i don’t like to proclaim firsts in anything unless i’m really sure something is a first; & today i had the unusual distinction of being the first person to fly with emirates airline from munich to india without a visa. the check-in woman consulted another check-in woman, who had worked with emirates since they’d been in munich (about 12 years) and had never encountered someone able to travel to india with a visa. new zealand is one of only 9 countries that india allows a “visa on arrival”, & i had double-checked this with the indian high commission in wellington, but since i guess not many kiwis fly to india from munich, it was something totally new for the emirates staff in munich and they had to go and consult others, look up regulations, & then declared i was the first person they’d checked through to india without a visa. of course i do still need to get the visa when i arrive, with a hefty US$60 fee, but it has been good not to have had to organise that as well in the last few weeks, busy as it has been.

i “should” have had 2 relatively calm weeks at home in munich, working on make-shift & UpStage, & generally catching up with everything i couldn’t keep up with over the last 3 months of travel. however, the day before i got back to munich, my web server company upgraded something on the server, which caused the make-shift site to somehow get copied into the directory for this blog; & other problems. my initial attempts to fix it myself naturally made it worse, so i have spent the last 2 weeks in intimate email communication with the support staff (who are pretty good). as one problem was resolved, another was caused or discovered, including odd file-paths and log-ins that ceased to work. fortunately through-out the whole saga, no data was lost; and this morning, as i zipped up my suitcase for india, the last little tweaks were smoothed out. it meant that my catch-up time was severly eaten into, but on the positive side the support people are very good, prompt and polite, and they are giving me a month’s credit to make up for it.

but it did mean that i haven’t managed to write here about the rest of my time in new zealand and australia, or my visit to nantes when i got back to europe. i did find the time to create this needle-felt flower as a gift for lena, who created a lovely book-cover for me as a christmas present & a very fine painting for andy. needle-felting is an interesting craft that my 10-year-old nephew rowan taught me while i was visiting them – he, rata (7) & doug (6) are all profient needle-felters, with doug boldly experimenting with materials, needle-felting some of his own hair. when i got to brisbane, i taught my cool-sons chad & mali (10) how to needle-felt, & they also quickly got the hang of it. in coffs harbour, i discovered that the needle-felting craze had got there before me; all of my cousins’ children over the age of 4 were already stabbing away, making dolls and fish and all kinds of other abstract art, toys and ornaments.

an auspicious event to note is the cool mother ceremony that we held in brisbane; recently chad & mali, whose birth i attended ten years ago, did me the honour of asking me to be their cool-mother (kind of like a godmother but without the religious bit); naturally i accepted, & on sunday 5th february we held a ceremony to formally celebrate our cool relationship. we talked about what it meant to be a cool mother and cool sons, and what we expected from each other; mali sang a song he’d composed for the occasion, & louise presented us with our ceremonial cool pendants – small different coloured soap-stone turtles (turtles being the great cool-mothers of the ancient world).

from the sweaty heat of brisbane i plunged into snowy munich, rested for 3 days then flew to nantes, in the north-west of france, where the digital arts organisation APO33 is located. APO33 had hosted martin, one of the UpStage developers, for a month to work on the prototype of his new engine for UpStage, aptly known as DownStage. i was there for the final days of his residency, which included a meeting to brainstorm ideas about how to fund the development of DownStage. then a few days later we had a performance of make-shift. nantes seems like a very interesting city, with good support for the arts. APO33 have an office in one part of the town, and a black-box performance space on L’Ile de Nantes; this was formerly a major shipbuilding area, but the industry has been moved further out of the city and the island, which is in the centre of nantes, is being redeveloped into a thoughtful mix of arts, housing, and education. many of the old buildings have been refurbished in a post-industrial style, & in amongst are many new buildings and the school of architecture. there’s also an area called “le nef” – the skeletal remains of what must have been a huge factory or warehouse – & it’s here that the elephant lives – a fantastical machine that takes people for rides. i was really intrigued and wanted to ride on it, but as it was school holidays there were huge queues every day so no chance. next time!

this post comes to you from dubai airport, where my flight to chennai is now boarding …