Rowan Martin-Hughes

Walking home tonight, as the frost began to form on the wet ground. The grass sparkling with a thousand tiny reflections of light. So shiny - an excellent bed of stars! Or at least that's what a man I passed seemed to think, lying in the wet grass and laughing as he chatted happily into his phone.

I lay claim to being a good problem solver. However, showing my mathematician heritage, that really only extends to seeing the existence of a solution, never mind the implementation.

That's not great for getting work done, because when I can see that it's possible to finish writing a chapter, well, that's "solved". But what's worse is that I will think "I'm thirsty", see the glass of water on my desk, think "ah, problem solved" and carry on with what I was doing. Only to repeat the process once again every few minutes. Eventually I actually realise that the water in the glass is the same water as was in the glass before and my problem is not solved, but that can take hours.

Brilliant.

Walking in the dark and the rain, yellow lights turning the eddies and puddles into rippling patterns of gold and black. The next morning the most verdant green as life asserts itself for the briefest of days, before winter arrives and the crackling autumn leaves crunch for an entirely different reason, frozen in a thin carpet of ice.

What will today look like?



BREAKING NEWS: Insipid! Grey!

The letter "D".

Medieval merchant guilds.
Obesity in rats.
Bread making machines.
Rehabilitation of psychopaths.
Vietnamese tea houses.
The 1973 Group Facilitators Guide.
The United States power grid.
Astronauts.
The sexual habits of bonobos.

Waves of gold and amber strewn across the sky.

Watched a quite pleasing movie about an isolated buddhist pagoda floating in the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Korea. The scenery was beautiful, and it was one of those almost entirely silent and still experiences.

The highlight though, was the older monk who wins the award for most creative use of animals. Using a rooster on a rope to retrieve a boat was good, but was entirely trumped by holding a (surprisingly cooperative) cat and using its tail for a paintbrush in the course of writing a Very Long message on the deck of the pagoda.

Normally Canberra is so crisp, with sharp, well defined edges and a sense of purpose, if not meaning. But this morning a dreamy impressionist blur in a most unusual morning mist. Thick, heavy, wet, and so silent. A wide halo for every streetlight.

A long Easter weekend, so once again the only lonely souls to be spied in Canberra are those who drew the short straw and had to stay behind to maintain a facade of open retailers.

I'm ready to move on, but I'm sure I'll miss the solitude of this place once I'm somewhere new.

There's been a bunch of times over the past 4 years where it's felt like everything is crumbling around me, that everyone's lives are falling apart and I can only watch and listen in silence and try to say the right thing at the moment when all is darkest. I guess it's a tumultuous age to be.

Again recently I've found myself ending most conversations with "it's all going to be okay". But it's different, I can really mean it. My friends are mature capable people and their problems *will* sort themselves out. It *will* all be okay.

Maybe I'm just riding on the tide of love from a wonderful friend's wedding today (and eating my weight in wedding cake) at the moment. Maybe it's seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in my little world of my own phd and what comes after. Maybe it's that objectively I seem to be in a tighter situation right now than most, but I know I'll be fine, so I trust that others will be too. Maybe it's that most of the things are fears and memories rather than current uncontrollable disasters.

Either way...

I just want you to know...

You'll be fine! :)

So the thesis continues to come along in fits and spurts, a page here and there, ideas for further work there and here, all that sort of thing.

Now, when people have read my work I've copped my fair share of criticism for being generally unclear, and not explaining diagrams all that well. I just want anyone who reads anything by me to know that it could be worse.

I was browsing through yet ANOTHER paper that approaches things from another entirely different perspective, because, eh, that's what I do. I came across this beautiful diagram.



I.. uh... well, what would you guess it represents?

As much as I liked 4:13 Dream, it doesn't actually take top honours for the year.

The National do, with Boxer. One of many truly excellent recommendations from a new friend, this album became a favourite largely on the back of the song Brainy. According to last.fm that was my most listened to track of the past 12 months, though it fails to take into account the many many other listens at uni or on my mp3 player.

