home sweet home

There is nothing like home. You can imagine the people’s plight on being stuck renting on a 6month lease basis. I can’t understand how anyone can cheerfully change their home being at the mercy of a 6 month lease.

Yet, before we came out here, renting was the norm and most people would spend their entire lives just in one property.  I ‘earth-googled’ our old address back in The Hague. Sure enough it is as if we left it yesterday. The street is unchanged, the doors and windows still the same, and not a brick has changed. No doubt, all those living there are renting the same as when we lived there. Perhaps, central heating and bathrooms have been added and kitchens with hot water. We lived on the top floor. At the bottom floor there were gardens and many of those lucky bottom dwellers kept chickens. A city still had chickens and veggie scraps were collected each week by horse and cart.

Yet, going back to Revesby whose architecture is far more recent, all has changed and our house hardly recognizable, the walls covered with colour bond weather board and a solid terra cotta tiled roof instead of the cement tiles that were put on when built originally… Many of the houses have had stories added, some with columns holding up little Romanesque like triangle bits of roofing or other odd bits of architecture.

Coming across some old photos of my first year here in Revesby, I can hardly believe how time has passed, and yet, I don’t think I have hurried the years unnecessarily.  Have I stood still but the houses and surroundings changed? Would this, not having moved from Holland, have produced the reverse?

You’re getting old with retrospection a sure sign, many would argue, as if years ahead for them are still numbered in multiple of decades. Yet, reading the obituaries’, it is not uncommon for people to cark it quite happily at the age some of us are in now. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Cheer up, old man. The best is yet to come.

Painting by Lehan Ramsay

Just look at Lehan’s lovely painting of the Pig’s Arms and The Pink Drink. It graces our wall but should be hanging in Canberra’s National Gallery.

It would cheer up anyone.