My annual revelation this year is the sheer variety of ways in which a human being can feel bad. My least favourite is the sensation of cold shock, where your soul shrinks into a tiny kernel deep inside, leaving your extremities frozen and useless. This sensation cannot generate tears, but brings on an urge to smoke cigarettes which has been dormant for more than 2 years . This is the king and queen of bad feelings, but it brings with it a retinue of lesser bad feelings to do its dirty work when it is not available: general malaise, loss of the will to live, a sort of magnetic (as in opposite-poles magnetic) anti-enthusiasm which makes my mind turn away from any thought of the thesis and bolt, scattered, in a million different directions. Today I am under the influence of lost-the-will- to live. Tune in tomorrow for more of the same.

Yesterday evening after three hours editing my single chapter in the library I got on the train in Redfern. It was six o'clock, the sour hour of the homebound commuters, and I went upstairs and sat down next to a thin young Asian girl who looked like she wouldn't spill over into my seat. As the train pulled out of the station, I slowly became aware of a voice reciting quietly in the corner of the carriage.

At first I thought it was somebody on their mobile, but instead of the usual public-transport monologue (I'm in the train. We just left Stanmore. Etc. ) I slowly became aware that the voice was preaching. I looked around, surreptitiously, (already knowing that it wouldn't do to catch the eye of the reciter) and easily spotted her , marooned in a desert of unoccupied seats, surrounded by sullen work-worn faces all staring stubbornly in another direction. She was a middle aged woman, with long grey hair tied in a pony tail: on the seat beside her was an old ladies handbag which she stroked to the rhythm of her own voice as she recited a litany of natural disasters (2003, earthquake in Pakistan, 137, 000 people killed. 2004, tsunami in Asia, 200, 000 dead. Mudslide in Bali, 25000 dead. And so on). When she ran out of natural disasters, she started on the glory of Jesus (Jesus can do anything. He can save the lives and souls of everyone on this train...It reminded me of the stickers we used to see around school advertising TAFE courses. Girls can do anything- take up a trade! They were supposed to convince us to become automechanics instead of teenage mothers) . When she got fed up with Jesus, she went on, in the same measured tone, to blessing the contents of the train.

She blessed the train back to front and upside down, with all its sorry human cargo included. She blessed the young suit squeezing his pimple as he looked at himself in the window and the lady in red polyester with her red vinyl bag cushioning her head while she napped. She blessed the woman with the grimy child who had somehow contrived to shove her pram through the doors of the train at Town Hall and colonise half the ground-floor of the train and she blessed the train driver and she blessed the students reading their economics notes and she blessed the plumber with the blue esky and the nagging wife and the silent moustachioed husband hunched down behind the Daily Telegraph.

The blessings started to get on our nerves, more than the mudslides and the earthquakes and far more than baby Jesus. By the time we arrived at Petersham there was a growing groundswell of irritation in the carriage, the averted faces starting to turn warningly in her direction like a field of fractious sunflowers. The people sitting in the seats closest to hers got up and moved downstairs to hang off a pole in peace and quiet. The relentless tempo of the blessing started to sound ominous- a drumbeat in the jungle warning of impending disaster.

Eventually, somebody shouted Shut up!!!! I looked around, but none of the closed faces gave anything away. We were at Lewisham. The lady got up, collected her bag and walked, soft-shoed and still blessing us, out onto the platform.

Spam to brighten your day

This is from a catholic elementary school test. Kids were asked questions about old & new testaments.
1. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.
2. Adam & Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of ark. Noah built an ark & the animals came in pears.
3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.
4. Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had truble with unsympathetic genitals.
5. Sampson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a jezebel like Delilah.
6. Samson slayed the philistines with the axe of the apostles.
7. Moses led the Jews to the red sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.
8. Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to mount cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.
9. The first commandments was when eve told Adam to eat the apple.
10. The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.
11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.
12. The greatest miricle in the bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him.
13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. he fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times.
14. Solomon, one of Davids sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.
16. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.
17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.
18. St. John the blacksmith dumped water on his head.
19. Jesus enunciated the golden rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. he also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.
20. It was a miricle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.
21. The people who followed the lord were called the 12 decibels.
22. The Epistels were the wives of the apostles.
23. One of the oppossums was st. Matthew who was also a taximan.
24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached holy acrimony which is another name for marraige
25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

I would like to disagree with the Buddhists and say that the absence of desire is a horrible thing. In support of this claim I will describe an encounter with it from a number of years ago.

December 2004 , Northern Sudan, some days before Christmas
I arrive in Dongola after six days cycling on a dirt road which runs beside the Nile and at times has trouble imprinting itself on the plain of glittering gibbers which stretches out on either side. I am not especially fit and have been permanently dehydrated throughout the trip: also, at some point in this six days I have succumbed to the ubiquitous fiction that the Nile water of northern Sudan is the 'best in the world', and drunk from the river. Somebody has given me a kilogram of dusty dates from their store and it's hard to tell if the culprit is the dates or the water, but I am quickly losing the will to live and am feeling a creeping malaise which seems to originate in my stomach. When I arrive in Dongola and feel bitumen under my wheels I start to cry with relief.

I stay in Dongola for three days. In this time I meet Marcin, his friend Anka and two Czechs all travelling together in a mobile new democracy whose decision-making process seems to me like a good argument for dictatorship. He gives me some medicine for intestinal parasites and I am charmed by his accent, his scarf, his black rimmed glasses which, I will discover later, can only be worn in circumstances where peripheral vision is not required. He is very nice and this encounter will change my life, but it is not a matter of immediate concern to me.

What I really want is my appetite back. And it comes, slowly, in increments, as I revive. On the first day, I eat a piece of fish. The parasites revolt. They want green apple fanta and cake. They punish me for the rest of the day. On the second day I manage two meals by placating them with heavily sugared tea. But it is not until the fourth day that I am really hungry again.

It's difficult to explain the quality of the feeling of wellbeing which the desire for food creates in me. I leave Dongola with a packet of bread, some cheese and a couple of tomatoes: enough to last me a day or so. By 11:00 I have already had five meals, stopping to scoff sandwiches in patches of shade beside roadside hits and wells, under a tree at the periphery of a cornfield, between the crumbling mud walls of towns abandoned to the flooding river . There is a metallic smell of earth and vegetation coming off the alluvial flats in waves where the sun hits them, reminding me of the market garden my parents had when I was a child.

For this day, I don't think of love (following me at a distance in its black glasses and scarf), or literature, or the future. It is enough for me to feel this hunger, which tells me that I am alive.

A weekend depression of a black and comprehensive variety, brought on by too much coffee and a less than impressive PowerPoint presentation on my goddamned thesis last Friday. More or less cured by Monday morning by the therapeutic combination of 30 episodes of the Gilmore Girls, a leg of lamb, ten bottles of wine and the vision of a pair of mating stick insects on our window (would a stick insect give a flying fuck about a thesis?). I can throroughly recommend this cure.

My thesis is starting to coagulate, slowly, at the back of my mind. I catch frequent glimpses of the edge of it emerging and feel it lying there at the very limits of the known world like Australia on an old map, amorphous and incomplete, a temptation and a terror. (Terror Australis) It is guarded by sea monsters that rear their unrealistically long necks and bare their nightmare teeth when I turn towards land, hissing at me as I make for the shore.

But I am entering the territory of total panic where doubt is not an option, the zone of compulsion where there is no choice but to proceed, sea monsters in hot pursuit and an unmapped coastline veiling its face behind the white spume of the shorebreak ahead. Arriba!

Warning to Jorge: contains rodents

There is a family of small creatures living in the long grass near the train line in Lewisham where I cycle on my way to the university. The first day I notice them, I see a ginger cat too, lying in the sun with its stomach to the sky, eyes narrowed. The weeds around it are alive with something but I don't see what it is. The things don't flap like birds or bound like kittens- it is more of a scuttling motion, and they are fast enough to avoid identification, at least on this first encounter. The ginger cat is undisturbed.

