The world goes round Repins, the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,

at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers

the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands

and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:

There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.

The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile

and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk

and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets

which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:

There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.

The men we surround, the man no-one approaches

simply weeps and does not cover it, weeps

not like a child, not like the wind, like a man

and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even

sob very loudly – yet the dignity of his weeping

holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him

in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,

and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him

stare out at him and feel, with amazement, their minds

longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

Some will say, in the years to come, a halo

or force stood around him. There is no such thing.

Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him

but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,

the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us

trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected

judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream

who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children

and such as look out of Paradise come near him

and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

Ridculous, says a man near me, and stops

his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit -

and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand

and shake as she receives the gift of weeping,

as many as follow her also receive it.

And many weep for sheer acceptance, and more

refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,

but the weeping man, like the earth requires nothing,

the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out

of his writhen face and ordinary body

not words, but grief, not messages but sorrow,

hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea -

and when he stops, he simply walks between us

mopping his face with the dignity of one

man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

You'll have to voice it in your head in that speechy way.

Have you ever had that moment on a dance floor where, mid-boogie, you look around and think, what the hell are we all doing? I had a moment like that when I was thinking about tonight. All these have been designed, printed, bound, cut, driven thousand of kilometres around the country; put online, all for short stories. The Minister is here. There’s (one, two, three, ten thousand people…)

So since it’s why we’re here, what is a short story?

In 2006 I’d been writing just two years. My family and friends were pushing me to submit my work but I was waiting. Mostly I thought I wasn’t quite good enough yet. But sometimes I wondered if I might just be scared of rejection.

Nevertheless, I was writing story after story as a way of practising. Not caring if they were perfect, caring only that they had a line, a paragraph, an idea in them I could be proud of. And all stories have that.

As a naive writer I wandered round the outside of the Melbourne writing world, wondering how you got in. I found and devoured a Sleepers Almanac, looked at the submission guidelines and sat back at my writing desk, and thought, at last.

It was another year of hard work before I did finally send my first story off, to The New Yorker.

Which is perhaps the first thing a short story is, it’s ambitious. Getting a narrative off the ground, up to cruising altitude, and safely back down again on such a short airfield is Top Gun hard. Short stories are the wafer thin Swiss watch of the writing world. All the mechanisms of a novel but in a triumphantly elegant package.

Not just ambitious, a short story is also hopeful. If you’re doing it right, you’re taking a truth of your own, turning it into characters, putting those characters in a plot unlike your own, but trying to have it all still resonate the bit of you that sat down to write in the first place. A bit like redecorating your front hallway through your letterbox, that.

Which must make a short story a marker of perseverance, or perversity. So important to you is that truth that you resist all the easy distractions of modern living. You work at this literary contortion act alone. You send it out along with all those other competing truths in the world, foolish or courageous enough to ask an editor-stranger if, out of all the others, they could please love it too.

And who could possibly love your story like you love it. Blind to its frailties. Loving it the way your gran wants you to love her incontinent poodle; like your dad loves his crusty towelling dressing gown; like your brother’s guitar playing or your girlfriend’s parallel parking.

And so in that way, a short story is a bridge – between the disguised innards of its author to the innards of a reader. Because if you get it right, and we only manage that from time to time, you get to plant your insides in another person. So much so that they recognise your truth as their own.

I had a woman tell me on election night that she plans to have a line from my novel tattooed on her body.

But short stories are mostly unrequited, foolish, devil-may-care. Because you can’t be sure if they will be accepted, often they’re not. They get sent back to you with scabby knees and grazed elbows.

Or if accepted, readers flick over them. They miss your truth – mangle your plot. You had a story in the last Almanac didn’t you, they say at a party. It was about talking dogs, wasn’t it. Sleeping horses, actually. Yeah, I read half that one.

After the New Yorker rejected me, the Almanac was next. Mainly because since attending one of their launches and looking at their submission guidelines it became clear to me that what I would be submitting to was a fresh-faced meritocracy.

What can be more important to our writing ecosystem than something which says to a burgeoning writer, there is nothing stopping you being published but what happens between you and your writing. Not your name. Not your CV. Not your reputation. A proper publisher which says if you write a great story, we’ll publish it. Actually, we’ll champion it. All a writer need do then is practice. And god knows you need that struggle to be all there is, because that struggle is struggley enough as it is.

Without the sense that merit alone is enough, a writer looking to climb the ladder will see only one rung, the top one. Who would begin climbing?

I wouldn’t be writing now if it weren’t for strategic encouragement when I was beginning, and I wouldn’t be writing now if I didn’t have a faith in writing that is sometimes just as blind as Grandma’s love for her poodle – if I too didn’t mind that while licking my face, my story’s tongue might stray into my mouth.

