5

It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy […]

2

A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in […]

2

On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people […]

80

My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my […]

11

Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas […]

8

A homeless man was sleeping in the stairwell when I came home. Or, to put it in the terms which my instinctive body understood, a stranger, appearing unexpectedly, had barricaded my door; his body was coiled and his face hidden; I had to step round him to get in. Raised in Australia with its pleasant […]

32

In this house of illness and pain I get lonely. Everyone is in bed by eight o’clock and the long night stretches ahead. Tonight I can hear the rain plinking on the skylight which reminds me of the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound of my childhood. I am tired. My father […]

44

Mum’s in hospital. Dad’s in hospital. Both in the same hospital and admitted on the same night. He has pneumonia, we think, and they’re waiting for the results of the PSA test on his prostate cancer this morning. If he has a heart attack, he told the doctor, he does not want to be revived. […]

40

My friend has died. She was very courageous and had cancer. She was a photographer, a maker of exquisite works. She was Dutch and chose euthanasia when the pain she was suffering became, after months, too unbearable. Now her partner is left alone to garden. She was wise and quiet in her mind, an insightful, […]

4

I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his […]

37

For four weeks now, this terrible grief. It takes up residence in my throat, is heavy, slides into the sweet solar plexus where self-belief resides. Crushes back my breathing. Gives me the tired. It makes bed seem a dire, unavoidable residence, where I will spend my days: all of them. Though I enjoy so much […]

77

My dad has cancer. They thought he had got rid of it but now, it’s back. It’s in his spine. My mother habitually announces things with enormous flourish. A printer jam, a forgotten shopping list: “We’ve got a major disaster on our hands.” This time she wrote an understated letter. “Not good news, my darling.”

This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels […]

Today I had to face some things inevitable but leaving pain. They are not my fault nor anyone’s and there’s nothing I can do about them. But it’s ok. You know how you grapple til you get to grips. While I was grappling I walked the streets. As I walked I passed a very well-dressed […]

5

Gleis Siebzehn (Platform 17). Here is where ten thousand Jewish Berliners were herded onto trains. Only very latterly (1991) was a memorial opened. It is very simple and harrowing. No names, just numbers all the way down the platform: 29.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. 30.10.1942/100 Jews/Berlin-Theresienstadt. The second place name refers to the ghetto or death camp from […]

10

Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass […]