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I now no longer live in Cheltenham (A: 20 km SE of the Central Business District, B), somewhere I’ve never really formed an attachment to. I now live in Oakleigh (C). Oakleigh is the outermost limit of where I was prepared to live: 15 km southeast of the CBD. End of Zone 1 for metropolitan transport; there is a cost barrier between Zone 1 and Zone 2, but a more important psychological barrier. It is suburbia, but it is at least suburbia that gets lumped together with the inner city on some maps. Those maps are unfamiliar to my friends at Melbourne Uni, who congratulate themselves if they venture as far as St Kilda (D, 3 km south). But if your world extends beyond the self-conscious inner-city bohemia of Brunswick (E), you can tell the difference. My friend Tania has bought in Ivanhoe (F) (but will construe it as Heidelberg, G, if you don’t look at the map too closely, for some reflected bohemia), and overlooks a generous serving of parkland; when she heard my news, she exclaimed: “Oakleigh. That’s a bit… urban, isn’t it?”

Mm. Urban.

And it is a bit. It’s still tree-lined in the residential streets, and there are lawns; but the lawns are measured, and the old weatherboard houses are increasingly being subdivided into brick units. That’s a trend sweeping outwards from the inner suburbs for a while now: more people want to live closer to town, especially if the alternative is the exurbia of Cranbourne (H), Point Cook (I), or (heaven help us) West Sunshine masquerading as Caroline Springs (J). So houses that took up an entire block in 1920 are being replaced by two or three units of higher density housing. Murrumbeena (K, two suburbs up from Oakleigh) has already succumbed to this, and it’s now noticeable in Oakleigh too. The Great Australian Dream of sprawling lawns and gardens and sundecks lives on, but not inside Zone 1. In fact, it’s a diagnostic for another pair of suburbs I was looking at: Bentleigh (L, also 15 km SE, around train station, lots of units) vs. East Bentleigh (M, no access to trains, houses left brick and sprawling as they were in 1950.)

I should at this point praise the weatherboard houses as giving a historic depth to Oakleigh that is absent further out: the weatherboard is 1920s, and the undistinguished brick veneer of middle suburbia, like East Bentleigh, is associated with the postwar urban spread instead. I should, but I can’t bring myself to praise weatherboard: it’s always looked impoverished to me, and it does not compete for character with the Victorian terraces of (*sigh*) Brunswick.

The other urban thing about Oakleigh, which has made it very attractive, is the set up of its shopping centre. My house is walking distance from Chadstone (as long as you have a packed lunch); Chadstone (N) is the Biggest Shopping Mall In The Southern Hemisphere—i.e. an unnavigable sprawling suburban mess, strewn with the skeletons of shoppers looking for parking. But Oakleigh itself has a bunch of shops 5 minutes walk away from me, including four computer stores (it’s almost-but-not-quite walking distance to Monash University, O), lots of restaurants, a couple of late-night supermarkets, and more Greek food shops than I have use for. The walkscore.com index gives it a walkability rating of 74%.

Critically, Oakleigh now also has a patisserie that stays open past midnight. I haven’t availed myself of the post-midnight confections yet; but knowing that it’s there, and seeing people spilling out onto sidewalk tables past 7 pm, is reassurance enough to me. Having anything open here past 6 pm is an urban thing, and unknown in the suburbs. (Pubs excepted; but suburban pubs don’t arrogate public space to themselves the way sidewalk tables do.) Having a midnight café option is something I’ve always found a comfort—enough that I spent way too much time in Denny’s in Orange County past 2 am, commenting on thesis drafts. (Tania’s, in fact.) It’s a victory of sociability over seclusion, of activity over repose, of urbanity, dammit, over dormitory suburbs.

And as those of you in the know will have gathered, of the contemporary urban Greek scene over the suburban Australian scene: the patisserie is doing what Salonica does by night. Oakleigh is now Melbourne’s Greektown, and the original Greektown of the CBD is on its last legs. Oakleigh being Greektown is not why I ended up buying there—it was more an intersection of price ranges and luck, and if I was made of money, the sweetspot would have been Caulfield (P). I already know shoppers in Greek sound like, I wouldn’t have minded finding out what they sound like in Yiddish. But a familiar streetscape is not a bad thing and off the main shopping street, Oakleigh is no longer as monolithically Greek as it used to be; so it’s familiar without being oppressive.

