Write it down

My [other] constant companion is my notebook. The poor thing is beginning to feel the strain. It contains all the general tasks of life, thoughts and ideas that I rush to capture before they evaporate. I always intend to organise them later.

My fear is that it has become an indicator of my mental state; a collection of disjointed scraps and notes associated only by virtue of their collection in a single location. Tattered and frayed, dog eared and overworked it threatens to give way at any moment. Missing pages are missing memories, whole days passed in a blur or torn out, deliberately put beyond recall.

You can see why I'm worried.

Time to consolidate, organise and rearrange. I might sort my notebook out too...

Backwards busriders

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing in the opposite direction to travel. Not those who do so because all the other seats are taken but people that actively choose to do so, they're a bit different (rare too).

Going backwards makes most people a little queasy, these people are tougher than that. They are so accustomed to public transport that motion sickness long ago ceased to be a problem for them.

A lot of people don't always know where they're going or at least like to be able to see their stop to make sure they get off in time. The backwards people aren't worried by this, they have their routine and they know the route so well, they know it backwards.

The backwards seats are the only seats on the bus that force you to look your fellow passengers in the eye, all at once. Other seats grant the comfort of staring at a seat-back but not these. These seats reveal the bizarre theatre of people on the bus, in public but in a confined, unnatural state of locomotion. Sitting backwards on a Saturday night-bus is an operetta.

These people spend their journey looking from their point of departure watching the world go past them with their back to their destination, meeting it only when they choose to get off. In the mornings this means facing back toward home, watching it disappear into the distance. In the evenings watching work fade into the past.

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing backwards, they're a bit different.

Why not?!

This sticker is under the driver's side window of all Sydney busses.

Hospitals I have waited in

It appears to be a fundamental truism that on average one must visit a hospital at least every 18 months (obviously a bit more often for health care professionals). On this occasion you must sit and wait for a period of no less than two hours. The most recent of these for me was at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick. The staff were excellent the best of them being the attending doctor, despite looking about 12 years old, it was a privilege to watch him work. However...

I despise waiting and I'm not fond of hospitals. Eventually, no matter how serious the reason for being in a hospital, you attempt to alleviate the anxious tedium of the waiting room by entering into an advanced level of schadenfreude in the form of a guessing game:

"Ooh, look at the one in the pink dressing gown! Bloodshot eyes, barely able to stand and carrying a bucket of puke. The dreaded lurgy or a cry for help?"

This is particularly true of accident and emergency wards where there is an additional element added to the game necessarily added by the triage process. Patients are rated into [it'll all end in] tiers to denote how urgent their treatment is and to allow the staff to prioritise the right people:

1. About to die. Intensive care required with the possibility that bits might need to be sewn back on.
2. In immediate danger, could be a bit messy, attending doctor should be prepared to get sticky
3. Pretty bloody urgent but not in immediate danger. They'll be OK for 10 minutes but keep an eye on 'em
4. "You nailed what? To where?! Ate/drank what? You dipstick."
5. Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning

• Anything else - sticking plaster with mickey mouse on it and Mummy kiss it better.

You rarely see tier 1 or 2s in the waiting room. The helicopter/ambulance crew generally having scraped enough of them together for a delivery direct to the ICU (I wonder if the same rules as pizza apply here; if you wait more than half an hour do you get your treatment free?). You do see some tier 3s and some very funny high-end tier 4s. The best of which this time round was a very south American sounding man who was dragged in across the shoulders of his girlfriend, his eyes not focused and not quite capable of standing on his own.

Eee ate a mushroom in the bush and now ee is intoxicated!
A magic mushroom?
No, jus a mushroom. In the woods.

The idiot was dragged away to have his stomach pumped. Sadly my first thought was "we are interfering with natural selection and I'm not sure we should have on this occasion".

Whilst I understand that the position of triage nurse calls for an extremely grounded and pragmatic personality the two on duty here could have used a gentle reminder about privacy. One poor girl, brought in doubled up in pain, was shut in the consulting room to preserve her dignity, but not before the nurse had bellowed out that treatment would be "stuck in your bottom". I presumed it was an intramuscular injection but who knows, a dill pickle suppository may be more effective.

