NetDynam 2.0

I can’t help it—when I see LHR being attached to my baggage, I get a feeling which is hard to explain. A sense of romance, of promise, of something bigger than me creeps into my mind. It isn’t something you explain in words, but the feeling is there, from just those letters, by themselves, intimating I am going somewhere of great significance. This feeling does not come from seeing the letters SYD either, even though it means I will be going home. It might evoke these feelings if the code for SYD was instead KFS for Kingsford Smith, similar to NY’s main airport being JFK. It does not come when I see NRT, although those letters also speak to me of excitement, visual interest, a world of wonder and possibilities to come. No, it is LHR which creates a special sense. A sense of history and staid conservancy overlaid with memories and feelings from the late 20th century when London was the centre of the cultural universe for a young me interested in fashion, music, and art. It means the place where Concorde regularly took off and landed, and the place which handles the highest frequency of air traffic in the world. It means I am travelling to the capital of the English-speaking world, a cornucopia of a place, a multicultural circus of a place, an old-fashioned, hip-hopping, vibrant and miserable place.



P’s brother had arranged to pick us up at 2.30 pm, since our plane was due at 2. We got out of the airport formality area in super-quick time, and we sat down to wait at the meeting point because P was sure his brother would assume we’d be more than half an hour getting through immigration and customs. But we weren’t. So P decides to call him on the mobile. Luckily the airport and the UK in general still has not uprooted all their public phones—as they’ve done in Finland for example—and I came with a small supply of coin of the realm. But brother’s mobile phone number would not connect. Eventually we worked out that P had been using the same number as he’d used to call from overseas, but in-country one is meant to append a zero to the beginning of the number. By then, it was too late—during the train of failed attempts, the phone had already swallowed all the coin I had brought. After an hour of waiting, we are greeted by P’s brother and the three nieces. They hug us happily and insist on ice-cream while we are there.

On the drive back to their house—via Southall for a walk and a visit to a favourite Pakistani restaurant—the pale green of the trees and bursting blooms on all the prunus reminded me of the time I’d flown into London in 1979 at a just slightly later time of year. I’d left a few weeks before Easter and London was its usual cold yellow-grey self, dismal and all closed in. I travelled through Europe until I’d reached Greece, which was warm, dry, and a sandy pale washed-out colour. I remember descending through the lid of London, that almost permanent grey cloud cover it seems to sport year round, and suddenly below me was a great expanse of green, lots of different types and textures of green. I took the tube back from Heathrow, the railway cuttings covered in green—when before I’d left they’d had been brown and damp and lifeless. Right now, as I write, each variety of deciduous tree is sprouting, some in full leaf, others just pushing buds out of the end of twigs, still others like the magnolia and prunus heavy with shades of pink or white, fluffy or stiff. My favourite bush, the spiraea also covered in their tiny white flowers in long sprays along the length of their arms.

When we foolishly stepped into a bookshop in the shopping centre we visited, I saw a copy of Collins Tree Guide for the trees of Britain and Europe, lavishly illustrated, as they say, with coloured diagrams to make tree identification easy in the field. Even though I intend to go to no fields, I am already noticing mature and juvenile forms of a variety of different species—although real ability to differentiate in the matter of European trees will never be mine. The guide tells me that in fact the UK has only sixty different native species, due to successive ice ages, and a lack of time between the last ice age and the flooding of the North Sea. It lists the most common trees found in the region, and lets the reader know where the variety originated and when it was first planted in the UK. It astounds me to learn that some individual specimens (of Taiwan Cypress for example) can be up to 3,000 years old, but that there are few mature individuals left and certainly in the UK, they do not grow very large—or else, having only been planted here since 1910, there are few old enough to display completely mature features.

One of my main aims in buying the book was to disabuse myself of the impression of the flora of Finland, which is that it is lacking in variety. ‘Only birch trees, firs and spruces’ I said disdainfully to a fellow gardener when asked about the local plant life in Finland. But I neglected the larch, the pine, the cypress, the juniper, the prunus, the poplars, and more. I am hoping that when I get back to Finland the real first signs of spring will have started to appear in the branches of the trees, much the same as it is in full swing here. It is then I will start to notice differences in the local population of tree species.

