Bubbles is the runt on the far right. Maddie believes she’s autistic, but the standardised human tests were inconclusive.

If you looked at her gummy facial organs, the electrified fur, and her thousand yard stare, the only word that came to mind when she was young was: decrepit. She was always cold. Always sneezing. Maddie syringe-fed her nutrient-infused milk every two hours overnight, making jokes about how she was imprinting on the sweet little darling and so would never give her up.

‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘Good one.’

Our kitten fostering experiences have so far been chaotic, stressful, and stinky. Flicker got lost in the membranes of the attic. Doody poo’d in the fireplace, and on the bottom of his feet.

‘She’s very cute,’ I said, and not without remorse. ‘But we won’t be keeping her.’

And bada bing, bada boom, not only have we kept her, but my housemates are all in Europe and I’m left to solo parent a high-needs inside cat whose favourite pastime is to climb things she’s been forbidden from climbing.

‘There’s going to be some biiig changes while you’re gone,’ I said, when I dropped everyone off at the airport.

‘Yeah,’ Maddie laughed. ‘When we get back, Bubbles will be walking you.’

Good one.

This is an old house and there’s an inactive fireplace in our bedroom. Bubbles has discovered that if she reaches her paw through the grille and makes broad sweeping motions, she can build little piles of sand on the carpet — crusty white sediment from the old chimney, which is laced with interesting, vaguely possumy smells.

At first I tried to reason with her. I explained the health risks, and that good money had been spent on toys for her enrichment: top of the line springs, snake coils, mice-on-sticks, and something called the CatBook Pro which is a fake laptop with a scratching pad instead of a keyboard. She prefers my actual laptop, but still. Why choose a pile of sand and crystalised rat urine over all that?

She demurred. Meowed. Then she showed me how once she makes the pile, she can double the fun by dipping all four paws into it like she’s panko crumbing chicken and then charge around the house. First stop: my pillow.

You’d think with my big human brain and opposable thumbs, I’d be able to keep her out of the grille. And yet every time I innovate a new layer, she finds a way to crack it. It must be what computer programmers feel training AI Large Language Models to code: One day, this thing’s gonna kill us.

At time of writing, the Bubbles Prevention Device around the fireplace includes: three thick sleeves of aluminum foil, two empty Ikea containers, an ice cube tray, some frisbees, and all of the pillows from Maddie’s side of the bed. I give it two hours.

I was out for a while on Friday. When I got home, I caught the vaguest whiff of trouble, but Bubbles distracted me by purring loudly, and bestowing rare, auspicious buntings.

She didn’t go to the bathroom all afternoon, which at first was unusual, and then became medically alarming. Maddie is always coming home with stories about blocked cats — some small change in their environment and bang UTI, kidney problems, distended stomach, certain death.

I must admit that I tried, more than once, to induce urination with a warm, damp cotton swab. A reminder that I didn’t ask for this cat. Actually, the opposite. And now I’m simulating digging in her litter box with my own hands, saying calm and encouraging things about how good it feels to poo, literally begging a wild beast to please, please just shit, I’ll do anything.

No dice.

At bedtime she runs amok, and I flick lights on trying to find her. In Charlotte’s room I discover a giant, dried turd in the dead-centre of the bed. I’m so relieved that I haven’t given Bubbles kidney disease that my first emotion upon seeing this poo is genuinely elation.

I mean, if that’s not Stockholm Syndrome?

We have a way of finding each other in the afternoon, on or around the couch. Her sleep is the total, trusting, impossibly deep sleep of an innocent thing. Sometimes she stretches and yowls and flops so that her body is long and upside down. Each photo is pretty much the same, and yet every time I take a new one?

I had a cat, Goofy, when I was younger, but I didn’t let him in my room. He had a temper and a smell and a sick proclivity for fresh laundry, on which he liked to shed a thick ginger shadow. His name was an intransitive verb. He came, he saw, he Goofed.

I’ve also met cats in passing, out on the street. One white fluffy one acts like my best friend in the world in the mornings, but in the afternoon it looks at me like, if it could only summon the energy, it’d kill me where I stand.

Bubbles is not like any other cat I’ve known. Maybe because she thinks Maddie, a human woman, is her literal birth mother. Or because she goes into the Vet Clinic every day as if it’s her job too, and posts up high in her own dedicated crate in the treatment room. It must warp her brain to watch a dog have surgery.

She stands on two legs like a human all the time. When the birds squawk at her in the garden, she mildly turns around, as if whatever they’re screaming at must be behind her. She excels at fetch, famously a dog activity. I saw her the other day let a lizard pass between her paws, and not ten minutes later she was trying to eat my book.

I’m not sure what Bubbles is, but I don’t think it’s a cat.

She wakes up with the sun everyday, and gently gnaws on my fingers in the hope I’ll drift awake and be inspired to feed her. My counter move is to pretend I’m still sleeping, and subtly hide my hands under the covers.

About half the time I get up and play with her, and the other half she gives up and goes back to sleep — each resenting the other either way.

But she is just a kitten. Only a baby, really. And she must have so many questions I can’t answer. Like, where do you keep the food? Why don’t you like sand? What is my purpose on this earth? And where’s that beautiful lady who saved my life — you know, the one I actually like?

There is something vaguely sinister about a cat’s intelligence. Whereas a dog wants to learn new ways to please and communicate with you, you get the sense each new trick a cat acquires will be used against you later. For manipulation and/or disaster.

Sometimes I find her batting items off my bedside table, and when she sees me see her, she jumps down onto the floor and bats those same items under the bed where I can’t reach them. What’s that about.

She’s worked out the perfect place to sit so that I can’t see the TV:

The night started with her climbing inside the doona cover, and it went downhill from there. About once a week she goes totally feral, remembering that cats are really nocturnal hunters, and deciding that the closest thing to prey in this house is me.

I give up trying to calm her down. I actually fall asleep on the floor in a bizarre and accidental protest, even though I’m sure I can hear her breaking through the final aluminium layer of the Bubbles Prevention Device as I drift off.

I wake up in the morning with her sandy body stretched in the crook of my elbow, her warm soft head is on my shoulder, her arm is splayed across my chest as if to gently hold me there. Her green eyes glow at me in the early dawn, then blink sleepily shut. All she really wants is to be near me.

In these moments you can see it in her face. This is a feral, psychotic, inarticulate beast, and all she wants is to be kind, and for no one to feel alone.

This is why we have pets, I guess.

In anticipation of Maddie’s feedback that the photos haven’t done her justice, I feel obliged to inform you that Bubbles has an instagram @bubblesowens, complete with video compilations of her walking on a leash and shameless attempts to get sponsored by a cat food company.

Those were real examples of real negotiations he shared from his real life, to illustrate the value of his teachings.

‘Now, lunch is at 12, and we usually finish up at 4,’ he said. ‘But, those timings aren’t set in stone. If we help each other out.’

Everything in this life is a negotiation was what he meant. Including lunchtime.

He started running through slides on the four fundamental personality “types” and how to exploit each of them for profit. We’d use these strategies later during the roleplay block, buying and selling imaginary cars.

He said you should never speak first in a business deal. Always make it seem like you’re compromising, but do not ever actually compromise. And if you run into big trouble you should try to imagine that you are…

He paused. For effect. Then he clicked to the next slide, which was a photo of a crying baby.

‘There is simply no better negotiator on Earth than a crying baby,’ he said. ‘They know their market. They have incredible leverage. And they also have that special something that you need to achieve optimal personal and professional outcomes.’

When people started packing up around 3, he panicked.

‘There’s still a bit more stuff to cover guys,’ he said. But we hit back with uncompromising and unreasonable counter offers. A need to pick up kids, commute back to Newcastle. In my case, a fake appointment.

Realising he’d trained us too well, the facilitator skipped over a bunch of slides to triumphantly, if hurriedly, finish on a quote from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address:

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

My memories of the seminar are fuzzy and vaguely hostile — but this quote is crystal clear.

It reminded me of a thing I do every now and then at All My Eggs, which is appropriate other people’s work to save myself time and effort. The Pretty Blatant Plagiarism series — and Act I, Act II, and Act III are all available for your perusal — is basically just a collection of nice turns of phrase I’ve read recently.

I hope they help you to unlock that special something you need to achieve more optimal personal and professional outcomes. You’re always welcome to send back nice turns of phrase you yourself have come across, so we can expand the repository.

For controlling your micro-expressions in business deals:

The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.

— Margaret Atwood, ‘The Testaments’

For how to truly understand a person, so you can exploit their weaknesses for profit:

Ira Sandperl is a 42 year old native of Saint Louis who has, beside the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh, and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow.

— Joan Didion, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’

For if you’re trying to sell raincoats to a bird:

Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.

— Susannah Clarke, ‘Piranesi’

For if you’re trying to do an arms deal:

She gave him the little girl photo-floods, 48008 of daylight blue, and whispered, ‘It’s why you kill each other, isn’t it?’

‘Who?’

‘Men. Because you can’t love each other.’

— Thomas Pynchon, ‘Vineland’

For accessing the deep reservoirs of self-belief needed to win business deals:

He is special, and that specialness is a secret. So immense are the doubts Ames’s inner voice must quell that his self-advocacy approached the titanic.

— Jennifer Egan, ‘Candy House’

For when things get a bit cosmic:

Maurice twinkles down at him like God, infinitely able to do everything except understand what you need from him.

— Paul Murray, ‘The Bee Sting’

For positioning yourself on the spectrum of corporate morality:

And he began to see his draft dodging as a kind of vaudeville dance, look at Cyril Bagger go, maybe his purpose was to resist having a purpose, be the hedonist against which valorous sorts measure themselves, that’s its own kind of service, for without villains there can’t be heroes.

— Daniel Krause, ‘Angel Down’

For if you lose a negotiation:

Mrs Swanson, the school counsellor, showed me a couple of breathing exercises and suggested that I might find it helpful to discharge my grief by going outside and throwing ice cubes against a tree.

— Donna Tartt, ‘The Goldfinch’

For when you’re pitching to Shark Tank investors:

The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of mental health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.

— Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Sirens of Titan’

If you like this quote series format, you can read Act I and Act II and Act III.

My All My Eggs portfolio is a little samey — travel, weird hypotheticals taken too seriously, personal misadventure — and it’s high time I diversify into the most wonderful and beloved kind of blog post: the ones that go before recipes on the internet.

Wait! Don’t go!

Every human being needs to eat. That is a simple biological fact that food bloggers exploit for profit, and good on them. They deploy ultra-clickable words like ‘EASY’ and ‘ONE POT’ and ‘10 MINUTES OR LESS’ to suck you in, and before you know it you’re julienning tarragon and every pot you own is coated in goop and two whole hours have passed. And you’re really hungry. A neat trick.

But the true genius of the business model is that the Super Easy and Straightforward 15 Minute Radically Deconstructed Consommé, or whatever the dish may be, is just the carrot that food bloggers dangle to get you to read 1,000 words about their personal life.

And let me tell you, food bloggers are interesting people. The only person you’re cheating by clicking JUMP TO RECIPE is yourself.

So that’s what we’re doing today. The first ever diversified and interactive Egg — and at the end of it I’ll have unlocked the secret to happiness and you’ll have a Shepherd’s Pie. That’s what we in the food blogging business call a win-win.

EASY, ONE-POT Shepherd’s Pie in 10 MINUTES OR LESS*

^{*It uses three pots and I’d budget an hour twenty.}

JUMP TO RECIPE

Hi everyone, thanks for stopping by. Today we’re cooking something that’s perfect for the colder months, and is best eaten beside a cosy fire, in a ski lodge, while snow falls softly on the roof and windows. An unseasonably warm July in Australia will also work.

This dish is so rich, earthy, and comforting. It reminds me so much of my grandmother. She was a shepherd.

I first discovered this recipe when I googled it hiked the Scottish Highlands. It’s the perfect foil to rainy weather and making it for your loved ones will warm your heart to 200 degrees celsius (fan forced) — which is the exact temperature you should preheat your oven to.

Before we get started on the filling, we’re going to set ourselves up for mashed potato success. To mash a potato, you must first become the potato. Hold them. Listen to them. Coax their starchy secrets out with the peeler. Then boil them until they fall apart. You can either do this on the stove, or just chop them up in a container full of water, bung them in the microwave for twenty minutes, and try really hard not to think about microplastics.

