coffee caps peas etc (Monday April 26th, 2004 - 16:31)

category: mmhuh?

Nearly five months have gone by since returning to Sydney and I had one of those moments on the morning of April 20th kicking myself gently for being on the wrong side of the world. It’s peculiar that missing some music being played live can make me feel so torn but then to me it wasn’t just any music – it was John Moore, Sister Vanilla and Jim Reid on one bill.

This is where my little Jesus and Mary Chain love comes in to the game: John Moore played in the JAMC for a while; Sister Vanilla is fronted by Linda Reid whom I manage from afar; and Jim Reid … well he’s a rock’n’roll hero to my little self and this was only his second solo gig.

Bless friends and the internet – doddling about getting ready for work I received a phone call transmitting 30 seconds worth of tune from the tiny 12 Bar Club in London; over the following days I was emailed photos so I built a little page for Jim Reid.

Our office moved this week from a small no-man’s-land section of Surry Hills to the furthest edges of Darlinghurst. To one side there’re coffee shops as far as the eye can see with the skinny latte breakfast crowd hamming it up; to the other side is the sleaze and smell of Darlinghurst Road and Kings Cross. You couldn’t pick a better mish-mash snapshot of Sydney’s populace.

A nice discovery for the area (apart from the readily accessible Sushi) is that walking along to the overpass on top of William Street in the evening you can look out at the city skyline to the west and witness gorgeous technicolour sunsets.

At Zoe’s request, here’s a few photos of the Kimi cap being worn last night to spur on little Kimi and his car. At Imola he finally managed to clutch a world championship point – his McLaren finished a race for the first time this season and one point is hardly anything to crow about but seeing as he’d started from the back of the grid due to an engine change after qualifying Kimi did okay.

Well done to Jenson Button for getting up there and giving Mr M Schumacher a little to think about yet again.

My green thumb has been getting a work out – last weekend I planted peas, carrots and basil in pots on the balcony and all of them have broken through the soil to say hello. The peas are doing the greatest of all.

I’d also been contemplating growing mushrooms since they seem to be the vegetable that I get through at the quickest pace and by luck the Sydney Morning Herald‘s weekend magazine had an article about just that!

Seems that buying a mushroom kit (from a nursery – SMH suggests mushroomkit or Home Harvest but neither site is very useful) is a good way to go and can produce four to six kilos. The kits cost around $15 – $17 while the cost of mushrooms from a supermarket around here is usually $7/kilo. So I just have to track one of them down!

I’ve also been getting a brown thumb painting various bits of my apartment to add some colour (brown? colour? I’ve got two shades and it seriously lifts the place up from the clinical white that was dominating previously).

The 760-odd pages of Lars Saabye Christensen’s The Half Brother was time-consuming but well worth it – I won’t go in to a detailed explanation but it’s a story about four generations of an Oslo family and through it’s comic tragedies circling around the two half brothers, Barnum and Fred, it beautifully displays the common threads running through shared blood.

I’ve just finished up Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All (a present from my brother and Zoe) and I’m not entirely sure how they came across Tom Robbins but I’m wondering why I’d never heard of him.

Having no idea what I was in for, the first 10 pages had me utterly confused with talk of veils and turkeys and Southern Baptists and talking spoons and dirty socks and a can o’ beans. Soon enough the reasons for each of the above became apparent and the seven veils of the story drop one by one presenting the weight of issues in the Middle East counter-balanced with the fantastical travels of sentient animate objects heading for Jerusalem and the married life of Ellen Cherry Charles (artist and waitress) and Boomer Petway (a welder).

As I try not to read two novels by the same author in a row, I’m now on a fairly short Tim Parks novel, Loving Roger, I found amongst the stacks at Goulds in Newtown. I’m pressing on quickly to get on to Tom Robbins’ Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates.