom in to see it. When I win the lottery you may find me here, writing and painting.)

Summer dreams

There was a moment while we were walking along the closed-off streets, and a band of teenaged buskers played Riders on the Storm across the way. We hustled from shade-patch to shade-patch, sunburn stinging our thighs despite having left the beach by ten in the morning. 

Ralph’s hand was sweating in mine as he told me all about the water-soaker he’d just blown $6.95 of his pocket-money on at the pharmacy. The stream of information seemed endless: I learned all about the intricacies of high-tech material that had gone into the making of it (plastic, foam), the hydraulics that enabled it to both suck and spurt water, the additional equipment required for maximum impact (a beach, or failing that a bucket), and the extraordinarily complex battle-plan that would, no doubt, ensure him victory in the battle against his sister on the morrow. 

I had a moment while we walked together and Ralph talked, my head dizzy with the heat, when it felt as though I was somewhere else, outside myself, watching our little family tableau like a movie. 

I was me of 20 years ago, passively watching a middle-aged mother and her child winding in and out of beachside shops on a summer holiday. The little boy was carrying a water-soaker and chatting non-stop, almost drowning out the squeak of his flip-flops, and all the sounds merged with the chatter of a hundred other holiday-makers, shop jingles in open doors, distant waves, and Riders on the Storm which had blurred and distorted into something else by The Doors that I couldn’t quite remember. 

The scene was still happening, Ralph was still talking, but the me of 20 years ago couldn’t identify with any of this. It didn’t belong to her, it was somebody else’s son and they were living somebody else’s life. 

I thought, “How is this even me?” Because I’m still me of 20 years ago, every bit as much as I’m me of today, and I can’t seem to make them fit together. So different are these two women, their lives, their choices… opposite, almost. And yet I was happy 20 years ago, and I am happy today. How does that work? 

We found a bakery and bought vanilla slices because vanilla slices are the best things on earth and we are on holidays and anyway, the diet starts tomorrow. The vanilla slice brought me back into my body which was bad timing, because Ralph chose that moment to open a bottle of fizzy water and it exploded all over all of us, so my body definitely felt that. On the other hand, the day was so hot that nobody minded being wet. 

*. * *

I can hear cicadas in the bottle-brush trees outside. Piercing, they sing in unison, their chorus ebbing and flowing like ocean waves and never fully receding. There is sand all over the kitchen floor and flip flops strewn from one end of the room to the other, where the puppy has picked them up, one at a time, and discarded them. I know I should probably clean up but I sip water instead and open my computer to write, because these are the last days of the summer holidays, and I’m not time-travelling any more. I’m mindful - so mindful - that I’m here and now.

And in 20 more years, when I’m outside tending the apple trees on the tiny farm I hope I’ll own by then and suddenly and unexpectedly float back to the me of January 2021, I want to remember exactly what it felt like. 

Hunting for gold under rainbows

The first rainbow appeared in the morning, stretching in a big, lazy arc across the farmhouse, dissecting the clouds in luminous colour. It looked like one of those stretchy rainbow-belts we used to cinch around fuzzy, mohair jumper-dresses in the 1980s. The rainbow felt like a portent, a promise of good things to come on our little weekend away, our first foray out of town since everyone started hoarding toilet paper back in March.

In reality, the rainbow turned out to be a promise of rain: first a sun-shower, which blew Ralph's mind ("the rain is GOLD!"), but then the sky closed over and down it all came. We gave up exploring on foot and made a dash for the car. 

There was a farm gate sign saying "Pine cones $2" and if you live in the country you will probably think that is CRAZY and why wouldn't people just go to the fun of collecting their own pine cones? But we live in the city and the last time we found our own pine cones the children were this little. And every year I say "We will find somewhere with old pine trees to collect some," but we never do. So we thought $2 was a pretty good bargain and pulled over to buy a bag to decorate them at Christmas, but there were no bags of pine cones left. Only worm juice.

The next day at the General Store they were selling bags of pine cones for $12, so I guess we know who bought all the ones at the farm gate. 

The truffière building was at the top of the hill, all wooden walls and wooden floors and wooden tables and chairs, with a wooden kitchenette where they washed and stored the truffles, and a roaring wood fire by which two springer spaniels were sleeping.

