State Of My Life Address

A. Today I have lived for exactly 27 years, or 9861 days. Twenty-seven is both a perfect cube and a decagonal number. It is the atomic number of cobalt, the number of books in the New Testament, and the number of moons of Uranus. Twenty-seven is also the age in which musicians Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, and D. Boon (Minutemen) all died.

B. I am not a musician.

C. I live in Oslo, Kingdom of Norway, and have done since the beginning of August of this year. My time in Norway will finish in three days, at which point I will be leaving with most of my possessions on a bus to the south of Sweden. My home is a 25m2 one room (plus bathroom) apartment in a large complex of interlinked buildings with echoing corridors which smell of cooking, both good and bad. The buildings are positioned on the bank of the narrow Aker river, and wraps around a central courtyard with a playground and puddles made by a leak which recently have been mostly frozen. The complex incorporates student accommodation, a hostel, housing for immigrants and a Best Western Hotel. In the entrance to my building (#3) there is very often some rubbish or discarded furniture or household items, and there is some graffiti which reads "fuck da police". Right now there are some mandarin peels on the floor in the elevator; these were left by a French guy who I rode the elevator with and who was eating mandarin when I entered on the first floor. He said hello to me when I got on the elevator which is an incredibly rare event here - the Norwegians in the building rarely, if ever, say hello or even smile at people in the lift or hallways. Getting out of the elevator you must unlock the crimson coloured door to my hallway, and mine is the first apartment on the left, number 622. My door is also crimson. Inside, the walls are cream and the window and door frames a light wood. I have three windows which look out on a hospital and a tram line. Often you can watch tram inspectors stopping trams below my window and checking for tickets, dragging ticketless souls into a waiting bus where there are desks for the processing and awarding of fines. Inside the room there are two single beds, a desk, two chairs, a wooden stool, a coffee table, three lamps, a set of shelves, a small fridge, a cupboard, a set of coat hooks, a sink and two hot plates. My bed is infected with bedbugs, but as they have been there all semester without my noticing them, because my body not react to their bites, and because I am leaving in a few days, I am doing nothing about it. On the walls there are a series of old and new maps, including a Nazi German map of Europe (1940), a colonial era map of Africa (1922) and a map showing the location of Colombia's promising oil deposits (1939). There are also a number of illustrations by Marcel Dzama in two rows along one wall, a number of posteards, a badge reading "The Rock: Jesus", and an Efterklang poster. The room is pretty messy right now because the process of packing up stuff has begun (though not proceeded very far) plus I have in four large containers the orphaned household items formerly belonging to Sonja Litz, who left yesterday to Hong Kong. There is a heater in the room, but it doesn't really work, so a lot of the heat comes from the electrified bathroom tiles, which work perfectly. Norway right now is mostly covered by snow (so I understand) but Oslo is not. The roads are salted and there's neon Christmas decorations throughout the downtown and a little ice rink near the National Theatre crammed full of young kids and teetering Latino and Indian tourists. Today, the sun rose at 9.04am, and set at 3.14pm.

D. It has just turned 4.30pm, and I am currently sitting at my desk under the glow of a 60W globe, listening to Grizzly Bear's "Friend" record. I am pretty tired. I am wearing black rimmed glasses, a white shirt with red pinstripes, a maroon tie, a black cardigan, blue jeans, a silver ring, two Colombian bracelets of vegetable ivory, black socks and white & green K-Swiss sneakers which I bought in Sydney in June and already have already ripped at a number of places down each side, making them a particularly bad investment. The shirt and tie is on account of the semi-formal class dinner party I will be attending tonight to celebrate the end of exams. Beside my computer is a jar of 150 Norwegian kroner (A$30) in 1 kr and 50 øre coins which I have been collecting throughout the semester and intend to use tonight to pay my portion of the dinner, which is apparently going to be a selection of tapas.

E. Today I have eaten: 1 x raspberry tartlet, 1 x pesto, parma and mozzarella sandwich, and 1 x bowl of ICA "Crunchy" Muesli (with dehydrated strawberries and yoghurt clusters) and milk. Since arriving in Norway I have eaten this type of cereal almost every single morning, and I have kept every box (flattened) in order to know how many boxes I have bought and consumed. The grand total is 26. The tartlet and sandwich was from the United Bakery in Karl Johan's Gate, where they have a hot liquid chocolate fountain (with which to fill up brioches upon request) and a conveyor belt on the roof that pulls around little hanging carts, trays and boxes of scrolls and danishes, delivering them to the shop floor from the bake house in the floor below. I went there for lunch with AO and EK, and we sat and ate at a table on the street, where we weirded out Norwegians by smiling and saying hello to them as they walked past. I cannot report this year on my weight, as I have no access to scales, but I imagine its about the same as last year (70kgs) - perhaps a kilo or two less. I have some particular problems with my digestive system.

F. Yesterday was the last exam for my Master program - meaning that come January my full letters should read "BA(Hons), MIA". I do not have a job in which I am currently employed, though I am due to start working in February for the Australian Federal Government as a public servant at AusAID - the Australian Agency for International Development. This means that I will be moving back to Canberra, which is where I lived for most of the first half of my 27th year. Canberra is not a city I have grown fond of in any way, but I am thinking much more positively about the prospect of settling there than I was a few months ago. I think that for a few years I have been trying to create necessary change in my life by changing the place that I was in, rather than changing myself and my own outlook. I will try to do this in Canberra. For example - rather than sitting around thinking, procrastinating, using the internet, roaming aimlessly and such, I hope to read, write, cook, garden, build and create more. I will seek to be less distracted, more focused and unmixed in my attention. Rather than focusing my thoughts as much on human deficiencies I am going to explore the intricacies of the natural environment. I am going to seek, in both theory (through a forthcoming website) and practice (in my everyday actions and interactions), a more cohesive and symbiotic balance between community and solitude. If I can, I will not live in a suburb of Canberra, but in a cottage or small house slightly outside of the city, with a rural outlook. This may be tricky, particularly with the commute. I will probably buy a car and spend weekends bushwalking, camping, going for concerts in Sydney, skiing and exploring the eastern coastline. Absolutely essential to my vision is a bread machine and many, many books.

G. Recently, a number of people have said that I don't smile enough, or that I never laugh. That I am morose. This is probably increasingly true, and although I don't feel sad or grumpy most of the time, I am mindful of the impression I give people, and of the fact that I do take things too seriously and often find it hard to engage with people in a tender, relaxed, and loving way. I used to be a lot more filled with love and excitement for the world and its people, but these days, on the whole, I feel unable to connect with many things. There are individual people who I know that I love, and I know that were something terrible to happen to these certain people, I would be ripped apart. But I think that years, now, of moving and resettling and saying goodbye over and over to places and people; friends, family, lovers - all of this has led to my disconnecting my interior from the exterior, my self from community, my head from my heart. This is something I really want to undo. It is the thing I most feel I must try to change.

