TheBanyanTree: Richness comes in many guises

[Peter Macinnis]

Suffice it to say that I am enmeshed in several projects at the moment, 
and one of them requires that I master the intricacies of lawn and the 
lawn culture in many lands.  Lawn grasses, lawn mowers, Woodrow Wilson's 
White House sheep, pests, pesticides, rolling, lawn ornaments, Lawn 
Rangers and other lawn and grass-related curiosities, even Greta Garbo 
("I want to be a lawn").  I can tell you where Kentucky bluegrass 
originated (and it wasn't Kentucky), and the intricacies of scything, 
the merits of sheep and goats, stuff like that.

I am a Friend of the State Library, which means I have access to the 
Friends' Room, where I can make a decent cup of tea or instant coffee, 
read the paper and stuff like that as I await the efforts of some poor 
library drudge who has been sent to fetch the seventeen volumes of 'Army 
Worm Illustrated', 'Steam Mowers of the fin-de-siècle Illyrian Empire', 
the 1931 grass seeds catalogue of the Tunbridge Wells Lawn Improvement 
Society or some such publication.  These take a while to find in the 
cellars that reach down into the sandstone as far as a railway tunnel 
below will allow.

You often meet other Friends there.  A few of them know me or I know 
them from functions, most don't, but we are a Friendly bunch, short of 
geriatric, but probably with a higher average of infirmities than a 
random sample of the population.  We understand intimations of 
mortality, and use our time well, but you cannot speed the drudges, so 
tea and coffee are part of our lives, we Friends -- and conversation. 
The other day, there was a lady in the room, using the email computer. 
As I busied myself with tea, she wandered over and began to chat.

She was well-groomed and expensively dressed, and the dye job on her 
hair made her age a bit hard to guess, but when I realised who she was, 
I calculated that she is 15 to 20 years my senior.  A former academic 
who broadcasts and writes on Australian and international politics, she 
was part of my formative process from my teens onward.  I have also read 
several of her books.

She is a bit of a name-dropper, but I don't plan to name her.  She is 
probably known to some of the Australian readers -- as good a reason as 
any to leave her unnamed.

I mentioned, in response to her question that I was working on the lawn 
culture.  She looked a bit blank at this, so I shared with her the sheep 
struck by lightning in Hyde Park in 1859 (that came from another 
project, but I am allowed to cross-fertilise :-) and she launched into a 
story about Prudence the cow, who regularly escaped from her home and 
munched through the French ambassador's garden, and how she was sent 
around at the age of three to apologise for Prudence's indiscretion, not 
only to the ambassador, but to his Scottish gardener, Angus.

It all sounded a bit Beatrix-Potterish, but she had the yarn, chapter 
and verse.  The ambassador spoke in French, she said, which she was 
already learning.  Canberra at that time was only a few thousand people, 
and she was (it seems) being hothoused.  She was learning the piano, and 
regularly visited the embassy to play the embassy piano, reputedly the 
best in Canberra.  In those innocent days, small girls and cows called 
Prudence could wander at will, in and out of embassies.

About half an hour into our conversation, I had the idle thought that 
she must have been the love-child of Florence Nightingale and Henry 
Kissinger -- she knew too many people for it to be otherwise.  An hour 
later, the ancient mariner came to mind.  I was the wedding guest that 
was stoppethed, but even though my study of lawns was stymied, we kept 
talking -- and it wasn't all her fault as we ranged over microcredit 
(she had met the originator), politics, arid zones, the nature of good 
questions, education, the homeless of Sydney, environmental issues, 
Scottish history ("all my family died at Glencoe" she said, but then 
amended that to admit just enough survivors in her line to allow her 
existence).  At two and a half hours, she mentioned the Ancient Mariner 
herself, and it was about then that I learned her name, as we exchanged 
emails.

Close to three hours after entering the room for a quick coffee, I left, 
and rushed in to have my books placed on hold for another day before 
tearing off across town for a meeting where (I must confess), I caught 
me playing the same role myself -- I think Ancient Marinerism may be 
contagious.

I blew a morning's work, but came out of it thinking differently.  She 
had told me bluntly that I was frittering, and should take some of my 
stuff and turn it into a PhD -- not my idea of fun, so I am unlikely to 
discipline myself to that extent, but the project she discerned within 
me is still a useful one, and I may tackle it, with a bit less rigour 
and more enjoyment.

She is in the middle of a long article on where Tony Blair went wrong -- 
I have at least some of the details but will not unveil them, though by 
way of an oblique hint, I did mention to her that she might do worse 
than look at Stratford Canning, a long-term British ambassador to 
Istanbul (or Constantinople, as it usually was to western nations, back 
then), as a counter-example of something.  I also gave her a weasel 
phrase from China's Cultural Revolution -- "leftist deviationist 
adventurism", which she had not encountered, and plans to adapt.

I lost a morning, but gained a new world -- or at least a valuable 
insight into a new world.  What I make of it is up to me.

peter

-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder, & science gossip.
/     \  Inexplicable events coordinator and former designer
\.--._*  of medium & large-scale mistaken identity matrixes.
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm