It is a crisp, clear day in my mountain village and I am shopping on the main street. I have my calico bag which is looking quite haggard from use, and as I go from shop to shop I throw all of my shopping in together.
On the street I find the crisp, clear sky dazzling. It is sharp and fresh like toothpaste.
Just before 9 am, replenishing the cottage’s stock of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine, I suspect I am the bottle shop’s first customer of the morning. The attendant asks me about my plans for the day and I am at pains to assure him my plans involve sensible, responsible activities, not lolling on the carpet with the peppery remains of the bottle. I mention something about replacing the filament in the lounge-room up-lamp. There must be a goodly proportion of his clientele that he doesn’t believe and I wonder if I am one of them.
My husband and I saw the Spooky Men’s Chorale yesterday. They were gorgeously amusing as usual, although somewhat hamstrung by the low house lighting which interfered with that connection to their audience which is the engine of a lot of their non-verbal humour. The first time I saw them was in a bright community hall at Lawson and I loved the way the Spooks would gain eye contact with an audience member and then stay connected until it became a contest of who blinks or looks away first. I lost a few times. The buggers.
The Spooky Men announced on Facebook about a week ago that they were holding auditions for new members and at that moment I was more genuinely upset that I was not a male than you can possibly imagine. I have triangulated these results with other women and I am not alone in my misery. Who would not want to be one of these guys:
That clip was lifted from the Spooky Men’s Chorale page.
The show was doubly wonderful because not only did I enjoy the music and comedy of Spooks, I also got to see my local theatre at close to full house. I’ve got this desire for the Springwood Hub to be such an attractive place for entertainers that I will never have to go into the city to see another act ever again. In this dream, weekends unfold like this: my husband and I walk out of our cottage, along a few streets and then down to the local theatre where we are entertained by world class live acts the likes of which New York, London and Sydney enjoy constantly. And we enjoy these fearsome acts and then, depending on the time, we wander back down the main street of our mountain village for a coffee with cake or a glass of red or a pub meal and then we meander home to the cottage for the donning of my generic Australian ugg boots and maybe the last half of this week’s episode of Dr Blake Mysteries, where I spend the entire time wondering what on earth is going on and why yet again is Dr Blake being immediately relieved of his duties as coroner and didn’t that happen last episode and wasn’t that a marvellous time at the theatre that we just had.
This morning I asked myself which Bible verse would go with the mint-fresh toothpaste sky. And I have the answer. It is Job chapter 37, verse 21:
But now, the sun cannot be looked at — it is bright in the skies — after a wind passed and swept the clouds away.
May the clear mint skies blow fresh on you. Or may it rain, if that is what you need.
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