I Know What I Did This Summer

This was not how I expected to spend my Christmas break, but 1500 pieces later at least I can say I helped to do something.


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If you met yourself from the future, what would you ask your future self?
What if they wont tell you anything?


Not the First Time

Today was not the first day of my life that began with sunrise in North Adelaide walking the dog and sunset at the beach walking with my wife. I didn't take any pictures, which is not because there was nothing to see nor great light. I am privileged that despite what happens in my life I can enjoy pleasures such as these with such regularity that I don't even feel the need to document them. I also ate what apparently is Australia's best breakfast of 2023 and I didn't take photos of that either.

What I did document today were these Nash themed oat-flour gingerbread cookies.


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Optimizing The System

Currently, my favourite coffee in Adelaide based on taste is The Grind in the central markets. They are a treat, as the price is now $7 for a large flat white which must be noted contains a lot of shots of coffee that you will feel after sipping.

We filled up two backups with fruit and vegetables after that, for about $19 (which for future reference was quite good and would have been double at the supermarket).

Then we went to the supermarket and spent a lot of money on groceries like frozen berries, sugar free soft drink, and a royal flush of dog treats.

There's a lamb surplus in 2023, so lamb legs are now much cheaper by volume than excellent tasting coffee. Lamb is a good meat, but a pain to roast as it takes a long time. Today I experimented by searing it in a frying pan with salt, pepper, olive oil and garlic at about 11am and then putting it in the slow cooker on top of a cup of chicken stock and a few sprigs of rosemary. It was ready about 6:30 and I have to say it turned out extremely well for something I put very little effort in to. I even made a wheat-free gravy out of the leftover stock and some chickpea flour and despite being lumpy that was easy cooking too.

Where Am I?

The last week of September has been the kind of unrealistic spring weather you dream about in winter. Sunny, warm enough to wear shorts, but not so hot you can't go outside. Basically perfect, if you don't suffer from allergies. I've been riding my bike into town when I'm not working from home. Drinking coffees in the sun. I can't help being fascinated by flowers and the lifecycle of plants.

On the weekend we went to the Barossa to dog sit, and took Nash along for the ride. This presented more opportunities for enjoying the weather. We did the full Kaiserstuhl walk after having to cut it short last time due to injuries. I ate cereal, fruit and yogurt on a log in the morning light watching the birds before striding on up the hill and it felt like this was what my body was made for.

While in the area I also tried award winning bacon (it tasted like bacon smells like) and visited Greenock Brewery for a tasting paddle. I also walked around a lake and took in the golden canola fields.

The second brown snake spotting made us to decide on cutting the trip short, and we packed the second dog into the car for two more nights of dog sitting back in Adelaide.

I feel like I will finally sleep well tonight.

Chance of a Shower

I've been back from Europe for over a week now. Did I ever really go there? The thousands of photos indicate yes.

I've ridden my bike three times already, in an attempt to conserve some of the summer spirit. The first trip was to the supermarket, then on Monday I rode along the Torrens to visit the office. The sky was overcast, the water was brown and the boring, muted towers of the Adelaide skyline gave me a visceral reaction. I muttered some ungracious things about the city and did not take any photos.

Since then my body has adjusted to the dark and the cold and the damp. It was definitely a good idea to put fresh bedsheets on the bed the day we left. There is still eight weeks of winter remaining, but at least the backyard that confronted me after a week away was not just a gigantic pile of mulberry leaves, but a couple of flowers too.

Saturday was my third bike ride, a trip to the markets between downpours for delicious, strong coffee better than anything I had in Europe (except maybe one in Rome) and cheap fruit. I felt a lot better after that one. Then we rode back home.

I Tried Being a Parisian

Today I tried being a Parisian. After being here six nights, seeing most of the tourist attractions, eating a lot of kebabs and working out how to use the self service checkouts at Monoprix I finally found myself with a couple of hours free to live in the city instead of visit it.

This meant, leaving my hotel wearing sneakers instead of hiking boots. Donning sunglasses and noise cancelling headphones. No backpack, camera, or map. I had places to go and things to do.

My first impressions, it reminded me of living in Sydney. There too, any visit to the city for work or leisure is always slowed down by tourists. Paris is a lot vaster than Sydney. And because of the language, tourists stand out much more here too. I would imagine as a Parisian that it would be easy to feel superior when there is a ubiquitous lower class of human - the tourist - in your daily life behaving clueless and obnoxious because they don't know your language or your culture.

I strode by some tourists on my way to the supermarket, and left them standing dumbly while they waited for traffic signals that I jaywalked through. I reached some gardens with a snack and a beer and music on and felt very at home putting my feet up on a second chair and relaxing under the cloudy, yet warm summer afternoon sky.

My belonging in Parisian lasted until someone sat next to me at the park and their cigarette smoke put me off. Which was not long.

This was actually my second visit to the Luxembourg Gardens today, and third gardens in general. I don't think I will ever tire of going for a walk first thing in the morning and then eating breakfast somewhere pleasant. The destination for us today was Jardin des Plantes. I was forced to eat my oats with a fork as one of the spoons has been MIA for a while.

