Fabergé’s Very Unusual Egg

The Fabergé Trans-Siberian Egg   Easter 1900

It's nearly Easter for some of us

I live in Sydney and it's nearly Easter.  In Orthodox Russia, it'll be another month before they celebrate and exchange their eggs.  It was the same gap in the calendar in 1894 when young Nicholas, destined to be the last Russian Tsar, was visiting Germany, and couldn't join the earlier festivities.  He wrote in his diary:  "It is not very convenient to keep Lent abroad and I had to refuse many things." 

A short-lived tradition

The most famous Easter eggs of all time were those first ordered by Nicholas's father, Tsar Alexander III, from the court jeweller, Carl Fabergé.  The first order, in 1885, established an imperial tradition that lasted only thirty-two years, yet, a century on,  Fabergé’s eggs still captivate our imagination with their decadence, extravagant charm and ingenuity.

The Imperial Eggs

When Nicholas succeeded his father, he continued to order eggs each year from Fabergé, one for his wife and one for his mother.  Each told a story revealed by a surprise nested within.

A secret ...

Fabergé conceived and developed his designs in secret, not even disclosing his patterns to the Tsar.

Perhaps not ...

But perhaps in the year 1900, Tsar Nicholas II had had an inkling of what Fabergé had in store for his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna, when he took delivery of the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg. 

Easter fell on the 9th April and a week later, came the opening of the Paris Exposition Universelle with countries from around the world displaying their art and inventions.  The Russian Pavillion’s pièce de résistance was a display of carriages from the new Trans-Siberian Railway line, inaugurating an era of luxury passenger service that would revolutionise travel from Europe to the Far East and symbolised the growing industrial power of Russia. 

Poster from the Paris Exposition Universelle promoting the Trans-Siberian                                             

 
A present for the Tsarina, but was it really to impress the Tsar?

Fabergé’s Trans-Siberian Egg was crowned with the Romanov eagle asserting the Tsar’s special connection with the railway project he had grown up with.  His first official position was as President of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and as a young man returning from a grand world tour, he had laid the foundation stone of the track’s eastern terminus
in Vladivostock.

The miniature locomotive and its golden carriages

The egg was a masterpiece. 

Engraved on the silver shell was a route map of the track, each station marked with a jewel. The enameled lid opened to reveal a miniature train.  Its locomotive, made of platinum, had diamond headlights and a ruby lantern and pulled five golden coaches. Each coach unique, ‘mail’, ‘for ladies only’, ‘smoking, ‘non-smoking’, and a chapel with miniature bells.  And if that were not surprise enough, the tiny model was clockwork, wound-up with a gold key.

The Trans-Siberian Egg                                                       Photo Credit: Kremlin Museum

Why, to me, the Trans-Siberian Egg stands out from all the rest

I'll admit bias right now.   I have been writing a book that describes my own journey on the Trans-Siberian Express.  That journey was nearly fifty years ago and sixty years after the last imperial egg, but the heavy velvet curtains, polished wood and green lamp shades of the First Class carriage suggested imperial Russia was not so far away.

Threads run through all our lives and sometimes it is left to a biographer to see them.  The Trans-Siberian ran relentlessly through the Tsar's life right to his untimely death.   

The design of the Trans-Siberian Egg epitomises an era where technology and art flourished hand in hand and it signified a period of Russian hope and prosperity. 

And it also smacks of a bizarre excess of questionable taste and a wanton squandering on baubles!  A Russian court completely out of touch with reality.

Ultimately of course...

Tsar Nicholas II missed the brief window of opportunity for constitutional change. Delusion, denial and dreadful decisions made revolution inevitable.  As Easter 1917 approached, the Tsar was forced to abdicate.  Work on that year’s egg had already been abandoned. Carl Fabergé fled Russia and escaped to Switzerland but nothing could save the Tsar.
 

 

 

More Information:

The Trans-Siberian Egg is displayed in the Kremlin Armoury, Moscow

I highly recommend a fascinating book - Fabergé’s Eggs by Toby Faber published by PAN

The Fabergé Museum in St Petersburg, Russia was set up by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian businessman, who is the single largest owner of Fabergé eggs.  
http://www.faberge.com/news/142_fabergest-petersburg-museum.aspx

There is also a Fabergé Museum in Baden-Baden, Germany  
http://www.faberge-museum.de/index.php?lang=en

A Detour to the Amazing Paris Expo of 1900

To write waylaid by curiosity is a better thing than
closing the chapter

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “… to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”.  Now that I write, I’ve found a parallel; settled at my desk, curiosity drives me deeper than my story requires.  It’s seductive; the manuscript makes slow progress, but the quest uncovers destinations and kindred spirits that make it all worthwhile.

Paris Spring in 1900

Last week I paused in April 1900 for the Paris Exposition Universelle - a grand celebration of the achievements of the closing century where art and design showcased seamlessly with the mechanisms of the future; diesel engines, talking films, escalators, and the telegraphone - the first form of magnetic recording, forerunner to video, audio tape and computer hard drives, to name a few.  Fifty million people visited the exhibition.  Fifty million!

Flamboyant Stage-Set under the Eiffel Tower

Under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, National pavilions sprung up, flaunting cultural myth, art and innovation.  Art Nouveau in vogue, the hard mechanics of new-age infrastructure were softened with flowing natural forms.  Moving sidewalks carried visitors past mock castles and pagodas and a square rigged caravel.  The Belgians recreated their Gothic Oudenaarde Town Hall.  Flamboyance and optimism heralded the new millennium.

Paris to Peking, via Moscow

In truth I never got past the Kremlin-styled Russian Pavilion, for here was exhibited the Trans-Siberian express - Moscow to Peking.  A journey time of months by sea and overland, reduced to days.  An extraordinary achievement.  To court the business traveller and wealthy voyageur, real carriages were rolled into the Pavilion. 

"... one was decorated with white lacquered limewood mirrored walls, ceiling frescoed with figures from mythology and embroidered curtains, another was in the style of Louis XVI with bulging furniture of gold embellished oak and a third as French Empire and a fourth imperial Chinese".  

