If we could stay married for ever, that would be cool with me.

Down through the years my sweet mother never failed me
Held me close to her heart as she taught me to aim high
Lifted me up so I could reach and attain sky
And changed my lucky star from what it was to what it is
Never enough time to give praise for what she gives

Words of wisdom she grants as natural as life’s breath
Things to remember when day turns and only night’s left
Words like: “Always give thanks for the greatest of men is grateful”
And: “Pride can never reach where humility can take you”

Sweet mother! I’ll never forget you!

And falling asleep again to visit the house, loved house, lost house, changed in dreamlike ways, ways that Richard both would and would not approve. The polished concrete floor half-stripped of red and green paint was beautiful, and all the rough bricks were true to life. But this version had an imperious view of rooftops and the Harbour, and it was not at all clear why Jeremy’s room did not have a door, so that we had to climb through an internal window. And waking to remember that the house has been sold to a half-Scottish half-Danish lover of Sydney School houses, whose three young sons will, I hope, love it as much as I do, although how can they?

No wonder I spent most of yesterday verklempt and listening to depressing songs of youth. I was emo before the word was coined! Last night was a lot better, a very liberal Anglican church up near Coso and Mirabel somewhere, with a friendly (two-humped?) llama eating nasturtiums out of the front garden and chickens wandering around during the service. Thussy would have loved it. We all went, Bryan and the boys, Shannon, Salome and Milo, us Fitzchalmers and even Janny and Gemma when they came to visit; there was a treehouse in a spreading live oak where they could conveniently stay. Testimony took the form of people writing famous mathematical proofs on the whiteboard, with all of us in the congregation chanting along with them. “DIVISION BY ZERO! CONTRADICTION!” A straightforwardly happy San Francisco dream.

Toni McIntosh is not horribly ashamed of my riding! I was so thrilled I rode Scottie through the line on a loose rein and he jumped it perfectly.

Zoomed back up to the city, went to work, brought the research calendar up to date, met with colleagues to go over the numbers, started a piece of research. Got crossish mail from someone who is offering us field trips, so zoomed over early to Monroe and walked from classroom to classroom getting said field trips scheduled. Made it to Claire’s class just in time for the Valentine’s Day exchange. Zoomed to the Community Music Center for her piano lesson. Had tacos and avocado and chocolat at Los Jarritos. Picked Claire up, came home, made dinner, went to taiji, came home and kissed Jeremy on the stairs as he went to wushu. I don’t know why I don’t taijiblog as much as I horseblog; stay tuned. Got the kids to bed, had a bath. Jeremy came home and we hung out.

I would like to say that it was an anomalous day, but today suggests otherwise. We slept in and had to teleport Claire to her wushu class. Salome and I dumped the kids on Jeremy and went to the farmer’s market and the garden store and talked nineteen to the dozen, as is our wont. Now that Ritual and Great Harvest are both at Alemany, it’s sort of a food black hole, with me well inside its Schwarzschild radius, never to escape. Back to Salome’s apartment to mind the kids and work on the novel and bake eggs for lunch while the kids drew characters from Lord of the Rings and Salome and Jack went to see Avatar. Off to swim class, where both girls are coming along in dives and sprints. Home to roast the butternut squash and soup it up with the homemade chicken stock. While I ate, I linked accounts to my new financial advisor’s web site, sent mail about the field trips and more mail about an upcoming dinner. And now I blog.

And I’m leaving out the bits where I was plotting the novels, or reading, or just staring into space and thinking about you and how great you are and how lucky I am to have you in my life.

Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty. And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it. Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead.

Stay safe.

A year after starting again, I’m still a pretty sucky rider, but I suck at harder things on better horses. Scottie has to be one of the nicest horses I’ve ridden in my entire life – even Colin says he is super-nice – and that hypnotic canter is easily, far and away, the best canter I ever sat. The trick is to learn to give him confidence, which gets harder as we try harder things and jump bigger fences. Yes! I am actually jumping him at last, over teenytiny rails it is true, but high enough that he transmits clear mental images of falling poles and pain and fear. As well as staying on and keeping my position absolutely correct and relaxed and soft, I have to reassure him of my competence and his ability. When he gets too fast I have to slow him, not with the reins, but with the rhythm, making the footfalls slower and more sure by asking for it with my abdominal core.

