glenroy/broady

Had to go to Broady yesterday for reasons I am not yet ready to share, and went on the train, so took some paths not so travelled lately, it was sort of interesting. 

A couple of benches. The top one is, I suspect, a local handiperson's handiwork, and it's nicely done. The next is I imagine a council construction that some clever clogs has seen fit to burn, presumably on purpose. I mean these are never used, were never used before one of them was made unusable, as far as I know. 

I often have the experience of knowing something's gone but not knowing what it was, so this patch of grass intrigued me not a little because I was very certain that there was once a building of some sort here, but what the hell could it have been? Apart from anything else, clearly (not in the pictures, but in real life) access was very limited. Anyway, here I present my picture of an empty space. 

big day out

 

My story begins at the Broadmeadows Shopping Centre though of course like all stories there is a preface of I guess not only millions of years of life on Earth but also God's infinite existence, but let's start where my story begins, at the Broadmeadows Shopping Centre. Faffing around like an old fool at JB trying to get the cheapest easiest earbuds (ugh I hate that term) for my phone, which means actually buying an adaptor and then getting cheap 'n' nasty old-school product. I didn't want bluetooth nothing (yes I do have bluetooth things somewhere, but where are they? Answer me that and then we don't have to have a terse exchange). I knew I would be doing a fair bit of walking today and I wanted to listen to podcasts or whatever. (I say whatever, but all I ended up listening to was podcasts.) So here I am wandering through the BSC after buying something for that purpose, also, some dog biscuits. I had about 25c in 5c pieces jangling away in my pocket for the guide dog dog into whose head you put money. It's good luck I know 25c isn't much but it adds up if you do it every time for fear of having bad luck. Next slide please.

This is the argument I was having at the same time. I always try to have an argument with some drone from Optus every day, it keeps them on their toes and keeps my bile up. 

I took Barry and Ferdie out for a little walk, and as is now my wont I let them go into the water. It was quite a warm day (it got warmer, this is only midday) but Barry did not want to go into the water, just potter around the edge. They were panting quickly though and they both drank deep from their water bowl when they got back. 

I decided after this to walk to Glenroy which means first of all crossing Jacana Reserve (this picture is a bit of an illusion, there's a big drop between the green grass and the yellowed bit which is much further away, I saw that and can't unsee it but I am not sure how it looks to you, just imagine the second tree from the right is absolutely on the edge of a steep hill, and when I say imagine, it's not a lie. 

Emu Parade shops, a late 1950s Housing Commission construction which has never really been a jumpin' joint in my experience, though someone there was smart enough to register the name Broady Pizza and that was, well, smart. Hard to conceive of this now but whereas Jacana is the very southernmost tip of the City of Hume today and for many Hume is really two major centres - Sunbury and Broadmeadows - the old Broadmeadows council went much further south. It unnecessarily irritates me that the true fact is often stated that, until Hume set up the Broadmeadows library there was no library at Broadmeadows. And there wasn't! But Broadmeadows CC ran at least two libraries - at Fawkner and Glenroy - because Broadmeadows wasn't really where the population was. OK enough defending Broadmeadows CC for now. Don't really know what this landscaping etc is about (in the top picture) but seriously, that vacant land on the right which I think was once a petrol station (never in my Jacana experience, so more than 15 years) has been vacant too long. It should be a groovy vegan cafe and record shop, shouldn't it. 

So many great brick HCV houses in Jacana, it was probably one of the last bastions of brick HCV before they went concrete (as they did over the railway line within years). This one has a name, 'Jallen'. 

This is not a house but a tree with a really nice view. I have probably mentioned this before, I don't know what happened here, it was a weatherboard house probably from the 1920s that burned down about a decade ago. Surely foul play of some sort. I met a man there, when the house was still standing, who claimed to be the owner, he told me that there was an old saying in Greek that you needed three things in life, friends, cunt and money, which was not as far as I'm concerned the sort of thing you say to a stranger, probably not even a friend, and certainly not the kind of thing you write on a blog for anyone to see. He was complaining that he was not being enabled by council to pull down the house and build something else on it, and now the house is not there, but I don't see anyone trying to build anything on it, so what's that about? 

As you probably know when the Bolte government considered ways to get people to and from the new Tullamarine Jetport, dedicated 1959, a significant amount of land was reserved from the Broadmeadows line just south of Jacana station (which actually opened that year) to the airport. Presumably most of it was sold yonks ago, but this little patch was only developed a few years ago and currently looks like this. It is called something ridiculous like Coupling Lane which sounds a bit, hmm, not heteronormative but at least relationshiponormative. It should have been called Friends, Cunt and Money Avenue. Why? Well, it has a tree in it, that makes it an avenue. Avenue been told that's what makes an avenue? 

