These Days ... the Golden Bay Days.

This morning, I woke at 5am … a new normal, possibly inspired by being in bed early. A response, perhaps, due to incredibly early morning starts at my job but there’s also the fact that we’re beginning the long slow journey away from the shortest day. Long nights, that are cold … that inspire me to make my first task of the day breathing life back into the fire that we bank to last through the night.

Below, here are some photographs that give you a sense of this north coast of the South Island, life … in winter.

Another departure from all those other lives I’ve lived, is making a wee loaf of bread before the sun comes up.

A dear friend, called Jeanie, gifted me the simplest of bread recipes. One I will share here for you, if you have a love of white bread … a love that should surely be hidden in these days of sourdough and grain breads :-)

450ml warm water, 1 teaspoon of honey (or sugar) dissolved into the water.

2 teaspoons of yeast (I use Bakels Instant Active Dried Yeast), sprinkled over top of the warm water and honey mix. Do not stir, Leave for 15 minutes until frothy. (mine only goes a little frothy)

450g white (or wholemeal flour - I use organic), 1 tsp salt, mixed into the flour.

After 15 minutes, stir wet mix into dry. Stir for 5 minutes, until mixture starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Grease bread tin and warm it slightly, then pour dough mixture into the tin. Cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise for 30 minutes, or so.

Bake 30 minutes at 180 celsius

It’s ready when it sounds hollow after you tip it out and tap the bottom (this step has never really happened for me but I like the bread I get at 30 minutes.)

I use all organic products, bar the yeast (and it may be anyway) but my body handles digesting this wickedly good bread better than any bread I have eaten.

There’s almost always a pot of porridge, there on the stove top, waiting for my bloke when he wakes up. And the local supermarket keeps me in Italian Lavazza Oro coffee, for the first of my morning espresso.

And most mornings, I end up with 2 dogs, one snoring noisily, there at my feet close to the fire while I read and prepare myself for the day ahead.

It’s not the worst life I’ve lived.

I still have the old-fashioned red armchair I bought, back in those days when I was living with Dad, not long after returning from Italy. It’s mentioned, and photographed, at the end of this very long post about learning to live with Dad’s Dementia.

I have 5 days off from work this week. It’s feels like a dream, and has allowed me to reach this point where I can write a little on my blog.

Each time I have moved countries, moved towns, moved houses, there is that period of readjustment … moving in, finding small routines that make the days easier, while leaving space for impulses. And I enjoy my part-time job but miss dreaming-time.

My photography exhibition, titled A Gasp of Delight, closes at the Dangerous Kitchen Cafe, this weekend. It has felt so good to quietly step back into my photography - a passion largely put aside after I returned to New Zealand, while navigating the lives of so many, unable to find the peace of mind, and sense of playfulness, good photography requires.

The exhibition has done well, both in a sales sense but also in some kind of unfurling of self. Let’s see where that takes me this time round.

But enough. I’ll end with a small Ciao, from down here, in The Bay.

An Art Project ... by Kylie Sinkovich and I, Nelson, New Zealand

Kylie Sinkovich and I worked on this art project together.

We’re rapt with how it all worked out.

You can view it online, here at Containment/Uncontained Bollard Exhibition.

Here’s how it looks, in Nelson, New Zealand.

A Memory, from Beloved Genovese Life ...

Some mornings, here in Italy, it feels like I am living in an enormous mansion … that my apartment is merely one of the many rooms located in that solid mass of building that is my Genovese home.

I doze for a while, in the mornings, windows open/shutters closed, waking again and again ... to the sound of voices passing by, down in the narrow medieval alleyway. I am woken by conversations, by greetings shouted …by bursts of laughter, dogs barking, children calling. Metal roller doors being rolled up, as if thrown by a giant hand intent on making the most noise possible.

I imagine the people who belong to the voices. Italians, living their routine, stopping for coffee … friends who meet everyday, on their way.

The progress of my days are measured by the rise and fall of the noise, down there on Via Ravecca … coffee cups clattering, saucers rattling, cutlery clinking ... then a slow easing into the quiet of mid-afternoon, before a crescendo that becomes a solid hum, as those same morning friends settle into aperitivo after work.

I make up stories, at my desk in the Italian kitchen … stories of lives long lived in one place. Of generations.

I am quietly envious.

I feel like an orphan.

Sometimes, I am startled awake by a wild and angry voice in the early hours of a morning, or a suitcase rolling over the massive paving stones.

Suddenly the cafe's metal security door is rolled up, 6am … clattering and rattling directly below my bedroom.

One lunch time, I watched an old man lean out from his window across the alley, to shake his tablecloth clean of crumbs. We smiled at one another

Sitting here, writing and editing photographs … I hear a small 3-wheeled truck manuvoring its way along the narrow caruggi. Scooters zip through. People are passing by constantly. University students, carrying their heavy porfolios, businessmen in blue suits, the old men and women, the shoppers, the mothers with their babies.

