Driving Miss Daisy...up the Wall

Here's how the story goes.  Underneath the booths was carpet.  Old carpet, still damp and not very hygienic or able to be cleaned.  As far as the health inspector was concerned..the carpet had to go.  It should in fact have been put out of its misery years ago but somehow, the old 1980s carpet was still hanging in there under the booths.

Okay so to get he carpet up, we had to pull up the booths.  Now if I had really thought about it at all, I would have realised that there was a lot more to it than just pointing my magic wand at the booths and asking a bunch of burley farmers to pull them up.  But that is sort of what I did.  Well, in terms of the burley farmers, not the magic wand because if I possessed one of those, I would ave waved it at the whole cafe and we would be done and dusted by now.  However, the very obliging burley farmers pulled up the booths which, I had it on good authority, had been plugged, bolted, nailed and glued into place.  Along with the booths, came the wall render and suddenly we were looking directly at brickwork though thankfully not, straight through to our neighbour's shop.

Oh great, now we had to fix the wall as well as the floor underneath.  It was a problem that required some contemplation, some lost sleep and a bit of blinkering so we wouldn't be reminded that we are not plasterers while we got on with other jobs.  In the end we couldn't ignore the problem any further and so Roger had a go at plastering 101, with average success.  Apparently there are still some things that you can't learn from the internet.

But fortune came to our rescue through a chance meeting with a real plasterer and we were saved.  Many early starts, hot sweaty days and a bit of plastering apprenticeship later and we have our walls back, minus the holes.  To boot we have been regaled with colourful tales of the life of our handyman saviour and his dog.  So now, with just over a week to Christmas, we can finally start painting the walls and laying the lino on the floor.  Phew!

P.S. Underneath the plywood panel in the window we found another strange relic of the past.  The signature Bullock Douglas and a pencil sketch of a profile.  Who was Bullock Douglas?  Was he the artist who painted the original window motifs in the 1930s renovation?  Or is this signature more recent?

The Mercury Rises

Summer kicked in with a vengeance last week with temperatures rising to the high 30s, bringing thunderstorms laden with humidity and an ill-timed power cut.  With the town sweltering in the dark, even just for a few hours the night the power outage took away our air-conditioners, we decided to take advantage of the heatwave by opening our front door to cold drinks and ice creams.  Turning back the clock on the cafe means turning back the menu as well so we are serving traditional soda soft drinks with flavours such as portello, sarsparilla, lime, creaming soda and raspberry lemonade.  Eventually we plan to go back to the traditional scoop ice creams as well but for the moment we have popular pre-packaged varieties in our freezer.  And for the homesick kiwis we offerLemon and Paeroa soft drink for that little slice of heaven in the heat that is world famous in New Zealand.  It has already proven popular enough for us need to restock the fridge.

Later this week on Friday 7th December, Lockhart has it's Christmas late night trading with market stalls along Green Street.  The Blue Bird will be there trading again but this time we will have some little Christmas morsels like canoli and seasonal truffles.  We will also be having a book sale to support the restoration project funds so we hope people will find Christmas gift options and great summer reading matter among the late release second-hand books in our collection.  There will be more books on sale at the cafe over the summer because as a librarian in my past life, I know how much books, coffee and the social space of a cafe go hand-in-hand.

Little by little we get closer to being fully open and we thank all those who have stopped in to buy drinks, offer advice, information and lend a hand. It won't be too much longer now...with a little bit of luck.

All things bright and beautiful

One of the first things I did when we arrived was start a small kitchen garden in the existing planter out the back.  Amongst the weeds the planter had some bulbs left in it but like the cafe, it too had suffered neglect and needed some repair to make it useful again.  It was also unfortunately located outside the toilets which is not my ideal place to grow herbs but hey, I wasn't really expecting it to do well straight away and intend to move it once the list of 'things to do' is down to the last 50 points.  However, it gave me a sense of hope that straight away, even if it was only tiny, we could make a change for the better.  So I planted tomatoes (tommy toes variety), complementary basil and a bit of parsley.

