Which is not to suggest that I was looking for wine with breakfast at the Cafe Segovia the next morning, or at Knife Fork Bottle & Cork on the Wednesday morning, but the option was there. I’d be more than happy to return to either establishment in the future, but there are plenty of other options to explore in Melbourne’s inner-city lane way.
With breakfast out of the way, there was nothing for it but to head off in search of interesting retail venues with a side trip back into Chinatown for yum cha.
Madam may have rolled her eyes each time she arrived at the agreed rendezvous to find me adding to the CD and literary collections, but I thought that limiting purchases to the recent Byrds box set, a couple of New Orleans collections and the new Richard & Linda Thompson live set meant that my credit card escaped rather lightly from the time I spent in Basement Disks and Greville Street Records. Mind you, she’d have been much more impressed if she’s been able to see how much stuff I’d put back on the shelves. The damage could have been infinitely worse.
That night we headed back to Villa Romana with Madam’s Melbourne Mates for another go at the spaghetti allo scoglio (highly recommended after our previous visit to Melbourne and still as good as ever) adjourning from there to Jimmy Watson’s for a couple of glasses to round out the evening.
Once we’d broken the fast a couple of doors down from the Leo Pacific next morning, there was nothing for it but to haul the luggage across to Southern Cross to catch the Skybus and, literally before we knew it we were touching down in Mackay, contacting the Better Five-Eighths of the Cox Combo, handing over a bottle of Dalrymple pinot noir as thanks and heading homewards.
And, given the fact that a survey of the larder once we’d arrived revealed that the cupboard was bare I guess it’s hardly surprising that we ended up visiting Franco at Pizza Pronto for a family-sized pizza that cost me a little more than my return flight to Melbourne.