The world's longest railway line and
the world's longest painting

Visitors could eat in the train’s restaurant car while canvas scenery scrolled past the carriage windows.   All the atmosphere of travelling from the Volga River east across Siberia evoked by the painted panels of pastoral life complete with changing weather.  

The young Tsar, Nicholas II, patron of the Trans-Siberian Railway, had commissioned the Russian artist, Dr Pavel Pyasetsky, to paint the panorama.  Pyasetsky travelled by train, cart and bicycle, sketching bridges and fords, hamlets and villages, railway stations and halts, working teams and depots.  He condensed the 10,000 kilometer journey onto three rolls 850 meters long.*  

Train Connections with Russian Dolls

The Trans-Siberian held me in thrall but at the Russian Pavilion was another product launch right at the opposite end of the scale.  It was the first time babushka dolls were exhibited. The designer, Sergey Malyutin, a folk artist, inspired by Japanese nesting dolls, characterised them with Russian fairytales.

Finding both the Trans-Siberian Express and the babushka dolls at the Russian Pavillion, took my writer’s dream-time to a physical shiver. 

My fascination with the Trans-Siberian began when I travelled the line in 1968 on my way out to a job in Hong Kong and the souvenir that I have of that journey is a babushka doll given to me by a Russian passenger on the train.  He bought it at a wayside station and I gave him Nivea Creme for his wife - a simple exchange of gifts - after a week of shared laughter laced with copious amounts of vodka as we rolled across the Siberian steppes.  

The carriages, Hard Class, were not quite as elaborate as the Tsar envisaged, but then a lot had happened in sixty-eight years.

* After a hundred years of being rolled up, the canvas scrolls have been restored and are now at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Google the Paris Expo of 1900 - it is a lot of fun!  http://www.expomuseum.com/1900/

Go get the gone days

I was twelve when I saw the photo

The photo was of my maternal grand-mother, Mamie.  She was sitting at a dinner table, laughing out loud, her head thrown back a little.  The meal is over,  napkins careless on the table.  The laughing woman adds joie de vivre.  My mother looked at it for a moment and said, “Mamie gave wonderful dinners.  She was the heart and soul of the party.” 

My grandmother as a party animal was totally unexpected.   I’ve described Mamie recently in my memoir as a thrifty, tall and vitreous stick of a woman.

I was not a favoured grandchild  

Mamie seemed never pleased to see me and I steered clear of her.  So I saw an opportunity.

“Mamie’s in the garden; I’ll show her, the photo,” I said.

“NO, no.  Don’t do that, you will upset her.”

“Why?”

Mum tried to explain. The past was a place adults didn't like to visit for the present
didn't measure up.  

Years later when I was twenty-one and just about to leave for Hong Kong, Mum uncharacteristically snapped at me for endlessly crooning the hit song Those Were the Days. 

Russian folksong goes down well in Russia

Days after that exchange with Mum, I was rolling across the starry steppes of Siberia, singing the song with great gusto to Russians on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  They loved it because they were drunk as Tsars and because it was originally a Russian folk-song.

Recently, and now in my sixties, when I started
to write memoir

I thought of my mother, my grandmother, that photo and that song.  Revisiting the mopey, self-indulgent lyrics of Those Were the Days, I have to wonder what were we thinking!   But I also thought about messages that the past was a place to visit with trepidation.

Bullshit, my friends

Like life itself, the past is what we make it.  How we imagine the future is seldom objective, how we remember the past isn't either.  With hindsight we can use perspective and examine life and celebrate our success, for survival is success; warts and all!   My generation has even earned the right to sing that silly song, unlike Mary Hopkin when she first sang aged eighteen!

Are you reticent about looking back?   
Does it make you melancholy? 

Sophia's Easter Treat

Ilya Repin's 19th C portrait of Princess Sophia in Novodevichy Convent- Look out that window!  She lived from 1657 to 1704

The fortified convent of Novodevichy

I was in Moscow in 1968 to catch the Trans-Siberian Express on my way to Hong Kong.  Although I visited Red Square - I missed Lenin - he was on holiday to see his embalmers - but from the walls of the Kremlin, we rattled off to the Moskva River and the 16th Century fortified convent of Novodevichy.

It was a visit I never forgot...

For there lingered the smoldering wrath of the incarcerated Sophia, half-sister to Peter the Great.  Her last succession plot had failed and she was compelled to take the veil and kept in seclusion at the convent; there was no other way to keep her from scheming.  

Her Royal blood saved her from the fate of her fellow conspirators who were hung.  To make the point, their bodies were strung up outside her bedroom…

“Where they hung, blackened and rigid,
turning idly in the wind,
all winter long,
their frozen boots tapping
against the windows…”

Quote from Lesley Blanch in Journey into the Mind’s Eye 

Sophia was immured in the convent for the rest of her life.  Only once a year, at Easter, was she allowed to join the other nuns in worship at Smolensky Cathedral.  This brief interlude offered little consolation to the large and formidable figure, once a patron of the convent and the first woman to rule Russia, who found herself hostage to the church that her brother, Peter, controlled and derided.   

All the magic of a Russian Easter

Sophia joined the congregation on Easter night when the cathedral’s dark interior was lit by guttering candles and a choral litany reverberated over row upon row of nuns prostrated in prayer before one miraculous icon after another.  Chill draughts wrestled with wafts of warm incense and anticipation built hour after hour, as the time for the resurrection
drew near.  

Before the midnight bell tolled

Tapers were lit and fresh incense set to smoulder on burning charcoal.  At midnight, crosses and icons were borne aloft and from the Cathedral's inner sanctuary emerged the bearded priests in ivory-white vestments heavy with gold embroidery.  As clouds of holy smoke billowed from swinging censers, the solemn procession began down the aisle of the Cathedral and led the congregation out into the starlit night.

