7:22 am, Friday – Glenelg North Beach

Mar 15, 2025 | Mickey Randall

Jogging along the ribbon of blonde sand, he was grateful for the gulf and majestic sky.

There were only vague, soundless characters scattered on the coast.

In the softened distance a lone figure was smudged on the scenery. He could make out her muted pink dress. She was at the water’s edge, moving north towards West Beach.

Arriving at her side he slowed and bent towards her. Then he reached for the closest shoulder. He kissed her cheek—exquisite, familiar—and was moved in a profound, unspoken way.

She murmured that the morning suited her, that she should come here more often.

He reminded her of the unseasonal winter’s day, a few years’ back, when they did this before work.

She smiled, a kind nod to their memory.

Yes, he said, August—just before the Josh Pyke concert.

He returned to his jog and stretched away from her. The water receded some more with the moon’s fading gravity.

It was the briefest of exchanges, a sliver of chat. But it was connective and affectionate. As he pushed away, she offered tender encouragement after him, before laughing too.

Squaring his shoulders to make erect his carriage, he stared towards the usual turn-around point. It was just beyond a jutting ramp, bordered with rocks.

With the delighted sun vaulting into the incalculable blue, he’d soon return and ease to a walk alongside her.

Again, he would kiss her cheek.

You and I Colour in the Hours

Aug 6, 2024 | Mickey Randall

The beach, our beach, lies serenely under the mild weather and is sparsely populated.

Awaking early, you urge me to accompany you. We’d not been for months. Trackies and coats, and off we went. Coffee would wait and welcome us back home, warmly.

Three D radio plays in the car and you ask about Classic FM. I reply that it’s most needed for the monotony of workday commutes.

Stormy weather’s dumped seaweed along the sand, and you wonder if this is the culprit of your recent mystery (leg) bites. Shortly after, I feel a scratch at my ankle but it’s a false alarm or a sympathy sting. We survive.

There’s a urine odour coming from the rocks by the ramp. Its stink is still there upon our return. We speculate about its origin: canine or (yuk) human?

We see a woman named Sara and her dog, part poodle, part Golden Retriever. In its mouth is a tennis ball and not a nugget of gold (disappointing as they promise to retrieve gold).

I’m pleased to have started this day by surveying our beach. It’s a treat.

I love how a Sunday can unfurl with only minor obligations and the buoyant opportunity during which you and I colour in the hours.

There’s such domestic intimacy in the gentle rituals of coffee, oats, and toast (these last two a half-rhyme). Sharing breakfast with you is rich with subtext because of the closeness of dawn. I’m newly grateful that this is part of our morning.

Our chat topics meander from Greece to the day’s chores including brasso and handles and watch bands (only briefly considered for ‘My Favourite Things’) to the Meg Ryan airport film we watched last night and the various personal connections we unearthed.

There’s mostly affirmation and encouragement of each other. It’s a healthy and kind exchange as befits a weekend day before lunch.

With ladder and baskets and Mum’s good scissors (similarly rejected by Julie Andrews) we tramp next door to Mrs. Hambour’s as requested by her son, Nick. You climb the ladder, and I steady you during your ascent. This, too, is a privilege for which I’m pleased. You flick open the latch and in we go.

It’s still and quiet.

Beneath the lemon tree, I pluck off some sizable specimens while you snip some camelias. It’s joyous foraging and a perfect way to invest some languid moments. The simple rhythm of our dual labours is meditative.

The tree has presented with a substantial crop, and I remark that we should return in a few weeks. You make the kind comment that the camelias would be nice for Mum’s birthday, but I suggest by then they could be finished. I note how like so much of what you offer others, there’s endless generosity in the promotion of happiness.

I also contemplate my blessing in finding you here with me on this calm and tender morning. It’s miraculous and soaring evidence of how wonderous our little planet can be.

Three Moments of Beauty

May 25, 2024 | Mickey Randall

Trundling along the murky esplanade, dawn was hiding behind the Adelaide Hills. To the west the ocean lay as if it too were asleep making me the sole speck of animated life. Some mornings are crisp and the world’s in sharp, razored focus. Today, the sky was fuddled and uncertain.