And I might not be writing now if there weren’t an Almanac – a precious combination of reputable and fair.

I got my first ever acceptance email whilst on holiday in Turkey. Me and my then girlfriend were travelling the awful Black Sea coast – her driving was driving me up the wall; people on the filthy beaches would finish their drink or cigarettes and throw them in the sea; at the day’s end we’d try to find an unsqualid place to camp, and howling wolves would wake us terrified in the night.

But for three weeks after that email telling me Sleepers had accepted my story, I was transcendentally happy. The Black Sea coast became an eccentric heaven. We weren’t down and out, we were free. And was it me, or had her driving improved?!

And so the definition of a short story is not a short story. They’re an opportunity to practice quickly a craft that takes years – a lifetime – to never quite perfect. They’re an opportunity to let out that which brims painfully or deliciously full inside you. But, more than that, if you’re in here, it means you managed to really capture that feeling, that brimming. Here it is translated into print, where this physical artefact of your uncertain toil makes a very certain sound indeed.

But more amazing still, it means that what sat you down to write and rewrite will make its way into others. In the comfort of their own anywhere, people will be able to pat your inner poodle.

And so on a night like tonight a short story is a community. A celebration. No wonder there’s ten thousand of us gathered. I salute all the writers in this edition; all those who’ve been published here before; but most of all, those of you who will be one day. In whatever form.

As for Sleepers. Amazing design. An amazing eye. PASSION. Pioneer spirit. The decency to be decent in the way you carry yourselves and your trade. The guts to run a meritocracy even though a more cynical approach could sell you more copies. The courage to choose this over a safer career.

Sleepers is already a benchmark in this country, I recognised that years ago. I also recognise that this wonderful rung on a difficult ladder is rising fast, but not losing its values along the way. It’s taking Australian literature up with it.

You make it seem possible. You make it seem worthwhile. You make it feel amazing. For that, every aspiring writer should thank you. And so will every reader.

Perhaps that's why she's blind. Without expectation. And having to crane in close to hear the few sounds remaining to her.

In classical mythology, Pandora opens the box that dispenses disease and pain to the mankind. Hope alone remains inside.

It's amazing how precious a thought from another can be. How little we do it now with the advent of email. But how beneficial to my day it is to get such a missive.

Sharing it here.

I went to see Brett speak on Friday night and was nervous, since I knew he'd basically refused to take the spoonfuls of question his last interviewer had been trying to feed him. I was worried it would be some obstreperous, self-important display of ego. And in some ways it really was that.

Ellis is an eaten down human. Confusing to watch. I laughed once, not that he wasn't funny more often than that, but I was too transfixed by his performance to take the time out to register my reaction. I was too busy trying to put my finger on him.

He seemed contrived and held, and yet was genuinely nervous and overwhelmed. He seemed cold and aloof, and yet quite genuine and warm.

The audience was not like any writing event audience I'd ever seen – except maybe the Dave Eggers audience – only a smattering of grey heads but mainly young hipsters with lit-up pockets. (The questions made me wish the audience had more grey hair, though. Banal, self-important, “Can I take drugs with you, Brett?”) Generally they lapped him up. Famous people are too-often applauded for not being kind. Not something I subscribe to. The more your renown the more you need to uphold decency.

Not that you have to be nice. Let's not have people be nice. Kind, yes. Decent, yes. But nice, no. Nice = dull. Brett wasn't nice. He skirted kind and strayed beyond it at times. Like when he asked the chair if his laugh was real. 

Like most people in the audience I was watching the chair too to see how he coped with such a tough but important gig. Brett barely listened to his questions. He often barely answered them. And like some in the audience I was questioning too whether the chair was over-laughing. Probably out of relief that the evening had just hit some sort of success. Probably it was a laugh that gave him the opportunity to release some tension.

Cruel to ask him though, mid-laugh, if it was a real laugh. In front of everyone. That is a moment in which you are putting yourself squarely first, if you so blatantly out someone

I still like Brett's writing. But sense from that talk that he doesn't like his latest novel, and that TV and film is more alluring to him now.

I like Brett for his brains. His humour. And his strident disregard for the rules. His ability to not have to play the game. Even if at the end of the night I wasn't sure I liked Brett.

But what was I expecting? His writing is funny, cruel and self-obsessed too. It refuses to adhere to the social conventions. And even if that is what makes it great, even if that is what makes it alive, it is not necessarily what makes its creator that.

It must be a hard burden to carry, that the things most difficult to live with are what make you so applauded as a writer. And especially hard to live with if he really is going into film and tv, since the conveners of those media are rather more controlling and careful than publishers. 

He might find himself stymied, even if his temperament might suit that world. So that I'm betting we'll see him returning to the dying realm of the book.

The reviews are coming in and are all, except perhaps The Age, glowing. I'm top of the sales charts through Readings, but I know that's probably a short-lived blip.

So now what? 

I can't go on waiting to see what'll happen. At some point I have to slip into an inner state of normalcy. But it's hard. Because even if I'm not being interviewed all the time, or as if anything much is really different, there is still this sense that a part of my innards are caught on a hook.

It's hard not to watch, intent, seeing what will happen. Except the truth is, nobody will know if this book is successful for about a year yet. Word of mouth takes time, international deals take time. It's not a swing at a golf ball or a shot on a pool table. Books are slow motion.

But the interior feels high speed.

I know what most writers would say: Write another.

But they'd also agree that it's hard to write a novel in this sort of headspace. Short stories, yes. I'm writing them. But a novel... Plus I'm supposed to be moving house.

The most interesting part of having a book out at last, is that in some ways it lives up to the hype, but in others, it no way does. Because it can't live up to that unwittingly hopeful bit of you that thinks it will change things.

When I get a book published...  That's how the daydream begins. Or, When I find the right partner...

The bit of you that invests bits of you in things not part of you, that's the part that makes all this a touch existential. A touch sad.

And yet we go on investing that bit of ourselves, because life doesn't feel right when we have to keep that bit in.

I kept the names to a minimum last night, reluctant to list them, which does no real justice to the occasion or those mentioned. Besides, the best thanks are done privately, from the heart. And I knew I'd be reluctant to speak from the heart in front of 150 people.

While I was writing the book I daydreamed outcomes of course, and the moments you envision aren't always those that sate. But I'll long remember standing in the Bella Union Bar last night, up close to the stage, and with all those familiar, loved faces looking on, watching Aviva and Cate speak. To have two wonderful experts in their field say nice things about your work will linger a long time. And they certainly gave more than they intended last night, since a thief crept in and stole their purses.

Both Aviva and Cate manage to be expert practitioners in their field, without giving up anything of their good grace. I go on about this a lot, and perhaps it is not as rare as I think it is. But I'm always so grateful to people who've come so far, without compromising the most important parts of themselves.

I'm full of admiration and gratitude for both Cate and Aviva.

I talked a lot about Scribe, how I admire those who work there for much the same reasons I admire Cate and Aviva. 

I am so thankful to that organisation and the people in it. I like going in there. It feels like a healthy place to work and visit. And I am nothing but content with the way they've published this book. It's been perfect, it really has.

I want to thank Scribe. Ian, who I know engaged with the book during editing, Emma who puts up with my visits, Carly, likewise, Amanda, Nicola (good luck with the baby), Henry (for creating such a great organisation), Roger, who I know is doing a great job on the book, Marika!!, Josh Durham who produced a design that EVERYONE comments on. It really is a great looking cover.

And Susan Hornbeck, who has generated an incredible amount of buzz and attention both behind the scenes but also in the media for this book. I cannot imagine that any other writer has had such a nourishing working relationship. Not only does she put up with my intrigued angst, but out of our working relationship has formed a wonderful friendship. She's a brilliant, hilarious, savvy, and incredibly generous human being. And I'm glad Scribe led to our friendship. Thank you, Susan.

I could thank so many people here, family, friends, specific members of the writing community... All of whom I've thanked in person.

Last night was incredible. Lots of loved ones and kindness and support. Even if it all happens so simultaneously, that you never quite get to fully grasp any of it. Or feel you've done it proud. So that I'm left feeling like the night did me justice, but I let it down.

Neurotic to the grave.

 “Oh you must be so excited,” they say.

We often do this. We polarise our idea of what something will be like, and then plonk it on the person it’s happening to. And I do that too, to my own idea of the future. I make it all one colour – good or bad.

Things are never all good or all bad though, are they. Or are they? Maybe it’s just me that complicates things. Mr Ambivalent.

My debut novel, Rocks in the Belly, is coming out at the beginning of August. It has a Coetzee quote on the front of it, it’s already getting very positive reviews, there’s a great deal of hype. To the observer, these all look like all good things.

I left marketing to write full time, and one of the reasons I was happy to leave was that I didn’t cope well with the stress. Especially the getting up in meetings and presenting to clients kind of stress. I have a clear memory of rushing around before a particularly important presentation, the projector in the meeting room was broken, or my presentation file had corrupted. I can’t remember what it was that had gone awry, except that it was something bowel-wrenchingly frightening and I was sprinting from my office to the meeting room but looked down into the lobby and saw the clients reclining in chairs, laughing together about something in the newspaper one of them was reading.

That was the point I realised what a mug I was. Why wasn’t I in their position? Or out of the game altogether.

So the experience over the last few years of having no clients, just my own writing ambitions to work towards has been marvellous. No more presenting either.

