Having spent a few days in Melbourne, I feel just that little bit hipper and cooler. I’ve been hanging out in bars with uber-cool names like …
which has a series of unusual collages on the walls –
And Melbourne’s the sort of city where you can get a Shiatsu massage in the market –
I don’t know of anywhere else that you can do that. Certainly not in Bedford, that’s for sure – if you lay down in the market square there, you’d be trampled by the hordes stampeding towards the freshly-picked Brussels sprouts.
Because the Australian Open is on at the moment, there are lots of tennis-related promotions and freebies. I was offered a free fan on a hot day, so I accepted it gratefully and spent the whole day happily fanning myself with what I assumed was a fan advertising sun screen –
– it was only later that I discovered it’s actually advertising condoms.
The food is pretty hip too. The stall selling these whole, spiralled fried potatoes on a stick had a huge queue –
And so did the whole roasted stuffed pig –
– sporting a fashionable pair of glasses.
What I particularly like about Melbourne is the way it’s preserved its heritage – like the Victorian architecture –
Thanks to the 1850’s gold rush, it was the second wealthiest city in the British Empire, and the newly minted inhabitants wanted their houses ‘draped in an iron petticoat’. Apparently the British thought this was very brash, and Ruskin described it as ‘cheap and vulgar’ – but the Melburnians couldn’t have cared less.
I think they look splendid, and even those that haven’t been restored –
– have a dignified, faded grandeur about them.
And what’s with the trees in skirts?
They’re to stop possums climbing them and then destroying the trees by eating out the centre. Like the other inhabitants of Melbourne, Possums are discerning eaters and only like imported trees, so the native species don’t need skirts.
And it’s not just in trees that possums are a nuisance. My Melbourne friend, Gordon –
– drinking Pimm’s with me here at Naked for Satan – had a dead possum in his basement, which exploded and filled the house with noxious fumes for six weeks.
We have deer that damage trees in England, but at least they don’t creep into people’s houses and explode … and we should definitely be thankful for that.