Sixteen

Many's the time, since I began this blog, that I have held back from banging on about my son or posting photos of him. Partly for his own privacy; and partly from a sense that there can only ever be limited interest in other people's children. If you find parents' rhapsodies about their children uncomfortable or irritating to read, you should click right on through to your next website immediately.

Joel turns sixteen today, and my fond mother's heart is overflowing with pride and joy in my boy, who is now, really, a young man for whom most of the pieces of a complex and difficult world seem to be more or less in place. He is (a) healthy; (b) clever; (c) handsome; (d) nice; (e) good at making friends; and (f) has found a passion in life, in his piano.

The balance between us has shifted slightly over the last few months. He is as likely to make breakfast for us as we might make it for him. He makes clever suggestions about what we might do, and how we might organise things, on large and small scales. He listens to our suggestions, and makes up his own mind. There are some tough things in his life at the moment and he seems to be rising to those challenges as well as one could wish. I am the one who now has to learn a few things about letting go, about trusting him to have the smarts to be safe when he goes out, for example.

On this day, sixteen years ago, I woke from uneasy sleep, packed a little bag, and we drove over to East Melbourne. The baby (sex unknown) was breech, heading down feet first, and there was no chance (probably given my age) of a vaginal birth, so we knew exactly when he would be born, at 39 weeks. The previous day we had lunch at the Stokehouse and walked along the beach at St Kilda. So it was all very calm. And once I'd had the anaesthetic, I was even more calm. Conscious, but floating, all the same, buoyed up by pregnancy happy-hormones, too. I felt safe and confident the whole time, and was really surprised later on when Paul said it had been a bit confronting (of course, he looked over the other side of the little curtain they strung between me and the scalpel). Apparently, the baby's little knees came out first. I heard them counting up his agpar score (or apgar? I've forgotten), and then all of a sudden, they placed him next to me, with his beautiful peachy head on the pillow. He said calmly, "ah, ah, ah," inaugurating a life of intelligent conversation. Paul stayed with me, and my parents and his mother followed the baby's progress in a grand procession, according to Jean, while he was weighed and cleaned. Jean took the most magical photographs, as she did throughout his childhood, especially on her weekly Tuesdays of looking after him until he started kindergarten. He is one of six grandchildren for them; one of three for my parents. The miracle of the elastic human heart that can grow to be full of love for however many there are.

Today — the birthday of J.S. Bach, and the first day of the astrological year — began early for us. It begins early for Joel every day as he gets up around six and does an hour's piano practice before breakfast. But he had left his Italian homework at school and was planning to leave early. Paul, too, had a meeting at 8, so I got up early too, and made French toast (Dench grain loaf, Ceres eggs, passionfruit yoghurt, maple syrup, strawberries, blackberries and peaches). His birthday present? Sibelius!

Music is now the thing that structures his day, and offers an invitation to the future. Who knows where it will take him, or whether it will structure, or ornament his life? Either way, I can't help feeling how fortunate a child young man he is, to have this passion in his life, and the opportunities to exercise that passion.

But mostly, when I think of my son, I think of someone who is now, simply, his own person, comfortable in his skin, and as comfortable with his place in the world as a sixteen-year-old can be. Here he is, sketching the beach at Punakaiki, in New Zealand, in January...


 

Finishing again. And ... post-doctoral fellowships advertised

A very long blog hiatus.

Why? Who knows, really? It's not so much that I've been busy writing. I stopped blogging around about the time I stopped writing my book.

I'm spending long hours on email at the moment, though, trying to set up the Melbourne hub of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. The first round of post-doctoral fellowships was advertised on Wednesday, but because of reasons, the two Melbourne positions don't yet have job numbers and so don't appear on the University's job website when you click through. Sigh. As soon as they do, I will be bombarding all the e-lists I know to make sure people know about these ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIC opportunities. Actually, I'll paste the ad below.

As an indication of how late I am with a task I have just finished, however, when I went to look for the email address of the person to whom I had to send the review, I found my email system had archived the initial letter. Oh dear. It is finally done, however: a review of Cole and Smith's Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. A very difficult book to read and review.

Now, amidst all my other chores, I'm turning to my paper for the Piers Plowman conference in April. It's called "Langland's Tears: Piers Plowman and the History of Emotions." Now that I'll be writing something difficult again, perhaps I'll start blogging, too.

