It is a bit down-at-the-heel these days, having probably lost out to the flash new one at Darling Harbour, but still an excellent place to take an eight-year-old and a five-year-old.

(That’s Manly, Sydney, Australia, should there be any confusion.)

* Stingrays look like they are smiling when viewed from underneath. (e.g. See here.)

* Port Jackson sharks – a gloriously ugly little species – lay amazing egg cases that look and feel like pine cones. This website told me further that: “The egg case is soft when laid by the female. She uses her mouth to wedge the spiraled egg case into a rock crevice where it hardens, and from where one young shark emerges after ten to twelve months.”

Further, they are capable of pushing their bodies out of the water to half their length and moving sideways while doing so, possibly so they can see if there’s a rockpool on the other side of this one.

* Anenomes can’t sting humans because our skins are too thick. The fish that live in a symbiotic relationship with them are universally known as “Nemos” to children. (The ubiquity of Disney.)

* Sea hares are misnamed. They really look, and feel, like slugs (very slimy).

* When a small boy accidentally walks into the ladies’ loo, he will be so embarrassed that he will immediately lock himself into a cubicle in the gents, forcing his female carer to go in there to get him out, and consequently hugely embarrass a couple of teenage boys who then walk in. Unisex loos would solve lots of problems.

It was an interesting day.

Sorry.

Life is a little chaotic at present due to a temporary housing crisis. I want to buy a flat; I have the money to buy the flat; it was all arranged, as was my builder to help put in the necessary new bathroom and kitchen.

But now the owner is not responding to calls from his agent or his solicitor. It is a mystery, and a very irritating one!

… or at least I was, now being back in England, at least in body, and scrambling for a house move on Tuesday. (And the new place isn’t final yet.)

But I did find the perfect plane book: Ursula le Guin’s Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind.

It is really a collection of short stories, broadly in the style of The Left Hand of Darkness, one of my all-time favourite reads, tied together by a delightful conceit:

“It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who … discovered the interplanar technique most of us now used.
Her connecting flight from Chicago to Denver had been delayed by some unspeakable, or at any rate untold, malfunction of the airplane. It was listed as departing at 1:10, two hours late. At 1:55, it was listed as departing at 3:00. It was then taken off the departures list…
The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
She had been sitting for over an hour on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor in a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor in a row of people sitting on blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor when (as she later said), ‘It came to me.’
She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes. [Original itals, p. 3, Orion, London, 2004]
(Don’t you just love that daring use of repetition, entirely typical of Le Guin in its originality of form.)

My favourite “plane” was Asonu, where the people “once past early childhood … speak very rarely to anyone, under any circumstances. They do not write; and unlike mutes, or monks under vows of silence, they do not use any signs or other devices in place of speaking.” Given all of the junk conversations that inevitably assault your ears during travel (I had the misfortune to get a pair of incredibly fat young honeymooners beside me on the Sydney-Singapore leg, whose conversation was positively sickening) that had an obvious attraction.

In a typical dry aside, – the narrator, who often takes a sociological/ anthropological approach – says that the Asonu are peaceful. “No hostile relations between groups are apparent, and in fact no observer has reported seeing adult Asonu fight or quarrel. Arguments are clearly out of the question.” (p. 21)

Many of the other stories take a similar approach, one of course that has a long history, of imagining societies much like our own, except for one significant factor – they might even be labelled “thought experiments”.

There’s the Finthian plane, where “dreams are not private property”, with everyone – and every animal – within a certain radius sharing their REM sleep experiences; the society of the Ansarac, which involves two entirely different lifestyles linked by regular migration; and the Nna Mmoy, with its untranslatable language: “Each syllable is a word, but a word with no fixed, specific meaning, only a range of possible significances determined by the syllables that come before, after or near it.”

Other stories are obviously allegorical, including that of Mahigul, where an utterly pointless war between two cities eventually creates a massive tourist attraction; and the utterly commercialised Great Joy Corporation destinations, including Christmas Island, where it is always Christmas Eve and “the prices are really just as low as Wal-Mart, and a much better selection”, and “Fourth Island”, which features a “reenactment of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima to the Rockets; Red Glare Four-Hour Fireworks Display every night” (p. 124).

Finally the operating corporation was tracked down, banned, and the resorts “now operated by the islanders themselves as a cooperative venture”. The narrator says: “This makes sense, in that the modest subsistence economy of the region was completely destroyed … and cannot be restored overnight … On the other hand, it boggles the mind a bit. Especially Fourth Island. An orgiastic monument of American sentimental nationalism operated entirely by people who know nothing about the United States except that they were ruthlessly used by Americans for years? Well, I suppose it is not wholly improbable even on this plane. Exploitation can cut two ways.” (p. 129)

There’s a serious political, philosophical side to this book, but unlike say Asimov, Le Guin is also a delightful, witty writer. I often laughed out loud, which upset the honeymooners by interrupting their cooing. I didn’t mind, but you might want to read it in private instead, if you don’t want to be a Le Guin-style character.

I mentioned I’d been reading The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson, the pen-name of Ethel, described in the blurb as “recognised as one of the greatest novels in the English language”.

I think that is not an unfair description, yet I’d never previously heard of it, the text having never featured on any school curricula that I know of. The length of the work – originally published in three volumes – more than 800 dense-packed pages in my Angus and Robertson 1983 edition – undoubtedly tells against it, but it is eminently readable, finely observed, and surprisingly feminist.

Although the story, put simply, is the account of the life of the title character, its central figure is really his wife Mary. He is a bright but wayward figure – irresponsible, reckless and unsettled – while she is the one that holds both the text and their fictional lives together. Her female friends and relations are also more real than the male, and acutely aware of the restrictions of their gender.

“Mary had a glimpse into depths that were closed to her menkind. Just to be married! It meant that solace of woman who was getting on in years – the plain gold band on the ring finger. It meant no longer being shut out from the great Society of Matrons; no longer needing to look the other way were certain subjects alluded to; or pretending not to notice the nods and winks, the silently mouthed words that went on behind your back. It was all very well when you were young; when your very youth and innocence made up for it: as you grew older, it turned to a downright mortification – like that of going in to dinner after the bride of 18.” (p.445)

Tilly: “A figure for all the soft sawder that’s talked about marriage. The long and the short of it is, marriage is sent to try us women, and for nothin’ on earth besides.” (p. 685)

That might sum up Mary’s life. As the novel finishes she, having been one of Australia’s ladies of society, is reduced to being a postmistress in an outback town, slaving to maintain her gentility, and particularly that of her children, against all odds.

* The Oxford DNB tells me that an Australian woman, Florrie Forde [Flora May Augustus Flanagan} was the music hall performer who made ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ THE song for British troops.
“Forde was one of the few women to launch her own touring revue company, Flo and Co. (which included Chesney Allen), and for thirty-six summers she performed on the Isle of Man … Her likeness appears on the sign of the Bull and Bush, Hampstead, which also boasts a Florrie Forde bar.” (Have to try that one out.)

* More power to the web: Southeast Asia in the Ming Reign Chronicles (14th-17th Centuries): An English-language translation of Ming shi-lu references to Southeast Asia.

* I buy organic food whenever I can chiefly because I think it is a form of farming that ought to be encouraged, but this rather good wrap-up suggests there are also genuine health benefits. (This link may only work for a few days.)

* American history is not my territory, but an email pointed me to this interesting site about Los Adaes, “the capital of the Province of Texas for 41 years. Los Adaes was a place of rare cooperation among the Spanish, the French, and the Caddo Indians”.

* She was the “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, but what happened to Kate Millett?