The North American author and great journal writer, May Sarton, referred to her journal technique as ‘writing on the pulse,’ capturing whatever she was able to write down, about what was happening on a given day. She also added she didn’t allow herself to go back and change things afterwards, except for style and she didn’t expand on the writing either. Although later in that same interview in the Paris Review she remarked she could go on ‘revising forever.’
 
When I write in my journal I like to capture my thoughts in a quick burst of creativity. I think of this process as writing on the wing because that’s how it feels, it has a soaring and swooping kind of an energy. Each writing surge can last from five minutes to thirty minutes or longer when there is more to write and the muse is sitting gracefully on my shoulder.  For this project though I will contain the practise to five minutes, only, on most days, writing rapidly, on each alternate line of my A4 journal and when the timer goes I will spend three more minutes, using those spare lines of the journal to edit the material. Lightly. No more than that. I absolutely must resist my ingrained editorial impulse to refine, to check facts in books, or on Google, because if this experiment is to work it will need firm parameters to ensure the writing project doesn’t interfere with the holiday. I want the writing to feel more like play and not a burden. It will be something I can do for relaxation while my husband anagrams. If he enquires about what I’m doing, I will say that I’m companioning him, in the down times, playing with words.
 
I don’t yet know what will fall into my writing except that I will be following my interests in nature, gardening, art, architecture, photography and children. When I am in nature and when I am with little children I feel very happy. When I observe children at play, their curiosity and enthusiasms, when I listen to the piercing perceptions that only a child can see and state I feel reassured. There is hope for us all in the confusing maelstrom that is our world today. I remember studying Russian Art a long time ago at Canterbury University and learning about the very great fears that gripped people at the turn of the 20th century. The pace of change through the industrial revolution had excited but also frightened people and they imagined the end of the world was nigh. I think we’re living through another time of great fear and flux. There is more to think about than ever before. The volume of information flooding the digital highways and media channels on a daily basis, some of it so very negative and alarming, can leave us struggling to comprehend fully and keep up. We have more to feel panicked about than any other generation – the very real impact of global warming, species extinction, contamination of the waterways and the atmosphere, housing markets out of control, examples of greed and excess and madness screened to us daily. We are witnessing, through first hand reportage, increasing human suffering everywhere through famines and plagues, through violence and continuing wars. There is a refugee crisis of terrible proportions with millions of fellow human beings now dislocated from their families and communities and countries and detained in inhumane conditions on overheated islands in the middle of the Pacific. There is an increase in the random acts of global terrorism that are impossible to address and suppress if we can’t get to the root of the mental disorders afflicting the people intent on destruction and offer them help.
 
It is easy in the face of so much turbulence to feel helpless, to want to turn away, curl up and give in. But I think it is possible to remain grounded and even hopeful in the midst of the challenges and that the act of journalling can offer relief in the same way that meditation and mindfulness techniques help a person settle a whirring mind because writing down your thoughts and assembling the words in a way that is pleasing on the page is reflective and contemplative and the process itself is wholly absorbing. So I really do believe that attending to what is happening in the moment, in close up and putting it into words can enhance our experience of living. And that is what I’m planning on doing for this trip. I want to be receptive to all the good things that come my way, to the enchanting and soporific power of Nature, to the small moments of meaningful connection with people, encounters that illustrate our common humanity. I want to be alert to possibility and to acts of human kindness and tenderness that always remind me I’m not alone and that it is good it is to be alive.  
 
When the writing of my pain journal, Giving Yourself to Life, was drawing to an end, I paused to consider the year of journalling and what I had discovered. I wrote that initially I hadn’t known where I was going but as I settled into the act of self-reflection I realised there had to be a commitment to speaking honestly from my personal experience. I thought that if I started with my intimate thoughts and observations I might facilitate a flow of ideas that might be relevant to my reader. And then I wrote, 
 
Perhaps the primary task of a journal writer is to observe the world passing before her, to record the beauty of the planet she inhabits, to share something of her inner struggles, to be like a medium through whom the experiences pass and are noted, recorded and passed on.
 
I still believe in that function of the writer as recorder and will proceed in that spirit although at times I might also have to record the funny and downright odd. I won’t be able to stop that aspect of living from creeping in. And I have to admit to one other motive for writing. A week ago I stopped working and tidied away my books and papers. I was giving myself a week to prepare the house, the garden and the cats for my departure, to organise my clothes and pack my bags, to check and check again that all the documents were in order, to be ready without any fuss at the last minute to head away overseas. But what I found was that the jobs were performed very quickly and efficiently. Halted in my tracks I wondered what do I do now? I went into my study and began tidying the books on the shelves. I went through some drawers, made a trip to the Hospice shop. And then I looked around and wondered what to do next? I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of emptiness. My footsteps on the wooden stairs sounded hollow through the quiet house. The nest, now that both my chicks have flown, felt bare and forlorn. By day four I couldn’t stand the sound of my footsteps and found myself hatching this plan to write a journal. It seemed that even one day without writing, in some form, felt like a day not worth living through. So that’s the other reason why I’m writing this journal because I can’t not. WRITE.

Safely in the embrace of the turquoise mountain water I began the series of resistance exercises, stepping and lunging smoothly down the pool channel. I like to think of this flat channel, that reaches to my shoulders, as a moat, and the house with its high wall of chocolate stained weatherboard as a castle. When this deep pool was built, up out of the ground to the lounge level we added the channel at the last minute to provide a shallow end for children. It loops back along the back along the wall like a defence in a castle. When I am in the channel the feeling is of hovering above the garden and bridges down below. The nature writer Roger Deakin had a moat too, a real one in England. I read about him swimming in his moat in his collection Notes from Walnut Farm, although more recently I read in his Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain that it was not a proper moat, because it didn’t circle the property, it was just on two parallel sides of a square. My channel is not a moat either but in my imagination it is.
 
In the water I said goodbye to the kowhais that bend gracefully over the water garden, and to the Persimmon beside the driveway, and to the Karaka and Puriri, the Mahoe and ti kouka on the far slope. I looked at the grand old Pohutukawa that grows on our other neighbour’s section, its branchy outline, like fancy ironwork with a silver sky between the filigree. I noted the glossy green and grey green tree canopy, the furry and spiky forms, and thought how they have leapt up and flourished in the years since we planted them. Above my head I saw two Monarch butterflies cavorting together, looping the loop, in the silvery, wintery light. I had thought that it was the sapphire violet hues of the bright salvias in my garden that had brought the clouds of butterflies here but recently I discovered that hundreds of swan plants are growing, not far away along a grass verge opposite Meola Reef, providing food and a sanctuary for the beautiful creatures. I wonder who thought of that?
 
The day was going well. I went into the garden and picked Mutabilis roses and the strong sweet smelling flowers of the parma violets picturing women’s soft gloved hands reaching into a tall glass jar of the purple, violet tasting tablets that might be sitting on a glass counter in her boudoir. I arranged the flowers in small vases for the young woman who will look after our house while we are gone, a tiny offering from a winter garden. On the way back across the lawn I noted the tulips in their pots just poking through. I’ve planted the mahogany ‘Dark Night’ by the kitchen windows and further out in pots on either side of the lawn I’m trying out softer tulips in chalky pink tones for the first time. Maybe they will be blooming on my return.

The big lumbering jet is making its way slowly down the runway. It never ceases to amaze me how these great beasts of aeronautical engineering rear back on their hind wheels and lift up into the air. We’re a long way from pioneer aviatrix Jean Batten in her tiny, flimsy, skeletal plane sitting in her goggles with her scarf flying behind her a thermos tucked beside her on the hard wooden seat flying in a series of intrepid hops all the way from England to New Zealand. Incredible. And when she arrived the Mayor of Auckland said she was a naughty girl and her should put her over his knee and spank her.
 
And it has happened. The plane has loped down the runway and slowly risen into the sky. Such a good moment. My two gardening friends tell me the instant they step on the plane, they treat it as the beginning of an adventure and they fly all the way across the world with that positive, optimistic attitude, not fussing about sleep and discomfort along the way.
 
Down below the lights of the silent city, orange and silver like jewels on invisible strings, shine, against black spaces where the quiet water of both harbours, Waitemata and the Manukau wraps around the tiny isthmus, upon which the city of Auckland floats. Slowly the lights dim as the plane climbs through wisps of cloud, like spun strands of wool, into white space and further up into the black indigo of the night sky.
 
… Later. Six hours of sleep disturbed by wild turbulence, so bad it felt like a ride on a carousel at a fun fair.  We were about three hours out of Auckland when the plane began bucking wildly and I was awfully glad of my seat belt holding me in. And though I put my trust in the pilot I did briefly think, we could just fall into the ocean. Later when we talked about it my husband said he felt quite worried and that from a man who is normally unflappable.
 
This morning although the announcement just said good afternoon, LA time, the skyscape through which we fly is shades of blue – periwinkle blue tinted violet with a soft band of white tinted mauve three quarters of the way up the canvas. Sea and sky merging in Helen Frankenthaler bands of horizontal colour.
 
      

I’ve searched every crevice of each of my three bags at least four times, rustling through the layers, emptying everything into my lap looking for the lost bag. In the process I cut my finger on something sharp. Fortunately after a lot more rustling and with blood gathering under my nail on the hurt finger, I was able, using my other hand, to locate my small pack of antibacterial wipes, and from a snaplock bag in my handbag, holding a memory stick and two plasters, I extracted one of them and taped up the blood flow. When I told the flight attendant what had happened she put her hand into the hold and pulled out the empty foil strip from the last of my two Panadol taken moments earlier. She ran her hand along the edge, frowned and in a soft South London accent said, ‘Look it’s sharp.’  
 
Always when I travel I get in a muddle and leave things behind. For this trip I was feeling more confident because I thought I’d solved all my issues. I bought GLAD snaplock bags, little ones and bigger ones to hold; my lipstick and eyeliner; a bottle of eye spray for contact lens wearers that works apparently when you spray it on closed eyes; although my husband doubts the veracity of this claim. I have a bigger bag for my contact lens solutions and another for my toothbrush and toothpaste and moisturizer. And I have three different carry bags to hold everything. My phone and reading glasses are in my little black Minnie Cooper handbag that I sling over my shoulder, into a colourful bag that rolls up to nothing I have stored my cardigan and shawl and clean knickers and bra. That bag is tucked away in Julian’s hand luggage. And before the trip at Ballantynes in Christchurch I bought a new small sweet A 4 size black backpack. It’s a Safepak product with internal wiring that resists slashing and fancy zip fastenings that make it theft proof. I love it because it fits snugly on my back and even with my laptop inside doesn’t feel heavy and this gives me the feeling of striding out lightly, hands free. The lining is its best feature. The fabric is a soft apricot in colour and the material is sleek and slippery and strong. It’s not satin. It’s more hardwearing than that, made of a new smart 21st century robust and aesthetic fabric. There are lots of secret compartments in this bag, holders for pens and zip pockets on the inside and outside, and a sewn in band of apricot to hold the laptop in place. But I’m the faulty product. Even with all these clever organisational systems in place I keep forgetting where things are.
 
… LA airport, as we rolled down the runway was another abstract painting, in soft focus. The scene down below was washed with pale yellow sunlight the effect through the gauze of a hazy, smoggy sky made the markings on the runway, cream lines and green rectangles on grey, like strokes on an abstract canvas. 
 
We had been in the sky only a short time when I spotted a chiselled series of landforms lit up golden red in a muted landscape. I felt sure this had to be a famous geological wonder so I asked the handsome Maori flight attendant with the new man beard fashion, a narrow closely clipped shape from the earlobe to the jaw, what is that down below? It’s the Grand Canyon, he said. ‘Have you ever been there?’ I asked. He smiled, white teeth brilliant against olive skin and said, ‘No, I fly past it almost everyday but I haven’t been there, yet.’
 