We crowded in gratefully, hands outstretched to the fire, as the dogs danced around us and the farmer handed around a big bowl of truffles from her morning's find. Ralph whispered to me, "I don't like the smell of wet dog," and I couldn't tell whether he was actually smelling the dogs or the truffles. 

(Something I learned: did you know you can put a truffle into a lidded container with your eggs overnight, and when you make scrambled eggs in the morning they will be truffle flavoured?)

I've heard truffles called "diamonds of the kitchen" and, as we stepped out among the oak trees, the winter sun was making a riot of the raindrops on the leaves and the entire farm was lit up like a million diamonds. Or a disco ball, if you're on a budget.

Thomas the springer spaniel led us through rows of oak and hazelnut trees. I asked the farmer, "Do the hazelnuts mean you get a double crop, or else a tasty consolation prize if you don't find any truffles?" She told me yes, in theory, except that the white cockatoos had eaten ALL the hazelnuts. All five acres of them. So there went my brilliant idea for homemade truffle Nutella. 

I don't know what I expected a truffle hunting dog to do: maybe race from tree to tree, sniffing and barking like a police dog in a detective show? Instead, Thomas ambled happily among the trees, apparently enjoying the stroll, until the farmer told him, "Find a truffle, Thomas!" and he began to sniff around with purpose.

When he found one, he was simply supposed to lie down. But he didn't want to, because the ground was wet. He wiggled and fidgeted from side to side, easing himself part way down and then leaping back up and looking for a treat. I couldn't blame him, I didn't want to lie down in that mud either. 

The next rainbow appeared over the oak and hazelnut trees, a brilliant arc reaching out of the sky and landing clearly in an open field to the left. We all paused in our dig for black gold to wonder whether there could be pot of real gold in that paddock. It reminded me of the time, when I was a teenager, that my brother's friend and I spotted the end of a rainbow at the bottom of our horse paddock. I raced down because I wanted to know what it felt like to stand inside the rainbow but when I got there, I couldn't see anything. Not until I looked up and there was the rainbow again, floating in a tantalising way above me. I leaped up and down, stretching to try and touch it, but to no avail. My brother's friend though, still watching from the top of the hill, said it looked as though I was dancing inside a river of colour.

Our first truffle was rotten from all the wet. The farmer cut it up and dropped it into a shallow ditch dug alongside the trees, so that the spores would soak into the soil and re-inoculate the trees. But after that, Thomas found his stride, and both children were given a turn digging up their very own "black gold." I thought they might have found it boring but they were excited: it was like a treasure hunt! They both made polite and appreciative "Mmmm!" sounds when the farmer passed them their muddy treasure to sniff, although neither was keen on eating anything more adventurous than truffle butter on their warm bread at lunch later.

We might have kept going but at this point the rainbow fulfilled its promise again and as "light sprinkling" transformed gradually but all too quickly into "decent downpour," I remembered that I had left our umbrellas inside the timber-clad shed with the roaring fire and the second sleepy springer spaniel, so we all made our way back up the hill and out of the cold winter rain. 

Later at lunch in a nearby winery, warm and dry, we watched the rain and sunshine come and go across the vineyards in dancing swathes of alternating grey and gold. The children approved of the truffle butter on their warm bread but truffle shavings over the potato soup was a bit too rich for their taste and both declared truffle ice cream to be "just wrong." That's when the third rainbow appeared, framing the vineyards like a bucolic oil painting.

Then the skies closed and the rain returned, gurgling through pipes and plonking and splashing off the wine barrels on the empty verandah outside. A frog started singing. Is there anything more cosy that watching winter rain fall outside, while you are inside where it is warm, with the people you love the most in the world, feasting together and sipping wine, with nowhere else to be for the entire afternoon? 

Slow mornings

Slow mornings are for waking up to birdsong and not getting out of bed straight away. Of lying still and listening to the chorus.

It starts with one plaintive call, a single note. A moment of silence, then an answer. Now a handful (or feather-full) of small trills, like a vocal warm-up, make gentle music for the dawn.

And then at the wave of an unseen conductor, the entire ensemble bursts into song, a thousand avian voices turning the valley into a kind of amphitheatre of chirps and dings and trills and gurgles and caws and tweets and shrieks and twitters and songs, mostly songs, that celebrate the dawn.

