Delia Falconer’s Sydney is, I think, the best book I have ever read about my hometown, and an excellent short introduction to Why I Am So Fucked Up. Recommended!

A reread: Seven Little Australians, which has aged amazingly well. The shock for me was realizing that Yarrahappini, Esther’s home “on the edge of the Never-never,” is… just outside Gunnedah, and closer to Sydney than my parents’ place.

We swim at the pool at Haddon’s homestead. Cobalt tiles and sandstone. The children are real swimmers now; Julia can swim across the pool; Claire can swim its length. Sunlight through the water. No sound but birdsong.

Driving home, the shadows of clouds across the green hills.

At night, leaving my sister’s house: ten times as many stars.

A day that started pretty rough then improved enormously. Went to bed last night feeling sketchy – heartburn – and woke this morning feeling worse – sinus-y and coughing again and irritable and tired. Had to decide whether to drive seven hours to get to Barraba in one go, or split the journey. Felt very guilty about not pushing myself – apart from anything else, I really want to see Mum and Dad and the Marretts – but here we are in Scone checked into a motel after a fairly relaxed drive, and it is so clearly the right decision that I cannot repine. I’m still vaguely flu-ey but much less cross and sad.

The most surprising thing about the drive is how fast we got from Redfern (where Jan’s apartment is) to Wahroonga (where the freeway splits out from the Pacific Highway.) That drive connects the lovely cockroachey boho beVictorianterraced inner-city of my teens and twenties to the red-roofed and megachurched northern suburbs of my childhood. It traces the entire landscape of my fucked-up psychodrama. In my head, it’s hundreds and hundreds of miles, but in the real world, it’s just under 26km.

You could fit two of it into my regular drive down to the barn.

Once you get out of the city you’re in Kur-ring-gai National Park, the land of the Kameraigal people. I love that bush more than words can say. It’s where I rode Alfie. My eyes feel rested when they look at it. It’s what land is supposed to look like.

“I know,” said Jeremy.

Then you swoop down between sandstone cuttings to the Hawkesbury River, then you climb Peat’s Ridge, then you turn left and take a long winding back way down into the Hunter Valley through Wollombi, an achingly pretentious little yuppie enclave with sculpture gardens on its verdant slopes. A woman with bleach-blonde helmet hair tried urgently to sell us on the place – “The elementary school has fourteen children now! And it’s only ninety minutes to Chatswood…” Further down the highway (two lanes of patchwork blacktop, then one lane, then a half-mile of gravel) it gradually became clear from the proliferation of protest signs that AGL is threatening to start fracking the place, and half the population is trying to offload its achingly pretentious yuppie property.

Very sad. The Wollombi Valley is staggeringly beautiful, like the Anderson Valley in California, but half the distance from the city. And much horsier. “They look happy,” Jeremy said, as we passed another red pony nose-deep in clover. Further along, our route joined the Putty Road and the Hunter Valley started looking more like I remembered from visiting it with Mum: broad and flattish and ringed with faraway hills. Like California’s Central Valley, down to the Toyota dealerships. Further north there are monstrous open-cut coal mines like moonscapes, and huge power stations with cooling towers letting off steam. We talked to Claire for a long time about primary industries, power generation, exporting minerals to China, and importing manufactured goods to the Port of Oakland.

Julia was, perhaps wisely, asleep.

Where numbers of humans are concerned, NSW long-tails like a mother. Sydney has nearly 5 million people – a quarter of all people living in Australia. The next big town we drove through was Muswellbrook, population 10k. Singleton is a little bigger, at around 14k. Scone, where we have stopped for the night, doesn’t crack 5k. Tomorrow we will pass through Tamworth (a metropolis! almost 50k people) to my parents’ tiny town (just over 1000 souls.)

Claire and Julia are bouncing on the beds and watching TV and getting overexcited about room service breakfasts, just as J and I both did when we stayed with our families in identical country motels at exactly those kinds of ages. Continuity.

I didn’t think she would really get out of bed, but at dawn Claire and I were indeed up on Bernal Heights, watching the lunar eclipse. Then this evening she pored over Jeremy’s copy of Full Moon. I love her so much.

