I was hoping to get a good instructor. Sandro trained in Germany and at the Pessoas’ barn in Brazil, so that worked out okay.

Sandro picked up exactly the same issues that Erin and Dez always ding me for: close my fingers on the reins. Keep my leg aids consistent, not on-again off-again. It’s as if there were an international language of good riding which I am just now able to have the most basic conversations in.

It was surprisingly difficult to ride in jeans and a too-tight helmet and no gloves. I was sloppy, especially in a couple of the transitions. But the horse had done dressage and was as sweet as sugar. By the end of the ride I had him cantering over a crossrail in a good rhythm and moving off my inside leg.

This barn is exactly ten minutes from the flat, as opposed to 35 minutes door to door in San Francisco. So that’s nice.

Then I got home and set off the burglar alarm and locked myself out of the flat for three hours. OH WELL.

…my novel fragment is twice the length it was when I left California.

Ten thousand words down, seventy thousand to go.

Another way to look at today is our progress out of the city: under the Harbour and up the expressway to Naremburn with its Victorian workers cottages; down through Sailor’s Bay Creek and up through Willoughby and Roseville with their California Bungalows from the 1920s and 30s; down over Middle Creek and up to Forestville and Frenchs Forest with their houses beginning in the 1960s. Successive waves of development further and further from the city, depending on the construction of Northbridge and Roseville Bridge respectively.

Then Scotland Island and Kuring-gai Chase and Cottage Point, all aristocratically inaccessible and beautiful. My own early-childhood-imprinted wilderness, my goanna sprawled insouciantly across the road. Wooded fjords and sailboats and Pittwater full of flashing fish.

“It takes a real commitment to self-dramatization to have an unhappy childhood in a place like this,” I said to Jeremy.

“You put a lot of effort in,” he said.

Barraba is similarly indebted to engineering marvels, in its case Split Rock Dam and Woodsreef Mine. The dam and the controversial tailings pile were separated at birth, as I pointed out to my brother-in-law after he’d graciously driven us all around and explained what he knew about them.

“Piles of dirt,” I said. “Men never grow out of your Tonka toys, do you?”

Woodsreef, when it was being mined, let Barraba grow to a population of 3000. The town has since dwindled to a third of that size. The missing pipeline from Split Rock Dam, if it is ever completed, would allow the lost population to return. The downside of Woodsreef is that the miners were mining asbestos, a mineral now so reviled in Australia that my sister asked us not to visit the mine, or if we did, at least not to get out of the car. I made sure when I got back to her house to cough theatrically. I am obnoxious.

So we’re back in Sydney, I guess. It’s overcast.

We visited Ric in Lulworth. He was okay. Afterwards…

Claire: Why do we have to visit Ric?

Jeremy: Because he’s my Dad.

Me: If your Dad were sick would you visit him?

C: But I’m shy of Ric.

J: I’m shy of him too.

Me: I’m not shy of him but seeing him this way makes me really sad.

J: Yeah. It’s not shyness. It’s sadness. And you don’t want to cry in front of him because that would just make him sad.

Me: Right, so I do this horrible smiling-all-the-time thing. I’m hideous.

J: Don’t be silly. It’s obvious how much he likes to see you.

At this, I burst into tears.

Me: Oh, to get through a single day without blubbing.

Next we visited Thussy. Thussy and her Reg are two of my favourite people on earth. She is Austrian. He is a former RAF pilot. In their house, it is always World War Two. Reg has walked away from plane crashes and fought off cancer and is now a bouncy and bellicose 87. I suspect he will outlive me. We whisked Thussy away to Cottage Point Kiosk for awesome fish and chips.

Thussy! Has met! George! Morris! She says he is very nice. Thussy has also tickled a rhinoceros named Ferdinand and hiked in Nepal and ridden in Iran and Patagonia. Good luck having an awesomer godmother than mine.

Next we met Mary and Andrew and Vincent at a chocolate cafe in St Ives. The chocolate was delicious and the company was even better. We have been making an effort to meet new people lately and have had a 100% They Are Lovely, We Like Them Very Much result, which seems absurdly yet gratifyingly high.

Morrisa lost her father today. Jen is still fighting her way out of a bone marrow transplant. So it is inappropriate for me to be feeling as sad as I do. But my brother drove back to Brisbane this morning and we will fly back to Sydney tomorrow. We are disentangling my things from my sister’s. It hurts.