Thrice round the cathedral under a frosted moon

Three times, the procession circled the Cathedral.  Its magnificent golden cupola gleamed above, while a river of reflected candlelight traced a path along the stone walls.   The Priest halted at the open door and waited to hush his mustered flock.  They held their breath as he walked forward, craning his neck to look inside the empty cavern of the darkened cathedral and symbolically discovered anew Christ’s empty tomb,

“Khristos Voskres!” his cry resounded out the triumphant chord. “Christ is risen!” 

A wave of adulation and celebration
swept through the throng and condemned
Sophia to another year of solitude.

Novodevichy Convent on the banks of the Moskva Ruver

Days of Freakish Luck and Preposterous Happiness

Edmund Dulac - Gerda and the Reindeer - I think she was having a day with a white mark.  I always have loved the surprise on the Reindeer's face - maybe it's him that's having the day!

I've been digging out my poetry books this week.  I used to read it in the bath, but now I take a shower!

No one reads poetry anymore, too busy reading tweets

Is this true?  What a terrible bargain we've made in the 21C.  Can't we tweet poetry?  Or is tweeting
the new poetry?

I am neither poet nor philosopher, but when a poem really resonates, I stop breathing.  

A finger on my pulse stays time and the lines take residence, stirring only when there is a crack
in the right moment.

Do you have days with a white mark?

I first read The Day with a White Mark by C S Lewis, when I was in my thirties.  The years gone by have amplified the pleasure, for now when I awake to a day with a white mark, I greet it like an old friend. 

Do you know what Lewis means?  Days when you are whirled in a preposterous happiness?  Days when you could kiss the very scullery taps! 

They arrive unbidden and, as Lewis says, arrive even on days when in the dark ahead only the
breakers are white.

Reading the poem will make you smile, and maybe, like me, ever after you’ll have an elf in the blood or the bird in the brain.

The Day with the White Mark

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel's transit roaring over and through my heart?

My garden's spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The plann'd and unplann'd miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers are only white.

Yet I--I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock's chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one's feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children's tale.

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

~C.S. Lewis, Poems, Edited by Walter Hooper, (1964)

 More recently I discovered Jan Zwicky

The second piece is a fragment of a poem that I came across only a couple of years ago.  It’s very different, but again time paused and I read it without a breath.

From Transparence

Only in fairy tales,
or given freakish luck, does the wind
rise suddenly and set you down where everything
is safe and loved and in its place. The mind
does not expect it. But the heart,
                                                        the heart -
the heart keeps looking for itself.
It knows and does not know
where it belongs.

~Jan Zwicky, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, (1996)
 

I'm writing memoir

It's like squeezing a whole harvest of citrus, sweet and sour, into a liqueur glass.  So I find the economy of
Jan Zwicky’s lines exquisite. 

In that first reading I was pitched headlong into the Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham illustrations of my enchanted childhood days before I was swept up with the Wizard of Oz, which is a short synopsis of my life.  I know I am not unique!  

I felt tears prick when I read the words, the heart keeps looking for itself.  It knows and does not know where it belongs.  And then I read again and felt found, not lost,  as if suddenly I understood what I had known all along.

 Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky is a Canadian philosopher, poet and musician and she originally published these lines in 1996 in a book called Songs for Relinquishing the Earth that she hand-made for each customer.  At first each book was individually sewn for its reader between plain covers, harnessing an extra dimension of intimacy between the reader and creator.  Although the book is now published by Brick Books and available on Amazon, that idea of a gift from the hand of the author remains in my head and connects us all.

http://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/songs-for-relinquishing-the-earth/

Arthur Rackham - Girl beside a stream
.....      the heart keeps looking for itself

Dropping off dangerous spiders!

I didn't take this photo...  It was taken in my house, in my garden ... relax!

The international guests I host through Airbnb are hardly in the door, when they ask about spiders.

“Not to worry, the spiders in the house are harmless, you have to really go looking for dangerous ones!”

They are not easily convinced.

And then one time...

Moments after I had shown one guest her room, she arrived screaming in the kitchen and threw herself into my arms.

"A spider, a spider, above my bed!"

IKEA should really not sell lamps like this in Australia:

I didn't buy it to terrify guests, I bought it to amuse my small children

Guests ask difficult questions

Although I'm reassuring, the conversation complicates if guests follow up by asking if I have ever found a dangerous spider in the house.

“Well yes, once, but a long while ago ...” 

Their eyes widen, “IN THE HOUSE?”

“Yes, but it was before we put in flyscreens and got brushy things on the bottom of the doors.”

This confirms their worst fears – the spiders are OUT THERE, battering to get in

They immediately want to know more.  “What kind of spider?  What did you do?”

“Well it was a funnel-web. I released it in Lane Cove National Park.”

What I don’t tell them is that I confiscated it from a guest who was a biology student.  He'd put it in a jar and wanted to keep it as a pet.  When he cooked, the jar sat on the kitchen bench.  Other brave guests would shake the jar to see if it was true funnel-webs jumped.    But when he told me he let it out for runs, I’d had enough. 

Neither do I tell them that I didn’t drop it at the nearest entrance to the Park but took it far away as I was terrified it might have some kind of homing instinct.

That’s why I prefer hosting graduates.  They are past keeping things in jam-jars.

Take aim, fire!

“You didn’t kill it?” is the next question from my newest guest.  It is especially Australian men that want it dead.  And they repeat, "Really, you didn't kill it?"

Last week my daughter Emily listened to my spider spiel

She watched the expressions on the faces of my guests as I moved into the convoluted story about the single funnel web ever known to have crossed the doorstep. 

Afterwards, she took me aside and said, “Mum too much information.”

 “But I can’t lie!” I say...   “I have to tell them when they ask if I’ve ever had a dangerous spider in the house.”

“But Mum, it was over five years ago.”

“But it still happened.”

There was a pause while Emily, who is very practical and solution focused, thought about my predicament.

“Mum, think of it like demerit points - spider sightings drop off after five years.”

