another reality

We often go out for dinner on Friday night, just the three of us. One of our favourite occasional places is the dining room of the local Ex-Services Club. In our little hippy town of funky cafes and intellectual coffee drinkers (and even a sophisticated French restaurant) stepping into the Ex-Services is  like  entering into some other reality. 

It’s The Old Mullum, the small town of rural working people, of retired diary and sugarcane farmers. The Club is full of folk who I never ever see on the street or in the healthfood shop or the deli or the IGA. Elderly red-faced blokes with beer guts who wear long white socks with their neatly belted Bermuda shorts. Their plump, permed wives in floral dresses with pearls and cardigans.

I always feel at The Ex-Services like I’m somewhere else entirely, which gives me a pleasant, exotic feeling. As if I’m a traveller, a drop-in perhaps, to some strange out-west town in the middle of a long road trip.

As we head past the front desk, we glimpse the garish colours of the rowdy bar with its pokies and blaring tv screens and meat-tray raffles. 

But the dining room is sedate: brightly lit, with white paper table cloths and a neat vase of plastic flowers on each table. F particularly likes  the moving 3D waterfall picture behind the counter. He gets fish’n chips, his dad gets a steak, I get a prawn-avocado cocktail, which is delicious and somehow 1970’s appropriate. 

that wonderful pub carpet