I rounded off my week or so in Melbourne with a visit to St Kilda, the down the tram tracks sea side resort that I had a perfectly pleasant time in, and only resent slightly for painting me strangers-stop-and-gawp red in the face with sunburn. It contained one of the best book shops I’ve ever been in and a classic Australian white strip of sand. It also has the rather ramshackle Luna Park: a fairground that looks half shut down and thus feels very Scooby Doo. There’s a pretty good pier to walk along which has a rocky outcrop at the end where you can spot tiny little native Australian penguins nestling down for the day.

 I also went to the Queen Victoria night markets (they love Queen Victoria in this country.She may’ve been monarch when the first settlers arrived here but I wonder if anyone’s told them she’s stopped. Perhaps they think the current Queen is a geriatric hat model) which is full of  different types of cuisine, classy knick knacks, sangria and bonhomie.  I liked Melbourne, a lot. I’d very much like to return, except much richer than I am now and with a mule to carry my large supply of coffee beans back with me.

I had to get up last Saturday to set off on a tour along the Great Ocean Road. After much preparation and the kind of sleep you get when you’re worrying that your alarm on your phone won’t go off so you stuff everything up entirely, my stupid alarm didn’t go off on my stupid phone, leaving me in an incredible rush. (Obviously, if Mum wasn’t going to read this, I’d have put ‘fucking’ there, rather than stupid. It portrays my shock and anger rather better.)

But the tour itself was rather good, concisely taking in the impressively eroded rock formations which jut out of the Ocean along a small section of Australia’s southern coast and the beautiful Grampians national park in west Victoria, which is a green and hilly place, speckled with small towns and beautiful rivers and lakes and lots of hikes to go on. So a bit like a sunnier Wales, really. The highlight was climbing a small summit overlooking the Outback town of Hall’s Gap as the sun rose. Or at least, reaching the top was a highlight. Me sweating uphill for a considerable period of time never appeals much, perhaps least of all to the girl who had to sit next to me on the tour bus.

 I can now say not only have I seen (and filmed) three Kangaroos fighting in the wild, I’ve also been in a vehicle that’s hit one.  I’d love to be able tell you it was fine, but I’m afraid it was rather the opposite of that. Still, it’s the way of the world out on dark outback roads, unfortunately.  There’s plenty more of them out there. Unless that was Skippy, in which case we’ve seriously compromised Australia’s main security infrastructure. 

The trip took me to Adelaide, a city that is sometimes left off travellers’ checklists and dismissed by Australians as a country town with pretentions of being a city. Guidebooks are ever so keen to extol its charms, but ever so vague on how to fill your days here. It’s the only one of country’s city that was meticulously planned to reflect ideas on how an’ ideal’ town should look and you can definitely see that.  The streets here as so wide, the buildings so far apart, the corners so sweeping, you feel you are looking at a city reflected through a fairground mirror and it makes you feel a little off kilter. While waiting to cross the road, I’ve idly wondered if I’ll age 10 or 15 years like when Simba crosses the log in The Lion King.

It’s also full of churches and fountains, the latter of which surprises me a little because this is the driest state in the driest continent in the world. Polite but firm signs warn you to limit your shower and use a sink plug; but the same amount of water is fine when spurting out of a stone dolphin’s mouth for pure aesthetics, apparently.

Luckily, I have a friend who’s been staying down here who’s showing me the sights. We’ve so far been down to the seaside suburb of Glenelg (sunburn: large patch, upper right thigh) and been to the moonlight cinema in the Botanic park, a warm summer evening picnic affair where the film was made more magical by fireflies flitting across the screen.

In Melbourne, I had been booked into a Nomads hostel by a travel agent. It was my worst idea of what a hostel could be, with a bar thumping out dubstep every evening and a tiny kitchen and beds that creaked if you so much as had a particularly strong thought in them. Which of course you did. About the noisy bloody beds.

The hostel I’ve moved to in Adelaide is brand new and totally brilliant. It has free pancakes two mornings a week and books in the book swap that don’t make you wished you’d packed  it in with the whole reading thing around the time you’d learned the letter c. Having said that, the general shoddiness of such an expensive hostel in Melbourne did get me chatting to my roommates in a wartime spirit kind of way. By comparison, it turns out ‘Well, these facilities are more than adequate, aren’t they?’ isn’t much of a conversation starter, although it is one I intend to try if I’m ever invited to meet royalty at Buck House.

