Jacarandas and Catameringues

Lovely day for a day out, innit, and though I thought Nicole might want to get her nose down into some work on her day off rest prior to, you know, going to work, when I suggested a trip to the city she accepted.

Even though on a Friday Eloise has to be dragged moaning from bed at the very crack of dawn, that is at the time we normally wake up but without the fannying around, by the time Nicole had dropped her off for her pre-school Strings session and we'd flolloped around for a while, it was 10am before we got out of the house, activities having expanded to fill the time available.

We parked down at New Farm Park but on the whatsit, you know the thingummybob that runs around it, not a rotunda, more a road, perhaps a lane? Anyway we parked there, after having driven around it and looked at the jacaranda trees that are blossoming down there; it's rather lovely. New Farm Park in jacaranda season is always beautiful. Did I mention that the jacarandas are lovely? They have these lilac blossoms shaped like little trumpets, like I probably mention every year, and there lilacity, or lilacness if you're less scientifically minded, is truly something to behold. Though when the flowers die, fall off and wilt into sad brown crushed little trumpets on the ground they are prone to pong a bit.

We hopped on the ferry - not all the way obviously, that would be dangerous - and headed upriver to the City where we disembarked at Eagle Street. We hung out (that's something that young people do, I've heard) in a plaza-like area with uncompromisingly modernist aqua-pools, metal-rimmed, flowing uncompromisingly towards a black staircase waterfall. Lyra decided that the Atta in the pool was there to be drunk from.

A nice man pointed out that we shouldn't be letting our child drink from that water: I asked him why, he said that it was recycled and after I'd thanked him, pointing out not-at-all ironically that recycled water is generally triple-purified and probably reasonably safe, he sparked up not-at-all ironically a cigarette which he proceeded to puff away at, next to the no-smoking sign. Ironic!

Still before long it was cruising towards some sort of notional nap-time and we thought to negotiate a nap in the pram, but it was all too exciting with all the car! car! car! truck! car! and other Lyra-words we don't yet understand fully. We made it to a coffee shop and sat down at Anzac Square where a backpacker with questionable dress-sense (according to Nicole) alternately fed ibises with potato crisps (perhaps hoping to fatten them to the point of flight-unworthiness) and remonstrated with her bogan backpacker mate, then proceed to unpack her belongings on the grass.

Lyra, however, even after our flavoursome and ambitious al-fresco lunch of pizza-flavoured Blam! and potato crisps and summer fruit, became suddenly very un-personable, really very un-personable and strangely resistant to mollification. In grave need of sleep, but utterly unwilling to actually sleep.

We considered a nearby playground then thought instead bugger this for a game of soldiers. She perked up as we got back to the ferry, chippered up as we cruised down-river, broke down again at the New Farm Park cafe nappy-change facility, descended further as we forced her mercilessly into the Perambulator of Doom, and fell asleep as we perambulated the life out of her along the riverfront.

We returned to the cafe, borrowed a picnic mat, and drank coffee, laying upon our backs, watching the leaves ripple overhead in the sea breeze.