 

AND IF YOU REALLY MUST KNOW MORE:

Don’t mess with spiders with your bare hands

Don’t leave your soggy towels on the floor

Don’t walk around outside at night in bare feet

Don’t touch spiders in the kids paddling pool – funnel-webs just look drowned

Don’t go poking around in my garden without gloves on

And if you find one, call Emily

I threw the Russian chapter to the wolves

I wanted to write

I enrolled for Travel Memoir at the Australian Writers’ Centre with Claire Scobie.   She focused me and she cut to the chase.  She told me I was already a writer.  All I had to do was to write. 

I walked on air, and then, for long weary months through fog, snowstorms and mud. 

There is a children's book called The Bear Hunt.  Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, got to go through it

Every budding author should read The Bear Hunt.  Because for many of us, the start is like the bear hunt... got to go through it.    Five starts and I was heartily sick of being a writer.  Never could I get further than the Russian chapter.  I got completely bogged down in Russia.   Of course, I knew my history, Russia did that.  

My book was about Hong Kong - I'd travelled there on the Trans-Siberian railway and I needed a Russian chapter

I got off the track altogether when I started to read about magical shaman who wore deer antlers and, at a whim, shapeshifted to travel the sky like geese or ride on airborne goats and rams.   When their bums got sore from all that flock-flying, they slid along rainbows to visit the spirit world and grazed magic mushrooms. 

Maybe I was easily diverted by spirited Russia, but Russia can serve an enormous range of distraction; the largest military battle in history, one of the largest museums in the world, the deepest lake on earth and of course the longest railway line.  It is impossible to pick up any book on Russia and not be sidetracked.  Siberian brown bears, man-eating wolves and reindeer migrations.  See?  Quite impossible and we haven't even started on the Tsars, Tolstoy or Laika, the first dog in space.  Notice too the Reds have not yet had a mention.

I put it all into my back-pack

I was still working on the chapter when Dale and I went to Europe in late 2013.   I spun her interminable tales of Russia.  I moved from mystics to statistics about the Trans-Siberian, from Imperial Russia to revolution.  A bleak and bloody tale. 

Her eyes glazed and eventually she said, “Mum, enough of Russia.  Stop researching.  You are doing my head in.” 

I knew she was right!

I put my books and notebook away.  I couldn't complain.  We were in Tuscany to visit Dale’s friends.  Their company arranged wine tours by Fiat 500.  Each tiny car identical except for the paintwork; blue, red, green, cream and yellow.  We drove the countryside in single file and paused at a glorious renaissance villa for lunch. 

The next day, Dale and I went to Florence.  Walking by the Palazzo Strozzi we stopped in our tracks.  The current exhibition was The Russian Avant-garde, Siberia and the East.  Dale rolled her eyes with a laugh, while mine twinkled.  Fait accompli.  

Wolves by Night

An 1912 oil painting by Alexei Stapanov, Wolves by Night, greeted us in the first exhibition room.    A century ago this dude was troubled by the spread of urbanisation.  He warned against man’s intrusion into Russia’s fabled and primitive wilderness.  His wolves are bewildered by marks in the snow; parallel tracks like those of the iron road of the Trans-Siberian.  

No escape from the Russian Chapter

The wolves were right to be nervous, Alexei Stapanov was right to be troubled.

Dale was troubled too.  Was there no escaping the Russian chapter?    

Wolves by Night was like a talisman for me.  I didn't have to hunt the bears, just to throw ninety percent of what I had written to the wolves.

Fun in Florence with Fiats and the Russian chapter

Travelling in Time

I travel countries, but what I seek is to travel time

In 1960s Hong Kong the journey from duty-free shopping to imperial China only took a matter of hours. 

Off the beaten track, in the New Territories, were walled and moated villages, fortified against pirates, rival clans and tigers. 

Dawn explorers

It was not far past dawn when my friend Gerry and I explored.  The early light still thin, the sun soft, a lull before the summer heat solidified.  We had to go early because by mid-morning, we needed to be rigging our boat for sailing in a regatta. Gerry already had one eye on the weather.  A wisp of grey cloud ahead had an olive tint. 

We parked my mini tardis some distance away

In the wall of the fortified village was a plain entrance, like a door frame, and we passed through to a narrow winding alleyway that squeezed in on us.  At first we thought the village deserted, left to robust pigs rooting the rubbish in company with small-time chickens.

Curious, we wandered on, past rows of closed grey-black houses flat-facing the path. 

The crones appeared

Some old crones appeared in front and behind and blocked us in the confined space.  They started to pat my pockets and held their hands for coins, good-natured cackle rising and persistent. 

Then, from nowhere, a terrible utterance broke over us.  A shockingly deformed man leapt at our little convocation and the women scattered shrieking with laughter and melted into the walls. 

I took fright and grabbed Gerry's arm.  No part of the man was complete, his face contorted, his body twisted.  Gerry smiled and extended his hand.  The man hooked a withered arm, beckoning us through the village, past closed doors, and little temples, scruffy and littered, back to the entrance and pointed to a decrepit notice board and a money slot. In English the faded writing asked for donations for the upkeep of the village. 

Gerry had slowed his pace to match the man's gait

They talked as they went.  What about, neither of them knew, for they had not a word in common, but between them was a communion of souls that I could not enter because I could not fully overcome my horror.

The diaspora

In those villages only the old and infirm held on, scratching an existence, the young had long gone, sometimes far, far away, to America, Europe, blown off by the winds of change and opportunity.

Hong Kong's deserted villages spring to life

I thought back to that early morning expedition when I read in an article that Hong Kong's abandoned villages, deserted for decades, may be about to get a make-over.  Some descendants see an opportunity to repopulate, farm the land and create an eco-tourist opportunity - to let visitors glimpse a living history.

Some villages hadn't been lived in for thirty years

As I read, my heart beat with conceited superiority; after all I'd been there in the old days.  Then I remembered that crippled man.  

Destination heritage village

But part of me still felt irritated.  Are our imaginations so blunted that we can't just walk the ruins?  Must everything be presented hygienically to be tourist-correct?  I suspect the planning authorities will insist on a prescribed number of toilets and rubbish bins, fatuous notices about step-minding, a souvenir shop and a car park.

