Talking To Myself

“Do you always talk to yourself?”, a colleague asked me the other day. She’s in a nearby office, started work with us only recently, and told me she’d noticed every time she walks past my office, I’m talking to myself. “Really?”, I said, emphasising that it didn’t worry me, I just hadn’t realised I did […]

Notes from the Underground

“I have tickets for Notes From The Undergound and my sister is sick and can’t make it. Would you like to join me?” read the mid-afternoon text from a friend. Having no plans for Saturday night, I immediately said yes. And then I looked it up. Ah yes, I’d read the novella by Dostoyevsky maybe […]

Sixth Sense, Troubled Waters and John Fries

The thing about art gallery opening nights in Sydney is that they often”clump together”. They’re often on a Thursday night or a Saturday afternoon, and they’re often at exactly the same time. 6-8pm on Thursday. 2-4pm on Saturday. This is both good and bad. On the bad side, it means you sometimes have to rush […]

Woolloomooloo Lunch

Over lunch (at The Tilbury) my good friend and I chatted about swimming. She’s quite a serious ocean swimmer whereas I’m more of a casual paddler. As a child, I was actually a little scared of the water, and was never a good swimmer at all. Getting my 50m medal was a major achievement, and […]

Mekong Restaurant

You know how it is. Sometime you go out for dinner, and you remember every detail of the food. The waiter goes into intricate detail about what’s on offer, where it came from, how it’s been prepared, and you savour every moment. Truly memorable. Other times, you go out for dinner in a largeish group […]

Surry Hills Bakery

You might recall a few months ago, I wrote about the widespread sadness in my part of Surry Hills / Redfern about the closure of our long-term bakery local, Baker’s Bun. Though I should stress, it wasn’t so much the loss of a local business, it was about the loss of a long-term local family in […]

Discarded

Though it’s been a few years since one of my “discarded” posts, I’ve been keeping an eye out for new and interesting stuff left in the back laneway of my apartment in Surry Hills. Sadly, there hasn’t been anything as “interesting” as some of the items you’ll see below if you follow the link “discarded”. […]

James O'Brien