Trial Run

I spent most of yesterday in Melbourne, taking my usual Arvo Job train to the city and, for the first time in two months, also returned home on my usual evening train. From my experiment, I suspect that for the next few weeks at least, train time will not so much be writing time as napping time.

In between, I did many un-Arvo Joberly things. First, fresh off the train, I caught up with a friend in Degraves St. Arriving early, I popped around the corner to Flinders Books only to discover that another mainstay Melbourne bookshop is closing down. So sad! Ah, the times I've ducked into that repository of second-hand treasures for a nice peaceful perusing. Long ago, I purchased one of my most favourite and always envy-inspiring books there - Writers' Houses  by Francesca Premoli-Droulers, with a forward by Margaret Duras, which features beautiful photos of the amazing abodes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Castles and fantastic retreats abound, and browsing through it never fails to inspire sighs of longing and thoughts of how I too could be a great writer if only I had a mountaintop chateau in which to collect my thoughts. Anyway, since there was a 50% off sale, and for old time's sake, I bought two hardbacks - Brian Stableford's The Empire of Fear and Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End. Then it was back to Degraves St for tea and a chat.

After that, I trammed it to St Kilda (and gleefully eavesdropped on a bunch of young Danes), visited my doctor, walked back to the city via Chapel Street popping into many shops along the way, and finished off the day with fried noodles and a movie, namely A Royal Affair, simply because Mads Mikklesen is in it :) It's all about an infamous liaison between King Christian VII of Denmark, his wife Queen Caroline Mathilda, and the freethinking court physician Johann Friedrich Struensee. Not very historically accurate, it was nonetheless entertaining, and had some pertinent comments to make on the power of  ideas, information and misinformation control, political spin, influencing the masses, and the sheer nastiness of folk with much when it comes to sharing their toys with the less fortunate. It was also a long movie - if not for the arrival of a just-in-the-nick-of-time tram to speedily carry me across town, I would have missed my homeward train.

So I did the time (a day crammed with fun like that certainly illustrates just how many perfectly good hours our day and arvo jobs take up) and even though I had to sleep in this morning, I'm not overly pooped now. I should be right for a gentle return to the Real World next week.

Now for some walking and writing.