escort diary® of Jolie: Thank you Melbourne
I have just come home from Melbourne and I am doing the thing I always do after Melbourne, which is sitting in my apartment in Sydney a little happy that I am back in humidity with normal water that doesn't make my skin cringe.
I love Melbourne on short trip. I walk the CBD every time I visit and I find something new every time: a cornice I missed, an ironwork balcony on a building I've passed a dozen times, a tiled entryway from the 1920s that someone has, miraculously, in a city that loves to demolish things and replace them with glass, left intact. Melbourne's architecture rewards attention.
It hides its best details at the second-storey level where only the people who are looking will find them, like a city that is quietly testing whether you deserve it before it shows you what it has.
I always deserve it.
I always look up.
This trip I found Il Papiro. I want to be clear about the emotional significance of this discovery: I found Il Papiro the way some people find religion. It is a stationery shop that sells paper and pens and nibs and inks and the kind of beautiful, useless, absolutely essential objects that exist only for people who still believe that the physical act of writing, with your hand, on paper, with ink that smells like something, matters.
I found nibs there, nibs for my wooden nibholder, nibs that I had looked for for ages and never wanted to buy online for some reason, in brass and gold. There is a difference between a nib that works and a nib that makes you want to write, and the difference is not rational and it is not defensible and it cost me more than I should admit, and I regret nothing. The woman at the counter understood, she did not try to upsell me, she simply watched me hold a nib up to the light with the reverence of someone examining a diamond, and she nodded, and the nod said yes, you're one of us, and I have never felt more seen in a retail establishment in my life.
I also found THE vintage photobooth, from the 70s, in front of Flinders Street Station. Not a modern one with filters and countdown timers and the option to add dog ears to your face. A proper old one, the kind with a curtain and a flash that goes off slightly too early and a mechanical process that produces four small photos on a strip that you have to wait for like it's 1970 and patience is still a virtue.
My photos came out confused. Not bad (it's me we're talking about), confused. In the first one I am still looking at the coin slot trying to figure out if I can count to 8 properly or if I missed something. In the second one the flash caught me mid-blink so my eyes are closed. In the third one I am looking up, too high, and I look... still very confused and unsure. In the three of them, I look French, blasée, and as if I couldn't have been bothered to be here. A friend looked at them and after laughing said "you have the pout of a Parisian girl who is doing the cool thing against her will".
I kept the strip. It came out still wet from the processing, it looks amazing. It's in my writing desk, and will follow me wherever I go, as if I were my own lover looking at my face while I'm away at war.
Chinatown.
Melbourne's Chinatown is not a tourist attraction that happens to serve food, it's is a living, functioning, semi hidden, chaotic, absolutely glorious neighbourhood that has been there since the 1850s and has the confidence of a place that knows it was there before most of the city and will be there after. I loved finding the little corners and herbal medicine shop, but most of all I adored finding the museum and its animated basement that scared the living daylights out of me. A must for anyone who loves learning about the history of their town.
The museums. Melbourne has the kind of museums that make you feel simultaneously more intelligent and more ignorant, which is the hallmark of a good museum. I go to the NGV every trip the way some people go to church, not out of obligation but because I need something that is bigger than me and more beautiful than my problems and hangs on a wall without asking anything in return. This time I chose the Melbourne Museum for the Rome exhibition, then the one in Chinatown, and a return to the Hellenic Museum, just because.
And then... Reine & La Rue.
The building is from 1891, Neo-Gothic revival... this means stone and arches and the particular quality of European architecture that says I was built by people who believed that a building should make you feel something when you walk into it, which is a belief that contemporary architecture has largely abandoned in favour of glass and efficiency and the emotional temperature of a corporate waiting room. Reine & La Rue has not abandoned it. Reine & La Rue has leaned into it with the commitment of a place that knows exactly what it is and does not care whether that's fashionable.
The food was extraordinary. I am not going to describe it in detail because food writing is a genre I am not qualified to practice and because the best food, like the best evenings, resists description (although admittedly the Pomme Purée and marrow deserves its own poetry). What I will say is that it was correct, correct in the French sense, which means: the ingredients were respected, the technique was invisible, and the plate arrived looking like something a person who loved food had assembled with the quiet authority of someone who does not need your approval but would appreciate your attention.
Melbourne.
Thank you.
Thank you for the regulars who adjust their weeks around my visits.
Thank you for the laneways that keep revealing things I missed.
Thank you for the architecture that rewards looking up.
Thank you for a stationery shop that sold me nibs I didn't know I needed and a photobooth that showed me the confused, blinking, unfiltered version of my own face.
Thank you for Reine & La Rue, which made a French woman ten thousand kilometres from home feel, for two hours on a Saturday evening, that she was not so far away after all.
I'll be back in September if things don't change too much.
See you soon.