And yet ...

Raymond Fung, once a Hong Kong government architect, sees no need to build more tourist attractions.  "We need to showcase the quality of our city - and that's our countryside and our culture."  For an architect to say a city is overbuilt is so encouraging, but he went further.  "The quality of a city's brand is not derived from shopping."  Let me repeat that, because when I read it, I did just that:

"The quality of a city's brand is not derived from shopping."

Fung made me think.   If the choice is between another Disney Land or Water World and a revitalised Hakka or Punti village, then I know which I'd rather. What I think Hong Kong might get though is a Disney Land Hakka village in all its commercially viable glory.

Time travel can be a selfish satisfaction

And in the scheme of things, I have effortlessly travelled time.  Hong Kong's duty-free shopping in the 1960's offered cutting edge technology - a transistor radio, a View-Master, a cassette deck - all so coveted!  All so old hat!

If you'd like to read more, here are the articles I enjoyed:

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/hong-kongs-deserted-villages-spring-life

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1904339/its-nature-makes-hong-kong-so-special-former

Photos taken at walled villages in the New Territories, 1970

I

Gong Hey Fat Choy - the year of the Monkey is almost here!

My daughter Emily's interpretation of the Year of the Fire Monkey.      Gong Hey Fat Choy!

Chinese New Year - Monday 8 February 2016

Welcome the Year of the Fire Monkey!    I feel an auspicious year ahead.  1908 was a Monkey year when my Glaswegian grandfather enjoyed the celebrations in Hong Kong on his world tour.  And I landed in Hong Kong myself, sixty years later, in another Monkey year.

Anything can happen!

Chinese pundits say anything can happen in a Monkey year.  Breathe deep for a hugely lively time of opportunity.  Leap in and embrace innovation and creativity!   With breathless speed, a dollop of humour and quick wit, it’s a time to dare to be different, be flamboyant, shake up your life and take a risk.  But don’t be gullible or you’ll get peanuts!

So mercurial and quirky are the ways of the Monkey, one horoscope warns iron-fisted bosses may go belly up, pitched out in the melee.

That’s just what happened to my Hong Kong boss in 1968 – my quintessential Monkey year.

Celebration Central

Chinese New Year in Hong Kong swept out the turgidity of Christmas celebrated by Europeans on a monsoon island far from home.  Down came soggy Santa and up went red and gold banners heralding exuberant celebration - an unrestrained eruption of discordant noise and colour, indulgence and togetherness. 

A Resilient Festival

Successive revolutions on the Chinese mainland, Sun Yat-sen in 1911, the Communists in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, tried to extinguish everything old and interesting and especially riotous festivals.  So the spirits channelled Hong Kong – or that’s what it felt like to me when I was there.

A month of double pay.  A time to eat, drink and embrace.  New clothes, new starts, new possibilities.  Dragon dancers wound the streets with cymbals and gongs, cheered by onlookers, ignoring the drippy, oozy weather that heralds Spring in the South China sea.

Markets, massed with flowers, opened until the wee small hours.  Row upon row of pink cherry blossom branches signified, beauty, prosperity and growth.  Potted white narcissi marched shelves of bamboo scaffolding.  Miniature kumquat trees were sold in pairs. Put at my doorway, their golden fruit jostled glossy green leaves, assuring a year of joy, abundance and wealth. 

Chinese New Year on the Water

Businesses were shut-up, bedecked with flamboyant red paper notices wishing their patrons happiness and riches.  And in particular, the huge fishing fleet that set out daily from Aberdeen, a village in the South of Hong Kong Island, stayed home.  All the junks were arrayed with red flags.  In the dawn they flapped wettish in the muggy chill, until the fires on board got going to roast whole suckling pigs, and the warm, greasy smoke wafted up, stirring the bunting.  Whole families prepared a feast together, joyous with raucous noise, Incense and drumbeats. Grinning pansy-faced children jettisoned red envelopes to float enlivening the harbour swill while they clutched their lucky money.

Going Crackers

Firecrackers made the old men start and smirk and the children squeal with delight.  Illegal after the riots the year before in 1967- the prohibition made the explosions all the more exciting.  The noise heralded good luck and prosperity, frightening away evil, shaking the ground, acrid spitting smoulder drifting into smoke and misty weather.

Gong Hey Fat Choy!

Chinese New Year 1969 Aberdeen and Victoria Park Market

Taking Outward Steps in the Direction of a Dream.

The Artist’s Way.  Unlock your creativity in 12 weeks, said the flyer.

Doing The Artist’s Way with Ros Burton opened my eyes to the opportunities that a lifetime spent working for crazymakers could spell if I would banish them forever and focus on my own creativity.   

But there was more in store

Week 5: Recovering A Sense of Possibility.  There is a real advantage to doing some courses later in life.  You’ve been there!  OK, it would have been good to have done them, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, but I didn’t.  The Artist’s Way was published in 1993 so I could have done it two decades before but I’m a late bloomer, a late developer. So never mind.  

To us also comes a prize

Just as the session on crazymakers leapt off the page and let me end my subscription to the Worshipful Cult of Crazymaker Enablers, Week 5 would validate some decisions I’d taken when I headed for the UDO, my Unilateral Declaration of Ownership, a few years before.   I quote Julia Cameron, “Time and again, I have seen a recovering creative…… take a few outward steps in the direction of the dream – only to have the universe fling open an unsuspected door.”

Wow, I related to that.  In my first blog, I told you about my head-banging moment.  Maybe the universe thought because I was banging on the floor, I needed a big door.  It is absolutely true that the universe flung one open: more than one.

And the feeling was familiar

I’d experienced the sentiment first when I had dug a hole for myself in the early weeks after my arrival in Hong Kong as a twenty-one year old in 1968.  I was hardly a recovering creative then, more like a would-be.  But it was true, a few outward steps was all it needed to open doors and trigger a whole new world.

