Category Archives: Ocean

Strange Days

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Today is the last day of Miss Malaprop’s school holidays, and as the hours have ticked by I have found myself thinking about that old song by The Doors:

Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down
They're going to destroy
Our casual joys
We shall go on playing or find a new town...

It’s been an unusual holiday, to say the least, and many of our activities were circumscribed by the date on which Miss Malaprop herself could receive her first Pfizer shot. Our casual joys have been destroyed by this pandemic — or, more accurately, by the choices I have made to keep my children as safe as I can, the best way I know how. After all, keeping them safe is my main job.

We’re doing our best to go on playing, because there’s absolutely no point in finding a new town when we are completely in love with where we live. We are incredibly lucky to live a short walk from the beach, and heading down there whenever the mood strikes us has kept an element of spontaneity in our otherwise contained lives.

The ocean is where I feel most at peace at the moment.

In a world that seems to be almost permanently tainted by anxiety, the sea is where I am free.

Floating in saltwater is one of the most calming and beautiful experiences I know of: my muscles relax more deeply and my mind quiets more quickly than when I am anywhere else.

And even though this has been a strange summer, I suspect some of my memories of being in the water in the past few weeks with my girls will endure.

I know my love for the ocean will.

Mind yourselves,

BJx

The Delights of Spring

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  • Despite living in Australia I have always been enamoured with English cottage gardens and European blooms.

SPRING! The word itself is a delight, and I happen to think Southern Hemisphere Spring is particularly magical.

I haven’t written about my quest for the delightful since midwinter, and have been more preoccupied by the progress of the pandemic and by The Professor’s dementia that I would like to be, so the delights of spring have been a welcome and much needed distraction.

Springtime, here in old Sydneytown, begins at the same time as the final school term of the year and the onset of Eastern Daylight Saving Time. While seasonally spring may be about new beginnings, for Sydneysiders it signals the beginning of the year’s denouement, when we start enjoying warmer weather and longer, increasingly golden evenings.

The end of the year is in sight, and I suspect many of us are keen to see the back of 2020. What a year! Though, on reflection, I could never in my wildest imaginings have known what a strange and eventful year this would be to take note of the delightful I encounter in the everyday — if I only look for it and recognise it for what it is.

So here, in no particular order, are some of the things I have found most delightful this Spring:

Spring Flowers and Fresh Herbs

For Christmas some years ago, The Bloke and the kids decided to present me with a raised garden bed. After it was assembled in the back yard, the following month they arranged a delivery for my birthday: several cubic metres of top quality soil. Not the sort of thing you can easily gift wrap, but greatly appreciated and loved ever since…until this year.

This year I had such great intentions, during lockdown in particular, of getting outside and fixing up the yard. My raised garden bed was looking decidedly bedraggled, particularly since a bunch of baby tomatoes (and other less desirable plant species) had decided to self-seed and subsequently launched a bid for world domination.

Humble new beginnings…it looks much better now…

Finally, a few weeks ago, I found a moment to show those baby tomatoes and assorted weeds who was boss. I removed the netting that had been possum-proofing the garden bed since forever, and I ripped everything out.

YASSSSS!

What a breathtakingly cathartic experience — and one I can highly recommend as a delight! But was what was even more delightful was replanting the raised bed with loads of spring flowers and verdant herbs, and watching each plant blossom and grow. I have relished being able to use herbs straight from the back yard when I cook, and have enjoyed the surprise of seeing colours emerge and change as different flowers bloom.

My Octopus Teacher

I think just about everyone I know who has seen this film has raved about it, but for me the true delight came in watching it with my children. The cinematography — particularly the underwater sequences — is utterly breathtaking, and they were both captivated.

Witnessing the bond between man and octopus was astonishing, especially since (as coastal dwellers) we’ve had to drum it into our kids never to touch any octopus they find in case it’s of the blue-ringed variety. The beautiful but highly poisonous Hapalochlaena is a regular visitor to tidal rockpools near our house, and a single blue-ringed octopus carries enough venom to kill 26 people in minutes, so seeing a human interacting with an octopus in such a carefree manner was quite extraordinary — even if it did come with a deadly serious and timely “don’t try this near home” reminder for the kids.

What I found most delightful about the movie was that it immersed me in a world completely different from the one I inhabit, offering me a window into what it’s like to live below, rather than above, the ocean surface. Clearly Craig Foster has some crazy free diving skills — but it’s his talent with an underwater camera that filled me with wonder and awe.

Free Books

Now this is a delight I would welcome at ANY time, but was one I was extra grateful to receive just before the school holidays. A while back I received an email from a large book retailer, offering me advance copies of a couple of new books. I clicked on the link, not thinking I’d end up with anything in return, and was utterly amazed when a package turned up on my doorstep a couple of weeks later with proof copies of two novels for me to read. Needless to say I’ve already devoured them both, and I will definitely be on the lookout for more of those email gems hitting my inbox!

The Light

There is something about the quality of the light at this time of year that makes my soul sing. I think I summed it up best when I wrote this post five years ago…though reading all my references to Jazz Festivals and NRL Grand Finals makes me realise just how precious delights are in these crazy times.

