One night last year I was sitting at my computer here in my tiny flat, and heard amplified fiddle playing in the near distance. I couldn't make out the tune, but the optimist in me thought that maybe it was an Irish folk band, and that I should go out and investigate. It was getting dark, and I was knackered, so I didn't want to change into my baggy old fat man clothes to do so, and I did what I had never done before: I went outside dressed as me.
Now "me" is an old lady in high-waist mum jeans, t-shirt, and cardigan, so this isn't all that scandalous. But it was the first time I'd ever gone outside without making an effort to look vaguely like a man. As I rounded the corner into Lygon Street, I started feeling a bit exposed. I also couldn't hear the music any more. This made no sense. It's Carlton; where else but Lygon Street is music going to come from?
Eventually I gave up on the music. Nobody was giving me a second look. The sky wasn't falling in. Granted, I wasn't wearing makeup or giving off any strong gender vibes one way or the other (or the other, or the other…), but where I come from that's challenge enough to the social order.
The mission became "Walk to the Green Man and back, and see if you can be relaxed about not pretending to be something you're not."
I was so pleased with myself that I took a selfie in the stairwell when I got home. The dam had broken. From then on, unless I was headed for an appointment where they were expecting ol' Deadname, the world got me instead. But I never did find out where the music was coming from.
Tonight I was just about to curl up in bed, watch an episode of 1970s Doctor Who on my phone, and sprinkle chocolate digestive crumbs all through the sheets, when I heard a fiddle playing off in the near distance.
You're joking.
I consulted the timestamp on that selfie: 18th February, 2023.
I consulted the current date (do I look like somebody who knows what day it is?): 18th February, 2024.
Right. Now I really need to know where that music is coming from. I put my jeans back on, and put Tom Baker on the back burner.
Instead of heading up Lygon Street, I go up the back lane, which the windows of my flat overlook. I take the opportunity to deposit a bag of rubbish at the bins, which the windows of my flat also overlook, and oversmell, if that's a word (a highly sought-after feature in rental property, if the cost of my tenancy is anything to go by).
Near the end of the lane there's an open gate through which I see a guy with a guitar and a radio mic leading a couple of dozen young adults through the motions of a bush dance on a pristine astroturf lawn. The fiddle is evidently part of a pre-recorded backing track. To make the scene even more Wes Anderson, a lanky young man with a magnificent plume of jet-black hair strides out through the gate with an urgent Groucho Marx gait.
"Ah, sorry! Excuse me!" I venture.
"You want to know what this is about?"
He's clearly in possession of an incisive intellect, so I realise: "Oh! This is a Melbourne Uni thing!"
He explains that the property is postgrad lodgings. These kids are undergrads on "the committee". (I don't ask which committee, as I'm not interested.) This is a function held every year for the committee members. Nothing to do with him, as he is a postgrad.
Well, yes obviously he's a postgrad. It hardly bears mentioning, given the fulsome sprigs of hair lined up almost neatly between his nose and mouth. Why in terms of maturity, he's clearly streets ahead of those feckless youths wheeling round the astroturf!
I thank him for resolving a long-standing mystery and he hurries off, presumably to vape down half a pack of cigarettes' worth of bubblegum-scented nicotine, phone his love interest, and scuttle back to his room in a crouch to conceal his erection.
I go back out the lane and round into Drummond Street to examine the front of the building. As student lodging goes, "Cydelia House" is pretty posh.
Case closed, I stop to take a celebratory selfie in that same stairwell, 365 days later. I really can't complain about that year. It's been a good one.