My house is full of books by people I know. Al sent me a copy of his play Melonfarmer, Salome lent me Eben’s mother’s book The Trauma of Gender, and I bought After Long Silence, by the brilliant and discerning Helen Fremont, as a gift for myself, how festive.

But I haven’t read any of them yet. Except for a couple of restorative side-trips into Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Trollope’s Autobiography, I’ve been hard at work on Roy Jenkins’ barnstorming Churchill for more than six weeks. Longtime readers may remember it as the book that sent me into a deep blue funk over my failure to become a senior cabinet minister at 32. In fact Churchill’s greatest achievements, for which his earlier life can be seen as a series of elaborate preparations, came after his 67th birthday, a far more cheering prospect for your average ageing wunderkind, ie me.

Churchill was, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, an extraordinary man – Shakespearean in his effortless combination of power and charisma and insight and courage and dedication with utter, unforgivable stupidity on a handful of key points, such as, oh I don’t know, say India? Turkey?

My pet theory of geopolitics states that wherever you see a straight line on a map, it’s the bloody legacy of well-meaning but inept European post-imperialists carving up what they can never hope to understand, Stoppard’s conspiracy of cartographers, the rabbit-proof fence extending over the sand dunes and out of sight.

A straight line on a map represents a catastrophic failure of the imagination. The rough equivalent in technology is the network cloud; in science, it’s the subject of Sid Harris’ funniest cartoon, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

As a rule, ho ho, oversimplification is the tombstone of thought. God and the devil both dwell in the details, chuckling together over bone-dry martinis. As Byron said of his sprawling, messy poem Don Juan: “confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing?”

Yesterday was my first mothers’ day as a, you know, combatant. It was lovely. Jeremy made me breakfast in bed. We found parking and a table at Tartine, and even though they’d run out of their (fabulous! amazing!) olive bread, we had wonderful quiche, excellent coffee from their new espresso bar and the best pain au chocolat I have ever tasted, hot from the oven, the berry-rich Scharffen-berger melting between intricate strata of yeasty pastry.

We dropped by some friends in the East Bay then drove up to Tilden, stopping randomly at the first trail head that beckoned. We’d happened on the Arroyo Trail, and turned out to be the exemplar of a Tilden trail, winding up through oak woods beside a running stream, past a whispering eucalyptus grove to high meadows riotous with wildflowers: gorgeous, emergency-orange poppies like fierce little flames, purple clover, blue harebells, scarlet paintbrushes, crimson Andes grass, butter-bright dandelions and various flowers that until we moved to California I knew only as the names of rabbits in Watership Down: loosestrife and feverfew and speedwell.

We sat on a rock near the hilltop with the North Bay silver and splendid beneath us, Mount Tam crooked like a sleeping woman’s hip, the northern pylon of the Golden Gate Bridge suspending its cables over a white haze. Another family followed us up, their boy about four.

“What do you see, Noah?” asked his mother.

Noah surveyed the scene. “Chemicals!” he said.

His parents exploded with laughter, and so did we, but as soon as they were out of earshot Jeremy said: “He’s quite right.” Even leaving aside the Richmond chemical-industrial complex directly below us, the entire scene was composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and their compounds and cousins, arrayed in visually pleasing forms.

I fed Claire and Jeremy took photos of a determined little ladybird climbing a blade of grass.

“This is the imaginary version of parenthood,” I told him. “Sitting on a hill in the sun with flowers all around us, and my beautiful daughter inspecting a piece of clover. I didn’t think it would really be like this.”

“This is how my mum always described it,” he pointed out.

“I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.”

We stopped on College Avenue for a surprisingly pleasant Italian meal, and zoomed back over the Bay.

“The toll collector must think he’s seeing double,” I say as I pull in behind another silver Jetta, Hedwig’s twin.

“I think toll collectors are probably quite used to seeing silver Jettas,” says Jeremy.

“I’ve seen them everywhere since we bought Hedy. There’s been a rash of them.”

I think for a minute.