H. I am not a member of any organised religion, but I have felt more recently as though religion, or at least a part of it, is beginning to mean more to me and be more a part of me than it was in the past. By religion I follow Tolstoy in referring not to obedience to church dogma, not to submission to established authority, but simply to "the principle by which one lives". Part of the above process of personal change involves some fine-tuning, some recommitment and some reimagining of the principles by which I hope to live. I hope to engage more in and understand what may be called true human work - home and community building, agriculture, cooking. I hope to attend Quaker meetings in the new year and see if they hold anything of value for me. I hope to read and reread and become actively inspired by Henry David Thoreau and ideas of transcendentalism. I would usually refrain from providing hyperlinks in a State-of-my-life Address, however I must say that these two Curtis White articles in Orion magazine (along with two others of his in Harpers magazine) have been, very recently, massively influential in helping consolidate my thinking and outlook on belief and faith and care. I believe I am more of a pacifist than I was this time last year. I have a long way to go, however, before I can claim to act in any manner that may be thought of or described as religious.

I. I have a girlfriend; she is tall, Swedish, and perhaps the most caring, rational, hopeful and loving people I know. My love for her is both important and warming, and continues to grow, all the time. I wish I understood the way I experience love more than I do, and I wish that I could express and show it better. I look forward to learning more and more from her, about her, and about this love for what I hope will be a very, very long time. She was also the person I most recently kissed. I will see her in three days time.

J. I am very broke - particularly so because of the expense of life in Oslo. I have, over my time here, become more used to the idea of paying up to A$6.00 for a bottle of water. I owe a lot of money to my parents and a lot of money to the government of Australia. I hope, after February, never to have to borrow money ever again. I do not have a car, a boat, a horse, a dog or cat, and I have not read The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice - I apologise to MMM and EK, respectively. I do not drink coffee or alcohol. I have a Facebook account, a Flickr account and a Gmail/Blogger account. I use the internet more than I should. I need a haircut.

K. Currently I am reading The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen, The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, and Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. The last movie I saw was The Dead Poet's Society (1989). The last gig I went to was The National and Hayden, here in Oslo, and it was absolutely incredible. Seeing me at that show would have surprised those people who think I don't smile. The last thing I bought was a black cardigan, from H&M. The last meal I cooked was burritos with red kidney beans.

L. I have been to 36 countries and one occupied territory: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Laos, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States of America, Vietnam, the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territories). I have lived in Australia, Canada, Egypt and Norway. I speak English, a little Spanish, a little French, a dwindling amount of Arabic and a tiny collection of disconnected Scandinavian words.

M. I am a member of CISV (Building Global Friendships), an international peace education organisation which I've belonged to since I was 11 years old. CISV likes acronyms. I am currently a co-opted member of the IMC, in which I am part of the training and communication sub-committees. As of today I will responsible for doing the Mosaic website. I am also a director on the board of the Australian NA. In the last year I have participated in two international programs -APRW/JASPARC in NZ, where I did a training session for the JB; and an IPP in DK. Etc. Basically, its a cult.

N. This year I have attended lectures by three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates - Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams and His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and in two days time I will be seeing a fourth (and fifth) when I attend CNN's interview with Al Gore and a representative from the IPCC in the Oslo City Hall, as part of this year's Nobel ceremony celebrations. I have studied often in the Nobel Institute library, visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and held a season pass to the Nobel Peace Center here in Oslo. These experiences have been: varied.

O. It's been a strange year, a bittersweet year. I've learnt a lot, I've felt lonely and even forgotten, I've hurt people I love and been hurt by people I love, I've made only a handful of new friends, and missed my old ones more than I usually do. I've found new clarity and focus in where I want to go and who I want to be, but I've simultaneously become more lost at sea than ever before. I feel scarred and bitter, and yet naive and hopeful. I have realised that the idea of 'place' has come to mean a lot less to me now than it once did, when it used to factor heavily in my writing and thoughts and dreams, and I think this has come from living in two separate cities with which I am not in love, nor have historical connection to. It's been a year without spring - autumn then winter segueing into a windy and wet intermission when it was often light but seldom warm, before returning again to autumn and dark, dark winter. Even love, which I have tried to allow myself to feel again, has, at once, soothed and confused me. I have spent a lot of time watching seabirds pass my windows, suspended in the grey skies. Here I am, I'm twenty seven, and I'm hovering in the thermals, feeling the updraft, hanging here, one of the luckiest people alive, and yet still: black eyed, selfish, and unable to decide where to perch next.

State of My Life Address 2006 (26 years).
State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years).

Simulated Roomscape

Today, it was grey and wet and dark by 4.30pm. In a desperate attempt to do anything but an essay on Proportionality, Just War and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Scuffle, I downloaded the newish Google SketchUp program, which is: Awesome.

Instead of 1000 words on jus ad bellum, then, we have a 3D model of my one-room (plus bathroom) apartment. In colour. Lets just say it took me some time.

So, if, dear reader, you find yourself wondering what hijinks I'm up to o'er here, rest assured that what with wretched weather, lack of disposable income and impending academic assessments I am more than likely sitting in my private 25m2 penitentiary, which, while in actuality a lot more dirty, messy and filled with kitchen utensils, pieces of paper, books, clothes, chairs, and, on the walls, posters and postcards, is otherwise roughly as these diagrams suggest:

(view from above)

(view from the doorway)

(view of the main area)

(just imagine that outside the wind is blowing water at the window at a 65 degree angle)

Are Falling Leaves

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Today I sat, reading, in the window seat of a French-style delicatessen near my house, where I had a shrimp & salad sandwich drizzled in olive oil and a cold bottle of hylleblomst saft, which in English you would call elder flower drink. Elder is common here in Scandinavia, both as a cordial made straight from petals, at home, by crafty men and women, and as a pre-made beverage in a green bottle. In times when we as humans paid more heed to folklore than we do today, it was thought unlucky to grow elder in one's garden. If an elder tree was cut down, a spirit called the Elder Mother would be released and take her revenge. Reads the poem "Wiccan Rede": 'Elder be the Lady's tree, burn it not or cursed you'll be". In order to cut the tree you had to chant a rhyme to the Elder Mother. Now elder is sold in Israel as Fanta Shokata, which is this bright red fizzy type of Fanta that kind of tastes like heavily sugared battery acid. Danish/Norwegian hylleblomst is much much better.

Oslo's getting really cold. The vanloads of begging and busking gypsies with layered skirts and accordions who were scattered all over the city area have dispersed, returned with their earnings to Budapest and Bucharest. Every first step outside immediately makes me think of Montreal, the way the skin reacts instantly and your breath suddenly adumbrates. I have a Syrian scarf, big and black and grey and red and green, but I don't have any gloves yet. Everything is quiet in the streets, the cafes and bars look sleepy until the doors open and the clatter and din and warmth inside escapes. The trees have turned from rufous to gold to sallow, to thin and tenebrous. The leaves are becoming mulch and loam, a pepper tinted carpet. The skies; greyer, often, and darker, sooner. We play basketball to keep warm, hustle to-and-fro, and it's that strange combination of sweat and chillbitten cheeks.

