Dog. Drum. Duet.

Up at Metro Tobalaba, where the Tip y Tap beer garden fills the plaza in front of the entrance to the metro, a couple of musicians had set up shop. One had a guitar, another a drum kit, and they were good - I mean, really good, or at least they almost certainly would have been, but when I came into the plaza, the guitarist was putting away his guitar with a face like a sucked lemon, and the drummer was going at it on his own.
            The dog thought he was fabulous.  He was a big black dog - mostly labrador, with a bit of mastiff about the shoulders, and he had parked himself nose to brass with a cymbal, and every time the drummer hit a drum the dog barked a great big whoouff.
            The drummer hit a drum.  The dog barked. The drummer hit another drum. The dog barked bigger. The drummer drummed faster.  He reckoned he could out-bark the dog. Pretty soon he was going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, but the dog's tail was going about double that -
            As far as that dog was concerned it was an ecstatic, practically hallucinogenic, full-on meeting of souls and minds. It barked and it barked and it barked.
            The drummer was beginning to look a wee bit lemonish himself. He and his guitarist had counted on a beer-generous Tip y Tap audience, and what they had was about fifty people laughing their heads off and holding up their cell-phone cameras - not even pointing at him. They were all aiming at the dog.
            I would have love to have stayed, but I was late for an appointment, and slipped past them into the metro station.  A machine-gun whoouf-and-drum-kit duet followed me all the way down the stairs.


It was a GOOD day.

Summer in Santiago

Summer Summer has hit. For real. The air is light and balmy, the platano trees are a mass of green and a bird is chirping its little heart out just outside our window.
            This afternoon I went places. I took a taxi. We were stopped at a light; the windows were down and I lay in my seat with my head back and my eyes closed, enjoying the early summer warmth, overlaid with the smells of petrol and hot tarmac. There was music coming from another car nearby, happy boppy summer pop-
           "Look." The taxi driver said.
            I opened my eyes. The music was coming from the next car over - a red Volkswagen beetle; not fire-engine red, but ladybird red, which is brighter and more alive, and behind the wheel was a girl. Her lips were painted a bright barbie pink. Her long hair fell down a high ponytail, tied up with a blue twist, and she was dancing in her seat, shaking that long fall of hair, bouncing her fingers on the wheel, singing and shimmying her shoulders, sending her summer-blue shirt slithering and slithering from one bronze collarbone to another.
            It was a performance, but she wasn't playing to anyone. She was dancing her heart out for herself in her bright red summer car.
            "Look." The driver said again, and his voice was one long sigh. "She even has a flower."
            I looked. There was a flower, a peony tied with a bit of ribbon to the rear-view mirror.
            "Es ella una maravilla." (She is a marvel.) "Una maravilla." He folded his hands on the wheel and watched.
            She was Joy, and in a whole day full of summer, she was the most wonderful thing I saw.

Bah Hachoo Humbug.

I'm sure that flus come at worse times than between Christmas and new year, but this particular time is probably the least fun time of the lot.
Bah Hachoo Humbug.

Let's pretend that my sneezing sounds like this - and feel all holiday happy and fizz.


It's pretty much the reverse of inappropriately lugubrious holiday music, isn't it?

Post Prandial Phantasies. Burp.

"On the seventeenth day of Christmas
The Elephant said to me -
It's almost HALLOWEEN!"

Someone has a turkey-stuffing hangover...

Merry Christmas, You-All!

This morning's shower ditty:

"I don't want a lot for Christmas
That is one big honking fib!
I'm dreaming of buckets of gold and rubies
A necklace like a diamond bib
(Just like Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies in her seminal royal portrait of 1830)*

Oh, I just want you for my own
Just how much you're gonna know
When i throw you down, tear off your stockings
And smooch you beneath the mistletoe -"

At which point Mr Tabubil stuck his head into the shower, asked if I was quite done, and that he was going to be out on the terrace with a boiled egg. Did I want one? There was one for me if i wanted one.

*The line doesn't scan, but pedantic accuracy is important when it comes to Santa's Wish List. You can hum it in E sharp if you like.

Second-rate Holly Jollies.

I am trapped in customer service telephone hell.
            I wouldn't mind so much if the infinite roll of Christmas carols they're playing at me weren't buried in so much static.  Or if they chose versions that weren't maudlin and lugubrious.  
            Stop singing about holly jolly holidays with a catch in your throat.  And if you're going to hang a star upon the highest bough, remember that only Judy ever got away with quavering like that. Your quivers, semi-quivers, demi-quivers and little achey-breachy wibble-wobble-whoopses will not be supplanting Judy as doleful holiday queen anytime soon, alright? Go try a jolly little jingle bells.  Go ahead, try it. Throw in that perky decant about snowflakes if you want, but above all, sing it cheery!  
            I've got a long wait and an epic argument ahead of me and i want to be in a fighting spirit. Not curled up sobbing underneath my Christmas tree while a second-rate celebrity sings a mournful dirge about snowmen.
            Please.  Thank you.  Please.

