N: What can I say about Belize?

Z: It’s wet and green. And it doesn’t have roads.

Most of Belize is jungle, which in some areas looks primordial and huge – all tangled canopies and gigantic ferns and tree roots the size of my leg – while in other places it looks more like a dense European forest (if European forests were in the habit of housing jaguars). Because I’m ignorant I thought the forest was really old, but most of it sits on top of the Mayan cities of old – it appears that pretty much wherever you dig your pickaxe you’re guaranteed to stumble on an ancient settlement, provided you had substantial time and money and energy for this pickaxing- which isn’t excavated due to insufficient funds.

In a way I found it a comforting idea – that nature persists even if a civilisation perishes- and have ever since had postapocalyptic visions of my living room with giant roots and glossy ferns growing from the floorboards, their droplet-covered fronds refracting light.

I think it says a lot about Z and me that we invested so much more effort into planning our honeymoon than we did our wedding, and we chose Belize since it promised to cater to both of our passions: exploration (his) and lazing on books with beaches (mine). We went there in January 2007 and ever since it’s been our reference point for Things That Are Magical.

Although I had been apprehensive about navigating a foreign, densely-jungled country in airplanes the size of my sofa nothing untoward happened and I’ve ever since felt that pilots who don’t saunter up to you in shorts and slippers while chucking away the remains of a cigarette just aren’t living the right kind of life. Our first five days were spent in the jungle-happy mainland (Orange Walk) in Chan Chich lodge on a private nature reserve.

It was a breathtaking place – vivid with birds and monkeys and fermented oranges. The first couple of nights howler monkeys having it out sounded like someone being murdered, but eventually we more or less just slept through them. Between the fragrant air, the high ceilings and walls-as-blinds it was essentially like going to bed in the open – falling asleep was like floating in space with the occasional dream of jaguars . The 11 cabins of the Lodge were set far apart from each other and the seclusion of the place could be deceiving which everyone learned to their regret one day as on the way to dinner Z and I were treated to a full-frontal vision of a fresh-from the shower neighbour.

…I think of that car park where we first kissed and he floored the gas by reflex and accident

…Of the first night we spent together and the wind that shook the trees and their branches that rattled against the windows of our house and his hands travelling my body and the kiss of his breath in the hollow of my throat, and our whispering voices rising and falling and touching like hands in the dark

…of the ragged moorlines of our shared history, our buried griefs

… of holding a broken man, of being held when our child was coming into the world (but that was later)

… and before it there was a weekend in a city across the Channel, staying in that shabby cheap hotel and walking in Montmartre for hours getting increasingly lost, holding hands, laughing mostly, looking at people’s houses and the spread of a twinkling city before us and talking for the first time of who we are and where we want to be, and weaving dreams and making plans, breaking rules, talking and crafting that forbidden foolish thing they call The Future.

I have come back from Montenegro with my baby and 50% of my luggage. The other 50% is enjoying an extended holiday in Vienna.

Age at which Matei learns to pull himself up to stand holding on to bars of his cot – 7.5 months.

Age at which Matei manages to vault himself over the side of his cot and flings himself headfirst towards earth – 1 week after that.

It is difficult for me to believe looking at him that my genes had any part in his creation. Each day I am becoming more and more convinced that it would have been far more just for him simply to have emerged fully formed from his father’s head, like Athena.

So, although Z’s genes have solidly thrashed mine in this battle I hope that mine will WIN THE WAR, because if I have another child this active I will hand in my resignation and go off to the Bahamas.

1.Book a flight that leaves at ridiculous o´clock
2.Make yourself overtired the night before and don´t do any packing
3. Oversleep by 20 mnutes
4. Stroke cats who have manifested on your bed instead of getting up
5.Clean house instead of packing.
6.Faff about with cats because you can´t resist their confused looking faces or their attempts to instill themselves in suitcases.
7. Leave house 40 minutes behind schedule.
8.Expereince roadworks on the way to Luton.
9. And then speed restrictions.
10.And then take the wrong turn.
11.Then more roadworks.
12.Get lost trying to find Long term Car Park.
13.Make a detour and get lost again.
14.Then a third time.
15.Locate car park and parking space and see bus to the airport arriving.
16.leg it to the bus while dragging bags between parked cars and across gravel.
17.At the doors of the bus have your husband realise that he can´t find his wallet meaning that he has most likely left it in the car.
18.Have him leg it to the car and back (with wallet)
19.Have the bus shut its doors in front of his arrivng face.
20.Wait 15 minutes for the next bus.
21.Have the bus break down.
22.Wait for new bus.
23.Arrive at terminal after the plane has taken off.

But it all turned out OK really because there was a vast amounts of flights to Malaga and we just got transferred to the next one allowing time for a leisurly breakfast and shopping at the airport.

After we made it to Spain we enjoyed more holiday firsts- namely an attempted mugging as soon as we stepped out of the door of our apartment (two guys on a scooter passing by who slowed down and attempted to nick the posessions which Z hung onto). Everything is fine although Z has developed a reflex that makes him reach for bricks every time he hears the sound of a scooter behind him.

On the other hand the weather is lovely and the giant squid are just as big and tasty as I remembered.

