This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous […]

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Coming past the apartment below me I heard from the stairs the unmistakeable noises of grief. Fresh, recent, still shocking grief. It was new, and she was pleading with him. I stood hesitating on the steps. He had just delivered some devastating blow and her voice rose and I heard how clearly everyone must have […]

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Two Americans in a coffee shop staffed by Australians. This is Berlin where not everybody bothers to learn German. They come in and order and make themselves comfortable. One starts talking about Sylvia Plath. He is reading a book about her life only it’s not very good. “I mean, with Hughes,” he says, sounding oddly […]

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It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh […]

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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 […]

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Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to […]

We tried out a new coffee house, on our bicycles. Actually it was an old cafe, one of Brisbane’s earliest, in a dingy nook at the entrance to the gold-crusted cinemas on Queen Street. However it’s been done up like an ageing aunt, trussed in striped golden paper and with those little dinky tables too […]

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On the markets I ordered a cup of coffee under canvas, under trees. The fig trees in Brisbane are extraordinarily broad and they spread lumpy dragon roots as well as branches. “What name shall I put that under?” he wanted to know, and I said, “Toby.” The man looked me over thoughtfully. His eyes were […]

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I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and […]

Lady Barista and I made each other laugh today, or maybe I just made myself laugh, which is lamer but still enjoyable. I turned up with my curly-handed mug and passed it across. “Just the uzh?” she said, which is her uzhual question. I was reading the band posters behind her. “Oh! I’m performing in that!” […]

Walking down the street in the wake of three blokes as confident as three galleons. Their coats blow open. It’s a fresh sunny day. Something small flies off to the side & I follow it into the flowerbed: one of those tiny, slender plastic stirrers that have, to my mind, no excuse for existing in […]

It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin […]

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the […]

I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the […]

Hired a bike and visited my only friend in Denmark, who runs a beautiful second-hand store that sells his three favourite things: books, and records, and coffee. He has two splendid crimson armchairs and windows onto a cobbled street. How we met was, I was in Berlin over the summer and dropped in on the […]