The CapitalThis is my favourite pic of Lily and Nick in London, staring up as Big Ben strikes ten o'clock, after a long, crazy day in the city.
When I was a kid growing up in Norwich in the 1960s, London was the centre of the universe: Big Ben, the Beatles, Carnaby Street, Nelson's Column, the queen in her palace, safe as houses with all those soldiers dressed in bearskin and scarlet with shiny brass buttons, looking after Her Majesty and us, her loyal subjects, all over England!
We had two trips up to London from Brighton.
The first was organised around Lily's appointment for a student visa interview at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The embassy was scary: a couple of the roads alongside it have been blocked off to cars, there are cameras everywhere and high perimeter fences patrolled by cops in flak jackets holding machine guns. Machine guns.
Anyway — Lily's appointment ended up taking about three hours, and by the time she emerged she knew she'd got the visa okay, so with great relief we skedaddled and did some serious sightseeing as night fell.My mum had told me, earlier in the day, 'When you go to Trafalgar Square (above), take some pictures of yourself and Lily with the pigeons [check — though there are very few pigeons left these days] and on the corner, opposite the National Gallery, there's the old jewellery shop where Dad bought my wedding ring — see if you can find it!'
We didn't find it, though we walked right around the square looking at every shop on every corner. No jewellery stores any more!
We had a fabulous time: dinner in a (grotty) pub in the West End, a walk along the Thames at Westminster with the London Eye glittering across the water, listening to Big Ben chime in the hour, and a nod to Westminster Abbey, where my g-g-g-g-g-g-grandfather (one more -g- for Lily) is buried. We were too late to go in and give him our love this time, but Lily did that in '96 so we didn't feel too bad.
On our second day in the capital, we started early with three objectives: the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, and King Lear at the Globe with Alice, one of Lily's oldest and dearest friends from Subi Primary School days.
We found ourselves unable to tear ourselves out of the V&A (allow at least a week — there are over five million things to see, all of them fascinating), so we had to forgo the Tate. I'm saving it for my next visit, when I'll give it a week as well!
The Globe, which is the low white building in this pic from the Millennium Bridge,is almost next door to the Tate. It was fantastic. In its way. I'm no fan of Shakespeare, or live theatre — throw your rocks at me now — so the combination could've been fatal but for all the wonderful people-watching opportunities. The acting seemed like a contest: who can talk Elizabethan English fastest with the most emoting, alas my liege. David had very cleverly booked our seats online and found us a box, the Gentlemen's Room, with four of the very bloody few seats in the place, and on top of that, four that had backs on them. (I'm all for a genuine experience, but authenticity can be taken too far. I pay therefore I sit.)We had a splendid view of the stage and the audience — lots of those standing up were dropping like flies in the stuffy heat down there — and I spent three and a half very happy hours looking at the costumes (Where do they get the shoes from? Do they have costume underwear on under all that? Does he have make-up on his legs? What is he going on about? Where did they get the thunder machine? Is that real fur?) and staring at the building, and wondering if the columns were real or painted marble, and how long the musicians had had to study to play their wonderful old instruments like the sackbut and crumhorn ... And did the developers of this re-born theatre know it was directly under the flight path from Heathrow, with a plane roaring over the top every three or four minutes ... ?But Alice, Nick and Lily are far less philistine than I and they loved every minute of it!

Young and oldThis is Lily and me at Trafalgar Square in London a few weeks ago. It was surprisingly late, maybe 8pm, but the sun was still up we'd been on the go all day. Wonderful!
Lily is in Chicago at the mo, having driven for two weeks across the top half of America to take two of her friends from Perth from her house in Olympia WA to their new uni in Champaigne, Illinois.
Every two or three days, we'd get excited calls from her en route: "I'm in Yellowstone!" "I've just seen a baby grizzly bear!" "I'm in Minnesota!" "I'm in Wisconsin!". I'm very happy that they're finally in Chicago, staying with our lovely friend Sue in Naperville , who doesn't mind at all being invaded by a band of excited young people.
Lil's boyfriend Nick has flown to Chicago to join her for the drive back to WA (spooky that her home state in the US has the same abbreviation as her Aussie one). They have to be back by August 20 to see Radiohead in concert in Auburn. I'm so grateful to Nick for going to all that trouble. (Such a lovely laddy!)
