When did I become so political? Is it age? I can string out a whole evening on martinis and questions about Labour.

I'm talking to a man with a perspex scorpion brooch inlaid with diamantes and he's a dickhead. Laura says he walks like he is on acid and he may well be. Constantly. That would be a convenient explanation. He takes her phone and we talk about the best case scenario as the initiation of an art project. It alll falls apart up close and I have to walk away.

I'm watching television, listening to a different man, a photographer. He is the victim of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. In the immediate aftermath of the bomb he is questioning everything.

I can't sleep. I don't know what to think. I ignore a man in a lift even though I know him. Is this who I want to be, how I want to be?

I have a thought that is a great contrast while driving in Hordern Street but it escapes me now.

There's a Marlin in my bathroom. The blow dryer shakes it from its ledge and the blue/green plastic nose breaks off. I am reminded of the Salamander Hotel and my first experience of plastic animals attached to coloured drinks. I believe they were monkeys.

The Score

Me 1
Spiders 0
K-Rudd Honeymoon Over (Noonie's words)

Should we make believe you remember me from a holiday delayed by a storm?

When You Get Caught Between Didion and Architecture in Helsinki

The weekend ends in pure joy and if my back wasn't sore from a combination of tennis and lugging washing I'd be jumping up and down with everyone else. Jen says that my outfit is great for an under-18s gig and I don't want to admit that I've thought about it. From the moment they run on I'm infected and smiling despite exuberant kids singing every word into both my ears and the back of my head.

When the girls in front turn to speak the artificial sweetness of Red Bull is a bubble of aroma that takes just a second to reach me.

We pass the Great Southern on the bus on the way in and I tell Noonie about the Kris Mac plan for a daggy ball in the upstairs ballroom where everyone has to wear their year 12 formal dress. Noonie leans over as they come on stage to note that the girl in the band looks like she is wearing a year 12 formal dress. If not hers then someone else's. I hear later that she did nine years of jazz ballet, that girl. It shows. Back on the bus we're sitting behind two girls who are eleven, maybe twelve, and excited. We're not sure what they're excited about. Possibly everything. One says to the other: "so do you get on the internet and, like, chat to people?". Then the mother comes to tell them that they have to get off the bus and the answer is lost forever.

There's a sign pinned to a gum tree in the park. It reads something like: "he was a short and insignificant man with a false sense of his own independence". There's another one exactly the same on the very next tree, with handwriting in blue or green texta on a lined page. That makes it a hate campaign, I think, on the way to tennis.

A small black dog breathes in my face as I lie in the sun finishing the book club book two weeks after book club. The notes at the back take me back to a Sydney Festival a long time ago and Street of Crocodiles. And then Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea. Shared Experience. After Mrs Rochester. Stella Bowen. Ford Maddox Ford. The Moldy Peaches. A kid doing heroin. Enough of word association.

When I was a kid I used to obsessively trace my thoughts back one domino to the next as I lay in bed before sleep each night. I feel comforted still going to sleep with a television on in another room.

The lead singer says they're Gen X and we feel validated. Noonie says we're the angsty generation and I claim it because the flip side is talent.

My hair is dirty and I try to wear it large and matronly but actually it sags halfway through the evening. I think of a marriage still strong after so long, still saying what you mean. I think of an intellect so fierce and structured learning to swim into the cave, responding to the visceral. Get up, get dressed, do the crossword and you know you're OK. Make the letters fit between the lines.

Noonie is crying because the daughter does die in the end. I'm thinking about an evening on a balcony in Honolulu, drinking wine while others sleep prompting an enormous sense of wellbeing. I'm thinking of a Blur song. I'm thinking that I am Ruben Guthrie.

Gambarimasu = I'll try my damnedest (in Japanese)