I don’t think the old Whacker will be heading into town again anytime soon.It’s just too bloody confusing, congested and now, increasingly, confronting.
We took the train down because the missus refuses to drive in Melbourne. And she also refuses to get in a car I am driving in Melbourne. She’s lucky I like her.
So there we were, wheeling a suitcase down Spencer Street and I kept having to stop, because all these people apparently wanted to speak to me.
Except they weren’t.
They were just babbling to themselves, and in more languages than this old bloke could fathom.
I thought the whole world had gone mad.
Until I realised they were on the phone. Well, not actually on a phone as you and I would understand it. When I looked a little closer, they had these weird stalks sticking out of their ears and they were all talking as loudly as they could.
In my day when we had the odd person wandering down the street babbling away, they were truly that – odd.
We used to call them shell-shockers. Which, in hindsight, some of them probably were when you consider that as a very early post war baby, the now old Whacker would have seen plenty of veterans around the place.
But once I managed to curb my natural friendliness and resisted the urge to say howdy to every other person in the street, I also realised we had bigger problems.
Because weaving in and out of the babbling masses was a small fleet of loonies on electric scooters, electric bikes and even the humble old pushbike.
And most of them were on bloody phones, too.
Even worse, they were not just scooting along, they were flying.
It got to the point that we weren’t game to step around a corner without taking a peek first to see what sort of mechanised missile was coming our way.
Then when they get to wherever they are going, they simply step off the scooters and drop them, wandering off and still babbling on their bloody phones.
We walked past hundreds, even thousands, of people and there wasn’t a friendly face or smile among them, they simply ignore you, too busy babbling or belting along the footpaths in their urgency to be somewhere else.
What a crazy place.
As sad as that all was – after all, I can still elicit a ‘g’day’ or ‘how’s it goin?’ from just about anyone I see on the footpath in a country town (not just my town, where admittedly I am a bit of a legend and everyone wants to say hi to the Whacker) – it got worse.
Because not only is Melbourne’s golden mile littered with dumped life-threatening scooters, and crowded with people who can stand right next to you and pretend you are not even there, its streets are also awash with the homeless.
Who the babblers and scooterists are also happy to go by and largely ignore.
And there are so many of them. Everywhere you turn. Hidden under mounds of blankets, sound asleep in doorways and on benches, in your face asking for money, or sitting in silent desolation with a cap or can in front of them appealing for a handout.
All of them armed with rolled up blankets, a small pile of possessions or the ubiquitous shopping trolley.
The whole city was, for us, grey, sad, crowded, chaotic, and now nowhere near the top of our wish list of places to go.
Which doesn’t overly fuss yours truly, I hate going on any of these trips because they invariably involve shops where decisions which could be made in seconds, at worst minutes, can drag on for the whole day.
Don’t even start me on the prices at a restaurant or some of those fancier hangouts where they have glass-encased menus on the street so you don’t have a heart attack in their dining room when you get the bill.
One place we looked at wanted almost $50 for half a roast chook. It wasn’t called that, it had some fancy French name and a pile of palaver about all the little extras which came with it. But when you stripped away the bulls***, it was just a plain chook, of the feathered variety.
No folks, I reckon that might be the last trip down there. All we wanted to do all weekend on our little getaway was to get away and go home.