From then on, my two youngest kids are virtually on tour through California with Radiohead. Will and his mates are seeing them in San Francisco on August 22, in concert with Beck (I just do not understand his appeal to young people — so poppy and wimpy!). Then Will and Lily see them again in LA at the Hollywood Bowl on the 25th, and two days later here in San Diego. Lily will have to zoom back up to Seattle to be at Bumbershoot, a huge three-day music and performing arts festival starting Aug 30. Exhausting, but so much fun.
Wish I was thirty years younger ... though Dave and I have just bought ourselves tickets to see the Dandy Warhols in concert in Solana Beach. It's an over-21 event so yah boo suck to the kids. (I do wonder, though, if we will look like ancient senior citizens among the five or six hundred 21-year-olds likely to fill the venue. Hey! Too bad!)
:: This is what I look like today:
I've buggered my back, right where it becomes my hip. I did it in Perth on Saturday, and since then it's been sort of been okay off and on, until I lie down. I go to bed okay and wake up not okay. Today, though I am in the mother of all pain, right down my right leg to my knee, and I just can't find a position that is anywhere near comfy.
I'm off to see a therapist tomorrow. She's also an ... ahem ... love coach, so that'll be a learning experience — but a trusted friend who lives near us highly recommends her, so I'm suspending all cynicism.
Perhaps this is my poor old bones telling me to slow down and sit still and shut up for a bit.
Hope I can find a comfy position by tonight, though, cos we're off to see Jacques Loussier live in concert in La Jolla. I am such a fan. I just love being in America!

Crime file
I love a good crime novel. I've enjoyed a great variety in my time, from Agatha Christie (I can remember my grandmother reading her books in the 1960s and eagerly pouncing on the latest editions in the library), the Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters, and the upper-class adventures of Dorothy L Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham's Albert Campion, to more gritty contemporary stuff by writers like Minette Walters and Ian Rankin.
And recently I discovered Andrea Camilleri's laconic Sicilian detective, Inspector Salvo Montalbano — so funny and urbane, so very stylish.
So when I was generously offered a couple of detective/crime novels to read and blog about, I didn't hesitate.
Being a terrestrial with no desire for or understanding of sea legs, I was immediately in very unfamiliar waters with Linda Greenlaw's opening words in Fisherman's Bend: 'I stood at the stern facing aft ...' I had to get out of bed, go downstairs and consult the Big Mac so I could work out where I was standing on the boat and which way I was looking (at the back, looking backwards, right?).
But thereafter I was spellbound, as much by the story as by the depth and breadth of this writer's sea knowledge. She writes non-fiction about the sea, and on top of all that she's a lobster boat captain and a former swordfishing boat captain. So well-known and admired is she at the helm of a fishing boat that she was made an actual character in that amazing film, The Perfect Storm, and was played by Mary-Elizabeth Mastrantonio. NB: It's a truly wonderful film, but you may need anti-seasickness pills ...
Anyway, Fisherman's Bend (Hyperion) is set around tiny fishing towns in Maine, a setting just as intriguing as all the nautical elements in the story.
Our heroine is Jane Bunker, a no-nonsense, sensible, hard-working young woman who is perfectly at home on a boat. The book is written in Jane's first person, and she's a very likeable cool-headed woman who (thank the lord) doesn't have tickets on herself, or tell us what she's wearing, or what her hair looks like, or if her make-up is all mussed up — yee ha! In fact, you can make up your own mind about how she looks — it's not important. I liked her vulnerability and self-deprecating commentary. Refreshing.
Jane is a former Miami homicide detective (introduced in an earlier novel, Slipknot) who is now living in Maine and working as an insurance investigator and deputy sheriff of Green Haven.
While investigating some vandalised equipment on a hi-tech survey boat which had been commissioned by a big corporation to determine if the area's seabed is suitable for oyster farming, Jane comes upon an abandoned lobster boat, engine still running, turning circles out in the bay.
