I found the soundtrack for Into the Wild for sale in the city yesterday. It has been great company as I've worked my way through this sunny Sunday in Belgium.
Into the Wild is the first solo studio album by Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder, and is based on his contributions to the soundtrack for the film Into the Wild. Source, Wikipedia.
Tickets have been booked and I'm off to Genova in February. I cannot begin to tell you how good it feels to have the promise of wandering back in my life. It's time ... more than time.
Miss 9 and I have begun reading a new book series together. It's delightfully creepy. And I have 'Italian for Dummies' here on my desk. Now to open it and begin serious work.
I have been struggling to fulfil my daily foto commitment. And I'm intrigued because I see it's so much about my inability to give myself too much time off. And the battle is there in the fact that I can't 'snapshot' this commitment. I climb into photography, working my way towards the right angle perhaps, seeking out the right light. I have to be prepared to do ... just do the photography for an hour each day. It's an interesting battle.
And emails ... I've been caught up in a few email exchanges that make me stop to take notes. And I'm printing out interesting blog posts and articles, sticking them into my journal.
My super-talented niece called Katie sent me an email containing the static digital image she made at school and it's stunning. I must ask permission to blog it. Katie's the one in the foreground.
So, I did a 'girl and her guitar' series for the foto-a-day shoot today. I was using my 17-40mm lens on the Canon EOS 5D MkII and I was all but climbing onto the couch as I took the image you find at the end here. I think, in future, I might just stick with my 70-200mm lens. I love that lens. It's my way of seeing ... and being. Potentially my photography subjects may appreciate a bit of distance too.
It just went crazy here at midnight, in that Belgian city where fireworks are illegal on New Year's Eve. Just before midnight it sounded like a warzone. 19 minutes later and there are still explosions but it's no longer the ENTIRE city anymore.
Kids on the streets, neighbours too, some rain, and cloud cover. Weather Underground tells me it's 7 celsius as I write this.
And so it is, 12 hours after New Zealand crossed over into 2014, we've arrived too. Happy new year to you. I'm posting a shot taken in New Zealand around this time last year. The tree with the red flowers ... the NZ Christmas tree. The Pohutakawa. Cooks Beach.
Note: In Belgium, in general, it's only illegal if you're caught ... or that's what the locals tell me.
I'm so ready to head back into portrait work ...
We left New Zealand, a 1am Singapore Airlines flight, on this day a year ago today.
The days leading up to leaving were full of the things I love best. Solitary early morning walks, the beach, good people, and sunshine at Christmas.
The clothes- line pictured is loaded down with swimsuits after a swim in the river at Cooks Beach. And the little hut at the end reminds me of the much-hated longdrop toilets that occasionally featured in my childhood memories. This was was decommissioned and could therefore be defined as picturesque.
It's a blue-sky 5.2 celsius day in Antwerp as I write this. It reads colder than it feels. I have the bedroom window open and we've already been out for a short walk. Coats and scarves were involved but we still haven't even had many serious frosts. There was blossom out there. And there was that one evening of snow that didn't settle a while ago.
Gert was cautioning me, explaining that the Belgian winter kicks in in January and February. Last winter was simply brutal and long. December through into June, more or less.
Anyway, from the backyard of a New Zealand crib (South Island) or bach (North Island), holiday home (rest of the world) ... a little bit of simply happy.
I would be wicked if I didn't add today's news from Cooks Beach ...
80mm of rain in 2 hours, as reported by New Zealand's TV3. And I will admit, NZ does have unstable weather around Christmas. In fact, if you're planning on visiting NZ, February's considered a more reliable time.
Miss 9 and her new guitar.
Day One of guitar-ownership and still in her 'indoor morning-wear', with the hat that Shannon gifted her on her head.
Meet the artiste!
The Christmas highlight was watching Miss 9 open the gift we four bought her together. I may have hinted at the fact we didn't have much money and had simply bought her lots of little presents at the 1 euro shop. She is the sweetest, undemanding creature and so that was okay with her.
Christmas morning, and after we had handed out the gifts from under the tree, we put the bulky, blanket-covered gift on her lap. She found it odd. She said 'It's guitar-shaped?' We said yes, 'maybe it's a novelty box to put all the little gifts in'. She lifted the blanket and said, 'Ohhh, you used Sander's guitar case!' Then she looked at the case more closely and said, 'Oh, it's not his.'
I think it began to dawn on her then but still she busied herself with opening the zip. The look on her face as she opened the lid was simply gold. She was stunned and bemused and amazed. She pulled the guitar out, slipped it into position and started strumming.
'Did you guess?' we asked her.
'Never', she said. 'I never imagined I might get a guitar!'
And maybe that's why we 4 put money together and bought it for her. She never demands. She never even really asks for the big things. And this is the kid who has written 'oh so many' songs already. A guitar was a far away dream.
Sander gave her her first guitar lesson on Christmas Day and by Boxing Day she was playing Twinkle Little Star. We watched as she heard her mistakes and went back to fix them. As Sander said, she has the music in her already.