It is impossible to sleep, but on slow mornings, there’s no need to leap out of bed. Slow mornings are permission to stretch first, twist, yawn, and when you’re ready - only when you’re ready - soft-foot into the kitchen to fill a kettle and boil some water.

Slow mornings begin with steaming cups of tea cradled on laps, in old comfy chairs under light-filled windows, where an entire chapter of a favourite book is read at leisure.

We have rented a little two-bedroom cottage on the edge of a walnut farm and when I make my way into the kitchen, the ghost of last night’s fire haunts the air like a toasty hug.

Ralph hears me and ambles over for a cuddle, his eyes still puffy with sleep and wild curls shooting in every direction. We don shoes and coats over our pyjamas and sneak out for a pre-breakfast walk, just the two of us.

The path at the front of the cottage is thick with onion weeds in bloom (which looks a lot better than that sounds), and we tip-toe through starlike flowers in the dew to the tree lined edge of a dried up creek-bed. Follow that to the edge of the orchard, where I carry Ralph over the cattle-grid, balancing precariously with each step, and set him down among row upon row of walnut trees, just beginning to bud.

Cold air, birdsong, a little hand in mine. In the distance, the Victorian Alps, forest green since the snow melted a month ago.

We walk in silence for a little while, if the ever-enthusiastic chorus of a thousand birds can be considered silence, before Ralph wakes up enough to start telling me stories. Once he does though, then stories don’t stop. Long, convoluted, nonsensical stories about games concocted in the playground involving superheroes and villains and clever inventions and magical powers.

Then he breaks off mid-sentence, and we freeze where we stand. Ahead on the path, a glorious, red-gold fox pauses and stares back at us. Time is suspended: the fox, Ralph and me floating like motes in our own little time-bubble made of golden morning light.

Until somewhere in the distance a cow bellows, and the spell is broken. Released, the fox turns and disappears among the walnut trees but before we can move, another crosses our path at the same place, pauses to watch us, then runs after its mate.

Ralph skips ahead, collecting walnut buds, river pebbles and wildflowers, until he notices something in the grass and calls back at me. “I think I found where the fox sleeps!”

I catch up, and he points to a big, round patch of flattened grass. Bed for a cow, not a fox. There are flattened grass-patches all around us, and a hefty sprinkling of still-steaming cow-pats on the path.

We tread more carefully now, not wanting to step in what the herd left behind, and Ralph invents a new game: “Pat-Man.” We hop sideways and forwards but never diagonally, saying “bleep! bleep!” Walnut flowers are power-ups (without them, we slow down or stop) and the ultimate goal is to reach the next cattle-grid and find our way to the river.

We win. The river is deep and green and still, made for picnics.

On the way back, we finally find the herd. Fat, peaceful cows, grazing under the trees. When they spot us the mothers call anxiously for their babies, who skip over to them, and the whole herd ambles away into the shadows.

It’s a slow, gentle amble, not a race to escape. Cows like slow mornings too.

(There’s a little video below so you can join us among the walnut trees. If you can’t see it, click on the title of this blog post to view it in your browser, and the video will come up).

What if we walked?

It is a ten kilometre walk to the children’s farm and back, and we don’t have a car today. Before France this would have been out of the question. But now, with the resilience they brought home in their suitcases alongside the medieval Papo figurines, sweet little jumpers from the Monoprix, and a collection of Barbapapa books, the children say, “What if we walked?” 

So I pack a lunch box of chopped apple and pear, crackers, and these banana muffins, and we set off. 

Follow the route towards school and then turn off at the park, sticking to the paths because the long grass is soaked with dew and the day is bright but only three degrees right now. Our breath forms clouds in the air to guide us, and nobody wants cold, wet shoes and socks at the start of a day (the end of the day is a different matter, apparently). 

At the railway crossing, we stop to let a train go by. The children put their hands through the railings and wave to the train. Before the train hurtles past, we can see the driver stand up in her cabin and wave back: a big, whole-of-body, over-the-head wave, and a beaming smile to go with it. 

We see a beautiful but decrepit old house, one that once probably nurtured families and echoed to tiny, thumping feet and the laughter of children. A long time ago, a colour-loving person had planted a pink-flowering geranium beside the front gate. But now the windows are boarded over, the paint is peeling, some of the cladding has fallen away, and the posts that support the verandah are rotting. 

