"...poker chips..."

The hostel looks like a war zone this morning. An explosion in a badly-managed brewery. There are ribbons of paper towels strewn and pasted upon every surface. Broken and intact bottles are stacked on patio tiles slick with spilt beer and spirits. They ran out of mugs and started drinking from saucepans - they ran out of saucepans and drank Goon straight from the inner plastic bags. This is known as 'Spanking the Goon'. The plates have been smashed, the toilets flooded and the fridges ransacked. Something exploded in a microwave. Cigarette butts are stick to the walls upon which they were extinguished hours ago. There are one or two dazed survivors crouched over coffee cups, trembling hands, trying to spark lighters that will never work again. There is - I am not making this up - someone in the car park playing mournful scales on a harmonica as though he has survived another night in the trenches... put that light out, Private...

About six o'clock last night I went for a swim at Byron Bay main beach. The clouds had drawn over and the beach was almost deserted. The water is warmer than the air and the waves are thin and flat. I showered, went round to the YHA to have a drink with Louis from Quebec. Two Brazilian girls from his room were drinking champagne from plastic pint glasses; class is global. I went back to my backpackers and heated up yesterday's bolognese - had a couple of beers with Martin and Marlina - a samba band with much in the way of headgear and facepaint stormed by the back gate trailed by a procession of hippies protesting everything from overfishing to the evils of holiday lets. I danced along with them for a while and the policemen took my beer away. I bumped into Brook and Ina from my dorm and danced the samba with them for a while, then went back to the hostel to fill a thermos with rum and coke - Havana Club, naturally - and grab my hipflask. An African band took over from the samba and the hippies, then a reggae band. The singer has a fat head. Marijuana coils in the air, bottles turning ankles underfoot, coffee, kids with fairy wings, digeridoo that hum and spin and all drone behind my ear... the bells, a woman in a top hat counts down from "10 - 9 - 8"... sporadic fireworks, whooping and yelling, hugging of strangers. This year must be better than the last - I have said that every year for the last six years. Brook and I decide that we're going to be amongst the first to swim in the Southern Pacific in 2007 - skinny dipping at ten past midnight, she's afraid of sharks. There are no sharks in Yorkshire and she's convinced they hunt at night. The tide is coming in and our clothes are soaked. We change at the hostel and go back to the beach to rescue Ina from a mob of rabid Canadians with greasy skin and shaking with the cold sweats. Brook swallowed too much sea water. She starts vomiting in the public toilets. Ina and I cajole her back to the hostel where she locks herself in the shower and pukes bile into the plughole. We get the door open and make her drink water. I've sobered up after barely the first hour of sitting under the shower but Brook keeps mewling something about sleeping under a waterfall. Dealing with drunk people is probably good practice for children. They are equally sly, stubborn and untroubled by reason. I get to bed about three.

This is 2007. It's funny how the days go by - "ticked off on calenders, counted down like poker chips staked against birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs, holidays..." The last days of 2006 were a lot better than the few hundred that went before them. From the Bondi Beachouse I wound up in the A.C.T. caving with my cousins on Christmas Eve and being savaged by mosquitoes. Christmas Day was just as odd - there were phonecalls and presents and a lengthy game of Jenga in which Ali introduced me to the 'J-move', where any layer that has two blocks on the sides seperated by a central gap can still be used; firmly slide one of the edge pieces into the gap in the middle and then remove the now-superfluous block from the other side. It's tricky but I've seen it done... fortunately someone else spilt the tower before I had to test it for myself. We went for a Christmas Day walk in the Orora Valley that shares the dual distinctions of being both home to the most populous kangaroo population and the coldest mean temperature in Australia. You should see the 'roos scatter before a rugby ball. They can't play at all.

