Footsteps...

for Knots in the String.

‘The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.’ Mary Catherine Bateson.

I don’t mean to harp on memories with each newsletter I write but today the weirdest memories came coursing back.

I had cause to attend an appointment in a building I used to work in in the 1970’s. Of course, it’s been updated since the heady days when it was ABC Broadcast House in Hobart.

ABC Radio was broadcast from Elizabeth Street, occupying the whole Art Deco-ish building.

The halls were floored with linoleum, the walls a 1970’s kind of cream and lit by rows of 60’s fluorescent tubes, at odds with the original style.

It was a rabbit-warren. Rural, Sport, News, Announcers, Religion, Education, Drama, Continuity, Tech Services, Publicity – curious and adventurous departments that with politicians hatred of an independent nationally-funded media, have been erased from the face of the earth.

The lifts were antiquated cages that would rattle up and down and it was quicker to race from your own floor to a studio at broadcast time than to hope for a lift to get you there. And trust me, we always raced into the studio minutes or seconds before the hour.

Once, I was stuck in a lift with Prog. D. Radio (Programme Director Radio), the pay, a pay clerk and a security man. An hour and a few half-floors later, we were finally released and everyone dutifully lined up for their delayed pay-packets.

TV was in a building across town – a sixties building with a distinctive mural across its front. The sinuously beautiful artwork is now a heritage-listed piece, originally created by George Davis, father of internationally renowned actress, Essie Davis. (I’m a HUGE fan of Phryne Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Beautiful Essie Davis is a Tasmanian.) All former ABC employees remember the mural with fondness – it defines a hugely exciting period in broadcasting, when women were starting to come to the fore as journalists and presenters and documentary and current affairs TV was coming into its own.

In our case, in Rural, any TV doco would be edited and produced in TV House and so the programme-makers would dash across town in either a hastily called cab or running fast along the streets to settle into TV House for the day, with a deadline.

If I was on the weather roster (Rural presenters were all educated at the Weather Bureau before we were allowed on air), I’d finish researching rural affairs for the next day and gallop to the commissionaire in TV House who had received all the printed detail from the bureau, (now called the BOM – Bureau of Meteorology), go into TV 1 (the cavernous news studio), sneak into the Weather Corner,

set up the maps, take the supers to Presentation,

then go to Makeup and be tarted up (men too), write up a short intro and learn it (I could never do off-the-cuff) and then ‘hang around’ until weather time of 7.25 PM.

(Sorry, image very blurred but it’s a very old pic!)

So that’s the background to today’s event.

I left the appointment, turned out of the building, walked down one street, up another and across a third and suddenly realised that I was treading those former footsteps. Completely unconsciously, my feet had headed off and with each step, experiences that had been hidden in some cobwebbed part of the memory cabinet came flooding back.

It was an astonishing realisation that sometimes, one only needs a very small key to unlock that cabinet.

Something as innocuous as a footstep…

Bookshelf:

Still reading Marillier’s Song of Flight. I’m slow because I only read it whenever I’m in town for the night.

For the rest of the time, up the coast at Beach House, I read on Kindle and am knee-deep in mantras and dharma with HCC, His Holiness’s Cat, as I read Awaken the Kitten Within.

There is a word in Tibetan buddhism called niyati (fate) and I really do believe that its fate that this book is in my life right at this very moment. Curious…

In audio, still with Cornwell’s Stonehenge but suspect I’m almost at the end.

Watching:

The latest series of Heartland. I’ve been a devotee since the get-go.

Bridgeton. Pseudo-Jane Austen on multi-coloured steroids. I did laugh a lot at the flagrant anachronisms. But good fun!

Gardeners’ World – I feel so privileged to be able to watch this wonderfully informative and beautifully produced TV series. The fact that Monty Don presents it is little short of wonderful.

There’s been quite a few other shows but I’ll list them next time – bit busy today.

I want to watch the last series of The Last Kingdom but am not in the right frame of mind just now.

Boredom Busters:

Baking triple choc cookies. Nothing much else from the oven as Life is convoluted and I haven’t time.

Finished the load of hearts for the Mental Health Units and delivered and am back to my needlework canvas glasses case. Love doing this. I don’t have to count the squares but I count them anyway – it’s a kind of meditation and suits the times.

Ballet. I so love what we’re doing. After barre, we step out pas de basques, gallopes, and graceful waltz steps. But my heart sings when we do the beautiful Révérance

at the end of our class. You would see dancers doing on stage as they thank their audience and the orchestra. We are thanking our teacher, after which we burst into spontaneous applause – always a fabulous time in the studio. I come home happy.

Walking. Walking twice a day with Dog is de rigeur with mindfulness front and centre.

Gardening. Pruning back, digging out, creating a new bed in the Matchbox Garden in the city.  Off to the plant nursery to have a SPEND-UP!

(Post spend-up I have just dug for England in the garden and whilst it looks patchy with small new plants, I know they will grow and fill the beds.)

Mostly, I’m just happy to be alive. To share my life with family and friends and to have time to appreciate all that is kind and good. It’s Yin and Yang. My life is filled with so much to be grateful for and then I see the news reports from Ukraine or experience the pain of someone close to me and I feel the scales tipping. It’s why I take time to revel in the joy of ‘a fortunate life’.

Do you agree?

Cheers all.