Dez took off her own spurs and buckled them on under my chaps: “Your leg’s quiet enough now.” Alex had already put the rope gag bit on Bella: “Your hands are quiet enough.” Responsible horsepeople won’t give you the grown-up kit until you’ve proved you won’t misuse it.

Bella, moving off my leg. Bella giving me more forward than I was asking for: the best and most welcome of mistakes. Bella stepping up from behind and flowing forward. My hands quiet and still, my elbows floppy.

Bella reaching down into the contact.

1. We have given the girls an allowance, so Claire set up a Kiva account and made a loan.

2. Me to Julia, unjustly: Claire is so grumpy. She gets that from Bebe.

Julia, without hesitation: She gets it from you.

Al left this morning, but I did get to follow him all the way out to Cobbadah, which made me feel a bit less like crying. Mum and Jeremy and I were on our way to Upper Horton and the last day of the big New Year’s campdraft.

I had no idea what the rules are, but a really nice lady named Jen explained that each competitor cuts out a head of cattle from a herd of seven or eight in a small corral called the “camp.” Then they ask for the gate to be opened, and they race the cow (sorry, “beast”) out into the big arena, where they chase it around a figure eight and through a gate marked with road cones. (Not actually cones; it’s the tall cylindrical ones that Google says are called traffic delineators, but Sarah says if I use the word delineator in my blog it makes me a major wanker. Such are the perils of blogging at my sister’s house.)

Campdrafting? Is awesome. The horses are all compact little stock horses, with big butts but built uphill, light in front and high head carriage. When you see them working cows, you see why. They sink back onto their hocks and pirouette left, pirouette right. They keep the beast in that big high eye of theirs. Then when the gate opens, they take off like a rocket after the sprinting cow. The riders sit them like centaurs, riding in plain snaffles, and the horses pull up short when the rider so much as thinks about stopping.

Did I mention that this is awesome? It’s really, really cool to watch. You lean on the fence, while ten feet away the horses lock intensely onto the cows, and the cows spin and run. Mum and Jeremy enjoyed it, and I could have watched it for hours, except that I got hungry. We had sausage sandwiches and cups of tea. We’d watched this one epic run early on, a big guy on a lovely chestnut with a baldy face, and I was beyond thrilled when they packed up during lunch and presented awards, and my favourite chestnut walked away with the grand prize. Then we drove home the back way, which was SPECTACULARLY BEAUTIFUL, like a huge park; like you imagine the grounds of Pemberley.

There was a dead fox on the road which because I am my father’s daughter I felt obliged to move. (He frets when carrion birds are killed on the roadkill carcases they are eating.) Poor little fox; it was quite fresh. Not fresh enough, as we discovered when I got back in the rental car with a boot reeking of decomposing fox. I washed it with water from a bottle, and also stopped at the next river to wade around. These are my favourite Frye boots! I guess at least they’ve been blooded. I offered Mum the brush, but she politely declined.

Got back to Sarah’s to find that the children had had three bowls of Cocoa Bombs and were watching cartoons. It’s the best day ever.

Delia Falconer’s Sydney is, I think, the best book I have ever read about my hometown, and an excellent short introduction to Why I Am So Fucked Up. Recommended!

A reread: Seven Little Australians, which has aged amazingly well. The shock for me was realizing that Yarrahappini, Esther’s home “on the edge of the Never-never,” is… just outside Gunnedah, and closer to Sydney than my parents’ place.

We swim at the pool at Haddon’s homestead. Cobalt tiles and sandstone. The children are real swimmers now; Julia can swim across the pool; Claire can swim its length. Sunlight through the water. No sound but birdsong.

Driving home, the shadows of clouds across the green hills.

At night, leaving my sister’s house: ten times as many stars.

Since we last spoke about riding in a frame, I have tried the same technique on Archie and Jackson. (Dudley, Bella, Louie, Archie, Jackson, Mattie, Ruth, Verina, Oliver: why yes, our barn is actually a Montessori preschool in Pacific Heights.) They’re much more difficult than Dudley and harder even than Louie and Bella to get moving off my leg. Dez is right: it takes WAY more leg than you think, and slightly more leg than I actually have. My thighs shake after a serious session at this.

But even with Archie, and more so with Jackson who started the ride completely inverted and did a 180, I managed a few steps of fluid softness. I itch to ride more. The feeling is so extraordinary. The resistance goes away. Freely forward.