I hide away at nights and make processed foods with stick blenders.

Tonight I saw Kurt Wagner play under a pegged and pulleyed clothes line for his tunesheets. The audience were perhaps the most silent I've ever heard one. His voice's warm timbre was perfect for autumn. He even started, from amongst the audience, in darkness, with a hymn about autumn, a capella. Snaggletoothed. We were definitely snug there, under those songs. He made the season feel less in transition. We are meant to be here, after all.

an irrelevant anecdote and an angry outcry

My friend "Giacomo" works for ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, one of the two co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. He doesn't get paid for this job, he does it pro-bono, but its amazing work experience and he's extremely likely to get streamlined into some other, equally great organisation, as soon as he's done with this one. About a month before I left Canberra, he asked me to do a tiny little comic/character that he could use on a bunch of business cards he was having made up. He wanted either a picture of himself with "some luggages", or perhaps a little looking land mine with an evil face, or something. I agreed, but never really got very proactive on the producin'. And then it sort of became a joke, sort of, in which I just kept alluding my promise, much to his chagrin.

Anyway, about a month ago we were sitting in a bar here in Oslo and I was drawing on this stack of napkins and we were talking about the West Wing, which "Giacomo" discovered earlier this year and became appropriately obsessed with. So, while we were talking I just started scribbling this sketchy picture of Toby Zeigler, all furrow browed and shoulder-slung jacket, a drawing that was finished in about 25 seconds. "Giacomo" took the napkin and put it in his pocket.

I was against his using it for the business cards. I thought it represented him as a short, bearded, grumpy, balding Jewish man, rather than what he really is, which is a tall, grinning, beardless, goofy-but-loveable northern Italian, with a full head of hair. But he loves Toby and he loves the West Wing and he insisted. He sent off for the business cards to be made, and they were.

---

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the signing, in Ottawa, of the International Treaty banning landmines. Here is Oslo, there are celebrations going on. One of the main squares, beside the Hard Rock Cafe and the National Theatre, have been taken over by a simulation mine field, demonstration sniffer dogs and an absolute Leviathan of a truck called a "Minewolf" which looks like cross between a tank, a bulldozer and a combine harvester, and swings thick metal chains out front to detonate mines in large flat areas like fields. Throughout the week a series of conferences and events are being held, which in part commemorate the project, but also draw attention to, and prepare further for the signing, hopefully by the end of 2008, of a similar treaty against cluster munitions.

Yesterday during lunch, I put on a collared shirt and my better shoes and snuck into the afternoon session of the Civil Society Conference. "Giacomo" had been there all day, in suit and tie, schmoozing with the NGO celebrities and meeting his co-workers, previously known to him only by email and skype calls. And there he was handing out the business card, with my little Toby Zeigler scribble. To the ex-head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. To Charmaine Gooch, founder of Global Witness, who initiated, ran and pulled off the campaign to ban blood diamonds. To ICBL members Paul Hannon, director of Mines Action Canada, and Steve Goose, Director of Human Rights Watch - Arms Division. And to his wife, Jody Williams, campaign spokesperson for ICBL, recent head of mission for the UN Human Rights Council in Dafur, and joint winner in 1997 of the the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was there to see Jody speak, along with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Judge who also won the Nobel Prize, in 2003. "Giacomo" and I had told a bunch of people in our class about the talks and said how we should be able to just walk in and listen, even though we weren't officially invited, but nobody else came, citing "too much study" or "it'll probably be boring".

It wasn't boring. It was incredible. Jody Williams gave the most inspiring speech I've seen given for a long time. Probably ever. In massive contrast to the other Nobel Peace prize winner I saw this year, the Dalai Lama, there was not one platitude, not one feel-good fuzzy, not one moment of kumbai-ya. There was no apologies, and no set speech, and no big statements, and no soft forgiveness. Jody Williams is angry, she is outraged, she said so many times. She is outraged at governments, she is outraged at the UN, she is outraged at civil society for giving in, or for not pushing harder. She is outraged, and she should be, we all should be, at what has happened to humans, what has happened to the concept of the individual, to the need for human security, to the absolute common fucking sense that says that inventing, testing, producing, selling, stockpiling, threatening to use and actually using all types of purely destructive machinery, from small weapons to land mines to clusters to thermobaric bombs (like Russia's darling newbie) to nuclear monstrosities, is WRONG; that it is not just wrong but disgusting, criminal, evil. Jody Williams sat there, tired eyed and tight jawed, and she ponders these simple questions out loud, and when she asks why, it's not the sort of why you can just make up excuses to. It's the sort of why you just have to listen to, and think about. And get angry about, too.

How, she ponders, can a country like Sweden, with all its platitudes to peace and freedom, how can it still be the leading producer of small arms and clusters per capita in the world? How can the Russians and the Americans produce bombs of massive destruction and then release statements to the world's media about their "pride" and "excitement" at the success? How can government's like Frances - smart men like Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières - how can they seriously even consider the possibility of war with Iran? How can Western governments continuously backflip and pander and smooth over the truth in Dafur when every day people are being slashed to death and women are raped and there's just not enough food and shade and water and medicines, and they say they want reports that everybody is happy with? How does one act in such a way, when we know the full extent of the destruction our act is causing, but we do it anyway?

And the beauty is that she wonders all this without leftist cliche, without flimsy grand statements about the brotherhood of humans, without inane gestures towards the strength of the human spirit, without always blaming someone else, without using just words. In order to wonder all of this aloud, to cry out about all this she uses truth, she uses outrage, she uses logic, she uses the painful fact that we are all to blame, but that we also all have the capacity to make noise, to learn more, to care.

It's an odd feeling, being filled up with a sad flame of fury, and a hot flame of excitement and energy at the same time. To walk out of a room with a new hero.

---

After the speeches "Giacomo" was approached by Paul Hannon, asking whether the balding bearded guy on the business card was meant to be him or Steve Goose. "Oh no, it's meant to be me when I'm older and balder" he said. "But it doesn't look like you at all" replied Paul, "although, it does sort of look like a... fictonal character". Hahaha.

---

STOP CLUSTER MUNITIONS, NOW.

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.icbl.org/
Jody Williams' Nobel Lecture, 1997

Oslo

Oslo. I walk your quiet streets flanked by quiet houses capped with handsome mansard roofs, these quiet, neat streets, with autumn trees holding green, the quiet skies darkening earlier and earlier. The soft moaning sigh of a passing tram, the harmony of a raw wind from off the fjord, a wind danced by seabirds. A trio of Swedish girls, teenagers, all matching in Helly Hansen puffy parkas and dusty foundation and jingling charms, their hair fashioned wet and swept sideways (as though licked by a large horse), their mouths stuck in scowling singsong and dipthongs. Street corners colonised by 7-Elevens, by Narvesens, by Delis-de-Luca. A sound, a silence, a sound.