Probably the stand-out moment though was when we actually sitting in the ward waiting for everyone to be in the same place at the same time again. A & E wards are terrifying places at the best of times and this one has good road links to most of the eastern side of Sydney, and a helipad on the roof. The majority of patients were elderly brought in with suspected heart attacks but there were some in there who had clearly been spread across the road only an hour or so earlier.

The unseen octogenarian in the next cubicle over was having a tough time of it. The doctor returned to him and explained that he was going to have to do a rectal exam; "what that means is...". There was a rustling of sheets and a short, utterly silent pause. And then, "ooooh, aaaaarghhh, oooh!". I would have laughed out loud had they not been talking about a full blood transfusion to keep him alive.

Just pants

My car insurer has just sent me this tasteful pair of undies. Still no policy document though...

Top Gear vs Alabama

Hicksville Alabama

I have lots of erudite and witty observations to make but right now I am hung over; subtlety is a forlorn hope and wit a forgotten dream. Watch this instead, it's very funny indeed.

Soft as shite shandy drinking broadcasters.

Didn't take the medication today...

I am troubled by a recurring dream, or rather a series of dreams with a recurring theme. In these dreams the universe gives has hidden and embedded a vital part of itself as a person. This person has a task to complete which releives them of this essential element of the universe. The task is never complex but it must be performed for time and space to continue. I suspect, but I can't be certain, that everyone has a task. Often I am the person with the task, but sometimes I am just involved with them in some way.

Each person is persued in their task by a thing which can hide itself as anything or anyone (it prefers people). The object of this creature, or whatever it is, is to stop the task being completed. The quickest and most effective way of doing this is to kill the person with the task. It does this by morphing its head out of whatever it is hiding as and smashing this into the head of the task holder once at unbeleivable speed, there is no chance of survivng its' attack. Its' head is a fire-axe shaped blade with a steep serrated convex edge made of a mother of pearl or white obsidian substance. It has been doing this forever and will continue to do so into infinity. The creature has a name that every task-holder is aware of but that I can never remember when I wake up. Every task-holder is aware of the creature and the task only for the duration of their task. They are equally aware that they will inevitably be killed by the creature should they encounter it.

Once the task-holder is dead time loops back around to the point at which they recieved the task, until either they complete it or it becomes apparent that they cannot complete it. If they can't complete the task then time loops back around to the very beginning of time and begins again almost exactly as before, but not quite. The person who couldn't complete the task is never born or is never given a task. I don't know how I know this as I would normally wake up either as this happens or from the raw shock of seeing a sudden and normally unexpected death - the creature kills using surprise and cunning but it will only ever kill the task holder.

When the task is completed someone new gets a task and the creature has to find them. Each time a task is completed anyone who was aware of the creature or the task continues in their life without being aware of either or having any memory of it. In fact they may reach a state where, despite the task remaining complete there is no record or trace of this contained in reality.

The dreams are extremely vivid and I wake up with a start and sometimes with a cry. I'm pretty sure I snapped awake one morning this week with a howl that shook the building. I'm not always sure that I'm having one of these dreams until the creature appears and it scares the hell out of me when it arrives. In fact it is so real that I half expect to walk round a corner and get nutted by a bizarre white axe thing.

What particularly troubles me is the varying degrees of information given to me by my subconscious. Why does it give me so much information that I couldn't possibly have derived from reason and so little about the specifics of the situation.

Now, I know that I'm not normal, but this isn't normal even for me. I might take it easy on the sauce for the next day or two and see if this helps. Exercise too, nice fresh air and healthy food. Otherwise it looks like it's time for a nice cosy rubber room and one of those jackets with the long sleeves that tie behind your back. Nurse, the screens...

Do I know you?

It's always weird to bump into someone you know and haven't seen for years, but to do it in a different hemisphere from where either of you thought the other was is more than a little disconcerting...

Linda and I run into each other in the strangest places. Last time we randomly turned up at The Ten Bells on Shoreditch High Street at the same time, I had thought she was in Mexico (The Ten Bells is famed for being the "Jack the ripper pub"). The time before that we walked past each other at a music festival on Hackney Marshes, I thought she was back in Sweden, she thought I was living out in the sticks - I was!

