PODCAST · society
Drifting Notes
by Lyss
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
Episodes
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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…
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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....
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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...
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Giovanni padre (S5, E1)
Between one and three in the morning, they leave. We are asleep on Cooee, our sailboat, moored some metres away in the same harbour, and their engines are kept so low and the lines slipped so quietly that by the time the sky begins to lighten the boats are already past the breakwater and out into...
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Objects designed for circulation, not survival (S4, E9)
The first thing that stops you on the fourth floor of the State Library of Queensland is a promise printed across a dark wall. Extraordinary Stories. The letters are large enough to interrupt your stride, which is a clever architectural gesture in a library, because by the time you reach the…
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You can buy a piece of the library for $4 (S4, E8)
You can buy a piece of the library for $4. In the gift shop at the State Library of Queensland, Australia, small bundles rest on a low shelf, each one wrapped in black paper. They are old catalogue tags, used in 1988 when the library moved across the river from a smaller building in the city…
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When colour outranks category (S4, E7)
A book about grief is bright pink. Not muted, not solemn, but unmistakably pink, and it is sitting beside a book with a cartoon dog on the spine. They share the same shade of red. That, it seems, is sufficient qualification. Colour is the only credential required here. It is late summer in...
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I always stop for Annie (S4, E6)
Annie is already reading when I arrive, the book open on her lap, the words upside down, the spine resting against her knees as if the book has decided that this is the correct orientation for today. She turns a page slowly, without fixing anything, without apologising to the text, without...
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The hold shelf (S4, E5)
Someone stands at the shelf with nowhere to put their hands. They have arrived with purpose and now, seeing that their book has not yet appeared, they hover for a second longer than expected, fingers adjusting a strap that does not need adjusting, palms briefly empty in a space designed for...
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Always open (S4, E4)
I stop because of the handwriting, and because something written directly onto glass without permission or polish has a way of asking you to slow down even if you did not plan to. It is white marker straight onto a door, and the letters are not even and some strokes are pressed hard while others...
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Books that belong to the day (S4, E3)
In Diane’s house, books do not belong to rooms, and I realise this while standing in front of a heavy wooden ladder that leans into a wall of books as if it has committed to the arrangement for life, and I am here in tropical northwest Queensland on a rural property where distance shapes...
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Borrowed books demand care, not loyalty (S4, E2)
I walk in and my sound follows me, and for about three steps I am on white tiles that carry the noise of my arrival, my shoes announcing themselves in a bright echo that says someone has entered, but then the floor changes to carpet, red and cream, and just like that the sound disappears, not...
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Library slow, not city fast (S4 E1)
The air presses down lightly at the top of my head as soon as I step inside, and it feels as if the building has trained it to behave, and inside the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, the cooling system keeps the damp out and the thinking in while the river outside moves through...
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A building that hummed (S3 E10)
I am sleeping in a building that used to hum. Not the gentle hum of lights or lifts, but a louder…. more muscular sound. The kind that ran through the night and into people’s bones. This place once stayed awake so an entire city could wake up informed. Now it is quiet enough to hear my socks on...
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From keel to kiln (S3 E9)
I spent an afternoon inside a pottery studio, Studio18, on Waiheke Island, the kind of place where nothing is finished in a hurry, where tools hang where they’re needed, clay waits and light comes and goes without asking permission. The studio belongs to our mate Tim. He’s sailed the…
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The noticeboard (S3 E8)
Outside a small corner store in Waiheke Island, the kind you stop at after a dog walk for a flat white, there’s a noticeboard. A corkboard, pinned full … Dog walkers, builders, wellness practitioners annnnnd nn intuit. No cards were overlapping and it felt like no one was shouting for attention....
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The piece that travelled (S3 E7)
This note begins on a quiet Sunday in Hamburg, with a small puzzle poured from a tube onto a dark wooden table worn smooth by everyday use. The pieces are tiny and a yummy coffee is made. Outside, the city keeps its low winter hum, but inside the room everything slows. My girlfriend and her...
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Quiche on the counter (S3, E6)
Sometimes a story begins in the smallest warmth, the kind that rises from a kitchen counter long after the person who made it has stepped out into the cold, leaving behind something that feels a little like welcome and a little like love, even if no one ever uses those words. This episode follows...
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The missing chapter of someone you know well (S3, E5)
There’s a particular wonder in finally seeing a friend in their home country. Not in Munich or Tallinn or Thessaloniki, the neutral cities where he and I often meet as equal foreigners, but on the soil that shaped him. This episode drifts into the night I met my friend Josef in Cairo, and how...
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S3 E4 Press for 10 seconds
There’s a particular kind of public shower you only ever find on Australian beaches, the “ten-second miracle.” A metal button, a stubborn pole, and a short burst of fresh water that feels like someone rationing relief in tiny, timed-out blessings. If you’ve ever swum on the Queensland coast in...
