Empty Friday

It is Friday night.

I had originally made tentative plans to accompany a friend to a sex/bondage bar in St Kilda (for everything other than sex and bondage, it was a business meeting), but his partner in this particular item of business could make it instead.  So I finished work, and after a discussion in the car on the way to the train station with two young boys about Doctor Who and parallel universes and where you may go when you die, I came home to enjoy my currently empty house.

In my kitchen I stacked the coffee cups and the bowls holding chocolate crumbs and uneaten black jelly beans from last night's gathering of friends, and then made a large pot of spicy red lentil soup while enjoying a glass of wine.

In my bedroom, with a second glass, I ate the soup and perused the television guide.  The television is hardly ever turned on, but, with an empty house and an empty Friday, a movie and hot chocolate enjoyed under a blanket sounds perfect.  And I have an overdue fine at the video store, so it has to be a movie on the television.

My television choices include Clueless, which I have miraculously gone twenty three years of my life without ever seeing, and Boomerang which doesn't start until very late at night.  My plan is to watch both, while waiting for randomly sent emails from Ben to arrive in my inbox as he alternates his time in Changi airport between wandering and lining up for the free internet terminals.

Which actually brings me to Ben, and the reason I too am writing here.  

It's a strange concept to be writing a travel blog, without actually travelling anywhere, but that is my side of this story.  While Ben is jumping from hostel to hostel, and train to train, in strange and unexplored lands, I will be jumping from tram to tram, and train to train, in a not so strange, but still mostly unexplored city.  For that is the thing about Melbourne.  It's very big, but it's also very fluid.  It changes so often that it's impossible to really keep up.  The city itself is like its weather.  Like the blue, mild sky that turns to a flat, grey sheet between putting your washing in the machine and taking it out to dry.

So, this will be a travel blog, of my travels through my normal everyday life, until Ben retuns in four months' time when I will be travelling for the third time this year to Adelaide to greet him at the airport.