Home is the border line between Grünerløkka and Grønland, between hipsterdom and the migrant quarter. Along the Aker river African men stand in position making hissing noises and whispering hash? hash?, their hands clenched around tiny parcels, while the water gushes and trickles towards the fjord. Blond men pushing strollers. Bass guitar from the warehouses. The two sides of the Anker bridge, guarded by statues of human-animal teams from Norwegian fairy tales - Per Gynt and the reindeer, Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon with requisite bear, Veslefrikk med fela and Kari Trestakk - and in the middle, a Roma couple playing accordion and tambourine. My apartment is part of a massive complex, eleven connected buildings round a central square, where Somali women talk to friends through ground level curtained windows, where bored looking Kurdish teens hang out by the little playground, where white students pass by, heads down, where Arab men stand against the wall listening to Arab pop songs on the fuzzy speaker of their mobile phones. From Anker: down Torggata, the Turkish and Vietnamese grocers, the Kurdish kebab and pizza shops, the cobbled squares, the worn out, greybearded gypsy beggar, always in the same doorway with his paper cup. Up Markveien, the second hand stores, the keffiyahed indie kids, the bars with antique furniture, the smell of coffee, the ghosts of industry.

I spend a lot of afternoons in the Nasjonalbiblioteket, the National Library, in its big reading room, rimmed by bookshelves, under disc shaped ceiling lights that look like UFOs, listening to the symphony of paper shuffling, zips, computer keys, the tap and squeak of stepping shoes and the occasional punctuation of sniffs or coughs. I spend a lot of nights in bed, under the doona with my back against the window sill, reading Sigrid Undset or my Ethics textbook and listening to Efterklang or Pärt. I spend the mornings sitting naked, mindlessly trawling the internet for items updated while I was sleeping. I spend the other mornings in class, in which I am one of 16 students from seven countries. I spend the darkness dreaming about people I have never met, and of hideous circumstances. I spend most breakfasts eating ICA muesli clusters with dehydrated strawberries and dried yogurt clumps. I spend a lot of my time thinking about one person, one girl, one smile, one set of eyes, one city, south of here, a city that feels as much like home as any other at this point.


But, Oslo, you hold me safe for now, you appease me for now, you with your rolling skies and cold sea air and colourful streets and lanterns and fountains and construction sites and drug addicts and freckled girls and accordion players and sighing trams and oil-proud Hummers and sad looking trees and street-corner berry sellers and graffiti and nervousness and wooden houses and hills; you with your song.

You smug city, Oslo; you'll do for now.

Looking into the Eyes of Others

In his book Totality and Infinity Emanuell Levinas makes a distinction between rhetoric and conversation (or dialogue). Rhetoric resists dialogue and corrupts the freedom of the Other not to become the Same. For that reason it is violence par excellence and thus injustice. Levinas talks about violence as interrupting humans' continuity. It is tempting to see our lives as lived narrative in that connection. For Levinas the face of the other speaks to us and its manifestation is already conversation or dialogue. The face opens for the original conversation. We do not fuse with the other or become like her, but interact. The ethical is for Levinas then taking consideration for the irreducibility of the Other. The way the face of the Other presents itself to me is, he writes, non-violence par excellence because it does not violate my freedom but instead calls my freedom to responsibility. As nonviolence it maintains the plurality of the Same and the Other.

Ref: Erik Cleven, "Between Stories and Faces: Facilitating Dialogue Through Narratives and Relationship Building"

just a song

Ukelele: The camp ended. There wasn't many tears, except when Joanna left. There were, of course, hugs and notes: hugs that spoke louder than words had been able to do in three weeks, as well as uncomfortable hugs, hugs by expectation, hugs of severance. Notes containing compliments and platitudes, silent notes speaking carefully, notes with outpourings of almost desperate love. A note declaring the recipient as grossly self-centered, honest. His back was a voice bubble saying "Rock On" which is about as much a sidestep as you can get and still have pen on paper. It appears the people of France and I might need to spend a bit of time on patching our relationship.

Voice: I do feel bad that I didn't really try very hard. I tried but I couldn't find it. This will be my last international CISV program for a while - I think I get it now, I think it's time for me to do something else. Mosaic, for one thing, and other things, other things entirely. Which is certainly not to say I have regrets: No. Wheat fields, capoed guitar on hilltop, Amella (as a symbol), Magdalena, Jo, the looking beyond, the smell of rain and fire; no.

Accordion: She is only seven, and she is waiting and she will keep on waiting and she has been waiting all of her life, and she is unknowing, she is defined by unknowing. Here I am in Sweden, so easily in Sweden. That's something.

Percussion: The Dane, Kierkegaard, asks if despair is a merit or a defect. He proposes that it is both. "It is infinite merit to be able to despair. And yet not only is it the greatest misfortune and misery actually to be in despair; no it is ruin...Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself. But the synthesis is not the imbalance, the synthesis is ust the possibility; or, the possibility of the imbalance lies in the synthesis. If the synthesis were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair; it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something that happened to a person, something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone. No, despair lies in the person himself. But if he were not a synthesis there would be no question of his despairing; nor could he despair unless the synthesis were originally in the right relationship from the hand of God."

Trumpets: You are so beautiful when you are shy.

Stories from Svogerslev

Tonight we were in the fields, waist deep in grain, and suddenly, thirty metres away there was a young deer, bucking and leaping through the wheat. I yelped "ET RÅDYR" which is how you say it in Danish, and stooped and sprinted along the tractor path, thinking I could catch it up and surprise it. Unfortunately a leaping deer is faster than I am and it got away. Still, it was a beautiful moment, the sky of milk being pierced by a disappearing cardinal sun and the wind mills whipping and our movement making tracks of crushed cereal stalks. It was always gonna be beautiful, but the addition of a solitary leaping deer? I mean, come on.

Also there are hundreds of very very large slugs, often in clumps.





The school we are staying in is peculiar in that it has a Lord of the Rings theme, and has meeting rooms with runes on the wall, and hallways with murals on the walls which depict different bits of the story, kind of like a Catholic church might have depictions of the twelve stations of the cross. At night local kids play on the sloping tin roof and spy on us through the skylight as have our discussions. While exploring the adjacent forest today I found a series of paths which lead to a mini climbing wall in a little clearing in the trees, on which I plan to hang a white sheet, and to which I will run a very very long electrical cord to power a projector and computer and I will take mattresses and couches and citronella lanterns and tea lights in brown paper bags and set up a little outdoor cinema. This I will do in secret and then I will lead the other participants to it in the dark, and we will come to the clearing and they will be shocked and enchanted. There we will sit and we will watch the film Voces Innocentes which is about a very good film about child soldiers in El Salvador and then we will be discuss child soldiers and everybody will be very engaged and interested and even emotionally affected. But shhh, I said it´s a secret.

