Monday, October 11, 2010

Streets of your town



Sometimes Sydney will unexpectedly remind me of Edinburgh: a certain slant of light, or an old building, or the texture of the stones. I usually think of Melbourne as being more akin to Edinburgh, as Sydney is akin to Glasgow: the former genteel, maybe a little smug; the latter brash, sometimes full of itself. Walking down Bridge Lane in the CBD, the first half of the alley was glistening with plastic bunting as part of the Art & About festival. There was a nightclub, apparently called FAKE, at the corner. And a beautiful archway led to Bridge Road, and the light coming through it, and the fact that Bridge Lane seemed like a secret known only by the people walking through it, made me imagine for a moment that I was in a close in the Old Town of Edinburgh, somewhere near the Royal Mile.

5 comments:

The greedy murmur of little men said...

The Go-Betweens, much impersonated, never bettered.

LottieP said...

Lines from that song often come into my head here: "and I ride your river under the bridge"... - although I'm not sure it's necessarily about Sydney.

Anonymous said...

Brisbane, or Earls Court I suppose.

I suppose it should be imitated instead of impersonated, which conjures up images of fat (always Las Vegas, never Viva Las Vegas!) Elvis not-so-lookalikes.

tpe said...

Hmm. I (twice) misread the title of this as "streets of your own". Not hard to see why, is it?

Hello, LottieP, how are you doing? Can you remember the last time you used a more superfluous "maybe" in a sentence? "Edinburgh.....maybe a little smug." Please.

But then there is rather a lot to be smug about, surely, so we (guilty as charged: smug) probably shouldn't worry too much about it. Or should we? No. Should we? No. I don't know. Ach.

I see Glasgow as being more insecure. The brashness and in-your-faceness appears nothing more than a manifestation of these insecurities.

At first glance, incidentally, I thought one of your pictures was from Edinburgh. I would sometimes love to go back and wander in the closes off the Royal Mile.

Kind regards etc....

TPE

LottieP said...

Thank you, TPE, and how very nice to see you here. I really like this photo and it's precisely because it's like an Edinburgh close. Those closes hold a lot of allure.