So I crossed the railway line. This is in the yard of the house in Glenroy where these people live: 

Glenroy has a lot of good weatherboard houses like for instance this one:

I know what you're going to say but I kind of like the idea of these flats, too, in Pascoe Vale Road:

Then I went to the two Glenroy op shops. I hope never to see this film. I only photographed it in case I was ever challenged at a dinner party to provide an example to counter the claim that 'everyone who ever wrote the text on the front of a DVD never made a mistake in punctuation'. 

I didn't buy this either though I probably should have. 

What the hell was being implied by the shapes formed by the song titles? Also, who is more objectified by this, the woman or the mop? Assuming neither of them is actually Ken Griffin. OK, next slide please. 

Look I now can't remember what this cafe used to be called, I have remarked about it en blog in temps passe and it will probably come to me. But calling it "21 Days Later" seems zany, I mean why not just go the whole hog and name it after a real dystopian horror film? 'Meet you at Night of the Living Dead!' I didn't go in, it looked a little sad in there but I think that's covid trading, not any reflection on the current owners. 

Glenroy underpass, which everyone loves. I suspect its days are numbered however as there is presently a skyrail solution to the very real shithouseness of the Glenroy level crossing. What worries me more is what this means for... 

The Rotary Centre, a pretty decent op shop for a long time now, is no longer trading. I have a sense that this building is actually pretty old, though I concede it doesn't necessarily look it. I have a feeling it hasn't got long. I wish I could remember something I got there when it was an op shop that sparked joy but to be honest, nah. It had a certain something though. 

Behind you! 

So we shall see where this ends up. Meanwhile, over the road from this sign/site, the weird phenomenon of the other big Glenroy supermarket that was a kind of bizarro world 'how does it make money' place, presently I suspect fixing to die (it's certainly not trading any more):

Kept walking down towards Oak Park, stopping in at the beach for a relax. 

Travelled all the way to Kensington on the train, during which time I heard from a lovely girl who just wants to be friends: 

Apparently she lives in Bendigo now but she was originally from Narrogin in WA, which is about an hour's drive north of Katanning, where I have been, but I don't think I've been to Narrogin. I wonder why she wants to be my friend and what she has just for me. Sadly I have too many friends so I had to decline. 

I wish this story had a good solid ending, maybe you're just happy it has any kind of ending whatever it is. I went to Cheaper Buy Miles and KFL Kensington (no relation at all, as far as I'm aware, to KFL Glenroy) and then I got the tram back because my feet hurt and my shopping bag was heavy. Curiously, just as I got back to Parkville I saw an instagram post from the national archives showing the cast of Aunty Jack, which I recently found out something interesting about (and put on the Aunty Jack wikipedia page). Did you know that the first Aunty Jack outing on Australian (naturally) TV was on the same night that Monty Python was first shown on Australian TV? Well, anyway... 

That's not a good ending to my story of my day out, but it'll have to do you. 

stock

We only went to Perth for 36 hours but for some reason our various vegetables in the fridge let themselves go as a consequence and we came back to slimy asparagus and yellow broccoli. So I am making stock with the addition of potatoes with the shoots cut off and some of that massively expensive garlic. When I put it in the pot I thought, god, I might just as easily go out and spoon crap out of the compost bin, but in fact it has been cooking gaily away for an hour or so now and it smells excellent.

Yesterday was overheated but today is a nice cool (if still a bit muggy) day and I think it will be OK. As the dogs are outside I am the focus of attention by cats. Asha is sitting to my right looking perturbedly at Bela who is approaching me from the left. Bela is like a dinosaur, huge and impractical, and when he sits on the floor it's like a small 4WD has been left there. Asha is a trifle overweight due to the fact that she sleeps almost the entire day well into the night, usually in the bed like some kind of hypochondriac duchess, but her nervousness has stopped her from descending entirely into obesity. Asha sees herself as part of a pack of three: Mia, me and Bela. Anyone else is an enemy. Bela has no time for her at all, though they will sometimes sniff each other's faces, but it is as likely to end in him cuffing her with his claws as anything else. She also doesn't really trust her humans either, and considers anything they do to be potentially life-threatening and vicious, so she is always running away, and in that really irritating way of getting underfoot while doing it.

I am going to take Charlie and Barry on a walk to Glenroy, to take a swag of books back to the library there. That will be my main activity of the day I feel.

hottest days

(written 12/1) Yesterday went up around the 44-45 mark which was shocking. I spent much of the day in the SLV with my mother researching the introduction of a social work degree at the University of Melbourne (1941) and the professionalisation of social work per se in Melbourne (1929 onwards). We went out of the library at 3-ish which was a bit of a shock but not quite as bad as I had expected, given the extra acclimatisation required (though the library is kept at a sensible level, not frozen). The bad bit was leaving work later in the day - between 4.30-5 – when it was the hottest. It was surprising though all things considered how many people and other creatures (ie birds) were around. I wouldn’t have expected so many.

