EC-Rider Travels

This morning was a bit of an adventure as I headed off across town to see my lovely ol’ school mate – Lucy Farmer. Walk, train, tram, walk – but I got there! Until this summer Lucy and I had not seen each other since the day we left NFL, after o’levels, in 1977! Almost exactly forty five years later, she came to lunch with me at Smith Terrace in July and it was as if I had not seen her for 45 minutes, not years! Lucy has just moved to a lovely central suburb of Melbourne, called Fitzroy – voted by Time Out magazine as the coolest neighbourhood in Australia and 27th in the world! It is lovely, full of cafes and restaurants and quirky boutique shops. She lives in the quirkiest place of all, through a hole in the wall and a beautiful historic garden (apparently once a dairy), and in the most fun and bonkers apartment. It has a communal pool just outside her door, alongside a party room which she and her 14 co-residents can use. It is brilliant and she is thrilled with it.

We went for a walk in the Yarra Bend Park, about fifteen minutes drive away. Wild bushland, with the Yarra running though, it felt as rural as could be and was home to the most amazing colony of flying foxes (fruit bats). These enormous bats are heavily protected and completely amazing. As it was so hot, they were much lower in the trees than usual and desperately fanning themselves with their huge wings to keep cool, some of them with their young clinging to their sides. It was INCREDIBLE! I really loved it.

We returned to open the champagne and have a delicious dinner, joined by my lovely ol’ friend Diana Vernon. By coincidence, Lucy’s greatest friend. It was so good to see her again. For the last nine years she has been the Principal of one of Melbourne’s top girls school’s, MLC, Methodist Ladies’ College. She has clearly made quite an impact here and done wonderful things for the school, but is now returning to London, which is lovely for us, but sad for Lucy. Lucy is the Communications Director of the most incredible sounding charity called FoodShare who rescue, cook and grow nutritious food to distribute to people struggling to put food on the table. Lucy is responsible for their communications, volunteer programs and community fundraising. Truly admirable.

We then headed for the gardens at the end of Lucy’s street to see the first of the two city firework displays. Unfortunately, there were rather a lot of trees, so we could sadly only see the very tops of the fireworks but we heard them well. We laughed a lot! Later in the evening, Tim and I went on to different gardens, Anderson Park, where we had a better view of the midnight display, but couldn’t hear them – so we sort of got it all!

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!