Reconnecting with nature and community in the inner city.
As I sat daydreaming on a fallen log, dangling legs over rushing water, hours passed and the warm light faded and cooled. Little did I know that somewhere upstream those same rippling waters were casting a spell on my boyfriend and from that day onwards he would be a fly fisherman.
We didn’t expect to ring in the New Year wondering whether three men in a pink dinghy were going to drown in a spontaneous burst of drunken cray-fishing. Luckily they didn’t, their children’s toy boat good humoured enough to keep afloat it heavy load, a held breath away from being inundated by each tiny wave.
Picnics on the beach next to strangers in fading light soon lead to lively conversations with a beer in the hand. Full bellied contentment, squint eyed games of beach cricket and frisbee lit by fireworks with Gracie dogs collar held tight.
Tourists tend to stick together, sometimes it’s hard to appreciate something when there are so many people trying so hard to do the same on all sides. We made a plan to return to the Twelve Apostles on a day that was not sun drenched Summer.
If you just venture a little to the west and down there are wilder adventures for those who leave the guide rail behind, past the Thunder Cave and onto the rocks. As we approached our fellow wanders they were frozen on the horizon in the act of a guilty holiday pleasure. They counted down the seconds until the wave crashed onto the rocks as he stood posed on an imaginary surfboard, the ocean had other things in mind, drenching them, squeals and all, washing away their hopes for a novelty holiday photo. Tourists can be determined though and we all rushed onto the cliff edge with renewed vigor to stand in various bizarre poses, playing chicken with the surf.
The warm, sweet smell of honey was so strong it had begun to sway towards the sickly side of delicious. We thought it might be time to harvest a few bars.
Last year when bee mania hit our sharehouse the newspaper arrived on our doorstep with a front page cautionary tale of beekeeping gone wrong in Flemington. We considered ourselves safe as long as we steered clear of “bizarre nocturnal attempt(s) to move a beehive onto a roof” and “beer fueled escapade(s)” . But when it came time to try harvesting our honey, finding ourselves short of a suit, smoker and experience, we thought who better to call than our Irish neighbour of “bee bungle” fame, we bee keepers have to stick together and afterall 60 stings later he would surely be a lot wiser for his experience.
Quick to laugh and enjoy the challenges of the bee keeping experience, Andrew was a delightful addition to our little honey gang. And challenges are never shy around us, culminating in our bees having been very busy over spring fusing the bars diagonally to each other rather than in neat little lines. So the removal experience wasn’t quite as easy as we had hoped, a call to the bee man, Martin, informed us we would probably have to remove the offending combs in winter and start afresh! There weren’t many stings, although one did involve an unfortunate incident of a bee flying up someone’s pants which elicited gales of laughter from the flats above.
The gorgeous, golden Flemington honey was worth our misadventures and hopefully with a little bit of experience we will be running our bee operation in a less chaotic fashion next year.