The other morning Claire was sleeping and Jeremy was off making the tea and I was lying sideways across the bed reading Kenneth Clark. She didn’t even hoot when she woke up, just sized up the situation, then crawled commando-style down the quilt and over my elbow so she could roll over and lie in my arms laughing up into my face.

And people wonder why we call her Wiggle Worm.

R: I got shot!

Jonathan: It’s about time!

“I’ll come and watch Claire in the bath,” says Salome. “You come and open this damned wine.”

“My corkscrew’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with my corkscrew!”

“Good. Use it yourself.”

We change places. The cork comes sweetly out of the bottle, I hear Claire splashing around, then there’s a sound like a gunshot. Something hits me on the back of the shoulder and tiny shards rain around the kitchen. I duck.

“That sounded dramatic,” says Salome, sticking her head around the bathroom door. “What was it?”

“Don’t know.”

“Sounded like gunshot.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, but…”

Salome goes back in the bathroom. I think, the wine bottle? but it’s fine. Then I’m guessing, a light bulb? All the light bulbs are intact. There are shards of what look like glass on the floor, but they’re actually just white plastic. Finally I notice a tiny hole in the plexiglass skylight over the kitchen.

“Meteorite strike,” I tell Salome as I bring her glass of wine into the bathroom.

“Call the landlord! Oh wait, that’s right, you can’t!” she says, laughing. “Bet you wish you had a landlord now!”

“Dad-DY!” says Claire.

So I call Jeremy. “Hey landlord! Fix my skylight!”

“What happened to your skylight?”

“Meteorite strike!”

“Not likely,” says Jeremy.

We get the baby out of the bath and into her jammies. We drink our wine. Jack arrives. We pour a glass for him and tell our story. He’s skeptical.

“So where is this meteorite?”

“Couldn’t find it.”

Salome pokes around, looks under the bench. “Here it is.”

Jack inspects it.

“This is a round from a .22,” he says. “Some guy fired it up into the air, and it came down on your kitchen skylight. I ask you, what are the chances? I tell you what else, this guy was a real killer. See how the bullet’s been hammered down on one side? That’s so it tumbles when it penetrates flesh. Some gangsta three blocks away fired his .22 pistol in the air ’cause his basketball team won, and it came down and landed on you.”

“What should we do? Should we call the police?”

“Yeah,” says Jack, laughing. “They’ll get right on it. ‘Oh, we’ve got all these murders to solve, but wait, a bullet broke this chick’s skylight! We’ll be there right away!'”

“Can you believe this? Six years I lived at Alabama Street, not a scratch on me. I move to a better neighborhood, and BANG.”

“Did it hurt?”

“A bit. Do I have a bruise?”

They look. “No.”

We drink our wine. We look at the bullet. Salome says:

“I liked the meteorite story better.”

Wow. Eight hours actual sleep last night, unpunctuated by two-hour crying jags or sudden eruptions of vomit! Luxury! Teething molars is a bitch, it would seem, and the worst of it comes on at 3am. Shannon’s theory is that as Claire sleeps the fluid accumulates in her sinuses and jaw, just like the sinus pain you get when you have a bad cold. Nowadays the baby books all say that teething doesn’t hurt, but the baby books don’t have to mop gallons of bilious macaroni off the sheets in the dark hours before dawn. Between that and the horror, the horror of Showbiz Moms and Dads on Bravo I have revised my earlier position on Claire’s status as infant prodigy. I now view her instead as tiny, adorable demonspawn. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

She does crack me up, though, she’s such a little bruiser. Having spilled her guts, literally, all over both of us and the bed the other night, she blicketed happily around pulling pillowslips out of the bottom drawer while Jeremy and I stripped the sheets and carted them to the laundry (the laundry! How did I ever survive without a laundry?) Once we’d restored some semblance of order it took her about ten seconds to fall asleep in Jeremy’s arms. Then last night Bryan came over and as he and I were chatting, Claire tripped over her own feet and did a face-plant on the carpet.

R: Are you all right, love?

Claire gets up on her elbows and grins at me.

Bryan: She meant to inspect that bit of carpet anyway.

In other book news, Bryson’s Short History prompted me to read Oliver Sacks’ wonderful Island of the Colorblind; I love Sacks’ enthusiasm for multiplicity and his overflowing empathy and admiration for the way people adapt to the weirdest situations. The Gaskell Bronte biography made me pick up The Professor, which I’d never read and which is usually dismissed as a draft of Villette. Not sure yet what I thought of it. Exquisitely written, but with all the suspense of a wet noodle. The Penguin Classics introduction arguing that it’s a mature work of fiction reminded me of my own defense of Marlow’s Faustus in my Honors thesis. Everybody protestethed too much. I’m just saying.

Now reading Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Like Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which I had another go at last week, it’s not really right for the bus trip too and from work, because I keep having to stop and think. The trouble is that when I do that I look out the window and get distracted by Mission Street. I have the attention span of a gnat. They’re both lovely writers, but they both keep tripping me over by saying things that are profound, highly questionable or both. Clark’s book was written in 1969, and you couldn’t write one like it today. If you did, it would be Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, a very different beast. What Barzun presents as his own unabashed curmudgeonliness, Clark serenely sets forth as fact. As It Was In The Beginning Is Now And Ever Shall Be, World Without End, Amen. He holds these truths, for example, to be self-evident:

“…if one wants a symbol of Atlantic man that distinguishes him from Mediterranean man, a symbol to set against the Greek temple, it is the Viking ship. The Greek temple is static and solid. The ship is mobile and light… The carving on its prow has that flow of endless line that was still to underlie the great ornamental style we call Romanesque. When one considers the Icelandic sagas, which are among the great books of the world, one must admit that the Norseman produced a culture. But was it civilization? The monks of Lindisfarne wouldn’t have said so, nor would Alfred the Great, nor the poor mother trying to settle down with her family on the great banks of the Seine.

“Civilisation means something more than energy and will and create power: something the early Norseman hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. The wanderers and the invaders were in a continual state of flux. They didn’t feel the need to look forward beyond the next March or the next voyage or the next battle. And for that reason it didn’t occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books.”

This bugs me on many levels, not least because I heartily agree. I am that mother on the banks of the Seine, trying to build a city of stone I hope will one day be Paris. But my conscience won’t let me stop there (Bryan again last night: “Anglicans are Unitarians with doubts.”) By design, ten years of education in critical theory stand between me and the uncomplicated embrace of my desire. If you reject theory, you’re just using someone else’s, as I read in New Scientist the other day, or possibly on Mordwen’s blog. Much as it pains me to confess it, real estate and good books aren’t universal, absolute values. I was going to write that they are a peculiarly Western incarnation of the Higher Good, when I bethought me of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan and remembered, again, that It’s More Complicated Than That.

But if books and houses as the embodiment of civilisation and what’s worth preserving aren’t specific to Western culture, I think I can make a good case that they are specific to the middle class. The people I think of as My People are not all white, by any means, but they may all be (whether by birth or aspiration) bourgeois.

So, yes, doubt as the intellectual legacy of Protestantism; cultural relativism as the shibboleth and sacred cow of Liberalism, discuss. Or consider if you will exactly who is crewing the Viking boats these days, the unbearably beautiful vehicles of war that strike terror into the hearts of women not (yet) on the banks of the Seine but certainly on those of the Tigris and the Euphrates. I can’t even talk about Abu Ghraib with any coherence or detachment; there’s too much shame and disgust and worst of all, unsurprise. What I’m groping toward is some (useful, nonselfpitying) way to express my sense of complicity. This is very difficult to write. I must have deleted twenty false starts. All I can say is that the government to which I pay my taxes doesn’t seem to be thinking beyond next November, and that my taxes pay for bombs and schools for torturers. This may indeed be a peculiarly Western dilemma. I’ve pursued Clark’s civilisation all my life, in the shape of books and houses and the city of lights, and look where it’s got me: I help prop up an unelected and utterly corrupt regime. I honestly don’t know what to do.

But, but, but then there’s this: On the Uses of a Liberal Education, II. As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor.

It’s come to our attention that Claire is viewed as some kind of miraculous prodigy, an angel child with profound insight into the properties of matter, space and time. This is not exactly the case. She’s delaying publication of her paper on room-temperature fusion until the results can be independently verified. Her screenplay has not, as rumored, been green-lighted by a major studio. We’re still waiting to hear back. As for the selection of her juvenilia to be published in the New Yorker this fall, I might as well admit now that she is dating the poetry editor.

