It’s snowing outside. It started this afternoon, so faintly I didn’t notice at first. But the babbies didn’t like it, it was far too cold, so I took them all in again. Now, under the streetlights, the night is broken by swirling white.

It’s my Grandma’s 80th birthday tomorrow, which is already today in Australia. Happy happy birthday!!!

I have thought of my Grandma often since I started working in the kindergarten. Being with all the little children has made me remember my own childhood. My Grandma was such a big part of it.

My brother, my cousins and I spent so much time at her house. I remember…

Sitting in her clothes basket in the garden. I’m not sure if this is a memory or a memory of a photograph.

Having very many dinners with my cousins around her kitchen table. Recently I’ve been re-imagining all these memories from and adult perspective. What must it have been like to have all those children around?

Sneaking down the long hallway on sleepovers because we ‘couldn’t sleep’, and knew if we poked our heads around the tv room door we’d get hot milk with honey in the cups with the birds on them, and half an hour of late night tennis watching.

Grandma showing me these incredibly long cloths embroidered by distant aunts a long long time ago.

Her kitchen. The texture of her bench-tops, the ABC news on the radio, the funny little secret drawers where the flour and the sugar were kept. The day we were making Christmas pudding and the mixer exploded and we got Christmas pudding all over us. The day I accidentally broke a china bowl and she wasn’t angry at me but I could see that she was sad because it had belonged to her mother. I felt terrible, and so did she. But she said – ‘it’s only a thing’.

Trips into town for afternoon tea.

Her garden. The big leaves out the back where we played at being tigers. The miniature violets I used to pick for my great grandma, who lived with my Grandma at the end of her life. She told me fairies lived there. Sometimes I pretended I saw them. The broad green lawn where my cousins and I build space ships out of garden furniture. The swings on the island. The jasmine growing on the bridge.

Her love of beauty – whether mountains or gum trees or autumn leaves or jacaranda blooms or Lalique glass.

Her stories of the wide wide world. Her joy in my chance to explore that world.

My Grandma taught me how to make bobbin lace, and how to make the perfect sponge roll. When I was doing my masters in York, Grandma and Granddad came to visit me, and took me to St Petersburg because I loved Dostoevsky.

So, yep, my Grandma is pretty special. She has always adored all of us, no matter what, and we’ve always known it. And these memories only scratch the surface. I’m so glad you had a wonderful birthday party last weekend, and I hope you have a brilliant day today. I’m sending thoughts of the last bright autumn leaves and the first whirling snow flakes into the beginning of your Adelaide summer. And I can’t wait to see you at Christmas. xxx

Today the light was soft. Sunlight hazed through billowy clouds, gilding the edges of the harvested fields, getting caught in the golden trees that have already started losing their hair. English weather really. Most mornings, frost glitters on everything, and once the mist clears, the sky is blue as ice.

Quite a lot has happened in the past two weeks. I had my last day of my summer job of proofreading and newsletter writing. Finishing up was actually a bit sad. We made a seriously brilliant newsletter though.

I held a two week old baby. She was beautiful.

I got back from the UK yesterday, a five day trip that started with an essay exam in Leeds, continued through a packed two days of catching up with friends in Leeds and York, and culminated in a lovely weekend involving curry and beer in London with my brother and two cousins and their wives. Family is just the best.

I also squeezed in an exhibition on T.S. Eliot and Faber and Faber in the British Library (did you know, there was only ever one Faber but they thought that two Fabers sounded more distinguished). Seeing type-written letters between Eliot and Pound and Stephen Spender and a whole host of other poets was just cool.

And on Tuesday morning I went to the Turner Prize exhibition with my brother. Probably not quite worth the eight quid but fascinating all the same. My favourite was a partial whale skeleton that you could only view through slits in the wall so that you were taken aback by shocking details and strange angles. It was called ‘Leviathan Edge’. The artist had also reproduced Brancusi’s Bird in Space sculptures in coal dust. My brother preferred a different installation involving an atomized aeroplane scattered on the floor like a desert landscape, and wall sculptures made of a mix of plastic and powdered brain. Actually both installations seemed to be about trapped flight, and movement, and time…

Speaking of flight, that’s what Michael’s been doing – brushing the sunset with his wings. He’s in the States for a conference (and other things), but I couldn’t join this time because of commitments.

I got home last night to a fat package covered in stamps with whales on them. It was a copy of the brand new Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature, which my Grandma very very kindly posted to me. Another world, more than a thousand pages long. I can’t wait to get stuck into it.

I’m happy to be back – happy to be at the kindergarten, and to have two days a week free now for writing. Let’s see where it takes me.