Christmas Day was six for breakfast, then lunch with the same six. It was oddly non-traditional but lovely in terms of food. We cleaned and perhaps some of us napped, until Shannon and Erik drove in from Holland.
Shannon and I have become old friends, having met long ago here in Belgium and now there is Erik, her truly lovely Dutch bloke. He fits in so easily it's like we've always known him. No photographs from the day and so I wandered through my 'this time last year' folder and voila ...
I was talking to Julie tonight... she's back home in New Zealand these days, after months spent wandering the world. I was reminiscing about a red wine I had enjoyed while I was home.
I remembered there was a truck on the wine label, laughing over the fact that I don't think I ever paid full price for a bottle of The People's Wine - that pinot noir. I found them on special where ever we wandered. And, of course, I took that to be a divine sign to drink more because they were retailing for $22nz normally.
There is a photograph, of course ...
I don't know how we keep meeting these people that become important to us. Will it ever stop? Are we looking for them or were they always there under a current and we just stepped in the creek at the right time.
Amy Sharp, extract from, We will meet in a flower shop or on a corner in the rain and then later I'll tell you everything.
I'm awake before anyone else, on this Saturday morning in Belgium, and I have my laptop here with me downstairs. It's resting on a tower of toilet paper, bought on special deal yesterday. I must take them upstairs but for now ... a useful laptop table.
The Tasmanian arrived last night. Jobe is a lovely bloke who visits periodically, when he's not partying his way through Europe. I've told him, more than a few times, he must put together some kind of book. He's much-loved where ever he goes and the photographs of him hanging out with happy strangers in Poland and London and every place else, make me smile.
It's too cold and the pollution hangs heavy outside otherwise I would be off and wandering this morning. Like I did early one morning, back at Cooks Beach, in New Zealand.
When I lived in New Zealand I used to love getting up with the sun sometimes, wandering a while with my dog and my camera. Last year, those days spent at Cooks Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula, were painfully exquisite.
It was something else to return with eyes hungry for home. I saw ordinary everyday plants like the flax bush or the manuka flower in an entirely different way. It was as if I was celebrating the familiar and elevating it to the point of extraordinary by virtue of not having experienced 'everyday and familiar' for 8 years or more.
I needed longer, more time to soak up the beauty I saw there.
We were buying a Christmas tree on that particular day but guided by some wicked and mysterious impulse, I raced off inside while Gert was watching the tree being loaded onto that trolley, and asked Dieter if I might buy one of his beautiful bouquets. Just flowers this time, I told him.
And this is what he did.
Last year was the first 'real' Christmas I had had in 9 years.
I left New Zealand mid-2003 and experienced my very first northern hemisphere non-Christmas in Istanbul that year. Living in a predominately Muslim country meant that life didn't stop for Christmas. The weather was rubbish. It was winter.
That year I was given the day off to celebrate Christmas because I was considered a 'christian'. And my Turkish boss took me home to her family that evening, generously celebrating Christmas for me and with me. The next year I was teaching English conversation class at the university on the day, then raced off to English friends to experience my first-ever English Christmas (in Turkey).
Then came Belgium and the next few years were spent attempting to get used to the whole Christmas-in-winter thing. But the traditions here have simply moved Christmas so far from my New Zealand origins that I don't experience Christmas as Christmas. It's just this strange holiday that people mess about with over December, beginning on the 6th - that day when Sinterklas comes, leaving gifts for the children who then, more often than not, have to head off to school after present-opening.
This time last year though, I was home in New Zealand and it was magnificent. With a little bit of terrible thrown in too. I was trying to do that final organising of a lifetime's worth of possessions. I needed them to fit into just a few boxes so I could store them before shipping them over to Belgium. I think I arrived at 4 medium-sized plastic containers ... giving the rest of my stuff away or throwing it into the rubbish.
Christmas Day, 2012, in New Zealand was so familiar and delicious however throwing out most of my previous life and trying to pack two 21kg suitcases to fly in the morning ... it was difficult despite being the best Christmas day I had had in a long time.
This year, I seem to have misplaced Christmas. I haven't bought any presents (except for that gift organised for Miss 9, shared between 4 of us. A gift she will love because it is simply marvelous). Nor have I sent any cards. I haven't even managed to organise Christmas Day but perhaps that's because it's not really Christmas Day to me anymore. There is none of the excitement of summer, of cherries and strawberries, of finding a box of new potatoes ... it's just so different.
It will come together on the day, we have children around and I'll make sure it's marvelous for them but I am suspecting that Christmas just is that thing I don't get excited about anymore.
Let's see how it goes. Meanwhile ... my people, last Christmas in the land Downunder.
When I changed my jandals for something more sturdy the plump and middle- aged dog was seized with a puppyish urge. He pounced on a jandal, ran to the lawn with it, tossed it high, pounced again as it landed and shook it to death like a rat. Then he looked at me with both ears cocked and the jandal pinned and I had to smile at his joy. Don't let anyone tell you that beasts don't feel.
