In the small hours after the acceptance speech, I was reading – very anxiously – the Conservative blogosphere. I do this occasionally to get out of my echo chamber. Liz does it in a much more disciplined and organized way, and while I’d like to emulate that, mostly it upsets me too much. Anyway I followed a link to this one guy’s blog and now I can’t find it again and don’t want to wade back through all those comments, but –

His point was that he was extremely sad about the result, and cynical about an Obama administration, but grateful about and awed by the peaceful transfer of power. I remembered that that was my only real shred of comfort in the wake of the Democratic losses in 2000 and 2004. What a grown-up thing! Bitter partisans accepting the other side’s triumph!

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is democracy. We liberals want to be all yay! Vindicated! Take that Dubya and whatever, but Obama’s victory is only partly that, and partly a manifestation of this nation’s innate desire to change things up every eight to twelve years. That honest grief I felt for Gore and Kerry? I know McCain’s supporters feel that way now. I can see it in their faces. I can remember every pang of sorrow. I wish them only peace. It’s why Obama urges no high-fives, no triumphalism. It’s the United States.

This is the price of democracy: that committed, political people will, half the time, have their hearts smashed to bits. Every few years we open executive power up for debate, and sometimes the other guys win, and then we mourn and rage and say it’s gonna be the end of the world. But the alternative is to have the same guy in power for ever and ever and that is MUCH, much worse.

This is democracy! It’s a chance for the disenfranchised to take the mike. And in four or eight or twelve years? We’re gonna have to give it back. That’s the deal. It’s this or a dictatorship.

It’s easy to say it right now, with my guy having just won, so remind me of this next time us liberals are out in the cold: I say it is worth it. I will endure the grief of loss ten times over before I will deny anyone else the right to vote for their candidate ahead of mine.

Abe Lincoln (who totally supported my guy) put it like this:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.

And Ze Frank is saying it with Tubes.

My centrist Christian tax-cutting guy beat the other centrist Christian tax-cutting guy. Euphoria! Hippies dancing in the streets wrapped in the American flag. Yet California voted against love.

And yet and yet: there will be a black man in the Oval Office. A president for his supporters and for the people who didn’t vote for him; a president from my America, for the world; a 21st Century president for the Long Now and the Big Here.

I’ll miss compulsively-reloading Nate Silver, whose outstanding wonkery covered itself in glory. I’ll miss Fake Sarah Palin. I’m not under any illusions; the country and the planet are in a big-ass mess with no easy way out. But I will never forget last night or this morning. I feel honoured to have witnessed this.

We walked along the beach again as we have done a thousand, ten thousand times. The grey sky glowered. Sand scrunched between my toes. Cold waves pushed up and over our feet, all salt and foam. Wave succeeded wave like shaken-out bolts of silk. We wandered back to the car, teasing and jeering, lost in the parking lot.

“Where is Claire?” he said. I looked up, startled. And suddenly it wasn’t Alain, my childhood’s constant companion. It was Jeremy, and I had forgotten the girls, and I was racing back to the rough water’s edge and praying “Please please please…”

My distress woke me up. I lay, heart hammering, in my quiet room beside my sleeping husband. The sky over Noe Valley was blushing indigo and orange.

The girls, I knew, were safe in their own beds.

I have made myself a responsible adult because I love my daughters as I love sunrise and the sea.

But some small part of my soul is still twelve, with my brother, on a beach.

Dad asked the fair question of why I didn’t mention Dublin in my big England-confuses-me post. Thing is I don’t really associate Trinity with Oxbridge any more. It wasn’t a consolation prize and I can’t believe I ever thought it was. It was a miraculous escape and the beginning of my adult life. I learned vi there, for God’s sake! I spent the night of the Ireland-Norway world cup match reading the first copy of Wired magazine I had ever seen! Rathmines, the Long Room, Ha’penny Bridge, the Winding Stair, Ormond Quay, Newgrange: all mine. Ireland made me. I am listening to the Pogues as I write.

(Go give money to Burma and China. And then when you have compassion fatigue, come point and laugh at the non-disabled white girl who wants a pony.)

