What a year, eh? I said goodbye to Bella and to Jackson; they’re both knee deep in clover, eating their adorable heads off. Dad’s a little worse, Mum’s much better. I called her during her birthday party yesterday. We get another Christmas in Barraba with mah jongg and too much marzipan and Baileys. After that, who knows? Claire and Julia are happy at their respective schools, although they don’t like doing homework, an attitude I am not necessarily helping to overcome when I mutter to them that “Homework is boring.” Although I did vow before I had them never to lie to them, so.

A crowd of us piled into my living room yesterday to drink tea and champagne and watch spellbound the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, and it could have been written for me, it touched so many of my id vortices: my older and younger selves trying to reconcile with one another, not necessarily in chronological order; my rampant survivor guilt. Plus it soared over the Bechdel test and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is probably my favourite character in the entire canon, because Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is my mental model for the grandfather who died three weeks before I was born. And then the curator came in, and I said: “I know that voice.”

Fall is the most beautiful season in San Francisco and the city has never been more spectacularly lovely. We hiked around McLaren Park, which is like having Golden Gate Park almost entirely to yourself. In a meadow studded with daisies we were struck dumb by a great blue heron that took off and soared right over our heads. Last night on our way to and from her swim lesson, Julia and I gazed at the Golden Gate Bridge just before and just after sunset. Your mind cannot comprehend the scale of it, not even when you have seen it a hundred times. “Did we build it to there or did they build it to us?” she asked. “We started at both ends and met in the middle,” I said. She said: “Oh my.” This morning as Claire and I ran over the hill and back along Precita, the morning sun slanted across the dewy grass in the Coso triangle and made it sparkle.