Here are the post-doc ads: salaries vary a little from university to university, but are pitched at Level A lectureship salaries. Note excellent university superannuation rates, and additional research resources... Not also the absence of the difficult ARC post-doc application procedure. Inquiries welcome, especially for the Melbourne positions.


ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR THE HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS (EUROPE 1100-1800)

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in collaboration with The University of Western Australia, The University of Adelaide, The University of Melbourne, The University of Sydney and The University of Queensland, seeks to appoint nine exceptional postdoctoral researchers to contribute to research projects in the history of emotions in Europe, c. 1100-1800. 

The Centre addresses big questions: to what extent are emotions universal? How, and to what extent, are they culturally conditioned and subject to historical change?  What are the causes and consequences of major episodes of mass emotional experiences?  How are emotions created and conveyed through the arts?  How does Australia’s emotional heritage influence today’s social and cultural patterns? 

The Centre draws on advanced research expertise at five nodes in Australia (the universities of Western Australia, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland), plus research partnerships in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden. Our approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with researchers spanning the fields of social and cultural history, literature, art history, museology, Latin studies, history of medicine and science, musicology and performance practice.

These prestigious research positions (with additional $16K pa research support) offer an exciting opportunity for innovative and enthusiastic scholars with demonstrated track records in medieval and/or early modern studies and a capacity to engage in interdisciplinary research.

Benefits include 17% superannuation and generous leave provisions.  Some relocation allowance for successful applicants will be considered.  These and other benefits will be specified in the offer of employment.

The University of Western Australia
•    Research Associate (Interpretations and Expressions of Emotion) (Ref: 3449)
For position information go to: https://www.his.admin.uwa.edu.au/jobvacs/external/academic/ads.htm

The University of Adelaide
•    Research Fellowship in Medieval or Early Modern Europe, (Position number 16567),
•    Research Fellowship in the Emotional History of Law, Government and Society in Britain, 1700-1830, (Position number 16568),
For position information go to: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/jobs/current/

The University of Melbourne
•    Research Fellowship in Emotions and Sacred Sites
•    Research Fellowship in Texts describing Emotions
For position information and to apply online go to: www.hr.unimelb.edu.au/careers

The University of Queensland
•    Research Fellowships: Reason and the Passions in English Literature, 1500-1800 (2 positions)
For position information go to: http://www.uq.edu.au/staff/

The University of Sydney
•    Postdoctoral Research Associate in Emotions related to Suicidal Impulse (Ref 160/0111)
•    Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Emotional Responses to Public Death (Ref 161/0111)
All applications must be submitted via The University of Sydney careers website.  Visit sydney.edu.au/positions and search by the reference number for full details

Finishing

There are many stages to finishing a book. But one of the biggest is when you send off ten files that include Acknowledgements, Bibliography and Table of Contents, as well as deathless Introduction (oh! ghost of Gwen Harwood, who used to use that adjective to mock academic prose, do you choose this moment to visit me now? *shudders*) and seven chapters. As I have just done.

The study is a mess of papers; the computer is a mess of files (will back-up as soon as I post this post); there's an enormous pile of ironing in the basket; and a stack of emails to answer, and tasks to complete.

There'll be another round of tightening-up revisions once the copy-editors have been through the manuscript, and Helen and Anne are still working on the thirty photographs and images and permissions, but for now, I've done all I can.

I feel I've run a marathon. I'm dehydrated. I haven't been to the gym for a week. My shoulders ache and my eyes blur. I crash into bed at nights exhausted and lie waking for three more hours. It's partly the sheer masses of detail that have to be mastered: the checking, the refining, the polishing. The redundant commas to be removed: thanks, Romana! But hardest of all is the relinquishing, the letting go of the project and its infinite possibilities. The last few months have been a slow and painful process of letting go of all the other directions this book could have taken.

I feel I'm not writing this very eloquently. But I am also aware of the irony: finish a book, then immediately write something else!

Sometimes people ask me, "have you finished your work?" It's the nature of the academic life that you have never finished. There is always some ongoing project. I'm going to be late with a book review that's due in ten days.

But once a decade or so, I manage it. I have finished. My work here is done.

You're probably dying to know what the last word is. It's "heart".

Spelling word cloud

I'm sorting out spelling for my final manuscript submission. I use "find and replace" and search for our to change to or, but can't do a global change since so many of my source quotes are English, and there are words, of course, that don't change. So this is not a job that can be done after midnight (are you listening, Stephanie?).

Honor, favor, armor, but court, discourse, tournament. Also, who would have thought I would use the numbers four and fourteen so much? Well, I guess "fourteenth century" is part of the problem here.

