The hotel Lionel and I are staying in has a funny little swimming pool about the size of a tea cup. The pool is situated beneath a highway and, oddly, populated by the hotel guests. It looks, from my balcony spy point, like a pool of pollution and anything but refreshing. Regardless, the people are happy in the chlorine.
This is one of the greatest hotel’s on earth: My mobile phone charger forgot to get into my suitcase and stayed at home. But, would you know it, but the hotel has over 250 mobile phone chargers in their lost property. Less than five minutes was spent finding one to fit my phone and the world of text messages and mobile rings returned to me.
All these details are just details – the act today was Lionel in the Red Box Gallery. The crowd was tiny but diverse. I think most other festival goers were at the big name events featuring historians and pearl earrings and palatable stuff. Yet, in the glassed in theater, Lionel took those listening into the past, present and future of his life and the landscape of Brisbane. The audience were transfixed and, I hope, fully aware that what they were hearing would never be repeated in the same way again; that the poems from Lionel, today, were read because they had to be.
