Finding the shore

And the wine. You can’t buy wine in Norway now, or at least it’s very difficult, a measure to stamp out excessive public drunkenness. It’s worked, but at the terrible cost of excessive public winelessness.

But it is not for this alone that coming home to the South West delights. One can’t help feel a bit jingoisitic and recall that old joke about travel narrowing the mind, for the more we see of the splendours of the world, the more the region is revealed as a truly special place, unique and uniquely rich, and worth treating at least as well as it treats us.

I’d been to Norway to see my son (who’s not Norwegian) but I bring him up because his first language was Japanese. He’s not Japanese, either (his eldest sister is), but he was born in Tokyo one April, cherry trees blossoming outside the hospital window.

I left Norway, caught a couple of planes, and landed back here in… Setagaya. Or at least a little part of it, having been given the honour of an invitation to speak at the Bunbury-Setagaya Sister City lunch last Wednesday. My deepest thanks to the cities of Bunbury and Setagaya and to Carol McDowall for the privilege, and to Carol I can only apologise again that I didn’t have the courage to tell you what a dreadful public speaker I am beforehand. Luckily, the food was from Kokoro, so nobody was paying any attention to me, and those who weren’t completely entranced by it were admiring the room: congratulations to the new Maker+Co for reactivating that beautiful space.

It was up to Carol to put eloquently what I had merely stumbled towards: that the sister city relationships are so important because the exchange they provide us with enables new ways of thinking about and doing things and the connections with people reveal common aspects of humanity and change the way we see the world.

It’s wonderful to see such strong sister city connections well anchored in Bunbury and we can be grateful to the City that they are in such capable and respectful hands.

We are more and more connected with others these days as others become us and as we strike out to become others elsewhere. 

Last week I may have been in the only Franco-Australian family with an Italian cat watching Japanese films in Norway, but that’s nothing these days. 

Suave Americans are meeting rugged Aussies in steamy Vietnam. Hands are reaching out across seas.

I stepped aboard the Duyfken for the first time this weekend and she is truly astonishing, something of great beauty and wonder. If you haven’t visited her yet, she’s in town at Pilot Jetty on Casuarina Drive until Sunday. 

The presentations are terrifically well done and the ship and the displays are stunning to see. But step down into the hold and prepare to have your mind absolutely boggled: the ballast bricks, beautiful little rectangles of earth, are original, from the era, and they are believed to be the oldest European artefacts in Australia.

You can walk on them and, even in port, feel the waves move them beneath you.

From the ship I took the ocean road home. The sun was setting and a large group of people had gathered. I stopped, curious, but a chill in my chest told me I knew what was going on. Music was playing. People walked down to the beach carrying flowers.

So many people, and so young. Too young to be farewelling one of their own, but there they were, their gentleness and tenderness just heartbreaking. Peace be upon them.

They threw flowers into the sea and below, one after one, waves found the shore.

– Jeremy Hedley