Until now. Now I’m published. I have festival events booked for the rest of the year. Radio interviews. LIVE radio interviews. I have a launch at which I have to give a speech to all my friends, family and the writing community at large. A bit like a wedding day for one.

Suddenly I’m being taken far from the nest-like safety of my writing desk, back to the pressure environment of books to sell and people to present to. And worst of all, I’m not presenting ideas and concepts far removed from me – marketing concepts I can hide behind. I’m presenting me.

Yes I’m lucky. Yes I'm grateful. A book published is one of those things-to-do-before-you-die clichés. Having a Nobel laureate on the front of your first book is an achievement. I got a letter from David Malouf. An email from M J Hyland. Yes, I’m happy. But I worked hard. I put myself into the book. It’s an authentic novel, even if it’s absolutely fiction. And now I have to be the face behind all that honesty I wrote back when the idea of fronting the book was entirely good in my mind. Back when a published-future was all one colour.

Yes, I am excited. But I’m not just excited. I’m also amidst a heady soup of many conflicting feelings.

And whilst I understand why people assume it’s all good, I would hug someone who said, “You have a book being published? Oh, you must be feeling awfully ambivalent.”

It feels stupid to ever impatiently anticipate anything, because no matter where it is in the ether of the future, it is also, always, imminent. If feels like that. Even the things you’ve squinted at for so long suddenly force your neck back on it’s joint and you look up at the towering of the present with an ‘oh’ inside you. It’s here.

I had it all to myself, the half-dismantled half-standing rubble of Homer’s past. Twenty-eight yawning centuries between this quiet hillside and a bustling school day – barefooted children writing in chalk, perhaps.

I stood on the chiselled-out steps – smoothed them over with my hands. A butterfly fluttering across me, it’s shadow briefly swatched across that past too – the silent juggernaut of a ferry crossing the sea all those kilometres away, the wild sage and rosemary and summer hubbub around me. Such a verdant landscape this, even if it’s simultaneously rocky and arid.

Ithaca stuffs your senses fuller than an airing cupboard. Every avenue into you becomes thick with the nectar of smell and sound and light and touch.

And at Homer’s school the almost sixth sense of the past (and the future) was filled in me too. I felt like a stylus bobbing up and down on the record of time. I felt the sense that each moment is a ball at the top of it’s upward trajectory. How everything, at all times, is up in the air.

Yet Ithaca also has this conjurer’s art of making you feel like you are not here. It won’t let you capture it fully in your mind. It shimmers when you look at it. You have to see it from an oblique or squinty angle, so that I know I won’t assimilate this island until it’s behind me. Which won’t be long now.

I took my top off, sweating up the same steps as Homer walked. There was some unfortunate litter on the hillside too from all those who must have come here looking for what? And finding, as we do time and time again, that the past is the world’s most famous cult celebrity who never shows.

As I carried my own hopes up the hillside I was thinking about the books I’ve read here – the books I’ll read still, and the way, to my mind, the reading stops when I get home and have to take up the pen I’ve not managed to really get flowing here. Plus I have to go home to a soupy kind of crazy – the book launch.

I’ve resisted the not writing I’ve done here (even emails have been near impossible, let alone letters; postcards). I’ve been such a prolific non-writer here. I’ve churned out enviable swathes of nothingness. Epics. Unwar and Unpeace. The Nonfire of the Humbleties. Greek House. But you never know what the answer is with your not writing. Whether to push and poke, or wait and sigh. Leading and following at the same time – a Sontag notion about writing that just won’t dull for me, unlike the other quotes you pick up and carry for a time during your life – quotes and platitudes that can seem to encapsulate everything for a while but quickly dull and fade like a pebble you take from the sea for its beauty, that then looks at you, ugly and resentful from your window sill.

I’ve been reading Almaas here, a philosophical writer most aligned with Buddhism, I suppose. Reading him makes me spectacularly calm. I lie there fizzing with the surrendering simplicity of how stupid our minds are. Grasping. Rejecting. Trying to move the immovable boulder of the present.

How I push and strain at the present. And the future, too, which is this permanent kind of intruder in my life.

But with the time and space here, and my reading, I’ve become more intimate with how hilarious it is, the way I seek to control and flinch and strain. Not that this dawning will stop me when I get back. Not that it even fully stops me here. I’ll never make emancipation. I’m unsure I even want to. Perhaps I could write it a postcard?

I’ll never reach far beyond the wonky shores of my frailties, but I do feel bathed by the ideas I read, and go out into my day different on the mornings when I digested those words first. As if I should always be reading Almaas.

It was the same with Brenda Walker, though her book gave me an intimacy with a very different part of myself.

