A humorous and honest account of how the author spent a month exploring his home city, going to many out-of-the-way places with his partner and young child, and learned to enjoy the present rather than worry about the past.
At 7 am on Monday 1 September 2003, the day Lucy and I celebrated our eighth not-married-but-together anniversary, we were in bed with our ten-month-old daughter Bibi lying chaperone between us when the crash of breaking glass startled us awake. Bibi wailed. I jumped out of bed and crept to the window, three men were attacking the front of the house next door with sledgehammers and crowbars. They were crashing in windows and bashing through walls. I sighed. 'It's started,' I said.
James O'Loghlin and his partner Lucy were concerned. Their once-peaceful mornings would now be full of dust, loud radio and miscellaneous smashing from the demolition and rebuilding going on next door. Then came the idea: they would get out of the house every morning, but they wouldn't just go and sit in the park. Each day for that month they'd go somewhere they'd never been before. Between the three of them - James, Lucy and Bibi - they'd lived in Sydney for many years, but it was full of places they hadn't seen and things they'd never done. It was time to do some catching up.
Surely you can't have new experiences and see new things in a city where you've lived for twenty years, can you? And isn't it ridiculous to think you can feel the wide-eyed excitement that travel offers without actually leaving town? Perhaps not. But in doing so, there's a chance you might just stumble on the most important thing of all: learning to enjoy the moment, wherever you are.
'A Month Of Sundays' is a humorous and personal and account of what James and Lucy found when they ran away from home each morning and went looking for peace, fun and somewhere new.