England confuses me. There are all these none-too-subtle reminders to Know Your Place, most recently when we went to Kings College Chapel for Evensong and a smiling Anglican person said “You are very welcome! Please sit in the antechapel in case the children need to leave in the middle of the service. I know it sounds horribly exclusionary but it’s not…” This after a fortnight of walking around the quite pretty public spaces in Cambridge looking through locked gates at the exquisite private spaces. It’s as if the class system here were set up intentionally to tweak my insecurities.

Oh.

And as it turned out the kids did need to leave early, Anglican liturgical music not being the overwhelming cultural touchstone for them that it is for me. Jeremy packed them off home and as I sat listening to the rest of the service I thought about the imaginary England of my childhood; the BBC and imported copies of Horse & Hound, Thelwell, Penguin Classics, Maree Suchting’s back copies of Punch and my grandmother’s Everyman Shakespeare and Kipling. Little wonder that everything in Australia seemed insubstantial and derivative. I was ignoring the dark sky and the thousand lost languages, and spending all my time in Edmund Blacket’s Main Quad and Christ Church St Laurence, explicitly modelled on the Perpendicular Gothic of Oxford and Cambridge.

Everything was a distant echo of the purported Real Thing, a black swan of trespass, &c. The unquestionably real and solid thing of my teens and twenties was my horse Alfie, the source of my obsession with Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Crabbet Arabians generally. Some of the best memories of my adolescence are dawn rides through Kur-ring-gai National Park. At least I was paying attention. Being in the place I was in. And when I thought about this, in Kings, it occurred to me that my malaise of the last few weeks might be attributable to my not being in the place I am in, and instead being bugged by my 21-year-old self who would cheerfully have killed to be here, albeit as a student, not as a townie wife.

So (here is my California stint for you) I went to sit down in the Christ Church choir stalls sixteen years ago with sad baby Rach. I said, Chin up old girl. You won’t believe me if I tell you how it turns out. You’re married to this extraordinary man! And oh my god, the children, you cannot imagine it, the way you love them makes you a better person. The members of your little family are all brilliant and hilarious and they smell good. And the place you live in! And what you do for a living! And oh my god, your friends!

As I did this (California is really getting to me, you can tell) I vividly remembered a moment that bitter February when I turned 22, with no clue what I was going to do. I sat in the choir stalls beside Moira, crying silently through the readings. And then I felt the ache in my chest ease a little, for no reason, as if someone had kindly patted my hand.

Here’s the thing. I knew nothing, really, about Oxford or Cambridge. I’d never been here and I still haven’t been to Oxford. I knew no one at any of the colleges. I asked Professor Riemer, the Grim Riemer, to write my academic references, and I’m pretty sure those references were bad. (Did he do me a favour there or not? Discuss.)

What I thought about Oxford was that I would get sort of promoted out of a life where I would have to scrabble and compete and use my wits, into a world of tenure, a world full of books. I saw myself sitting by a diamond-paned window, looking out on a lawn, reading a dusty tome. Life would effectively stop. These daydreams did not involve marriage or children or grocery shopping or going to the toilet. I would hover, I suppose. I would transcend.

Sixteen years’ hindsight makes it clear to me that this was a virginal death wish. (Incidentally I think I understand Sylvia Plath a lot more than I did two weeks ago.) What I wanted was not to have to grow up. I felt I needed tenure because otherwise I would certainly be fired. I needed the ivory tower because I couldn’t possibly cope out in the big world. I needed the imprimatur of Oxbridge because there was no other way I could avoid being exposed as the idiot I am.

Now I am presented with the unexpected option of not minding about any of this. Of thinking of Cambridge as a funny, beautiful old town full of posh (and not-posh) people, with some good colleges and some bad ones. Of thinking of class as a social construct, not a measure of worth. Of thinking of myself as just this person, you know? Yes, England confuses me.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

It is a rhetorical figure and a form of personification. In the strictest sense, delivering this fallacy should be done to render analogy.

…or as we learned it in my undergrad English classes, the pathetic fallacy occurs when the hero is sad and so it starts to rain. Or more accurately, it’s raining, so you know that the hero is sad. We had English in the Woolley building, not in the Main Quad; Archaeology was in the Quad and that’s why I love jacaranda trees. I was ambivalent about English, my forte, and passionately in love with Archaeology, which at times I barely passed. Nothing changes.

