Drifting Notes Podcast

About Drifting Notes Podcast

Short, voice-driven travel stories, made for anyone curious about the quieter corners of the world. I’m an Australian who’s somehow lived half a life in Europe. Home these days is a sailboat, though I spend as much time in airports as I do at sea. I record these stories wherever I can find a patch of stillness, sometimes in a marina, sometimes in a gale, sometimes balancing my phone on a suitcase in a boarding lounge. These are stories from the sea, the road, and the places my mother once wandered. For anyone who’s ever looked out a train window and made up a story about it. Love Lyss. driftingnotes.substack.com (https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Lyss

Category

society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Apr 2025

Latest episode

14 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

52 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Jun 2026

   Everyone went in (S5, E4)

   I smelled the rain before I saw it. I was down below making a coffee when it came through the open hatch, a sweet smell that cut clean over the coffee and carried a cool edge underneath it, and the deck above me was still dry. This is Menton, the last harbour in France before the border with Italy. In June the heat holds all day. Then a cloud comes down off the hills and the whole basin changes its mind. I left the pot on the stove and went up to check the lines. This is the order of things on a boat. Before you let yourself marvel at any weather, you put your hands on the ropes. I worked along them, the shore line, the springs, feeling for the give, and the rain was already in the air without yet having fallen. The masts had begun to tick against one another, the thin metal sound the whole marina makes when it senses what is coming. Only then did I let myself stop and watch. The cloud poured over the long grey hills that hold Italy on one side and France on the other, spilling down the slope the way something spills when a hand knocks it. The first drops landed on the water and made no sound at all. The surface went from glass to gooseflesh in a single breath, pricked all over at once. And then the people went. A harbour is built for movement. All day it performs its small busy life, feet on the docks, a line thrown, an engine turning over, a voice calling from three boats down... The rain folds all of it shut in under a minute. One hatch closes, then another, a figure steps down out of the wet, and the place goes still. Bare masts, dark water, nobody on deck. But nobody has truly gone. That is the part you feel rather than see. Behind every misted window there is a face, the way mine was at mine, a whole marina of people sitting an inch behind glass, watching the same grey water come down. Berth I 24. The small blue plate at the edge of my dock, going dark with wet. The shore line I had just checked sagging between pontoon and hull, filling along its low middle with a thread of water that gathers and lets go and gathers again. Earlier, in the dry, I had walked up to the old fort above the harbour. There is a bronze Neptune standing there, bare-chested, one arm raised, a trident in his fist and an octopus curled at his feet. He is still up there now, holding his arm in the air in the same rain. The god of the whole sea, set down on dry land, gripping a weapon he cannot turn on the weather. Every living thing had gone inside. The one thing that was not alive had stayed out. Huh. Our lines fill, and lets go. The water takes the rain the way it takes everything, without a sound, and holds us all exactly where we are. Thanks for drifting with me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com (https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   6 Jun 2026

   Everything is here, nothing is working (S5, E3)

   At seven in the morning the beach has everything and is doing nothing. We carry the boats up from the water and set them down on the stones, and the stones are small and loose and speak under our feet as we go. This is the beach at Norsi, on Elba, an island off the Tuscan coast, and it is Sunday. The umbrellas are still folded over their stacked chairs, blue over white, in long even rows that hold no one. The rescue boat rests on the stones with its oars pulled in and the word SALVATAGGIO down its side. A chalkboard offers pizza and cold plates and four kinds of beer in a careful hand, and the kitchen behind it is dark. Or almost nothing. From the bar comes a radio, turned low, an Italian song I half recognise and cannot name, and the woman opening the café is already talking while the machine warms and ticks. She did not have to be warm at seven, and she is. She makes two strangers a coffee and talks to them while it pours. Out on the stones the rest of the beach is still only itself. One umbrella has been opened early, orange among all the blue, with no one beneath it. A young man has arrived before the staff and lies back on a lounger with his phone and his sunglasses. Two men walk the shoreline with their sandals in their hands. Near the water there is a small chair with Spider-Man on its back and no child in its seat, and the child is in the sea, or still asleep on a boat in the bay, or coming down the path behind us. We drink the cappuccino and the espresso on bright blue chairs under a slatted roof, the same cups as the family at the next table, the same foam, and for one hour the beach is not a service. It is only a place, and a woman is making coffee in it. Behind all of it the cliff is folded. The rock has been bent and stacked and tipped onto its side, layer over layer, pressed into that shape from the inside by a force that wanted nothing and sold nothing and waited for no one. It was folded before the umbrellas. It was folded before the chalkboard. It was folded before the first person on this coast thought to charge another for shade, before there was anyone at all to lie down in the blue and ask for the bill. The umbrellas will be open within the hour. The chairs will fill. The kitchen will light. The rock will do today exactly what it did yesterday, which is nothing, which is hold still. Everything on the stones is waiting to be used. The umbrella waits for a body, the boat waits for a rescue, the chair waits for its child. The rock waits for no one. It is the only thing on the beach that was never going to work. So we go. A man comes past with a folded umbrella over his shoulder, plants it in the stones, and works the chairs open beneath it, one, then the other. We finish the coffee, carry the board and the kayak back down to the water, and push off while the chairs are still being opened. We came across the bay for one hour of a place that was not yet a service, and the hour is ending, and we leave it to the family on the path. Behind us the radio thins to nothing over the flat water. The umbrellas open one by one, blue after blue. Ahead of us the bay is still empty, Cooee still waiting at Capo ai Pini, the crossing still ours. The rock holds still, and lets the day come. Thanks for drifting with me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com (https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   24 Apr 2026