The plot soon thickens — sorry. Green Haven is a seething mass of tension, with lobster families who have feuded for generations, oil companies, drug dealers and Native Americans — the Passamaquoddy and the Maliseet tribes — who feel oyster farming will impinge on their ancestral fishing rights.
Greenlaw paints some great characters among the small-town eccentrics, and for a non-boat person, I really enjoyed all the seafaring stuff. I also liked her matter-of-fact writing style and humour, suspecting that Jane Bunker may be ever so slightly styled on Greenlaw herself.
I was genuinely intrigued by the crime, but have to say the denouement came far too neatly and too quickly at the end, which was a little disappointing after so much cleverly built tension. Perhaps Greenlaw's publishers could have given her another 100 pages so she could have let it all unwind itself at a more appropriate pace. And what a shocking, cheap, old-fashioned, unappealing dust jacket they gave this neat little book — spot the nautical cliches! With embossed type to boot. Yuck. Looks like something from the 1950s.
Still, I enjoyed it enough to look out for more Jane Bunker mysteries when the multi-tasking multi-skilled Greenlaw gets around to them.
:: Mariah Stewart's Mercy Street (Ballantine Books) is less impressive. The story has potential — especially the secondary plot, which was way more interesting than the main one but was dealt with too hastily and simply in a 'Oh and by the way, the sniper turned out to be ...' sort of a way.
Four teenagers meet in a park in a Pennsylvania town. Next day, two of them are found shot dead and the others are missing, presumed to have been the killers.
Our detective is Mallory Russo, a former cop who was bullied out of the force and is now hired by a reclusive billionaire to solve this case, prompted by the billionaire's brother, a priest (could not stop envisaging him as Spencer Tracy meets Karl Malden — very irritating) who knows the grandmother of one of the missing youths. She's helped, unofficially, by cop-with-a-past Charlie, and, of course, he's kind, caring, considerate and compassionate, and there's the hint of romance in the air. Which sucks.
Also very sucky is the infuriatingly convenient way the local cops just happen to haul in one of the key characters on a minor charge. Along the lines of 'Hey Mallory? You know that really nasty guy you really wanted to talk to but simply couldn't find? Well, you'll never guess! He had a broken tail light and we've got him downtown! Come on in — and bring donuts!' The plot needs to be a whole lot more complex.
Add to that the way all Malory's hunches about the crime are all instantly spot on, a hooker with a heart of gold, and the totally unbelievable character who's lived out in the sticks for yonks and knows everything about everybody and just happens to be crucial to solving this crime, and you end up with a very antiseptic sort of crime story. No grit, no realism, no real people — not even much bad language.
This is the start of a series, it seems, and the title of the book has very little bearing on this story, being all about the billionaire's decision, in the very last pages, to fund a private crime solving foundation to find missing persons ... like the billionaire's own wife and child, for instance.
If you like cleanish crime laced with cleanish romance, you'd probably like this and the series that's bound to follow.

Developments
:: Qantas delivered the rest of our luggage last night, about 10 pm, so I spent this morning unpacking and doing the washing. And feeling very relieved that we hadn't lost anything!
:: I have got the quilts all ready to start work on them again, the priority being to finish piecing Lily's top and then to start hand-quilting Larissa's.
With quilts on my mind, I'm also planning a red one of my own. Just look at all the fabulous fabrics I've collected for it already, beginning with this pile of lovelies from my dear friend Laura's stash in Perth: She has a history for every bit of red in this pile, and she also gave me these all-sewn-up checkerboard strips made with some reds I gave her many years ago to make a schoolhouse quilt. These reds (below) are all from my stash. Some are from Chicago, there's a fair bit from Perth and Albany, and a lot from San Diego quilt shops. I dunno yet what sort of quilt I'll make, but I am thinking that this may be the one I get hand-quilted by an Amish craftswoman, just for the sheer joy of having something worked on by them. So it had better be a quilt worthy of such work!
:: This is my trusty, much-loved ancient Bernina Record, which I photographed at Mum's place while I was back in Australia last week. I've written about this marvellous workhorse on the excellent blog, Zigzaggers, which invites people to write in and tell all about their old sewing machines. It's great fun to read about some of the old machines still in use out there, and it's a great service for anyone planning to buy a used machine. You can read about my Bernina here.
