Bricks with vanishing signage

With these advertisements on either side of the doorway, the corner shop in Pearson Street must have been a popular destination in times long gone.

Aladdin's Cave

It is rare enough nowadays to find an Alcoa Cash for Cans centre. Until we get container deposit legislation, it is only the very motivated who try to make a few dollars from recycling cans. However such a rare place is to be found along Brunswick Road, just a few doors from where the great Sydney Road begins. And when I went there, I found what looked like a treasure trove.

Luscombe Street Community Garden

Not quite a year ago, I chanced upon a lively street festival in a small street off Lygon Street. Bands were playing in a vacant block, which also had garden boxes full of the last summer vegetables growing in them. The festival was called Hot Diggity, and today it was on again. Only this time, there was a little street market and I had a stall there.

Pitt Street

One morning not long ago there was a garage sale in the Buddhist Centre in Pitt Street, just off Lygon Street. As well as buying a great vintage blouse there, I also had the chance to observe this fascinating little street. On the corner there is an old fashioned hardware store, then a few industrial buildings of different eras.

Teatro do fin do ano

As usual we spent New Year’s Eve quietly, however it was wonderful to be able to see quite a lot of the Melbourne midnight fireworks from the window of the front room. Vince always laughs at me when I say the Brunswick flat has “city views” but indeed we could see most of the pyrotechnics that were set off from the tops of buildings.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to resume an old connection with my childhood penfriend, Rosario, in Portugal. When we were schoolgirls and later students, we carried on a long friendship by correspondence. It was one of those legendary exchanges of letters that went on for years, accompanied by the sense of excitement when one opens a letter that has travelled through time and space half way across the world.