A distant, descending plane hung silently; its light frozen against the darkness like a lamp. Looming over the seascape, the burning, off-white moon threatened as if in an old horror film. The ghostly glow illuminated my plodding path and connected night and day.

Considering nature’s ravenous fire and the minuteness of human life, I kept running.

As is my happy habit I’m eternally re-reading The Sportswriter series and am on the final novel. The prose is often startling in its magnificence and makes me inwardly gasp. I forever find literary diamonds in these and Be Mine offers this scene at Mt. Rushmore:

Just now, as if propelled from the mountain itself, a helicopter- tiny- materializes down out of the marbled heavens, high-tailed and insect-like, and for all of us along the viewing wall, soundless. It passes on string through the grainy air, tilts to starboard, seems for a moment to pause, then slides away, changes course and makes a dreamlike pass close to the presidential physiognomies, comes about again, tail swaying, makes a pass the other way, so that whoever’s inside get the fullest view up close.

The author, Richard Ford, has a rare sensitivity to the splendor and joy of words.

Originating in Athens, Georgia, REM was primarily a guitar band, and courtesy of singer Michael Stipe’s lyrics, they presented the world opaquely. Their jangling sounds were, for example, sometimes accompanied by a mandolin and sometimes by arena-sized grungy bombast, but REM’s most gorgeous track is one of which acclaimed keyboardists, Elton John and Ben Folds would be proud. ‘Nightswimming’ is a piano delight, penned and played by the band’s polymath bassist, Mike Mills. The circular motif is at once fragile but also driven, serenely.

It features on the album Automatic for the People, a meditative, melancholy record that gave opportune shape and meaning to my West Coast life when it was released three decades’ back. ‘Nightswimming’ is a prayer to nostalgia, friendship, and summer’s end. Spending time with the song this week, its embrace is that of a dear, old companion.

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit around the fairest sun?

last swim

Apr 3, 2024 | Mickey Randall

Life is boredom then fear.

Or at least according to the poet Philip Larkin. Fear lurks just beyond the horizon’s curve with the crawling truth that eventually everything will succumb. I’m certain I’ve played my final game of footy and probably cricket too. These are aggregated losses, joining the ever-lengthening string of diminutive deaths.

Instead, I now run thirty kilometres a week, partly driven by knowing of people whose knees or hips have called time on this. Every morning (lately under the cape of darkness) because I can, I stumble out onto the tarmac and trot beachward. I often wonder if I’m running towards a destination or from a spectre. The disquieting thought lingers: what if this is all halted? One day, of course, it will.

It’s easy to spot the opening to a sequence. A baby’s first steps, a first ever goal in a footy match, or a first love. These are commencements we can celebrate.

I love the first swim of the summer as the world opens up when the lengthy, lethargic days stretch out like a fluttering ribbon. While not endless, we sometimes pretend to ourselves that they might be.

For some pursuits, the last in a sequence can also be simple to note. Grand finals, New Year’s Eve, our last day on holiday. But for other activities, how do we reconcile not knowing which is the last? I like to think there’ll often be one more.

There’s always next year, until there isn’t, so I appreciate our beach. When I say swimming, not actual freestyle or breaststroke or anything as deliberate and exhausting as this. Just standing about in the greenish-blue shallows.

Late March and under the slanting sun, towelling off on Glenelg North’s crunchy sand, I promise myself with the next temperature spike I’ll be back down in the ocean. And then abruptly, summer vanishes and exquisite as it is, autumn arrives but swimming’s done. Some years, that anticipated next time just doesn’t come and I look back with minor regret.

To squeeze these moments like a ripe orange, I plunge in. Claire tip-toes along the sand and inches her way out, grimacing with every step. Waist-deep, we chat and look around us. My eyes dart about for stingrays and fins. I gaze north towards the West Beach Sailing Club and then south at the Marina. Flinging myself into a marching wave the salty stuff blasts by as, eyes open, I scan the corrugated floor.

Upright with water cascading off me, it’s a phantasmagoric instant and once more the beach, that narrow, ever-pulsing connector of ocean and earth, nudges me into gratitude and tranquility.

So, is adult life governed by fear? Only if we choose.