My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Blogging (10) and a Dirty Story

No pictures today: for some reason my phone isn't working, but a sad tale of mud.

They are replacing the gas pipes in our street and I came out today to find most of the strip of garden between pavement and gutter all dug up and piled on the pavement and front driveway. I'd call it a "nature strip" but it's a bit narrow and isn't planted with grass, but little shrubs we have put in and mulched around, including a mini lillypilly and a lovely white hardenbergia.

There was a woman wearing rather a lot of make-up and an orange fluro vest guarding the path (there is lots of pedestrian traffic, as we are on a main road near two schools) and a man waist deep in black mud,  with a pile of ragged pieces of bluestone that had already been dug up.

I was dashing to the dentist but had to seize the bluestone moment, and asked him what it was like digging into the sticky black mud/clay around the bluestones. He looked a bit nonplussed and then started slowly shaking his heads, without words. Very eloquent!

I said I was interested in them and he offered to leave them for us, rather than carting them away. Win-win!

So when I came home, all the plants had been put back in, though in a different order along the strip, so they look weird; all the mud had been carefully scraped off the pavement; and there is a neat little pile of uneven bluestones with heavy scrapes along the side of each piece, that we can use for landscaping around the garden.

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Blogging (9)

Another short post today (I'm leaving tomorrow; have not finished paper, etc. etc.). A year ago my parents moved to Melbourne. It's taken them a good year to feel settled, I think. But we've just had the delight of being able to walk up to visit them for afternoon tea towards the end of a working-at-home day. My mother had made a cake; we chatted; and then came back to our desks. I'm so glad they live so close now.

Moving was tough, because of leaving good friends behind (about an 80 minute drive away), and because it meant downsizing. But they have done very well. My dad enclosed one end of the garage, too, so he has a study that looks out onto the little landscaped garden; and my mum has her sewing room as before.

In the garden there has been a massive job of landscaping, bringing up huge bluestone boulders from the Merri Creek (we are so close that one day I ran into my father on the creek path: that was a good day!).

Here are the enormous boulders, and the ubiquitous spider plants. The garden is easy to care for (that's another reason why they moved). But I mostly like this garden because the bluestone links our houses, at two points along the Merri Creek.

I'm not sure I'll blog while I'm away. But will definitely be back in two weeks time. 

My Year with Bluestone: The Rough with the Smooth

After the drama of yesterday's post about the burning of St James church in Brighton and the confusion of feelings about it, now that the police suspect arson, and we know of the church's notoriety, I am going to take a while to try and process that complex situation, but with a streaming headcold, today is not the day. And so a simple one-picture post today: the front of a house in Carlton, with its smooth safe steps for walking up to the front door, and the rough hewn blocks on the side, that are also helping to terrace the garden on this hill (there is only really one hill in Carlton). 

Smooth bluestone today, then, after the torrid fire of yesterday.

My Year with Bluestone: Teresa's house

I walked home a slightly different way last night (seeking to avoid the St Patrick's Day crowds outside the Dan O'Connell) and found myself face to face with this vision: a free-standing, double-fronted bluestone house with an extraordinary addition above its white pillars.



I was taking a few photos when a woman came out to say hello and when I said I was collecting photographs of bluestone she instantly invited me in to see the rest of her house. Teresa has lived here for over thirty years and put the bluestone up 28 years ago. She told me they said it would last for thirty years, and so it has: there was not a hint of movement or cracking anywhere on the facade, even though it looks rather top heavy. It cost $3000.

I wish I had felt bolder to take more photos inside. The front rooms were bedrooms painted bright shades of aquas and blues, and had big beds with shiny satin covers and dolls and scatter cushions. There was a living room with a wall unit full of photographs: Teresa has four daughters and three sons and something like seventeen grandchildren and seven "grand-grand children". She was watching the news and eating a salad of watermelon and grapes. She insisted on showing me her whole house while apologising for the mess (a cupboard door was open and a towel was sitting on a chair). The whole house was absolutely spotless, including the spare bedroom with an enormous white unicorn (or maybe it was a pony) on it for the grandchildren.

"I go to church in the morning and I clean in the afternoon -- I'm Catholic," she said, almost apologetically. She also gardens, and was apologising, as I took her photograph, that she was wearing her gardening clothes. The house had a wide central corridor which is now a spotless indoor garden with skylights.

