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On my last day in Sydney, I caught the morning ferry to Manly, just in time to watch Theo pack up his mobile Manly Library Afloat which operates Monday to Friday from 7.15 am to 9.15 am to offer its unique service to ferry commuters.
He posed for this picture after which we had a chat about the merit of the printed book versus the ebook and agreed that the tactile enjoyment of holding a real book will be with us for a very long time yet. And so, I hope, will be the Manly Library Afloat!
I enjoyed our little chat, Theo, and if you ever come this far south, you know where to stay, don't you?
And, of course, the rest of Manly didn't disappoint either. It is such a pleasant change from 'the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city' just across the harbour. According to Jan Morris's beautiful book, simply named Sydney, "In 1857 Henry Gilbert Smith, a rich emigrant from Sussex, England, decided to turn the fishing hamlet of Manly, which straddled a spit between the harbour and the open sea, into an ocean resort for the city. Perhaps he was remembering Brighton, after which he originally intended to name it. Certainly he made of it an emblematic pleasure place, still a kind of blueprint of your ideal seaside town. From the ferry station on the harbour shore (which has its own small beach, fun-fair and shopping plaza) you walk down a wide pedestrian street, called romantically the Corso, until there opens out before you the wide surf-ranged crescent of the ocean beach, lined with now raggety Norfolk Pines planted by Smith himself. There is an aquarium and a museum, there are innumerable ice-cream ships and pizza parlours and fish-and-chips places. Manly calls itself a village, a rare usage in a country where every huddle of shacks is a township; and what with the homely satisfaction of it all, and the green headlands, and the level sweep of sand beneath the pines, and the terrific surf pounding the beach, it remains everything that a Victorian entrepreneur could want of a populist watering place."
Which reminds me: I knew a chap once who was called Bondi. Why? Because he was far from Manly ☺