Saturday was my best visit ever to the Dickens Fair. I found a bodice that almost exactly matches my silver-grey skirt, and wore them with a white peasant blouse and a black leather belt and high-heeled boots and a couple of strings of jet that used to be Mum’s. I looked adorably steampunk.

The kids are old enough now that I don’t panic as much when they are out of sight, mostly, and they don’t whine or need to be carried, as much. This has had an enormously positive effect on my wellbeing. It’s most noticeable with the things we do once a year. I started going to the Fair when Julia was a babe in arms, and two or three hours used to be a long visit for us. This year we were there when it opened and almost closed it down. I don’t get as tired or irritable, and I don’t get that terrible feeling of having heavy weights hanging off me all the time, so that my very skin aches. Small children are an unimaginable amount of work. But my children are not small any more. Vast relief, and of course also, great ruefulness and sentimentality.

We got to do many more things. We heard Rudyard Kipling read The Elephant’s Child, and sketched live models in a Pre-Raphaelite Salon. Burne-Jones was there, and William Morris. And I learned how to waltz! I’ve waltzed before, but I can’t turn my head fast enough. So my lovely partner said “Just look into my eyes,” and so I did and the camera swirled around us and the music soared and I laughed my fool head off, and he said “Yes! This is how Victorians got high!” and I said “I finally get why it was so scandalous!”

Foxhunting and waltzing and Jane Austen. The pommification is starting to take.

A chocolate mouse, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

Claire is having her school friends round for a cat party. Have mercy upon me O Lord.

“Once there was an evil witch and she made a spell that looked like blueberry juice. The people loved blueberry juice so much they drank it all up and then they were under the spell! The evil witch cackled and cackled. One young girl did not drink the blueberry juice because she did not like blueberry juice. Her name was Bella. The evil witch disguised herself. But she loved apple juice. The witch made the spell look like apple juice and taste like apple juice as well. The girl drank it all up!

“Then the little girl followed her everywhere and the other people did as well. Then she noticed something. That she was following the evil witch! And she told everyone! It didn’t curse her at all. It half-cursed her. Then Bella’s big sister Calypso became the new evil witch. The witch drank the evil spell. But! Calypso wanted a partner and she chose Bella. And her friend as well. Her name is Julia. But! Julia saw Bella and she really really really wanted to be a witch. But then Julia saw the old witch. She became a member of the Witch Family.

“And Calypso wanted her as a partner as well. And a speeding cheetah came to the castle! And gave them a potion! But! They all four of them drank it up together and went to show everyone in the entire city that they were best friends! In the entire world! Everyone yelled “We love the new witch Calypso!””

Claire: “Mama, what do you think is the most dangerous part of a lion or a bear? Lemony Snicket says it is the stomach, because by then you are already torn up and eaten. But I say that by the time you get to the stomach you are already dead, and so Lemony Snicket is not reasonable.”

To get to Oz Farm you drive for a million years on 101 then turn left and drive for a billion years on the most beautiful twisty turny roads in the world. The good news: in the mumblety years since we first ventured up there, my driving has improved out of sight. The bad news: I have daughters now, who get carsick. When we finally reached the domes, down an unpaved road, along a riverbed, over a log bridge and up through a bit of Middle-earth, it was with armfuls of vomity laundry to wash in the bath.

The good news: Oz Farm is still the loveliest place on the planet. The domes sit above the river, beside a meadow, under a redwood forest. We’ve never had such spectacular weather this late in the year. We could pick apples off the trees and eat them, but it was hot enough to swim in the river. We saw Stellar’s blue jays and frogs and falcons and deer and garter snakes and the bat that lives inside the domes. We climbed the Point Arena lighthouse and saw seals and a kestrel and the exhalations of a whale.

Mostly I lay in the sun and read, or sat by the fire and read. I caught up on any amount of sleep debt. We had ravioli and rack of lamb. Carole made lemon mousse. We drew pictures and played Carcassonne and took a sleeping bag outside so we could lie on the deck and watch the stars. Both Claire and Julia fell asleep in my arms.

