There’s a point where leisurely, as in progress through the day, transforms itself into downright leisurely and another where that status morphs into looking for ways to kill significant amounts of time.
I didn’t quite get that far on the last concert day for this little jaunt, but I wasn’t far off it on a day where the Translink research indicated that catching a 12:09 Helensvale Rail bus in Southport would deliver me to Brisbane Central at 1:59, right on time for a two o’clock check in.
There were a couple of things you could, in the regular run of things, use as a convenient time sink, but the particular circumstances surrounding the situation tended to rule them out.
For a start, under normal circumstances, you could cut a fair chunk of time out of the situation by sleeping in. That wasn’t going to work in a situation where The Nephew had to be out the door before seven and Hughesy had to be on deck for the anticipated arrival of a plumber some time after his departure.
Arranging things like visits from tradesmen can be difficult when you’ve got a seven o’clock start, so my presence was definitely helpful in that regard.
Predictably, the particular issue with a leaking toilet cistern was a relatively straightforward procedure that meant the plumber and his offsider had been and gone by seven-thirty.
I could, of course, have gone back to bed at that point, but having been up and about for a good hour and a half after six days of relatively early nights and later than usual emergence from the depths of slumber I didn’t fancy my chances.
Under other circumstances, I could have taken myself for an extensive walk along the paths in the Broadwater Parklands, up as far as the caravan park and, possibly, over the bridge and around to The Spit and Main Beach.
On the other hand, when you’re looking at a late night with at least an hour between the end of a three and a half hour concert and the time you get to bed it seemed like a good idea to conserve the energies.
Breakfast, of course, provides a way to kill a bit of time, and I wandered out and headed for the Shaftson House coffee shop where Eggs Benedict with salmon looked to be about enough to keep me going through the day. In a situation where you actually wouldn’t mind being on the end of a queue in an establishment where they weren’t overly efficient the cafe, predictably, was almost deserted.
And the eggs arrived in a reasonably timely manner.
With breakfast out of the way you could, of course, take yourself on an extended ramble around the local CBD, but there were issues in that regard as well. I needed to head to an ATM to replenish the cash reserves, and chose the one at the Commonwealth Bank branch in Scarborough Street rather than the more convenient one in Australia Fair, but there wasn’t that much that could be done in the way of shopping to kill time.