“It must be like, if you become a Rastafarian, you suddenly start seeing Rastafarians everywhere. And there’s a rash o’mon.”

I pause for effect.

“But that’s another story.”

“It all depends on how you look at it,” says Jeremy.

We laugh excessively. The laughter subsides. I think some more. Jeremy starts to chuckle again.

“I love the way you move your lips when you’re rehearsing another dreadful pun,” he says.

The silver car speeds us home.

John: So I’m thinking of blowing off Burning Man this year, going to New Zealand instead. Have you guys been?

Jeremy: Yeah, my mother grew up there, I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid.

John: Is it really beautiful like they say?

Jeremy: Yep, it’s amazing. Geothermal in Rotorua. Fjordy in, well, Fjordland. Those films, The Two Towers, they were pretty much documentary as far as landscape goes.

John (interested): What, and they have the little hairy people as well?

Jeremy: Pretty much.

John: Maoris, or white people?

Jeremy: Err. Both – it’s complicated –

Rachel (proudly): Claire is one-quarter hobbit.

Claire: Goo!

John: She’s so cute! And there’s only, like, four million people in the whole country, right?

Jeremy: Right, but four hundred million sheep. A hundred sheep per person.

Rachel: When you arrive, they issue you with your own personal sheep.

John: I’d like that, as long as I could have a little sheepdog. So these tiny sheep-people, are they illiterate? Are they, like, peasants?

Pause.

Jeremy: The universities there are very good.

1. Sprawling on the sofa at the Moonbase, drinking Irish Breakfast tea.

Salome: I read your blog every day while you were away, but I got really upset when you were talking about all the delicious food you’d had, and you said you’d eaten veal.

Rachel: Grass-fed veal.

S: What does that mean, grass-fed veal? What, do they poke grass through the bars of the crate along with the syringes full of antibiotics? I mean, even my Dad knows not to eat veal.

R: I agree with you. Commercial veal farming is the worst. Which is why I haven’t eaten factory veal in years. But grass-fed means grass-fed. In a paddock, full of grass. Like Niman Ranch beef. Which you eat. At Burger Joint. Every chance you get. And wait, didn’t you go to McDonalds last night?

S: I had this whole screed ready to post to my blog, with pictures of suffering calves.

R: I knew you would. I thought of you when I wrote it. That’s why I said grass-fed! I actually considered leaving it out, or saying beef, but I felt I owed Yatima the truth!

S: I ended up not posting it because you were so far away. In case you got mad at me. Failed to see the humor.

R: I’m like that.

S: Yes.

R: And yet I knew you were annoyed. My mental model of you is superb.

Pause.

R: It was absolutely delicious.

S: Shut up.

R: Melted in my mouth.

S: Shut!

R: Poor ickle wickle calfie.

S: Up!

R: I love animals.

Pause.

R: They’re tasty.

2. Perched among the boxes at Chateau De Haro, drinking margaritas and eating guacamole in celebration of Cinco de Mayo.

Kathryn: I wish I could take ecstasy with my Dad.

Jeremy: Your Dad doesn’t even eat avocado!

After an all-but-offline holiday, geekdom has reasserted itself. Claire has been pounding on the keyboard, gazing intently into Goom, Jeremy’s favourite music-to-graphics software. At length she became dissatisfied.

“Hoot.”

“Claire’s having creative differences with the visualizer,” Jeremy explained.

“The door to a better
future opens here!
flag divination
cytochemistry asteroidal anaheim blissful machine %RANDOM_WORD
problem blustery vulpine ecliptic creditor %RANDOM_WORD
arrow stir derivate spittle
To be
removed from database please go
here.”

As Jeremy pointed out: “Yes, but what are we supposed to do?”

Overheard on the train to Katoomba:

Girl: My mother was pregnant when she married my father.

Other girl: Mine too. I think she got pregnant so my dad would marry her.

