My view, otherwise known as one of the few things keeping me sane in this place, looks incredible today. It’s raining, and these slate-grey clouds are sitting quite still, shrugged possessively around the neighbouring skyscrapers, and probably my own, too. The ANZ Bank Tower – an enormous, Gothic thing on the best of days, all brown stone, spikes, angles and black glass – is shooting straight up into the fog like some possessed urban beanstalk, threatening bats and hunchbacks and ancient bells somewhere in its unseen upper reaches. (Its actual inhabitants are, I imagine, more along the lines of a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters)
While the clouds bear down from above, the lesser buildings below defiantely belch out their own obscuring fumes as their steam vents go into overdrive, throwing a lighter, less ominous mist back up at the sky. And it seems to me that I am sitting somewhere in the middle, no doubt an optical illusion, I could be in the midst of the thickest, darkest cloud in the city, but it looks like I’m in between two strata of mist, where the sun is the brightest. I’m in this corridor of dull yellow that stretches above the street and below the tops of the skyscrapers. I wouldn’t know it was raining if it weren’t for the parade of umbrellas I saw when I looked down to check that the ground was still there.