   The man who played the shaker (S5, E2)

   The setting sun was on my face and catching my attention until the music found my ears, and the jazz tunes pulled us from the golden street through the green velvet curtains. We had been walking up the Via Roma to a dinner appointment, and we had not meant to stop. Tom and I sat down on a velvet two-seater, and my coat stayed over the arm of it. Tom’s whiskey sour arrived on a deck of cards. A chess board was set by the window across the room, a game already in progress. The piano by the bar was already being played. The pianist was a man well over seventy, playing when we crossed the threshold and still playing as we were shown to our table, his hands moving across the keys without looking down. He finished a tune, and in the gap that opened between one song and the next, a woman at a table near the piano leaned forward and whispered one word across to him. Summertime. She was loud enough for our table to hear and quiet enough that it felt like overhearing rather than listening, and he nodded once and began it. She did not lift her head. She sang along under her breath, just loud enough for the man she was with to hear, and he watched his glass, and I was secretly very happy. Summertime is the kind of song a person carries privately and occasionally hands to a stranger. Gershwin composed it as a lullaby for a mother singing to her child, and it has been played so many times in so many rooms that it no longer belongs to anyone in particular. A lady in a jazz bar at sunset does not ask for it the way a person orders a drink. She names a song that has been following her all day, and she asks a stranger to play it back to her. He finished Summertime, and in the gap that followed, the bartender was shaking a whiskey sour at the bar. The pianist heard it first. He turned toward the bar and found a rhythm the ice did not know it was keeping, settling into his own groove, the kind a body of seventy settles into rather than performs, and he leaned toward the bartender the way you lean toward someone you are playing with, and he launched into an improvisation in the same key. The shaker became his percussion. The bartender kept shaking. The drink was ready long before the song was, and the shaker kept going anyway, and the pianist played to the ice and the ice held the time. We shared a laugh, the whole room, the first sound in the bar louder than a whisper since we had arrived. That was the moment I understood what a seventy-year-old has that a thirty-year-old does not. The ear that finds the song already present in the room, rather than the ego that wants to make one. He finished the improvisation, and the bartender poured the drink, and the pianist stood up, not with any ceremony. The maître d’ walked over and closed the piano, and the lid came down without a sound. We clicked our fingers. Someone at another table said bravo, quietly. Clapping would have been too loud for the room, and the room knew it before we did. The pianist walked back through the green velvet curtains and out into the street, and someone handed him a drink at the doorway, and I did not look to see what it was. Only after he was gone did I look properly at the room. Il Club was a high room, taller than it needed to be, walls the green of a very old bottle, with two crystal chandeliers hanging from black twisted cords. The tables were onyx marble. The lounges were deep leather, and ours was a velvet two-seater, the only piece of furniture in the room built for company. On one wall, a grid of small agricultural tools in red-velvet frames. On another wall, wooden tennis rackets with their strings gone slack. On a shelf near the bar, a set of rosary beads. Above the leather lounges, two large oil portraits in gilt frames, a man and a woman in period dress, watching the room the way the painted always watch. The quiet in the room was not an absence of sound. It was the sound of everything continuing without anyone playing it. A man came in through the curtains a few minutes later. He walked to the chess board, studied the position, moved three pieces, and walked out. He did not sit down. He did not order a drink. He did not speak to anyone. The pieces he had moved were waiting for someone we never saw… We finished our drinks and left for the restaurant. On the Via Roma the sun was almost gone, and the stone still held the warmth of the day. Tom took my arm. A pianist I would never see again was somewhere behind us, holding a drink at a doorway. We walked the rest of the way in the kind of quiet that stays between two people after they have seen something they cannot quite describe yet. Thanks for drifting with me. If you pass through Siracusa at sunset and you hear a piano coming through a green velvet curtain on the Via Roma, step inside. The bar is called Il Club (https://www.instagram.com/ilclub.ortigia/), which is the plainest name for the most beautifully dressed room on that street, and the plainness is the point. The room will still be there, the game still running. Tell them I sent you, I would like to know how it goes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com (https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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