Thoughts about Mozart (cont.)

The sounds of Mozart's piano sonatas were making an indelible impression on my mind when an opportunity came up for me to acquire practical legal training in a six month course at the Australian National University. I decided to take up an offer of a place in the course and to travel to Canberra by train. I also booked a room in an off-campus residential complex called Narellan House. The train trip was a long one and also a fairly lonely one for me. I slept on the seat in a second class smoking carriage placed right at the rear of the train. You could smoke on passenger trains back then, around 1977/78. In my youthful folly I had taken up the habit of smoking tobacco, a move I later deeply regretted and personally rejected.
After travelling from Brisbane to Sydney I had to change trains for Canberra at Sydney's Central Station. I remember spending many lonely hours watching people endlessly come and go in the station until the departure of the Sydney to Canberra train was announced in the early evening. I had no idea of the city I was coming into or the people I would be mixing with. Finally, however the train arrived in Canberra and somehow I found my way to Narellan House. I unpacked my bags and entered my room.
I was probably carrying around too much gear in those days and I was certainly carrying some Hi-Fi which included a turntable for L.P. records, a pair of speakers and not a few L.P.'s as well. I also had a tennis racquet and a few books. In my collection of L.P.s I might well have been carrying the boxed set of the Marriage of Figaro I had bought in Brisbane years earlier plus a few L.P.'s of Bach Cantatas and other Bach harpsichord works. The overwhelming majority of records I had would have been classical, but not necessarily of Mozart at that time.