Overheard

The train leaves the platform. After sitting silently for a while, a woman looks up from her newspaper and says to her friend, "It says here that 90% of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century because of industrial fishing."

Her friend looks up in dismay.

The woman continues. "Only 10% of the whole world's tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skates and flounder are left. In the whole world! That's it—I'm never eating tuna again."

"Are you serious?" Her friend says. "I'm going to eat as much as I can before it's all gone."

Sharing Food

It's my niece Indigo's 9th birthday today and to celebrate she had some friends over for a slumber party last night. I went over to hang out with them for a while. What a great age 9 is — so mature yet still so gorgeously unselfconscious.

For dinner they each dressed half a homemade pizza base with their favourite toppings. Unfortunately I couldn't stick around for the eating as I had my own dinner to get home to.

It was my turn to cook, and on the way home from the party I was busy planning what I was going to make. But it turned out all I made were ooh and aah sounds as PJ had surprised me with this delicious home grown, home caught, home cooked meal.

The greens are all from our garden — silverbeet, spinach, broccoli, snow peas, sugar snap peas, spring onion, spearmint, wild rocket, broad bean leaves, oregano and parsley. The Redfin (English Perch) was caught by yours truly in the local lake the day before, and the lemon was gifted by some friends.

I like what David Graeber says in his book Possibilities:

Sexual relations, after all, need not be represented as a matter of one partner consuming the other; they can also be imagined as two people sharing food.

Fish Out of Water

Today was the first sunny day we've had since we returned from Newcastle, and funnily enough, it was the first day since we've been home that I have felt properly grounded.

We had a pretty packed schedule for a Sunday, the majority of which was spent at a Family Fishing Festival organised by the Department of Primary Industries, at a beautiful local lake. It was a really fantastic event, which is pretty surprising considering it was a government initiative.

Highlights of the day included:

Watching Tonia Todman cook fish a dozen ways.

Laughing at Flathead Fred.

Having sea star balloons made for us.

Attending a fishing workshop.

Making new friends.

Learning how to cast off.

And taking our fresh booty home to cook for our supper.

Here are the fish we caught, before we caught them. (The lake was restocked with hundreds of fish throughout the day.)

You might think us slightly silly for our excitement every time we felt a tug on our line when we could have just grabbed a fish from the bucket and voilà. But really, where's the fun in that??

Floating

We spent the afternoon down at the lake again today; swimming, reading, listening to the Hottest 100 playing on a nearby stereo.

Doesn't this look like heaven? I love that this is practically our backyard.

These three girls floated by on their cloud and I had to snap a photo.

Ghost Nets

A few days ago I read Donovan Hohn's wonderful essay, Moby-Duck: Or, the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood.

In it, he talks about high-sea drift nets that were banned by the UN in 1992.

They were nets with a mesh size of about four inches, but they were, like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s, and if you do the math they were filtering all the water in the upper fifty feet every year. Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it clearly could not go on.

Despite the UN's moratorium on the them, nearly half of these ghost nets are still out there, abandoned.

What happens is, the nets keep catching animals, and then the animals die, and then after a while, the nets get old, and they roll up on a coral reef, and the waves roll it along like a big avalanche ball, killing everything in its path.

I read the article three days ago on the morning I visited my grandmother, who has Alzheimer's. Occasionally she makes sense, but for the most part she talks as though she's reciting a Gertrude Stein poem.

When she does make sense, she doesn't really make sense. Her mouth forms words that remind me of things she used to say, might have said, could have said, would have said. I imagine her consciousness like a ghost net, bobbing willy nilly on forgotten seas.

I charter a little row boat and paddle out into her depths until I reach such an expanse of netting. Amongst all the flotsam debris I find solid remembrances. 

On closer inspection, once I have returned to shore, I am unable to determine if what I have netted are my memories of her, weathered by months of deterioration, or her memories of me, suffocated by the barnacles of her illness.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Gone Fishin'

To Market, to Market

Before I departed the city and moved to these hills I would often come up and stay with my sister K and her family. My favourite thing to do on a Sunday was walk around the market that even bustles in the winter months.

When I moved up here I would ride my bike there; my basket brimming with perishables for the week on the downhill home.

When PJ and I first got together he was working weekends and I would roam the market alone, pining to walk the aisles with him arm in arm, like so many of the touristing couples who visit.

This morning we three rode bikes and skateboards to the market. The journey homeward was a little more slow going as we had kites and new fishing rods to contend with.

We didn't have much luck catching fish at the lake, though I managed to catch up on some reading and to catch some ZZZZs in the quiet of the late afternoon.