The plants were perfect: shiny, flourishing. Teresa said the house had originally been "for the horses". Her English was very very good. Outside most of the garden was spotless white concrete with a hills hoist sprouting like a tree in the middle, but there were garden beds along one side, and a covered barbeque area on the other side where the family would gather for Christmas.

I was blown away by her graciousness. She offered me a drink but I said I had to get home, which wasn't strictly true. I was less gracious in receiving than she was in offering. But such a vision this encounter opened up for me of the lives in the city.

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (7) Into the Earth we go...

When we demolished the back half of our house in 1999, Paul thought it would be a good idea to dig a wine cellar to go underneath the new extension. He started by pulling up the floor of the only ever half built bathroom. Weirdly, this bathroom stood as a self-contained square in the middle of the old extension: you could actually walk all the way around it.


He started digging a few months before the builders came to pull down the back of the house. We had no spare money so stayed in the house. Our builders moved our sink and stove into the loungeroom so we could cook. We had a hose to come through the window, and emptied the sink into a bucket. We had a portable shower and toilet in the back garden for months, and I used to bathe Joel in a big plastic toybox. Fun times!

But before all that, Paul started digging in the bathroom. At first it was just a small hole you could cover up at night; then eventually the bath had to come out. Digging down beneath layers of bricks he first came to layers of sticky black clay. It seemed unaccountably wet, too, till he realised there was a leak from one of the water pipes...And we sent small children down to do the work.








Then he hit the layer of huge bluestone boulders, jammed in together and stuck to each other with clay. They were too big to lift out, despite enormous crowbars, levers, and concrete breakers. So he hired a series of larger and larger jackhammers to break them up. At one point I looked down and saw him covered in black dust, holding up an enormous jackhammer, powered by a small generator/compressor, as it dug into a rock in front of his waist. Not your best OHS practice. And the house was soon full of black dust and sticky mud. It became a race to get it dug before the builders arrived. Soon they arrived to pull down the back of the house. They would work during the day; Paul would start in the afternoon, digging and digging, enlisting various friends to come and help.


I notice in this photograph below I am wearing a white linen frock; didn't seem to be getting down and dirty at all, myself.



Around the northern suburbs, lots of houses have small cellars for wine, cunningly concealed under floorboards, where you might keep a few boxes in the lovely coolth. But because this was being dug under a new construction, it was subject to all kinds of regulations about reinforcement. We originally had plans for something grandiose like two rooms you could stand up in.... But that was without accounting for the bluestone, that was so hard to dig out. It was physically exhausting, and dispiriting and very very slow, so it became smaller and smaller.






The piles of bluestone by the side of the house stayed there for several years...

And then the night before they were going to put in the scaffolding, Paul realised the layers of concrete and reinforcing were going to be so thick they would mean it would hardly be deep enough to stand up in, so in a super human effort he managed to clear another six inches of depth. It was almost heartbreaking to see how much of his labour went to make room for the frame and the two layers of steel mesh.


Anyway it is now a beautiful and secret place under the house. You can stand up in it, and we have transformed lots of rather ordinary wine into much better wines. And the good wines have become great. So, not a romantic bluestone-lined cellar to look at; but a place forever associated with the blood, sweat and tears of my cellar-loving, bluestone-breaking man.

My Year with Bluestone: Have I found the book's cover?

My friend Kristin is a painter. She lives in a house in Brunswick. The previous owner had built a kind of arty shed in the back garden, using the bluestone pitchers that had previously been the floor of a small dairy on the site.


Kristin's architect built a gorgeous new studio for her and the bluestones became the basis for the garden (she and Chris laid them themselves). Here she is in the doorway:


And here are the stones laid down under the walnut tree, along with Basil's tail:

and a low wall that the brother of her first lodger built.



A few years ago she painted a series of paintings of this bluestone ledge across the seasons. We couldn't afford to buy this painting, but we both love it, and I now think it would be a wonderful cover image for my bluestone book. 

Not only is it a gorgeous and luminous image, and a lovely contrast to the monumental building style that we mostly associate with bluestone, but it's fitting as a cover, too, because bluestone is so often affectionately recycled in this way, and built unevenly. Kristin loves the way it kind of tapers off at the edge. She has been very happy in this house of her own, and while we tend to meet for walks in a park, rather than home visits, I've spent some happy hours in her studio when she's been painting my portrait (this will be the fourth time, I think). Of course book designers will have their own ideas, and of course, of course, I have to write the book and secure a publisher, but it's a bit like writing the contents page: thinking about the cover helps me think about the book.