As we walk on, we make up a story about its haunting. I try for something chilling and deeply tragic, but the children are convinced the demise of the house had been hastened by hungry monsters, aliens and flying dogs. They build their outlandish story with relish, growing more ridiculous by the sentence, giggling and shouting over one another with excitement. I blame Captain Underpants. 

Under the overpass and onto the Main Yarra Trail, where water is tumbling over rocks in a happy gurgle and bellbirds are calling everywhere. I tell Ralph to move to the left if he hears the ding of a bicycle bell, but he says he can’t tell which ones are the bikes and which ones are the birds. He makes a good point. 

We tell ourselves, this could be Dinan! Here we are, walking alongside a river again. We climb out onto a wooden lookout and say, “These are the ramparts at the ruins.” Further on, a wall stretches up, up, on the other side of the path, as tall as the Dinan chateau beside the wild apple orchard. This wall is covered in graffiti but we try to ignore that, and tell each other, “Those are the castle walls.” A road bridge up ahead plays the role of the viaduct that connects Dinan to Lanvallay. 

We are chevaliers again, and tired legs discover a last burst of energy before we reach the children’s farm. 

In fact we are so excited to reach the farm and find our friends that we don’t notice the oak tree but, on the way home, we stop at it in wonder. 

It is ancient, and most of its golden leaves have already dropped, set in a circle of stones and stretching its branches almost all the way to the river. The children climb over the stones and play in the fallen leaves but I am overcome with a powerful sense of stillness. 

The sun is turning golden as we make our way home along the river, the children collecting leaves and nuts, fanning them out in their hands like cards at a poker table, to inspect the intricacies of Nature’s design. Ralph finds a giant fern frond broken on the ground, and holds it aloft like a sword. 

Back on the back-streets, they discover a small pile of smooth, round pebbles, so we start a game of Hansel and Gretel, counting out steps between stones and taking turns. That game lasts a good kilometre or two, all the way back to the railway crossing. 

The day is warm now - 17 degrees! - so Ralph takes his shirt off and struts those streets as though he’s at the beach. (I am carrying jumpers, shirts, hats, gloves, picnic lunch, water bottle, and other various accoutrements in my back pack. Thankfully a friend has taken our coats in her car, and drops them home for us.)

We find a park we’ve never seen before, rows of trees glowing in the late afternoon light, and promise one another we’ll return one day because there is a playground in the distance “that looks awesome!” We also pass a bakery that we hadn’t seen on the way out, so Scout suggests that next time, we should pick up a baguette. 

The children say, “We feel sorry for our friends who drove in the car, because they would have missed all of this.” 

---

100 Scottish words for rain

I heard recently that there were more than 100 Scottish words for rain.

Musical, melodic words like spindrift (spray whipped up by the wind) and aftak (an easing or lull in a storm or rain). Hilarious, fun-to-say words that you’d swear were made up, like drookit (absolutely drenched) and daggle (to fall in torrents).

And words that seem to be plucked straight out of a Scottish novel, transporting you through time and space to a place where “wild” still holds meaning, and ghosts in tartan haunt your imaginings. Yillen (a shower of rain, especially with wind), uplowsin (heaving rain), smirr (a fine rain drizzle), and goselet (a soaking, drenching, downpour).

The day we hiked to the falls that tumbled into Loch Ness, rain settled in a smirr only ten minutes after we’d started out. But walking through it was not a misery, but a joy. Ralph was fairly sure he had spotted the Lach Ness Monster (“or maybe it was a turtle head”) in the cold waters, and we watched the tiny waves through the trees and raindrops for signs of monsters, dinosaurs or turtles.

When we reached them the roar of the falls, swelled by melting snow, was almost primal. We had to shout to be heard but still the wind snatched our words and swept them into the spindrift before hurtling them into the lake below.

I bent my body into the wind and stood on the platform overlooking the brutal, yellow torrent, inside the spray. What is the Scottish word for rain that falls up, not down? The spray lashed my face and I was drookit in seconds, dripping and frozen and truly, joyfully alive.

There is a tiny drop of Scottish blood in me, on my mother’s side. My great-grandmother was born in Scotland, with the surname Calder. Calder is a highland clan that once was powerful up near Inverness. It doesn’t have a chieftain any more, but it does still have a motto:

“Be mindful.”

