public records office

Spent the afternoon in the public records office. This is genuinely one of the greatest places to go. Like an op shop you rarely find what you're looking for but you may well find something better. In this case I was a little disappointed; I waded through quite a bit of mid-1980s administrative bumf from Sandringham Council and really didn't get much out of it. That said it's amazing what survives merely by dint of it being in a council archive. I read a bit of municipal archives correspondence from the late 1950s, all these job applications from teenage girls who want to be the person selling the tickets at the pool. Imagine if you were some 19 year old in Spotswood in 1956 writing a job application out on lined paper with a fountain pen all badly spelt and mundane, and some mystical thing appeared in front of you and said, 'You know someone's going to be looking at that page in a huge building in North Melbourne in 50 years', what would you say? Best answer wins the final Ulker Cikolatali Gofret bar out of our fridge, unless we eat it first.

Like the SLV the genies are everywhere or at least I assume that's what they are, loudly dominating the proceedings, I had to leave a table I was sitting at because of these oldies reading loudly from some old register, and most annoyingly there was one name - something like Hamilton or Renton or something ending in 'on', and they both kept pronouncing the 'on' part very prominently, as though it had some significance, 'not Hamilten, not Hamiltin, oh no, it's HamiltON' was the inference (in a Kenneth Williams 'not an asp' voice I reckon). Like people who say condOM although there's no other word like that. Is there? We don't say LondON or randOM... anyway. I do love the PROV. They have so much stuff. And if in this case everyone else's stuff looked a little more interesting than mine well, I'm happy for them.