It seemed to be a day ideally suited to sitting inside and eating. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, chocolate biscuits, walnuts, apple strudel…. Cold and windy outside, swirls of rain and the threat of hail.

Warm and tasty scrambled eggs for breakfast, accompanied by the second half of our weekend tasty fresh loaf from one of the Oakleigh bakeries.

A brisk walk in the wind took us over to Hughesdale, or maybe Murrumbeena, I’m not sure exactly where one suburb ends and the other begins. When I moved to Melbourne in 1996 I lived in Rosella street just around the corner from here. There are now two cafés on the stretch of Poath road that used to hold only a greasy fish and chips shop and a video games parlour. The Homebrew beer shop has closed and become a café called “Brew,” the old fish ’n chip shop is now the “Turtle Bean café.” A toss of the mental coin and it was the Turtle Bean for lunch; hot soup, red wine, toast slabs an inch thick and a bruschetta piled high. Yum!

The creep of the cafés… Murrumbeena, Hughesdale, Oakleigh, all still within “a reasonable distance” of the city and becoming increasingly desired as real-estate. Maybe we bought a house in the right place! Now if only there was a decent pub within easy walking distance — from being spoilt with riches in Richmond there’s only “the Junction Hotel” in Oakleigh — an uninspiring place offering “pokies” and “sport bar.”