We could have lined up for the Sydney Festival thingy on the Opera House steps, but instead we went for one of Sydney’s mundane miracles. On the back of the Manly Ferry, looking at the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and the pure living sapphire-and-emerald beauty of the Harbour itself, I thought to myself in astonishment: “I used to take this for granted.”

It is my favourite dish at the Moroccan place Francis found in Midtown, where we always have dinner. Rach H. made it for us last night when we went over. Between Jeremy’s visit in September and this trip, Rach’s mother passed away very suddenly from cancer. Seeing her face I was reminded how exhausting grief is. It is very hard work.

She cut and peeled garlic cloves and crushed them in a mortar and pestle. She mixed them with cilantro, olive oil, turmeric (instead of saffron), chopped onions, lemon juice, salt and pepper and marinated chicken legs in the mixture for a while. She added a cinnamon stick and water and put everything in her Le Creuset on the stove to simmer for almost an hour. When the chicken legs were falling off the bone, she took them out to brown and let the liquid reduce with green olives and preserved lemon in it. She served it over couscous. It was divine.

And then there was pavlova for dessert.

I have a very weird chemical-burn-like thing on my neck. Best guess is a caterpillar. It’s healing now, or at least the burned skin is sloughing off. Sarah had one of these too. Sarah: how is yours?

I have large bruises on my inner calves, exactly where jodhpurs have patches, and for exactly the same reason. Riding English in jeans is whack.

I have a large bruise on my hip, where I slipped on the pool stairs while holding Julia and made sure she landed on top of me while I took the force of the blow. As I explained to the kids afterwards, this is pure instinct, not a moral choice, and when they have my grandchildren I will protect the grandchildren at the expense of the kids. “It’s not called the selfish gene for nothing!”

Maybe best of all, I had a visual or ocular or opthalmic migraine last night.

We were at dinner with Jess and Mark and their boys, and I kept taking my glasses off to polish them because I was seeing spectra at the edge of the lenses. Then I looked up at something Mark said and realized I was still seeing the spectra without my glasses on. They were in multiple zigzag lines and they were flashing bright rainbow colours.

Both Jeremy and Mark have had them before and recognized them from my description. When I got home I learned that they are called scintillating scotoma. There was no headache. I did feel loopy afterwards, but apparently that’s normal.

Mum: it’s harmless.

It was very gratifying to find the exact thing I saw described here:

and to be able to show it to Claire. “Isn’t my brain interesting?” “Yes, Mama.”

ETA: How could I forget the scratch on my toe where I walked through barbed wire at Woodsreef!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Me to Jeremy: And then she climbed the Harbour Bridge and laid a clutch of giant glowing green eggs.

J: Did she.

Me: Read it on Twitter. Must be true.

J: I never thought of Oprah having an ovipositor, but it makes sense.

Me: It totally makes sense!

J: You’ve got an ovipositor! You’ve got an ovipositor!

Together: EVERYONE’S GOT AN OVIPOSITOR!

Whatever nice things happen, a week with a bullying suicide is always a crap week. I am nearly forty and I am a proper grownup now, with a green card and a 401k and a personal style (yes I do, it’s cowgirl-librarian, shut up) and Optimal Husband and the Sproglets and the sorts of achingly, awesomely sympatico friends I only dreamed about and read about in books when I was growing up. I can drive stick shift and cook a delicious meal for an impromptu dinner party of 12 and write a publishable short story or eight, and I jump Thoroughbred horses over fences for fun.

Back in the day, though, I was the weird nerd, with stupid glasses and horrible pimples and bad hair. I was hilarious. I stank of fear the way roadkill stinks of carrion, and like roadkill, I was irresistible to the grosser sorts of vulture. It was side-splittingly funny to point out that my skirt length was incorrect, that my shoes were not approved, that I had said something that I had apparently read in a book. The fact that I read books was just beyond funny. I was frigid, and a slut. I was uglier than shit. How about a little kiss?

This was at high school; at university, I realize now, it actually got worse, because it was subtler and more barbed. It was howlingly funny that I said “mankind”; Glenn, obviously a far better feminist than I would ever be, corrected me to “humanity” with an indulgent chuckle. I was, hilariously, “the most pretentious person” Julian had “ever met.” “I knew there had to be something I liked about you,” said Alistair, and the entire cast of the play fell about laughing. Twenty years on, the memory of these exchanges, preserved in far more vivid detail than anything nice anyone ever said, can still make me angry and ashamed.

If the bully culture I grew up in was meant to make me want to conform, it failed: all I wanted to do was get away, or failing that, set fire to the entire city, and I’m still awkward and uncomfortable whenever I go back to Sydney. I am on the defensive there, and constantly surprised when people treat me with ordinary courtesy. But I don’t think it was meant to change me. I think it was just meant to hurt. I think hurting me made the bullies and their hangers-on feel safe and included. A nice little bonding ritual for them. Bless.

I think it’s how privilege works, and that’s why it was worse at Sydney Uni. They were Grammar boys and college boys. They knew exactly how to shut people out, and why.

And even that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how desperately I craved their attention and approval: how badly I wanted Glenn and Julian and Alistair and others like them, many others like them, to be my friends. That’s why I didn’t walk away. They couldn’t hate me any more than I hated myself. It’s still hard to forgive myself for that.