I leave you with a humorous company logo from the side of a plastic food delivery tray.

On Escaping

Behind the school where we are living, over the little hill and across the road, there is a vast wheat field, the stalks waist high and shimmering yellow. In the middle of it all, three vast turbines, whooshing mechanically, and a tractor path running under their shadows. It’s half past eight, the sun is getting lower on the flat horizon, and we are enjoying the magic hour, the four of us, which is to say me and the three people I like most in this project – Maggie (Sweden), Jo (Canada) and Ghassan (Lebanon). We are lying here, hidden by the sea of crops, feeling good because we have escaped for a little while; we are vagrants, camped out and cautious of farmers with shotguns, we are five minutes from the camp but it feels like we are in a John Steinbeck novel, somewhere in California, or Nebraska, or Saskatchewan. We are giddy with laughter and there are ravens in the sky, and flat white clouds. The stentorian whomping of the turbine blades, the gentle rustle of wheat husks, the glow of the sunset on the faces of these people that I have recently met and recently come to love.

We started phase ‘two’ of the project today, which means that working with the kids in the refugee centre is on hold while we devote time to discussion, research, activities and exploration of the project theme (human, and specifically children’s rights). This does not suit some in the group, those who came here to act, to plunge themselves into the lives of some confused kids with confused futures, to do something for a couple of weeks so as to return to ‘normal’ life feeling as though they have achieved something – who look shocked and somewhat horrified at the suggestion that this could in fact be a learning experience for themselves first and foremost. I guess I understand this almost desperate desire to be of use, to stop talking and start acting, but for me this is in no way the venue for that, and we are not the right people – and I disagree greatly with these people. On the other hand most of us are excited and engaged by the switch into discussions. Having seen first hand the impossible awfulness of the situations of these children I feel like I owe it to them – Burhan from Kosovo, Omar from Iraq, beautiful doe-eyed Shamsa from Somalia – to know as much as possible about everything (every declaration, every policy, every arrogant or ignorant decision) which has led them here. Then I owe it to them to work, with every one of my actions, with every one of my thoughts, with my life, towards change. That this is not a reaction shared by some of the other equally well meaning people I am currently sharing a bedroom with is…interesting to learn.

The last day with all the kids at the centre was the easiest so far in terms of running activities and dealing with the kids – but it was by far the hardest emotionally. I think this is the first time I’ve cried sad tears from watching children laugh and smile – brought to surface by the overhanging realisation that their score has been well and truly set, that we are only masks, smokescreens, three minute long funfair rides, that we are powerless, and that next time I hear of death in Iraq, I will have no idea which of these kids are there now, and which are still trapped in the green, leafy purgatory of Avnstrup.

The other day, in the sunshine, a moment worth sharing: Muna from Somalia was playing djembe (she plays really well), while the other girls (Kurds, Persians, Albanians, Roma girls) clapped and trilled their tongues and sang together the song "Ah Wa Noss" by the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. I sang along too and attempted to dance, which inspired the Kosovar boys, who busted out some break moves in the long grass. There was a butterfly, and I remembered the name in Danish. The world seemed so small in that moment, and incredibly beautiful, and in that moment, just like in the wheat today, and in the fields of daisies with M and S yesterday, it felt as though escape (from reality, from everything) was really still possible.

Scandinavia: An Introduction

Hello?

For a while now, there's been something wrong. Somehow, somewhere along the line, this blog became something in my mind which it was never meant to be when it started, it outgrew itself and went through some sort of mid-life crisis - it lost shape and energy, its very reason came under question, it grew inert. The need to write began filling me with apprehension, with emptiness, with fear. Once upon a time it was a way to say hello to friends and loved ones around the world, and just express whatever was in my head, or in the streets and skies and hearts and minds around me - but at some point it became something else, it hung above me threateningly, it taunted me, as if saying "you're not good enough anymore. Your writing is not as intelligent, not as beautiful, not as thoughtful as Bec's or Marty's or Patricks. Your photographs are nothing like the brothers Eaton. Your thoughts are repeats, your emotions thin and familiar. They don't want to read about that, not now".

I know this is a stupid way to think. I know that even if it was true, it shouldn't matter, because this is for me, its for my parents, its for my most forgiving and loving friends, its for my children, its for my memory. It's the only way I've ever found by which I actually maintain some sort of commitment to writing - and I must start again now, before I lose this one last medium, before the doubt and paralysis overtakes completely. I must write regularly from here on out - If I can't do it in this six months, when I'm all the way over here, experiencing these things, learning all that I am learning, then something is massively wrong.

I've been meaning to kick off this "new phase" of the blog for a while. I meant to use it to mark the end of my period in Canberra, and to process my quick return to Perth, and to herald my arrival in Scandinavia two weeks ago. But this has been a hard post to write. I've stalled on it again and again, distracted myself just as I've sat down to write. And for whatever reason I needed it first, as a page break, a border, a full stop, a new paragraph. Hopefully with this posted, we can forget about the lapses over the past few months, and I can just start using this more as I always intended it, with entries frequent, imperfect, and likely rambling. This is ok. At least it is better than silence.

Right now I am living in a school in a small village with an unpronounceable name (Svogerslev) which is a few kilometers from the city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand in the nation state of Denmark. I am living here with 24 others from 9 countries, and we are working together with CISV and with the Youth Association of the Danish Red Cross in a refugee asylum center nearby. The families that live here are mostly on their way out - the system has pulled and shunted them around for up to seven years, but their temporary residence visas are about to run out, and they have been denied permanent residence, so they are due to be returned to their countries soon enough. There is despair, and there is pain, and there is depression in this place, especially with the adults and the teenage kids, who remember life before Scandinavia, and understand completely what uncertainty may come next. The younger kids, meanwhile, the ones we are working with, mostly, are left confused, bored and scared. Boys and girls from Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Kosovo float above the grass in the Danish countryside. We spoke earlier in the week to an Iraqi Kurdish guy who had grown up in the Danish asylum seeking system, and had been lucky enough to be able to stay on in the country. We heard about his family being sent a bill to pay for the bullets that the Iraqi government had used to execute his uncle. We heard about the psychological pain his father went through during seven years of imprisonment, and the damage caused to his mother as she tried to get her children out of Iraq and to keep them in Denmark, and to keep them alive. And these were horrible stories to hear, incredible and hard stories, but they have become so real, working with these kids, watching them move and talk and think and play, and doing all these things with them. It is an honor, and it is devastating.

