Outside the Lansdowne Hotel at lunchtime

Yesterday morning I organised to meet with a friend for lunch at the Lansdowne Hotel, partly because we knew that the historic Sydney pub was to close, and so it was to perform a farewell of sorts that brought us to the corner of City Road and Broadway at lunchtime. As I arrived before my friend at the spot, I decided to turn on Periscope to broadcast the street view to followers. I have set up the app to automatically save videos to my camera roll but for some reason the recording is not as long as the video I actually broadcast initially. But never mind, there's no point in crying over spilt milk.

For me it's a familiar location. For most of the time I was an undergraduate I lived not far from this spot, in Glebe on Franklin Street just behind Grace Bros, which is now the Broadway Shopping Centre. Which is why I have an old photo taken in those days showing a Kingswood cornering eastward from Broadway onto City Road. It was always a busy intersection but it's a lot busier now than it was then, for obvious reasons.

When my friend arrived we both went inside the pub but since the hotel is closing down - it will become a music school - the kitchen had closed for good the night before, so we just drank a celebratory beer each at a shaky table on the footpath then jumped in a cab and headed south to the Marlborough Hotel in Newtown for lunch. I had the schnitzel and chips with gravy and my friend had the felafel salad. We had more beers and a bottle of wine, then a final beer to finish the session. Eventually my friend went off to meet someone at a location further down King Street and I jumped in a cab and came home, where I teased my daughter with drunk tweets on Twitter. Bad form, I know, since for health reasons she doesn't drink as much as she used to.