The water is blue, but it's apricot, and the sky is salmon like the costumes of the fantasy family. It was sunny when I woke, and pouring fat drops of rain.

Tadpole Husbandry

I look at the book with pictures of New York while Ray transfers the tadpoles to a better container. He's not sure what to feed them. We talk about breadcrumbs but then when I search for information on the internet the Growafrog site says it's important not to feed anything that fouls the water. There are some fatalities in the transfer but many more make it alive into the Schweppes Sodawater bottle with the hole cut in the side.

In the book there's a family in Brooklyn sitting in their swimers on the sidewalk keeping cool under spray from a fire-hydrant. They know how to use cities.

Chris says that there are four episodes in his life that make him feel tight in the chest when he thinks about them.

I pass the mechanic and smell sweet WD40. On the weekend when I drove past the kids soccer game I could smell the sausage sizzle.

Sixty five minutes door to door, and there's haze in the space between me and bridge. Red flags diffused and silver tips on tree leaves. All Fired Up in the supermarket.

Lobster Beach

I can do this. I can leave at any time. I can jump in my car and drive around the water that is a mirror. I can listen to Jeff Buckley. I can sing. Loudly. I can think about jetties and the ideas I used to have about them when I was a kid. I can stick my arm out the window and make black and white stripes rise and fall in the breeze. I can look up at the dome of best blue, humming hallelujah. So I do.

It's a sort of tree house. A central room with a bedroom and a bathroom on each side and above that a loft with tiered bunks, like sleeping at the football. The deck looks over Lobster Beach, and for the avoidance of doubt, inside there is a plastic lobster hanging from the wall. It's purple orange.
Kerry says the ambidextrous nature of the collection of lost thongs nailed above the doorways disproves the theory that it's always left ones that go missing.

The house annoyingly and wonderfully clings to the side of a cliff. There's a steep concrete driveway and then a hard to discern path picked among the rocks and dried gum leaves. On arriving it seems impractical and in my head typical of the hippies who built the house. In the daylight my deadline mind has disappeared and I no longer feel trapped.

On the walk to Tallow Beach we talk about the boy called Chook who got laid on his last night in Brazil. He hasn't called the girl that he likes now even though their date was three weeks ago. The sand is made of shell fragments smooth like shellac. They won't let go of my hand.

Richard Butler is a minimalist. He likes Picnic at Hanging Rock and Jindabyne. He doesn't like Candy or The Goat.

We eat lunch of ricotta gnocci and green salad on the deck with the wind at our backs. There's a black dog called Stella and she moves intently. Before dinner she's doing the rounds and I can feel the warmth of the fire there on her coat. I'm opening bottle after bottle of red and peeling potatoes on my lap.

I keep the wolf from the door, but he calls me up. Tells me all the ways he's going to mess me up.

Cardigans

Rules for boys wearing cardigans:
- never, EVER wear them done up
- make sure you're whippet thin
- make sure you're not a geezer to start with

I'm inspired by a girl I see in the supermarket. Inspired by the back of her outfit. I'm right behind her in the line so I can't see what she has on underneath her jacket, and I can't see all of her accessories. I try to peek over her shoulder but it's no use. She's called up to the first checkout. Still can't see. Too soon I'm called to my checkout. Past hers. Still can't see. Do I want a plastic bag? No. Then she's gone.

I go home and watch Sex and the City on DVD. There are some I haven't seen before.

These are the questions in my mind: is Dan Kelly the new Dave McCormack? Isn't Judith Lucy a lesbian?

I like tahini now.

Periodically, from my blissful back-to-sleep I hear dog fracas from the cemetry. The anglicised plural is fracases. There were more than one. Repeated dog fracas. Bark-BARK-BARK-bark-bark-bark-BARK. Then church bells.

Voices don't carry to me here. I can't learn the news of the street from my bed. If I could, though, it would be news of the suburb, not news of the street, such is the volume of the pedestrian parade. I pretend to read the newspaper but I'm distracted by Church Street and its oblivious possibilities.

It turns out we can't do scissorhands, Noonie and I. Some sort of genetic deficiency, and we discover it, of all places, in the bar at the Gazebo hotel. The one with massive red crepe-paper flowers on the wall and a stuffed fox suspended upside-down from the ceiling. Annie says it's Burley Caton Halliday.

The hop continues. Some peel off and I give them the narrow-eye. Eventually, we're the last to leave. We stand on the footpath beside the place that sells the best brownies in Sydney, and the street is quiet - devoid even, and importantly, of taxis. Can it be that the people who would normally be our competition for a cab are in fact at home in bed preparing for the City to Surf? No, the whole bar-going public have simply left the Eastern suburbs early to beat us to Istanbul on King. Even Kuletos is shut. Hence the kebab crowd. No tabouli, thanks.

Today, the city is sunshine and silence. I've mistakenly got the flat sole trainers on. I walk down the very centre of Northwood Street, chasing the sun until the fig trees connect and the canopy is complete.

Three Pelicans Fishing in the Shade of the Wharf

I finish my make-up in the parked car listening to The Rainbow Connection. Somebody thought of it, someone believed it, and look what it's done so far.

There are three pelicans and sundry seagulls fishing in the shade of the wharf.

I remember Noonie singing in a Louis Armstrong voice until we did the muffler on the sandy track through the mangrove swamp.

I am on the train and there's a man holding a small green teapot. He gets off at Central and I wish I had nothing better to do than follow him. Where does he work, this man clutching a teapot? Does he emerge from his office building for morning coffee still clutching his teapot? Perhaps I've missed the point and he doesn't emerge at all until lunch time because he's quite sorted for hot refreshments.

Blistering and Wistful

It's a duty to Andrew that brings me back. He sends a text from London: young lady, what would you say if I said that I was dancing to disco...and that it is the future? Me: I'd say that's going straight to the blog.

There's disco at Splendour. It's the Scissor Sisters and it doesn't sound like the future. It sounds like old Elton John. It sounds like ten minutes ago. It sounds like the period too soon after a big debut. Like The Killers. Like Franz Ferdinand before you remember why you liked them in the first place.

The future? The future, my dears, is Karen O. Her surname is a perfect circle, but she's got all the right angles. Much later Noonie says that the musical boys in our group were caught up in the fact that there's no bass guitar. We hadn't noticed, but we loved her crazy shorts. I know, what I know.

There's another brunette on stage the day before, but you can't even see her. She moves too fast. How does she sing and jump and breathe and shimmy all at the same time? And how does she make Great Gatsby dance moves look so damn punk? Josie says it's kids music. I'm happy to be a kid. The songs are complex and jaunty and familiar. Gen Y is all savvy delightful innocence trailing a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon and it makes me wistful.

Noonie says Tim is wistful too. I wonder if it's possible to be blistering and wistful at the same time. When he throws his head back and shakes the sweat off from side to side there's no purer expression of joy. Part of me wishes that I was a boy that could play guitar, drink bourbon from the bottle and hang out with Perko, and part of me is repulsed.