canberra late may

I am writing this in the nearly empty restaurant of a high-class hotel having eaten a lot of stuff none of which I really enjoyed. Particularly as in this vast expanse of empty tables they decided to plop me between two other occupied tables, one with the saddest public servant in the world, and the other with two middle-aged lovers who continually made loud kissing noises in the way of kids sucking chupa chups. The public servant got a case of the sneezes, too, which was also bad.
Later: the next day I went to a choice cafe in Manuka which is one of the places I always like to go when in the Can, along with Academic Remainders and Gus'. Here I tuned in on a classic case of punny-style misunderstanding, the owner of the cafe was giving some kind of 2011 'women, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em' spiel with overtones of 'I have some kind of ill-defined NESB background to me, so I can say what I like about particular ethnic groups', and it went like this:

'She's hispanic.'
'She's his what?'

I guess you had to be there, to wish you hadn't been (at least as far as that conversation was concerned). The mushrooms on toast were exo.