Indeed, as I tied my shoe I asked myself when I was last as happy as the dog was now. And the answer was Wednesday.
Joe Bennett, extract from, Happy as a Dog.
This captures something of what my New Zealand life was like sometimes. Although I only fished off the wharf and out of a lake. No fly-fishing. But it was possible to live so much closer to Nature than it is here in Antwerp. And lately I've found myself attempting to weigh up what means more to me ... the proximity of Genova, Paris, and the rest of Europe, or quiet moments spent wandering on an empty beach with my dog.
I loved the morning hours back then ... dog-walking, or dreaming over breakfast coffee taken on the steps of some house I was living in. I lived in so many houses between 1985 and 2004. And all over the South Island of Home. Each place I lived would be added to my list of places colonised by my soul. Mosgiel, Dunedin, Cromwell, Blenheim and Te Anau, before circling back to Dunedin.
I had one dog for most of the years of my first marriage. She and I had so many places we loved. She knew the joy of jandals although we were happiest with stones or sticks, a tennis ball, a lake, river or beach. We needed so little to be joy-filled.
Joe Bennett's article set my soul singing a song of longing this morning. I'm just in from zero celsius and horrific pollution. Miss 9 and I headed out into it at 7.30am, mostly laughing our way across the city. We're both very amusing ... we tell ourselves. We shared Gert's big old woollen gloves. She wore his left glove, I wore the right glove, we held hands with the hands left bare and were warm enough out there in the mist and the frost.
She's wearing the cutest little bear hat these days, with long sides that hang down as pockets for her hands but more effectively, those long bits can be worn as a scarf. I hand it to her some mornings saying, what did the fox say?' It's our signal to begin ... she says, 'It's a bear!!!' but we can't help singing that bloody song. 'Bloody' as explained in this interview with the guys who created it (the language switches to English quite quickly, if you haven't viewed it already).
And here I am, still smiling over the long answerphone message I left for my baby brother over in Perth. It's Kim's birthday today. He's surprisingly old, not the 17 year old I still imagine him to be. There was that surprise of time moving on when I picked up our Nana's ancient birthday book, looking for the year he was born.
I'm nursing a pollution-inspired ache in my head, putting off beginning the work I know I must do. My Genovese friends are in Brussels today and I'm cooking them dinner tonight. The skies have been clear since they landed, this morning's mist is already gone ... 10am. They'll never believe me next time I'm in Genova, when I tell them I'm fleeing the grey grey skies of Antwerp. They just haven't experienced those skies, and I'm torn between glad and compromised. They leave on Monday.
But anyway, today's quest ... I would like a small jandal of joy moment like Joe's, like his dog too. I looked through my this time last year photographs from New Zealand and found this one. It was taken on a beautiful sun-rising morning while out wandering Cook's Beach in the Coromandel.
It seemed I only needed to roar a little and voila, the words came bubbling up afterwards.
I sent the advert text away before rushing out and across the city on the Thursday school pick-up. It's a half-day, like Wednesday. So now I just need to do the bio and locate some photographs of Genova.
But the happy news from today was that Miss 9 and I stopped for lunch at the new New Zealand shop located in the heart of Antwerp. Pies ... Buzz bars, L&P, and etc. We love it.
Miss 9 is a fairly radical vegetarian at the moment and so she chose the vegetarian pie which, to me, seemed like a very big waste of 'pie'. I had the Stoofvlees pie ... a pie filled with the rather divine Flemish beef and beer stew.
L&P was our choice of drink. Miss 9 because she finds it delicious and me because it takes me straight back to those childhood days where it was always summer.
Fortunately, before devouring too much pie, I remembered to stop for a photograph. An imperfect image but I was far more interested in eating it.
Meanwhile, a 4th day of sunshine! The frost is thicker every morning though and -3 celsius in Antwerp today. Still, sunshine ... not to be sneezed at in December, here on the northern end of the world.
I was out with Miss 9 recently. She took this photograph of me after we had worked through exposure and composition while wandering. She trotted off and worked on framing then signing it. She presented it to me to add to my blog. My youngest photography student so far ...
I posted, over on Facebook, that some friends in Genova will no longer believe me when I tell them I go there to escape the grey skies of Belgium. Roberto and Doris flew in from Liguria on Monday, just as a high pressure weather system stalled over us. They have enjoyed deep blue skies these last 3 days ...
We have had our first frosts here but a lot can be lived with if deep blue skies are involved. I mentioned the fact that I had laundry drying on the clothes-line outside ... not completely drying but still, it was out and it was drying some, and she asked if I had photographed my lovely December clothes-line.
The thing is, once I pick up my camera, the difficulty is in putting it down again. So rather than simply photograph sheets and duvet covers drying on my clothes-line outside, I wandered round our little pocket-sized garden. I noticed the honeysuckle has been fooled into flowering again and that the raspberry leaves look rather divine in their autumn state.
And so, a collage ...
In the end I can't resist playing with reflections ... even in Venice.
Or maybe, most especially in Venice.
Or so it seemed, especially when we were lost in Venice.