This evening, I’m off to Kangaroo Island- apparently Australia’s Galapagos, voted 5^th best island in the world by readers of National Geographic magazine. The Isle of Wight didn’t even make the list, so I can’t begin to imagine the heady highs of the ones which have. As usual, with tedious inevitability, I’ll be sure to let you know next week.

Street Art, Melbourne

I thought for a while, that I didn’t want to like Melbourne. That doesn’t, on the surface, seem to make much sense, does it? But bear with me.  

You get a couple of different accounts of Melbourne living in Sydney. To the loyal Sydney-siders, it’s alright, worth a visit perhaps, but nothing special. Some backpackers positively foam at the mouth when talking about it. To me, on paper, Melbourne looked exactly like my type of city, arsty and friendly. Basically, I didn’t want to find out that after spending 3 months in lovely Sydney, that a mere 12 hours away there was a friendlier cooler city there for the taking.

 It’s probably like being one of Kate Middleton’s neighbours in Wales-all evidence in Now magazine points towards her being a really nice person with shiny hair, but she never invites you round for coffee, the bitch, so it’s easier to kid yourself she’s dull and you can see her split ends close up. I kind of wanted to see Melbourne’s split ends and tepid chit chat to be sure I hadn’t been missing out on somewhere quite a few people were telling  me, like the Duchess of Cambridge, is just lovely.

Therefore it is with mixed feelings I report that Melbourne, like the Duchess of Cambridge, is just lovely. I woke up from my 12 hour coach journey from Sydney to see 5 hot air balloons floating serenely over that morning’s orange sunrise. The city was already being bloody charming and it wasn’t even 7AM. 

And over the following days it has continued to charm.  The best way to describe it, is that it’s a bit like existing in a Sunday supplement style section. The people are stylish people who sit outside various shabby-chic cafés, most probably reading the Sunday style section. It’s a city that was made for Sundays.  It is also a shopping mecca for beautiful clothes and largely aesthetic lifestyle bric-a-brac:the sort of place where you might pop out merely to add to your vintage scarf collection, only to come back with a necklace with a moustache on it, 100 sheets of loose leaf writing paper and a broken 1920’s sewing machine.

Some of the higher end shops are minimalist to the point of dysfunction. One in a high end mall had a few clothes littered about and was sparely decorated with pretend graffiti on a white back drop, displaying words like ‘twitter’ and ‘terrorism’  next to one another.  As if the customer is meant to walk in look at the two words in bold conjunction with another, scratch his faux intellectual beard and think: ‘Twitter? Terrorism? Oh my God! I see what they mean!  Both those concepts are demonstrably and evidently things’   Another out-of the way shop had loads of pictures Woody Allen’s face on bell jars.

Each to his own, I suppose, but obviously M&S straight down the line attitude to selling clothes is something to which you grow strongly accustomed.

The trams trundle next door to the lemon yellow taxis, making the city feel a bit like San Francisco light-it certainly doesn’t feel like you’re in Australia- (or like in San Francisco, like you’re going to be stabbed) -more like a European city without the slow talking and hand gestures when you can’t get to the bus station.

And then of course, there’s the coffee. Melbournians are proud of their coffee in a way that would make a cynical coffee snob want to brand it just passable. Luckily, with me, they have someone who taught myself to like it largely so I’d have something to do with my hands at train stations; a palette recently trained by $1 buckets of French Vanilla blend at US gas stations. Even as that sparsely educated person, I can tell you it’s some of the best in the world. And there is an insultingly large collection of rustic laneway outlets to buy it from. Wandering through Fitzroy this afternoon, it felt rude to turn away from yet another artfully distressed wall, leafy outdoor sitting area, graffiti wall or large over spilling bag and pungent bag of fresh coffee beans on the counter.

My only slight criticism: Melbourne has mixed weather. If you’re visiting and planning to go outside, a venture I would strongly recommend if you really want to see the city, I suggest bringing and carrying with you at all times: a parasol, sunglasses, a small shady gazebo, a light jumper, a thicker jumper, an umbrella, a sou’wester and a small, collapsible dinghy.  Despite several times falling victim to its enigmatic meteorology,  it is only fair I should mention it also has awesome museums (One has a forest inside it and in another, you can play Mariokart) a lovely river and picturesque botanic gardens.