Today we consorted with our grown-up friends, who have children and houses on the North Shore: Piers, Tash, Bill, Anna, Thalia, Brad, Carolyn and Brigid. Last Friday we spent five hours in Corelli Cafe in Newtown with our young-at-heart friends who live in the Inner West: Big, Moira, Adrian, Sam, Kay, Kelso, Paula and Jason. But even there the conversation was all about rising property values. Sydneysiders only agree on one thing: it’s not called real estate for nothing.

Rach-the-artist: Look at these pictures! Patrick had his first easter egg this morning.

Big: How can that be? Yesterday his daddy ate the Easter bunny.

Actually Michael had the lapin au vin. Big, Rach and I all opted for the beef with potato rosti in beetroot jus, which I believe was the correct choice. Jeremy had the market fish and Jo had a fine rack of lamb, ho ho. The lime souffle with passionfruit cream rocked my tiny world. Below us, the sun glowed on the red sandstone cliffs of the Jamison Valley.

‘Snice here.

Did I mention the food?

In Brisbane alone: Atlantic salmon at the Summit Restaurant on Mount Coot-tha, with two bottles of Penfolds Rawson

I called America to make sure all was well with my cat.

Kat and Ian stayed the night on Friday. Apparently Bebe jumped up and down like a kangaroo to look out the window in the front door, hoping to catch sight of us on the stairs.

Sarah: My hamstrings hurt, and I get no sympathy, because it’s self-inflicted.

R: Poor, poor Sarah.

S: But tomorrow I’ll be much stronger than you.

R: I had a baby.

S: I had two babies.

Mum: I had four babies.

R & S, in unison: You win.

Once when I was small, Mum and Dad took me to Palm Beach. We looked north to Broken Bay and Lion Island, and Dad said:

“That’s Brisbane Water over there.”

“Is that where Auntie Barb and Uncle Ron live?” I asked, and everyone laughed.

“No,” said Dad, “they live a thousand kilometres further even than that.”

Brisbane, as my sister keeps pointing out, is a great big sleepy country town. It’s tropical here, so a lot of the houses are beautiful old timber Queenslanders on stilts, with trellises and wrought iron verandahs and corrugated iron rooves. Trees grow lush and are festooned with flowers: jacaranda, bougainvillea, flame tree. I can hear at least five different birds singing – a mourning dove, a currawong, a mob of cockatoos, a honeyeater and a lorikeet. It’s overcast but steamy and hot. Insect dreaming. Ants found Claire’s gripewater and feasted. No colic for them.

Barbie and Ron live in St Lucia, near the University of Queensland. Barbie’s my father’s sister. She has a degree in botany and used to be the audio-visual librarian at the university. She’s small and round and quiet and immensely droll. At our wedding, Barbie and Jeremy’s Auntie Jan got talking and realized they’d known each other as children, on the huge cattle stations of northern New South Wales.

We Chalmers women marry men just like our fathers, and although he’s not a blood relation, I think of my uncle Ron as a Chalmers man. He and Barbie met in the botany department at Sydney University. He worked for the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO, for many years, studying crops for arid regions. He’s brilliant and cynical and political and funny, and he’s always found me completely ridiculous, a quality I value in an uncle.

Ron’s very ill. Heart. We’re dropping in for lunch tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it, because Barbie’s a wonderful cook. We’ll sit on the terrace under the lush ferns that grow on the cliff behind their house, and if we’re lucky, the resident goanna will drop by.

(The kingfisher who lives in Sarah’s garden just made a bombing run at the window.)

You only get one life and you have to choose where you’re going to spend it: Sydney, Dublin, San Francisco, London. I’ve been to Brisbane every year or two for the past decade and a half, but it’s not enough. Years trickle away while my back is turned. Kelly and Ross grow like monkeys and learn to read and write. Baby Ely goes to university. Barbie’s hearing starts to fail. I drift in and out of their lives like a recurring character, like a comet, like a ghost.

…she was in my lap gurgling, and I spilled hot chai on her.

No serious harm done, but God! Time to call Child Protection Services.

