Did you know, Gentle Readers, that public buildings which have chairs in their lobbies are great places to sit & read, or sit & listen to music, whilst waiting for one's next appointment? No purchase required.
So, in the morning (really early, compared to my recent lifestyle), I got the bus into town with Mr Golightly. I'd forgotten how he always likes to pretend my somewhat large bottom is pushing him off the seat into the aisle... anyway, dip the ticket, 6.53, onto the bus, and of course because it's still school holidays, the bus was empty (well, that and the fact that it starts just round the corner from our bus stop, so you'd expect it to be empty). By the time we'd wended our weary way into town at 8.00, it was standing room only, school holidays or no.
I met up with my lovely former colleague The Jaxster, and my mentor and former-former boss, the gorgeous Q, and we had a huge breakfast and planned our strategy for the assault on available jobs in the August Institution when I return (l'orrore!) in March.
That took until 10.00am. Then Q and I wandered up to the big building with the TV studio in it, which also has offices of the August Institution, and I rang Babs, who was in my team last year, and we met for coffee and
So then it was 11.00, and I had an early lunch date at 11.30 (note - I have never felt less like eating lunch than I did at 11.30am yesterday) with SD, another former colleague, where we chatted on like really old friends, rather than people who worked together for 3 brief and ugly months, until 3.00pm. I also poured an expensive G&T all over the table and her cardi, and ate a fantastic Caesar Salad that I really didn't want, but enjoyed, nonetheless.
After we parted company, I wandered down to one of the new chrome & glass edifices which they are throwing up all over town, trying to convince us all that people who come to Sydney want to see 'an international city', which is a bullshit way of saying 'we get to knock down interesting old buildings and build new, shiny, crappy, gone in 10 years, stuff'.
Nobody who comes to visit a new country wants to see the same buildings they can see in every other country! They want to see buildings that tell how we got to where we are, that say something about who we are. Ahem.
Anyway, I wandered into Trenery, which is an off-shoot of Country Road, almost an institution in Australia, a clothing company which has been around for about 30 years, but which doesn't make anything above a size 14 because "they don't want fat people (fat!) to wear their clothes". Since when is anybody who's a size 16 fat? Maybe if you were 4' tall & 100 kilos? Tossers.
Anyway, Trenery is "a new label for men and women who appreciate the beauty of a simple, sophisticated collection that is modern in approach and classic in style."
And expensive. Don't forget expensive. But apparently not quite so elitist as Country Road, because they make things in XXL, which in the real world, translates to things a slightly tubby 5'6" person can wear (ie, me). Note: This is not me. Really.
Then, I went to Eckersleys, the arts supply shop & fed my ribbon addiction a bit more, by which time it was 4.00pm, and I was supposed to be heading home. Anyway, after a brief, somewhat terse discussion with Mr G, I stayed in town, had a drink at one of my after-work favourites, which I'm not going to tell you the name of, in case it gets any more popular, and then Mr G joined me. One Negroni Aranciata and large glass of Trummer Pils later, we were in a taxi heading to my Nephew's place, for yet more food.
I felt like Mr Creosote by the time he bought out the cheesecake. Phew. Dinner was fabulous though, lots of great conversation around form versus function, the role of art in life, whether graffiti was an art form, whether you could really inherit skills & the desire to use them from grandparents you'd never met (opinions please!)... all the good stuff. I dipped me lid* to My Nephew's beliefs, buying a white wine called 'Two Churches', and a red called 'Faith'... the red was lovely, the white had too much sulphur in it & I was sweating like a pig after one glass... maybe the sulphur we're going to encounter when we got to hell? If I believed in hell, of course...
Then we watched a fascinating DVD about Banksy, who is a very interesting man, and which led to more questions about what Art is, whether you can truly be called an artist if you have no skills but just pay people to make stuff for you, stuff which is incredibly derivative of things you'd seen other people do, right down to the painted animals, and whether the whole thing was a Banksy-driven hoax... then we got in a taxi & came home & collapsed. It was midnight. I was stuffed full of food. I was knackered.
And that, Gentle Readers, is how I come to be still in my PJ's at 9.25am, thinking about more sleep and whether I can go through the weekend without eating anything at all.
We shall see. Ciao!
*aussie term for acknowledges
