🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • Prompt

    Prompt, Smiling Service - Mary at Mary’s, Dee Why

    A woman stands just inside an open-fronted cafe, resting one hand on the back of a chair and smiling at the camera. She wears a black t-shirt, brown trousers and dark brown boots, and has one knee bent. Inside the cafe are tables and chairs, two tall fridges against the far wall, the serving counter and, behind it, a doorway leading into the kitchen. The floor is tiled, and glass doors are folded back against the right-hand side. A sign above the entrance says “Mary’s Dee Why” and “Serving Adore Estate Coffee”.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 28

  • Two smokestacks tower above the turn-off from Victoria Road towards the Anzac Bridge. On top of one stack is a big white rabbit with pink, floppy ears.

  • A little girl climbs the steps behind her mother, clutching a purple lamb.

  • A young woman with purple hair slouches along the walkway, scanning the park for evidence of hostility. Finding no-one to challenge, she takes out her phone with a sneer.

  • A familiar man zips through the park again on his electric scooter, sitting on two big sacks of rice. This time his feet are tucked behind.

  • A tiny little boy dawdles behind his mother on the walkway. Skinny legs and sleeves too long. His mother waits, and he hands her a drink to carry. Further along he finds a metal plate set into the path and stops to examine it. He goes down on all fours, then rocks back into a squat and watches his mother, waiting for her to notice. She does, and she calls to him. He crab-walks to the other side of the metal plate and sits down comfortably with his back to her.

  • The bus is full of penitents, heads bowed, phones in their laps.

  • Before the IMAX Theatre is a lawyers' building, in two shades of purple.

  • Hanging Around, Manly Wharf

    Sunlight shines through shallow water, lighting stretches of sand between patches of dark seaweed. Seven plastic canoes, red and yellow, are attached to ropes stretching above the surface. The canoes float at various angles, half in the sun and half in the shade of an old timber jetty. Near the canoes, a round yellow float drifts at the end of a rope, and in the darkness beneath the jetty, an eighth canoe is almost invisible.

  • The Axis, claims Putin’s new sting,
    Lives again in the West. What a thing!
    But the only new Axis,
    In theory and praxis,
    Is Russia aligned with Beijing.

  • Support

    It’s a strong support network, but they make it hard to sit down.

    Beside a busy road, building scaffolding begins in the right foreground and stretches into the distance, top left corner. The scaffolding stands at the edge of a tiled footpath, and immediately outside it is a bench, with metal frames and arm-rests and brown timber slats. There’s very little room to sit comfortably. Against the back of the bench is a planted area with tall grasses, trunks of palm trees and tall, dense, spiky green semi-succulents.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 27

  • As the bus flies down the Burnt Bridge Creek Bypass, a glimpse of the bike path flashes past. Two riders emerge from a tunnel and disappear beneath the road.

  • A little boy stands at a public phone in Dee Why, deeply engaged with his mother, who squats beside him. She passes him the phone receiver and he uses two hands to hold it to his ear. He listens. His face lights up.

    At the end of the call he says: ‘I spoke to Daddy!’

  • A man is collecting prescriptions at the chemist. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘for Valerie and the dog, Bella.’

  • As we cross the Parramatta River, seven kayaks paddle towards the Iron Cove Bridge.

  • Two women clash on York Street, strolling in bright red and hot pink, side by side.

  • The Spit. A middle-aged man in slacks and shirt (no helmet) sits astride his motor scooter, arms folded, unimpressed, as a man in high-vis points to the scooter parking area.

  • Rainy Window

    Looking out through a window with rain pouring down the glass, between four brown, rounded vertical blind slats. Everything outside is distorted by water on the glass, so that the view is like an abstract pattern: aqua-blue on the left, muddy grey and white at the top, brown at the bottom, green and grey in the centre and expanding upwards to the right, with patches of shadow and deeper colour here and there. Low down, in the centre of the window, something small and white is stuck to glass, and the water flows around it.

  • It’s a drone war, the first, no dissem’lin’,
    But ‘drone’ is a bit of a gremlin:
    There’s the flying device,
    Then there’s taking advice
    From the drones who inhabit the Kremlin.

  • Evening Rainbow, Collaroy Beach

    A wet, shiny main road in the early evening, and cars with their lights on. Across the road, four Norfolk Pine trees stand in silhouette against a blue sky that shades to grey on the horizon. A band of pink runs through the middle of the sky where a skinny rainbow curves up from the roof of a long, two-storey building with big, arched windows. The rainbow climbs steeply and exits half-way along the top of the photo.

  • A young woman walks round to the front of the Dee Why Grand, whose facade is concealed by scaffolding. She wears dark blue cargo pants and a pink, long-sleeved high-vis shirt, both with fluorescent strips. Her hair is long, dark and pony-tailed.

    As she walks, she keeps looking up at the facade as if she’s waiting for something to happen, and each time she does this she checks her watch.

  • Across the road a baby travels in a pouch, legs swaying with its mother’s steps.

  • On Spit Road in Mosman, a service pit has collapsed into a sinkhole. This danger to pedestrians is flagged with a pair of fluorescent plastic posts, but as these have themselves fallen into the hole, three witch’s hats have been added to the perimeter.

  • The Spit Bridge must be up, because traffic is banked up almost to the top of the hill on Manly Road. The young woman in front of me just sits for ages, but finally begins to read ‘The Girl on the Train’.

    ‘The Girl on the Bus’ isn’t written yet.

  • In the cardboard polling booth, a tiny old man fusses with his vast Senate voting paper. He has Elvis sideburns, and lots of dark hair in a faithfully executed Elvis quiff. His suit trousers are black with pinstripes, and he wears a white shirt and braces. He departs slowly, stiffly, and doesn’t swivel his hips.