Sydneyburger, Gothensider.

Dr. Absent, I presume?

This won’t shock anyone, but this winter’s been colder than a witches proverbial, and as dark as wearing black velvet sunglasses under a lead-lined quilt during the moonless winter equinox on Pluto. But it’s almost spring now, thank Frigg.

It was -15º and the annual day-care Luciafirandet was outside.
Not happy, Jan.

Christmas has come and gone, Cheblet has turned 4 and Poskis 2 – as shocking and wonderful events as they should be, and recorded for posterity in my brain and heart – not the video camera. But there are a coupla snaps.

Chebs plans her future orthodontics.

Chebs is in the midst of a massive pink, glitter and princess phase – just last night she exclaimed how beautiful she thought the 70s (or early 80s?) Elton John on an old episode of The Muppets we were watching was. All his glittery-glasses-framed, purple-lensed, ostrich-feathered, sequined self. For all Elton’s later horrendous dross, I have to admit that Benny and the Jets, Crocodile Rock and their ilk are good tunes.

Posks is also currently following classic gender lines (like Chebs, not Elton) by being obsessed with anything with a motor. Though neither is he averse to a bit of nagellack (nail polish) on his tootsies, and he has a go wearing Cheblet’s glittery frocks when the mood takes him. His single word exclamations (Gruck!) are now morphing into standard phrases and the occasional improvised sentence, which are extra cute to hear since he speaks in toddler fugue, essentially:

“Nanna’s beanie. Nanna’s beanie there. Nanna forgot beanie. Nanna forgot beanie there.”

Poska Kahlo

Random Swedish thing: something which I’ve noticed about old-fashioned Swedish which fell out of use during the 60s (which I think I’ve understood – feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). Demarcation of social hierarchy via language led to a weird avoidance mechanism when referring to someone you were talking to. Just as French uses tu or vous to indicate formalised or actual social hierarchy, up until the first half of the 20th c, Swedish speakers would not use Du casually to people who they didn’t know well, or who were of higher social standing than them, using the more formal Ni instead. But when this distinction started to break down, people avoided both Du (you) and Ni (thou) so as not to insult anyone, or give anyone airs about their position in the pecking order.

One would select from a range of standard avoidance expressions:

Ska has kaffe? Would you like some coffee? Lit. Is coffee to be had?

or slightly less convoluted:

Ska doktorn ha kaffe? Would the Doctor like coffee? (when speaking directly to the Doctor herself)

Weird.

Cheblet thinks it’s weird too.

Swedish words of the month

analfabetism adj., illiteracy. Literally the same meaning as English, but Swedish uses Greek and English uses Latin to make up the word. Funny.

alfabetisering n., literacy program, or as I like to think of it “alphabetification”

fröken n., Miss (as in not Mrs. or Ms.) The non-PC (or peh-kå = p.k. = politiskt korrekt) thing to call a pre-school teacher. They prefer pedagog (pedagogue) – although every single kid and every parent calls them fröken. Understandable definitely – but some male pre-school teachers prefer being called fröken – “Hej, jag är Fröken Mats.” Trés deconstructive. Male nurses are also known for calling eachother syster/sister – a.k.a. “Murse”.

dagis n. (slang), again, non-PC. Förskola or pre-school is preferred to dagis/day-care. Again understandable, but it reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld when Jerry pays out podiatrists for not being real doctors.