At 6am on Boxing Day cousin Ali and I went climbing at Baroomba, a granite crag in the A.C.T.. It's a thigh-crunching trek to the top of the climb, where we dropped off our bags and jam sandwiches and scrambled down the side of the cliff. This was my first multi-pitch 'trad' climb, and this is how it works: Ali climbs first with a harness full of safety gear. He places these stoppers into cracks in the rock and then clips his rope into them before climbing onward and upward. I belay him from underneath, paying out the rope as he climbs. After thirty or so metres (roughly one 'pitch') he ties himself into the rock and I climb up as he belays from above, collecting the safety gear as I go. When I reach the same safety point, I give him his gear back and the process is repeated until we hit the top. We did two climbs run together - 'Denethor' into 'Ivory Coast' - four pitches totalling 120 metres of granite slab climbing. The hardest, crux move is at the start of the first pitch; the second pitch is an easy scramble; the third pitch begins with a revolting crack climb that bloodied the mosquito bites on the back of my hands; and the fourth pitch is a monster. I'd said on the first pitch that I didn't like the hollow noises made by the layered slabs of granite - it sounds as though they will detach at any moment and slide you down the cliff, complete with the safety gear. When I said this, Ali just chuckled to himself. On the fourth pitch, 'Ivory Coast', I found out why. It starts with a tricky traverse to reach the bottom of a huge flake, a massive shield of this layered stuff. It's about ten metres of really good climbing up this edge as the booms, knocks and creaks vibrate and echo obscenely throughout the entire layer. It was only when we reached the top that Ali told me about the old man he'd met earlier in the year:
"What did you climb?" asked the man.
"'Ivory Coast'," says Ali.
"Is that still there?" replies the man, startled. "I thought that fell off years ago."

Jam sandwiches have never tasted so good.

Anna's friend Chi taught us how roll our own sushi for lunch - the sticky rice seems the tricky part but I'm rapidly getting hooked on sushi and I need to learn to how make it. And oh, but so many happy moments thrown out by the difficulties and differences in English and Japanese. At one point Chi asked me, "Simon, do you have a-" and wiggled her little finger at me. When almost everyone had finished crying with laughter we established that the gesture in Japanese means 'girlfriend', and not quite how we understand it in the UK. Culture shock? You have no idea.

Cousins and fiances and friends disappeared on the 28th and I stayed overnight in the Canberra YHA. In a double whammy of bad things, I left a CD full of photos in an internet cafe (pictures of Christmas and climbing to follow when Ali has sent me a replacement!) and had my iPod stolen from the hostel. They've been over the CCTV with no luck. My travel insurance only pays $100 per item with a $50 excess, so that's not good at all. No more Mogwai, no more Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, no more Arcade Fire, no more Sleater-Kinney, no more Arab Strap. I am not pleased. There's always Triple J - taking a radio with you is the best of whatever poor advice I could offer anyone else on the move. The flight from Sydney to Byron was uneventful - on the bus between airport and town three women in front of me were muttering and whispering important things about the woman sitting in the front of the bus, who seems to have been a Big Brother winner or something else I don't care about.

Since arriving in Byron I've finished 'Flashman's Lady' by George MacDonald Fraser (author of the excellent MacAuslan saga), 'Ice Station Zebra' by Alistair Maclean (for the fifth time), and a repeat of 'Lunar Park' by Bret Easton Ellis which I stole from the Bondi hostel and is, on the second reading, better written, incredibly sadder and much more frightening than I found it the first time round. It is a genuinely disturbing novel. So then I swapped it for 'Generation X' by Douglas Coupland but first I have to finish James Kelman 'You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free'. I put this up before but no-one acknowledged it and it still makes me laugh, so - how many James Kelmans does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. It takes three James Kelmans to change a lightbulb. To change a lightbulb, it takes three James Kelmans.

I made that up.

Laugh, you Philistines!

Right, that's it. I've got better things to do than hang around here having my best made up joke ignored because only Dan and Iain and Bob know who James Kelman is and they didn't find it funny the first time anyway.

I somehow thought that this would make an amusing picture. I was dreadfully, horribly mistaken. This was dubbed 'Brokeback Simon' and I was called Ennis for the next three days. There's more Christmas pictures if you check cousin Anna's blog in my Links.