It's a funny song for me to like in a way, because the lyrics are all creepy stalker... but my brain just picks up some melancholy yearning, which as usual I can't resist. At the same time the drums just draw me in and never let go. Along with From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea by The Cure, it's become my favourite traveling song. Sad songs for leaving people behind, but holding onto the moment a little longer...

( Other albums behind a cut )

Of course, it didn't matter what time of day we arrived in Trondheim, the sun would still have been shining down on us and allowing a pleasant walk around. It was very surreal not getting any clue from the sky, and seemed very arbitrary to see people out and about at some times of day and not others. I absolutely loved it.

Clearly it was pretty popular with the locals too. Everyone except bus drivers seemed to generally be in a constant good mood brought on by all that light (unlike the suicide inducing other end of the year...). Though there was a certain... smugness I felt like I was picking up from Norwegians. I couldn't really blame them though.

The first day and a half was spent doing the touristy thing in the city. The botanic gardens were first up, and as soon as I turned my camera on for the first time in Europe it died very thoroughly indeed with the lens halfway extended. Aww. The ancient gothic style cathedral we visited at the "end" of the day was definitely more my style than the gaudy Catholic cathedrals I'd seen previously.

It was a good thing I got some looking around done on those days though, as I wasn't going to have any more free time during or after the conference. I feel just a bit disappointed I didn't get to see any of the countryside or fjords in the end though.

Time to talk The Cure, 4:13 Dream!

It turns out that a large portion of the albums I've bought this year have in fact been bits of the same one. Starting in May, with 4 singles and then an EP of remixes, before the album eventually surfaced in late October. Unsurprisingly I've rather enjoyed it, although in the end I think having heard the singles a couple of hundred times each before having the full album has hurt my enjoyment of the album as a whole.

Perhaps my favourite songs remain the b-sides of NY Trip and Down Under though. Whimsical and light, lyrics of monkeys and whales and the thoughts that surface in hopeful daydreams.

The real dream begins with the album opener Underneath the Stars. One of their most beautiful and evocative songs. Lying still and looking up at the sky as waves crash nearby ..."Whisper in my ears a dream / We could drift away"... before the less-than-subtle - almost downright rude - fantasies of The Only One.

Being The Cure of course, we couldn't have sunshine all the way. I found it amusing that many reviews latched onto the lyrics of The Reasons Why ..."I won't try to bring you down about my suicide / If you promise not to sing about the reasons why". "Tsk tsk, still being depressing Robert Smith?, they'd say. In an interview he mentioned that many of the lyrics in the song are from a suicide note he received from someone he knew back in the 80s. Gives the song a whole new ironic light... though he never does mention the reasons why.

It is absolutely true that this song and the rest of the album are the same old insecurities The Cure always latches onto though. I'm okay with that. The ways in which we all search for things that aren't really there, that are almost on the edge of our vision, the doubts we have in our dreams, the dreams that make us look twice at something the next day, wonder what could have been, long for always more.

Along the way we have time for a song which is reminiscent of a sea shanty in Sirensong, and a sleazy song about drugs and Snow White "all dressed up in seven ways to please".

It culminates for me with The Scream. An entirely disquieting song which is immediately less pleasant than the rest of the album, drawing me somewhere darker yet irresistible, trying hard to wake up now as the sourness of the dream becomes apparent. Then the frenetic and loud conclusion with It's Over. As this is one of their heaviest songs, you can hardly still be asleep afterwards. Dream over.

Arriving in Trondheim could hardly have been more of a contrast to arriving in Fortaleza. In Brazil we sped past the homeless and their rickshaws at night as music blared from roadside parties around derelict bars. In Norway we arrived in the morning and paid an exorbitant sum of money to get onto the most modern bus I have ever seen, driving past pine forests along perfect roads and through bright tunnels to the small city of Trondheim.

The contrast was there in the people too, in Brazil everyone was always actively friendly and helpful, eager for my possible tourist money. In Norway (and the rest of Europe)... eh, tourists. Arrived at the hotel and found out some spectacular bonuses despite the astronomical cost of accommodation. Buffet breakfasts and dinners - nothing like a spot of pickled herring first thing in the morning, should one choose.

