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For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer. Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you […]

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I woke up strapped to the bed by six different apparatus. The last thing I remember is the surgeon greeting me at the swing doors, ‘Welcome to Theatre,” and I said, “Oh! How gracious,’ then, “I’m scared.” Of the leashes pegging me out like a goatskin my favourite is the pair of disco moon boots […]

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When I got there the doctor said, “You know when we call you in at seven in the morning it’s not good.” She had called me in at 7.15am on Friday to give this news. I have cancer. She used words like ‘chemo’ and ‘metastasize’. She emphasised that these are words I may not need […]

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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 […]

It’s wonderful to be cheerful and I will be cheerful. We are alive and are blessed with refrigerator and bath tub, bookshelves and beloveds, hot and cold running comfort in which to be trapped. Also, the sky today was wild blue outside. Our little drawing group normally meets. I longed for the bicycle ride across […]

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In Berlin this early in the quarantine it’s ok, the sun is out and I would love to be out in it, I imagine people here might be finding it daunting at the end of a long low skied winter to have to stay indoors for longer. Seems to be one of those instances (unlike, […]

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I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought […]

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On the bus coming home from our forest walk we passed a billboard for Hochzeitswelt: Wedding World. My partner says it’s a giant sales emporium but I am convinced it is some kind of fun park. At the market hall we got out and walked. I was noticing the graffiti – hereabouts is my own […]

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I was seeing this guy once who got comfortable enough to start flossing in front of me, thus revealing his ingenious method: he’d extract the string of floss periodically and holding it still taut between his fingers, sniff at it. Possibly the most repulsive act I’ve ever seen in my life & I could never […]

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What if the things we are most dependent on are insufficient substitutes for something else? Walking home from my first independent visit to the gym – no trainer – and feeling throughout my body how free and magnificent I felt, and noticing the autumnal leafy breezy feel of Brisbane’s deep winter and how the traffic […]

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To overcome a longterm injury I’ve taken on some personal training, in a stinky gym paved in black rubber. I can only afford two half hour sessions per week so we need to get us some work done. The trainer is strawberry blonde and perky, with perfect ankles and a somewhat staring pair of baby-blue […]

I was chopping wood today & remembered a guy from Wales many years ago who was missing two fingers from his left hand. He described how he felt the sickening, impossible thing… then his first thought was, as he told me in his furry accent, “You stupid, stupid bastard.” He says instantly the pictures started […]

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I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. […]

My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the […]

Supermarkets turn me into a raging misanthrope. I am never more judgmental than when dodging slow-moving families in the aisles. Artificial food substitutes reach out like glistening fruit arranged on extremely symmetrical trees. There’s the couple towing two listless children who have not one fresh product in their cart. There’s the urge to tap them […]

Six beautiful teenage men were doing parkour across the roof of the sunken restrooms by the harbour. Ropes gently knocking against masts, land-passengers drowsing at cafe tables in the sun, and this buoyant half-dozen pruning their dedication, lightness, skill. It was wonderful to watch. They do it in total silence, wearing soft shoes and baggy […]

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I realise it is an insufferable habit to peer into other people’s shopping trolleys and make guesses about their state of torpor and poor little stolid fat inactive kids as a result. And many people would see it as high-handed that I carry a thick black marker for amending signage that has missed its apostrophe. […]

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In a sense it is true that every inch of every block of every city centre we have is wasted. As we’ve made a lot of cities – that’s a lot of real estate. That’s real as in ‘commons’, ‘waste land,’ ‘abandoned land’, ‘no one’s putting it to much use.’ Oddly enough the same is […]

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I wonder if the reason we are all so fascinated by vampires is that we *are* vampires, draining the blood from our land. Is that why we want to see this as desirable and glamorous? Is that why we long to confess?

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Girl on the tram, to her friend: “It made me wanna throw up. And not in a good way.”