Hi Callum! Good morning I’d like to ask your advice as I don’t know now what to do with my free trial. Can we suspend it? Can I apply it to a different training group? I attended two sessions at the riverside park with Chris. Was super looking forward to it and excited to commit […]
One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly […]
I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me. She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the […]
Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of […]
Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between […]
Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New […]
Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay […]
So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never […]
Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring […]
When I travel I am never alone because always there is the companionship of my shyness. This sometimes feels like a long shadow I drag over things (‘allo, scuse us, thank you, pardon me’) and sometimes like a large soft yielding mass I work my way through to reach people, to reach the surface: the […]
Oh, I love my little desk in my little borrowed room. At night the night is all around and silent, absolutely silent unless you hear the unending majestic progress as if across tundra after tundra of the wind. This desk is surrounded on all sides by literal towers of the possessions of the host who’s […]
All my life people have been telling me not to get too excited about things. They say, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” And the truth is the thing I have so vehemently looked forward to almost never resembles the picture I have built in my mind. It’s often disappointing. But it feels like […]
So cold and empty at the heart today. I feel all the little threads connecting me to everyday life in the usual world – the usual world of Brisbane, that I grew so painfully and slowly reattached to after some 13 years away – have been cut, or burnt off and I am gliding in […]
Abu Dhabi airport. The altered reality of long haul travel is hard to convey. It does feel like we are hauling something, up from under the water. My hearing is dimmed and my sense of humour sharpened. When the lights came on for our last landing my companion pulled a blanket over his head in […]
Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her […]
Yesterday morning I woke in that state known so satisfyingly as A Towering Rage. Must’ve had infuriating dreams. The sun came in my window and all the injustices of life lined up around me and stared like palings. It’s not a very usual experience for me and I wasn’t well equipped to deal with it. […]
Switzerland: land of milk can honey. I am back and the milk from the Bioladen is fresh and sweet and creamy. Honey-coloured cattle browse along the path flicking fat mosquitoes with paint-brush tails. It’s all pretty: even the oversized Lego industrial landscapes. Life is orderly and a little prim. A church on every hillside: Catholic […]
The man with bare fingers playing guitar at the riverside markets, in the snow. He is playing a languid, spooling version of “I’ve Done All the Dumb Things” by Paul Kelly. In his hands it sounds musing rather than regretful. The two Australians drifting in front of me hatless, talking about parties. The boy who […]