It gave me great pleasure, first thing in the morning and as we locked up and left each night, to give them a drink and yes, greet my wee plants with a cheery "good morning".  Let Roger's eyes roll at me as daft for talking to plants but it felt good to see the daily results of my nurturing something when everything else about the place was just a long, hard slog of achingly slow progress.

The garden was the first thing to grow and finally, just in the last week visible changes to the interior of the cafe are now also coming together.  There is still some way to go but at long last we can see some results and an end to the renovator's doldrums.  At last we can say that we have reached the turning point and are on the homeward slope.  We have a sink installed and okay, so there is no water in it yet, it is the newest and most shiny thing in our cafe.  Painting has also been largely achieved to a point where I can declare that I have finished the booths...and can now sit back and spend time watching the paint dry.  Some flooring has been relaid and the rest is not far off.  This week, we will attack the project of rendering and re-plastering the walls.  From there, I get back to my painting job but for now I can take a moment to enjoy my garden which is now providing us with basil to complement our simple evening meals of pizza and pasta.  By the time I get home each night I am too shattered to attempt anything more complex.  And although I was only expecting the tiny tomato plants to provide nutrients to the sandy soil for next year, they have responded to my nurturing by squeezing out a tomato or two.  It's not going to be a huge harvest this year but it is a start to establishing a sustainable kitchen garden.

Where the streets are paved with..seafood?

Back in the day when the Blue Bird was known as the Marathon Saloon and Oyster Bar, they served seafood.  Well, there has always seafood on the menu in one shape or form but these particular oysters came from Sydney each day on the train and somewhere along the line, ended up under our floor.

I'll tell you how I think they got there.  Roadside collection of household and shop refuse would have been a thing of the future back then.  It was quite common, as I understand, for people to dispose of composting rubbish under the floorboards.  Out of sight essentially but not probably out of smell.  However the dark, dank earth under the floors of buildings would have provided a good composting environment. It is surprising then that some bright spark never worked out the fortune that could be made growing mushrooms under their floor.  Never mind.  Just as long as the decomposing food didn't bring vermin with it, although I'm sure it often did.

Anyway, we figure that the shells went in under the floor sometime between 1903 and 1930 because Young Peter tells us that his folk were not in the habit of dropping shells under the floor.  Coins and marbles sure, and they lost a crow bar under there once, he thought we might have retrieved that for him, but not apparently oyster shells.  Peter's cousin Nick from the Matis side of the family, told us the story of the local millionaire from down the street. According to legend the millionaire instructed the two Greek waiters from the Paragon (that would be Tony Matis and Old Peter Veneris), to scatter oyster shells over the muddy Green Street so that he wouldn't get his spats dirty.  Nick reckons that if they ever dug up Green Street they would find it paved with oyster shells rather than gold.  Well, we have our own handful of found seafood memorabilia to add to our growing collection which will eventually go on display as the Box of Blue Bird's Memories.  But for now..it's back to my seemingly neverending painting. Sigh.

Here is a Season..turn, turn

Already we've watched the season change in our new home town.  The winter cold with icy mornings and chill evenings have given way to a cool early spring and now a lovely warm late one.  When I first came up from Melbourne the fields were awash with the breath taking buttercup yellow of the canola flowers amid the green grassy hillsides.  They promised a good crop of oil but it wasn't long before the vista seemed wilted.  Not being a country girl, I asked how the canola crops work and was told that they wait until the flowers fall before the harvesters come through delicately scooping up the oily debris.  I was told also that in their wake the second harvesters come through to cut the wheat, barley and oats.  I am still largely mystified by the process but I am delighted to have spent my first harvest season in the country to witness the change of colours and textures as the sunny yellow has been replaced by the dry gold of the crisp wheat crops and hay bales.

Roger does not have the same romantic attachment to the spring that I have although he does appreciate the visuals.  As a hayfever sufferer however, the pollen on the breeze is not his something that takes his fancy.  And I have to admit that the dusty, gritty wind gets up my nose too.  I am coming to terms with the fact that I live in a dust bowl, not only a dusty interior created by our efforts at sanding and grinding but just a generally dusty town.  When up in the roof space investigating the state of the old horse-plaster ceiling, Roger discovered 80 years worth of rust-coloured topsoil dust blown in from the street.  It is 15cms of very fine but also very dense dust and he has had to wear breathing apparatus in a dark, cramped, and very hot confined space.  But we are making headway with it at least.