I’ve mentioned her in a blog here not long ago but she deserves an infinite rap for what she’s done with Reading by Moonlight. I loved it. Such an intensely, deftly, accomplished piece of crafting – writing in a very oblique way about her time versus breast cancer. And she’d have been forgiven for wanting to shovel her whole deluging experience onto the page – to bury you as a reader. But instead she’s managed to forge the most subtle, rich and nourishing path through her particular humanity, with all its cold, coal-face drudgery, as well as the most arresting motifs of personal meaning and solace. So many talismans of living flutter from the page, beautifully crafted.

Her book is an emancipation, if you like – one of a writer and her pain.

And how lovely for me, a reader who struggles these days to find books to fall in love with. If you spend your time unpacking your own work, it’s hard to lay aside the scalpel when you read others.

I’ve just finished an equally filling and comfortably disturbing book: Jonathan Safran Foer’s, Eating Animals. A rigorous enquiry into mankind’s approach to food. Including a gory tour of factory farming, our most unphilosophical and devolutionary approach to omniverousness. A tour that’s gory because of the plain facts, not the writing. I mean, I always knew the farms were bad, but reading Foer I was full of nauseous disbelief.

Meat has long been one of my most nourishing comforts – almost sexual in the way it satisfies me. And yet my attitudes to eating meat have been changing the further I’ve moved from the orbit of childhood influence.

Having read Foer, I’m changed more than ever – teetering on the edge of vegetarianism. In fact, I can say here, in case I fall into dumb forgetfulness again of the inhumane unforgiveable moral stench of factory farming, henceforth I am a vegetarian. Unless I know exactly (forget ‘free range’, forget ‘organic’) how the animal and environment have been treated during the ‘production process’ (therein lies the whole philosophical failing).

Sigh.

Today is a special day in this village because it’s a celebration of St Andrew. And like most religious festivals there will be a great deal of pious alcohol consumption and dancing. It’s what St Andrew would have wanted.

The village is in deep preparation – building the stage (on beer crates), setting out all the tables, and switching off the water just as I’d fully soaped myself up in the shower.

And right on Greek time, the psycho killer is back from his spell in the funky farm. (Considering the wonky way Greece runs itself, I can’t imagine the wonky wonkiness of their funky farms.) It’s mildly disappointing to have him back. Although in the bar last night he looked like he was elegantly draped on a lithium lino.

We’ll see how he goes tonight. I’ll be watching his progress as well as hanging out with my two new crushes: Shimon and Naomi.

At the beach yesterday I took to an elderly man swimming and floated over for a chat. He had such an open, kind face. And from that initial contact a bunch of us all ate dinner together. An Athenian, a Greek-Australian, a Geek-Australian (me), a German-American-Jew (Shimon) and his Romanian-American-Jew wife (Naomi). It was a delicately strong human cocktail that was such a wonderful libation when you’ve been among the limited conversational geography of islanders.

Shimon and his wife have been married for just five years. Shimon is eighty-four, but says he’s still trying to work out what he’ll do with his life. For a person’s idea of their life to be opening out at that age is a real accolade. And to marry at seventy-nine… He’s an electrical engineer turned environmentalist. He’s why the Italians stopped killing the songbirds of Assisi (once at the rate of 20million a year at a national level). He’s travelled the world working to rescue the world. And his wife Naomi is an incredibly progressive counsellor in trauma, and sixty-six.

It was all such open-minded company, roving from trauma to Greek politics to the environment, to all of us divulging our astrological charts to one another.

To be learned is one thing. To remain open and learned is a rarer thing. So often people use their tiny repository of knowledge (everyone’s knowledge is tiny relative to all knowable Knowledge) to rule out so many questions and possibilities and the simple under-used art of uncertainty.

This perfect evening kept improving. Above us trees bent over to listen, sometimes dropping an olive to ping off your glass like an idea. There was the perfect amount of perfect wine and perfect food in our perfect spot outside the perfect restaurant in a, well, let’s just say the setting was good.

It was some walk home so those of us with hired mopeds offered lifts. Helmetless, Shimon (84) and I wobbled slowly through the fragrant night, talking about his stolen iPhone (84!(he was rather crushed about his stolen gadget); a meeting he’d with a snake in his house, and more, well, perfect things. Except that everything feels deep when you meet such wonderful, rounded humans. Especially if that human was just hours ago a stranger.

At the end of the night we all hugged like old friends, promised to repeat it all again at tonight’s psycho buffet, and I left feeling so utterly life-affirmed that I had to drive straight to the perfect beach and wade nakedly in, swimming out into the calm clear waters, the phosphorescence exactly mirroring my innards.

In the end it had been a day that started full of Homer’s past and my future, but isn’t it nice when the present stands up and roundly banishes those intruders from the room, wanders back clapping its hands of the work, sits down, and engages you in conversation with that ball atop its flight. A grateful intimacy with a sense that everything, at all times, is up in the air.

