Holly (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} several_bees) wrote,@ 2006-09-22 08:54:00 |
|
The flight was lovely. The trip from the airport to Battersea wasn't.
Adelaide is enormous; not in a boring literal sense, but in the sense of containing most of the important things in the world.
A lot of Australian cities are like this. They're a long way from anywhere else — Adelaide is the only population centre of more than 25,000 people in its entire time-zone, ten hours by car or a couple of hundred dollars by air from "nearby" Melbourne — so it's relatively difficult to move cities for university or a job or a whim, and ninety percent of the things that have happened to me happened within half an hour's bus ride of the city centre.
When I was thirteen and read a novel set in Rome, I got out a map of Adelaide and oriented it so the Tiber overlapped with the Torrens: aha, there's a mausoleum where the wine centre should be; brilliant, there's theatres in the Festival Centre; the Colosseum's in Victoria Square, surely that's going to be inconvenient. Later, university lectures were filled with people I'd debated against at school, every bus route went past a relative's house, and until yesterday I could walk to any place I'd ever lived in an afternoon (we'll ignore three-month-long overseas visits, because it doesn't make much of a sentence to say "within, ooh, I dunno, a year? If there wasn't any water in the way, and there were people every ten miles with food?").
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I'm now in London, which is also enormous but in a different sense, one involving rather more "being really big" and "having a lot of people in it". If you're one of those people, perhaps you would like to visit a park or museum or something else with me, or come round for boardgames and biscuits one afternoon! You'll find me, probably in the company of the delightful if livejournal-shunning Kevan, in charming Battersea, which — judging by the afternoon I've spent in it so far — seems to be devoted primarily to cheerful streetsweepers waving hello to friendly passers-by, gentle breezes rustling through green leaves, red-brick railway bridges overflowing with lilacs, ducks chasing squirrels merrily through the absurdly huge park, and dappled sunlight that doesn't actually cause sunburn or make objects warm. This can't last, so hurry, before London shows its true colours and I get mugged by a flock of pigeons desperate for a couple of pounds to buy a cup of tea.
Adelaide is enormous; not in a boring literal sense, but in the sense of containing most of the important things in the world.
A lot of Australian cities are like this. They're a long way from anywhere else — Adelaide is the only population centre of more than 25,000 people in its entire time-zone, ten hours by car or a couple of hundred dollars by air from "nearby" Melbourne — so it's relatively difficult to move cities for university or a job or a whim, and ninety percent of the things that have happened to me happened within half an hour's bus ride of the city centre.
When I was thirteen and read a novel set in Rome, I got out a map of Adelaide and oriented it so the Tiber overlapped with the Torrens: aha, there's a mausoleum where the wine centre should be; brilliant, there's theatres in the Festival Centre; the Colosseum's in Victoria Square, surely that's going to be inconvenient. Later, university lectures were filled with people I'd debated against at school, every bus route went past a relative's house, and until yesterday I could walk to any place I'd ever lived in an afternoon (we'll ignore three-month-long overseas visits, because it doesn't make much of a sentence to say "within, ooh, I dunno, a year? If there wasn't any water in the way, and there were people every ten miles with food?").
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I'm now in London, which is also enormous but in a different sense, one involving rather more "being really big" and "having a lot of people in it". If you're one of those people, perhaps you would like to visit a park or museum or something else with me, or come round for boardgames and biscuits one afternoon! You'll find me, probably in the company of the delightful if livejournal-shunning Kevan, in charming Battersea, which — judging by the afternoon I've spent in it so far — seems to be devoted primarily to cheerful streetsweepers waving hello to friendly passers-by, gentle breezes rustling through green leaves, red-brick railway bridges overflowing with lilacs, ducks chasing squirrels merrily through the absurdly huge park, and dappled sunlight that doesn't actually cause sunburn or make objects warm. This can't last, so hurry, before London shows its true colours and I get mugged by a flock of pigeons desperate for a couple of pounds to buy a cup of tea.
