Small, the thoughts that come to mind as you drizzle olive oil over a motley row of blanched asparagus, over the poached egg and the crushed walnuts. “You know what would make this better?” I said, to no one in particular. The mice were dozing behind the fridge. The white ranunculus were curling round to see the sun. “You know what would make this better?” I said, and where I have found that Pancetta is normally the fail-safe response to this question, today I thought of walnut oil.

So small, these thoughts that show up, well scrubbed and neatly combed, toothy in the grin, when the sky is blue and the bus ticket is charged and ready to go. Not half an hour after the last bit of asparagus had mopped up the last bit of yolk, I was getting off the 393 opposite Waitrose.

I put the bottle of walnut oil in my cart. Then four conference pears at 99 p, and some strawberries on special. Handsome boxes of cereal, two for the price of one. Rainbow trout fillets, reduced, and half a leg of lamb at 25 per cent off. Fresh ravioli, in mushroom and in spicy salami. And some flat-leaf parsley for good measure.

As for the one-kilogram Lindt gold bunny beckoning from the gilt and flash of the Easter display, well, I thought I should let sleeping bunnies lie.

I slept for two days, and then it was time to wake up. Olive had made a strawberry brownie.

I am easing into London again, with Rilo Kiley on Volume High. There is laundry to be done, and work to hustle. But first, there is lunch. Yesterday the wind blew me and Hens into Hi Sushi for large, steaming bowls of sukiyaki ramen and salmon dons topped with plump, squishy roe. We hadn’t seen each other in three months and some, and our hair has grown.

We have hare-brained schemes, Hens and me, on, well, let’s call it hiatus, while our husbands are at work. For one, we are going to strong-arm our friend Marcello into coughing up a contact at the BBC so we can have our own travel show on the telly. “Do you want to go to Eastern Europe?” Hens had said, innocently, so innocently. “Come!” I said. “Croatia?” I was picking corn out of my soup kernel by kernel. “Yes,” she said, “and Istanbul? And then Morocco?” “I want to go to all these places,” I said. “You know,” she said, and delicately she bit into her sashimi, “I am choosing these destinations based only on the Easyjet flight routes.” The TV show was clear in my mind, like the water that sparkles off the Adriatic Coast. “We will travel along the Easyjet routes only,” I said, “and the show will be called” – and we were egging each other on now, though my mother (Hello, Mowmy!) will be proud to hear I did not wave my chopsticks around – “Easygirls.”

There is this thing we do, me and CC, and it is seeing someone to the airport and waving them off before they fly to the other side of the world. “Don’t be sad, CC,” I said as I zipped up the last zip Friday afternoon, “this is our lives,” but the truth is that the dependability of the exercise doesn’t take away that unsettled, queasy feeling in your gut. The clock was ticking its way slowly but surely to two-thirty. There is little so miserable as waiting to leave.

Our first last hurrah was feasting it up at Tomodachi the night before with Deborah and Lloyd, where we collected so many green and blue and maroon plates off the sushi train we didn’t even have room for the syrup-drizzled strawberry mochi dessert (blue plate with gold flowers). Our second last hurrah was french toast breakfast the morning of the leaving with our cousin Sam, and then waiting too long for the bus home creaking its way round the bend. Our third last hurrah, and I know this doesn’t first appear to be a hurrah at all, was the late McDonald’s lunch at the airport. “A Filet-O-Fish, please,” I said to the empty-eyed countergirl, and she said, “What?” “Fill-let,” CC muttered in my ear from behind me. “In Australia you pronounce the t.”

I ignored the lurch in my stomach and headed, waving madly, into customs and immigration. In my carry-on I had a small box of gingerbread figures. “I’m going to make gingerbread bears for Olive!” Maeve had announced, and CC had brought out the cookie cutters and rolled out the dough while the kid pranced about in a pink apron. She’d decorated five gingerbread men before losing interest in us, then CC and I had sprinkled, M&M’ed and silver-balled the remaining seventy or eighty of the little suckers.

