Perhaps we'll start by admiring the autumn flowers popping up in our driveway - some of them, like the red ones, there one day, gone the next; others resolutely flowering for weeks on end. We need to grab this opportunity however as they will all have disappeared by the weekend. Our neighbours (who I thought quite pleasant until now) have complained to our estate agents that we have not been keeping up our side of the drive. Harumph! Firstly, it would have been nice to have been told that it was our responsibility to do so and secondly, couldn't they simply have asked us to tidy it directly? In the spirit of neighbourliness I have swallowed my rage and engaged the services of the wonderfully named Con to come and hack away at the overgrowth on Saturday. Con is very Australian. I need a translator when he speaks. He gardens without socks with a kind of blithe machismo but then complains bitterly when he's bitten by red ants. He should beware the funnel-web spiders - I've spotted their lairs and enjoy gingerly placing leaves over their tunnel entrances, leaves which are silently and secretively moved, spider-fashion, by the next time I pass...
Once past the drive we soon get to a footbridge over the creek, Beencke's Bridge, so-named after a Herr Beencke from Hamburg, born in 1852, who built the first shop here in Greenwich and many of the early houses. In 1906 he built a wooden trestle bridge on this spot to enable us to cross Berry's Creek (which no doubt was much wider and more treacherous in those days) for the steep sounding sum of £50.
Unfortunately, this has now been replaced by an infinitely uglier bridge built in 1964, the year I was born. No doubt this cost a lot more money, involved a lot more people, and was imagined to be a thing of beauty...Sometimes, no mostly actually, I wish I had been born in 1852....
From Beencke's Bridge you could stop and look down through some magnificent, enormous tree ferns to the creek below if it wasn't for the fact that Sniff always bounds across it like a hound possessed.
From here it is but a hop skip and a jump to the station past some towering conifers and their attendant jabbering kookaburras. There is a small grass sward with a bench in its centre and this part is called Smoothey Park. I haven't been able to find out why but Australians seem to be very, very keen on naming things: every second step you seem to find yourself in a newly-named area. The smallest patch of green is called So and So Reserve, the tiniest beachhead Such and Such Point. There's a new suburb every second. In fact, now we're no longer in Greenwich we're in Wollstonecraft. After all folks, we've crossed a bridge...
I particularly like Wollstonecraft station because it is stuck in a charming time-warp. It looks completely provincial despite being only fifteen minutes or less from Circular Quay and the Opera House. There are no MacDonalds and WH Smiths here. Oh no. Everything is run by local independent shopkeepers and the station is manned by friendly eccentrics. One of these, a tall man of over six feet who seems slightly simple-minded, invariably asks whether he can pat the dog and then seems surprised when his formidable physical presence looming over him causes Sniff to quickly scarper.
This is Max. Max runs one of the two shops at Wollstonecraft Station (his is the larger of the two). He's always smiling and cheerful and refuses to sell you packets of muffins if there's the smallest tear in the wrapping...
His rival, on the other side of the tracks, is a diminutive Chinese women who sits behind a miniscule counter in her tiny shop beaming daily. Despite her apparent cheerfulness, I was too scared to ask to take her photo and she didn't look like someone who would understand the word 'blog'. I'm not sure that I really understand the word 'blog'...
And that's it. Wollstonecraft station in a nutshell. There are two platforms - one going south into town, one going north to...oh, hell, frankly who cares where! So all you have to do now is come and visit - you know you want to. We're on the North Shore Line, marked in YELLOW on your map. Get on at either Central, Town Hall, Wynyard...It couldn't be easier. Sniff and I are waiting for you on the platform now...
PS If anyone has seen Daniel can they please send him home, preferably loaded with presents.
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