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S3 E3 Shoelaces at the edge of the sea
Some mornings in Brisbane feel like the space is tuning itself, the river sighs, coconut sunscreen drifts across the air, strangers gather like loose notes in a half-written song. On one of those mornings, I found myself at the ferry terminal with a backpack slung over one shoulder, the city…
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S3 E2 Little hands in a big ocean
The ocean is in a good mood this morning … calm, kind, and I’ve got a coffee in hand. A (thankfully) grey November sky hangs above Miami Beach, the waves lined up in rows of promise, and the air carries that first brave sound of children running toward water. They’re called Nippers here, the...
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S3 E1 Big birds on small branches
Every morning I ride across the Gold Coast bridges and end up laughing at the same ridiculous miracle… enormous birds landing on thin tree branches. Pelicans, cormorants, herons, all bulk and grace, touching down like drunk acrobats, wobbling, correcting, pretending it was intentional all along.…
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S2E9 I left the sea to hold her hand, now the waves keep time for both of us.
This week I’ve been thinking about how time behaves beside someone who’s fading. It slows, slips, folds back on itself. Some mornings stretch forever, while it feels like others vanish before my coffee even cools. I’ve come to land to be with my Queenie. Each day I hold her hand, listen to the…
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S2E8 The quiet assignment
Eight weeks into palliative care with my Queenie, I realise I’ve been arriving like a project manager, with my plans, checklists, bright ideas on how to ‘make her life better.’ Feed her. Move her. Sing with her. Save her, a little. But love, it turns out, is less about doing and more about…
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S2E7 Two women, one song, and a birthday that finds its own kind of light
It’s Queenie’s eighty-fourth birthday. Buuuut, no trumpets this year, no cake collapsing under too many candles. It’s more gentle. Just a soft room, sunlight on her blanket, and my ukulele. We used to celebrate and roar like the world was ending, hats, laughter, three cakes for good measure. Now...
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S2E6 Two currents, one flow
At the point where the Brisbane River divides, the water seems to hesitate, one arm drawn toward the port’s restless industry, the other curling inland, slow and green. From the mangrove-lined banks, the split looks like a question the river keeps asking itself. This reflection drifts through…
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S2E5 Arms out at daybreak
At first light in Nerang, the mountain bike trails are empty, there are just the gum trees, the squiggle of roots, and two old friends. Lisa runs in front, knowing every turn and fork. I follow, arms out like a child on a roller coaster, yelling “weeee” into the forest. This episode drifts…
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S2E4 The circle that holds us.
Four bracelets in a cloth pouch - > blue, pink, green, grey.Passed from wrist to wrist, carrying a mother’s touch, a family’s pulse. In this episode, I share a small ritual my family and I have created with Queenie, as she moves through palliative care. The beads remind us how fragile and how...
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S2E3 Champagne in hospice.
This drifting note begins with a piece of hot pink cardboard. The kind meant for school science projects. Ours is taped to the wall of a hospice room, and it’s filling up with post-it notes, crooked, bright, and full of life. At my mamma’s bedside, we could spend hours looking back her years in...
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S2E2 The chorus of grief.
Grief feels like the loneliest thing in the world, until it doesn’t. In this episode, I share how the kindness of friends, spread across Berlin, London, Sydney, and home in Queensland, has lightened the weight of spending my days in palliative care with my mamma, Queenie. A table laid under…
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S2E1The geography of a palm
There’s a reason we reach for hands, to steady a child learning to walk, to pull someone back from the pool’s edge, to high-five at a finish line, or squeeze tight at a wedding altar. This week, I’m holding my mamma’s hand as she recovers from surgery. The hospital beeps, the future is uncertain,...
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S1 E19 Between mountains
The Mythen peaks in Switzerland don’t talk to each other. But they look like they’re listening, probably to the weather, or to a conversation glaciers started centuries ago. This weekend, I stayed in the valley between them with my friend of twenty years, Vero, and her rescue dog, Winston (a...
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S1 E18 A thousand commas in a rainy field
What happens when you find a field of sunflowers... and none of them are looking up? In this episode, I drift into a small discovery, a sea of bowed yellow heads that caught me mid-run and reminded me that even the brightest things don’t shine all the time. These weren’t the postcard-perfect,...
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S1 E17 The island I could finish
In this episode of Drifting Notes, I take you to Île Saint-Honorat, a small island off the coast of Cannes, home to pine trees, shrugging lizards, and monks who make olive oil that could change your outlook on life. I didn’t mean to run the whole island…It just… happened. Join me as I jog a...