Hope everyone else is doing well and waltzing along rainbows with puppies and ponies.

Read you soon.
x

It had:

Tide mandated parking

Porno Mermaids

Lovely scenery

Now I’m back in London, quietly expiring on my day off while the neighbours upstairs seem to be having sex and doing DIY at the same time. More power to them.

It was beautiful. Like another world entirely, and everything seemed curiously slowed down, like the world inside a dream.

We landed gently as a leaf does.

I am not without mercy however, so I’ve used Lj-cuts with handy titles to help group pictures from various travels.

Foreshadowing: Montenegro

Winter and Summer

For any feeling curious, previous photography of Belgrade can be found here

Main Square, and Karlo’s Bridge

Bedouin settlements in the desert, and a goat market

And it has a time I am used to. Maths is my weak point and so is schedules and punctuality (time just flows away from me, like water escaping your cupped hands despite your best intentions) so I never really got used to Australian time. SUre, my body began to operate within its broad definitions but I never quite shook off the impression that all this time I was in a twilight zone of sorts, inhabiting a parallel universe. Where things happened before they happened in the world I was used to. Where people slept while I was awake (though this is by no means an unusual thing in itself).

I was also unable to forget how far I was from everywhere else, like floating in a pocket of space across the veil from the known world. A storybook place of undefined boundaries and unrecognizable stars. Cardak ni na nebu ni na zemlji. A castle in neither earth nor sky.

I went to bed early, 9pm UK time, under the impression that it was something like 4 in the morning in Japan and I ought to sleep and woke up, disgruntled to realise that it was 4 am UK time, and spent the next four hours very happily curled up reading books and snacking on some herring that had been left over in the fridge from before we went away (I’ve noticed a bit of a Russian Roulette attitude to food I have occasionally) trying to decide whether its strange taste was the sign of something toxic or just the vineagar it was pickled in and whether I’d get a particularly interesting case of food poisoning.

I am happy to report that I appear to be hale and intact, and that Kate Atkinson’s new book, Case Histories is a thoroughly engrossing and entertaining read. Although I am also unsettled and vaguely distressed by how awake I feel, how energised and ready to do things (like clean, and go grocery shopping *shudder* *shudder* *shudder*) and it’s not even 9 am yet. This state of affairs seems completely unnatural, and possibly immoral and plain wrong.

All sorts of things happened while I was away. To mention but a few, Birthdays were had by feath, twistedserious and my mother (who is thank the gods, not on LJ) and I hope happy days were had by all. Also mooism wrote an impressively long entry, and verlaine very excitingly witnessed a brawl and recounted this in a highly comic manner, causing me to laugh outloud when I read it and sedate Japanese people to look at me strangely.

Settling back in hasn’t been too bad, and I think I’m much less jet-lagged than Lynne who is touchingly still running on Japanese and Australian time. Whereas, I having the advantage of feeling lost in any time zone have adjusted extremely well.

The flight was hellish though, long long long and now made much more bearable by the extra legroom we managed to plead for. Perhaps it was watching Taking Lives for the fifth time, or Troy that caused me to crack sent me into the state of mild wild-eyed delirium and convinced me that JAL economy class was really just a form of subtle, legal torture dreamed up by the Japanese to make up for no longer being able to stick bamboo slivers under peoples fingernails.

And gratifyingly, in the special hell in which you’ve watched the same in-flight entertainment on three different long-haul flights, I did manage to catch an excellent film I’d never seen before. Sazen: The Jar Worth One Million Ryo , about a ronin Samurai and improbable events which befall him, and it is very very very good. saucebook I think you would really like it.

About halfway through the flight my joints went into full-scale arthritis attack mode and set up a physical agony to match the one of my entrapped mind, and not even paracetamol washed down with wine would calm them. Everything hurt. Even joints which had previously co-operated with me quite peacefully had now decided to do themselves in, and my body trapped me in a cage even more constrictive than the tiny JAL seat. And by the time we had landed the pain had no eased although it had thoughtfully migrated to the right side of my body, throbbing in every joint from ankle to shoulder and co-alescing in the knee and hip causing me to lurch through the airport in the alluring manner of a stroke victim.

Yet, despite all these setbacks Lynne and I were united with all of our baggage (which reached us unharmed and un-lost) and managed to lug it, and myself and a didgeridoo nearly as tall as I am home in excellent time (all miracles I am grateful for).

Talking to friends on the phone last night, informed the ones who knew I was away that I was back and the ones who I’d forgotten to tell I was leaving that I hadn’t died or been abducted, we ended up discussing the magic of time and a friend told me a rather magnificent thing.
How flying back from India she had flown into repeated sunsets, moving backwards in time, seeing the sun set repeatedly on a golden horizon.

It seemed a wonderful image. As though for an instant our vast world was transformed into something else entirely, like the planet from which The Little Prince came from in which he could watch the sun setting repeatedly simply by moving his chair forward.

Time, when it doesn’t baffle me, beckons me. Like a veil of water you can almost reach through, almost touch. As though seen from a different perspective it might be a puzzle solved in which fractured pasts can be restored, wars undone and parents resurrected. In which borrowed time might be outrun and made to last, like a sunset stretching to infinity along the edge of earth and sky.