In short, she’s just like any other normal, healthy sixteen-month-old. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

There are rumors of a coyote raising her pups on Bernal Hill. I dreamed about her before we moved. Very strong magic, said Jamey, to dream of a coyote. There have been actual sightings of a black bear at Point Reyes: notices were posted at the Palomarin Trail we hiked with Christopher last week. (Hike is a bit of a strong word: it probably wasn’t three miles to the beach and back. But I did climb the hill with a plump toddler in the Kelty Base Camp, which is not to be sneezed at.) Last night I dreamed I met the bear beside a creek. I was scared at first, but it turned out to be very tame and cuddly, with dense soft fur like Bebe’s. Not cuddly like a toy: dangerous but kind, like a very big dog. It put its muzzle in my hands.

Finally, a lion has attacked two horses around Felt Lake, where we used to keep Noah. The big fierce predators are coming back. I find it oddly comforting, like the herds of taki around Chernobyl. This is what the world will look like after we are gone. I am reading Bill Bryson’s Short History, which is full of asteroid strikes and hypercanes and the Yellowstone supervolcano, a bit like Mike Davis but on a cosmic scale and without the existential despair. Bryson makes these observations about life: life wants to be. Life doesn’t want to be much (look at lichen). From time to time, life goes extinct. Life goes on.

I had one of those difficult, complicated dreams about software and online communities last night, qv Jeremy with food poisoning in Dublin: “I am a database.” People were exchanging their poems on IM, and other people were deriding said poems, goading me until I pointed out that however bad they were, they were better than Southey. Salome popped up and argued that I’d never given nineteenth century poetry its proper due, and that as with music (I like everything up to Bach, then virtually nothing until Stravinsky) my taste in poetry skips straight from Jonson and Donne to Yeats and Eliot.

As I woke I thought of countless counterexamples: Coleridge for Kubla Khan and The Rime, Wordsworth for that deathless bit from the Prelude (“Not in entire forgetfulness…”), everything Emily Bronte ever wrote, Tennyson for certain bits of In Memoriam and for the lovely, lovely Crossing the Bar, and I suppose for dreary old Mariana in her moated grange, certainly whenever I’m waiting for a bus; most of Browning and Meredith, all of Hopkins, plus Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson across the pond.

Not sure why I singled out Southey for dream-disapprobation, either. Not really familiar with any of his work, to the extent that I hadn’t even realized Lewis Carroll was parodying him with “You are old, Father William”. Maybe I had him confused with Shelley, who I’ve never really seen the point of at all.

I gave up writing poetry when I was 22, on the excellent grounds that I was very, very bad at it indeed, qv my lines on the death of Sugar Dog. For ten years I was never even tempted to try again, short fiction, irritable journalism and IP-based sarcastic asides apparently fulfilling my expressive needs. I am embarrassed to admit that since Christmas 2002 I’ve occasionally felt moved to write a poem, because the way I feel about Claire burns me like a Type G star five feet away in the direction that can’t be pointed to. But so far I have, you will be glad to hear, refrained.

Instead of writing poetry I have used other peoples’ poems as a way of recording the things I am not willing or able to talk about. In which spirit I offer this, from the great and unjustly neglected Judith Wright, who is so little Googleable that I am reproducing this piece from memory and doubtless gutting it in the process.

Silence is harder, Una said
If I could be quiet I might come true
Like the blue cup over the sink
Which is not dead
But waiting for something to fill it.

Here is some information about my husband.

My husband has a thick, curly red beard and wavy ash-blond hair. People admire the effect and ask him how he dyed it.

My husband is thirty-three years old and has never held a driver’s license. He says he’s getting around to it.

My husband owns one pair of boots, three pairs of pants and about fifty t-shirts, all with interestingly abstract designs. My husband does not own a suit.

My husband has been in Australia for the last few weeks, and I have been in California. He’s back now. I am so glad.

I just selected all the messages in my work Inbox and dumped them into an archive file. My empty Inbox gives me the illusion of achievement. Quiet satisfaction.

Last night after the nice policemen woke me to let me move my car instead of having it towed, I was curled up in bed listening to the clock tick. All of a sudden Claire, who had snored through the entire episode, kicked me in the scapula and said very clearly: “Daddy.” I looked over. She was still asleep.

