james o'brien

Even though I live only fifteen minutes walk away from work, I usually catch the bus when it’s raining, as it virtually guarantees me cover to cover shelter. As I got in the bus this morning, and as I looked around, you could see the grumpiness about the weather on everyone’s faces. “I thought we’d gotten over winter” was, I’m sure, the thought going through everyone’s minds.

Everyone looked so completely grumpy, which made me observe to a colleague “We really don’t cope with rain very well in Sydney” when I got to work. “No we’d like it to be 24 degrees and sunny every day”, she responded. I smiled in agreement.

With the clearing of the rain, the Sydney transport zeitgeist had improved somewhat later in the day, when I caught the bus to the Lewisham Hotel for our regular Wednesday night drinks.

And then when I caught the bus back to Railway Square, I wasn’t really able to judge things, because I was the only person on the bus. I presume everyone in Sydney had retreated indoors for the evening, as the streets were almost empty at about ten o’clock tonight.

It wasn’t just a day, though, of sitting on buses. I caught up with my friend Yvette for lunch, and I met up with the usual crew at the pub tonight. We celebrated Dave’s 36th birthday with a few beers, as we chatted about life, the universe and everything.

In between time, work was as busy as ever. Although I never talk about work on this blog, I will mention just one thing: The Great Spelling Bee Drama.

For the last few years we have broadcast part of The NSW Premier’s Spelling Bee. As anyone who has ever seen the film Spellbound will know, spelling bees can be extremely compelling. And normally, we broadcast the last half hour, as it gets down to the final half dozen who fight it out for Spelling Supremo.

But today I got an alarming phone call an hour before our scheduled broadcast. “We’ve got a winner”, I was told, making me suddenly go into panic mode about what we will do with half an hour of radio to fill, and a theatre full of people.

A very clever young man from Bundanoon had swept the floor, emerging as the clear winner, in an unassailable position. There was absolutely no way anyone else could win, based on points. “It’s like ABBA at Eurovision in 1974”, I thought to myself.

An “emergency meeting” was held with the competition organiser. In the end, we went ahead with the broadcast as the young kids competed for the as-yet-undecided second and third places.

“One of life’s many challenges I guess…” I giggled to myself at one point this afternoon.