A Day In My Life – September 12, 2015

Back at the start of August, Celine Jeanjean tagged me in a meme, in which one is required to chronicle a day in their life by posting a photo from every hour. I have to be honest, if I were to do a ‘normal’ day for me, it would just be a million shots of the computer, maybe interspersed with some food. So why do that, when I could do a day I spent in the 1920s last weekend? (Honestly, this is mostly just an excuse for me to post lots of photos of myself looking far more glam than I usually do). My partner, Edy, and I traveled to Melbourne last Friday to attend the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries costume exhibition and 1920s Garden Party at Rippon Lea Estate on Saturday.

(For the uninitiated, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is a crime show set in 1920s Melbourne. Phryne Fisher is a socialite/lady detective who helps the local police solve crime. It’s a stunning show to look at, and the cast are fabulous. I recommend it to everyone. The first two series are on Netflix. The third only aired in Australia earlier this year, so I’m not sure when it’ll show up Elizabeth just informed me in the comments that the third is also on Netflix now, in the US at least.).

It was wonderful. So without further ado:

We only arrived in Melbourne at 12:30 on Saturday morning, as our flight from Sydney got delayed for two hours. And then we got woken up by construction work at 7am. Here I am looking and feeling very disheveled in my Little Miss Sunshine PJs.

After breakfast, which I don’t have a photo of because I left my phone on the charger while we went out, and a shower, I felt a bit more presentable, though still pretty tired.

Then it was time to put the dreaded contact lenses in, and put on make-up. The only time I usually wear make-up is when I’m in a musical, and you have to, but when one is dressing up for a 1920s party, it’s also something of a requirement. Being used to caking it on for use under stage lights, I’m always worried I’ll put far too much on when I’m just doing it for going out. I managed to take up half the sink in the hostel bathroom with my spread of supplies and ended up looking like this. Extra foundation went under the eyes in order to make me look less tired.

  
Eventually we were ready to go. This is the waiting-for-the-taxi selfie.

Twenty minutes or so later, we arrived at Rippon Lea. Edy doesn’t pay as much attention to the TV show as I do, so he didn’t realise that not only was this the venue for the exhibition, but it’s also one of the show’s locations. So I was bouncing around going, “Ah! There’s the swimming pool! There was a dead body in that swimming pool in one episode! And that’s where they had the tennis court!” And Edy didn’t really have much of a clue what I was going on about.

It was around 12:30 or so by now, so we decided to get some wood-stove-cooked pizza for lunch, then followed it up with ice-cream. I am the classiest ice-cream eater, ever, as you can see from this photo (that’s not even the worst one that I took, haha).

After lunch, it was time for skittles, croquet (we actually had no idea how to play that, so we just knocked the ball around with the mallet a bit, and hoped it went through the wire hoop thing), and vintage cars. Check out the 1935 Rolls Royce we got to play in! Also, you can actually see my waistcoat in these ones!

By now it was about 2:30, and we’d had a good look around the party and done all the activities (the ones that didn’t cost more money than we had, anyway. A vintage photo would have been cool, but…). It was time to head inside to the exhibition. First up inside the door, dress-ups!

I won’t spam you with too many costume photos. Just some of my favourites. Also, Phryne’s pearl-handled pistol. Which is a real pistol, not a prop. The person who was supervising the gallery pointed out that if you look closely, you can see the wear where it’s been handled in the past. Makes you wonder who used it and who they used it on.

After this, it was sadly time to head back to the hostel. One more photo before we left:

Back at the hostel, the late night and early morning caught up with me, so it was time for a nap. (Confession: this photo was staged after I woke up, for purposes of this post :p )

After I woke up, I joined Edy out on the balcony. Time for some writing and/or reading. And going through the “free stuff” rack. I scored a really nice pair of boots.

Around seven, we headed across the road to Nando’s for dinner. I discovered that maybe I don’t hate olives as much as I thought I did.

Those were the last photos I took of the day, and nothing especially exciting happened afterwards. I managed to persuade myself to stay up until 9:30, but fell asleep again pretty promptly after that. I hope you enjoyed!

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