It’s the butterfly effect.  Big clod-hopping steps have a bigger effect and the thumping of a howling, head-banging banshees bigger again. 

The lesson went on

It explained that thwarted artists can eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at family and friends.  They need to be left alone without unreasonable demands made upon them.

Dear family, see I wasn't mad.  Just a thwarted artist.  Consider it proven when you get to read my memoir about Hong Kong.  I just had to start writing, that's all it was.

Crazymakers’ Central

Emily's collage illustrates how I constantly swept up after crazymakers.

The Artist’s Way.  Unlock your creativity in 12 weeks, said the flyer.

The course was by Ros Burton.  She credited Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, with her success as a writer.  That’s what I wanted to be.  It was January 2013.

I was so excited.  I enrolled immediately.  So excited, I completely forgot I was deaf. 

You’d be surprised how long it takes to get used to being deaf.  When no-one is talking to you it is not a consideration and when they do, well, it’s the way they speak.   I can hear my daughter Emily clearly, but not so easily Dale’s modulated tones.  Alice talks like a fast undercurrent, impossible.  Kim, talks rapidly too but in shot-gun staccato and I can hear that. 

On the first day of the course lively chatter bounced off walls around me that I couldn’t catch.  No context, a dozen unfamiliar voices.  Babel.

I tried to focus on what Ros was saying.  Everyone was years younger than me. I sat tight, a bit like a bobblehead doll, nodding and smiling like an imbecile. 

I might have cut and run, but the second week was on CRAZYMAKERS.  I didn't care that I couldn't hear that session, I was mesmerised by the words on the page.

CRAZYMAKERS! 

All my life I’d worked for crazymakers.  But I’d never categorised them.  Now I could count them off on my fingers.  I'm a good 2i/c, a Jack-of-all-trades, hardworking; I make things happen.  Crazymakers give free reign, an endless supply of things to fix, revamp and restore.  I thrived on drama.  Crazymakers are charismatic, charming, inventive and persuasive. 

“To fixer-uppers, they are irresistible…” wrote Julia Cameron

Damn right they are.  Endless chaos for me to FIX! 

I read and reread the pages.  How had I not recognised it before?  Ye Gods, I choose them and they chose me.  Cultist.  Footlights, please.  Ladies and Gentlemen, let the circus begin.  The show must go on.  The most destructive show on earth, the paranoia, the politics and the Herculean effort.  And I’d enabled that, no problem too ridiculous, too personal or too outrageous.

The solution was to recant

I read on.   You have to BE crazy to keep working for a crazymaker; a self-destructive delusion averting any chance of nurturing individual creativity.

I walked out into the cool air of an Autumn evening and along the Manly shoreline promenade.  I made some decisions.  I was going to cast adrift the last crazymaker and restore my equilibrium by putting them all where they belonged, on the pages I would write.

And, I was going to get hearing aids.

Do you know any crazymakers?

Or did Julia and I hog them all?  It feels a bit like I did and I’d hate to be selfish, so I make a promise, they are now all yours. 

PS - a really good start to 2016

Ros is running another Artist's Way Course at Desire Books, 3/3 Whistler Street, Manly 2095 commencing Monday 1st February Email desire@desirebooks.com.au or phone 02 9977 0888.

Comfort Women

I've just finished a memoir about the two years that I spent in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  I still log on occasionally to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) to scan the news.

An article just before the 2016 New Year, highlighted some unfinished business from World War II.   The Japanese Government had reached a landmark agreement to resolve the comfort women issue with the South Korean Government, Comfort women being a euphemism for girls dragooned into Japanese military brothels.

'Silenced No More'

In 2015, Sylvia Friedman, a Hong Kong based author, published her book, Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women.  She documented the heartrending stories of lives ripped apart in the most barbaric way and the duplicity of Governments on both sides of the original conflict.

Sex-Trafficking sanctioned by Imperial Japan

The Imperial Japanese war machine set up the brothels as their World War II campaigns moved through Burma, Ceylon, India, Thailand, Indochina, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong.  The reticence of the survivors make it hard to quantify, but some believe the provision of comfort women to brothels is the largest episode of sex-trafficking known in modern history.   

Military mindfulness

Japanese army commanders wanted to stop their troops raping women in the areas they occupied.  They didn't need any more local hostility and they didn't want pillow talk.

They had good reason to curtail loose gossip.  Tokyo pieced together snippets of strategic information about Hong Kong collected from pre-war brothels, bars and dance halls seeded with Japanese informers.  It was invaluable when the time came for their invasion. 

Raw memories

When I lived in Hong Kong in the late 1960s, the Japanese occupation of the Colony during World War ll was still a raw memory.  I didn’t comprehend the depth of the antagonism; it was not my war and I had good Japanese friends.

Nevertheless, we don’t need to take sides to ache for what happened to those women. It’s almost too late for compensation - only a few are left.  What they need most of all is an apology.  They also want their plight to be written into Japanese history text books so their suffering will never be forgotten.

Still the cycle goes on

Yet as I read on, skimming the SCMP webpage, I saw a report that the Daesh has established a department of War Spoils to codify the sexual exploitation of young girls and women taken prisoner in the current battle ground of the Middle East.  Sex slavery condoned all over again.   

It took forty years for the comfort women of South-East Asia to speak up and more than seventy years to get to the recent resolution for some of them.  Today’s newest victims may never gain even that outcome.

When will it ever stop?   

What the comfort women endured and what the women captured in the Middle East are now enduring is a continuing saga of sex slavery.  Perhaps, put in that context, we can all do a little bit to help and feel less powerless.

Journalist, Rahim Kanani, covers really interesting social innovators.  From his interview with Siddharth Kara, an expert on human trafficking and modern day slavery, I learned the US Government spends more money to combat slavery than almost any other government in the world, yet it outlays 350 times more money each year to combat drug trafficking. 

