I’m well acquainted with that bunch of muscles in the middle, in constant use breathing, singing, talking. Since the I.B.S. they’ve been even more prominent.  Some bastard has got them all in their fist and is squeezing them tight 24/7, and occasionally they decide to use the other hand and twist them into a tight [...]

Tall thin spindly legs pad about on a concourse of grass near the waters edge- their territory, probably a mum and a dad. A tuft of white with patches of brown and a yellow beak, in constant contact via walkie talkie- bird walkie talkie that is. It’s a shrill alarm, a repetitive chatter, stay off [...]

The bed is comfortable, sheets new, it has a three way adjustment control panel. Watching television suspended in mid air, waiting for the surgeon. Earlier a nurse has come and checked my veins and burrowed under the skin at the top of my hand and left a tubular device in there. I feel like a [...]

On my honour, I promise to do my duty, to God, to the Queen and to Obey the Scout Law. Friday nights, a shed clad in thin corrugated tin, the cold biting at us in winter, the heat a fan forced oven in summer. Gathered in a horseshoe before a 1950’s picture of the queen. [...]

Curls and whirls spin around in smudgy blurs at the end of my finger. I transfer the world to my bank of senses through my pads and they register memories from past experience, but sometimes something new.  A skim along the ledge of window – It’s jagged and rough and leaves a trail of fine [...]

He was half in, half out as I walked through shifting shadows cast by the stately elms. I could hear him from the Hampden hotel  until all the way up to the clock tower. His conversation was a live broadcast for all to hear. Obviously he didn’t have a mobile or he’d be using it- [...]

He was half in, half out as I walked through shifting shadows cast by the stately elms. I could hear him from the Hampden hotel  until all the way up to the clock tower. His conversation was a live broadcast for all to hear. Obviously he didn’t have a mobile or he’d be using it- [...]

An electric shock – a real ‘buzz’, eh? It’s a funny experience an electric shock – and as they say it’s not the voltage that kills it’s the amps. Our domestic supply runs at 240 volts, enough to kill and make flesh smoulder, that’s a particular smell isn’t it-  burning flesh, not that I’ve smelt [...]

It had been coming all day, the Melbourne humidity so thick it demanded to be licked and tasted and gorged on like ice cream, so thick. Would it come as one of those manic afternoon sweeps, the sky becoming an obtuse grey, the clouds gathering like formula one racers at the start of the race, [...]

Millions of years ago great plumes of ash and orangey gluggy molten stuff was pouring over the landscape like semi solid Jelly, the Earth being singed and scorched, shrivelling up  like a flower on a hot day. Over the lip of the Marr it came, an orange glowing river, lighting up the night sky, bubbling [...]