Scary sign

Seen in the Marrickville Metro:

True, that’s what I saw! Nicabate supporting someone’s suicide pledge! What I saw when I looked again, and what was in this photo before I took to it with the eraser tool, was ‘STOP SMOKING DAY’ after ‘WORLD’. How useful a comma would have been after “QUIT’!

 

 

Length? Reach?

A greengrocer’s apostrophe has escaped and been seen at this block of flats in Victoria Road, Marrickville. Approach with caution, as it is believed to breed at a phenomenal  rate.

For Nicola

What better way to acknowledge and welcome editorabbit, cranky pedant and rabbit lover, to the blogosphere than to share a couple of images from the World That Gets By Without Editors.

This is from King Street South in Newtown. It repeats its two-A’d message in an endless animated loop.

And I have wanted to take a photo of this sign for a long time. It’s one of three at the corner of Salisbury Road and Australia Street in Camperdown. Two have this charming variant spelling.

SO welcome, editorabbit. The world is so full of a number of such things. I look forward to seeing many more on your site.

Rhyll McMaster at Sappho’s

Next door to Gleebooks, Sappho’s Book Shop stages monthly poetry readings. Last night Rhyll McMaster read from her next book – she’s writing poetry again after years engaged one way or another with the novel Feather Man.

No one was smoking in Sappho’s courtyard, but I like the way this phone photo suggests the classic smoke-filled ambience for poetry reading.

Not the rabbit-proof fence

… although maybe these all got impaled when they tried to get into the property at Easter

Elegant graffiti

I wouldn’t have noticed this but for a young girl who read it out loud to her mother just as I was walking past. It’s on a building site just around the corner from my place.

A mighty wind

This morning people in my house said to each other, ‘How about that wind?’  Not all the people, mind you: even though I had a disrupted night because of a heavy cold, I didn’t hear a thing. So I was impressed when taking the dog for her afternoon walk  to encounter this proof that the wind had indeed been violent:

Apart from the blue car with the good fortune to be covered by a tarpaulin (whose tarnished bumper bar suggests that the owner might have preferred the insurance bonanza of serious damage), there’s a bright red BMW under those branches, which seems to have escaped with just a few serious dents.

I wasn’t the only one who whipped a phone out in the brief time I was there. Given the state of the light at the time, I’m impressed by how much I managed to capture.

Tomorrow night, after Book Group meets, I’ll  post about The Tree of Man.

For science

I’m mildly asthmatic, and every now and then lend my body to science. Today I spent a couple of hours in a high-tech environment doing mildly undignified things – mainly breathing into various gadgets.

Jess, the charming PhD student who told me what to do and harvested the data I generated, kindly agreed to take this photo for you, dear reader. I am in an airtight cabinet called, I think, a Body Room. There were no body bags in sight.

Fourmillante Sydney …

… Sydney of dreams …

Last night we spent a couple of hours in the city for the first night of the Festival of Sydney. We saw:

• thousands of people in a good mood, many sporting little electric fans that somehow lit up with an ad telling us to switch to a sponsoring bank
• the fig trees in Hyde Park sporting ornate trunk wraps
• a spangled woman floating beneath a giant balloon outside the Barracks Museum, who dived in slow motion to touch fingers with a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders

• kaleidoscopic images lighting up the wall of the law courts building
• a hundred saxophone players belting out a tune from the upper and lower verandahs of the Mint Museum
• twenty bagpipers playing ‘Amazing Grace’ from the front of Parliament Building
• Black Arm Band singing ‘Treaty’ in the Domain, and even though we were half a kilometre away from the stage they really did the business (Al Green, the main act, didn’t reach as far back as us in quite the same way)
• aerialists throwing weird shadows onto the western façade of St Mary’s Cathedral

• A fabulous band called (I’ve just looked them up on the Festival web site) Big Bad Voodoo Daddy doing ‘Minnie the Moocher’ in Martin Place, which was packed even tighter than the Domain

I don’t have high expectations of these kinds of giant parties, particularly since being vomited on by a stranger at Darling Harbour one New Year’s Eve 25 years or so ago. Last night was like a good dream, or a dozen of them at once.

’Tis the season

The nursing home, which is run by a church organisation, has a number of celebratory events at this time of year. Last Tuesday was carols evening, attended by residents from all the organisation’s nursing homes in the region. The home’s vast garage is hung with tinsel; there’s a gigantic throne for when Santa makes an appearance, and a number of life-sized Santa statues. A troupe of school children sing carols (some of the same ones that have been piped in from a CD player as the masses assemble. A chaplain (or ‘Director of Pastoral Services’) gives a brief talk about ‘the true meaning of Christmas’, which apparently is that her allocated time is far too short. There’s ice cream and cupcakes and softdrink. Mollie joined in the applause and waved her cup of lemonade in time to the singing, and that makes the event a success. Personally I’d rather have teeth pulled, or even listen to Bob Dylan’s latest album.

On the weekend it was the residents’ Christmas party: more softdrinks and carols, though this time sung by a crooner with a finely developed sense of his audience, and mingled with other less single-minded tunes. There were lots of visiting relatives, including young ones, and a genuinely convivial mood. The dining room was cheerfully alive.

And yesterday morning Penny decided we should experiment with taking Mollie out. She’s been pretty much living a wheelchair for a couple of months now, which has its own disadvantages, but paradoxically creates opportunities for greater mobility. When Mollie used a walker, her progress was so painful that to walk any further than the small outside garden would have been an ordeal. Yesterday, we dared to wheel her out – through the front doors into the astonishingly bright sunlight, down the short street with its occasional rose pushing through a cast-iron fence, across Balmain Road, and to the ultra-cool DiVi Cafe, where Mollie drank a cup of not-too-hot hot chocolate and watched a number of small children playing on playground equipment. She smiled and nodded (language has pretty much deserted her) and I realised that the simple, basic pleasure of being around small children is something that nursing-home residents have very little of. Those couple of minutes sitting in the sun, feeling the light breeze, sipping a lukewarm milky drink and watching a little girl play on a slide and a little boy try to give his father a fright had an awful lot of joy in them.