Beastly

Melbourne is finally treating me to a healthy serving of its famous rain. Somehow the city just makes more sense when it’s wet, grey and gloomy, rather than bathed in sunshine and heat. Nothing worse than a sweaty broiled hipster, after all.


Speaking of hipsters, I treated myself to a hipster haircut and beard trim yesterday. You know you’re getting a proper hipster haircut when you’re sitting in a space filled with raw wood and exposed brick and the barber offers you a cider before getting out the scissors.





Beef’s is named after Beef, the owner’s lovable couch-sized mastiff. Beef’s face adorns the signage, and the beast himself spends his days dozing in the window, snoring like an idling tractor. As a piece of marketing its brilliant and, apparently, entirely accidental: the barber just didn’t want to leave him at home all day.


I came out immaculately shorn and smelling like four different kinds of manliness.


In the evening I went to another comedy show, ‘She Was Probably Not a Robot’ by the charmingly kooky Stuart Bowden. The show is basically a loose tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world shot through with expertly improvised floundering. Bowden has a warm and goofy stage persona that makes it impossible not to like him, even when he’s just capering maniacally around the stage, or beating me over the head with an air mattress, or telling random audience members how they’re going to die (head falling off while brushing their teeth, in one case).


I ended my evening with a quintessential Melbourne experience: eating late-night Anzac biscuit gelati in St Kilda while being shouted at by a homeless lunatic about deodorant.