This room feels like it's floating. Has done for all the years I've been coming here. I try to look at the curtains, really look at them, not just to register them as green apple but to process the batik type print that's on them. The white lines make celery sticks, a saucepan with a lid, and assorted leafy vegetables. They're kitchen curtains, and this no kitchen. I get up to close one side bringing shade across my bed, and throw open the other. Morning sun falls on a single bed across the room. I open the window and breeze, no, just air, is relief. Outside it's autumn cool and I've been sunbaking in my floating green 70's batik world. Tree leaves match the curtains, and past them through ghost gum branches, the water is silver sequins. I lie back down, half close my eyes and it's all blue and green.

I remember a sleep in Sicily. A hungover back-to-sleep in a room in a white hotel, and through the green shutters, only terracotta and blue water. Flat squares of colour. Noonie and I had been down to breakfast, around us Italian couples groomed to within an inch of their lives. We were wearing sunglasses, and Noonie asked for a glass of Coca-cola. The waiters were amused. The well-groomed Italians quietly horrified. Me drained and puffy-eyed from drunken tears in a taxi down the mountain the night before. The taxi-driver wanting to involve all his Italian sense of drama: "she crying over a man?". Noonie: "No, she's just drunk." So after breakfast we're back in our room with the green shutters, and sleep. That sleep is what I aim for now, and constantly. If I could sleep like that back-to-sleep. Do you think that a sleep, a particular sleep can be, could be, should be a highlight of your life? I know it can. It's what I aim for.