parismarisamadonna

Strong – London Grammar 2013

You may think that strength is physical. 

I know plenty of people who spend hours and days and weeks in sweaty rooms lifting moulded doughnuts of iron, pushing against their own weight or running on the spot in a measured effort to better define the slabs of muscle that surround their nipples or their groin. Effort that renders their physique that much more appealing to the human eye. Effort that is by no means wasted. Tom Hiddleston recently released a video on YouTube demonstrating just how much the fine-tuning of the human form can transform a woman from sentient being to quivering jelly of oestrogen-infused energy. I’m all for the pursuit of physical strength, I only wish I could master the talent myself.

Instead, my strength is mental.

I’m not very clever when it comes to physical acts of force; caber-tossing, karate-chopping cinder blocks and such…when a perfectly finished manicure is at risk, I prefer oenological feats. Walking in a straight line without clashing against a wall, a doorjamb or another person has oft proved to be a challenge beyond the bounds of my ambulant skills. All of which could be due, in part, to the oenological athleticism.

But when required to withstand the onslaught of abuse inherent in any family, in any professional setting or as of late, while engaged in the search for gainful employment, I stand up better than most. I’ve got all the fancy words, the witty turns of phrase and the litany of filthy words to hold my own…and then some.

Granted, I don’t do it alone.

Spending one’s days fruitlessly is tiring. Spending one’s days fruitlessly without the comforts of home is just plain exhausting.

For two weeks now, I’ve been forcibly relocated from chez moi; the little red box on the hill in Montmartre is undergoing much-needed repairs. The walls have been falling away from their struts for four years when the pipes from up above exploded under the weight of a hundred years of Parisian showers and Parisian sewerage and lord knows what else.

Not willing to spend the days alienated from my professional life in a garret leaning across the darker side of La Butte, I took the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge and escape to the welcome embrace of my French family in the South. I’ve written several times before of the blonde brood that occupy the Little House on the Prairie in the South; The Blondes of Salies de Bearn.

Ciboure. Birthplace of Ravel and an impressive thunderstorm.

 

Papa and Maman are my French parents. I met them when I was 16 years old fresh off a plane from Sydney. They tell me that I was a bit of a monster at the time; all adolescent expertise and unruly mouth, unwilling to listen to anyone or heed the warnings of those with more life experience than I. In the 20 years since, not much has changed, but they assure me that I’m a little more tolerant of their interjections. I’d argue that they’ve just become a little more tolerant of me, of my outbursts, of my inherent aggression and my obsessive need to be right…all the time. Which I usually am.

They are doted with three children; Michelangelo, an elder son crowned with his trademark cherubic blond curls, Raphael, a middle son branded with all the drama intrinsic to any middle child and Leonarda, an ultimate daughter, doctor of chemistry and the without question, the brains of the whole outfit. ^ 

Unlike their Parisian parents, the children grew up among the cornfields of the Pyrenees-Atlantiques; a trapezium of yellow and green hugged to the south by the snow-capped heights of the Pyrenees, to the North by the duck-farm expanses of Les Landes, to the west by the fruited vines that produce the finest yellow wine in the world, Jurançon, and to the right by the only thing in France that reminds me of Australia. The Atlantic coast on either side of Biarritz; surf beaches, wetsuited surfers, the European headquarters of Rip Curl, Billabong, Quiksilver and if you are very lucky, fish and chips.

The brash, young Australian of the early nineties has given way to the mouthy, aging Parisienne of the teenies. While I was once horrified by the sleepy village that afforded little amusement for a suburban teenager, today I am enamoured with the rolling green fields of harvested corn that offer welcome respite from the dense grey fudge that is Paris in the wintertime.

The Horse Butcher at Salies Market..no, I didn't.

 

More to the point, in the South-West of France, one eats like a king. I don’t know about you, but for me, the ennui of modern life is much assuaged with a tonic of fermented grapes and force-fed poultry.

It isn’t for nothing that Yves Camdeborde, originally from Pau, is recognised among the best Chefs in France…and a judge on French Masterchef. Chefs from this part of the world use the local Piment d’Espelette instead of pepper. The little red peppers, the fattened duck and the salted ham are certainly the reason that there are more than twenty Michelin starred restaurants within the 64*. This tiny corner of France is famous for duck in all its forms, for Foie Gras, for Poulet Basquaise, for Jambon de Bayonne, for some of the best seafood beyond Brittany…and it is also the home of the beret and the espadrille. Such a small pocket of countryside has given the un-Gallic world so much of what France is renowned for, it’s no surprise that the Atlantic Coast is among the most visited regions of France.

A few days in the country was exactly the prescription to alleviate the stress of being homeless, the waiting game of a job search and the abject solitude of being the only person I know who has nothing to do during standard working hours.