It’s raining here today. I thought you might like to know that, especially if you’re in Austraya. It rained yesterday too. So there.

I didn’t get to sleep till five last night, for no reason at all. Though you can over siesta. When does a siesta graduate to a sleep?

Siesta sounds way cooler than a nap though, doesn’t it. If you say you’re going for a nap, you feel like a bit of a grandad. Going for a siesta though – way cool. Sounds more like a snowboarding move than a sleep.

I’ve got a sore throat, which might be a clue I’ve been snoring. That and the fact that, even though there’s nobody’s here but me, the tea towel migrated from the kitchen to my mouth during the night.

And what’s the shower curtain doing in here?

I’m not much of a snorer, and when I do it sounds like a nightingale. Honest. Although I remember sleeping in a hostel dorm in Canada years ago, having had a particularly boozy night, and waking up next morning to find a shoe with me in my top bunk bed. Then another shoe. It took me a few drowsy seconds to work out why I was waking up with a load of half-pairs of shoes on my bed with me.

Come away on holiday and you bring what you’ve packed, plus other things. Most of us pack everything, since there’s that stupid fear that on the other side of that plane ride everything will be totally different. You’re not going to Mongolia but somehow your reptilian brain panics. Oh my god, will they even have toothpaste there?

Then you arrive and quel surprise they have everything we have at home, and actually, their stuff is way interestinger. I always love it when I need to buy toothpaste overseas because then I get to be uber cool for having my foreign-arse toothpaste when I get home.

Plus my holiday isn’t officially over until I’ve used up that toothpaste. It’s the rules.

But you don’t just bring the stuff you pack on holiday with you, you bring a whole bag of something else…

You find love and nourishment in unpredictable places. Hence love or nourishment are so often a pleasant surprise when discovered. And, more frequently, a sadness when the rock you hoped to find them under, the rocks we heave and dig over, come up empty.

Sometimes you go digging where you expect to find gems and find only dirt. And sometimes you find gems where you expected to have to sow seeds. 

Always I come to a situation packed with expectations++ of what it will be like. And always it is not like my expectations. Not necessarily worse, just different. Fuller actually. Richer, on both sides of the good-bad equation. Always angles I haven’t foreseen. And yet I still live my life expectant. Funny (ridiculous), isn’t it.

Even when every facet of a situation is as you expected –you chose the setting, the hotel, perhaps even, for the sake of argument, the same hotel of a holiday you so enjoyed in the past. You could recreate exactly an experience of yesterday and live it differently today. Never is your experience as you intended or implicitly or explicitly expected.

Mostly, despite my repeated indulgence in this foolhardy tendency, I don’t even know I’m anticipating certain elements until I arrive and they’re missing. Then a familiar voice says, Of course. I knew it.

Imagine how dull life would be if you could know how you’d feel given a set of circumstances. We’d be bored gods if we knew in advance what a relationship or an experience would dig up inside of us. Although sometimes it would be nice, say, when it’s the search for love; deciding to Christmas with family; buying any of U2’s albums after Rattle and Hum…

Funny to transition from those paragraphs to paragraphs about cereal. But there we are. From the here of grandiose moaning to the there of cereal.

I don’t eat cereal at home. Dairy isn’t my cuppa and, well, I like my ritual of brown rice, olive oil and salt. Don’t knock it. Try it.

Do they have brown rice in Greece? I thought, as I packed to come.

Lately I’ve been having a torrid love affair with cereal. The same cereals I loved in childhood. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and Weetabix (the UK version, not that namby pamby Aus version). Mix them together and add lashings of goat milk, the way I used to have goat milk, since I grew up on a smallholding and had childhood asthma.

I’ve gone through two boxes of each cereal in two days. Morning noon and night I eat cereal, as well as other meals. Sometimes I’ll have a bowlful and go straight back and have another – crunching up the Weetabix into powder, the way I used to. And crunching up the crunchy nuts the way I also used to, so that as much of them as possible are like that sexy fucking powder you get at the bottom of the bag. They should sell whole boxes of the bottom of the bag magic fucking powder dust. I’d buy it. Save me pulverising the whole contents into that powder with a rolling pin.

And I’m having a love affair with Brenda Walker. Reading by Moonlight is a wonderful piece of writing, about the books she read while she was being treated for cancer. As a teacher of literature and a novelist she’s the perfect person to weave her experience of cancer and reading together in such an honest but delicate and nourishing balance. None of the gothic realism of cancer but every granule of its personal reality. Cancer runs over you the way a glacier runs over a landscape but Walker’s book is an incredibly well-written kind of peripheral image of her cancer. She focuses on literature, and the intricacies and archetypes of individual perspective and meaning. Cancer brings its own awful power, and so she hasn’t lifted a finger to try and inflict anything on her reader. No need. Instead she’s given us the space we need to walk alongside her. Plus it helps that you know she survives.