In transit I talked to a young woman from Wellington who is on her way to Paris for her wedding in a chateau in Champagne. A small party of 32 guests have been invited. And there will be another wedding in Wellington. The North American woman in the seat next to me has an oxygen kit that she uses while flying. I’m not sure why. She is flying to London for one week, including a day in Paris. A day!  She tells me that next year she is taking her seven grandchildren and three children to South Africa for a holiday but they’re waiting for the youngest to turn six before they go.
 
I may not write for a few days. I will need time in London to become acquainted again with my daughter and her husband, and adjust to the upside down time zone.
 

The drive from Heathrow to our hotel in Notting Hill was smooth and quick, our son-in-law driving carefully and seamlessly through the west London streets. I cannot begin to describe the flood of emotions and the memories triggered as we drove through the leafy streets — plane trees, sycamores, lindens, beech — layer upon layer of leaves running like waterfalls through the city. I had forgotten that London is softened and made lovely by trees and gardens and an abundance of large and beautiful parks. We passed Fulham Palace cemetery the hedging grown so big and rampant it reached to the tree canopies leaving no view inside whatsoever.  There are giant Buddleias in bloom, the bushes as big as trees and the colours lilac, purple, magenta. They bend and arch this way and when I pulled down the window I smelt their sweet scent heavy on the air.
 
Was the London growth always this riotous and romantic? It is 22 years since we lived here and in that time the new garden design movements have evolved. Referred to variously as the prairie dream landscape or the new perennial movement these planting schemes are a long way from the cottage garden movement of the 1980s, or the horrible straight line marigold and begonia borders, sad little plants in dry earth, entirely weed-free and a status symbol, of the 1960s and 1970s. The new style incorporates prairie and meadow grasses and wildflowers, and perennials arranged in masterly schemes. The key word is relax and allow the plants to reach and stretch and do their thing.  The master designer of the movement, Piet Oudolf, is from The Netherlands and is perhaps best known for his design of the gardens that grow along the New York High Line. His approach is to combine carefully selected perennials —some of his favourites are verbena bonariensis, echinacea, helenium — in generous planting schemes interpolated with tall grasses and soft clipped hedging and to give the effect of surging, unfettered growth. Winter is one of his favourite seasons. He doesn’t prune but allows dried seed-heads — fennel, artichoke — coated in frost and snow to grace a haunting frozen landscape with their fine form. Maybe in a nod to the Victorian designer Gertrude Jekyll there is a painterly approach to colour and form. She was training as a painter when her myopia forced her to stop and instead she channelled her gifts into garden designs that had an Impressionist quality with their beautiful blurry swathes of flowers. I’m thinking this rampant London style that I’m encountering everywhere must surely be a response to the new movement of which there are many gifted contributors, Dan Pearson is another.
 
I feel like a child in a lolly shop. We have nine days in London and the possibilities for exploration and rediscovery are abundant and delicious. Everything beckons. The feeling is of being in a dream where memories collide with the experience in the moment. I look at my daughter, her dear, familiar face and wonder is she really here beside me? I want to hold onto every minute and never let it go.

The London Wetlands were the conception of Dr Peter Scott, son of Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott and sculptor Kathleen Bruce Scott whose magnificent, skilful, larger than life-size statue of her husband stood in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens until the earthquake on February 22nd 2010 catapulted it from its pedestal onto the ground. Their son, Dr Peter Scott was a psychiatrist, a conservationist, an author, an acclaimed wildlife painter and the founder of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust. This project, the London Wetlands was his dream. He wanted to reach a mass audience and show them the value and importance of creating a sanctuaries for wildlife and the best place to reach people was in the heart of a city. Remarkably he painted a prophetic scene, in 1989 with black swans floating on a wide waterway while overhead flocks of birds soared in formation, eleven years before the project became a reality. His painting is so close to what you see today, from the observatory at the top of the Peacock Tower.

The major conservation project began in 1995 using four redundant reservoirs and water treatment ponds in Barnes. From the air they looked like four segments of a square while now the shape is more like a map of Africa with a patterning of green islands spread through. It was a major undertaking. First the water had to be trained and the land reshaped. All the spoil was used to build paths, a fish reef and a car park. The planting followed, 27,000 trees and 300,000 water plants.  Then they had to wait while their new sanctuary began attracting the wildlife. There are forty species of wildfowl in residence, flocks of ducks fly in from Europe, eider geese, wader birds come too, the gulls cry, there are water voles. Apparently reptiles — frogs, lizards, newts were rescued from sites in Kent that were zoned for development and relocated to the new habitat. In just 21 years this Nature oasis, crafted by human hand, has become one of the 21st century’s greatest urban conservation projects.
 
One of the best aspects of this trip, for us, is that our daughter is here to guide and help us. So we don’t have to scrutinise underground maps or bus maps and make sure we are going in the right direction.  She had even organised our passes. We just followed gratefully, onto the train, off the train, down the street and onto the bus, off the bus and across the road to the Wetlands.
 
The approach is down an avenue of Beech trees, through dappled light passing meadows high with summer growth, up to our shoulders, streams and ponds some of them covered with bright green weed. The feeling of fecundity and growth reminded me of the poem ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas.

We decided to uber from Notting Hill to the North of London, taking turns in the taxi to sit in the front, to catch the view. It’s leafy and green all way. We passed white Georgian terraces, circles and crescents, and the arts and crafts houses of soft orange brick, leadlight windows and dark stained shingle roofing and walls. We wound round Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, went over Camden Lock and saw the canal boats floating on grey water, and then we were in one of our old haunts, passing the street in Kentish Town that ran down to Bartholomew Road where we lived, over twenty years ago in a top storey flat in the middle of a plane tree canopy and above the train line to St Pancras Station. I grew to love the swaying sound of the trains pulling in. It was in that flat, the home of a lesbian writer, who needed an income to write a book, and so let the one bedroom to us, while she stayed with her lover and wrote. I gave birth there, at home, with the French obstetrician and guru of the natural childbirth, movement Michel Odent in attendance.  It wasn’t an easy labour, lasting hours and hours and I felt unsafe. When I screamed, ‘I’m dying, please help me,’ the guru, put his finger to his mouth and said ‘shh.’ I also attended Janet Balaskas active birth classes in Hampstead. We both went to her yoga classes and learned how to stretch and breathe through labour, none of which was any use when the wild shrieking took hold. Further on we passed Estelle Road in Hampstead, where my godmother, a biophysicist at University College London lived and who, with her brilliant German intimate and research partner, was our family away from home, each time we lived there.
​
We waited for our guide in the restored Church of England chapel by the side of a magnificent forecourt where once carriages and carts would have rattled in, over the cobblestones bringing bodies and mourners to the graveyard. Above this forecourt there is a perfect colonnade of cream arches built into the hill and beyond you can see a lone spirit of an angel levitating amongst the brilliant beech canopy.
 
I need to express my frustration with my limited technology. You must never try to photograph the beauty of a vast and historic 19th century forgotten graveyard sited in a forest of English trees on a hill overlooking London, with an iphone. My photos couldn’t capture the magic of what my own superior eye could see. I thought because the sky was overcast that the light conditions would be ideal but the camera struggled to make sense of the contradicting light effects, the striping of stone, tree and daylight. I began to feel annoyed by the men, with their flash cameras and long lenses and the sound of their shutters clicking rapidly, and also with their agile movements as they leapt about, paying very little attention to the fascinating commentary, crouching on their haunches, angling the camera sideways, like fashion photographers, to get their close ups.
 
My other problem is storage. I have too many photos in my camera roll and not enough GB to store them, so just at the wrong moment, the camera refused to capture my angel and I had to hurriedly and recklessly delete some videos and photos that not so long ago seemed very precious, just to free up space. I can see this is going to become more of a problem as the trip continues. I will talk to my son-in-law. He knows about these things and is good at solving problems by reading up on google.

Her speech was followed by another, equally inspirational address, by Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon Brown, former prime minister, and a human dynamo. I should have known about her but I didn’t. She is, apparently, a passionate advocate for global education, and as founder and president of the children’s charity ‘Theirworld’ and executive chair of Global Business Coalition for Education, she has, along with her husband, made a very real difference in the lives of vulnerable children and young people everywhere — her mission is to send 57 million children to school. She is also ranked the top tweeter in the UK, her success judged by the impact of her messages on her reading audience. The question asked was ‘how well does a person resonate with their audience, and with the world at large?’
 
I’m struggling to write my journal. There’s not enough time in the day to live the experiences, let alone write about them. So the graduation ceremony was a perfect place to write my Highgate cemetery entry. I had taken a tiny notepad from the hotel, and sat quietly, writing my account, as the flocks of graduands proceeded slowly to the middle of the stage, where with a shake of Jacqueline Wilson’s hand, they became graduates. I wrote on as the creative writing students and the social workers filed across but pricked up my ears when the psychology PhD students were announced because then we were treated to a description of their topics, all of them extraordinarily inventive and intriguing. Here is a sample:
 
‘Fighting to survive in a woman’s world: an interpretive phenomenological analysis of men’s experiences of having breast cancer’

‘Caught in the complex web of words: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of counselling: psychological accounts of grief work’

‘Investigating how exposure suppression and coping flexibility are related to the psychological well-being of police officers’

‘The empathy fillip: Can training in more expressions of emotion enhance empathetic accuracy’

‘”Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails” Exploring the ‘gender disappointment’ experiences of mothers of boys who wanted a daughter: An interpretative phenomenological analysis’

‘How do fathers make sense of their experience of stillbirth, after therapy?’
‘The relationship between anxiety, sensitivity, experiential avoidance and sociability in sleep quality'
 
I was seated next to a proud grandmother, dressed in a luxuriant turquoise and gold sari, and the extended family, mother, father, sister, aunt, of a very clever PhD student Gauri Chauhari whose topic was:  ‘Stories of comedy and tragedy in therapy: Psychological therapists’ experiences of humour in terminal illness.’

Born in Wisconsin, the eldest daughter and second child in a family of seven she knew from an early age that she would be an artist. The big love of her life was her husband the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, although his inconstancy and his declaration that he did not want to have children with her, because his daughter from his first marriage developed schizophrenia and was institutionalised for the rest of her life, lead to divorce. But in the good times they supported each other’s art and sometimes worked collaboratively. He photographed her collection of bones from the desert in Santa Fe and she painted them. He also produced some of the most beautiful and sensuous black and white photos of the nude female human form in the history of modern art, photos that endure and which contributed to his fame. She was his model and his muse.
 
There are some brilliant artist statements in the exhibition that reveal her originality and her strong determination,
 
I can’t live where I want to – I can’t go where I want to – I can’t do what I want to – I can’t even say what I want to. School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to […] as that seemed to be the only thing I could do […] that was nobody’s business but my own.
 
And there are also some quotations taken from a biographical documentary film made towards the end of her life, when perhaps she had grown weary of the voice of the critic, that have a sharper ring. I understand, though, why she hated and rejected the term ‘woman painter’ because of the way the signifier ‘woman’ automatically implies a category separate from and inferior to ‘painter.’ She also disliked and refuted the art historical and feminist analysis of the interiors of her flowers as depictions of female genitalia, although when you view them, it’s hard not to see this.  But look at what the male critics said. This from Paul Rosenthal;
 
Her art is gloriously female. Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us at last to know something the man has always wanted to know.
 
Georgia O’Keefe’s very good response went like this, ‘When people read erotic symbols into my paintings […] they’re really talking about their own affairs.’
 
Perhaps I am homesick but I preferred the retrospective of New Zealand painter Rita Angus, mounted around the time of the publication of Jill Trevelyan’s magnificent biography of the artist. Rita Angus was another truly great painter, in my opinion, her still-life paintings, her landscapes and self-portraits just outstandingly brilliant and original. When you view her work you feel her fierce personality and intellect piercing her art. I think these two artists had things in common; the struggle to make it in a man’s world and be accepted into the art canon, and on a personal level they endured experiences of great emotional pain, and mental illness. When Stieglitz opened a new gallery in New York and registered it in the name of his new partner, whom he’d met when she was 22, O’Keefe became ill with psychoneurosis and was unable to paint for the next thirteen months.
 