I am blessed too to be working here with some incredible people, with warmth and intelligence and creativity and real, thick, creamy compassion. I invite (actually I implore) you now to read a blog entry written by one of the girls I am doing all this with, Joanna from Canada, who is 20 years old, and very inspiring - and you should read it because she says everything I have been thinking, everything I want to be able to express, and she says it amazingly well. Her blog can be found here: http://ideas-thegrandtour.blogspot.com/

I will try to write every two days or so for the next six months at least. Maybe more. I really hope it will be no less. Right now its the middle of the night and there are still birds chortling and squeaking outside, like this: "chauuuuchooootwitttercheeeechoootweet". There are always birds making these noises, which makes me think that Danes don't need windchimes. Today I sat in the grass and planned pirate activities and made daisy chains and we fit three grown people on the tyre flying fox. This is the beginning of the Scandinavianised version of the Standard Line Delivery System. Velkomme til.

An Echo.

It’s a slow and measured ride. A little after sunset, the smell of wood fires, the scratch and shuffle of possums. The chilled air bites your cheeks, your knuckles, your nose. Scattered milk crates, a barking dog, patches of gravel on the path left from flooding during the hail storm months ago. Bus stop graffiti reveals Casey to be a Big Fat Slut. You cross the dew licked grass. The moon is full, and glows like a future behind the dark lump of Mount Ainslie. A carefully placed bunny-hop up the curb and you’re out the front of the house, cresting at the apex of the shallow U shaped crescent, hidden by the line of conical hedge trees which are exactly the sort you can buy in hobby shops to line the country roads of your model train diorama. Around the dark buses, through the chain link gate and past the old bath tub and little piles of car parts. Through the bead curtain hanging in the backdoor frame. This is what we call home.

And it’s definitely a lonely town.


But here I am and here I am. Canberra, our nation’s brave and bright political beacon, our majestic capital. A city kinda like Pauly Shore or Vanilla Ice – a joke that never fades. Already half way through my first (and possibly only – inshallah!) stint here. Steel-trapped behind the computer desk, reading, typing, thinking, procrastinating – procrastination never feels so bad when you’ve got nothing better to rush off to anyway. Stretch it out, make it last right up to the hour it’s due. See what I care. I’ve got Allen’s snakes, I’ve got the new Modest Mouse, I’ve got Facebook messages from ex-lovers. Out there there’s nothing but a couple hundred up-collared jocks stumbling liquored outta Mooseheads, humming Khe Sahn, on their way to the $2.50 pizza slice counters. Beyond that? Silence and cold and darkness, and somewhere among it all, my bedroom.

I exaggerate of course. There are warm, sunny days with windsurfers on Lake Burley Griffin, and birds flicking from orange and yellow trees. And there are people I have here as my friends, and they are good people, despite not exactly making my desert island shortlist. The key people in my life right now, for your information, are as follows:

"Giacomo"
He is Italian, from near the French border. He likes wearing his sweaters over his shoulders, smart-casual style. He has a particular way of speaking that often includes the use of the phrases “It’s a good/crappy thing, actually, at the end of the day” and “oh PERfect, well done, well done”. I will be studying with him in Oslo for the second half of the year, also. He once stole a 7 disc set of Dawson’s Creek Series 5, but felt guilty and returned it to the store, offered to pay for it, and was arrested. He represented himself in court and walked away without a criminal record. He has trouble with getting the ladies because they all think he is “such a good friend” and “such a nice guy”, and we all know how sexy that is. Little do they know that he’s actually a sexist, Eurocentic (bridging on racist), porn-collecting, smack-shootin' motherfucker. You’re missing out, girls.

Yui
She is from Thailand. She is here on an Ausaid scholarship, meaning the Australian government pay her the same amount to study here as they give about seven local undergraduates – ie: she actually gets enough to live on. She’s pretty much the cutest thing since Sanrio and I’ll admit here that our friendship kicked off when she was chosen in the early days as the closest thing to a crush I was ever likely to develop in the course (and indeed in Canberra) and thus approached her with invites to social occasions. Since then its all gotten pretty severely platonic (thus rendering the whole crush-scene distinctly wastelandic) although Micky and I joke often with her about both of us being somewhat head-over-heels, hence our new (hilarious!) project – http://yayforyui.blogspot.com . She likes cake and German boys.

Hugh
He is from Perth. He is friends with Jim Mitchell! He has a pretty girlfriend called Claire, and surfs, and wrote a honours thesis about Aceh. When he doesn’t want to discuss something he gets very obvious in his vagueness. He doesn’t like discussing the affairs of others, or about his honours thesis, or about skinny waitresses with lisps who have mad crushes on him. He’s a really lovely guy, but he lives out in Upper Downer, which is a very inconvenient place to get to by bike, so he’s consequently notoriously antisocial.

(photo to come)

Jason
He is from Taiwan. He is the most fashionable male in the course, as voted by me and Yui. He works at the Taiwanese embassy, or whatever they call it given that they are not allowed to have an embassy. He is actually a special operative spy intent on the immediate destruction of China. He cooks a powerful Korean dumpling, too.

*
I’m gonna post more, I promise. This is the start of a new era for the Standard Line Delivery Corporation. Enough stalling with illusions of literary birds nests – this is supposed to be a diary goddamn, something to belt out when I’m alone and cold, and to read back on someday when I’m alone and cold and, also, old. For now, to the two or three of you who still bother checking this thing for updates, goodnight, and may your dreams hold rickshaws filled with soft fruit and slender Vietnamese women in milk white ao dai.

Sturm Und Drang

(all photos are not by me, but are, rather, taken from these four flickr sites - (1) (2) (3) (4) -
you can see many more such photos at these sites)

“Oh, and by the way,” Sarah had told me, “Jane said you can only stay with them in Canberra if you can bring some rains with you. They’re desperate after such a long drought.”

Last night, I was sitting on my bed, slowly absorbing a dry and drawn-out essay on self-education and evaluation in humanitarian aid organisations during situations of crisis, when, all around, the rumbling started. Not at all like the usual punctuated claps of thunder, the approaching storm sounded like a great stampede of wildebeests, like the catastrophic build-up of angry electricity, like the centre of a oval-sized swarm of bees. There were bursts of lightning, slashing across the city centre, and there was the growl of wind coming from all directions. But for a while there was no rain. For a while there was only the terrible noises, an approaching war.

But then it came, the rain. And with it came the hailstones, pounding the trees and the soil and the windows; rocks the size of icecubes. I opened the door a little - ice flecked in through the crack and scattered onto the carpet. It was ferocious - I closed the door again and a burst of excitement shuddered through my body as I jumped onto the bed and snuck under the covers.

It continued. The drains were blocked by hail, and the yard flooded. I went to the door again, turned on the light outside, trying to assess the carnage from the safety of my flat. Where my feet had touched the carpet, wet patches appeared. From under my door, rain had been pouring in, the rubber-bottomed carpet was floating. My room was flooded.

