Category Archives: Diary

500 people: Week Eighteen

Posted on 19 Jun 2021 | 7 comments

See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

Slim pickings this week. It’s not so much that I haven’t had casual contact with strangers as that I’ve been preoccupied with other things and not made mental notes. Here’s what I’ve got.

  1. Sunday 14 June, driving back to Sydney from Brisbane, we stopped at a motel in Port Macquarie. It turned out that when I’d made the booking online I’d left out the final digit of my phone number. Our host made a point of telling us this, because usually she sends a confirming text. She was clearly relieved that together we’d managed to get us booked into the last remaining room with no drama. So were we.
  2. Monday afternoon, having had a sore throat that was getting progressively worse, I drove to our local COVID–19 testing site, where, unusually, I had to wait – there were two cars ahead of me. A man in PPE came to my window, introduced himself as Doctor ––, and gave me a form and a pen. My impression was he came out just for the human contact.
  3. Monday, a little later, a woman in mask and PPE came and took the completed form from me. We made polite smalltalk and then she swabbed my inside cheek and my preferred nostril. [The text message advising me of the negative result arrived at half past 6 next morning, and my throat and other symptoms cleared up by the end of Wednesday.]
  4. Wednesday evening, in the flash new extension of the Marrickville Metro, I went looking in vain for our preferred brand of green curry paste. At the checkout of the Asian supermarket, I asked the woman on checkout how she liked the new shop. Unlike an old pal at checkout elsewhere in the new Behemoth, she didn’t moan about the changed conditions, but said simply, ‘It’s a lot bigger.’
  5. Thursday midday, the Emerging Artist, granddaughter and I visited Kelly Wallwerk, an artist-friend of the EA who is painting a mural on a water tank beside the oval in Petersham Park. The mural will show a woman in whites bowling, and we had a long chat about the process of creating it. (Photo in the slide show below.)
  6. Friday, filling prescriptions at the chemist’s, I couldn’t help but notice that the woman behind the counter looked weary. I ventured a comment: ‘You look tired.’ She didn’t hear and asked me to repeat it. When I did, instead of a smiling denial or similarly smiling agreement, she just looked even more weary, and said, ‘Yes.’ When the woman on the second cash register said she’d stay there for a while, my woman said, partly to me, ‘Thank God.’ I didn’t get the impression she was complaining. She was just bone-tired.
  7. Friday late afternoon, walking beside the water in Blackwattle Bay, we noticed some odd behaviour in a flock of seagulls near retaining wall. The birds would hover just above the water, perhaps even letting their feet go under, then dip their beaks just beneath the surface, all the time flapping vigorously so as not to move forward. Each bird would then fly away in a tight circle and repeat the process. A man was sitting on a bench nearby with a camera on his lap, looking off into the distance. I asked him, ‘Have you seen what the seagulls are doing?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. That’s why I stopped here. We then speculated together about what they might be up to. He thought they were feasting on a school of whitebait, and I couldn’t think of a better explanation.
  8. Saturday, at breakfast, in Leura where we went for the day, we asked for pepper for our eggs. The waiter brought us the grinder and left it on the table rather than doing the grinding herself and taking it away, which left me in a state of moderate to high alert in case the pepper was needed elsewhere. Sure enough, soon after omelette and poached eggs were delivered to the table nearest to us (a safe 1.5 metres away), the man on that table was trying to catch the waiter’s eye. I held up ‘our’ pepper and asked if it was what he wanted. It was. He was effusively grateful.
  9. Saturday afternoon, we’d been told there was to be music at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. We logged in at the Carrington’s courtyard. where there was a great mass of men, women and children in yellow, many of them sporting elaborate yellow floral headgear and other ornaments, many looking as if they meant business with drums, and all seeming remarkably cheerful in the face of the bitter wind that swept through the space. I stopped a young man, who had a delicate yellow chain attached to an earring, and asked him what was going on. He was only too happy to explain that Katoomba’s celebration of the solstice, which usually takes over the whole town for the weekend closest to the actual date, had been Covid-cancelled, but some community groups had decided to put on a show anyhow, and the Carrington had made the space available. What we were seeing was the group Hands Heart Feet, who were second on the program. [Not strictly part of this narrative, but they were fabulous, as were the belly dancers who opened the show.]
  • Photo by Penny Ryan
  • Photo by Penny Ryan
  • Photo by Penny Ryan

Running total is now 170.

7 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

Tagged , , , ,

500 people: Week Seventeen

Posted on 12 Jun 2021 | 11 comments

See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

I’ve been travelling this week, visiting family in Brisbane. Surprisingly, I’ve had fewer opportunities for new connections while away from home – so much time spent in the travel bubble with the EA, working out timetables and routes. Conversations with AirBnB hosts, though invariably pleasant, don’t count. But the following hit-and-run encounters do.

