Many years ago, in the long ago times of dish-pan hands and iced-coffee banana shakes with three scoops of ice-cream, a time before gluten-and-dairy intolerance, a time before it seemed I knew anything about weight loss. It was a time of Oak shakes — coffee and spearmint — bought from the store in Chatswood Chase. It was a time of gleeful visits to eat cinnamon buns and drink coffee after school with my best friend, when staying out until 4.30pm seemed like the world’s greatest indulgence and so wicked.
Before drugs and 6am late night returns speeding around that endless curve off the Harbour Bridge back to the North Shore… but that’s getting ahead of the story here.
There’s something glittery bright about Chatswood nostalgia. The idea of privilege and of how unbelievably privileged we were hadn’t really kicked in at all yet. Glass skyscrapers and careering through the mall, hanging out in the record shops and picking up the Aria chart to see what lyrics were printed on it this week.
It was a time before the instant lookup, a time of mastery and trivia and cutting faces out of magazines and sticking them on to our folders. Where the awkward crush on Tim Freedman (singing songs about Orange Chupa Chups long, long before he was famous) was complicated by the fact that the guitarist in his band was your friend’s brother and that someone might tell…
There’s no convenient rounding up of suspects here. No one is kissed and swept off into the sunset. It’s just moments of freedom, flashes of rehearsal for life before expectation descended.