Oakleigh is no South Yarra (Q), where I went to high school, South Yarra with its head held high in chic and affluence; and the Portman St Mall of Oakleigh is no Chapel St, full of Beautiful People doing their passeggiata. Which is a shame: the passegiata (or volta, as the Greeks calls it, using a different Italian word—the public stroll in your Sunday best) is a fine pastime, and would have done me some good. But Oakleigh is not the rough suburb it was in the ’80s either; the murals of the late ’80s at the train station, monumentalising ghetto blasters and Metallica T-shirts, look out of place as well as dated. Oakleigh’s liveable enough, it’s home, it will do.

Yes, I have a house. Now to work out what to say about the whole process, without twitching uncontrollably.

I renovated. That should help explain things.

OK, from the top. I entered into a protracted period of house-hunting, carefully evaluating market offerings and weighing them up, and not at all panicking that I’d be locked out of the market if I did not buy yesterday. This went on for, oh, at least a month. At the end of it—and as it turns out, at what was still the tail end of the housing bubble, I settled on a townhouse in Oakleigh. The townhouse has several things in its favour. It is not weatherboard, in a suburb full of weatherboard; in fact, it was only built in 1998. It looks quite stately on the outside. It’s in an estate with nine other townhouses, but they’re separated by garages, so no common walls. It’s on the spacious side for a townhouse: the Australian inflated real estate measure, counting by roof surface, is 14 square (= 1400 square feet, or 126 m²). It has a garden surrogate at the front (tenuously superimposed on some woodchip), and a paved yard surrogate up the back (though not spectacularly wide—not quite two metres). It has lots and lots of windows, so it is potentially suffused with light. Its entrance is off the street, and the street is at any rate off the main drag, so it’s quiet. (You can barely make out the train at night if you strain to listen. And I hear the train more often than I hear the garage band rehearsing in the front townhouse.) And of course it’s walking distance from the shops and transport: I do virtually no driving to get to things. (I do a lot of driving to and fro from my old house, but that’s another story I’m not getting into now.)

There were some catches to the place. Primary among them, it was designed by buffoons. I mean, a toilet opening up into the kitchen area? Srsly? Three toilets in a three-bedroom residence—what is this, a youth hostel? Not to mention the claustrophobia of the downstairs area: a kitchen with little storage area, and crappy cupboards, cordonned off by a superfluous doorway and a side corridor. Icky mouthwash-blue carpet, fake floorboards, drab walls, risible blinds, bare lightbulbs. Things could decidedly do with rearranging.

Rearranging is not for the faint-hearted, and I’m positively pusillanimous about that kind of thing, but once I embarked, I kept going until I ran out of money (and arguably even longer than that). On the way, I discovered that I have expensive taste. This surprised a lot of people, not least myself; and it helped me run out of money all the faster. Things also dragged on because of the logistics of coordinating dependencies between various tradespeople; and changing one’s mind about one thing (as is one’s prerogative) was enough to throw the tradies’ schedule off by a month. All up, I settled in late July; the house wasn’t really habitable between September, when the work started, and mid January, and I finally moved in early February.

The house is now rearranged and reconfigured; the kitchen dunny is walled off, downstairs is tiled, the master bedroom wall is a solid Sienna red, the doorway underneath the stairwell is a Tardis of storage space, the crap cupboards have been banished to garage as supplementary bookcases, the kitchen is shiny and austere, the kitchen bench is a conversation piece of opal-like sparkle (doesn’t photograph that well though), the lighting fixtures are conversation pieces of chrome and crystal, and the walls are yet another conversation piece of subtle warmth. (They’re more white than the apricot I wanted, ca. 1982 vintage, but still more apricot than what everyone else wanted.)