  1. Monday 7 June, having arrived in Brisbane, and found what we thought was a safe parking spot (it wasn’t, we copped a $100 fine) we passed Red Hill Cinemas, a building that was once a skating rink, on our way back to our flat, and decided to go to a movie. We asked the young man who sold us our tickets if there was somewhere we could eat. He directed us to the Colle Rosso (get it?) pizza place, but it and another that we found through Apple Maps were both closed. We went back to the cinema and asked the front-of-house man if we could get a refund on our tickets as we needed to eat and wouldn’t make it back in time. He went and asked his manager then, having failed to get through, told us that the cinema provided food. Gratefully we ordered toasties, and twenty minutes later, just as the movie was about to start, he brought our meals to Row F.
  2. Monday, on our search for Colle Rosso, we asked for directions at a bottle shop, which was the only sign of mercantile life nearby. The chap there was kind, pointed us in the right direction, and said he’d be surprised if it was open on a Monday night. Mildly distressed at the prospect of us going hungry, he said, ‘I’d make you a pizza myself, but I haven’t got an oven here.’
  3. Tuesday, at the Queensland Art Gallery’s wonderful William Yang retrospective, Seeing and Being Seen, there’s a series of photographs related to a North Queensland murder case in the early 1920s. The Emerging Artist asked if the magistrate who made an egregious verdict in that case was my grandfather. I had a close look at the photos and text, and said to a woman who happened to be looking at the same work, ‘That magistrate was my grandfather!’ She was suitably impressed, or perhaps horrified. (For the record, I was wrong – the case was heard four years before my grandfather got the job.)
  4. Wednesday, I was visiting an old friend who is living in a kind of home for aged Marist Brothers. He introduced me to a number of men in their 80s and in various states of frailty and apparent aphasia. The one I want to single out here was someone I had known reasonably well 55 years ago. He is the man who introduced me to the writing of John Henry Newman, Raissa Maritain and, you won’t be expecting this name, William Burroughs Jnr. When I introduced myself and offered some memory prompts, the only response I got was a blank watery gaze, and a limp handshake.
  5. Thursday morning, in the QUT campus at Gardens Point we were looking for the swimming pool. We approached a young man in a tracksuit that seemed to be made from African material with bold geometric design in dazzling orange and green. He knew where the pool was, and he was heading that way. A few seconds later he pointed to the pool, but said he had no idea how to get to it. The EA complimented him on his gorgeous outfit at the same moment as I, going for something less obvious, was saying how I liked his lavender hair. ‘Thank you,’ he said to both of us, in a tone that could have meant, ‘Why are these old people commenting on my appearance?’ (I don’t usually mention race in these encounters, but it’s significant that this man is white.)
  6. Friday morning, we called on the William Robinson Museum near the pool. The woman on security told us we could visit a website that gave a guided tour of the exhibition, relating it to Nick Earls’s book William Robinson: A New Perspective. ‘But it takes a lot longer if you do that,’ she said. I said we needed to be quick because we’d just been for a pre-breakfast swim and were hungry. ‘You went for a swim in this weather?’ she asked in Queenslandish horror (we’re having a bit of an Antarctic moment). We reassured her that we’d been to the heated pool. When we left 20 minutes later, she wished us a good breakfast.
  7. Friday, a knock on the door turned out not to be the Emerging Artist returning from the laundromat, but a woman who introduced herself nervously as working with our AirBnB hosts. ‘I’m wondering,’ she began, ‘if you’ve seen—’ I interrupted her and to say that yes, I had seen the bunch of access cards she was looking for. I apologised for not having been in touch as soon as I saw them, as I knew they weren’t meant to be there. Her relief was so enormous, it clearly didn’t occur to her to blame me.
  8. Saturday morning, as we headed out for breakfast and the European Masterpieces from the MET exhibition at QAGOMA, we shared the lift with two brightly clad young people. They barely acknowledged us when they entered the lift, not rudeness so much as mutual absorption. When the woman said something about coffee, I said something about the importance of the first coffee of the day. (I don’t actually drink the stuff, but I’ve learned that it’s richly symbolic of the good life for some people.) That broke the ice, and for the rest of our descent we chatted about the terrible noise from construction work in Roma Street that had kept up all night.
  9. Saturday afternoon, we were barefoot in bathers on our way to the sauna in our hotel/AirB’n’B. Outside the lift on our floor, an elderly gentleman said hello (elderly, but probably younger than me!). I said something about us making ourselves at home and he ignored me completely. A little later, he asked if our TV worked. I said it had last night. He again didn’t respond. At that moment the lift arrived and two much younger people came out. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘I need your help. My television doesn’t work.’ I realised later that he must have been very deaf, and had been looking away when I spoke.
  10. Saturday evening, when we’d finished dinner, a group of young people arrived at the door we were coming out of. The woman who seemed to be their leader said they were in the wrong place and should turn around. Knowing that the eatery has three entrances, I said its name and asked if that’s what they were looking for. She said No and set off. The last of the group, a man with a blond beard and a northern European accent, said, ‘We are just confused.’ I said, ‘And I was just helping to increase the confusion.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Thank you.’

Running total is now 161.

11 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

Tagged , ,

500 people: Week Sixteen

Posted on 5 Jun 2021 | 5 comments

See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

  1. Sunday 30 May, at a one-year-old’s birthday party, I met a number of new people, but really only had one conversation with someone who was new to me – the baby’s father’s stepmother. (We didn’t discuss what relation that makes her to the baby: I’d just go with grandmother.) She’s been travelling to Europe for work three times a year until last year, and was happy to regale me with tales of her travels, including a particularly lovely three days working at her computer on a train from Chicago to San Francisco – three very productive days with fabulous scenery rolling by outside her window. I asked the potentially annoying question: Did she know a friend of mine, from the same country of origin as her parents? After some memory trawling and adjusting of my pronunciation, she realised that she did know my friend, whom neither of us has seen or some years.
  2. Tuesday afternoon, I was having a hot drink with a couple of relatives from out of town at the Art Gallery of NSW. As I carried two large slices of layered honey cake to our table, the woman at the next table looked up from her abstemious salad and said something envious. ‘They’re not for me,’ I said, sharing her envy.
  3. Wednesday, in my second 20-minute session in the sauna, I somehow managed four conversations with new people. When I returned from my between-sessions cold shower, the two men I had left in sombre silence were chatting. The subject was tattoos. When one of them said, ‘I actually regret about half of mine,’ I seized the chance and asked him which ones. He backed off from his original statement ], but gave us both a tour of his calves and lower thighs, where he sported the images of a number of computer games – Pacman, Mario Bros, etc – and (the reason he’d backed off) the names of his three children. He saved the upper part of his body, he said, for more spiritual images. Something from The Everlasting Story scraped into that category.
  4. Wednesday, a woman joined us, and took control of the situation, swapping names and information about how long we had all been coming. I mentioned that my partner had stopped coming because the sauna was a bit male dominated, and people didn’t observe the Covid three-person limit. As it happened she had come in and made it four, but we didn’t make an issue of it. When another man (more about him soon) poured water on the rocks, she said something like, ‘It doesn’t matter to me, but there’s a sign asking us not to do that.’ A little later when the same man took a swig of water, she said, ‘It makes no difference to me, but I’ve read that if you drink while you’re in the sauna it takes away from the health benefits.’ She didn’t seem to mind that she got grunts in return and when, after a decent pause, the man took another swig, she exchanged a rueful smile with him.
  5. Wednesday, somehow the conversation turned to health and the water-swigging, stone wetting, grunting man, who had long blond hair and had a godlike surfy beauty about him – someone I was prepared to dislike on sight – volunteered that he’d recently had a brain tumour removed. While the woman, who had facilitated the conversation so elegantly, expressed sympathy, I went for vulgar curiosity: ‘Did you have a general anaesthetic, or did you have to be awake for the surgery.’ He’d had the anaesthetic, but knew it wasn’t always so. In that brief exchange my whole understanding of what was happening with the grunts etc was transformed. Later, I saw him with his clothes on, and something in his demeanour made it clear that he was dealing with the after-effects of the surgery.
  6. Wednesday, then I was alone with the other man who had been part of the tattoo conversation. He said he wouldn’t be game to bring a book into the sauna. And we had an interesting chat about the problem of too-many-books. He’d recently sold some art books for about a fifth of their worth, because it was easier to just accept the first offer from a bookshop. In the earlier conversation, before we got to tattoos, we had been taking about flexibility, specifically the possibility of putting one’s palms flat on the lower bench while sitting on the upper one. He had said to tattooed man that he could help him get there. I’d chimed in – and maybe it was my entry onto the conversation: ‘You’d never get me that flexible.’ He took it as a challenge: ‘Maybe not. But I could get you closer to it.’
  7. Saturday in the Inner West (Dulwich Hill, Earlwood, Marrickville, Enmore) I kept noticing other drivers being courteous and generous, often with a friendly smile, which was pretty good given how heavy the traffic was. I’m not counting them, but we had a similarly courteous encounter while walking on the Earlwood side of the Cooks River. As we approached a little sandstone-block chicane (see photo) designed to make the path unpleasant for bike-riders, a 60-something man with earbuds approached from the other direction, jogging at an impressive pace. We stopped to let him through, but he also stopped, and waited until I gave an explicit ‘After you’, then ran between the stones and past me with a friendly smile.