When I’ve had enough to drink, I talk about godshatter, an idea I have stolen from Vernor Vinge. I think consciousness is a shard of a mirror, and that our chosen family, our jati (an idea I stole from Kim Stanley Robinson, who stole it from Hindu), is composed of the pieces near us in the jigsaw, so that together we make up a bigger piece of what for the sake of argument let’s call God. (Getting this far takes several drinks.) Obviously I think horses are conscious too. When I ride well, I am part of a bigger and more splendid thing.

Taken all together, that’s what we are. That’s why we love. The idea that we are not all on the same team is the first and most pernicious illusion, but it can be dispelled. (Of course the idea that we ARE all on the same team is another illusion, exploited by the oligarchy for political gain, but that is another ranty for another time.)

I didn’t think she would really get out of bed, but at dawn Claire and I were indeed up on Bernal Heights, watching the lunar eclipse. Then this evening she pored over Jeremy’s copy of Full Moon. I love her so much.

Julia vigorously requests They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science every time we get in the car. So we’re all singing along to “Meet the Elements”, and I say:

“Ooh, ooh, huge science news yesterday. You know the Super Proton Synchrotron?”

Claire: “Maybe?”

Julia: “No.”

Me: “It’s a particle accelerator, like the one at Stanford, but way bigger. Well, yesterday they announced they think they observed neutrinos travelling faster than light! It’s almost certainly a mistake but if it’s true, it’s the biggest science news of our lifetimes! We’ll have to throw out a hundred years of science and start again!”

Claire: “Wow, really? I can’t wait to tell everyone at school!”

Claire and Bounder, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

What with one thing and another.

I dreamed that Werner Herzog was giving me a lift home. His forest-green car shapeshifted between Porsche and VW Beetle, and when he remotely controlled it out of its parking space it turned over in a ditch. Not to worry. Herzog threw a rope over a tree limb and hauled it out by hand.

The dream is true to the spirit of the film. It’s a documentary about a French cave found in the 1990s that is full of paleolithic art. Herzog, being Herzog, found the stone eccentrics: a circus-trained scientist, an “experimental archaeologist” and a master perfumer who snuffled his way around the Chauvet Cave before announcing it didn’t smell of much. Oh Herzog, how I love you! NEVER CHANGE.

The paintings, though, are ungainsayable. Despite a couple of weird layering artefacts, the film is worth seeing in 3D because of the way the painters used the contours of the rock. There’s one frieze that made both me and Jeremy laugh because it could have been the Picasso we’d seen earlier at SFMOMA.

Very comforting to me to know that for as long as people have been people, some decent proportion of us has been spellbound by horses.

Can I say again how woefully, how pathetically grateful I am that the kids are such stoic little travellers? Sleeping where they can, soaking up the seat-back video, willing to be entertained at the baggage carousel, enthralled by the spectacle out the window of the Heathrow Express. The night after we arrived was a little Gothic. We had a great dinner with Grant on Store Street – Julia is still head over heels in love with him, and as McKenze said, her irises turn into little cartoon hearts when she looks at him – and we all got to bed at a reasonable hour. Then we all woke up again, and when Julia started crying for food at 3am I had to walk to the nearest 24 hour grocery store, which turned out to be across the street from Kings Cross station, which is about a million billion trillion light years from our hotel.

The Euston Road is different at night; also, it was incredibly hot. I was in a tank top. Apparently I am still, just barely, cute enough for various handsome young Londoners to take a chance on, at least in dim light when there are no other girls around. Every neon light turned out to be a place of business that was closed. The store, when I found it, was twenty yards past where I had already given up once. I caught a black cab home because my feet were a mass of blisters. When the cab driver dropped me at the hotel with my plastic bag full of cornflakes and milk and yogurt and orange juice, he asked “Going to work?” and I had a very complicated reaction of “No my jetlagged kids are in there but as a FEMINIST I totally support all the women who ARE.” Which was probably a bit too nuanced a message for 4am, judging by his expression.

At 8am I was at the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone wearing my new Calvin Klein pleated little black dress and t-strap heels over the blisters. The conference went very well, I thought, although I was flying on empty for most of it. There was an especially nice moment in the bar at the end when I was reminded that (dear God I hope they never read this) I genuinely like and respect several of my colleagues to the point of near-friendship.

Oh! Our fancy schmancy speaker was Professor Brian Cox, of D:Ream keyboard and Manchester physics fame, so Jeremy and Kirsty and the kids came along to join the fun. The girls hid behind my skirt when I introduced them to him, and afterwards Julia said: “That was really cool for you, wasn’t it, mama?” Can we at least PRETEND I am doing this for the sake of the children? No? OKAY THEN. Brian Cox is a great speaker, do hire him, he made us do math, but then he had me at his first slide, which was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Respect, sir.

