N E 1 4 …?

Last night, Sunday night, we got all dressed up but in the end we had nowhere to go.

Saturday we spent in the usual fashion, lazing around the house reading the paper and, after Rage finished, watching a bit of the tennis. I ended up catching a fair bit of this year’s Australian Open, actually. I got a little bit interested last year, when we had actual tennis players staying in the hotel in our street (we never saw anyone famous, all we saw were were the chauffers going to pick them up. Lleyton Hewitt must have been close by though; soon after the tournament his picture appeared in our favourite nearby Mexican restaurant where they already had a burrito named after Aggassi on the menu). This year, being home by myself so much during the day, I fell into the habit of putting the tennis on in the background while I pottered around the house.

On Saturday, we got the local paper as well as the national one that I like to read in order to feel connected with the rest of Australia. The local paper ran a bit of a critique of the bars and clubs of Townsville, and it got me thinking that we really haven’t been giving them a fair chance. The article pointed out that, contrary to our initial impressions, not all of the pubs and bars around here are blokey, redneck pick-up joints. Many of them are. But there are a couple (yes, more than one) that are quite nice bars where a girl can take her boyfriend for a quiet drink. I thought it was high time we got to know some of these places and, as a low-key introduction, I invited Hayden to go and watch the men’s tennis final with me at The Brewery, a bar that reportedly had a massive telly screen and served some tasty Brazilian beers.

The women’s final (on Saturday afternoon) was pretty dramatic, I thought, and by Sunday afternoon I was getting pretty excited about our night on the town. We even got a bit dressed up: my hair was washed and dried, and Hayden put on whole pants, not just three quarters. But it was to no avail. The bar was closed. And so were many of the others. Townsville is not a town that is interested in tennis. Or in quiet Sunday evening drinking. But that’s OK. It was still pretty fun watching at home, drinking coronas and eating take-away pizza straight out of the box.