A very odd day

I've always been jealous of people who have lives full of fantastic experiences that they just wander into. I've been reading Rousseau's Confessions recently. Actually, I was reading it, and then somehow lost my book, possibly at Uni. Which is symptomatic of my absent mindedness. But I've borrowed another copy from the library.

His life, it seems, was a constant series of these sorts of events. It's an excellent book.. very timeless, you almost forget that he is writing about his life in the 1730s, except for the constant romance of it all.

Anyway, to get to the point, I had a day rather like that today, in my own small way. I had a six hour break between classes, and was waiting about in a courtyard near one of the uni's cafes, attempting to write a sort of awful poetry without any concern for metre or rhyme. Which is to say, words in lines, not poetry at all. After a while I noticed that I could hear a piano, so I stood up and wandered in that direction, wondering if it was a recording. As it turned out, in the hall full of tables attached to the cafe there was a man playing in the corner.

He was rather small, with grey hair, completely hidden until you looked around for him. He didn't seem to notice me, and I thought it best to be inconspicuous and sit there, writing away. For the next hour and a half we were the only two people around, except for cafe staff trundling trolleys across, and a few cleaners who stopped in and looked momentarily capitivated. It was a very nice piece that he was playing- sweetly melancholy. It was just about the first cold day of the year outside, but sunny, and the hall opened onto the courtyard.

I've been at the uni for more than two years now, and parts of it are quite old (by Australian standards), which- being so precious, as very few buildings here date from 1856- aren't often used by undergraduate students. I had a lot of time, and it would be a pity were I to leave in a year or two without exploring them. So I spent another hour waiting for my class in an empty hallway, upstairs in the cloisters, underneath this magnificent carved stone ceiling that sucked up noise like a tomb. There's an enormous stained glass window there which, despite its mundane subject matter, looks amazing in the early evening. Those were my accidental moments today. They don't compare with Rousseau, but I enjoyed them.