Perhaps this is not what I wanted to write at the beginning of a new decade either but perhaps the decade should get over it.

Trains pass. I see the people on them. People on them. Even at this time.

Still, it is a house that has our belongings already in it. And order. Put the bins out on a Sunday. No matter what time one comes home. Put the bins out on Sunday. Order. And the trains, aeroplanes - especially on a Sunday. Over the tennis courts now dormant. Structure. One can play around. Mix up other elements so long as the trains keep on. Will we find another house where trains keep on?

I thought this was the first post of 2010 but that's not the case. Lack of memory is surprising comfort.

6.12am. 6.19am. A taxi driver working till 3pm. Trains pass.

The Bird

A month of birds. An artificial sulphur-crested cockatoo presides over a Grenfell garden. There's a kookaburra sitting on a pool fence in Mosman and another real live cockatoo out the front as we walk the terrier in its harness down the old tram track to the promenade. None make a sound.

On the book shelf of the place we're not staying is a book about how to do dressage. I take a photo. At this place is also a sofa with an excellent blue/green graphic print, and on the other side of the sliding doors the owners are watching cricket across a coffee table laden with papers.

Later, Elaine plays the violin before we eat. She's accompanied by a man whose name I don't remember. Three, maybe four different people tell me that he conducts piano lessons and concerts regularly in Grenfell. Later still, or perhaps earlier without me realising, someone lets both my driver's side tyres down. At the end of the evening I drive the short distance home without realising. And in between? In between all these things there is suprise and delight of the genuine kind, food and wine and duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, goose and presents and dancing and dress-ups and joy and ABBA. And no cock-sucking cowboys.

I look for patterns in a month that asks questions and delivers no answers. Discombobulates. Early New Year's Day is silent too, or too silent and yet productive. I tiptoe round the back yard in bra and knickers placing bottles soundlessly in the recycling bin lest the neighbours be provoked. There's nothing to suggest they will. Only my own guilt. In the end someone rings the door bell.

Only hours before we've been discussing Kevin Rudd's performance and the problems with the politics of our state in my bedroom. I break the discussion by needing to pee.

I forget. Forget the simple stimulation of a road trip in a Lloyd Rees/John Olsen/Whiteley landscape. All I want. I forget. Forget excitement about a useless infatuation. Forget excitement entirely.

Noonie says her New Year's Resolution is to be less harsh. Mine is to be less snippy, and to do more day trips. Five days in we're not doing so well. Still snippy, no day trips. Although I did go to Bronte Park this afternoon.

Flight of the Conchords is comfort. I fall back on the cheap humour of a kiwi accent. What else is comfort? Rain. Jack White. Gin. Edward Scissorhands.

Oh, and I went to see Andrew Bird and he whistles well but Aaron says that the concert went for 2 hours and ten minutes and the approach is overly intellectual.

This is not what I wanted to write at the very beginning of a new decade.

There's a fat cockroach high on the kitchen wall, the first one and an indicaton of high summer.

The man at the corner store says: are you working today? I've not prompted him but it's the perfect question and I'm able to say: "No! I'm on holidays this week. I'm just reading the paper." The reality is that I'm unable to open the paper. The headline on the cover screams "Make evacuation plans" relating to rising sea levels. Subconscious panic sets in.

Not working allows time to ponder just where the brown spider who used to reside in the far corner of my room has gone. I suspect the answer is into my wardrobe. I'm also prone to making a litany of appointments to deal with a litany of self-suspected illnesses. Perhaps that's why I'm destined for the majority of my life to working at high pace. No time to ponder means no time to self diagnose.

It's a week. This week.

Last week I was terrified and at unease at the prospect of being stuck on the moon, also at the prospect of my twenty year school reunion. We discover the answer to rising sea-levels and it means, in order that Kylie Lambert's backyard at Collaroy is saved, that some person is dispatched to The Moon as the administrator of spurious alternative forms of energy. Forever. Not that they're meant to discover that. They're a clone.

And then, the school reunion. Terrifying. From what I've observed on Facebook.

I have a list for this 10 days off. The list is divided in to A and B priorities. I am 38 years old. A and B priorities are surely a luxury.

Buy Cigarellos and smoke them with Noonie is a (B) priority where as Choose new Glasses is an (A) priority. You get the drift.

We arrive in Melbourne. We catch a bus from the airport to the city, then we walk to the train platform and catch the train to the appointed suburb. After that we walk to the street, except the street is in the wrong suburb and we've carried our bags there, for more than two kilometres. When we arrive, and realise we're wrong, we're waiting out the front, leaning on the red brick wall and a man in the dirtiest jumper that Noonie has ever seen asks us what we're doing. He pretends he's looking in his letterbox but we know he's only there to find out what we're doing. He has few teeth.

October

Did I miss a month?

It's a reference, this space. Why can't I remember the film I saw a year ago at The Chauvel? I feel it was Australian. Can I tell you of Australian films I've seen recently? Beautiful Kate. Regional Australia in all its godforsaken-ness. Is it Walcha, really? Blessed. What to say? We damage children. We don't mean to. Somehow we can't help it. Children are resilient. Children are perceptive and that's their problem.

What I do remember from being on holidays a year ago? Having a beer with Ray. Chairman Ian introducing me to Terry Serio. Was he not JO'K in our regional TV folklore? Domminick Dunne was alive but we were watching him in documentary. And I wonder, will everything ever be this good forever? I remember Conor Oberst at the Enmore. Tim and Tara. Brendan Cowell pretending to meet Chris Taylor at the Townie. Was Conor Oberst just a year ago? Is that fat moon on the rise? No coat, no shoes, no idea where they went.

October never seemed so October.

The children want to play in the tree.

Ice makes glassy cracking noises in my drink.

Too warm for this time of year, but reminiscent of other years at this time, looking forward necessarily to the future defined by a calendar and wondering, as close as I come to planning what might come next.

Most people around me change. And what prince constancy?

A bookie's ticket in the shop on Cleveland Street. God knows how many we collected off the ground filling in time at the Scone Cup. A bookie's ticket by a stag's head made for my wall.

My laptop keeps my legs warm.