Cheblet

Å, det gör jag, Yes, I do
Jag vill också ha! I want one too!
Jag vill ha det nu! I want it now!
Busis, stolis, matis, pruttis, Nearly everything gets an -is on it these days. Translates as “cheek-o, chair-o, food-o, fart-o”
pruttkalas, fart party. She must have heard one of the frökens say that at dagis

Poskis

blemming n., välling (gruel – not as Oliver Twist as it sounds. It’s a standard kids drink here – kind of like thin porridge)
melling n., välling (later in the week)
Makna! (Vakna!) v., Wake up! (when I’m pretending to be asleep)
gruck n., truck
Ehmee n., Emil (from Lönneberga – a classic Swedish kids book and film)
tuff tuff (onomatapœia), choo-choo
trän trakth, train tracks

10:49 pm – 3°C. This ship of a house is creaking and huffing as it’s sleeting a 12 metres per second gale outside – and I have to get up at 5 am. The obvious response? Write something about Sydney and some of the parts of it I miss, accompanied by some great musicians.  Just so you don’t get the wrong idea with my pro-England post.

Let me count the ways…

Bondi’s cracked pavement, the beach-sand grey with cigarette ash, sloughed coconut oil and limerence (I just learnt that word, obviously.) Dry, eroded nature strips, local friendly faces popping out from amongst the slightly more rapidly transient throng. Packed 380 buses, always tense with expectation: for The Up-hillers, work or study; for The Down-hillers, hoping coastward, willing the sunlight to linger longer so they can get in one of the last few after-work baptisms of the Autumn. Trotting home, throwing everything on the floor, grabbing still wet togs and tip-toeing barefoot between glass-shards and bone-dry dog turds down to the aqua perfection of everything.

The prow-like end of Brighton Boulevard at Ben Buckler, watching as long rope-like cloud fronts boil over the water in the grey-green pre-Southerly light.

Back-street walks into the womb of Boondi: Forest Knoll, (no idea why they called it a knoll – surely it’s a dale) then traversing up switchbacks to the summit. Crumbling, mouldy-walled, maroon-bricked Art Deco apartment blocks with astounding multi-coloured tiling and warped windows. The general awesome Art Deco-ness of Sydney: red-purple bricks, mirrors, coloured glass, geometric decorative carpentry, black and white tile mosaics.

Say what you like about Bondi – she may be a princess, but she’s a jaded princess – made up of rust, loose-bricks, flaking plaster and rotten frangipani blossoms, all easily coaxed out from underneath the tourist patina. Go on a rainy day.

Harbour water has a weird brackish smell – rusted ferries pump out bulbous, freakishly smooth humps of it as they downshift gruntingly into their berths at the Quay: the Narrabeen, the Freshwater, the Collaroy, the Queenscliff.

Sitting at night on the roof of the Jetcat from Manly as a silent hundred-thousand-voiced choral soundtrack of lights bursts in all its cyberpunkified glory from behind Ashton Park – after an apparent eternity of prehistoric thrumming darkness of Middle Head. An extreme contrast, inconceivably wonderful in the middle of a city.

The ever-changing Monet-requiring view from the flat on the 16th floor of Elizabeth Bay Gardens – out over a thousand bustling fishbowl apartments, Point Piper, Fort Denison and all the way out to the heads.

The cool chasms of north of Town Hall, where it’s always twilight. Cadmium-yellow afternoons reflecting off the mosaic on the pool wall at the North End at Bondi. Weather which allows for open-air sunset cinema in Centennial Park. The dusty haze of a punishing summer over the endless ‘burbs.

Dusty vegetative pungency in Hyde Park of a summer’s night; unseen fruit-bat wings creaking past. An occasional faint whiff of poppers on Oxford Street. The smell of rope, wood and sheep leather in The Rocks; the stale sooty smell of the bowels of the city at Town Hall station as the silver trains push stagnant, pre-breathed air up the tunnels.

The painstakingly hand-written stickers on the albums at Red Eye Records; the plethora of unbought vinyl gems at Good Groove; the multitude of longed-for band T-shirts hanging on the wall behind the counter at Waterfront. Triple frikkin J. Club 77. Phantom. Gould’s in Newtown, Kinokuniya, Gleebooks, Kings Comics, Adyar, Galaxy. Sydney University’s Fisher Library stack, an unrelenting obsidian monolith amongst a flurry of unoriginal Gothic Revival – its particular chemically paper smell. So many not-at-all wasted days in it’s cool cloisters, poring over many a tome of forgotten lore.

