JoeyJoJo: Farewell and hello

Well it's farewell to Old England and farewell to my pals there too.

I don't think I'll ever be able to repay the kindness that people have shown me over the last few weeks, (well, months and years really) as I packed up an entire existence to get on the plane to Singapore and now Melbourne.

Bye Cath, thanks for kicking my arse into gear gently and kindly, thanks for dealing with the huge pile of paperwork, oh yes and thanks for cleaning the oven.

Bye Louie, thanks for being my confidante & taking the baton of care from me for Mary Ludbrook

Bye Kate my lovely lovely friend and thank you for ..

treating me on YOUR birthday to tea at the Ritz.

Bye Robyn & Rob, thanks for your tender loving care of me AND for clearing out the garage.

Everyone offered help to pack boxes and yet packing a box was the one thing that I couldn't let anybody else do as every last thing, every single piece of paper had to be looked at and decided upon and I was the only person who could do that ... What do you do with wooden spoons when moving to the other side of the world? Or pictures that friends have made for you when you don't have a wall to hang them on. I've culled and stored and culled and stored some more. Luckily Ricardo & I lived quite lightly in our home with loads of furniture just leant to us by friends or found by the side of the road.

All this made me think of Richard packing up his life in Australia just before I met him. I remember the most important thing to him was a tiny wee vase made of metal, slightly dented on one side. He'd won it when he was at primary school and had taken it home proudly to show his Mum. She'd kept it as the precious thing that it was and now I was holding it trying to figure out what to do with it. Then there was the tiny frame of drawings done by Roxi on the back of bank deposit slips when she was small and Richard had been trying to keep her amused while he waited in the queue.

It made me think of the nature of "things" and what really IS precious to us in our lives. That old question of what you would save if the house were burning down. I'm trying desperately to think of it as liberating rather than dissempowering but I feel like a crab with no shell.

I had a dream last night that I was slowly falling down a long square hole, and I could see way down at the bottom a piece of green cloth with cards and dice set up for some kind of gambling game. That pretty much sums up my situation at the moment.

I should be able to feel lucky. Lucky that I can live anywhere in Australia OR Europe, I should feel lucky but I don't. I still feel really sad. There I've said it. No amount of sunshine can make you feel happy again.

I stopped in Singapore for a few days and thought a bit of warmth would do the trick and lull me into a state of relaxation but instead I felt like an exhausted dragonfly with limp new wings emerging from a pool having dragged myself up a waving blade of grass. I made a trip to the new "Gardens by the Bay" & was kind of appalled at the futuristic cleanliness of it all. Not an insect out of place here.No place for an exhausted Odonata.