Airport sketch

Airport

I had an hour longer than expected at Melbourne airport on my way home. Staff were hurriedly lining us up to board the plane before the threatening storm arrived but they weren't quick enough. The lightening alarm went off and we were grounded.The woman next to me in the queue took a quick look at the BOM storm app and said 'Well be waiting 30 minutes, or maybe thirty five."

  It was a short but violent storm with hail blowing in through the cracks in the door.

Hail coming through cracks in the door

I said to my neighbour that I was glad to be inside and not sitting on the plane we could see through the window, unable to dock as our plane was in the way.

'Spare a thought for those in the air circling the airport,' she said opening a radar app and showing me a tight bunch of  planes hovering over Melbourne. Turned out she had once worked at the airport. (Her estimate of a 30-35 minutes wait was two minutes short.)

Meistersinger in Melbourne

Kasper Holten Set his Meistersinger in a gentleman's club, and it works. The set for this production is a piece of genius, never intruding but always adding visual interest to the stage.

The singers and musicians (under the baton of the magician Pietari Inkinen) did credit to the music and the audience loved the whole thing.

Eva storms off the stage at the end, which I thought decidedly odd but then  I remembered this is an English gentleman's club that her Walter had been blackmailed into joining. I would have stormed off too.

(I couldn't help thinking about Brexit and all those Tory fellows in their clubs hankering after their colonial past.)

Darabin Parklands

After a few days in noisy city streets, how relaxing to be walking along woodland paths listening to the bees buzzing in the trees. Or was it flies in the undergrowth? It was difficult to tell.

Along the path there are benches and small plaques suggesting methods of contemplating life's problems. Sage advice: examine your problems, think about your support structures and about small steps to move along your chosen path. Then think about what you are going to do to take that first step. 

Unreal cakes

Cakes at Brunetti Cafe in Lygon Street
Real actually, not unreal. 

Melbourne shopping

A book, all I wanted was a book.

I set off down a Melbourne street to find a bookshop, followed some schoolkids into an alley and found myself in 'the southern hemisphere's biggest under-cover shopping precinct'. It is a series of shops with pedestrian bridges across intervening streets. Mercifully no Muzak,  so it is relaxing, especially on an early morning week day.

I asked a passer-by where the nearest bookshop was and she scratched her head and said "Well there used to be lots, but the only one I know if now is right at the other end of this street. Just keep on walking and you'll find it."

So much stuff....

So walk I did, on and on past clothes and yet more clothes. No bookstotes and hardly even a shoeshop. Who wears all these clothes, clothes that are apparently out of fashion two months after they are bought? Someone must or these stores would go broke.

Three storey of clothes shops

I eventually found the bookshop. It was busy fortunately so there is still a need for books in Melbourne.  Just imagine though a city with as many bookshop as clothes stores.

Early heat

Sydney is breaking heat records with 37.5C today. Last night was one of those nights where you toss and turn, then finally at 2am you get up and change your bedding to summer weight.

Today was a scorcher and tonight will still be warm. Will we drop off from exhaustion or will we be still more zombie-like tomorrow?