I hadn’t expected Georgia O’Keefe’s palette, apart from the poppies and the black paintings of the canyons, to be restrained and pastel — pale apricot adobe architectural forms, pastel blue and lilac skies, white clouds. I liked the painting of the view from her kitchen window in Santa Fe, because it had a more intimate feeling, as though you are standing next to her looking into the pale green and pink softness of the cottonwood tree in spring.
 
I must be biased because as I viewed the exhibition I kept thinking of New Zealand artists and their work. There was a view down into a ravine and I thought of a similar perspective by Olivia Spencer Bower. When I looked at the black paintings I found myself thinking of Colin McCahon and his Otago landscapes and wishing to see them again. I took a photo of an early work, a half fan shape in graduating tones of soft magenta through red and purple because it reminded me of the work of Gretchen Albrecht and I got into trouble with a security person, ‘Haven’t you read the signs. No photos,’ he growled. I had read the signs and I saw another woman taking a surreptitious photo, so I thought I’d try too.  This gallery policy means that sadly I can’t show any of the works here apart from the exhibition poster featuring the white convolvulus. I don’t really understand this attitude, if it denies people the opportunity to enjoy her work. When I visit galleries in Australia, I have a happy time photographing the art in the galleries, taking close ups sometimes to enjoy the brushwork. For this exhibition, I had purchased a guided commentary with headset and portable screen, so I decided to take photos of the paintings featured on the screen, balancing the device on my small handbag, which hung from my shoulder while I clicked the camera on my iphone. They’re good images but can only be used for research purposes.
 
After the exhibition I purchased an unusual and interesting biography of the artist, Miss O’Keefe (1992. It’s by a Costa Rican born author, Alvaro Cardona-Hine and was a collaborative project, co-written with Christine Taylor Patten, an ex-nurse who cared for Georgia O’Keefe at the end of her life. The artist lived until the age of 98 and sadly in her final years she suffered from macular degeneration, which seems a cruel condition for a person whose vocation and enjoyment of living relied on her visual senses. The biography is oddly satisfying because it is written at two removes from an autobiographical account, through the lens of the artist’s nurse and the male author, and is about a time in O’Keefe’s life when she had stopped painting and was enduring the indignities of old age.
 
Now I’m thinking perhaps I should return to the exhibition and reconsider because last night I read a passage by the nurse, Christine, about the hair brushing and plaiting ritual, performed in the morning and again at night for Georgia O’Keefe and found it moving. The artist wore a tight braid during the day and a looser one in bed. Initially it was trial by fire for the new carer. The artist got very impatient and angry until the technique had been mastered, calling her a fool and screaming at her but eventually they slipped into a compatible routine.
 
She loved to have her hair brushed. She loved the feeling of very firm strokes on her scalp, yet she would shout if there was any tangling, or pulling of her hair. It was a difficult job, for her hair was quite long and would have tangles in it since it had been braided all day or overnight.  
 
Once Christine overheard the artist talking on the phone to a friend about her hair, “My hair has turned white, but I guess it really doesn’t matter. I can’t see it, but I reach up and feel it, and it feels pretty lively. They tell me I look good, like I have no right to look good. Everyone’s mad at me. I am a hundred and seven, I think. But, anyway, I have three more years until I’m a hundred.”
 
Christine also commented on the protruding bones in Georgia O’Keefe’s back. She referred to them as ‘exquisite’ and found her bony slender form in old age touchingly beautiful.  Another thing that delights me about this book is the warmth and respect with which it is written and the feeling that both carer and author were working cooperatively to create something poetic, and another art work in itself, to honour the artist’s life and work.
 
One of the things that was important to me was this look of her back, this amazing beauty, probably because it was symbolic of her dignity. The way her flesh hung on her back like silk or satin curtains… perhaps it was that she had particularly beautiful bones as anyone who had seen Stieglitz’s photographs of her can attest. I do not wish to invade her privacy but it was so beautiful, it said so much about her because, of course, it involved the dignity of her carriage.

​One of the things that O’Keefe was about was that kind of beauty in a woman. Women in their nineties allowed to be beautiful…
 
Christine Taylor Patten and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Miss O’Keefe, University of New Mexico Press, 1992:22-23
 
 
Postscript
 
I had a closer look at the exhibition catalogue overnight and discovered more warmth and colour in her work than I’d perceived in the gallery. I’m not going to use a portable headset again. I think it a distraction. Better to stand in front of the works, read the information panels and really study the work closely.  As well I found this statement by Georgia O’Keefe of her desert paintings that explains her colour palette and her artistic response to the beauty of the landscape,
 
I wish you could see what I see out of the windows - the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north – the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky behind a very beautiful tree covered mesa to the west – pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars – and a feeling of much space - It is a very beautiful world.
 
Quotations from Georgia O’Keefe and Paul Rosenthal sourced from: Hannah Johnston, Tate Introductions O’Keefe, London: Tate Publishing, 2016:9,12&20.

Today we were journeying into the English countryside and had to choose between two destinations. Would we visit the bitter windswept beach of Dungeness to view the garden set in the shingle, of found sculpture, flowers and herbs beside the black house with the yellow windowsills, of writer and film maker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994) or would we drive to Sussex to see the house and garden of the great English garden designer Christopher Lloyd (1921 – 2006)? Fortunately my family were open to either possibility so I chose Great Dixter because I have a smooth, pale yellow stone from Derek Jarman’s garden that my writer friend Fredrika, brought back, following her visit to the special site years ago and that will have to suffice. 

On the journey down, we watched the English countryside blur by— the lacy hedgerows and high trees overhead forming tunnels of green, the villages of orange brick and deep brown timber shingled rooftops, the stonewalls with green ferns growing in crevices, the elegant church spires and steeples, and a windmill. As well I googled for material about Christopher Lloyd and narrated passages from an excellent obituary in the Observer  to the family in the car along with a ‘what’s app’ message from our son in Sydney. He’d had a productive day grocery shopping, washing, ‘took the rubbish out, cooked a nice meal, cleaned the kitchen.’ Gosh. And there was a photo of his dinner with all the components arranged separately on the plate – steak in one corner, mushrooms in another, mashed potato on the left, broccoli underneath, tomatoes at the top.
 
Nothing, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the very great romantic beauty of Great Dixter. Its 19th century house incorporating the original 15th century dwelling was designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1910-12 and he laid out the gardens, too, that Christopher Lloyd turned into a masterpiece. It was raining, not hard, just satisfactorily so, making the air heavy with moisture and encouraging the plants to stretch and stand up tall. The sun, falling through the cloud cover, gave the effect of light projected through a mauve screen. Petals pulsated, the green growth flowed like a river round the hedges and through the gardens, the plants they seemed to swell and grow in front of us. But something was not right. With me. Walking down the path through the meadow, I felt myself drifting to the right. I fought the sensation and went on through a hole in the hedge into a garden stacked up to the sky with flowers growing in brilliant profusion, their colours juxtaposed daringly like the jewel paints in an Indian miniature — magenta, lime, lilac, gold, red, pink, orange. And then it happened. At the side of the lily pond on the path, near a spreading leafy green and pink tinted ground cover and pink, I bent down to photograph tiny frogs leaping lightly. I staggered.  I stumbled. ‘Something is wrong,’ I said clutching my husband. I was fighting to stay upright and walk. My legs didn’t want to move. Holding onto to his hand I lurched towards a seat in the next garden room and sank down. The sickness had returned. ‘No’ I cried. ‘No, not at Great Dixter.’ The weakness that is in my tummy, or my head, I still haven’t figured it out, and that gives me symptoms of vertigo was upon me. My heart sank. Once it arrives nothing can stop its horrid unfolding. I sat on the seat and the rain fell on my head, plastering my hair to my skull and I was glad of it. I could die in the rain amongst the flowers. But Julian found a pill, which I swallowed quickly without water while my daughter ran to the café and bought a bottle of pear juice — it was called ‘OWLET Kent Pear Juice’ — which I quickly drank, knowing, however, that it wouldn’t stay down long.

At times like this, I really, really love my husband. I love him because he is a doctor and that helps me feel safe. I love him because he stays calm, like a rock, in these tricky situations, although today, he was rattled. I could sense the thought train, is she having a stroke? The drifting to the right and the stumbling was a new experience. Through the next two hours he stayed close, his body the pillar that I leaned on each time we moved and each time I collapsed onto a bench. I was absolutely determined not to abort the trip and spoil the day for the family. It had taken over two hours to get here and I knew we would never see such magic in a garden in such perfect conditions and never travel in this combination, just the four of us together in England, again.
 
So they viewed the gardens and the house and sat with me in relays. When my daughter came, she scolded me gently for being on my phone in the car  — I’d noticed that she was too but didn’t mention that — ‘I know, I know,’ I replied. ‘It was a mistake.’  She stroked my head then, pulling out and fluffing the hair saying ‘Look at you. Your hair is a mess. It’s all stuck down.’

Getting from one resting post to another, with the whole garden tipping and twisting, felt impossible but thankfully Cleo had thought to get a paper cup when she purchased the Owlet juice. It instantly became the receptacle for the regurgitated pear extract that I had to discreetly tip onto Christopher Lloyd’s garden. Somehow that seemed more acceptable than vomiting directly into his garden.
 
Finally the family was ready and I made one final effort to move through the gardens to reach the car. On the way I snapped photos hurriedly and desperately, aware of the immense beauty that I was rushing through. The garden is vast and like a maze with tightly organised zones packed densely with plants and hedges that overflow onto the path and join together overhead in riotous and joyful yelps. Sometimes you arrive at a dead end which is what happened in the final hurtle. We became separated from Cleo and had to fight our way down a pathway, hedged on both sides, and as narrow as a birth canal to a sudden drop over which Julian leapt, leaving me stranded. In desperation I threw myself onto his shoulder and slid down his back onto the path.
 
The following day when we could speak of the ordeal I asked Cleo to tell me about the Edward Lutyens’ interior. Her descriptions were so good I wanted to cry. She is learning embroidery and so she recalled the colours and patterns of chair coverings, cushions and curtains in great detail. She told me about Christopher Lloyd’s vast library and his shelves and shelves of Country Life magazines for which he wrote a column, until I said, ‘Stop. I can’t bear to hear anymore.’ In the meantime she had purchased a book from the garden shop, Christopher Lloyd In My Garden: The Garden Diaries of Great Dixter (1993) and it was a good choice with some interesting thoughts on editing. Published by Frank Ronan of Bloomsbury Press, Christopher Lloyd said it’s the book he’s most proud of because Frank Ronan’s method ‘has been to reproduce exactly what I wrote’ from scratch ‘even before it passed through the subeditors’ hands. He has gone back to the original typescripts.’ When Lloyd was writing these pieces for Country Life he was writing to very tight deadlines and this gave the work immediacy but then it got edited and some of it excised. Often he didn’t round off the pieces but the editor did. In this instance Christopher Lloyd said, ‘I would rather have Frank on it, any day.’ He felt that this approach made his work more readable, more appealing and then he said,  
 
I enjoy my gardening (and have been tremendously lucky in my opportunities) and I  enjoy writing in our wonderfully expressive, albeit ambiguous English language. I find it impossible to take either myself or anyone else too seriously. Gardening, like living should be fun. It can’t be, much of the time, but we can do our best to make it so.      
 