Running total is now 151.

5 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

500 people: Week Fifteen

Posted on 29 May 2021 | 6 comments

See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge. I’m realising that the point of taking note of these mainly probably ephemeral encounters is to pay attention to moments of making connection. Since starting these weekly reports, I’ve remembered my first encounters with people who have been important in my life – which is another story, but not unrelated.

  1. Sunday 23 May, we made an unplanned visit to the Corner Gallery in Stanmore, where there is an exhibition centred around beautiful photographs of Central Australian sites by Philip Bell. The artist was present, and we had an interesting chat about the work: he took the photos some time ago, and has reconsidered them in the light of Mark McKenna’s book Return to Uluru and the story of Bertha Strehlow.
  2. Tuesday morning, as I was heading out to the street when a tiny white dog with a pink collar yapped a furious challenge. I bent down and offered her the back of my hand, which was enough to change her challenge to a warm, bouncy greeting. So of course I got to talk to the human who, it turned out, has just taken on looking after the puppy two days a week. She, the human, lives in a part of our complex that means she rarely has reason to come to the lovingly tended flower gardens, and she was enjoying noticing them. We chatted about dogs and working from home, and then …
  3. Tuesday, immediately after that encounter, I was hailed by a recent acquaintance (Number 4 of Week 14), who introduced me to her partner, who was cleaning the brick wall outside their back door with a high-pressure hose. He apologised for the noise and, as expected, I said it was no bother. Truth be told, I’d barely noticed it.
  4. Tuesday, later in the day, I was in the sauna with an old acquaintance (Number 9 of Week 13) when a third person came in and pretty much ignored my greeting. After we’d been sitting in silence for a while, my old acquaintance started doing stretch exercises, and the newcomer asked, ‘Do you have flat feet too?’ We three then had a wide-ranging conversation, starting with flat feet and achilles tendons, taking in the Indian army’s policy of rejecting applicants with flat feet or no space between their thighs, to the difficulty of making friends in a new city and the possible role that ethnicity (polite word for racism) might play in that. Both my companions were the sons of servicemen. The newcomer had to ask us to repeat some things, so I realised that his initial lack of response may have been because I had mumbled incomprehensibly to a non-native English speaker. Possibly the mumble’s friendly tone helped him to take his later initiative.
  5. Thursday, as usual, was grandfathering day, and being in the company of a three-year-old person makes encounters happen. This Thursday, we had hot drinks at a cafe near the Newtown police station, a table away from a couple of men in suits who were discussing the prices of different sized USB sticks. when one of them went inside the cafe, someone at my table burped loudly. The USB man couldn’t resist. ‘Was that the young lady who did that?’ he asked. The young lady in question hung her head in pure shyness. I said, ‘No, she wouldn’t do a thing like that.’ He said, ‘Not yet.’ Given that everyone involved knew that I was the burper, this was a complex exchange, mostly benign exchange.
  6. Thursday, a little later, we were on a train. A young family – man, woman, baby nearing 12 months – sat opposite us. Out of the blue, the woman produced a shiny white camera and having asked permission took a photo of us. She then handed us the undeveloped polaroid snap, and all six of us watched the image emerge. It turned out they were o their way to the airport, going home to Melbourne. The Emerging Artist and I expressed our sympathy – they were heading back to a week’s lockdown, and there we all were, chatting maskless on public transport.
  7. Thursday, on the train on the way home, a woman sitting opposite us started chatting to Ruby. She responded with bowed-head shyness. The Emerging Artist asked if the woman and her companion were on their way home from work, and that led to a substantial conversation about their decades of employment for the same company, their prospects for retirement, and eventually the woman who had started it said she was sixty-five years old. The EA expressed surprise. Though I had also thought she was in her mid 40s, I thought this was a bit of an ageist gaffe, so I pointed at the EA and said, ‘She’s 35.’ (The EA is brilliant at making connections with new people – she does it by asking a lot of questions. I guess my most comfortable way is to make a joke.)
  8. Saturday morning, we’re spending part of the weekend with friends at Patonga, secluded beach town north of Sydney. On an early walk, the EA and I were behind a family where each adult in turn had something to say about how the teenage girl should dress for the unexpected cold weather. One of the women noticed us drawing even with them and said, ‘Sorry,’ in that Australian way of acknowledging proximity. I said, ‘Nah,’ or something equally articulate, then pointed to the EA and said to the teenager, ‘She’s been trying to figure out what I should be wearing too.’
  9. Saturday, later in the morning, we went to buy hot drinks at Cafe du Blueza – a marquee pitched in its owner’s front yard that serves snacks and drinks. I noticed some Girrakool Blues Fest merchandise and asked about his connection with it. It turns out he was the director of the Festival, but had to make a Covid pivot when it was cancelled – and is now doing quite well as a weekend front-yard barista.

Running total is now 144.

6 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

500 people: Week Fourteen

Posted on 22 May 2021 | 9 comments

See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

Here’s another week’s worth of apparently almost meaningless encounters. I say apparently because I can feel my general attitude changing when I’m out in public. Where I used to be content inside my bubble, either alone or with my companions, perhaps enjoying people-watching, I’m now tending to notice possibilities for connection – and notice how generally people welcome a friendly word out of the blue. It may not be the beginning of 500 beautiful friendships, but it changes the feel of public places.