The catch now is, the house is still substantially unfurnished, which makes it hard to take seriously as a place of residence. Furniture is slowly trickling in: there’s stools, some plastic chairs, an armchair, and a bookcase. As of two days ago, there’s also a bedroom suite—which makes the place start to look like I’m not just squatting there. Still, until it has a sofa (and a computer bench), it isn’t really a home; and the sofa is going to take a very, very long time to settle on: I simply not partial to anything I’ve seen to date. Which means I’d better save my pennies for what I am likely to be partial to. Expensive taste, you see. (And the blinds have to come first.) Until there’s a sofa, any friends visiting (couple of visits so far) get shown the conversation pieces, listen through the conversation underlying the conversation pieces, and then get frogmarched to the all-night patisserie. I mean, how can one entertain without a sofa? Honestly. There is a telly (which I couldn’t really afford—it was an impulse buy, I have to admit); but I also don’t get the bit where people visit me and end up watching my telly. I’d like to think I’m more fascinating than that. Ι might be wrong, but my house is where I get to nourish my illusions.

Speaking of which, the academic books are now in the house (or the garage), which makes it a bit more mine than it was. (The non-academic books are the next batch of ferrying; the storage spaces are still work in progress.) The sight of all the Greek dialectology texts arrayed underneath the stairwell is melancholy: it’s who I used to be, not who I am being now. But at least they too have a place.

There’ll be photos of the place when I’m back from Amsterdam. The photos of Amsterdam will come first.

(The temptation of the eeePC has so far been dodged: HKD 3500 is if anything dearer than AUD 650, and they were still flogging Windows on it. Heathrow will be the real test for the eeePC temptation, given what the Brit behind me was saying to the shopholder in Hong Kong: “Things seem to be more expensive than in Britain…” “Yes, pound now really weak.”)

Given that I’m resuming blog service, I owe people an account of what I’ve been doing for the past nine months. Not that you were getting an account of the months before that through here, nor that you’re going to get much of an account here. (At least not unless I order another Bailey’s here in Patrician Class. The curdling of the last Bailey’s I ordered suggests I shouldn’t.)

Well, I have a house, and I’m in it. More on that next post.

I’m on a diet as of three weeks ago—calorie controlled intake: it’s the same diet I went on when I came back from the States, and is timely since I’ve long since regained all the weight I’d lost. That of course is the flaw of the whole diet cycle: little point shedding weight if you’re going to keep eating midnight snacks afterwards. Still, I can do without the bloat, or the casual GP question “do you have a history of hepatitis” because of how much fat has built up around my liver. The diet does make it aggravating to go out to dinner (the primary means of socialisation in my circle), and watch other people eat, while I’m limited to a latte—chai, if I’m feeling like throwing caution to the winds. Serves me right, though: no penitence without penance.

Of course, the diet is being shot to buggery while I am in the Low Countries this week, but I will make some token efforts at good behaviour. I declined the second breakfast in a row just now, for instance. Tasty though that porridge looked. Must have been the strawberry plonked in the middle of it. Just like they plonked a strawberry in the middle of the first breakfast. [Update: I did have the tuna baguette a couple of hours later instead, so I wasn’t all that disciplined…]

I’m still working with Link Affiliates, this year with more responsibility to manage myself, and I’m still working through what that translates to. I’ve have been based back in Melbourne Uni since October. I’m working the other side of the street from campus, in the Thomas Cherry building—it’s where university IT used to be based, upstairs from the former garage where I used to entertain myself by doing Robin Williams impersonations on the technical support helpdesk. There is now no helpdesk as we knew it—certainly none that would have patience for impersonations of anything. The former garage succumbed to the same imperative as my erstwhile pub, and has become a soulless student apartment block. The IT division has long moved out of Thos. Cherry, which now hosts miscellanea, including me. And the place is not what it was twelve years ago: You can’t go back.

That’s even more true of the campus itself. The students want their money’s worth, now that they’re paying real money, and aren’t there to have fun. The staff that haven’t taken redundancies and left are harried and not having much fun either. The libraries are no longer in the book business: what used to be the ERC library (and is now a student lounge with some books up the back) does not even have an after hours book chute. I’m hard put to recognise the place, and don’t cross the road that often. In a way—and I did not expect this at all—I actually miss Monash. Not so much the Monash Industrial Park, but the library and environs where I first was stationed. Maybe there were just less ghosts there, maybe that’s what it was.

