Neil Diamond in Melbourne
Thursday, October 29th, 2015
It was nice getting out of Tasmania for a couple of nights holiday. Megan and I ate a lot of good food, roamed the inner city streets of Melbourne with rural Tasmanian gusto and sat up in the middle of Rod Laver’s way-up-high-in-bum-fuck seats for a couple of hours of Neil Diamond. For a man in his 70s, Neil banged out song after song like the old showman we expected. It was a great little holiday.
Of course, it would have been nicer to be there for a week. The food and coffee in Melbourne’s central business district are sublime. But the beds in the Mercure Treasury Gardens are like having to sleep on an unpadded pile of railway sleepers. And our requested city view was of a nondescript littered roof area above the Mercure entrance where old socks and a not-quite-empty iced tea bottle flew circuits in the wind as mock salutation to The Tasmanians.