The first time Kristin painted my portrait was when I first got to know her, over twenty years ago, when she and her then husband, who were living around the corner from me in Princes Hill, bought an old shed in the laneway behind our house to develop as a double studio/darkroom for the painter and photographer. Of course that laneway was a bluestone one!

My Year with Bluestone: The Guerrilla Gardeners of North Carlton

Today's blog post practically writes itself. There was an article on the ABC website yesterday about a group of Carlton residents who have made a community garden in a bluestone laneway between their houses. It's controversial because at least one resident wants vehicle access to the laneway.  But just look at these gorgeous photos by Simon Leo Brown.

And here's the sound bite for my project:

"I think anyone who sees it loves the laneway," Mr Gaylard told 774 ABC Melbourne's Red Symons.  

Even though they don't actually mention the bluestone in the article, I think it's clear that this love for Melbourne's bluestone laneways is apparent here. Even though the stone is hard, in these laneways the cobblestones are soft and easy on the eye, and certainly photographed lovingly here too.

See also this interview with the objecter in The Age here:

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (3)

Several years ago, we undertook a big remodelling of our garden. When Paul bought the house over twenty years ago, there was a big cement section and a big grass section and that was about it. He planted lots and lots of trees, then later dug up the cement section (after keeping a big sandpit there several years for Joel and friends — I well remember the "volcanic panic" he built with his cousin Imogen there), and grew vegetables, but it was time to introduce some kind of water feature, and get rid of the grass. Yes, the house still has lots of unfinished parts and there are always more things in an old house that require attention, but a garden takes longer to get established. It's all about the priorities. We love our home and plan to stay here forever, so while it was a "grand design," we were building for the future. The very first things Paul planted when he moved in were a couple of lemon-scented gumtrees and a little copse of silver birches down the side of the house and they now tower up, and frame the garden. The big manchurian pear has come and gone and the maple now shades the back door. The trees had given the house its own history already, and this design would give the garden a new frame to grow into for the next couple of decades.

Anyway, back to bluestone. I'm not going to post big pictures of the garden but today I'm focussing on the bluestone retaining walls. We worked with a garden consultant who used to have a regular TV spot, and later wrote about our garden in a book, and a brilliant team of builders (and a rather bigger budget than we had planned), but now we have a mini-system of fishponds and retaining walls that control the slope of the land. I was also very keen to have ledges to sit on for parties (note also the little light)...

We're not sure where this bluestone came from, but it came in big chunks that often had to be re-cut and shaped, and then chipped again into rough shapes if they had been sliced into a smooth edge. It took a few weeks of the team cutting and laying the stone to size. To cut it they used a diamond-tip bench saw that ran water across the stone and screamed with a high-pitched intense whirr. There was dust and noise and water for weeks as they cut the stone for the pond and the walls. (We bought several cases of wine and went to visit and apologise to some of the neighbours later.)

The garden plan became a bit gothic in appearance (more on that next week), and we broke up the darkness of the bluestone walls with sandstone paths, which are lovely to walk on. (The sandstone is another story: it came in large slabs in wooden crates, imported from India, we realised to our horror, but with lots of plant fossils embedded in it.) We also wanted little nooks and crannies for plants to grow, so these spaces were part of the construction, while the walls themselves were supported by concrete.



From the front, then, they look like drystone construction (without mortar), but David saw the first version of the walls without reinforcement and said they would only last five to ten years, and made the builders re-do them.

The ledges came as smooth rectangular slabs, but David also got the masons to chip along the edges. They are smooth and comfortable to sit on at parties, though not immune to stains from melting candle wax... Looking at them again in the light of this project, I observe the fineness of their construction, and the way the masons have been able to make lovely round curves from this very blocky stone.



Its "affect" here is domestic, home-bound, built for us. 

My Year with Bluestone: Awesome Colleagues

One of the things I love about our research centre is/are my fabulous colleagues. Grace has an office next to mine and is excellent at sending along just the right reference or picture or voicing an idea, just at the right time.

As I hoped, too, this blog is starting to generate ideas and images from other people. Anne mentioned the project to her bookclub and there was general interest and agreement about the attachment Melbourne folk have to their bluestone. This is very inspiring: the thought that one's theory might actually touch the nerve it is attempt to describe and to which it is appealing.

(Actually, Catherine has just sent me a lovely picture of Queen Victoria's Garter necklace from an exhibition she saw at Kensington Palace: even though that project's well and truly over for me, it was still so lovely to see how one's research projects act like idea ear-worms into friends' lives...)