Click on the image to see its source
  1. Sunday 16 May, early afternoon, walking with the Emerging Artist in Sydney Park on another beautiful late autumn day, I passed a man and a woman who, like us, were in their couple bubble. The man’s T-shirt caught my copy-editor’s eye. In a beautiful cursive, it read, Theiyr’re. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and by their startled reaction I may have said it in a tone of great urgency, ‘where did you get that fabulous T-shirt?’ They both laughed, and he said, ‘Google it.’ It turns out, of course, that the joke is everywhere, but none of the T-shirts I found on line did it as beautifully as that one. The pic above came closest.
  2. Sunday, on the same walk, near the skate park, I was similarly awe-stricken by a birthday cake sitting on a low wall. It was shaped as a blue skateboard, with wheels made of chocolate-topped cupcakes and candles shaped as the numeral 10. Such art cried out for an appreciative audience. After a moment of polite, silent appreciation, I caught someone’s attention and asked, ‘Who did that?’ ‘The mother,’ someone said, and the mother came back from a short distance away. ‘That’s fantastic,’ I gushed – sincerely. ‘It was a rush job,’ she said, in the classic ploy to avoid the evil eye. And she laughed.
  3. Monday morning, I bought a soy and linseed sourdough loaf at our local artisanal bakery. The masked man behind the counter, whom I hadn’t met before, said, ‘There must be a Spanish joke in that.’ Replying to my raised eyebrow, he went on, ‘Soy is I am, so Soy latte means I am milk.’ Being a smarty-pants, I said, ‘It would have to be Soy leche.’ Then as I was leaving, I said, ‘It needs work but you may have the makings of something there.’ (Arguably this exchange doesn’t qualify for inclusion here, because I did nothing to provoke it, but on the other hand I’ve had nice casual friendships with other people in that bakery, and who knows about this one?)
  4. Tuesday morning, setting out to visit the physiotherapist, I passed a woman wiping down the wrought iron fencing in front of part of our complex. I stopped to chat, we told each other which units we lived in – hers, obviously, was the one whose fence she was cleaning (‘Spring cleaning,’ she said, even though it’s late autumn). She asked if I was an owner or a renter, and when I said, ‘Owner’, she told me her name. I reciprocated.
  5. Tuesday, on the way home, in the back streets of Newtown, near the back of Camdenville Public School, a woman called to me from her car. ‘Can you tell me the way to Newtown Public School?’ Embarrassingly, I couldn’t. ‘I can tell you where Newtown High School is,’ I said, and offered to look up the primary school on my phone. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, indicating her own phone, and drove off. I’m still not sure where Newtown Public School is, but about five minutes later I passed her on foot in King Street looking as if she’d found what she was looking for. I don’t think she recognised me.
  6. Tuesday, at the vegie shop later in the afternoon, the woman ahead of me at the cashier was leaving with a wide open zip on the bag slung over her shoulder. I called out to warn her. She said, ‘Yes, I usually leave it open because I’m always in and out of it.’ When I’d finished checking out, she was still outside the shop with her two or three young companions (sons?). I kind of apologised. She said she usually has the bag at the front. I confessed that I’m regularly told that my backpack zip is wide open, and I was just passing on the favour. (Actually I have a new backpack whose zip isn’t broken, so those encounters are generally in the past.)
  7. Wednesday afternoon in the sauna, clearly a good place for talking to people, I had an actual conversation when there were just two of us there. I can’t remember how it started, but I know it was my doing. I learned a lot about how saunas are done in Finland: in particular I now have a mental image of my sauna companion gasping for breath in the ice-cold pond he plunged into after his first Finnish sauna, barely able to gasp out the word English so the nice man who was trying to help him could switch from Finnish to impeccable English to advise him to slow his breathing right down. We talked about life as a paramedic; I recommended Benjamin Gilmour’s movie Paramedico, though sadly couldn’t remember Benjamin’s name; my companion had read the book of the movie; he had suggestions for where there might be a sauna better suited to the Emerging Artist’s needs and preferences.
  8. Friday early afternoon at the School Strike for Climate, I was impressed by the row of policemen who marched beside the demonstration about two metres apart, keeping us to our side of the street (alas, not shown in the photo below). Remembering a moment fifty years ago at my first demonstration – a moratorium march against the war in Vietnam – when I said something to a policeman and received a punch in the head, I decided to see what happened this time. I don’t remember what I said in 1970, but in 2021 I said, ‘Thanks for doing this.’ The young policeman smiled and said, ‘You’re welcome.’ Emboldened, I said, ‘This must be a change of pace for you guys.’ ‘No,’ he said, we do this most Fridays and Saturdays. There’s usually a demonstration about something, not always climate change.’ I went back to chanting, ‘Stand up, fight back!’
  9. to 11. Friday, a little later, we were about to be organised to spell out a message – ‘Invest in the future, not gas’ – for a drone shot and a commercial TV helicopter. A woman standing next to me asked nobody in particular what letter we were standing next to. I was able to tell her that we were standing on the edge of the E. Someone joined the conversation and said we were at the end of the future, and a small group of three or four people bonded over the dark joke.
    12. Friday about 5 o’clock, in the thick of King Street, a young man with a scruffy beard (not an unusual sight in Newtown) was shucking a big and evidently heavy backpack. A long white arm stretched from the top of the backpack. Instead of just noting this as a colourful detail of the street, I stopped and asked him about it. ‘It’s my travelling companion,’ he said, with what may have been a British accent. ‘When I’m asking for a lift, I hold it out.’
    13. Saturday lunchtime, we were in a small Lebanese cafe where the owner said the kafta burgers were made using her mother’s recipe. I asked if she’d seen the recent episode of The Drum on ABC TV where they talked about vegetarianism. ‘I never get to watch TV,’ she said in the familiar sorrowful tone of the small cafe owner. I told her: ‘They were saying that a lot of men won’t give up meat because it would somehow affect their masculinity, and a man on the panel said, “I’m Lebanese, and if I stopped eating meat my mother would kill me.”‘ Our host laughed and told a story of what happened in her family when she tried to go vegetarian temporarily. ‘Oh yes,’ her father said, ‘have some of this delicious lamb.’