The time I spend with my family gets better and better as I get older and saner. We do nothing, essentially. The kids watch as much TV and play as many games as they like. The girls regard their older cousins as near-Gods. We old people play mahjongg and gossip and gorge on Christmas cake and swim rueful lengths of the pool. Barraba is beautiful, too; it is the shadows of clouds on wooded hills. I feel myself untwisting every moment I am here.

I am more grateful than I can say to have both parents and my brother and sister, and to be able to spend this time with them, and to realize how completely and crazily I love them all, how funny and wise and perfect they are.

This afternoon the thunderheads assembled like giant iron anvils in the sky, and rain came down in bucketfuls. There are still drumrolls of thunder and blue-LED washes of lightning as I lie here in the hotel, ready for sleep.

Oh yeah so I have a blog.

Julia got a splinter. Non-coercive efforts to get it out having failed, I held her down while Jeremy dug it out with a needle. Julia screamed and beat me on the back, yelling “You don’t like me any more! THIS IS THE WORST WORST WORST DAY EVER.”

Parenting can be fun! It came out. It was quite the little barb. Afterwards Julia and I held each other and sobbed.

Andrew very kindly did a special screening of the 2008 Royal Ballet production of “The Nutcracker” for a certain small ballet-obsessed human of my acquaintance. The nice thing about having the entire cinema to yourself is that you can recline on floor cushions while said small human can join in the ballet. I watched her leaps in sillhouette against the screen.

Remember when Julia was a baby? That was, like, five minutes ago, right?

When we arrived at Currawinya everyone was already out on Mum and Dad’s new screened-in back deck. The horses next door were walking through their paddock. Drawn to them as if by a magnet, I purloined an apple and went down. The horses had no interest in the apple, had clearly never been given apples as treats before, but were happy to stand with me and breathe their warm breath into my hair. Thoroughbreds in beautiful condition, their muscles hard, their skin like silk, their trimmed hooves hitting the ground at precisely 45 degrees. Curious and friendly and respectful of personal space. Handled by people who understand horses and like them.

Ross and Julia came down to meet us and the horses and I walked over to the fence. “Their heads are big,” said Ross, as the horses inspected him and Jules. “Yup,” I said. “Make them go away,” he said. “They’re freaking me out.” I pushed their shoulders and they ambled off, then I piggybacked Julia up to the house where my Mum gave me a glass of champagne. The sun set, gloriously.

Dad made pappadums, bhajis, rice, dal, beef curry, tandoori chicken and his own potato curry. Everything was perfect, and there’s enough left for dinner tonight. Port wine trifle for pudding. As we got ready to leave I realized Mum and Dad don’t have a dishwasher, so I filled the sink and my brother Alain picked up a teatowel and we washed up together like two halves of a whole, as if we had done it a thousand times before, as if we had done it, in fact, with these exact plates and pans, all our lives.

Metres swum: 1000. Or possibly 933; I may have lost count.

Riding as it is taught at McIntosh must be way more of a workout than I give it credit for, because I have never swum a kilometre before, and this was really Not Too Bad. I kept checking in with my body to see if we were good to go. Every time I did, we were. It was way less aerobically exhausting than running a comparable distance. Even my muscles feel warm and pleasant rather than actually sore.

Or maybe it’s the taiji?

Metres swum: 266
Words: 500
Bailey’s: still 0. What the what?

Metres swum: 200
Kilometres bushwalked: 1.5
Words written: 500
Glasses of Bailey’s drunk: 0 (a severe oversight)
Steak pies: 1
Sausage rolls: 0.5
Iced coffees: 1
Slices of pavlova with vanilla whipped cream, mango, passionfruit and kiwifruit: 2

The trouble with this country is that some of the people who live in it are ex-boyfriends of mine. Conversations such as the following may ensue.

“You should call her brother.”

“I’m not going to call her brother.”

“Why not?”

“What if he answers the phone?”

“What if he does? You could talk to him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t talk to him.”

“Why not?”

“Because I touched his penis.”

“That does make it awkward.”

“That does make it impossible.”

“It was a long time ago!”

“Not long enough!”

“Fine, but how else are you going to get hold of her?”

“Can we avoid using the phrase ‘get hold of’?”

“You’re the one who brought up penises.”

“Can we not talk about bringing up penises?”

“I can see this is hard for you.”

“We should also avoid the word ‘hard.'”

“This is bringing up some issues. There’s a lot of stuff coming out.”