The time spent navigating memories

It’s a slow process. I don’t just mean the making of the #100DaysInDinan project: combing through old photographs for inspiration, sketching a rough idea onto my antique postcards, going over it in pen, painting it. Then finding old pages from magazines, tracing onto them around the envelopes that had held the postcards for a century, folding them into place, then copying addresses onto paper and pasting them onto the front of the envelopes… 

All this takes time, and perhaps in retrospect one a day was too ambitious. 

But the real time is spent navigating memories. As I paint I walk my memories like I walked those old, cobblestoned streets, a hundred times over, during the 100 days we lived in Dinan. 

As I sketch the outline of a fresh baguette, I am back there again, standing outside Boulangerie Banette with my children, tearing the still-warm loaf into into smaller pieces to share, and the smell is the best in the world: nutty, malty, a hug. 

Scout announces, “I can’t go a single day in the world without this bread,” and from that day on, our baker Mohommed keeps one or two baguettes aside for us - and often throws in some free croissants and Nutella crepes - in case they sell out before we get there (which they often do). 

Now as I paint I am climbing the steep hill to the castle ruins in the village next door and I can feel the muscles in my legs burning all over again. (And oh! That wicker picnic basket is heavy! Why did I think a picnic blanket was necessary? And did we really need that much water?). 

My memories tumble onwards, gaining momentum like my children rolling down a steep and grassy hill on a sunny day, squealing with laughter. I think about the friendly grey cat at the ruins that had so enchanted Ralph. He sat among the wildflowers inside the crumbling castle walls and patted the wild cat while it purred like a tractor, and I dug into the bottom of that heavy wicker picnic basket for the hand sanitiser I was sure I’d packed somewhere. We learned that French cats don’t much mind if your French is somewhat lacking.

I paint my feet in canvas shoes, dangling over the canal on a quiet jetty. As I do it, I taste again the honey and walnut cake I’d baked the day before, and carried with us on our walk. I remember throwing crumbs for ducks that wouldn’t come, and watching the tiny bubbles and rings in the water made by unseen fish coming up to feed.  

On comes the summer’s day we spent in nearby Saint Malo, digging and splashing in the beach all day and then running the whole three kilometres back to the bus stop just in time for the last bus home… only to discover the timetable had changed the day before, and we were trapped. So we trudged the three kilometres back into town and found a little hotel. We ate bananas dunked in yoghurt for dinner and it was hot, so hot, so we all slept in our underwear on a big bed. I left the window open all night and watched the moon rise slowly over slate rooftops and terra cotta chimney pots as my children slept. 

It slows me. I start with an anecdote but all too soon I am lost in a fully-fledged memory, and follow that path deeper and deeper into the wilds of nostalgia. 

It washes over me, a longing to be back inside those slower days once more. I was mindful then, truly mindful, consciously taking in everything: watching it, feeling it, tasting it, and appreciating it. Committing it to memory as best I could, not wanting to miss a thing, not wanting to lose any of it. 

So when I paint and I am slow, I don’t mind. A hundred memories is taking me more than a hundred days to record, but this project has become exactly what it set out to be: a process in gratitude. 

Sustainable travel

I’m sorry.

I’m going to apologise to you, first, but then also to the planet. Because the truth is that as much as I tried to be mindful and sustainable while we were travelling as a family last year, I failed more often than I succeeded, and I suspect I could have tried so much harder.

I realise this confession is not very helpful, especially if you happen to have opened this post in the hopes of finding tips for sustainable travel (perhaps we could brainstorm ideas together?). But I think confessions are an important. I fail all too often when it comes to taking care of the world we live in, and I think it’s important to own my failures, and to let myself feel the shame rather than sweep it under the carpet, so that I can do better next time.

Also, maybe if you sometimes feel that everyone else is a zero-waste champion, carrying around a year’s worth of waste in a single mason jar while you forgot to bring the reusable bags to the supermarket last week… my confession might help you feel a little bit better, and perhaps a little less alone. We have a better chance of success if we support one another.

(A bit of context: we were on holidays for one month. There were five of us, three adults and two children, making our way from Dinan in France to Scotland, via Paris and London, staying in Air BnB homes along the way. Our time in the village hadn’t been a brilliant success at sustainability (I shared some of our experiences and ideas here), but it turns out that life on the road can make things a lot more difficult.)