As for me, I swing rapidly between being mildly bemused and  hugely furious about the amount of logistical organisation travelling seems to be taking. My banks both choose to lock me out this week, a situation that resulted in my fuming my way silently across the city, angrily berating everything and everyone I saw in my head.  But it will probably, hopefully be fine. Today’s tragedy is tomorrow’s somewhat amusing anecdote. Although if fate is watching, please note I’ve never found spider bites particularly funny.

Sydney Australia day regatta boat. And classic seagull. 

It’s a pity that comparing experiences to being like a rollercoaster ride is such a cliché, because this week, life has been very like a rollercoaster. It’s had apprehension, fear, excitement, confusion and a lot of sitting about doing paperwork. And if you don’t acknowledge that bureaucracy can be a legitimate part of a rollercoaster ride, you’ve obviously never been on ‘The Administrator’ at Thorpe Park.

My time in Sydney has come to an auspicious close with two events. The first, Australia day, a public holiday so generally affable I may well try and honour it even when back in the UK.  I had a pretty wonderful day, all told. The first sign of this was when I made a rash decision that all food purchases were to be considered in reason in honour of the day. The positive ramifications of this decision came to a head when I passed a Mr Whippy van at around noon.  As well my food based indulgence, I had a pleasant time strolling in the botanic gardens amongst revellers relieved the sun had shaken off the restrained British-ness of the week and decided to be truly Australian. I had a free look around the Governor’s House which is grand in an airy, offhand Australian kind of way. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in.

The streets of the city were lined with classic cars and flag bedecked crowds. I went and read my book in Hyde Park and in the evening, on my usual stroll near the Glebe harbour, heard the strains of a jazz band float across the water at dusk.

Secondly, I went to see a show at Sydney Opera House. I’d been scouring the listings for a while for something worth the pretty hefty ticket prices and come up with a showing of the film West Side Story with the music provided live by Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I’m sure at this point a few of you will think I should have scoured them a bit harder, or even better, not at all. But as a musical lover who’d never actually got around to seeing West Side Story, it was a wise choice.  Perhaps even better was the moment when leaving, I turned the wrong way and came out looking through the ‘eyes’ of the building across the water on to the harbour bridge with the lights of Luna Park funfair glittering below. It was the type of classic view that can’t help but make you smile. It occurred to me that in all the time I’d been in Sydney, I’d never actually come to see Circular Quay at night. And on a warm Friday, it hums with friendly people and has that stamp of a city’s unique atmosphere. It’s weird what you almost miss out on.

And so, to travel. I spent so much time worrying about jobs and money when I first got here,  I almost forget I hadn’t yet worried about travelling.  I had casually thought about it and somehow, a plan of what I was going to do has formed in my head. But I never thought I’d actually have to do it.

 While mulling over various issues this week, I realised I think about travel the way I imagine a lot of marathon runners think about marathons: they want to run a marathon to say they’ve managed to run a marathon more than they actually enjoy being there on the day, covered in a cling film of sweat and feeling like they have party balloons for lungs. Running a marathon is a means to an impressive achievement, not something they’d casually and happily do every weekend with no reward. Unless of course, they are Eddie Izzard.

When I think of travelling, I do think of it as a logistical assault course-phone calls to be made, trains to be caught- rather than of the experiences I might have.   I am trying to do this a bit less if I can help it.  After all, I’ve read a lot of internet rumours that travel is meant to be fun.

So, I’m off to Melbourne on the first stint of my trip, meaning on this blog, I will try and talk about places a little more and my neurosis a little less. The ‘I’ key on my computer is like a red eyed office worker, deathly tired and suffering from overwork due to its overload’s chronic egotism.  So I will write more about atmosphere, people and history and deathly boring things like that.

So, Goodbye Sydney, I’ll see you in 9 weeks for my flight home. I’m absolutely positive that by then a 22 hour sit down will be exactly the thing I need. Followed by recession, putting on weight and losing the small amount of tan I’ve gathered in between rain storms.

I better enjoy this while it lasts. 

I am tired.

My brain is a sponge filled with custard.

I tried writing a blog for an hour and it was really rubbish.

I am trying to sort through stuff so I can go travelling. Tomorrow.