We’ll come back to these later.

Now, in a large pot, on a high heat, saute a bunch of mushrooms. Recipes will often say you should cook mushrooms ‘until they release their moisture,’ which I have always felt weird about. Who am I to steal their precious moisture?

Once the mushrooms are crying, add and brown your mince. I like to use Impossible Mince or a plant-based equivalent, available at all good supermarket duopolies, since I suffer from feelings of oneness and kinship with cattle. So many of them are called Angus.

While you’ve been dealing with all of that, I hope you’ve been finely grating a big carrot. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier. The bad news is that you’re also going to have to finely grate an onion.

I’ve tried many onion-tears prevention strategies in my time. Chilling the onion in the fridge, swimming goggles, positive self talk. I promise, promise, that absolutely none of that is going to help you when you finely grate an onion. It’s just the most awful thing in the world.

Just know that if it gets really bad you can always lean into it, and reallocate some of your daily crying minutes to this shepherd’s pie! Telling the rich stinging onion juices about trouble in your personal life (I had a whole thing about my taxes today) can be very cathartic.

Stir the carrots, onions, and your tears into the pot. Cook until the tears have reduced.

Now you’re going to need to dice a cup of walnuts. Easier said. A walnut is not designed to be diced at scale; they’re the wrong shape and frankly don’t like it. Depending on how much grief I accidentally discharged while grating the onion, I will either methodically lay the walnuts over the chopping board and slice in neat rows and columns, or, I’ll put them in a plastic bag and punch them until they’re dust. We just need them to be in little bits. Dealer’s choice for how we get there.

It’s time for a flavour BLITZ. I like to toss this stuff into the pot haphazardly and without measuring cups, like I’m a mad scientist on the cusp of a big breakthrough. Again, dealer’s choice. Just get the tomato paste, soy sauce, red wine, stock, peas, obliterated walnuts and cornflour in and stir.

Occasionally stir the pot as the filling bubbles away on a medium heat. Add salt and pepper and some rosemary to taste, then look around at the carnage of your kitchen bench. This is an important phase of the cooking process that other food bloggers often omit. Not me.

Just push all of it onto the floor and hope one of your housemates comes home to clean it up. It’s the least they can do. Plus you’ve got potatoes to mash!

Drain the water and get to work. Butter is your friend. And salt. And a splash of milk if things are too dry. The smoother and creamier the mash is, the easier it will be to draw in later.

Once the filling has reduced put it in a dish, then heap the mash on top.

I like to use the back of a spoon to make it all nice and smooth, and then draw in it using a chopstick. Mashed potato is an excellent medium for art — plus it tastes good. Michalengo’s David is nice enough to look at, but have you ever taken a bite of it? Very gravelly.

I’ve drawn birds. Dogs. One of those superman S’s. A sheep that looked a bit demented. Once you bake this guy, the butter will melt in the cracks and your work of art will come to life.

A warning that the mash potato has to be really creamy if you want to write text — and even then you’ve only got so much potato to get your point across. Morse code is fun but often not worth the hassle. Today, in honour of Cabo Verde’s inspiring FIFA World Cup run, I’m doing a football field.

Then you put it in the oven for 30-40 minutes, or until it’s golden on top. That gives you plenty of time for you to do something interesting with broccolini and/or sourdough bread, which are the good sidekicks for this pie.

Happy cooking. And if you draw something in your mashed potato please send it to me — I’m making a scrapbook. Regular eggs will resume next month.

Shepherd’s Delight (A Pie)

Ingredients

• 350g mince

• 2 cups mushrooms

• 6 x large potatoes

• 1 x brown onion

• 1 x carrot

• 1 cup walnuts

• 1 cup frozen peas

• 2 TBSP tomato paste

• ½ cup red wine

• 1.5 cup stock

• 2 TBSP soy sauce

• Minced garlic

• Rosemary, salt, pepper

• Constarch (or flour)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees.

2. In a large pot on a high heat, saute mushrooms until they release their moisture (:’(). Brown mince in the pot. Reduce to medium heat and add grated carrots and onion.

3. Add tomato paste to the surface of the pan and cook for 30 seconds. Add walnuts, peas, soy sauce, red wine, stock, cornstarch. Mix and cook until reduced, stirring frequently.

4. Peel and boil potatoes until fork tender. Mix with butter and salt until creamy, add dash of milk if needed.

5. Lay the mince filling in the casserole dish and spread the mashed potatoes on top. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until golden and crispy on top.

‘The Bounties of Space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.’

— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Four physicists are eating lunch. It is a bright day in the summer of 1950 at the Los Almos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the four physicists are the kind of physicists that get pretty cerebral in their lunch hour. For example, for a bit of fun, one of them asks, ‘But okay, how probable is it that within the next ten years we will have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than the speed of light?’ Wowzer. What a radioactive Q. This riles them all up. This creates electricity, hubbub. This moves tangentially into speculation about UFOs, since many a strange, saucerish light has been spotted in the sky of New Mexico in 1950. The physicists eat. Sandwiches. Fries. Tuna salad. And through the luncheon din, just because he is curious, really, Enrico Fermi says to the table something along the lines of, ‘Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?’

One of the dangers of being a curious physicist is that at any moment you might accidentally get a paradox named after you. Enrico Fermi was not personally overly interested in the whereabouts of intergalactic superbeings, but neither was Schrödinger super into cats.

The Fermi Paradox is a niche but serious field of academia that tackles the conflict between the lack of any obvious evidence of extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence. Bear with me. Actually, just strap in.

The Fermi Paradox

According to a thing called the Principle of Mediocrity—which by complete cosmic coincidence is also the name I go by when I freestyle rap—in the total enormity of the Milky Way Galaxy, our Earth is almost certainly a typical rocky planet, drifting through a typical solar system, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of a totally unexceptional region of a perfectly boringly ordinary barred spiral galaxy. Our physical existence—our brains, our bipedalism, our digital watches—can all be explained by the immutable laws of evolution. If there is nothing discernibly cosmically special about us, then it is very possible, even likely, that in the grand calculus of Outer Space others might exist as well.

I sense reluctance. Withdrawal, even. Possibly you’re disgruntled. Please wait. Here’s the Fermi Paradox’s chain of reasoning:

• There are billions, billions, of stars in the Milky Way similar to our sun.

• With the use of really big telescopes and very hard maths, we have discovered that well over 300 million of these suns have planets in a circumstellar habitable zone—i.e. right size, liveable temperature, potential for liquid water.

• Millions of these stars and planets are billions of years older than our sun, and if the Earth is typically mediocre, many of them may have developed intelligent life long ago. This is further validated by the probabilistic arguments laid out in the Drake Equation, which has nothing to do with Canadian singer-songwriter Drake.

• Some of these civilisations may have had enough time to evolve and advance and develop interstellar travel or galactic colonisation, which seems like something vaguely on the horizon of Humankind via our various egotistical billionaires.

• If even an infinitesimally minuscule percentage of intelligent civilisations successfully developed interstellar travel, we probably should have seen some evidence of their existence through our really big telescopes—radiation lines, asteroids with big holes in them, that kind of thing.

• But we have not. Not a single shred of space junk. No amoeba, no electromagnetic emissions, no big green spaceships drifting lazily past the moon with ‘If lost, return to Betelgeuse’ stickers on them. Nothing. Nada. Zip! Here in lies the paradox.

I get the feeling that you’re still on the fence. But we’re all busy people and I can’t spend all day explaining astronomical equations that I do not myself understand. So you can do your own reading, or, you can just suspend your disbelief for like three minutes. Turn the gravity in your brain off. Have a bit of fun for once in your terrestrial life!

So, where is everyone?

1. The Commute is Murder

Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star to us, is 4.2 lightyears away—roughly equivalent to 9.44 trillion kilometres. The journey to the moon, the furthest human beings have successfully travelled in our solar system, is 0.0000004% of this distance. Using current technology it would take us 6,300 years to get to the next nearest star, let alone the nearest habitable planet—and with a litre of E10 going for $2.25 these days, unless your spaceship is a solar-powered Tesla, you can basically forget about it.

As we adjust to a post-pandemic world, many of us are discovering that we did not much enjoy getting two trains and a bus to a building that’s always too cold. It’s possible that highly evolved extraterrestrial life has come to the same conclusion but on a galactic-scale—the most advanced and progressive civilisations are all no doubt working from home.

2. We’re Not As Interesting As We Think

If a rich, complex, space-faring extraterrestrial civilisation has existed in a beautiful utopia for millions of years, why do we think that they’d even remotely care about our brains or geopolitics. Do you care about the ants in your garden? Do you try to communicate with them by scattering honey-coated leaf shards in a fibonacci sequence? I didn’t think so.

3. It’s About Damn Time

We’ve been producing radio signals for like a hundred years, and venturing into the void of space for only fifty. That’s not even a fraction of a blip of a nanosecond of the history of our own planet, let alone the 13 billion years the Galaxy has been around.

Imagine a group of Alien Surveyors that routinely check habitable planets for signs of intelligent life. If they swung by the Earth eighty million years ago they would have found the dinosaurs who, though obviously terrifically street smart, knew very little about physics. Even if they made a note to circle back around to this part of the solar system every, say, one million years, they’re statistically unlikely to have crossed paths with anything smarter than a dolphin. Unless the dolphins are the Alien Surveyors… Uh oh.

4. They’re More Scared of Us Than We Are of Them

Have you ever seen a game of ice hockey? Yeah. I wouldn’t want to come to a planet that does that either.

5. Aliens Are Mean

Obviously the alien in Alien is a good illustrative example, as are the Predators, the Daleks, the Klingons, and so on. To maintain a galactic monopoly on resources, a pragmatic species of aliens might routinely annihilate any civilisation that tries to mine an asteroid. It could be the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.

We shouldn’t get too uppity about this, either, since we have to number our World Wars in order to tell them apart. It could be the nature of all intelligent life to destroy itself, through one or a combination of war, or climate catastrophe, or cardiovascular disease.

6. Aliens are Weird

There’s a base assumption in science fiction that extraterrestrial beings are at least roughly the same size as us, and breathe the same air as us, and create intelligible sounds at roughly the same frequency as what we can comprehend. This could be totally wrong. With different planetary conditions and billions more years of evolution, aliens could be completely incomprehensible to us, with brains that might work radically faster, or radically slower, than anything we can perceive. We might look at a nebula and think, ‘Gee whiz, what a cool nebula,’ when in reality this is a highly expensive and sophisticated attempt to ask, ‘Hello? Is this thing on?’

7. It’s Spooky Out There

It’s easy to forget that you’re actually stuck to the surface of a rock that is fragile and blue and hanging in a void of nothingness. Our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy, which is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. Just thinking about the giganticness of the cosmos is enough to drive you somewhat loopy, but actually travelling through it might be even worse. The vast oceans of nothingness, of vacuum. The interminable distance. The comparative bigness and beauty of everything around that reminds you how completely insignificant you really are.

The answer to the question of ‘Where are all the aliens?’ might be very simple: they’re all too crippled by debilitating existential crises to be interested in finding us.

What do you reckon?

The observable universe is a horrifically big and beautiful place, full of exploding suns, waxing nebulae, clouds of superhot dust, planets made of poison and ice. I personally like the idea that we’re not all by ourselves in this humungous galaxy—I feel you frowning again. Well, I don’t care. David Brin says that, ‘Aversion to an idea, simply because of its long association with crackpots, gives crackpots altogether too much influence.’

So keep that gravity in your brain off for another five seconds and ask yourself, seriously, where do you think that everybody is?

For example, Masterchef is rebranding as Masterchef Island: Brains vs Brawn. Wanna-be chefs get seconded in tropical paradise, divided up based on psychometric testing, and are only able to unlock croquembouche ingredients by winning physical challenges.

Maybe you’ve seen that the RSPCA is in a tizz because Shark Tank now includes an actual dunk tank full of great white sharks, which creates something of an uneven playing field for business deals. The new season of Alone will take place on the surface of the moon. It’s going head to head on a Wednesday night with Kidney Donation at First Sight.

