My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

So we went to see One Man, Two Govnors. Again. Because it's fun. Love a bit of British farce, me.

And it was a lovely day out, which I wasn't expecting, only being able to get tickets to the screening in my dreary home town, as it was. We arrived with hours and hours and hours to spare, forgetting that we we weren't commuting twixt cities, for once, and so we had brunch. It wasn't that bad, either. The cafe had seen better days, with crumbling concrete and kicked in doors (it must have been another typical Friday night in the old town), but the food was better than I dared hope, and, indeed, better than I've had in a cafe for brunch for a long, long while, so appearances aren't everything.

Ignored the big shopping mall to wander down the main street, which featured, and you could have knocked me down and served me whisky, get this, a brass band, ladies practising with big fans in the park (usually a nature reserve for drunks and drug dealers), a farmer's market and ...an ice skating rink! Okay, what have they done to my home town?!
( more: I've been everywhere man )

Friday night, from the notebook, dateline Hyde Park: Noodles for tea in Hyde Park. Well, green curry and then sticky rice and mango and an excellent rose from Brown Brothers.

I know, I whine and whine and then it's all 'oooh, sticky rice!'. Well, it is sticky rice. A forbidden treat is always the best.

It's the annual noodle night market. It's achingly cosmospolitan and yet so very Sydney, it smells and sounds like Sydney, and nowhere else. Nevertheless I've found myself a quiet corner, as always, where I can watch the crowd and the pretty, pretty lanterns. I love a Chinese lantern. It rather looks like all those old 19thC park life paintings I love so much. So I'm going to sit here for a bit more. Before I have to move. Before I can move. That was a lot of sticky rice. Yum yum.
( more: What You Give Is What You Get )