In the title-song on her 1974 LP, Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell called Los Angeles city of the fallen angels.
In December 2023 “The Terrace” – the unusually long through street in the non-Scottish Perth’s CBD – has a lot of upstanding angels, along with banners that declare Christmas Lives Here.
Needless to say, their presence will be brief.
And – as you can see in the featured image – they are dwarfed by towers, named after the temporal powers that have prevailed here, year round, since the 1960s.
Friday December 22 was the year’s longest day.
As dusk fell, in a city on which snow never falls (and on which not one measurable drop of rain has fallen in December 2023) my beloved and I walked through the streets where Christmas allegedly lived.
The visual evidence suggested that hardly anyone else did…or that almost all of them had fled.
The section of King Street between Hay and Wellington Streets purports to be Perth’s epicentre of “sophistication”, and of “exclusive”/“luxury”/ “chic” shopping.
At 7.19 pm, less than a handful of days before Christmas, its southern end would have made an excellent location for a “spaghetti western”, set in a small 19th century cowtown.
No great imaginative leap was required for us to picture its residents, cowering behind closed doors, waiting for the looming confrontation between “lawmen” and “outlaws” to deliver a result….
A little further north, it became marginally easier to believe that we were indeed near the centre of a wealthy metropolis, home to some 2.2 million other human residents.
And lo – on the ground, right in front of us – “signs” miraculously appeared!
Merry Christmas… I hope you all prove unstoppable.
(all photos taken with an iPad. I was not carrying a “proper” camera. WA does not have “daylight saving time”; if it did, the relevant clock times would all have been after 8 pm)