Some poor bastard in a Santa suit

My dorm in the the Beachouse YHA has seen more than a fair share of crazies in the ten days I've been in Bondi. There was an Italian guy with a diamond nose stud and a hair dryer, an Australian kid who wheeled tracks of sand from his BMX all over the room, a German man who has been making daily trips to the airport for two weeks in the hope of a last-minute cancellation to fly him home for Christmas, and Simon from New Zealand. Simon is 48, works on a submarine base in Adelaide and is rather special. He has saved two months of holiday to come to Bondi, but he doesn't surf or sunbathe. He comes to the hostel so he can "save money to actualise in my pension." This phrase crops up quite often. Most of the time he seems to be expressing his internal monologue but then making a conversation of it with whoever is unlucky enough to have heard. The actual holiday seem to consist of going to a rugby club to eat roast dinners for $8 bucks. He reminds me of the 'Meaning of Liff', in which words are ascribed to things that have a meaning but no name. Simon from New Zealand reminds me of 'the kind of family that go to the beach and sit in the car with the windows rolled up, reading newspapers'. He was about to ask reception to swap rooms because the clasp on his locker had a slight ding which could "damage the design, create a structural weakness, you see. I want to keep my passport in there, and I can't very well do that if it has a structural weakness, can I? Not my passport." He was getting quite agitated, and it seemed for the best that I swapped lockers with him before things got out of hand. Then he started to fret about sleeping on the top bunk. "You're going tomorrow, you say?" I confirmed that this was indeed the case. "Hmmm. And Alfonso is going the day after?" Again, I agreed with him. "So the question, then, is should I take your bed tomorrow or wait another day and take his bed?" He looked at me for several moments with watery eyes before I realised he wasn't being rhetorical. I looked at my bed, and then at Alfonso's. Alfonso had his nose buried in a German novel and hadn't said a word since I came in and interrupted Simon lecturing him on the dangers of driving in Australia. The really curious thing is that Alfonso is Spanish and can't read German. I looked again at the beds. "Does it matter?" I asked. Simon looked at both beds, and at me, and at both beds, and seemed a little crestfallen. "No," he said. "I suppose not, if you're going to be like that."

I arrived from Katoomba about ten days ago. Checking in ahead of me was Louis from Quebec. He has a big afro and works as a computer graphics artist. Like so many of us out here, he's reached a dead end and has taken some time out to think things through. I hope he manages it better than me. We ended up in the same dorm room with Alfonso, who is on another surfing holiday. He has surfed his way round America - both north and south - Europe and North Africa. This is pretty much the only time except in Cairns and with the Coral Trekker crew at Airlie Beach that I've fallen into regular company with people I like. I've taught them how to play El Presidente, which anyone worth talking to will tell you is the best drinking game of all time. We speak a lot of French and drink a lot of VB.

The surfing is OK - Bondi has regular waves and on sunny days the beaches are crowded with topless girls. There was a man with a ponytail at the top of the cliff taking pictures with a long lens and a tripod. It's better in the wind and the rain, when the sea is rough and the beach is deserted. I've done some surfing with a longboard but the waves are big and I am amateur - fighting the swell to get into a decent surfing spot is tougher than falling off the wave is worth. I ended up using a bodyboard instead and having much more fun. Having decided 'one more' would finish me for the night, I immediately saw a cracker chasing down and rearing up towards me - paddling frantically, the wave picks me up - tide and gravity, the wave breaks - I raced towards the beach and the wave doesn't die, it builds every time and breaks again, twice, three times, four times to deposit me at high speed on the beach and leave me laughing out loud in the sand. A total fluke, yes... but the best wave I will ever catch.

I've done the last of my meagre Christmas shopping in Westfields mall at Bondi Junction, where some poor bastard in a Santa suit sweats out another shift of yelling kids. There are pet shops with animals in the windows where people AWWWW and OHHHH at the sleeping tumble of a dozen kittens or the puppies that fall over and can't work out why. There is cheap sushi for lunch, local cricket on the way home and pasta bolognese for my dinner. It's a bit of a party hostel but not quite my cup of English. I mostly just sit on the big sofas and read. The only time I've gone out I was forbidden entry in the Bondi Hotel on the grounds of intoxication. I would like to point out that I'd drunk a liver-threatening, socially disreputable four beers. That's four beers. Four. Alfonso had drunk two bottles of wine and Louis was pickled on rum and jetlag and we were in the company of a Norwegian and two 18-year old Canadians who had been drinking all afternoon; but the bouncer picked on me. I was mortified. He realised almost immediately that he was wrong, but he couldn't back down any more than he could look me in the eye. A bouncer's IQ shrinks to match his collar size come the weekend. We stood by the queue for ten minutes haranguing the security and warning all passers-by that they weren't allowed into the Bondi Hotel if they were intoxicated. It was funny to everyone except the bouncer, and eventually the manager came out with a wounded expression and asked us to go away. I went back to the hostel. Four beers.