“Yes, that’s right, it’s coming from deep inside.”

“You never know when it’s going to sort of, spurt forth.”

“This is my point!”

By this time we are both laughing so hard that, at least in my case, my back ribs are aching and it is difficult to breathe.

“You are corrupting innocent children here,” my sister accuses me.

“I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson,” I say. “Never touch anyone’s penis.”

Again with the perfect day. Up early for breakfast, Jeremy wearing his starry owl tshirt, then we left the girls with Mum at Currawinya. “Remember your pleases and thank yous! Be respectful of other peoples’ things!” Then Dad drove us to Narrabri. On the way we saw an Eastern grey kangaroo up very close – she hopped away into the bush – and lots and lots of washed-out creek crossings from the recent floods.

Barraba nestles at the crossing of a couple of lovely valleys with gentle rounded hills. We headed north and then west at Cobbadah, and the land gradually got steeper and more rugged and the forest more dense until we were near Mount Kaputar, an extinct volcano and the high point of the Nandewar ranges. We got out of the car and walked down to Sawn Rocks, a 40m cliff face made from a crystallized basalt lava flow. We surprised an exquisite water dragon along the way. On the creek floor below it there were broken-off pieces of the cliff, looking like the ruined columns of some ancient civilization. The only sounds were insects and birds singing.

The volcanic range ends abruptly in an escarpment, and beyond it is an ocean of land that stays flat until Western Australia. It is Mount Kaputar that makes the rain fall on Barraba, so the sky is clear out beyond it on the western plain. So the CSIRO, which is Australia’s awesomely badass league of mad scientists, built its Compact Array out here. Seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen six 22m antenna dishes mounted on railway tracks running through the bush.

Actually one of them is fixed and it’s 6km away from the moving ones. That means that the Compact Array can work as a virtual 6km dish on its own, or it can join up with its sister dishes in Parkes and Coonabarrabran to make a properly big antenna, or it can work with dishes all over the world and receivers in space to look at objects that are actually quite far away. You didn’t know, did you, because you suck, that radio interferometry was invented by an Australian and first carried out in Sydney on Australia Day in 1946. We may talk funny and eat yeast extract on our toast but we bow to no one in our astronomical fu. It is a long tradition in our country.

Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

Sarah, who is, in fact, my sister: Did you think of a holiday achievement plan with checklist items like “Play mahjongg,” “Drink Bailey’s” or “Loll around aimlessly”?

Me: …um, no?

Sarah: So basically, you set yourself up to fail.

Me: I’m sorry, but have we MET? Do you even KNOW ME?

5.30am: Woken by jetlag, exuberant offspring. Authorize watching of TV. Turn over, go back to sleep.

8.30am: Scalding shower, followed by leisurely bacon and eggs.

10am: Father arrives to whisk us away to sister’s house.

11am: Elevenses. Lemon sugar crepes with stone fruit salad.

12noon: Three games of mahjongg, in which I prevail mightily.

1pm: Swimming, watersliding, gossiping with mother and sister, getting royally sunburned. Exuberant offspring noticeably more confident in the water this year.

3.30pm: Ice creams and film (“Despicable Me”) at the Playhouse. Resolve to be more evil, execute more cunning schemes.

6pm: Three games of mahjongg, in which I am hopelessly defeated.

7pm: Dinner straight out of Enid Blyton or C S Lewis. Roast chicken, ham, eggs, four kinds of salad. Mince pies, Christmas cake, shortbread, chocolates. Lashings of tea.

8pm: Three games of mahjongg, in which my empires are overthrown and my enemies revel in the lamentations of my women.

9pm: Exuberant offspring bathed and shoehorned into their pyjamas.

Metres swum: 400
Words written: 500

And so to bed.

Words: 500. This is hard.

“Mama!”

“What?”

“You can’t eat Julia.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you love her?”

“Yes! And I love ducks, too. They’re delicious.”

“Don’t you love her to hug and kiss?”

“…you could hug and kiss a duck.”

“Mama you can NOT EAT JULIA.”

“I thought you said she was really annoying?”

“She is! But that doesn’t mean you can eat her!”

“I think the real question here is, Do you love your baby sister?”

“…yes.”

“To eat?”

“No!”

“To hug and kiss?”

“…yes.”

“Even when she is REALLY annoying?”

“…yes.”

Kilometres run: 1.5
Metres swum: 150
Words written: 506

“I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”