I like fairly challenging books: I believe that the reader should occasionally be made to work for it. I love Pynchon and I enjoy Woolf. I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and I’ve enjoyed pretty much every production I’ve seen, even when I didn’t know the play, both traditional and modern interpretations.

We left this play at intermission, along with a pretty significant proportion of the audience. I have never done that before. I won’t even walk out of a bad movie.

This was plain awful. Absolutely, completely unwatchable. Why? It’s about 60% performed in Hindi, with no sub- or sur-titles. If you don’t speak fluent Hindi you won’t be able to understand what the characters are saying most of the time. I know that’s obvious when I say that it’s performed in Hindi, but the Sydney Theatre really didn’t make this obvious enough. I was also handicapped here as I didn’t know the play. I’ve seen parts of it before, and remember some scenes but I don’t know the overall plot and characters. I certainly couldn’t imagine what was happening when I couldn’t understand the dialogue.

The opening scene to establish the plot was entirely in Hindi, and from then on I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Mana tried to help out by whispering brief explanations as she has previously studied and performed this play. But she couldn’t keep this up, and by this stage it was pretty much too late: I already had no idea who any of the characters were.

What do I know of Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, there’s one of my favourite Shakespearian lines:

If we spirits have offended, Think but this and all is mended: You have but slumbered here While these visions have appeared. – Puck

That’s from memory, so excuse any mistakes. I also remember the sarcasm, wit and lyricism of Puck. And I missed all that in this performance. Surprisingly enough, the play would have been better if it was entirely performed in Hindi: when they were speaking English I could follow what was happening and start to get involved. Then they would switch back to Hindi, kicking me out of any involvement, and leaving me bored and disconnected in my seat. But, then I would try to get involved again in the dance and acting, only to be booted again when they switched back to English.

Shakespeare is entertainment, especially his comedies. These were great works meant to illuminate the human condition, while also highly engaging and entertaining. Anyone should be able to watch a production and enjoy it. The only people who could enjoy this production were those who spoke fluent Hindi, and those who already knew the play intimately. And while I fully support the production of entertainment for specific languages, this should not be promoted to a larger audience as something for everyone. Because is it’s not: this is an exclusive production only meant to be enjoyed by those who have already studied the play.

And I don’t like this artificial, constructed exclusivity in the arts.

Apoise is 67m long, which just pushes it out of the top 50 yachts in the world; the shortest yacht on that list is 72m. It’s impossible to tell who owns Apoise. The owners are listed as some Cayman Island company called Apoise Holding, Pty Ltd. Which tells you nothing.

It’s a rainy day, there’s three of us huddling under the balcony of the Town Hall hotel. The rain drizzles down slowly; the ashphalt and brick building glisten damply. We’re chatting about garbage collection in Scheme as the bus pulls up and everyone piles on. The three of us take seats at the back and A, R and I keep talking.

A little further down the road (maybe the West End hotel stop, but I wasn’t really paying attention) a guy gets on and takes the seat in front of me. The bus continues; droning out of Balmain, onto the Anzac bridge. The sun appears out of the clouds briefly – playing across the bridge pylons and the last vestiges of the working harbour beneath. Our discussion is getting animated – what can I say? Scheme and garbage collection matter to us.

And then suddenly, the guy sitting in front of us interrupts. ‘Hey!’ You’ll have to imagine the nasal, pinched drone for yourself – ‘Does any of youse guys has a mobile phone you could lends me?’ ‘Sorry mate; no.’ We respond.

And that was enough. ‘Where’s the fucking Australian spirit? Ya bunch of fucking wankers. You’re all just a bunch of fucking c*&ts. Fuck youse.’

We tried to go back to our conversation, but he wasn’t having that.

‘Nah! I don’t want to fucking hear it. Shut the fuck up, ya poofs.’

Then his phone rang. Yes, he had his own phone. The guy on the other end was told (loudly) about how this poor traveller was surrounded by a bunch of un-Australian c*&ts.

The bus continued along the Western Distributor, over Darling Harbour and into the city. At the next stop, on Sussex St, A, R and I all decide to get off.

We’re followed off the bus by more descriptions of our patriotism, anatomy and sexuality. R blames my long hair for the last. Having a look back at the bus we can see him screaming at us and pounding the window. Wow.

The Morning Bus Trip to Work

I run into DC waiting for the bus. She’s reading a book: ‘Scaling Software Agility.’ It’s about RUP and agile for big and growing teams. We start talking about it, and continue talking after we’re on the bus.