Running total is now 135. There are 32 weeks to go and I’m 365 short of the 500 goal. So about 12 encounters a week should get me to the goal. I reserve the right to shift the goalposts

9 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

Tagged ,

500 people: Week Thirteen

Posted on 15 May 2021 | 8 comments

Almost all the encounters I’m recording in this series are pretty much hit-and-run. That doesn’t mean they’re insignificant, of course – some of them are the first salvoes in what might go on to become something substantial. But who can tell? See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

  1. Sunday 9 May, as we came home from somewhere, a young man with a lot of tattoos and a part-shave haircut was opening the door of our small block of flats. We introduced ourselves, and he volunteered that he’s moving in with a downstairs neighbour, or perhaps just visiting.
  2. Wednesday evening, we had our annual fire services inspection. This meant a man with a ladder came into our flat and set off the smoke alarms. After the minimal transactional exchanges, I said, ‘It must be hard on your ears doing that a hundred times a day.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I’m deaf.’
  3. Thursday at GymKidz, in order to deal with a bit of social awkwardness among the young gymnasts, I asked a man for his daughter’s name. He wasn’t her usual escort, and she had been having a great time showing off her balancing skills to him. He had tried a couple of times to encourage her to pay attention to the instructor, but given up with cheerful resignation. We swapped the names of our young charges, but not our own names. It was his birthday, and he said that spending it at the gym was a lot better than being at work.
  4. Thursday lunchtime at Sydney Park slippery-dips, a young woman in a hijab was playing on the slides with her two young children while a man I took to be her husband sat under a tree and filmed some of their activities. As we were moving away, I said to him, ‘You’ve got the easy job.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I try not to fall asleep.’ (I should say there was no hint from anyone that he wasn’t just as active as she on other occasions.)
  5. Thursday a couple of minutes later, I spoke to the woman in the hijab who was then watching her daughter walk across a rickety bridge. When I admired the little girl’s fearlessness, the mother smiled broadly and amplified my comment. We chatted a little about our young people’s relative ages and sizes.
  6. Thursday, still in Sydney Park, Ruby and I were riding our scooters around one of the ponds when a big dog came bounding over to us. He was friendly enough, but given that he was more than twice Ruby’s size it’s not surprising she backed off in alarm. In the nick of time, the dog turned his attention to a middle-aged man in lycra who came jogging by at a pace. The man saved himself from falling, and turned indignantly to a woman sitting on a bench nearby nursing a dog lead: ‘You have to put him on the lead, that’s the second time he’s nearly tripped me up.’ She made a compliant gesture with the lead and he jogged off. A couple of seconds later the dog, still not on the lead, got underfoot with another jogger, who went on his way discombobulated but without saying anything. At that point I said, in what I hoped was a friendly tone, ‘You really should put him on the lead.’ ‘It’s an off-leash area,’ she said. ‘That’s why we come here.’ And she and the dog, still off-leash, went off, leaving me and Ruby to our negotiations with our scooters. We passed the cranky man a little later, but by then the offending dog and its owner had left his circuit.
  7. Thursday about a quarter of an hour later again, we were playing in a sandpit near a small boy and his mother. (Only the young ones were actually in the sandpit.) The mother spoke to her son in some English but mostly in another language. I broke the ice by asking what language she was speaking – Polish. Every time Ruby or our friend’s little boy went near the little Polish boy, he would clutch his big yellow tractor and say, ‘Mine!’ His mother was embarrassed, and said he had only become possessive like that since gong to childcare. We chatted about the possibility that he would keep both languages into adulthood. As we left, I refrained from saying Dasvidaniya in case a) it was Russian, and b) it meant something other than goodbye. It turns out it does mean goodbye but it is Russian. The Polish, I now know, is Do widzenia.
  8. Thursday evening, when I took our recycling out, there was a new man going through the bins for cans and bottles. We chatted briefly. I rescued my single Heaps Normal can from our small bin and handed it to him.
  9. Friday afternoon, I had the sauna mostly to myself. When a young man wearing a small cross on a gold chain came in I asked, conventionally, ‘How are you?’ and it turned into a conversation: he was having ‘a bit of a wild time’. We chatted for a bit about his not-very-wild dilemma (choosing between almost identical job offers) before he turned on his ear buds and I went back to my book. I couldn’t swear that this was the first conversation he and I have had. Certainly it felt as if some groundwork had been done on previous occasions. But I’m counting it as part of the challenge anyway.

Running total is now 123.

8 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

500 people: Week Twelve

Posted on 8 May 2021 | 8 comments

I started the week at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which you’d think would be a great place for talking to new people. But, though I caught up with a number of people I hadn’t seen for a long while, and was pretty awkward with a couple of writers whom I admire, even love, I didn’t do a lot of talking to strangers as such. See this post for a brief description of my 500 People challenge.

  1. Sunday 2 May, at an afternoon session, I fell into conversation with the woman sitting beside me. (I’m not counting the man in a wheelchair a couple of seats further away who unleashed on the subject of accessibility.) We’d seen Mehreen Faruqi in different sessions, and it was fun sharing our slightly different perspectives on her.
  2. Monday early morning at the pharmacy check-out, I got into one of those slightly awkward dances about where the queue actually went. I said to the woman at the till, ‘In Spain, instead of having queues you just ask when you arrive, “Who’s last?”‘ She said, ‘Yes, it’s the same in Cuba. You arrive and say, “Qui es ultima?” Then everyone can sit, or move around , or chat with people who arrived much earlier.’ The man I’d had the little dance with chimed in: ‘That’s what we do in my barbershop around the corner. When a customer arrives, they ask, “Who’s last?”‘
  3. Monday evening at the Griffin Theatre for Dogged (which I recommend), I was sitting next to a woman who seemed to be alone. Ever original, I asked, ‘Do you come to this theatre regularly?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m from Albury.’ and we had a very pleasant chat, reminiscing about theatre (we both used to come to that one when it was the Nimrod), grandchildren (she has more than me, and she comes to Sydney to visit them as well as go to the theatre), etc. Despite being masked, we may well recognise each other on future nights at the Griffin.
  4. & 5. Tuesday in the checkout at the supermarket, a small child (about a year old) was calling, ‘Baby,’ to the world in general. I asked where the baby was, and he pointed to the stroller with the woman ahead of him. Then he said, ‘Dog,’ and pointed over my shoulder to where there was indeed a cardboard cutout dog. I observed that there was a cat next to it, and he said, ‘Cat.’ Other words were exchanged, and his father joined the conversation less monosyllabically.
    6 & 7. Thursday morning at GymKidz, little girl came up to me and wordlessly showed me a sticker on her hand. when I admired it she peeled it off and offered it to me. I graciously accepted it, and asked if she’d like me to stick it back on her hand. She held the hand out to me, and I stuck it back on. Then I realised her father was the burly bald man with a pirate beard a couple of seats away who was wrestling an older child into his socks and shoes. I said something about the juggling act he was performing. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you learn how to stay cool under pressure and be in two places at once.’
    8 & 9. Thursday evening at the launch of Radicals, I mostly chatted with people I know. One conversation was joined by a Famous Person who, if we’ve met previously, certainly doesn’t remember me. ‘Hi E–,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’ she replied, and soon I was being eased out of the conversation she had just joined. Not rudely, but definitely. Later I had a chat with a man I’d not met before. It was an evening for reminiscence and ancient gossip, and that’s what we did. The bit I remember is that Geoffrey Roberson had told him he was radicalised by realising that the copies of a Shakespeare play given out at his school had had the rude bits cut out. I told him my story about the pious Brother who taught me Macbeth dictating the rude bits so we could write them back into our bowdlerised books: ‘Showed like a rebel’s whore, that’s W-H-O-R-E.’
    10 & 11. Saturday, at the Dobell Drawing Prize exhibition at the National Art School, I was entranced by a video component of Maryanne Coutts’s Dress Code, when two women who seemed to know a bit about art started chatting about the work. ‘It’s got a bit of everything in it,’ one of them said. I boldly offered, “I love the video.’ We watched companionably for a while. The other one said, ‘I like that outfit.’ (The video shows the artist emerging from a closet, walking about with large, Frankensteinish movements, then crawling back into the closet, her outfit changing every second or so.)