Australia, apparently, is the second best country in the world to live in. But guess which country is the best?

And then we threw a frisbee in the sun.

I’m trying to psych myself up to apply for a postdoc fellowship at Oslo University. It’s for four years. They’re interested in ‘culturally oriented literary research’, including ‘projects that combine theoretical reflections on historicity and mediality with the reading of concrete literary works’. So – pretty much right up my alley. I can’t afford not to apply for this. But it is really hard to make myself do it.

Firstly, I don’t think I have a realistic chance of winning it at the moment. I just haven’t got my act together in terms of pulling together a book proposal and churning out a few articles. I’ve been working full time and studying part time for the past few months so I’m not beating myself up about it. But there it is. I should apply anyway, for practice, and so they know my name. More things will come up. Norway is a very good place to be for postdoctoral funding.

Secondly, I’m finding it really hard to come up with a new project. I’m really happy with my PhD, and quite looking forward to carving a book out of it. But something new? Do I stick with medievalism or go further afield? Do I stick with Australian literature or do I branch out? I came up with quite a nice one-year-plan for an earlier unsuccessful application, but a four-year-plan is another matter.

The trouble is, my big ideas tend to have slow, quiet births. I wrote a novel, on and off, for ten years. And I thought about my PhD for years before I started it. And I’ve never been one of those super-organized types with well thought out life plans. I’ve always thought – I would quite like to be a academic, but I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t work out. I have my other writing that I can do. I write stories. That is my deep desire. But the trouble is, after finishing the novel, I haven’t written any stories, either. I was of course writing a PhD. But finishing the novel, finding a beautiful end to a story that had haunted me for years and years, resolved something inside of me. The stories suddenly weren’t urgent any more. Even if it never gets published, it is written.

I know there will be new things to write; I can’t imagine a life without writing. (This blog helps with that a lot, actually – it’s a space to weave writing gently into the cracks between things.) But I’m not sure, right now, exactly what they will be.

It is, all of a sudden, cold. There is something exhilarating about the swift change of season. We swapped lapping up the sun in Berlin parks for scraping ice off the windscreen at 7:30 in the morning. The trees are swiftly turning gold, and I drive through wreaths of mist to get to work. All week, the afternoons have been shiny-bright, and at the kindergarten we’ve been making the most of them, bundling up the babbies in layer after layer and spending hours outside. On Friday we had an impromptu outdoor disco. One my co-workers, sitting on a grassy slope with a babbie on her lap (the babbies she’s responsible for are too old for extensive cuddling and lap-sitting, but she usually steals one of mine), watching the rest of us bounce about and flail our arms, said: ‘this is really quite a good job, isn’t it’. And I had to agree.

The best things we brought back from Berlin were two hot water bottles Michael asked his parents to buy for us. They have little blue and red fleece suits, and they are great. Soft and furry and warm, they feel exactly like kitties curled up under our duvet. I keep expecting them to bite my toes.

Aside from that, we’ve been looking at houses. We’ve seen so many houses. And so many reasons for leaving. Old people moving to smaller apartments, young families needing an extra bedroom because a third (or a sixth) child is on the way, a messy divorce, people who bit off more than they could chew in terms of the renovations required, people climbing the property market, and people falling off it – there was at least one case of insolvency. One house was a little spooky and rather sad – the deceased estate of a teacher, with gifts from her grandchildren still on the walls.

Every single house seems to have a fatal flaw. They’re a bit like people. Last week we fell madly in love with a house out in the countryside with amazing views and a balcony flooded with sun, but we decided we’d feel lonely out there, and as we only have one car and cannot sensibly afford another, commuting to work in opposite directions could prove a big problem, especially in winter, when the car is prone to dying at short notice. Topping the list at the moment is a funny little house that looks like a shoe box, or, more precicely, a lego man’s shoe, perched precariously half way up a rocky outcrop, with stunning views of the town and the fortress and the harbour. We haven’t seen inside yet, but wandered up there last night. A full, flat moon hovered above the fortress as though on purpose. The problem with this one is access – you have to park at the bottom of a slope, and clamber up a steep narrow driveway. This isn’t a problem in summer, but in winter we might need spiked shoes and an icepick.

This pretty much sums up our weekend. Oh, and this.

There was a bit of this

and some more of this

and then we moved onto the green stuff.

Michael’s parents joined in for pizza, icecream, and a float down the river in the sun.

We found a park bench that makes tall people small.

And then, sadly, we said goodbye to Berlin and to my brother, whose birthday it is today, whom this city fits like a glove.