Chocolates for the Dentist

Yesterday I had to go to the Dentist. 
            I peeked. He held in his hand an enormous metal syringe.  He pushed the plunger, just a little, and a drop of novocain beaded on the tip.
            "Don't worry." He said. "I'm very gentle."
            "I know." I said.  "But I'm going to cry anyway."
            He took my shoulder in a warm, reassuring grip. "I know." He said. And picking up the needle, he slid it in as smooth and light and delicate as silk. I didn't feel a thing.
            And that, unfortunately, was the last mutually positive moment of the whole experience. I had my happy music cranked, and all was peaches and cream and roses, or it would have been peaches and cream and roses, but the drill was buzzing and there were things flying against my tongue, and holy hell, those things were bits of my teeth-
And there was a little moment where we had to put the drill away because of tears and a middle-size panic attack.
            My happy music is the original Broadway recording of Cats.  Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat is divine for diverting attention, but the track only lasts four minutes and fifty-five seconds, and if you accidentally turn off the repeat button during a panic attack, you get something different right when you probably shouldn't.
            "Here we go!" The dentist cried, changing  his drill bit for something smaller and pointier - "Turn that music up!"
            So I did.  And it would have worked a treat, if we'd been bouncing along with the Gumbie Cat in the chorus where the cockroaches and mice do all the tapdancing, but the drill roared and I cranked and got -
            "Gus!  Is the Cat!  At the Theatre Door -" 
            Limpid -
            Plangent -
            Exquisitely slow -
            And the music stayed exactly where it was for sixteen consecutive bars of what sounded like water dripping on stones.
            There was another little moment.
            After the dentist had wiped my face clean of tears with the little paper apron dentists make you wear around your neck, we switched to Australian shearing songs and sea shanties, and went rollicking around Cape Horn - "Heave Away! Haul Away!" and the Dentist breathed steady for three whole minutes - 
            Which was the point at which he got through the enamel of the tooth right into what felt like the nerve direct. I'm pretty sure I owe him a box of chocolates. The expensive sort. If he'd only been a leetle more aggressive with the novocaine at the very beginning-     
            He tried to make it right. He pulled out the needle again. And again, until I was bleeding like a stuck pig from all the needles, and it still felt like he was drilling right on the exposed nerve of my molar.  I was a wreck and he was almost crying. The poor dear soul.
            I begged for the gas. He told me that in Chile, gas was restricted to use on small children under extremely specialized circumstances and he wouldn't even know how to do it.  I asked if he'd ever had a patient panic and try and knee him in the chin and run.  He said "No", but winced, and took a my shoulder in a firmer grip.

When it was all over, he leaned back in his chair and looked at me. 
            "You know what I'd do now, Tabubilgirl?" He said. "I'd go find a nice bar and have a stiff drink. A pisco sour, maybe. Not just one. Line them up on the bar - a whole line of pisco sours. And drink every single one of them. One after the other. Doesn't that sound wonderful? "
            I definitely owe him a box of chocolates. And if we ever have to do that again, I'm getting drunk first. Not pixilated, not tight, not pie-eyed, norcock-eyed, nor bent, but firmly, solidly pissed. They're going to have to pour me into the chair.  Prop me open with those little rubber wedgies. I intend to snore beatifically and aromatically through the entire thing. 
            The dentist would probably prefer that too.

Christmas Upside Down

Here it is hot as hot, which is just how a Christmas should be.  Mr Tabubil is is languishing and complains that he can't take the season seriously, but my earliest Christmas memories are of Dad taking my sister and I swimming in a jungle creek while Mum got Christmas dinner sorted without two overexcited children underfoot.  
            And what Christmas dinners!  Christmas was a hot and stodgy English dinner (roast chicken, creamed potatoes, doughy puddings and dense fruit cake) eaten on a hot and sticky verandah, with ceiling fans pushing the heat around and driving rich smells into your face, and afterwards, afternoons spent on the cool grass of the lawn, and children running around with sparklers in the long summer twilight. 
            Over the years we replaced the hot English food with a menu less colonial and more suited to the southern climate, but we embraced all of the other northern Christmas trimmings as a matter of course.  Our Christmas cards showed snowfalls and lantern-light, glittering with sugar frost.  Our dads Ho-Ho-Ho’d in full Santa fig – sweltering under polyester beards and sofa cushion bellies.  Our heads and ears dripped and clinked with tinkling jingle-bells – we, who had never seen a sleigh. We cut Eucalyptus trees and planted them in plastic buckets, raised trees of plastic tinsel, and sniffed the eucalyptus and plastic scents, and satisfied,  called them firs.  When I moved north, a northern Christmas was easy for me. I’d been mentally living one all my life. 
            Mr Tabubil never had the pop-culture guides to tell him what to do with seafood BBQs and carols that, like Australia and Chile, are upside down –
            “The North Wind is tossing the leaves             
            The red dust is over the town            
            The sparrows are under the eaves –“             
            “Red dust?” He shouts. “Red dust?  It’s blizzards! Blizzards and wooly sweaters and ice-skating and hot chocolate and fir-cones and fireplaces-”
            I try for something colder.
            “The tree-ferns in green gullies sway             
            The cool stream flows silently by             
            The joy bells are greeting the day            
             And the chimes are adrift in the sky-”
            Mr Tabubil stamps off into the kitchen to stuff his head into the freezer. And sighs. 
            Merry Christmas, you-all.

