Walking through Darlinghurst this week, I spotted a chalked message. Something’s happened, and something’s changed. Someone’s trying to claw their way back.

This one was outside the Darlo Bar at the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Liverpool Street.

While on Burton Street, the chalked up ‘Miss You’ appeared on the wall. This one, below, was further up Liverpool Street at the corner of Darley.

Someone’s feeling the autumnal mood. Hope it works out.

Christmas dollars make as much sense to Darlinghurst shops as anywhere else. But there’s a different vibe here. So when decorations go up, they’re generally on a different tip.

A dishevelled looking Santa Claus appeared hanging from the roof outside the Darlo Bar on Darlinghurst Road this week. There’s a moulded plastic Santa in the window at hip second hand shop Blue Spinach. And at the cafe named for its location at the corner of Forbes and Burton Streets, a very rock’n'roll Santa Claus is tearing across the outside wall, propelled by a giant shark.

It’s well into the Christmas drinks season in the neighbourhood, so the streets are permeated with a generally relaxed vibe. Which is great, unless you’re still hard at work, of course.

Moments after that last post, I received news from my co-blogger that he was closing in on the mystery chalker.

Hours later, two emails popped up in my inbox from readers, Shawn and Fred, saying they had (independently) captured the chalker’s latest stunt, on the Hardie Street wall of the Darlo Bar: “L is for Libation.”

Reemski commented about “K is for Kleptomania,” too, but didn’t get a snap.

Following a couple of leads, I found the chalker.

He thought it seemed a shame to ruin a good mystery. I agree, but we reckon we owe it to you guys.

The This Is For That series/chalk alphabet is just a celebration of great words, or at least favourite words. They’re not, as a rule, linked to the location or what’s going on in the world, just words that are excellent for some reason.

The first one was “a is for atom” on a toilet door, then “b is for brain” on the footbridge, then “c is for cephalopod,” which was the first one to get photo’d, and is of course another word for a squid.

Other words are really normal, but when put out there on their own they get weird, like “igloo.”

Some are great sounding like “wobble,” or kind of moving like “heartache” or “fiasco.”

Some are beautiful words and things like “filament” and some are excellent concepts like “entropy.”

Then others are interesting concepts that need a bit of research, like “azimuth” (which someone modified by adding “z is for zenith”, which is a word describing a similar thing, but starting with z… brilliant).

Other great modifications include someone taking letters out of “g is for gyroscope” and making “g is for goop.”

I’m up to my second alphabet now. Currently up to, um, “m”… not sure what that’s for yet.

The z is for zipper is the z from the last alphabet.

So, the mystery is solved!

Hmm, turns out that had we the nous to type “a is for azimuth” into a search engine, the mystery may have been solved long ago. But where is the fun in that?

Incidentally, the letter m, it’s for meddling.

Is that “meddling” directed at us?