We took the girls out for pizza that night and Turkish the next night and altogether too many glasses of Marlborough sauvignon blanc were involved, so that by 3am Thursday I awoke with a mighty hangover as well as jetlag and the standard post-conference loss of the will to live. I couldn’t get back to sleep either, so I slithered into the office at 9am and sat shivering at my desk till 3pm before slithering home to sleep. Jeremy and the girls came home at 5pm, joyous after a day at the science museum, and we all trundled out to Grant’s place for more sauvignon blanc. I thought I would surely die of jetlag, but was revived by meringues and double cream, and came home to sleep a SOLID NINE HOURS and now I feel like a valid and worthwhile human being once again.

For future reference: after the piddling little sleeps on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon I kept waking up and feeling worse and worse, which confused me because all I wanted was sleep, and it wasn’t until this morning that I realized the problem was I wasn’t getting a long enough sleep in a single go. I needed a couple of REM cycles or whatever to reset my clock.

I was up late and woke early and XO was out of chocolate croissants, so that although it was a glorious day I felt a bit frail and mostly glad that I would be riding Bella.

But also just a tiny, secret bit bummed, because she’s little and has an upside down neck and doesn’t really come on the bit like the BIG horses.

MOAR FULE ME.

“Dez,” I said to Dez, our lovely trainer: “should I be using a driving seat with Bella?” This is the sort of rubbish I get out of books.

“You already use too much driving seat,” said Dez, who is lovely. “I want her to move off your legs.”

So off we go, and I am pushing her and pushing her and also messing with the bit, because for heaven’s sake Bella you are a grown horse, do not be ponying around with your nose in the air.

“Leave the bit alone,” said Dez, fountain of loveliness. “It’s more important to get her moving forward.”

Okay, so, this isn’t working, why don’t I do a crazy thing and try what the trainer says. Leave Bella’s ridiculous head in the clouds and ride her off my leg into a light, consistent contact.

Trot without stirrups, counterflexion, circles at counterflexion, true flexion, canter, drop stirrups, flying change. Lots of work at the canter, me trying to sink into the saddle, hold my legs soft and still at her side. Not use a driving seat.

I started to feel her finding her own cadence. I tried to sit still and soft and supple, and actually felt my hips creaking, too stiff to move with her. Dez has always told me I do this, but I never felt it before. I tried to soften, and tried to soften, and tried and tried and tried.

And Bella reached her neck down into the contact.

Well, I thought. I’ll be damned.

She wasn’t arch-necked and picture-perfect like Archie and Dillon and Omni. Her little neck is too short for that. But she was moving off my leg and accepting the contact, and I had done it without my hands, just with patience and my seat.

Next we did a distance exercise and I threw away the reins and she ran out on me in front of a six-inch log, the little brat. But later again we jumped a course most of which was 2’9″ and half of which was oxers and all of which felt enormous to me. And we rode it in that same forward gleeful canter, united in a single purpose, counting strides and hitting good distances and taking off and landing like Fred and Ginger. I eased her into a trot with the biggest grin my face is capable of.

But the biggest happiness didn’t wash over me until later, when we were walking back to the barn, and I looked at the sun shining on her iridescent orange withers and her strawberry blonde mane. She may be little on the outside but don’t be fooled. Bella is large, she contains multitudes; she has infinitely more to teach me.

Showjumping is in and of itself a pointless pastime, I know that. On the drive down, Katie and I were chuckling about our habit of driving thirty miles to ride horses round and round in a small arena, and how we might explain this to our great-grandparents. But equitation is also an art, and like any respectably pointless human activity it contains both nothing and the everything that that tiny point of nothing is connected to. It is teaching me history and psychology and anatomy and genetics. It’s teaching me how to learn.

I propose a third domain of study, beside the sciences and the humanities. I shall call it, the equanimities. The queue forms to the left.

Sundays have been perfect for a while now. They start on Saturday nights when I go to bed early BECAUSE I AM OLD AS DIRT, and curl up in my lovely bed with my lovely cat and a library book. They continue when I wake up and kiss everyone goodbye and walk over to Cafe XO and have a pain au chocolat warm out of the oven. Then Katie and I carpool down to the barn and talk about books and politics. Then we have a showjumping lesson, on horses dappled with good health and shining like Akhal Tekes, under the sparkling aspens and the benevolent smile of the Stanford Dish.