Anyhow, Grace sent me this photo of her neighbour taking delivery of a large chunk of bluestone. 

It comes from Port Fairy down in the south west of the state, where there was a lot of volcanic activity.

Apparently the man is going to cut it up to make pavers in his back garden. The irony is that if he dug down deep enough in his garden, he could probably dig up his own bluestone, though it wouldn't be all smooth and even like this (and ok, let's revisit this question this Friday when I talk about my own garden). It makes me wonder how it is cut: looks as if it sliced like butter or pastry from a big lump of very solid, and not very porous stone, because despite quick appearances sometimes, bluestone is not at all like slate. 

I wish him joy of his big stone!

Bad rufous night heron! bad!

Early dusk, and the pale yellow light of a rain-drenched Hallowe'en shone on the huge reddy brown bird, perched solidly on the edge of the fishpond, amidst growth that after all this rain can only be described as verdant. And shining.  I summoned the others to marvel at its beauty, then we ran outside, shouting loudly, to frighten it away from the fishpond. It flew away; but an hour later was back, perching high in the citriodora. We looked it up, and it's a nankeen or rufous night heron. When it's breeding, it has an elegant white plume down the back of its neck. The one we saw had a plume about eight inches long, as opposed to the much shorter one in the picture here. I understand it's feeding itself and its young, but after such a visitation, we don't see our fish for days. And even if we could frighten it away, it would still come back and be feeding at night. It was huge, solid, and placid. And hungry. Trick or treat, rufous night heron?

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What's that blue thing in the pond?

Little routines before settling to work involve stepping out into the garden to feed the fish. But what's that blue thing that looks like a ball or a toy that's fallen in? Oh! it's the head of a rainbow lorrikeet that has somehow fallen into the water. I don't have a working camera, so here's a picture from the web.

I pick up the bird. It's still warm, but clearly dead. Its colours are extraordinary and detailed; its black and green tail feathers elegantly splayed. I turn it over. Its belly is delicately speckled: each feather seems to have several different colours of flame and autumn leaf and blue sky. How did this poor creature come to this untimely end?

Hmm. Last night when I was bringing in the washing, I saw four large black crows in the lemon-scented gum, which the lorrikeets also like. Is this a territorial war in my back garden?

But where do we put it?

It's been raining all night. The gutters on the shed out the back are overflowing, but it's too wet to get up on the roof and clear them out. The two big water tanks are full. There are little runnels in the gravel path where rain is running out into the street. The upstairs windows are almost clean. The ponds are full to the brim. It's still raining, and the little frog is unaccustomedly croaking in the morning. The creek will be full and the bike paths flooded.

But now that all possible receptacles for water are full, what do we do with the stuff that keeps coming down? After training ourselves to use less and less, and to save every drop, it seems like a shocking waste. The bucket in the shower? I'm going to have to pour the water down the drain. Guess we just hope it's falling into the catchments, now. I bet I won't be the only one checking the dam storage levels when they're updated this afternoon.

Pressing "send"

Had you been close to my house ten minutes ago, you would have heard a loud "squeak". That was the sound of me pressing "Send" as I sent off the first six chapters of my book on the Order of the Garter to the very patient editor at the big US press I hope will publish this book. We've never signed a contract to publish, which was a good idea as I would never have met a deadline, and it would have just been a source of stress (as I'm writing this post, I can see in the email "progress" window that a quarter of the ms. has now been sent).

The deal is that these chapters can now go out to be read, while I finish the last, a third of which is drafted.

There are many stages to go, of course. If the reports are positive, I hope we'll then sign a contract; and while I secretly hope and believe the readers will think it's perfect as it is, there will certainly be changes to make. Then there's final approval, copy-editing (half of the message has now gone), tracking down of permissions for images, checking, and cross-checking of references, compilation of bibliography and all the rest of it.

Still, this is a big day: the first, very big milestone on the last stretch towards completion.

What am I going to do now?

I'm going to go outside and feed the goldfish, then come back in and work on a grant application for an hour or so. And then tonight, I am going to see this. How's that for timing?

And how's this? Entourage has just played its little chimes: message SENT.

Garden fragrance in the city

Many years ago, when the Wednesday afternoon research seminars in my department (the fur on Dr Cat's back has just stood up) used to be a cross between gladiator fights at the Coliseum and episodes of The Office in their intensity, competitiveness and general social malfunctioning, one afternoon in spring a young man who had grown up in Melbourne but who was visiting from some advanced comp.lit. programme in the US, came in to sit behind the desk and laid on top of it a long spray of jasmine, commenting on how it reminded him, more than anything else, of Melbourne.

