Holier
Great joy this morning as I witnessed my dear friend Vinny, the handsome traffic cop, pull over a messing-looking lady on Laurel and Mullholland for trying to snake her way into the left lane from the right hand turn lane.  I pumped my fist in the air with joy and waved at him, and I noticed other drivers grinning too.  Hopefully it wasn't because they thought me completely crazy.  I'm turning into one of those people that wants to wind down my window and say to people "you know, you'll get a ticket for that," with a loud tsk tsk.  This is the real middle age spread.  It's the spread of the holier than thou.  The other thing I hate?  People who smoke in their cars in Laurel Canyon and hold their hands, cigarette poised between first and middle fingers, ash growing like my grandmother's did, till it drops of in the street sending little sparks into the dry brush.  Harpy-like, I want to scream, "I live here and you don't and I don't want my house to burn down" but end up just glowering at them, as mean as I can muster, hoping that I don't burst the blood vessels in my furrowed brow.

Rejection

I have received my first official rejection letter from the New Yorker.  It's so pleasant that I can't really feel offended, and plus I probably should have started at the Metro Station not the Eiffel Tower:

Dear MissWhistle,

I feel as you do about birds and  birdsong even though this poem didn't find
a home here. Many thanks for sharing it.

Best wishes,

Alice Quinn

Isn't that the nicest rejection letter you've ever seen? 

 

Syphilly

Jumby is already up and out and off to Philadelphia after one comfortable night in our own bed.  The dog we nicknamed Syphilly (the children named it after I mentioned rather too loudly I fear that it appeared to have syphillis) was left on the dock in Yelapa, with tears all round.  Like a miniature labrador with a fox's head, chihuahua body and fox terrier snoot, it followed us around the beach and was dutifully fed.  The people that named it "Tamale" seemed to fair better, and not surprisingly so. They were from Indiana, with beautiful blonde children who played catch with a baseball mitt on the beach, and the dog protected them from all interlopers including an over-zealous puppy.  But the Indiana father would not melt, and as it was Easter Sunday, it could not be ascertained that a carrying case would be tracked down, even though the local vet will fill out paperwork just as easily as our own Dr Kipper will fill out prescriptions for Vicodin.  So the dog stayed, and we cried as we pulled away from the dock.  Sarah and Day being the worst offenders, snuffling and pink-faced behind their sunglasses.  

I have a hideous Britannia meeting to go to.  "Don't get a parking ticket" says my beloved as he heads out the door.  I want to sit in my little office and write but as it is, I have donned high heels and a navy blue skirt and I am off to sound intelligent.  I fear it may be a stretch.

 Mexico, just in case you're gripped, was amazing.  Both children stopped complaining about the scorpions in their room by about minute 23 at the little beach hotel and by Sunday morning they were rolling around in the surf like beached whales, sunburned, grinning, salty-haired and happy. I don't want to see another bowl of guacamole or another margarita for at least three months, but other than that, a good time was definitely had by all.  Next time we'll bring Syphilly home with us.

You Can't Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old
finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting
pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold
hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be
grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,
grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot
sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

-- Barbara Ras 

From Bill Buford's profile of Gordon Ramsay in the April 2 New Yorker
In England, good food has always been French, even if, today, many suspect it can’t possibly be the real thing (if the chef is so great, what’s he doing here?), a suspicion held also by Ramsay. “When I heard that Maison Blanc had gone tits up, it added two inches to my cock,” Ramsay was quoted as saying after Raymond Blanc’s restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, in Oxfordshire, yet again did not get a third Michelin star, adding, “I don’t give a fuck what that jumped-up little French twat thinks—the only reason he’s in Britain is because he failed in France.”

