We’re off to spend Easter in a cabin in the Sierras. Thrift Town had two snow suits left: one a perfect fit for Claire, the other a perfect fit for Jules.

And my blood sugar and cholesterol panels were beautiful too. It’s just life.

Ach well. I am feeling better, and was especially tickled that my endocrinologist is only half a mile away. Getting a blood test at UCSF would have been a massive time-suck, instead of which I just dropped in on the way to work and looked at St Lukes’ beautiful Moreton Bay fig to distract myself while the needle went in. Big fig!

And now it’s time for bed.

…let’s look at some of the predictions the Monterey Institute made five years ago, for what they called even then this “Imprudent and Unnecessary War”:

• Al-Qa’ida conducts terrorist attacks to coincide with war
• U.S. viewed as causing high casualties among Iraqi civilians
• Inadequate U.S. and international support for reconstruction of Iraq
• U.S. must occupy Iraq for years to maintain stable and pro-U.S. regime
• North Korea exploits U.S. and UNSC focus on Iraq to build nuclear arsenal
• Enduring outrage among Arab and Muslim populations broadens social base for terrorism against Americans
• High U.S. military casualties in urban fighting

Seven for seven. Whee.

…or more accurately back from Manhattan, where I did a spit-take over Spitzer and saw the market exeunt, pursued by Bear.

Much to report, in particular: Ozick, Hughes, Roth, Shadowunit.org. Don’t touch that dial.

The scariest, funniest, most heartbreaking, most romantic Doctor Who episode ever.

R: I swear sometimes I think that cat moves when I close my eyes.

J: Don’t be silly.

R: No, look, bite marks!

Our beloved Bernal branch of the San Francisco Public Library has closed for renovation, so I redirected my hold requests to the Mission branch. It’s half a block from BART, and it’s open till 9pm every weeknight.

I dropped by on my way home from work this evening, picked my books off the open shelves, checked myself out and caught the next bus home. The whole process could not possibly be any cooler or more convenient. Hurrah!

Dear Tetsuya Wakuda,

Re: the a la carte menu served at your restaurant on February 19th 2008 (my birthday), including (but not limited to) smoked ocean trout with avruga caviar, leek & crab custard, confit of Petuna Tasmanian ocean trout with daikon and fennel (I don’t even like daikon and fennel, except yours,) grilled fillet of barramundi, twice-cooked spatchcock and oh my god the Wagyu beef with lime and wasabi:

Marry me.

There was also that Sydney rock oyster with rice wine vinaigrette. Tell me the truth, do you feed your oysters on butter?

And the blood orange sorbet.

My God.

With inexpressible respect and admiration, I remain, yours sincerely,
R

Dear Robert Smith,

I don’t normally write to celebrities; I’m not big with the fangirl, unless the object of fandom is a friend or friend-of-friend who writes excellent SF or fantasy and has a LiveJournal. It’s nothing personal – quite the opposite: I soured on corporate rock after waking up from a bad infatuation with an Irish rock quartet I won’t name here, out of pocket for five albums I haven’t listened to voluntarily in fifteen years and with a nasty taste in my mouth. And that was years before I covered the Napster trial and got to know the record labels and their business practices better than anyone ever should. These days I listen to lots of mashups and nerdcore. I hope you understand.

My point is, I got the shiny new Sandman collection from Jeremy for my birthday, and it’s hard to write an interesting review of something that everyone else already read ages ago, and loved, and told me that I would love. I mean, what: Newsflash! Sandman genuinely terrific! Major influence on all the other graphic novels I love! Stop the frickin’ presses. No.

So I got thinking instead about how Morpheus reminds me of you, dancin’ around in those early Cure videos, Lovecats and Why Can’t I Be You (the sideways lips! So funny and wicked) and my favourite, Just Like Heaven. You with your spiky black hair and eyeliner and white high tops. How iconic you were! And how well those old songs have aged, how well they evoke those confused and crazy and complicated years. And I remembered the story about you, and realized that would make a way better blog post than Yet Another Sandman Endorsement, Yawn.