The -ize words are even harder, as they look so weird: realize???  Some look ok, though, which makes me realis/ze how hybridis/zed my own spelling has become.

But the wonderful Jerry, my editor, emailed me this morning and said "regularize as you are able (notice the z, which is "zee" and neither a "zed" nor an s), but don't drive yourself nuts."  Which is good advice, as I'm still more likely to be fussing about spelling than doing the final revisions to Chapter Seven. Crazy!

This house believes that restricting the growth of cities will improve quality of life.

Interested in the question of urban sprawl and the management of cities?

Interested in seeing how an international online debate can be structured and run?

Skip over to The Economist and see how close is this debate between my Paul and Chetan Vaidya: you have about a week to vote or take part in the debate.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/640

when the rains came

You know the rains have hit Melbourne when you have to disconnect the agricultural pipe that fills the fish-pond from the run-off from the shed, so the pond won't overflow. That is all. Back to the footnotes to chapter four, and changing "honour" to "honor" throughout. Sigh.

Finishing

Sometimes I think the book I am finishing is brilliant. Sometimes I think it's under-researched, under-theorised and badly written.

Sometimes I think I'll have it ready to send off by the 21st of this month, as promised. Sometimes I think I'm just deluding myself.

Nevertheless, it finally now feels I am on a train that won't stop till I get there. There's a closing finality about each long sentence I break into two, each extraneous comma I remove, each query ("follow up", it says) I either resolve or abandon, each time I check whether I have already referred to a book or article so I can use its abbreviated title in the notes (Chicago style, I love you).

On Sunday I decided not to work on it late at night because it then became too hard to sleep. Yesterday I worked on it till midnight and slept all night, dreaming vividly, but sleeping all the same.

Nearly there.

Big chickens, little fish, long walk

There's some furious work going on at my desk at the moment. Writing a new little section into Chapter One [check], some more polishing of Introduction and Acknowledgements [check]; and now having another look at the final chapter before the last round of revisions, removing excessive punctuation and starting to get footnotes in final order.

So not much blogging or facebooking at the moment. In lieu, some photos.

The chickens are enormous: time for them to go up to Ceres pretty soon, I think.

And the baby fish are growing, too: big enough to start nibbling directly on the fish food: 

Their parents are looking good, too.



And it hardly deserves a mention, because it is so unutterably depressing, but the cricket is on, and the Ashes are gone. Boxing Day at the MCG was awful. The crowd was enormous (89,000?), and most of it very quiet, as we watched one after another Australian batsmen go out. It was freezing cold, with a nasty wind blowing up into the pavilion. There was a rain interruption, and by the time I took this photo the lights were on. It was a very long quiet walk back to the pavilion in the afternoon.

A chirpy Englishman climbed back into his seat near us at one point and said cheerfully, "It's awfully quiet up here!" And we were all so depressed no one had anything to say in reply. And it's just gone from bad to worse since then. 

OK, back to work.

I Am The Woman. And so is Bernadette.

I Am The Woman. The woman who looked at Paul's reservation online and saw that his week-long delayed flight from Heathrow just looked a bit fishy. I am also the woman who phoned Qantas to find out it was a "fictitious" booking, a kind of place-holder that bore no necessary relation to any real flight. Because their system was saying he had already flown home.

The lovely Bernadette is also The Woman. She is the Qantas rep who scrounged around and now has booked him on a flight leaving London Wednesday night in time for him to walk in the door just before Christmas Eve lunch.

I am also the woman who couldn't contain her excitement and phoned the man at 2.00 in the morning to tell him the good news. But I feel, all the same, as if I am bringing him home myself.  I have an awful feeling that if he had turned up to Heathrow on Christmas Day, he might not have had a booking at all.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Extremely rare guest post

I am very sorry my love, but I have just come down to do a final check on my flight for today and it has been changed to Christmas day.
I am stuck here!!!
Attached is the latest version of my diary notes. Please distribute it to family and friends as you see fit and apologize to everybody for my absence.
Love and everything,
Paul

 

On Not Getting Home for Christmas, or, Doubting the Joys of Global Travel

Saturday afternoon, 18 December, Heathrow

The designated boarding time of 11.45 am for BA30 leaving London for Melbourne has come and gone, and Qantas is not telling us anything. I keep checking the board and some Iberian flights have been listed as cancelled. People around me are repeating conversations over and over on their mobile phones, and various delegates from our section go forward to the desk only to be told that Qantas plans to fly soon.

