Can you guess where we are NOW?

Well, can you guess where we are now, based on the photo below?

We're here for David to have MRI investigation of his neck bones in connection with pain and weakness in his right arm. Worse in last couple of months, so may be to do with being stretched back under anaesthetic for a couple of hours for thyroid surgery. In other news though, the results of scans after the radiotherapy treatment are perfect. Whew.

Yes, it's Sydney. Having got the medicals out of the way it was time for some fun.  So yesterday we had a walk from Surry Hills to the NSW Art Gallery, passing this lovely old building in the city en route.  It is St Mary's Cathedral and is in fact the place where Marjory was married to David's Dad Jim all those years ago in the 1940's.

 We were at the Gallery to see the Picasso exhibition and what a tour de force it is.  Over seven decades of fearless innovation are represented, from some technically perfect little academic sketches done at art school in his teens, right through to the huge, expressive and powerfully suggestive oils of his nineties. Picasso said, "I could draw like an adult when I was young, and it took me the rest of my life to learn to draw like a child"

This was much richer than the Picasso exhibition I saw in Melbourne a couple of years ago. But it was similarly confronting in that macho Spanish way. He had so many lovers and yet his portraits of them are anything but tender. They are all about bits of them, the bits of his particular focus: breasts, eyes, hair, openings.

After Picasso we had another enjoyable and muscular cultural offering, long awaited and keenly anticipated. It was held here (below) at the gorgeously over-the-top ornamented State Theatre in Market Street.  They just don't build them like this any more.  I hope no-one ever gets the idea it would be a good move to gut this and renovate it. But I wouldn't put anything past Barry O'Farrell.

Here's David in the stalls, all excited like a kid waiting for a treat.

And here's the support act, a gentle indigenous duo from Rockhampton, family in the audience and stoked to be there, as if they couldn't quite believe they had been chosen. Name of Busby Marou http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Marou

And this is the big name they were supporting: the incomparable KD Lang.

She and her big country rocking band Siss Boom Bang are doing an Australian tour.  What a privilege to hear that remarkable voice that whispers and soars and roars and swoops.  She can hold a semidemitone under a note, then resolve it and howl into a big long finish at full power that goes on and on. The tender emotional impact of her delivery is all the more remarkable, coming from this big boned, crew cut, plainly dressed dyke. What a performer. She said, "You may find, you people of the female persuasion, a strange pull towards the stage.." Pause.  "This is normal"  By the end of the show she was down to bare feet and an open shirt, bending towards and touching the people who had left their seats to come and dance in front of the stage.

We knew all the songs. The crowd roared and whistled and clapped every one, and then she sang an encore and another and another, five in all.

They must have been exhausted, but they all looked like they were having so much fun. A great night.