Escaping today’s guerrilla heat spike (41 degrees at 4.50pm), Claire and I march like North Korean soldiers from the motor and then we’re inside the dead-eyed TAB-tomb and want to steal through to the beer garden but head-butting all the internal walls, we’re thwarted as the Warradale Hotel comprises two separate buildings so it’s actually dual, eerily competing pubs with distinctive demographics, and we reluctantly retreat outside to the hotness; subsequently re-entering through the gaming section during which I’m sure Claire wants to shout, supportively, to the glum zombie faces, ‘Save yourselves from this vampiric psychic awfulness and the free tea and instant coffee and colourless digestive biscuits which aren’t really free’ and arriving in the Garden Bar, despite my studiously booking a spot on Monday and now stepping purposely like mildly enraged librarians, we locate no sign gently announcing in a kindly font, ‘Michael 5 pm,’ and it’s personally deflating and sets a prickly, I suspect, unrecoverable tone for my relationship with this colossal concrete pub, but right now doesn’t matter, as we enclose a dappled table reserved later for the dedicated, undoubtedly oppressed folk of the dastardly Spotlight emporium (fabrics, craft and homewares) who, we collectively decide, are getting their Christmas function done early this year, a celebration certainly to be fraught and hilarious and teary and concluding messily with more unashamed tears and multiple snotty carpark wailings of, “I bloody love you’ and ‘I tell you, Jayden’s not bloody good enough for you, Honestee’; however, as the ceiling aperture is useless, it’s a marginally toxic room, and boxes in the fuggy smoke (both vape and traditional, like so much in our world we now have electronic and organic versions) shrouding us like a Scooby Doo phantom, so we flee inside with our cherished friends Michelle and Trish, who are today’s Mystery Pub special guests like Suzi Quatro when she was on Happy Days as Leather Tuscadero (even becoming a brief love interest for Ralph Malph) and each of us clasps a unique Friday drink: Claire opting for a turbo-charged brandy and coke, Michelle indulging in a zesty and luscious cocktail, Trish choosing an uplifting soda water adorned with mint leaves (an unparalleled scent, methinks) while I foolishly endure my twice-a-year Heineken in retelling myself that it’s not an exotic lager but really just European VB sans the sophistication; spinning our attention to Michelle’s trip to that continent next year, which arrives as ‘I’m going to Eurovision in Malmo’ while my question to her, ‘Are you looking forward to the irony of it?’ receives a positive reply, with Michelle also listing kitsch delight, outrageous music, and ridiculous Swedish fun as key anticipations then our conversation migrates to our vegetated backyards and our sometimes errant offspring, and the bi-weekly quiz nights, and our respective dreamy retirement visions then concluding with goodbyes a-fluttering, and we’re going, ‘to the places you will be from,’ as the band Semisonic sings in the rousing barroom anthem, ‘Closing Time’; nevertheless, the curious future tense of the lyric is true for blessed people in midnight bars sometimes chance across their momentous other, and fashion mutually enriching lives, and I wonder about our table in the Warradale, yes, this very durable table which another sign indicates will later vanish when the floor beneath us enjoys a twilight transmogrification into a space for disco, Nutbush, the military two-step but hopefully not line dancing, and I mention the short story conference I’m currently attending to which Trish says, ‘The Californian creative writing professor (from whom at a provoking but productive workshop I was inspired to attempt this literary technique) is a dancer too and I danced with him Wednesday night at a salsa social,’ but overall it’s been a buoyant hour, and the Mystery Pub excursion into minor pleasure and suburban surprise continues, while in our tandoor car, Claire pulls the seatbelt over her shoulder.