It's all relative

Before we begin, I'll tell you that I'm a relief blogger this time. Leslie had a very good, very long blog entry written, and when he went to publish it Blogger ate it. He got frustrated, so I'm now filling in.

Two weekends ago we went to visit Louise Joy, a relative of some kind of Leslie's. She's a fifth cousin or fourth cousin many times removed, or something. She lives in a suburb about 30 miles from the city. We took a tram and two buses to get there, and walked the final half mile or so. It was a 2-hour Odyssey.

She's a very nice woman, and showed us around the grounds of where she lives and made us morning tea. She has an interesting history - she spent a good portion of her childhood in India, where her parents were missionaries. She showed us yearbooks from her time there. It's kind of strange the way Britain imposes Britishness on its colonies, with no regard for the local climate or culture. The yearbook could have been from any private school in England at the time - everyone was white, and they wore the same clothes that children would have been wearing in England, not taking into consideration that England and India have vastly different climates.

I have to admit, the concept of looking up very distant relations is something of a strange one to me. I'm glad people do it, as you meet very interesting people like Louise by doing so. But I don't think I'd feel any more connection to a very distant relation than I would by choosing someone at random from the phone book. Louise knows many members of Leslie's family, so this was not a cold call to a relative. But people do look up their distant family, and I wonder why. What draws them to look for them?

Louise has a daughter, Rosemary, who is an artist. As it happened, she had a show opening at a gallery very close to our house on Thursday of the same week. We headed along to that and met Rosemary, who is also very nice. She had created miniature percussion instruments. They were very beautiful, made of a rich wood. She said it was interesting to see people's reaction to them, because many people picked them up and played with them.

We were very artistically-inclined last week. The day before Rosemary's opening we went to a exhibition opening at the gallery two doors down (between us and it is a chocolate cafe, which makes beautiful cakes, scrumptious chocolates and excellent breakfast pastries - it's a rough life here, but we are stoic). This exhibition's centrepiece was a series of life-sized (or slightly smaller) kangaroos made of ceramic tiles carrying satchels on their backs. They were really cute (I don't know if cute is a word bandied about it Real Art circles, but I thought they were extremely cute), looking very friendly and sweet. I think the woman who opened the exhibition thought they were cute too, because she said they were travellers, and they collected food on their journeys and stored it in their satchels. She also said they were eager to share their food with friends or fellow-travellers.

It's getting a bit chillier, and we've been making soups to keep us warm. We've made tomato and basil, vegetable, mushroom and carrot and coriander. If anyone has any (vegetarian) soup recipes and want to give them to us, we'd be very grateful. The market is about a 15-minute bike ride from here, and it's nice to have so much fresh produce available to us to make our soups. The market also sell fresh orange juice, which is the best I've ever had outside Florida. Victoria is a citrus-producing territory, and now that the weather has gotten colder the oranges are extremely sweet and delicious. The orange juice is squeezed that day, and there's just nothing better.

Leslie has bunch of assignments due this week, and he's working hard to get them done. He works very hard, but I think he feels rewarded and that this course is teaching him a lot of very useful stuff.