A walk on a busy Sunday morning

When I headed out for my walk this morning it was sunny and warm, and it had rained earlier in the morning. There were puddles on some of the pavements, and the corners of the buildings were damp. I went past the homeless man across the road from the casino, and he had little blocks of different-coloured glass near his collection hat; it was a cap that had just been turned upside down for people to throw coins into. The man himself was asleep on the footpath and people were walking around him.

I'd like to see him trying to sleep on that pavement on a work day, I imagined to myself. After getting through Darling Harbour I saw a plastic syringe without a needle sitting on the parapet next to a green, transparent plastic spoon on the bridge at Liverpool Street over Harbour Street. There were drifts of sand up Goulburn Street where the cars had pushed it aside from the wheel tracks.

Dixon Street south of Goulburn was busy as usual on a Sunday morning, with all the restaurant tables set out on the mall for people wanting to sit down and eat Chinese food. Some people were already sitting at the tables, waiting for their food. A yum-cha place near the top of the hill only had a few people sitting outside at tables.

Harris Street was almost deserted, with only a few people walking along. There was an Indian couple - aged in their twenties - walking up Harris Street and the man was dragging a wheeled shopping basket that had loose wheels. I felt like going up to him to tell him about the situation, for what good is a shopping trolley that has wheels that do not turn?

The airborne seeds from two days ago had all settled down and were lying in patches in the gutters and around the bases of the trees standing in their plots cut into the pavement. Some seeds were caught in the cracks between pavements. In any case, they were not flying around as they had been a couple of days before. Now they were all sitting quietly in silence as the world moved past around them.