Monday, April 21

 I've just come back from my walk, my regular 900 steps up to the corner and back, passing the same houses and the same cars.  Just up the road there's a Leyland P76 parked outside in the street.  I haven't seen one of these for years and it could be 50 years old, the first models coming out in the 1970s.   I wonder if it's valuable and shouldn't be left unattended.

As usual, I was listening to music through my government-supplied hearing aids.  For some reason, the tune which sticks in my brain is With or Without You by U2.  I normally hate that sort of stuff but it helps to keep my mind off the rigours of the walk.  I notice that the wifi link cuts out when I pass a particular house. If I were writing a spy story, I could incorporate that phenomenon in the plot: a radio transmitter in the house is interfering with the wifi signal to my ears. But, maybe not.  There's a mismatch with the technologies: the radio transmitter fits nicely into the WW2 period but the in-ear receivers are more 21st century.  I don't have the energy to try to sort that out, although maybe a Back to the Future scenario ... nah!

MY SPECIAL PLACE

I’m sitting at my computer, as I often am, drawing a blank, as I often do.  My assignment this week is to tease out, from my imagination, a few hundred words on one of three nominated topics.  Nothing comes to me. I can’t even decide which topic I will choose.  Something precious? Yes, I do regard some things as precious, but they’re very personal.  John Green said once that a writer is ‘an introvert who wants to tell a story without making eye contact’, which describes me to a T.  I want to tell my story without giving away too much of myself.

Could I write about Dark Secrets, without stumbling into cliches and predictability? Probably not, so I’m left with My Special Place.  I’ve had a few special places in my lifetime but which one deserves to be singled out for special attention?

Pondering on this dilemma, I suddenly realise that my very special place is staring me in the face.  The screen saver on my computer is a view of Sydney.  In the middle is Sydney Tower with its famous revolving restaurant.  On the left is the building site of Barrangaroo where yet another casino is being built.  On the right are the cranes, employed in erecting even more units to meet the insatiable demand for homes.  So, there it is – Sydney, my special place.  Maybe a city the size of Sydney shouldn’t qualify as ‘a special place’; after all, there could be millions of ‘special places’ for millions of people all contained in that metropolis.  I could even identify a couple myself: Luna Park, for example, or Coogee Beach.  But Sydney holds a special place in my thoughts; it’s the most special of my special places.

I first hear of Sydney sometime during the year 1950.  At that time, we were living in Scotland in a bleak industrial town still trying to get over the ravages of war.  My family lived in a tiny apartment in an old tenement building with no bathroom, no electricity and a shared toilet around the back. It was a great day when Dad came home from work and told us he had been offered a job in Australia and we were moving to the other side of the world. Our ship would take us to Sydney.  That very name took on a magic aura for me.

My teacher at school made a fuss about our move and found pictures of this fabled land, including one of a school class being taught out-of-doors, under a eucalyptus tree.  This became the symbol, for me, of our Shangri-la and, because our ship would deliver us to Sydney, all of our hopes and dreams I had of a new life became focused on this one special place.

We left Scotland in a cold and dreary December and arrived in Sydney during a warm, sparkling Australian summer. Before travelling to our new home in Wollongong, we had ice-creams and milkshakes in a milk bar in Pitt Street and, to an almost-8 year-old used to unrelenting rationing, this was the height of luxury.  Although we didn’t live in Sydney at first, it remained the symbol of all that was good.  We went there for special days out, to go to Luna Park, to visit the zoo, to swim at Manly, to marvel at the Harbour Bridge.

In later years, we did live in Sydney, at Drummoyne for a time and, in the first years of marriage, at Coogee, and Sydney has never lost its magic.  The Opera House has now been added to the list of my special places.

We travel there still, to sail on the harbour, to see a show or to have a special meal at one of its great restaurants.  It’s been over 70 years since Sydney first became my special place and it’s special still.