Fitzroy on a cool sunny summer morning, a nice one to be out (the lack of extreme heat won't last forever but it's good while it does last). A bit of right knee stiffness at one point but that disappeared; still think I would have struggled to run today. A "nature is healing" indicator was that the overhead road sign at Clifton Hill, used over recent months to indicate things like curfew times, instead warned of alleged delays due to roadworks several kilometres away which finished a week ago.
This was a bit late in starting because I'd left a mask behind on the first attempt and wasn't sure whether I needed one (it's not a legal requirement any more in places like this but some premises set their own rules). I'm still not sure because they were signs up but they were being universally ignored, so I don't know whether they were considered current or were historical relics, like the ones (equally universally ignored) at various Bright establishments which said that Melbourne residents would be refused service. (The real historical relic was the one which also mentioned Mitchell Shire, which hasn't been lumped in with Melbourne since the start of August). One sign which has become more current than it was is the one in the changerooms telling people to "complete personal grooming discretely" - I'd long interpreted this as being just another person who can't tell the difference between "discreet" and "discrete" but maybe they were anticipating the coming of social distancing.
My current reading is a book which traces the rise and fall of Habsburg Europe (engagingly written and more interesting than it sounds). As it happens, the first three places it mentions in depth were all places I associate primarily with major orienteering events: Pecs (WMOC 2011), Wiener Neustadt (WMOC 2006) and Bautzen in the far southeast of Germany (JWOC training camp 1991). The last of these is remembered by me for making a 2-minute mistake and ending up in another country, and by everyone else for the toilet paper - it was only 18 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a lot of West German consumer products hadn't made it to the further reaches of the east yet, and East Germany appeared to have one sandpaper-like grade of paper which was used for everything from orienteering maps to wiping your backside.
Many years later at an ALP function, I unsuccessfully bid on a roll of East German toilet paper (brought back by a former MP from a 1980s official visit) in a fundraising auction. I did end up with a book on the history of the Bendigo ALP, which I remember chiefly for its account of the episode during the 1996 election when then leader John Brumby and
the candidate for Bendigo East became the first, but definitely not the last, political aspirants to have the misfortune to find themselves between a camera and a sign for the Reject Shop. (This is probably just about the only thing, other than a good level of fitness, that Julie has in common with Tony Abbott).