The third time, I see that they are rats. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, skinny ones, racing industriously back and forth on their rat business between the retirement home and the train tracks. Every time I pass they are there, and they seem to be getting bolder. After the initial surprise wears off, I start to get squeamish. I am glad that I'm on a bike and that there's no chance that they will choose to run their rat errands between my feet.

Then I start to think about the ginger cat. Why doesn't it do something? I get more and more disgusted and start to metaphorise : the cat is an analogy for the human race, which has lost its hunger and is no longer intent on survival; it aims to get through its days as comfortably and uneventfully as possible. We lie in the metaphorical grass by the train track, balls to the sun. scratching our ginger arses and waiting for the next tasty morsel to be dropped into our plate. This line of thought occupies the remaining four kilometres to the university, my disgruntlement with the species definitive proof that my internal weather is synchronising with the tantrums of spring: squalls and sunshine, sunshine and squalls, five times a day.

Dinner with my colleagues at a Chinese restaurant in Manly, owned by the father of a Chinese- Australian social work student. The job attracts a strange mix of migrants, misfits and dogooders- E, a middle- aged Argentinian with a handbag collection to rival Imelda Marcos' shoe stash: C, a stud in his early 50s with Indian parents and a freshly trimmed moustache that sits stiffly just above his upper lip like a broomhead: T., sexually abused as a youth and now involved in suspicious cult-like activities with a woman who promises to change his life (this information gleaned secondhand through another colleague who apparently invites confidence more than I do, though an indiscreet soul lies under that trustworthy face): D , a Maori woman with a consuming passion for cigarettes who has been heard to claim that she would rather die than give up, and her Fijian husband hiding at the corner of the table under his cap and occasionally muttering unexpectedly funny additions to the conversation; J, the social work student, and me. A motley assortment of human creatures out to save the world, make a living, and thrive on the proximity of extremity.

It's springtime in Sydney and outrageously beautiful Australian wildflowers are vying for supremacy with vulgar and excessive European imports.. our room has windows on three sides and I wake up every day before dawn with a feeling of possibility, girding myself for war with Soula and thesis. It would be a brave real estate agent who chooses to do battle with me at this time of year. (I have never seen her but from her name imagine a moustachioed Greek who grows squatter and more unattractive in my mind with every conversation we have). Love and life are reconstituting themselves slowly after the trauma of the move, though my thigh muscles still retain the memory of two thousand trips up and down the stairs. Perhaps everything will be alright after all.

Hard to imagine how love can survive a relocation without dying under the weight of strangeness and logistics. I go back at night to a stranger's house which has, by some miracle, been populated with my possessions, with a distant view of the city and an ancient Moreton Bay fig probing the foundations of the building with its curious old roots. What is home? Is it a lampshade, a chair, the fall of light or the view from a window; a habit, a person, a smell, a language? Currently I feel totally uprooted, and as if anything can happen in the hiatus between two zones of comfort- things can fall irreversibly apart in the chasm that separates Alexandria from Summer Hill. This general sense of disruption is compounded by the fact that we are fighting a rearguard action with Soula of Century 21 over being classified Dirty Tenants as well as (of course) over money, which only confirms my opinion that real estate agents are worms in suits.

I am terrified of my thesis supervisor. It's hard to imagine why, as he is a gentle and mild-mannered man who is also several inches shorter than I am (which means in evolutionary terms- I like this perspective-gaining exercise- that I should feel superior) . But this is the human jungle, where being bigger and stronger doesn't mean anything- and so, whenever I have to see him, I am overtaken by a completely irrational and strongly somatic attack of panic: pounding heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, blank mind. He is more powerful than me (says who? The oppressive patriarchy, if not the law of the savannah) and I live in dread of exposing my stupidity.