Christopher Lloyd, Christopher Lloyd In My Garden: The Garden Diaries of Great Dixter, editor, Frank Ronan, London, Bloomsbury, 1993:1-

I felt at home in London and could have stayed on. The nights when we gathered in Cleo’s apartment by the Linden tree canopy, and she cooked for us, were amongst the best. We ate dinner around the television screen watching early episodes of Luther, that they hadn’t yet seen, and it was a welcome change from dining out. That lifestyle rapidly loses its appeal after a few nights in a row. The food is too rich, although I do relish the break from my normal routine as cook and provider, night upon tedious night. Sometimes I like cooking. I get satisfaction from producing something tasty and well balanced but equally I resent it, when I’ve got a lot of work on the go. Then, quite frequently, I burn good food because my mind is not really on the task, or I have the laptop open on the bench and I’m trying to work and cook.
 
I will use this flight time, 45 minutes, to record some impressions of our stay.
 
The Serpentine Gallery — One bright morning we walked from our hotel in Notting Hill to see the extension designed by the recently deceased, Iraqi born, London based architect Zaza Hadid, (1950 – 2016) at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. ‘Are you sure it is within walking distance’ I asked my husband, knowing how he likes to ramble on foot but also aware that we were off to Highgate cemetery at mid-day and already I was feeling tired and still fluffy in my head, still tipped upside down. ‘Yes, it’s an easy walk,’ he said, striding on his long legs, a whole lamp post in front. This is always how he conducts his walks with me. The first time we went to Europe, in our early twenties, I was shocked. We stepped off the train and he marched off and before long he was a whole village ahead of me. He can’t help it. This is his style. He focusses on the mission, whereas my way is to trail behind, on my much shorter legs, and soak up the ambience of the scenes around me.
​
The sun shone as we walked through the meadows of Hyde Park. In the mid-distance I spied a man half sitting, one knee bent, the other leg resting there, the calf outstretched, a trembling vision amongst the long grass and dandelions, of rest and contentment, I thought. Julian hurried on. ‘How much further?’ I called. ‘Not far, now’ he called back. ‘But I can’t see the gallery,’ I complained. ‘Look there’s the water’ — a thin line on the horizon — ‘it’s over there.’ But it wasn’t. He’d tricked me. It was a small lake and there was no building in sight. ‘Julian,’ I called. ‘You don’t really know where you’re going.’ I turned on Google maps and stabbed in ‘Serpentine Gallery.’ It was another 500 metres, and then a right turn, and then…

But it was worth the long walk to see the strange futuristic space, with a small nod to Gaudi perhaps and to caves of stalagmites, its moulded concrete dripping from the high ovoid roof onto the floor. What was its function exactly? An afternoon tea pavilion, a wedding venue, maybe. Today it was set up for tea and drinks and so we rested in the cool, green and white interior sipping a drink that was a combination of elderflower, lemon juice, apple, egg white and soda. Through windows that looked like bubbles, or viewing panels in a spaceship there were glimpses of a ‘new perennial’ terrace garden overflowing and effusive. Zaza Hadid had a difficult time in the UK getting any of her designs built. She had far more success in Europe where they embraced her computer generated, fantastically engineered, impossible designs. Buildings that defied logic and gravity…
 
London was on high alert the week of our stay and people’s anxiety was palpable, particularly in places of high congestion, like the tube station in Oxford Circus. One day while exiting, I watched people on the opposite escalator going down the steep, long portal, a collection of different ethnicities, ages, fashions, colours, gathered together. They were leaning forward, like skiers, hands on the moving rail, a stream of humanity, like faces in a Goya painting, being conveyed into hell.
 
Each time I ventured into those tight spaces I grew anxious and my chest would constrict. I have never enjoyed travelling on the underground, but like everyone else, I use it for its efficiency and speed. Now in 2016 it really does require courage to voyage there. At the rush hour, somewhere between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch the train stopped in the dark and the heat and I found myself falling back into a childhood pattern and praying, ‘Please God, please God keep everyone safe.’ People wedged in a tube like a digestive tract with a black tunnel skin wound tightly round, everyone of us, vulnerable.
 
Further down the carriage I noticed an elderly Chinese man with a very straight back, his head bent slightly in a posture that suggested he was meditating. I might have got it wrong but his restful pose settled me. Observing people is a good distraction in stressful situations. I smiled at a little Indian baby next to me, nestled into his mother, brown eyes upon me, huge in his fine boned, delicate olive-skinned face. His mother turned and said, ‘I’m sorry he’s staring at you.’ But I was encouraging him. ‘He’s lovely, I said. A toddler sat next to her. ‘How do you manage them both on the escalators,’ I asked. ‘It’s harder when I bring the double buggy, ‘ she said, heading to the door, in her gold-yellow Sikh flowing pants, the little one tucked under her arm, the toddler holding her hand.
 
Later I met up with Julian and we waited for our train. Beside us on the platform two millenials, young men with all the swagger and confidence of youth were talking very loudly into their phones. And when the train drew in they leapt on and continued their business meetings in the tight spot by the doors, where you hang onto whatever is near — a pole, a hanging strap, your husband. One of these creatures was wearing a very smart suit, made from fine pale grey wool with a pattern of white and grey threads arranged in squares. Tucked into the pocket of his waistcoat, he had pushed a flowing yellow silk handkerchief. At the conclusion of the call he turned to his friend and exclaimed, ‘Fucken retard.’ Julian caught my eye and grinned. ‘It’s the boss’s wife. She’s a fucken retard. I told her we had to meet at ten to fucken free and do you think she…’ his voice trailed away as he exited the train.
 
On the underground people engage in a lot of reading — newspapers, books, magazines, information on their phone screens. They plug in their earphones to block out the unpleasantness. People cart their luggage on and off, they drag helium party balloons, gold numerals saying ‘30’ with weights on the bottoms that slide along the floor. They apply makeup. I watched a young woman change her face. Before she began the transforming process I thought she had the kind of beauty, with her pale skin and symmetrical features, dark grey eyes and high cheekbones, her topknot that would have appealed to many a portrait painter from Degas to Lucien Freud. He might have liked her deliberately tattered and ripped blue jeans and her outrageously high cork soled platform sandals. I watched her applying her eyebrow powder. She used a light brush that she dabbed in a ritualistic way, three taps on each of the three different brown powder tones in her compact before stroking each individual hair it seemed, making a perfect semicircle above her eyes. She used a big brush to dab powder over her face, more repetitive movements. She defined her cheekbones with blusher, pulled the mascara brush through her lashes, at least five times for upper and then lower and then she stepped off the train.
 
A couple sitting opposite me were genuinely scary. They had matching brown walking shoes and matching style small wheelie bags, one brown the other gold. The wife looked like Mrs Twit from Roald Dahl’s children’s novel The Twits. She had a large, grey and purple, pitted, drooping face and her head was shaped like a rectangle running vertically on her neck.  I’d noticed them when the woman pinched her husband hard, on the arm, to stop him picking at a yellow paper label on the bag between his legs. ‘Don’t touch that label,’ she said in a sinister voice. ‘It’s MINE.’ He looked away through the dirty, smeared lenses of his plastic spectacles. The train rocked. They sat in silence for three stops. Then she began a pantomime. Hand extended she counted her fingers and I caught the words, ‘Potatoes, bread, sugar.’ She stopped. She did it again. ‘Potatoes, bread, sugar,’ and then he, with a stroke of inspiration, said, ‘Tea.’ She was pleased with this. ‘Potatoes, bread, sugar, tea…’ The finger routine again. In unison they said ‘Butter.’ They had their shopping list.
 
We dined out at Nori, the Soho restaurant of the very successful Yotam Ottolenghi and the food was very good but the thing I will remember about this night is not the delicious plates of food but the behaviour of the couple at the table near us. During our meal, Cleo’s husband overheard them complaining about the meal. ‘The chicken is dry,’ said the husband. The waiter was called to the table and this is what we heard the husband say, ‘The meal has not met our expectations… We’ve come all the way from Wales… We have all the Ottolenghi cookbooks… We’ve watched all the programmes in the cooking series…’ The waiter knelt at the table, his back to us, receiving the criticism. You could tell from his posture that he was responding evenly and kindly. The couple were bathing in his attention. ‘It’s okay mate,’ said the husband as he got up to leave, ‘we’re just giving you our feedback,’ as the waiter helped the wife on with her coat, she smiling coyly.   When I was sure they had gone I asked the waiter, as he was passing, I couldn’t help myself, ‘Was he a total tosser?’ The waiter burst out laughing.
 
The Victoria and Albert Museum — the underground train deposited us directly across the road from the Victoria and Albert museum and we walked through a tunnel of music, a man was playing an Irish harp and his classical music filled the space with swelling, amplifying sound. On the walk we read billboards advertising an exhibition, Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear but illogically I decided I was going to soak up the exhibits in the main halls, explore the architecture, visit the shop where once I bought a collage art work, of layered handmade paper, pieces of gold and flecks of thread, the colours orange, pink, turquoise, yellow. It floats on a white ground in a box frame of speckled gold. I see it everyday sitting on the bookshelves in the lounge at home, and I love it.
 
So while Julian attended Undressed I wafted through the halls, taking photos of rich, exotic, ancient objects especially from the Middle East, Iran and Iraq, from Turkey, Afghanistan and India and one ethereal Napoleonic red silk dress, high waisted, with chenille thread embroidery around the yoke. Out in the courtyard I photographed the High Victorian brick and stone building through a contemporary installation, a kind of seedpod, made of steel and Perspex, but for most of the time my attention was taken by two water nymphs in the central pond leaping and frolicking. One child sat like a fairy on a leaf pad, the other lay back in her white high-waisted, simple shift dress, quite flat with the water about her ears, in a way that reminded me of Lizzie Siddal in John Millais’s bath, catching pneumonia, while the master got his iconic Pre-Raphaelite painting. 

While waiting for Julian, I browsed through the catalogue of Undressed and realised I had missed a really good show. Why did I make that odd decision? Julian was quiet. He’d bought a copy of the catalogue for me.  There was no time now, to rush through. We were taking tea at the Ivy with Cleo and the parents of the little girl she nannies for on one day of her week. ‘I will have to go back,’ I said. 
 
What joy to meet a small child in London, just eleven-months old a well-loved, well-adjusted first child she is the lightness in Cleo’s working week. Sometimes Cleo sends photos and once a video of this dear little girl racing down the pale pine floorboards of the English house, in a walker, squealing in response to Cleo’s encouragement. I play the video sometimes to lift my spirits when I am down. 
 
I had bought a soft, pink, floppy bunny with Liberty paisley on the inside of the rabbit’s ears and a book about a pink bunny, with just snippets of a story and different textures to touch. Cleo told me she likes the feel of Velcro and there was a bright pink circle of the sticky texture for her to scratch. The soft toy rabbit was like taking coals to Newcastle because this child might have the biggest collection of soft toys in London. Once Cleo sent me a photo of her lying on the floor surrounded by ten different Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse soft toys. And predictably on this day, the bunny was tossed aside but the book and the interesting surfaces were studied, page by page, again and again. Some children just are more appealing. This little one is petite and perfectly formed and has a lovely nature, quite shy and bashful but when something pleases her, her entire face breaks into a radiant smile. I’ve seen photos of her smiling with her whole body, eyes, mouth, teeth, of which she has a lot now, and even her bare feet they tighten and stretch in pleasure. At our afternoon tea, I sat across from her smiling and she in return gave me an uncertain, winsome smile dropping her head and burrowing into her mother. ‘I would love to touch her,’ I said, meaning just her hand, but her Daddy leaned over, plucked her off her mother’s knee and plonked her on my lap. Not a good idea. She didn’t cry but reached for her father.
 
We said our goodbyes and I returned on the underground, back through the tunnel of music, in a state of high exhaustion to view the show. All the way there and even during the viewing I was hating this driven aspect of my personality, the way it pushes on disregarding the state of my tired body. ‘You’ll be pleased later on, to have the memory,’ the driver always says. 

