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.

Cruising the web for some sunrise entertainment, I have just come across the information that the site in east Darling Harbour recently contentiously named Barangaroo (and not The Hungry Mile) should actually have been called Gomora.

Today I will map out an olfactory geography of my daily trajectory from Alexandria, on the rim of the airport industrial belt, to Ryde in the heart of the bordering-on-western suburbs. This is a trip of about 15 kilometres which takes approximately one hour, from the coffee-laden airs of Erskineville road to the fumes of the 506 as it squeaks and grumbles to a halt outside my office. The backstreets of the inner west give off their own affluent and slightly exotic aroma of jasmine and good living which fades to a mingling of Co2 with the clashing perfumes of the small flock of commuters waiting to cross Parramatta Rd in their straight skirts and spiky heels.

The Co2 persists, down Johnston Street in Annandale to the Balmain dockyards at the end where the City Westlink edges around the harbour. Here the odour depends on the time of day- a concentrated, powerful mingling of oil and mud at low tide, a saltier and more dilute version when the water is high. At the Darling Street intersection in Balmain, before the long rugged sweep down to the Iron Cove Bridge, there is a whiff of ammonia struggling with hospital grade disinfectant emitting from the public toilets (which are painted- appropriately- in a weak, well-hydrated yellow). Two petrol stations contribute their potent emissions to the mix as I swoop by.

The Iron Cove Bridge- more salt and, because of the exposure to the wind, a taste of distant bushfires or storms, depending on the time of day and year. On the other side I leave Victoria Rd and and cut through the backstreets of Drummoyne- more affluence, more commuter perfume, the more subtle fumes of expensive cars. The Gladesville Bridge is more impressive for its views than its odours, until - reaching the bottom end of the cycle path- there is a sudden sweet and overpowering waft of wattleflower.

And now downhill to Tarban Creek. Early in the morning the grass is still damp and smells of dew and at the very lowest point of my trip the path leads through the mangroves towards Gladesville and Hunters Hill. Here the odour is rich, organic, bordering on rotten but somehow still pleasant. The flowering shrubs and trees in the nature resrve on the other side of the creek balance it out with more honey and musk. This is the end of the trip, the last thing I smell before the steep climb where my own pungent sweat takes over and I am onto the final kilometre of my journey.

Marcin and Kuba thrive on noise, and to live they need a constant soundtrack which keeps total silence at bay. I don't suffer from this aural horror vacuii and when they aren't home I listen to nothing at all and find that it is loud enough in itself. There is a hum of whitegoods, a sporadic swish of tyres down on Euston Street, the tapping of the keyboard. I can hear a phone ringing and a fire alarm erupts as somebody fries their evening meal with too much enthusiasm on the floor below, but it is the sound of the electricity in the walls which I notice the most. It is a sort of symphonic accretion of sound, a low background hum overlaid by a chorus of erratic squeaks and a steady high-pitched whistle. I sit in front of the computer and feel myself caught in a web of invisible impulses which ebb and flow in the air around me, ripping through my cells and creating an unseen turbulence in the tranquil spaces of our flat .

It is nothing like the lively night air in the bush, province of possums and owls : in that silence and that darkness you can feel yourself expanding, released from something confining which you notice fleetingly as it disappears. The night silence of the city vibrates with uneasy human sensation that makes the air contract around you.

My Rostered Day Off is an island of calm in the month which I swim towards with growing desperation as another four weeks reaches its culmination . Yesterday it was marred by caffeine and a disturbing reread of Peter Goldsworthy's Three Dog Night- a novel about jealousy, the secret seed of destruction that lies at the heart of the empire of happiness. I have read this book before and because I know what happens, because this prior read puts me in a position to see the signs of ruin rising like a tide towards the happy love affair at the centre of things, I found it almost impossible to bring myself to repeat some sections. Maybe it's a bit too close to home.

