The hood revisited.

I spent all day yesterday back in St Kilda visiting folk and favourite shops, and drifting in and out of my old haunts, the ghost of a resident past.

It’s been two years since the gentrification of Melbourne’s inner suburbs found me wanting as a desirable resident and ordered me to move on, and each time I go back, increasingly the place no longer belongs to me. The incremental changes are adding up. One dark and cavernous op shop that I used to pop into every week is now a big, shiny exercise/coffee/yoghurty bike place, the once nook-filled Chronicles Bookshop has become a square, shiny yoghurty place, the once famous burger place where regulars hung out has been replaced by bland, shiny yoghurty place full of tourists, and for goodness sake, even ‘The Newmarket Hotel’, that last bastion of take-your-trendy-designer-atmosphere-and-stuff-it, has gone upmarket and, no doubt, also serves yoghurt. Scheherazade is gone, The George Cinema closed a while back, countless other beloved places have vanished, and my 'Magic Op Shop', which once upon a time always produced something that I really needed when I needed it most, well, now it looks overgrazed; even though I searched high and low, it gave me nothing yesterday. They say you can’t go home again, but you can almost go home, which is a strange, disjointed feeling.

I met up with an old neighbour. He told me all the latest local news, including how he recently solved the mystery of what happened to a neighbour who disappeared four months before I left, during the time of the February 2009 bushfires. It was an amazing story. Sadly, people are now moving in and out of the building where I used to live too quickly to get to know each other. My old neighbour, a great talker who used to help everyone with their handyman problems, said that he mostly keeps to himself these days.

On my way out of town, my old friend The Book House, perhaps for old time’s sake, bestowed its favours upon me and provided me with a hardback copy of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America for $4.00 (I read Julian: A Christmas Story a few months ago). Then I left St Kilda. Again.

In one of those neat balancing out acts that life sometimes constructs, an hour later in the city, I met a man from Castlemaine – another new resident and commuter like me – and we talked about being part of the exodus of inner city residents to the country, and how we were both annoyed by other newbies who go on about how much they love living in a country town BUT they wished the shops had longer opening hours and that there was a bigger supermarket and that there were more restaurants and blah, blah, blah.

So, before you know it, we both agreed, there’ll probably be a whole lot of shiny, yoghurty places out here too.