La vie en Sydney

One of the things I love most about Sydney is its human colour. Wandering down one of the main streets – Elizabeth, Pitt, Castlereagh, George – on any given day, you are liable to come across one or more of the following characters:

• There’s the bicycle courier (I think – he rides a bicycle and has one of those Australia Post containers so common to bicycle couriers, but the container is so old and worn and his general appearance so unkempt I am inclined to doubt) who can be found at random times and places across the city playing something fabulous on his trumpet – usually with his bicycle chained up nearby and while still wearing his bicycle helmet. The last time I saw him I was standing across from the QVB waiting for the lights to change so I could cross with all the other pedestrian hobbledehoy and he was perched on a traffic control box playing the melody to Vivaldi’s “Spring” – which concluded while I waited and then, as the lights changed, so did he, to “If I were a rich man” from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. As I walked away he was cheerfully beating out time to the melody with his heels upon the metal sides of the control box.


• There’s the Chinese gentleman – so old and so archetypically Chinese in appearance (slim, benevolent of expression, with flowing gray hair and a long, flowing gray goatee) that you are tempted to think he has just walked out of an old Chinese painting. That is in the millisecond before the rest of his get-up registers – because, you see, he carries in one hand a giant yellow sign with a smiley face painted on one side and a sad face on the other. In the other hand he carries a large plastic sunflower and a dog lead, which is attached to a small, nondescript dog. He also sports a set of sandwich boards – you know, those placard-things you saw protesters wearing in the olden days. The boards have a message on them, handwritten in red marker, but to be honest I was so flabbergasted when I first encountered him that I didn’t have the presence of mind to pay them much attention. I’ve seen him a few times since then, only in the distance, and so the message he wears remains a mystery for another day.


• If you walk up Elizabeth Street - up, up, to the point where it is just coming in sight of the Quay, you will walk under the awning which forms part of the entry to the Sofitel. Here you will find a burly concierge who is the very epitome of concierge-ness. Always immaculately turned out, even at 7 in the morning, he presides over his realm with the air of a king - commanding, yet benevolent - and when he whistles for a cab (something I thought they only ever did in New York, in the movies), one always appears, sometimes apparently materialising out of thin air in response to his summons.