I bet you don’t even remember that particular concert in Sydney, Australia, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, I don’t even remember exactly when. You came out of the stage door and signed programs for everyone, and at the end there were three young Australian men left, and you. You chatted for a while – it must have been close to midnight – and then you said “Wanna go for a drink?” Now THEY were diehard fans. They’d loved you and dressed like you since they were twelve. You blew them away.

That would have been kind enough – beers and a couple of hours chewing the fat with these guys. They were nobody really, just fans; no one would have blamed you if you’d shrugged them off. But when the bar on Oxford Street closed, you said “Hey, I have keys to a studio near here – wanna come listen to me lay down some tracks?” Could they have jumped at the offer any more eagerly? When the sun rose they were still there listening to you noodling around on your guitar.

Two of those guys were friends of mine, and the third is my big brother Al. He’s a fantastic brother and I love him to the moon and back, and he’s never in his life had one quarter of the luck he deserved. I wish I could say that night changed his luck for ever. It didn’t. But it was an incontrovertible good thing, a shining adventure, something he can still look back on and grin. Thank you for that. It was extraordinarily decent of you.

I was going to say that under the circumstances I could make an exception for you, and sign myself your undying fangirl in spite of the whole unfortunate corporate rock thing. And then I realized I don’t even have to do that. I already outlined the personal acquaintance exemption above, and so I can go ahead and be the undying fangirl of your great songs and human kindness, because you are, after all, a friend of my brother’s.

Lots of love,
R

When my brilliant and beloved mother-in-law discovered to her astonishment that I hadn’t already read Pat Barker’s WW1 novels, she promptly gave me all three for my birthday. I started reading them on the flight back from Australia and about three sentences in, made myself slow down so that the experience of reading these books for the first time would last longer. That’s exactly how to-my-taste they are.

Light from the window behind Rivers’s desk fell directly on to Sassoon’s face. Pale skin, purple shadows under the eye. Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell. His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady. Rivers raised his own cup to his lips and smiled. One of the nice things about serving an afternoon tea to newly arrived patients was that it made so many neurological tests redundant.

Note that I didn’t particularly remember this passage, and when I went back to Regeneration to find something to quote, I just flipped over a page or two before I found this. And now look how much work this paragraph is doing. It sets two scenes – not only the cozy tea-time, but also the hell from which Sassoon has recently arrived. It begins to stage what will be an immensely complicated and morally charged relationship between Sassoon and his doctor, and in doing so it indicates the extent to which Rivers is already unusual, preferring informal exchanges with his patients to tests that reinforce the hierarchical distance between tester and subject. Rivers is exceptionally humane – he is, we’ll discover, a very good anthropologist as well as a psychoanalyst. And Sassoon is, in fact, a deathless poet. The power distance between doctor and patient is unusually small; and it’s only going to get smaller.

And if that reference to sugar tongs is not a deliberate evocation of Wilde, I will eat my hat.

Cecily. [Sweetly.] Sugar?

Gwendolen. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

I could have picked any paragraph. They’re all that good. And the prose is all that translucent: simple, beautiful declarative sentences, layered each on the next until you are no longer reading but hovering over Rivers’s shoulder, watching. And Barker respects the intelligence of her characters, and gives them room to breathe and think.

There’s a lot of thematic overlap between this trilogy and my last two reviews, as it happens. (Well, it’s not exactly startling, since I make several fairly strict demands of narrative and can’t be bothered with it otherwise. Anyway.) Regeneration tackles madness – Sassoon isn’t, as it happens. Book two, The Eye in the Door, examines sex and class and will make you grieve for its innocent monster. The last book in the series, The Ghost Road, looks into the face of death, and it includes some of Barker’s finest use of the source materials, Rivers’s books on the societies of the Solomon Islands. (The heat and singing reminded me of Ten Canoes.) I keep going back to Google Books to read the originals and try to figure it out. That was awesome. How did she make that work? How can I do that?

The first major feature film in an Aboriginal language, ever. Ten men canoeing on the Arafura swamps retell an ancient story of love and betrayal. Gorgeously shot, irreverent and funny as all hell, dark, beautiful, heartbreaking. If you’re wondering why the apology was such a big deal or if you are even remotely interested in Australia or people or culture or contact, this is a must-see.

