After many years of a stressful career in the legal profession, I decided to make a tree change and move to country Victoria. Needing a challenge in life, I bought a rundown cottage on the main street of Hollow Bend, an old gold mining town some thirty klm’s west of Ballarat.
He moved down the narrow hallway through the debris of moving day: boxes upon boxes stacked, bottom to top and shoulder to shoulder the length of the passage. They congregated outside doorways like drunken uncles at a wedding. A posse of boxes stood leering at the bride from the entrance to the master bedroom, another set were reminiscing about buck’s nights gone by outside the study, and a smaller, more collapsed group wistfully mulled over lonely bachelorhood outside the bathroom.
This video is about an abandoned old cottage in an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne.
Music is Melancholy Galliard, composed by John Dowland and performed by Karin Schaupp.
Shelley’s eyes flicked on to the email from her oncologist. It had just come in. “Your results,” said the subject line, which was in bold.
Against Dr Gupta’s advice, Shelley had insisted on receiving the news by email. She’d told him she had to fly out to Bali, so she wouldn’t be able to go to the clinic.
Eric slumped in the wingback chair. He traced a taloned forefinger across the bony ridges of his brow, and glared balefully at the heavy black envelope on the occasional table opposite him.
I had recently moved suburbs in Melbourne, and was out walking and exploring, when I came across this abandoned old delivery van. I returned with my camera, and then home to edit the moving pictures, to the beautiful music of Ennio Morricone’s DEBORAH’S THEME.
It had been a while since there had been any decent action in the bedroom, and I was getting pretty toey. Tiesha and I had notched up some 16 years of happy marriage together, and although our love life was still pretty good, it was too often lacking that certain je ne sais quoi that had existed in those earlier bedridden Elwood days.
She held on to the window, watching as it slowly floated away, tears welling up, refusing to run, fogging her vision until she swept them away, flicking them off. She stayed vigil at the window, looping through tears, fog, clarity, until it was long out of sight, gone, departed, until the tears no longer welled. She made not a sound while she watched, there was none that could mask the sound of her hope being shredded, so she was quiet. There was only her to hear it now anyway.
She pushed away from the window, gently twisting and flipping to correctly orientate herself as she went down the short connector between modules. Drifting into the central hub, she grabbed a handle and swung herself around and edgewards down another connector. She passed the offshoots to the tertiary and quaternary labs and continued along, running her hands along the sides to bring herself to a halt at a t-junction. With a sigh, she pushed off to her left towards the accomodation module.
I was in the city on business and the day was a stinker – nudging 38°. My next meeting was over two hours away, and as I walked down the eastern end of Collins Street, I was mulling over where to go to escape the heat.
The threads are there, waiting to be touched, to be caressed, to be pulled on. They’re there, just hanging and waving in the most gentle of breezes, just within our grasp but so tantalisingly out of reach. Threads of rough cotton, gossamer silk, the finest hand spun angora fleece, fine flaxen hair, barb wire, and glassed string. They’re all there, waiting to be pulled, twisted, braided, to be delicately woven into a fine tapestry, a worn rug, a wedding gown, a funeral shroud. To be knotted into fishing nets and dream catchers and a cat’s cradle to entrap the wisps of thoughts and emotions, desires and hates, to bind them all together into stories and tales. Of adventures into the depths of the ocean, of passionate dramas of love just missed, of sudden deaths and treacherous journeys. These are the threads that gently pull on to see where they lead, to see if there is something else on the other end pulling you towards them. These threads make us, inform who we are, create great swathes of cloth as we move through our lives, fraying at the edges and catching with others. Gentle or rough, makes no difference how we handle them, they survive because we create them as we go. To destroy them, well, that would be impossible. Unravel a bit, certainly, but the threads still remain, still intertwined, still knitted together. To unravel on cloth would be to unravel them all, a pile of unconnected strands.