I wrote the bloody book!

It was another day of intermittent showers sprinkled with downpours and moments of intense heat. Well, intense for me, anyway. According to most of the people around here the breeze made it ‘freezing’. I’m pretty confident that 24° is not even close to freezing, regardless of the breeze.

Ignoring the wind, the rain put paid to a pretty exciting bowls match scheduled for play this afternoon. Mum and I managed to bag a couple of ring side seats, waiting for the game to start but the weather decided otherwise.

Mind you, a lot of that was because Sue (the activity coordinator) was busy elsewhere and didn’t start gathering players till late on.

She had a couple of volunteers to show around. Two ladies who will sit around with the residents, chatting and generally making life a little more interesting. Or that’s the idea.

One of the ladies sat down with an old chap while we were waiting for the bowls. She had a book with her and was flicking through it. It was one of those coffee table books full of beautiful photographs. It was about far north Queensland. The photos looked gorgeous from what I could see.

Anyway, the lady was flicking through the book, commenting on how lovely it all looked and the man was grunting without a lot of enthusiasm. This didn’t put her off. She kept trying to get him to talk about himself and the book. Eventually he spoke though it surprised her somewhat.

She had been told that he was originally from New South Wales so, naturally enough, she pointed to the book and asked if he’d been to the north at all. He gave her a withering look and said “I wrote the bloody book!“

You’d think that would put paid to any further conversation but, actually, it sort of broke the ice and the two chatted happily away after that. It turns out he took the photographs as well as wrote the text. He sounded like a man who’d lived a very interesting life as the two discussed snorkelling and scuba diving and so forth.

My interesting life, at the moment, consists of trying a different cafe every morning. Today, wandering up to Bulcock Street first thing, I went left rather than right and wound up at the quite funky looking Kai Cafe where I had the best latte so far this trip. (I’m ignoring the weird double thickness glass it came in.)

They almost didn’t have any hazelnut so it was a close run thing. According to the guy who served me, they had had a plague of sugar ants last week which meant throwing all their sweet syrups out. His eyes lit up when he produced a brand new bottle.

Suitably sustained, I headed down to the bus stop only to get the same bus driver as yesterday. I was almost prepared to get off at the stop before my stop but he informed me that he’d had a long chat with someone about the J Pole lacking bus stop and all was well. It was a bona fide stop.

The J Pole was scheduled to be put in but the location was, mistakenly mapped as being about 150 metres further up the road and the footpath is closed off for now. This meant the pole had to be taken back, to wait for access…which is seriously weird given the bus shelter is there and completely accessible.

Denise was home sick today so I took the bus back again as well and, of course, I had the same guy. We discussed the state of the roads in Queensland, the weight of the bus, the risk of fire on the top deck of double decker buses and the rain. Strangely, I thought it was just me and the driver on the bus but when I left the bus at my stop I glanced back and there were about four other people sitting behind me.

Anyway, the day passed pretty much like the others this week except I was roped in to the quiz they were playing in place of the washed out bowls game.

Following a stint of anagrams, Sue decided we’d all play a game of naming a country or place starting with the letter of the last letter of the previous country or place. Mischievously I kept choosing places that started and ended with the same letter (Africa, Austria, Australia, Andorra, etc). It helped pass the time.