A Singing Taxi Driver

My morning started very badly.  
            You all know the sort of day - the sort where everything goes wrong right from the very beginning. My alarm didn't go off, so I overslept and rolled out of bed on the wrong side. The water in the shower wouldn't go hot and the yogurt in the fridge was past its date and tasted like stomach-aches later at lunchtime.  There were no clean shirts, my trousers needed a button sewn, and when I threw on a skirt instead and pulled my stockings up, a fingernail popped and ripped a ladder all the way from toe to thigh.
            In short, it was a perfect petty morning storm, with irritation running up and down my spine like needles raining down on a tin roof.  It felt so ground-in I reckoned I might fill those needles up with ink and run that funk right into my skin like a tattoo.
            And then I missed my bus. Of course I couldn't get a taxi -  taxis with passengers inside seemed to pause and gloat as they flew past, and when - at last - a free taxi stopped, it overshot, slamming to halt ten yards farther down the street.  I chased it down and stepped inside - and I was drowned, crushed beneath a wave of sound.  The driver spoke.  I couldn't hear.
            "Turn Your Music Down!" I yelled.
            "______!"
Accordions and violins rose and swelled.  My funk was flattened, crushed, beneath music like a fifty-foot monster swell off of an Alaskan surfing shore.
            "TURN YOUR MUSIC DOWN!"
He nodded and the music shrank in size to something more manageable  - a howling north-sea gale perhaps, and we shot out into the street, crossed three lanes of traffic without a single honk, and settled down to cruising comfortably in the inside lane.
The driver twisted in his seat and smiled at me. I hated him at once.
            "Good Mooooorning Senorita!"
And he rolled his rrrrr's.  With enthusiasm.  I hated him worse than ever. 
            "Where, Sennnorrrrita?"  He said, rolling worse.
I told him. He nodded, and turned the music back up.
            "You mind?" He shouted back at me.
Strangely enough, I found that I didn't.  It was tango music: thumping upright piano and accordion, with lots of sturm and drang.  It suited me and my funk right down to the ground.
            "The music's the best parrrrrt of the job!"  He shouted, clashing the gears horribly and braking sideways into a lane full of big orange buses.
            "Herrrrre in the taxi I can sing all day long.  Tango, cumbia, jazz, bossa-nova, opppperrrrrra-"
He rolled his rrrr's again, but the accordion was thumping and I found I didn't mind.  He twisted in his seat to look at me again, and we shot across a rather large cross-street on the red.
            "May I sing for you?"
            "Sure."  I said weakly. I held tight to the door handle.  "It's your taxi.  Feel free."
Flashing me a splendid smile, he turned back to the steering wheel, nudged the volume dial up to maximum, straightened his back, and sang.
He sang Dejame Asi by Alfredo de Angelis, and he sang it in a loud, clear tenor voice, all the way through to the end.  My bad mood melted away like snow beneath a summer sun, and I clapped and shouted out loud in pleasure.
            "Bravo!"  I cried, when he had finished.  "Wonderful!  Magnificent! Would you do another one?"
            "You mean it?"
            "Please."
So he did. He sang El Choclo - by de Angelis again, and then  he sang another one, and another -
He sang me all the way across town.
At the end of the ride, I tipped him the entire value of the fare.  As he nosed back out into the traffic to drive away, I reached out and tapped on his window.
            "Thank you."  I said.  "Thank you." 
And I reached back into my purse and gave him all the money I had in it.  If I miss my bus again this evening, I will be walking home.  That's all right - there's a big moon scheduled, and a clear sky, and I'll do it singing, imagining piano and accordion going at it hammer and tongs, all the way.

That's how my Friday has gone so far.  How's yours?

It's the future and we're living in it.

I went to the dentist today.  It's been a while.  It's not that I've been putting it off, exactly, it's just that I live a very busy life and there are many many things to do, and dentists are only one of them. Sometimes, however, your husband gets fed up and makes an appointment for you, and then you're stuck.

"Tabubilgirl!"  My dentist cried.  "Long time no see!  It's been months! You cancelled an appointment for a cough and you never came back. I trust that nasty thing has cleared up by now?"
            "Yeah."
            He bowed me with rather more than the necessary gravity into the chair and clipped a little paper bib around my neck.
            "Are you ready?"
            "Sure."
            "You are sure?  Absolutely sure?  You have your music?  Andrew Lloyd Webber is all ready to go?"
            I burst into tears.
            "I forgot!"  I wailed. "I left my player on the dining table and I didn't notice until I was already on the bus and I had somewhere else go before I came here and I just don't know how I'm going to do this without my happy music!"
            My dentist is a very nice man.  He dabbed at my tears with my little paper bib and waited until I stopped crying.
            "Oh Tabubilgirl." He said.  He shook his head and smiled.  "Do you remember the first time you saw me?  I wrote a note in your file. 'Tiene mucho miedo.' She is very afraid."
            "That's all you wrote?" I sniffed.  "I'd have said a lot more than that."
            He smiled again - he has a very gentle smile - and patted my hand.
            "I am very careful with your fear.  We will only do x-rays today.  And possibly we will do impressions. For a guard against tooth grinding - there must be a lot of stress built up in that little mouth of yours, eh?"
(Presumably, my dentist saves his smirking for when he pulls up his dental mask.)

