Sunday. I had been met at the airport by my contact. Effectively he was a total stranger, albeit one who I have spent a hundred hours talking to on Messenger for work. He turned out to be even nicer than I hoped, giving me a tour of Melbourne and taking me for lunch on Fitzroy Rd with his wife and dog.
Right from the moment we left the airport I was regretting the fact that I only had one full day in Melbourne. The only solution was to pack as much in as possible.
Even if I had flown in straight from New York or Chicago I would still have been impressed by the atmosphere and sights of Melbourne straight off the bat. Coming from Christchurch in a bad mood it was like a vision of paradise.
The skyline and buildings are very modern but driving around St Kilda the scale was much smaller and more human than an American city. People spilled everywhere, looking relaxed and happy.
Not being ‘on duty’ for the SA-Aus ODI I had that hot bath, opened a bottle of Lindauer and watched the first 20 overs in a drunken, fluffy bath-robed haze from the comfy chair, before passing out. See passage below re: hard work.
Monday. Here we go. Hotel gym at eight, lavish hotel breakfast at nine, shopping at nine fifteen.
Thank god I didn’t buy anything in Christchurch. There is no criteria under which I can be judged an enthusiastic or able shopper but my eyes were opened slightly last year under some expert tutelage.
Besides you could pluck someone from an undiscovered rainforest tribe and drop them in Melbourne at ten a.m. with only a bone through their nose and the tribal credit card. By five o’clock they would be fretting about the wash on the last pair of jeans they bought and whether they should go back and look at the watch they found again. It's entirely possible that they could have found somewhere selling nose bones
a la mode. There is nowhere in the world where I have seen so many fantastic shops in one place.
I did the malls north of Swanston St with a fair amount of success before meeting
Matt and Sal for seafood on the SouthBank. They were extremely well and very happy to put up with me dragging them down Chapel St despite being on their own quest to buy a banjo.
Chapel St is a long, straight drag crammed with shops. Some of them, probably more than I realised, were chain stores but since these were stores that don’t exist in the UK it didn’t matter. Fundamentally the clothes were much more stylish, cheaper and generally better than anything I have seen in the UK for a while.
The haul eventually amounted to: three pairs of shoes, two pairs of sandals, one pair of jeans, one pair of shorts, five T/polo/rugby/shirts and a pair of sunglasses. Everything that I bought is at least two steps up the style ladder from my current wardrobe.
If a small red warning light didn’t start blinking in Mastercard HQ then it ought to have done.
I rode a couple of trams and savoured the Melbourne city culture – a lot of happy and conspicuously well-dressed people bathed in sunshine.
In the evening I went back to St Kilda with my contact and his wife. We ate Mexican on Acland Rd and had a great time. On the way home I wandered through the Crown Casino, listened to the hordes of Chinese gamblers and stuck my head into the poker room, before heading back to The Westin tired and extremely happy.
Wednesday. Spent Tuesday flying back to Christchurch and incurring a $60 excess baggage charge on the way. Henceforth I shall be known as Imelda. Back in the Hotel Offthesquare in sleepy, backwoods Christchurch with another hateful cricket match in prospect.
There isn’t really much to say about the game. The Windies won the toss and bowled first. The decision was a poor one because it was a flat wicket and a hot day. It was done purely so injured all-rounder Dwayne Bravo could play as supersub and perhaps add some weight to their batting. Most times captains make the best decision on the evidence and experience available to them. Subsequent events (often luck but sometimes factors which were foreseen but not given the right weighting) may show their decision up as poor but that isn’t something which they could control. In this case the decision was clearly wrong.
Vexatiously the Windies bowled quite well upfront and the market behaved a little counter-intuitively. I hitched a couple of small carts to the Caribbean wagon because of the prices. The Kiwis then hit forty runs from nine scoring shots (the minxes) and the game went out of the reach of my brave lads. Bastardos.
Unlike last Saturday I sat on my hands and took my medicine. Instead of getting depressed about prospect of showing a loss on the trip I let my mind wander back to my two amazing days in Melbourne and the memories were more than enough to make me very happy.
