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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Meditation, music and museums...


clinamen, an acoustic installation by Celeste Boursier-Mougenot

School holidays are rapidly drawing to a close and usually, by this stage, I've secretly started to look forward to an orderly return to the school/work schedule. These holidays, however, have been different. I've been meditating every morning and there has been no holiday program for the kids just a mixture of work and days off for me and outings and days spent with friends for the kids. Time has had an elastic quality. Over the past two weeks we've managed to squeeze in visits to Luna Park, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Hollywood Costume exhibition at ACMI and I've watched in awe as colleagues raced to the finish line with the truly remarkable exhibition, The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush.

Another definite highlight was the wonderful day I spent in the city with Henry. I took him to Thomas', a very special fine music store in Melbourne, so he could spend a gift voucher his grandmother had given him. Henry's passion is classical music (especially early twentieth century French!) so of course the staff took a shine to him right away and we left with five CDs including one they gave him for free. He was in seventh heaven. To complete the top of Bourke Street tour I wanted to take him to Pellegrini's but, alas, it was too crowded so I got to try somewhere new too when we ended up at Self Preservation where we shared a delicious slice of Lemon Pound Cake with our coffee and blood orange juice. Of course we couldn't walk past The Paperback Bookshop or The Hill Of Content without some serious browsing and the acquisition of at least one book, Oliver Jeffers and Drew Daywalt's new children's title, The Day The Crayons Quit.

We then walked back to the car through the dappled sunshine of the Fitzroy Gardens, past Ola Cohn's intricately carved Fairy Tree and the model Tudor Village given to the City of Melbourne in appreciation of the food parcels sent to Britain during World War II. With time still on our hands we motored down to the National Gallery of Victoria where we sat before Celine Boursier-Mougenot's beautiful acoustic installation which chimed so nicely (both literally and figuratively) with my new meditation regime.

Time seemed so inconsequential that day. I could have sat there forever.