Mid-winter

It's the middle of winter, which means the leaves have finally fallen, and camellias are in bloom.

Things I have learned this week

• Children don't listen.
• when swimming freestyle, pull your arms out by the elbow once your hand is directly below you - it makes for a more powerful stroke.
• I feel bad when I don't give the barber a $2 tip. And worse when I spend it on a pain-au-chocolat instead of eating my muesli.
• Kipfler potatoes are delicious when chipped and deep-fried.
• How to turn a pictClipping file into a jpg.
• Someone at the Sydney Theatre Company spells Atreus wrong, and that they correct it when told so.
• How to pronounce Jordi.
• Jordi is George (Jiri is George too, how come English has the stodgiest George?).
• 23 year-olds haven't heard of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
• 8 year-olds haven't heard of Gwen Stefani.
• Cornflower-blue eyes and guinea-gold hair DO exist outside the pages of Georgette Heyer!

Near the coffee cart

Please rotate computer screen.

At the Paragon

larus novaehollandiae

The late 31 May

Today I got the newsletter out on time! Unlike these last 31 posts, each of them meant to be posted on the corresponding date in May. I think maybe 3 actually were. I was posting in solidarity with my friend jaci who had undertaken to do it. She has better reasons than me - an audience, for one.

Now for June.

Eurovision

Colette's in town for the weekend, to watch Eurovision with Jason, her Eurovision date for the last 15 years. She invited me along too when our breakfast-date was hijacked by a hangover.

The apartment was elegant, in a modern interior-design way, spacious and uncluttered, everything white, grey or dark, stained woods, expensive. I hadn't seen Jason since he was a shop-assistant at DJ's - now he's some high-powered exec at DJ's, who owns a swank apartment. He and his partner of many years also split a few months ago, in Melbourne, and here Jason was, in his flat, with his job, and a beautiful, simple, sweet young neighbour leaning into his side on the comfortable white leather lounge, while we marked our scores for Belarus, Cyprus and Germany.

As Colette sat next to me, eating Maltesers, I wondered why I wasn't Jason.

Sweetpeas: Two Weeks Later

Tintin au Congo

King Ottokar's Sceptre was the first Tintin I read. One of my little brothers, I think, got it out of the local library.  But they didn't have them all, so on my visits to the City library, catching the train into town every few Saturdays, I would keep an eye out for them too, as well as new Asterix books.

Hergé was still alive and writing them in those days, and once we'd got through the back catalogue, we had to wait for Tintin and the Picaros, his last one. The Broken Ear was an old one that was translated about the same time.

We had three more to go, I knew from the back of French-language editions. Le lotus bleu, Tintin en Amerique, and Tintin au Congo.

Tintin in America was the first, and it came to our place from the library. Years later, much lusted-after, The Blue Lotus came out, and I bought it, to add to this collection. It was actually very exciting, even though we were all teenagers by now.

I stopped collecting these before Tintin au Congo was translated into English.

Collection #2

How many Weet-Bix does this collection represent?

It would have been more if I hadn't let my brothers collect/lose most of the car/truck sets.

In the early days I used to get rid of the doubles once I'd filled the project posters - crazy!