I learned some interesting things in the exhibition, that the French word lingerie derives from ‘linge’ for linen which is where underwear history begins in France in 18th century with undershirts and drawers for men, to protect their over-garments and chemises in daintier french linen for women. I viewed the array of boned, hooped and caged crinoline to the sound of arpeggios, in the style of Michael Nyman’s piano composition for Jane Campion’s film The Piano. It’s amazing how that one score has influenced an entire generation of film music and beyond.
 
The colours of the early underwear astounded me. I saw a British ‘stay’ in chilli red silk damask dated 1740 – 85 and a delicate pale blue cotton twill, whalebone corset and another called a ‘dermathistic corset’ to protect the vulnerable parts of a woman’s body, the advertisement said, in a beautiful combination of pleated gold cotton sateen and dull red, with bronze fastenings and a trim of cream lace at the bust. But the standout corset was the hot pink garment on the cover of the catalogue, made of silk satin, lace and whalebone, with a steel busk and metal eyelets its attribution and date, ‘probably Britain, 1890-5.’
 
Seeing the corsets and their intricate fastenings triggered a memory of my grandmother, tying her undergarment, pulling the laces around metal catches, pulling hard to tighten the thing and then looping another tie through holes near the bottom of the garment, before she attached her stockings to the suspenders and finally put on her bloomers. The entire operation took ages and never failed to fascinate me.
 
I saw men’s undies, silk embroidered socks, and a wide belt made out of pale brown cotton sateen to hold his tummy in and a silk dressing gown. Women’s daywear included samples of Liberty silk tea dresses and a pair of Chinese lounge pyjamas, made of indigo and blue silk. There were hostess gowns and kaftans which were followed by contemporary bustiers and girdles worn over clothing, or just on their own as provocative high fashion, examples from Vivenne Westwood, John Paul Gautier, John Galliano and from Agent Provocateur. Most of all though, in the 1970s section, I enjoyed reading about the feminists who rejected the bra, saying it ‘suppressed’ the breasts… ​

The final two days in London were spent in the company of my mother’s friend, Miriam Frank. I wrote a review of her memoir My Innocent Absence: Tales from a Nomadic Life 2010). It’s available on my website in the Reviews section. Miriam lives in a light-filled apartment designed by Richard Rogers, right on the Thames at Battersea, beside a 17th century church. Apparently the artist J.M.W. Turner liked to paint his London sunsets here and would be rowed across the river to this position beside the church. On the day of our visit the clouds were flossy lilac and grey above the London panorama but when Miriam described for us the fiery skies that turn the city and the water and the rooms of her apartment red and gold, I could see from her expression that the light effects must spread enchantment. She said, ‘I see what Turner saw.’ I would have loved to witness a sunset. On this day when the light shone through it touched the tall plants arranged together near the windows, the walls of books, the table set with afternoon tea china — platters of blinis and plates of pastries and European cakes. It lit up the paintings on her white walls, the very vivid, outstanding expressionist canvases and watercolours painted by her husband, the Austrian painter Kortokraks.  

On the final day I met Miriam at the National Gallery and together we viewed the exhibition Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck. This exhibition was satisfying. It had an intelligent curatorial narrative, starting, the ‘wrong way round,’ in the close present with the British portrait painter Lucien Freud and a sample of works from his own collection that showed some of the influences on his painting and moving through the Post Impressionists, Matisse and Degas to the older English painters Joshua Reynolds and ending on Van Dyck. Each gallery juxtaposed the favourite works in the artist’s personal art collection, with examples of their own paintings.  It’s not often you find the perfect art companion, someone who shares a similar perspective and who studies the art at the same pace engaging with each work responding, questioning, analysing what she is seeing. That’s how it was on this day with Miriam.
 
I had wanted to take Miriam to lunch but no, she insisted that I was her guest and she had arranged our booking at Portrait, the rooftop restaurant at the National Portrait Gallery, her favourite London dining place. The table overlooked the London skyline — copper domes, columns, slate rooftops, Big Ben in the distance. It was like viewing a hand-tinted watercolour scene through a diorama. I had to give myself a pinch to remind myself that the view was real, that I was actually here in London experiencing the beauty of a very great city and that I was a grown up person having lunch and sharing an intimate conversation with a brilliant woman, an anaesthetist and an author, my friend who had just asked me if I might read her latest manuscript and offer feedback.
 
And about the food at the restaurant, following the linguine with zucchini, lemon, pine nuts and parmesan I experienced a delectable, sensational sweet treat. The ‘lemon posset with blackcurrants’ was served in a small glass from which I took tiny teaspoons, plunging through the sticky blackcurrant topping to the tart just set liquid, a combination of lemon, cream, egg and sugar underneath

My original intention to write for five minutes, rapidly, and to resist the editing process has failed. Instead I have slipped into an essay-like form in some entries, going back to university and my studies in art history and quoting from books, which is something I said I would not do. As a result the writing seems less like a journal and more like a travel/art history blog or even writing with pictures. And I can’t judge whether that’s okay. I’m too close to the project. The main problem however is that, once I get going, the writing process takes over and I end up watching helplessly as my hand holding the pen follows my wilful mind. Another annoying aspect of making a record in the midst of a tour is that I end up writing, after the event, about the past when actually journalling in the moment can sometimes be more interesting and potent.

9th August, 2016

It is over and I could weep.
 
I have admired the work of Piet Oudolf from a distance for a long time and dreamt of visiting his own garden near Hummelo in the Netherlands, but had thought it impossible. Some years ago I was stopped in my tracks by a neuropathic pain in my sciatic nerve that was made worse by an accident and then worse again following surgery.  ​

This is not a normal pain because it never ceases and feels like permanent scalding all the way down the affected limb to the toes. So I had thought my travelling days were over because I wouldn’t be able to cope with the physical demands of life lived at an intense pace and on a very tight schedule but then I began writing about the experience of pain in a journal and that helped me process the feelings. I also sought help from a pain psychologist and the medical team, led by Professor Bob Large at The Auckland Regional Pain Centre and they helped me learn how to live, or to co-exist alongside the pain, how to be non-reactive in the Buddhist way. The pain is a challenge, yes, but not a catastrophe. It just is That is all.
 
The sky this morning was overcast and beautiful, in the way it can only be in Europe, where the clouds are more tonal and seem to have greater depth. Earlier in the week the weather report had promised sun but today it said, ‘rain starting at 11am,’ the very hour of the opening of Piet Oudolf’s garden. After a short consultation, perhaps we should visit a castle first and find shelter inside, away from the rain? We decided to go directly to the garden.

The hedging in this garden, with its imperfect rectangles provides a perfect foil for the overflowing plant forms. One yew hedge is a big wide circle on a green lawn. In a garden nearer the modern house, the designer has arranged the plants in rows, with narrow apertures just wide enough for a person to walk down and study the plants in close-up, bumping into bees and spiders and butterflies on the way. That’s another effect of being in Piet Oudolf’s garden. He makes you stop and look closely at every facet of a plant form including the pale purple feathers of the grass seed heads.
 
It was very hard to leave this garden knowing I would never return. The brief visit made me aware of how ephemeral a human life is. I stole through the hedge for one last viewing, this time in the rain, to absorb the miracle and say thank you to Piet and to nature and to the single spark of life eons ago that set off the process of cell replication that led to the radiance of this garden today. Taking one last gulp of the mystery with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks I turned on my heel and walked away. ​

10th August, 2016

​There is, at last, more time to write as I am on a plane again, this time departing from Schipol Airport, Amsterdam and flying to Geneva to see family in Yverdon. The thing I enjoy about flying in Europe is the complete absence of safety videos with an All Blacks theme. I dislike them. I find them corny and pointless. The only segment of an Air New Zealand instructional film that appeals to me is the footage of the kiwi surfer Ricardo Christie. I like his blue eyes and his shoulder length, wavy, blonde hair and the way he smiles broadly, as the four wheel drive he is steering bounces over a dirt track by the sea. ​

Here on this plane, there is no screen, just lovely KLM flight attendants, a woman with a blonde chignon and a Dutch African man with black ringlets. They stand in the aisle, bracing their legs, and demonstrate how to open and close a seat belt and pull down on the oxygen mask which might be all you could achieve in a sudden emergency, apart from that highly televised miraculous landing in 2009, after the US pilot, captain Chessley Sullenberger, flew into a flock of birds that then jammed the jet engines forcing him to float his plane down onto the Hudson River. I remember the scenes of the plane on the water, and the people huddled together on the wing, before the rescue boats arrived.  It was the happiest story to emerge from New York in a long time.
 
Yesterday because of a silly human error, the experience of the Kröller Müller sculpture park and art collection, half way between Hummelo and Amsterdam, was marred. We had forgotten to empty the safe at the Bed and Breakfast. It was located at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard behind a rubbish bin and I remember having had had an earlier discussion about whether to use it or not. We must have put the valuables inside and then promptly forgotten about them. When you’re travelling through Europe on fast-forward, you really can forget your head.
 
In the car I had said, in a self-satisfied way, to Cleo, that on my last survey of the bedroom, I had lifted the lid of the brown and cream wicker woven laundry basket and my pacific island necklace, a brown and white shell on a cocoa-coloured woven cord made by my friend, Sofia Tekela-Smith, had dropped to the floor. Wasn’t that lucky,’ I remarked to Cleo. Alas, arriving at the sculpture park, I opened my backpack, looked into the apricot cavity and thought something is not right. My little jewellery pouch was missing along with the passports. This meant that a journey that should have lasted a pleasant two hours, with a break at the sculpture park in the middle, turned into a four hour trip all up, three of them after our time at the park. Luckily we were both at fault in this instance and there was no blaming.
 
The brilliant thing about the Kröller Müller experience is that the museum and sculpture park are located in the Hoge Veluwe National park, a vast area of forest and wide open spaces patterned with low growing grey firs, like Christmas trees and the yellow wild flowers of golden rod. The grass there is burnt off and pale brown, reminding me of the landscape around the Rakaia riverbed in Canterbury in the summertime, although there the flora is gorse, broom and lupins and the fauna is rabbits.
 
The only access to the museum is across the park, along a 2½ kilometre long cycleway. There were hundreds of bicycles to choose from, at the park entrance, big, comfortable jalopies with wide seats, and pedal brakes. I haven’t been on a bicycle in years and the feeling as I went freewheeling through the trees was a revelation. As the wheels spun I was reminded of the female physician in the German film Barbara riding through wartime East Germany, near the Baltic Sea. And rolling further back I was a girl again, on the Canterbury Plains, riding my bike, with my dress winding up round my thighs and not caring and with the wind rushing through my hair.
 
I sensed that other cyclists, on this path, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in The Netherlands shared the feeling. It wasn’t expressed necessarily in smiles but rather in a softening around the mouth and jawline. There were people from many nations crossing the park, from Africa, China, Japan, Europe, the US, each individual discovering and delighting in the fact that they still knew how to ride. This is something I admire about the Dutch, the way they privilege the bicycle. The whole country is criss-crossed by cycle-ways, so that as you drive through the landscape, you see young people, middle-aged couples, the elderly, moving seamlessly, with just their torsos showing, above the summer pastures. The Dutch do seem more relaxed. And then someone up ahead spotted, in the distance, the faint outline of a baby deer, and braked suddenly so that all the people following close behind almost fell off their bicycles.