Last night was particularly unpleasant, like sleeping in a shoebox on the fire. But sleeping nonetheless, so why complain you might ask. Well, I am in the kind of mood a day and a half of extremely hot weather gives one, which leads me to say, I complain because fuck you. It was bad enough where I was a few minutes ago at Glenroy station with a juvenile learning to smoke on the platform (making it impossible to sit out there) and someone old enough to know better – a man in his mid-20s, but an ugly mid-20s, he might have been older – playing a hand-held computer game which was probably supposed to be projecting the sounds of millions of rounds from some gun or other but actually sounded like someone shaking a packet of tic tacs, or an old recording of many typewriters played on a transistor.

I should have complained to them but fortunately for me and you I have a blog.

As I stood on the Glenroy platform I felt a cool breeze from the south up the railway line which was a nice thing and boded well for the future.

This morning I spent finessing some chapter proposals for a book I hope to publish (by which I mean to say, have a company publish for me). I think I jumped the shark with my corrections and reworkings but I felt reasonably OK about it.

going home last week

Sometimes going home I take the 542 bus from Glenroy to Jacana. Particularly if I have walked to Glenroy in the morning in which case I only buy a zone 1. So then I have to get off somewhere and buy a zone two to progress, and so I may as well switch to the bus which gets me closer to home anyway.
This is a delightful piece of history, which must date from the 1980s, probably the early 1980s, perhaps even the late 1970s. No-one talks about Meadow Fair anymore, and the bus actually goes to Roxburgh Park.

One of the things that confuses all and sundry at the busstop at G'roy is that whichever way the buses are ultimately going - Oak Park in the south or Roxy Park in the north - the buses line up at the bus stop facing the same direction. The fact that the busdrivers often forget to put the appropriate destination on the front just adds to the fun. This is the arse of an Oak Park bus, advertising a film I suspect I will never willingly see.

Self-portrait

My bus. And...

The 'meadow fair' just near home, at which point the sun came out, and a fairy asked to be my friend on a rainbow.

march of progress II

House about to be demolished to make way for six units, Glenroy

silver sage

There is a cafe in Post Office Place, Glenroy called the Silver Sage. We occasionally ridiculed it from afar because of its strange name and seemingly archaic style, and like a lot of ridicule (from afar in particular) this came from ignorance. Part of the ignorance was, I have to say, invited by SS itself, because if you pass by there in the evening or any other time it's closed, you don't get a very good sense of the fare it offers; you get a sense of a transplanted cafe from Horsham (toasted sandwiches, instant coffee, coke spider, it screams without actually saying as much) with the bench of bad magazines at the front window, and the back wall of the cafe area masking a much older kitchen where god knows what happens. But this morning we went there and it is tops.

The food is not ostentatiously turkish, but that is in fact what it is - or at least that end of the mediterranean. The 'European breakfast', for instance, is (a) oddly labelled 'European', considering it contains olives, cucumber, tomato, fetta and turkish bread,* and (b) there's no b, I summed up the whole thing in (a). The coffee is excellent and the service friendly and remarkably (sorry Glenroy as a whole, all due respect) efficient. We both had European breakfasts, actually, and the olives in particular were grouse - I think perhaps home grown.

Delightfully, the east wall is adorned with artistic pictures of locations in Glenroy, including night shots of the station and the very remarkable library building.

I can't say more, because that's the sum of my Silver Sage experience, but I will say, highly recommended *****.

* Hey I know these are European, they're so European they're European with Wegener on drums, but they're a particular kind of European aren't they, you know what I mean.

gordon

Surely (I hope so) this week spells the peak of Gordon Ramsay's extraordinary overexposure in Australia. A few weeks ago I would not have been able to put his face to a name. This week he is seemingly on television all the time, in one of two ridiculous television programs, a british one and an american one, that both always run to the same script. Oh and apparently there is also a game. If there is more to tv at present than Gordon Ramsay and CSI I can't seem to find it (well, admittedly Mia did tape an episode of Young Ramsay (no relation) for me so that was something - why can't all tv shows have Syd Heylen and Briony Behets on them). Yesterday I was having my morning coffee and a girl said to her boyfriend across the table, 'Gordon Ramsay thinks his kids swear too much'. Last night I got out the Green Guide and Gordon Ramsay was on the front, swearing too much. I went to Glenroy Noodles and they were playing a video of an old Gordon Ramsay show in the shop. I am being swamped by this idiot. I told Mia and she said oh just blog it but I knew that wouldn't do any fucking good.

a building soon to be absent

This is the second time this week I have walked to Glenroy. I save three dollars off my ticket and get to see interesting things.

highly amusing juxtaposition

Dowd's Furniture, Post Office Place, Glenroy.