Guitar Girl

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.

A Sad Goodbye to Marleen.

We attended a funeral today.  A good friend of Gert's died on Christmas morning.  She was his friend, a much-respected colleague and, because of their friendship, she became a woman I appreciated and respected intensely.

You see, she performed our wedding ceremony in District Huis.  After a service in Dutch, she gifted us a poem about love, read aloud in English.  I think I quietly adored her from that moment on.

Marleen De Backer was Flemish.   A politician, a school teacher, and a woman who worked tirelessly at the highest level, for the community of Deurne, over decades.  I can't even begin to list things she achieved because I don't know a half of them.  I do know the flower baskets in the streets here are hers.  And I saw how politicians from all sides respected her. 

And when I heard the bagpipes warming, up on our way to the church, I was  a puddle of tears partially because of my memories of the bagpipes back home in New Zealand but mostly because I had heard they wanted to honor her because of her work for them.

This morning the church was full of people from diverse backgrounds.  She was a woman respected and loved by so many. She was still young and surely had so much more to give.  Sitting there in that full church I understood something of how much she had managed to achieve and how many lives she had truly touched.

She will be sorely missed and I'm sure there will be a space left in that place she used to fill with her own particular grace, intelligence, and charm ... for a very long time to come.

Note: I'm going to turn off the comments because I don't think there are any words.  I was there on the edge of her life and while I respected her, I never stepped up beside her.  I wanted to share her.  Just her. 

Midnight in Antwerp, on New Year's Eve

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.

The best of portrait photography is surely the beautiful souls you meet along the way.  This man was truly delightful.

A Little Bit of Happy

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.

Just Her and Her Guitar ...

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!

 

Remember The Old Brown Jacket ...

I shouldn't have worn that beloved old brown jacket for the tv interview.

I wanted to feel as relaxed as possible.  I wanted to feel like me. 

Let's just say, lesson learned.

Gert and I wandered off to Holland a few days before Christmas.  There's an outlet village, full of end-of-line fashion clothing and etc.  Useful when it comes to buying 400euro worth of new jacket (2 very different styles) and preferring to pay just 70euro in total. Two because how do you choose between that funky little fushia pink number and the more classic grey one.

So they're classic and kind of funky.  I should be okay for a while now.

The old brown jacket still hangs in the hall but I shall be more prudent in future.

A Glimpse of Christmas Here ...

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 ...

 

 

The People's Wine, Pinot Noir, New Zealand

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 ...

Saturday Morning

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.

Manuka Flower, 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.