The 2007 Australian comedy series Summer Heights High features its creator Chris Lilley as three characters: as an appalling private school girl spending a term at a public school; as the school’s acting head of drama, in a role that cleverly skewers Lilley’s own; and, most affectingly, as an illiterate FOB (fresh off the boat) Tongan boy in year eight.

What seems like a crass gimmick as I’m describing it to you (and is just that in something like Little Britain) turns out to have powerful dramatic implications. Lilley seems as convinced as I am that nothing in Australia is not about class (and its co-conspirators, race and gender.) By playing multiple roles, he cuts to the heart of all three issues. How are we shaped by class, by race and by gender? Well, what if you put exactly the same person into three entirely different situations?

That makes the series sound dreadfully po-faced, which it isn’t: Lilley effectively mines the considerable comedic veins from privileged bitch Ja’mie and effete wanker Mr G. And his little dog too. Both caricatures are keenly observed – Ja’mie’s habit of brushing her shiny hair away from her face with the back of her hand, for example, or Mr G’s elaborate self-delusion and barely repressed viciousness. I totally had him for a drama teacher.

All of which serves to underline the tragedy implicit in the situation of Jonah, the year eight boy whose unfocused rebellion and aggression test his teachers’ character and mettle – and in all cases but one, expose their lack of either. And while Ja’mie goes on and up, doubtless to study law at Sydney and marry the heir to a retail empire, and Mr G ends up back where he started, Jonah’s trajectory points relentlessly down. While Australian society keeps rationing its limited opportunities on the basis of anything other than merit, the show points out, nothing’s ever going to change.

Recommended.

The flight home from Australia was reasonably good, as these things go, so I was feeling quite calm and competent when I found Hedwig in Long Term Parking. I should have recognized this as a Sign That I Was About To Do Some Impressively Stupid Things.

Hedwig didn’t start when I turned the key, and didn’t start, and didn’t start. I walked down to the cashier and they sent a guy up to give me a jumpstart. I turned the key. She didn’t start. She didn’t start.

“Let me try,” said the guy, and she started the first time.

“You need to push the clutch down,” he said, and I blushed so hard I thought my face would catch fire.

I slammed down the hood without realizing that jump start guy had left the battery cover to one side, over the latch. The latch caught in the hole in the top of the battery cover. You couldn’t open the hood with the battery cover stuck there.

So we drove home like that, with Hedwig looking like she had half-eaten a piece of moulded plastic. It took the mechanics at Jerry’s to break the battery cover in half and throw it away.

The whole time I was thinking about how much Big would laugh at me over this. He did, but he added:

“Next time you get off a fourteen-hour flight you should just treat yourselves to a taxi.”

I thought that was uncommonly kind.

I am really sorry to have missed seeing so many of you. I wanted to feed the chickens, have a dog’s breakfast, venerate Mrs Peel and re-disambiguate Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark and Marky Mark. (We missed Mark by about ten minutes, which was particularly awful.) I didn’t get to play with Korben, Tabitha, Jackson, Aubrie, Tara and the twins, Brigid, Charles, Bridie, Holly, Kira, Sasha, Leo or Oliver.

Stupid, tyrannical distance.

Next time, for sure?

The last few days have seen us eating a lot with old friends and old friends’ children. Moira, Richard and William have moved into a brilliant art deco house in Earlwood and are waiting for baby brother Francis Xavier to arrive any day now. Rachel, Michael and Patrick now have a wonderful open-plan kitchen and twelve-week-old Evelyn. (Claire loves Evelyn’s name because it has “evil” in it.) Anna, Bill, Tahlia and Luke have also extended, and we spent a morning on their shiny new verandah watching the weather roll in. Garfield, Olga, Madeleine and Sebastian bought the place they were renting on the edge of Garigal National Park. Wallabies and echidnas visit their garden.

Visiting every year or so as we do, we get these snapshots of peoples’ lives, flickering like a zoetrope: flats, weddings, babies, houses, second babies, renovations. It’s impossible (for me at least) to avoid wondering what life would have been like if we’d stayed. Would we have migrated up the North Shore or stuck to the Inner West? Would I have started the meds or stayed crazy-unhappy? Would I have kept working or stayed home with the kids or gone back to uni?

Does it matter?