There is something for everyone at the Kröller Müller art museum and sculpture park— there is the steel pivot, K piece by Mark di Suvero its bright red colour set against the shiny green lawn near the entrance to the gallery, there is the essence of swan Sculpture Fotent 2  by Marta Pan sailing in a dark pool beyond the galleries and inside, hanging from a glass panelled ceiling, there are the matte soft red blades of an Alexander Calder mobile The vast painting collection once belonged to Helene Kröller Müller (1869 – 1939). She was one of the first women anywhere, to gather a major collection of art including paintings by the Impressionists and Pointillists and a major collection of the work of Dutch artists right up to the 1930s. She was also one of the first to recognise Van Gogh’s brilliance and she was generous and foresighted. In 1935 along with her husband Anton Muller she donated the entire collection along with their large forested estate to the Dutch people. ​

At first I couldn’t pin down my feelings about the landscape. It’s very different from England where you have the rolling topography and The Netherlands which is flat. Here there are mountains, long lines of them, floating on every point of the compass — north, south, east, west. The towns along the route, viewed from the motorway, seem self-contained, impenetrable, whereas in England and The Netherlands villages, houses, gardens, stonewalls appear suddenly in front of you and virtually wrap themselves around the car as you move through. The journey took us past vast fields of sunflowers, not quite blooming but getting ready for high summer. The car entered and exited from tunnels through mountains, from dark into light and more sunflowers, more fields, more mountain and lake.
 
The very first item on my sister-in-law’s agenda was a leisurely tour through her garden examining each flower and grass in the meadow, the gingko tree, the fir tree, the bamboo and willow hedges, and then the kitchen garden with its mix of flowers, the tall spires of bright pink hollyhocks and a newly planted ‘rosa mutabilis’ a link with the illustration on the cover of my pain journal. I admired the herbs that grow in bright purplish-pink containers on the outside sill of the kitchen window. I didn’t know the pretty pink spires and the soft grey serrated leaves of the common vervain. Apparently it is a relative of the verbena family but with a slightly bitter astringent taste not ideal for eating, although it makes a good poultice for headaches and the aches of rheumatism. I viewed the vegetables, the tomatoes on the vines not yet ripe, because, this has been a cooler summer than usual, but laden with green fruit. The kiwifruit vines have over two hundred furry brown fruit not quite mature but ripening rapidly in the summer heat. The vines coil on wires strung from a pergola that makes a shady arbour around the outside table where meals are consumed ‘al fresco’ in summer.
 
There was a sense of déjà vu as we made our round of the garden. This was my mother-in-law’s greeting ritual as well. Always when we arrived at her home in Christchurch, before we’d even unpacked our belongings into the little house, where we slept each summer, my mother-in-law would whisk me into the garden to see her ‘treasures.’  The routine had the feeling, for me, of sneaking into the nursery to view a sleeping baby, which is something I used to do when my brother and sister were born nearly a decade after me.
 
I still haven’t recovered from the sale of the family home, which was precipitated by the earthquakes. Over all the years of our marriage, my husband’s home had been a haven of security especially in the early days when our lives seemed to be forever about movement and living in unfamiliar rented accommodation in flats and apartments in New Zealand and overseas during the long years of training and studying. Viewing this Swiss garden brought the memories flooding back and made me realise that still I haven’t moved on. I continue to mourn the loss of that garden with its vigorous perennial borders, the purple clematis vine, in memory of our niece, that twirled up one cherry tree, and the falling white blossoms on the companion cherry under which we were photographed on the day after our wedding. What I especially miss is the way a Christchurch garden provides an acute representation of the passing of the seasons, unlike Auckland where the climate is subtropical and winters nowadays, with global warming in full meltdown mode, almost non-existent.
 
I know I should be mature about change because life transitions and losses are inevitable and unavoidable upon a life path. The wheel turns and turns again. The younger generation become the older generation and people pass on, new babies are born. But still I don’t like it and though I try to continue the traditions that provide links in the chain between the generations, I’m also aware of the impossibility of ever being able to replace the particular ambience and mood of an actual house its past dramas and secrets, its dark and dry and sweet scents of dust and musk, the smell of carpet and leather, the faint whiff of lavender when you open a drawer of clothes. Such essences of place can not be replicated.
 
Already I have a feeling for my themes for this section of the journal because I had received advance notice of our schedule, before the trip began and it included gallery visits, swims in le lac Léman, as Lake Geneva is known in this the French speaking part of Switzerland, and lac Neuchâtel, a walk through the historic cities of Bern and Lausanne and a visit, by boat, to a medieval castle on an island at the southern end of Lac Leman. So one theme will most likely be travel experiences and amusements, while the second motif threading through the writing will be food. My sister-in-law is a creative and accomplished provider of fine food so it’s likely I will be itemising a long list of mouth-watering food.  I don’t drink alcohol so I won’t be able to elaborate on the beer and wine, but in Switzerland there are more non-alcoholic beverages — iced teas, syrups and mixes — than anywhere else in the world it seems to me, and the packaging on the bottles is so appealing, with botanical illustrations of herbs, coloured green, blue, red, yellow on a white label background, like a fresh Liberty print.
 
The welcome tea today and the series of tasty morsels and tempters that followed made me consider my own approach to food. I think I could be more creative and should have more of a plan as opposed to racing round the supermarket, grabbing thing, on the morning of the day that visitors are coming for afternoon tea. Obviously my sister-in-law had invested time in advance planning and food preparation for today and even tomorrow and probably for all of the week. Already a potato gratin with kohl rabi has been prepared for tomorrow evening's meal.  The food began rolling with a minty herbal drink served in a large glass teapot, bigger than my own herbal teapot, and European in its styling and much more elegant. The table was set with candles, two smooth maroon-coloured balls of wax, and there were hollyhocks floating in a bowl.  Eight table mats shaped like gingko leaves with matching drink coasters had been laid out around the table. The serviettes had all the colours of a peacock with its tail up, or a paua. On one white plate there was a careful arrangement of small, strongly flavoured marshmallow bullets; the pale orange was flavoured peach, the pale blue was blueberry, the pink tasted like raspberry. I watched fascinated as Marita, in her kitchen with all its clever European appliances and efficient food preparation and cooking systems, including a steam oven, spooned a swirl of thickened sour cream, like crème fraiche, onto little round cinnamon and apple biscuits. Next she dropped freshly picked redcurrants from the garden into the cream. And then daughter Claire, thirteen years old, long brown hair, a top of stripy French navy and white, skimpy white shorts, showing off long, brown legs, ducked through the hedge and went next door to collect blackberries from the neighbour, one for each biscuit. 
 
Initially we were quiet. After a gap of time people need time to adjust to one another and become familiar again. There was a huge amount of catching up going on in my head, like a shifting of cogs round and round and fitting into place — this is where I think that sea and river travel, or riding on horseback must be so much easier on the mind. It would give you time to process the shifts in time and place. Only a few hours ago I’d been in another country, and then without looking, a one-hour plane flight and a one-hour car journey I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and come out in Switzerland.
 
I have never visited this family home — the others have — and so I was responding to the new environment, pinching myself, thinking,  ‘ Finally I’m here. It has happened.’ I had reached the home I’ve viewed so many times through photos attached to an email, or on the Skype screen, in the gaps between and behind the faces. All this was going through my mind during the short pause, on the channel surfer, before the fast forward button was pressed and soon everyone was talking at once and the gentle teasing and ribbing, that goes on in families, had begun.
 
I absolutely adore the very first day of a holiday with loved ones. There is the bounteous bonhomie at being reunited mixed with the exquisite anticipation of further treats in store, endless days of fun and adventure stretching ahead. There is also the realisation that family and blood ties are incredibly strong and meaningful. But the best bit is the sense of starting with a clear slate and all the liminal possibility that such a situation provides.

21st August, 2016

The Paul Klee museum, Zentrum Paul Klee, is situated in a field on the edge of the city of Bern. You hardly know it’s there because it is embedded in a meadow. The roofline is a series of three giant wave-like forms that emerge, rolling, from the ground so it seems a part of nature. It’s not until you reach the entrance that the building makes its presence felt.

​The story of the realisation of this great museum and art centre is inspiring. It was designed by the Italian architect and engineer Renzo Piano, who was also one of the joint architects involved in the design of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971) and completed in 2005, just one year ahead of a deadline set by Livia Klee-Meyer the wife of Paul Klee’s only son Felix, and Alexander Klee, the artist’s grandson. When they offered their collection of 690 art works to the city of Bern, in 1998, it was on the condition that a purpose built gallery and study centre, for the arts, must be built to house the collection by 2006.

All forms of life writing involve the act of looking back but for a journal the writing needs to occur close to the experience, ideally at the end of the day. This has been a problem throughout the trip and has made me feel desperate at times that I will end up writing the final entries when I am home again and by then I will be clutching at the threads of a dream, or a mirage, that has been swallowed up by time and jet travel and distance and it won’t really be a journal anymore. It will be writing ‘about a journee’.

This is all I have managed to record about Bern. I glimpse the small historic city of Bern through trees, as the car descends the hill. The view is partially obscured by splatters of rain on the windscreen and lacy tree foliage. So the sighting of a city that looks like an illustration from a fairy tale goes like this. I see something wonderful that looks like a walled city. It’s gone, hiding behind more emerald leafage. The view opens and terracotta rooftops, church spires, bridges and the outline of impressive parliament buildings reveal themselves against the sky. There is a river down below this walled city, a deep, mysterious, fast flowing river coloured aqua with lots of white mixed in.

Marita has prepared a picnic. It’s all her work, apart from the brightly coloured macaroons, that Julian purchased in Yverdon this morning while I was finishing yesterday’s journal entry. It is another well-balanced and tasty meal; brown bread sandwiches spread with hummus and filled with roasted aubergine and grilled bacon and and three cherry tomatoes, one red, one orange and one yellow, plucked from the picnic bag and placed on top of the sandwich on the recycled paper plate. There’s a serviette patterned with yellow camomile flowers on a green check background tucked underneath. We are drinking Lionel’s favourite ice tea — it’s mine now too — which is minty and herby and not too sweet, out of small goblets. To follow there are the fine white shavings of the cheese tête de moine — they look like pale fungi — served with dark red cherries and to finish there is something labelled ‘Pommes seche bion,’ a perfect ring of shrivelled apple with the skin on. I’m aware of my utter indolence leaning back in my chair accepting and consuming the morsels, without doing any of the hard labour to produce it. This truly feels like a holiday.
 
‘Deb-o-rah, you need to look up at Montreux.’ Perhaps I will have more time to write on the return journey. The boat is pulling into the pier of the town made famous by the world-renowned jazz festival. An older woman with long ash coloured hair stands at the railing of the boat peering at a grand house and garden as the boat glides in so close you could reach out and touch the stone walls, the green hedges, the blue cypresses, the turrets, the window boxes of geraniums. Her dress is a double layer of red chiffon, with fine cap sleeves. The pattern on the fabric is like Monet’s painting of a field of poppies. She’s looking up now at the forested slopes above Montreux. They’re very steep. The town itself is mostly clustered towards the bottom and further up, there are castles on points in the air.   Jason, in the course of his work for the firm Investec, had visited the home of the founder of the jazz festival, Claude Nobs. He gestures, now way up high and describes the views from the house, you could see in every direction down the mountain over the lake and into France.
 
Marita is telling me about a man who sat on a deckchair that was ‘not properly engaged and he fell on his head and died, so now,’ she says, ‘whenever I sit on a deckchair I think of him.’ When I comment that there seem to be a lot of grim deaths in Switzerland, she asks me what I mean. ‘Well Claude Nobs died in a cross-country skiing accident and you mentioned Jason’s work colleague who died while snow-shoeing a year ago.’ And there was another of Jason’s colleagues, who had an epileptic seizure in the street and hit his head on the curb on the way down, who died also. These are very sad stories. And there is Michael Schumacher who was left in a coma in 2013 following a skiing accident although that was in the nearby French Alps.
 
My niece Claire is leaning back on a white slatted bench seat with her eyes closed. Today she is wearing her stripy top again with skinny denims that hug her slender legs. Her walking shoes are made of a soft fabric that is patterned with purple dots. The laces are magenta and the soles of the shoes are pink and black. Only here in this part of the world could you find such delectable colour combinations on a walking shoe. Her hair is tied up high on her head with a bright pink ribbon. The entire effect is effortless and lovely.
 
