dreaming

Even though I'm never sure how much I "like" Tim Winton's writing the thing I enjoy most is that Western Australia fills every page, not content to be a background or a landscape but an equal part of each story. So much so that I couldn't have read one of his novels in July or August this year, when homesickness was gnawing at me, but last month with the end of my days in Portugal in sight my driller lent me a few novels including one of Wintons.

The images/memories reading it evoked prepared me for Perth and the sights, smells and sounds which are all around me as I type - the smell of bitumen warmed by summer sun, the easterly blowing leaves along an empty street, the feel of hot bricks burning your bare feet, the humid salty smell of the sea breeze as it comes in on a warm summers evening and those long lazy evenings themselves.

But instead of the present I must finish with the past. When I started this blog I thought the last entry would be full of triumph and revelation, a fitting climax written superbly (unlike these still-clumsy attempts!). Instead because my last months in Portugal were taken up with work and much packing (!) free time meant collapse so this blog slowly faded into the shadows, read by a dwindling minority. It might be a shame but maybe I am still precocious in dreaming of grandeur, regardless there doesn't seem to be many other routes I could have taken with it.

It was also spent saying goodbye to people there, and while that wasn't new/different enough to communicate it was also very special. Friendships made across cultures are valuable not because those people are your closest friends, since true friendship requires depth of understanding, but because to even be friends you have made a significant effort to cross those cultural and language barriers and in being friends you are able to learn and teach and make impacts greater than those you get from friends inside your own culture (or subculture). And maybe thats where this blog might endure, as some sort of window on my life at home. We will see whether I can make time for it, or whether it remains the best outlet for me. Whatever I do thanks for reading over the last 2 years and I hope you have a fantastic 2008.