Fortified with duck fat, the blood-red perfume of Madiron, the syrupy sugar of Jurançon and the spark from the red peppers of Espelette, I am now strong enough, like a bird of prey, to return to the North, cross the channel and conquer all that awaits me.

There’s also a bit of a crush on the horizon, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer for any news about that. I’ve waited twenty years…I’m now strong enough to wait twenty more.

So can you.

 

 

The house the Spanish Infanta resided in as she awaited her marriage to Louis XIV.

St Jean de Luz.

 

 

 

^All references to teenagers and mutants are entirely intentional

*The department number for the Pyrenees-Atlantiques

I’m Gonna Be (500 miles) – The Proclaimers 1988

Family. 

We are born of two parents, if we are lucky, we have a sibling or two, even luckier, we have a crowd of cousins and aunts and grandparents and uncles who surround us with affection and support and unconditional love, guiding us safely along the road from infancy, through our turbulent adolescence and into the void of uncertainty and self-doubt that characterises adulthood. 

If we are truly blessed, we manage to enlarge this circle of trust with a few friends and lovers, who will, each in their own way, help to build a wall of security around the individual, creating a fortress of understanding, shared history and someone you can shag that doesn’t share your DNA. Most people achieve this by getting married or something equivalent; creating their own family unit to replace the one they were born into… Simba and Mustafa knew it; it’s the circle of life. Aie-chum-mum-maah!

View from Cargese

 

Opting to take the road less travelled by, and stubbornly unwilling to settle into anything like comfort or security, I’ve ripened and grown these past years without the proximity of my biological unit. Mine, depleted by the loss of a parent, adored grandparent and the very real geographical chasm between Sydney and Paris, is insufficient to stabilise the increasing insanity of a middle-aged woman riddled with insecurity and anxiety. I have replaced my immediate need with friends, all of who are lovely and exquisite in their own way, but none of who have known me longer than the half a decade I’ve lived on this side of the equator.

But I count my blessings.

I have another family.

Some hill I walked up..

 

Papa and Maman, and their three children, took me into their home when I was a brash, mouthy 16 yr old. They have continued to love and support me, despite the distance, despite the years between visits and despite the fact that I am now a brash, mouthy, 37 yr old. They, like my own venerable family, delight in taking the piss out of their somewhat unstable, teary and emotional sister/daughter. Like the family B I’m from, my French Famille B recognise that I am not what I generally appear to be; that much of it is artifice and sleight of hand designed to detract from the much feebler reality. They love me, unconditionally.

They love me so unconditionally; they decided to invite me on their family holiday to Corsica.

Once owned by the Italians, and subsequently sold to the French to pay for war debts, Corsica is one of those scraps of earth that stubbornly refused to join on to a proper country and instead floated off into the Mediterranean. These floating remnants of empires became strategic fortresses; poker chips to be thrown in as collateral for political negotiations that today, embarrassingly, serve no greater purpose than providing the rest of Europe with somewhere to get a tan. Like Sardinia, Sicily and Palma de Mallorca, Corsica is among the top tourist destinations in the world.

A beach. A herd of errant cows. No need to salt the beef.

 

My French Famille B rented a home near the town of Cargese. A home featuring a bedroom, for my particular use, from which it required no more than 7 steps (I counted) to jump into the pool and then about 100 more (also counted), to jump into the Mediterranean (though the sea was only about 2 metres deep so jumping in headfirst would have been unwise, even for someone like me, someone who always jumps in headfirst). Seven days on an Island, surrounded by water, with no questions or decisions about where to go or what to do, what could possibly go wrong?

Corsica is essentially an extension of the Alps; a little bronzed appendix of mountains pushing their chests out above the sea. There is not a single stretch of highway on the whole west coast, let alone a stretch of straight road, let alone dual carriageway. Getting from point A to point B involves the careful navigation of a series of conjoined hairpin bends. Seven bobby pins up a hill, followed by eight bobby pins back down, every day, every time you want to go somewhere. If you are especially lucky, there will be a bit of steel strung along the outside ridge to hold in the cars as they drive out into the void. But more often than not, it is down to the chauffeur and the tyres’ tread to hold you on the breathing side of the pearly gates. I spent every morning dreading egress into Papa’s PT Cruiser and every afternoon praying I wouldn’t lose my lunch. Especially considering that lunch was so damn delicious.

Pig. All different ways. But not Alive.

 

After a bit of research and consultation, I’ve discovered that the main reason people go to Corisca is to eat.

Corsica is blessed with a moderate climate, miles of seaside, buckets of rain, days of sunshine and lots of hills. So it stands to reason that they produce kilolitres of wine, mega tonnes of pork and half the continent’s chestnuts. If there is a way to combine pig, chestnuts and wine, I’ve almost certainly eaten it. They also, like their Italian neighbours, have a bit of a thing for veal. Perhaps their shared Latin sanguinity doesn’t lend itself to patience; so they just cannot wait for the poor beast to achieve maturity before they slaughter it and slather it with garlic and tomato.