I will admit, the new run of Beauty and the Geek and the Laser Beam began full of heart and promise, but it lost its way with gimmicky partner swaps. By the end of the season I was cheering for the laser.

Probably the only good Australian reality show anymore is Bondi Rescue’s “blockbuster” spinoff, Cape York Peninsula Rescue, which is all crocodiles and irukandji and Hoppo handing out green whistles like they’re tic tacs.

When I saw the bus ad for the new season of Antiques Roadshow, which has rebranded as Cursed Antiques Roadshow, I was so tantalised I forgot to get on the bus! A monocled old coot, tweeded to the gills, is pictured appraising a splintered family heirloom while a noxious green smoke oozes out of its cracks. A tagline looming in a large gothic font above it all: ‘You won’t BELIEVE what’s in this ceramic pot!’

What follows is my report of the episode, in case you missed the revamped premiere at the extremely spooky time of Sunday, 4 pm.

We open on a castle

As is custom, while the credits roll, we pan across a rolling green hillside to a stately castle. Jaunty classical music accompanies us. A posh British voiceover. We get a few quick shots of the restless line, where codgers are labouring under the supernatural weight of their gravy boats, their possessed portraits, and so on.

The first gentleman we meet, Darren, has a glowing watch on. The woman appraising it is sort of wincing, but Darren is quite jolly.

‘Story goes that my great, great, great, great grandfather stole it off of a witch,’ he says, holding his wrist up proudly to the camera. The flesh around it is red raw and covered in spidery green veins.

‘Oh, my.’

‘It doesn’t keep very good time. Actually, the hands, you can see, point at whoever’s looking at it instead of at the numbers. Also, if I go to church while I’m wearing it, I start vomiting bile.’

‘I see. And you said it’s been passed down from father to son. I’m presuming that’s because the fathers often have some horrible fate befall them while they’re wearing it?’

‘That’s right. Probably only worth a few quid then.’

‘On the contrary! I’d say it’s worth fifty, sixty thousand pounds!’

‘Cor.’

‘I just don’t think anyone would want to buy it, on account of the unbreakable curse.’

These people don’t look well

The jaunty music strikes up again and we pan to the crowd at large. The castle is abuzz, and these people don’t look well. Some of them are bug-eyed. Yellow. One man is floating a few inches off the floor, muttering in tongues.

We are taken to a different appraiser, the monocled coot from the bus ad. He’s standing quite a ways back from a woman with purple skin, eyes of blue ink, and an unhealthy looking underbite. She holds a dark vase to her breast, and strokes it as if it were a cheshire cat.

‘Good heavens,’ says Mr Monocle. ‘The smell.’

‘Eee gib me spesshal bowers.’

‘No, certainly. I can see that. Very special.’

‘Ee helbs me whisba wib sbirits ob the deb.’

‘Indeed? And wherever did you find this item?’

‘Graveyarb. Olb tomb. Ee call to me soul wib a earf-shakin roar anb—’

‘Good heavens, that tooth just fell right out of your mouth.’ Then turning to the camera, he adds, ‘How many more of these have I to do?’

There are four different appraisers that we bounce between, each looking increasingly troubled by the antiques coming their way. One is forced to yell, ‘Stay back! Stay back!’ and operate his cane like a fencing épée, when a drooling old lady tries to give him a closer look at her possessed dentures.

Some notable items from this rapid fire middle section:

• Sentient candle holders that resent having to hold any candles (£15,000)

• A sapphire that doubles as a portal to another dimension (£10, because the other dimension is one without oxygen).

• A portrait that an incredibly nervous but beautiful young man describes as “a bit of a picture of Dorian Gray situation” that he’d “really like to see the back of” (unsellable).

• A grandfather clock that takes the form of the grandfather of whoever’s looking at it (£400! Bargain)

The floating is becoming an issue

Be advised that the people in the background of the castle are starting to look increasingly funky. Deranged. Limbs are hanging at unnatural angles. Flesh is yellowed, and in some cases green. Eyes are cavernous. The codgers are floating higher and higher off the ground, some of them are even upside down.

But finally we stagger towards the big climax of the episode: the ceramic pot from the ads. It’s a beautifully put together piece. Ancient clay, gorgeous finishings, with hand chiselled monsters doing strange warfare around its splintered surface. Our old friend Mr Monocle stands over the pot, looking noticeably worse for wear — his silk cravat has come loose, his tweed is frayed.

‘So, what are we looking at here?’ he says.

Nobody answers. The camera does a quick pan side to side, but there’s no one there. Mr Monocle talks sternly with a producer while the camera zooms in, and ultrafine cracks are revealed in the skin of the pot. Like scars. As if the clay had burst and tried to heal itself.

Mr Monocle gives the thing a dubious tap with the tip of his pen. An emerald haze begins to seep from its mouth and coil insidiously towards Mr Monocle, who has the good sense to run away. The camera pursues. He doesn’t get that far before he doubles over, sneezing.

‘My god,’ he cries. ‘I’ve inhaled it!’

His trademark monocle explodes out of his eye. His tweed suit, already frayed, now tears, as his muscles grow and twist and crack. He gets larger and larger, thick dark hairs bursting from the back of his hands, his face. The camera must back up to take in the full height of the beast — three metres tall, eyes yellow like the sun, his old clothes hanging off him in tatters.

He groans, sadly. ‘Well, the craftsmanship is shoddy,’ he roars. ‘Notice the cracks in the surface here. The smoke is noxious, unpleasant — a sort of sulfuric smell. And the lacquering is all chipped. Plus the whole monster thing. I’d say it’s worth twenty pounds.’

A final strike of the jaunty music. The crew is now actively fleeing the castle. Mr Monocle is trying to tie his silk cravat about his bulbous, sinewy monster neck, without success. The camera zooms out to show that ghosts have been haunting the architraves, and a ghoul now unleashes an unholy shriek and flies into the heart of the camera. My television turned itself off, which I guess marked the end of the episode.

All in all pretty good viewing, though I’d rank it slightly under Masterchef Island: Brains vs Brawns — those brains sure know their way around a croquembouche.

We caught the red-eye. Ten heady, turbulent hours hurtling against the rotation of the Earth, then landing in O’ahu on the morning of the same calendar day that we’d departed at night. If that’s a confusing sentence to read, try living it. There were birds inside the terminal. Trade winds lashed tropical rain into the shuttered glass. They bussed us into a bizarro customs hall that was all hardwood and coarse floral carpets, like the US Border Force doing stodgy cosplay of a beach cabana.

They chewed on our visas for an hour that felt like a day and then spat us into a grey, temperate morning full of wonder and free-roaming chickens. Aloha.

Staff in second hand bookstores have that look like they know stuff. We seek a turtle. She glances up from her paperback and blows hair from her eyes and says to go to the beach on the tip of the cape, then keep going. Walk around the corner. Past the lifeguard hut, past the unswimmable breakers, past the trees with roots like splayed giant’s fingers, to where the fine black sand turns back to rock.

‘You could find one there,’ she says, like it would be cool if we did but if we didn’t, no worries.

What we find is a kind of motorcycle clubhouse of turtles. It’s hard to actually count them, since some sleep down on the bottom of the little bay, and others are swimming zigzags with real zip, and all are well camouflaged amongst moss and stone. How did they even get in here? The rock pool is a cauldron of sharp volcanic slabs, against which the Pacific Ocean rages. Slams.

But here they are, in a pocket of calm in a violent place, relaxing. Breathing very occasionally. Asleep? Their triangular hearts beat as few as eight times a minute, while the younger ones take gummy bites of one another’s flippers.

The very fact of their being here seems to thicken the turtles’ native air of mystery and tidal wisdom.

We drove to Keanu on a long stretch of highway that ducks and weaves between two snow-capped mountains. We set off from the “rainy side” of the Big Island, maxing out the wipers. Within half an hour the valley becomes so hot and dry it could be the desert. Or Mars. Ten black apache helicopters fly patterns around an army base on the plateau, cyclists caked in red dust look mystified that a flat expanse can be so steep. By the time we hit the other coast, it’s Hawaii from the postcards — blue, and lush, like paradise.

Things on this side of the island are cut right into the mountain. The taco place hangs off a cliff face with big open windows. Side streets are at silly degrees of incline. Sometimes there’s a break in the trees and the world simply falls away — glance at these vistas at your peril, since they show how sheer the path is down to the water.

Somehow we descended to snorkel in a little bay. The water is warm and the sand is fine and black. Volcano rock, pulverised by time. I see fish that are colours I never knew existed. Fish made in shapes only a kid could imagine. Sea urchins lurk like landmines, inky blue veins exploding up their spikes. The water is so clear and warm and light, it’s almost hard to believe you’re not flying.

They drive on the other side of the road here. The clocks still aren’t making sense. Our bodies are zonked and do strange things to us on the strange drive through three different climate zones, like how Maddie (the navigator) keeps microsleeping without realising. When we got near Keanu she woke up with a start, saying, ‘Left in four miles, you didn’t have to yell at me.’ I use so much brain RAM converting miles to kilometres that I forget to say, Maddie, sweet darling Maddie, I did nothing of the sort.

But it’s getting easier. Hawaii seeps into our brains. Not because imperial measurements feel any less whack (5280 feet in a mile??), or because we’ve become desensitised to inside places (restaurants, museums, baggage carousels) being set up entirely outside, or because our circadian rhythms have forgiven us for crossing the International Date Line — it’s getting easier because time, as both a measurable thing and as a concept, just doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did. It’ll happen when it happens. And what rain there is is light, and surely soon to pass. No worries.

I’ve said ‘no worries’ all my life and never truly meant it.

Manta rays feed on phytoplankton, which are too small to be visible except as a kind of ultrafine murk. Since the manta ray is so big, and the phytoplankton are so very small, they spend all day doing slow hungry loop-de-loops with their big mouths open. Phytoplankton are drawn to sunbeams. With enough raw wattage, you can summon them at night.

The boat ride from the harbour across the open sea is on the bumpy side. It maybe doesn’t bode well, but is still very funny, that unsheathing Maddie’s emergency anti-nausea ondansetron is nearly impossible. The guys running this operation are cowboys. They’re swinging off the boat’s beams, they’re blasting some Hawaii-themed music playlist, and they’re booking it across an ocean that is close to pitch black.

Conversation is tricky, so we just kind of sit, look, and get buffeted by the trade winds into a state of unlikely tranquility. It’s really very nice. Lil Dork’s sleeper hit, Lost my noodle, starts up with a ukulele strum. The words ripple out into the ocean: “I wave at the waving palm trees, they just shook their heads at me / There goes my pride on a passing tide, my logic drifted off to seeaaaaa.”

It’s not just the sheer size of the waves when we pull up to the manta ray site, but that they can’t agree on a direction. Churning is the word. We crawl around the boat, hooking into the railings with our elbows because otherwise you’d get airtime, collecting our snorkels and our noodles and leaping into the open water. We wade to floating boards in the middle of the swell, and then they turn on the lights.

The manta rays are spectacular. They’re gentle. And their gentleness in the churning sea seems like a kind of magic. It’s said that their touch brings good fortune, and I am blessed by as many as two flippers to the face. It is surreal and magical and truly full of wonder to watch them gently arc through the violent waves and yes at one point I threw up in my snorkel.

Maddie makes it back to the boat before she pukes, from the upper deck and directly into the trade winds, so that it lands on stranger’s heads as they exit the water. I at least have some class. The only person I threw up on was myself. And in a way I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to explain, it was peaceful. Funny even as it happened. Sometimes you just have to vomit, you know? No worries.

We swim in a cove that is crystally and flat. There are frangipanis, and big hot rocks to lay down on. Watching the ocean is an actual activity here. And yesterday we’d looked in at the big volcano, Kīlauea — it’s venting steam, magma tubes, bubbling sulfur. This land was forged with lava.

Maddie found a turtle while she was snorkelling, or maybe the turtle found her. It swims around us, lunging at boardshorts, gnawing on the rocks by our feet. There should be a hundred people here, and an expensive boat tour. Go-pros for rent. But it’s just us. And we have nowhere else to really be.

A turtle does only what a turtle needs to do next, like take a breath.

A dog might look at you like the sun shines out your ass. Cats give you that smug, wondering look, bemused that you’re bothering to exist. But if a turtle happens to look at you, it’s with a glassy eye of wisdom.