Things that did work well

First, the positives. There were some things I did that worked really well, making life easy and practical for us on the road while also going a small way towards minimising our footprint. They included:

• We used public transport as much as possible. From the time we left Australia in August to our return at the New Year, we took trains and buses almost everywhere. We only hired a car for one week, in order to travel in the Scottish highlands, and only took a taxi on one late night in London, and two extremely early (one of them 4am) mornings

• I packed three beeswax wraps of varying sizes when we left for our trip, and used them to cover just about anything. They were especially useful in Dinan, but also came in handy when, for example, we wanted to transport a half-eaten cucumber from one Air BnB home to another, without using plastic wrap or take-away plastic boxes

• I had also packed a square, collapsible, insulated lunch bag. Again, back in Dinan this was great for carrying cold things home from the market, but it was also handy once we hit the road, not only carrying food from the shops but also storing it and taking it with us from one place to another, rather than throwing things away

• I bought some tourist-style biscuit tins. I love to use tins at home for storage, but they were also very helpful while we were travelling, slotting and stacking neatly in my suitcase, and carrying everything from food to stationery supplies to first aid. (Clearly I had already eaten the biscuits. I did it for the planet)

• I packed two heat-proof drink-bottles with me when we first left Australia. One was glass and I accidentally smashed it in a ceramic sink in our London B&B, but the other was wood with metal insulation, and is still going strong. I’d fill this with water before leaving from the day, so that we didn’t need to buy plastic bottles of water

• I packed two tote bags for carrying groceries, and bought a couple more when I needed them. I also wore a back pack every day (this one), rather than carrying a handbag. It could expand to create a surprisingly big space, and I’ve carried full-sized blankets in it, bottles of milk and wine, stacks of books, and secretly-stashed Christmas presents. Mostly I was pretty good at bringing bags with me, even for things like Christmas shopping. I think we used three or four plastic bags in total in the month we travelled, and those I saved to use as garbage bags in our B&Bs

Things we really should have done better

• I didn’t bring a reusable coffee cup. In France, this didn’t matter. I drank tea at home and coffee in cafes and, knowing this would be the case, I just didn’t add it to the luggage I was packing. But in London and Scotland, often my husband would go out early while I was getting the kids dressed, and bring back two coffees and the newspaper to read. It was so nice to have a ‘proper’ latte after all that time that my conscience grew weak.

  Lesson: I should have said “no thanks.” Or waited until I could leave, too, and had the coffee in the cafe. I did sometimes, but mostly I didn’t, and I’m sorry.

• I took a big bag of soap nuts with me when we first went to Dinan, and used them for several months. But then the ancient washing machine in our rented apartment tore apart the little muslin bag I used for them (as well as several items of my clothing). I didn’t know how to replace it, so I had to buy ordinary laundry powder to use on the road. I tried to find earth-friendly detergent but still ended up with a kind of contact-dermatitis on my legs and torso, which doesn’t bode well for the waters it drained into.

  Lesson: I’m not sure. Learn how to sew my own little muslin bags? There’s no way I could have carried a month’s worth of clean clothes for five people travelling in winter. Can you help? What would you have done?

• I used traditional Christmas wrapping paper, even though I knew it probably couldn’t be recycled. There was a lot of angst around this (for me) and in the end, I chose paper because a) by the time we arrived in Edinburgh, where we’d be for Christmas, we only had two days left to organise everything, b) I couldn’t find brown paper and didn’t have time to decorate it anyway, c) my husband doesn’t like furoshiki wraps because he thinks they don’t get used, and anyway I couldn’t afford to buy enough for all the presents, d) the children didn’t have Santa stockings or sacks, so I wanted to create some kind of ‘unwrapping’ experience for them, and e) we didn’t have a tree or much in the way of decorations, so the other adults travelling with me quite rightly felt a bit of festivity was in order.
  
  I didn’t want to be the wowser in the group, and perhaps by this point was feeling a bit (or a lot) hypocritical about pushing the issue, given all the other slip-ups and outright failures we’d been making along the way. It’s hard to be vigilant about recyclable wrapping-paper while sipping coffee from your take-away cup.

  Lesson: In retrospect, the smartest thing would probably have been to bring two stockings or sacks for the kids, so that the Santa presents didn’t need wrapping, and then to use a combination of cloth, tea-towels, ribbons and other ideas for our presents to one another. Also, I’m going to teach myself how to properly use furoshiki wraps, so by next year, my husband might accede to their usefulness.

