Dessert at Customs House

Turns out, turns out, that the platter, be it cheese or desert, is remarkably good value, being split between three or four, and would perhaps satisfy five (as a post-dinner of course). Me, I prefer my main meal to be satisfying or cheap: Bill and Toni’s or Tropicana as a preference. Byron would prefer something ‘nicer’, but I would disagree, although I also argued about expensive cars (and their undesireability) with K, so I think the disagreement is deeper than mere pasta. Something that feels like you’ve swallowed a boot, but a good, wholesome boot. It was cold, but my companions did not believe so. They said it was only so by the water. Turns out all of Sydney is by the water, idiots. I have to be all Hannibal Lecter with my scarf, it’s chilly.

Wildflowers

I’m hurtling through the green under a scummy soap-sud sky, the countryside verdantly lush because of the rains. Pools and ponds have burst their banks, joining already swelling rivers or turning roads into watercourses. Flooded forests stretch their downward reflection into infinity, a living chasm in the landscape. The tops of the gently undulating hills are crowned as always with gums but occasionally breaking out in serious thickets of bush and tropical foliage. The changing types of wildflower growing along the tracks are perhaps the only variation, the proportion of black to crown cows apparently unchanged from state to state.

Human habitation punctuates the dullness with its own brand of monotony: coal yards, scrapheaps, electrical substations, forgettable towns and the reassuring power lines, leaping over and beside the train like dolphin or gulls on more buoyant transports. Lying sometimes in gullies, riverbeds or in distant clearings are mysterious piles or deliberate constructions of corrugated irons in various states of decay, begging to be explored. The train, unfortunately, has no sympathy for my curiosity and roars on in its own bullheaded, implacable fashion. Charging into the primeval darkness of a tunnel and out again, only to plunge into another a few steps along the mountain. In these passages the train windows become completely reflective, and we are without warning confronted by our own faces, ravaged by sleeplessness, discomfort and boredom. It is very disconcerting, and the end of the tunnel is eagerly anticipated. Back in the foliage again, a bright yellow and green portable toilet splashes its antiseptic fluorescence by the rails, a curious contrast to the lack of people. Perhaps the local cows are modest.

In the late afternoon the taller, more fully forested hills in the distance are smothered by the sky dropping under the weight of all that boorish rain. Oh look, black and white spotted cows, the only herbivore Frances will allow the title of “real” cow.

Twin Bins

I was dwelling on two bins entrenched side-by-side on George St. Why dwelling on the bins? Well, in the city it’s best to dwell on things below head level, to avoid the horrible mistake of making eye-contact with a rushing anybody. It’s terrible exchanging that anxious animal glance between people in the city, herbivores agitated by the crowd and the smell and the speed. So: dwelling on the bins. Funny bins, placed so close together when the block to either side was decidedly free of rubbish recepticles. Fitingly, outside the station there was also a clutch of postboxes; another utility characterised by its loneliness. Commuters were hurling their butts into the curved metal container at the top intended for this purpose, being too busy of course to stub them properly. The bins were both spouting smoke vigorously. Both combustions were uniformly affected by the wind blowing from the Quay and sweeping up the funnel of glass and metal of George St, so from these two bins, huddling together and immobile in the isolation and compartmentised hurry of those busy, busy city folk, spilled out twin dancers that would waft and twirl in perfect synchronisation, oblivious to the background roar and sharp air-brake sounds of buses.

Bats #1

On cloudy, windy nights, bats are given grace by their sillouettes, looking like silent seagulls as they drift and coast and soar in the breeze coming off the harbour, flapping about the street lights for their meals, until they fly directly above and expose the prehensile fingertips of their membrenous wings. Their noiseless flight is the only spectacle of motion, interrupted perhaps by the glint of a late night car on a distant suburban hill across the harbour, or a ferry drifting gaily in the blackness between two piers, told always by the flashing reds and greens of the bouys. In the morning their bodies can sometimes be found in the street, killed by the wires powering the bulbs that attract their morsels of nurishment. Their deaths, surely noiseome, must occur at that perfect moment when everyone is unconscious, or, like their flight, it is soundless, and the bats hanging on the wires droop silently and gently slump into the dark bitumen of the street.

So maybe that’s what we’re like, ugle and graceful at the same time, or depending on your point of view, the sole creatures ducking and diving through our local stream of consciousness. Then, just like the bats, all at once, we are dead, and it is either silent or ignored. But there will always be more bats, because there are so many bugs.