It’s a miracle to me that I can even try (and mostly fail at) this. A year ago I had never asked for a flying change! Now I am riding this glorious made hunter and I mean really trying to ride him, awake every stride, trying to unlock my arms, keeping my leg on but soft and quiet, doing my utmost to lull him into that beautiful rhythmic canter so he is in a cadenced trance over fences, so he forgets the fear and the falling poles, so all he thinks about is the music of his footfalls. What joy.

(If you like how I write about riding, you should go read Hannah, who says very precisely what I am always struggling to get at.)

I was slow to adapt to the change. Scottie’s carrying himself better, because he’s more comfortable in this hardware and happier generally. Just as Bella did last year, he’s spent a few months settling into the barn and putting on weight, and now he’s a mellower and more cheerful horse. You can feel the muscles of his back relaxed and loose and warm. I guess that means I am sitting better, too? I get some undeserved credit for my riding improving on the sale horses when it is the horses themselves that are filling out and calming down in the kind and wise McIntosh program. But that’s quite okay with me!

Anyway, slow to adapt, yes: we were warming up in the dressage arena and I was fussing with his head, when I should have been just getting him to move forward. Bad Rach! I must not fuss with heads! As soon as I kept my hands still he did move forward. A lovely thing about Scottie is that he isn’t lazy, as all my great and perfect chestnut horses, Alfie, Noah and Bella, absolutely were or are. I’ve become so accustomed to nagging at horses and pushing them with my seat that my lower leg swings like a pendulum. This is an appalling fault! I need to keep my leg very still and just apply pressure with my calf. The great pleasure of riding Scottie is that when I do this, when I press him gently into a light but secure contact, he sort of surges forward with a great generous wave. It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away.

So of course the other awful and counterintuitive thing I did was to try to mess with that awesome forwardness. We went into the jumping arena and started an exercise cantering figure-of-eights over a pole on the ground. The other Erin went first on her big hot dark bay, and he tried to run off with her, as he does (he has improved out of sight since I saw him last; he used to go straight up in the air or backwards, and now he is going forwards, which is key.) Apparently while watching this I decided that Scottie was liable to run through it as well, so I rode the exercise hanging on the reins for grim death, thus guaranteeing that he would.

It was instructive. I’ve tried to avoid antagonizing Scottie on the assumption that I wouldn’t be able to cope. He did get shirty, and was well within his rights to do so, given my death grip on the reins, which clearly violates the terms of the international convention on equine rights. But Scottie’s definition of naughty, like his definition of a hard mouth, fall well short of the insane brumbies in twisted wire bits I used to hurtle around on as an immortal teenager (hi, Hawkeye!). So his little cow-hops and evasions were not even particularly frightening, let alone dislodging, and when I did sort myself out and reinstate an appropriate contact, he cantered with his big rocking-horse cadence again and I remembered that riding properly is nicer in every way.

And then he was spooked by a person behind the hedge and did a teleport to the left, but I stayed on him, and we went to chat to the person behind the hedge, and Scottie snorted disgustedly a few times and went back to being a cow pony ridden on the buckle. All in all it was a splendid Sunday afternoon.

A: Depends.

But San Francisco’s beauties do reveal themselves shyly, to the patient eye: breathless empty roads at midnight, the Dolores Street palms standing straight in the orange pools of streetlights; unnecessarily cool air startling your throat and needling your exposed skin; the lemon-and-silver sun after rain.

Despite various tragic events, I am enjoying an extended period of uncomplicated happiness.