I leave my windows open, pretending I am a part of this beautiful living tapestry.

The conversations … I have learned 'va bene' via that open window. And I practice my 'ciao' by repeating it whenever I hear it.

So often.

What do I love about Genova?

What has pulled me back here, since 2008 …?

What fuels the passion I feel for this little-known, often over-looked Italian city?

I love the secretive alleyways, known as caruggi by the Genovese.

I love the hills that surround the city. And the Ligurian Sea that caresses its feet.

The colourful buildings. It is a city that glows apricot, pale yellow, terrocotta, green or blue metal shutter. The ruined buildings still inhabited, and not as ruined as they first seem, to my New Zealand eyes ….... eyes unaccustomed to ancient.

And then there's the Genovese light.

It transforms the ordinary, the ugy, the beautiful too.

It transforms everything it touches.

One evening, I glanced up and saw the wall across the alley changed. The ordinary, slightly dull yellow surface, was singing gold in the evening light.

Perhaps it is this promise of transformation. Both of the city, as the light moves across it, and of me …

When I am there, I walk often, drinking in the light and sights via my camera.

I lose weight, I grow strong.

Somehow, this Genovese life strips everything away, and leaves me reliant on my senses … and my camera, translating all I see, all that makes me curious, into images.

The centro storico, the old city, comes alive, like a creature … a 2,000 year old creature,who has a heartbeat and a soul. She allows me to walk her streets with impunity.

Camera in hand, I feel like a child of hers … I feel safe.

Zena, an ancient name she also wears with pride. She is a shapeshifting city. A living breathing city. She has a pulse. She whispers to me, every single day I am there.

Sometimes, I feel the weight of centuries pressing down on me. It is a simple thing to feel ghosts walking with me, around me, caught in other times perhaps or, more simply, still present, just slightly out of focus.

But most of all, there is this comforting feeling that things have been like this forever … that the streets carry the imprints, visible or not, of the millions of feet that have walked here.

Tracks have been worn, habits and customs formed, and generations born here … since forever.

A Year On ...

It has been a year, more or less, since we moved north … to a more temperate climate, one that sees us picking lemons, figs, feijoa, oranges, blueberries and all kinds of vegetables too, in their seasons.

It has been a year of silence from me. I was discombobulated by the way social media was being harvested for information, saddened by the polarisation being pushed down here in New Zealand, on the back foot about how to go forward and so, I silenced myself.

Perhaps this is the beginning of me finding my voice again.

Who knows, I thought I was beginning to speak again, back in January.

I have watched as friends round the world, have struggled then, oftentimes, fallen silent too. The old Chinese curse could be applied perhaps … May you live in interesting times.

Perhaps we need an instruction book on how to live through interesting times.

Live till you die was the best I could come up with.

Live every moment you can manage … deeply and richly, taking pleasure in the ordinary, in Nature, in the smallest of things … if you can.

I have learned a few new skills. Had some old and tired teeth removed by a dentist who I talk of in hushed tones of reverence. When it became clear that my teeth needed work, I simply wanted to fly back to Belgium, to my beloved Antwerp-based dentist called Marleen. But it’s a bit far, and Marleen might not even be practicing now. And I thought about flying further north, down here in New Zealand, to an incredible dentist I met upon my return however, I should have known … the universe delivered me to the most remarkable dentist’s door, after a long and miserable year in the land of denial.

When I go to her now, I bounce in the door, like one of those enthusiastic labrador puppies, overjoyed to see her again, despite her job. But she is a bit of a special being, living a life that seems straight out of the most luscious novel, one that makes use of magical realism.

She, unlike me, is extremely grounded but her life …

Summer is on its way now, after an interesting, and very wet, winter and spring. We were all feeling the greyness, and the relief of spring’s arrival is being well-celebrated, in this place where they drum by the light of the full moon every month, and hold events like the recent Abundance Festival.

I missed Genova for a long time but finally, my mind caught up with the actuality of my body being back home, and I don’t imagine leaving New Zealand again. I was always a woman in love with the beaches, mountains and forests of home. It’s good to be back, in a place where I live between both.

And there is a hill, between the rest of NZ and here, and when you drive down from the top, the view reminds me of how it was to land at an airport. More than that, The Hill acts like an old city gate, back in Europe. I will never forget how it felt to be enclosed by that beautiful old Genovese city wall, built to repel Emperor Barbarossa … it made me feel safe. I loved walking home, through Porta Soprana, back in those days when Genova was Home.

These days, there are two dogs, and a lovely man, in my life.

A wee rental cottage, with a view that makes it simple to appreciate the ordinary everyday life that I’m living.

Snow Patrol remains a major love.

Sometimes, in the evenings, I make attempts at devouring good books but I fall asleep, so much more easily than ever before.

It is a smaller life but I love it, so much.