A beautiful flurry of snow begins to obscure the view and I take photos of an Air Emirates plane taxing into Terminal 3. A snow plough leads the plane in, and the curving dark line in the snow and the faint colour of the Emirates’ fuselage make a subtle pastel-on-white composition.

Finally, a public address suggests that BA30 has been delayed until a late-afternoon departure. It all seems hopeful and I settle comfortably into reading an airport thriller on the history of typography and working on an essay on Be’er Sheva and a mosque that has been closed since the 1948 Naqbah when hundreds of thousands of Arabs were displaced from Palestine.

A few hours later we hear that Qantas no longer knows what is happening, but we should wait. I am good at waiting. A week earlier I had waited patiently for a few days (in vain as it turns out) for a visa from the Israeli authorities to get into Gaza, a visa that I had applied for six weeks earlier on a notified five-day turnaround. My four colleagues were allowed entry, but despite a further day of phone calls to embassies and relevant NGOs I received no word. I was never formally rejected, but still do not know if I am to be approved. The backdrop to that occasion was a wind storm that swept in across Syria and made the air gritty and the streets ugly. Here the snow is exquisite.

The snow stops falling outside. This is much more pleasant than Be’er Sheva buffeted by the dust of the Negev desert. The wine in the Lounge is unusually complex, the coffee is drinkable, and the food is sort-of appetizing even though the beef curry is mostly spiced sauce thickened with flour. By late afternoon I am feeling tired and sleep a little.

A few hours pass with a long Qantas silence on what is happening. Eventually, we do receive some news, but not from official sources: it is the BBC news on a wall-mounted television which announces that the airport is now closed for the evening. At the same time ITV news suggests that a few planes are still leaving Heathrow. A number of clearly-influential passengers had been on their mobile phones and seem to know more than the news reporters and Qantas staff. They pack their bags to leave.

A crowd has gathered to find out what is happening. Some are good natured; some less so. One elderly lady reproaches a tall burly Qantas staff member for not telling us anything. Her voice is not loud, but she is stridently insistent, asking the same question three times, and he turns and walks out saying that he feels threatened. His official-looking hat and jacket look unconvincing from behind as he walks away self-consciously. His legs move with mincing care as if he is new to the skill of walking away.

At around ten o’clock an announcement comes over the public address system that our plane is not leaving tonight, but is now rescheduled to depart at 9.30 in the morning. We need to leave the lounge and be back at 7.30 am. Parents with children are distressed; one parent urges solidarity. ‘We should all stick together. We cannot let them divide us.’

It is announced that Qantas has made no arrangements for hotels or buses. ‘All passengers need to find your own way’, they say. More distress. Five police officers arrive—they are carrying guns—and we are told again that we need to leave by 10.30. ‘You are of course welcome to stay until then and eat what is left of the food, but it is impossible to stay beyond the closing time.’ I return to see if there is any curry sludge left, but all the food has been cleared away by the kitchen staff who are rushing to finish their shift.

I decide to leave. My sense of solidarity has wained. Most of the shops have closed in the terminal and people are rushing in different directions not knowing where we pick up our luggage. When we find the collection area all the signs are dead and there is no way of knowing which is the relevant carousel. I walk up and down the carousels with hundreds of other people, everybody relatively careful not to run others down as they successful find their bags.

Then the final ignominy: we all have to go through border control in order to get out of the airport. It takes an hour. I stand with a Canadian couple who joke about four inches of snow causing such chaos. ‘Call that snow!’

We exchange ironies, and just before midnight I stand on the inside of the state border-line thinking about whether it is worth an hour of travelling on the London Underground in order to get a few hours sleep in an expensive hotel before returning to the airport. It hardly seems worth it. I hate waking up at 5.30 groggy after deep sleep. I choose the romance of finding a quiet space in Heathrow, some forgotten corner to sleep quietly till the morning. I am good at sleeping.

3.00 am, Sunday 19 December

Heathrow Terminal 3 has been taken over by people, thousands of people: some standing, some sitting uncomfortably with silver-foil emergency sheets wrapped around their shoulders, and others sleeping on the hard, cold terrazzo tiles. Copies of newspapers have been spread on the ground to slow the emanation of the cold, and a few people over to the other side have yellow thin-foam camping mattresses that were handed out during the night. They are the lucky ones.

