On Swimming

I love swimming. I love swimming enough to wear dorky uncle goggles frequently.

I love that my wonderful aunt and uncle live right next to my favourite beach in the world and that I'm able to escape to this incredible other world almost whenever I like.

On Fruit and Happiness

A big part of what I've been trying to do in bettering my existence is to do with food. As an eating disorder sufferer, I've always had a difficult relationship with food, especially since I've regained a healthy weight, and choosing and eating food can be incredibly stressful for me.

Part of this stress is striking a balance between eating healthy and eating at all. A diet that involves lots of fresh fruit and vegetables is great, but it can be a bit of a slippery slope. The great thing about this time of year (summer!) is that there is so much beautiful fruit and veg to eat, I eat enough to be healthy without feeling the kind of debilitating guilt that comes with the kinds of rich, starchy things we generally reach for in the winter.

This has turned out to be a bit of a negative post, and I'm sorry about that. I do genuinely love food, and cooking, and eating, and that's why it's quite difficult to talk about these things, because whilst my "episode" is more than five years in the past, it is impossible to get rid of the feelings and thoughts entirely. The best way of dealing with it is to really enjoy your food and lead as active a lifestyle as you can.

.. and you really can't be grumpy when there are fresh figs in the house, can you?

Mission Lifestyle Rearrangement: Day Two

Last night I stayed up too late. Bad start to my Brand New Girl push, perhaps, but the point is that I woke up at eight thirty this morning and felt truly rested.

I hardly ever feel rested, so that was very exciting. I put it down to drinking lots of water.

I then hopped in the car with my family (including my brother, who was Not Happy about being woken... he's seventeen, which pretty much explains that) and drove to to beautiful Clovelly, where I had my first swim of the summer!

If there was ever something that deserved bold-ing, it is that. The water was perfect, the fish were swimming happily around my ankles, and although the blue groper eluded me, I saw a fish that I thought was a parrot fish and ended up being just a very clever regular fish carrying a stone in its mouth.

Getting physically active - tick!

I also enjoyed some pretty wonderful food, which I'd like to share in my slightly crazy, point-form way:

• tabouli in pita bread pockets with baba ganouj
• a big old strawberry milkshake
• door-stop sized slices of a wonderful chewy sourdough bread we bought from a woman selling loaves over her garden gate in Clovelly, with olive butter
• Fresh strawberries and grain crisps

Documenting food and exercise may be very boring for any readers I may still have, but is wonderfully helpful to me. I hope I can keep going like this for at least another little while...

Twenty Eight!

Oh my goodness, dolphins and porpoises, it's going to be twenty eight degrees on Sunday!

I know it's only August, but summer is really on its way, the breeze has been so wonderfully zephyric and balmy and I'm starting to turn into Summer Kenny (a fundamentally unsound oceanid with a desire to jump into water from dizzying heights) already.

So, just to get me more excited, twenty eight glorious things Sydney summer is bringing to me: -

1. Icy Poles

2. Clovelly

3. Twilight Picnics (mosquitos and all)

4. Strawberries

5. Raspberries

6. Blackberries

7. Eurydice

8. Making a Dent in My Reading List

9. Getting Oil Paints all over my Hands and Clothes

10. Sleeping with the Windows Open

11. The Clovelly Groper and his Lady Gropers

12. Late Nights at the Duck & Swan

13. White Sandals

14. Sun dresses

15. Home-Made Lemonade

16. Summer Projects

17. Sewing Bags and Dresses

18. Early Sunrises

19. Late Sunsets

20. Late Nights with Good Friends

21. The Mystery of Edwin Drood

22. Colourful Flowers Everywhere

23. Straw Hats

24. Sleeping Nude

25. Swimming in the Ocean Every Day

26. Wandering Through Markets

27. Living in Bare Feet

28. Spending a Third Summer Kissing That Man of Mine

Smoke in the Sky

This weekend is a very sad one.

In Victoria and New South Wales, bushfires continue to claim property and lives, with 35 now confirmed dead and many more missing and assumed dead.

Bushfires are part of our national identity, and not a summer goes by where they don't cause destruction all over the country. I vividly remember a week summers and summers ago, I might have been twelve or thirteen at the time, when we were sitting outside our Sydney home, watching the sky turn sludge brown in the 40 degree heat.
By mid-afternoon the sun was almost completely blacked out by the smoke in the sky, and the light was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was like looking at the world through red-tinted glasses, still daylight but strangely coloured.
Ash started to fall. Big white flakes all over our balcony railings, carried from the fires in the bush straight to us.
My next door neighbour kept the most beautiful roses, perfect, enormous blood red blossoms. That's the image I remember. White flakes of ash on blood red roses.

I remember exactly how I felt then, and still feel now. There's a very perverse beauty in a fire. It's an exquisitely beautiful assertion of nature's phenomenal power. It reminds us that we are mere mortals and that nature can still trump us on every account. It's hostile and violent but even in our fear and anger towards its seemingly pointless destruction we have to feel a certain reverence for it.

Even as I say that, there is still incredible sadness in our hearts today as we hear more and more reports of destruction and loss of life in Victoria and New South Wales.

Please, keep your thoughts and hearts with the 500 firefighters that have been working 16 hour shifts overnight, trying to combat the 50 or more blazes that speckle the East, as well as with those who have lost their homes and loved ones overnight.

Please, if you are in Australia (or in fact anywhere around the world) you can lend your support in the following ways:

- Donating to the Rural Fire Service (http://www.bushfire.nsw.gov.au/) or via the Victorian Fire Hotline (180 2211 180 2211)
-Sponsoring NSW Fire Brigades.
- Encouraging and supporting volunteer fire fighters and becoming a volunteer fire fighter yourself.
- Donating to State Disaster Relief in Victoria and NSW.
- Donating blood as soon as possible if you are a registered donor.
- Observing the TOTAL FIRE BAN, including not smoking or chucking your butts outside.

