30 September 2020

Drinking coffee with a friend of twenty years, talking of work and idiots we have known, I slowly reassembled who I am. It’s not hard to lose all sense of being, be thrown into chaos as tumbled as a gully where magpies dive and rustle, where the sky just disappears.

29 September 2020

I was last in a mall months ago. Today, in the overbright lights and constant barrage of music that is almost familiar, a sense of nostalgia was beginning to creep up, a nascent desire for a visit to a mall to be commonplace, when I saw shelves of Christmas merchandise.

28 September 2020

Of course it was just for the four-year-old that I stopped by the side of the road to delight in tiny black-faced lambs, leaping behind their mothers in the paddock. And only for her did I accept the farmer’s invitation to feed the lamas that nibbled soft-lipped at our hands.

27 September 2020

After a day in the Wattle Garden, with prostrate wattles, and swamp wattles, wattles with leaves of diamonds or fluff, leaves that droop or splay, in greys and greens and grey-greens, covered in little balls of yellow, my eyes have to adjust outside Bowral to a neat bed of ranunculus.

26 September 2020

Can I mention that in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the answer to the meaning of the universe is 42, and that it’s 42 years since the radio program first aired. And that Ford Prefect and Arthur encounter survivors from Golgafrincham, a planet wiped out by a virulent disease.

25 September 2020

People have put their rubbish on the street, as if this wind won’t take it and distribute the pieces, the box upended behind a car, the plastic wrap flapping out across the road, the polystyrene booming down the road to flop in front of a too-fast truck and be shredded.

24 September 2020

We first see the train as we turn at the end of the street. ‘We’re following it!’ my granddaughter laughs, and so we are. We see it again across the paddocks, reduced in size, a matchbox train. ‘It’s smaller because it’s further away!’ my granddaughter exclaims. Both rational and magic.

23 September 2020

Down in the street two young teenagers are walking, shoelaces undone, school backpacks drooping. His arm is draped over her shoulder. They both smile dreamy smiles of contentment. They kick across the road in the benevolent afternoon. Mild sun warms their backs, and a breeze is animation in the trees.

22 September 2020

The woman at the playground tells me that her baby is seven weeks old, then that her daughter is two. I tell her that my granddaughter is also two, and we compare birth dates. ‘Never come across anyone so stubborn.’ She gestures towards her daughter. ‘Except me,’ she adds grimly.