• Food waste and recycling was tricky. I did manage to sort-of minimise our food waste, but we were limited in terms of recycling options, depending on the rules of each home we stayed in. I’ve written before about the challenges of not bringing things in, rather than figuring out what to do with the things on the way out, but I don’t think I was particularly good at this, especially once we hit the road.

  Lesson: Really, there’s not a lot you can do in these situations, other than to be mindful of what you bring in, and I just needed to be more vigilant in that respect. It’s a lot harder to cook at home while on holidays, and can sometimes be counter-intuitive (the amount of ‘things’ we’d need to buy for just one meal in terms of food ingredients that wouldn’t get fully eaten, and all the jars, tins and plastic they come in, would possibly be more wasteful than a single take-away pizza box or plastic container), so I guess the answer is to think hard and creatively about what comes in, every time.

• Air travel. This is the giant, white elephant in the room when it comes to sustainable travel. Here we are as ‘responsible’ human beings, travelling with our keep-cups and tote bags, while just to get where we want to go, we are participating in an industry that is responsible for more than 2 percent of the entire world’s carbon dioxide emissions by burning finite fossil fuels, emitting greenhouse gases, and leaving contrails in the atmosphere. In addition, airports and the related infrastructure (terminals, runways, ground transport, maintenance facilities and shopping) use up huge amounts of energy, water and resources.

  Lesson: Clearly, the easy answer is not to travel by plane. But I am selfish and I do want to travel, at least sometimes. Australia is an island, so any international travel requires flying. It’s a start to participate in a carbon offset scheme (where trees are planted to ‘offset’ the fossil fuels your journey burns). I did this and don’t want to discount it, but to me that feels like a tiny drop in the ocean.
  
  I have had another thought: I’ve read that the per-passenger-per-kilometre carbon emissions of air travel are roughly the same as travelling by car. So now, back home, I need to be even better at not taking our car, walking instead, or using public transport if necessary. (Although to get from Melbourne to Paris, and then to get home from Edinburgh to Melbourne, we flew 33,682 kilometres. Multiplied by the five of us, that’s 168,410 kilometres, so I have a lot of walking and tram-rides to do before I even break even from this one trip, environmentally-speaking. It’s not a perfect system).
  
  What do you do? How do you combine air travel with your environmental conscience? What are your top tips for thoughtful, sustainable travel?

Midwinter mystery

I wanted to watch the sun rise through the standing stones on the winter solstice.

In truth, the true magic was supposed to happen at sunset: the last of the day’s light beaming through the passageways of the southwest-facing cairns and spilling over the ancient dead like a gift, for a few precious moments in this one important hour every year, for four thousand years.

But sunset in mid December was at 3.30 in the afternoon, and I knew we’d probably still be out. We had made plans to visit a tiny village close to Nairn, and walk ten kilometres though fields to see Cawdor Castle in the distance, the seat of my distant Calder relatives. Probably, I thought, we’d still be driving home at sunset. (We were).

And the forecast was for rain in the afternoon, anyway.

So we hurried down our breakfast and left in the dark, arriving just in time to watch the dawn instead, as it coloured the ancient wood in gold, and sent the fairies shimmering back into the shadows, seconds before the sun’s rays broke then burst over the nearby hills.

My family wandered with me for a few minutes but then retreated to the relative warmth of the car, leaving me to explore the cairns and stones alone.

For a little while, I pulled my gloves off and rested my fingertips on the ancient standing stones, letting the earth’s currents flow up through that quiet ground and the lichen-covered stone, then coursing into my hands and grounding my body in nature and history.

Four thousand years. It’s an almost unthinkable age to me but, to our planet, those stones are little more than the passing acne of adolescence on the surface of time.

The stones were sharp with ice, and smooth inside the “cups,” little circular dips carved out with stone or antler tools, patiently worked by human hands millennia ago. Hands just like mine, maybe even genetically related to mine, but on people leading lives so different to my experience it is impossible to fathom that which binds us.

Except this earth. This dawn. These stones. They are our constant, linking me to them and them to me as though time did not matter and they had just - just - left, melting away into shadows with the fairies mere moments before I arrived with the sun.

Who were they?

