Ghosts of the past

I have always felt we had a close family. So it has been interesting in the last week to be with extended family members who we haven't seen for some years in some cases.
It is easy to pick up a whole lot of threads with people who really I don't know terribly well, and yet there is an interface because we share the lives of individuals who we have known.
It is a melancholy reflection of age, I think, that we need to value our family. I think this can be overstated, but we should not be blasé about our families; for ill or for good.
I am conscious of the fact that one way we often deal with family difficulty is by ignoring our family and perhaps withdrawing from it, but we don't escape quite so easily. Walking in the last few days around the haunts of my youth I am glad that I have a sense of ghosts being laid to rest. Ghosts which in many cases I hadn't fully appreciated.
We don't have to blow trumpets or confront anything necessarily but we should at least not try to ignore where we come from, who we are or what has happened to our folk.
I hope you might think about this (if you want) without me having to do more than just tell you that it has been good for me to muse about this in the last few weeks

Organic distance

In the way that we have of making the complex even more so, environmental issues seem to get more difficult rather than less as years go by. Here in Europe where so much fresh produce has to be imported from warmer climes an interesting debate about organic versus carbon is happening.


I often think of 'organic produce' as being those not entirely clean vegetables and tomatoes that you see at the Adelaide Market. But this is quite crude caricature. Of course the key thing is that they are grown without chemicals, either fertilisers or pesticides.


But the British National Farmers' organisation makes the point that a lot of 'organic fruit' (bananas for example) may be organic but have travelled an enormous distance to get to UK markets.


The usual sort of complaint you know a farmer in Shropshire, the heart of England's asparagus growing district (through which we recently travelled) noted that his local supermarket had abundant supplies of 'organic' asparagus from, of all places, Chile and none from local farms.


The hidden ecological cost in transporting the produce is difficult to pin down, though clearly there is more to be considered than whether or not the banana has been sprayed with Zyklon B (unlikely!!).


Australians don't yet appear to have got to such a keen point where the carbon footprint is examined alongside other factors, though clearly we will have to.


It would be nice to think that we will not just hurtle down the path of more and more cars and roads, cheaper and cheaper flights, until everything is just so gummed up that it is almost terrifying.


Organic, it seems to me, is good...but at what expense. There is much to be balanced in the scales

Holy Shrine

News that the parents of missing child Madeleine McCann will visit the holy shrine of Fatima in Portugal,(here) is in a way not surprising. Yet both of the parents who are medical scientists and doctors are uinlikely candidates for the pilgrimage circuit. Is it an act of desperation or a supreme act of faith? One can't help but hope that, which ever it is that it proves to be fruitful.
I have pondered the mystery of pilgrimage quite a few times whilst we have been wandering these northern climes. Yesterday for example as I visited Carlisle Cathedral and the lady on the table said "Are you familiar with the Cathedral?" I was able to truthfully reply...."I haven't been inside this Cathedral for over 40 years!"
And there was indeed a sense of pilgrimage about it. It was the first cathedral I ever stepped foot inside, it was the first place I ever witnessed an ordination. And it was in this Diocese where my early sense of vocation was nurtured. So an important religious pilgrimage place.
Last night we drove to my cousin's house, she told me about it last year. A lovely (but indeed in need of lots of work) Cumbrian farm house...the centre of their trucking business, and as she told me last year the focus of nearly all of her life. Her father and mother were there when we arrived. George looks so much like my father that it is alarming sitting there talking to him.
A pilgrimage into the heart of my family.
There is a deep sense of connectedness with these people even though we do not know each other well, on one level and yet share enormous common story. This is quite profound in searching out the far off place of pilgrimage.
Today we will head to Durham, where is buried St Cuthbert. Then later to Gateshead, the largest shopping centre in England. A different sort of pilgrimage.
I hope and pray that the McCann's experience of Fatima will reconnect them with the lost child.

The detours of our lives

Yesterday we detoured, got lost, reminisced and all in all had a jolly nice day. We ended up in Kendal which used to be in Westmorland (which no longer exists) but is now a part of Cumbria which now takes in all of what was Cumberland where I grew up, Westmorland and part of Northern Lancashire.
Any way Kendal is famous for Kendal Mint Cake as every hiker will tell you an absolute must when hiking in England's Lake District.
Removing the wrapper immediately I thought it didn't have the same sharp white colour I remembered as a child. There was a certain inspidity about it, the taste was OK. But a lot sweeter than I remembered.
Sue grinned and bore it. The eating of ethnic food is always a trial to those who have not grown up with it! And we Australians forget that there is is as much disgusting English ethnic food as there is Sauerkraut in Germany, frog's legs in France or dogs in Korea.
There is of course brawn, made from pig's head, black pudding made from pig's blood...and of course sausages are just an excuse to eat anything that you shouldn't really eat!
Many times I have found that the fond memories of the food of my childhood have been tempered by the fact that we now eat next to no animal fat if we can avoid it, our children have never known vegetables cooked with a handful of salt. And everything these days has a quarter of the sugar it had in the 50s.
This I think was the Kendal Mint Cake shock, it had the sugar content of my childhood rather than the plastic content of today.
Food is an interesting example of our distorted memory, but perhaps not the important one (We often seem to trivialise ethnicity back to food and music and dancing...when really it is about the ways people relate to each other).
So one has to be careful talking to family you haven't seen for decades, or to whom you are genetically connected but with whom you have little or no shared experience. I watched my cousin wince as my wife deflated an image of one of my closer relatives...did he really want to know what she was actually like or did he prefer the sharp taste and stark colour contrast of childhood.
It's good stuff, as we make these detours into our dreams. But we are reminded by Yeats:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