Emily & I had been at the night noodle markets, which are part of Good Food Month in Sydney. We walked to the bus stop and Linda was getting the same bus as us home and currently lives round the corner from us. I was so stunned I couldn't think of anything to say, at all. At moments like this you really want to come accross well as how you are at that time may be the way that you are remembered until you meet them again. Given that the intervals that Linda and I meet are doubling every time - that could be four years! This made me more awkward than I would like and particularly as I was still in work clothing and in dire need of a haircut, she was dressed in civvies having been planting trees all day. Dammit I want to be a hippy and go and plant trees all day, and here I am working for AMP!

The slightly awkward feeling lasted for the most of the bus ride home but I have put it down to being tired and have written it off as surprise. I still made Em give me a haircut when we got home (given that she gets upset with me if I let anyone else cut it this isn't as extreme as it sounds). It was great to see Linda again and I hope that I see her again before she goes back to Sweden to train as a nurse but on our current form it'll be quite a while before I see her again.

AAAARRRRRR

Shiver me timbers right soon it be the time o' the year when it be right to talk like the cutlass wavin' scum o' the spanish main.

Avast ye scurvy dogs September 19 be Talk Like a Pirate Day.

A moment of clarity

Idly dreaming as sauntered home last night, lost in my usual comfortable childish fantasies (Jedi/James Bond/Batman/Free Ice-Cream – delete as appropriate), I was struck by an awkward moment of clarity:

I had just been playing tennis at the club and was walking along the seafront to go back to the apartment to sleep and to prepare for another day at my job working for a huge financial corporation, in Australia. That doesn’t sound like me, how the bloody hell did this happen?

Thankfully this moment was a particularly momentary one, interrupted as it was by a pair of flying foxes doing a quick circuit of the park. These things are bloody enourmous and make a quite incredible sound as they take off (a bit like a wet sheet being shaken). Normally I get to the spot where I had this awkward feeling, deep in infantile reverie, and startle one of the bats. Naturally when it's dark a bat with a wingspan nearly the size of my armspan taking off and swooping low over my head can interupt my train of thought. It's uasually about this time of the night that I realise I need the toilet quite badly and that I should run home up the hill as quickly as possible to avoid an embarassing accident. The shrill scream of "AAAaaarrrgggH! A fucking vampire!" is completely incidental.

I was pleased to see the bats this time. Firstly because for once I saw them before they saw me and secondly it brought me back in to focus. I came to Australia to see things like this every day.

temping:2

Okay, it's been a month and I am thoroughly sick of being a filing clerk. Working here is like some sick parody, a bit like The Office but with a darker tone. All the characters are certainly here (all names have been changed to...er...no sod it, they need to know what a bunch of freaks they really are, and if they find this it'll be a bloody miracle:

Liz
Liz is genuinely physically impaired. Through some hideous accident of birth her left upper arm is about half the length of her right. She would normally get my patience and sympathy but unfortunately she can also be loudmouthed beligerent and dogmatic to the point of me actually having to walk away from her. She has an idiotic high-pitched laugh which she uses every three minutes without fail on items of conversation that would not elicit a chuckle from a nervous hyena. Liz's nose appears to emit a strong gravitational field which has, over the natural course of time, sucked the features of her over-wide face into it's middle and elongated both eyebrows.

Patricia
Patricia has the most deadpan sense of humour I have ever witnessed and takes great delight in saying the most miserable possible things to you without a flicker of emotion passing accross her face. She would be very hard to read had I not caught the slightest most momentary upturn of one corner of her mouth when she does it. She also gets the hiccups at least twice a day, very loudly.

Gail
Gail is a great person and very easy to work with but English is very much her second language. She flits around the office in a very businesslike way and generally gets the job done. Her favourite trick is to jab me in the ribs with a biro and say, "You mean to me Tom, you saying me a bad girl!" and giggle maniacly.

Lynette
Lynette is of Italian descent and is very pretty. She also knows it and can be an unbearable flirt. When Andrew, a typical Aussie of the 6 foot sheap shearing rugby playing type, joined the office she melted into butter. "Andrew's a country boy, aren't you Andrew? I'm a country girl, I like country boys, don't you like country boys Gail?", all this whilst fluttering her eyelashes in the most cartoonish possible way. I could have punched her were it not for the fact that she is the only thing of aesthetic value in the entire building.

Renee
The biggest mouth of the section belongs to Renee, as does the widest arse (it's funny h