Anyway, my point is, Tyler Clementi was actually way too cool to have been friends with then-me; he could play violin fantastically well, and he got into Rutgers. And the thought of him closing his computer and his cellphone and stepping off the George Washington Bridge, the thought that there will be no more violin solos, the thought that he won’t move out to San Francisco after he graduates, and get his heart broken by some asshole he met at Center Camp, and cry into his mimosas at Mission Beach, and then meet a nicer guy on OKCupid and settle down and adopt a couple of kids and join the PTA… Well, fuck you, bullies. Fuck you. You have no idea.

And to the people I bullied myself: I am beyond sorry.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

Eek!

Last night I dreamed Tony Abbott sat next to me on a train, maybe a Tangara. We were heading West. I don’t know why that was important. I do blame this hilariously homoerotic oped for disturbing my beauty sleep:

I could not fail to notice the walk – which with an obviously athletic body could only be described as unmistakably masculine. Indeed Tony must be the most masculine and athletic of Australia’s politicians, and not boringly so. I have often thought that had he been on the left he would be the media’s pin up boy.

My stars! Is it warm in here? Get a room, boys! The piece, disappointingly, does not continue with “…my heart palpated as he caught my eye. His eyes, twin flames under that stormy brow, burned as he huskily whispered my name…”

My dream also ended unsexily. I told Abbott off for his platforms and policies, although I did it a bit self-consciously, since most of what I object to in his position (he’s bad on gay marriage, immigration and the environment) is exactly the same as what I object to in that of his opponent. He’s a Catholic monarchist! She’s a centrist cipher! They fight (property) crime.

I have only theories about the right. Despite my decade-long flirtation with Christianity I always thought of myself as socialist, just a Fabian socialist. It was a shock to discover that my church was actually hard-right, anti-abortion, anti-feminist and come to that, anti-women and children, at least in practice.

More recently my theories have revolved around the Big Five personality traits – the idea that our personalities can be mapped along five independent vectors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This research made immediate sense to me when I first encountered it. It’s trivial to note, for example, that I score sky-high on Openness and Neuroticism, and that I am introverted as hell. In fact Julia’s the only Extravert in our little family – the only one who draws energy from company, as opposed to from solitude – and framing it in this way has helped me to accept her manic glee.

My theory is that conservative people do not score very high on Openness. Is that tautological? And it’s not even that, as a progressive, I think things are going to turn out well; it’s just that I know from bitter experience that whatever else happens, time will pass. Sometimes that’s a good thing – +1 to team White Blood Cells! go the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement! science yay science! – and sometimes it’s an awful thing – bring back the bookstores; boo to old age. But either way, there’s no point fussing about it.

I also, relatedly, subscribe to the notion that conservative religion is pretty much all about sublimating the fear of death. I know it was for me. And it would explain a lot about how conservative religious people behave; their nasty secret sins, and their otherwise weird and alien assumption that as long as their imaginary superhero in the sky “forgives” them, then despite all evidence to the contrary, no actual harm was done. They store up for themselves so many riches in heaven that they leave the earth a smoking crater. This life doesn’t matter! It’s just a starter life! Do-over! I’m not a fan. Can you tell?

Separately, I finally got a glimmer of understanding the libertarian point of view when I realized how historically late an invention the income tax is, and how little tax people used to pay:

Another income tax was implemented in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. Pitt’s new graduated income tax began at a levy of 2d in the pound (0.8333%) on incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200 (£170,542 in 2007).

Put like that, it’s obviously a shocking imposition, and I myself would far prefer not to be hurling a goodly fraction of my income at the US military establishment. But I don’t mind a bit paying for public schools; I would pay more; and I would prefer to pay for Medicare for All and a respectable public transportation infrastructure than to pay for my private health insurance or my car. My parents, you see, taught me that it is good and right to share. Because they’re pinkos.

So those are my theories: that conservatives want things to stay the same, and they don’t want to be made to share. When I think of it that way, you know, I can honestly sympathize. I don’t want to grow old and die, and I don’t like being made to do things either. But I am going to grow old and die, and I do have an awful lot of privilege while other people have far less, and it behooves me not to bogart the cash and the happiness and the, you know, access to clean water and antibiotics and so on. My ethical stance boils down to an ultra-streamlined Postel’s law: be kind and tolerant. Or even more simply, don’t be a dick (Cheney.)

Then there’s that whole weird thing about taking the Bible seriously. Or more precisely, taking extremely tiny morsels of the Bible, daisychained together with logical contortions and dubious interpretations, as an infallible guide to modern life that totally lets you off the hook for being a homophobic douchebag. I dunno. I find far more beauty and wonder and testament to the human spirit and the awesomeness of life in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But you knew that already.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

(At least you guys have preferential voting and won’t accidently Nader yourselves into a Bush administration, touch wood. But that is another ranty, for another time.)

I dreamed I was trying to tidy up my room at Bluegum Crescent. Stuff was stacked six feet high and sliding; a maze had been built between the stacks. “Got somewhere for this little one to live?” asked Sarah, who had caught a shiny brown mouse in her hands. There was also a rat, which turned out on closer inspection to be a calico guinea pig with a baby.