For some reason she likes to sleep on her face, arms folded, butt in the air.

Yesterday evening, as the thought of cooking and eating yet another meal for just me and Claire was filling me with silent horror, Jamey called and invited us over for tofu curry. I grabbed the Delicato shiraz and threw the baby in the Jetta before Jamey could change her mind. The wine was great and the curry, superb.

Yesterday Bryan and Shannon went to inspect a house perfectly situated half a block from ours. Unfortunately, as Bryan observed, this house will stay on the market until the owner finds another elderly gay funeral-home fetishist to take it on.

I wonder whether it will open as a tiny B&B, by and by?

One thing I particularly like about Breakfast with Enzo is that Enzo doesn’t smile unless there’s some concrete reason to do so. I can’t bear so-called children’s entertainers who leer at the kids the whole time. They’re hiding something.

Home Remedies on Valencia is closing, snif, but I bought the last two Cornish Blue mugs at 20% off. Also the last two pairs of 12-18 month Robeez for Rowan and Claire. “Pink for girls and blue for boys,” I thought, then, “wait, NO. Cats for Claire and rabbits for Rowan.” “I can’t believe you got him pink bunny slippers!” said Carole. “That is SO COOL!”

Of course I read ravenously while stranded in Oz, but to be honest it was mostly garbage. I am, obscurely, more ashamed of having plugged my way through the nasty, sexist and pretentious The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury than the rabidly conservative, sexist but unpretentious and immensely readable Score! by Jilly Cooper. The History Man, which is supposed to be one of Bradbury’s best, is, like the TV adaptation of Lucky Jim I recently endured, Comic without being funny and Literary without being any good at all. The main character is so sickeningly unsympathetic that he makes the foul Ray Finch from Norman Rush’s Mortals seem, errm, slightly less awful by comparison. Maybe I’m just allergic to academic novels. I don’t like David Lodge or AS Byatt much either. I do like Philip Pullman’s Oxford and Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, but then they’re imaginary, right?

Hmm. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ankh-Morpork and Trollope, as you do: fictional Londons, their origins and uses; Discworld, Barchester and Palliser, why so addictive. I love Pratchett better and better over the years, in belated homage to my woefully unappreciated high school librarian Marie Sutching, may her name live in glory forever, who recommended to me many books that to my shame I did not read until years later and whose recommendations were never wrong. As well as Henry Fielding and Victor Hugo and Elizabeth Gaskell all of whom I now adore and could not live without, she tried to get me to read The Colour of Magic. I dismissed it as bad imitation Douglas Adams and ignored Pratchett for another ten years until I met the man himself and heard him read at Trinity. He was wonderful, duh. Granny Weatherwax, Angua and Carrot are old friends now, but Sam Vimes is probably going to end up recognized as Pratchett’s masterpiece. He just gets more and more complicated and vivid in every book.

I wonder whether Mrs Sutching liked Jilly Cooper? Bad as her books unquestionably are, with their uniformly appalling politics and puns more dire even than mine and cliched tropes you can smell a mile off (every left-wing character without exception has deplorable hygiene and just needs a wash and a shave and jolly good shag from the charismatic blond(e) Tory hero or heroine), Cooper has the same moreish quality as Pratchett. In her case I think it’s her acute sensitivity to tiny but telling class-indicators – she actually wrote a book in the Nancy Mitford U and Non-U tradition, titled simply Class. In it she spells out a lot of what’s implicit in the rest of her books. You can always tell her aristocracy, for example, because they’re potty about animals and don’t give a crap what anyone else thinks of them; the working class come across in almost exactly the same way, whereas lower-middle class social climbers tend to be grim, insecure and all-around unpleasant to know.

Pratchett and Cooper have quite a lot in common in this respect. Vimes’ wife Lady Sybil, with her dragon rescue organization and her interchangeable Sarahs and Emmas, would feel right at home with Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife Taggie and her heroic mongrel Gertrude. Vimes’ acute self-consciousness is more insightfully drawn than anything in Jilly Cooper, but she has made stabs at the same kind of thing with Jake Lovett, for example. Even Cooper, with all her bizarre prejudices, has more time and temper for likeable and humane characters than Bradbury and Lodge and Byatt put together. Tenure seems to make people a little bit misanthropic, don’t you think?

Marie Sutching had some kind of Parkinsonian disorder, which made her hands shake and her handwriting lurch off the library card like some species of spider. I was phobic about that. After I finished my first degree I called her and told her how I’d done, and she wept for joy. I wish I’d stayed in touch. She’s not in the phone book any more. I wish I’d talked to her more and read the books she recommended and remembered everything she ever said to me. I didn’t have the intellectual equipment back then to appreciate my luck in knowing her. She’d won the University Medal at Sydney and studied overseas; London, I think. She won a major poetry prize for a coronet of sonnets. When she got back to Sydney her father had burned all her poems. “You won’t be needing those now you’re getting married.” She never forgave him, and never wrote anything else. Her husband was a foul vampire who sacrified her academic career to his own, then ran off with the departmental secretary. She was good-naturedly resigned to her fate, and beyond brilliant. Having a woman like her working in the library at this godawful suburban high school was like having Charlotte Bronte as your English teacher at a dreadful little college in Brussels. I owe her so much.

Take the chicken breasts that have been in the freezer lo these many months, and defrost them.

Chop up an onion, a carrot and half a punnet of mushrooms. Throw them into the big pot with a little bit of butter. Wash some baby spinach and throw that in as well. Add the half-bottle of Pol Roger left over from Claire’s party. Add a carton of organic chicken broth.

Cook.

Slice the chicken breasts and fry them in the skillet with red chili flakes, bay leaves, rosemary and thyme. Throw them into the big pot.

Cook.

Turn everything off and go to a party.

Come back and heat it all up again. Eat. Say to toddler: “Wow, this is amazing soup.” Give soupy vegetables to toddler. Watch toddler devour same with terrifying appetite, even after hefty servings of cereal and cheese. Sing, with toddler, an impromptu Song Of Soup:

Yay!
Yay!
Yay!
Yip!

Despite plan to eke said soup out for a few days, share nearly all of it with toddler. Wonder if it’s possible to justify buying Pol Roger just for use in chicken soup, and conclude, reluctantly, not.

I am the Elizabeth David of Eugenia Avenue.

Over various unpleasant events of the last couple of weeks, permit Yatima to draw a discreet veil. Let us reflect instead upon the not inconsiderable delights. I found a picture of my mother aged about two, looking exactly like a sepia-toned Claire. My sister and I gave each other necklaces, hers a silver teadrop, mine a diamante cascade. My nephew Ross adopted Alex, jewel-eyed prince among medium-hair brown tabby cats. During a lengthy lunch at the Stamford hotel in Brisbane, Claire learned to skewer sultanas (golden raisins for you Americans) with a full-sized silver fork.

I finally got to meet my personal trio of Australian baby boys, Harvey, Korben and William, all huge-eyed and irresistible. We caught up with many, many old friends at a glorious picnic on the Lane Cove River: Tash blooming in her last trimester; Keith and Tracy, Matthew and Melinda newlywed; Justin and Paul taking a well-earned break from their latest startup, which, along with Claire, constitutes our mutual excuse for seeing one another in Australia rather than in San Francisco where we all live.

The park at Lane Cove is a little like Tilden but far more beautiful to Jeremy’s eyes and mine. The eucalyptus trees in California look nothing like the pink-fleshed scribbled-over Murray River redgums that grow in their native habitat, with spiky grevillea in the open heath under their canopy, and whip-birds and butcher-birds and currawongs and bell-birds and kookaburras and rainbow lorikeets providing the unforgettable soundtrack of home. It was already April, very late autumn, but still far warmer there than it is here in San Francisco in early spring.

Sigh.

Now Claire and I have returned, and goop is back on its feet thanks to the indefatigable efforts of one Mister Walsh of Amalgamated Durables. Normal service is expected to resume.

When trying desperately to distract myself from international document delivery and the Department of Homeland Security, I like to dabble in the Usenet newsgroups aus.motorcycles. They got me a bewdy this morning with a post to the effect that Billy Connolly had been killed in a bike crash. My heart sank for the big yin before a Google News search and visit to his official Web site revealed a certain, shall we say, dearth of veracity in the rumour.

