One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

queen_nephthys and I spent most of today cruising country towns under a soggy sky in cold conditions. Clunes, a rather rundown town between Ballarat and Bendigo is trying to reinvent itself as a book town ala Hay-On-Wye (which is my third favourite Welsh town after Bangor and Llangollen). Every spare shopfront in town was packed with trestle tables heavy with books, thousands of people were jammed kidney to elbow browsing the volumes and for some reason, there was a recumbent bicycle race going on in the main street. Every few minutes one of the bikes would grate over the small domed plastic cups that marked the bicycle course with a loud grinding noise. I grabbed a sausage at the sausage sizzle outside the RSL Club and after an hour of browsing came out of there with six books: a volume of bawdy music hall songs from the early 19th Century, Barry Humphries' autobiography, Eric Sykes' autobiography, a MAN FROM UNCLE novel, an Astronomy book and a large, old volume of adventure stories for boys called Bravely Done, which was given to a student for coming first in his class in 1911 (not bad for $5!).

The crowds started to get to us, so we drove off and ended up at the monthly farmers' market at Talbot, where I picked up a couple of smokily delicious sticks of chilli ostrich kabana, which is excellent. queen_nephthys got a couple of kilos of good orchard-fresh apples and we also scored a loaf of locally baked sourdough for our picnic lunch, which we ate at a riverside rest stop somewhere between Maryborough and Newlyn. From there we went to Daylesford for coffee and cake, and then home once more through intermittent rain.

The countryside in that part of Victoria looks great at the moment. The grass, after the drought has broken is vividly green and dams are filling up again. Cattle are on agistment on the road verges and the fire bans are off so farmers are burning out tree-stumps they hadn't been able to get rid of before now. Looks lovely after the sere brownness of the last few years.