The Goldberg Variations of Allen Road

Number 34 sings to me, a dusted blue layer cake, charming trinket box, the perfect townhouse. A Georgian-looking thing of perfection, snuggled duly in line with its bigger brothers of Allen Road. A stage-set faded shop sign reads ‘Mr Harvey’s snack bar’, barely discernible. I scroll in vain with one frozen finger, in search of who Mr Harvey may have been. How is it that just a few weeks ago the corners and secrets of this road looked entirely different? Stories sing from their walls and new eyes become accustomed, but on first meetings we are blinded. A big poet once described a train journey he had taken, the landscape that had rushed by, the beauty of it. The same journey he had taken 10 years later looked and felt like another world, except the landscape hadn’t changed at all. It was he who had. His own variation of myself. Yet often we hear that first impressions are the purest. The one constant is change and every step along my ‘hood reveals a new dance. Along Brighton Road, Number 67 is dressed in oak, its windows sheets of ice against billowing scarlet curtains, always drawn. Yet a big sign on the door shouts out ‘Please knock, we are in!’. Broken, black and white chequered pathways stretch out from doorways, whispers of the Victorian era left for stories. Wrapped against the cold I march for my refuge coffee cave, the Luminary, dancing the two metre distance around similar shadows. Suddenly raindrops break into little crystals as Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations pours into the street. A man cycling with his ghetto blaster seems utterly unaware of the liquid magic he has spun. I stare as he parks his bike outside a fruit & veg shop, Bach trickling down the street. The secret little variations of Allen Road, every moment a story. Our one constant is change.