Almanac Jogging: Pavements and Ponderings – A Sunday Jog Through Adelaide’s Heart

 

Stepping through the hotel lobby onto Hindley Street, I then creak into a trot. The stained footpath looks like a tangle of Rorschach inkblot tests. It’s Sunday morning.

 

Adelaide’s most notorious street is freshly circumspect after another torrid evening and moving east, I pass a café of breakfasters demolishing their eggs and bacon, their arms pumping up and down like fiddlers’ elbows. At King William Street, the pedestrian lights blink to green so over I shuffle.

 

Until now, I’ve never run through Rundle Mall, over its reddish-brown pavers. It’s wet this morning so I’m cautious and wish to avoid splaying myself outside of Lush for the satisfaction of shoppers seeking locally sourced, preservative-free stinky stuff.

 

Reaching Gawler Place, Nova FM is promoting this week’s tennis at Memorial Drive. A good-natured queue meanders across my path, Dads and kids spinning the chocolate wheel for tickets or an icy cold can of coke, assuming this remains the base metric for radio station giveaways.

 

Glancing south I see the Mall’s newest resident: a pigeon. Or rather a two-metre reflective metal sculpture of one. It’s curiously compelling and I could be in The Land of The Giants. The sculptor says, ‘I see pigeons as proud flaneurs (loafers), promenading through our leisure and retail precincts. They are the quiet witnesses of our day-to-day activities in the city, our observers from day through to night.’

 

I then note a store called Glue. That’s intriguing but why not call it Clag? That’s a word which is always funny, especially when you use it to secretly stick shut the pages of your Grade 3 friend’s exercise book, or their copy of Let’s Make English Live Die.

 

The Malls Balls appear in their enigmatic majesty. Fashioned by Bert Flugleman, they’re the nation’s most iconic pair of balls. I’ll leave it to you to insert a joke of your choosing.

 

With another green light I scamper over Pulteney Street to Rundle Street before passing the distinctive green exterior of Adelaide’s finest pub, the Exeter Hotel. Inside it’s always the 90’s when our nation’s best wine writer, Philip White, resided by the bar. Straining my ears, I’m disillusioned to not catch gliding up from the beer garden some ghostly wafts of Nirvana.

 

Taking coffee on the footpath is a clot of Sunday suits while over the road a rotund woman of Caribbean appearance is urging us all to, ‘Repent, repent.’ She’s sure our timeframe is only forty days. ‘Repent, repent’ she repeats. I best get on with it.

 

Over East Terrace sits the Garden of Unearthly Delights, the focus of the Fringe. Now it’s lush-green and empty. Next month it’ll be buzzing, and any surviving grass will be brown. To my right is Rymil Park, annual host of Harvest Rock. Again, it’s morning mass still. How these micro-cities appear and disappear! Despite their fleetingness, they shape our city in enduring ways.

 

I turn left by the brewery apartments and am halfway through my run. It’s both discovery and a comforting repetition. The O-Bahn tunnel runs beneath me. Last week with Claire I first rocketed the twelve kilometres to Tea Tree Plaza on its clever, Germanic bus.

 

Drizzle smears the sky as the National Wine Centre swims into view. It appears as a Noah’s Arc for plonk. When those antediluvian rains came what if the 600-year-old skipper had to usher onto his boat two bottles of every wine varietal? Sorry, Grange, back down the ramp for you as we’ve already got some shiraz.

 

We know well our CBD, but there is something magical about staying in the city that sprinkles enchantment over the recognisable buildings and boulevards. I’m now on North Terrace by the Botanic Hotel. After 4^th year English between 4 and 8 on Mondays my old friend JB and I would drive to the Bot while I would soothingly play her Bob Dylan cassettes. Sorry, JB.

 

I peer into Ayers House trying to recall how many wedding receptions I’ve been to there. I can’t and then above me stretches Adelaide’s tallest building, the Frome Central Tower One. Not tall by global measures but the skyscraper’s emblematic of Adelaide’s revitalised confidence. Claire and I went up there recently and gazed out over the eastern suburbs, spotting landmarks. Ah, there’s Norwood Oval!

 

I pass 2KW which is a roof-top bar. Are these elevated boozers the new Irish pub? Will we tire of these too? I often try to look at our city as might an overseas tourist. What would I think?

 

A compact, fetching metropolis, without the glamour of Sydney harbour or geographic clout of the Brisbane River, Adelaide’s quiet beauty and ease of lifestyle would progressively reveal themselves. I’d be impressed by North Terrace’s elegant institutions and the Torrens and Adelaide Oval precinct. If I wandered in for a beer, I’d love the Exeter and its eccentricity.

 

I ease up Bank Street and, in the hotel, click open the door to our twelfth-floor room.

 

 

To read more by Mickey Randall click here.

 

 

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