Unicorns

From Eric Norden's "The Final Quarry":

"Listen to me, my son," the priest continued, the ancient words falling with liquid precision from his lips, "this beast you seek to slay is the last guardian of man's innocence. Unicorns live on thoughts of beauty, and the radiance of their sould has fallen like sunlight on the world for thousands of years, even before the Old Ones were dreamed into substance on Olympus." The priest's voice fell even lower and the mad eyes filmed with grief. "But the day Christ died on the cross the king of the Unicorns took it upon his race to suffer penance for the act, for otherwise God's wrath delivered on the heads of man would indeed have been terrible. And so on that day, while the heavens shook and the earth trembled on the brink of chaos, he ordered all the females of his race to die, and in great silver flocks they mounted the heights of Thessaly and threw themselves to death on the crags below, singing the ancient songs as they fell. Their voices reached the ear of God, and the tears of Christ rained upon Greece for three days and three nights, and beauty crept into the dreams of everyone."

He is mad, thought Deverish feebly, why does he keep looking at me, why does he not let me out into the sunlight ?"Since then," the priest went on, "the remaining unicorns have died one by one, always by the violence of man's hand, because Christ in his love has spared them pain or illness or suffering or death, save that inflicted by his own tormentors. And with the death of each unicorn over the centuries, something of beauty, something of innocence, has gone out of the world, and a candle has been extinguished in the heart of every man, and the darkness has grown. This poor tired beast you plan to kill is the sole custodian of that ancient, guttering flame. When he is slain the last light of God's mercy is snuffed out, and even children's hearts shall become soiled, and wonder will die slowly, strangled until it becomes only a word, and innocence shall never return. A vast darkness hovers over the earth, peopled with the horrors of the apocalypse, and this beast is man's last solitary light. So God intended it and so it shall be. Go and destroy him."

 

African Violets and DEW

For the anniversary of a death, the day is already surprisingly plump with optimism.  I can almost imagine my father smiling down on us from his grassy field in heaven where he walks all his dogs (generations of them), smelling faintly of halitosis (I found it most comforting), and with that familiar twinkle in his eye, watching our dumb moves, our crazy thrashing about, trying to pound meaning out of this mortal coil.  He is smiling like the Buddha and telling us all to relax and look for the signs in nature.  We're all trying too hard.  It's there for the scooping up.  The birds know it.  That's why they have all the fun.

Norwegian cabbage stew (lamb, cabbage, salt, peppercorns, water served with boiled potatoes and masses of chopped parsley) was on the menu last night.  Everyone but me turned up his nose at it.  Minks opted for Lean Cuisine (ew) and John made a Thai Pork Noodle concoction.  But I luxuriated in the velvety overcooked cabbage, the lamb neck falling off the bone, the floury potatoes.  I cooked it unwittingly, forgetting it was his favorite meal.  But now I know why I cooked it.  The parsley is the key - you need loads of it.  And of course, a wee dram.

My friend E who's a poet (and I didn't know it) came for tea.  I felt like one of those "ladies" in Little Britain, with cucumber sandwiches, egg sandwiches, earl grey and jaffa cakes, sitting outside in the late afternoon sun - "oh doo come for teaaa" - and discovering that everyone that starts a book over the age of 40 thinks it has to be Gravity's Rainbow, and the sooner you can disavow yourself of that dumb notion, the better.  E is right and E is very wise and today, armed with my new African Violet that I vow will not die, at least till I'm done, I march bravely into the fray, with a new desire to not let the bastards get me done.  I will finish this thing if it kills me (now doesn't that make you want to break into a chorus of "Rule Britannia"?).   

I miss you DEW.

 

 

Whenever my father and horses are in the same dream, I know everything is going to be all right.  That he was haggling over a room service bill for two beers and a glass of white wine is beside the point. His mere presence is soothing to me, oddly enough, even as a disembodied voice at the end of a phone line.

strolling on the pampas I rather love this.