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S1 E16 Foiled again
Learning to wing foil in the kite-surf capital of the Mediterranean is equal parts exhilaration and slapstick. I look like like I am trying to put a tent up while on a trampoline. Teenagers fly past me in elegant silence. And still, I fall. And fly. And fall again. Buuuuuut in between, I discover...
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S1 E15 Café crème and correspondence
What does it mean to truly learn a country—not through guidebooks or Google, but through voice notes to friends? In this episode of Drifting Notes, I reflect on a slow, curious season in southern France, three months of coastal living, café confusions, comic legends I’d never heard of, and the...
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S1 E14 The bag that follows me
This episode drifts between the Côte d’Azur and the Sunshine Coast, between the cheese aisle and the boat galley, between the deeply ordinary and something that almost feels like magic. It’s a story about my Coles bag, bright red, bought fresh each year when I’m back in Australia, and how it’s...
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S1 E13 What the angels see
In the centre of Bandol, in the south of France, stands a cast-iron fountain, green with age, framed by 150 café chairs, and crowned with three small angels. They don’t move. They don’t speak. But on this warm June day, I decided to imagine their lives. In this episode of Drifting Notes, I sit...
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S1 E12 When the sea is still, but nothing is quiet
In this quiet morning paddle near Cala Rustella on the Costa Brava, I found myself gliding over a sea garden. I saw shallow rocks bursting with mosses, algae, grasses, and small sea creatures, each clinging to life in brilliant, it was an overlapping chaos. This episode is a slow drift through…
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S1 E11 A chair, a shelf, and the sound of quiet
In this episode of Drifting Notes, I take you to Süßen, a small town in the Baden-Württemberg countryside, where I found myself with an hour to spare and nowhere in particular to be. Wandering into the village's Kulturzentrum—a timbered former home now serving as library, council hall, and quiet...
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S1 E10 She sang Fauré after dinner
Some evenings linger longer than they’re supposed to. Not because of the time, but because of what happens in the quiet afterwards… when the dishes are done, the stories fade to stillness, and someone sings not to perform, but to feel something shift. This drifting note comes from a night in…
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S1 E9 The bag in the lobby
In this episode, I share a quiet moment from a hotel lobby in Barcelona—one of those liminal workdays between meetings and flights, where the espresso is on a timer and the leather couch becomes a temporary lifeline. What unfolds is a story about presence, trust, and the kind of kindness that...
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S1 E8 Spring loop by the tarmac
I take you on an unexpected run—around the outer edges of Munich Airport. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t pretty. But somewhere between perimeter fences, vending machines, and the low hum of jet engines, I found something close to peace. Join me as I jog beside something built for departure, past...
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S1 E7 Reading rocks
This episode of Drifting Notes was recorded after a jog along the east coast of Spain, where storm clouds gathered and the scent of wild rosemary clung to the air. A crumbling rock face on the trail caught my attention—not because it was striking, but because it made me wonder >> What would it be...
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E1 S6 Click, Click, Fump
In this short episode, we step inside a small-town hardware store that still hums with the he past. From the click-click-fump of a manual pricing machine to a proudly embroidered name tag, this is a quiet ode to the shops—and shopkeepers—who still know their stock by heart and their customers by...
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S1 E5 The bee that stayed
Somewhere between Malaga and Torrevieja, out where the land fades and the sea stretches into forever, a bee appeared on our boat.Not frantic, not lost — just quietly, stubbornly going about her work. In this episode of Drifting Notes, I tell the story of an unexpected companion, the strange…
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S1 E4 The quiet Torero
In this episode of Drifting Notes, we step into the quiet morning rhythm of Casa Felipe, a café in southern Spain shaped by the steady hand of its founder, Felipe—a former torero who now brings the discipline, ritual, and reverence of his earlier life into every corner of the café. Felipe doesn’t...
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S1 E3 The woman at the café
Easter in southern Spain, a windy morning led us inside a traditional Spanish café—burgundy velvet chairs, silver-plate service, and long-time waiters who carry the day like ceremony. There, I met an elegant woman sitting alone. What began with a warm smile turned into a moving conversation about...
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S1 E2 Smoke and skewers
In this first audio episode of Drifting Notes, I take you with me on a jog along the coast of Fuengirola in Andalusia, where the scent of olive wood smoke signals more than just lunchtime, it signals a ritual. We pause at the chiringuitos, those humble beach bars where fish is grilled on skewers...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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
HOSTED BY
Lyss
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Drifting Notes have?
Drifting Notes currently has 50 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Drifting Notes about?
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...
How often does Drifting Notes release new episodes?
Drifting Notes has 50 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Drifting Notes?
You can listen to Drifting Notes on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Drifting Notes?
Drifting Notes is created and hosted by Lyss.
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