Mona Lisa

With classical -- no, late Romantic -- music rolling like Leura fog from the open hatch of her car, the woman moved rotting boards, sandwich-coloured foam and a split plastic laundry basket from what must truly have been the Mona Lisa lying face down at the edge of a gravel drive for the council pick up on Wednesday.

More tenderness than embarrassment

Sometimes you glimpse a small occurrence -- say, a man in dusty shorts carrying a statue of what looks like a shepherd boy (with more tenderness than embarrassment) through four lanes of moving traffic -- and something stops you from continuing to watch it -- that is, until the man opens the back of his ute to settle the statue in a nest of blankets -- since the banality of the probable ending is more than you can stand.

The occasional falling note

I couldn't help thinking now, walking through the park this early in the night, of the series of YouTube videos of their new house in Brazil, where each of the rooms opens out in beautiful, destitute silence, newly cleared of rubbish but with grey fringed holes in the walls yet to be filled, the sound of dogs barking in a distance which is still so much closer than here, three sets of working bathrooms, plenteous space and a delicate forest of fruit trees beyond what seems to contain a loft; people walking, chatting, by the front of the not unusually caged front yard whose single chair must have been placed by the former owner as it has the look of someone lingering -- thinking of this house as I listened to the bleating of the hundreds of settling corellas in the Moreton Bay figs and gums in Victoria Park and trying to be sure, as it was impossible to single them out, that the series of upward inflecting cries, once sounding together, still managed to hide as soon as it revealed, the occasional falling note.

We don't call that walking

The whole time we were walking behind the man whose posture was so upright that he walked on his toes -- his bunched calves pulling his springing heels high -- we wanted to tell him to walk properly, to make his heels touch the ground. We even wanted to lay our hands on his head and press him to the footpath so he might be able to walk like us -- although we knew that, in order to do this, we needed to place ourselves higher. The rust-bottomed fridge lying flat on its front in Chalder Street was perfect for this kind of leverage. Your tennisy outfit doesn't fool us. You look ridiculous. Your way of walking is obviously a joke -- or is it that you're ignorant of the normal methods of locomotion, in which case your way of walking is making us anxious. Who are you trying to impress with your toe tip stepping? What on earth do you think you are doing? Walking? We don't call that walking. We just had to lure him into the backstreets off Salisbury Road to release these thoughts.