Grindhouse

I am missing QT's premiere. I had every intention of going.   He asked me t come.  He was looking forward to it.  I miss him.  I want to see him; in fact, I can't wait to sit down with him to laugh belly laughs and sing badly, but I just can't face going alone and seeing all those people, and feeling miserable (why would I feel miserable, it's ridiculous, but truthfully premieres make me nervous and miserable and I remember the bad ol' days).  I am pathetic, I know.  I am completely pathetic.  I do not want to drive down town to watch three hours of an explotation picture, albeit an exploitation picture with an excellent pedigree.  If Jumby could come, I'd rethink it.  I don't know if this is procrastination or self-preservation or just downright stupidity.  I'm thinking of you Mr T, and I hope it goes well, and I miss you and I know this one will be brilliant, because you are never not brilliant.  And bugger them all if they don't understand you.  And, if if makes you feel better, my sixteen year old son can hardly contain his excitement that the movie will be in the theatres Friday. But perhaps it's the girl with the machine gun leg that does if for him.

 

Cold like Norway

Outside feels like Norway, the ominous threat of rain hanging over us, spreckling us a little, but not quite letting go.  It's gray and cold, but cold in that summer in the fjords way, cold enough for a couple of layers and flip-flops, under the awning, buried into a deep chair that smells of India.  Today even the hawk who lives on the ridge of Horseshoe Canyon is quiet.  Minks is on vacation and on best behaviour as I've confiscated her computer.  She visits me occasionally and shows me her latest projects - photographs and stickers cut and pasted into little books, labelled in curly, childish writing, ribbons around the edges.  We had adventures this morning, some birthday shopping, some lunch, some giggling, and now we're both working silently, she inside and me out, she in a coccoon of pink and white, me in green - spiky flax, feathery eucalytpus, and underside of olive. I like this kind of alone-ness, when she is here and chattering, just a room away from me.  It's hard, the alone time.  Kurt Anderson did a show on it this week, with a novelist.  I've downloaded it and plan to listen to it alone, walking the dog.

"Visions of Argentina in my head, plans for everyone... it's in the whites of my eyes", (with apologies to Bowie and swastikas).  Huechahue dances around in my mind and I'm trying to write about it, but finding a way in that does it justice is not easy.  

I love my husband.  I would like that to be noted.  And it's not because of the rolled pork he made last night. 

evanescent

It's become so commonplace now for me to write down everything that goes through my head (yes, I'm actually that dim :-)  ) here that I don't really stop to think that it might be read, or that, God forbid! I may be judged on this stuff, but it's probably too late now to worry about it.  However, what I find odd, or curious rather, in an adult person such as myself, is that like a dog whose mate is taken away, I get very sad when J has to travel.  This is made worse by the fact that we've just spent 10 day, twenty four hours a day in each other's company and actually had rather a nice time together.  We maybe fought once, and that was when we got back home, grumpy and jet-lagged.  But yesterday, when he left for Mexico City, it was all I could do not to stare at the wall and wait for the tears to roll.  It's pathetic, I know.  Not exactly pioneering or feminist either.  I don't like it when he's on planes.  I'm scared that something will happen.  It's nuts.  Entirely irrational, but there it is.  There is a space when he is gone, a very large (and quiet) space.  It's more harmonious I suppose, but in rather a dull way.  

So, overcompensating, I made tea and breakfast of onion & red pepper fritatta and wheat toast with apricot jam for both children, lunches for Noony as well as Minks, even though I know he goes out for sushi.  But today is internship day and he's usually to busy to buy lunch.  I bought big fat floury bread rolls and filled them with butter and salami and baby lettuce and cheddar. Bags of grapes and Cadbury's chocolate eggs and garbanzo beans.  He eats three mouthfuls of fritatta because he can see I've made the effort.  They're all gone now, all three of them, by car, by bus, by plane, and I'm here with the dogs, the tulips, the grey morning, the white plum blossom, the hum of the refrigerator, an occasional bird that makes its way through the low cloud, Minky's blue ribbon from Sunday, and the envelope that contains the final payment for Noony's college trip back east. He leaves on Saturday.  Two days ago we were looking at pictures of a little blonde seven year old fishing for crabs on a jetty in the late afternoon sun, gappy grin, sunburned nose, and in a couple of days he will be making choices between NYU ad BC and Middlebury.  It's wild.  He is handsome and clever and wise and most of all, he is kind.  I know he will make good choices.  I have no worries that he will land where he is meant to be, but oh my, did it have to go this fast?