We settled for x-rays. When the films were done, he let me up to stretch.  He stretched as well, and smiled his lovely smile again.
            "I have the most wonderful new app on my phone, Tabubilgirl! I was playing with it just before you arrived.  I turned on the radio and held up my phone to the speaker and the app listened to the music, and fter only five seconds - five seconds, Tabubilgirl - it told me the name of the song!  And the name of the composer!  Even which orchestra did the recording!"
            "Really?"  I was intrigued. "I have an app like that, but It doesn't know classical from a hole in the ground.  It only does popular music. I do get the lyrics-"
            "Lyrics?"
            "Yeah - they run on the screen in real time, while the song's playing-"
            My dentist clapped his hands. "Come into my office!" He said. "You must show me. Lyrics!  How marvelous!"
            In his office across the hall, soft music floated across the carpet and around his heavy wooden desk.  He pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up against the speaker of a stereo and pressed the screen -
            "There!"
            "Wait-"
             "No time! Beethoven!  The seventh symphony.  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic.  Can you believe it?  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic!  It's incredible- it knows! 
            Tabubilgirl, my wife is in California right now, visiting her mother.  Yesterday, while I was driving home, I called her telephone from my car. I said to her 'Are you at home?  Turn on your computer'  and she did and she asked me what the weather was like and I turned my phone around and held it up to the window of the car and I said 'See for yourself!'  It's the future, Tabubilgirl!  And we're living in it!"
            "I remember" I said " the very first telex I ever saw.  You remember telex?  They used it before the fax?"
            He nodded.
            "In the mid-eighties we were living in Papua New Guinea, in a little town in the middle of the jungle. My dad was doing a lot of traveling - he'd be away for weeks sometimes, and this was the eighties - we didn't even have affordable long distance telephone! I remember that one day the secretary in Dad's office called and told us to come down to the office. She wouldn't say why, just told us to come.  When we arrived, she held out a blue sheet of paper.  My dad had written a letter - just a few lines, and sent it through by this brand new machine.
            I remember that my mother snatched that piece of paper right out of the secretary's hand - she held it so hard that she trembled.  I remember that she cried.  It was my dad's own handwriting - his own hand- written that same day in some place so far away it might have been on another world.  My little sister and I crowded around her and we saw her tears and we reached out to touch the paper with something like awe. It was magic.  A new sort of miracle.
            And today, only twenty years later, I can open a video window and watch my sister-in-law's new baby cry and smack her baby lips - in real time, from the other side of planet.  And you can talk to your wife in California from your moving car - in video-"
He nodded again, and smiled, and nodded, and smiled and held up his phone against the stereo -

It's these little things that make the wonder.  Digital music - sound spun out of numbers, for your ears only. X-ray photographs of your insides, on demand, no waiting.
A machine that holds your memories and do the listening for you and read out the lyrics, in real time in case you don't remember or never knew- A weather check from a world away, a baby's smile, brought into your home -

The Dynamics of Baa Baa Black Sheep

Life has been dynamic and exciting in all sorts of forceful and vigorous ways for the past couple of months. Our Australian friends Sarah and Miles have been with us for four weeks, and they have brought their two year old son along with them.  
            When we last saw little Laurie, he was all of two weeks old, and not up to much beyond squeaking occasionally, crying lots, and keeping his mother and father up at night.  All this still makes up a reasonable part of his repertoire, but he’s mostly a rambunctious font of cuddles and enthusiastically splashy bath-times.  And balloon-popping. We really like balloons in this house at the moment. The louder, the better.

            Miles just came out of Laurie’s bedroom, and said “Hey! If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, I have a tip for you. Start by rolling over and over, like a seal. Switch the head and feet end of your bed at least a dozen times, and while you're rolling, say the names of every single thing you did and saw and heard and smelled and touched over the last couple of days. Then pile all your blankets and stuffed animals underneath you, and sing Baa Baa Black Sheep fifty times in succession. Over and over and over and over and over-"

            "Is he still at it?"

            "Yep. Ninety minutes so far, and going strong." 

            "Is he ever going to fall asleep?"

            "Search me. He didn't even notice when i left.  He was too busy singing..."

Music in Saint Peter's

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Rome.

St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  The world’s largest wedding cake.

I sniff.

From the outside, St Peter’s appears a modest-seeming three stories tall, but as you see the clouds move behind the building, and as the multitude of ants crawling before it resolve into people, you realize just how large the building is, and the tricks of scale resolve into an order several hundred times larger than life.
            Inside, the church is a warehouse of wonderful sculpture, all of it drowning in the immensity of the space, and where there isn’t something splendid and sculptural, there’s something cheap tacked onto to fill the gap - swags of second-rate saints and sibyls and cherubs, chiseled by assembly line and cheerily defying gravity, swinging from the clerestory arches.  There’s no grace. Or if there was, it was lost among the shadows and swept out years ago.
            The cherubs are worse than second-rate: giant stone babies with cellulite and the eyes of eighty-year old congenital sinners, dipsomaniac and debauched. When a ten-foot infant leers out of the shadow of an altar and eyes you up like he means to try something on right there in church, you know things have gone somewhere that they shouldn’t have.
            I sang there once. I was fifteen, and the concert was the grand prize at the end of three weeks through every hill town church and square in Tuscany: the Cardinal’s Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, with five choirs singing in unison, and the Pope there to listen while we sang. 
            My parents and my sister were meeting me in Rome at the end of the tour, and they thought it would be nice to come along to the Vatican to watch us sing.  My father made it inside the basilica. My mother, good ex-catholic that she was, spent the mass outside the door, standing nose-to-nose in a shouting match with an overly-striped member of the Swiss Guard.
            Inside, before the altar, we sang.  Right there in front of the great bronze Bernini Baldacchino. It had been a long and dusty three weeks and we were somewhat under-rehearsed: we were all unfamiliar with the music, and the tour hadn't made space for even one proper practice with all five choirs singing together, and in that great big barn of a space, the acoustics were just too good.  The basilica was so enormous that our conductor was three bars behind us right from the start – we were booming, we were grandiose, we were all of us over the musical map, and she simply couldn’t hear.
            I know for a fact that my own choir began the piece three full bars behind at least two of the others, and one poor group, all the way from Australia, trailed off to an uneven finish half a verse after the rest of us had finished for good.  Our choir directors melted away like snow in a Roman summer, vanishing behind pillars and stepping quietly into side chapels.  Dad told me afterward that it had been the most excruciatingly embarrassing musical moment of his life –
            “I went and hid behind that baldacchino!  Pretended I was there for the paintings.  You were like cats, Tabubilgirl!  Cats who harmonized, but cats!”
            There was only one small scrap of silver lining.  As the whole thing trickled its way to an inglorious finish, Mum swept into view, flushed and square-shouldered with triumph.
            “It wasn’t what he said,” she said. “It was how he said it. There needs to be a complaint.  Where’s the Pope?”
            “Ah.”  Dad brightened and beamed at her.  “That’s the good part.  He has a cold.  He didn’t come.”

