melbourne and its attractions
I went to Melbourne recently.
Stayed in a Lygon Street hotel (bookshops, Italian touts outside all the dud restaurants) and all about 20 walking minutes from city centre . Lovely pub, not too pricey, and lots of very friendly young men hanging around the lobby – wanting to see my room. So many interior decorators down there.
Low-key city that place in daytime though, and there’s this big Town Hall style building right in the middle of town in the centre of the tram stops and here’s a bloke just standing there checking out the ambience of a foreign city when some strange little woman looms up stage left and belts a
‘YYYYYAAAAWWWAAANNNKKKERRHH!!!!!! …..’ right into the left ear.
Right close she was, and nestling it up into my ear. Never saw her coming. All hot breath spit and passion.
The last lady who got that close my hearing aid I married forty years ago.
Unwashed little sheila this one was with a flattened old face, smokes at the ready, breath like Arnold the Alky, teeth like tombstones. Legs like Johnny Sattler.
A complex unit.
Whitened up old eyes looking to burn some hate onto someone – and it looks like I’m ok for today’s target. Must have had SYDNEY carved onto my forehead.
She’s wearing an old curtain tucked into bulk trackie daks, she’s barefoot and it’s WINTER down there and once again she rips out another
‘PPHHHWWWAAARRRGORFYAAAAAACAAAAAANNT !!!! ‘
So a bloke’s thinking about all the country girls he promised everything and left nothing all those years ago when Bells to Joanna was a mystery tour of waves and pubs and parked cars.
And he’s hoping that those couple of local ladies at Mildura have forgotten the boy fruitpicker from Bondi.
Surely not, but in this wide brown land you never bloody know. Maybe I should have kept a diary.
‘ YYYAAAFFFUKKKENBBAAARRSTTTERRDDD!!! ‘
Maybe not.
This lady has a voice like a train coming out of a tunnel and every bag-arsed commuter in the city has stopped eating his salad roll and is waiting and watching for me to deal with the situation.
Fact is: I’m looking at a very cranky woman who has a problem with some bloke long since departed and is no doubt still looking over his shoulder.
– and she thinks I’m HIM!
And know her not do I do, this I swear.
So I wait for her next bellowing incoherent utterance and when it comes, as it must –
‘YYYYAAAAFFFFUUUUUCKKKKEEENNNEBAAARRRSTEDD!!!’
– and I reach into her horrible mouth, through the greasy spittle and jagged teeth, and I grasp her tongue with two fingers and then yank it right out, sharply, by its fleshy roots.
Thwooookkk!
Wherein she subsided footpathwards, gurgling hard for breath.
Eventually drowning in her own of blood – Anyway that’s what I read in the papers the next day, and St Kilda isn’t half of what it’s cracked up to be is it... Trams every five minutes is fair enough, but with $9.50 for a Bruschcetta on white bread and no Coopers anywhere a bloke would rather be in Wardell fishing the Richmond.
(author’s note: not all of this is true)
petebowes.com 
Plenty of Coopers in St Kilda Pete. I live there, plus there’s a few in my fridge.
Next time…
Thanks greaat blog