There's nothing sadder than opening a cupboard on a summer day, in the time when it seems the afternoon will extend forever and the evening never come, and feeling the stale heat of neatly folded sheets and towels. I'm thinking here of Brisbane and a natural instinct that sheets, particularly sheets, should be cool to the touch.

A dragonfly is wedged dead behind the photograph of the swimmer, its wings visible like a pair of inverted stained glass rabbit ears. Shellac. Only Gab will know that it's been there for some time. I lift the frame away from the wall but the dry insect remains there and I won't touch it lest it disentegrates to powder in my hand, more moth-like, lacking structure. And tonight, another mini version hovers above the red sheets on the bed. I'll find it deceased in some corner later, I know.

There is a possum in the garage, a rooster on top of the book shelf and last night's ant near the wooden hand pointing upstairs.

Noonie is thirty-five.

The past is near and foreign. It exists holus bolus in boxes of letters and diaries but, I discover, only selectively, an edited version, in me.

Noonie is a child on a red Christmas bike. She is refusing to have training wheels attached. Our father and grandfather take it in turns to run beside her holding up the bike until she gets her balance. It is Scone in high, quiet, front-of-the-house midday December. They are soon red in the face, like the bike. Noonie is determined.

And that Christmas face paint, once thick in resolute shapes, streams towards the crew necks of our t-shirts as eventually we do bitumen laps sometimes underneath peppercorn trees, sometimes faster near the grandstand.

Alex constructs a black chair and then walks down stairs carrying a cake topped with fruit on a white plate.

The possum is in the jasmine. I am waiting. Noonie is thirty-five.

Perhaps it was David Blood who said that his father used to pose a question as a matter of course to the people he came across each day. "What has occurred to you lately?" It might be a perfect habit to adopt to assess the changing mood of the crowd. The perfect way to ask it. Accumulating those things that come to mind to provide a collective definition of the times.

Perfect like the Manhattan at Water Bar. "Would you like your Manhattan sweet, dry or perfect?" Do you mean somewhere in between? Somewhere in between so rarely perfect.

By Friday afternoon my head seems full of new people I've gotten to know and like, but each time I go to tell someone, I realise that they don't currently exist outside the small rehearsal room.

David Blood seems star struck, annoyingly. Even him. Ray says if he could meet anyone in the world it would be Annie Leibovitz. I realise I only want to admire idols from afar. Meanwhile Jo plots her path to Obama.

A boy sits in a bean bag reading books with no covers, nameless books, and that's the point. Characters in a story with no name, no origin, no writer. Just existing in his head, until he articulates it and the surprise of collective experience frustrates him.

Lindsay Tanner says: "In Australia we need to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time" and in a milk crate in the cave-like (but not cavernous) living room of a house in Annandale there is a record at the front of the stack that says The No Neck Blues Band.

On Thursday I put mascara on my right eye first. This is not normal.