A large young man with a speech impediment drives me from Brisbane airport to my downtown hotel. He talks of going to teach English in China but his heart is in the right place. I’m up on the tenth floor, overlooking the rail station. Short-order trains (eight or so single-deck carriages) shuttle back and forth in unhurried (“un-harried”) fashion. Bent on dinner, I head out into the city centre, King George Square, five minutes’ away. By now, the fruit bats have appeared, ferried in aloft on the crosswinds of the night. (The bats come out at six and the hoboes at eight.) Walk past the City Hall, Law Courts, Conrad Treasury Casino, Queen Adelaide Building. Admire the beautiful sandstone edifices. I pass two young lovers, embracing by a purling fountain, enveloped within the shadows beneath the mantle of the cool winter’s air. Tramp up the mall, contemplate going to dine in an aluminium and glass, colourless enclosure with an outlook onto the casino but the fare looks too hard-pressed and glitterless, and the invisible cost speaks for itself. Plus I doubt it’s meant to fully satisfy. I’ve got a map of the city in my back pocket but never refer to it, preferring to find my own way around. Such is life. Wander into a bookstore and out again. In the end I dive into an Irish theme pub and order a pot of beer. I sit on a stool at a solid wooden counter fronting the street, and a corner. Watch the passing traffic and passage of people. It is incredible to think that each person I see, going about their business, I will never see again. As such, the young will never age – and likewise for the old. I get given a huge plate of nachos. Nearby sits a balding, middle-aged, wire-rimmed bespectacled gent with a double chin and paunch, dining on ketchup-spattered chips from a bowl big enough to shove over a bullmastiff's head. A classic Otto. He tries to pick me up: “You here on holiday with yourself?” Whilst I easily dismiss him, I am intrigued by the non-conventional use of the word “with”. Can it be any other way? Bizarre, really. But there’s more to come. This is (sub-tropical) Brisbane, after all. A few tables behind me there’s a crackling fire in the fireplace. However, outside, certain folks insist on strolling about in short sleeves and short pants (particularly men hosting paunches). Back inside, butchers’ cleavers adorn the bright space above the mantelpiece and a pseudo-ancient watering-can perches on a ledge up on high. People cross at the lights to my right, walking towards my side of the street. Among them are two girls holding hands. I turn back to my nachos and the next thing one of the girls launches herself at full stretch up against my window, crushing her lips against the glass, pressing instantly, before falling back and disappearing with a laugh. In a farther reach of the pub, a young solidly built musician with a shock of black hair sets up his equipment. He has a booming, harsh but conversely fluid voice. By now Otto has left to bother the bartender, and a tramp with coal-black eyes, beard and hair seats himself on the newly vacated stool – yet doesn’t order anything. The musician is belting out ballads when I leave. By the casino, past the entrance where pretty young things in high heels and short dresses emerge with their polished, coconut-haired escorts, a round-girthed Aborigine sits up against the wall. The aged troubadour wears a Bob Dylan cowboy hat and sings Hey Jude, by the Beatles, while thrashing a weather-beaten guitar. Brisbane has a sense of propriety and orderliness (even the hoboes seem to know their place) (well-trained by the local constabulary, no doubt). This is also a city where the trees are allowed to roam, can stretch out and breathe. Thus the full extent of their commanding presence as part of one’s visual intake on life is magnified – to their normal size, really.