I lifted up the VCR, books and clothes which were on the floor and put them on my bed. I slammed towels and the bath mat up against the door to stop more seeping in. I rang Ed, who ran down and got in through the shed, into the flat. The main house was leaking everywhere, he said, rain was pouring through the roof. We ran outside. Ted was up on the roof, clearing hailstones out of gutters - Jane grabbed a mop to help make the water flow efficiently into the storm drains, Ed and I threw rags and tarps at the base of the door to try and clog up the openning. We ripped drainpipes off the walls to make it flow faster, we clambered up to try and divert the flow of water to other areas of the roof, we dashed through troughs of water in the garden up to our ankles. All the while, hail stones pounded us from every direction.

Then it stopped. The wind slowly died down. Everywhere there was the sound of sirens - police sirens, ambulance sirens, house and car alarms, wailing like this was some other type of air raid. Everywhere the ground was a pot pouri of white and green - huge drifts of ice banked right up to the house, flecked throughout with torn leaves and broken branches. A thin mist snuck across the suburbs.

I pulled up the carpet, and in my soaked socks I started mopping the concrete floor underneath.

Today, the university is closed, due to water damage. Classes are cancelled, shops are shut. People in the streets are shovelling the huge carpets of ice that coat the paths and gardens, creating mini mountains of hailstones. The city centre's streets are covered with ripped leaves and drifts of ice. I have never experienced anything remotely like this.

And they say it might happen again this evening.

(Special note to those in the northern hemisphere - I would like to remind you that: (1) this is summer, and (2) this is Australia. Yeah, holy shit.)

Goodbye Qawawis

( all photos by my friend David Parsons. Thankyou David. )

During Ramadan 2005, I stayed for a short time, just three days and nights, along with two friends, David from Canada and Maraya from the USA, in the rolling south Hebron hills in the occupied West Bank, in a tiny Palestinian settlement called Qawawis. Settlement is a loaded word to use in the context of this land, like so many other words ('wall', 'terrorist', 'refugee camp') it is drenched in subjective meaning - but there is not another good word for this place that I stayed. It is smaller than a village, and not really a farm. Qawawis was a collection of about seven stone huts built low to the ground, it had some pens for goats and sheep, it had some olive trees, a couple of stone bake ovens, a well, and a population of about 40 people, from four or five families. These people are shepherds and olive farmers, they rise early, graze their gaunt stock in the surrounding hills, bake bread, make olive oil, pray, talk, laugh, play soccer. They had electricity for only one hour each evening, from a generator.

David, Maraya and I were in Qawawis for these three nights because we were acting as international activists aiming to lessen the threat of harassment of the Palestinians who lived there. Qawawis was situated near to a smooth bitumen Israeli road, like the many which slice through the West Bank, connecting army posts and illegal Israeli settlements with Israel itself. On the horizon on three sides such Israeli settlements were perched high on hilltops, overlooking the huts of Qawawis - these settlements were all built since 1982, and are home to Jewish communities of the more fundamentalist persuation. Frequently the Israeli settlers or soldiers would make visits to Qawawis, or stop on the roadside, often with weapons, in order to harass, abuse, threaten and sometimes attack them. Shortly before I was in Qawawis a makeshift bomb was found, planted by settlers in a stone wall - if a rock above the device was removed the bomb would be detonated. The log book in our hut documented countless cases of the villagers being hit with rocks and sticks, of cars driving loudly towards the village honking horns to scare the animals, of settlers suddenly walking around, and into the huts, unannounced, and occasionally accompanied by soldiers. Caves attached to the houses and often containing ovens or storage areas have been cemented over, animal feed and olive trees poisoned. Soldiers at one stage declared the area a "closed military zone" and began to arrest any Palestinians found in the area.

In March 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the military had to respect the rights of the people of Qawawis and similar villages in the surrounding area to live in their ancestral land. The people of Qawawis returned and rebuilt their homes, requesting permanent assistance from International Human Rights observers to help them retain their homes. Harassment, on an almost daily basis, continued.


This photo is of Hadj Khalil, one of the patriarchs of Qawawis. In this photo he is sitting on a platform on which he prayed each day, and looking towards the watchtowers of a nearby Israel settlement.

Hadj Khalil, along with all the other people of Qawawis, were welcoming and warm with us during our stay. Despite the fact that they were fasting for Ramadan, they frequently bought us mint tea and olive oil and za'atar and warm fresh loaves straight from the ovens in the caves. They sat with us and spoke in patient Arabic, as we asked countless questions they had been asked again and again by other internationals. The three of us had an incredible time here with these people, we were made to feel at home in our little stone hut, and together we learnt so much, in so short a time. I will never ever forget the people of Qawawis, or the short time I was there.


A few days ago, Qawawis, along with a number of similar Palestinian villages and settlements in the Hebron hills area, was destroyed by Israeli military. My heart is sunk. Please read the below press-release, sent to me by my friend Sarah, and today, keep in your mind these few innocent, peaceful, beautiful and now homeless families, and the countless others like them, throughout Palestine and the Middle East.

---

Seven Palestinian Homes Demolished
Independent Catholic News
Saturday, February 17, 2007

Israeli soldiers demolished homes in three Palestinian villages near bypass road 317 on 14 February, the Christian Peacemaker Team reports. Starting in Imneizil at around 9am about forty Israeli soldiers with two bulldozers demolished one home, an animal pen and a stone bake-oven. At noon the soldiers moved to Qawawis where they demolished the homes of five families and one bake-oven, then on to Um Al-Kher where they demolished one home and damaged a wall of another home.

At Imneizil several young children were in their home eating when the Israeli military arrived; the soldiers gave the family time to get out, but did not give them time to remove their personal belongings. The animal pen was demolished with a few animals inside; two lambs were injured. The Palestinian family began immediately to build a makeshift pen for the animals as the majority of the sheep were just returning from grazing in the fields.

In the village of Qawawis one of the demolished homes was over sixty-five years old, and sheltered two families.

The Israeli military, in concert with Israeli settlers, has been trying to force the Palestinian residents of the south Hebron hills to leave their homes for years. Due to harassment from the nearby Israeli outposts several of the young families of Qawawis moved to a nearby town; when the Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the remaining families, a court ordered that the families could return to their homes. According to a lawyer representing the families, the Israeli army now claims that this court ruling allows only the last inhabitants of Qawawis to return, not their children who earlier fled the assaults of the Israeli settlers.

"Our children need homes," said one villager. "What do they want us to do?"

The Israeli army said: "Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity." The Israeli military made no provisions for shelter for the families whose homes they demolished. The families asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide them with tents.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said: "A building permit is unavailable there [in the south Hebron hills]." The preceding day three Israeli peace activists and two internationals, including CPTer Sally Hunsberger, joined approximately fifty Palestinians in working on their land near Imneizil. The Palestinian men, women and children planted 600 olive trees in fields that they had been afraid to walk on for the past four years due to threats of settler violence. During the action, soldiers and settlers watched from a distance, but did not interfere with the tree planting.