As the aus.moto crew said, don’t believe it until you read the memorial haiku. My favourite was Bigman’s lightning adaptation of the well-known hippo classic:

Billy Connolly
Anti-Billy Connolly
Annihilation

I believe I mentioned this in the first ever post to Yatima, but it bears repeating: My brother, he is funny.

Next time I am tempted to use the words “settled and pleasant routine” in a blog entry, kindly throttle me before the karmic payback. You’ll be doing me a favour…

My visits to Brisbane are falling into a settled and pleasant routine. Last year I blogged my feeling of chagrin at the parent’s room at Brookside Mall, which was bigger than my then apartment. This year I was pleased to notice that my new apartment is (slightly) bigger that the parent’s room at Brookside Mall.

Last year when I visited Kate she broke the wonderful news of her pregnancy. This year Claire and I got to meet James Harvey, her delicious and wildly cute son, who laughs and laughs and hardly ever cries.

Last year, after Kate and I talked to each other for five hours without getting remotely bored, we promised to try and stay in touch. This year after we talked up a precisely similar storm, we agreed that we were both too busy to stay in constant contact, but that if we ever end up in the same city again, we’ll hang out together all the time.

There was one thing I don’t think I blogged last year that I should have. Jeremy and I were about to leave for the airport, and my heart was raw, because I didn’t feel I’d found the right things to say to my sister. We started singing songs from our childhood to tiny baby Claire – silly rounds like Fish And Chips And Vinegar and nonsense songs like Flea Fly. Sarah has a wonderful voice, and hardly anyone still remembers those idiotic old songs but me and her – certainly no one knows them in America. Getting to sing in harmony like that was my parting gift. It was almost the thing I’d been trying to say.

Last year I kept feeling that the time I spent at the computer was stolen from Claire. Right now, as I write, Claire is sitting five feet away with Ross and Kelly. They’ve been happily playing dominos for half an hour. I don’t think Claire has even noticed that I’m busy.

I can’t remember whether it’s zed or zee, the check or the bill, left- or right-hand drive. I’m a tourist everywhere I go now. This is mostly fine, except when I get maudlin and complain to myself that I never get all the people I love together in the same room.

Yesterday Kay drove Jeremy, Claire and I up to the farm to see Thussy and Bellboy, so that was four favourite people and one pony. Claire wasn’t particularly interested in sitting on Bellboy’s back, but when we set her loose on the green and daisy-speckled grass she made a beeline for his blue velvet nose. He breathed interestedly all over her. He looks the same as ever, all huge eyes and flirty silver tail; so beautiful he should be a unicorn. He taught me to ride and at the rate he’s going, he’ll teach Miss Claire too.

Today we flew to Brisbane. Claire hooted and wiggled in the lap belt, causing the grumpy businessmen across the aisle to glare impotently at me. As soon as I let her wriggle down, she climbed up into the empty seat next to mine. Lunch arrived and she ate the foccacia and silverside off my sandwich. I just had time to pop a cushion under her lolling head before she fell into a deep snooze.

Mum and Dad picked me up, and Sarah and Alain came to meet us at Cafe Zanetti, and now we’re all at Patrick’s Road with Max and Kelly and Ross, so that’s – how many? Another eight of my favourite people, counting Claire.

Imagine that I am saying this in hushed and reverent tones: Claire’s grandparents took her off our hands so we could go out for an evening.

We scampered to the Academy Twin to see Lost in Translation, then spent an hour in Ariel pawing at the pretty books, then wandered down to the Pink Peppercorn to meet Mister Pesce and Miss Emily and Emily’s Jeremy for spectacular Laotian food (roast lamb, salmon with fennel and dill, searingly hot laab chicken and prawns.)

We talked about swordfighting with cadaver parts and the internal composition of the human penis (“spongy”, says E’s J.) We talked about art deco furniture: E and J picked up an oxblood leather club lounge and two matching chairs from a neighbour for the princely sum of $200. Score! We talked about London and New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Sydney, comparing the real estate market and quality of life in each: species of spaces.

E’s J had to go home to study – he’s practically a doctor now. The rest of us wandered through Surrey Hills to discover that Mark’s yuppie apartment block is built on a warehouse where Emily attended a rave in 1994. From the roof garden and pool we surveyed the city lights and the incoming weather.