P’s brother J’s house is totally wired. It is a household usually of six: the parents, the three girls all in their teens, and a live-in au pair. On the third morning we were there, I came into the kitchen—where there is the only large and clear table in the house— to find P, his brother, and two of the nieces all sitting around the table each with their own laptops open, working away. Our advent meant that the wireless internet had been turned back on for the whole house, and so the elder two girls were taking advantage of the fact that they were able to connect at any time they chose instead of the regulated times of day. The three daughters also each have an iPod of various sizes and ages, and each of them has a laptop as well. There appear to be at least three other in-use desktops in the house—one in eldest sister’s room, and another in the lounge room for public use, plus another in J’s study.

We were put up in J’s study downstairs, and that room’s large desk is covered in computers and their accoutrements—two desktops, a laptop, a printer, an external hard-drive, extension plugs and leads, keyboards, mice, and a host of other detritus. In the kitchen on the sideboard and above that on top of a cupboard, is housed the centre of operations. Here we find a telephone and a charger, a multi-plug device whose function I have not ascertained, a hard drive, and the wireless modem, as well as innumerable wires and extension power supplies. J is a consulting surgeon and needs to keep medical records up to date—both at home and at work—and so back-up is essential all over. For two days, three of his laptops are lined up on the sideboard while difficulties in the files are sorted out. Then another two computers are brought online in his office, and he works around me grumbling about software and computers not doing what he wants as he moves back and forth one to the other, as I sit at his desk using my own laptop.

Everyone in the house has a mobile phone. Some are hand-me-downs when another person gets a new one. If someone’s phone goes bung, there is much consternation. J has a hands-free in the car so that he can talk while driving. We are lent various phones when we go shopping with the family. Once P is given charge of his sister-in-law’s iPhone, and P cannot stop playing with it and calling them up. He brings up the browser function and comments ruefully that one cannot make a selection, the screen is so small. I offer the possibility of a slender pen selector, which is not there. He says this would still not be minute enough to click on a link. Luckily, I am mac-enhanced, and I say that there will be possibilities entailed, and I try the trick of widening my thumb and forefinger on the screen, whereupon it enlarges the required amount. Voila, I say—or words to that effect—they are ahead of you in the small computer business, P dear.

The day after we arrive, the middle niece, S, begins her 16th birthday party. The closest of her friends arrive the night before the actual party for a sleepover. Before they get there, we go out in one of the three cars they have to a large bulk-buy supermarket, Cosco, where we put so many items in the cart that it needs to be pushed by one person and pulled by another. One of the necessary things on the sleep-over shopping list is cookie dough. We can’t get it at Cosco, and so they go out again to procure it after we arrive back at the ranch.

The food is squirreled away in three different refrigeration devices, two of which are in the converted garage which serves as the laundry and storage area. In the laundry there is a constant flow of washing activities. The washing machine is always on or full, and so is the dryer. In addition some of the clothing is dried on a clothes horse arrangement set up in the big lounge room at the back of the house. I keep thinking how expensive a house like this would be to run. When the girlfriends arrive, they repair to the big lounge room behind the kitchen, where the DVD home theatre device is set to run. The four of them occasionally emerge to run upstairs and talk or make food—including the mixing of the cookie dough. The next day about ten more girls arrive. I see them intermittently as they walk back and forth and about, but we are not disturbed at all. They are lively and talkative and laugh a lot, but it is not disturbing or overly raucous.

On the Friday evening, P and I and the eldest niece M, accompanied by her friend, catch the train into Leicester Square to meet her other friends and attend a comedy club. Even though it was Good Friday—or perhaps because it was— there were throngs of people in the square. A carnival atmosphere. While P and I walk off and have dinner in Chinatown nearby, where we found a very good Japanese café, she goes off to meet friends, to meet up again later at the Moon Under Water, in time for the 9pm show across the square. We see Inky Jones who is quick-witted and amusing, and although his humour teeters on the edge of my poor-taste boundary, his cheeky confident attitude managed to carry it off. His chief stock in trade was to find members of the audience with attributes he could use to tease them with. Unfortunately, not many people volunteered that they were from Australia that night, and P became the focus of some of the running jokes for that show.

The eldest niece goes to school in London and knows her way round the underground like a native. Once more I relive past lives, and feel somewhat elated travelling on the tube again. I see analogies in the warnings issued to passengers to “Mind the Gap”.