She’s the turquoise blob in the middle :)

ETA: Rach’s jetlagged roast butternut squash

Choose a butternut squash with a long neck and a small bulb. Cut off the bulb, peel the neck and slice into 5mm circles. Quarter the circles. Toss in a roasting pan with salt and olive oil. Roast at 450 Fahrenheit until just caramelized.

They were sweet and savory, crisp around a silky puree. Claire had to be force-fed one, and then she ate two helpings.

I don’t think I’ll ever love a house as I have loved this one.

Met a friend in a park in Birchgrove. “Dude, you live in Paradise,” I observed, and he agreed. Afterwards I went to Adriano Zumbo and picked out an array of jewels, including Through The Looking Glass With Jessica Rabbit and Clancy the Rains Are Coming. And the passionfruit tart for which he is justly famous. Adriano served me himself and was adorably pleased that I’d made the pilgrimage all the way from SF.

My father-in-law and I are the only sweet teeth in a family that leans towards the more astringent pleasure of olives and juniper berries and limes. His eyes lit up when he saw the shining confections. They tasted of summer and heaven. He ate with relish and asked for more. Afterwards, we had two nearly coherent conversations with him – “What’s under a floating floor?” “Concrete!” and “You fell in love with me at first sight, didn’t you?” “Oh yes.” Janny told him Claire’s comment on Janny’s wedding photo: “You had much less wrinkles, Janny.” Richard laughed.

It was more than we’d had from him in weeks, and it was our last visit on this trip. I have no idea how to end this post.

Three and a half weeks seems about the right length of time. For three weeks I get completely immersed. Then one morning the kids and I wake up and in spite of the fact that there are mangos and rainbow lorikeets here, in spite of the fact that my love for my Australian friends and family gets more intense with every passing year, in spite of summer, we all suddenly miss shabby old San Francisco and our micropartment and our American family and even our wholly reprehensible cat. That time is now.

This morning we went to see a Festival show based on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. It’s about people who run away, and what they find, and the stories they share when they get there. I cried, of course, but for the beauty and sorrow of it and not because I was feeling sorry for myself. How novel! Australia always used to hurt me and make me feel angry and guilty but this year, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Skud told me it wasn’t Australia I disliked so much as Sydney, and when I got here I realized it wasn’t all of Sydney but only a tiny and unrepresentative sample. The rest is vanilla milkshakes and bats in the Moreton Bay figs.

And all kinds of things that have made me crazy for years and years are suddenly okay. I can’t put it any more precisely than that. Sydney hasn’t changed – well, it has, enormously, but it’s also exactly the same. And I haven’t changed either. I’m just as groundlessly opinionated and bitchy and well-meaning and tactless and incompetent and embarrassingly fond of you as ever, don’t worry. But Sydney and I are okay now, like childhood friends who had a massive falling out and made up and can’t remember, now, what any of it was about. The past isn’t sticking its knives into me any more. It probably won’t last but while I feel like this, while I sit in the house Richard built and listen to the cicadas and breathe the humidity, I am more grateful than I can say.

Julia: Are mutants really real?

Me: Oh yes. Not like in Futurama, living in the sewer, but there are lots of mutant frogs, for example.

Julia: What do they look like?

Me: The frogs? Oh, they might have an extra eye or an extra leg.

Woman coming through the door: I definitely walked into an interesting conversation here.

Me: My daughter was asking me about mutants!

Woman: Oh! Well, I was born with an extra finger!

Julia: Wow!

Me: Yeah! Polydactyly is awesome!

“Yes,” said Jeremy proudly. “That was my brother.”

It is the Australia I remember from my childhood.

—–

With its art deco style and urbane hosts, the Playhouse Hotel is the ideal venue for a Roaring Twenties sex farce. Next time we should bring all our crushes, and no children.

—–

The memorial site for the Myall Creek Massacre is very moving.

“This is your inheritance,” I said to Jules as we piggybacked on ahead, moving quickly so the bullants wouldn’t bite my sandalled feet. “I’m sorry it doesn’t have more honour.”