Running total is now 114.

8 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

Tagged , ,

500 people: Week Eleven

Posted on 1 May 2021 | 2 comments

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Friday this week, I heard my name called. It was a friend who said, ‘It’s no good talking to us, you already know us.’ Thus encouraged, here’s my next report on the challenge to talk to 500 new people this year. See this post for the brief description of the challenge.

  1. Monday 26 April, in the sauna, when I came back from my shower, a chap was lying down on one of the benches, reading his phone. Though I said not to worry, I had plenty of room, he sat up at a notionally Covid-safe distance. I had my book in hand (Rabbit poetry journal, the Science issue). He said, ‘Time goes slowly in the sauna when you don’t read.’ I agreed. I didn’t bring a book last time I was here and spent the whole time willing the minute hand on the clock to speed up. ‘But is it safe for your phone?’ I asked. ‘Everyone says that, but I have to have something to read.’ We went back to our devices, then I realised that the glue in some books melts in the sauna heat, and showed him where a number of pages had come loose in my journal in only 10 minutes: ‘Phones might be OK, but not books.’
  2. Wednesday, in the sauna again, reading Rabbit again (I’m going a lot because it does wonders for a stiff neck). A chap came in and before he sat down poured water from a plastic bottle onto the coals. If people ask, I never object to this barbarism, but as far as I’m concerned the sauna is for dry heat and there’s a steam room two metres away for anyone who wants steam. I didn’t say anything, but got up immediately and left. The third person in the sauna laughed: I must have made my displeasure crystal clear. As I showered in the dressing room, I regretted not saying something, preferably something civil, but as I was putting my shoes on the situation was redeemed. I tuned in on two men who were chatting loudly. ‘So rude,’ one of them said, ‘reading a magazine in the sauna. Some people have no respect.’ He was the man who laughed, taking to the man with the bottle. As he walked past on his way back into the sauna, I asked, ‘Are you having a go at me?’ ‘Was that you?’ he asked – people look different with clothes on. ‘Not having a go, but you shouldn’t read in the sauna. There are too many memories.’ At least I think that’s what he said. Maybe it was ‘too many members’. For some reason this little exchange had me smiling all the way home.
  3. Wednesday evening, I had a call to say that a friend with Parkinson’s had had a fall and none of her friends who are on call could get to her place. A young man had helped her from the nature strip to her apartment and waited there until I arrived. He and I had a brief chat before he, his partner and their little white dog went on their way. Really, the chat was pretty transactional, but I’m including this encounter because it’s not right that acts of kindness to strangers should always go unrecorded. (My friend is fine, except for a badly scraped knee.)
  4. Thursday midday, we went to Observatory Hill to have lunch with the Granddaughter, and visited the extraordinary Tree of Life exhibition at the S H Ervin gallery while we were at it. As I was leaving, the volunteer at the cash register asked if I’d enjoyed the exhibition. I said yes, very much. That doesn’t really count as a conversation though, more of flesh-and-blood evaluation survey. A woman leaning heavily on a walking stick spoke to me from the doorway: ‘It’s spiritual!’ Not a term I would have used but she was describing something real. We exchanged a few more words and then I was back to grandfathering.
  5. Thursday, 5 to 1 at the Sydney Observatory – I know the time because we were waiting for the Time Ball to drop – another woman leaning on a walking stick, with whom we’d crossed paths in the museum, joined us. ‘That’s a powerful smell,’ she said. My sense of smell is feeble at best and I couldn’t smell a thing, but I said, ‘It could be the lavender.’
  6. Friday early afternoon, picking up some new lights for our kitchen, I said to the man behind the counter, ‘Now we’ll be able to see.’ ‘Always a good thing,’ he said. So I told him the story I’d just heard from Lily Brett on ABC Conversations – she had cataract surgery and suddenly could se how filthy her apartment was.
  7. Friday at our 4 o’clock session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I had a chat with a woman sitting beside me. My opening line was, ‘Do you know who we’re here to see?’ ‘No,’ she said, and we both laughed, then looked up our programs and remembered why we’d booked these tickets so long ago.
  8. Friday an hour or so later, as we were leaving the Carriageworks, I spoke to a security man with an impressive waxed moustache. ‘This must be a cushy job,’ I said. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s a writers’ festival. I don’t know what they’re paying me for.’ ‘Just wait,’ I said. ‘All these silver haired people will get rowdy when the sun goes down.’ At least I wish I’d said that.
  9. Lateish Saturday morning as we were arriving at Carriageworks for our second session of the day, a small family group with English accents were walking just behind us – a man, a woman and a child in a stroller. They the woman was saying they had great seats in Row CC. Given that we had seats in Row BB, which I had assumed meant way up the back, I turned around and asked her if she knew for sure that BB meant up the front. ‘Definitely,’ she said. They went on ahead of us, him reminding her several times in few seconds to keep left on the footpath.
  10. Saturday, just before 12.30, waiting in Row BB (second from the front – the Englishwoman was right) for the session to start, a man sitting in the front row a couple of metres from me turned around and we caught each other’s eye. we didn’t speak, but there was a definite friendly exchange. He did talk to the women sitting right behind him, and I fairly brazenly listened in. He was the partner of one of the speakers, down from the country, and pretty glad to be there. He and I exchanged friendly glances a couple of times during the conversation: I think he may have been glad to have at least that much contact with another man.
  11. Saturday, after that session, in the Festival bookshop, I had picked up a copy of Nardi Simpson’s book, Song of the Crocodile. A woman said to me, ‘I’ve got a hundred pages to go in that.’ And we chatted for a while about the session we had both just attended. You hear a talk differently depending on whether you’ve read the book or not. Both our book groups have read Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip.
  12. Saturday, before the next session, I stepped out of the queue when it started moving because the Emerging Artist hadn’t come back from the toilet. The volunteer who was policing the queue asked if I had a problem. I explained, and all was good. Later, I asked her how long her shift was, and thanked her for volunteering and doing the work so cheerfully.