J’s wife S is Pakistani, and family stretches to include brothers and wives of cousins and in-law’s cousins and their children also–so there are usually visitors in the house and a lot of food. While we are there another couple who are in their 20’s and live in Belgium come to stay for a few days. They are old friends of the family in some way—the girl has been visiting S and J since she was a child. The mattress behind the sofa bed we are sleeping on is pulled out and put into the music room for them. At other times, other visitors appear, including the sister of a former au pair, S’s younger sister with her husband and baby, and a cousin and her husband. There is always food being prepared or cleaned up afterward, and the nieces are very good on the tooth. Of course S is also a very good cook, and produces various curries and other delicacies while we are there so that we begin to feel our trousers tightening.

We take a ride into London with J and S one morning when S has to go into Harley Street to see her specialist. It’s a great morning in the city, grey light and weak sunshine on great wads of trees and bushes in various stages of budding up and out. The variety and abundance of plant-life creates in me a strange sense of ease and excitement. Spring is in the air. I never feel this excitement in Australia—in fact, I quite dislike Spring there, as it only means less rain, and more fickle temperatures until summer when we will bake or broil. In Japan, many people expressed a liking for Spring, but it is a melancholy time there I feel, dwelling as it does on the ephemeral, a forced noting of the transience in all things, enjoying the day because tomorrow is one day closer to the grave. Of course I subscribe to this view anyway, and thus I do not need Spring for it to be made relevant to me. Indeed, in Japan, the ephemera of life is somewhat overwhelming. Too much wabisabi is not such a good thing for me.

Every city I’ve become attached to in some way has a predominant colour for me in my mind, and for London, the colour it exudes is yellow-grey. Most cities in Japan are silver grey while New York City is a brown. Sydney is blue and white due mainly to the sky, clouds, and water. Anyway, on this morning in London, it seemed as if the yellow-grey were being slowly out done by the encroaching green and pale pinks of the blossoms. Everywhere there are plants growing—it seems like a jungle to one who is used to sparse growth at home, and has just come from the still wintering climate and tundra-like aspects of Finland. We walk about the city of London all day, stopping in this shop and that to look at clothing and catch the busses to old stamping grounds, stop for lunch in a café in Chelsea, remarking on the food that it is not as good as we’d expect to find in a similar establishment in Sydney, and eventually get tired feet at about the time the early evening movies begin. We attend the Trocadero in Picadilly, and see “Duplicity” with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The best we can say for it is that it passes the time pleasantly enough, and that we’d be very happy to watch it late at night on TV. Indeed, I confess to P that I preferred the movie I saw a day or so earlier with the youngest nieces, a girlie move called “17 Again” with a cutsie-pie young Zac Efron. During that movie at least I emitted a couple of loud cackles.

We are lent S&J’s old Toyota in order to drive to Birmingham for a couple of days. I want to go there now even though we are coming back to the UK to stay longer in Birmingham next month. This is because one of my friends from post-grad days at the university has now completed her studies and will go back to Korea a few days before we get back next time. I’d like to see her before she leaves. It’s been more than three years since we left Birmingham anyway. All along the motorway, green and green and green. It is somewhat incredible to me. In Brum, we stay with friends just around the corner from where we used to live, and on the morning of our leaving, we walk through the park and along the streets we used to walk when we lived there, eventually passing our old house and noting how big the tree out the front has grown… a eucalypt, E. Debeuzvillai, meant to be moderate growing and not so big. In the front garden of our old house it has burgeoned, and so has been severely cut back, leaving the big thick beautifully-patterned trunk, as fat as an elephant’s leg, sporting lovely big leathery leaves. It evidently likes the climate of Birmingham, and when I ordered it from the Eucalyptus nursery in Wales , I noted that it had been ‘tested’ in temperatures down to minus ten degrees centigrade out on the moors.

The next day we are back on the plane again bound for Helsinki. Not for the first time I remark to myself and P that I hate flying, it is unnatural and uncomfortable and I do not believe such big hunks of metal can ever get off the ground. I am reading Scientific American regarding the difference between black holes and their cloaking event horizons and naked singularities which can sometimes be seen since their make-up is not homogenous, thus some light and other matter is sometimes emitted from them—according to latest calculations. I find this easier to take than taking off in a 757. In our bags for the return journey we have secreted some important foodstuffs—a tube of Vegemite, and two large packets of Yorkshire Gold leaf tea, a nice hearty blend and one that has spoiled us for any other sort of tea. When we arrive back at E’s flat, these are the first items we get out of the bag and try: a nice cup of tea and some toast and vegemite.