Recognised, cool change, mania

Still no Sydney update - I have to tell you about something else that happened on burger and gelati (burgelati?) night. After I left the shop with my blood orange and chocolate gelati and sat down at a table outside, a woman in the shop stopped Luke on his way out to ask if I was the owner of the Girl in Melbourne blog. He answered in the affirmative and then relayed this to me straight away. I was a little bit thrilled. I've been recognised! 

Then after she had finished her gelati, the woman came over to say hello herself! Her name is Brooke. She said she's a lurker at GiM. If you're lurking here too, Brooke, hello! You made my day. 

The weather in Melbourne was very cooperative today. The cool change came through in the afternoon, sending the temperature plummeting 10 degrees to 27 in 10 minutes, which allowed Luke and I to walk in comfort to Bridge Road. I think we're going to have to start planning our route to Grill'd and Fritz now because it's becoming harder to find 'new' streets. So soon! 

We didn't see much new this evening...oh, wait - we saw two nuns of Daughters of Divine Zeal on Church Street. The street name's not a coincidence - the imposing St Ignatius church sits high on the hill opposite the hostel run by the Daughters. I can't comment on how zealous they were. We didn't get close enough.

I also patted a friendly Russian blue cat that was sitting on the front porch of a blue house. I think his humans like blue. 

And I spotted this old sign on the back of the building Grill'd occupies. 

It says 'coke depot' on the upper right, but I can't make out the rest. Something ending in 'ggs' on the left maybe? 

When we were walking through Gosch's Paddock on our way home, there were dozens of bats flying overhead on their way to feast at the Botanic Gardens. I see them most nights - sometimes one or two flying right past our window - but I don't often see so many.  

My invention of burgelati above reminded me that I've recently come to suspect I have some kind of sickness characterised by a mania for making up portmanteau words. I can't help it. I just do it without thinking. For example, every time I see the 7Eleven ad for their Frozen Coke, inside my head I scream, 'FROKE! Just call it FROKE!' It's not a bad affliction. I quite enjoy it. Maybe I'll start a blog called Portmantopia... 

An obscure coincidence

Hello and happy new year! OK, it's not so new now. I started writing this a week ago, but got side-tracked by laptop dramas which involved losing nearly a year's worth of photos (and my temper). Fortunately I managed to recover the photos (and regain my composure).

 

I'll give you a full report of my Sydney adventures soon, but before I get around to that, I have another one of those freaky little coincidences to share. 

 

While I was on holidays I read The Lost Art of Walking, which included a (somewhat mocking) chapter on psychogeography, a concept completely new to me even though the practice isn't.

 

Last Thursday evening Luke and I brought forward our regular Friday night burgers and gelati date and I picked up a copy of Frankie magazine to read while eating my meal.  While flicking quickly through it, I thought I saw the word 'psychogeography' zip past my eyeballs. 'No, surely not!' I thought. 'That would be far too great a coincidence.'

 

I paged through more slowly and guess what? There was a little story on psychogeography! It was headed: The art of psychogeography or how to make fartarsing about seem legitimate and intellectual. Ha! (No, I did not rip the page out of the magazine or nick the whole thing.) The story, by Eleanor Robertson, reads: 

Travelling through human environments, especially cities, is usually a means to an end. Anything else is variously known as 'dawdling', 'wasting time' and ' for god's sake would you stop fartarsing about'. In 1955 social theorist Guy Debord legitimised the practice of fartarsing about as a meaningful and valuable activity called 'psychogeography'. Actively encouraging aimless daydreamy wandering, it turns urban spaces into objects of wonder, rather than simply points between A and B.

The idea of familiar cities as something to savour originated in 19th century France with the flaneur, or wanderer, a concept that really got going in critic Walter Benjamin's analysis of poet Charles Baudelaire. The flaneur is a social and literary archetype: a privileged intellectual man who, instead of working for a wage, uses his wealth to bunk off employment in favour of strolling  the streets of Paris. The flaneur is an observer, someone who experiences urbanity for its own sake. He doesn't hurry through the streets and passageways; he enjoys being in them on purpose. 

Psychogeography is best thought of as bushwalking in cities. Bushwalking is satisfying because nature is beautiful, and with attention and some luck, you can experience a bunch of cool things happening...The same is true for cities, with  buildings and architecture creating the landscape, and people creating the interest and drama. After laying dormant for half a century, psychogeography is becoming popular again, mainly because having a smartphone makes it easier and less stressful  to amble about without getting seriously disoriented....

Part of psychogeography is trying to alter your perception of what's around you in order to appreciate the historical dimensions of where you are. Ivan Chtcheglov, Guy Debord's friend and collaborator in revolutionary project Situationist International, said:  "All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past."  Or in less airy-fairy terms: what landmarks are around you? Who built them and why? what are they trying to tell you about your city?
 

Another part of psychogeography is the idea of leisure for its own sake. The Situationist International was heavily into seeking experiences "outside capital" - a Marxist way of saying that society doesn't really provide for our need to play and explore because we're all too busy  working. Most of our human-made environments and the activities we consider 'normal' to perform there, are centred around either making money or spending it. "Radical leisure" uses those places for pure fun, gaining enjoyment from a place without being productive in the economic sense of the word. 

So what does this all mean to you? ...go for a walk!... Pretend you're a tourist in your own city or suburb. Pay attention to what you see and how you feel about it. What's unexpected? Watch people around you, interacting with the landscape in different ways. And remember to take pictures...

