on my way home..

So in the end I learned there are indeed far too many human beings on the planet, but not including, dear reader, either you or me. In a little park I visited during a lunch-time walk in Seoul, there were many schools sharing corners of open space with one another, and the pigeons. The children amused themselves greatly by taking the normal level of pigeon-human harassment and reversing it, although one did avenge itself and its fellows by a nicely targeted top-of-the-head splat.



I learned that of the many forms of spoken English, mine is an obscure and often unintelligible one to our cousins across the Pacific. I also learned that the Australian use of irony increases misunderstanding times the percentage already created by our accent.


I learned that the stock has places for locking up legs, the pillory is for arms, and that wherever you are on the planet and whatever time of day or night it is, Dr Phil is there too, demonstrating the modern-day equivalent for his viewers, the unsleeping jetlagged among them. American television is astonishingly 'unprivate'.



I learned that when your hotel Internet access seems to have failed, think like a librarian, climb under the desk and plug the network cable into your laptop. I also learned that wherever you are, there might wifi be, except in those places which advertise providing it like VIA Rail Canada.



I learned that mastering bathroom engineering across the globe is as challenging to the modern-day traveller as getting hold of money in a foreign country used to be. The one below offers a steam sauna option. If only I could read the Korean instructions on the wall.



I learned that anyone offering any kind of service in an airport or train station has a metaphorical hand already outstretched for the tip. I also learned that this goes for EVERY service offered by a Hotel chain, and that the equal and opposite is true of Mum and Dad outfits. But isn't tipping just one of the last remnants of feudalism, with no place in a properly managed economy?


Most of all I learned, yet again, how much fun it is to head off into the world, pocket camera and bank notes at the ready.

GIBSON HOUSE - Toronto. This woman was dressed for the Rebels Dinner that night, and neglected to invite me! The house was a beautiful American-Georgian building, both fascinating and appalling. People slept propped up on their straw beds, presumably hoping to overcome nightly the asthmatic effort of breathing in straw dust. And the wife of the house shared it with the farm manager who had his own attic, carefully locked off from the woman folk at night.

GREENWICH VILLAGE - I was tempted to have my fortune told by 'Zena' until I caught a glimpse of her through her prominent shop front. Shortly thereafter a man I photographed in Washington Square filled me in quite succinctly in any case, with two words.

The very grand GRAND CENTRAL STATION - rescued from demolition by, inter alia, Hillary Clinton and perhaps reason enough to hope she becomes 44th Prez. Consider the fate of Penn Station, main entry and exit point to NY for those of us fond of train travel, a station once built on a scale to rival Grand Central, but its replacement version as nondescript as a public rest room. There's also the curious shambles involved in actually getting on the right train at Penn. Important travel information is suddenly unveiled by last-minute disclosure of the Track allocation. While waiting, along with the hundreds of other travellers in the same jostling predicament, there's nowhere to sit, and no indication of which track your train might be leaving from. Prue and I discussed mastering this process. Her assessment was that even in running shoes, and ready to spring down the stairs the minute the track numbers began to spin, one would always be shouldered aside by a stiletto-wearing woman in leopard print pants. So I had no chance.

And of course I re-learned how extremely nice it is to be heading back home again.

Stradbroke Island, last Christmas (thank you Elizabeth).

Stockyards in Purga, outside Ipswich.

Of that Ilk

My knowledge of Toronto until Monday might have been summed up in two words : Glenn Gould. The great Bach keyboard exponent lived in Toronto for most of his life, from memory in one of the suburbs built along the shores of Lake Ontario. As my tram trundled towards the lake, I looked about for the perfect accommodation for such a man, surely an apartment block all chrome and glass, with an outlook to the horizon and some sea birds wheeling in the stratosphere. But I saw nothing that really matched.



In fact Toronto is so long and flat, and is such a beautiful old Victorian city, and has such a fabulous network of trams, and is built along such a huge expanse of water, that it seems a lot like Melbourne, but without the 'edgy' under-belly. Or so I thought until I came across the numerous homeless men strewn asleep on the footpaths, right in the heart of the financial district, and often right by the kerbside or wherever one of the grates above the subway warms the air.



Their visibility was confronting. And so was this sign in Trinity Square, on the side of the little church next to Eaton Square:


How do the homeless survive in such a climate? The answer clearly is, that like the woman who froze to death in one of Chekhov's stories, they often don't.

Eaton Square itself is a massive shopping 'mall', a convergence of shopping and tourism, and where our conference is being held, and almost presents a challenge to my pre-eminent love for department stores.




There are heaps of good places to eat in and around Eaton Square, but as my VISA card is currently in a state of disarray (memo to self : A$ do NOT = CA$) I'm currently confined to gazing from without, like the little match-girl. And my hotel is but a pretty pathway away.


