blue skies and sunshine

I stayed at my grandmother's place, in Gosford, over the last couple of days. All of my thesis work and basketball training had meant that I hadn't visited for several months, which is a pretty long time considering that I used to travel there with my family every weekend. I drove up with my dad, and every time I hop in the car with him it's as though my driving is being inspected. I suppose it'll take us a while to overcome those 50 hours of driving lessons that we endured together. We seemed to have made some progress, as my dad was actually relaxed enough to fall asleep as I drove along the expressway. At one point, however, he did spring back into consciousness, yelling out, "Slow down! There's a speed camera here!". I'm not sure if he was just having a nightmare, because he dozed off again without saying anything else.

Our family moved to Sydney from Gosford in 1991, so my thoughts of Gosford are always associated with the 1980s. As I drove through the city on the way to my grandmother's house, I expected to see women with large-framed glasses and big hair walking down the street with men in blokey ARL style short shorts. Perhaps this impression that I have is also due to the fact that Gosford did seem to take an extra 5 years to move out of the 80s. I do remember seeing the local roller-skating rink being open for business well into the mid-90s. However, the last odd testaments to the 80s seem to have finally been removed from the town. The Kentucky Fried Chicken turned into a KFC several years back, and even the dinosaur attracting people to the Australian Reptile Park now appears well and truly of this era, with clean, fancy billboards surrounding it. Driving through Gosford no longer gives me the feeling of driving through a time capsule, which is a bit of a shame.




When we did eventually get to my grandmother's house, I was once again reminded of how living in the city is a bit like living with a layer a cling wrap around you. Everything's ever so slightly isolated from reality. Food doesn't come from the earth, walking on dirt means that you've strayed from a footpath, decayed consumables are useless garbage, trees and animals are just pleasant designer points in a landscape of pavements, cars and streetlights.




It was nice being able to grow up in an environment in which getting bitten by snakes and spiders was a reality, where you could find a cicada hiding beneath crusty layers of bark from a gum tree, and where a lack of stimulus from cathode rays in plastic boxes didn't result in boredom.