Breakfast

Next Saturday some of us blokes from church are going to have breakfast together at the Runaway Spoon. I checked it out this morning (its been revamped from when it was the Tablespoon) and had quite nice Spanish baked eggs and a few cups of tea: English breakfast. Then it was to the M7 for a trip to Wollongong via Appin. Nice morning drive to my conference to discuss pricing, dollars and revenue risk and avoided the Sydney traffic.

I had lunch at the Fraternity Club on the way back to the office (Spaghetti Bolognese), continuing up the coast road to have a short coffee at Coledale in a cafe where the verandah overlooked the road and the toilets had magnificent ocean views...only in Australia. Nothing like that on the Amalfi coast.

The radio on the way up the coast road had Margaret Throsby interviewing Alan Gold, author. Alan likes opera so we were treated to a few great works: a quartet from Rigoletto and the fabulous Gotterdammerung: Funeral March by Wagner. A tremendous work that MT introduced very aptly I thought, referring to the death's tragic unavoidablity (to which there is no response in a materialist, agnostic or atheist world...one just watches dumbly).

After swooshing at moderate speed over the sea bridge I headed up to Stanwell Tops. The last time I'd been on that road was I think with Foxtrot, a girl I was at a camp with...we had 'bunked off', something I love to do at camps (I was at a Christian conference in Brisbane many years ago and did the same to see the film Another Brick in the Wall, being a bit conferenced out, and feeling quite good about it, similarly at a business conference in Hong Kong; I nipped down to Macau for the day instead of attending).

But opera: Gold related taking his 11 year old son to Traviata...got me thinking to take my son to see a good opera seeing he's about that age. As Gold pointed out, opera traverses the range of human emotion and spirituality (if you are so minded to see it that way, and I do) so it can shine lights into corners that might otherwise go unlit.