At Niagara Falls (yes, of course I had to go there) after our baptism on the Maid of the Mist we were given a commemorative card. The opening words were rather striking in their complete separation from the truth : "Standing at the bow, you feel the mist lightly spray your face"



In fact, rather than feeling a light spray upon our persons, we were pounded by what felt like two turbine driven front loaders. Even in our fetching Da Vinci style blue plastic hoods and capes, it was basically a full body immersion. The water crept inside everything. It wasn't quite as exciting as being dumped at Main Beach after Christmas lunch, but I still loved it. I also loved the fact that the first recorded dare-devil to successfully go over the Falls in a barrel, was a 63 year old woman, in 1903. Time to get in training.



Bu why does every tourist 'strip' look like it's been designed by Homer Simpson? And with the cacophanous soundscape to match.



By contrast the little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, scene of the 1813 British victory over the fledgling US army, and also of Ontario's earliest government, has retained its elegant 18th century architecture right down to the colours people are allowed to paint their buildings.



I did like the far from subtle Nelsonesque statute of General Brock, gazing across the river for eternity, like a gigantic middle-finger raised straight at the losers over the border.


Peace has now formally broken out in the form of a North American Free Trade Agreement, but for the first time travelling from the US to Canada requires a passport, something only 17% of American citizens have. So now they don't visit Canada for cheap pharmaceuticals, instead the Canadians go there to buy.. well, everything. The exchange rate having reversed the status quo, even going to the US supermarket for milk can save a bundle. Buying a car will knock CA$10,000 off the price. The whole area around Nigara is a micro-climate and vast fruit-bowl. It was warm and sunny for us for the day, cold and wet in Toronto.




And now to the pointy end of my journey, the conference launched last night, in the Ontario parliament. I asked directions of a couple of people, but no-one knew, although it's a little hard to miss.



I did find my way, by following a likely group, until I came to a gathering point of others, clearly of my own ilk.

Black robe

Heading North across New Hampshire and Vermont in a Greyhound bus turned out to be one of those unstuck plans which prove to be exactly the right outcome. As we drove deeper into the New England forest and the rain picked up, I saw occasional deer standing in the distance, and until the Canadian border the perfect realization of Fall Colours.


And the truck-stops were almost as good. Pausing in a tiny Twin Peaks village, overhead traffic lights swinging in the wind and wooded hills looming all around I succumbed to the ersatz allure of vending machine Apple cake and 'vanilla' cappucino. Once I might have added an insouciant Peter Stuyvesant.




Solzhenitsyn spent his twenty year exile living in Vermont, no doubt fully prepared for the New England Winter by his apprenticeship in Siberia. I recall a picture of him wearing a hunting cap. The ear flaps lent a certain symmetry to his down-turned mouth. Apparently he showed up at the occasional Vermont town meeting, in practice for his return to Russia where he lambasted Gorbachev and perestroika. Wonder if he's still alive, and if yes, whether he has anything to say to Putin. Speaking of writers whose fire remains undiminished by age, how fabulous to see Doris Lessing as an 88 year old Bohemian perched on her front stoop and not looking quite like anyone's grandma.


Unlike the beautiful old port city of Quebec, Montreal is rather charmless. In fact to me it resembles some rundown Scottish city, with its grimy blockish architecture and badly laid out streets.







Weirdly the street names echo every corner of Paris. Such familiarity of cadence, but set in a colonial aesthetic, has been disconcerting. Montreal apparently prides itself on its souterrain, the vast network of underground shopping strips joylessly connected by empty, and therefore mildly sinister, corridors.

Above ground, the streetscape is ugly, dishevilled and rather dirty; below ground it's like an unending airport corridor, all artificial gloss and gleam. I looked around for a flock of hosties, trailing their wheelie bags behind a handsome pilot or two, but .. there was no-one. Upstairs, damp and cold; downstairs, cosy and warm. What would Dante have to say?

But I'm staying somewhere so charming that the awful streetscape hardly matters.

It's a house in which the owner continues to live on the ground floor (first floor in American parlance) while progressively restoring each of the rooms on the floors above for a B & B. My room has all the things I like. It's made of old fashioned building materials i.e. real stuff like timber, brick and stone. The window frames are pine and my room has a window seat, wifi, cable, and a huge plasma TV screen fixed to the wall. Geraldine Grainger looked the size of a small piano in her Vicar's robes (and there's a bit of a Pride and Prejudice plot coming up for Dibley's vicar, not that I want to give too much away).

On some good advice given in Brisbane I spent a day visiting Quebec City, built on the immense St Lawrence River, and still partly within the huge city wall which failed to repel the British during the so-called seven year's war (how useful Wiki can be).

Along the river's edge, and built beneath a long escarpment which borders the city, little harbour-side houses sat in flat rows.