The twenty-something hours of flying were yet to come, as was the special-ordered Hindu meal served to me in 34G while I sat surrounded by a family of Indians, but for now I turned around and waved, I waved while I walked towards the passport queue, I stood on my toes and I waved till my CC disappeared behind the curve.

Monday morning Maeve wore her extra-stompy shoes to music class, hoping for a couple of reprises of “Bear Goes over the Mountain”.

(The bear did not go over the mountain, we later heard, but a new song was learned. Maeve sang it to us later, as CC carried her up the slope, past the fine-flowered rose bush leaning seductively over the picket fence, to the bus stop on Rowntree Street. It went a little something like this: Naughty pussycat, / You are very fat. / You have butter on your whiskers, / Naughty pussycat. It is sung with prim accusation. If you are Maeve, you sing it while also wagging a condemnatory finger.)

While the kid and maybe eight or nine of her contemporaries wiggled and chorused their way through rhythm and rhyme in the Scout house, CC and I waited across the street, on the grass in Mort Bay Park, reading, writing. Just after eleven-thirty, we heard Maeve’s high-pitched, “Mummy, come and get me!” amid the other eager cries. Like so many squidgy-cheeked jailbirds clinging on to the aluminium rails of the Scout house balcony, the hullabaloo of three-year-olds jumped and squirmed and stuck their arms out towards freedom and sugary treats. It had not gone unnoticed that one mother had baked cupcakes with pink icing.



Adventures call on a sunny and cloudless day, to me and CC and the bundance kid shaking her moneymaker to the techno thumps blasting out of Jet Bar Café.

We meandered through the Botanical Gardens marvelling at the cactii collection and the ingenious, impossible webs of the trapeze-artist spiders. Above our heads, the bats swooped and called and settled battily upside-down on any available tree branch. Longtime residents of the city centre, these grey-headed flying foxes have fed on the sweet, sweet nectar of Sydney’s fruit trees and native eucalyptus flowers for a hundred and some years; inspired, we sat in the garden café for iced chocolates and lemonade ice creams on sticks. Just outside, fat pink blooms broke the leafy green surface of the lotus lily pond every here and there, and bright-eyed ducks paddled in the shade of the large, nodding leaves.

Later, the kid skipped and ran under the spreading branches of a fig tree as old as stones. She was a supergirl with flying powers, and with an invisible wand she turned us into supergirls as well. The sound effect of transformation, in the whizzbanger cartoon series that is her life, is: “Turn!” Similarly, when she is the boss lady of an imaginary cake shop, the sound effect for putting a pretend cake in a pretend box is: “In a box!” You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that the sound effect for closing said box before handing it over to a customer is: “Close!”



The sunny promenade along Farm Cove took us past the Opera House to Circular Quay, and to the 5:10 ferry pulling up at Wharf 5. Just across the harbour at Milsons Point, the wondrous, terrifying carnival mouth of Luna Park waited to welcome us in. In the late 1930s kids rode the Big Dipper and the Coney Island for ninepence a spin, and during the war servicemen sauntered down to the fairground on their time off. Half an hour to closing time on Monday, we mugged in front of the funny mirrors while the Tango Train ran backwards, and then the kid picked out a painted horse on the merry-go-round. The carousel carnie leaned against a pillar with spacey eyes, but our grins were wide for all to see.

We are having a lazy day today –

I know it seems like everyday’s a holiday in Stellouland, but you try carting a wriggly three-year-old around town all day, keeping curious little fingers out of your food and away from all manner of breaky things in the shops, you try entertaining a small and quick-moving creature who can’t stop nattering and asking questions, and then come and tell me about your holidays –

So you see.

We are having a lazy day today, keeping close to home with comics and fashion magazines while outside the crickets are keeping up a steady, hysteria-inducing chant into the hot, hot afternoon.

Our Saturday jaunt to Haberfield with Deborah yielded, among other things – among mini cannoli and veal ravioli and a rose ganache in white chocolate – a handsome lump of burrata, this yielding, cream-filled ball of mozzarella made fresh at the cheese factory. This was lunch this afternoon, sliced and plated with small, sweet tomatoes. We mopped up the peppered-and-salted olive oil with chorizo-and-red-pepper flatbread from the bakery up the street.

