Chase the devil out of earth

On Friday we went to a wildlife sanctuary just outside Hobart. The animals are mostly waifs and strays -- they've been brought in after being found injured or sick. They have two tawny frogmouths, both blind after chasing moths into the headlights of cars.

That said, most of the animals were in rude health and we had a great time in particular feeding the kangaroos and wallabies -- you're given a bag of papery pellets at the entrance and as soon as you enter their enclosure they come loping or bouncing over, even grabbing hold of you for balance with their disturbingly long claws as they nuzzle for a snack. Anya thought the whole experience -- kangaroos eating out of her hand! -- was hilarious.

The saddest inhabitant was the sole Tasmanian Devil. I still think of these critters, a la Bugs Bunny, as big bipedal furry brown things with tempers and teeth and a habit of getting around by turning into a sort of furious tornado. The real ones are like black-and-copper raccoons with a pitbull's smile and a funny waddling gait. They're also fighting off extinction due to facial cancers that have been spreading through the wild population for the past decade.

There was just one Devil at Bonorong and he was a pretty sorry specimen, with a balding tail caused I guess by whatever accident got him in there in the first place. Apologies to Max Romeo for the title, but these creatures have been pretty well chased off the earth already. I hope his relatives are still running wild by the time Anya's my age.

Staying with Astrid

We're having a long weekend down in Hobart visiting my cousin Astrid. While it's not dramatically colder here than in Sydney, we are at a spot where the next stop south is Antarctica and the gift shop at the port is named after Douglas Mawson, the polar explorer. Tasmania had glaciers in the last ice age and you can see it in the landscape.

Astrid's house looks right across the valley that Hobart was built around to Mount Wellington, a bare crag that wouldn't look out of place in the highlands of Scotland. It gets dustings of snow all through the winter, and Astrid can generally tell what to wear by seeing how far the snow extends down the slopes.

Haircut

Anya's hair has been getting out of control of late. Tangles and split ends that likely formed more than a year ago (when she was a baby who lay with the back of her head scrunched against a mattress 16 hours a day) have formed an undergrowth of proto-dreadlocks on her nape.

The curls are really beautiful, as crisp as the ringlets on the heroine of a BBC Dickens adaptation and a gorgeous golden-copper colour. But run your hands through them and it can get like velcro. We've used anti-tangle spray, but her yoghurt-stained and crumb-bedecked hands can undo our work as quickly as it's carried out.

On Sunday we put a stop to it and took her to a hair-cutting stall at the markets near our house. I've previously had her fringe done there -- the woman has a lovely manner and, most importantly for Anya, a funny pet pug -- but this is the first full-blown haircut.

We thought this would be a nightmare -- Anya hates people mucking about with her face, and Kate and I become History's Greatest Monsters every time we try to wash her Barnet in the bath -- but in fact once she was sat on the stool she took on that slightly bored, slightly quizzical look that all hairdressees seem to adopt and contentedly watched some episodes of Dora the Explorer on Kate's phone.

Storyteller

Anya made up a story this week. It goes like this:

"Mummy said 'Help, help! And Daddy came back."

She's told this tale half a dozen times over the last few days, and to the best of our knowledge it's not relating an event that actually took place. But to get all Northrop Frye on you, it does pretty well conform to that theory (I can't remember whose) that all plots boil down to one basic story: "The family is divided; the family is united."

She's also written a couple of songs, which similarly dwell on classic themes. Her favourite one goes:

"I lost a flower..."

The tune, in a C major scale, has G on "I", G up one octave on "lost a", and E up one octave on "flower". Loss, beauty, and memory: what more do you need in a classic song? The other one is more of a party tune:

"Splish! Splash! Having a bath!"

The tune here is C for "Splish", the A below it for "Splash", the G below that for "having a" and the E below that for "bath".

Now I realise this is all utterly silly. But I do think it's a beautiful moment when a child goes from reading stories to making up her own. And though this sort of archetypal theory of literature is very out of favour these days (and very susceptible to that fallacy where you can describe anything with the same concepts if you define your terms broadly enough) I think it's pretty fascinating that she has hit on some classic themes.

And, most of all -- it's very, very, sweet!

Attack of the foam monster!

Anya up to this point has been absolutely fearless. I don't mean that figuratively, either: until just a few days ago, I would say that we'd never really seen her scared of anything.

Certainly she's been upset, or angry, or sore on occasions, and a couple of times she's had what look like night terrors: that middle-of-the-night, still-asleep yelling fit that seems to subside as the sleeper wakes.

She also understands the terms 'scary' and 'scared' and likes to use them, though you can tell from the context that she understands them more as synonyms to 'run away' or 'may bite' and thinks of it all as quite a fun concept --missing the essential dread involved in the whole idea of fear.

Well that changed this week. Kate ran her a big bath with lots of bubbles, because bubbles are fun, right? Not so: the bubble mountain was so huge that a piece broke off and perched on the edge of the bath, wobbling. I think you can appreciate that this was utterly terrifying, and Anya became quite hysterical with fear. The next night we tried a bath with only a smaller quantity of bubbles but she was still desperate to escape; only last night, with bubble-free bathwater, were we able to get her to just sit down and enjoy herself.

I suppose this is part and parcel of her showing other signs of imagination, such as telling stories. Fear is all about imagination: it's really just our response to a plausible story we tell ourselves that involves pain and suffering. So I'm glad it's only the foam monster that's scaring her.

Update: Actually, there is one other thing she's scared of. A few times while we were in Fiji she woke up in the night upset, saying "cheeky monkey" in a forlorn voice. We have no idea what this meant -- she loves monkeys, so maybe the monkey in question was a victim rather than an antagonist. Then again, it does sound a bit like what you'd call an evil monkey in a horror film. I don't know if Anya's scared of cheeky monkey, but I think I am...

Weird stuff on immigration forms

Look closely and you can see a requirement to declare swordsticks before entering Fiji. Luckily there's nothing banning the case of grenades I had in my luggage. But I think Raffles the Gentleman Thief will find it hard going in this country.

Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky...

Last night was stormy. The news is reporting 120km winds and beaches all but swept away by pounding tides along the coast. At work during the afternoon, our view of the harbour gradually darkened until you could barely see the Opera House, five minutes' walk away. The rain came down in drenching gusts, swelling the gutters till you couldn't cross the street.

Anya was a bit unsettled by this, as it rattled her windows and boomed in her chimney for much of the night. Jasper too was running around with his hair on end, quite uncertain what to do about everything. This morning, walking to the station, I saw a eucalyptus branch some 4 metres long lying in a churchyard. In my cursory look, I couldn't see any evidence nearby of the tree it had come from.

Living in Australia you're really aware of how mild most British weather is. I remember as a standout event of my childhood the day it rained so hard that the gutters overflowed the road. I think I still have a photo somewhere of child-me, standing in the water in wellies and a raincoat. That sort of event happens several times a year in Sydney. Likewise with storms: Britain still remembers the great storm of 1987; I think it has its own, quite comprehensive, Wikipedia page. And I'd guess it wasn't much more severe than last night's storm in Sydney, which we'll all have forgotten by the weekend.