Claire: Mama, what is your favourite flavour of sorbet?

Me: I will eat any kind of sorbet.

Claire: Really?

Jeremy: Even poo-flavoured?

Claire: Even snot-flavoured?

Jan: What if we served you horse-flavoured sorbet? What would you say then?

Me: Ciao, Bella.

I came across a notebook the other day with this written on the back:

JULIA FIZHARDING
A GIRL
HER BUK
SHE ROTE IT
THIS IS HOW YU RITE MI NEM
J-U-L-I-A

After Claire’s riding lesson on Saturday, she and Julia and Jan and I went to visit Filoli, a highly improbable English country house with acres of formal gardens in the foothills of the California Coast Range. It was a glorious October day, with air like sauvignon blanc and the promise of fresh apples. Jan is evidently a little unused to sightseeing at the kids’ natural pace, a rapid trot, but it did mean we inspected the house and gardens comprehensively, if not in great detail.

My affection for Filoli is part of my swords-into-ploughshares fetish, like my deep love for the former nuclear missile silo that is now the Marine Mammal Center. After sixty years of housing high privilege and absurd balls and drunken dinner parties and so forth, Filoli was donated to the National Trust in 1975 and now any commoner and her kids and her mother-in-law can bounce through it at will.

And not only us. As we came out of the visitor center after returning our pencils (filling out the kids’ scavenger hunt, for the purposes of) I stopped and caught my breath. A doe bounded across the path, not ten feet in front of me, and into the olive groves to my left. She was followed by another doe, a fawn and a third doe. Claire and Julia, crowding behind me, saw them as well: their ballet-dancer bodies arrested for a heartbeat in the golden-hour light, every tawny hair detailed, their graceful heads turned to look at us, the deep orbs of their eyes. Then a weightless leap into the olive trees and away.

“That!” said Julia, “is the coolest thing that has EVER HAPPENED TO ME IN MY LIFE.”

Julia vigorously requests They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science every time we get in the car. So we’re all singing along to “Meet the Elements”, and I say:

“Ooh, ooh, huge science news yesterday. You know the Super Proton Synchrotron?”

Claire: “Maybe?”

Julia: “No.”

Me: “It’s a particle accelerator, like the one at Stanford, but way bigger. Well, yesterday they announced they think they observed neutrinos travelling faster than light! It’s almost certainly a mistake but if it’s true, it’s the biggest science news of our lifetimes! We’ll have to throw out a hundred years of science and start again!”

Claire: “Wow, really? I can’t wait to tell everyone at school!”

Me: “Do you know who she is?”

Claire: “She was the first woman computer programmer.”

Me: “Nuh-uh. She was the first computer programmer.”

Claire, wide-eyed: “Wow!”

Julia, reading: “A-da Love-lace.”

The night before last I dreamed that I was minding a store and couldn’t make change because the cash register was neatly filled with empty tubes of toothpaste.

Last night I dreamed that Alfie and Sugar were alive, and that they and Bebe were my animal friends and we and the girls were out having adventures. We went to a beautiful island like Kirrin Island, except that it was in Sydney Harbour. I parked Hedwig on the tidal flats and she was flooded, but we floated her to shore and there was magically no damage.

The dreams of Alfie are often especially vivid and concrete. In this one, he was occupied with business of his own but came, obligingly, when I called. I had to adjust his saddle because it had slipped back, and I saw and remembered how the blonde and chestnut hairs grew all crazy and hedgehog at the top of his tail. His red mane was almost a foot long and tangled in the salt spray. I lifted Julia onto him and she wound her hands in its strands.

Me: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Optimal Husband: “Yes?”

Me: “Today I went riding with my daughter. And tonight I had an all-time top-three meal. I should be euphoric! Instead I am merely very happy.”

(Special commendations to the beet meringue. And the heirloom tomatoes with a tomato water on the side. And the sucking pig. But it was all just beautiful and delicious.)

Claire and Bounder, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

What with one thing and another.