Oh, Haberfield: Two buses south and west of us, Haberfield is good for girls with a penchant for pleasure-seeking. In the deli-drogheria on Ramsay Street, Italian mammàs stipulated strict cuts of meats and cheeses, while on the corner, in Pasticceria Papa, the coffee cups clinked on their saucers and the shopgirls served up chocolate biscuits and ricotta cannoli and gelati in green and swirly pink. These are treats that feed a bout of girltalk. When Deborah gently chided her absent fiancé for leaving the toilet seat up, I said, “It could be worse – he could be a ladyman.” “A ladies’ man?” she said, laughing confusedly. “No, no,” I said, “a ladyman.” Saturday sweet-tooths swirled around us like aunties in a Toa Payoh hawker centre, but we’d found ourselves a table for four and we are ladies – even the kid, who was on the floor playing with her tractor by this time – who like a sit-down.

By ten Sunday morning the bus to Bondi was already packed. There were hats and ponytails, canvas totes and rattan baskets, shorts and thin cotton shirts. Bikini ties peeked out the collars of girls’ tops. We sat in the back row, me and CC and Maeve, like the bad girls on the schoolbus. The kid had been slip-slapped with sunscreen. I had on starlet sunglasses and dotty flip-flops. We had ice cream money in our pockets.



The approach to Bondi Beach on the 380 is steep, delicious downhill. First a glimpse of sea beyond the trees and low wall, then, after the curve in the road, the full, resplendent swathes of turquoise, teal and cobalt blue as the bus revs along Campbell Parade.

We started at the markets: here, the elastic-waisted rayon dresses, the made-in-China matryoshka dolls, the Muchacho T-shirts, the handmade soaps cut like blocks of butter, the mismatched mirrors made out of handsome, salvaged wood. The smell in the air was bacon on the grill; we followed the scent till I was holding a sausage roll in my hands.

A sausage roll in the hands can save you from many things, friends. Buying necklaces with cutesy laser-cut plastic pendants, for example, or handing over money for a fetching stripey dress whose above-knee hem, while fresh and frisky on the beach, while dazzling and devil-may-care in the sun and the sea breeze, would probably make me mince down London streets as I tugged ungraciously at the fabric and the seams of my self-awareness. I was out with Nora once, shopping, and I said, “Am I too old to wear a T-shirt that says ‘Drop Beats Not Bombs’?” “Yes,” she said, unhesitatingly, and I dare say I got a Look, too, for having even asked. I am not saying you are a sausage roll, Nora, but I am saying sometimes a sausage roll in the hands busies you before other distractions take hold.



Later, the cousins converged: Stephen and Suzanne, and Yen-Yen, and Sam – Ee-ee the chaperone among us all in her large straw hat – and the Exotic Dessert Platter from the fish-and-chip joint. Hello, pineapple fritters, and hell-o deep-fried Mars bar. I held out for a pistacho gelato, eaten in the shade, before we headed down to the beach, CC and me and Sam and the kid, to bury our feet in the soft sand, and to scream at the water teasing our feet.

This is how a Sunday afternoon passes by while the waves wash languidly onto the shore. Maeve chased her pretend pet crab. Stephen did cartwheels on the grass. The girls sauntered in maxidresses and minidresses, and surfer boys grinned in boardshorts and bare torsos.

Two weekends ago we celebrated Rowan’s birthday. We brought a chocolate-passionfruit tart on the train – CC carried the tart and I carried the kid – and came up to the gate at his Potts Point apartment a little after noon. Ee-ee had just arrived, too, with our cousins and a car boot of homemade curries and salads.

Uncle Rowan – white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed Rowan; smiley-lined, liver-spotted Rowan; tall, charming, straight-nosed Rowan who has always sent us notes and letters in an illegible handwriting only my mother can decipher – is a family friend who’s been around for as long as I can remember. Two Sundays ago he turned 95, but the truth is, he’s also been old for as long as I can remember. For as long as I can remember, Uncle Rowan has been the parents’ friend we always visited when my family came to Sydney. He’d give me a book from the Macleay Bookshop each time we met: every book of fiction or non-fiction that came from his hands came with a sticker from the Macleay Bookshop. Once – I was already working as an editor in New York at the time – he brought me down the street to see the store and its rows of wooden shelves.

