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The little cat puts her hand possessively on my arm. After a moment’s thought her other hand creeps up to join it and I remember the day I finally found her again, after she had been lost for a lifetime, five months at large in the laneways of inner Melbourne, and a man rang in […]

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This week I’m going home to Berlin to find an apartment of my own, via a writing sabbatical in Thailand which I suspect I will sleep through. What was supposed to be two weeks has turned into a six week endeavour. I have worked from dawn til night, busted my finger, worn myself to a […]

Pissed on by a possum as I was lying in the hammock. Cat sprang out and stalked off, tail in air. Possum continued climbing the branch, tail in air. This was after I had already been bitten by a sharp mosquito that turned out to be claw of cat perched on nearby kitchen chair on […]

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I love how the cat comes and sits, not next to the fridge, just sort of within range… letting me know with infinite courtesy that, you know, no hurry or anything, but some people might say it’s high time for Meat Time. “Meat Time!” I say, finally noticing her where she folds like a furred god, immaculately footed. Her […]

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I think this cat’s favourite person is the sun. She believes everything he tells her and is willing to let him whisper into her belly and long ears for hours. I don’t think she realises he is distant, to her he is close. And I don’t believe she cares that he sprawls his favours indiscriminately. […]

Last night I slept under my own roof for the first time in four months. So to speak. It’s a beautiful sublet in a groovier part of town, bristling with bars, but very quiet behind the city wall of our foremost apartment building. I’m in the back, windows facing the trees, in a place with […]

Some days I really miss my cat. She is grey & downy and is a right little snuggleupagus. She’s also a kind of miracle cat because she got lost one night, this was in inner Melbourne, and stayed lost for five months until one day someone rang in response to one of my posters, saying, […]

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On the first day of life-drawing class the teacher said, the mistake you all keep making is, you are trying to draw the outline. ‘The outline is an abstraction,’ he pointed out: ‘it doesn’t exist.’ One of the challenges in learning to draw for the first time, as an adult, is to see past your own expectation of what ‘a face’ looks like.