Mark’s one-bedroom apartment is a stunner, with a huge Northern exposure and wraparound balcony and hardwood floors and, at present, almost no furniture. Very Zen. We drank chamomile tea and deconstructed various mutual friends to three or four decimal places, and then I found that it was 9:30pm and I missed Claire with a violent pang. And so to the taxi stand and back to Cooper Park.

C was moderately pleased to see us. She’d had a long snooze and endless games with her grandmother. Lost in Translation made me a little sad for my old life, with its business trips and high-rise hotels and late nights talking to intriguing strangers, but then there was that lovely line when Bill Murray’s character pointed out that your children are the most delightful people you will ever meet. A night off every now and then is plenty.

When I was a kid I never understood why grown-ups obsessed over little details. What about the big picture, huh? Why not talk about Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love? Now I am that grown-up, and I have long conversations with my mother-in-law about how sad we are that the majestic bougainvillea that used to grow up the front of the house on Cooper Park Road had to be cut down. The tree surgeon who carted it away said it weighed three hundred kilograms.

I was genuinely grieved to hear it, and worried that the house would look raw without it. In fact it just looks different: barer, sure, but you can also see its lovely clean Frank Lloyd Wright-ish lines. I’m quite surprised at how happy I am to be here. We got married in the park across the road and had our reception here, so the house is full of joyful memories of floating around in my fantastic ivory silk-satin Reva Mivasagar wedding dress, drunk as a lord on champagne. Jan bought the Marimekko shower-curtains at Crate and Barrel on Union Square in San Francisco, and from where I am sitting in her office I can see no fewer than six photographs of Miss Claire, taken at our old place on Alabama Street and in the garden in Villerouge. It’s a temple of Claire, and I approve.

I’d also forgotten how much I love Sydney. The weather is humid and overcast – both very kind to my chapped and tanless skin. I forget how delicious the garden smells. I’d forgotten the heavenly quiet. Right now all I can hear is the wind in the leaves of the palm tree next door, and a butcher bird.

This morning we had the obligatory Big Brunch at the back table at Petit Creme. As we approached the cafe a large stranger approached me with open arms; it took me full seconds to recognize Mark Pesce – a far slimmer and more muscular Pesce than I have ever seen.

“This city suits me,” he says joyfully. “I’ve never loved a job so much. I’m not leaving till they kick me out.”

He asks me how’s tricks, and I tell him about the new apartment and the deal we got on the mortgage, and he starts to laugh.

“You can take the girl out of the Sydney real estate market,” he says, “but you can’t take the Sydney real estate market out of the girl.”

At which point Miss Emily turns up with her Jeremy, and I grill her on their new place.

“Two story two bedroom in Rozelle, back garden, gourmet kitchen with granite countertops and Smeg appliances…” she begins.

Mark is laughing his head off.

“Shh,” I say. “We’re downloading.”

The conversation turns to politics: Jeremy L. asks if we think Kerry will win. Mark blocks his ears and sings “La la la, I can’t hear you.” I ask if Latham will win, and we wonder whether he will be disqualified on account of man-boobs.

Adrian and Sam arrive with the adorable Korben Hugh; our coffees arrive and I take my first delicious sip; Barney arrives and cuddles his niece; Mister Bennett arrives and we begin, with relish, to insult one another.

“We like each other really,” says Mark Bennett to Mark Pesce.

“He likes me,” I say coolly.

Bigman arrives and I give him the gift of Ebola – a plush figure of the celebrated virus, brought with us from the States. Moira and Richard arrive with the perfect William John, and the conversation takes a yet more visceral turn.

“Korben eats only boob,” Sam brags.

“Hey! We got through half an hour before starting on boobs!” I say.

“No,” says Jeremy, “there were the man-boobs.”

I am chatting to Moira in an undertone about weaning Claire, and fail to notice the silence that falls around the table halfway through this story:

“I frightened the piss out of myself one night when I found a lump in my breast, but then I squeezed it and got a jet of milk in my eye.”

I look up to see everyone staring at me, my fellow parents tolerantly amused; the childless heterosexuals and gay men frankly appalled.

“So,” I say gamely, “how about that real estate, hmm?”

In Cold Comfort Farm Flora Poste carries with her and frequently consults a volume entitled The Higher Common Sense.

Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior is my higher common sense.