First fly of Summer - Pt Clare #2 - Brisbane Water Walk #8

Swallowed one today. Not that, you filthy creatures! My first fly of the summer. Bloody things were swarming thick and early. It didn't get all the way down my gullet though it had a bloody good try. I felt it tickle and yacked it up. As soon as I said, "Fly!" my fellow commuters were okay with the yacking. Yack up anything else in public and it's gross but a fly recieves the utmost sympathy.

The forecast for today is 32 hot stinking degrees (89.6 F) and it was already warm at quarter to six this morning and it's touching hot now.

So anyway, I marched off and did about an hour at Point Clare. Took my hist list this time and found one item on it and the place where another had been. "Shop, 'Theroy', 59 Brisbane Water Drive ... c.1920" is still there. It's the old white shop next to the new pharmacy near the corner of Talinga Avenue. It's empty now, with a 'for lease' sign on it. It's not in bad nick as far as I could see. Bit of peeling paint and so on but nothing major visible from the street. "Shop, Point Clare General Store, 51 Brisbane Water Drive ... c.1920" is long gone. There's a couple of seventies shops on its site there at the corner of Talinga. A Thai restaurant and the aquarium shop.

Today's streets were mostly forties houses. Very few seventies, a refreshing change. A dozen or more fifties, half a dozen eighties and maybe a dozen 1910s - 1920s cottages. There was a forties church in Takari Street, St John's (Anglican). There was no date on it and it looked late Carpenter Gothic (circa 1890 - circa 1915) but the building was not that old. The foundations were the standard 1940s and so were the oleanders behind it. The school next door (Point Clare Primary) also has a weatherboard forties building. They're not in the same style though so maybe it was never a church school. There's nothing about it on their website.

The streets I walked today weren't very high up the ridgeside. High enough though for views across to Presidents Hill in West Gosford, Gosford, the length of Longnose (present name Pt Frederick), Green Point and, from the Takari Street end of Hughes Street, the pointy hill of Saratoga. The water was blue and like glass. Not much cloud and a long con trail low across the sky from north-west to south-east.

I was feeling bloody crook this morning. Plenty of pain. The pain is all through my large intestine. Your large intestine starts just belong your lungs and goes down to your bowel and out towards your sides. So when you get pain through it it's all through your lower torso and when you get bad pain it makes you breathless. Just as well I had only a couple of short slopes on today's walk. The pain's the same if I stay home so I mostly walk through it and just stop for a bit when I can't breathe.

The school bell was just going as I finished and I came home on the bus. The train is a smoother ride but although the bus goes along Brisbane Water Drive and so beside the train, it also darts off on little excursions up onto the ridgeside. You get better views and you see more of the suburbs. Today I noticed a lift (elevator) I hadn't seen when I walked its street last month. It was at the back of a carport. The ridgeside dropped like a stone from the road's edge and I couldn't even see the roof of the house. The carport must've been on forty foot poles at the back. The lift had a slit window in its door and the lift itself looked wide and deep enough to fit one skinny person holding their breath. Apart from seeing the views and conquering the hill streets, my other ridge-related ambition is to see one of those private funiculars in use. Barring that, watching someone squeeze into that lift will do.