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.