Today the sky is blue; high clouds are racing by; and the air is filled with the sweet scent of jasmine. I could even smell it when I came out of the gym this morning, which is on a busy road. There are more exotic varieties of jasmine, perhaps, but this one drapes itself luxuriously and expansively over garden fences all over the city, and on sunny, windy days like this, it fills the streets with its extravagant fragrance.



It smells like home.

Domesticity

Such an odd thing. After two months of apartment living, using the loathsome dryer, or draping clothes from hangers and on the tops of doors and benches, and after months of drought, I've just had to run outside and bring a load of washing in off the line. The rain isn't heavy, but I bet after all the dust and dryness in the air, it's filthy, so I'm pleased to have everything dry inside. And then I heard a little rustling in the piles of autumn leaves, and the little cat Mima was also making a dash for indoors.

A lovely domestic routine, breaking up a day of writing on Chapter Three. Time to stop soon, anyway, to be a good mother and make raspberry friands to serve at the Middle School production of Grimm's Fairy Tales tonight. Joel and Meg, cast for their twin Germanic blondness, I'm sure, have to play Hansel and Gretel very straight, as the witch, a less than German-sounding boy called Paddy, is apparently show-stealingly hilarious.

But such a pleasure to be writing, and really feeling I am starting to finish some of these chapters. I've sent the Preface and the first two chapters to friends to read, too; another sign of finishing.

Fish, water, wind, trees and sun

For the record: it's currently 42 degrees outside at 3.00 in the afternoon, and climbing. That's hot! And it's just day 1 of the four days above 40 we are promised this week.

My plan for today was to put on my old white cotton dress, which weighs little more than about two handkerchiefs, and sit quietly in my study at home, which is still pretty cool in the old downstairs brick part of the house. I had just opened up email when it turned out today had to be the day that we emptied the fishpond. There is a little leak, and the wonderful Bill was coming by this afternoon to start the repairs. This meant the pond had to be emptied and dried out by 5 this afternoon. The drying part was not a problem, in the sun, but the emptying was horrible. It is quite a complex system, and the process involved moving most of the rocks and plants to make sure no fish were left behind as we emptied the filter and ferried buckets of water around the garden. Which may at least mean the plants have a chance of surviving.

It was really more than a two-person job, so this meant persuading the resident teenager, who was all showered and changed (Obama t-shirt and cherry red jeans bought second hand for $5), and ready to go out, to change into old shorts and spend half an hour ferrying water. He did do it, but he said only because I made him feel guilty. Which I guess was fair enough...

There's not much wind, so while it's hot, at least there is not that soul-destroying northerly wind we sometimes get in summer, but every now and then, a little breeze would float by, and the citriodora would drop, as if on purpose, a little group of leaves it had decided it could do without. A bit like the whomping willow in whatever Harry Potter film it is, when one leaf drifts slowly to signal the beginning of autumn, and then the whole tree gives itself a shake, and they're all gone. Giving a whole new meaning to the word "deciduous".

Anyway, we scooped up bucketloads and ice-cream container loads of water and all the regular muck that's always at the bottom of the pond, at the same time as trying to catch fish and move them into areas we weren't emptying. (It is quite an elaborate system, with different levels.) Some of the perch would leap out of the net as soon as we caught them: remarkably frisky, and suddenly a whole lot bigger than they normally look. When the water was ankle deep, I was standing scooping out water, and they would come between my feet and nip me. Cute! We lost only one that got caught out in the shallow hot water when we had gone inside because we were starting to feel faint.

It was a horrible, job, really: very hard on the back, and very hot. But I kept thinking: this is the pond, and these are the fish that gave me such comfort when I was convalescing, so it was not that hard to keep shovelling. And all but one poor fish are now safe in cool deep ponds. It's hard to imagine it ever raining enough to fill up the pond again when it's fixed, though: I think we will probably have to buy some water.

Now I'm back in my white dress, about to read an ARC draft, translate the last stretch of Havelok for our reading group tomorrow, then reading another chapter of a PhD thesis. Haven't even put the fan on yet...

P.S. Aaargghh! Weather pixie has put her bikini on!!