Then when I get home Jeremy is making French toast for the girls. Today was even better than usual because my lovely Yoz had come over with his lovely Dexter. We walked up the hill, kidnapping Martha and watering Fitzmurgistead Farm on the way. We sat in the sun in the playground and went to Tacos Los Altos for burritos and Jamaica and went back to the park and Kathy and Rose and Salome came and found us. And then we wandered home and drank wine and played Fluxx and I made tagine and it was unctuous.

Now we are watching the adorable Brian Cox, and I am wondering what I will say to him when I meet him in London next week.

Sundays! There should be more of ’em.

I sat in Cafe XO this morning contemplating my pain au chocolat and my coffee and my unopened Lionel Shriver novel and my forthcoming riding lesson, and I experienced perfect happiness.

Now I am at home after a great lesson and my cat is draped across my collarbones like a mink stole, purring like fule, and Jeremy and the children are off seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 and I am contemplating the hot shower I am about to have.

Rest of my life’s going to be downhill after this, is what I’m saying.

Really ace weekend. Dinner at Brenda’s Friday night – crawfish beignets zomg – and then Source Code, which was epically popcorn. And then drinks at Yoz’s, where he pulled out his phone and said, “About this blog post: is Juniper Arwen Anemone Sagan Donner Hermes really a real name?” and we said “Oh my God, haven’t we introduced you to the Ximms yet? You’ll love them, they are lovely!”

Saturday I mostly slept. I slept late, went to the farmer’s market with Salome, which these days is mostly sitting outside Sandbox eating beef piroshki and drinking De La Paz coffee and talking about our lives. Then I went home and napped for hours. Then we took the girls swimming and Jules went to Azucena’s party and Claire and Jeremy and I had yummy vegetarian Indian. When I got home Bebe lay on top of me purring and saying “You remember how you slept late and then had a long nap and I got to snuggle with you all day? That was aces.”

This morning I rode Omni with Toni and Colin and jumped VAST FENCES, possibly as high as 2 foot 9. I have undeniably improved. I visited Salome on the way home and played with the boys while she tidied up, then we went back to my place and collected J and the girls and walked up the hill and had lunch in the garden behind Progressive Grounds, and bought books at Red Hill where I took a picture of a job ad for Rose, and visited Good Prospect Community Garden and picked lemons, and met Kathy and Martha out for a walk, and went to Holly Park, and picked up dinner at Avedano’s and now we are home and dinner smells awesome and I am fond of my life.

When we arrived at Currawinya everyone was already out on Mum and Dad’s new screened-in back deck. The horses next door were walking through their paddock. Drawn to them as if by a magnet, I purloined an apple and went down. The horses had no interest in the apple, had clearly never been given apples as treats before, but were happy to stand with me and breathe their warm breath into my hair. Thoroughbreds in beautiful condition, their muscles hard, their skin like silk, their trimmed hooves hitting the ground at precisely 45 degrees. Curious and friendly and respectful of personal space. Handled by people who understand horses and like them.

Ross and Julia came down to meet us and the horses and I walked over to the fence. “Their heads are big,” said Ross, as the horses inspected him and Jules. “Yup,” I said. “Make them go away,” he said. “They’re freaking me out.” I pushed their shoulders and they ambled off, then I piggybacked Julia up to the house where my Mum gave me a glass of champagne. The sun set, gloriously.

Dad made pappadums, bhajis, rice, dal, beef curry, tandoori chicken and his own potato curry. Everything was perfect, and there’s enough left for dinner tonight. Port wine trifle for pudding. As we got ready to leave I realized Mum and Dad don’t have a dishwasher, so I filled the sink and my brother Alain picked up a teatowel and we washed up together like two halves of a whole, as if we had done it a thousand times before, as if we had done it, in fact, with these exact plates and pans, all our lives.

Again with the perfect day. Up early for breakfast, Jeremy wearing his starry owl tshirt, then we left the girls with Mum at Currawinya. “Remember your pleases and thank yous! Be respectful of other peoples’ things!” Then Dad drove us to Narrabri. On the way we saw an Eastern grey kangaroo up very close – she hopped away into the bush – and lots and lots of washed-out creek crossings from the recent floods.

Barraba nestles at the crossing of a couple of lovely valleys with gentle rounded hills. We headed north and then west at Cobbadah, and the land gradually got steeper and more rugged and the forest more dense until we were near Mount Kaputar, an extinct volcano and the high point of the Nandewar ranges. We got out of the car and walked down to Sawn Rocks, a 40m cliff face made from a crystallized basalt lava flow. We surprised an exquisite water dragon along the way. On the creek floor below it there were broken-off pieces of the cliff, looking like the ruined columns of some ancient civilization. The only sounds were insects and birds singing.

