Urban camping

 

Here is a shot of a spot on the Upfield Line that has intrigued me for a couple of years. Actually, it could be longer. Every time I am passing between Flemington Bridge and Macaulay stations I have a flash of this place. Next to the graffitied wall, beneath a peppercorn tree, in a vacant block of land there is a tent. It is hard to see in this photo, but you can just make out a flash of red. Every time I pass it, I wonder who sleeps there. Are they homeless? How do they eat? How do they sleep? Do the police notice them and try to move them on? Has anyone else noticed it before? Every time I pass, something is different. One day I saw a campfire and a lady and a man sitting next to it laughing. I saw mounds of earth  piled up there one day and was stricken with sadness that they had lost their home. They hadn't. I'll keep watching and wondering...

I earned these grey hairs!!

This is a dodgy, on-the-go shot after I left the hairdressers today and you can't really see my grey hair, but believe me, they are becoming more obvious. A couple of weeks ago I had a birthday. I made a bit of a fuss beforehand, reminding the kids of the impending date quite frequently, just until I had annoyed them enough! When we woke up they sang to me and remembered, which was great. It wasn't until I saw my Dad and he said "How does it feel to be 48!!!" It suddenly occurred to me that I was actually turning a year older. Weird huh? You know, 47 was close enough to 45 to feel like I was still in my mid 40s, but 48 is getting very close to 50! I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Today, my wonderful friend  offered to have my kids for a couple of hours, to give me a break and I decided to visit my old haunt, Brunswick St. On a whim I decided to get a real haircut, in a proper salon, you know, where they wash and blow dry your hair, give you a cup of coffee and charge a fortune? I was assigned a gorgeous young Frenchman from Lyon. I was telling him how I loved Paris, had been there a few times and probably the last time was 1995, which to me feels like a couple of years ago. He points out it was 20 years! He was 2 in 1995!! So we chatted about this and that and he was telling me which colour would suit my cut and I explained to him that I had stopped getting any colour in my hair, mostly for financial reasons but then I had a sudden epiphany! I don't want to cover up these greys!! I have earned every single one of them! And every wrinkle and blotch on my face has been painstakingly etched by time and stress and tears, by sunshine and laughter! So there...I embrace my grey hairs and wrinkles and my 48 years.