Made it by a whisker, just a whisker more, they really are thin aren’t they, whiskers, close shaves. How thin, how tiny do they have to be are we talking about a single follicle a stunted piece of stubble pouring out of the epidermis? Are we talking about a cat whisker? Long and wise, a [...]

Nee naa nee naa nee naaaaaaa, that’s the sound that ambulances used to make when I was young. They just came in plain wrap vanilla white with a red cross on the side, a revolving red lamp and that siren. Nowadays it’s any colour as long as its plastered with strips of lumo green reflective [...]

A question I often ask is- will I be worrying about this in ten years time?- Answer NO. Will I be worrying about this in five years time – NO, what about one year? I hope not – 6 months probably not- three? again, probably not – One month- in one month I’ll know won’t [...]

When it’s summer and the humidity has steam-rollered you like a pancake and the sky seems to want to squash you, you can get this sudden change in Melbourne……we call it ‘the change’. We anticipate it, expect it, so when it doesn’t come and you know there’s another night of tossing between a thin top [...]

C.A.E. they call it here – Council of Adult Education – though you don’t have to be an adult I guess, everything from macrame to blues harmonica to entry level English. It used to be in one pokey building but over the years it has spider-webbed out to consume the other buildings around it, in [...]

I make my way up the half landing like a mole through the half dark, the lower hall light throws indistinct shadows on the walls. The brass rickety knob of the bathroom door squeaks as I turn it and the guillotine lock turns up just enough to open the door. It slices down into its [...]

She knew she had to act fast, a whip crack in her mind snapped as clearly as the fingers of a fifties rocker in front of a bulbous microphone. She rode to the supermarket on a melody of need. Cream. That was the lyric running through her head with those finger clicking fifties melodies , [...]

A book as thick as a brick containing heiroglyphs of mathematical language, propped up on the table made of brown woodgrain laminate, the ends angled so they can be put end to end. Room 301 The windows arranged in long lattices of light and an occasional vision of freedom courtesy of a skinny branch of [...]

The clacker on the front door echoes along the hall and up to the bedroom. Immediate thought is – “what are they selling”. Who knocks on the door at midday anyway? Expecting Jehova’s Witnesses or something similar I am surprised by a man in Fedex Outfit. A white rectangular package in one hand and a [...]

Lawn mower man – stuck inside a main frame room ‘access denied’ ‘access denied’ trying to escape down a telephone line somewhere to continue his mayhem. Russell Crowe ‘virtuosity’, a self made man in his own image, virtual. Sci fi novels, too many of them with crumbly yellowing pages read as the digits tick past [...]