It’s not the bright colours and smells that assault you first.
It’s the crowd.
Only on Saturdays does it get this crowded anywhere
in Hobart. People from all over the place.
Curious tourists snap away with their cameras, despite the wet-flannel drizzle.
Vegetable and fruit vendors, multicoloured carrots, aromatic limes,
the resplendent flower stall with bouquets of roses, rhododendrons, hibiscus, cyclamens,
hyacinths, geraniums, pelargoniums, poppies…
The cake shop sells poppy cakes, which I buy because it reminds me of seed cakes from The Hobbit.
Anything and everything you need.
You name the ware
and there will be a shop under a rainbow coloured umbrella selling it there.
Visitors relax outside Irish Murphy’s with their ales,
listening to street performers serenading them.
The sounds of violins, saxophones, accordions and siren calls fill the air.
Despite poor weather I’m delighted to be there
on my first visit.
I smell something tantalising.
It’s a Bratwürste stall. Popping and hissing sounds come from within.
Resistance is futile.
Another stall proclaims a local ice cream called Valhalla.
The creamy, dark, bittersweet chocolate ice cream is heaped on a monstrously proportioned cone.
It’s almost like lifting Thor’s Hammer.
I buy a jacket and a keychain.
The keychain is square and nondescript
but has Hobart’s map inside it.
It used to jangle cheerfully with my Home and office keys, the keys to all our windows and some miscellaneous, mysterious ones that opened nothing.
I still have the keychain.
It is now bruised and battered, chipped in places, but the map inside is clear as day.
Just like my heart.
If I misplace it, I panic.
Not because of the house keys it carries now.
But because it was my first purchase. A link to another life.
It doesn’t jangle happily with my keys anymore.
These are alien, hanging desolately only for the singular purpose of opening a front door.