In the meantime her brother Lionel is photographing everything — the lake, the boat, the flag, the funnel, the mountains, the deckchairs and the people on them, his parents, his sister, his uncle, my Cleo and her husband. He had saved all his money from a holiday job emptying rubbish bins and tidying up the foreshore of lac Neuchatel for the local town council and bought a Nikon camera with a big zoom lens. At the Paul Klee museum, the other day, he was very busy photographing the art, taking close-ups in the way I like to, and shots of people. In the evenings Lionel edits the hundreds of photos snapped during the day and then shows his selection to an appreciative audience in the cosy part of their living room. Nearly all eight of us can squeeze up together on a long L-shape maroon-coloured sofa. If I’m lucky I get to share a portion of the L section where I can stretch out my nagging limb.
 
I really, really hope there will be time for a swim in the lake. It is such a beautiful day, a gift from Nature. When, back home in Auckland, I studied Marita’s itinerary for this day I took special note of the swim in le lac Léman. But when we unpacked the car at Cully this morning I was told to leave my swimming costume behind. I was stowing it away in our bag, the one with the enlarged reproduction of a paradise duck that Julian had bought at the Great Dixter shop for me to vomit into — fortunately I used the disposable cup and saved the bag because it’s a sturdy bag and the duck is very appealing and I will enjoy using it back home, I can picture baguettes and market produce inside — when Marita, spied me.  ‘No, Deborah, we’re not swimming at the castle, today.’ She has decided that the picnic basket and a chilly bin are quite enough baggage to lug around without the weight of additional towels.  ‘There will be time for a swim on our return,’ she says but I’m not so sure. We’re dining out this evening to celebrate a cluster of birthdays and Marita wants us to gather beforehand at the house for aperitifs to exchange presents. Still my hand hovered over the bag, it’s such a warm day and we’ll dry off quickly. But ‘No Deb-o-rah,’ said Marita. ‘There is nowhere to swim at the chateau.’ She said this with such authority that I left them in the car.
 
But about this swim in the lake, that it seems will not now happen, I can’t quite let go of this. Before I left Auckland I bought a new German swimsuit especially for this day. The fabric is in the bright neon colours that I had thought were popular in Switzerland. Marita has blinds in the children’s bedrooms and shared study in the same orange, turquoise and pink as my suit however Marita isn’t so sure about that. Her bikini is a paisley pattern with dreamy soft swirls of mauve, blue and pink, very tasteful and lovely. 
 
Normally I wouldn’t wear such loud colours. This costume is a swirl of variegated colour starting at the top with a pale, yellow-lime bodice ruched into a straight line of stitching that runs all the way down to my tummy. Through the colour changes a pattern of indistinct circles cluster like stars in a sky, the colours graduating through each change. The first circles are orange that then flush deeper orange with centres coloured green-blue. This is very hard to describe.  The colour of the suit keeps on transforming, like a sunset, through lipstick orange-pink, the circles turning blue and mauve, to hot pink, followed by magenta with a pattern of purplish blue circles, around my bottom. The lining of the suit is aqua.  It looked a bit wacky when I tried it on in the wintery cold, in the cubicle of the swimwear shop, Hot Body, in Auckland and so did the crinkled muslin bright fuschia wrap that I bought to wear with it. What was I thinking? My rationale went like this ‘it will be unremarkable in Europe where I will camouflage alongside the other swimmers and look less like a tourist.’ And then on an impulse I said to the woman in the shop, ‘oh what the heck, you only live once’.

Coda to a very long journal entry

​Today at the castle, looking through a slot in the castle wall, I noticed the moat dividing the chateau complex from the mainland.  I was thinking how the seawater in this channel was coloured turquoise like the water in my pretend moat at home when Marita joined me and noticed, with a laugh, further along from the moat, the swimming beach. We had almost finished our navigation of the castle by then but still we had over an hour to fill before the boat returned. I felt mightily frustrated seeing this beach and said as much, ‘Marita, I am wild with you.’ She laughed again, because there wasn’t much heat in my voice, and replied flippantly, ‘Just swim in your underwear.’  
 
At the beach I sat on the stones and stared moodily out to sea. Then I got up and waded into the water. I wanted so much to swim. Marita was still being insistent. ‘Here,’ she said waving a tea towel at me, ‘just go on in and you can dry yourself with this when you get out.’ It was then that I noticed my son-in-law looking at me. I could see he was thinking about something as I swished my feet. I love this young man very much. He is one of the kindest people I know. He doesn’t actually need to do anything more than be himself to make me feel very glad for my daughter that she found him. I hadn’t noticed that he was wearing a white singlet underneath his shirt until he asked me ‘Deborah, would you like my singlet?’  And that’s what he did. He took off his shirt and handed the vest to me to wear over my peacock blue knickers. It came right down to the top of my thighs.
 
Oh that water, it was warm and delicious. The others didn’t think so but because I have grown accustomed to freezing temperatures in the pool back home it felt practically tepid. The feeling, swimming toward the castle floating just above me there on its island, with its beige walls pierced with narrow apertures and its wooden shingle rooftops was one of sheer elation and disbelief. I had to keep checking that this French castle built in the middle ages really did exist. And were those the French Alps floating pale blue on the horizon? Soon Claire was swimming and somersaulting at my side. She was wearing her knickers too and had her mother’s delft patterned, blue and white scarf tied round her chest. When I told her she was like a porpoise she threw back her head and laughed, with all her lovely white teeth showing.  
 
Marita was ready with her tea towel when I emerged from the water and some additional advice that I should shed my wet undies and return home knicker-less on the boat. ‘Going commando,’ said Julian with a grin.  After awhile you cease to notice their absence, and instead there is a feeling of great ease and freedom. And anyway when I viewed the exhibition Undressed at the Victoria and Albert Museum I learned that women didn’t wear knickers, bloomers that is, until the nineteenth century and they absolutely couldn’t when they had to manage the great big contraption that was a crinoline.

2nd September, 2016 

Leaving family is hard. It just is. There is no salve that can diminish the nasty pain of saying goodbye. You can suggest, as I did, that we will return in two years time but that doesn’t stop the wrench on the heartstrings, the feeling of despair deep in the solar plexus that rips and twists and asks why must families live so far apart on separate sides of the world? Why? Why did we have to go global?

I don't feel ready to acknowledge that this grand/small European tour is drawing to a close. My mind is in revolt. But wait a moment the plane, en-route to Rome, is flying over the Swiss Alps and there is snow on the mountain tops like folded egg white beaten into peaks just before you put the meringue mixture into the oven. ​​

This is a reassuring sign in the midst of high summer, in the context of global warming. I wish there was more snow on our mountains back home. In all the years that I have been travelling up and down to Christchurch, the Southern Alps in winter have always been always reassuringly deep in snow. Until recently. Now I’m noticing distinct changes. Patches of bare ground have been opening up and widening where thick snow used to be, all the way from Picton to Christchurch.  And the famous glaciers, Franz and Fox, they are melting and retreating. What are we going to do?
 
It was hard saying goodbye to my daughter, even though, I learned on the holiday that we will see them again, in New Zealand at the end of the year. At Geneva airport leaping from the car, each going our separate ways, there was time, only, for a hurried hug and a kiss when what I most wanted was to pause and breathe her in so I can keep her essence with me. I’ve got the photos but when I took a quick peek, as the plane was taxiing on the runway, and saw the two of them on the high bridge in Bern I felt sick with nostalgia. Au-e. They’re gone. It’s nearly over.
 
In this mood I asked Julian, just now, ‘How do you feel about leaving Switzerland?’ I wanted to know whether he was feeling pain at separation and at having to leave his twin brother again. But he replied, ‘I just want to get home.’ Incredulous, I said ‘Really?’ and he said, yes, the trip had been long enough. ‘Well I don’t feel like that,’ I said in a declarative tone. ‘I want it to go on and on.’ He looked at me for a moment and then went back to his iphone screen where there is an anagram in progress. ‘But how do you really feel about leaving your brother?’ I asked. ‘Deborah I saw him a year ago and he’ll be coming out to New Zealand next year, possibly.’ I wish I could think like that but I don’t. What I see in my mind’s eye is Jason looking sad as we pulled away. The whole family had.
 
I suppose I am reassured by Julian’s pragmatic attitude. He has a calmer more rational approach to tenderhearted moments that ensures less drama, he hates that. Mind you looking at his face bright red with sunburn I think there might be another reason lurking behind this desire to move on.  He’s absolutely worn out by the strenuous water battle that took place in Lac Neuchatel this afternoon. This skirmish began when two teens suddenly metamorphosed into teenage bears and attacked their father’s identical twin showing no mercy. As the combat raged the rest of us stood in the water, waist deep, viewing the antics, smiling, puzzling a little about what was going on, but mostly cheering on the two teens as they launched themselves through the air at Julian, the father bear and chief of the clan —he was born half an hour before his brother, and so has always assumed the mantle of eldest. And he was quite magnificent batting them off. Then when they realised they were never going to dunk their uncle they began pelting him with algae and mud from the lake bottom. He retaliated of course hurtling handfuls of mud back their way. This was something I had already noticed in the game of taunting, that manifested in different forms on all the expeditions, that Julian was sometimes the instigator. Even today as we were walking back to the car, everyone thinking there was finally a truce, he bent down and picked up a handful of pinecones and threw them, one by one at the unsuspecting children, metres in front, pinging them on the back. So that might be why he is keen to go home. He’s shattered.
 
But right now, coming into the present, it is 8.30pm on a balmy Friday evening above Europe and I think that might be the Dolomites, down below. The sun dropping through the sky is infusing the clouds that float in drifts above the landscape with dusky pink but it’s the atmosphere that is really enchanting. How can I describe the blending of colours, the way pink and coral and mauve are whisked up lightly together, like coloured smoke and the sense of mystery as we float right on through. How I love flying. And how I love flying, particularly at this time of day and on this date, into a sunset, on the way to the ancient/modern city of Rome.

Gosh it’s so warm already. I commented on this to Alessio and he said airily, ‘oh it will be quite cool today, anywhere between the late 20s and mid 30s.’ Apparently it’s been as high as 43 degrees here recently.
 
The gardens are green in Rome with hedges everywhere trimmed into fine examples of the art of topiary including big urns of box and yew plants shaped into balls.  After breakfast I walked up the pebble paths of the hotel garden, and inspected the herbs and vegetables growing there. I found a lemon myrtle in the herb garden that appeared to be thriving in the heat, the leaves plump and smelling sharply of lemon, when I rubbed the leaf between my fingers. My myrtle in the kitchen garden at home is not doing so well, it’s grown quite twiggy.  I think the Auckland summers are too hot and humid and that the plant might need to be moved to a shadier spot, like this one, near a taller tree offering dappled light.
 
Before I left for Europe I saw Piet Oudolf being interviewed by Monty Don on an English gardening programme on the Living channel and he was saying that the path to being a successful gardener is through experimentation. I give that same advice to life writers who attend my memoir courses. It’s the only way, learning through experimentation and regular practice. He also said that gardeners must learn from their failures. I’m not sure whether all writers would agree with that. Sometimes the failures seem unfair and unlucky. But Piet says we need to accept that some plants will fail and the approach to take is to try them out in another more clement location.  And you keep on trying until you find the right setting and the right plants for your weather conditions.  I agree totally with all those points. The great garden designer also said you could create his prairie effect in a small garden, using just one grass and one, of each of his favourite plants. I find this notion liberating and a validation, finally, of my own uncertain approach to growing the grass ‘miscanthus sinensis’. I had planted it in the kitchen garden, just one plant, and then I’d worried that it looked silly on its own with the verbena bonariensis, the bronze fennel, the silver artichoke, the bright russet heleniums, the roses. When I get home I’ve decided I’m going to take a stronger more confident line on how I garden.
 
