A bit of my day that makes the winter okay

For two weeks I’ve been walking a particular path at a particular time of day that is, in my mind, too early to be about in winter. Yet there’s one corner of my route that, in its mundane way, gives me a strange sense of pleasure. There’s a hum about the space there, brought into being through the combined efforts of the senses and the imagination of one hoping to imbue the ordinary with the romantic. Sounds are central: the constant deep purr of the traffic that gathers in frustration at the tapering of Flemington Road to Grattan Street; the intermittent whirs and cracks of the construction site that, if you listen but don’t look too closely, echo the never-on-pause progress of New York. Then there is the sense of scent that brings the bitter warmth of the cigarettes smoked religiously by the pyjama-clad patients who emerge from the hospital, hooked-up and bound to the entryways, into the cold morning. It’s a concentration of tobacco that you’ll encounter little in this city, where the haunts of the smoker are less and less. The olfactory mingling of the smoke with the faint trace of cheaply baked danishes, hospital-grade coffee, and the chilled air of the a.m. allows the walker to almost transport themselves—again, with a little less looking—to the streets of the great metropolises of the imagination: London, Paris. The moment makes the morning pass a little more warmly, in spirit if not celcius.

’Twas in that place o’ Scotland’s Isle

Edinburgh, in my mind and recollection, is a city of theatrical contrasts: Old Town and New Town, vastness and intimacy, drama and comfort. I traveled there in a particularly cold winter, only intensifying this sense.

On the one hand, Edinburgh is a place of great spatial spectacle. Not a very large city, it is set upon a series of

And that was New York

As a lover of cities, of the pavement and the steel, of the bustling shops, the rushing people, I have been wanting for sometime now to put down in words my experience of that ultimate metropolis, Manhattan.

A Walk in My Melbourne

It’s late afternoon on a Wednesday in August, late winter in Melbourne. I’ve ventured out from my native Carlton North, heading out on foot to cross Nicholson Street, the Carlton-Fitzroy border and a mental barrier between my territory and the unknown. Ostensibly a rare act of exercise (I have on my trackies and runners left over from school hockey trainings

On Dressing Up and Fitting In

When I was four, my mother dressed me as Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding. Grey tights, grey skivvy, a stocking over my face with currants drawn in permanent marker, and a pudding basin atop my head, the outfit’s crowning glory. No, she wasn’t indulging a deranged whim – it was dress-as-your-favourite-book-character day at kindergarten.

Already, I was different and, even at four, I knew it. All around me swirled tulle tutus and streaks of satin, glittering pinks and purples, cute little button-nosed Goldilocks and Tinkerbells. And here was I, a goddamn pudding. Refusing to submit to the indignity of the stocking, I gazed maliciously at the camera, unwittingly completing the impersonation of that bad-mannered, ill-tempered edible.

Urban marvel 1959: The Lonely Londoners

Reading Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, the narrative of West Indian immigrants in post-war London, I was struck by this passage which rather sums up the power of a city to enthral its inhabitants, to inspire a sense of real romance and imaginative possession. You could so easily substitute the streets, squares, and haunts of your own city:

Oh what it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square…’ What is it that a city has, that any place in the world has, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else?

Nightmare on Main Street

Halloween is one holiday that I firmly advocate we take up with more verve below the Southern Cross. I believe I have been trick-o-treating once in my life, and attended just one Halloween-themed party; never once have we had trick-o-treaters knocking at the door of our house, certainly in the twenty-two years I’ve been in residence. But I was utterly delighted by my Halloween experience this year. I mean, the holiday has

Holiday, oh, holiday! And the best one of the year

Now that the old “holiday season” has begun in earnest, it seems that the end of the year is approaching rapidly – it’s Thanksgiving on Thursday, and Christmas is already more than in the air. There’s something contagious about the sense of holiday fun that’s circulating at the moment, something that isn’t just about excitement of a potential white Christmas. Certainly, the weather plays into it - there’s ice-skating on

A poem on the underground

I love the subway. Any city, any system, there is just something wonderful about those rattling old trains hurtling at break-neck speed through subterranean tunnels. The subway is hot, it is crowded, it is grimy and rat-infested, it has the power to ruin your day with its delays and abrupt route alterations, and yet I love it.

On Train Travel

On my few trips through Western Europe and New England I have discovered something about myself that would never perhaps have surfaced in my native Australia – I love to travel by train. One would expect to be deathly bored, cooped up with nowhere to go for hours on end, with only the distraction of an undulating stroll to the café car and its promise of a packet of crisps and bland, expensive coffee.