Tourist-Wranglers on the Palatine Hill (with bonus Harrumph)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Rome.

We rather liked the Palatine Hill.  It was quiet there.  At the end of the afternoon we found ourselves on the South-east end of the hill, on a promontory at the top of the ramparts of the built-up terraces of the baths of Septimus Severus palace, with a view over trees to the brown domes of the baths of Caracalla.
It was a big open space, there were nine or ten of us floating about it, but the space and the views were expansive enough that we all contrived to feel alone.  Mr Tabubil and I found a sunny corner and settled into it.
            “This is more like it!” Mr Tabubil sighed.  “No crowds, just history, a cool breeze, a warm sun, and it’s only five o’clock.  The park doesn’t close till six.  We can stay up here for ages.”
And right on cue, someone blew an ear-shattering blast on a whistle, about three feet behind his right ear.
The effect on Mr Tabubil was electric – his limbs flung out spasmodically at right angles and he rose up from the ground – vertically – pop-eyed with outrage.
Behind him was a woman – short and cross and scowling, with an official ID necklace around her neck, and a bright red whistle in her hand.
            “You need to leave now.”  She said, looking back and forth across all ten of us on the promontory as if we constituted her personal work day hell.   “All of you.  Park closed now.  Go away.  Get out!  Right now! go!”
            If she has tossed a ‘please’ in there instead of blowing that infernal whistle, if she had made the smallest concession to social convention and politesse, no matter how false the ‘please’ had rung in our ears, we’d have all gotten up and moved.
            But she didn’t. She blew her whistle again.  Three times.
            And nine – or ten- people found themselves wedging a little deeper into their seats, focusing extra- hard through their camera viewfinders, burying themselves in their guidebooks and turning away, ever so slightly, from her and toward the view –
            Mr Tabubil pulled a paperback out of his backpacked and ostentatiously opened it to the very first page, but he was feeling sore.
The lady huffed and stamped her foot.
            “Now!  You go now!  All of you!”  She blew the whistle again.  “You and you and you!  Good-bye!”
With much ill-grace, and a great many last photographs taken and last guide-book pages read, she had us on our feet, and shouting and blowing her whistle, she herded us off of the promontory - the worlds least-competent sheep dog and a flock of the worlds worst-tempered sheep.
            “It only takes ten minutes to walk down to the gate.”  Mr Tabubil whispered to me.  “Do you think we can double back when she’s gone?”
            But ahead of us, a metal gate had materialized out of the shrubbery, and a man – with a grace-saving smile on his face – stood ready to close it behind us as she chivvied us through.
            On the other side of the gate, the sheep revolted.
            “Doesn’t this spot have an amazing view of the coliseum?”  Someone said, in Spanish.
            “Si.”
            “Ja!”
            “Oui!”
            “Yes!”
            “Hai!”
And nine – or ten – people dropped their bags and hat on the ground, lifted up their cameras, and would Not Be Moved.
            Behind us, with the ghost of a grin, the young man melted away.  The cross woman huffed and fumed and stamped her feet and blew her whistle at us, but we had an entire hour to be out of the park, and we weren’t going anywhere as long as it was her telling us to, and eventually, with one last long ear-shattering blast of that whistle, she went away.
            Once she was gone, so did we – and got ourselves creatively lost twice, and we were still down the hill and out the gate ages and ages before the warning gong.
            “There’s still so much to see.”  I said.  “Next time we visit we’ll have to go and see the catacombs-”
            “Catacombs?” Mr Tabubil stopped dead.  “Rome has catacombs?  You’re telling me that we’ve been dragging through every church in the city of Rome when we could have been looking at catacombs?”
            And he sulked all the way around a whole circumference of the coliseum.
            I’m sure I’m terribly sorry, but when a man tells his wife to go ahead and plan the itinerary without mentioning once his passion for catacombs, she doesn’t necessarily know that subterranean engineering trumps history and aesthetics.  Humph.

The Dr Tabubil Files: Odd Fellas

My sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland Outback.  It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a series of guest posts  all about living and working in the Red Centre.  Enjoy!

Small towns have large shares of characters.
            Driving to the hospital one morning I drove past what is probably the oddest thing I have every seen. There was an old man in an Akubra walking a bull on a leash.  A pet bull.  The bull’s name is Toolabuc… and he’s registered as a dog in the shire of Cloncurry. He’s well trained. Every day he goes for walkies down the whole length of the town.  He was rescued from a future of hamburgers as a newborn calf.  He was hand-reared, and now weighs 770 kilograms.  And walks on a leash. He knows the way to the Post Office Hotel, where his owner will have a glass of rum (or five) before it’s time to turn around and go home.   His owner's watering hole is next door to the home of one of the GPs.  It’s not a happy relationship.

