Dear Mike

Do you remember space eggs? The ones in the park, with the wheel in the centre that you pulled with your skinny child arms, opposite your friend who was pulling as hard as they could as well? Eventually you’d get it going and it was like your very own small spaceship fun park ride.

From the other side of the park other children could hear your screams of joy coming out of the two small openings in the egg and when you eventually stepped all wobbly legged out of the egg you could hear one of them yell, “Geronimo,” as they leapt off the end of the squeak flying fox.

Did you have this? I don’t see them anymore, those crazy space eggs.
It seems that seesaws are out of fashion with children these days as well. I’m assuming you had seesaws when you were a child, but space eggs? Back in the sixties growing up in New York City did you have gravity defying play equipment?

If I go to my bathroom window, which is down the very back of the apartment, I can hear the whooping and gleefully frightened cries of people on the rollercoaster at Luna Park.

You’re thinking Coney Island Mike but instead think smaller and more run down. Luna Park’s entrance is a clown’s mouth gaping wide open its large teeth ready to bike down at any time. I don’t think its great fen sui, or business sense, to have the entrance to a fun park looking like an insane child gobbling clown. Isn’t clown phobia (the powers of Google just told me its called Coulrophobia) right up there with fear of flying and spiders and possibly flying spiders?

There’s a Pirate Ship and The Gravitron in there, but most importantly possibly the worlds most rickety looking rollercoaster with more coast than roll. People get stuck up there frequently. Once, during a rather quiet season, someone was stuck up there upside down for hours. Who goes on a rollercoaster on their own? If no one else is getting on it shouldn’t that tell you something?

Speaking of Coney Island; my spies tell me that New York City is in the middle of a blizzard at the moment. I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to live in a city where it snows. Your photos arrived in the mail today. I can’t believe that’s you actually standing in a park surrounded by nothing but snow and trees covered in snow and a little bit of, yep you guessed it, snow on your shoulders, holding a sign with Hello Kate written on it.

Your friends must think you’ve gone completely mad. Did you tell them why you were getting someone to take the photo of you in the middle of winter?

Did you say, ‘Oh there’s this girl in Australia that I write to on the internet who wants to see what I look like.’
Your friends, do they ask you who I am? How would you explain me to them? I don’t think my own version would be a good one to tell them.
‘She’s twenty-six and lives with her partner above his family’s business and has a series of lovers, the latest of who lives near the college she goes to, and thus she’ll never get a degree and is constantly plotting her escape from it all. I’m also subtly trying to brainwash her into falling madly in love with me resulting of course in her running way to New York City where we’ll live happily ever after.’
So to flesh out the story of where I am and what life is like here, I’m sending you some pictures, via the wonders of technology.

The first is of me sweltering in my front room in thirty-seven degree Celsius heat in front of the computer. Yes, your eyes are not betraying you that is really a poster of John McEnroe pretending he’s James Dean walking down a raining dark New York street with his collar pulled up against the wind. I really do have two fans pointed at me and yes it looks as though I’m sitting here in the dark because I am.

I’ve taped blankets up against the window and still the heat gets in.

The second one will explain why, the other night when we were playing email ping pong, I suddenly had to disappear.

It is the view from my window, right beside the computer looking down onto Acland Street. So you can understand that just as I have a birds-eye view of the goings on of St Kilda so do my friends who pass on by and decide that internet junkie Kate has had enough chatting online for one evening.
In the photo you’re probably looking at whilst you read this it is a typical Sunday Acland street style, complete with overly tanned guys; their ridiculous spiked hair styles and t-shirts stripped off and tucked into their back pockets, with obligatory girlfriend in tow. The girls with their fuchsia pink toenails and big hair and even bigger breasts don’t seem to think its strange walking along outside my house in their bikinis. I daydream of pushing them over. Watching their high heals wobble before they crash to the ground.

We have, you can see in the bottom right hand corner, a busker who belts out songs as though she’s in a Broadway musical that just happens to have a medley of Toni Childs, Melissa Etheridge and K.D Lang numbers in it. I can hear her most days and nights over the dinging of trams and the voices of tourists who’ve decided that the best way to spend their weekend is with a day down by the beach juggling toddlers, ice creams and bags of shopping.
Night time is a little quieter, punctuated until about two a.m by guys yelling obscenities to their mates or girls screeching ‘oh my god, stop it’ at the top of their lungs before dissolving into a sound similar to drunken parakeets fighting.
It all winds up for me when I can no longer stand Dave’s pestering, ‘Kate, you still on the computer, come to bed’ or, if I’m lucky and he’s snoring away instead, when the street cleaners swish past in the morning at around five a.m. That’s when I crawl in beside him and blank out the whole lurid palm treed bizarre world that one day you’ll come and visit.
Unless I get to you first.