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit: the CPT website

© Independent Catholic News 2007

A house, a family, a home.

SINCE arriving in Canberra I have been staying at the house of the Radclyffe family, in Ainslie, just a short ride from the city centre and from the university. The deal was hooked up for me by my friend Sarah, because she is wonderful. The house's residents currently number six. There is a dog named Lucy. There is a cat named P.C. There is a guy named Ed and his girlfriend named Kat. And there is Jane, the mother, a warm faced woman of about 60, who teaches English to refugees and migrants, mostly kids and women from Sudan and Sierra Leone. She also sometimes teaches French and Japanese. And there is Ted, her husband, a small man with a tight face and white hair and a blurred tattoo on his inner arm. Ted used to be a public servant, now works as a contractor, something to do with passports. All this info I was given by Sarah on a special piece of paper before I left Perth, a short introduction to the family. They, and their house, are some of the very best things about my short time in Canberra thus far.

-

ON the front verge there is a vintage car, a light pink Dodge with two surfboards strapped to the roof, and there is a beautifully restored silver and blue full-length antique bus. In the driveway; two more buses, one massive green and cream double-decker which looks like it belongs in some 1930s Superhero comic, the other smaller, blue and red and decorated with Trailer Park Trash stickers and an exhaust-burnt dolls head on the tow-ball. This bus has been converted into a living space and is therefore the mobile residence of Kat, she who is the girlfriend of Ed (the son), has piercings in both nostrils and is from Tasmania. Ed is a musician and this week Kat and he have been in Melbourne while he was being filmed on some new show called "Australia's Got Talent!" so I haven't really spent much time with them yet. Also in the yard is a motorbike that Ted rides to work, another restored Dodge with bench seats and some tiki figurines on the dash, a noseless mini minor which has been converted into a trailer, an old engine or two, and a fair amount of junk. Also: there is a vegetable garden, there is a murky pond rimmed with stones, there is a hills hoist, there is a plastic hose transporting run-off from the washing machine into the garden, there are two wooden hives, flecked with swirling bees.

I am currently bedded in the granny flat, which is out back of the house as well. The flat is joined to the garage and a shed, which until late last year was the space in which Ted was constructing a small aeroplane from a kit he got from the United States. It took him seven years to build it, but its finished now, and hes been travelling two hours each way once a week to fly it around a bit ("It looks pretty unique up there on the tarmac" he tells me, "all those other planes are nothing but caravans with wings, all painted perfect white with stripes. Mine might not be like theirs, its all hand-painted, red and silver, but thats the effect I was going for, and it's the way I like it".) This weekend he is flying it to the coastal town where he and Jane have a holiday house so that in the future he can stay longer on the coast, and just fly back to Canberra for work. "At least once" he says. "I just want to do that at least once, y'know, to say I've done it".

Inside the granny flat there is a small fridge, a tv, a microwave, two burners and a bathroom which has a floorspace measuring about 1m x 2.5m, including the shower. There is also a Telstra rented telephone, as well as an old black telephone without any dial on it, just a silver crank you would use to contact the operator in order to place a call. I thought this was a showpiece only, until it rang with two short bursts the other night. I didn't answer, thinking it must have been hooked up to the main line inside the house, but a few minutes later Ted came knocking on the door. "Dincha hear the phone?" he asked "I was tryin ta ask you if you wanted to come in for some dinner, or a beer". Apparently inside the house there is another vintage phone, hooked up as a direct line through to the one sitting plump on my bedside table. An old-world intercom.

Inside, Ted tells me how he brews his own beer, in order to save money on Reeche's, which is otherwise the only beer he'll drink. He tells me his plans to go to the following night to the club. ("They raffle a meat tray on Fridays. Not many people go down for it, so I think I'm in with a chance"). He discusses his hatred of pumpkin ("Ah, I just don't think we should eat orange vegetables. I mean I don't really mind pumpkin in a soup. Or a pie. Or a garbage dump".) At 6.30pm he turns on SBS World News. Asking my age he puts my data into the Nielsen TV ratings tracking device they have hooked up. I become a statistic. Every morning at 2.15am on the dot the stats of who-was-watching-what,-when for the day gone are sent by modem, causing a single trill of the telephone throughout the house. "We try to stick in who's watching as accurately as we can," Ted says. "You can cheat it if you like, trick 'em about how many people are watching. But what's the point?"

Jane brings out some dinner and the three of us watch the news. The two of them moan and grumble whenever Bush or Howard are mentioned, but its whenever David Hicks is discussed that they start exclaiming at the screen. "Bring the poor fella home!" cries Jane. "Oh, they will, you wait and see," predicts Ted. "Right before the election, they'll whisk him outta there. You wait and see." After dinner and the news are over Ted flips through the channels. "Ah, what is this?! SHIT-HALF-HOUR?! That's what we call this Chris, when they don't have anything to show of value. So all we get is shit."

I excuse myself (something tells me Ted is going to sit and flick through the shit anyway) and head back to the little flat out the back, where I find three Daddy Longleg spiders in the kitchenette. I clamber onto the bed with a massive round of Afghan bread and three tubs of dip - red pepper, smoky eggplant and Persian chickpea; I tear the bread in chunks and dab . I dance around the flat a while to the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, I watch the West Wing on ABC, I do some readings for International Relations Theory. Outside I can hear a possum growling and wheezing like some terrible monster, and then a sudden fight, and a clatter, and then silence. The night hangs close and heavy around my little shack. I am asleep before midnight.

-

THIS arrangement was meant to be temporary, while I scouted the city for a room to suit my needs and budget. But, this is Canberra, and therefore this is almost impossible. The city is flooded with students, the (liveable) cheap rooms near the uni have been claimed. I looked at a room in a house the other day whose two other tenants are currently taking each other to court - she's a miniature Russian woman called Dino (who I thought was a feminine Asian man until I was corrected by two others who had also been to see the room before me - apparently we've all been covering the same ground, all us new arrivals) who likes meditating but never cooks, only microwaves, and requests that tenants scrub the shower (in their private en-suite) down after every time they use it - while he is a one-eyed drug user who lives out the back and doesn't trust anyone to touch his stuff, so while thats where my room would have been had I taken the house (haha!) I couldn't actually see that particular room today, because he was apparently in a bad mood. What's confusing is that despite their feud when I arrived Dino was delivering him a salad.

Anyway, after explaining this particular househunt experience to Ted and Jane they warmly offered for me to move more permanently into their house, outta the granny flat and into the spare room inside the house, once they've cleared some clutter out of the way. So this place, this house with its TV watching monitoring system and its stacks of banjos and guitars and cobwebbed books and antique telephones and cars and buses and its mannequins with sailors caps, and its tiki masks and Buddha heads and its cat and its dog and its possums and its smell of possum shit in the rafters, this place is, for the next four months, going to be my home.