Pema Chodron (I think that is her name, without looking it up, I can't be sure) talks of making sure the moments count, of being mindful of each moment, because we cannot rely on hope or what will come, because we don't know, and that all things will happen because they are supposed to, and for a reason.  By this way of thinking, I wonder whether the two mouthfuls of fritatta are in fact the things one remembers.  The sitting up till 10:30 last night, in the kitchen, talking about college, the fact that he chose to share his storyboards for his film project with me because I happened to be there?  I think she's right.  This is what counts.  I watched them both cut up a pair of Mink's jeans because it's Spirit Week at Buckley.  Left alone, they help each other, have fun together, and I can only stand by and hold my breath and enjoy the ephemeral moments.

 

 

Hello, Goodbye
Much to the delight of the dogs, we're home.  Stuffed full of beef, dairy products and dulce de leche, but home nonetheless.  TipiLuca & Tony, our faithful steeds, are but distant memories fading into the gaucho dust; Buenos Aires a mere speck on the horizon.  Farewell to the medieval pig, the red berets, Janet & Julian from Basingstoke, and Tommy the cook who would avoid eye contact with Jumbo for fear of his volunteering sausage-making assistance. Farewell to the apple orchards, the horses staring in the bedroom window in the morning, wild boar prosciutto, apricots & long-life cream & sweet pink wine, to vertigo, condors, turkey-necked vultures and late orange sunsets.  I think my job for today is to "back-fill" so I hope I will do it justice.

Zorro

We're sipping beer in the garden before dinner (miraculously there is wireless internet that reaches out here) studying a wild boar that is snarfing around underneath the apple trees.  Perhaps because no-one else is here and the only sound is the wind in the silver poplars and the stream that runs through it, he seems not to care that we're here.  Soon however, the dogs have discovered our secret and are rushing him ferociously, well, as ferocious as a Jack Russell, a fox terrier puppy, a bloodhound puppy and a black lab can be.  I didn't ever imagine I'd be saying this, but I've just finished herding 20 horses with two gauchos from the estancia to their fall pasture, about four miles away.  All's well except for the part where we had to cross the main road (only road) with twenty wild horses all of whom wanted to go in different directions and a motorist in a Fiat going so fast that when he applied his brakes sparks flew off the road.  The cliff along the road was so steep that one false move would mean a sheer 180 drop to the road below.  Funnily enough, after a day of riding criollo horses, you learn to put your faith in them blindly and let them find their way.  Mine, the aptly named Zorro, is black and can do a collected canter so slow that you could practically pirouette on his back. The gaucho said to me in spanish that he thought Zorro the nicest horse in the barn so I felt extremely smug.

J walked while I rode, up the hill to get pictures of the moutains and hoping to see a condor.  It's been raining on and off all day and I am happy that we have foregone the three day camping trip that our fellow guests have gone on, up to the top off the Volcano Lanin, because the idea of sleeping in tents in the rain is just miserable to me.  We've used Jumby's bad back as an excuse but today he's quite chipper and felt no pain when we rode this morning. He has progressed from Chameleon to Tony.  Good gaucho name that.  Tony is grey and steady and J adores him.

After lunch we sat on the terrace outside our room reading books and watching the horses on the lawn, alternately eating grass and red apples from the trees, and then napped for an hour because Siesta is mandatory in Argentina.  Viva L'Argentina! 

