The more astute amongst my readership — yes, that’s all three of you — might have noticed that I haven’t updated much recently. There are reasons for this — some administrative, as the site transferred to a (hopefully more reliable) server, so I didn’t want to create too much content that could be lost mid-move — and some of a personal nature.
To be specific, I’ve been on holidays. Yes, I know, as a qualified* layabout… ahem.. Freelance Journalist, I’m not meant to ever be at work, or on holidays, but simply in some murky purgatory inbetween the two all of the time. But even I can take a few days off, or in this case, five.
First for the weekend, up to Iluka to visit Di’s grandmother (and thus logically, Zoe, James and Luc’s Great-Grandmother — so, naturally, she’s known as “Nanna”), and then over to Armidale, city of my birth. There’ll be a post up about that very shortly, but in order to get from Iluka to Armidale, we had to drive via Grafton and Glen Innes. Now, Glen Innes has a certain place in my heart as my Grandfather — well, one of them, as for complicated multi-marriage reasons, I have more than the normal compliment of Grandparents — was the Station Master at the now largely-defunct Glen Innes railway station. So while the kids played in one of Glen Innes’ truly beautiful parks, I went on a little drive down memory lane, towards a railway station and more specifically the stationmaster’s house, that I hadn’t in fact seen for more than twenty years.
(Amendment: My brother, who for reasons of Junketing, is in San Fransisco, tells me that it was exactly twenty-one years and two weeks ago that I was last in Glen Innes. I don’t feel inclined to disagree with him.)
Glen Innes isn’t that large a place, but I still grabbed a map from the tourist information people, and set out driving. I knew where I was going, but I was totally unprepared for the shock of effectively driving back twenty years in time. The photos don’t show it well — even for those of us who remember it — but I’d swear that just about nothing has changed.
Mental note: It’s not a good idea to suddenly feel like a ten year old when you’re driving…
*OK, I got a qualification through a dodgy Internet University as Bachelor of Layabout. Nothing wrong with the ol’ B.L…