There is bookshelf for free exchange in the hostel. I've been able to thin out some of the dross I've been carrying and read another half-dozen books in the last ten days. Out of desperation I read some Dean Koontz horror novel. I was 450 pages through before I realised that I'd already read it when I was fifteen. Things improved - I caught up on 'Empire of the sun' which is an extraordinary novel, much better than the rest of Ballard's work. But Paul Di Fillippo's 'Steampunk trilogy' was utter tosh and made me quite angry... then one of the interminable 'Dune' prequels... then a 'Da Vinci Code' style money-spinning spin-off... then some detective nonsense. Americans have forgotten how to write detective fiction - I blame Hollywood. DISCUSS. And Paul Auster doesn't count, Bob.

Yesterday I caught the Greyhound from Sydney to Canberra. When I woke up and sat up, Simon from New Zealand stuck his head over the edge of the top bunk. "You're going today, aren't you?" It was 6am, he was fully dressed and gave no impression of having slept at all. "Can I have your bunk when you've gone?" I looked at him, upside down, and the rising sun glinted off his massive bald head. On the bus I was sitting next to kid in a Spiderman suit who wouldn't stop fidgeting. Three and a half hours of kicking my ankles when he missed the chair in front of him. The only salvation was listening to Mogwai and watching the face of the poor bugger in front... 'Ex-cowboy'! Take that, Spiderman! His head implodes, leaving only a fine mist and stunned passengers.

Cousins Ali, Anna and Kate, Kate's finace Kees and Anna's Japanese friend Chi met me at the station. We just about packed everything into the Red Dragon, Ali's long-suffering van. It reminded me in spirit of the Millenium Falcon back in London. You can tell immediately when you're in a van with character, and the grinding noises coming from the Dragon were neither a surprise nor a disappointment. We made our way to the supermarket and spent $500 on food and drink. Ali is an instructor for the outdoor adventure charity Outward Bound, and we're all staying on the company compound for Christmas. There is kangaroo shit everywhere and it's fantastic to be out of the city, out of a hostel, staying with people I know. The mosquitos are phenomenal. I couldn't sleep for the whining, the droning in my ears. It's the first time I've regretted owning a three-season sleeping bag. Impossibly hot underneath, savagely bitten above. I tried counting the bites the next morning but gave up after finding more than fifty on my left hand; it was only once we went swimming in the mighty Murray river (waist deep) that the others saw my back - I've probably got about three or four hundred bites on my back, shoulders, arms and chest. I've got bites on my fingers and the palms of my hands. Typing all this seems to have finally triggered a vicious itching, and my hands feel like they're on fire.

It's a strange Christmas Eve. Last year Ruaridh and I drove from London to Inverness in seven and a half hours. This year I was caving in Wee Jasper. Gravel roads and dead wombats is a bit different from the M6 Toll and the A9. It's about a forty-metre abseil into the first cave, and confused bats are silent against the sunlight. The abseiling was good, dropping down into total darkness. We crawled and climbed and walked for an hour or so. Some of the rock shapes are incredible, including an absolutely unbelievable profile of Elvis Presley (photo to follow). The caves that are riddled with tunnels and chutes. It is dry at the moment but some of the shapes conjure up the waters that carved them... and even down here, even forty metres underground, even in the middle of nowhere in Wee Jasper, 'Ronald loves Marcie' and 'Steve loves Susan'.

I haven't said anything about the cricket. My friend Ali has said it better than I could - the following was in response to my sarcastic comment last week that I was looking forward to the start of the Ashes...

"...I too can't wait for the Ashes. I think we've got a really good chance of holding on to the urn. Our bowlers are ruthless and operate as a fearsome team, while our batsmen are tenacious and sell their wickets dearly.

We've generally ironed out sweep shots and cheap strokes, now using them only at opportune moments. Our selection is perfect: thankfully certain players have had over a year without cricket, meaning they are well rested in order to play to their best ability. Our young spinner I hear will be left out of the first two tests, which is an excellent decision given the reason above and the coach's description of him as 'the best drinks carrier' in the world. The Aussies won't be able to carry drinks in anything like the fashion he does.

Best of all, this England side is now ruthless and, having seized a lead, will never squander it but press home their advantage, quashing all Aussie resistance.

It's going to be great."

Ain't it just?

Happy Christmas, people. I hope things is good where you are.

Quakers for World Peace

There was a demonstration earlier outside the Carrington Hotel. Women are standing around in combative poses, sheltered from the sun by rainbow umbrellas and hoisting high a fearsome six-foot banner insisting that 'Quakers for World Peace!!'. There are two of them.