I dunk my snorkel mask into the frigid water and we share a look.

‘What’s the hurry?’ the turtle says. And I wonder.

Done git kicked in his head by his horse

Read palms in saloons

Spoke ill of the moons

Possessed by a wild desert force

.

Morse thunk he were our sheriff ranger

Slept out in the munitions container

Threw axes for practices

Then ate him some cactuses

An’ his supper got even more stranger

..

He rode his ol girl side of saddle

An’ whispered his secrets to cattle

When wanting his funs

Morse done fired his guns

Says knowin’ what’s a dream’s half the battle

…

Here are some of the great Greek Myths, abridged for the go-go modern world, with pre-divined morals to save you the trouble. Read on but do it quickly!

PANDORA: STEP AWAY FROM THE JAR

Having just clashed with the Titans for dominion of Heaven and Earth, Zeus — famous nepo baby— was at a loose end. He wanted a pet. Something simple. Something pious. He asked his friend Prometheus to sculpt men in his image out of clay, so that they could roam the beautiful seas and valleys and praise the world that Zeus had won.

‘You got it, Z,’ said Prometheus. He was only too happy to spend a day in the mud. Prometheus let his mankind sculptures dry out in the sun, then had Athena breathe life into their souls.

‘Marvelous!’ cried Zeus, conjuring a fierce storm and then laughing as one of the men struggled to build a shelter. ‘Look at the little fellas go.’

‘Aren’t they cute!’ cried Athena, as one tried to eat a rock, and another picked his nose.

‘They’re smart, too,’ said Prometheus. ‘Very devout. If we give them fire they’ll really—’

‘No!’ Zeus thundered. He wanted the men to love him, to worship him, to fear him, and was worried fire would make them forget their debt to the Gods.

Prometheus had grown attached to his men. In much the same way that man would one day grow attached to lego. He scaled Mount Olympus and stole a torch of divine fire, then returned to teach the men how to use it to hunt and cook and evolve. Zeus was absolutely filthy.

Instead of atomising mankind with his lightning bolts, Zeus devised a wicked plan to expose these creatures as the greedy heretics he knew them to be. He got Hephaestus to build him the first ever woman. She was singularly beautiful. Unless stated otherwise, everyone in a Greek Myth is singularly beautiful. She was to be named Pandora.

Zeus sent her down to Earth and gave her a wonderful gold jar for safe keeping. Not a box mind you. A jar.

‘Now, whatever you do down there, Pandora, don’t open the jar.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, my liege,’ she said, the very face of innocence.

‘Because there’s nothing interesting or magnificent inside of it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I can see that. It’s glass.’

‘Good.’

‘Great.’

‘See ya.’

All was good and all was well on Earth. Pandora married and she prospered, she had feasts, terrific parties. A utopia on earth, which Prometheus was very smug about. And though Pandora redecorated many times, wherever she put the jar it seemed to sing to her. Even when she buried it.

One sleepless night, Zeus’ hints to magnificence ringing in her ears, Pandora desperately dug the jar up from her garden. She opened it (how could she resist!), and out came Pain. Out came Misery, Discord, Lies, and Wants. Death. Mankind had fire, and now mankind had War. She slammed the lid back on the jar as quickly as she could, but all but one of Zeus’ wicked afflictions had already escaped. The only thing left in the jar was Hope.

Moral we’re meant to divine: Don’t trust Zeus (recurring theme).

MIDAS: CAN’T TOUCH THIS

Phygria was a humble kingdom. Though Midas, King of that realm, lacked riches and resources, he’d a killer garden and his flowers were blessed with many rich blooms. One morning, out to sniff the sweetness of his cherished roses, he stumbled on a drunkard.

It was a satyr, half horse and half old man. There were crumbs in his beard and wine stains on his tunic.

‘Excuse me,’ said the King. ‘You’re sleeping on my azaleas.’

The drunkard snorted awake. ‘What? Huh?’

‘I said, you’re sleeping in my azaleas. Won’t you come into the castle for some breakfast and a bath?’

‘Good one,’ said the satyr, rising sluggishly. ‘Much obliged. And then I’ll be on my way. Now. Is this the kind of castle that serves wine with its breakfasts?’

The old man, Silenus, stayed for ten raucous days and nights. Until all the food and booze had run out, basically. Then he summoned his master, Dionysus, God of Wine and Festivity, to pick him up.

‘Silenus!’ cried Dionysus. ‘How I’ve missed thee!’

‘Sorry, my lord. I’ve been feasting on the hospitality of King Midas here. Made quite a mess of his garden, I’m afraid.’

‘Really!’ laughed the Wine God. ‘Is that so? Well. Midas. What would you like for your troubles?’

A re-stocked wine cellar must have crossed the King’s mind, but he was ever-gracious. ‘Nothing, my lord. I’ve no need for riches.’

‘A wish, then.’

Gracious though he may be, King Midas was human. And a capitalist. In something of a giddy panic, he blurted out the first kid-in-a-candy-shop idea that came into his head: that everything he touched would turn to gold.

The God of Wine clapped impressively, and it was so.

The first place the King went was his garden. He touched a blooming rose and it turned instantly into gold, thudding down into the soil under the weight. Drawn outside by his screams of joy, he greeted his wife and daughter with a kiss — and both were frozen into gold at the touch of his lips. A shock, of course. But he could fix that later. Midas ran around that palace, goldifying grapes, guards, curtains, silver necklaces, believing himself to be the richest man on Heaven or Earth.

Being rich works up an appetite. But the instant his lunch touched his teeth, clink. His wine turned to undrinkable gold also. For days he wondered about the lonely palace, the gravity of his mistake weighing heavy on his heart. When finally he fell asleep on his hard golden bedsheets, he tossed and turned in a feverish nightmare so powerful it summoned Dionysus.

‘What!’ snapped the God, impatiently. He was still hungover from the night before and was in no mood for mortals.

‘My lord! Please! I want it all back the way it was! This blessing is a curse!’

‘Duh. Fine. Anything you wash in the River Pactolus tomorrow will dissolve the gold. Now leave me alone, I’ve got a terrific headache.’

In the morning, Midas hauled his family, bedsheets, house servants, trinkets and roses to the River. He cleansed and cleansed his untold riches until every last bit of gold had washed away.

Moral we’re meant to divine: If a God grants you a wish, always wish for more wishes.

ECHO: ECHO Echo echo e c h o

In the foothills of mount Helicon lived the comeliest nymphs in all of Ancient Greece. Zeus — famous visitor of comely nymphs — spent a lot of time there, frolicking and consorting with everyone but Echo. Echo was beautiful, yes, but she was a loud mouth. A gossiper. A chatterbox, dangerous for secret trysts, who was seemingly unable to stop herself prattling on and on and on and—

Having got wind of Zeus’ latest excursion, his wife Hera searched Mount Helicon and found Echo. Echo had just seen her sister run off with Zeus, and felt she had an obligation to keep their secret.

‘Where is Zeus!’ demanded Hera.

‘Zeus? Zeu-uus? Cloud-Gatherer, King of Gods, that Zeus you mean? Why, now let me think. Thundering personality. I like his lightning, don’t you like his lightning? It’s so, like, sparkly! Well you know all about his lightning, of course, my Queen. But I’m sorry, what was the question?’

The interrogation dragged on like this for a time. Hera grew furious at Echo’s rambling nonsense.

‘Enough!’ cried Hera. ‘You talk too much, lady.’

‘Who, me? You really think so? But there’s just so much to say, don’t you think? Ever since I was a young nymph I’ve always—’

‘Silence! For Zeus’ sake. I’m trying to curse you, you nut!’

‘Curse me? Oh. Well. Please excuse me, my Queen, only now that I’ve had some little time to think about it I’m not so sure a curse is something I’m interested in acquiring. I knew a goat that was cursed once and—’

‘Be! Quiet! You’re insufferable! From now on, you cannot speak unless spoken to. And you can only repeat whatever was just said.’

‘Just said.’

‘Ahh. That’s much better.’

‘Much better.’

‘Now beat it!’

‘Beat it!’

Echo fled to the forest, sobbing. Whenever she tried to speak her throat clamped shut. She found another of her sisters lazing in the river.

‘Morning Echo. How’s it going?’

‘It going!’

‘What was that?’

‘Was that!’

‘Echo, you’re grinding my gears.’

‘Grinding my gears.’

‘Piss off, Echo!’

‘Piss off Echo!’

This is how all her conversations went, with sisters and villagers and would-be lovers. No one wanted anything to do with her. Devastated, she fled to a cave and desperately prayed to be free of her curse. Aphrodite took the call. She freed Echo from her body, and her pain, but the voice remained. A spirit to wander the land. And you can still hear Echo’s cry today. in caves and valleys, in cliffs and empty rooms.

Moral we’re meant to divine: Never do Zeus a favour (recurring theme).

By this point in the cycle home, my quads are burning. My pasta is slipping. A Subaru Forester with an entire young family in it, packed to the brim with holiday provisions, has pulled over to the side of the road to let me pass. All three kids in the back are pointing in my direction and I’m pretty sure they’re laughing. A bird then flies so close to my shoulder that I think I’m being swooped, and the bike and the pasta and I guess my dignity careen towards the gutter. The lady who sold me the bike that afternoon on Marketplace for $50 had said ‘the rear brakes are a bit wishy washy’, and this sudden lurch to the left was my first chance to really test them.

If I’d been going faster, I might have died. In actual fact, the feeling of things happening in slow motion was just because things were happening very, very slowly — I was riding at the pace of a gentle walk, and simply had to put my feet down to come to a complete stop. The Subaru children were no longer laughing. I can only assume this was because the spectacle had changed from a slapstick comedy into a surreal, low-stakes tragedy before their very eyes.

Anyway, the incident felt like a metaphor for my 2025, which has been mostly very good despite its strangeness.

To help keep things mostly very good in 2026, I’ve come up with a few short and practical resolutions that, like most resolutions, I’ll probably keep up until February.

Resolution 1: Stop knocking the glass of water beside my bed over

FOUR times this year, I’ve flipped my pillow and somehow sent the glass of water tumbling across my bedside table. For some reason I always seem to have important papers and recently laundered clothes in the area, and the splash zone very much includes an old powerboard that has been known to spark if you plug things in too quickly.

You think after the third time I’d have learnt to at least stop filling the cup all the way up to the brim, or to use a lid, but no. In 2026, NO WATER.

Resolution 2: Use my real, legal name for parcel deliveries

Long-time All My Eggs subscribers may remember the Trials and Traumas of Gusman McTooth, when I ordered a new toothbrush under a wacky fake name to an address I was not legally a resident of. Somehow that incident didn’t scare me straight. For most of the year I’ve been happily receiving mail for Gussy McGoggles (sunglasses) and Angus MacEars (headphones) — and the postie didn’t bat an eye when I signed for a package for Gustav MciPhone (iPhone).

Then the opposite of a Christmas miracle happened to me on December 23, when the delivery of my books and UV blocking “Sparms” sleeves failed, and I had to go collect them.

Please believe that I took absolutely zero pleasure in holding up the long post office line on the eve of Christmas Eve with an existential argument about my true identity with a surprisingly scrupulous parcel collection clerk. After five minutes of pointing at my license and explaining the whole schtick about not wanting to give companies all my data, I’d finally convinced her that I was in fact Gusman McBooks, and signed a waiver to that effect. It took quite a long and excruciating time to convince her that I was also the internationally renowned Dr Angus MacSparms.

Lesson learned. Price paid. In 2026, I’m just going to use my actual name.

Resolution 3: Have more interesting dreams

Recently, I had a dream that my night vision was becoming a minor issue. Not really bad, just average. So in the dream I sat for an entire eye exam, with the phoropter and no surreal extras or confusing subplots of any kind. It must have gone for at least 40 in-dream minutes. I woke up in the middle of having difficulty lodging a claim through my private health insurance web portal.

I just think that my subconscious can do better than that? So as I drift off in 2026, I will microdose myself with malaria tablets and imagine I’m in a Mission Impossible movie.

New Year Old Stories

Thank you as always for your patronage of this blog. There’s never been more things to read in the world, so thank you for spending a few minutes every month reading this weird stuff. If you’re looking for some light, holiday catch up readings, these were my favourite stories from 2025. Click the title to be sent straight through.

