The inevitable banality of beauty:

and the possibility of chickens on Melbourne streets

Note to reader: I was supposed to leave Athens today but am holed up in a hotel with gastro. I’ve written this missive anyhoo and apologise if it descends into darkness or never actually ascends in any way due to the aforementioned darkness.

This is where I have spent the last month, give or take a week here or there. I eventually developed a routine in this new place (a Greek island just off Athens), that wasn’t so dissimilar to my regular life. In my regular life I would wake up, walk to coffee, sit on a park bench and just stare into the vast distance for a period, then walk home again. The difference here, was the vast distance I would stare into – the sky, the water, the boats, the mountains, the ferries, the sound of fish, Maria, who didn’t speak English, miming with me about the day’s order and adding in moves to make me laugh. She was my friend I decided, but I didn’t officially ask her, so this is not a hard launch.

When I first saw this landscape, I was breathless. It was so different to the one that occupies my eyeballs each day when I’m at home. I felt lucky, as we all do, to be in the presence of such beauty. And I realised, as I was getting jiggy with a new landscape, that with my everyday landscape I don’t see it anymore. I think I omit a lot. I must. Like a long marriage that forgot to go on date nights when the kids were young, I don’t see it fresh anymore.

But here, my eyes woke up again, excited by all these new details – the colours, the movements, the wind shifting umbrellas, the ferries ferrying out of view.

This surely is the point of travel. I’m not sure I’m convinced of any other – not the museums or ruins or festivals – although of course they are an essential joy – but travel is about seeing the world again with an innocence that you lose when you see the same landscape all the time. You reignite what it feels like to be inside a world. You are forced to remember that you are not just a single cell walking around unconsciously, but that you live in the cement and the stars and the trams and the birds. You remember yourself, when you see where you are.

And while this view rocked my socks off, some of those that had been coming to this Island since they were children, told me they were bored. The same scene. The same coffee shops. The same weather. The same dance to get a seat by the water. And they told me on numerous occasions that this beauty that I was looking at, had settled into the banal for them. Just another beautiful landscape that they had seen, largely unchanged, for their whole lives. It didn’t spark for them the curiosity and awe it was sparking in me.

Of course, I am guilty of this. You don’t need a breathtaking scene to realise you have turned off from the world around you. During those long lockdowns, the family would go walking and we played, ‘what have you never seen before?’ Cute perhaps, except that I realised that what I hadn’t seen in the years that I had lived there were things as large as factories not far from our house. How the hell did it get there?

In Melbourne the Lord Mayor, Nick Reese, is planning to outlaw the barely conscious. In a recent opinion article in The Age, he notes that there is a disparate and chaotic way that we walk around the streets of Melbourne and he’s gonna bring down the heavy hand of the law to fix it. ‘If we want to remain a beautiful walking city, then we need to brush up on our pedestrianising skills’ and ‘Victoria’s Road Safety Road Rules mandate pedestrians must keep to the left when walking on roads “without footpaths”. But they remain silent about how people should move on actual footpaths. Is it time for a keep-left law for pedestrians on footpaths?’

The argument is that we spend our lives engrossed in our screens, not interested enough to lift our heads and see the world around us. But perhaps its time to jazz up the Melbourne landscape one night when we’re all sleeping. Add a beach or a mountain, or Maria. Throw some chickens in. Random cats kept me alert. A new factory even, and pretend it’s always been there. I don’t think we can be blamed for losing a bit of vibe for our vista when the good people of Greece are ho-hum over theirs. But I guess, we can try a little harder to see again. At all the things we have forgotten are there, because well, they’re boring now.

I think there is more gastro activity. See you properly again soon xx