Running total is now 103. Posts on the Festival are coming soon.

2 Comments

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary

Tagged , ,

500 people: Week Ten

Posted on 24 Apr 2021 | 1 comment

Continuing with the challenge to talk to 500 new people this year. See this post for the brief description of the challenge. The encounters in these posts probably break down half-and-half into conversations that would have happened in the normal run of things but that I’m noticing in a slightly different way, and those that I initiate because of the challenge. You can probably tell the difference just by looking.

  1. Sunday 18 April, walking down Alice Street in Newtown, we passed two Mediterranean-looking men staring into one of the tiny front yards. I didn’t hear what they were saying but I realised they were looking curiously at a couple of fruit trees. I stopped and said, ‘That’s a cumquat.’ ‘Ah,’ one of them answered, ‘yes, a cumquat. But what’s that other one?’ ‘It’s a guava.’ ‘Oh, guavas are delicious,’ he said, and I was flooded with fellow-feeling. The Emerging Artist, who was also there, hates the smell of guavas and refuses to taste them. ‘Do you think we could lean over and pick some?’ one of the men asked. ‘No, but they’re too green anyway.’ I told them where we’ll all be able to pick ripe guavas from trees growing in the street just a couple blocks away in the next couple of weeks. As I type this I’m salivating.
  2. Monday afternoon, at the sauna, where the Covid-safe limit of three people is still in force, person number 3 came out of the door just as I arrived. Alas, a hefty chap rose up from a nearby bench. ‘You’ve been waiting?’ I asked. ‘Yep,’ he said, smiling with relief that he didn’t have to fight for his rights. I went instead into the steam room opposite, from where I saw another bulky chap arrive a few seconds later and go into the sauna unchallenged. Never mind, I had the warm glow of having done the right thing.
  3. Tuesday evening, when the lights came up after the curtain calls at The Removalists at the New Theatre, I turned to talk to the person sitting directly behind me. This was mainly for the sake of this challenge, but also because I thought I might be about to clap eyes on someone who had giggled during a truly horrible moment in the play. It turned out it wasn’t the giggler, I could tell by his voice. I asked the young white man (knowing the answer) if the play was set for study at his school (‘Yes’) and if he’d read the script (‘Yes’). I said I liked the casting of someone who isn’t white as Kenny, the man who is beaten up by police. He agreed, and asked if I went to the theatre often. I laughed and said I’d been three times in the last four days. Suitably shocked, he asked if that was usual. I reassured him that I usually go every couple of months.
  4. Thursday morning at GymKidz, I asked a woman with BLAH printed on her T-shirt in rainbow colours if this was her first session – it’s the start of a new term. ‘We’ve been coming for a year,’ she said. I expressed surprise, as her daughter seemed to be about two and a half. It turned out that they started coming when her daughter was just 18 months old, and played in the free play times. Then someone made them a gift of a term’s enrolment, her daughter loved it and they’ve been coming steadily ever since. This conversation happened in three parts, in the interstices of the gym session.
  5. Thursday, a little later, as we were making our way back to our car, we fell in with another couple of mothers and children. I commented to one of the mothers that I liked her small son’s brightly coloured pants. Yes, she said, they came from Gorman’s, and she did her best to make sure he didn’t get caught in the standard dullness of boys’ clothes.
  6. Thursday, early afternoon at Sydney Park, looking for a patch of grass where we could have lunch, we passed what at first glance looked like a fine china tea-set on a blanket. On a closer look, I realised the cups and teapot were plastic – it was a children’s play set. I said something to the woman standing guard over the set. It doesn’t really matter what I said because, though she smiled as if she thought what I’d said was mildly amusing, I now think she didn’t understand a word of it: when an older woman turned up a few seconds later with two small children, they spoke to each other in what may have been Latvian.
  7. Friday evening. No words exchanged, but this was a sweet moment. Walking near the Marrickville Metro Shopping Centre, I heard loud music coming from a parked car, and saw a woman sitting behind the wheel dancing vigorously with a big grin on her face. As I came closer I saw that a young teenage girl was sitting in the front passenger seat, looking cheerfully mortified. I smiled broadly and muttered under my breath, ‘What an embarrassing mother!’ She couldn’t possibly have heard me, but the girl smiled back and waved her arms in shadowy imitation of her mother, who also grinned in my direction.
  8. Saturday, on our morning circuit by the Cooks river, we passed a man with his toddler daughter who was insisting on walking back over a little wooden bridge to hear the sound it made as she walked on it, while the mother stood patiently with the stroller at the other end of the bridge. We stomped a little as we entered the bridge and earned a wide-eyed stare from the little one. As we passed the mother she said, ‘You can see why walks always take forever.’ ‘And it stays that way for years,’ I said.
  9. Later on Saturday morning, coming out of the Metro shopping centre, I saw a man with two small boys. He had lifted one of them up and was speaking sternly, and intimidatingly. into the small one’s face: ‘You have to wait for me. You can’t go out there by yourself.’ Seconds later, the boys were happily leading him towards the little water feature. ‘You can only look,’ he said, still sternly clearly having given up on the intimidation tactic. ‘You can’t get wet.’ I laughed and said, ‘Good luck with that one.’ ‘It’s a never-ending battle,’ he said. [This interaction is no less evanescent than any of the others, but I like to think that a friendly, amused word from another adult can be a huge help when parent-child tensions are brewing.]
  10. Saturday, a few seconds later, I stopped to draw Ruby’s attention to the toy monkey she had first noticed more than a year ago hanging from a high branch. [We were enjoying the rare treat of a weekend visit from Ruby and her father.] As we all strained to see the monkey, another family group coming the other way stopped to see what we were looking at. I explained, ‘We have to look at it every time we come past.’