So that’s it for now folks — just a few of the gems I’ve noticed as Sydneytown greets the Spring. I’d love to hear what is delightful in your part of the world at this time of year…

À bientôt, BJx

Beyond the Bends

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Pittwater

Pittwater and the Peninsula

This afternoon I took a lazy drive with my girls, wending our way up the Northern Beaches, heading beyond the Bends.

The sun is finally shining in Sydneytown after a week of relentless rain, and the temperature is on the rise too. Today we had no plans — just a vague idea about hopping in the car and driving north. And with The Bloke back at work and several more weeks of glorious summer ahead of us, that’s just what we did.

We cruised up the road, reveling in the beauty of the blue of the skies and the sea, taking it easy. One of the best things about summer holidays is not having to rush…

We stopped for lunch — burgers, because another great thing about the long summer break is getting to eat your main meal in the middle of the day if you feel like it — and then poked our heads into various shops before getting back into the car.

This time we headed briefly west, making the short trip across the peninsula from the beaches to Pittwater.  For me, it’s like taking a trip down Memory Lane…particularly when we drove past the holiday house that had once belonged to family friends when I was growing up. I found myself telling the kids that the first place I ever saw a koala in the wild was in their front yard, and then lost myself in a reverie of recollections as the road meandered down towards Clareville.

Christmas 2015 & Jan 2016 062

Summer skies…

The water was welcoming when we arrived, and the shade beneath the huge eucalpyts at the sand’s edge was deep.  We sat for a while, listening to the lapping water, watching the clustering cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon, searching for giant seed pods beneath the ancient trees. Time slows down during those moments…those lazy summer afternoons that new memories are made of…

Miss Malaprop fell asleep as we made our steady southbound journey home, while Marvel Girl stared dreamily out the window. And even now, as the first raindrops of that summer storm begin to fall, I still have a smile on my face.

Today, we had no plans…and it was wonderful…

Saltwater People

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I Will Never Turn My Back on the Ocean...

The Surfers’ Code: I Will Never Turn My Back on the Ocean.

One of my life’s greatest joys is living close to the ocean.  Smelling the briny air each morning, feeling the salt on my skin after a swim, hearing the waves crashing onto the shore while I’m drifting off to sleep at night — these are all things that I love. Things I would have trouble giving up, or even trading for something else.

I don’t need to be in the sea, I just need to be near it. To see it, at the very least, every day. I love being able to bear witness to the ocean’s varying colours and moods, and I find security in the knowledge that the stormy grey chaos I see one day could very well be sun-tipped sapphire saltwater the next. Like life itself, the ocean is ever-changing.

When I see the ocean, I see power. I see a potent, expansive presence. We may speak of the good green earth on which we live, but it is no accident that anyone who has seen our world from space refers to it as the Blue Planet: more than seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by sea.

The ocean is a force to be reckoned with.  It is teeming with life, but is just as capable of taking life away. It gives and it takes, it ebbs and it flows. The ocean has hidden depths, far beyond our reach. There are mysteries beneath the waves that we may never see. The ocean, with all its power and its wonder, has my utmost respect.

The Bloke's rule of thumb...it's a good one, and he's sticking to it.

The Bloke’s rule of thumb…it’s a good one, and he’s sticking to it.

The Bloke has a different relationship with the sea to me: he needs to immerse himself in it. He rejoices in it, revels in it. My husband is happiest when he is swimming, surfing, snorkeling, or Scuba diving. Being in the water is his downtime, his exercise, his release — even his hangover cure. Given half the chance, I suspect he would live underwater if he could. Yet while we may connect to the sea in different ways, we both have a love of the ocean that is as strong as it is lifelong. And when we’re no longer here to see and ride the waves, our Wills specify exactly which part of the sea our ashes should be scattered over, so the ocean can claim us one last time.

Jacques Yves Cousteau once said that “the sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever”. Our children have already been well and truly captured by the ocean, though perhaps, with the parents they have, they didn’t have much choice but to become saltwater people too. And while they may not yet know exactly what they need from the sea — to be in it, to be near it, to see it, or something else entirely — we are all loving the experience of allowing them to explore the ocean, inside and out. I don’t just mean they are learning to swim in the sea or in an oceanside rockpool, different as those experiences are from swimming in a backyard pool, they are also learning to negotiate waves, to understand tides, to recognise rips, to go with the flow.

Shaun Thompson...surfer, father, environmentalist, actor, author, businessman, legend.

Shaun Tomson…surfer, father, environmentalist, actor, author, businessman, legend.

And as they learn more about the ocean, our kids are also beginning to appreciate the Surfers’ Code — or my preferred version of it, which was set down by Shaun Tomson, the former world champion surfer who was an integral part of the Free Ride Generation, and a person I greatly admire. The tenets of the Surfers’ Code are as much lessons for life as they are for living with the sea, and the first of them is as simple as it is powerful: I will never turn my back on the ocean.

It was gratifying to hear one of the kids call, “Never turn your back on the ocean!” to her sister the other day, just in time to stop her getting wiped out by a wave. It might have only been shorebreak, but knowing that the principle had been absorbed brought a smile to my face. One day, hopefully, they will take this and the other precepts set down by Tomson and apply them to their lives as much as they do to being in the surf: I will take the drop with commitment…I will watch out for other surfers…I will paddle back out…There will always be another wave…

After all, as Anne Morrow Lindberg wrote,”The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea”.

Then again, for some of us, the sea itself is a gift.