Breast Cancer Day

October 27 is Breast Cancer Day. It's also the eve of my second annual check-up. This time tomorrow I'll have had a mammogram, ultrasound, and meeting with my wonderful surgeon. In contrast to last year, when I was a little spooked about this (and didn't fully blog about it till several months later), I'm feeling perfectly confident. I'm doing pretty much every thing I'm supposed to do, and hardly ever doing the things I'm not supposed to do, and feel fit as a fiddle (apart from walking into a plate glass window on Saturday, and still feeling a bit wobbly).

Even so, I still have the sense of the day, today, as potentially the last day before the world could turn upside down again. If they find anything tomorrow, I'll be up for biopsy and surgery again, which would almost certainly be more aggressive than the first time. What would this do to the piles of things on my desk, waiting to be read, and the documents on my computer, waiting to be written? What effect would it have on my dear family and friends? And you can see, from that very first response, the extent to which I no longer see myself primarily as a cancer patient, as I did for the first year or so: I've come back to the world of imperatives and tasks. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, but either way, that's the way it is now.

I'll take a moment, even so, in a minute, to step outside and sit in the garden for twenty minutes, to feed the fish, and sit with Mima, and marvel at the smell of rain. We've had two showers this morning.

Breast Cancer October commercial pinkness still raises my hackles a bit, but not today, actually. Today I'm thinking of women who are at the pointy end of diagnosis and treatment, and hoping they'll feel as calm about the future as I do now, when they are two years down the track.

Update: Maybe I'm not as sanguine as I thought. I was in the supermarket earlier this evening, standing at the deli counter next to a woman who looked and sounded like a lovely woman who used to work in the Arts Faculty, and then in the Research Office, who died of breast cancer a year or so ago and who was, I heard, also a talented artist. Same big eyes, same lovely open face. A real haunting; or better, a memory. Rest in peace, Cassandra.

Home

Well, it's a long flight home, but a happy one. Avoiding the drama of the plane with the big hole in it, our flight was on time and without incident, touching down at what would have been the civilised hour of 8.00 p.m., but for the fact of my case being on the very last trolley load off the plane, and me being at the wrong end of a 25 minute queue in the quarantine check-out. So I didn't get home till 10.00. Peter brought Joel home ten minutes after that (Paul is away for a bit: back very soon), and it was wonderful to see my boy, so tall and strong he nearly bowled me over with his bear hug.

We had hot chocolate and exchanged stories for an hour or so, then I slept, woke at 5.00, and then again at 8.00 and walked up to Ceres to let the chickens out (a fortnightly commitment to a co-op in an environmental park). It was lovely to be on the creek again, to see it full of water, and to see the golden wattle in bloom. In the garden at home, the hellebores and daphne are flowering, and best of all, last night I heard the little "cree cree cree" of a frog. I didn't blog when next door's cats caught Herbert last year: just too sad. But this was definitely the same species, so it seems as if Herbert's mating calls did have some effect... I think this one's probably called Herbert, too.

It's too wet for tennis, so it's a day for laundry, sorting out the travel receipts and preparing for the week ahead.

One minute it's summer...

Just hanging out the washing when I saw something pink up in the Manchurian pear tree. What could it be?



Oh. It was autumn.
And it was in the maple, too.




Oh. And it was already at my feet. That was quick.

Bats, Boats and Books

Another burning hot night and day, with the temperature already at 34 degrees at 10.00 in the morning. The hot northerly wind is howling around the house, sending the birds flying in all directions under a pale white sky. Clouds are drifting south, but really, waiting to be sent north-east by the cool winds that are anticipated this afternoon. The hydrangeas are struggling on, and the basil and parsley plants we bought two days ago are still in the kitchen; we won't plant them till it's cooler.

Here's a link to a wonderful photo of a bat, cooling off by swooping along the river. Well, technically it's called a flying fox, but we like to think of them as bats. We see them after dusk, if we are sitting outside in the garden.

(I'd love to post this picture, but I'm assuming there are all kinds of copyright reasons why I can't...)

It's the last day of my "holiday" today. Since we aren't going away anywhere, this is code for "not going in to the office till next week". I've sent off my essay on Wade's Boat, and have one grant application to read today before I sit down seriously amidst the horrendous files and piles of papers and try and sort them into my filing cabinets. I am "shepherd" for my school this summer. I'm an appalling filer at the best of times, but the problem is compounded by my working on lots of little projects last year, and then moving all my papers and books when my study was renovated. Still no bookshelves, but no reason not to sort out the files. The good news is, I've now cleared my list of "things to write" that aren't my books, and I am determined to get this Garter book finished this year. Just as soon as I sort out my files.