The only piece of actual Sydney Uni culture I ever picked up was that by the time the jacaranda is blooming, it’s too late to study. I didn’t study much, which may be why Archaeology gave me such a thrashing. I would sit underneath the jacaranda gazing at Danielle and her Mycenean golden hair, waiting for Alexander Cambitoglou to enlighten us on the techniques behind red figure vases, or Jean-Paul Descoeudres to blow my mind with his readings of the floor plans of Pompeiian villas.

I was a bit surprised to learn that jacarandas aren’t Australian natives (its placement in the Quad, of course, should have been a clue. Once you’re in the Quad you’re not supposed to be in Australia any more, you’re in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Oxford!) Anyway, I was pleased to find, on the day we moved in to our San Francisco home, that the street tree outside was a jac. With yellow-and-red roses growing at the foot of it, like the ones I carried at my wedding. I’ve been gazing into its upper branches for four years.

And for the last week or two I’ve been watching its leaves fade and fall.

Well, it’s a tough spot for any tree, on a slope with not a lot of direct light in the winter, and our jac got rootbound and has died. And it’s probably not worth trying to save the roses either. So I’m going to pull everything out and rebuild the tree well and replant something that might be able to cope with the rough conditions, and I am going to ignore the symbolism of it all because it’s just tacky and overdone, like how Nature has absolutely no taste when it comes to sunsets.

Ric’s not doing very well. Jeremy’s leaving in a few hours.

Dear Robert Smith,

I don’t normally write to celebrities; I’m not big with the fangirl, unless the object of fandom is a friend or friend-of-friend who writes excellent SF or fantasy and has a LiveJournal. It’s nothing personal – quite the opposite: I soured on corporate rock after waking up from a bad infatuation with an Irish rock quartet I won’t name here, out of pocket for five albums I haven’t listened to voluntarily in fifteen years and with a nasty taste in my mouth. And that was years before I covered the Napster trial and got to know the record labels and their business practices better than anyone ever should. These days I listen to lots of mashups and nerdcore. I hope you understand.

My point is, I got the shiny new Sandman collection from Jeremy for my birthday, and it’s hard to write an interesting review of something that everyone else already read ages ago, and loved, and told me that I would love. I mean, what: Newsflash! Sandman genuinely terrific! Major influence on all the other graphic novels I love! Stop the frickin’ presses. No.

So I got thinking instead about how Morpheus reminds me of you, dancin’ around in those early Cure videos, Lovecats and Why Can’t I Be You (the sideways lips! So funny and wicked) and my favourite, Just Like Heaven. You with your spiky black hair and eyeliner and white high tops. How iconic you were! And how well those old songs have aged, how well they evoke those confused and crazy and complicated years. And I remembered the story about you, and realized that would make a way better blog post than Yet Another Sandman Endorsement, Yawn.

I bet you don’t even remember that particular concert in Sydney, Australia, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, I don’t even remember exactly when. You came out of the stage door and signed programs for everyone, and at the end there were three young Australian men left, and you. You chatted for a while – it must have been close to midnight – and then you said “Wanna go for a drink?” Now THEY were diehard fans. They’d loved you and dressed like you since they were twelve. You blew them away.

That would have been kind enough – beers and a couple of hours chewing the fat with these guys. They were nobody really, just fans; no one would have blamed you if you’d shrugged them off. But when the bar on Oxford Street closed, you said “Hey, I have keys to a studio near here – wanna come listen to me lay down some tracks?” Could they have jumped at the offer any more eagerly? When the sun rose they were still there listening to you noodling around on your guitar.

Two of those guys were friends of mine, and the third is my big brother Al. He’s a fantastic brother and I love him to the moon and back, and he’s never in his life had one quarter of the luck he deserved. I wish I could say that night changed his luck for ever. It didn’t. But it was an incontrovertible good thing, a shining adventure, something he can still look back on and grin. Thank you for that. It was extraordinarily decent of you.

I was going to say that under the circumstances I could make an exception for you, and sign myself your undying fangirl in spite of the whole unfortunate corporate rock thing. And then I realized I don’t even have to do that. I already outlined the personal acquaintance exemption above, and so I can go ahead and be the undying fangirl of your great songs and human kindness, because you are, after all, a friend of my brother’s.

Lots of love,
R

When my brilliant and beloved mother-in-law discovered to her astonishment that I hadn’t already read Pat Barker’s WW1 novels, she promptly gave me all three for my birthday. I started reading them on the flight back from Australia and about three sentences in, made myself slow down so that the experience of reading these books for the first time would last longer. That’s exactly how to-my-taste they are.