 

Can I call myself a psychogeographer, do you think? It'd be nice to be a flaneur and spend my days strolling about observing stuff, but sadly I'm lacking the wealth to enable a life of bunking off employment. Sigh. 

Sydney glee

Hello from Sydney!  Guess what l can see from my hotel room? A very large old sign on the neighbouring building! I'll take a photo tomorrow when the light is better.

I'm getting a little excited about going on a sign-spotting jaunt in the next few days.

I had a very pleasant taxi ride to the airport this morning. I was only going to go as far as Southern Cross station to catch the Skybus, but the taxi driver was having a slow day, and offered to take me the whole way for $40 - only a little more than l would have paid for taxi and Skybus, but waaaay less hassle.

The driver was chatty and polite. He's from Bangladesh and has lived in Australia 27 years. He kept calling me ma'am, which made me laugh, and when he dropped me off he apologised for talking too much.

I had almost an hour to spare after checking in. I wandered about the shops...so many bookshops... l told myself l wouldn't go in because l had enough reading material with me. And then l went in and bought a book. It's called Embracing the Ordinary: Lessons from the Champions  Every Day Life by Michael Foley.  Not prizes for guessing why that appealed to me.

I started reading Wild, Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail on the US west coast. So far, so good, though her account of her mother's death nearly had me blubbering on the plane,  because l've been through a similar experience and it brought back sad memories.

It's good to see my mum again. I last saw her in July, but didn't get to spend a lot of quality time together.

Off to bed for me. (I'm posting this from my phone, so the formatting will be sloppy.)

Below is Sydney Town Hall all tizzed up with a light show.

Hooray for holidays

Oh, frabjous joy! I'm on holidayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees! I was even able to leave work a couple of hours early after rushing like a madwoman to get everything done.  Sixteen blissful days of no work, here I come! 

What's that Skip? A plate, figs and bread

I was wandering around Chapel Street Bazaar yesterday afternoon when this caught my eye:

A SKIPPY PLATE! My brother and I had these exact melamine plates with Sonny and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo on them when we were young uns. I'm not sure what happened to them, but I'd long forgotten about them. There were two plates at the bazaar, in pretty good condition considering they're more than 30 years old.  Yes, I bought one.

According to the Skippy Wiki (hehe), Skippy was banned in Sweden because psychologists thought it would fool kids into believing animals could do things they can't actually do! It also says Skippy is still being aired in Iran. How delightfully odd. (Click here for a collection of Skippy-related videos, including the opening titles and a Fast Forward spoof.)

I bought two fresh figs at the green grocer yesterday. Yay! It's fig season again. I'm going to have them for dessert tonight. 

We bought a slab of Turkish bread from the kebab shop on Swan Street yesterday. It's so soft and light and delicious...and I might not have eaten anything else today apart from the rest of the slab. Oops.  

Only FIVE DAYS of work to go before I'm on holidays - or only 4.5 days if I'm lucky enough to leave early on Friday. Of course I have a packing list of stuff to take with me to Sydney and a rapidly expanding list of things to do when I'm back in Melbourne. 

Salad days

I made a salad on Sunday night to take for my lunch on Monday - or at least I chopped up all the ingredients and packed them into the little containers and compartments of my nifty Nude Food Rubbish Free Lunchbox, ready for assembly and dressing at work. 

Then on Monday morning I went to the fridge, grabbed my breakfast shake, snacks and the salad dressing, shut the fridge, packed my bag and left for work. Forgot the salad, dammit. 

But I remembered it this morning and it was still good. Delicious, in fact. 

The ingredients are rocket, baby spinach, roasted pumpkin, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, baby beetroot, bocconcini and toasted pinenuts, with a garlic-infused olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing. Simple, but tasty and good for me. 

I've roasted more pumpkin for my lunches for the rest of the week. I didn't like pumpkin as a kid, but I've really grown to like it in the last few years, especially roasted. When I was cutting it up before, I could its sweet, fresh aroma. Yum. 

I ran/walked around the Tan again after work. I really, really didn't feel like it, but I tricked myself into putting on my exercise gear by telling myself I'd just walk around the Tan because that's still better than nothing. It was harder tonight than the last couple of times, but that's probably because I added a few extra sets/reps to my gym routine last night and it was nearly 30 degrees this evening. I still passed a couple of people though. Go, me. 

A good sign on Goodwood Street

Yesterday I went back and took photos of the old signs on the building in Goodwood Street we saw on our Friday night meandering around Richmond. 

Here's the whole building. I've fiddled with the photo (and all the others) to make the signs a little more visible, which gives you an idea of how hard it was to see them in the fading light.  

There's a phone number painted on both ends, beside the windows. It's a phone number, but it must be a very old phone number because it's prefixed with the letter J.

I only noticed when I uploaded this photo to my computer that you can still see the name of the sign writer on the bottom right above. It says Butcher Signs and something I can't make out that begins with "St". 

You can't make it out in the top photo, but there's also a sign above the door (click to enlarge).

It looks like the business name across the top - maybe Weer & Sons? - but it's hard to say because I'm missing the bit on either side.  I couldn't see very well with the sun in my eyes and the sign might have been too faded to see anyway.  

Below the name it says "Established 1860." 1860! No wonder it's so faded.  The bottom is "Also at Sydney and Newcastle". 

A very cursory Google search didn't shed any light. I might have to delve a bit deeper. 


But wait! There's more!

There's a sign on the east side of the building too.  It looks like it says LAMPS and below is the same phone number the appears on the front of the building.