Legend has it a fortune teller in India once told him he would live to a ripe old age; throughout my childhood and well into my teens, Uncle Rowan was known to cross busy streets willy-nilly. For many years he apparently drove his car around town with the same blithe confidence, the seatbelt hanging loose and forlorn. Rowan fell off a cliff once while taking a stroll but clung on to surrounding weeds till a passer-by saw him and went off to get help. It wouldn’t surprise me if I learned that Uncle Rowan once wrestled a tiger in the jungles of Malaya.



There are always flowers in Rowan’s house. There are always modest blooms in vases and sleeping buds in small bowls and dishes.

There have also always been, in Uncle Rowan’s house, souvenirs of travels wide and far, and drawings, and cards, a piano, and chairs to sink into, and many, many books, but this Sunday two weekends ago – for it is not every day one turns 95 – there were also four other cakes in Rowan’s house.

I understand Rowan is a renowned cardiac surgeon in some part of his life, but I realise, now, that he is also the BFG. Somewhere in Uncle Rowan, in his white hair and long legs and large nose, in his chin and kind eyes, is Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Two Sundays ago, despite not having seen me in some years, he welcomed me with a strong hand on my shoulder. He leaned in to kiss me hello on the cheek and he smelled as he has always smelled, of Rowan and of the light in his apartment and of Elizabeth Bay winking and twinkling just past his bay windows.



A birth celebrated and a life quietly remembered. Early this week I learned that Barbara Seaman died. I met Barbara when I was just starting out in book publishing in New York. I had been despatched to her Upper West Side apartment to work with her on a massive tome on women’s health. She had glasses and a big mouth. She was a muckraker and an activist. She was a feminist. I didn’t know all of this – well, I had some vague idea of this: they’d briefed me before I left the office. Mostly I was new to New York and new to publishing and I did what I was told.

We worked together for some weeks in her apartment full of books and paintings and photographs and wall hangings, going through files of papers – newspaper clippings, magazine and journal articles, scribblings, thoughts. She let me edit and she encouraged me to write. She sprang for lunch. We had thick, mayonnaisey sandwiches from the deli downstairs, or we ordered in off the one-colour Chinese take-out menu. She said to me once, opening a box of matzoh crackers, “Jews love Chinese food, so you will probably like Jewish food.” There was a grin in her eyes. We didn’t quite make it to the jar of gefilte fish.

Barbara always referred to my then-boyfriend as “your handsome boyfriend”. “How is your handsome boyfriend?” she would ask, teasingly, but when he and I eventually broke up she said he wouldn’t have been good enough for me anyway.

Because of Barbara and because of Uncle Rowan and because it’s been too long I’ve been saying I’m going to do it, I finally set up a monthly donation to ActionAid. Chin-chin to ye’ an’ ye’ an’ ye’.

So. This is life with a kid. In this life, I wake when she pads up the stairs at seven-thirty in the morning, and I can only be grateful it is not seven. (Some of us are very tired.) It is a funny life – and a sticky one, too, as plum juice runs down her arm. Tonight at dinner, we tried to make her eat one last bit of risotto, one last bite, just one last spoonful. “Eat some more, Pokes,” we said, CC and I did, cajoling, and she said, smiling widely before running off to balance on the top of the sofa: “Tough.”

This kid, in this life, whines and stamps and crosses her arms tightly in displeasure. She interrupts relentlessly. She wants me to be a cat, her sister, a baby, a rabbit, she wants me to order rubber sushi from her red-roofed playhouse, she wants to play dominoes – no, trains – no, doctor – no, painting, she wants to scale every height, to ride every bouncy animal in every park playground across town.

She is unturnoffable, this kid, this pixie with the bright eyes and the ready laugh. From a running start she torpedoes herself towards my legs; with arms wide open she launches herself into a huge smack of hug. She draws cats with a frenzy – pages of stripey cats, smiling cats, six-legged, fat-tailed cats. She pokes. With her index finger out straight, she pokes, decidedly and seriously. She likes glitter and lip gloss. “Look at my lips, Ee-ee,” she says, and then she cocks her head and puckers. She has a set of self-adhesive moustaches, one for each day of the week. Saturday is ‘The Grandpa’, a dapper curl of grey. She likes this one because it is fuzzy.

