Gone for a little walk

At Little Collins Street, a sign in front of Cityblend Café declared on a blackboard: "The greatest knowledge is that even a fool can sometimes be right." That is so true. There are many of them in politics, and sometimes they can truly be right. I like that quote. I must find out where that came from originally. I got this inexpensive notebook from IGA X-press at Queen St., in front of the Melbourne Safe Deposit Box building, with the admirable architectural style from maybe 100 years ago. Without this notebook, I would be lost, and for $1.25, I’d say it was a good investment for it can contain notes and details which the limited brain can easily forget.

We proceeded to Little Collins St and came out to Elizabeth St. At the corner, was a Vitamin ME shop which boasted a sale with a proliferation of "Sale" banners all over inside the shop. Here I got a favourite saw palmetto herbal supplement. "Seventeen dollars!", I exclaimed, "Now that’s a good price." I handed my card to pay. On the same street, we stopped by Payless Shoes. A sign on top of the shoes on sale declared: "Reduced now, $29. We’ll surprise you." I wondered what the surprise was, when they have already divulged the price. Did they mean quality? It’s all the same unsurprising quality everywhere in this shop. A black and white notice also declared: "Look for reduced tickets to save even more." Two young women came. One wore a dark-pink blouse, a pink strapped shirt with the whole middle portion of her body sticking out shouting and blaring, probably wanting nothing much to be left to the imagination. "I just had Brazilian wax," she announced brassily in her head. The other one was fat, wearing a deep-brown tight-fitting tube: she was trying on some yellow, daggy slippers.

A 5-foot tall saleslady in black uniform came with some kind of ingenious grapple pole to fetch down some shoeboxes on the top shelf signed "Size 6, Euro 37, USA 5 ½"; we all have different numbers for the same thing. She reminded me of that girl in the movie "Looking for Alibrandi". Could she be Italian? She stood there, her hair tied up with a simple light blue rubber band. She seemed to have contemplated there for a couple of minutes, gathered some courage, before stretching the grapple pole, which had a heel plate and a rectangular tongue that caught the shoebox lid: a clever contraption which I believed worked most of the time, except you needed to apply some concentration and a bit of balancing skills to make it work. It didn’t quite work this time, two sad shoeboxes falling down in a disappointed heap. She muttered something incomprehensible, looked at me, and went back to the counter. She came back a second time, used the pole again, and whiffed the air of success.

Outside the shop, a young Chinese girl in a pink tube with black stripes, and a black miniskirt, sat on a chair in front of Caffé Map, proud of showing her crossed legs. Her chair was placed cheeky close to the entrance of the café, away from the alfresco seats, right in the way of passing pedestrians but that didn’t seem to bother her one bit.

At Bourke Street, a long line of families queued up to see the Christmas window display at Myers. The queue started from the building next door, the Melbourne GPO. An attendant ushered the people to progress in the queue. In front of the GPO, a balding man wearing a light-green T-shirt and blue ¾ pants, stood with microphone in one hand, preaching before the queue, while a man filled his sports bottle with water from a nearby fountain. In front of Myer came heavenly sounds of Spanish flamenco guitar which reminded me straight away of the Gypsy Kings. I came closer and saw four men in the group, three Latino-looking men were playing the guitar, the fourth one, standing, was Chinese man playing the bongo drums. A woman close by was flogging CDs produced by the group: Moliendo Café, Juan Martinez. I asked which one Juan was and the woman pointed to a man with a brown hat with red lining, gold shirt, and a beard under his chin. We passed by a sad-puppy-dog-look man sitting on the busy sidewalk near the Accessorize shop with a sign in front of him on the floor which said: "My name’s Kris, I just had my appendix removed…" And so on, I didn’t read the rest of the message. He looked like he was clutching that part of his tummy where the appendix probably would have been. At the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets, there were big yellow stars gracing the wires above the intersection close to the traffic lights. On a corner, a tall imposing figure stood, probably eight feet tall. This Asian man was dressed up as Christmas tree, on some kind of hidden pedestal. He had something like a Jamaican knitted cap with either long hair or a Rastafarian wig, probably the latter. He was constantly smiling and spinning clockwise a white hula hoop. He was wearing tinsels of different colours for a skirt, which flowed right down to the floor, also covering his pedestal. In front of him were placed two dolls, sightless witnesses to the coins that end up in the plates they guarded. On a lane on the left side of Russell Street, a depressed man in green fluoro vest organises the thousands of discarded flattened boxes, quiet reminders of the noisy, aggressive Christmas trade from the shops around.

The grinning salesgirl at Cotton Up back at Bourke Street wore a short black skirt and a Christmas-red shirt on which were emblazoned the words "I had this look first". Okay, baby, so you’re the fashion leader, I said to myself . Around her model-poised neck was a red lanyard with a white plastic access card. She beamed with a pretty, happy, toothy smile and enthusiastically suggested that I go see the back of the shop where they had better items on sale. I asked what time they’d close. "Six o’clock. And we’re also open tomorrow till 6." Red posters hanged around the shop, boasting "50% off original prices." In the background, some Euro-retro techno music played, which started to make my silly head go on a giddy spin and turn somewhere else. At 6:15 pm a black tram stopped in front of the shops, its whole body covered in full by one massive advertisement. The destination sign on the rear declared "Southbank Depot." A cheerful lot of people seemed to be wearing red today. I decided then that I would wear a conforming red shirt the next day, to join the friendly spirit of Christmas in the place. A group of Indian-looking men gathered gregariously in front of the Red Silks Restaurant and Bar and the phone booth nearby. A mute sign of a street pole displayed confidently: "This area is monitored by Safe City Cameras."

Ah Christmas, with the depressed, flattened boxes in Melbourne alleys, discounts and half-price tags, Santa-crimson shirts and overstretched shopping hours, and ubiquitous Christmas trees (traditional, still, motionless trees, or non-conventional dynamic trees playing the hula hoop), cheery, curious shop windows with singing elves and ho-ho-hoing Santa Clauses, long patient queues, the loud blare of fire-and-brimstone microphones, Asian tourists belting out songs in Hollywood Karaoke at Bourke, yellow stars under the nonchalant traffic lights. Somewhere out there is the true spirit of Christmas. You just have to look real hard for it.

23 December 2005