The volcanic range ends abruptly in an escarpment, and beyond it is an ocean of land that stays flat until Western Australia. It is Mount Kaputar that makes the rain fall on Barraba, so the sky is clear out beyond it on the western plain. So the CSIRO, which is Australia’s awesomely badass league of mad scientists, built its Compact Array out here. Seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen six 22m antenna dishes mounted on railway tracks running through the bush.

Actually one of them is fixed and it’s 6km away from the moving ones. That means that the Compact Array can work as a virtual 6km dish on its own, or it can join up with its sister dishes in Parkes and Coonabarrabran to make a properly big antenna, or it can work with dishes all over the world and receivers in space to look at objects that are actually quite far away. You didn’t know, did you, because you suck, that radio interferometry was invented by an Australian and first carried out in Sydney on Australia Day in 1946. We may talk funny and eat yeast extract on our toast but we bow to no one in our astronomical fu. It is a long tradition in our country.

Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

Do I sound miserable here? Someone asked me today if I was going through a hard time! I’m ashamed to say I laughed. Oh, my heart is breaking for the all kids who committed suicide this month, and I just sobbed my way through several relevant bits (ETA Milo’s is the best), but the reason the It Gets Better project slays me dead, every time, is precisely because I was bullied and it did get better, so much better, better than I could possibly have dreamed. Not only do I live in a city that, if it were human, I would have a helpless girlcrush on and want to make out with all the time, just look at this place, I mean, damn, I’ve had at least two occasions in the last twelve months – Jeremy’s last birthday party and the Labor Day picnic – where about five hours flowed past in real bliss. Didn’t even know that was possible. I’ve been worried my blog is getting too sappy, because I am just nauseatingly cheerful and fulfilled right now.

Anyway! Just felt I should clear that up. Today was really great. Claire, Julia and I Internationally Walked to School for cute keyrings and stickers. The webinar I gave in the morning went exceptionally well. I had a vat of Blue Bottle coffee and a very delicious bit of salmon at the reliably nommy Boulette’s Larder, right on the Bay, with several of my favourite people. In the afternoon I fooled around a little with amusing work, and then I came home to run the first math circle session for Fall. All the math parents just lovely, and even better, half of them already knew each other and were overjoyed to catch up. The new space is pretty much ideal, and it’s about sixty feet from my front door. I was able to sneak away during the third session, have a sit-down dinner with Jeremy and the kids at home, and be back in time to lock up. Now I am blogging with the MacBook on my left hip and the Beeblebooble curled up on my right. Oh look, and there’s a new MythBusters, and Jeremy just brought me tea and chocolate.

Riding lesson tomorrow! Oz Farm this weekend! Tickets to Zoe Keating next week!

You need some back story, an essential piece of family lore which I have mysteriously never blogged. Once when Claire was very small, we made one of our regular visits to (be still my heart) the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A docent was introducing her granddaughter to the Pacific Giant Octopus. When the docent ran her finger in a squiggly pattern against the glass, the octopus followed her with a tentacle. In a voice aching with affection, the docent said: “He loves to interact.”

Now you are ready for my story. I have called my husband on the telephone. This is what ensues.

R: Can you stuff the girls’ sleeping bags into the big IKEA bag? And pyjamas for each of them? And a change of clothes for tomorrow?

J: Sure.

R: …with a pickle?

J: You don’t like pickles.

R: Hate ’em.

J: The girls don’t like pickles. NO ONE LIKES PICKLES.

R: Someone must like pickles.

J: Because they exist?

R: …yes, that was going to be my supporting evidence.

J: So someone likes neutrinos?

R: Not very often. And only in caves, far beneath Antarctica.

J: They like them. They just don’t like to interact.

Item the first: When I fell off Bella I landed on the point of my hip. I was kinda stiff for a few days but mostly okay, and even had a riding lesson in the midst of it; but then I had an evening lesson with Dez and Dez was eeeeville; no-stirrups, trot over a crossbar and canter out from it evil. I could not do it. I can half-ass most things on a horse, but this felt like there was a pointy bit of metal jammed into my hip joint, so I had to opt out. Mehness, and likewise mehitude! I was actively limping all weekend, which suhuhuhucked, because that weekend we went to China Camp with the camping gang, who are all great fun and who love to hike. My hip was so hurty Saturday night that it took me forever to get to sleep, even in our lovely tent under the lovely trees.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?