            There’s a man in town that everyone knows quite well. Apparently, he is filled with ideas on how to improve the town.  His plan, they say, is to turn Cloncurry into the Las Vegas of North West Queensland (imagine that!) He wants to start by turning the local motel/caravan park into a legalized brothel.  Not that rooms 10 and 11 don’t make up the unofficial town brothel anyway.  He is so dedicated to his cause that he ran for shire council to get his ideas approved.  He couldn’t understand why he only got two votes (one was his own).  
            “Everyone in town promised they’d vote for me!”  
            I think his dreams of legal prostitution in this tiny country town will have a wait a while he comforts himself with the key to Room 11… 

            Speaking of the caravan park, on one of my strolls down the town’s one main road (which is also the main road across the continent.  Yes, the town evolved around a little country road, and when the little country road got upgraded to a highway, the planners didn’t run a diversion, just plowed right on through) on a Sunday afternoon (and I can walk it in less than an hour, notwithstanding the windburn from passing road trains), I overheard the afternoon’s entertainment entertaining the Gray Nomads in the caravan park.  There was a rather insipid but enthusiastic man-and-woman duo singing popular American country songs interspersed with jokes a la Australiana:

            “I always like to ask travelers if they have nicknames for their wives.  I asked this one bloke from Alice.

            'Yeaaaah, he said.  "I call my missus Harvey Norman.'

            'Harvey Norman!' I says.  'What for?'

            'What for?' He says.  '12 months innerest free!'

            (Note: Harvey Norman is the name of a large national chain that sells furniture and electrical appliances.  We enjoy a very high level of humor out here.  I’d rather go and watch the under-twenties slow dancing in the pub.)

            I walked past the Oasis again yesterday night at Happy Hour.  There was a wizened old man playing mournful songs on his accordion while caravaners drank wine coolers and made small talk.  It was not inspiring.

(editor's note:  This sounds lovely!  A convivial evening in the country in the caravan park?  Can I come along too? What’s not inspiring about that?

            Reply from Dr Tabubil:  There is absolutely no way this is inspiring.  It was one of the LEAST inspiring things I have ever heard.  He was a sad old man, so tired out that the accordion almost hid him from view.  It was like he didn’t even have the energy to play a faster song. It was like the moment in the war movie  - the night before the big battle where everyone is sitting around a campfire looking depressed and a wounded solider plays on a mouth organ and the orchestra leaves him alone because you know everyone is going to die tomorrow and silence and a bad mouth-organ is sadder than music.  So please don’t try to make it inspiring, okay?

            Ed note: Okay.)

La Ensambe Serenata

Yesterday was a public holiday in honor of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.  Chileans don't generally pay too much attention to the honorees of their many public holidays.   When a gringo asks, they shrug and say that they're not entirely sure, but ISN'T it nice to have an extra day to spend with family?

Chilean work days are very long, and I can't imagine that anyone worth the honoring would mind being remembered in happiness and family rather than by name. 

On this particular long weekend, we were taken out by a group of musical friends to La Maquina  (the Machine) a small club in Providencia to listen to la Ensamble Serenata.  La Maquina is housed in an old, high-ceilinged Chilean house.  Room dividers had been knocked out and floor levels now vacillate around an unspecified mean-floor-level.  The walls have been painted ochre-red and hung with large papier-mache carnival masks: one of the men in our party whispered to me that with the ochre color it was a VERY Valparaiso sort of club - and now I will have to go down to the coast and do the midnight-till-five club scene there, just so I can find other places just like it.  La Maquina was bold and cheery and squashed in with far too many tables, just like all the best clubs in every city everywhere. We were a large and cheerful party and had a large table right in front of the corner of the old house that had been roped off for the band.  

As he passed around the menu,  the proprietor of the place bent his head to ours and whispered that machas were available - not on the menu, but happening back in the kitchen for those in the know.

Machas Parmesanas are a very Chilean dish: surf-clams baked in their shells under a layer of parmesan cheese,  and cooked until the cheese is brown and crispy around the edges.  They are served by the dozen, on a plate swimming with a rich, cheesy broth, and they are always accompanied by with a basket of bread-rounds to sop up the juice.

To repeat, this club is called La Maquina, and it is situated at Seminario 65 in Providencia, Santiago, only 500-odd meters from the Baquedano Metro Stop. I note this, not in passing, but because the machas parmesanas that they serve here are some of the best machas that I have ever eaten - the sort of meal where you inhale the meat and lick the shells clean afterward and fight to sop up the broth - double dipping and be damned- until the plate is clean and shining and everyone has had almost enough, but not quite, so that you need to order another plate.  And possibly another one after that.

We sat at our cheery, squashy table and ate machas and drank red wine and weirdly de-natured strawberry daiquiris, and music happened all around us. La Ensamble Serenta counted  a flautist, an oboist, and a percussionist in a corner with all manner and sort of drums and cymbals. There was an acoustic bass guitar, a man with a perpetual and dreamy smile who alternated between an acoustic guitar and a mandolin, and Senor Claudio Acevedo, the band leader, who played nine instruments over the course of the night  - from maracas to a Bolivian charango and a squeeze-box, as well as two guitars, one of which was strung with something that made the sound come across all silvery like a harpsichord.

They played music that combined Caribbean Latin rhythms with Andean scales (for those not familiar with Andean Music, listen to El Condor Pasa, one of the most internationally familiar songs in the genre), lifting all that was best of both and fusing bright percussion with the minor chords and melancholy flutes so that toes tapped while we sat still and LISTENED. 