The trip from Montreal to Quebec took 3 hours each way by bus, and was completely full both aller and retour. The journey was on the longest, straightest road I've ever travelled upon, rather like going from Oakey to Dalby but over and over again. Alongside ran a railway line and at one point we passed a container train miles long, on its way to the port with cargo bound for China or empty containers returning, it was hard to tell. On each side of the road vast fenceless grain fields flowed, and in the distance I could see a little French eglise here or there. Listening to and reading French everywhere seems to be a necessary ingredient of any vacance I decide upon; however this time I wasn't prepared by bringing with me my trusty miniature Harraps, so there were many words I grasped for without success.

It's been extremely cold. I loved Bruce Beresford's film Black Robe when I saw it, for a variety of reasons. Even in October it's been possible to get a sense of the ferocious winters that so defeated the early Quebecan missionaries portrayed in that film.

I couldn't find any real bears for you darl, but I did find some inside my giant TV - bears playing in the snow. If the bears can ski so can you. Actually they were rather good, but they do have four paws. Canada awaits you!

Miss Nichols will see you now

It was fun staying at the Parker House, imagining Jacqui's whispered response to the call of history and an improved wardrobe ("Was that a yes Jacqui?") but not so much fun listening to every conversation of my neighbours through the paper-thin walls. I didn't find 'low-talking' to be a Boston characteristic, any more than I could claim it as a feature in my own arsenal of uncorrectable flaws. The online reviews of the Parker House seemed on the mark (tiny rooms, unreceptive receptionists, shabby furnishings, steep prices especially with all of the construction noise going on outside); but there was the history of the place, and that made up for a good deal. It was simply a matter of stepping across the street to reach Beacon Hill, the Massachusettes State House, the Samuel Adams Courthouse, the Nichols Museum, Louisburg Square, the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, the Granary Burying Ground, Boston Common, and so much more. So I tramped about in the sleet, crossed the river in a Duck and tried to make sense of a subway which in places doesn't make sense, all of the time surrounded by Europeans who, like me, are happily taking advantage of a very favourable exchange rate.




I did think of making a trip to Amherst on my last day, but when I rang Emily Dickinson's number she wasn't there. It's 3 hours each way, quite a long journey. You have to go by Peter Pan (bus). I've been a bit disorganised since I got here, dawdling about in what seemed like limitless time. I confess I've even spent some mornings in the beautiful Boston Public Library, reading Ian Hamilton's book about Robert Lowell, at times accompanied by a woman reading aloud through the knitted hat pulled down over her eyes. I couldn't think of a better companion for a morning spent with Lowell, one time patient of Carl Jung.





By good fortune I caught a discussion on court TV, on the workings of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which I think is an appellate court only. As well as sitting in on some of the real-live process in action, with all of the judges happily interrupting the lawyers and each other during the presentation of legal argument, the Chief Justice then spoke to camera about the way the judges distribute the writing of decisions among themselves. She made the observation that they almost always reached unanimity with one another over the legal points at issue, I presumed because of the highly interactive manner in which the appeal was heard. The US judicial process, like its legislative process, seems wonderfully open to the society it serves. But is the other side of that a kind of national solipsism?



Reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching TV, it always seemed the same: parochialism on a truly grand scale. But I did see a tiny paragraph in one of the give-away rags you get on the subway. Queensland doctors had kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding vodka to him intravenously for 3 days. And I'll never complain again about the amount of sports coverage in The Courier Mail. The Red Sox won something important, and well, that obviously matters a great deal.

SPORTS FAN

Even more than Brisbane, Boston seems at the mercy of engineers, politicians and town planners. Besides the massive and ongoing Big Dig, an apparently never-ending process of tunneling, widening, ripping out and re-building, some subway stations seem in a permanent state of semi-repair. But at least they have a subway. Transport issues, car accidents, poor urban planning: watching the nightly news was déjà vu all over again for me. One thing that wasn't was the horrendous gun slaughter. Boston Police now have a device which pinpoints gunshot by a kind of GPS system; as soon as the warning system picks up a shot, cop-cars swarm to the scene. And can it really be true that a teacher is claiming her right to bear arms in the class-room? You can see the logic…




My favourite place in the end was the Nicols House Museum, the former home of Miss Rose Standish Nichols, Boston Brahmin, landscape gardener, carpenter, pacifist, suffragette, and all round amazing woman. She spoke a number of languages, had friends all over the world and helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And she didn't believe in marrying. Unlike Miss Bouvier, Miss Nichols was an heiress.

Boston has been tremendously interesting, and very beautiful, except for the bits the urban planners have got at. Last night I ate snails, drank pinot noir, and enjoyed myself talking far too much to Clare's good friend Janet, from the Harvard Law Library, who as it turns out will be in Toronto next week at the conference I'm going to. I've begun to think of law librarians as a kind of international cabal; everywhere I go there are friends, or people off the INTLAW list, or others with useful connections into and out of our own not very self- contained little research realms. Meeting up has been part of the fun too.

HARVARD PIX -I liked the little gardener's truck most of all