At the theatre after some years of relying on the cinema for my visual stimulus, I am shocked by the three dimensional bodies of actors rotating and breathing in front of me. Cinema is a flat world swelled only by music, where everything you see is included for a reason, and body parts are amputated and blown up on the screen as ciphers of feeling. The camera zooms in on hands, twisting in nervousness or reaching for a gun or clasping one another in fear or desire or an attempt not to fall from the 25th floor. Eyes, lips, heaving breasts fill the field of vision as the violins howl. Each body part carries such a surfeit of meaning (apparently Hugh Jackman's beard had its own separate screen tests for Australia) that the sight of an entire organism could overwhelm the viewer completely. All that exists is the piece in the frame.

At the theatre, on the contrary, there they are, living human anatomies, the kneebone connected to the thighbone connected to the hipbone. Nothing is obscured, nothing is irrelevant. You can see their eyes and feet all at once; their fronts have backs, their tops have bottoms. The character is built slowly, in the thrust of a hip, the motion of a wrist, a shifty sideways glance. The bodies must only move as the person they are pretending to be, in a dance equal parts freedom and constraint.

At first I find them oddly unconvincing: they are too much on display, they cannot possibly be anything but themselves, clumsily faking another set of mannerisms, another life. But look what happens as the show proceeds: I am drawn in, slowly but completely, to this imaginary world, to the orbit of these three bodies. It is only a story, but a story lived in every muscle and sinew of the three men on stage, who must surely forget who they are for the duration of the show, who must surely cease to be who they are until they are recalled to themselves by the applause of the audience.

It is pure magic. The human body, unairbrushed, unmade up, unrepentantly flesh, is more lovely and more expressive in its entirety than it could ever be when decomposed on screen.

Enough about the crazy right, what about the crazy left? Politics in the (Irish) pub on Friday night, a talk about Iran and Palestine (War or Dialogue?). A quick perusal of the internet reveals a large amount of cyber-bile directed at the two speakers, one of whom sweats heavily and stumbles over his words, the other honey-tongued and welling with smooth private-school confidence. The crowd is what is really interesting- mostly over 50, and all deranged to various degrees. I have the impression that they are desperately seeking their 15 minutes of fame behind the microphone in question time. None of them actually asks a question, using up their allocated minute on establishing their credentials to be there in the first place. I am from Middle East, I am an academic who...., I have been to the middle east etc etc etc . There is a man in a beret (yes, a beret) seated at the back of the room who devotes himself to drinking and heckling in the time-honoured tradition of beret-wearers. There is bad feeling, resentments and general pettiness- more like a 2UE talkback session than a gathering of intellectuals, which is how they bill themselves. I feel simultaneously disappointed and vindicated: as with hippies, left wing intellectuals are no more virtuous than anyone else.

A long weekend of good feeling and alcohol in the City of Melbourne, reconstituting lost pieces of myself that reside in the memories of Marcelle and Brendan Renkin. The week starts with initial apprehension- Brendan and his friend Damien are in Sydney. There is old love and hurt feelings, and the possibility of awkwardness. For some reason this awkwardness doesn't materialise, as it sometimes does, in defensive sparring and mockery: we drive to Melbourne together in harmony, talking about Australian identity, about pedophilia, laughing at the contraband foodstuffs in the boot that Brendan's brother has acquired by questionable means and sent south to his numerous relatives. Marcin and Brendan talk about Russian politics. I watch them with proprietorial pride- such good boys, look how they get along. They turn out to have other things in common besides their romantic involvement with me. Look how modern, how mature we all are, driving towards Melbourne without discomfort or envy, discussing the nature of the universe and smiling at each other. As I write this I realise it sounds as though we are driving towards some horrible denoument, but we aren't. Things are simply alright.

In Melbourne there are shades of scores of other trips to stay with Marcelle. We giggle for days about nothing much, consume bottles and bottles of booze, dance and drink and eat. We lie in bed and talk to Marita and cuddle her daughter. We go to the shopping centre and buy cheap and hideous Australiana for Marcelle to distribute when she gets back to Panajachel. We finally have time for silence as well as constant jabber.

When we leave them on Sunday afternoon I succumb to a terrible feeling of loss which I have not felt since Marcin left me 5 years ago in Awasa. I pine (mainly for Marcelle- I have erected defenses against Brendan long ago) all the way to Albury. It takes several days after returning to Sydney for the good feeling to reassert itself, and I remember leaving them another time, nearly ten years ago when I came back to Australia. It was a definitive separation for me and Brendan, though I didn't really acknowledge it at the time. They drove me to the bus station in Manchester. It was a gritty, grey autumn day, eddies of wind blowing takeaway wrappers and empty plastic bottles around the benches. I kissed them goodbye as they stood there in the turbulent air, and instead of doom and impending loss I felt simply happy to know that somewhere in the world, the two of them existed. Toxic blues eliminated through the usual metabolic processes, I feel the same now.