Volunteer fire fighters have gone out into fire zones after losing their own homes and loved ones. Would that we could all show such selflessness and bravery.

Please keep residents and fire fighters in Rural Australia in your thoughts and prayers.

Sunday in Pictures

Good morning, beautiful flowers from a beautiful boy. Good morning fresh fruit! Good morning beautiful Sunday morning!

A feast of thick crunchy toast, antipasto and other delicious things I found in the fridge.

And of course my mum's fantastic (yumyumyumyumyum) Greek Salad.

And here comes the darling flower-bearer's requisite appearance in Sunday, doing his newspaper crossword... I must say I find there to be something so wonderfully intimate and endearing in that image.

I decided to go swimming at the beach... I can't go for a week without being with the ocean, it's so silly. So we packed our beach bags and waited impatiently to get there.

A sweet little fabric flower wrapped around my belt-loop made my day (and my outfit... heh).

Finally we got to the beach. I look like I've been swimming in this picture but it is in fact because my sister poured a bottle of water over my head. Still, it was so wonderful to be on the sand again. I was so so very excited to go swimming with my goggles and look at all the amazing fish that live in Clovelly (there are a family of Blue Groper that are like big beautiful puppy dogs under the sea).

Alas, it was not to be... as I first stepped out into the water I noticed something bobbing on top of the water. It was a bluebottle.

FUCK. That is so annoying.

For anyone who is unfamiliar, bluebottles are fucking horrible little stinging (for lack of a better word) jellyfish that sit on the surface of the water waiting to sting the shit out of people who are dumb or unlucky enough to swim through their path. My mum tells horror stories about big dirty long ones that wrapped themselves around her leg when she was young. They're not life-threatening but they are incredibly painful. And there's never just one - if you see one you can bet your life there are a thousand more blobbing towards you.

Basically, when you see one, you get out of the water. So there goes that great beach adventure. Poo.

The funny thing about bluebottles is that they have no choice in who they sting - they have no muscles or motor skills, they are just a pouch of air that floats on the water's surface and a tangle of blue tentacles that stretch out below. They don't attack, they just float where the sea takes them. Tomorrow morning the beach will be covered with them - they'll wash up on the beach and die, turning dark as they dry up in the sun. Wouldn't it be horrible to have that little control? One thing's for sure, when you're at the very bottom of the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation, you're a fucking bluebottle. Poor bastards. Still, get the hell away from me.

After our failed swimming expedition we returned home where I cooked my weekly meal. This week it was Emily's delicious Cherry Pilaf, with lovely firm grape tomatoes and beans.

Followed by DESERT PIZZA. Banana/Apple with caramel sauce. Oh my goodness. Death and heaven all in one.

Have happy weeks ahead, my loves!

Sunday in Pictures

Sunday began with tea, ricotta and jam toast, and a plum.

... sitting across from lovely Roman as he reads his paper (such a ritual ever since he got a free student subscription!)

Then we went to Manly, which I must say is not my favourite part of the east coast, but the light was just perfect on the almost-stormy summer day.

There's something very theraputic about the rocking of the waves as they come in, something so lovely and complimentary in the steely blue ocean against the frothy white foam...

I followed my lover over the rocks...
(feeling like some sort of amphibious fairy girl as I hopped over the wet stones)
I reminded my darling how silly and sweet he makes me feel by writing our names into the sand... it really was a very perfect little adventure for young lovers.

There is a certain aesthetic poetry in the lines and contours one finds at the cusp of earth and sea, I think.

Whether they're man-made...
..natural...
... or a crystalline mixture of both.

One finds all sorts of treasures at the seaside.
And some fascinating little creatures in its rock pools.

For me, there is nowhere like the coastline. It's the perfect place to sit and contemplate your next move...

.. or simply to gaze out at the supreme majesty of God's creation.

Moonlight Cinema

Five reasons to offer the Moonlight Cinema your patronage:

1. Beautiful sunsets behind the screen...
2. The wonderful company of friendly pirates (with matching shoes).

3. Colourful characters sitting near you (in fairness we did go for Rocky Horror...)

4. Glasses of Rosé out of plastic glasses...

5. Did I mention the sunsets...?

I love the sea.

There is nothing quite as wonderful as the ocean on a burning hot summer day.
I spent the other day beach-hopping with my beautiful pink hibiscus sister...

... and ferny orange hibiscus cousin.

Balmoral baths are a favourite. Lilly and Roman and I took turns jumping off the jetty.

And I was very happy with Roman, who likes beaches about as much as a cat would, for his swimming and sand sitting. Roman good boy.

There's something about sticky wet swimmers, sandy feet and burned shoulders that just feels right. Do you like my ocean coloured nailpolish?

Summer!

It's the first day of summer! This means summer dresses! Yay!

... if anyone's noticed how severely I've been abusing exclamation marks recently, I'd like to explain that it has something to do with taking more vitamins.

Sidebar: If you're a woman who gets bad crampies or semi-homicidal mood swings or itchy/blotchy/spotty skin, I highly recommend Evening Primrose Oil, which I take as 2 or 3 capsules every day. I cannot tell you how much it makes my life easier.

Anyway, back to summer.

SUMMER!

Sunday in Pictures

Firstly, let it be said that the weekend and the sunlight calls for Watermelon.
Succulent.
As can probably be gleaned from my many pictures, I am a great fan of sitting in Victoria Park with friends. And such beautiful friends I have. They really brighten up and chill out an otherwise hectic existence.

I live for the love of dappled light and sticky humid grass and golden green trees and summer freedoms, but mostly thanks for daylight savings and the exquisite sunsets I can watch every day...