Ideally positioned for lifestyle

runs the description of a house for auction in the labyrinthine backstreets of Newtown, where a car has sat with a smashed windscreen for over a week and jacaranda petals make a soft, purple-brown carpet over everything in a five metre radius from the trunk of the tree.

Man on a bicycle

My friend told me that last week, while crossing the street where she knew David Malouf to be living, a man on a bicycle passed her – a late middle aged man with tanned calves, a white helmet and a small white moustache under a recognisable nose – a man who could even have been David Malouf himself, if I wanted to believe it, but she knew couldn’t have been.

Not only was he far too wiry and peddling far too fast, this man on a bicycle was not the sort of image that occurs in any of his books, she said.

Missed observing

Walking along the street only minutes before half past twelve in the middle of the day, I realised that I had avoided being in a public place for eleven o’clock and had therefore missed observing the one minute’s silence in remembrance of the end of the First World War.

In the same way, almost exactly one week earlier, I had missed observing the Melbourne Cup.

Now, no one could control

He told us how Pierre Boulez had the habit, every couple of years, of declaring one or other young conductor the greatest conductor alive, after which, with very few exceptions, the young conductor would begin an exhilarating career of dizzying disaster that was fuelled by the hubris that, now, no one could control.