We then indulged in more summer fruits from the street markets of Rue Mouffetard, as well as a chocolate covered eclair, that we took and enjoyed in Luxembourg under nice skies and in front of nice flowers.

Then we did visit one final museum, because we already had the reservation for Sainte-Chapelle. This place is only really worth visiting because of the stain glass windows, and yeah, they are impressive.


Each panel is a full story, most are books of the bible. I'm starting the plan now for converting my June journal entries into stain glass.

After that we ate lunch at an Israeli style creperie, enjoying a savoury crepe followed by a buttery one. This gave me some fuel for the being a Parisian that followed.

Our final evening: another visit to the bookstore, then dinner at Rosie's BBQ, and a walk along the river enjoying the sunset.

And that was that. C'est fini. Nothing left to do but go to bed so that I can then travel for 26 hours and end up in the cold.

The Eiffel Tower Sparkles At Night

We started our visit to Paris with the City of Lights walking tour, which concluded an hour before sunset.

Today was our first full day, and it was definitely filled.

Starting early, on a mostly deserted Boulevard St. Michel, we bought café crème from a takeaway store, the first hint that coffee in Paris was not going to compare to Italy.

We then ate crepes on Ile de Cité in a park that wasn't technically open.

After breakfast we needed to find a toilet, a journey that took us across the prow of Ile Saint-Lois (a 17th century planned neighbourhood), over the Seine, past the medieval architecture of Hôtel de Sens and to a small playground where a part of one of the Bastille's towers remains in a fenced off section behind an old gazebo.

No plaque, but a little bit of trash.

Between that point and our first afternoon nap in Paris we walked up the canal of Port de l'Arsenal, visited Place de la Bastille, had another average coffee among the shops of Marais, visited Place des Voges for further review of seventeenth century urban planning.

One of the first planned, public squares for recreation. Circa ~1604. Still going strong in 2023.

Then we visited one of the oldest houses in Paris (now a busy Pho place), had a kebab, and saw more of the canals.

Around dinner time we re-emerged to golden, early evening sunshine and browsed a couple of the many English second-hand Bookstores. As a book lover, these cramped spaces crammed with second hand novels, non-fiction, plays and everything else in narrow aisles and mismatched shelves stretching above my head reminded me of Portland, and were a treat just to be inside. The prices were quite high though.

After the bookstores we commenced a self-guided history tour of the nearby area, concentrated on the Latin Quarter and Île de la Cité. This took us past statues, old churches, parks and streetscapes, and highlighted the many appealing and busy restaurants between Church of Saint-Séverin and Boulevard Saint-Germain. We squeezed in to a table at La Maison de Gyros for an immense plate of chicken kebab, salad, fries and garlic sauce. More chicken in one meal than I think I ate in all of Italy.

Our tour continued after dinner, past the church into Square René Viviani to observe the oldest tree in Paris. There was a paving stone from the original Roman road somewhere around there, but I couldn't spot it before the whistles started to kick everyone out.

We crossed to the island and admired what was left of the Notre-Dame. An amazing building, and with all its scaffolding a reminder that even city staples that feel like they might last forever could one day be whittled down to a hard to find paving stone in a small garden.
Fortunately, the gargoyles withstood the flames. And we learned about the difference between gargoyles and grotesques, and added a few museums to the to do list.

After a further tour of the island, we came up to the O.G. modern Paris landmark the Pont Neuf. According to some French historians, on this bridge in the seventeenth century they invented for the first time "stopping and admiring a river in a city". And whether that's true or not, I do believe that at a time when rivers were full of mud and corpses and the many cast offs of early industry that anything that motivated city planners to take steps to clean up waterways and create walkable places to visit was a huge turning point in world history for people like me who would come to visit centuries later with my camera.

And speaking of walkable cities, we crossed Pont Neuf to the right bank, and then down to the edge of the Seine. As the sun set in front of us we walked four kilometres, never needing to cross a road once. The entire way, on both sides of the river, people sat with picnics and drinks and music. Parisians and tourists. Hustlers sold water, beer and cigarettes. Everyone was happy. A group walked behind us for a few minutes playing Titanium on their portable speaker on repeat and people sang along, which was a nice connection back to Adelaide on a Saturday night in France.

We reached the Eiffel Tower at dusk, paid a Euro for the toilet and then crossed back to a good spot in front of Trocadéro to wait for 11 PM and the light show.

During planning the Eiffel Tower didn't even earn a pin on my map of Paris, but it was worth seeing once. Not just for the spectacle, but to be a part of that huge crowd which spanned both sides of the river and all around me. Everyone was here to be in Paris. The part of my homo sapien brain that likes to conform to social norms was ecstatic. But more than that, during the sparkling that lit up the iron beams, the mood of the crowd carried the sensation that this was one of those moments in life that you look forward to, and that you don't forget. It symbolised the achievements of a species and an individual that allowed me to be born halfway across the world and to then stand here in this historic city for a few minutes. Five to be exact. Then we took the metro back to the hotel for sleep.