“What is honour?” she asked, and I was enlightened.

Claire said: “I am against the white people, even though I am white.”

I said: “But some of the white people behaved very well. William Hobbs reported the murders, and Governor Gibbs prosecuted them.”

“It’s complicated,” said Jeremy.

—–

On the way home we rescued a snakeneck turtle from the middle of the highway.

“We’re eating outside,” said Andrew.

There were coloured bulbs in the grapevines on the trellis, and candles on the table. The lights twinkled from the bottles and wineglasses. Everyone had dressed for dinner. Ross had spiked his hair, Kelly was wearing a silver chain, Mum was wearing an indigo blouse with a red and purple enamel brooch. Their faces shone.

“Aly,” I said, “can I ask a huge favour? Jeremy left his camera at Sarah’s house.”

“We brought it,” he said, and there it was on Kelly’s lap.

I poured myself a glass of white shiraz.

Moments of perfect happiness are awesome.

Julia grazed two knees at a playground in Bondi Junction, but is now proudly sporting Pooh and Eeyore bandaids. Salome is shaking her head sadly at this indulgence in branded merchandise. The girls and I just got back from the park across the road, where we set off the Christmas rockets and did some wushu and taiji. Claire is reading Raymond Briggs. Julia is turning the pages of a book and singing. I am stuffed full of avocados and mangos and may need to nap. We’ll be off to see Ric in a little while, and then Michael and Rachel and Patrick and Evelyn, and then tomorrow is Mark and Mark and Matt and Melinda and Aubrie and Jackson and Adrian and Sam and Korben and Tabitha…

It is beautiful. I admire it especially because it has two bedroom/study/bathroom arrangements, one at each end. I call them Reg and Thussy’s sulking corners. They are finally moving in together after only twenty years – I hope they’re not rushing it, they’re both very young – and they’re a couple who expresses love through bickering, not that Jeremy and I would know anything about that. Sulking corners seem to me to be a fine contribution to domestic architecture. There should be more of it.

My godparents were in rare form. I got Reg to explain a bit more about his adventures after the war, as a gun runner for the Australian arms dealer Sid Cotton. It was 1947. Reg, just out of the RAF which he had lied about his age to get into – he only survived the war because he was sent to Canada as a flight instructor – got a call about a job. He sensed that something was up when he turned up to a meeting with Cotton, Don Bennett, the creator of the Pathfinder Force, and a third man who he recognized as a very close advisor to then-leader-of-the-opposition Winston Churchill. Oh, and Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the richest man on earth.

After partition Hyderabad and its Muslim Nizam found themselves surrounded by Hindu India. With aid from Pakistan, and with the de facto support of the British shadow cabinet, the Nizam hoped to establish an independent Hyderabad. Cotton supplied six planes. Reg’s job was to fly arms out of Geneva to Karachi, in Pakistan, and then onto Hyderabad. They lost two planes to poorly packed cargo – rifles and anti-aircraft guns. Reg barely made it out of Hyderabad ahead of two Indian air force bombers, who cratered the runway from which he had taken off. He lost his pilot’s license and went to what was then Rhodesia to earn it back – anecdote here about a friend who was killed by an elephant – and after flying briefly for British European Airways he became a Qantas captain, which is how he ended up in Australia, building a house with my Austrian godmother. Truly, the twentieth century was an age of wonders.

I dropped the family at home and headed out to Mike’s birthday drinks, which was perfectly lovely once I finally managed to sort out which Darlinghurst watering hole is which. It was at the Beauchamp, no, the Burdekin, no, the Beresford. People of Sydney please could you disambiguate these a little? Uncles Barnaby and Rob came over for dinner. Barnes gave us a laser show with lasers he had built himself; as we were washing up Rob and I had a moment of bonding over being Ric’s in-laws, and just missing him so very much. Today was errands: passport photos, exercise books, a failed assault on the post office. This afternoon was occupied with wushu, taiji, music theory and long phone chats with Mum and Kay. And here are Jeremy and Jan back from visiting Ric.

