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The Age calls my agent, offering me ‘six figures’ for ten pieces a year, on anything I fancy. I say I’m happy at the Independent Monthly. The editor of the Australian summons me to his office. I go out of curiosity. He lolls behind his desk, I perch on a chair. Sums of money are mentioned, and a ca…

In the street we ran into a Labor MP I vaguely know. She teasingly asked V if he was giving me ‘plenty of support’ since my book came out. V passed it off with a quip but at home later he launched one of his rants against stupid, cliché-ridden, impertinent, presumptuous, offensive women. A heavy vi…

The adventurous beauty tells us about her lover in India.

V: ‘What are his good points?’

AB: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral…’

V: ‘What are his bad points?’

She hesitates.

H: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral?’

She laughs.

AB: ‘Exactly. He doesn’t much like to play.’

The harbour. I can hardly comprehend its constant differentness from itself. Today wide slow ridges, ten feet apart, move towards me at a slant and softly collapse against the low stone wall. Taking notes—this little discipline—is a defence against the blank wordlessness that overcomes me when I st…

Since my drunken fall in New York I have hardly any sense of smell. I read in Janet Malcolm about a patient of Freud’s whose sense of smell went away while she clung to unrealistic fantasies that her employer would return her love and marry her. I ask myself what my ‘unrealistic fantasies’ are, or …