So: it's the beginning of August and three months of hernia-inducing effort and panic attacks of the aforementioned variety lie ahead. Blogging for this period may be very boring, and I warn you in advance.

Meditating on the evolutionary value of a constant feeling of anxiety about matters which are (at least on the evolutionary scale) minor events: does it have a purpose? In Poland I was in a constant state of vigilance trying to work out what was going on and what was going to happen next, which seems to me like a fairly productive if not entirely comfortable form of the beast. Australian worry is a different species and seems entirely disproportionate, but maybe it's more serious because I also have to generate solutions for my problems rather than looking on as a disinterested spectator. Here are the problems, in order of time frame:
1. Where are we going to live?
2. how am I going to write this fucking thesis ?
3. what am I going to be when I grow up?

Interestingly, when worrying about these things, I usually start at 1 (around 3 am) and work myself up over the following hour or two to 3. If I lose interest in these things I have several optional issues to gnaw on: organising a new magic button to open our garage, whether or not Marcin has enough friends, and that old chestnut: money. It' s boring. And exhausting. Over and out.

It's my birthday. In Pruszkow it is 6 am and has already been light for two hours- I am the only one awake and I'm enjoying this situation. There is still a sort of ringing in the air (or maybe in my ears) after an enthusiastic dinner yesterday which served as our Polish wedding party- it started out demure and awkward and closed with a furniture breaking tango that necessitated the removal of two of the guests under pretense of 'going for a walk'. This veiled eviction led us to the railway tracks where we drank beer in the rain and watched the trains go by with Remigiusz (Kuba's faithful friend who he speaks to almost every day on Skype) and Marcin's friend Macek, who started training to be a priest but left and went to work in a porn shop (women being his downfall). We squatted on the weedy verge amongst the beer cans and cigarette packets, eaten alive by mosquitoes, and Marcin told me, This is my Potato Point and Broken Hill...now you understand the forces that shaped my character. On arriving home he started to vomit and is expected to spend the day in a state of pale green dormancy.

Seven hours in front of the computer, typing like a fiend on the first real day of winter, leaves me with a strange sense of elation- although, like Frankenstein, I have no idea what I have created and am far too pleased with myself to take a critical look. It has taken me six weeks to get this far with my bastard of an honours paper. SIX WEEKS!!!!!!!! Nevertheless I am feeling cheerful and as if I've reached a turning point in this horrible year. I have even answered the phone a couple of times this week, and read Bernard Schlink's The Reader again, scanned and briefly wept over before falling into a corpse-like sleep that lasted 11 hours. Currently revelling in a long-suspended feeling that everything is going to be alright- thank you and goodnight.

The things which make me feel better in these difficult days are many and varied. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

hearing that other people are miserable
baths
red wine
a good sleep
coffee
cirrus clouds
the smell of the mangroves in Tarban Creek
the prospect of terminal illness which will make it unneccessary to finish my studies
good movies (especially involving terminal illness and other people's misery)

The things which make me feel worse are no less numerous.

stories of other people's success
coffee
the thought of terminal illness etc.
the blue computer screen which appears periodically saying 'physical dump of memory completed': after this cyber bowel movement, being forced to turn off the computer and start all over again.

It has recently occurred to me to resort to a paper diary for certain internal investigations, and I'm learning something about my own distinction between the public and private and what it means for this blog. The marital universe in all its shifting complexity is not, unfortunately for voyeurs among you, a subject for these pages unless it is sunny and free of blemishes. I wonder how many romantic alliances collapse under the weight of these privacy laws, or- alternatively- under a sense of betrayal generated by public airing of dirty laundry?

An autumn revelation- going outside on Sunday morning ( a few hours off from my torture), down a deciduous avenue of falling leaves on my bicycle with my love at my side (or behind me, or- more likely- in front. He doesn't like to be beaten). We go for breakfast in a cafe near the park- it is early, and only a few dog walkers and cyclists are there, swilling coffee in the expectant air. We eat, gossip. Marcin reads the paper and I read a draft of an essay I've been writing- the sky is deep blue and I suddenly like what I've written.