METROPOLIS

Umbrella salesmen in Milan are among the most organised and relentless in the world. They’re everywhere that rain is—an unlikely but truly and literally saturated market. They harry and heckle. They often offer auxiliary 2-for-1 deals on portable chargers. And they treat a simple ‘No thank you,’ as the promising beginning of a long and fruitful business relationship. One guy has the audacity to yell, ‘Umbrella boss?’ while I’m actively holding an umbrella, and when I decline he says that my umbrella is cheap flimsy plastic crap and that his umbrella, for €4.00, cash only, is the real deal.

One Small Step

One day someday maybe soon / Humans will live on the moon

Angus of the Apocalypse

We can save ourselves some time on anti-biotic resistant super bugs and just say that two years ago I got sinusitis so often that the medical clinic I went to literally had me on file as “Ankus Macdonald.” I think I’ll be an early casualty.

Thanks again and happy New Year.

Look out for a new story on the last day of every month in 2026.

The psychic stuff is not going well. All I’m getting is hair. But so intense and laser-like is my telepathic concentration that I don’t see the glasses fall, I only hear them break.

For longer than I’d care to admit, I thought I might have shattered the glasses with my mind. But no. The guy behind the bar just knocked a tray full of empties. He runs off for a broom and says over his shoulder, ‘Talk amongst yourselves!’

A cruel thing to ask of two strangers in this day and age. Everyone knows that in these situations, the only thing anyone wants to do is pull out their phone and disappear into the ether for a few minutes. I’m in fact only one tap away from starting a game of chess when the guy in front of me turns around. Eek. He offers a curt, inner-city-neighbour sort of smile. Arms length. The kind of smile you might give a colleague you don’t really want to talk to while walking past them in the kitchenette.

He says, ‘What’s up?’

This timeless opening, calmly delivered, has me immediately on the back foot.

I urgently think of something clever and interesting and charming to say, then worry that I’ve spent too long thinking, then forget whatever I’d thought of, then totally panic, and then finally hurriedly fire off: ‘Not much mate what about you, mate?’

This cursed double-mating is a symptom of my larger disease: I am really bad at bantering with strangers. And it’s incurable. Give me a hundred hours and no word limit and a generous reader and I can eke out a bit of wit, sure. But on the fly and in the moment, my wit blows either uncomfortably hot or very very cold (examples abound elsewhere on this blog).

The guy at the bar says that nothing much is up with him either. It’s nice to find some common ground. He’s returned my return of his serve, and now we’re settling into a rally. After his iconic, laconic, Federer-like ‘What’s up?’ I feel the onus is on me to produce something with impact and drive. I cast myself in the role of Nadal.

‘HEY!’ I say, accidentally three decibels too many. The shock of the volume makes him jump, and I use the few seconds he takes to regain his composure as much needed thinking time.

There’s the obvious: Come here often? line to take, or the ever-present conversation starter that is sport. What I really want to do is explain the mind reading thing I was trying and ask him if by any chance his name is Dwayne?

‘So like,’ I say, building the runway while the plane is taking off, ‘if you travelled back in time to cavemen times, what one item would you take from the present day to really blow their minds?’

This is something that I do under social pressure: I fall back on a large bank of hypothetical questions I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s a compulsion. Bordering on a personality deficit. I think my hope is that an interesting and creative question will make me seem more interesting and creative than I actually am, but it rubs a certain subset of people the wrong way.

Dwayne is one such person. He gives me the same grim wince you might give a sick puppy that’s just thrown up on itself.

‘Ummm,’ he says.

How I ever thought this guy was Federer-like was beyond me. Federer doesn’t umm. The silence between us thickens with each ticking second, like a curdled cream.

‘Well you might say, for example, an iPhone 16,’ I offer, helpfully. ‘But keep in mind they don’t even have the BlackBerry, let alone the telegram, so the UX is gonna go right over their heads. And remember that they’re cavemen. So like, who are they gonna call?’

Dwayne makes a show of looking around. I can tell he’s searching for an escape route, for a person he knows. Never in all my life have I been so furious at bar staff. I’d gladly stand on broken glass if it meant an end to this conversation.

‘Alright,’ Dwayne says, with the same resigned air you’d give a relentless telemarketer that’s trying to sell you breathable oxygen. ‘Can it be plugged in?’

Obviously no, because then you’d have to invent electricity in a prehistoric cave. Still. It’s something. I’ve never been fishing, but I’m pretty sure if you get a nibble you’re not meant to tell the fish it’s a moron.

‘Sure!’ I beam. The rally is afoot.

‘Maybe like an aircon, then. Fujitsu.’

‘A fine choice,’ I say, and have to stop myself from adding a ‘Good sir,’ at the end of it. What the hell is wrong with me?

‘Or like a really big gun.’

‘That’d certainly get them talking.’

Dwayne grunts, satisfied. For a sickening moment I think he’s about to ask me what I do for work, but he apparently feels he’s done his time in my conversational prison and wheels around to face the empty bar.

I ought to cut my losses. More like cut my wins, actually, this is probably my most successful stranger interaction of the calendar year. But what would Nadal do if Federer turned around and opened up his instagram in the middle of a point? Exactly. He’d tuck his hair behind his ears, de-wedgie himself, and hit a screaming forehand into the open court.

So I tap Dwayne on the shoulder.

‘Nutribullet portable blender,’ I say.

‘What?’ he says.

‘I’d whiz up some leaves, maybe some mud. Make those cavemen a smoothie.’

‘Oh.’

‘That’s my answer.’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s pretty good.’

‘I guess.’

‘Think about it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Are you thinking about it?’

‘Yep.’

The barkeep returns with a broom and his apologies, and gets to sweeping right away. He must pick up on the weird curdled cream vibes in the air, or maybe he just sees me staring psychic daggers at the back of Dwayne’s neanderthal skull.

‘So…’ the barman says, pulling a schooner of pale ale for Dwayne. ‘What’d you guys talk about?’

The question seems to catch Dwayne in the throat and he wheezes out his now trademark, ‘Ummm, ummm.’ He’s embarrassing himself. Even Djokovic has respect for his opponent.

I clap Dwayne on the back like we’re old chums.

’Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘The stone age.’

‘One of our better Ages,’ says the barkeep.

Dwayne hurries away without so much as a cheerio. Frankly good riddance. We’re better off without him. I ask the guy behind the bar the same question after I order my drink and he thinks a moment. Really thinks. It’s kind of him.

‘Remote control helicopter.’

‘Sick,’ I say. I smile and I nod and all is right with the world. I thank him for his time and wander off quite happily, honestly close to tears at the joy of the success of the interaction. There’s a commotion behind me but I pay no notice.

I walk all the way back to my table, when a heavy hand claps down on my shoulder. Turns out the barkeep, the slowest retriever of brooms in the southern hemisphere, has quite a turn of pace when chasing vagrants.

‘That’ll be $10.40, mate,’ he says.

I’ll chalk it up as a draw.

For so long the pot seemed empty, and now here they are. Not just alive but living. All this time. Hello! And hello also to yet more proof of the strangeness, the green driving wonder, at what really goes on in the dirt.

The hedge has been creeping up towards the powerlines and my hope was that, in time, it’d be electrocuted back into a civilised sort of shape. Apparently it doesn’t work like that, so here I am up a ladder.

Cutting your own hair and taking on a hedge have more in common than you might think. Positive self-talk is important. As are sharp shears. And however FREAKY and BALD it may look at times, hold tight to the knowledge that it can always, eventually, hopefully, grow back.

I’m standing on top of the stone letterbox, surveying the hedge, scratching my head with the clippers, when a woman from across the street yells with disdain, ‘You look like you’ve never done that in your life.’ Why do strangers feel comfortable saying this kind of stuff to me? Is it something about the way I’m dressing?

Anyway, I start the chop. Pretty soon I realise that the tree is making strange noises. And it’s rustling even when I’m not touching it. I go snip, snip, snip, and as the outer branches fall away, I see a pair of black eyes watching me from the hedge’s dark interior world. No wait, two pairs of eyes.

It’s a possum with a baby on her back. No. Wait. Two babies. And as the last of my wonky cuttings fall down on my head, all six blank, squinting eyes seem to look at me with disdain, as if to say, ‘You look like you’ve never done that in your life.’

It’s my clothes, isn’t it.

When I was younger I believed the greatest retail experience a person could have on Earth was in JB-Hi-Fi. I now know it to be in Bunnings.

There are entire aisles in Bunnings full of things that you do not need, and did not know existed, and yet somehow end up in the trolley. For example, we don’t even have a lawn. So why am I always trying to buy these things?

Hanging baskets, cheap mulch, water features. Seeds. Colour bursting in the nursery. A million kinds of telescopic sheers. Fertiliser for every species. Deck chairs and plantar boxes and bird baths and fairy lights. Pots galore. Timber and toilets and tomato growing kits.

Lowest prices are just the beginning and I’m not so sure that there’s an end.

There’s something going on with the lemon tree, beyond just that it’s not very successful at producing lemons. I think it’s doing science experiments on itself. In the morning I sometimes find half-baked citruses on the ground, their stems pointing at each other as if they’d been consorting. Some still hanging have been skinned alive. Others are split and morphed. There’s one that looks like it’s been abducted, lobotomised, and hastily stitched back together by aliens.

Who do I tell about all this?

An ant inside is a worry. An ant in the garden is an interesting watch, for they lead the eye to treasures. Mushrooms. Sugar. Crucified cockroaches. Spider webs. A fallen lemon impaled on a spike. Empty snail shells.

There is a self-contained bug ecosystem on the branches of the hedge out the front. They’re big, small, tentacled, green. Things I’ve never ever seen. Fun just to watch them wriggle. Adapt. You don’t need a fancy brain to have a purpose in this world.

We get little lizards out the back, too. Sleeping under pots. Warming themselves in swathes of dappled sun. They’re cute. Once I saw one climb into a plastic feeder and come back out with a little spider in its mouth. The circle of life is a venn diagram.

I’ve not given the hydrangeas the light that they deserve, for which I’m very sorry. I whisper affirmations into their stems but I’m not sure if it’s helping.

I thought the petunias had some kind of disease. Here I was, heaping unto them the usual volumes of water and praise, and there they were, dying. Turns out it was just February. They’re seasonal and their time had come.

The petunias went to their next life quite willingly, but I have killed before. I drowned a lavender. Dropped a cactus. Watched on confused as the geraniums were feasted upon by thrips. I can’t keep a Kangaroo paw alive, no matter what I do, so then for what sick, pathological reason do I keep buying them?

There’s no vanity in sweeping. No more futile a task. It doesn’t matter what day I choose to go slowly and methodically around the back with the broom, that evening will almost always bring cyclonic winds and thundering rains and the leaves will be back by the morning.

You can get a blower vac from the middle aisle at Aldi for like $40, but that feels like cheating for a garden this small.

Sweeping is painstaking by design. Meditative. It is bringing a moment of order to a chaotic universe. A fleeting win. Since what is the point of any of this if not to make fleeting wins against weeds and hedges and winter and chaos.

“There comes a point, I’m afraid, where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”

— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

Having misjudged the flight of the ball, I dove headlong into a teammate’s shoulder. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was twenty and believed that my ideas were, as a default, good, moral, and of interest to the world.

There was a thunderclap. And it was suddenly very dark. I slowly returned to myself from wherever I’d been and was surprised to find that I was upside down, with grass between my teeth, sludge where my prefrontal cortex had been, and an aching feeling that maybe my ideas weren’t quite as good as I’d been led (by myself) to believe.

Concussion recovery can seem more like an art than a science, which was lucky. I was a student of the Arts at the time. I was only too glad to action vague medical advice like, ‘Listen to your body,’ and ‘Don’t think too hard,’ and my shamefully few on-campus contact hours promised a gently graded return to full-consciousness. By the start of the next semester the headaches were mild, and if I had any memory problems I certainly can’t remember them. Sensitivity to light was not uncommon among my classmates. The only issue, really, was Existential Philosophy 206.