We dropped the baby. She was lolling on one of Sarah’s chairs, and lolled a little too far. She somersaulted onto a cushion and my handbag, took a breath and roared. My heart cracked into tiny pieces.

She howled and howled until I fed her, then she cooed at her extended family for a while, then she drifted off to sleep. At least, I hope it’s sleep and not a coma. I’m still anguished.

The parent’s room at Brookside Mall in suburban Brisbane is bigger than our whole apartment in San Francisco.

Plus, lessons in ornithology:

Dad: That’s an emu feather. Look how there are two shafts growing out of a single root.

R: Awesome. How many birds have that, then?

D: One.

1. stormbringer

Also yesterday at Petit Creme.

Big: See that? That’s Mark’s bike, Stormbringer. It rains every time he rides it.

Mark: Not true. I’ve ridden it twice when it hasn’t rained.

Big: You’ve owned it for four months.

2. arch-ninja

Doyle’s on Watson’s Bay. We sit in the shade of palm trees, wolfing fish and chips and beer, watching yachts bob on the harbour.

R: I think I want her to be an arch-nemesis when she grows up. We’ll give her ninja training, that sorta thing.

Kay: Whose arch-nemesis will she be? Do you have a worthy foe in mind?

R: Nah, I thought she could freelance. God knows I could use a replacement for my arch-nemesis. I figure there’s a lot of people out there in the same situation.

Kelso: Can’t she just be an ordinary nemesis?

Big: She has to start as an ordinary nemesis, and work her way up to arch.

3. fang-snatcher

At home in Bellevue Hill. I am eating a mango. My father-in-law has been to the dentist.

My mother-in-law: So how was the fang-snatcher?

I snerk, and inhale mango juice.

It feels like summer here. Claire’s sitting on my lap and singing to the lorikeets in the flame trees outside the window. The late afternoon light is the colour of Houghton’s White Burgundy.

We’re home.

We had breakfast at Petit Creme this morning with a mighty horde of well-wishers: Paul and Paula from the Moonbase, Squishy’s friend Shannon and the Sarcastic Mister Bennett, Michael and Rachel and Patrick and Uncles Barney and Big. I explained that we’d adopted Claire as a gesture of compassion towards the suffering nation of America. Her parents, I whispered, were Republicans.

My darling Bellboy, the pony on whom I learned to ride, turned thirty last November, and still looks about twelve. He patted me down for carrots and, finding none, turned his back on me and stared moodily out to sea. We had tea under the jacaranda tree with Thussy, and she gave Claire a kangaroo on a spring.

R: What shall we call him? What’s the Austrian for kangaroo?

Thussy: Kangaroo.

Lunch was in Duncan’s tree house overlooking Bungan Beach. Lauren made us chicken sandwiches, and Blossom the rottweiler drooled over Claire. Literally. There were great pools of rottie-saliva collecting on the deck.

I could totally live here. If I had DSL, and twice the bandwidth across the Pacific. And a private jet.

Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, once seriously annoyed me by making fun of my accent. This is, in my opinion, an irregular verb: I speak with graceful fluency; you have a not unpleasant drawl; he or she butchers the language.

That said, the man knows how to beg. Seeking contributions, he writes:

“We don’t want you to vanish into the abyss.”

I scribble my check in hasty dread. Beyond me, oblivion yawns.

Jenny Fong is back from Carnivale in Rio, and told us about rushing sideways through crowds in an elaborate costume of plastic and feathers. Her shoulders were wide as a football player’s. She reached the rest of her samba troupe with seconds to spare.

Kathryn riposted with Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The Extra Action Marching Band Greyhound bus moved off before the sousaphone player had finished strapping instruments to the roofrack. He pounded on the roof and passing cars honked their horns, but the bus was almost on the freeway before the other musicians twigged to what was wrong.

R: I’ve been reading this great biography of Churchill, and when he was my age, he was a senior Cabinet minister. So that proves I suck.

S: Yes, I think it’s completely appropriate for you to compare yourself with Churchill –