Once one has eaten all the ham, all the sausage and all the cheese and poured a bucket of wine downs one’s throat, why not lace up the sneakers, slap on the hat and head off on a fifty trillion metre walk through a cliff top forest?

The goats got there so much quicker than I did

 

Michelangelo, my older French brother, is, like his namesake a master at fashioning beautiful things from the rugged crumbs of the earth and he is crowned with a mop of cherubic blond Sistine Chapel-ite pre-Raphaelite curls. He has several passions; he is an avid collector of the comic books that every single human soul bearing a French Passport reads at least once a day, bandes dessinés,* he knows about everything since forever and he loves hiking. So each day, after a three course lunch, I’d be dragged, kicking and screaming and cursing and damning, along some track through the nature to discover the natural beauty of bugs and dirt while walking up increasingly steep inclines. I hated every minute of it; I was sweaty, I was red-faced and jelly-legged, but I did it.

The main reason I did it is because Michelangelo is an adult male and thus has some kind of psychological noose around my neck; I am obligated instinctively to refuse to let him win. The second reason I did it was because I was eating all the ham, all the cheese and drinking all the chestnut beer in Corsica; walking straight up a hill in 35 degree heat was one method of ensuring I would still fly home. Even so, I’m not at ease in the natural world where I have no control over my environment; little buzzing things fly at my face, there is just so much dirt and leaves and trees and flowers and rocks are just not as impressive to me as they might be to others. But I did it anyway; I am glad I did.

What I preferred though, were the boat rides.

 

Scandola. Rock Porn.

 

The Gulf of Porto is a cliff-bordered bay hugged on the right by the Natural Reserve of Scandola and on the left by the Calanche of Piana. I’m from a country that can boast it’s fair share of magnificently impressive red rocks, but I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as that gulf^. Especially given I saw it all, from the water, inside the Corse Adrenaline, a boat powered by Mr Fusion and driven by a rather handsome doppelganger of Mark Webber. Gigantic red granite protrusions give way to little grottos and lagoons painted straight onto the sea from The Little Mermaid. You can see the bottom of the water; you can see the fish swimming under the sea and all of this while gigantic sea eagles skim over your head in search of their next meal. It was truly magnificent. The only thing missing was Ariel herself. 

Papa and Michelangelo have dedicated their lives to laying marble, buying marble, shaping marble and sometimes, just to change it up, carving things from stone. Rock formations springing up left and right for two men obsessed with petrified dirt, it was kind of like geological porn. For me, rocks serve no purpose unless they are set in platinum and threaded into my earlobe, but I’ll own it; I was aroused as well.

Bonifacio. Place where men are bronze and women tremble.

 

The second boat ride took us around the very bottom of Corsica, within view, and 3G reception of her southern sister, Sardinia. Six hours of nausea prevailed as Michelangelo flung us from one hairpin onto the next. But despite his best efforts, just before lunchtime, we arrived safely in the southern port of Bonifacio. 

Not content with signalling arrival on French soil the same way as the English do, the salute of steep white chalk cliffs, the French built a village atop their calcified, crumbly precipice. Screw you Wellington and your UNESCO listed National Park at Dover, Napoleon made a cliff top skyline of tiny cottages. Sadly, many years later, the Germans invaded Corsica and stamped their orderly practical gun towers onto the cliff face from above. The WWII concrete fort they wrapped around the ancient citadel serves only to remind one of how the south of Europe values everything that is beautiful while the North favours function.

 

What WWII and a chisel can do to something beautiful. Michelangelo might have fared better.

 

Despite how unique Corsica is, there was much to remind me of the rugged, parched beauty of Australia. Beyond the red dirt and the forests, the beaches are coated with wild colonies of prickly pear. Little patches of spiny peachy goodness reminded me of my grandmother’s front yard. How is it that two Islands, so very far apart, could be so very similar? I guess that like most of what I see, I look for the similarity to ground myself. I suppose that is the sickness of a traveller, always looking for what you know, what is familiar, what reminds you of home.

Again, much like any journey to my own Southern Island, the final insult was the flight.

After seven days winding around cliffs in a car, it was only fitting that the flight should also involve intestinal acrobatics and a glass of Pietra (the chestnut beer) to calm the nerves. It isn’t that it requires 30 hours, or that you’ll spend two nights sleeping on an A380, no, it isn’t that at all; the final insult lasts only 40 minutes as you fly on a microscopic ‘aircraft’ from Ajaccio to Nice; a flight that requires one final hairpin bend around the mountains, a final loop into space, a final view of the spectacular jagged ochre coastline below.