They helped me realise what disturbs me about this place. Unless I've made a horrendous mistake - and no, you're right, it's not likely - then nobody in Katoomba ever blinks. Not the Quakers. Not the busker with his small head and wiry hair and eyes that are pale and have no pupil. Not the kids with sneers and piercings. Not the Buddhist monk in his orange robes, who seemed so confused. And certainly not the man advertising his classes in Chinese Swordsmanship... it's The Midwich Cuckoos. They patrol the streets without blinking, and duck with no purpose into shops where nothing is ever sold. Katoomba has all its business on the main, steep street. There is a shop called 'Electrical Furniture, & Bedding'. Mark the position of the comma and make of it what you will. I certainly have.

The place is a devil to walk around - much like Bristol, actually - but at least it's stretching my calves back into shape. I did the walk along the Federal Pass again, but decided to run it. In my flip-flops. There was much in the way of stubbed toes and elbowing of fat tourists. They have cheated the 900 Giant Stairs by taking the cable car and puffing their way along the forest floor.

Late on Monday I had booked a day of abseiling and canyoning with 'High'n'Wild'. That night the weather finally changed. After three days of scorching sun we were caught on the fringes of a distant overnight thunderstorm, and I could see the flickers of distant lightning on the horizon. By the next morning a shroud of mist had rolled in, thick and wet. It was the respite I had been waiting for. I turned up hungover and with anorak at the pick-up point and discovered, to my surprise, to be the only one on the course. The day before had eleven punters and the day after had seven - I just fluked it. The guide was a decent guy and we agreed to miss out the abseiling and spend the morning climbing on fantastic sandstone at Mt. Victoria. I did five climbs of 25 metres - a grade 10 which I could have done in carpet slippers, three 15s and a 16. None of it was very difficult but I'm out of shape. Miss my bouldering. This business with the ropes is all very well, but I miss the focus of Me VS. Gravity and remembering how to make your fingers work. After lunch we went to the Empress Canyon. Canyoning is gorgewalking, abseiling, swimming and scrambling in narrow winding gulleys shrouded with ferns and fallen branches. After an hour of wending a way through the cold waters the route finishes with a thirty-metre abseil down a waterfall and a bone-crunching trek back to the car. There are worse ways to spend $140 bucks.

This hostel is pretty good. Most of the travellers here are outdoors-type, and the lounge is full of weary people by evening time, tired out by hiking and climbing. We drink beer, and read, and play pool or boardgames. Two German lads went out into the drenching mist in their raincoats to play the giant chess in the garden. They chased a stalemate for forty minutes and the fog boils upwards under the lights. There is a cheery woman, I think from France - a divorcee, almost certainly - with a boyish haircut that suits her perfectly but she seems sad when she thinks no-one is looking. Belgians or Canadians with pimples. White girls who haven't worked out that white girls should never wear their hair in dreadlocks. An Australian is camping in the garden. He was told to wait two or three days for his visa to go and work in the movies in San Diego, and has now been waiting for two or three months.

A billboard on a church near the hostel has a picture of the bible and suggests that you 'Meet the author before you read the book'. I can spot at least two problems with this, but it is part of a bigger picture, a recurring trend in curious attempts by the churches of Australia to entice new followers: a hoarding in Townsville told me that 'God doesn't want shares in your life, just a controlling interest'. Hmmmm. The Father, the Son and the Vice-President. In Wollongong there was a poster of a brand new pair of boxer shorts and the question, emblazoned across them in bold type, was, 'Which would you prefer for Christmas?' Firstly, there was nothing offered in exchange against the underwear, and secondly - assuming that joining the Church was the alternative in mind - this is a very dangerous question when addressed to anyone whose wardrobe is as tattered as mine. Quite frankly, I need the pants.

I'm back in Sydney now, after another two hours on the train opposite a tubby girl in plaits who wouldn't stop farting. I've checked in to the YHA at Bondi Beach, and the fog has dissolved into thin sea haze. Tonight there is a BBQ on the roof and tomorrow I'll try and remember how to surf. This place has a decent computer - I've backdated some photos all the way to 'Tom Waits...', and for good measure, I've included below the very first picture I took in Australia, jetlagged sunrise 4am wide-awake from the seventeenth floor of the five-star Sydney Shangri-La, a shoddy self portrait and for my brother's delectation, the sand-surfing girl.







