That lazy afternoon, with Blue Juice dying on the radio towards one o'clock, the kitchen table had Sunday written all over it. The wreckage of someone's - or several persons' - late breakfast of maple-syruped pancakes lay almost buried under the outspread weekend newspapers. Yes, newspapers plural. At least three weekend newspapers find their way into this house. The death of the newspaper will not be on my head. I cleaned the table. I like cleaning it. It is a mid-twentieth century original, of smoke-patterned pale green chrome-edged Laminex, over a tubular stainless steel frame that cleverly curves down at each corner into twin chrome legs that stand on the polished timber floor in neat black rubber stoppers, like little socks. It is as quintessentially 1950s as an R-Type Bentley. (And as long-lasting. Every year I see Ikea tables thrown in disgust onto hard rubbish collections, pathetic legs snapped like twigs, and deep scratches in their faux-timber veneers.) I had pre
Early Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock. The path led north, hemmed in by a cliff on one side and the creek on the other. Occasionally a ramp or stairway, cut into the hill, cascaded down from a street above and into the valley. Eucalypts scissored the oblique sunlight and I walked on through the flickering kinescope. From my house I had turned west to the corner, north uphill, and east again, to meet the path following the stream’s s-curves. It used to be an undefined dirt trail, then one year the council concreted it and painted a line down the middle with a pedestrian and cyclist symbol. Today - meaning literally today - it was a human superhighway carrying refugees from the torrid hatefulness of their own four walls, moving north and south like somnolent zombies. Floral-masked Brunswick and Coburg hipsters bearing takeaway coffees; family groups with prams and dogs and toddlers wobbling on first bicycles; old people making painful physical progress towards death; joggers, w