And... WAFFLES! Every afternoon there was a waffle maker and appropriate mixture to be ladled into it, along with cream and delicious jams. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what made me *so* very excited about making waffles. They aren't even something I'd normally seek out... but the freeness and the novelty made them extra tasty!

In a way that was the biggest thing I noticed in Trondheim. While the prices were always ridiculously high, everything one could possibly want was included, and the quality was always good. It cost as much to live like a beggar in Trondheim as to live like a king in Fortaleza, but you got much the same in the end. It's really bizarre that stuff of terrible quality mostly just does not exist in that country, because everybody has enough money that they can afford better.

Still.... nearly AU$20 for a Big Mac (more after our currency crash I expect)? I obviously didn't go for one, but it'd better be crazily better quality than what's on offer here...

A few weeks back someone died on the other side of the world. Not uncommon. Happens every second or two, on average.

I'd never met her, or been within at least about 6000 kilometres of her.

I don't know what she looked like, or even her name, though I'd very likely recognise both. One of many pretty laughing faces.

I know there was a car accident, but I don't know anything about it, or what happened afterwards. Or what is happening now.

Yet I've been keeping her to mind.


So when it comes up at dinner that "isn't X at that conference too?" and the response is "didn't you hear? there was an accident", the world stops for a second. Turns out all is well for human lives if not machines in this case.

But much closer than we'd like.

Dessert concoction is something that generally has eluded me but intrigues me, because baked goods are tasty. Unfortunately those times when I fancy something sweet to munch on tend to be entirely disjoint from those times when I feel like putting the time and effort into baking something.

However, after an embarrassingly lazy performance on the dinner making front (battered fish from the freezer and a simple salad), I opted to experiment a little! Dough of some description rolled thinly and simply wrapped around frozen berries. Pretty much entirely healthy, and very delicious!





Just to show that we don't always try to poison ourselves in this house. ;)

The accompanying photo is of my great-aunt Liza. A less than recent photo, to be sure. Born in Lithuania, and traveled to Australia with her husband and my grandfather as a displaced person after my ancestors fled to Germany to avoid the returning Soviets during the second world war. They hated the term "displaced persons".

I only really started getting to know her in the last couple of years. While visiting her with other relatives they would normally speak in Lithuanian. I naturally assumed we had little to say to each other, and much of what I did hear or have relayed was in the form of complaints about health and the world. What was I thinking? I love complaining about the world too - we had lots in common!


Once I visited her alone we chatted for ages. Aside from hearing about her past (including a disdain for living in Canberra), much of this was disagreeing about politics and matters of immigration and the dangers of society. We both enjoyed it immensely though, I think, as at heart we were both sufficiently cynical to not truly believe what we were saying. A bonding of sorts.

As an aside, I do not forgive television news for having the same effect on her and all of my other older relatives who cannot regularly leave their houses to see the world through their own eyes. To them the world is a dangerous place, with a gang on every corner, murders every night, rampant drug use, and constant disaster. It wasn't like that when they were young, despite living through a war. It isn't now either, but when your only lens is news services, what else can you believe? News is poison.

While her mind remained incredibly sharp, her body was failing though over the past few years. It was awkward at times. As the youngest member of the family I think she (like most of my other relatives) always wanted to do things for me and look after me, going to lengths to make a nice lunch when I did visit. While I'd have loved to do some things for her while I was there I wasn't allowed, while she ordered a helper around instead. But the talking and the company was what I was really there for, I suppose.

The last time I visited was about a week before traveling to Norway and beyond. I held her hand while she told me she was afraid of death. That she wished she believed in something. She promised to be alive when I returned so that I could tell her my impressions of Lithuania, but we both knew it was probably a lie.

When the call came that doctors thought she wouldn't last the day, my mother and I were in the car on the way to airport and headed for Europe. We had said our goodbyes and knew it was coming, so after a last couple of phone calls to relatives there was little to do but switch the phones off and board the plane.

It made for many somber though often enlightening conversations on the flight over as we went over memories and family histories. After a few hours of flight I turned 25, and my birthday lasted for 30 hours as the clocks went back. Quantity over quality.

And that's how the trip to Norway and beyond started...