Every morning, I woke before sunrise to take this photo

 

Corse, je t’aime. Corsica, ti amo.

 

 

 

 

*Sort of like Asterix or The Smurfs, every single person I know reads these books; it must come with the penchant for protests or the tolerance for tripe, it is native to the French 

^I have never been to the Red Centre of Australia so I’m pretty sure I’m not betraying my national heritage by saying this

***All photos are unflitered and taken with a phone

 

Happy – Pharrell Williams 2013

I’ve been awake since 3am, I’ve been wearing the same flannelette pyjama pants for 3 days, my flat looks like a photograph bomb exploded on the living room floor and I’ve eaten versions of a cheese sandwich at every meal since 2014 began. Even so, I’m deliriously happy…and it is not only because I’ve watched Death at Pemberley six times since it screened in the UK and Matthew Rhys makes a damn fine Mr Darcy especially towards the end of episode three and Matthew Goode might be the most perfect Wickham ever and… yes, so anyway, deliriously happy.

The song after which this is named features in the film Despicable 2; if you haven’t watched it, you should, I did, several times, on the planes between Paris and Dubai and Sydney. Watching cartoons makes me happy; recently I’ve had the time to do that, time I didn’t have before. I introduced my niece to the Little Mermaid and I watched Toy Story a few more times than might be medically advised. Sapphire and Smack are fanatical for Woody and Jessie so I needed to scrub up on my quotes. “There’s a snake in my boot!”

I’ve had a lot of time recently.

 

The Ancient Carbon Ritual of the Australian Male

 

Huge expanses of hours and days and weeks stretched out before me with no diary, no calendar, no appointments, no beeps from the phone; just wake up, throw on a linen dress (record was same dress for 5 days) and mooch about the world reflecting on my past, my present and of course my future.

Several days were spent in my Godparents’ backyard sorting through the contents of twelve boxes that represented my life until I left Sydney. Love letters spanned two decades covering passionate missives written by the man I left to move to Paris 7 years ago to the torn pages from schoolbooks listing the seventy reasons I was in love with a teenage boy named after a classical composer. I found the ATM receipts from every single time I withdrew money from my French bank account, in 1992, when France still had the Franc. I found letters in the scrawled handwriting of two dead people; my beloved Gramma and my father. Each time I came across their familiar cursive I wiped away my tears with one of the 78 T-shirts I have kept from the dozens of live shows I’ve been fortunate enough to see. I also found the tickets, hundreds of them, dating back to the 1980’s. I found a lock of brown curly hair belonging to I-have-no-idea-who; the teenage Composer? The French Homosexual? Me?

It must have felt important at the time..

 

Reliving my past was a very cathartic way for preparing for my future. Realising what I’ve lived, where I’ve been, what my hopes and dreams were, that I had achieved my lifelong goal; I lived in Paris.

When I wasn’t shoulder-deep in boxes and garbage and memories and treasures and locks of hair, I was knee-deep in toddlers; Sapphire, Smack and Squeal. Three little people who can say my name, who are ambulant and who are blonde semi-satanic angels. Presents were opened, screams echoed across the suburbs of Sydney and the kids liked their gifts as well.

 

Mum's Car, Kangaroos, Uncle's Front Yard..Australia.

 

There were hours that passed neck-deep in water. I swam, the little ones swam (look at me, watch me do this, I can jump) and the big ones prayed for a precious minute of silent floating free from tiny feet kicking into fleshy womanly thighs (it really hurts). Water has the elementary power to wash away the salt and sweat of months of tears and weeks of panic and anger. Swimming in pools, stomping on wet sand, splashing in puddles; there was water everywhere and I was happy.

Finally, there were the hours, the days and the weeks spent with the people who are my sun-bleached anchors. Tears were shed, and not just by my High Visibility Godfather. I laughed so hard I split in half and even spat out mouthfuls of wine. I was with my family, the handful of people who’ve kept me going. We also ate a lot of food; prawns by the kilo, oysters, roast beef, barbecued everything and smoked salmon prepared in my brother’s new home smoker. I spent time, unscheduled time.

2013 ended unexpectedly and has blown open a world (literally) of possibility for 2014. Two months from now I have no idea where I will be, what I will be doing or who I will be with. Many gained husbands and children and jobs and dogs in 2013; my life has been stripped back to the very barest of basics. But even so, I am excited, I am scared shitless and I’m happy.

Thank you UPAD, AG & Big Al, The Smartarse, the Motherchef, The Professor, The Art-sist-olger and my rightest of arms, Motherbear, for the love and the strength to see me through 2013, ready and armed to fight my next battle. 

And thank you BBC1 for Matthew Rhys in britches.

 

Those arrows singed onto my feet are definitely pointing forward.