Buzz McCarthy
By 2012 Buzz, finally relieved from decades of cooking and mothering duties with her son, Hugo, living overseas, decided to head off on a kind of Gap Year.
Her departure involved despatching a vast amount of stuff: 100 pairs of shoes, 200+ pieces of clothing, 100 large garbage bags of photos and diaries and half her library. The entire contents of her house, 18 dozen bottles of wine, and her Mercedes convertible disappeared into storage. Her precious Burmese puss, Polyester, went on loan to her ex husband’s first ex wife. And she took only one suitcase, a laptop and a one-way ticket.
The story is told in her blog www.buzzmccarthy.com/blog and also published in one of the highly successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series entitled ‘Time to Thrive’. Coincidentally the Chicken Soup story entitled ‘100 Pairs of Shoes’ was released on the third anniversary of the day Buzz departed Melbourne, 5 May 2015.
For those of you into numerology, Buzz is a 5. The day she departed was 5/5 2012….that’s three 5’s. She was in a personal year 5 and it was a universal year 5. For the uninitiated, 5 means freedom, variety, don’t fence me in. Perfect for this girl and her Gap Year adventure!
Clearly her Gap Year has rather stretched…..and the end of not just the first year, but the second, third, fourth and fifth have passed with no sign of a home coming.
‘Home is no longer a place’ says Buzz, ‘it’s a state of mind and for the moment, that’s Europe. Apart from the history and the art and the architecture I love the freedom and the variety. I live between my villa in the Tuscan hills and a London flat, travelling wherever I can, often to European cities in winter when they are crisp and cold and devoid of the tourist hoards summer brings. Both places fill my soul and my life but in very different ways.’
Once in London Buzz started her #Galleries&Lunch lifestyle, visiting galleries, attending art history classes and learning that she previously knew nothing about art and little of London despite her years there in her 20’s.
She was invited to be on the Advisory Board of the 2014 and 2015 Australian and New Zealand Literary and Arts Festivals in London and is now a Trustee and Board Member of its present incarnation the Foundation for Australia and New Zealand Arts.
Buzz has also entered her third year as President of the Australian Women’s Club London, established over 30 years ago to support Australian women in London. A thriving organisation with 13 activity groups and special events marking special occasions like Australia Day and Melbourne Cup Day, it is a great resource for many women who still call Australia home but, for a time, are committed to embracing all things London. Buzz is also a Board Member of FIWAL, the Federation of Women’s Associations in London.
In Italy her life is very different. ‘Eating and drinking are part of the life here in my time-warped piece of Tuscany’, says Buzz, ‘with most things grown in the next village or the next field. I love it.’ The pace is very different from London with long summer days interrupted by weekly markets, glasses of prosecco at the local bar for €1,50, tending her organic vegetable garden, daily exercise in her 12 metre pool and enjoying hosting friends and family who come to stay.
Since leaving Oz Buzz has done the occasional piece of work: writing, coaching and supporting women in their business activities and running her annual empowering event for women in Tuscany. If she feels excited about a proposition she will evaluate whether she will take part or not. If it feels good, she explores further.
Whilst the original journey was more about the heart than the head, it now seems that Buzz has found a destination and unsurprisingly it’s London. She hopes to purchase her own home there before the end of 2017 and enjoy her possessions again when they arrive from Australia. Sadly, her beloved cat Poly joined her twin, Cleopatra, in cat paradise earlier this year, her wine needs to be sold and no one is sure about the Mercedes convertible. It seems it has more a hold over her than her Melbourne house.
Where this journey will finish is anyone’s guess. And none of us, Buzz included, need to know right now.
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