At intervals, the percussionist stood and became a tango singer.  He had a deep, dark, caramel-colored voice, the sort of voice created to be heard with your eyes closed and your hand wrapped around the hand of another listener, but he carried so much emotion outside his voice that closing your eyes was a terrible waste of him - his hands reached up before his eyes, his face twisted with pain and his back was racked with it, and we sat with our eyes wide open , eating and drinking his story until the very last ululating note.  As the evening passed, songs grew looser and toes tapped harder and people were clapped and rocked along with the music, and then, suddenly, after and hour and a half that had passed like a breeze, Senor Acevedo announced that they would sing their last song - and they did - and then they bowed and put down their instruments and left the building by the back door.

And the protocol was all bent - the closing of a concert demands a hemming and a hawing and at least two encore sets before the performers leave the stage, and here they were - gone.  We couldn't be having with that at ALL. 

In Australia - and the United States, an ovation is a critical mass of personal appreciation- there is a hail of applauses, and individual volleys of 'Encore!' are lobbed back and forth across the room like errant tennis balls until the noise rises like a storm.  The Chilean approach is rather more collectivist.  A Chilean audience stands abreast, links elbows with its neighbors and chants "Otra! Otra! Otra! Otra!"  ("Another!  Another!") until something happens to its liking.  Eyes may be dancing and mouths may be smiling, but the collective Voice has an edge that says that there had better BE an Otra, or there will be Trouble.  There is more than the whiff of a football mob about it.

A good band will pay attention to the way the winds are blowing: after just enough time for a quick cigarette and a single quick hand of poker, the Ensamble came back from outside and stood again behind their instruments.  They played a long rolling encore piece, and then they put their instruments down and Senor Acevedo took up a microphone and presented to us, one by one by one, each of the musicians.  We clapped and whistled and howled and stamped - and from the back of the room, ululated even - for all of them.  The flautist took up the microphone and told us that the oboist had learned that same day that he was to become a father, and he held out a hand to the back of the room where the oboists wife stood blushing and smiling - so we clapped and cheered and ululated for her as well. The oboist took the microphone from the flautist and pointed to the table behind ours, where, he said, all of the men there were a group of oboe-makers from France, visiting Santiago for an oboe-fest.  He went around the table, introducing each of them  by name, and we stamped our feet and gave every single one of them a great big hand of appreciation as well.  And while we were all turned around with our backs to the stage showing our appreciation to the French oboe-maker in the far corner, the band dropped their instruments and scarpered.

But we weren't NEARLY done.  We howled and whistled and clapped and cheered and ululated some more, and then we put our hands to the tables and began to drum.  We liked the sound of that, so we put our feet to the floor and began to stamp.  the sound thundered and the high windows began to shiver, and we raised our voices even higher and chanted 'OTRA' until the ceiling rang.  It wasn't that - or ONLY that - we wanted more songs; we had been sitting still and mostly quiet all evening while the live music bent itself all around us and now we were primed and firing and we wanted OUR turn to move. 

The band seemed to understand.  As the noise grew and harmonics in the floor became a susurration underneath the roaring sound, Senor Acevedo appeared once more.

He lifted his hands.

           "Silence."  He said. 

We stopped.

            "We will play two more songs." He said.  "The man who is to become a father would like us to play Ventana a las Estrellas for his wife.  And then we will play La Columbiana for you so that you all can dance."

Ventana a las Estrellas (Window to the Stars) was a sweet, simple, sentimental piece.  We sat through it patiently, nodding to the music, and when they finished we slipped loose and exploded.

The Band-leader fixed a gimlet eye upon us.

            "Now stand."  He said.  "Find a partner.  And DANCE."

And the band played La Columbiana three times all the way through without stopping.

And we danced in the narrow spaces between the tables.

Mr Tabubil wasn't dancing - he was in a three-way percussion battle on the table with the bassoonist from the Santiago Philharmonic and the Director of the Universidad de Catolica Chamber Orchestra.  Behind us, the French oboe-makers were stepping rather more soberly than there rest of us, smiling faintly and taking tentative stabs at a salsa. Their  host, a round, teddy- bearish Chilean gentleman,  was jamming it up alone between the tables.  When he saw me dancing by myself, his eyes lit and he snatched my hands and we were OFF - spinning and twirling and stamping along with a six-piece Chilean Ensemble Band, and a three part percussion accompaniment pounding out our way up to the sky.

Hotel Bathrooms When They're Done RIGHT.

We are spending the long weekend of the 21st of May (the celebration of the Glorias Navales of 1879) with four Chilean friends in the small coastal city of Valdivia. 

Valdivia is a small city an hour by air south of Santiago, and only an hour's drive from Lago Ranco where we spent the New Year.  Packing for the trip, I pulled my hiking boots out of the bottom of the hall closet, where they'd sat since our last trip to the south.  When I tied the laces, a cloud of soft grey volcanic ash puffed out into the air and billowed out across the floor of the apartment.

            Valdivia is a water city.  Several large rivers meet right in town:  the Cau Cau, the Cruces, and the softly named Calle Calle, which flows west past main street and joins the Rio Valdivia, which runs out of town and  empties into the Corral Bay, a net of fjords and more river endings and one single narrow mouth onto the ocean. 

            We arrived in Valdivia at night, in a rainstorm, and saw nothing but patches of fogged-out lights and their reflections on pools of big water.  It was extremely cold - the chill of a humid winter, and when we checked into our hotel and were sent up to our rooms, we six thin-blooded northerners decided that our weekend in the south could go hang- we had discovered our bathrooms.