That interview gives some pointers as to how we can help combat human trafficking

The first step is to become aware of what is happening around the world.  Knowledge is power.  Visit Sylvia Friedman’s 852 Freedom Campaign on Facebook and look out for Siddharth Kara’s upcoming film on human trafficking. 

https://www.facebook.com/852FreedomCampaign/?fref=nf

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1896474/why-japans-comfort-women-apology-coup-washington-and-blow?page=all

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1896432/sickening-edict-islamic-state-issues-15-rules-governing-sex-female-slaves

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rahimkanani/2012/01/08/how-to-end-sex-trafficking-and-modern-day-slavery-with-siddharth-kara/

http://wwlp.com/2015/12/30/film-sheds-light-on-human-trafficking/

Late Bloomers dare to go it alone

I'm told that, as a writer, I'm a late bloomer 

Full blown pale roses or full blown pale pantaloons; take your pick.   I’ll be a rose thanks.  At least that way I am between a bud and a dead-head.  Better than pantaloons – between a pair of speedos and a Vinnies bin.

I found a website.  It said that late bloomers are NOT FAILURES and gave this encouragement:

• Van Gogh was a late bloomer and didn't start painting until his late twenties.  My God, he so nearly missed the boat. 
• It’s OK if you don’t hit your peak in High School because it’s often downhill all the way from there.  Good, I don’t think I’ve hit my peak yet.  Now I’ll know when I do because it’ll be WOOOOOSH after that.
• Diving in too early to a relationship and set-in-stone life plans can keep you from determining what really
  matters to you.  Well I got engaged in six weeks but a set-in-stone life-plan eluded me, so I guess I’m well-balanced.  I know what matters first, it’s what comes second that confounds me.
• Let go of the pressure to be perfect ...   I don’t think I was ever that deluded.
• Going through an awkward stage can build character ...  Can?  Oh, God why else? 
• If it hasn’t happened yet, one day, you’ll feel truly comfortable in your own skin ...  Really?  I think that might be just before WOOOOOSH and the secateurs chop off the dead-head.

Go John Updike!

Then I found another website with a quote by John Updike, “Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”.

Updike was considered one of the greatest American writers of his generation.  

So that’s it.  I'm a ramblin’ rose. 

Late to bloom and, I hope, incorrigible but not too disreputable - it would upset my mother.  I did go it alone.  I declared UDO.  My Unilateral Declaration of Ownership.

Own the situation.  Own the solution.

Remember how much fun that was? 

No? 

Oh, pass the rosé.

Dreamtime’s Glossary

My daughter, Emily, kindly made this collage of my glossaric insomnia

Night Writers!

Some nights just as I drop off to sleep, words roll into my head.  My heart sinks, I know this sensation.  This is not what my mother called the witching hour, around 3 am, when the gremlins call.  That is the stuff of bank balances, ignominy and indebtedness.  This is a new affliction.  Well new, but now aged enough to be a familiar.  It started not long after I began to write my first book.

They show up individually, lone footloose forerunners

But that’s it, I’m done for.  I hold my breath; the corps is on its way.  With centrifugal force, they arrive: words multiplying, gathering speed, aligning and coalescing. 

I don’t know which sense to nominate.  I don’t hear the words, I can’t see them, yet there is nothing ethereal about this transmission, they rattle my skull, insistent, teasing and robust.

Sleep is unthinkable  

Some nights, I greet them with wondrous joy.  Phrases and couplings that have eluded me by day are child’s play now.  Other nights, I groan because if the muse has insomnia, it will be a long night for me. 

I reach for my notebook to capture dreamtime’s glossary and try to think what I have eaten or imbibed, what I have done or not done, to summon the word brigade.  If I knew, perhaps I could sell it as a cure for writer’s block and having triggered battalions; make another fortune if I could find the remedy and send them all back to barracks and the bookshelf. 

Do your dreams match your occupation?

The Ease Of Late Career Change

My daughter, Emily,  kindly made a collage for me when she read my blog.

A Jack-of-all-trades

I was born a Jack-of-all-trades.  Blessed with an optimistic disposition, I set off on a peripatetic journey through life, qualifying for, but never practicing, a profession.  

I'm of the age where people ask me what I did, rather than what I do.   I sweep a broad brush - 
“business administration", I say. 

Business Administration?

Have you ever heard anything more boring in your life?   Can you imagine any two words that conjure up a worse fate? Roll out the coffin, tip her in, she’s crisped and dried out. 

Jack shouts in my ear, “No, no.  That’s not right”.

“Shut up Jack, it’s too hard to explain.  And in any case the fat lady has not yet left the stage.”

I didn't necessarily choose careers either, some were foisted upon me.  An American watched me with fabrics, designing, sewing, trialling colours, making a quilt.  She said, “How long have you been an artist?”  I said, “No, no I’m not an artist”. 

Never mistake a blush

Jean-Paul Satre said modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.  My friends, I’ll own up to business administration sounding boring as batshit, but not to being lukewarm. 

Shortly afterwards I was back on the road.  I filled out the forms at the airport and when it came to occupation, instead of Retired Business Administrator, I wrote, with a flourish, Artist.

Forget, What Colour is my Parachute, mid-life career-choice blues, just book an overseas trip.  Then you can instantly be anything you ever wanted to be.  You can adopt the persona just for a trip or make it permanent.  Go joyfully through the barrier, exchanging your hat as you go.   Once I’d made it official, Jack said, “Oh.  Of course, that’s what we are…  I had been wondering”.  That whole trip, I saw images, constructed new artwork, for after all, I was an artist on sabbatical.

Two years later

It was the next overseas trip, two years later, when I changed professions again and I became a writer.   As I travelled, I filled notebook after notebook. 

And that is how you find me now. 

Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become”.

I had to think about this one.  I have always felt I became what happened to me, but once I fixed on the idea that I wanted to write a memoir, I made a choice and magic happened.   

There Is Seldom A Dream Run

Mike and I at home with our four daughters, Emily Dale, Kim and Alice.

In my early sixties, I had a life changing moment when I declared a Unilateral Declaration of Ownership

Next, I got cold feet and had to light a slow fuse.

