Cafe #34: Botanica Flowers/Lofts Art

Date: Sunday, 28 September 2008, 3.30pm
Location: Bay Street, Near New St., Brighton
Coffee: $3.00, skinny latte, weak

I haven't written a diary entry in so long I thought perhaps I had given up. But this is such a perfect cafe (except for very ordinary coffee), I had to write. Today is exactly what a Sunday should be like. I woke up at 10.15, began reading Ulysees, but was interrupted by a phone call from S. I booked my flights to Canberra for his birthday party, chatted briefly with A1, put on a short skirt and ventured out to the beach around 1.00pm.

I haven't made it to the water yet. When I got to Platform 2 at Richmond Station the Sandringham train was pulling away and the next one wasn't due for 17 minutes. Rather than wait, I got on the Frankston train. I decided to get off at Bentleigh, the last stop in Zone 1. I figured a long walk to the beach would be just fine. And it is! Bentleigh has a nice strip of shops with many $2 shops, a few fruit shops and lots of bakeries, and a Glicks. I hadn't intended to get lunch - I'm supposed to be dieting - but I couldn't resist a bagel. I got an everything bagel with eggplant and olive dip.

I walked through Bentleigh - a wealthy-looking suburb that began to resemble Canberra as I got farther from the shops and surrounding early-20th-century Melbourne-style brick houses. North Brighton shops are very cute, though all closed on a Sunday afternoon - posher, but funky posh, I think. Will have to come back.

The cafe I am currently sitting in has a room of candles, cards, flowers and assorted gifty things, a cafe with a few white tables, and a few art gallery rooms with walls covered in canvases painted in various styles. The floors are terracotta tiles and I am sitting in front of a bay window where I can examine the big backsides of two black-haired female wooden sculptures; a modern painting of a lily; a bright-coloured painting of a girl with cleavage; a European wasp-eating plant and a big terracotta pot of fake ivy and spider plants. The sun is brightening my table and two different CDs are playing, one in each of the other parts of the shop, the paintings in front, flowers behind me.

This is the first time I've had one of my day trips since finishing my thesis. Now that I'll be working, spending weekends with J and entertaining my mother, I don't expect to get these sorts of Sundays very often. I am supposed to be working on a paper for the post-grad colloquium but I haven't begun yet. Maybe at the beach I'll finally crack Badiou open.

On that note, I shall leave this blog as the note of an afternoon and get myself to the beach before the sun goes down.