The veritable cornucopia of south east Asian dishes: Laksa! Kim chee! Pho! Mie goreng! Wonton soup! Marinated lotus root! Steamed Pork Buns!

Fish and chips in paper, sausage rolls, pies and pasties. Properly ripe fruit! Mangos, watermelon, passionfruit… oh God – mixed fresh squeezed fruit juice! I’d give my right arm for one of those. Lamingtons, Custard Tarts, Vanilla Slices, Kitchener Buns, Tim Tams, Iced Vo-Vos, Barbecue Shapes.

VEGE-god damned mother-lovin’-MITE.

The comfy cushions, excellent by-gone film selection and veggie buffet of Govinda’s. Drunken 1am pie & peas at Harry’s Café de Wheels to calm the waves created by a flotilla of Three Sheets or Sharer’s Lager. The Australian, The Lord Nelson, The Old Fitz, The Royal.

The youth. The dreams. The self-created illusion that one’s on the edge of something – that there is a centre somewhere out there beyond the Heads that one can reach.

The past. The river run. Tears in rain, to quote a replicant. A quarter of this stuff probably doesn’t even exist anymore.

Don’t take it for granted. Cities have souls. Sydney’s is a great, dark, beautiful, gentle Leviathan beneath its affected smugness, and it sings to me of songs I know – songs of innocence – unlike this forest outpost whose forests hum and mutter in Old Norse.

Discover it again, and don’t give up until you’ve wrested a gem or two from its Horn of Plenty.

I miss England.

(Self-analysis alert!)

It surprises me that I do, as I only lived there for three years, but I miss it all the same. I should be specific and say I miss the south west toffee-nosed Chiltern England “of outstanding natural beauty”, since I’ve not been further north than Luton except for a train ride up through England to Inverness; and Scottish hiking trips don’t count as England unless I’m asking for a Glasgow Kiss or five.

What I miss are things like Sunday pub lunches across the road at The Row Barge…in fact in this draughtless wasteland I miss English pubs in general and all their associated trappings, including bitter (yes, I like it) and Yorkshire puddings. I also miss thirsty rambles on country lanes ending at pearls like The Stag and Huntsman; bike rides through bluebell-carpeted beech forests; acid wit; the telly; Jaffa Cakes; politeness (when you get it); the fact that they call lunch “dinner” and dinner “supper”…the list goes on.

Looking for chantarelles in Hambleden 2005.

Of course, there’s down sides – London being one of them (though of course it too has unbelievable gems), the booze-fueled violence (can’t have all the pubs without that), the expense, the traffic, the moaners, British Telecom, and the fact that almost every meal in every pub comes with chips. And I love chips. The weather does not appear on this list since I live in Gothenburg. It’s raininer here than it ever was in Blighty.

The rain in Sweden falls mainly on me.

I realise in writing this that fondness for England is one of those tender areas which excites the vitriol gland – like politics, religion and Macs vs PCs – in some Australians, including ex-pat Englishmen living in Australia. They can’t understand why I’d miss it when I have Australia to miss. Of course I miss Australia, that goes without saying. One does not utter the things which hurt the most.

Patriotism, though, is difficult for me to understand. Every country has its pros and cons, surely. I wonder if Brazilians think it’s un-Brazilian to be fond of Portugal. When stated like that it seems faintly ridiculous.

I have of course had the unbelievable fortune to be able to become blasé about my home country since I’ve never been forced to earn it – had to choose whether to sign up to fight and potentially die for it, or work to build it from the ground up, or to flee there from another war-torn or impoverished country and then fight to gain citizenship. I’m not naive enough to deny that there are reasons for people to love their country as much as any family member. It just that I never had them. All ties in life are built by long-term, repeated collective experiences.