            We were shacking up in the lap of southern luxury - the Dreams Casino of Valdivia.  And the architects had done one thing spectacularly, incandescently right: in a place where fresh-water is neither scarce nor rationed, bathroom designers can pull out all the stops, and the designers for this place had installed showers out of Shangri-la and tropical fever dreams - the shower was its very own little glass room, with a massive rain-head falling ten feet from a marble roof onto  a marble floor.  There was a second showerhead-on-a-hose exactly at chest-and-face height, there was a bank of water jets mounted on the wall, the lighting was soft and recessed, the walls were glass and etched prettily with tall grasses and bamboo fronds, and the acoustics were made for singing -

            Stories shared over breakfast the next morning indicated that what happened in the other rooms was about the same as what happened in ours:  I elbowed Mr Tabubil out of the way and turned up the heat and barricaded myself inside and gave in to the acoustics -

            I stood under the water and sang Zip-a-dee-do-dah (Disney), Going to the Chapel (the Dixie Cups) and Sound the Trumpets (Purcell) and the songs came out in double and triple harmony, and then I hollered out to Mr Tabubil that I was going to stay in there until I grew moss.

            But before I grew moss  I ran out of songs and came out and let him have a turn.

            Because I am nice that way.

            And because the silicone grout around the bottom of the shower walls didn't seal properly and I'd flooded the toilet.

Eurovision 2012: The One with the Unicycle

Tonight is the North American broadcast of Eurovision 2012. 
Last year's Eurovision wasn't worth much notice - being mostly populated by young men trying to look bad to the bone, but mostly succeeding in looking exactly like the sort of forward thinking yet wholesome young man you'd take home to meet Grandma. 
            And the winning country, Azerbaijan, won by being consistently not quite good enough to win the first place votes - but being just banal and non-confrontational enough to rack up the points as everyone's choice for runner-up.

However, among the rather drossy dross, there was one glorious pink flamingo.  I give you Moldova, Eurovision 2011, the One with the Unicycle and the Garden Gnomes:

Travelling in Australia with a Baby who is Teething

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 
 

I have three words for you, and they are magic:  Australian Shearing Songs. 
            Australians don't have a wild west - not the way North America did. White Australia was a convict colony, pure and simple. There was no war for independence.  There was no indigenous populations sufficiently well enough organized to fight back against us.  We didn't need a manifest destiny.  
            We had Bushrangers for our outlaws, and because the police weren't always much nicer, we built them up a bit, but there wasn't anything more than wistful ambiguity about what those boys were up to. There was just the land - dry, dusty, marginal land spreading out everywhere you looked and with nothing we counted worth considering in our way, we spread out across it. With sheep.  We white folks sent sheep inland by the millions and colonized the continent on their wooly backs.

Guess what our folk songs are about?  Waltzing Matilda, Ryebuck Shearer, Click go the Shears, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport - they're all about those dusty, snaggle-backed sheep and the men who worked them. 
The songs have got Heroic Ringers, (the fastest shearers in the shed) and Dying Swaggers (the old worn-out men that hung around the place and died there, knowing the ways of the sheep and the shears through to their fingertips) but mostly, they've got the thousands of miles of dusty outback track that the shearers walked on their way between the stations.

            The Sproglet loved every single song.  Preferably played at fifty thousand decibels on the car stereo, with all of us singing along at the tops of our voices, waiting for the tired, grizzly howling to stop and the poor child to fall asleep.

            "Only two hundred more kilometers to Gundagai!"  We'd sing.  "'There's a track, Winding back, to an old-fashioned shack-"

One evening, at the end of a night cruise on the Katherine River, the Sproglet decided that she'd had enough.  Of everything.  Right on the edge of a dusty camping ground.  The smile vanished, the eyes squinched shut, the mouth opened and she roared.  She'd been battering around Australia strapped to a child seat in a van for weeks without any sort of proper schedule or proper bath-times and she wanted to tell us every single thing she thought about every single bit of it.

            It was late in the evening - almost nine o'clock. Australian camping demographic is mostly over 60. They tend to retire early.

            In a fit of desperation, I opened up my own mouth and joined her. 
            "Give me a home among the gum trees-"

            "-With lots of plum trees"  Pippa sang. Then Sandor, then Thea and Mr Tabubil  -

            " -A Sheep or Two and a Kangaroo-" 
            We belted the song out into the night. Fumbling with the door handle, Sandor wrenched open the driver-side door and rammed the key into the ignition slot -

            And fifty thousand decibels of bush band roared out of the car stereo across the darkened campsite

            "A CLOTHESLINE OUT THE BACK! VERANDAH OUT THE FRONT- "

            We staggered backward, stunned into silence by the sheer volume of the sound.
            "Bugger!"

            "Get in the car!"

            For a moment, her eyes popping with disbelief, even the Sproglet stopped howling, and then she opened her mouth again and let the world know.  

            "An OLD Rocking CHAIR" We bellowed right back at her, pitching her headfirst into her car seat and snapping the buckles shut.  Sandor turned on the car lights to look for the volume knob, and there we all were - spotlit like singing angels as we threw ourselves into the van, night-blind.  At any moment we expected mobs of campers with torches and pitchforks to surround us, screaming Australian imprecations and explaining what they thought of things.

            Pippa and Thea manhandled the van doors closed at the same time that Sandor found the volume knob and for the campsite, at least, the volume abruptly ceased.  Sandor wrestled the van into gear and we got the hell out of there in a choking cloud of Northern Territory Dust.

            And the Sproglet fell asleep. Just like that. While we wrung the sound out of our ears. It's a good life, being 14 months old.