Friday 7 September 2018

Lancefield!

Well, it's craft camp time. 

It's 11 o'clock on Friday night, I got here, and also, I am in bed, and also, I got the Princess Room. Fuck yeah! (Thanks K.)

Just being here makes me really happy. Making things is a lot of fun, but this is also a holiday. I felt on holiday before I'd even got onto the freeway. I stopped at the servo in Bulla because I had to use the bathroom, and it was a horrific bathroom, and then I bought a cardboard box of chips from the bainmarie, and I ate those driving on the dark highway, listening to Venus and Mars. They weren't good chips, or at least, most of them weren't good. One or two still had a bit of the life bestowed by hot grease to quicken them, but most of them had gone hard and dead. I ate them all anyway, because they tasted great. Mainly it was salt, but there was something else too, some taste I couldn't identify. Night is very black in the country and I'm just not used to speeding along in a car when you can't see everything around you darkly outlined in soft yellow light. But it's not a long drive, and every so often, the lights of aircraft heading for Tullamarine shine above and inside the clouds and it looks like red and green and white UFOs coasting across the sky.

About ten minutes before you get to Romsey there's a road signposted 'to the historic Coach and Horses pub.' Every time I go past, I think about this Coach and Horses pub, which in daytime can be glimpsed for a second. I think it might be a large bluestone boxline building. I imagine it, firstly as a  gem of a pub that is amazing beyond all my wildest dreams, but I can't make that last for long, and then I picture it as a pub that is more sad grim and depressing than any pub I've ever seen or heard described or imagined. This image doesn't last either. I want them both to be real.

Any time I felt like it I could find out what's really there. It's only a minute off the main road. 


3 comments:

ernmalleyscat said...

There's an incredibly frustrated coach trying to train his ex racing team horses to tend bar. Quite the long faces.

elaine said...

Apparently that pub is (insert spooky music) The Most Haunted Pub in Victoria. (I get off the train in Woodend and go past it every work day)

Also: I am very jealous of craft camp.

lucy tartan said...

EMC: That's the way.

E: I'm sorry for your jealousy, but it makes sense.

Something about the way I only ever see the pub out of the corner of my eye reminds me very strongly of a ghost story called "The House of the Nightmare", where the narrator crashes his car because of an optical effect generated by a boulder on the roadside, which seems to shift from one side of the road to the other as he gets closer to it. The story starts out well and the bad dream is genuinely frightening like a real nightmare is, but the story has the worst ending ever and this is why I think it's best to preserve the pleasant mystery of what the pub is like up close. Because it'll be ordinary.