Today is going to be a much better temperature although admittedly still a little too hot for comfort (30). When it cooled down last night it was grouse. I am on a tram in Sydney Road and I am once again the unwilling eavesdropper into a very public telephone conversation about some idiot’s legal case which is obviously of concern to him therefore he has to make a really loud performance of it in public to make him feel better about ‘he’s gonna come off in court like a real bully which is what they’re accusing me of being, right?’ and lots of confirmations of meetings and where he has to be at particular times i.e. showing how in control he is of his appointments diary. Now he is talking about the trousers he can get to wear in court, he’s just I think repeated the word ‘slacks’ like he’s never heard it before. He probably feels it’s a little too much of a laidback term for something to do with acting really straight.
Melbourne’s history surrounds one on the Sydney road tram. A few minutes ago we stopped and I looked up and I was looking straight at a lawyer’s office with the surname Cilauro, obviously Santo Cilauro’s father and I think the same office used as the lawyer’s office in The Castle. Then we stopped again (dickhead got off by the way – I mean he got off the tram) to see the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, where local people met one auspicious night in the 1870s I can’t remember exactly when to demand the government build the Outer Circle line or was it just that the government build a rail line in the northern suburbs (there was one two minutes’ walk from the Mechanics Inst by the end of the century) I can’t remember. That’s the problem with history, it’s everywhere but you have to remember it or otherwise know it. Right now I can see the Sarah Sands Hotel of which I know little except geez it’s old, or some of it is. Geez.
2 comments:
Apropos the Sarah Sands, my great uncle was born in Brunswick in the late 1880s and lived all his 96 years there. He would recount how as a child he was in the front bar of the Sarah Sands when a street battle erupted immediately outside on Sydney Road. I can't recall whether it was a St Patrick's Day parade set upon by Orangemen or a Battle of the Boyne parade set upon by Fenians (I suspect the latter). Anyhow, my uncle's adult companion lifted him up to gaze out the window of the Sarah Sands whilst a JP arrived to read the Riot Act. My uncle took great delight in pointing out that this was the first time the Riot Act had been read in Victoria since the Eureka Stockade. In fact, I think he first told me this story sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s when it was reported on the news that a drunken crowd had besieged the Frankston police station and a JP read the Riot Act - for only the third time in Victoria's history. My uncle felt chuffed that he'd lived to see two-out-of-three readings of the Riot Act.
BTW, I've never sought to verify any of the historical claims made in his story.
Nor should you, Anthony.
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