For example: Freyja and Zaf's birthday party. We are up at her father's place at Peats Ridge, drinking around a fire under the stars- I go to bed early because I have to get up in the morning at seven, drive back to Sydney and go to work. I fall asleep briefly and wake up after an hour or so- Marcin is still not there. I am overtaken by a feeling of foreboding which I affix to a possible incipient attraction between Freyja's friend Marnie and my husband. He has expressed an admiration for her ability to keep herself in a consistent and extreme state of drunkenness without succumbing either to sleep or sobriety, and my paranoid mind goes to work on this so that sleep becomes impossible. I go outside and stumble towards to circle of firelight. As I get closer, I pull up short. They are sitting together on a wooden bench. I peer and squint in the darkness. Are they touching each other? Leaning on each other? I am overtaken by panic and can't go any closer. I lurk in the shadow of the barn, squatting on the stubble of recently-cut grass, and watch.

In Europe, Halloween takes place on the eve of the year's darkness, the time of steel - grey skies and contracting days when winter is beginning to wrap its bony fingers around the world. The spirits are released into these last possible moments of light and warmth, through the thinning barriers that exist on the seasonal littoral between autumn and winter. On November 1, in Poland, the graveyards are crowded with people lighting candles on the graves of their ancestors and taking advantage of this easy access to the other world. In Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Germany, France, this is a time to celebrate the deceased, a black festival that refuses to take death seriously and laughs at the coming cold.

In Australia, the time has just leapt forward an hour and the evenings are long and balmy. Trick-or-treaters here begin their evening in broad daylight , and cycling home from work I see that they are out in force, from three year olds in pyjamas and rabbit ears to girls on the brink of puberty, about to overbalance into the top- heavy world of womanhood. Witches and monsters, sweating inside their rubber masks, rub cheeks with fairies in tulle tutus waving silvery wands. In Annandale, an eight- year- old Grim Reaperette brandishes a paper mache scythe: a Balmain vampire knocks with trepidation on the door of a nineteenth century stone cottage, urged on by her mother who waits in the shadows by the gate.

And so Australian infants rot their teeth on the rituals of another hemisphere, transplanted and transformed into an excuse for an evening walk on the cusp of summer. This antipodean perversion of meaning gives me huge pleasure.

My workmate, R., is a beautiful young woman from the Northern Beaches. Unless you live in Sydney, you cannot immediately know what that refers to - a narrow peninsula where a final bastion of white middle classdom remains, bordered by the Newcastle freeway grinding away on one side and the sea on the other. Young women from this area are blonde and pretty with an air of the incipient housewife hanging about them - success here is a big white wedding or a new couch. R. is a recent psychology graduate with a Brazilian boyfriend and a record of brilliant academic achievement. She is also the proud possessor of a new nose.

Her previous nose (before the operation, undertaken to 'help her breathe better' )was longish and narrow and had a sort of aquiline charm, like the nose of a greyhound or a llama. It gave her a slight imperiousness and hinted at a mere possibility of cruelty. Now it is gone, replaced by a still-swollen button nose which has reduced her to perfect beauty and symmetry. In the course of this transformation she has sustained one black eye, a tiny scar, and severe nasal pain, which she considers a small price to pay for 'being able to breathe better'.
Her expensive resculpting has been, as far as she is concerned, a resounding success.

On Saturday night I went with Marcin to see Children of Men, a futuristic film based on a PD James novel about a collapsing world where no children have been born for 18 years. In this film London is a third world city, the streets choked with rickshaws and drowning in garbage, with a few enclaves where the rapidly disappearing upper classes carry out their rich white duties despite the imminent extinction of the human race. It is set in 2027, and led to thoughts of the nature of imagination, the idea of selecting one of an infinite numbers of nonexistent worlds, one of an endless set of possible configurations of actions and events and personalities. The defining factor of the fruits of the imagination is that they don't exist, and so they are only allowed as a reflection of reality, a sort of cast of the mould of the real world. Imagination is confined on one side by the facts and on the other by the limits of the human mind- rather than having no bearing on reality, it has various bearings, with reality remaining as its point of reference.

October 18

This is a post dedicated to gifts given twice, memories which have been forgotten and then returned to me by friends and by my archives, in the last couple of months.

