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| AT PEACE ON THE ROCKS: BLUFF POINT AUSTRALIA |
COMING HOME
Many people we have met since coming home have asked: Is that
a year gone by already?
For Fulmaya and me, too, it seemed as if we hadn't really been away all
that long and it had all been a dream, a sojourn during which time had been
zipped into a folder and filed away and labelled the past already.
For the last year we've been having communications about the
weather in Scotland. Raining every day, my daughter wrote in one
email. Now, we've had a text from a
friend, Thanks for bringing the sunshine
back with you.
Over the year, we
haven’t experienced more than a week of rain – a wicked, palm-bending storm in
Dongara, Australia; a few days of dust-settling drizzle in Kathmandu; and an
unseasonable downpour in New York that added to the enveloping humidity. I was quite looking forward to the rain on my
return – dour Scottish rain – a drizzle that seems to penetrate the skin.
I didn't have to wait long – a week in
fact. I’m looking out of my window at
the slate roofs of the houses across the gardens and there is a steady light
rain falling on them and leaving pearls of water strung out on the black
electrical cables. A crow complains from
a nearby tree and shakes its feathers free and I’m reminded of the cormorants
on the beach of Mandurah, drying their wings in the sun.
I've been asked a few times what my favourite place
was. I’m consistent in my answer – it has
to be Australia. In particular,
Kalbarri. The name sounded Irish to me
and I envisaged a rugged captain of a ship with ruddy cheeks and whisky breath arriving
and naming the place after his home town.
But I discovered later that the town was first visited by the crew from
the Dutch East India Company who put two-mutinous sailors ashore. No less colourful than my original imagined
thought.
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| OUTSIDE THE BUNGALOW |
We rented a spacious bungalow overlooking the Murchison
River beyond which whales basked in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. One exhaled water from its blow hole while it
nursed its calf near the shore. She had
lain there for three-weeks, we were told, slowly rising and falling in the blue
waves near the white sandy shore.
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| COW WITH ITS CALF IN THE SHALLOW WATERS |
A steep path takes you to a lookout point. From there you can see the place where the
trading ship, the Zuytdorp was wrecked in 1712.
To the north of the town is the Rainbow Jungle, the Australian parrot
breeding centre with hundreds of exotically plumed birds from all over the
world: the first time I’d seen black parrots from the African forest, their iridescent feathers like an oil slick in the sun.
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| PRETTY PARROTS PREENING |
As this was July, the winter temperature was in the low 20s,
warm enough for us to sit on the shaded veranda in the evening with a glass of
wine from one of the local vineyards and watch the crimson sunset in the west. You could sense the world turning on its axis
as a profound peace settled over you like a blanket and the cares of the world receded
and you felt that this is the way to live in your old age – had we settled in
our ways.
But this was only the beginning of our senior gap year
How does it feel to be back in Scotland? Well, there’s no doubt that Edinburgh is a
beautiful city and especially so in the sunlight. But the cold, summer rain drives you indoors
and you watch the sparrows shake their feathers and preen from your window and
wonder when the sun will breach the clouds again.