There is no place

I have no idea what is happening in Australia at all!! It is interesting how little Australian news is reported here..Sylvester Stallone's brush with importing steroids was mentioned on the news last night, the first time Australian news had been heard. You may or may not be aware that Britain's PM Blair has resigned and the Labour Party will elect his successor this week. The TV discussion seems as convoluted and meaningless as such things do in Australia. At once all engrossing, yet essentially meaningless to all but those whose lives are affected.
You probably don't hear much either about Maddy McCann a small British child who disappeared whilst on holiday in portugal. It is obsessing the media at the moment, as such things would in Australia. What does it all mean?
We are missing our children, such things are meaningful to us. We have always tended to talk to our children every day...and are increasingly doing so as our holiday goes on....but news and events pass us by.
The London Underground seems almost unreal, there are constant recorded messages delivered in an Orwellian tone.
"Mind the Gap" the traveller is warned..."Do not leave your belongings unattended"...it is a constant drone and I wondered amidst all this if they ever said anything of import.
"Mind the Gap"...it said last night..."There will be no service beyond Finchley Road tonight because of a body on the track"
Had I heard right!!!? yes
And so it continued..."Mind the Gap!"

National Pride

There is a profundity about national pride which strikes me is more significant than the jingoism that Australians often settle for. The huge flag which drapes the vacant space of the Arc de Triomphe is a powerful statement......I sometimes see the great flags in Victoria Square almost capturing something similar about our aspirations in little old SA.
Around the Arc last night there were (of course) tourists but also lots of young people and rap dancing with loud music.
The flag blows where it wills, and sort of watches over this mess of humanity.
Paris proclaims that its identity is about its culture, music, visual art...the beauty of its cityscape, the food the wine.
Institutions boldly close on Tuesdays, because that is what you do. On first Sundays all public museums are free and everyone flocks.....what a statement it is of how important a thing it should be for the ordinary folk to be allowed to see their national heritage......what encouragement do we give to our young to see the art of the falmous?
The shops close despite the flood of tourists.....I guffaw of the Chamber of Commerce telling the Parisiains that people will think they are a backwater if they dont open 24/7.
We hold not a candle to these people. We play a game instead of taking our culture seriously, mistaking commercioal expediency for cultural sophistication.
I hope one day we might grow up

Today is Friday it must be

PARIS!!!!!!

Yes we have made the transition from Italy to France, the heavens wept as we left the city of the Tiber, the Coliseum, the World Cup and heaven knows what else
Paris was foggy when we arrived but we effected our change with ease, had a boat ride on the Seine, a fast learning curve on the Metro.......well a rather slow left turn when we could have turned right!!!!
Then the amazing Gallery Lafayette....the proud boast of which is the only shopping centre that is also a national treasure!!
Shortly afterwards the rain caught up with us again.....and we lost each other as is our wont. And so here we are.
In the land where the air steward is called Herve, and where the equivalent of DJ's Food Hall looks indeed like the cordon bleu. Incredible. That's AnCredEEblah

Churches, churches, churches.....and not a place to pray

There certainly are a lot of churches here. We visited St Peter's yesterday and there were bucket loads of people. Though a spot of rain and a bit of heat got rid of many.
I find something faintly...well not faintly...repellent about all this religion. Much of it is about building being done to glorify worldly achievements of powerful men (almost always men )
But every now and then, even in the great basilicas, there are little spots where you can only go if you intend to pray with young mafiosi stationed at the entrances to ensure that ice-cream lickers stay out.
Today we walked to the Coliseum (which is within viewing distance... what an amazing thing to be able to say) stumbling across the wonderful basilica of St Clement where there is a 17th century churchj built on a 12th century church added on to a 4th, 6th and 8th century church....which in turn is on a pre Christian Mithraic temple. Unebleievable almost to Australians.
Maybe this afternoon we will go and see Spiderman3 at the Barberini (cui) to neutralise all this culture and history!!

New experience

We are having extraordinary experiences that we would just never have in our short stay in Rome.
It raises lots of questions about everything to do with life, culture, church and art.
Here near the Lateran Basilica, a huge concert is happening. The noise, as noise does, dominates everything.
It was amazing to me that amidst all this the side Chapel of the Holy sacrament is kept for silent prayer...and it is palpable. Today, however...the harsh culture of the world closed the front door of the basilica. It seems strange to me that in Rome of all places a majore religious building can be subordinated to decadent pop-rock culture. It is difficult to think that in Cairo, Jerusalem, Bangkok or even sleepy old Adelaide, people's religious sensibilities would be so readily trounced