Well, extemporanea is supposed to eschew the personal, but lately I've been lazy with the journal-keepin' (well, with the hand-writing in general) and so, in violation of that rule (more of a guideline, really, as I may've mentioned before) this'll serve in partial lieu of said journaling [so, as is customary: currently listening to Laura Cantrell - When The Roses Bloom Again]:
Had a couple of errands to run in the city on Saturday, but had disposed of them by about 2, so I took lunch, books, and pen and paper to the grass outside the state library and abandoned myself to the charms of sunshine and a velvet afternoon. After a time, lying on my back, I noticed an irregular flotilla of tiny red balloons unhurriedly drifting high above me, strings trailing, never more than about half a dozen visible across the wide blue panorama at any given time; a few minutes of this and then - and this will sound too artful for words, but it's what I saw - unexpectedly but fittingly, a single blue one in their midst, eddying sunwards like the rest. It was really rather beautiful. (Learning afterwards that their source was the Myer Christmas parade didn't take even an iota of the gloss off it.)
Anyway, a while after that charmful procession, my phone rang. It was David, asking if I was up for an impromptu road trip to and dinner at Daylesford (Adrian H being stationed there for a few days by his work) - and, while unreliability and unavailability are practically my watchwords when it comes to planned activities, I rarely say no to spontaneous ones, so by about 4.15, post-haircut, we were en route.
The trip took less time than we'd anticipated - something less than an hour and a half from the city, I think - leaving us with a bit of time to fill. I remembered a good secondhand bookstore from my previous trip, a few years ago, with Kim - although I'd forgotten that it was called the Avant Garden, to which my response can be summarised in a single word and an exclamation mark: "yes!" - so we went there and rummaged through the dusty cassette tapes looking for suitable return trip music, eventually settling on Rush, for reasons best known to David.
So we had dinner with Adrian (fish and chips sitting on a small pier we found jutting out on to the local lake, swans and other aquatic birds all around, drizzle falling occasionally) and then listened to Rush (Hemispheres - 1976 [?]) on the way home. It reminded me a bit of Muse, and also of the Heart songs I've hard, and somewhat of mid-period Pink Floyd, with shades of Pavlov's Dog, too - all a bit much for me, in that mostly boring but occasionally groovy prog/70s heavy rock sort of way. Best song by far was the last one, a complicated 10 minute instrumental with guitar epics a-plenty and more weird time signature changes than you could shake a stick at.
Sunday turned out fine again, and I was enticed out in the afternoon for secondhand book-browsing and general contemplation (enticed by the weather and my own driftiness, not by anyone else, natch). Both of these having been a success, I walked back up from that grassy stretch between Swanston St and the law building to Lygon St at around 5 and decided to watch a film; of those which seemed possibilities, Children of Men was on first, so I got my ticket and settled in.
So it turned out to be one of those films that, by just a small twist, could have been one that I really liked, but instead more or less passed me by, leaving me with a vague 'that was Quite Good' feeling at its end...all the pieces seemed to be there, but something was just slightly off. Reminded me of V for Vendetta in a lot of ways, though it doesn't have the explosiveness of that other. I did think that the depictions of the refugee camps were well-aimed (obviously) and well done - the camp scenes were of a sort to remind us, if we needed reminding, of the barbarity of treating people as if they were less than human simply because they have entered a country otherwise than through officially-sanctioned channels. (Unflinching depiction of the perils of extremist responses to authority, too.)