In the late afternoon, sometimes, we play pretend among the thick roots of the old trees at Elkington Park. Down Fitzroy and its sweet terraced houses, the park is lush and green with biblical leaves, and its cliffs lead down to the Parramatta River and its leaning sailboats, its sturdy ferries. There is a tree to climb, here, and space in which to run around in circles. There are swings to swing, higher with each push, till the ground disappears and our feet are framed by the sky.

“Ee-ee,” this kid says, “I like you,” and I say, “Pokey, my sweetheart, my sweetest of hearts, you are A plus.” She is generous with her kisses.

I’ll tell you, though. Nights, CC puts her to bed and then we stay up too late with date mamouls and rose pu-erh tea, or Turkish delight and a flowery jasmine. Two days a week we drop her off at playschool. These days are very nice days.



Last Thursday at the Bourke Street Bakery on Broadway, we had to tell no one to keep her hands out of her mouth. We didn’t tell a soul that chairs are for sitting on, not for jumping on and shaking one’s booty on. At no point did we have to lunge forwards to catch a cup slipping off the edge of the table, and at the end of it all, after the flat white, the hot chocolate, the rhubarb danish, after the jammy toast, no one whipped out a baby wipe to clean off the grubbiness and smears.



We walked up Bourke Street and down Crown, stopping only for pink and yellow biscuits and blue sandals and some very fine objects. The morning’s grey sky had turned into wild rain, and it wasn’t letting up. By the time we reached Danks Street and the wide, warehousey façade of Fratelli Fresh, we were an embattled troops, wet in the foot and empty in the stomach.

We ate slowly, savouringly, while the rain came down outside. There were berries and a wobbly buttermilk pudding. The macchiato was small and dark. We ate savouringly, slowly, while the rain came down and down and down, outside.

Tuesday we sailed the high seas again, hopping onto the ferry at Circular Quay right before it left. One of us had big sunglasses. One of us had a giant visor. One of us, the smallest one of us, had a banana.

Not twenty minutes east from the heart of the city, Watsons Bay, almost all the way to the very tip of the South Head peninsula, was a small curve of beach with a host of hopeful seagulls and a bustling fish-and-chip shop.



Hello, holidays! We have a bucket and a spade in the bag, and a big towel for the sand.

We tumbled about in the playground, on the turny things and the twisty things, and then on the climby things and the wobbly things, and then we ran through the park to the beach, to the water clear and sparkling like sapphire soda pop.



Here, we dipped our feet in the water noncommittedly; but it cooled our toes and our ankles, it lapped invitingly at our calves, and soon the hem of my skirt was wet. I bunched it half-heartedly around my knees but I knew the sun would take care of it.

We made one-bucket castles, on the beach, and we goaded the kid on toward the water. We looked out nervously for bits of broken glass, glinting green. We stalked the gulls, who edged away from us and bobbed on the little waves. We laughed, very loud, into the wide sky.



Of course there were fish and chips under a shady and welcoming tree, afterwards, and calamari and salads besides. We yelled at the seagulls and flung our arms out at them while they screeched and called in a ring around us. “No use waiting around, birds,” I said, “for there will be no chips left over.” But there were, in fact, chips left over, for we had an understanding with the gelato joint up the street – the best kind of understanding, really, tinged with the tang of a passionfruit sorbet.

We have been floating by on days floating by, like clouds on clouds against the brilliant blue, and with a tube of SPF 45 in the bag. We walk in shoes red and purple, we sit down for tea, we pick out truffles to make up a little sack. We have unlimited travel passes, and we want bang for our buck.



Last Monday we screamed and ran through the grass at Mort Bay and then took the ferry, green and gold, to the city. We sat out back with the sun on our heads. The wind was through my hair. “This is great,” I said, because it was, and at the Rocks we sat down to fizzy sodas and ham sandwiches.