It had been a faintly disappointing day. We'd sought breakfast at the Cafe Bastille, one of our favourite South Melbourne eateries. It turned out to have closed.

It has thus gone the way of our local Post Office, our local video store, Sweet Agora (our favourite South Melbourne Market breakfast venue), and City Basement Books (my favourite second-hand book store) -- which have all disappeared in the six months we were missing. A favourite Singaporean literary theme seems to be the rapidity, ubiquity, and difficulty of change. Well, guys, here's something -- it's not just you.

We'd enjoyed watching Le Herisson at Cinema Nova -- a sympathetic study of a gifted but precociously world-weary 11-year-old and a cultivated but lonely middle-aged concierge -- but we were disappointed that the fate of the concierge's gorgeous cat was left totally unexplained at the end. How can you leave the cinema satisfied if you don't know what's happened to the cat?

Then we'd discovered that the exhibition on Rupert Bunny, Artist in Paris, had upped and gone to Adelaide. So we've missed it.

If Laurent had let us down with the almond croissants as well, then it would have been a miserable day. But they didn't. Far from it. These were the best almond croissants I've tasted since Uccle, Belgium, November 1987. A triumph.

Cafes, cats, bunnies -- who cares when there are croissants aux amandes?