At about 3am on Friday night I was walking through the city to my tram stop to get home. It was cold and windy and I was in a hurry because I was very sleepy and I didn’t want to get sick. As I walked down Swanston Street, I passed a gay couple having a fight. I knew they were a couple because I’d seen them in a bar I was in earlier. The taller one was accusing the shorter one of doing drugs with someone else in the club they’d been at. The small one conceded that yes, he had, but was it really an issue? It was apparently an issue of trust.

I kept walking and I found out my tram wasn’t coming for 25 minutes, so I went to get some pizza while I waited. As I sat at the tram stop, shivering and eating my pizza, a homeless woman approached me and asked me for some change. I gave her some money because it was very cold. She didn’t say ‘thank you’, just ‘God bless.’ Initially this made me a cross and I considered her to be kind of rude, but then I realised that it wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful, she just used a different phrase to express it.

I fell asleep on the tram home and luckily someone woke me up a couple of stops before mine. He pointed to my Doc Martens.

‘Doc Martens.’
‘Yeah, they’re pretty comfy’
‘Whatcha wear them for?’
‘Huh? Oh, they’re just the only shoes I really have.’
‘Oh, so you just wear them as shoes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ah, that’s cool. Just that some people wear them for… Other reasons.’
‘What? Oh, I’m not a skinhead?’
‘Ah ok. I used to be a skinhead.’

I got off the tram and went home to bed.