engeful act

Unwrapping the morning paper, I toss the plastic wrap aside, unroll the paper, fold and twist it into a readable shape and open out the front page. I read the headlines, look at the accompanying photograph and toss the paper down on the floor. I sit in the chair, disbelieving.

Yesterday, a man dropped his almost five year old daughter off the Westgate Bridge into the River Yarra, 58 metres below. This dreadful event happened in the morning peak hour traffic as it crawled across the bridge and motorists around were unable to prevent its happening. According to news reports this man is estranged from his wife, works in IT and lives at the far end of Our Street. There is a very good chance that his days of living in Our Street are now finished.

I tossed the paper on the floor in disbelief because when I looked at the photograph I immediately recognised this man. At the Social Club, because it is an area open to the public, all sorts of people use the computers. We have people from a variety of ethnicities; people who live on the edge of society for whatever reason and who often have mental health issues; people who roundly abuse you if you look sideways at them and one woman who was known for spitting on people who crossed her.

Then there are the users of mobile phones who take their calls in the library and who, at the top of their voices, inflict the details of their personal lives on all within earshot. Sometimes I have been known to sidle up to them and ask them I they might consider toning their conversation down a bit. The man at the centre of yesterday’s events was one of the mobile phone users who seemed to be a little lacking in the social skills area and not able to understand that when the person on the other end of the phone said “No.” they meant no.

On the one occasion when I asked him to tone down the volume he did so immediately and seemed to be totally unaware that his conversation was being listened to by everyone within earshot.

If anyone had suggested to me that he would, at some time in the future, carry out the deed he did yesterday I would have considered they were having flights of fancy. As for what happened yesterday morning, you would have had to not only been in the vehicle on the way back to the city from the beach house prior to the incident, but also had access to the workings of this man’s mind.

It’s one thing to be at odds with your estranged wife but the idea that this might have been , as the papers have suggested, a way of getting back at her is unconscionable.

eather report

Another heat wave has arrived on our doorstep. After three days of reasonable temperatures, the thermometer has suddenly taken a leap upwards and we have endured three consecutive days of above forty degrees Celsius.

Combined with low humidity and overnight temperatures, where yesterday’s temperature at 3 am was 29C and last night’s low was just a shade under 26C, sleep has been elusive. There has been much tossing and turning, the fan has been whirring away through the night and applications of a small damp towel have been pursued in the vain hope of cooling things down enough to grab a few minutes real sleep.

Today’s temperature was the last gasp; 45.1C. Tomorrow doesn’t bear thinking about and I mentally run through a list of places where it might be possible to get some respite; a movie theatre, the National Gallery and the State Library are three cool places – in the real sense of the word - that spring readily to mind.

I read about the Chill on Ice Bar in the city where 30 tonnes of ice make up the walls, chairs and sculptures of a drinking hole and where the customers are limited to 20 minutes at a time. Any problem with damp clothes as a result of sitting on iced chairs would be solved in less than a minute outside in the sun today.

Quite frankly, I’m totally over this hot weather.

ternal blinds

There’s nothing like a long stretch of high temperatures to make me again consider the idea of getting external blinds.

I’ve spent quite some time reading about methods of keeping rooms cool, both externally and internally. It seems that once the window glass is allowed to heat up then the transference of that heat to the room behind the window is inevitable. It can be reduced a little by having heavy, dark curtains inside but by far the preferred method is to stop the heat from penetrating the glass in the first place.

None of the windows in our building are double glazed so the current trend for light blinds and no curtains does little to keep the heat out. Some of the apartments have double blinds, one that allows light into the room but prevents anyone outside being able to see in and the second blind which cuts the outside light and the ability to see into a room from the outside. Very few people have heavy curtains and anyone who has done renovations and wants to present the latest and most desirable interior design has not only ditched the old fashioned idea of curtains but have also removed the pelmets which act as a deterrent to the cold/hot air entering through any exposed glass.

And so with the brave new march towards highly desirable interiors with their up-to-the-minute accessories the way has been paved for the sellers of air-conditioning units to do a roaring trade. Residents, coming home to an oven-like apartment after spending the day in a cool air-conditioned workplace immediately rush out and purchase the latest and often greatest in air conditioners. In the last few years the design of air-conditioners has moved forward in leaps and bounds, away from the old box types that roared away in the window frame to ones that now sit happily on a balcony and work with hardly a murmur, cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. There is of course a price to pay for presenting the latest image to the world, and it arrives each quarter with the electricity bill.

I’m all for keeping the heat out in the summer and so external blinds appeal to me. I aim to have one fitted to an east facing window which draws cries of disbelief as the norm is to have these blinds on a north or west facing wall of a building. I do not have an exterior north wall and my only west facing window is shaded most of the day by the upper story of the building while the east facing room gets the sun right from the time it peeps over the tree tops.

The greatest obstacle to overcome, after robbing a bank to pay for it, will be getting approval of the colour for the blind from the Owners’ Corporation. We have some old-fashioned dark brown and cream striped blinds at the west facing front of the building, fitted about forty years ago which I might just be expected to install. Styles and fabrics have changed a lot since then and I have seen neutral coloured blinds that allow some light in while still keeping out the heat and they really appeal to me.

As we are now more than half way through this summer I will put the idea on hold and see how the weather shapes up through next summer.

oung concert

In all the aforesaid posts, full of drama and whingeing about the heat, I have neglected the big occasion on Wednesday night, the much anticipated Neil Young concert.

Luckily it was on the first day of the heat wave and even though Neighbour Heather and I thought we would expire while we walked from the tram stop to the Myer Music Bowl in the early evening we didn’t.

People converged on the venue from all directions and we plodded steadily up the hill towards the entrance. We were lucky in getting a young man on security at the gate who understood that we weren’t going to behave badly with our bottles of water and hurl them at some-one else in the crowd on some crazy whim. Our instincts for survival were centred on lasting the evening without expiring and any throwing of water would have been over our own heads and not over some-one else’s.

The concert was the best, we were high up on the lawn (read dead grass there) and although the figures on the stage were hardly recognizable the voice certainly was and I was thrilled to hear live some of my favourite songs. The crowd covered all age groups and everybody got into the spirit of things though I have to admit I wilted after a while and had to sit down.

All too soon the last song had been sung and we all filed out in the heat of the night and made our way to wherever we were going - which in the case of NH and I was to the nearest tram stop and then home.