Light from the window behind Rivers’s desk fell directly on to Sassoon’s face. Pale skin, purple shadows under the eye. Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell. His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady. Rivers raised his own cup to his lips and smiled. One of the nice things about serving an afternoon tea to newly arrived patients was that it made so many neurological tests redundant.

Note that I didn’t particularly remember this passage, and when I went back to Regeneration to find something to quote, I just flipped over a page or two before I found this. And now look how much work this paragraph is doing. It sets two scenes – not only the cozy tea-time, but also the hell from which Sassoon has recently arrived. It begins to stage what will be an immensely complicated and morally charged relationship between Sassoon and his doctor, and in doing so it indicates the extent to which Rivers is already unusual, preferring informal exchanges with his patients to tests that reinforce the hierarchical distance between tester and subject. Rivers is exceptionally humane – he is, we’ll discover, a very good anthropologist as well as a psychoanalyst. And Sassoon is, in fact, a deathless poet. The power distance between doctor and patient is unusually small; and it’s only going to get smaller.

And if that reference to sugar tongs is not a deliberate evocation of Wilde, I will eat my hat.

Cecily. [Sweetly.] Sugar?

Gwendolen. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

I could have picked any paragraph. They’re all that good. And the prose is all that translucent: simple, beautiful declarative sentences, layered each on the next until you are no longer reading but hovering over Rivers’s shoulder, watching. And Barker respects the intelligence of her characters, and gives them room to breathe and think.

There’s a lot of thematic overlap between this trilogy and my last two reviews, as it happens. (Well, it’s not exactly startling, since I make several fairly strict demands of narrative and can’t be bothered with it otherwise. Anyway.) Regeneration tackles madness – Sassoon isn’t, as it happens. Book two, The Eye in the Door, examines sex and class and will make you grieve for its innocent monster. The last book in the series, The Ghost Road, looks into the face of death, and it includes some of Barker’s finest use of the source materials, Rivers’s books on the societies of the Solomon Islands. (The heat and singing reminded me of Ten Canoes.) I keep going back to Google Books to read the originals and try to figure it out. That was awesome. How did she make that work? How can I do that?

I haven’t written much about when I lost Claire last year, and had to get her from the police station twenty minutes later, because it was the single most painful experience of my life. Worse than migraine or labour or a broken leg, worse than heartbreak or depression. I would have torn myself apart if it would have done any good, turned back time, brought Claire back. Just thinking about it makes me ill.

When the bookstore owner came to say that Claire had been found and was safe, my knees buckled. I fell into a stranger’s arms, weeping. (She was a mum and completely understood.)

It dawned upon me only a few weeks ago that that is how the mothers of the Stolen Generation felt, but not for twenty minutes: for ever.

Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s a start.

It took me a week to untangle from work, then I lost my glasses. It took me a few hours to figure out how to replace them in rural Queensland (a very fun road trip with my brother Alain, as it turned out) and then, because I was in rural Queensland trying to chillax, whatever the INS calls itself these days raised a question about my green card application.

Since there was exactly nothing I could do about it, I worked hard on being Zen; and the next time I checked my email my friends in the States had sorted everything, which makes me feel very loved.

Even with these transpacific stressors, the holiday is definitely working. I’m sleeping about ten hours a night and taking long naps in the afternoons, and behold, my cough has nearly cleared up. My sister was here for the weekend with her kids, making eleven of us altogether. Kelly and Ross were just delightful with my girls, very patient and playful and charming. It hurt to say goodbye.

Mum and Dad and Alain are still here, all camping on the same site. It’s beyond perfect. Our world is defined by the shops across the road – good cafes and restaurants, a butcher and a baker; the spectacular beach with its shipwreck; the creek that runs down to the beach; the playgrounds and the pool. The feel of everyday life is like Burning Man, oddly enough – walks and fun interspersed with socializing and tea.

I haven’t spent so much happy, unstructured time with my mum and dad and brother and sister since my wedding.

“Tobias Smollet thus became Europe’s tubercule; the infectious agent coursing the continental arteries.”

This, in case you were wondering, was the money shot for an essay I wrote for my English honours exams in 1992. My brain finally presented it, thus polished… this morning.