the storm
I dreamed I was walking back to the house on Eugenia Avenue, which faced a seawalled cove rather like La Paz or Howth. But the house wasn’t where it should have been. I stared from landmark to landmark in confusion before I realized that the village had been destroyed by a storm and saw my own books half-buried in the debris…
…and woke in an unfamiliar bed, thinking What time is it? And what country is this?
There was a TV show here I never saw, called Sea Change, about moving from the city to a remote beach. The title has entered the vernacular, so that the Herald’s real estate pages this week were all about “sea-changing.”
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
It’s very appropriate that Australians should… um… appropriate… Shakespeare’s description of a father’s corpse for real-estate marketing jargon. In other great Sydney property news, a prophecy of mine has been fulfilled, and developers are trying to flog luxury condos at Little Bay, right next to Long Bay Gaol.