As our bus crosses the Anzac bridge, heading west, there’s a lull in our conversation. And into the pause, the old lady in the seat in front of us turns around. ‘Would you look at that? Evidence for global warming if ever I saw it.’ She gestures towards what appears to be a cloud bank over North Sydney. ‘All that smog and all those new cars waiting to add more.’

Below the Anzac bridge is the White Bay car wharves – just about every new car in Australia has passed through there. They sit, gleaming, sparkling cleanly. Waiting to be shipped off around the country to their excitedly waiting owners.

At first DC and I are a little taken aback – as you usually are when a random person on the bus starts talking to you.

‘Well, actually, I think that’s fog; not smog.’ From DC, after a pause.

‘Yeah, we’ve had quite a bit of rain recently, that would be fog, I think.’ Me, this time.

‘Oh? Are you a climatologist?’ Now that surprised me. Such a sweet old lady, so confrontational! I had tried to be polite. There must have been some shock or surprise in my face though, because she quickly continued.

‘I’m sorry for interrupting, but I’ve just been waiting for a chance. Listening in on your conversation has just made my year in Sydney! It’s sounded like such an intelligent conversation, especially compared to the usual inanity I overhear on public transport. You know, the usual he said then I said and she said. Just so inane! Anyway, I thought you may have been scientists. Are you climatologists?’

‘Close,’ DC replies, ‘we’re both engineers.’

And then, alluding to her experience in public health policy, she regalled us with her very high opinion of engineers. All the way through the narrow street up the side of the Balmain peninsula and to our stop, opposite the Town Hall hotel.

The answer is yes, yes they do.

This is another photo from the large ex-Mark Foy building across the road. This ceramic pot fell from a balcony on the fifth floor, through some trees while people were on their way to work.

I was too slow with the camera to get a shot of the two terrified guys who were walking past when the pot landed. The street was full of fragments of pot for a couple of days.

It’s a very large building, with a lot of apartments in it. Lots of apartments means lots of ’stuff’ going on. A recent trick has been triggering the fire alarm. It’s loud, the whole building needs to be evacuated and it requires two fire engines each time.

Here are just some random photos from spending time wandering around Miller’s Point, Walsh Bay and looking off the balcony of our room.

Funny story: the weekend was kind of a present from me, so I was in charge of the organisation. I think you can see where this is going. We were going to make a whole weekend of it, so we also bought tickets to the play Don’s Party at the Sydney Opera House. Come the Friday afternoon as we were about to leave for the hotel and then the play, I went to check the booking for the hotel: and found the booking was for a Wednesday and a Thursday about two weeks later. Oh.

I called the Observatory’s reservations centre, and they managed to change the booking to that Friday and Saturday night, in the same kind of room. Fortunately for me. Weekend saved.

We got to Milson’s Point at about 9pm, but still managed to get a pretty good spot right on the water with views of the bridge, the Opera House and the city.

Getting back onto the train to get home was… interesting. Maybe a rave at Bondi, next time?

I wonder if I’ll be arrested as a subversive for posting this?

In spite of this, I did keep reading. And Alexander does expand on the idea some more.

The point is not to live in the exact same area as where you work, but to work in an area you could imagine living and, as important, live in an area you could imagine working. When you walk down the street you need to see all the parts of life happening: you need to dodge prams, see people eating and drinking, watch people in their offices as they watch people lounging around in a park. You need to see kids streaming home from school in the afternoon, you need to see the retired out doing their shopping during the day.

And you need all this both where you live, and where you work. You need to feel when you’re spending those 40 hours a week away from your home that you are still in a place that is someone’s home. Seeing those people and all the disparate things they do forms a connection between you and them. If the place you work and the place you live both have this, then you can easily transplant the connection from home to work and vice versa.

There is a name for all this: community. Community requires all parts of life: babies through to the elderly; workers, shops, services. And if you’re hiding away at work for 40 hours a week you tend to forget that not only this is all going on, but also that all these different kinds of people share your world with you.

This all comes down to graining. Think of it in terms of zoning. The zones of use form grains within an area. In older areas of a city, this graining will typically very fine. That is, you can walk a short distance down a single street and pass houses, offices, cafes, libraries, shops. In newer areas, the graining becomes larger, until you reach the 60’s ideal of a city composed of satellite towns: rings of suburbs with a shopping/office district at the centre.

And in there, a community dies. Communities need people to spend time with them to grow, if a significant chunk of a community’s demographic disappears for a big chunk of the day then it can’t really survive. Look for the fine graining, try to live and work there if you can, but always enjoy the graining.