Having turned back from reading yet another novel, in this case Silas Marner, it’s reassuring for me to find a book I can love. Even if it’s non-fiction. I worry about my propensity to turn away from novels. One of those things you can’t expect but know it when you come across it.

Since I’ve been writing, other people’s novels have become composites rather than locked entities. I find it hard to suspend myself enough to be absorbed. I used to read them with acceptance of the simple fact that this is how they are. They were absolutes. This is the plot, this is the writing, do I like it or not. Often, I did. But now they are anatomies to dissect, to question. And as a once avid reader, I miss my friend the novel. Plus I feel it’s some over-critical fault of mine that I can’t fall for the magic anymore. Which, I’m sorry, does make me wonder what happens to the sex life of gynaecologists.

Perhaps I should have used the chef and the evening meal example.

Anyway, films are my literature these days.

As with any love affair, such as I am having with cereal and Brenda Walker and Ithaca, there is the suffering. This island, whilst being a wonderful setting, does seem to steep you in yourself. Perhaps because whilst being here I’m taking up the reins of a first draft of a novel I wrote three years ago. But sometimes I’m finding myself overwhelmed by a simple face to faceness with me. Maybe there’s too much writing going on. Not enough company, even though I have a friend here, and some minor acquaintances now.

I’m feeling sprightly again now, but a few days ago… And the funny (not funny) thing is that when things get tough for me I tend to turn inwards. I draw into my own company. Not a good technique when the toughness is coming from the amount of turning inwards I’m doing. A little like a person drinking to forget his alcoholism.

Or like a gynaecologist who…. Forget it.

These weren’t serious things. Some irascibility. Some melancholy. Ailments that are perhaps there at all times but hidden by the frenetic life at home. In Melbourne it’s easier to medicate the emotions that arise. Busyness is a good tool. This person for this feeling, that person for that. The movies for solitude. Etcetera.

It’s easy to write-off the things that I didn’t anticipate. It’s easy to deny the credibility of what I feel here in a sort of wonky paradise. But then, based on what do I deny my experience, my expectations? Or the fact that others would love to be here, that’s another good stick to beat yourself with.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Is that a yucky platitude rightly attributed to Lennon? I’d amend it. It needs some word that encompasses not just the plans we’re aware we make, but also the expectations we didn’t even know we had, until we arrive.

Where else can disappointment (and surprise) spring from if not expectation? From where else can disillusionment arise if not from illusion. Which suggests that with a little more surrender, both disillusionment and disappointment would become obsolete.

In fact, ‘surrender’ is a word that has become quite suddenly miraculous to me these last few days. Not necessarily a wussy, I’m going for a nap, kind of a word. You can surrender to powerful impulses in yourself. And you can surrender to a sore throat and melancholy. And rain.

So I’ll eat my cereal and read my Walker and give up on Eliot and grapple with my novel and have not the holiday I came here for but, with a smidge of lamentable powerlessness, the one I’m having.

But Greece has many of the attributes of a developing country, corruption being the first to leap nimbly to mind. The flagrant bending of the rules from top to bottom is a big part of what’s brought Greek finances to its knees.

You can’t even be sure you own a house here once you’ve bought it. Turn your back on your home for a while and other people can move in – claiming the land for simple reasons like they’ve recently grazed their goats there. And when the case makes it eventually to court, the wronged side has absolutely no guarantee of winning what should be an open and shut case.

Like a developing country, nothing runs to schedule. Like the buses, which aren’t even reliably late, the bastards. Sometimes they run early, so that you can never be sure when to rock up at the stop. What stop.

Take yourself seriously here and you soon run out of irritation. A healthy non-stick coating is required. Teflon being the best apparel for a traveller. The best travel advice I ever heard was to take nothing personally.

The good thing about developing countries is they have no nit-picky rules. Ok, so it also means people can smoke indoors. I was in a pharmacy the other day and the pharmacist sparked up a ciggie in the dispensary. Leading me to wonder if dentists smoke during your check up (where’s an ashtray when you need one? HEY!)

I won’t go into Greece’s performance with regard to environmental responsibility. Except to say that if you bought a carrier bag here they’d give you a carrier bag to carry it home in.

Being here has made me wonder whether less rules means more personal freedom means more personality. There’s definitely a rich tapestry of personalities here. First up is The GBC (The Geriatric Broadcasting Service) – a woman who spies on everyone and everything here, then broadcasts it to anyone and everyone. I’m sure her permanent squint is from mind reading.

