More than a month since my last entry… Not too impressive, and fairly indicative of my lack of commitment to a lot of things. I guess it’s all about priorities. It’s too easy to spend too much time online I think, at the expense of your real life, therefore I try to limit my time tapping the keys – however a month between posts is pushing things so, I’m back. What’s been happening then? Well after all the ‘excitement’ of the commonwealth games a couple of weeks on and it’s as if it never happened – so much for my previous intentions of posting observations detailing the changes around town precipitated by the ‘great event’. In fact since then Melbourne has hosted the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix too. Now the city will disappear from the international map for a while and return to it’s more normal position of relatively quiet backwater on the southern tip of the great southern continent with only the (relatively) small island state of Tasmania between it and Antarctica. In fact since the Commonwealth games autumn has really set in. The clocks have gone back to standard GMT (plus ten) time and the temperature has dropped to the mid to high teens of a Melbourne autumn. Strangely enough the rain and wind put me in mind of England, and it’s this time of year I think I begin to miss the old country more. The smell of chimney smoke and darkness falling before you get home from work all remind me of the UK. In fact this is one of the reasons I like living in Melbourne – it is really as close to Britain in meteorological conditions as you can get (apart from Tasmania, but work is a little harder to get down there, and I think I’d miss the conveniences of Melbourne too much). Some people move to Australia for the constant sun and heat, but I’d miss the cycle of the seasons myself. It’s nice to walk in a bracing wind now and again, pulling your collar up against the drizzle – however it’s also nice to know that it never really gets that cold here (unless you listen to the whinge of the locals who have never lived through a British wind complete with it’s ice and snow – the nearest most Melburnians get to cold is when they visit to the alpine region ski fields of north East Victoria in their shiny Toyota Land Cruisers). The picture at the top of this post was taken recently looking east down Collins Street into the low morning sun, most autumn days here are sunny at least, and even in the depths of winter temperatures rarely reach freezing point - many winter days are no worse than a bad English summer’s day in my experience.
No, I don’t miss scraping the ice off the windscreen before I drive somewhere in the dark on black ice, or losing feeling in my extremities when putting the bins out…