My incipient midlife crisis seems to have broadened and deepened into a Buddhist meditation on death. Water is undermining the foundation of all these houses, of all the red-roofed California bungalows you fly over as your Qantas plane descends into Kingsford Smith Airport. All these cars on the road cough soot into the atmosphere, gently roasting the earth. Streetscapes change, friends while remaining absolutely identifiable as themselves grow ever older, the children I held when they were hours old are going into high school. And when you see forward like this you can see backward too, to when my mother had tiny kids like mine (and was, like Olga, stuck in a far northern suburb without a car), to when Jeremy’s father and his friend Joan were little schoolchildren themselves, in rural New South Wales. In the thirties.

And the only thing that seems to hold, the thread that sews these miraculous ordinary lives together, the serpent eating its own tail, is love. The friends I desperately want to see whenever I am in Australia are the people who were kind to me when I was a wobbly, pompous, witless mess through most of my teens and twenties (picture me sitting on the floor of Thussy’s farmhouse, remembering to breathe.) I’ve had a notably fortunate life but this undeserved compassion is probably its chief blessing.

Tomorrow I turn 37 and this is the first birthday since my 12th where I actually look my age; the baby belly and the crows-feet give me away. On Wednesday we fly back to San Francisco. Life in Sydney will go on, with its flat whites and adjustable rate mortgages, its wacky new prime minister, Tropfest and Tetsuya’s and the film festival, greedy developers and dreaming brick suburbs full of jacarandas and lemon-scented gums. I will pack my feelings back in their box and miss everyone here for another year.

My old categories no longer fit. I fled Sydney because it was a certain way, and San Francisco was another way; those reasons seem partial and suspect to me now, a glib confabulation. You might just as well say that because my mother and Jeremy’s mother migrated to have their children, it made sense to us to do it as well. Or tell the story I told Claire the other night; that a wicked fairy broke my heart in two pieces, and left one piece in Newgrange in Ireland’s County Meath, and the other on Bernal Hill. Narrative, as Joan Didion pointed out, is sentimental. It posits beginnings and endings where none are.

I can’t say anything about Sydney any more, except that it’s a mystery to me, as vast and unknowable as London or Claire, its twisty-turny road map like an MRI cross-section of a brain. (Oh, and that its inhabitants are apparently mole rats, since all our playdates now involve taking toll roads through billion-dollar tunnels.) I seem to have forgiven the city for the chunks I thought it tore out of me. But that relinquished anger leaves another kind of melancholy in its place. There are none more dead than those no longer mourned.

Who knows, maybe if I live another sixty years I’ll get around to forgiving myself.

The Germans have a word (of course they do) for this work of coming to terms with the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It’s a measure of my state of mind that the German is more succinct.

“It’s as if the whole place was stuck in amber for eleven years, under Howard, and now everything is moving again.”

“I think all the lefties are recovering from a decade of clinical depression.”

We went to the farm today. Bellboy, the world’s best pony, Claire’s pony, just turned 35. His mother made it to 37. Claire and Julia both got to ride him. He’s the pony I learned to ride on when I was 13; did I mention that?

As we were leaving I walked into the garden and found him in the sun, grazing on the green, green grass, looking exactly like a unicorn.

I want to burn that sight into my eyes so that I will never forget it.

ETA: Julia as she fell asleep said “I loff Bellboy. I loff horses.”

My heart went nova.

Then: “I loff toast.”

I haven’t written much about when I lost Claire last year, and had to get her from the police station twenty minutes later, because it was the single most painful experience of my life. Worse than migraine or labour or a broken leg, worse than heartbreak or depression. I would have torn myself apart if it would have done any good, turned back time, brought Claire back. Just thinking about it makes me ill.

When the bookstore owner came to say that Claire had been found and was safe, my knees buckled. I fell into a stranger’s arms, weeping. (She was a mum and completely understood.)

It dawned upon me only a few weeks ago that that is how the mothers of the Stolen Generation felt, but not for twenty minutes: for ever.

Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s a start.

We’re on the patio outside our cabin, listening to the rain on the sailcloth above us, and the Pacific Ocean crashing onto the beach.

It’s possible to hear all of this, now that Julia is asleep and no longer screaming like a deranged banshee.