And meanwhile I battle constantly with the dust inside the cafe.  I understand that at the moment we are working in a renovation zone that is currently not sealed to the outside world but I am still suspicious that dust will be something I am constantly fighting in order to keep a clean environment for our guests and diners.  Dust, and spiders.  Our work flurry has been stirring up the eight-legged critters of which I am not fond.  Mostly they have been daddy-long-legs which I can handle because they eat flies but every once in a while I come across a blacker, hairier, more beady-eyed cousin staring boldly at me from a corner where there was no spider the day before.  Roger is not much help in coming to my rescue...and it's not even as if I am asking him to kill the critter (because I know that not only are they quite good for the environment but I have this unshakeable superstition that killing a spider will result in bad arachno-karma revenge somewhere down the line).  No, all I ask is that I don't have to look at the thing and believe me, if I know it's there, I will see it in my sleep.  But Roger's reply to my nervous question of "what kind of spider is that?" (because I know that every spider in Australia is potentially lethal), is merely: "Oh it's a fingerweb. Probably harmless."  I don't believe him for a second but he does like to torment an innocent Kiwi sometimes by making up new spiders.  My response is simply not to frequent that corner of the building until it leaves of its own accord.  I figure that the building is big enough for me and the black hairy thing to avoid each other for a day or two.  After all, if David Attenborough is to be believed, the fingerweb is more scared of me than I am of it.

But then there are the flies that the spiders are not good at catching.  At the moment we are not bothering about them because we have no food in the cafe and we need the doors open to air out the paint smell.  But when we are open I know already that I will be very much on the fly crusade.  To be fair to the daddy-long-legs and the fingerwebs, I think that it is not so much a case of them not being good at catching flies, as there are too many flies for them to catch.  The other night we had a very cute baby blue-tongue lizard on our kitchen window.  He was licking his lips and snaffling up the tiny bugs out in the night air.  I wanted to keep him as a pet because he was really cool but now I think I could happily employ him in the cafe as our resident fly catcher.

For Whom the Booths Toll

We've been wrestling with booths in the cafe and what seemed at first like a small job has become a big one.  To begin with we needed to get the booths off the wall to uplift the still damp carpet and access the floor.  Young Peter Veneris (the son of Old Peter), told us that they were originally pegged into the wall but during his time in the cafe, the Lockhart kids worked out how to wriggle and jiggle them off the wall.  So not to be beaten by mischievousness, Peter and Jack glued, nailed and screwed the booths in place.  At some stage in their lifetime, the bases of said booths were reinforced with welded steel but by the time we inherited them the steel was fraying and the booths were lopsided and wobbly. But they are a special feature of the cafe and the kids who once sat there jiggling them out of place, are now grown ups with a great nostalgic fondness for the Blue Bird seating.  There was never any doubt that we would keep them.  But they did need some work...a bit more than just a new coat of paint.

So a dozen farmers offering their brawn later, and the booths were free of the wall but so unfortunately, was the render.  The look on Roger's face told me not to over react but fortunately we had done so much deconstruction already that I was no longer upset by the sight of debris.  I took the now rustic looking wall of exposed bricks poking through patches of concrete render, in my stride.

A bit of pondering went on before Roger decided that the best way to ensure we could make future maintenance and repairs without damaging the wall again, was to secure the booths to the floor. Ah, but this required some re-engineering because with one end having previously been the wall, they now looked peg-legged and were less than robust.  So with a little help from friends, a sign writer, the Lockhart Men's Shed and relatives, we have rebuilt, stripped back, sanded, patched, sanded again, undercoated, sanded (a third time) and painted eight booths.  And finally I can see the new colour scheme which I have based on ice cream flavours.

But before the new look is revealed to the world here is a riddle for the kids.

What is hard, slightly pepperminty and stuck to the underside of the Blue Bird Cafe booths?