We had Christmas lunch at Lulworth. I barely recognized Ric. He has lost a lot of weight and is mostly in a wheelchair and hardly talks any more, although he did ask very characteristically “From where did their flight originate?” The children were buried in toys. After a brief recess we resumed festivities for Claire’s birthday and dinner and cake. If I woke at 6am on the 23rd and flew out at 11pm and the flight was 15 hours and then I was awake from 9am to 9pm, I think that makes about 54 hours of Christmas? In the event it was just about one hour too long. I retired to bed and slept for a year or so.

Woke to the sound of birdsong and rain. Called Kay and Thussy and arranged to see them; bundled up the kids and Jeremy and Jan and went to the lovely Randwick Ritz, a beautiful old Art Deco cinema palace, where we finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Clearly, I am a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king; it all makes sense now. We went to one of the cafes on Bronte Beach for lunch and saw a hundred or so white sails against the grey sky as the yachts set out for Hobart.

It’s a remarkably prescient piece of work, foreshadowing not only the 2009 story arc of Doctor Who itself but also that of the Obama administration. But as the first-hand accounts start trickling out of the smoking embers of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the days of the Anglophone trickster are over. It was China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA that sat down in the decisive meeting, and it was China that prevailed. It’s the Monkey King’s century now. It’s his planet to destroy.

I had hoped for so much more. I don’t know what. Comprehensive, single-payer health insurance and a binding treaty on climate change, for a start. I know Obama is at heart a moderate, a reformer, one who believes in institutions and working through them. I don’t know whether I am that moderate any more. I held on through the tumultuous summer and fall but when he committed tens of thousands more troops to the war in Afghanistan – I almost wrote fresh troops but they won’t be fresh, they’ll be the same tiny minority of working-class people on their sixth or seventh tour – the president broke my heart.

I am not saying I have better options. I guess that’s my point. I let myself dream of better days, and now those days are here and they involve a difficult and disappointing set of compromises with the real world and its constraints, and I no longer even have the fire of my outrage to keep me warm. Paul Krugman, who is rather like Jeremy in his infuriating habit of being right about everything all the time, tells me to suck it up. “If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.”

No one is coming to the rescue. Time to grow up.

“I’ll ride her,” I said cheerfully. Toni and Erin looked at each other, and Toni said: “Okay. This can be your Christmas present.”

So I had an hour on Scottie, keeping my hands still and soft, trying to get him to work off my leg; achieving with satisfaction two good canter transitions where I squeezed him with my calves and felt his hind legs stepping forward – outside/inside – into the gait. Then I got off and saddled Bella and got back on and had an hour on her; a brief school in the indoor arena, and then a long walk around the Stanford Linear Accelerator with Erin, who was riding The Flying Dutchman. We walked above 280 for a bit and revelled in the knowledge that at least some of the people driving past us wished they could be us.

So I wanted Bella for Christmas, and I got her.

On the drive home I had a good idea for a YA novel.

As 280 swung down to San Jose I saw this fire starting – first the old cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which could have been no more than shadowy slip of fog, but by the time I got to Randall Street a thick black mushroom of ill omen. I am glad all the people got out, and I am very sorry about the cat.

Then we picked up Rowan and drove to Heather’s house, where we decorated and ate approximately one million cookies, and the children were reasonably charming, and we met a man who had grown up in Ryde in Sydney and who is flying out on the same flight as us on Wednesday, and we started listing people we might know in common and his first one was Rachel Moerman. So I laughed and said: “Have you met her boyfriend?” “Who, Big?” “Yep. Notice the family resemblance?” “Oh!”

Now there are eggs baking for dinner.

• We Are Family

• Dream a Little Dream
• Locomotion

I said: “You like ‘We Are Family’? You’re gonna love ‘I Feel Love.’”

Julia said: “I can’t stop dancing! This is the BEST SONG EVER.”

Speaking personally, though, holy wow.