Maxii — The museum of 21st century art
 
There is a reason for visiting the gallery of 21st century art in Rome and it’s the same prompt that had me visiting Zaha Hadid’s extension to the Serpentine Gallery in London. Last year at the Resene Architectural Film Festival at the Rialto cinema in Auckland I had viewed a portrait of the artist documentary about the architect. There were other architects and buildings on display too in this very worthwhile festival and I felt inspired to see all of them but they weren’t on this particular holiday route. Also I liked the idea of visiting a big, bold gallery that had been purpose built to house exhibitions of 21st century contemporary art, only. That seemed novel given we’re only 16 years into the new century. What I hadn’t known, when I planned the trip, back in March, was that the viewing of Zaha Hadid’s work would be poignant for she died this year, unexpectedly from a heart condition aged only 66.
 
There were several exhibitions available for viewing at the gallery today so I decided to take a tour of the building first touching just lightly on the art on display while keeping my focus on the experience of the architectural space itself, which, I must say, is exceptional and extraordinary. When that was concluded I would concentrate on one exhibition in depth, the show of contemporary European photography on the ground floor.

​It is as though the ideologies and art of two 20th century art movements, Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism along with the fantastical and sublime etchings of monumental and architectural spaces conceived by the 18th century artist, Giovanni Piranesi have been fused in a daring new three-dimensional architectural form. As I made my way upstairs the prison series Carceri (1749-50) by Piranesi depicting vast echoing spaces, labyrinthine passageways and staircases leading nowhere, were very much on my mind. I was also reminded in this gallery with its tilting walkways, sliding ceilings and odd geometric angles and juxtapositions of the experience at Great Dixter when the ground began moving underneath me but this time it was not another attack of vertigo but an intended effect created by the architect. I took some photographs of the interior but I’m not sure they will make any sense. There are steel angled shapes that look like louvres in the roof that are actually the treads of the stairs viewed from underneath. The tubular poles, made of red steel suspended at different angles that cut through the geometric spaces and run past luminous white panels and black cavities made me think for a moment that I was looking at a Malevich abstract constructivist canvas and not a building. Being in the middle of the artwork is confusing. It’s easy to loose your balance and your sense of direction and even to know what is up, and what is down but that does make for a visceral experience.

The exhibition of contemporary Italian photography was displayed in a more conventional space one that focussed the mind on the talent of individual photographers and the differing preoccupations, subject matter and styles. My attention was drawn to a selection of works entitled Atlas Italiae by philosophy graduate Silvia Camporesi that documented an Italy that is rapidly disappearing; palaces, prisons, factories, entire abandoned villages, places that once had a function and a purpose but now are places of memory only. When I looked at her black and white photos that she had coloured by hand using soft pastels I was reminded of the photos by a friend and collaborator, the photographer John McDermott, that he shot when we went down to Christchurch in 2013 to record the interior of the earthquake shattered Mclean’s Mansion.
 
The work that took my breath away was a very slow film, more like timelapse photography, by Petra Noordkamp Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina of the artist Alberto Burri’s memorial project built to honour and commemorate an entire town, Gibellina, in Sicily that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968.

It was 1979 when the mayor of the town invited the Italian artist Alberto Burri to create an artwork for the new town of Gibellina Nuova being built some distance away from the site of the original. But as the artist walked through the rubble of the old town he was so overwhelmed by the ruins that he conceived a plan for a giant land art installation, Il Grande Cretto, to be constructed as a memorial for the old Gibellina. His unique concept took over thirty years to realize with much stopping and starting due to lack of funds, so that it wasn’t completed until 2015. The project involved covering the rubble and ruins with giant concrete slabs thereby creating new forms like sarcophagi, on the hillside, and providing a monument that could be visited and viewed and reflected upon by traversing the large cracks in the work. And that’s what the film offers. It takes the viewer on a very slow walk through the streets, exposing you to the light effects in the landscape and changing colours as they strengthen and fade, subtle pastel hues illuminating the eerily beautiful structures that have weathered over time and sprouted plant forms, growing in the cracks. Some people wanted the town left untouched but the mayor understood Burri’s vision, ‘we must obliterate the ruins in order to commemorate them.’ The result is a masterpiece, a truly sacred and poetic site that memorialises and pays gentle tribute to the people who lost their lives there.
 
To view this beautiful film I sat on a pale wooden bench in a module that was like an open wooden box with a roof and a floor and only two walls, one at my back to lean on and the other holding the film screen. This created a sense of privacy minus the claustrophobia that can accompany a viewing experience in a blacked out room. I was glad of the wall at my back, too because the film unsettled me, stirring up memories of the deadly quake in my hometown Christchurch on February 22nd 2011.

In Christchurch some really important things happened following the earthquakes. The paper cathedral was built rapidly to provide an alternative venue to the badly damaged Anglican Cathedral and the artists got going and created really significant works of art in memory of the loss of life and the loss of a city. There was the installation of 185 chairs, painted white all of them different, from a child’s small car seat to a large throne to remember the people who had died in the CCTV building. There was an explosion of graffiti art on the few walls remaining in the city and there were the innovative Gap projects. One of them celebrated and labelled the wildflowers that grew in the empty spaces where buildings once stood. More recently there was Sara Hughes flag wall, an evocative and beautiful installation made up of hundreds of pieces of coloured fabric, like prayer flags that rippled in the breeze, beside the old Post Office in Cathedral Square. Looking though at this project I thought wistfully that Christchurch might have had a larger, more poetic memorial covering an expanse of ground where the old city had once stood. Already the vacant sites are being swallowed up and covered by a new city of concrete, steel and glass, representing not even an era of architecture but a very restricted five or possible ten years of hurried building activity, most of it very similar in style.
 
Petra Noordkamp’s ended her moving and delicate film with this quotation,
 
It is difficult to say how visions enter the mind. Who can tell?
Perhaps they are already stored there somewhere,
waiting for the right moment to appear in the mind’s eye.

This morning as we whisked through the centre of Rome on our way to the airport I felt regret over not managing a proper soak in the culture of this lovely city. I had mistakenly thought a taste might suffice but of course it didn’t. So all I could do from the back seat of the car, as it clattered over the cobblestones and swung around corners, was take photos with my iphone in the air, my finger sometimes missing the button. It was a desperate gesture, gulping and grabbing snaps of the buildings and monuments, none of them particularly satisfactory with their odd angles and blurred movement and half the frame filled with the interior of the taxi, the things on the roof and the dashboard. Also I didn’t manage to get a really good photo of a Brunelleschi-influenced Renaissance dome and that was a disappointment because these beautifully proportioned architectural features originated in Italy and then they multiplied and went out to every corner of every European influenced city throughout the world. And that included Christchurch where the bright green copper domes of the Basilica (1905) in Barbadoes Street, designed by Francis W. Petre, lit up the skyline, and made you stop and think how lucky for this city that it got ‘the finest example of ecclesiastical architecture in the southern hemisphere.’ But then Christchurch wasn’t lucky. The domes fell in the earthquakes and although the Roman Catholic Church has plans to reinstate a portion of the cathedral at considerable cost, they lack sufficient funds to reinstate the domes. So where will they go?
 
I wouldn’t have considered including the photos from this random shooting from a moving car, if I hadn’t witnessed the photographer John McDermott taking photos over his shoulder from the front seat of the rental car, through the back window, in 2013 when I was stopped at the lights. I remember being surprised that a famous photographer would take a casual snap from inside a car like this but of course when I saw the image of the foaming cherry blossoms that line the park, the bright green grass, the outline of tree trunks framed within the curve of the window-frame I realised that this was a master practitioner at work. And I’ve had that image as the background on my home screen of my computer ever since.
 
Oh dear. Reality sinks in again and I’m not sure I want to return home to work, although in a way I didn’t stop working on this trip, writing in my journal each day. Then again journalling is different because it feels more like a creative outlet. Work to me is a book project that requires lots of research and editing and takes years.  And this has been written in three weeks. Initially I’d worried that my family might get annoyed with my furtive activity but instead I found them tolerant and even indulgent, helping me a little too, by listening and saying, I don’t think you should put that bit in.
 
My sister-in-law had wondered whether the journalling was disrupting the trip but the thing I have discovered about journalling is that in attending to what is happening each day a writer gains a sense of living life more fully. Through making a record, of something that might otherwise be lost, or only dimly remembered the writer has a chance to preserve the experience. And another thing in support of journalling while on tour, or even at home, I think it might be beneficial for the brain because it compels the writer to be observant and to make a mental note to remember. Holding lots of thoughts in your mind at once, and remembering them must be a good thing, I think.
 
I might not write a travel journal again though, because it did exhaust me, although Fiona Kidman, in responding to this journal, said she wished she’d written one on her recent book tour of England and Ireland. The pace of her trip, however, and the launch of the English publication of The Infinite Air, her novel about pioneer aviatrix Juliet Batten, to a crowd of 200 at Foyles bookshop in London allowed no time for writing. I went into Foyles one morning on my way to the National Gallery and found her book on the shelves in the fiction section, on the mezzanine floor. I saw books by Lloyd Jones too and it was a thrill to recognise New Zealand writers there.
 
I think of Cleo and another pain like a bang in the chest hits me hard. The thought of resuming a relationship via What’s App and Skype and email, which is marvellous on some levels also depresses me because I think it’s a poor substitute for the real thing where you get to sit right beside that person and can read their body language, whilst also drinking in the soft skin, the light hair, the eyes that startle me because they seem like my eyes looking back.
 
If I am really honest with myself I realise that I have not adjusted well to the empty nest. The thought of returning there quite sickens me. I see two lost souls and their ginger cats rustling about in a too big house and I think that’s not normal. It just isn’t. Once upon a time humans lived in small dwellings in close proximity to an entire extended family and a village of connected people. They may not always have got along but still they were part of an organism and vitally associated with and defined by one another. Close-knit communities are harder to find now.
 
We’re still stationery on the runway at Rome airport, waiting for our plane bound for Singapore to be given the all clear to fly. Ahead there is an eleven-hour and fifteen-minute flight to endure with a one hour and 45 minute stopover in Singapore before the final leg to Auckland. I didn’t think to ask my gardening friends in Auckland about their approach to returning home. They had said the moment they board the plane they think, I’m on holiday now and they treat the long, relentless flight as an adventure. I don’t see coming home as so much fun. I’ve got plenty to do on this flight though. I’m going to prepare a journal entry and its photos for posting. I’ve got a book my old sweetheart by Susanna Moore, set in Hawaii and compared with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea which is Fiona Kidman’s favourite, and that is all the endorsement I need to read it because I want to discover what kind of writing inspires her. I’m going to read an article about the songwriter Laura Marling printed in The Times and another one about gardens and roses that Julian saved from the interesting part of the paper for me. I don’t think I will go to sleep because it’s lunchtime and I can’t sleep during the day. I greatly admire those people who can. I think that must be a very handy skill to have, to be able to switch off and let go.

9th September, 2016 

I paused before writing the final entry because I didn’t adjust well to returning home. The jet lag was much rougher at this end of the journey and for days I felt sick and giddy and out of sorts and was resisting facing into the unpleasant reality that the party was over and now it was time to return gracefully to the routine of everyday life and work. Also I’d had a media holiday and it had been blissful not having to worry about the fact that we’re going to hell in a handcart.

I’d enjoyed the break from brash politics and excessive sports coverage. When I first switched on the television and saw the news I felt like an alien listening in. It was the same with the television commercials, the Harvey Norman ads, why are they so loud? Why is everything so thunderous, so piercing? I thought wow we’re a fierce little nation. So I fled to my radio NZ app, to listen to the good journalism, Te Radar and Irene Pink and Kathryn Ryan, Mediawatch and the book and film reviews and they helped me settle in again.