Dear me

What sort of people send themselves postcards while on holiday, eh? Well, I do, as I confessed a while ago to the always understanding nmj. And now that I've booked myself an Easter break in Ljubljana, I'm wondering what sort of groove I'll be able to send myself from there.

So just for the sheer wackiness of it, here's a taste of previous missives to myself.

8 August 2006, Hilo, Hawai´i

singing frogs; tropical rain; red mustangs, pick-up trucks

31 July 2006, Vancouver, Canada

condominium blocks; street life (in all ways); Bohemia; trolley buses!!; coffee shops; microbrewery beer

29 July 2005, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Fantastic! A place to retire to!

25 July 2005, Lugano, Switzerland

Tik und tak und tik und tak. Here and now .... mmmm.

29 December 2001, Castries, St Lucia

Simply relaxing under a palm tree!

Alas, the wonder of Iceland (August 2001) had me so utterly gobsmacked that all I could manage from Reykjavík was a blank.

Beginning to belong

Is it true? Am I really becoming part of the Flickr community? Part of the wider web world? I substantiate this tentative suggestion with three pieces of Flickr evidence.

1. A photo of mine from The Butchart Gardens, British Columbia, has been invited to not one but two invitation-only image groups. This may be normal for established ether dwellers, but it's definitely a unique twitch on the line for a first-time fisher king.

2. A web journalist has requested permission to use another photo of mine, this time of a sculpture in Vancouver, in an online news item. Groovy!

3. An artist has selected yet another photo of mine, this time of Akaka Falls in Hawai´i, to form the basis of a piece of fabric art that they're working on. Distinctly cool!

so hey now chillin', happenin', surfer-type web dudes: i is the thing arrivin', man, innit?

To tip or not to tip

With theatre-person happeningfish heading for Canada this week (bon voyage, h:fish), I have been reminded once more of my own North American adventures over the summer.

One thing that I really had difficulty getting a handle on was tipping. The people in Canada were just so wonderfully and sincerely friendly that it seemed on the verge of rude to then pay for the service relationship with a waiter or tour guide. I think I even offended a couple of bar staff by suggesting that they should add the cost of a drink for themselves onto my tab. Apparently that's not how it's done. But they were so helpful in giving large denomination banknotes as change that it was impossible to find an accurate 10% or 15% in cash.

Even more embarrassing were the coffee houses (I preferred the local Blenz to the imported Starbucks), where the glass jar by the cashier's elbow showed clearly how miserly one was being with the huge piles of one-cent coins that it was impossible not to accumulate.

Things were slightly easier in Hawai´i. At least they gave change in small denominations, making it easier to count out the tip. In addition, the service, though friendly, was not as personal as in Vancouver, and so it was easier to peg it down as a professional transaction and leave the 15% behind.

Of course, there are always exceptions. I fondly remember the waitress in Hilo, at Cronies, who told me that I had a great smile. It was fortunate that we were already half way to the exit, because I had just finished the most wonderful Mai Tai and would have left her my entire wallet! But, being a soft European, I just grinned sheepishly and dived out through the door.

Cartography can be really frustrating

What an amazing thing it is to stand in the dusk and watch land forming. The Big Island, Hawai´i, is volcanically active, and the signs of lava flows are not hard to find. Especially when the lava has run straight across the road, cutting it off. Then one can trek a short distance across the cold, jagged lava that spewed from the ground a couple of decades or so ago, and see the red glow of fresh, hot lava pouring over the coastline, and the steam plume rising as the lava hits the waters of the Pacific below.

I imagined that the human figures standing silhouetted against the steam plume had to be a team of cartographers. The younger ones happy that they were being kept in work, redrawing the government maps. The older ones sighing that their life's ambition to chart the islands accurately was being forever thwarted.

Are tourists dumb or what?

As well as the heights of Mauna Kea, this summer's jaunt took in the Pacific coral reef off the western coast of the Big Island. We were only a maximum of a hundred feet below the surface, but it was clearly a different world down there, with the colours changing as the water absorbs the light from the surface.

The reef, to my uneducated eye, looked healthy. There were wonderful little yellow fish, called tang, and small shoals of snappers and butterflyfish cruising around. A couple of sea urchins crawled around on the bottom. And I tried to remind myself that coral is actually an animal, and not a plant as it can easily seem.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the life of things that we often only see in aquaria or on the plate at exotic restaurants. But at the start and the end of the trip, why oh why oh why did the submarine tour company insist on playing badly recorded sounds of Klaxons blaring and a voice shouting 'dive, dive' and 'fire torpedo'? Was this our war on coral? Do they think tourists are dumb or what?

Mauna Kea

There is a scene in 'Dead Poets Society' where the teacher (Robin Williams) leaps up onto a desk and urges his schoolboy acolytes to see the world from a different perspective.

Desk nothing. Get thee to Mauna Kea. It must be one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. Literally so, because the summit is so far up, at more than 4200 metres above sea level, that the altitude effect can be severe. I certainly had an unsteady moment or two this August, when moving and getting breath seemed to be the stuff of dreams.

But boy, was it worth it. The sense of sheer size and space; the whole world spread out below and the whole sky spread out above. The clarity of colour, the sunset's hues touching all, the shooting stars and constellations brighter than in any other sky. The compact white domes housing some of the most advanced telescopes on the planet. The totality defies words. As far as shifts in perspective are concerned, the effect has to be life-changing.

So as we approach The Winter's Tale, the biggest theatrical event in which I have performed for a good many years, I will try to remember. I will try to keep a sense of perspective. You may find me standing on a desk.

It is time

One of my favourite books as listed on Blogger is Brian Patten's Love Poems. In this, one of the poems that I come back to most frequently is 'It is time to tidy up your life'. I was reminded of this again recently when reading a blog entry by nmj on keeping pebbles from the beach.

Somewhat obliquely, it struck me that I still have a pile of boarding passes and other such 'junk' from my travels to Vancouver and Hawai´i this summer. Why have I kept them for so long? Probably because I want to hold onto the experiences from that trip for as long as possible.

There's plenty to read about Hawai´i on blogs elsewhere (for example by Anna MR). But I sense that the time has come to recycle the ticket stubs and allow the feelings to resurface in my own consciousness.

DJ Blogger in the house

Flanders and Swann are wonderful. Not just the songs, like 'Sounding Brass' and 'The Gas-Man Cometh', but also the chit-chat in between.

As they said: "We're often asked.... We're sometimes asked.... Somebody asked me once...."

Well, somebody asked me once why I haven't yet blogged about my summer holiday this year in Hawai´i.

Requests! On my blog!

I will, I will. When the time feels right, I will.