5.15am. I was up. It was still dark. I join Milo on the couch. He's very happy when the two red bullies aren't up.
There is no milk for coffee, I'd go and get it but the supermarket isn't open yet, so I just have to make do with reading the Guardian.
Lost Ella Fitzgerald recordings to be released – including her take on 60s pop. Oakland concert recording from 1967 features jazz standards alongside unheard Fitzgerald versions of the era’s hits, including Alfie and Music to Watch Girls By.
I read about Ella Fitzgerald. I take another look at her wonderful Mercedes, her 1959 4 door Cabriolet.
6am. It is turning light outside. I lie back on the couch and get more comfortable.
Everyone thought it would cause gridlock’: the highway that Seoul turned into a stream. Cheonggyecheon stream in the South Korean capital has become an attraction – and helps with flood management, fighting air pollution and cooling the city.
I don’t mean to paint badly’: accountant inundated with commissions for ‘terrible’ paintings. Jamie Lee Matthias’s art becomes popular with social media users after seeing his ‘talent’ in portrait of wife.
No coffee and I am, unusually, very hungry and I kind of find it hard to relax, with that hunger niggling at me constantly.
I open my emails
I read a poem called Day of the Dead by Peter Balakian.
I write my journal.
I catch up my blog workbooks. (I’ve always kept a word document of my blog posts)
7.20am. Sam and Otto are up. Sam complaining about Otto’s habit of sleeping with his head on Sam’s pillow, effectively pushing Sam off it.
Sam dreamed that Otto had faulty gene and the breeder wanted to take him back.
I tell Sam he has to go to the supermarket and get milk, as I need coffee. He tells me to go. I think he thinks that he pays more in food than I do in bills now a days. I don’t really know that. He says everything has gone up, but wouldn’t that apply to bills too? Surely. I resist and a little later I hear the front door open and close.
8am. Sam is back with two shopping bags full of shopping.
“Lovely,” I say.
Sam gives me a look/coy smile.
I make coffee and vegemite toast.
We’re going to have haircuts this morning. I’m keen to get going to get it over and done with, but Sam likes to pair it with lunch, which is a good idea, so we wait.
After breakfast, I got up on the roof and chopped down the creeper. It climbs up the side wall and then up onto the parapet and then it blocks up the box gutter up there, which will rot out if I don’t keep it cleaned out. I haven’t done the chop for a couple of years, clearly.
It was hot up there, in the summer sun, even relatively early, so I have a shower.
10:59am. We walk the Bulldogs into the city for haircuts.
The sun is shining, the sky is perfect blue tile over our heads. It really is a lovely day, lovely for a walk into the city.
Brun balks at the in front of the Imperial Hotel, where there is a group of people congregated on the corner of Bourke Street. I don’t think he wants to walk over the metal cover to the cellar. As he and I do a big circle to avoid the cellar cover, one of the women of the group gathered says, “just gorgeous.” Of course, I could think she was talking about me, but she was talking about the bulldogs.
We get to the hairdresser in Bourke Street. Sam goes in to have the first haircut.
Initially, there are two guys sitting on ‘our’ seat, in the street, where we always sit. Annoying, I think. But, pretty soon, one of the guy’s wives turns up and they leave together. Brun flops out on the footpath in everyone’s way, of course, as I take the vacant half of the seat. The other guy eyes me, suspiciously, more so the bulldogs, truthfully.
He looked at the bulldogs. He looked at me. He looked in the opposite direction. You’re on my seat, mate, I thought.
I watched people walking past in Bourke Street, rather than look at him, possibly, looking at me, again. I'd hate to hear myself apologise. I wrote this.
Sam is out quickly, suddenly appearing next to me, telling me to hurry on in there, the reason for which I didn’t quite catch, but I hurried in none the less.
A moment later, I am in the chair, as the ugly/cute guy, who I prefer to cut my hair, is unusually free for a Saturday. (The reason for Sam telling me to hurry, clearly) He’s not very chatty, ugly/cute guy, something else I prefer in a hairdresser.
Seven minutes later, I’m done.
I head into JBHiFi, oh, just to have a look and the David Bowie section is empty. How could this be? Life is over as we know it, if David Bowie no longer means anything, I think.
Midday. Sam goes into JBHiFi.
While I am waiting outside, a chick sitting next to me talks about the bulldogs asking how long they live.
“10 years on average,” I say. “But my last bulldog was a month off twelve.”
“It’s never long enough,” she says.
“No, I could have had another 12 years.”
Then she tells me that I’ll see them on the other side. “Don’t worry, you’ll meet him again.”
I probably would really respond to this normally, but she says it was such an intensity that she’s trying to convince me holding my gaze, and I think another disillusioned idiot.
“No,” I say.
“You will, it’s okay.”
“No,” I say. “There is nothing after this.”
“Yes, there is,” she says.
“No,” I say “it’s not.”
She tells me to watch someone on YouTube, Matt someone, he’ll change my mind.
“What?”
She repeats his name. This was the evangelical bit, I thought.
“I don’t need to watch anyone on YouTube.” I tell her. “There’s nothing after this.”
“Yes, there is,” she says.
“No, this is it. This is all you get,” I say.
She didn’t wanna talk to me after that. Pretty quickly she meets a friend. I’m too busy writing our conversation down in my journal to look up.
We’re at Momo Central Napoli‘s restaurant Bourke Street eating a platter of dumplings which are great. We’re sitting outside. It’s a lovely warm day. The sun is shining. We put the umbrella up, mostly because it blocks our view of each other when it is down.
Before 1pm, we’re walking back up Burke Street towards home.
Half an hour later, we’re home.
It is quite a warm day. 26 degrees.
We do couches and screens.
We drink coffee and eat cinnamon donuts.
Sam goes to the supermarket. He is returning his bone broth sachets, 3 of them, he bought for the dogs, one of them he’d opened which he hopes to also return. Coles wouldn’t take back the opened one. Funny about that.
Midafternoon, we’re eating frozen mango desert balls. They are good.
(If you think that diet at the end of the day sounds a little iffy? I guess it was, but it was good)