The light is cold and bright except for the ‘Departure’ signs glowing warm yellow with back writing. What is that simple san serif typeface? Is it ‘Transport’, clean and clear, developed for the British road system, or ‘London Underground’, developed by Edward Johnston in the midst of the First World War? I’ll check later in the book on typography that I had been reading in the Qantas lounge yesterday. [Note to self: the book does not say; look it up on the web.]

There are people who appear to be sleeping soundly and comfortably, lying on their sides with the legs pulled up to their bodies and their arms wrapped around their chest. I now know from experience that they are neither comfortable nor sleeping soundly. Over time, and despite the cold, your body and mind enters a nether zone in which moving a limb or twisting a torso is barely possible even though you are conscious that it might help. It takes an act of will to shift your body weight so that the accumulating pain is transferred from one part of your body to another. But it is not sleeping as such. Strange how a crumpled soft body on a hard floor can appear to be comfortable when you are not inside that frame to feel how a hip bone grinds against the marble.

I was in one of those nether states when they—whoever they were—came around with the silver-foil sheets and I missed out on the distribution. Despite being clear now that the floor is hard however you lie on it, my second thought was that the people who appeared to be sleeping soundly were at least snugly warm underneath the foil. I had lain against the counter for organizing hotels—now closed—until the terrazzo had sucked all the warmth out of me and I had then walked, shaking with bone-chilling cold, up and down the arrival halls looking for either a warmer place to sleep or one of the magic transporting silver wraps. After about half-an-hour of walking I found a silver wrap left on a plastic seat. I tried the seat for a while, but it was as a hard as the floor and the breeze from the nearby walkway exit was icy. I find a spot on the terrazzo floor away from the exit, and realize that the thin foil made little difference. I am still cold.

6.00 am Sunday

As the morning opens, people mill in small groups and couples, talking in German, Italian, Spanish and English, repeating conversations with each other, and asking parallel questions of any official-looking persons who happen to be coming by. Nobody knows anything for sure, and all the public address does is repeat messages about staying with your luggage and refraining from smoking as a courtesy to other passengers. A young woman stands above me as I type these notes, oblivious to my presence, shifting backwards and beginning to press with her leg against the laptop screen. I put my hand on her calf to signal my presence and she looks surprised, says something in a language that I do not understand, and moves on in a semi-attractive, slow, zombie-like way.

Other people step over my legs and few acknowledge my presence. I move my bags forward to protect my space. People are moving without purpose, perhaps with the notion that soon they will be in the right place, at the right time, as something happens.

A woman tries to step through the narrow space between me and my bags and begins to lifts her leg over my computer. I put my hand up and tell her that I am here and she might consider walking around me. She retreats and finds a different way through the massing crowd, all without looking at me or saying anything.

Then a passing Qantas official says that the only Qantas plane leaving before 6.00 today in the QF32. Four inches of snow yesterday and London’s Heathrow has closed down for another day. Nobody knows anything official—all the important looking people with Business Class purple tags on their luggage have long gone— and the website still has the plane leaving at 3.00 pm yesterday. It is time to retreat from the madding crowd.

This time I leave to go back to the city to find a warm hotel room. Back in the room I turn up the heat thinking that the vagaries of climate change may have contributed to the early snow storm, but I need to use some thick carbon-producing electricity to make me feel better. I hope that I get home for Christmas. However, at least I am more comfortable that the people of Gaza as they struggle with few resources locked inside a five metre concrete wall. I have all the resources of gold-level frequent flier membership and the ‘Priority Club’ at the Holiday Inn.

Sunday evening

There is no notification from Qantas, no email, no phone call — this seems strange given that they had only a few planes flying out of Heathrow on Saturday and I am one of their most important customers. A thoughtful staff member with a web connection could have set up a group email list and kept us informed. I am beginning to doubt that being a gold-level frequent flier counts for very much. Certainly it is excellent for getting those small advantages and status reinforcements such as getting a forward window seat on the plane so that one can disembark three minutes earlier than others. But it made no difference to the bag collection process at midnight after a few inches of snow.

When I go to the website I find that my booking has changed to Monday midday. No fanfare, no accompanying explanation, but very efficient. I register a wake-up call, and excitedly anticipate the next day. I am going home.

Monday morning 20 December

I check the website again. The booking has been changed to 25 December. It seems that I will not get home for Christmas. The last time I missed Christmas with my family was three decades ago when I was eighteen-years-old and on a Qantas flight from Cairns to Port Moresby. But that is another story.