Gauchos
“Gaucho has no word for canter: it’s just trot or gallop” says Olly, our fearless baby-faced leader, in his red beret (“latest Gaucho fashion” he explains).  And thus the innocent question “canter?” became a flat-out do or die race for the finish across La Pampa.  My steed, Tipi-Luca, the smallest horse at the estancia, measuring in at about 14 hands I would imagine, was not to be underestimated.  She was determined that no-one, man or horse, would beat her, and I think it’s possible that we went fastest than I have ever been on horseback.  She galloped home like a bullet, beating out the others by at least 200 yards till finally I pulled her up, by the avenue of quince trees.  Olly pulled up next to me laughing, “yes, it’s good you can stop her now, for years no-one could.”  Ah, good to know.  I am honored.  She is the horse of the oldest son of the owner, given to him by his godfather, most beloved of the fifty or so animals who live here, and by all accounts a complete whiz at polocrosse.  Being the cool cat she is, after a  7 hour ride, she hadn’t broken a sweat.

The morning started out grey and overcast and it felt ominously like rain for our first full day in the saddle.  Jumby was given a grey horse, Chameleon, who had a penchant for standing with his back legs straight out, as if he were about to pee, and turning his head round to nibble on his rider’s boot. Our companions, whom we’d met the night before at dinner and turned out to be much more fun that we’d originally imagined (as one does, as I do, because I am way too quick to judge) were Julian and Janet from Basingstoke.  She is pretty and blonde and smiley, and he looks like a cross between Ricky Gervais and that comedian Terry something or other who used to do the Curlywurly ads.  He owns a company that paints lines on the roads.   Lorna from Edinburgh, who reminds me very much of my English sister-in-law, rounds out our group.  She has taken some time off to “find herself” she tells me sheepishly grinning.  We ventured out, our lunch packed into saddlebags, ponchos and waterproofs tied behind our saddles, at about half past ten.  Our guides are Olly, who is 21 and looks 16, and is in his second year at the University of Buenos Aires studying industrial design, and Bella, who is 19 and on her gap year before heading up to Oxford to study theology in the autumn.  Bella is breathtakingly gorgeous in that oh-god-I-think-I’m-hideous way.  “When I was in Santa Monica, she says, I didn’t want to go to the beach because people are so thin.  I mean, I’m pretty thin, but compared to them I felt like a hippo!”  

The estancia sits by the Alumine river about 30km east of Junin de Los Andes.  It is about 30,000 acres used mostly for cattle, but the farm is entirely self sufficient, generating its own power, water, electricity and growing all its own meat, fruit and vegetables.  Ted Turner, apparently, is the neighbor to the north, but he owns a rather larger chunk of the river.  It is laid out very thoughtfully and exactly as you would imagine a well-planned Scottish farm.  Windbreaks of poplar, willow and fir, were planted first in the lowlands abutting the river, and then the fruit trees were added – orchards of apple, plum, cherry, apricot, quince, peach, along with almond and walnut.  In the hills are red deer, puma (mountain lion), wild boar and guanaco (llama).   

From Time Out (Buenos Aires)

During the 19th century, BA grew from a glorified smugglers' den on the fringes of the Spanish empire into one of the biggest, richest and most culturally influential cities in the Americas. From 1860 onwards, a vast grid spread out from the civic heart at the Casa Rosada on Plaza de Mayo and grand boulevards were laid in homage to competition with the Haussman of Paris. Just south of the political HQs are the old city barrios of San Telmo and La Boca where the boats came in to unload Italian immigrants and left with salt beef and hides. Tango has its origins here around the 1900s and La Boca's technicolour Caminito Street celebrates a classic song from tango's golden age.

Buenos Aires -- day two

It's 5 am and I'm perched precariously on the end of the bed because it's the only place that will reach the power socket.  Our room overlooks La Mancion, a beautiful Beaux Arts house now used for banquets, separated by the walled garden and pool area.  I can see men in uniform being busy with vacuum cleaners in the semi-darkness.  Jumby is sleeping soundly next to me.  A story in the Daily Telegraph links sleep depravation to obesity, so after reading that I shut my laptop and tried very hard to shut my eyes and go back to sleep, but to no avail;  I'm still insomniac and now, inevitably, fat too.