Declaring Unilateral Declaration of Ownership, gives one a rush of blood to the head - not the deep, gutsy,
sustainable valour required.  That needs camaraderie and unity.  I was flying solo.  So I played a trick on myself. 
I lit a slow-burning fuse.  I organised to lease our house out and gave notice at work.  That gave me
six months to come up with a plan for where Mike and I would go.  Fait accompli.

That was five years ago

Today, back in our house in Sydney, I have:

• an income stream from international travellers who know of us through Sabbatical Homes and Airbnb;
• found my niche as a writer of travel memoir.  I have recently finished my first book which is now  
  doing the rounds of agents;
• started on my second book;
• travelled extensively in the last few years and made a host of new friends and acquaintances. 
• journeyed halfway round the world to the Azores.  These islands that are the furthest landfall
  from Sydney.  Any further and you are on the way back!
• most importantly, four girls that all still talk to me …
• Mike, who also still talks to me, just ... 
• an idea, a vague idea for a new adventure …

So it all went according to plan? 

Are you kidding?  Absolutely nothing went according to plan.  I questioned my sanity.  Mike certainly questioned the wisdom of being homeless.   The original problem looked trite compared with the problems I created for myself and everyone else.  The "F" word became my mantra.  UDO was the stupidest thing I ever did and yet…  it worked! 

In a tortuous, devious, ambiguous way …  it worked!   

And Mike?

Well he might not admit it, but I think he did enjoy the brilliant, brazen and sometimes beastly
adventures that beset us.

My blog will embrace stories of how writing, travelling and opening my home to guests has
helped me live more comfortably than I could ever have imagined.

Dousing A Dream Leaves A Burning Spark

The Universe stepped in and delivered us to an island anyway - one I'd never dreamed
of going to - Waiheke Island, New Zealand.

The Declaration

I’d declared Unilateral Declaration of Ownership (UDO). 

Own the situation.  Own the solution.

The declaration followed a head-banging moment which changed my life after sixty.

Labour Pains

There had been labour pains, nine months before I’d made a suggestion to Mike.  A Year in Four-Quarters.  We would each choose two destinations and spend three months in each. 

“I’ll finance it by writing a book as we go.”  I could see by Mike’s expression this was going to be a hard sell.  Why didn’t I shut up?  He might have got curious.  Nope, I launched straight into rules. 

Mike hates rules.

“Only islands, off-season and no luxury destinations.  I’ve chosen St Helena and Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.”  

“Why would anyone want to spend three months on a wind-swept rock in the middle of the Atlantic in winter?   
Ask Napoleon, he hated it”, said Mike.  

“You can only get there by boat", I said.  Foolish me, I know romanticism isn’t persuasive as an argument.

Mike moved on.  “Do you know what winter is like in the Hebrides?” 

Mike is very lame so I said archly, “Yes, it has an added benefit; if you walk into the wind, you won’t be able to fall over".

Sometimes women invest big in ideas and present them to men as small change

I'm a woman so I’d thought about this trip and the possibilities for months and months before I presented it to
Mike as AN IDEA. 

Off the cuff, the idea didn't appeal and he dismissed it without a clue he had just asphyxiated a dream scenario of epic proportions.  He was right of course, it would have been bloody cold in Lewis and problematic for Mike landing at St Helena by boat.  And I didn't know how to write a book either.

But a spark was still smouldering. 

The Universe stepped in

For reasons well beyond the scope of this blog, we ended up on an island: Waiheke Island off Auckland, New Zealand. Mike thought it was paradise and wanted us to live there for ever.  Me, I got itchy feet ...  Well, it was only an idea!  

Island Magic

And I had this thing about islands …  Have you ever wanted to live on an island?  Which one?

Mike and I on the Beach in Waiheke

It’s Never Too Late For A Volte-face Moment

I was glad I changed course and one of the places my volte-face moment took me to was Spain.  I loved this lady, I reckoned she'd had a head banging moment too!

Dad, I think Mum's serious

It was late 2008 when my contemporary life began.   It happened a year or so after my sixtieth birthday when I sank to my knees, drummed the floorboards with both fists and howled with rage.

I'm a nice, quiet, refined kind of gal normally so my behaviour was unparalleled.  The girls rushed to pick me up and I heard Kim say to Mike, “Dad, I think Mum’s serious”.

Are you kidding?  My bum up in the air, banshee curdles and a fist tattoo.  A ridiculous, undignified spectacle.

But I was serious.  I was seriously mad as hell. 

My plan had been vague.  But I hadn't expected Mike to thwart it on the grounds of reason; we couldn't afford it, he said.   Something deep down within me recalibrated and my knees gave way.

Changing course

Fury brought clarity.  Delicate negotiations with Mike; the convincing and the compromises, were not the stuff that I was made of and the raw energy of impulse had floundered.  So I made a decision there and then to declare Unilateral Declaration of Ownership (UDO).   It was a decision of unitary selfishness, but I preferred a title.  Unilateral Declaration of Ownership has a ring to it; an absolution. 

I had rung the bell, whoever wanted to come my way was welcome, but I was changing course.  I would own the situation and own the solution.

Recalibration

I recognised the feeling; I’d recalibrated before, but then I had been single; much simpler.  I had wept into my pillow for weeks, until a flash of insight suggested to me that actively cultivating mildew in my bed, in the high-humidity of a monsoonal Hong Kong, was staggeringly unimaginative.  I've just written about that in my forthcoming memoir. 

The Trigger

The trigger is either the boredom of a depressive wallow or someone telling me I can’t do something.  
The first is a slow, deliberate and satisfying clamber out of the slough of despond, but the second is a wilful,
wicked, wonderful rush to the head.

As I write this I can see the head-banging spot.  It and I have a special connection.  I wonder sometimes if I should paint a little star there or put a brass plaque which reads, Life after 60 started here, or just a cryptic, UDO.

What about you?

Have you had a self-prescribed U-turn, life-changing, volte-face moment?  I don’t mean when life dealt you a
whack in the guts, tragedy or drama, I mean when you reached a dead-end and thought, Stuff this! 
There has to be another way.