:: Will's had a change of plans and is now going to study at Mira Costa College just a few miles up the road from us here in San Diego, with a view to returning to Perth with us in February (sounds of Lesley whisper-screaming 'Yesssss!'). House after house that we'd found for Will and his mates in San Francisco fell through, then his housemates all found individual accommodation, and then there were problems with the exact course Will was after — so this is a great alternative, especially considering the San Francisco college year starts on Monday! We'd never have made it.
:: All of the above means Will, David and I won't be whizzing up to San Francisco tomorrow to try desperately to find Will accommodation and try to shuffle his course units. So, we can relax, recover from the flight home, put our feet up and put the suitcases away for a spell. Phew ...
:: I've been invited along to a book club! I'm so chuffed! Only thing is, it's meeting tomorrow night and I haven't read the book, which is Peony in Love, by Lisa See. I'm cramming.
My invitation came from the lovely Fiona Chatwin, whom we met through the Bondi earlier this year when she was bringing an Australian guitar ensemble to San Diego. And the ensemble, a quartet, only included the guitar virtuoso Slava Grigoryan and his brother, for heaven's sake! Bigger than big! Unfortunately, I missed it due to one of my many dashes back to Australia, but we had a reception at the Bondi befiore the concert, with the lads playing away in the restaurant (can't believe they are not so well known here — at home they'd have been mobbed!) and on the night of the concert, out at UCSD, Bondi provided refreshments in the interval.
Anyway, Fiona and I have caught up since for chat about our homeland and other stuff. She's a soprano from Melbourne, working hard over here to get a community music school, Villa Musica, up and running.
Now I'm going to take a cuppa to bed and get back to 16th century China ...

Brighton This, above and below, was the fantastic view from my hotel window in Brighton, when I was in England two or three weeks ago.The pier was riveting viewing. Whenever I was in my room, whatever the time of day, I couldn't tear my eyes away from it.That is, once I'd got a hefty young staff member to crowbar open the ancient and crumbling sash window and fix it so it stayed open. I had a breathing gap of about 30 centimetres! Our hotel, the Royal Albion, was built in the 1820s, and looked as though it had last been updated in the 1980s. So much bleached wood and pompous upholstery ... tackissimo. Dirty windows and stained wallpaper. I had a huge room, but my bed — pictured above near the window, with Lily pier-gazing – was so old, thin, lumpy and uncomfortable, with springs poking me in the ribs, that after my second night, teary and baggy-eyed, I complained to the manager. A brand new bed followed me back up the stairs! Yay! The Brighton Pier is one of two along the seafront, but the only one remaining. The Western West Pier burned down a few years ago, and no-one is quite sure what to do about its blackened skeleton, which resembles a delicate sculpture made of burnt matches. I walked out along the other pier one afternoon, undaunted by the noise of the video game arcade and the funfair, and the aroma of beer, vomit and chip fat that lingers despite the salty sea breezes. It's best viewed from a distance.
Inland, well away from the seafront — and the swaggering bands of drunks, pale pink couples blushed with sunburn, ladies in blue rinses and stretchy pants walking deferentially behind their swollen-bellied men, and foreigners looking lost and homesick — Brighton was cleaner, much more attractive and on the up and up.
There are two fantastic districts. The Lanes (below), is a dizzying complex whirl of tiny, narrow streets, flower-decked pubs, cafes, restaurants and chi-chi boutiques. It brings to mind the fishing village that Brighton used to be, long before it became well-known for its therapeutic seawater — for swimming and drinking! — and a hub of fashionable society, led by the Prince Regent, later George IV, who took up residence in the Royal Pavilion, built and converted to a palace in the late eighteenth century. In the environs of the Royal Pavilion is the district known as North Laine (below),which is full of galleries, theatres, some great old buildings, more restaurants, more quaint pubs, and interesting shops.
Brighton is only 50 minutes from London on the train, and it would be a fab place to live if you were young and had more than an average income — and so long as you kept away from the sticky horrors of the seafront near the end of the pier. Yes, I am a terrible snob.