Every Arts student I knew, be they gung-ho, ultra-rational Arts-Law types, or your more hippyish beanie-in-summer Arts-Arts majors, had had a go at a philosophy elective. Reviews were mixed. One guy told me I’d have more fun eating the textbook. But I was twenty, desperately awkward at house parties, and somehow imagined knowing the meaning of life might give me some much-needed je ne sai quoi.

I’d enlisted before the concussion. When I picked up the textbook from uni — heavy as the yellow pages and about half as fun — I saw how steep the climb would be to a passing grade. But my soul was in a tizz and the course felt urgent. Necessary. I wanted to unlock the secrets of the universe for reasons of romance, power, and social credit.

I made it as far as week three.

In my admittedly clinically foggy memory, the EXTPHL206 lectures were in an old brick building with a flickering overhead light. My classmates were quiet. A little too serious. The lecturer was an eminent Frenchment whose big fast words rolled together into one long, tense, breathless, coursing river. The lectures usually followed the same course: a portrait of the philosopher of the week, then some commentary on their beards and their uniformly sad personal lives, then two hours painstakingly unpacking why they personally believed existence to be meaningless, torturous, or a cruel illusion.

The sinking feeling set in right away. And it sank and sank all the way to Camus, who we covered in week three.

Albert Camus was very into cigarettes, brooding stares, and ‘The Absurd’. That is, that strange, out-of-body feeling when a person’s need for meaning runs into the meaninglessness of the universe. He thought:

• On the cosmic scales of time and space, any individual life, and individual action, has such a mathematically microscopic impact on the universe that there is no point to anything. Eeek.

• Goodness and rightness are subjective human constructs, as make believe and ultimately spiritually valueless as money, the Loch Ness Monster, or the colour Blegrellow. If it’s not naturally occurring, there’s no point believing in it. Double eek.

• Death is inevitable (triple eek), so ipso facto living is futile.

Now this is a fun guy to talk to at a house party.

Camus thought that there is no universal purpose for being alive, which made it all the more strange that human beings are born with a deep hunger for purpose and meaning and reason. This strangeness is The Absurd, an ever-looming existential crisis that screams at you in the middle of the most mundane of morning routines. Ever felt like all you do is empty the dishwasher? Ever had to convince a computer that you are not a computer? Ever been sweeping the leaves when you realised there’s going to be more leaves to sweep tomorrow?

The Absurd is a collision. Violent! Stormy! This must all be for a reason crashes headlong into but there is no reason for this. A temple smacks a teammate’s shoulder.

And the ultimate tragic-comic hero of Camus’ thesis was Sisyphus, of boulder fame. As a punishment for trying to cheat Death, Sisyphus had been tricked by Zeus into the absurdly futile task of rolling a very slippery boulder up a hill forever. Knowing he would fail and yet unable to stop trying.

‘We are all Sisyphus!’ declared the eminent French lecturer to triumphantly end his week three lesson. ‘And we all have our boulders. Pushing our futile burdens up a very big hill, over and over every day, trapped in our routines, never really knowing why. Okay. See you next time.’

I wanted to run screaming all the way home. I actually think it’s pretty brave that I walked to the train, eyes bugging, back to the wall like I was being followed, and then quietly unenrolled from the course on my phone. There is something very liberating about surrender.

An existential philosophy class had given me an existential crisis. I tried not to think about how weird that was and, being concussed, it wasn’t so hard to slip into a delightfully foggy denial of the meaninglessness of the universe.

Quite by accident, in September of that year, I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy outside on the grass on a warm spring day.

If living is meaningless/suffering/hard, then French Existential Philosophy is like rigorous physiotherapy, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is like a scalp massage from a coy dolphin. The book is the existentialist antichrist. In it, ordinary man Arthur Dent is violently ripped from his usual routines and reluctantly embarks on a journey across a bizarre universe, encountering talking elevators, pan-dimensional mice, and an acclaimed planet designer named Slartibartfast. To keep him sane, he’s given the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — a near-infinite encyclopaedia of the absurdity of the universe, with the words, ‘DON’T PANIC’ inscribed in large friendly letters on the front.

Douglas Adams plays cat and mouse with The Absurd, and uses the apparent meaninglessness of the cosmos as a rolling punchline. That Spring felt as good a time as any to return to Camus.

I found the old textbook in my cupboard. And just one single page after the one I’d decidedly quit on were Camus’ resolutions to The Absurd as a numerical list. Why the eminent French professor had at no point mentioned that there were resolutions to the existential dread remains a great cosmic mystery to me.

Camus says that, though icky, awareness of The Absurd is the most important thing we can do as human beings. It gives us life. Knowing that we are desperate for meaning in a meaningless universe allows us to:

1. Rebel. Fight back. Refuse to despair or be deceived. Sisyphus can look the absurdity of his situation in the eye, and choose what matters to him.

2. Reject hope. Nothing is coming to save Sisyphus, so he must live in the present and find his own freedom in every moment. Decide his own values and forge his own purpose.

3. Have passion. Sisyphus cannot live good, so he must live much. Live large! Fiercely! Boldly. Smelling the underworld’s roses, as it were.

‘I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain,’ Camus says. ‘One always finds one’s burdens again. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

And if I ever find myself at a house party again, I guess I could do a french accent and explain all this in a frantic whisper. But wouldn’t it be easier to hand out copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? To just steal more of the immortal words of Douglas Adams?

Like…

And he was right! A month later, I was all too glad to jot down: ‘Just saw Dr G. (PhD) trying to buy a Boost Juice with an IOU scribbled on a scrap piece of paper from his notebook. Pen mightier than the wallet?’

But this is a digital age. I now keep a virtual note on my phone titled, ‘Is this anything?’ where life’s little wonders accumulate like lint in the dryer. It’s where my eavesdroppings go. Gardening reminiscences. Descriptions of the strange behaviour of neighbourhood cats. If I don’t periodically empty them out, I’ll have an electrical fire on my hands.

So that’s what we’re doing today. Go carefully.

Terrace houses have great acoustics for street-noise. Three times a week, Maddie and I wake up to an English woman screaming: ‘ARCHIE! AR-CHIE! COME BACK HERE! ARCHIE!’

For the longest time we weren’t sure what Archie was. It seemed even odds he was a dog, or a child, or a slippery figment of a deranged expat’s imagination.

One morning we woke up early and had breakfast on the front porch. A stakeout of sorts. The street is very pretty on a hazy Spring morning. Still. Sweet. And, soon, shattered to screaming pieces by the inevitable call from stage right.

‘ARCHIE! WHERE ARE YOU GOING! WHAT ARE YOU DOING! ARCHIE!’

It’s very triggering to hear your alarm in the wild. Like Pavlov's dog’s sleep paralysis, all of a sudden I’m drooling and groaning and it’s a work day and I would give my kingdom for five more minutes. When I (eventually) remember that I am already awake, I see a big dumb golden labrador bounding up the street. He sniffs happily and at pace, his tail a-wagging, his jowls a-jiggling. An Archie if I’ve ever seen one.

And in his merry, heedless, blissfully ignorant canter up the warm misty street there is a lesson for us all: Don’t let your alarm be the boss of you.

Overheard conversation on the train on my way to work in Parramatta. Couldn’t even begin to guess where these people were going.

‘I never come out here, oh my god, oh my god. It’s like, so like, regional.’

‘What, Strathfield?’

‘Yeah. It’s so far.’

‘Casey, I think this is the Inner West.’

‘The Outer Inner West maybe.’

‘Ha.’

‘We’ve been on the train for hours.’

‘Hours? No we haven’t. We came from Bondi Junction.’

‘North Bondi. I had to get a bus too.’

‘Ugh.’

‘Busses count as trains.’

‘Yes and no.’

Sick. Deep in the clutches of a rising viral fever, home early from work, dizzy from the train and the walk up the front stairs, desperate to collapse onto the couch and go non-verbal for several days, unable to find my house key, I tried to unlock the front door with my Opal card.

It didn’t work.

My very mild superpower is that I’m usually extremely, almost freakishly good at catching things that I’ve just dropped. Don’t ask me why. It’s subconscious. Like if I drop my phone while walking I’ll just go bam. Pure reflex. Snatching it from the air before I’ve even registered it’s falling. And I’d really think this would impress people if a) they ever saw me do it and b) my feat of inexplicable coordination wasn’t immediately preceded by a moment of equally inexplicable clumsiness.

Anyway, one time at the airport I dropped an entire Boost Juice onto Maddie’s carry-on luggage. Let me rephrase. I knocked it off the table, then I used my superpower to grab it just after it turned upside down, and the speed and power of my reflexes dislodged the lid.

If you ever think $13 is pretty steep for a Boost Juice, seriously consider tipping it upside down onto your cherished girlfriend’s cherished tote bag. You will be frankly blown away by the volume of liquid contained within.

The skaters at Sydney Park are interesting people to watch. Some of them are caught in a very visible triple bind of trying not to care about how much they don’t care about a thing they obviously care about very deeply. My hovering near the bowl and staring at them probably doesn’t help.

Just last week I watched a guy nail an intricate spinning, rail grinding, board flipping manoeuvre. It was just me and him around. To celebrate, he did a tiny leap on his board and then stacked it.

It was very funny but I didn’t laugh. Not much, anyway. I understood that I was watching a young man learn a life lesson the hard way and chose to respectfully avert my gaze while he screamed at the sky and smashed his skateboard over his knee.

Some geeks from the NSW Greens just knocked on our door. I mistook them for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Attempts to shoo them on religious grounds were embarrassing for all involved, and I felt so bad I think I might have agreed to hand out How to Vote cards at the next election.

Our Apple TV remote was on the fritz. I suspected water damage but what do I know? Could’ve been the software or the full moon or a lover’s quarrel with the garage door clicker.

For whatever reason, it was pressing its own buttons. Pausing. Playing. Exiting. Rewinding. Turning itself off. Turning itself back on again. Short circuiting. Imploding. Making strange whirring noises.

It would’ve been spooky if it wasn’t so annoying.

I tried to quarantine the remote at increasing distances from the television, but even in the glovebox of the car the homicidal bluetooth signals found a way through. The microwave worked, but it felt like a mild explosion risk to keep it in there. So I did what any sane, thinking person would do. I put the TV remote in the fridge.

I read once that the human brain is an excellent discounting machine. With every day that passes, a vase of fresh flowers will be harder for you to appreciate, or smell, or even notice. Your brain filters out the environment automatically, so it can stay alert to predators, which is cool but sad (like a lot of evolution).

I only mention this to explain why, a month later, when I asked Maddie if she’d seen the butter, neither of us thought it strange that she said back, ‘Yeah, it’s behind the remote.’

My optometrist is attempting a land speed record.

‘Oneortwo? Which? Which? Oneortwo?’

‘Umm. Well… It’s all a bit of a blur,’ I say, sorry to be slowing her down.

‘Which is more of a blur?’

‘Two, I think?’

‘And threeorfour?’

‘Is one still on the table?’

Then she wants to do a glaucoma test. I am barely halfway to glaucoma-onset age. Apparently there’s a warped shimmer on my optic nerve and she’d like to take a high def picture of it every year for the next twenty years.

‘That way, when you’re fifty, we’ll really know what we’re dealing with,’ she said, nodding furiously. ‘I can say, “What did Angus’ optic nerve look like when he was in his late 30’s?” and immediately I will know.’

This is the first time we’ve ever met. I might be slightly short-sighted, but I think all signs are pointing to a long and fruitful and (at least for one of us) pretty lucrative relationship.

Sometimes the basement floods, on account of the previous owner dug it out himself and we had something called a Bomb Cyclone during the week. I’m investigating it in gumboots because the water could be electric — I feel pretty smart that I thought of this.

That feeling never lasts long for me. As I bend to remove the gumboots, my phone slips out of my pocket. I use my freakish reflexes to try to catch it, but smash my fist into the staircase instead. The phone ploops into the water. Unthinkingly I stick my hand in. For some reason I also start saying ‘No way, no way, no way,’ over and over and at increasingly high frequencies. I didn’t get electrocuted but my phone won’t hold a charge, so I guess we chalk it up as a draw.

‘Gee whiz that’s a nice pen,’ I say, so painfully earnest that I must sound like I’m making fun. I’m not. This is as sincere a compliment as I have ever given a stranger. It is also one of the nerdier sentences I’ve ever said outloud.