I dipped into Twitter, but I doubt I’ll ever get into it: I’m not one for aphorisms, and the world does not need to know what I’m having for breakfast. I am contributing though to the Suda On Line—translating entries from a Byzantine encyclopaedia online. All the fun stuff got cherry picked eight years ago, so I’m left with verb definitions and the occasional complete misconstrual of a Classical passage. That’s fine; it keeps me busy, and I occasionally learn something. Strange to find out how tenuously our knowledge of the Classics has been transmitted: we depend on mediaeval commentaries to make sense of a lot of Homer or Aristophanes, but the mediaeval commentators often don’t know what they’re talking about any more than I do; on occasion, they know even less.

Apart from that, I still don’t have a life, but at least I have a shorter commute. 🙂

In re:
Last time I was in Honkers airport

Once again, I am in Hong Kong airport, waiting to get back on the plane to *shudder* Heathrow. Wonder if I’ll end up in Manchester Or Something airport again.

It being 6:30 am local time, the duty free shops are closed; so yet again I avoid the eeePC Temptation of Nick:

• How adorable the eeePC is!
• But I don’t need one, I already have a laptop.
• But you could do, like, impromptu blogposts and stuff, and type on your palm without it being a Palm.
• I don’t want a Windows machine anywhere near me, and I doubt my wireless modem will work on Linux.

• Pish tush, you’ll be on campus anyway. And it’ll be so much smaller and more convenient than your laptop!
• 13″ down to 10″ is a non-starter, what’s the point. 8″ may be too small to type on.
• Oh, it won’t be. Anyway, you can well afford it.
• AUD 650 dutyfree for a machine I don’t actually need, when there are Expensive Roman Blinds to put up chez Nick? I doubt that very much.

I have four more airports of temptation to clear before this cup is removed from me. After that, I’m probably free to save my dosh unless those Apple Netbook rumours materialise.

What’s that? The plane’s not leaving till 8 am? Hm, may just casually stroll past that duty free electronics shop after all…

This post is courtesy of my boss, who has seen fit to pay for me to travel to Amsterdam Premium Economy, that I may turn up to the UKOLN Repository Workshop refreshed and productive.

I’m just about at Hong Kong, and I type this with my laptop plugged into the patricians-only powerport (which took me ten minutes to work out). My posterior is in garb plebeian enough to have startled my workmates—they are sore unaccustomed to seeing me in denim and a T-shirt, especially as my colleague Mark had gone the opposite direction and becravatted himself, our managers visiting. My Levis nonetheless are enthroned in a seat patrician enough to wiggle in. My arms rest against armrests patrician enough to fit the next guy’s elbows as well.

My feet are taking a rest from the footrest patrician enough to let me recline in style, and now perch on my computer bag plebeian enough to have had its handle break off for the fourth time. (The nail’s clean out of the fabric this time, I don’t see how I’m going to reattach it.) The computer bag is awkwardly propped against the seat leg in front of me, as Premium Economy seats are too patrician to welcome carryon luggage stowed underneath them.

I am digesting a patrician supper of lamb and a patrician breakfast of cereal. Well, the lamb still had the slight whiff of microwave, and cereal is still cereal even with a strawberry in it; but the accompaniment of tablecloths (OK, matcloths) and silverware is enough to elevate any microwaved confection to Versailles level of sophistication. Or at least Inner Suburbs.

My ears have delighted to complimentary headphones being noise-cancelling (ha!), with a very patrician triangular plug; lamentably they were more soundproof than I was Brahms-proof, so I’m now back to my iPod (with my plebeian noise-cancelling headphones and their compromised structural integrity), wondering whether purchasing that Telemann trumpet concerto was really a good use of my money.

In all, not at all a bad way to fly. My snap reaction, which startled me, was not as much gratitude that for once I could stretch out my legs, but impatience at all the times I couldn’t. Surely these are the minimum requirements for decent travel, surely they are my due. A sense of entitlement: who knew I had it in me.

Not that much of a surprise, really, given what my new house looks like. On which, next post or so. I’ve turned out quite the snob, really. Well, this isn’t my due, and this isn’t my entitlement, and I’ll take it while it’s on offer. And stretch some more.

Descent commenced; stowing laptop. More anon.