These ancient ancestors of ours positioned the cairns to catch the solstice sunset, and graded the standing stones around them according to astronomical axes. Those that face the sunrise are smaller and whiter, while those placed toward the sunset are larger and the lichen, when scraped away, reveals stones of pink and red.

Artists of the earth.

While I stood alone and watched, the morning sun pierced a cleft stone in the lonely field.

On a whim, I stepped behind the stone and let the cut-light pierce and refract over my face, closing my eyes to the gold, and turning it red beneath my lids.

What do you think it means, that split stone? It is not the biggest nor the most impressive of the standing stones that guard these cairns, but the cleft feels strange, not something you see in nature, and to me it feels like a question. Two almost identical pieces of stone, side by side, kissing at the base but pushing one another apart at the shoulders, creating unearthly shadows and bending the sun’s rays and creating a hard-to-pin-down sense of unease.

Like listening to your parents argue in the next room.

Our humanity unites us throughout the millennia. These stones are part of me and I am part of them. But what do they mean?

---

A seasonal shift

The weekend before we left the village forever, they turned the Christmas lights on. I stepped out of our apartment in the twilight to go to the post office, and hadn’t taken two steps before the entire town burst back into light.

Christmas trees on every corner glowed with colour, rainbow twinkle lights floated in swathes above the cobblestones, intricate patterns of light made snowflakes above crossroads, and every laneway seemed touched with magic.

I raced back from the post office to call the family outside, and together we strolled through the wonderland, marvelling at each new discovery. It seemed as though almost the entire village had had the same idea, we were all, young and old, wandering the town in joy, and the streets were filled with the sounds of “Ooh!” and “Ahh!”, punctuated by church bells.

It felt like a fitting farewell to this town that we had called home for almost four months. From summer to winter, we watched the town transition from full bloom (and full to the brim) to a kind of turning-inwards, resting and readying for winter, and every new face on our town has been lovely.

In the summer, the streets hummed with tourists. The glacerie did a roaring trade, with towering coronets of triple-flavoured home-made ice creams, and markets filled with handicrafts lined the street underneath the ancient clock tower, every day. A horse and carriage clopped underneath our window every hour or so, and a miniature train carrying retired German tourists chugged over the cobblestones all day long.

We would wander down to the river in the sweltering heat, and sit on the stone edges with our feet in the water to cool off, or take a ride on the canal boat that took tourists to Lehon and back all day long (always telling the story, in two languages, of how if something happened to the horses pulling the canal-boats in the past, the captain’s wife would have to don a harness and drag that boat along the little river herself).

On Wednesdays, the square beneath our window, in front of the ancient basilica, would fill with stalls of antique toys and books and curios for sale. Scout wore a hand-woven “love knot” around her wrist, woven by a local woman at the market. Ralph found a red tin van that had once held chocolates. I picked up a 300-year-old writing desk, and a hand-painted ceramic kugelhopf mould from a famous artists in Alsace.

Everything in Dinan was alive. The geraniums in the pots outside our windows burst into extravagant colour, and the dancing light seemed to filter inside, even before dawn. There were jazz concerts in the square below us, sending music into our living room through the open windows until after midnight, while we ate crackers and cheese and sipped rosé, and I painted the memories of our grand adventure.

And then the wind turned cold.

As the seasons changed, so did the village. The glacerie closed its shutters for the last time in the year, as did our favourite boulanger, and many of the shops and restaurants taped handwritten signs to their closed shutters: fermé jusqu'en décembre (closed until December).

It was a lot easier to move around the town without the crowds, and the children never had to wait for a space on the tourniquet in the playground, and the cafes and bistros that did remain open started selling vin chaud (hot wine).

The breeze picked up, and the trees changed colour. Gold dominated, but there was also brown, orange, and crimson in the mix. On windy days, the sky would rain colour. We collected conkers and walnuts, and roasted found chestnuts. The chemin des pommiers (apple path) below the castle walls was slick with fallen, rotting apples, a picturesque death-trap to any who ventured down that steep slope.

I walked the children to childcare in the golden glare of sunrise, and home again in the dark. On days off, we started frequenting a deli where the paninis were particularly good, and the proprietress was super-friendly towards the children. In fact, everyone grew friendlier, now that the throngs and crowds had melted away.

And then one dark afternoon, they turned the Christmas lights on.