I’m having an out-of-car experience

Into the dogged Melbourne drizzle I am tossed like a raw prawn from the cosy, protective shell of my overheated car. I slosh towards the cheerless tram-stop and dubious comfort of a saturated metal bench. At least the rain will have washed off the spew. All the other punters are hulked over on the opposite side of the concrete trench, staring at me to a man. Do they know something I don’t? Do trams only go one way on this stop? I lower back at them from beneath the fur of my black Nanook-of-t...

Sometimes I wonder if I imagined going to the Russell-Collins tea rooms, that one afternoon in the late 1960s. At the centre of my unreliable memory sits a vast white urn of leafy purple flowers, surrounded by clusters of ladies in hats and gloves. You descended a short flight of stairs - at the corner of Russell and Collins Streets, of course - to enjoy this most Melbourne of elegant afternoon high teas. A block and a half, but a world away it was, from Coles Cafeteria, where a buxom woma...