On a winter's evening in Newtown

I explained how at five thirty on a winter's evening in Newtown a magpie might carol in the brownish orange light of a streetlight and that the beggars near the station usually call you darling -- except the one on the upturned milk crate I gave two dollars to in an attempt to salve my irritated mind.

The one extra detail

From his seventh floor student room, she heard, he could see the Eiffel Tower. He could also climb out onto the roof, although he had to be careful as he could slip and fall and die for sure -- whereupon she ruined the nearly Moulin Rouge image by a too detailed description of an eighth storey suicide over twenty years before: going into the context and the reactions of middle class Istanbul, as well as the thin red line from the mouth that the journalists had drawn onto the dead woman's photograph on page three of the paper -- this last the one extra detail that ruined the effect.

A functioning vegetable

At lunch, after my colleagues explained to me how a young woman they had recently seen on television spent one lucid hour a day with her otherwise comatose boyfriend thanks to the administering of a sleeping drug which, among the non-comatose, has been known to prompt the users to assault and battery -- or even driving -- while asleep, Eliza who was eating a mandarin on a length of kitchen paper told us about her time on a neurological ward, where a young man who had suffered brain damage after a honeymoon ballooning accident spent his entire day wanking. There were endless meetings about what to do with him. She didn't remember what transpired. He was a vegetable, she said: but a functioning vegetable.

Sheets of humid acrylic

Around a table only separated from the cold and wet of Blackheath by sheets of humid acrylic, he told us about the finger that someone he knew had found when he was clearing out the freezer. Admittedly it was a share household, and hence might have been lying in there for years, but no one seemed to know anything about it and so they just threw it out.

An odd enticing flower

On the radio she explained that when the bee was attached by its head to a toothpick with dental glue, it was able to fly through a virtual reality, and from this they were able to learn how the bee could navigate the dimensions of this virtual reality which, for all we knew, could have been a featureless concrete plain with the odd enticing, or even very crudely imagined flower.

Very early to pray

Although two of his fingers had been broken at work, and he still had a scar where he had been skinned by a circular saw, he told me that the only reason people in this country were so concerned for workplace safety was because Australian workers were drunk all the time and so got themselves killed, while he got up each day in the morning very early to pray.

Just slightly annoyed

Several of us read how the police had no choice but to allow the teenage orphan to live for fifteen months with the suspected murderer after her father and mother and brothers and aunt had been killed. It was then we realised that the publicised effort the police had gone to hide the girl from a killer who, as we had read just after the event, must have so wanted to destroy the entire family one by one, bludgeoning them to death in their individual beds, their faces unrecognisable from the force of the blows -- going to such effort to hide the current location of this girl and to screen her face so that the murderer, as we were then being led to believe, would be unable to track her down where she was safe with family members -- that this entire, too elaborate effort had been as much for us the readers of the news as for the uncle the police had long suspected but been unable to prove anything against -- in fact more, said one of my colleagues. Just look at the photo of him. He is not surprised, just slightly annoyed.