*******************************************************************

"Why won't you leave me be?"
"That's an interesting question, Lenny. The most common theories about supernatural appearances suggest that, when the incident cannot be attributed to individual psychosis, a ghostly manifestation is generated by worldly matters left incomplete. Revenge, you see, or unrequited love. The need for acknowledgement, and so forth."
"Mr Rosicky, why have you got a moustache?"
It was true. Mr Rosicky had grown a luxuriant walrus moustache since he had been dead.
"Well, why not? Didn't you know that hair keeps growing after you've died?"
There was a pause. Leonard studied the growth.
"You mean that," Leonard gestured accusingly at the dense moustache, "is an accident?"
Mr Rosicky became defensive.
"A man needs a hobby! Besides, don't you think it makes me look younger?"
"Well... you're dead, Mr Rosicky."

Flushed

Katoomba seems a decent sort of place. I went for a long walk today down from Echo Point through Federal Pass and up all 900 of the burning-muscle Giant Stairs. I was sweating like a footballer in a tax office by the time I reached the top. At every junction I had to stand aside for the people who seemed to think the stairs would be better approached downwards, rather than up. I had a short conversation in French with a Jacques Tati-type and then an old Japanese man didn't quite grasp how far down the stairs went. In fact I think he called me a liar, but I bet he ends up spending the night down there.


The Three Sisters at Echo Point. For a sense of scale you might be able to make out the people on the viewing platform top-left.


Katoomba Falls

I walked back past suburban gardens, where Jack Russell terriers hide in the beads of overgrown grass and watch with inky eyes. Still filmed in sweat, I went into a cafe near my hostel. I checked my watch - 3pm. Good timing: "Just how happy is the Happy Hour?" I asked the man behind the counter. He stared at me through goldfish glasses as though I'd just proudly announced selling his daughter to the gypsies. It's a fair cop. She'll be in Russia by now. I sat on the balcony, and poured my beer too fast. It foamed up over the table. Thinking quickly, and not wanting a lap full of beer, I flicked it all over the edge of the table. It was unfortunate that there were people sitting on the patio underneath the balcony; I heard some exclamations of disgust and beat a chuckling retreat to a safer spot.

The hostel is fairly decent, an Art Deco oddity built halfway down a steep hill with the railway station at the top and Echo Point at the bottom. We are situated just across from the ambitiously titled 'Palais Royale'. The place is full of children who run and scream and play the pinball. Every flat footstep thuds through the parquet flooring and up the sofas. The rabble of kids were playing the giant outdoor chess with three teams, taking it in strict turns regardless of who was black or white. I've been playing the best pool of my life with no-one around to see it.

There has also been an unfortunate incident with my hipflask. The ink has been washed out of my pocket notebook by Jim Beam. On the plus side, it was quite new and I hadn't written much, and the ink is now flushed into pretty patterns throughout the book, and it smells of bourbon. All in all it's a good result, but I think next time I'll remember to cap the flask if I'm going to set about falling asleep while drinking it on my bunk.

I'm considering a day rock climbing tomorrow or on Monday, though it's expensive and I'm horribly out of shape. I also might try 'canyoning', though I've yet to find out what it involves. I managed the medium-grade bushwalk in my flip-flops in about two-thirds of the suggested time today, and I don't want to buy walking boots.

I sat and watched a local cricket match for a while. It was much better than the test matches. I saw about forty runs and three wickets in the first six overs. I think I recognised Trevor Somney running in to bowl.

The corner of the ceiling.