I am waiting to hear back from a Hollywood producer about a film version of this blog. There are rumours Scarlett Johansson is attached to the project. Michael Sheen will play me, obviously.

There will be a blog.

Not today though.

After eulogising about Sydney in this very blog last week, I decided I needed to get out. For one thing, I had finished my last job. With my first day off in a while that wasn’t a weekend or a public holiday I could finally go and speak to some travel agents about travel.

For a short period, I was a one woman decision making machine. I picked up and perused leaflets. I googled things with a view to taking action. I made phone calls. I sent emails. I walked everywhere decisively. I finally got around to having my hair trimmed. It was a week for such bold moves.

As usual, I was stuck in the time between temp jobs, where unless you make yourself busy by hand washing your socks, you go slowly mad. The first sign of madness being, of course, hand washing your socks.  I decided, in a subset of many important decisions, to go and see my friend Simon who is an oil magnate (Or something like that. I forget. ) in the rural town of Orange,  New South Wales. 

This involved a two hour trip across the still beautiful Blue Mountains and then a further couple of hours on a coach to the town itself. For a four hour trip, it’s pretty pleasant. I was happy to see my first yellow ‘Kangaroos for the next 3K’ style sign as well as some actual signs of nature. I may try and maintain the cool and hardened outlook of a city dweller, but I’m a country girl deep down. Cow pats to the core.

I felt it was quite important to come and see a bit of Australia that one might not mark out as ‘on the backpacker trail’ so it was handy I knew someone there otherwise I definitely wouldn’t have bothered. We had a nice weekend. I learnt a new sport at the delightfully stuck in the seventies ‘Orange Squash and Fitness centre.’ (Drinks, sadly, not provided.) It’s hard to say if Orange is like a small town anywhere in Australia, as it’s the only one I’ve been to. But filled as it is with independent shops and cafes, parks and an incredible view of the night sky, as well as mountains to climb and lakes to Kayak in right on your doorstep,  if it were any closer to anywhere else (and nothing is in Australia) I’m sure it would be heaving. Perhaps it’s lucky it isn’t. Although, Orange Civic Theatre is putting on a play next month called ‘Life Through an Onion-The John Lennon story,’ so I’m pretty sure their temporary rise in population is imminent.

Another one of my decisions was that I worked out that if I really didn’t want to, I didn’t have to work anymore on this trip, I didn’t have to. Life is for living, I rationalised, and this trip is for travelling and my savings are for spending. Might as well stop worrying about things and get on with it, I thought. Which is why, as a person who notoriously sticks to her guns, I am now working again. It occurred to me that once I finish this job at the end of this month, I will then have a whole nine and half weeks in which to travel.

A lot of you of you reading this actually know me. (Apart from my niche selection of readers from Algeria) If you want to know how I feel about spending nine and half weeks constantly in my company, imagine you have to spend nine and a half weeks constantly in my company. Except it’s worse than just being my friend or a family member, a situation from which you can at least occasionally excuse yourself in order to furiously scroll your phonebook for someone better to talk to. Yes, I’ve seen you, Mum.

 Oh no, not only do you get my misguided attempts at wit, you also have to hear my inner monologue-my own thoughts constantly pecking away at you like emotionally unstable chickens, saying ‘That person is an idiot but I’m going to keep quiet and stew angrily about it on the grounds of politeness’ and ‘What are you doing staring into space eating rice crackers-that’ll never make a good blog!’

 So, you see, in many ways, I’m not too keen.

But then I consider the alternative- some stranger tagging along, trying to make me go to bed at an unreasonable hour and making me constantly cook for them and having to put up with their misguided attempts at wit. I may be an incorrigible pain in the arse sometimes, but at least I’m an incorrigible pain in the arse that knows what I like and caters for my every whim.   

So as a worrying pessimist who nonetheless is a determined optimist, I will try and pluck my worried and blue thought-hens from the pen and allow my occasional optimistic flurry of positivity to take over.

 I will have, if you will, a chicken coup.

Today, after weeks of self involved waffling about myself, which nonetheless people seem to be enjoying, I thought I’d try some proper travel writing. I always kind of assume that everyone I know has been everywhere I’ve been, just as I always assume they know more people, have read more books and can cook more things than I can. This is largely a defensive response to having such cultured friends and family. As such, I assumed everyone reading this has been to Sydney. But then, even for those who have, as I will tell people on my return, ‘one does not really know a place unless one has spent a certain period of time there, wouldn’t one agree?

