It's been a wild night with hurricane-like winds and broken branches and fallen trees all over the driveway, which I had to clear before I could even drive into town this morning. Not that I'm complaining; at my age, it's the only wild nights I get.
My reserved parking spot was still waiting for me as I pulled into the shopping centre to have coffee with an old Austrian friend who came to Australia in 1955 and then worked for more than thirty years with the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Canberra, where he must've learned how to defy statistics because at ninety-three years of age, he's both physically and mentally more agile than many others half his age.
(Of course, we conducted our conversation in German: he in his melodic Viennese and I in my goose-stepping Prussian accent; and, of course, we drew some filthy looks from people who already had problems speaking English, let alone a second or third language. Anyway, we've paid our taxes which supported quite a few of those "I was born here" types.)
Not that he plans to hang around for much longer since, after having bemoaned the state of the world for a good two hours, we both came to the conclusion that it's better to check out before it gets much worse.
Preview
Reflecting the state of the economy, the shopping centre has quite a few vacant shopfronts, one of which has been converted into "The Book Nook" which offers a wide range of very forgettable books. Instead of labelling individual shelves "Crime" and "Children's Books" and "Non-Fiction", they could've just hung up one big sign marked "Dross". Still, I did re-home a copy of Clive James' "Unreliable Memoirs" which, not surprisingly, had remained unclaimed since I last looked at the display many months ago. I tried out one of the comfortable chairs in the hope another chess player would pop in to give me a game on the giant chess set which no-one seemed to have used yet or they would've realised that the chess pieces were aligned along the wrong side (the rightmost square in the bottom row for each player should be a white square).
Someone in the adjoining Koon Hong Take-Away must've read about the "decoy effect", but failed to understand that the decoy priced at $19.90 must be slightly smaller in size than the desired target priced at $20.90.
I'm home again and inside and keeping warm close to the heater. I won't be going anywhere for the rest of the week, so please be my guest and use my reserved parking spot. Just make sure you also look the part.