There’s Kiki, the lady who runs the little supermarket here who used to be a wild child, setting fire to things and sleeping with everyone. She’s got a large burn scar on her face which comes, I guess, from her fire-starting days. As do her two fatherless children.

Make a mistake here and you’ll be nicknamed for life. There’s Gigolo, an old timer who always used to boast about all the women that wanted him. He looks ridiculous with that nickname at a decrepit 70. And Flood, the plumber. A tag that needs no explanation, but it is worth mentioning that kids take the nickname of their parents. Imagine being introduced as son or daughter of Flood, for a lifetime. Unless you put a foot wrong. Then you get your own nickname.

Why do you ask, Two dogs fucking?

And there’s Andreas. Andreas is about forty, well-built and psychotic. Nice, deep down, apparently. He groped the inside of my thigh the other day as he walked by. I didn’t give it much thought cos the football was on. A few days later though I found out about his penchant for psychotic episodes. He’s on medication and everyone knows not to give him alcohol. At least, we thought everyone knew.

The next town gave him some the other day, apparently (source: GBC). Now he’s going round threatening to kill people, staring menacingly at women, throwing cigarette butts in through the bonnet grilles of cars, and tried (how hard is unclear) to stab the owner of the restaurant he sits at most afternoons.

The last time he went like this he brought his samurai sword to the bar and had to be pulled away from one of the drinkers there.

Psychotic + samurai =  !

What’s been done? Nothing. So Andreas sits like a coffee-sipping rabid dog at the restaurant whose owner he pulled a knife on. Day after day he’s there. Brewing. Simmering. Staring. Sweating.

He threatened to kill a sixteen year old boy last night. And his own mother has left town in fear of her life.

Hopefully he kept his psychiatric appointment today in Athens. Although can you imagine being his neighbour on the for the bus (late or early?) ride.

Later, when I walk to the village, I’ll find out from everyone whether he made the bus or not. Since everyone here knows everyone and everything. I probably already have a nickname. Except most of the men here are cold to me since there’s a scarcity of women and plenty of men. The locals don’t like packed lunches showing up at their buffet. Not that I’m cutting any lunches.

In my own country I rail against the nannying rules of society. And I hate the pandering technologies like reverse-assistance; the beep that tells you your car door is (obviously!) open; the way microwaves hassle you until you take the food out (since when did technology see fit to nag us?); the penchant of washing machines to make you wait that pointless and murderous minute before it’ll give your washing back, like a dog with a ball fetish.

So I’ve enjoyed the free and slightly lawless state of Greece, but at times like this I wish it were a smidge more like a nanny state. Because then it would be easier for people to get the help they need. Because underneath the excitable gossip and nervous mirth everyone feels about Andreas, he’s suffering. And slightly terrifying.

If he stabs someone they’ll bleed out long before an ambulance navigates the long winding roads here. Then back again, boarding the ferry…

I’m not too worried, but it does give me a little of the sensation of being on your own. A sense that the onus is on me to keep safe. Something that is true at home too, but feels less evident.

And beneath the freedom of not having to wear a helmet on a moped here, beneath the option Greeks have to choose their own level of risk, are those you can see walking around with the burdens of their past. People with permanent disabilities from moped accidents that could have been minor but for a helmet. One guy here tells of having to hold his friend’s head together all the way to the hospital.

I remember the invincibility of childhood but, for once, I’m glad that barring a few courageous scars, and despite the nanny-state annoyance I feel at times, I’m intact. And even if I may be fined for not wearing a cycling helmet or a seatbelt (Greeks here look at you funny if you put a belt on, one taxi driver even told me to take it off) at least back home I can get a psycho sectioned when I need to. And who hasn’t needed to do that.

I’m embarrassed to admit that a bit of me is finally aware of the sunny side of control. Take the once crazy, fire-starting supermarket owner, Kiki. Of everyone, she’s perhaps the most afraid of Andreas the psycho giant. She’s keeping her daughter at home, she carries a perfume spray in her pocket to spray in Andreas’ eyes if he stops loitering near her shop staring at her and does what he keeps threatening to do.

Kiki has changed. She’s no longer that person who needed to lash out and take big risks. That propensity for us to change during the course of our lives tells me that some constraint around us is a blessing because it goes some way towards saving the more considerate or mindful version of ourselves from living with too much from our foolhardier days. And whilst a nanny state can’t prevent everything, some container around our behaviour, or the behaviour of others, is comforting.

The answer is a balance, as usual. But while I long for the freedom of disorder, and the right to set my own level of risk, I also recognise the luxury and safety that some interference brings. And being in this villagey-Greek life has shown me that, sadly, countries don’t seem to manage that balance. Instead they seem to polarise one way or the other, everything sectioned, or everything psycho.