They say it’s impossible to fake a smile.
Sure, your lips might point skyward and your cheeks may ache from the effort, but anyone looking carefully will most certainly detect something missing. A glint in the eyes. An involuntary crinkle of the nose. The subtle signs of contentedness. Humor. Joy.
I used to be a singer.
Not the garden-variety “belter of show tunes in the shower” type of singer, and certainly not the “queue for hours to get your face on national telly” kind of singer either.
A semi-decent singer that was sometimes paid to attend community festivals way out west and to sing old pop songs to a dedicated audience of children and a far less dedicated audience of passers-by.
We did covers of 90s pop and rock. When no-one was paying too much attention, we’d do “Mmm-bop” by Hanson and laugh about it afterwards. We did Chirstmas Carols in various parks around Sydney suburbia in the stifling heat.
It was a rainy weekend.
I really, almost desperately, wanted it to be sunny. To be able to sit in speckled light on the grass. To while a Sunday afternoon away on a soccer pitch. To take photos of beautiful people wearing beautiful outfits and eating beautiful food in the park. Soaking up the Vitamin D.
D for daylight. And dresses. And dancing.
I remember a Summer, not so long ago, when a German wandered into our bundle of friends. He was on a one year trip, in between something-or-other, and had decided to spend three weeks in Sydney.
We dubbed him “German”. Or, rather, I dubbed him German (for there were too many Davids around as it was) and took him along to the beach, and the mountains, and showed him what a whole, raw chicken looked like for the very first time in his twenty-something-year-old life.
Toasty warm bed.
It’s my favourite place in the entire house (kitchen included), and especially on the frosty winter mornings we’ve been having of late. But if there’s one thing that will have me humming down the stairs, it’s the promise of breakfast.
A slow breakfast. The type that involves multiple mugs of milky tea and something warm to munch on. The type that you don’t need to get changed out of your flannelette pyjamas for. The type that involves crumpets.
