o how nice to see krissie and jude and bim and edie, who drove all the way down from the mountains to grace us with their presence. maeve hardly gets to properly meet other little people (as opposed to pointing at random children we pass in the street), so it was a great novelty to have two friendly young ‘uns for the afternoon.

our party of six became those groups of people you hate, who trundle up the sidewalk with multiple prams, obstructing traffic. but balmain has the biggest number of pavement-roaming prams i’ve encountered in a suburb (although krissie claims penrith actually holds that title) so i’m sure everyone we hindered was used to it.

after walking up and down the main drag in an effort to get jude off to sleep, we ended up at circle cafe, where i went with nellicent once and a homeless man followed us in off the street and stood next to our table for the longest time, occasionally making conversation, before eventually pulling up a spare seat to sit down. not only does circle cafe have a breakfast-all-day menu, they also do the best ever vegetarian big breakfast: an enormous oval platter covered with two large slices of crunchy sourdough toast, two pats of yummy salted butter, scrambled eggs (though you can choose fried or poached), creamed spinach, sauteed whole button mushrooms, hash brown and three grilled tomatoes. and a sprig of parsley.

i ordered maevis a grilled cheese sandwich off the kid’s menu, which turned out to be old skool plastic cheese melted onto square white toast, and slightly mouldy on the edges, but that was ok because she ended up quite liking the eggs and spinach and tomato and sourdough… and that still left a whole slice of sourdough left on my plate at the end of the meal.

afterwards, as the drizzle returned, we sat on my couch, and krissie counseled me against buying “the complete new yorker” on dvd from the internet. for a couple of months i’ve been entertaining the thought of owning every single issue of the magazine ever published, since 1925, albeit on DVD — eight DVDs, but the original pricetag (US$100 plus $65 postage) was a little upsetting. over at amazon, it’s being sold for US$61 plus $6.50 postage, but my computer has a colourful history of randomly not reading DVDs, and what do i need with a set of shiny, limited edition “new yorker” drink coasters?

not so much. instead i am going to buy comics!