1. A night in Byron Bay with my friend Sara, and Pablo, her landlord's manic depressive son (who had a key and wasn't afraid to use it). Pablo spent twelve hours pacing and muttering and trying to seduce a former girlfriend who- in a terrible lapse of judgment or in the throes of her own bout of mental illness- had consented to come home with him. Sara is responsible for returning this memory to me and my own records confirm, adding this priceless piece of dialogue to the reconstructed occasion:

Pablo: Women have all the power in this world. How do you think it feels to have a dick and nowhere to put it ?
Sara: That's hardly our problem
Pablo: (triumphantly) Well, if you don't like it, get a sex change.

2. A pair of ceramic teacups which my old flatmate Melanie and her Prospective Spouse Masa brought back from their prenuptial visit to Japan. I had admired these for a month or two, having forgotten that they were indeed ours in the melding of sharehouse possessions.

3. A story I wrote in Poland starring a sex tourist and a young Ethiopian man (funny how fiction and life collide sometimes).

4. This image from February 11 2004, in the bar of the Park Hotel in Addis Ababa.
Nigeria is playing Tunis in the Africa Cup semi-final and despite all the talk of the tribal faultlines that shatter Africa, the bar is fully united in opposition to the Arabs. Nuweiri men (refugees from southern Sudan) with their scarred foreheads and herons legs crouch over orange flames of Fanta and appear to be in total agreement with the Amharic speaking waitresses and the cashier in his grimy purple coat. I would like to photograph this warm geometry of intent faces, shining glasses and white chairs but -as with all my photographic fantasies, it seems too intrusive.

October 16

My friend Freyja's father is still handsome, though ageing, and never seems to get drunk though he always has a glass in his hand. He has retained most of his hair, in conjunction with a sort of shyness belonging to a much younger man, and the only sign that the alcohol is affecting him at all is a barely perceptible loosening of the tongue. When this happens the consequences are hard to predict- often he begins, in measured, quiet tones, to describe the downfall of his sons, both of whom have spent time in psychiatric wards as the result of drugs and (he doesn't say this but it is there, between his calm, unblaming lines) a rather fucked up upbringing at the hands of their Jehovah's Witness mother.

Last Friday, he recounted how, in 1969, he and two of his friends were leaving the country for the first time. The nose of the plane was lifting off the ground when the pilot realised something was terribly wrong and aborted the takeoff. The plane buckled in the middle and both engines caught on fire. It turned out that a flock of seagulls had flown into one of them and jammed the propellor. The plane skidded into the swamp which, in 1969, marked the end of the runway, and the cargo of screaming passengers had to crawl along the wing and leap off into chest deep water to save themselves. His parents had been watching from the observation deck, waving their final wave, and had just enough range of vision to see the engines catch alight before the plane disappeared from their view into its watery grave.

Seems like it's harder to have a travel adventure these days, and I have spent the morning vicariously cycling in Madagascar since this sort of thrilling event is not likely to happen to me (now there is a special seagull- scarer who comes out onto the runway before the planes take off and blows a horn to discourage mass suicide and consequent engine trouble). Anyone who would like to do the same, click here .

October 10

The end pf a long day with the mad people- I am longing to lie down on the floor and watch a romantic, undemanding movie and massage my aching legs. However, in order to do this, I need to first rid the house of Rambo, which has been imported as part of my cinematic education. The brothers Ojrzynski claim that anyone who hasn't seen it is ignorant of modern culture and cannot possibly understand the world today. I am going to take it away and get The English Patient instead.

October 5

Last week I dreamed that I was in labour, a long dream that lasted the entire night and caused a lot of pain but didn't actually lead to the appearance of a baby. Drawn to make comparisons with my constipated creative faculty which, after a lot of straining, finally produces a few unsatisfying pellets and then shuts down again. At least there is always the blog- a couple of weeks ago Jorge sent me a link to an extract from Susan Sontag's diaries and I was struck by the fact that it is considered legitimate, this most private and disjointed writing with the secret desire for an audience lying at its core, inadmissable (reading someone's diary is the eleventh deadly sin) but informing all its content. The lists, the sketches of people and events, the ruminations, all bound up with a nice picture on the front and sold as literature. There's a degree of relief in the thought: this self-indulgence is permissible and even valued. As it seems to be all I'm capable of, I'm glad.