Paying Ready Attention

It was cold, damp and impolitely early when Mick the Taxi said “It’s all good”. My kids had never been up so early unless they were ill. If the truth be told I had not been up this early for a long time either, unless of course the kids were ill. The journey to the airport was as uneventful as you could have wished for. Melbourne was generally asleep, or only half awake. The world seemed to move in a collective feather warmth, and few of the buildings we passed had lights at the windows. The roads were quiet. The kids were quiet. But you could sense the excitement. When we arrived at the airport all hell broke loose. There were too many people, there were not enough staff. Instructions were contradictory at best and absent at worst. People were improvising, and people were getting it wrong. The kids were still excited, the staff were flustered. I was both. Simultaneously. The sparrows that had amused me as I stood in line for previous flights were nowhere to be seen. When I found them,

This is another experiment - very few words this time. All the pictures shown here were taken between about 4.45 pm on Friday 1st July and 4.45pm the next day. I just wondered what I would see. The house bricks flare in the setting sun. The trees shine with the light of green and of gold. Shadows grow, shadows dance, the sea of night cuts through. Flowers still bloom, some hidden, some clear, but this is mid-winter? The bark of trees, leaves fallen and brown, a winter reminder of the summer to come . By the door, a black spider, a faint flash of red, gathered around it the remains of its last meal. A long legged fly on the fence, another sits in the sun. A wood pile knot, the eye of a tree, seems to look out on the passing day. But it can’t really see. The hours tick over, a day comes and goes.

As a kid I could always tell when it had snowed. Not because it was cold - in the winter it was always cold in my bedroom - but because of the quality of the silence. It was a silver silence, gilt edged and firm. Not the kind of silence that follows an argument, or a misplaced word. Not the kind of silence you wished you could fill with the everyday or the common place. Not the feather soft silence of a quietened room, a church, a concert hall, where the urge to shuffle your feet, click your fingers or clear your throat grows by the minute. It was the kind of silence that would bury you and make noise or hearing pointless. The creaks and clicks of a waking house sounded like an intrusion. It was not the kind of silence you heard every day. It was the kind of silence that is important to hear. I doubt I will ever wake to snow and silence in Melbourne. But I do wake, now and then, into a new kind of light, a silver shadow light, gilt edged and firm. Moonlight washes through the house, g