I'm in a really filthy mood, very irritable, furious, combinations of things have me ready to commit murder. I left Sydney for Wollongong but was unable to meet former flatmate - the hostel turned out to be University accomodation and I spent two days walking the town, staring at breezeblocks or throwing things at the roaches that chased across the floor. A grinning man watched me eat my dinner and I was convinced he was about to take out a knife. I went to see two Japanese movies in Sydney - 'Ghost Train' scared me senseless though it wasn't especially good and 'Neighbour No.13' was exceptional stuff. I saw 'Borat' and the new Bond and found them both highly unsatisfactory. Either they showed the reels in the wrong order or there was some very dubious editing going on in the poker scene. Grinding teeth and clenched fists! It makes no sense to do things like this. (Though keep an eye peeled for second/half/not-quite-sure-what cousin Julian Sylvester's contribution to 'Casino Royale' - he's an animal wrangler in L.A., I guess he must have supplied the cobra and the mongoose.) England once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and all the Aussies gloated. In the supermarket today people did the unspeakable and hemmed me in to different aisles. I get horrible claustrophobia in supermarkets but this was worse than normal - it was like a concerted effort to deliberately trap me in Breads or Biscuits. Every time I approached a deserted area people would spring from nowhere with bad haircuts and hats and loud voices and fill the spaces around me. I was hemmed in by two women who ignored me utterly as I gestured for escape - one reported back on some gossip and the second dislocated her jaw in disbelief, an anaconda preparing to swallow some miscellaneous rodent. Flycatchers and grubby children. Banged on the hip by a basket - "Oh, sorry, was I in your way?" I was turned over again at the book exchange. I sold fourteen paperbacks for only $30 dollars, but I need to shed the weight. He had me and he knew it, smug in his bristly moustache and creaking chair. 'Underworld': 800 pages of proper good literatoor, boiling down to "America - hey, how about it? Eyyyy." I've read 'Of Mice And Men', 'Things Fall Apart', 'Lolita', and several others I can't even remember though I've sat here a full minute racking my brains for the names. I'm now in the YHA in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. No sooner had I unpacked but I was turfed out of my bunk by a shifty guy with Marty Feldman eyes who claims to have been sleeping there all week. I pointed out that all the other bunks had dirty sheets and this was the only one stripped to the mattress; he looked at the corner of the ceiling and muttered things about the cleaners and some mysterious daytrip. I no longer feel like a millionaire after checking my bank balance in Sterling rather than Aussie dollars. A man on the train divided his time between yelling at girls and sitting sobbing. It's too hot. I need a shower. I don't know what to do. People keep sending me spam emails for Viagra. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! have prevented murder today.

Balls

Six men in Italian football shirts are playing keepy-ups in a narrow alley. The one with big curly hair loses control and the ball rattles against the metal chairs outside the cafe.

A woman crosses the road without looking. In her left hand she carries a cardboard cup full of steaming coffee, and in her right she holds a pastry. She wears a shawl that totally covers her shoulders. She has a fake third arm in a green plastercast slung around her neck.

I pass two builders on the Darlinghurst Road, their workboots white with plaster. The one with dark eyes has a dense beard, but it will never be thick enough to fully disguise the Nazi 'SS' tattoo on his neck.

Sitting in a doorway outside Kings Cross station, an old man with an immaculate dinner jacket sucks on a roll-up, one leg bent, the other spilling onto the pavement. His hair is thin, and white, and gelled up in the manner of Frank Sinatra.

In a successful effort to save money I have done virtually nothing in the last three days but read and write and drink gallons of free coffee. I've only managed about thirty pages of 'Underworld' but all of 'Kiss The Girls', ''48', 'With No One As Witness' and 200 pages of Jasper Fforde's 'The Fourth Bear' which I bought about three hours ago. I have also bought some brightly coloured juggling balls for $5.50. There has been a lot of thunder and a little rain and I turned Amon Tobin up very very very loud. Rhino Jockey!



Sydney sunset...

PS. A moment of peculiar conversation: I was just about to go up the stairs to the roof terrace with a cup of tea when I was accosted by the elderly housekeeper. She looks fierce. "In my country," she says sternly, "you cannot do this. You get shot." She puts a finger to her head in the style of Travis Bickle and flexes her thumb several times. I am a little startled by this change in her behaviour. Any contact with her prior to this moment was limited to smiles and friendly "Good mornings". What have I done wrong? How have I upset her? What would get me shot? Not the cup of tea, surely... I've already drunk a dozen cups on the roof. She gestures angrily at my pocket. My iPod? Holy shit! She must know about the Bon Jovi! Who told her? How did she find out?! Then I realise she is pointing at my shorts, those scabby camouflage cut-offs I wear nonstop between June and October. "They take you from the road, they take you into the jungle, and-" the ominous thumb flexes again in slow motion, a vigilante hammer crashing down upon the puny scales of justice. She stares at me, the hoover pack strapped to her back, electrical cable trailing down the hall, a domestic Ghostbuster.

I nod politely. I've been nodding politely for a minute now, edging for the stairs. What's gone wrong? Nodding politely has always worked for me in the past. Why won't she let me be?

It turns out she's from Ecuador.