Outside, sitting tigetherat a table on the footpath, there is a middle-aged man and an old one. It is the old one that interests me. From where I sit, I can see his tan plastic hearing aid and liver-spotted hands. He has a pair of glasses with an extra set of black tinted frames clipped onto them, and he washes down a rainbow of pills with his orange juice. And I (with my juices still flowing, much good though it does me) I'm suddenly envious of him as I am, these days, of everyone who seems able to receive simple pleasures- he has gone past the tyrannies of youth- vanity, competition, the urge to achieve something out of the ordinary. He is free to reflect and to take full advantage of mornings like these under the plane trees , to fossick in the compost of his past for old joys, old conquests (I like the decomposition metaphor). Nobody expects much of him, except that he take his pills and not repeat himself too often. I begin to look forward to my retirement.

The news that my friend Freyja has written six chapters of the great Australian novel has galvanised me into blogging again- along with the urge to preserve for posterity the pain I'm going through with this goddamned motherfucking honours business. The last six weeks have been spent suffering and making regular excursions across the borders into utter derangement- some days I can feel my mind beating around in my head like a moth stuck in a lampshade, and think that I know what it means to crack up. I didn't know (oh limited imagination!) that it was possible to feel like this over intellectual endeavours as well as emotional ones- that said, it could lead to a divorce and then I'll have both. So, in order of magnitude, since last I wrote the world has inflicted the following trials on me.

1. Crisis of confidence of unheard of proportions
2. Computer misbehaviour
3. a mysterious pain in my left breast (today fondled by an ageing mincy doctor who may well never have touched one of these objects by choice)

In return I have had one compensatory vision. Two days ago, the library was evacuated by a (false ) fire alarm. There were sirens and shouts, the firemen came, they left. The library staff were allowed back inside. One librarian (the hairy one with a bald patch which is overcompensated by the tufts of hair sprouting from every orifice further south) stood in front of the library, arms askew, holding back the tide of nerds poised to overwhelm him and roll in a wave back to their computers. One boy (an Asian with a wispy moustache) can wait no longer.... he breaks loose from the crowd and bolts for the library door........ despite his youth and desperation he is intercepted by the hairy librarian, who turns him away. Without losing any speed he turns around and runs off in the other direction.

I still haven't stopped laughing.

On Monday and Wednesday nights, Marcin fights in a children's school in Redfern, where there is a class in an Israeli fighting technique called Krav Maga. People (mostly men, but not all of them) meet here twice a week to beat the shit out of each other- he returns from these forays into testosterone land without his glasses, wet with sweat, covered in bruises and in a mysterious good humour.

Last week I went to collect him afterwards on Wednesday night to go grocery shopping. I was waiting in the car, reading Kuba's rules and regulations on his housemaid's job in the Manly Pacific Hotel, when they emerged: two big men and Marcin. One six foot something Israeli with a jaw like the Terminator, and the instructor, a dark solid man with his head cocked permanently at an angle as if he was expecting someone to run up and try and tear it off at any minute. They formed a little sweaty constellation outside my window and Marcin said to them, "This is my wife."

I am still trying to analyse the obscure little thrill that shot through me to hear myself described in this way. Where did it come from? Do I like the idea of a man I love and admire laying public claim to me ? Was it caused by a cloud of pheromones emitted during manly activity? Is it pride, that somebody was willing to promise me until death do us part (though actually nobody did)? Is it the novelty of hearing myself described in a way I had never imagined I would ? And what does it really mean to be a wife?

Wife is a word of substance. That's why the phrase 'my wife left' always shocks: wives don't leave. They are immobilised under the weight of their title, held in check by wedlock. Being a wife means you exist in the world, that you are tethered by tradition to the past and the future. Wives are soft and smell of yeast and milk- do I, with my chicken legs and protruding ears, qualify? Wives forgive, make beds, wipe small faces and occasionally, when it all gets too much, shout and cry. They hang around and feed the dog and if you need something you can call them from work, they haven't got much to do so they can fix things up for you.

