Just another beautiful Sunday in the city that's nothing like Middlesbrough

Hobarts Food Court in the middle of the shopping mall is deserted. It's early morning and aside from the odd stray and those pressed into service in the search for shoes sit miles apart at deserted tables. I had arrived into the shopping mall early, the car park deserted, travelling back to humanity in a lift under construction, where the lift voice gives Ground Floor a sexy elongated twist. I imagine lonely men hang on that voice for ages, as they buy their toothpaste and while away the hours until senility. My beverage of choice is a badly frozen coke that drips disdain for the laws of physics. Around me, small Asian teenagers fitfully pick at early morning concoctions simmering in vats, somehow becoming things of promise and disappointment at the same time, almost Buddhist in their complexity. The smell of stew overwhelms them as they rub their sleepy eyes and drink water by the gallon. 1ne girl is smiling a tired smile in my direction while she clutches a bottle of iced tea in her shaking hand, while a cleaner pushes around a cart smelling of Ammonia with no sense of direction, banging it into table legs and chairs and cursing the inventor of the trolley wheel loudly and furiously. It's an unromantic and desperate setting, as vendors arrive to unpack boxes and look busy ahead of a meagre Sunday trade. I've got Bomb The Bass on my IPOD and have shut out most of the worldly distractions. The only other person still eating when I throw my Coke away is a burly Samoan man - my racial profiling is only sound because he has a Samoan rugby top on - with a coke gripped tightly in his clenched fist. He sits his large frame entirely on the edge of his chair, ready to spring off it at the slightest ethnic slight, and I'm certainly not going to give him an opportunity to unfurl his tension on me. As I leave, his mobile phone rings - his ringtone is a Justin Timberlake song, 1ne of the camper 1nes, hard as that is to pick. He grunts Samoanly into the air, and says in a stern lifeless voice the phone belongs to his girlfriend. I believe him, but I feel sorry for the poor coke can, which suffers for the ringtone by being dispatched with a hefty rugby style kick into the bin, as the Samoan walks off steaming, which is more than can be said for the average dim sim coming out of stall no 5...

I take my drink away from the scene of the crime. I wander for a bit past a hot dog stand. I used to eat a hot dog every day from this particular establishment, and still don't quite no why. There's a girl with early morning hair and a black netball skirt draped over the counter of the hot dog stand like a trade show model would drape herself over the bonnet of a car, face down on her elbows smiling sweetly. I suspect she's simply decided to be wacky and outrageous, and she shoots me an arched eyebrow and a wink which suggests as much. I'm not in the mood for wacky and outrageous though, and when I walk off she's trying to show a bit of thigh to an elderly passing gentleman who's holding a pack of Band Aids and walking at a glacial pace. He doesn't even stop to look at the rogue thigh, or if he does, he's used more subtle perving techniques than the average passer by. He's very protective of his band aids though. He holds them in the palm of his hand and hisses angrily at any passer by who comes near him, his tight jeans, his slicked back poster boy for brylcreem hair, but most of all his Band Aids. The girl on the counter of the hot dog stand is undeterred at being turned down and continues to try and throw sexy shapes underneath an illuminated cartoon boy holding a hotdog who's smile and expression never changes. The old man with the Band Aids pushes a baseball cap tightly onto his head with all the care and style of a true Syrup patron trying to look young under a strobe light and begins muttering to his companion about what a terrible day he's had. She holds up her left hand, a wrinkled stop sign, and asks for the Band Aids. It breaks the old mans spirit to be nagged and dismissed, his face and standard of hair care visibly wilting, so he looks back for a glimpse of thigh, and then turns in the direction of the sexy lift, condemned to a life of Sunday shopping until death do them part...

I'm in Harris Scarfe. 1nce Fitzgeralds, a jewelled hubbub of Xmas decorations, strangely piled up toys and things with horribly incorrect price tags - look ma! A kettle for 4c - it's now just a glorified cavernous warehouse, sale signs stuck to the floor and middle aged mothers swishing cougar like through the rack of affordable but fashionable jumpers. 1ne of them, glammed up to the 9nes, proudly holds up a kimono style nightgown, audibly saying Ta-Da in the direction of some confused Indian students who had hopped in for batteries. Do they say Ta-Da in India or is it just her shimmering middle aged silver eyeliner that has confused them, who could say, but they are entranced at the gaudy display regardless. She hams it up of course, saying in the direction of no-1ne in particular I'll take it, and then putting her hands on her hips like Anne Maree Cooksley would have done on the fringes of a Price Is Right set, straddling the showcase. Trouble is of course, there's no staff to ring up the purchase. So we all form 1ne elongated queue, the Indians at the back arguing about why he didn't just buy batteries at the garage, me, rocked by an ice cream headache as the Frozen Coke kicks in like anarchy at a rock festival, the silver woman, who I realise has a tattoo on her hand in Japanese writing that bends and twists and sags through her wrinkles, that unfortunately I stare at a little bit too long until she catches me and almost, but thankfully doesn't, engage me in conversation about. At the head of the queue are a party of elderly English grumblers, all tweed, grey hair and walking canes, hunting the biggest game of all - a shopkeep. The senior member of the hunting party leans on his elbow at the counter like they he's propping up the bar and says it was never like this in Middlesbrough. As I like at the queue and a red faced puffy girl in tight black pants sprinting from the remnants of homeware to serve us, I can only, albeit quietly, concur...

The lift back to the car is sadly voiced by an aggressive, sullen German sounding woman who sighs audibly at the arrival on Car Park Level 3hree. I only share the disembodied voices disappointment because my car is still there intact and not taken by urchins for scrap - the insurance payout is surprisingly tasty. I left most of my melancholy behind at lunch anyway, picking and nibbling at a cold chicken parma while 2wo bogans broke up behind me and a barmaid of a nervous disposition let out an audible obsencity when she dropped a glass. My mood is not especially bouyant on this particular Sunday anyway - sports are not your friend my son and neither are the encroaching black eyes of middle age. A barmaid who missed her calling to play a panto dwarf makes amiable mid lunch conversation as she wipes the crumbs from a previous occupant off the table with a sweeping motion of her jaycloth. She tells me about her life, as if I asked, as the crumbs, when I look closer, aren't swept at all, but huddled in the corner like naughty schoolchildren late back from lunch. I haven't been so penned into a corner since I was offered a screenplay by a crazy man on a bus. She isn't in a particularly cheerful mood either, all bangs and curls and incomplete sentences that end in that Australian way where it sounds like a definitive statement is somehow also a question. She isn't happy with her life, she isn't happy with her jaycloth, her chunky bangles clang off the edge of a table as the steam from my chips threatens to fog up her glasses. Most of all she isn't happy about Hobart. She begins tearing the place to shreds as she wipes nothing in particular. I think about my morning and wonder if this is what I sound like to my particular sounding boards, but in the end I say nothing other than to tell her Hobart has it's flaws, but it's nothing like Middlesbrough, and she disappears into the kitchen confused as the bogans eat a make up chip, reconciled as quickly as they broke up, the issue of what the lead singer of Nickelbacks real name is finally and utterably settled...

I would like to go to Middlesbrough 1ne day for what it's worth...if I'm stuck in a queue, I'll know they are lying...