And then I will fully expect one, whoever they may be, to punch me in the face. Three months still really isn’t enough time to get to know a place, probably, but this is what I’ve picked up:

Sydney is quite a new city. Notable, because for me, born at the end of the eighties, it’s just always been there on the other side of the world, appearing occasionally on the news, the Opera House squatting contentedly over the blue harbour, with the bridge glinting in the background. You forget until you hastily Wikipedia it that the coat hanger (an affectionate nickname used by no one) was only built in the 1930s. The Opera House was only completed in the 1970s. Neither has even had a centennial yet. That’s barely history.  So, although of course Sydney itself has been around longer, the defining shorthand for the city, and indeed Australia itself, is very new.  

Australia gained its first western settlers around the same time as what came to be the USA. When Obama visited here in November, he drew comparisons between the two nations, both which had settlers looking for a new life that arrived on the east coast and worked their way out west. The similarity he didn’t mention is that neither group of settlers were particularly welcomed by their respective countries’ native inhabitants.  Both countries have nevertheless diligently forged ahead and created national holidays celebrating the formation of the modern era of their countries. Australia is famously a hospitable place. I am toying playing with this affable nature by going to central Sydney on Australia day next week and exclaiming   ‘So this the day when all the criminals came, is it!? But I will probably not, because I am not Jeremy Clarkson, thank god, and that seems like something he would do.

 The other difference is of course that the USA has managed to fit a remarkable amount of study-able history in a relatively short amount of time. Australia has taken a more chilled out approach and hasn’t even managed a civil war. Yet.  Equally, it isn’t as nearly as full of people. Australia has proved not quite as bothered in expansion to the West.  Mind you, in the approximately equivalent place Australia has thousands of acres of inhabitable desert, America has Idaho, so it’s much of a muchness, really.

If you are lucky enough to enter Sydney via a cruise ship on the sail filled harbour, you will see Sydney’s iconic landmarks first. If you happen to come another way, however, it’s quite likely you will have to walk across the CBD –lots of fairly unremarkable if not entirely unpleasant office blocks and shops punctuating the long walk like a drawn out drumroll until you get to the cymbal crash of the harbour. It’s also a very colourful city, perhaps shown off to full advantage because it spends so much time bathed in sunlight. There’s the green of the many parklands, the blue of the harbour, the white of the opera house, the orange of the roofs of the houses on the North shore. When you can see these all at once, Sydney is at its best.

One of the highlights of working somewhere is that you get to see places you might otherwise not. I worked for quite a time in an area near King’s Cross station (if this is the entrance to the train that takes you to the Australian Hogwarts, I think it must be a much rougher school than its British equivalent) The only reason you’d go to Kings Cross as a tourist is if you wanted to a)get drugs or b) see some boobs.I told someone I was working there and they asked if it was at a brothel. It’s that kind of place. In these senses, a polite person might describe it as an area that is both up and coming. Still, the view from my (old) Office is something rather fantastic, taking in the skyline and the harbour and the domain parklands. It’s ok being somewhere dodgy if you can look at somewhere nice.

 I have already told you about some of the other districts- Glebe and Newtown. It’s been nice to have the time to ferret out some of these extra bits. Plus there’s cool things a stone throw away from the central city mass too-the blue mountains are worth a look (they can put that on their brochures) and then of course there’s Bondi and Manly Beaches. I’ve been lucky enough to go to both the North and South heads of the harbour and they both offer a unique view of the entrance to the sprawling waterside suburbs.

So: I reckon if London is a much loved respectable elderly Shakespearean actor with a twinkle in his eye and New York is a respectably lady-actor in her mid thirties with a lot of sophisticated critically acclaimed roles behind her, Sydney is definitely a young drama school graduate, keen and fresh and interested, doing some edgy new play at some edgy theatre, but not so cool that he’s he incredibly self aware when he’s being pretentious. He’s done a bit, but you get a sense there’s so much more to come. It’s a place that is going places.

