Last night we bundled up the baby in an old woolly jacket of Cian’s and trundled her down to 24th & Bryant. The scent of burning sage made our tummies rumble. There were Mission hipsters with their faces painted to show the skull beneath the skin, and Aztec dancers with elaborate feathered headdresses and bells on their ankles. A jazz band marched, all in white, with a white-faced bride dancing ahead of them, whirling like a dervish. Twelve skeletons formed another marching band, all of crisp loud drums. There were more skeletons on stilts, with flowered sombreros, the deranged love-children of Manny Calavera and Carmen Miranda. My favourite band is the medieval one with the recorders and wooden xylophones and the coffin all decked out in lace; straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal and into my neighbourhood, eerie and beautiful, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

The only year I’ve missed it was last year, when I was hugely pregnant. The truth is, I always wander down and then stand there feeling like a complete idiot in my Gap jeans and Blundstones, the most middle-class white girl in all history. But the Day of the Dead is one of the things I love best about the Mission. I have no idea who organizes it or how they get the Pabst-swilling loft dwellers and the liquid-eyed Incas to play nicely together for just one night of the year, so it seems almost magically spontaneous to me, as though the truck loaded with flowered crosses drives itself to the corner of Bryant & 24th from its usual parking space in the Land of the Dead.

With the honourable exception of my mother, I grew up among people uniquely squeamish about death (and, indeed, most other basic truths of the human condition). One day when I was little, Mum took a day off work for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. She came home and told us all very cheerfully that when she dies, she would like to be cremated and have her ashes scattered at sea. She also left clear instructions not to overspend on the coffin or flowers. She’s the Jessica Mitford of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, is my ma.

I miss her awful these days (she’s in Australia, Winnebago-ing the outback, and frequently out of mobile phone reception areas), but the juxtaposition of the cheesy papier-mache skeletons for sale at Galeria de la Raza and the tear-stained women holding pictures of their dear dead reliably conjures her up. I’m glad that Claire’s first home is the crazy, messy Mission, where the Hogfather takes to the streets banging on a drum. I’d like my girl to walk in the benevolent presence of the ancestor-spirits who endowed her with their wily, resourceful DNA. I want her to take joy in all this, because naturally, the very second she was born, I started to hanker after grandchildren of my own…

Last night she woke every ten seconds or so to feed. This morning my darling husband and I are sullen, moving our slow thighs while all about reel shadows of indignant desert birds. Ah well; Peter the Rocket Scientist will be here soon, and we’ll head out to Foreign Cinema for steak.

I clocked up five chapters of my Nanowrimo novel yesterday. Jeremy tried to get into my pants by saying of one section: “That’s very Trollope.”

Flirt.

I had been planning to get up early and write before boy and child woke, a plan which now seems about as practical as flying to the moon on pure goodwill and cheer.

It was hot summer on Thursday, and then so cold on Friday that it snowed quite heavily in Marin. Various energetic throwings-out of unnecessary clothes have left me with almost nothing to wear in winter. Shannon called and I whimpered so piteously that by the time I got to her house, she had the thermostat cranked all the way up and hot coffee on the stove for me. Bless.

But before the ice age, on Wednesday, I was walking up Wiese Street as a teenage boy walked down it, shirtless, his cargo pants riding low on his hips, his belly all six-packed up like a Praxitelean bronze.

Mmm, you’re pretty, I thought, and he caught my eye and grinned at me and said: “You’re pretty.”

Woot! Mama’s still got it. (And I’m pretty sure that I was, in fact, old enough to be his mama.)

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..which is just the sort of thing she would say.

She was all dressed up for Cian’s birthday party this morning, and Carla at Atlas, who is Claire’s number one fan, exclaimed:

“Look at you in your jammies! Where are you going?”

“She has a date with her boyfriend,” I said. “He’s an older man. He’s two.”

Jeremy added: “He’s old enough to be her brother.”