Yesterday we embraced "turiste norteamericano" full on -- backpack, camera around neck, snapping pictures of interesting old men on the edge of fountains, cool buildings, taxi drivers, ancient magnolia trees, cemetaries, bridges, you name it.  To hell with trying to look chic while taking in the city.  Buenos Aires is breathtaking.  Apparently at the beginning of the twentieth century when it opened its doors to an influx of foreigners the city planners decided that the city needed to be more classically European and erudite to attract the kind of people they wanted.  Hence it is laid out very much like Paris, with avenues of trees leading to great sculptures of men on horses, or elaborate fountains, plazas and mini arcs de triomphes, grand boulevards with wide, tree-lined medians and stretches of grass, and a lot of extraordinarily varied architecture.  It's hard not to fall in love with the city; it's Paris meets Frontierland.   "I would come back here" says Jumby, catching a breath after shooting pictures maniacally like a paparazzo.  "I could live here."  It would be an easy place to live -- great lawns of parkland, old shady trees, young people lying in the sun, smart ladies in their chic clothes walking small dogs, even the homeless have a wild, artistic quality to them.  ("It's scary to be in a city where even the bums look interesting" I say to J and he nods as if he thought the same thing.) 

One day, especially a Monday, is not enough to see very much of the city at all.  We tried to pack too much in, I'm sure, and seemed to get frustratingly tiny tastes of different areas instead of soaking up one barrio.  We leapt frenetically from Retiro to Recolletta, to Palermo and Puerto Madero and back again, not really knowing where we were.  The world flashed by down Avenue Libertador, the wide, fast-moving street to the east of the city - the Japanese Gardens, the Zoological Gardens, the breathtaking floralis generica, an enormous metal sculpture that opens and closes, like a real flower, with the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We lunched at Dora, an old-fashioned restaurant (the kind with really experienced waiters that serve you using a spoon and fork nimbly in one hand and don't tell you their name and that they'll "be your server today" thank God) which serves mostly fish, with business men, old ladies with well-behaved grandchildren, and a chic family (who seemed to order plate after plate of steaming, sweet-smelling delicacies from the sea, eating all of them family-style). J tasted the best seafood stew he'd ever had - full of pimento and thyme, preceded by small glass bowls of hearts palm and tomato, lettuce and onion salad.  Great bread too.  (Ten years ago Lawrence Bender's then girlfriend, a lovely french woman said to me "You can always tell how good a restaurant is going to be by its bread").

Sabine had given me an address for La Casa de Las Botas on Avenue Paraguay, a funny little store front with dark green plants in plastic pots outside, in the classic way we've seen so much in this city.  Inside the bootmaker, who speaks absolutely and resolutely no English, measured my foot by drawing around it with a biro on a little lined notebook, my calfs, my ankles and declares that I'll be receiving new riding boots "para la jumping" mid-May via DHL.  The walls were covered from ceiling to floor of riders jumping increasingly bigger fences, all signed to La Casa de Las Botas, with a few dressage riders dotted in between.  Maybe this will bring good luck, to be in such esteemed company. The Argentines do not ride the American way -- no hunter jumper posing with your bottom sticking out over the jumps for them.  "Look Jumby," I say, the smell of leather intoxicating me "if I lived here my leg would be almost perfect".

Fruits and vegetables, flowers too, look the way they should, healthy and fresh, but not perfect and waxed.  Like London, street vendors sell rows and rows of peaches and nectarines, grapes, lettuce and huge tomatoes.  Roses, crysanthemum, lilies, poke out of layers of walled vases in fat bunches.  You forget you're here for only one day and are tempted to take armfuls home.   

Annoyingly, J is beating me at Scrabble.  I take hours with each turn, searching with increased desperation for the perfect high-scoring word.  He takes no more than 45 seconds and beats me every time, and always with words that he cannot define.  "That's not the point" I want to scream.  For me, it's the words, for him, it's strategy.  But guess who keeps on winning?