Answer: 80 years worth of gum, chewed by generations of Lockhart kids and now rock solid (and in some cases painted over by previous owners) but incredibly sticky when warmed by the heat gun when removing the layers of paint.  Yum! 

We've survived moving house (twice!) and two street parties in as many weeks in our new home of Lockhart. Last weekend was our first foray into the Spirit of the Land, an annual art and sculpture festival held in Lockhart. It draws crowds of 6000 people over two days so it was an ambitious start to our new careers as cafe proprietors but it was a great chance to meet the locals and give them a small taste of things to come at the Blue Bird Cafe. Roger and I (with the much appreciated help of relatives) got out on the street with the other market stall holders and local business people to enliven the festival atmosphere.

Our plan was to offer scoop ice cream and granitas so when the weather turned chilly and grey earlier in the week (with roads in the Blue Mountains even blocked by snow!) we thought we had made the wrong choice of fare. However lady luck and the weather gods smiled on us and by Saturday the weather was brightening. The four of us were flat stick pulling granitas and scooping cones. It seemed that the crowds appreciated the tradition of old-fashioned ice cream flavours of Hokey Pokey, choc mint, passionfruit and rum and raisin. But mostly it was our chance to meet everyone in town...and I think we may very well have achieved that! They all had lovely words of welcome to our new home and pledges of support once we are open.

But the nicest thing was meeting members of the Veneris and Matis familes who came from all over NSW for the festival and to take a trip down memory lane by visiting the Blue Bird where they spent their childhoods and formative years. We felt bad that they were seeing the cafe at her worst, broken and bruised. We considered that it would be hardly recognisable to them but they still found enough in the shell to trigger memories and tears. Their support for our efforts was heart-warming and we only hope that we can do their memories and their faith in our vision for the future of the Blue Bird, justice. We can but try and we will do our best to live up to the expectations of the family and of Lockhart.

Welcome to our new venture. This is going to sound like one of those mid-life crisis stories..you know the ones where the disillusioned city folk make a change to an exotic location to feel better about life. You might think that you have already read "A Year in Provence" or "Under the Tuscan Sun" and you know how the story goes. It usually starts out with some successful writer or journalist feeling in need of a change. If you are anything like me, you will have read those novels, seen the movie, whatever, and thought..how wonderful would that be but I'm just an ordinary person without the budget of Hollywood, and I need to hold down a steady job just to keep myself off the breadline. That's how this story goes. And it's true. I was raised to work honest, work hard and play it safe in a profession (namely librarian) that would provide for me till I retire. Except...

Except that, in these uncertain times I found myself in my fortieth year, staring down the barrel of thirty more years of work (yep, my money is on the retirement age going up by another five years). And here I was in an industry that quite frankly, is starting to concern me. I get the sinking feeling that the future for books and careers for librarians may not be as solid as I expected when I bit the bullet and did my library degree. I heard in the news the other day that a school library in Adelaide has given all their books away and is clearing out the space to become one big empty study area for students on e-books and laptops. When I started out twenty years ago in community public library service, I did not anticipate that in my lifetime, there might be a generation of kids who may never have the pleasure of going to the library for, an actual book. It was a different world and a different library service twenty years ago and while, good on them, libraries and librarians have been working like ducks on a pond to move with the times, that pleasure and comfort of books may not last another twenty more years of my career. Apart from helping people and making a difference in their lives, it is after all what I love about the library. So I would miss the pleasure of books in my work too much I think. If I am starting to sound like a dinosaur then c'est la vie..books are great. And don't get me wrong, libraries are still amazing community places but I am looking to the future, my future and if there is ever a time to change and do something different with it, the time is now. Leave it any longer and that Little Doubting Guy that sits on everyone's shoulder will be telling me I'm too set in my ways, just keep playing it safe. So, it is time for a change, a tree-change, a lifestyle change, a risk yeah but the chance that that risk will be the adventure of a lifetime. So here it is...

The Blue Bird Cafe in a town called Lockhart NSW. Population about 1298, about to be boosted by the arrival of Roger and Louise to make it to thirteen hundred (with a bit of poetic license). More on that story to come...