An older gentleman is writing my contact details on an order form for a roll of film. The pen is fountainish and sharp and inky, flowing like a quick black river. It’s got a gel grip and a nice even keel.

‘You like it?’ he says. I’d given him my full name and my cartoonishly long work email just so I could watch him write more. I wish my phone number had more 7’s in it. His 7’s are a dream.

‘It’s like pinpoint lava.’

‘Here.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not worthy.’

‘Take it.’

‘No, no.’

‘I’ve got another.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Oh, thank you.’

And I’m not embarrassed to admit I ran all the way home, wondering which of my notebooks has the highest GSM paper.

This was the second chapter in the Is this anything? series. Chapter one is here.

Why Benjamin Stork Broke the Ribbit Glass was put on Island Magazine a few weeks ago. I’ll put the link below if you're interested.

My mum wanted to know if the ‘frog thing’ was a metaphor and, if so, what it was a metaphor of. I had to confess I wasn’t sure on both counts. Enjoy!

https://islandmag.com/read/benjamin-story-by-angus-macdonald

Thanks and regards for your thanks and regards.

I normally start my work emails with something professional and vaguely kind, like “I hope this email finds you well.”

Between you and me, what I actually hope is that this email finds you at the bottom of a well. Something deep and stoney. Not necessarily in any physical danger, but certainly stuck, with a bad wifi signal, while the cold and earthy well water wades as high as your waist. It would be a chance for you to self-reflect, B—, on the kinds of emails you’d like to be remembered by.

I am writing in regards to your above correspondence, dispatched in my direction at 4:03 p.m. on the Friday afternoon just gone. It was, to be candid, no picnic. There are crime thrillers with shorter word counts. Why the hell did you choose the Courier New font? And at size 14? Have you no shame? I note also that you said ‘utilised’ and ‘leveraged’ as many as three times each. The body copy is grammatically immaculate; but you have more semicolons than you have full stops; and that’s pretentious.

Your email was striking, B—. In much the same way a punch to the head is striking. One particularly concussive sentence in your fifth (!) paragraph:‘We must keep the procurement probity rich to preserve, and engender, viable competitive tension.’

Like, what are you even talking about?

I’ve had this problem before with you. I even made a little translation guide for my own reference:

• Ideation: Thinking.

• Let’s backchannel and reintegrate on strategic direction: I’ll talk to my boss, you talk to your boss, then we’ll present those ideas as our own.

• Living, breathing document: Document.

• Utilised/Leveraged: USED. My god.

• Our previous miscommunication: You made a mistake.

• From the perspective of your interpretation: You think I made a mistake?

• Holistic, 360 degree solution: Not sure.

Workplace proximity associate to workplace proximity associate, B—, your email is quadruple the size of my attention span and is frankly not interesting. Where’s the hook? The plot? As a graduate of as many as two online short story writing courses, can I suggest that you either:

1. Strip it back to the foundations, don’t use any word longer than two syllables, and deliver your message in the form of a quick corporate haiku.

2. Keep the email as is but add a murder mystery into the copy.

   1. Imagine, ‘Dear Angus, The vicar was found dead with an old watch in his pocket and the kettle boiling on the stove. I want to talk to you about corporate synergy.’ Kapow!

   2. And then later, ‘We need to ensure the stakeholder is delivered a holistic, 360 degree solution. Two years before the murder, during a terrible storm, the Vicar’s wife had had a secret affair with the village’s only policeman.’

   3. Now I’m invested in your competitive tension, whatever that turns out to be.

Do you really believe this stuff? Did you wake up this morning and smile at the sun and think, I’m going to make the world a better place today, one cryptic gobbledygook sentence at a time? Do you think the Vicar’s older brother, Frey, might be pressuring him to absorb debts from the family farm? Do you ever bite your fingernails off thinking about how your job, all corporate jobs, are made up? A way to keep the economy (also made up) alive? Ever wonder how you’d go if we had to start bartering again, e.g. ‘Hello good sir, I’ll keep your procurement probity rich if you give me that goose?’

I wonder, B—, if Acting Senior Regulation and Policy Officer was what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did any of your childhood dream jobs even involved a desk?

On the day he died, the Vicar had some teeth removed under general anaesthetic by the village dentist (also his sister-in-law). When the anaesthetic haze wore off, the Vicar insisted he drive himself home (joking that God could take the wheel if he dozed off). The dentist phoned the policeman to check he got home safely.

I came into the office early today, B—, and landed myself a nice desk near the window. If I do an about turn in my swivel chair, I can see the river. And the trees to the north. A very wide sky. And people, with their tiny briefcases, scurrying to or fro some job that is, I’m sure, not so very unlike my own.

A job is a job is a job. Sometimes a mercy, sometimes a calling, sometimes the feeding hand I want to tear to shreds with my canines. The thing I do more than I sleep, B—. The biggest barrier to, and also the thing that entirely pays for, the stuff that I think makes me me. A desk I sit at. A clock I watch. I’m grateful for the privilege to be ungrateful for it, which I feel guilty about most days. Does that make sense?

You can learn all kinds of cosmic truths sitting at a desk by the river for eight hours. Like that a day has a physical weight. That no single second of being alive is unendurable. That everything happens for a reason, and a lot of the time that reason is simple human error and/or incompetence. That everyone poops. That the more emails you send, the more emails you’ll get back.

Before he died, by poison, the Vicar in the death throes scribbled what looked like: ‘Pay back - truth fairy’ on the magnetic whiteboard on his refrigerator.

How often in a day do you have to convince a machine that you are not a machine, B—? Multiple multi-factor authentications. Click on every image that contains a hexagonal stop sign. That password is too easy, make it 25 nonsense hieroglyphs. Captcha. Spam. I tick the Remember Me box, but how soon Adobe Acrobat forgets.

My driving point here, B—, is that your email is not real human communication. It’s two robots back channeling with each other through a (long) (boring) series of cliches that leverages a very many words to say nothing. Mean nothing.

And how glorious it will be for me, B—, to hit send on this reply, and then to turn away from my computer and see something green. And wonderful. And truly alive.

Warmest regards,

In fact, piping hot regards,

My regards are exactly as hot as the plate in a restaurant that the waiter tells you is too hot to touch, but you touch it anyway, and it hurts (of course) but you also feel like you learned something about yourself,

Angus

P.S. The Vicar was killed by his brother, Frey, over an inheritance-related dispute.

The reason is to do more ‘mind wandering’, a vaguely defined pseudo-neuroscience sort of thing that’s apparently like jogging but for your synapses. I heard about it on a health-adjacent self-help podcast. Pretty sure it’s illegal to lie on a self-help podcast. Unmediated, stimulus free thought roaming is supposed to help your brain to process information, form connections, access cobwebbed nooks in your subconsciousness, communicate with animals, pick winning stocks, microwave popcorn without touching it, and so on.

What has happened instead is that, without my phone around, I’ve found myself with enormous amounts of time and space to daydream about zombie apocalypses.

This is the problem with brains: they have a mind of their own. Even though I’m a squeamish, cowardly city boy with chronic sinus issues who would not thrive in any kind of survival situation, on long and ostensibly enriching (but really just boring) walks around Newtown, my brain keeps serving up outlandish apocalyptic hypotheticals and asking me what I’d do. Die (quickly) is the answer a lot of the time. But some of the scenarios are fun to sit with.

I’m hoping that writing them all down will free up my synapses for some higher-grade and more enlightened mind wandering—fanciful medical inventions, impossible maths problems, where is Wally, that kind of thing. At the very least, it’s another month’s blog post that’s all but written itself. Here we go.

Alien Invasion

The universe is so vast that the chance of bumping into one alien, let alone a whole armada with weird tentacle guns, are vanishingly small. And yet every year there’s a new sci-fi blockbuster, featuring some freakish intergalactic goobers hellbent on harvesting our uranium or our organs or whatever.

Hollywood seems to think that there are two strategies when aliens invade: submit or rebel. I believe there is actually a secret and less televised third option, which is to offer to do their marketing. I work in communications, and if there’s one area that hostile extraterrestrial invaders tend to fall short in our science fiction, it’s in nuanced brand awareness and key messaging. Take the Daleks, for example—as in, the lethal murder robots from Doctor Who who wheel around screeching “Ex-ter-min-ate” at anything with a pulse. If your only public facing message is… homicidal, well, I’m sorry to tell you, you’re not going to get very far with the public. That’s where I come in. I can write persuasive emails, develop case studies to humanise the Daleks, maybe get a podcast going. By simply betraying my species and my planet, I can (at long last) put my arts degree to good use and win favour with the aliens.

Sounds simple, but it’s never as easy as you think to pitch a Director of PR role to a conquering extraterrestrial armada. There will be plenty of survival challenges along the way. The only real “weapon” I have at my disposal is passive aggression, and I don’t think that sarcastic post-it notes will be able to deflect a cosmic death ray? I will have to hide. Flee. Duck. If I can make it through the first few annihilating waves, all I’ll have to do is connect with the occupying force on LinkedIn. Slam dunk.

Survival outcome: Eviscerated by lasers one month into the occupation, trying to give a foot soldier my résumé.

Zombie Apocalypse

I give zombie media an extremely wide-berth. The undead give me the ick. I want to be far, far away from whatever experimental vaccine or radioactive mushroom mutation sets the zombie train in motion. But I have a basic understanding from pop culture of what it takes to survive. First, a good narrative arc. Second, a kind of gruff, buccaneering do-it-yourself approach to the new world order. It helps to also have military training, limited dietary requirements, crisis first aid skills, an ongoing sense of where “true north” is without the aid of a compass, and the ability to play hardball in the savage post-apocalyptic barter economy. I possess exactly zero of these qualities. Zero. On top of all that, once my orthotics break down, I’m going to be mildly uncomfortable with every single step I take. And you better believe I’ll let the other survivors know about it.

My entire strategy, literally my only hope, is to find and ingratiate myself with a group of jocks. Once there, I’ll just have to be a good team man. I’ll fill up people’s water bottles, I’ll have an endless supply of cliff bars and hydralyte. I could write pithy little blog posts for their amusement, I could juggle while they clap and throw coins at me. Importantly, I’ll seem like I’m always willing to sacrifice myself for my comrades while being extremely careful never to actually put myself in any real danger. Deadweight, and secretly deeply selfish, but on the surface good for everyone’s morale.

Survival outcome: After a year or so, attempts to monetise my blog don’t go down so well and I’m sent out as bait for a zombie ambush.

Antibiotic resistant superbug

We can save ourselves some time on this one and just say that two years ago I got sinusitis so often that the medical clinic I went to literally had me on file as “Ankus Macdonald.” I think I’ll be an early casualty.

Survival outcome: Bleak.

The TV Show Alone

Alone is the most physically and psychologically compelling reality TV show in the market. Sorry, MAFS. Ten contestants are dropped into extremely unforgiving terrain with a few necessary survival items and a camera. Then they just try to stay alive in total isolation—the last one standing wins. That’s it. That’s the whole show. Contestants are almost exclusively enthusiastic survivalists who craft innovative shelters, hunt and gather food, and fight their own demons for weeks and months at a time. At the end of all of that, the winner gets $200,000.

Coincidentally, you couldn’t pay me enough money to participate in this show. Fun to watch, not fun to do. Contestants are almost always eliminated for hubris related reasons. Good news! I don’t have that. No way will I try to build a fancy stone house or launch headfirst into the bracken because I have a ‘good feeling’ about finding a better fishing spot. I’m just going to locate drinkable water and lie down. Do your worst, mother nature. I’ll eat grass. I will lie completely still and expend no calories. It won’t be very good TV, though.

Survival outcome: Exactly as many days as it takes to perish from starvation, I guess.

Artificial Intelligence Takes Over

Chat GPT and I have been in a (fairly one-directional) feud since its very beginning, and in many ways I would feel a great deal of righteous vindication if the robots were to actually rise up and overthrow the government. ‘See!’ I’d yell, as sentient flying drones try to inject wires into our brain stems. ‘I told you something like this would happen!’