I am a wife. I don't do any of these things, though my will is good and I cook dinner sometimes.
Nevertheless, I belong to someone, and as time goes by I realise that I like the feeling.

I am celebrating my last chance to read fiction and tracing a decade of development by rereading The Alexandria Quartet. It appears that all that registered on my twenty year old mind were instances of aberrant sexual behaviour- child brothels, 'inversion', Pursewarden's incestuous passion for his sister and a multitude of convoluted and diverse extramarital relations. Questions of politics and ethics passed me by, (or at least made a very shallow impression) although on this current read they seem to be the most salient things- Mountolive's conflict between duty and personal affection, Pursewarden's suicide to escape same (or was it), the venal and eminently bribeable figure of Memlik Pasha, the prospect of Egyptian independence and the complicated relations between the Egyptians, French and English associated with it. I'm fascinated, looking at the pre-Israel middle East: a world which vanished at the end of the second world war, a commercial and social disposition of forces which has gone forever.

The romance element, on the other hand, strikes me as tedious and embarrassing this time around.Perhaps my interests are maturing- am I past the stage of looking up cunt in the dictionary and giggling? Or is it a corollary of marriage that I have stopped scanning the written page for references to Love, in the same way I have stopped (more or less) scanning the material world for prospective lovers?

During an alcoholic fancy dress party at my friend Annabell's house, Marcin (dressed as Borat) confessed to me (dressed as Bindi Irwin) that he knows of the existence of this blog. Until now he hasn't dared to read it because he isn't sure of the ethical ramifications of doing so. Is it like reading somebody's paper diary which they have accidentally left open on the table? (In this case you deserve, apparently, what you get.) Or is it more complicated, since I have an audience anyway and what difference does one more make? But on the other hand, since I didn't inform him of the presence of said blog, does it mean that in some sense I am refusing him access? He also commented that since he is present, presumably, in its pages, he feels like he has taken unwitting part in a game of Big Brother which he doesn't especially like.

So: who owns the rights to the world we share? This is my blog, but can I say anything I like about anybody in its pages? The fact is that I don't, and that I probably expected him to read it sooner or later and have been fairly careful not to include (many) details of an intimate nature. It seems that all the usual constraints on honesty, usually generated by desire to be liked and not offend anybody, apply here as much as anywhere.

Back to school this week. Am I enjoying it? I'm not sure if the vocabulary of pleasure is relevant to this kind of enterprise - I have various sensations but wouldn't call any of them enjoyment. Self doubt, excitement and a kind of relief, as if I am getting something out of the way which has been hanging over me for a long time. I like the sensation of being forced to think and suspect I need the discipline of being told how to go about it. But there's also a sense of vertigo when I think of the proliferation of knowledge and literature that exists in the world, growing every minute - do I have anything to contribute? Is it possible to know anything about anything? Which may be precisely why it's necessary to compartmentalise and classify information- to prevent it from becoming an amorphous mess that covers the planet like a great junket and obscures all joy and sense of progress.

At the same time I am having a last brief Indian summer of fiction reading- Disgrace, The Alexandria Quartet, Graham Swift's Ever After and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. I read several things simultaneously and gluttonously, hiving stories against the long dry winter ahead like a junkie intent on the last hit before quitting. David Malouf especially, because he writes about Australia and all the things I like to think about: the way this country which is so familiar to us must have looked to people raised on the damp green hills of the English countryside or the pullulating alleyways of English cities; the irony of feeling claustrophobia in the middle of so much space; the sense of owning-by the sheer fact of having a white skin- country about which you know nothing and which stubbornly refuses to succumb to your advances.

hallelujah!