I know I haven't done this city justice.  I'm going to keep trying, though.  Off to Bariloche this morning, and then a two hour drive to Junin and the Estancia Huechahue.  It's such a long way away from home!

Buenos Aires
Couldn't sleep on the plane but stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse and then the full moon as the sun rose of the Andes. I cracked my window shade open so that I could look at the mountains of Bolivia peeking out from the fluffy white storybook clouds.  Consequently, exhausted.  Only 2 hours of sleep last night at most. Trying to remember to be nice and not snappity.  On first viewing Buenos Aires is green and covered with a patchwork of seemingly English meadows.  It had been raining and so amidst the greeness, very large puddles, some as big as lakes.  The airport reminds me of Dr Who.  In fact it does very much resemble a military airbase, complete with the perimeter fence made up of concrete post in the shap of a 1.  Trees everywhere, from poplar, to pine, to monkey puzzle, even (I think) a glade of silvery eucalyptus as we whizzed from airport to the hotel.  It feels a bit like Russia, I know what Chatwin means.  Great grey highrises with peeling paint and triple strings of laundry drying on the wet balconies.  Strangely colored civic architecture (railings in parks painted a particularly alluring and very (bad) English sky blue).  Feel enormous pressure to run out and do touristy things because the city is so beautiful, full of early Edwardian architecture mixed with Spanish and classical.  Want to run out in it as we're only here for two days but am so dog tired I can hardly talk.  Very delicious lunch at LA Mansion.  Sunday brunch, actually, with the most yummy ceviche, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, beef of course, artisanal cheeses and meats, and so on.  We grinned at each other and flipped through my Moon's Guide to Argentina goofily, realizing how touristy we look.  A chap who was a splitting image of Fred Armiston of SNL fame, though a little chubbier, was sitting near us, chatting up a girl he didn't know very well, while she sipped on champagne.  He then ordered a bottle of Malbec, obviously to seal the deal.  An old English couple politely served themselves omelettes.  Strangely, although most people speak Spanish, there are so many countries represented in people's faces - Welsh, Scottish, Spanish, Indian, South African, Russian, etc.  Three very lovely girls served us, all tiny, dark-haired, blue-eyed and sweet - like hummingbirds around our table.  Blue sky outside.  Oh, and it smells like England in the winter!  That was the first thing I noticed as we got off the plane.  The smell of heathrow - damp, like wet flannels, a little cheesy, with a hint of tobacco for good measure -- heaven!  Now for my disco nap and then we're off to San Telmo for the "colorful Bohemian tango dancers, antique soda syphons and criollo wear."

In honor of National Book Day

The books that UK readers just can't live without:

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (20%)

2. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (17%)

3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (14%)

4. Harry Potter books, JK Rowling (12%)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (9.5%)

6. The Bible (9%)

7. Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte (8.5%)

8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (6%)

8. His Dark Materials , Philip Pullman (6%)

10. Great Expectations , Charles Dickens (5.5%)

 

Last day of February

More and more confused and confusing.  Twelve line poems take a back seat to complete bewilderment.  My friend is being held hostage by a paranoid schizophrenic and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.  It makes me jittery and sad though.  It seems lame but I do believe that making a large batch of sweet cardamom buns may help.  Send a prayer and some rose water away with each one.  A little Lenten prayer perhaps.

I started Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia" last night, after trekking through Nicholas Shakespeare's loving introduction which basically sets you up to expect Proust or at least Theroux.  Argentina is already getting into my bones, am very excited to go.  Jumby wakes up at all hours.  We have swapped sleeping patterns.  He is nervous.  The stock market dipped scarily yesterday.  I'm not sure if his anxiety is linked to that.  I feel as if we live in a society of lemmings, though.  Lemmings and paranoid schizophrenics.

 

From The Cloud Appreciation Society

“It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, as far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly… the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it is surely meant for the chief teacher of what is immortal in us, as it is the chief minister of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought…”

-- John Ruskin, ‘Of the Open Sky’ Modern Painters I, Part II, Section III