And so am I, actually. I’m coming back to the UK on April 10^th( although not before some travelling). This took a lot of decision making.  Whenever I read the news in the UK it is approximately:  ‘No one’s got any work  and yet we’re buying the Queen a boat and some poor girl is getting told to be quiet for questioning an incredibly flawed government work placement scheme AND A BIN FELL OVER IN THE RAIN AND WIND AND KILLED SOME ABANDONED PUPPIES.’ I said approximately, but that is the gist. Here is pretty wonderful in many respects and I nearly openly wept when I heard what I could potentially earn.  Oh well.  I miss good television and people being rude on the phone and being cold all the time. OK.  There is no rhyme or reason to it, really. Yet, home and the people there remains home, wherever you go.

Luckily, one of the least known forms of human coping mechanism (the more commonly acknowledged ones being denial and carbohydrates) is that we are programmed to justify a decision in hindsight to ourselves the second we have made it. This handy little psychological tool means that  spending loads of time thinking about something is largely reductive, because in the end our brains naturally kick into sub-conscious overdrive to convince ourselves we’re in the right. Pretty useful, eh?  So that’s what I’m doing now, while the sun shines and the sky is blue and travel is imminent.

As Mark Twain said ‘heaven for the climate, hell for the company’

  I must remember to bring back my own pitchfork.

(I apologise for the quote as the title, any Australians. It just amused me.) 

‘What do you write when you’ve got nothing to grumble about?’ I grumbled to myself, biting into my delicious brie sandwich. I may as well tell you that Australia does brilliant cheese. I wrote in one of my few blogs about America that it would do well to try and sell itself on its impressive geology, so people would stop thinking of it as the trigger happy nation that bought us the Kardashians. 

Australia’s similarly under rated selling point, as far as I can tell, is its cheese. It is perhaps one selling point too many. I doubt the Australian tourist board has to do much work at all to get people to come here as it is. They barely have to open their mouths to form the words ‘hot’ ‘beach’ ‘interesting wildlife’ and possibly ‘thriving economy’ before they have a wealth of Europeans and Canadians hoarding over here. I should know.

 Tell people about the creamy deliciousness of Tasmanian brie and they’d double their population in a month. It’d be the greatest migration since the one those Geese did in ‘Fly Away Home.’ Anyway. I have now let out this secret.  One hundred years from now, children of the great cheese migration of 2013 will tell us how their forefathers  came for a job, but stayed for the cheese.

As I said in the introduction, before I was so rudely interrupted by my sandwich, I have had little to grumble about this week. Makes a nice change, doesn’t it? I moved back to Glebe and went back to my job, which is a good’un. The man what does the weather, so often chastised by me in the past, has finally rolled out some really good summer days, although there was a massively impressive thunder storm on Sunday, which started while I was in the sea with friends at Manly beach.  That’s me these days. Risking shark, jellyfish and electrocution is just a normal day for me.   

Just before Christmas, I thought I was desperate to leave Sydney. I’m still quite keen to move on by the end of the month actually, but for the time being, I’m  quite content.  I have found the walk round Glebe point is a great factor in this. It’s a rather brilliant stroll and every time I see something new depending on time of day. When I went on an early evening, there were lots of older people bickering over boule. I went late evening and saw some rather impatient looking fishermen. Later evening still and another lightning storm lit up the night above the Sydney skyline (something else which is underrated, incidentally).  When I went at a weekend I saw ladies wearing proper style cone party hats. It’s like walking around the opening chapter to a different genre of book, every day.

I have also been looking into flights for coming back to the UK, a few of you will be glad to hear. It feels pretty odd, to be honest.  I mentioned a while back how time is totally different out here (it’s 11 hours ahead for one-ha ha!) but the fact that New Year’s Eve was only 10 days ago seems totally bizarre. It seems about 3 months ago. It’s like that much parodied film trope of a character arriving at someone’s house to visit someone they’ve recently talked to only to find out they’ve been dead for 10 years. You know the one. Either way, the point still stands-time is weird.

Coming home in April seemed ages away in December. Now it seems to be about a week away. It doesn’t help that even the most cursory glance at a newspaper tells me I’ll return to the three Rs-rain, recession and reality. And yet, all the good people live in the UK. Besides that, I don’t know when I finish work, don’t know where I’m travelling, or how, or when. There are still a thousand choices to be made. I get a different opinion every day about whether to bother going to see Uluru.  Basically, as usual, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. But when the sun is shining, and I’m strolling home from work or watching a storm under a canvas with amazing tapas and good company, it ain’t such a bad place to be.