It was an almost warm afternoon, slightly muggy on account of a light rain that had fallen a couple of hours prior. I had obtained a ticket-of-leave from work in order to pay my nice Vietnamese barber a long-overdue visit. Beck had been playing on the car stereo, but he made way for Belle and Sebastian. Coffee was taken at Silo, in the company of a recent New Yorker, in which Alex Ross (link at right) attempts to listen to the complete works of Mozart. Silo is nice in the afternoon, it has emptied out by then and you can take in the ambience of the room itself, although the bread has invariably sold out long before. I had given up all hope of finding the new CD by The Necks, "Chemist", having scoured the record stores of Civic on the weekend to no avail (all likely establishments had had it, and had sold out: good news for The Necks, bad news for me). Something made me think of Abels, in Manuka. Well, I was on the road anyway. There I found what I was looking for, at something above the recommended retail price, I'm sure, but what can you do?
I walked past a handwritten menu board outside an Asian restaurant which contained the words "Pe...king duck", where a mystery third letter had been obliterated from the word "Peking". I wonder what it might have been: "Peaking duck", perhaps? Or "Peeking duck"? Something in me hopes that it had said "Pecking duck", but I very much doubt it.
Much later, "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" came up on iTunes, and for a few moments everything was right with the world.
