Paying Ready Attention

It’s a touch past six in the morning, in the dog day weekend between Christmas and New Year.   It’s the time of year when the only things you can do are ones that are unimportant, but seem to get done none the less. The roads are almost empty, but perversely, I have been stationary for at least five minutes.   Road works and diversions cause delays whenever and wherever they occur.   I drum my fingers on the wheel and reach to take a sip of tea.   I’ve been looking at the back of the same car for a while.   It’s clear that it (and its owner) have been dragged into the same diversion as me.   I can see through the back window, past a faded newspaper, to where the driver sits.   Even from behind his body language is clear.   Steam drifts from the open slot of my travel mug, an unfamiliar but welcome companion in the chill of the morning. Steam also seems to be coming from the ears of my fellow traveller.   The driver’s side back panel ...

Camberwell. The doors open to let me out, and the smell of coffee in.   Not long ago, self-opening door were only found in Star Trek, but now they are commonplace.   On hot days the few metres from inside to outside are marked by a steep jump in temperature; on cold days – or as cold as cold gets in Melbourne – the shock is never as great.   In all but the heat of the summer, the smell of coffee is a greater challenge to walking than the temperature.   The fine blend being perfectly toasted just over the road temps me stop and sample.   The coffee shop’s logo has 1961 embedded in it, which may hint at funkiness, but only succeeds in making me feel old.   The air is heavy with tortured aromatics, pushed from the beans by hot and tumbled air.   Arabica? Robusta? Organic?   (Inorganic?) Single source or blended? I’m sure some people could tell; but to me, its just coffee.   Two or three strides later the rail line I will follo...

It would be fair to say that when I first saw a platypus I got rather excited.  Spy satellite images would probably show me hoping from foot to foot and pointing.  It’s not that I was getting great views, far from it in fact.  It was just that I was seeing platypus.  In the wild.  In the flesh.  I’d quickly learned to drop the “duck billed” part of the name in favour of the shorter and more accurate version.  After all, there is no “eagle billed platypus” or whatever, so the duck billed bit can be shed without confusion. There’s just the platypus. And there they were, floating like slightly plump sticks on the surface of the water.   With a humpbacked dive they would disappear, until they bobbed, flat backed, to the surface and into view again.   I don’t doubt that the return of these living corks to the surface of the water was greeted with laughter and more pointing. And a good part of that laughter, that wonderfully positive fee...