Michael says this blog is dying a slow death. I say no, it’s just a quiet patch! It’s been a very nice week, really. Our lackluster summer has finally given way to a most gorgeous autumn. The mornings are cool and misty, but the afternoons are warm and shiny-bright. And I’m rather grateful to be spending many of them playing in the sunshine. We went for a ride yesterday afternoon and it felt amazing.

I’m just about over the sniffy lingering cold, and I’m starting to feel on top of things. The fancy newsletter I’ve been pulling together for M’s work is almost done and we’re really proud of it! Today I spent a couple of hours preparing my ‘English sammlings’ for the toddlers. I think sammling roughly translates as ‘gathering’, but maybe in this context it has the added connotation of ‘class’. The difference between preparing lessons for nineteen year olds and two year olds is, well, striking, but the two year olds definitely require preparation too! It’s all about props, I think. I need to improve my props.

I also spent a couple of hours studying for an ethnography exam. I’ve been taking a part time distance subject for the past few months (part back-up plan, part reinforcement of my research arsenal). The assignments are all done (I improved spectacularly from 45% on my first assignment, the worst mark I have received in my entire life, ever, to 90% on the last one). Needless to say, I haven’t felt terribly much like studying over the past few weeks, but it is nice to have made a dent in it. The exam’s in mid October. After that I’ll be able to properly get stuck into the book proposal…

Next weekend we’re off to Berlin to visit my brother! Hurrah hurrah. Berlin is my absolute favourite city. And the other day I baked an utterly stunning apple cake. All is well.

Last week I picked up my new raincoat, waterproof  trousers, ‘warm dress’ and a pair of gumboots. The ‘warm dress’ is pretty much a ski suit. I nearly died of heat stroke when I tried it on. The sales assistant told me I looked like an astronaut. They tell me I’ll be glad of it soon. In Norwegian kindergartens, you play outside every day. Rain, sleet or snow.

When I first started, one of the other assistants asked where the children’s sleeping room was. ‘Oh no, we don’t need one of them’, said the boss, ‘Norwegian babies like to sleep outside’. ‘What, even in winter?’ ‘Until it gets to minus 10.’

They’ve certainly been pretty happy sleeping outside in their ‘wagons’ so far. (The Norwegians call prams wagons, which I think is pretty cute.) Last week we took them out to the forest to pick mushrooms and blueberries. They bobbed around in the bracken with their little hats on. But they were most excited about the lorry we passed on the road. ‘LASTEBIL!!!!’ they cried with glee. The driver beeped and waved.

Michael can’t believe I get paid for this.

I have been thinking about stone. Partly because of some lovely posts by Jeffrey Cohen which include extracts from an article he is writing, and partly because, in the past few weeks, I have seen many strange and beautiful stones. I don’t have a theory to share. But I have three images. Jeffrey, they are for you.

There is this stone, the stone of the Norwegian mountains. Michael once commented that in Norway you can see directly into the mountains themselves, into their core, whereas in Austria they’re still decked out in topsoil. The mountains in Norway feel old. Their bare, curved forms are clad only in lichen. Their stone walls drop abruptly, nakedly, down into the fjords. You think of the inching of glaciers. You think of those who farmed the valleys hundreds of years ago and trekked over the mountains and the ice to trade.

And there is this stone. The stone bodies of the Vigeland park. My brother said how strange it is, the bronze sculptures and the stone sculptures are all in exactly the same style, although it would have taken him decades to complete them. How strange to build such an edifice, so many similar statues. And I said – but it makes you think about your body, your physical existence, in a way that few things do.

I have been thinking about life. Its softness, its weakness, its slipperiness, its vitality. Because of my friend who died, and because of the babbies I play with most days. And, yes, stone seems something other than that. To see movement, and flesh, and babies, and old people smoothed from the stone itself… I don’t know. The sculptor himself is dead now. The sculptures speak of the human life-cycle, from birth to death. But each sculpture does not age, save slowly, minutely, by the rain and the sun and ice and the wind. The sculptures outlive the bodies they depict. But the sculptures will not last forever.

Stone speaks to us and we make stone speak.

And there is this stone, the stone ship. The strangest of them all.

The mountains are shaped by time and by ice.  We blast tunnels and build roads to make them accessible, but they are bigger and harder and older than us. They do not make concessions.

The Vigeland statues have been chiseled painstakingly until they resemble us. People. Bodies. The curve of an arm and the curve of a cheek; the softness or the fierceness of a gaze. They are stuffed and molded with life. But they are stone.

The stones of the stone ship are somewhere in between. More human than the mountains, more natural than the statues. The standing stones are solid things. They mark a burial site. They mark the space between. The space between earth and sky, between life and death, between earth and ocean. The stones form a skeleton ship, sailing the heavy earth.