Perhaps I should explain my history. My roots are shallow and widespread. I was born in the USA to ex-pat Australian parents who had already been living Stateside for around ten years, and who to my eternal chagrin managed to miss all the counter-culture awesomeness that was going on in that decade. It wasn’t really their bag – Dad was completing a Doctorate in Theology – ‘nuff said. At least he had sideburns. But not even one Janis Joplin or Dylan concert? Come on! But nor was Dad drafted to serve as padre on a tour of Vietnam either, so I can’t complain.

The year after I was born (‘74) they moved back to Australia – to Sydney, a city which neither of them grew up in; Dad is from Adelaide and Mum is from Melbourne, both from mostly southern English roots (with a smattering of Italian, Irish and Scottish in there for sanity – or lunacy, depending on your denomination).

I subsequently grew up with a great deal of American influence, even at a time when Australia had yet to fully ease out of the grip of its Englishness and embrace the Stars and Stripes with the gusto it did during the 80s and 90s. Mum’s cooking had been influenced by the US, so dinners included lush things like clam chowder, Boston baked beans ‘n’ franks, knox blocks, and so on (ahh, the memories).

American friends came to visit us from time to time, and I considered America to undoubtedly be where I wanted to live “when I grew up” (I had double-citizenship by virtue of birth) measuring it’s greatness by the TV shows, toys, lollies and breakfast cereals it produced (yes, I’m still shallow). Any country that had hot rods and hot pants like those in The Dukes of Hazzard just had to be paradise – weeeeehooooo! Hey, I was 10. However in Sydney I stayed, moving house around the suburbs a fair bit throughout my childhood and young adulthood (14 times in 27 years, give or take) until chance and love took me to Sweden via England.

So patriotism is void for one of my post-colonial, middle-class suburbanite, shallow-rooted, ex-patriate ilk. Many Aussies would half-jokingly deride me for not being a “proper” Australian, whatever that is. But they may be right. I undoubtedly feel a strong connection to fond memories of fun times with friends and family which happened to occur in a localized geographic area. And I definitely feel a deep connection to the landscape of Sydney itself, since I’ve tramped over a fair swathe of it.

This makes it painful in some ways to return to Australia, as only 25% of the precious time is spent in Sydney – which I still think of as “my home town” – since my family have all split to Melbourne, Brisbane and the Central Coast. We fly and drive around and spend time with all we can, but it’s the people, not the places which are important then. We may as well be meeting eachother in Barcelona or Milton Keynes for all the connection I feel to Brissie or Melbourne.

Quite simply, you can’t go home again.

So then why do I miss England? Maybe it was the last place that felt like home. Maybe it’s the common cultural ground. Maybe there’s something deeper – something in the blood handed down from great-great-great grandparents that went on the lam from Gravesend to Port Adelaide to look for browner pastures, as Benjamin Morey and his family did in 1849. That sense of place, that feeling of a real bond to the soil and the landscape created by generations of treading and working the same bit of sod…which every half-assed propagandist has spouted since the Crusades so I’ll nip that line of thought in the bud, lest I rhetoricise meself into a hole.

A bucolic frolic.

More likely I have – like many of my cathode-weaned generation – created a mythology for myself with some fictional kind of aethereal bond; subconsciously formed by virtue of a steady diet of Paddington Bear, The Magic Roundabout, Captain Pugwash, C.S.Lewis, Roald Dahl, The Wombles, The Goodies, J.R.R.Tolkien, Monty Python, The Two Ronnies, Blackadder, private schooling emulating the English public school model as hard as it bloody could, and a penchant for T.S. Eliot and William Blake. Or maybe there was just something in my blood that wanted to taste a Cornish pastie again. Lord knows.

Giss’ a butchers at your old school white trilby, guv?

But in any case, God Save Attenborough, Fry, Pegg, Brand, Ross, Mozza, Bragg, McVities, Twinings, Fuller’s, Brakspear, and yes, God even save the frikking London Underground. I miss you too.

Mind the crap. Toodle pip.