The Sound of the Suburbs

The street fireworks went off with a somewhat damp "bang" last Monday night: you could have predicted that our planned bash would coincide with the first decent downpour Canberra has seen since the start of the year. Nevertheless we had a strong turnout, and Adrienne had helpfully whipped up a batch of mulled wine to lift the spirits of the adults in attendance. The promised cannon didn't materialise (we don't know if that was in deference to the neighbours' dogs, an inability to obtain gunpowder ingredients without being placed on a terror watch-list, or on account of the rain or the fact that our next-door neighbour is a member of the Australian Federal Police). The absence of things that went Bang was a bit disappointing to those of us conditioned to such things, but the kids didn't mind; each firework was greeted with a very satisfying "ooh" from the attentive row of children sitting in the rain along the side of the road. A rival display seemed to be emanating from a back-yard in the next street, and the kids entered into the spirit of things by derisively booing and chanting "Ours are better than yours" each time the other group sent up a skyrocket.

A very nice lady called Cathy looks after our boys once or twice a week to enable us to get on with "other things". Last Thursday night Julius proposed to her. Given that Cathy is in her mid-40s and Jules is four, it seems unlikely we will be seeing any grandchildren. But Cathy was suitably flattered.

While Jules was proposing to Cathy, we were sitting down to dinner at Timmy's Kitchen in Manuka, a reliable Chinese restaurant which is perhaps not unrelated to Sammy's Kitchen in Civic (their specials boards are remarkably similar). I had a roast duck laksa, a.k.a. "laksa jihad", from which I was still recovering 24 hours later. Then we headed off to the cinema to see Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" before it disappears from the screens. A lot has been said about the bogus science behind the film; I prefer to see that aspect as a science fiction device for telling what was for me a quite profound and moving story. It's a nice idea, to think that there is one particular person out there who you would be drawn to even if all traces of a previous relationship you had had with that person were erased from your memory; a kind of DNA soul-mate. (Although there must also lie behind this the possibility that each relationship would end badly, resulting in a kind of infinite loop of unfulfilled possibility). And the way the Jim Carrey character fights throughout the erasing procedure to retain those memories was, I thought, very true. I was also expecting the film to be less easy to follow that it was (maybe I was blissfully missing entire aspects of it). What I thought the film was most like was an extended episode of "The Twilight Zone", and there would be few higher compliments than that.