Not all the seafront is bathed in chip fat, I hasten to add. Further west, where my cousin lives in a listed 1930s apartment building with the sort of huge sea view that makes you feel as though you're on a ship well out to sea, there are glorious Regency terraces, squares with little parks, and a lot less noise and clamour. It's really a seaside town with a split personality!The beach is all shingle and makes a wonderful crunchy noise as you walk upon it. I could hear people walking on the beach as I lay in bed in the morning. I was forever thinking of Dover Beach, that fabulous poem by Matthew Arnold:

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

And another thing ...
:: After a week in Perth of watching the odd bit of Olympic hoo-ha in the same timezone as Beijing, it's odd to be watching it over here with the sixteen (?)-hour time diff. They've scheduled the finals of events so they're on in the morning in Beijing, because this is prime telly time in the US. That means they're putting on all the heats on the afternoon, and finals the next mornings. We think it 'mazing.
Dave and I are loving the synchronised swimming, but we still feel that it is in skeet-shooting that our real Olympic potential lies. Its appeal is based very strongly on the idea that it is a sport we feel we can practise from the verandah at Eagle Bay, possibly from a Jason recliner or two.
:: It was fab to be back in Perth, albeit for the worst possible reason. I loved being close again to all my mates — or at least those I could whiz round to see in the short time I had. When I get back, I'm going to be such a good friend, I promise. We'll get those Bitches' Breakfasts going again, and there'll be lots of weekends down at the bay ...
:: Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda and The Bank Job were among the movies on offer on Qantas in-flight this month in both directions, so it's a shame that I wasted some of my wide-awake hours on The Other Boleyn Girl. It was a fizzer compared to the book, and the role of Henry VIII didn't exactly stretch Eric Bana. But the telly program line-up was great, especially the short film by Martin Scorsese of a Rolling Stones concert in NY (or was it Chicago?). Boy, are they still really, really hot, judging by this show. Andrew Denton did a great interview with Jerry Seinfeld and there were a string of really good Parkinsons to watch (Parkie and Denton are always good on a plane — bite-sized entertainment). There was a doco about a year in the life of JK Rowling as she finished the last Harry Potter. She came across as surprisingly self-effacing and much more vulnerable than I had thought — I really liked her a lot, especially when I saw her Christmas shopping in Tiffany's and elsewhere buying up big on divine shoes. there was also a useful UK show about what cosmetics really work and what to buy (conditioners for colour-treated hair; face-creams with SPF; and creams with vitamins C and E which are as efficacious in combating free-radical damage as the more high-falluting new discoveries like C60).
I mention all this only because I imagine lots of you in Australia will have seen all this recently on TV.
:: I've got lots of plans, and ideas for projects, for when we are back in Australia, and thank you to all my friends who encouraged the odd ramblings I came up with while I was over there.
:: I miss my luggage. David's laptop and all my toiletries are in the missing suitcases, along with my entire supply of underwear (clean and not), my camera and even the bloody novel I'm reading. Qantas assures us these bags are on their way and will be delivered right to our door tomorrow. Let's hope so.
:: Too much good eating in Perth — I'm back on the bike from tomorrow ...

Phew!
We're back — though most of our luggage is still somewhere over the Pacific, having mysteriously failed to board the same flight as us out of Sydney. Miraculously, one of our cases made it, but not the one that has my camera packed in it, so no pics for you.
Then we had a row with the rental car people in LA who wanted to charge us a whopping $149 to hire a car at LAX and drive to San Diego, when last Wednesday we paid $59 with the same firm to do the exact same drive the other way. One of the desk people said the price had "gone up" because it was "peak season". We scoffed. Another said "we don't have enough cars left, so the one you want will cost more". We stared in disbelief. They make it up as they go along. Eventually we had to settle for the fee of $100, and frankly, after almost 24 hours travelling, with a two-hour drive still to come, we were too stuffed to put up any more of a fight.
At home, though we had given Will two days' notice of our return, and called him from the airport to let him have another two or three hours to prepare, the place was a tip. So that's not standing a certain youth in good stead for mature, independent life in a new city.
But the sun's shining, the dogs look well and healthy, no-one has slept in our lovely big bed (they wouldn't bloody dare) and I'm out of my travelling clothes and off now for a long shower.
I've got lots of reading in blogland to catch up on as well!