Running total is now 91.

1 Comment

Posted in Around Marrickville, Diary, Theatre

500 people: Week Nine

Posted on 17 Apr 2021 | 4 comments

Continuing with the challenge to talk to 500 new people this year. See this post for the brief description of the challenge. Eileen Chong tweeted about my post on this challenge last week – it was her book launch where two of my encounters happened. And one of my encounters did a blog post about the event – here. From now on, I’ll give a little detail if the encounter happens at a cultural event.

  1. Sunday 11 April, the Emerging Artist and I went shopping for new kitchen lights. When I gave the very helpful saleswoman our address, she said, ‘Oh I’ve just moved to near there, in Dulwich Hill.’ The conversation progressed from the geography of Marrickville (we live at the other end of it from her), to the similar work fields of our sons, to her reasons for moving, her previous work and her feelings about her current employer (positive). Afterwards I wondered aloud how much of the conversation was a product of her training as a sales person – ‘Rule Nº 3b: Establish common ground with the customer’ – and I mentioned The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983), a book about air hostesses that I’ve never read but think about often. The EA dismissed my concerns and said that if we ran into that person in, say, Gleebooks in Dulwich Hill, we’d be pleased to see each other. Of course she’s right.
  2. Monday afternoon in the sauna, there were a couple of encounters. The first was pretty insubstantial, but I need to keep my numbers up. When I came in for my second 20 minutes, a man was lying on the top seat along one wall. He immediately sat up as I entered. I said not to worry, it was fine by me for him to lie down, but with Asian politeness, he persisted in staying upright. We lapsed into companionable silence.
  3. A few moments later, a young woman came in, only the third or fourth female I’ve seen in that sauna, including the EA. She was wearing a high-cut bikini, perfectly OK for the beach but arguably underdressed for the sauna. We all said hello and went back to ignoring each other. The other man left after a minute or so. I started to think about this challenge, and had pretty much decided that in that circumstance it didn’t make sense for me to start a conversation. Then I coughed, and I had to speak: ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ve got asthma. And I’ve been vaccinated.’ She laughed, and said something about how Covid–19 had made so many things feel fraught. We chatted a little and soon lapsed back into silence, me reading my book.
  4. Thursday morning in Gleebooks in the previously mentioned Gleebooks in Dulwich Hill, Granddaughter and the EA were at loggerheads over a Bluey book that we already own but GD wanted to buy. As the emotional temperature began to sky rocket the EA reminded GD that we were in a bookshop and it would be a good idea to take a deep breath and say what she wanted calmly. By sheer good luck I saw a Bluey book on the shelf that we don’t have. ‘Ooh, look,’ I said with genuine delight, ‘there’s a Bingo book.’ Suddenly everyone was happy. The talk-to-a-stranger happened next. A woman, probably also a grandparent, caught my eye as she passed by and grinned a conspiratorial congratulations.
  5. Thursday afternoon, two women were wandering around in our complex of units. I asked if they were considering moving in, and the older woman explained that she had lived here when she was a student and was showing it to her daughter. I was a little surprised at her nostalgic tone, given that our main building, a beautiful Italianate mansion, was a home for ‘girls who gave their affections unwisely’ run by the Salvation Army. But no, that wasn’t her, she said. In her time, 1995, it was a boarding house for women students. No men allowed in the rooms, and there was always a Salvation Army chaperone on duty in the parlour. When her mother told a neighbour in Bathurst that she was staying at this address, the neighbour burst into tears and said, ‘That’s where we got our adopted daughter!’ The section where I live was a parking lot in 1995. The daughter stayed silent throughout: ‘Why is my mother talking to this stranger?’
  6. Thursday evening, I took our recycling out. A woman was going through the bins that had been put out for collection. I stood beside one and asked if she had already looked in it. She misunderstood and came over to check the contents of my two small bins. ‘No,’ she said, ‘only cans or beer bottles.’ As I emptied my bins, she went on: ‘So many cans today and I didn’t bring a trolley. Usually there are other people here but I’m the only one today.’
  7. Saturday early afternoon, at the National at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a group of maybe 10 women were sitting quietly on straight-backed chairs around the edge of a circular rug. On the walls near them were a number of projects involving quilting and knitting. I asked one of them if they were somehow part of the artwork. She ignored me, but a gallery attendant explained that they were waiting to be joined by Kate Just, whose work Anonymous Was a Woman took up two of the walls: the idea is that women book in to sit and chat with Kate while she continues to knit panels for Anonymous, and the other women work on their own knitting projects. I asked another woman about her project, and she was happy to explain that she was holding a loom: ‘Not actually a loom, but that’s what it’s called. I.m making a beanie.’ She explained a little about the technicalities – like complex French knitting. We chatted a little until interrupted by the artist’s arrival.
  8. Saturday mid afternoon, I chatted to a baby on the tram. The baby in question, close to a year old, was in his stroller facing away from his mother and older sister. When he dropped his bottle, his sister scrambled around on the floor and retrieved it, but quite rightly gave it to their mother. He was left unable to see them and without his bottle, and started to fret. I was standing right beside him, so I said, directly to him, ‘It’s all right. Your mummy’s got the bottle and she’ll give it back to you later.’ He calmed down, and looked interested, so I kept taking. ‘You’ve got something stuck in your hair.’ I picked a small piece of purple paper from his hair and put it on the rail of the stroller in front of him. Even more interesting. I said something to the mother, she smiled the wan smile of the exhausted.
  9. Saturday evening, at a performance of Jonathan Biggins’s The Gospel According to Paul in Parramatta, with 10 minutes or so to spare before the show started, I asked the young man next to me if he was a Keating fan. It was a genuine question. He can’t have been more than 20 in an audience that was mostly at least 25 years older than him and was solo, so he must have had a particular treason to be there. Yes, he said, he was a Keating buff. When he asked, I said I wasn’t a buff, but an admirer. He’s studying politics, at Sydney Uni I think he said. He’d been intending to see the show the previous night with his parents but had to finish an assignment, so came tonight instead. We chatted until the lights went down: he was impresssed when I told him I’d been the editor of a magazine he’d enjoyed in primary school (though I realised I had already left the job by that time). At the end we agreed it was a terrific show and exchanged names.

Running total is now 81.

4 Comments

Posted in Diary, Theatre

Tagged ,