Watch as Lee Lin Chin and Lambassador Sam Kekovich embark on 'Operation Boomerang' - their mission to save Australians abroad from going without the essential lamb barbecue on Australia Day. Operation Boomerang is the brainchild of commander Lee Lin Chin.
Don't You Love It When ...
Don't you love it when your bowl of pasta arrives and it looks too small to fill you, then you begin to feel warm and satisfied, and realise ... the bowl is still 2/3's full!
Don't you love it when you stop to listen to a really good musician and you discover his name is Scott McMahon, he's Scottish, and you talk awhile. And he tells you the most marvelous story ever ... in his (something like) Billy Connelly accent, confusing you a little because he's serious and the story is true. He let's you photograph him as he sings. You buy his cd.
And don't you love it when you order a small glass of the house red wine and discover it's quite a full glass, and that the wine is good.
Don't you love it when you find a million bookshops, secondhand too, just as you decide that the directions you so laboriously noted down, are too difficult to follow.
... when you find the perfect book for Miss 11. So good that you begin reading it as you eat your pasta at the lovely restaurant that, while out of your price range really, is a great place to cheer yourself up on a grey and rainy autumn day in London. And knowing, simply knowing, that you and Miss 11 have many many hours of skype reading pleasure ahead ... 500+ pages, no less.
Note: she talked me into reading her 3 chapters last night. I couldn't resist.
Don't you love it when you work out how to reach the place you'd like to head to for those weekly meetings with New Zealanders. Although, in the end, that knowledge is for future reference, on a day when you haven't walked your feet into a constant throbbing ache like you just did now, here in the unfamiliar heart of London town.
Don't you love it when you manage to navigate the London Underground, weaving in and out and all over the place, alone.
... and when you find the National Portrait Gallery near Trafalgar Square, realise it's free, and walk the last of your feet off, exploring exquisite portraits of old heroes and heroines, and people you'd never heard of.
And the deep pleasure in realising you can afford that bottle of water in the Gallery restaurant, after discovering a thirst that makes you feel you have just spent 2 days walking in a desert.
Don't you love it, really love it, when you realise you are free to take photographs in the National Gallery.
And there was that other golden moment too, when I understood that no one would miss me at the Ngati Ranana meeting, and so I found a train heading my way and got a seat, despite it being rush hour.
Don't you love it, when everything is new and kind of scary sometimes, but you end up finding Sublime out here in this city where you never imagined you might live.
And arriving 'home', to a warm house, where your truly kind host has cooked up a big feed for dinner, with dessert. It's warm there and the company is good.
Don't you love it when you realise, sometimes, that day ... it was good one.
The images ... Scott McMahon, and the London Eye.
Beautiful Things Found In These Days Of Searching For My Voice ... (it's coming)
A friend shared this article with me ... Why Some People Are Interesting And Engaging Storytellers.
And this, The Wanderlust Gene and Why Some People Are Born To Travel.
I watched Pane e Tulipa ... again, last night. I love that Italian movie.
I thought this was interesting, How One Woman's Body Was Photoshopped To Meet 18 Different 'Ideal' Beauty Standards.
This may have made me giggle a little, as I shared it on Facebook.
My beautiful friend, Lisa Chiodo, shared some of her Italy. I cannot recommend staying with her and Sam enough. They are truly wonderful people living in Italy and opening their home to the world.
Moana Maniapoto wrote of the traditional Maori funeral here, and I loved how she captured it - Tangihanga - a dying tradition.
And this - Karanga Ra. Sometimes I just play it up loud because somehow it takes me home.
It's there on my playlist, between Tim Finn's, Parihaka - a song about the non-violent action preached and practiced by Māori prophets Te Whiti and Tohu at Parihaka in Taranaki forms one of the most compelling episodes in NZ’s 19th century history, as they resisted Pākehā confiscation of their land and home. Tim Finn was inspired to write this paean to the pair, after reading Dick Scott’s influential book Ask That Mountain. Band Herbs provide the accompaniment. Fane Flaws and cinematographer Alun Bollinger’s video was shot over a night at Auckland Art Gallery and takes Colin McCahon’s striking Parihaka triptych as its centrepiece.
And Little Bushman singing Peaceful Man. Performed with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, it's the story of the peaceful Maori resistance leader, Te Whiti o Rongomai.
And then there was the poem! Written by my exquisite friend butI need permission to share. I'll get back to you. It's all about those days after my first divorce, when she was my soulmate and confidant. There were beaches and long conversations, red wine and laughter. And so much kindness.
But that poem about those days ... I'll ask her.
Giovanni Tiso Writes ... and David Whyte too.
Giovanni Tiso wrote a beautiful piece about childhood homes and memories ... To visit now, if only electronically, to see that light again and the shallow sky, is to relieve the migrant’s grief for places and a life left behind.
I know these feelings he writes of, so well ...I cannot say that I miss this place, in the sense that there is no place for me there. Not in my grandparents’ house, that was sold over twenty years ago; not in the village, where I couldn’t build a life if I wanted to. I have a fondness for it that is reserved to distant things and for the past. I miss the people in it, but especially those who are no longer there. I miss my childhood, or maybe more precisely the idea of it: those interminable summer days and weeks, all identical to one another yet always charged with the remote possibility of adventure. I do not subscribe to the current fashion for romanticising boredom, but I wouldn’t trade that sameness, my few friends, our games for excitement and travel.
And David Whyte wrote this beautiful poem:
THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny close
grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels
of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun had made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
'The House of Belonging'
From The House of Belonging
Poems by David Whyte
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
The Story of 3 Birds That Rescued Themselves ...
My favourite cafe was closed the other day and I ended up at a nearby restaurant, hoping the espresso would be drinkable, knowing I didn't want to wander too much further in my search for good coffee.
Sitting there I noticed a rooster totally owning the small garden beyond the hedge in the grounds of the restaurant. It amused me. This was centre-city Antwerp.
A few minutes later I watched him visit with the pigeon you see in the series of photographs. And honestly, they seemed to be greeting each other.
I asked Vitaliy, the waiter, about them when he returned with a second, spresso and he told me the loveliest story.
The restaurant is called De Markt and the Bird Market is held weekly in the square nearby. Christoph the Rooster arrived first, after escaping the market, and set up home in the garden. They named him after the manager I was told.
Then Micheal the Pigeon arrived and he stayed too. He's named after the restaurant's Italian chef. Vitaliy told me, smiling a little, that Christoph the Rooster often 'shouts at' Micheal the Pigeon ...
And finally, I think that third bird is a Crow. He's quite motley but he moved in too and I love that. How did those birds know they could set up home in the garden of a restaurant in the city of Antwerp.
And they've stayed
I loved the story. I'll go back soon, I'll take Miss 11 with me. She's visiting this week. We have plans.
Microguagua - street power Reggae!
These guys.
I was in awe of the high-energy, joy-filled street performance of the Reggae band called Microguagua.
I bought one of their cds because I wanted their music back in Belgium.
They're brilliant. Seeing them perform live made me smile. Perhaps I caught a sense of them here but honestly, their music makes you smile.
I found them out in Via San Lorenzo, in Genova. I had to stop for some photographs.