so it goes

Dear Diary

It had recently been my mother Jane’s and my sister Tamsin’s birthdays so Mia and I held an early dinner for both of them, Tamsin’s daughters Olivia and Alice and my brother Michael and his children Laurie and Florence. Their mother Nicola was also invited of course but is sick with the flu. Mia did all the cooking, a very appropriate quiche (replete with notbacon), tabouli and an excellent chocolate chip cake. Most of us drank fruit juice with soda water in it, very suave.

Tamsin brought some presents to welcome Ferdinand of which a plastic bone with a rope through it was a particular favourite. Barry is still enough of a puppy, or at least puppy-curious (he never really had a puppydom of his own, with cruel Nurse Charlie as his guardian) to get a kick out of these kinds of things.

On Saturday night I made a quick trip to Westmeadows to get some videos. Just before I backed out of the driveway a maroon (I think) car from the 80s (damn those 80s) sped through Lorraine Cres towards Johnstone St (that’s no description; both ends go towards Johnstone St. How about, ‘going west’?). I was behind it at the corner of Lorraine/Johnson when it turned right into Johnstone, which has a nature strip in the middle of it and so you can’t turn right – you have to go left and do a u-turn. It drove on the footpath, up the hill causing three or more people on the footpath to jump out of the way – good reflexes. It then went onto the road (still traveling in the wrong direction, of course) and then across the nature strip and onto the right side of the road.

It was one of those things that I could barely process. I did note that on the other side of the road, placed where you would have had to pass it if you were doing the u-turn, was a tow truck with a flashing blue light. I suppose that (I only just remembered this and put two and two together) the maroon driver saw the light, thought it was a booze bus, and decided to make a quick getaway. Way to draw attention to yourself massively if it was a booze bus, of course. But that was probably it, what do you think.

The videos I got – well, I can only say I must have been in shock. I got two things that were actually made for tv movies. Cinema Verite, mainly because I’m pretty sure that anything with Tim Robbins in it is quality but also for the James Gandolfini and some other cast, also, Jack Irish with Guy Pearce which I really wanted to see partly because of any Melbournisms but also because I wanted to see how Guy Pearce, international star of the screen, handled this ABC-TV drama.

After those, we watched a big mess of documentary that the moment as I type, I can remember absolutely nothing about. Oh that’s right, the overlong examination of Ozzy Osbourne by his son Jack. It was too long, also, there was too much music in it, and unfortunately, the music was by Ozzy Osbourne. The scenes of him walking around his childhood home were funny; he just goes from room to room saying fookin’ eck, or words to that effect.