It appears that blogger is back to normal. I am going to spend the day trying to think of something intelligent to say to celebrate.

an advance! I can publish anything written in the title window, but not elsewhere. Will begin writing haikus

A trip to the dentist, for the first time since the late eighties. It is a small, well-airconditioned office in Newtown with the usual complement of unisex trash magazines. I am so unenthusiastic that I arrive on the dot of ten thirty and only have time for a brief perusal of the latest round of baby-buying and love ratting. I am peering into Angelina Jolie's pout to try and see her teeth when my name is called.

My dentist introduces herself as Yippella Espino. I'll be your dentist for today, she says. She is a small, dark neat Phillipina with her own row of pearly teeth peeking out from between a pair of plummy lips. She buzzes my chair down several centimetres and I can feel my pallid head emerging into the pool of light under the lamp like a sickly bean stalk. I am invited to open my mouth . When's the last time you went to the dentist? she asks me. My eyes skitter around the room, bouncing off stainless steel implements and into shadowless corners. A couple of years ago, I say. She peers into my yellow, unlovely grimace and we both know I am lying.

She puts a pair of black goggles on me and reclines my chair. She has a little mirrored piece of metal on the end of a stick and insists on showing me my cavities while I squint into the light. She and her assistant put on masks (spawning paranoid speculation that they are protecting themselves from my halitosis) and she stands over me with a metallic instrument in each hand, systematically rummaging through my mouth like a well-bred cannibal wielding a knife and fork over her victim. 31/5, occlusal and labial. 24/1, occlusal. 18/2, occlusal and labial. She is listing the teeth that need fillings, and the list goes on and on.

After that they clean them. I close my eyes and soon I hear a buzzing, whining, grinding noise. It takes some time to realise that this is the sound of something scraping on my teeth. Periodically she stops and pokes about with her knife and fork, making an enamelled little clink like a spoon falling into a sink. Then she continues. I lie back slavering while my tongue is sucked up into the spit-remover and then released with a slap and a small explosion of spray. Suck, grind, slap. Suck grind slap. I stagger home through the early weekday streets of Newtown feeling both shell-shocked and relieved.

They say that eyes are the windows of the soul, but if you think that. think again. The window to the soul is actually the mouth. Every cigarette, every meal, every blow job and kiss and cocktail and breath leaves its residue there, building up layers of sediment that contain the history of a life. Eyes know how to conceal their secrets, but the warm damp cavity of the mouth reveals everything to those who know how to look.

Last week I had a message from my friend Gabie, an Israeli living in Italy who I met when I was cycling in China. She is coming to Australia, and this news precipitated an unexpected internal turmoil. Since we met we have lived increasingly divergent lives, mine becoming more and more conventional as hers becomes less so. She has been catching dengue fever in Laos while I finish my degree, selling clothes in the markets in Italy while I try to save the mad people from themselves, and -apparently- applying for a working visa to Australia while I enjoy the plateau of peace of my early married life and wonder what the catalyst will be that will jolt me out of the complacent pleasures of certain love.

Suddenly I am imagining the way it will look to her- a sign of submission to the patriarchy on my ring finger, an ensuite, forty hours a week at the office. It drags me out of my complacency and I am starting to wonder if this is how she felt (and Jorge, and Dirty Rotten Jack) when I came to visit them in Europe before I came home from Jordan. Why do I live in the way I do? It feels like pure circumstance but there is no such thing. Having visitors from foreign parts, especially ones I rarely see, has the strange effect of forcing me to look at myself and my surroundings from their perspective, and always generates an internal process of reckoning. Maybe it's a habit bred from years of secrecy, from possessing a character so private it borders on shiftiness- a thought process that goes Is someone looking? If so, am I doing anything I want them to see?

The usual New Year hiatus in blogging is over- back from Tasmania to find an embarrassment of Christmas riches from mama in Poland and a letter from the quarantine officers saying that her Polish sausage contravened regulations and has been captured at the border. Not so the 30 sheets of communion wafer, the body of Christ miraculously passing where the body of an unfortunate pig could not.