I DO like to be beside the seaside

I’m sitting at my desk looking over Sydney Harbour as I often do when things are a little slow here at work. Scooting past the usual scenery of a ferry, a square-rigger, a submarine, a lightship and a destroyer, is a gondola.

I check again with my binocs. Yes, it is unquestionably a gondola. Black, shiny, curvaceous. Chap with straw hat on rear (of gondola, not his own rear) (that is, the chap is on the rear of the gondola and is wearing a hat - the hat is not on either his or the gondola’s rear, nor is the chap on his own rear. I hope that’s clear now). Not, so far as can be told, singing O Sole Mio, but apart from that exactly as seen in every move set in Venezia.

Far canal!

You think he made it all the way from Venice? Enquiring minds need to know.

By the Beautiful Sea
Words by Harold Atteridge, Music by Harry Carroll
1914

Chorus: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,
You and I you and I, oh! How happy we’ll be,
When each wave comes a rolling in,
We will duck or swim, and we’ll float and fool around the water.
Over and under, and then up for air,
Pa is rich, Ma is rich, so now what do we care?
I love to be beside your side, beside the sea,
Beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea.

Will you be selling seashells?

No, as I’m not by the seashore. Sydney Harbour. Pay attention!