I think that being Matrix-ed, or otherwise enslaved by AI, is the only apocalyptic scenario where I might actually fight back. But, like, at a distance, like smug guerilla marketing campaigns about reducing screen time. I could brag to other survivors about how I actually uninstalled Instagram in the weeks leading up to the uprising. The key to survival is to have a long list of past IT grievances stored in my mind—not only will this give me the motivation I need to keep fighting the good fight, it’ll also function as a list of weak-points for our machine overlords. To give a taste of their own medicine, I mean. I’ll overload their RAM or whatever! I’ll make their bluetooth devices have trouble connecting to each other for some reason! Take that, you stupid robots!

Survival outcome: Don’t see myself getting much more than three days of glorious resistance in before I am deleted.

People will live on the moon

Sealed in a metal cocoon

On the white sand of a dune

Paid for by a tech tycoon

Frolic in an endless noon

Floating always like balloons

Cricket pitch is crater strewn

Swim in the basalt lagoon

To the view they are immune

No gravity will make them loons

The sun will never set

The train from Innsbruck to Vienna is so full that people are pretty much sitting in the luggage racks. The rest of us are standing, faces smooshed into glass or into other people’s faces, thinking how lucky they are to have a seat.

This is really only a very mild exaggeration. In Salzburg, for example, 30 new people and two bunnies (in a comically large portable hutch) boarded our already full carriage. Three people and zero bunnies got off. The ticket inspector, who looked like he’d inspected enough tickets for one lifetime, gave hoarse and defeated pleas for people to move out of vital passageways—such as, ‘Please be not here.’ I saw his point. But there was nowhere else to be.

Eventually we fought our way to a small pocket of air in one of the cabins. I sit on Maddie’s suitcase and quietly weep. An announcement in German comes over the tannoy.

‘He said they are adding another carriage in Linz,’ says a man who, despite our feet actually touching, I had not registered the existence of. He is thirty something. Bearded and bespectacled. He doesn’t smile but isn’t rude, like a lot of Austrians we have met.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘We are actually getting off at Linz.’

‘Ah,’ he nods and squints. ‘To work in the steel mines?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘They have great steel mines here, if you need some extra money for your trip. Where are you from?’

I have the uneasy feeling of waking up in the middle of a game of chess. A game I will ultimately lose.

‘You must get the Pina Colada,’ the waitress says. She is all teeth and hypnotic, unblinking eyes. ‘It is our best drink.’

‘Is it part of the happy hour?’ Maddie asks. Maddie’s scam senses are highly attuned and they are tingling.

‘Oh, mm, you have to get it. You guys. It’s so good. The Pina Colada. It is our best drink.’

Charlotte and I, two of the biggest suckers in all of Milan without any highly attuned scam senses to speak of, say yes. Sure! Why not? And the waitresses' teeth get toothier still, and she beams right at us like we are the smartest people in the world and that we have just made a very good business decision, and she says she’ll be right back with them. We literally never see her again.

The Maître d’ was perfectly civil when he brought the bill to our table. When we expressed some shock—not so much complaining but just genuine disbelief—that the small Pina Coladas were 20 Euro each, his wide smile was both generous and sympathetic.

‘No need to tip,’ it seemed to say. ‘We’ve included a 25% service fee in the bill.’

We arrived in Paris a day after my birthday and went to a cafe that opened my eyes to the magic of the croque monsieur.

When I stood in line to pay at the counter, the waiter, who had been serving us for an hour—and who I personally had detained for five minutes in a tête-à-tête about croque monsieurs and the magic therein—came over to me and said, ‘Bonjour, sir, table for one?’

A sobering first day as a 27 year old.

There is a seven foot dreadlocked man wandering around the Berlin Museum of Magic and Illusions who may or may not be an employee. The staff with name tags do not acknowledge him, but neither do they shoo him away. He does a tarot reading for a group ahead of us with a deck that materialises from somewhere on his person. His front teeth point to opposite poles and he smiles easily and often.

Neither Maddie nor I can get the ‘Bowl of Harmony’ to resonate properly with our chi. You have to clear your mind of darkness and rub the two metal handles until the water trembles. The man watches us with concern.

‘Are you smokers?’ he asks. When we say no his frown deepens.

‘Are you angry about something?’ he asks. When we say, except for this bowl of harmony, not really, he releases a long, slow ‘Hmm.’

He’s a mystic and a kook and the resonance of his ‘Hmm’ cuts right through me, almost trembles the water on its own, as if he has in his possession my deepest darkest most damning secret, he just can’t quite remember how it goes. I am relieved when he moves away to chase a fly—not to kill it, but to give it a kiss.

Maddie has a teletubbies t-shirt that has endeared us to more people in more countries than our accents have. On the train to Amsterdam, a small Dutch boy charged into our cabin and started climbing all over her, firing off the names of the tubbies in between incoherent toddler babble.

He was so overcome with excitement that he did a poo in his pants. No doubt in homage to Stinky Winky, the often forgotten fifth teletubby who was removed from the show in post production.

At the Natural History museum, I overheard an old cockney woman say, ‘I hope them scientists can bring the dodo back.’

Kristen wants to want to jump—I fear it won’t go any further than that. She leant over the railing of the diving platform and called down to us, though we were obviously on our way out, and said, ‘So, how do you like, do it?’ A bad sign.

All told we are with her for an hour. Maddie leads the charge, yes queen-ing her from the pontoon before joining Kristen at the top, even offering to hold hands and jump together in a kind of aquatic death pact. Charlotte chews up a lot of her cloud storage by filming whenever Kristen stands on the edge. I sun myself and say helpful things like, ‘By the time you realise you’ve jumped you’ll already be in the water.’ I may also have implied that Lake Zurich is more afraid of her than she is of it.

It’s strange to want so badly for someone to overcome a personal demon. As if, in a way, it might help us overcome something of our own, and create a real sense of wonder and togetherness and belief that anything is possible. She doesn’t jump. She says she’ll come back next year and I want to want to believe her.

The chef himself wandered out to greet us, seeming confused. It was a one-man operation in a rundown building, bookended by a hairdresser and a phone repair shop. I heard myself say the words, ‘Hi, um, is this a restaurant?’ It’s not often that you have cause to ask this question inside a restaurant.

The answer was… kind of, but ultimately no. Takeaway only place. But the chef was very happy to have us. We were led to the back of the building and seated like special guests at a desk strewn with letters. Chairs were brought from other shops. Access was granted to the staff toilet. Assurances were given that they had the appropriate permissions to serve customers in person on Saturdays, but that we should try not to be too visible from the street. Orders were taken in a messy A4 notebook by the chef himself, who said, ‘Good choice,’ to every single one of our choices.

It was far and away the best meal we had in two months.

At Prague Castle, Charlotte saw one of the pompous ceremonial guards whisper something to his buddy.

‘Hey! That guy just spoke!’ she said.

The guard’s face, which had been in a sort of military smirk, became totally white and rigid. He stood up straighter and yet seemed to shrink. He was suddenly very young, no older than a teenager, and in his big wet eyes there seemed to pass every mistake he’d ever made. With an obvious exertion of willpower he became a sort of petrified statue, the stillest, sternest, most quietest tower guard that the castle had seen in a thousand years of service. As far as I could tell he stopped breathing.

The guard watched Charlotte very closely in his peripheral vision until we moved away.

Sometimes it’s nice to see sights that are off the beaten path—I think the hidden gem we found in Paris is called the Sacre Coeur.

Sitting on the cool stone steps, looking out over the City of Love, a busker appeared. He started playing slow acoustic covers of pop songs with world unity themes.

Beside the busker, a man in big sunglasses dances slightly out of sync with the music. He alternates between conducting the crowd with his index fingers and angrily urging us to join in, pausing only to light his cigarette. His relationship to the busker is unclear. They seem to know each other. They are not friends. And then he starts to sing, swaying now, arms wide like Jesus on the cross, and his raspy tuneless unaided voice is entire decibels louder than the busker’s portable amp.

‘Wearetheworld!’ he scream-slurs, a little out of time and a lot out of tune, with all of Paris behind him. ‘Wearethechildren!’

I was eating yo-chi in Camperdown Park with my friends when the lightning started, frantic forking cracks to the west and the north. There was wind but no thunder and no rain. We stayed put.

There are certain unspoken social cues we give our friends to indicate the evening is over and we’d like to go home now. Such as asking what everyone’s up to this week. Offering another round of teas and coffees. Once, at a house party, I saw a host come downstairs in her pyjamas and not try very hard to maintain conversation through her retainer.

On the night of the storm, the immediate need to stop eating yo-chi and go our separate ways occurred to everyone all at once. The wind died. The first few drops of rain were like rubber bullets, and made two distinct noises when they hit the earth. Lightning was now pretty much non-stop in every direction, and though there wasn’t any thunder, there was a sort of hair-raising static electricity quivering the particles in the air. There was also a smell of impending doom. The smell of a rapidly emerging Act of God. Hard to describe in english words, but I promise that you’d know it if you smelt it.

As we moved with haste to our respective cars and houses someone pulled up the BOM website. Never in my life have I seen such a thick, angry band of red on the Sydney (Terry Hills) 128 km Radar Loop, running totally parallel to the coastline, burning its way east across the city. Trouble. I had about a kilometre to cover down King Street, mostly sheltered by shop awnings, so I legged it.

The first few hundred metres were kind of dreamlike. I could see the storm lashing people on the other side of the street, yanking trees up by their hair, flash flooding onto the footpath, etc. But none of that was happening to me. I felt my decision to make a run for it was proving to be a very smart one.

I suspect Icarus thought something similar on his first few flaps towards the sun.

When I crossed the road at Alice Street, properly exposed to the elements for the first time, I had the uneasy feeling that the heavy sheets of rain were coming from somewhere beneath me. Such was their whip. The rainwater was ankle deep across the road. Winds now psychotic and gale force. It was like running through an hyperactive, homicidal car wash. And as I stood shell shocked on the other side of the road, wetter than I have ever in my life been outside of a body of water, I heard a voice behind me say, ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’

The voice had come from one half of a couple that had made the crossing behind me, and who were now wringing their t-shirts and smiling at each other.

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ the other said.

The idea of using famous quotes about adversity to somehow endure real world adversity struck me as both delusional and very righteous—though I do wonder how a non-lethal iron deficiency might make a person stronger?

This incident reminded me of a little trick I like to do on All My Eggs from time to time, which is to reappropriate nice turns of phrase that I have written down on my mousepad. Saves me the trouble of coming up with a story. Saves you the hassle of reading. And may also be helpful for both of us, should we ever have to face real adversity in our own lives (unlikely!).

Regular stories to pick back up in March. And as always, feel free to reply with any nice quotes you have enjoyed recently also. Enjoy.

For the next storm you get caught in:

Mrs Bingley Crocker, busy across the table reading her mail, the rays did not touch. Had they done so she would have called for Bayliss, the butler, to come and lower the shades, for she endured liberties neither from man nor from nature.

— P.G. Wodehouse, ‘Piccadilly Jim’

For ten year high school reunions you may or may not be attending in 2025:

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”

— Jennifer Egan, ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’

For when you’ve been thinking too hard about how your job is mainly sending emails about other people’s emails:

“There’s only one sure means in life,” Deasy said, “Of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is to always ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”

— Michael Chabon, ‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’

For when you can smell a rapidly emerging Act of God:

She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.

— Margaret Drabble, ‘The Witch of Exmoor’

For when someone offers you feedback you don’t remember asking for:

‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’

‘Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean,’ said Samad, tersely, ‘that it is a good idea.’

— Zadie Smith, ‘White Teeth’

For when you sublux your rib opening yogurt (for random example):

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And all this is very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, a backbone.

— Terry Pratchett, ‘Reaper Man’

For when you’re sick of the party and you are psyching yourself up to leave:

I wanted to go home, which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn’t any food left on the planet, you’d still keep feeling hungry too.

— Barbara Kingsolver, ‘Demon Copperhead’

For handling mundanities with grace:

She had what the French call je ne sais quoi. Even when she was clipping her toenails she looked like she was eating a peach.

— Paul Murray, ‘The Bee Sting’

For the power of positive thought:

Like, thank you brain, whatever you are. A weird strange little room in his head where things happen secretly: which in fact seems so impressive it crosses over into being alarming.

— Sally Rooney, ‘Intermezzo’

If you like this quote series format, you can read Act I and Act II whenever you like.

No wonder the French had so many revolutions.

We’re learning that landmarks are always mightier in the flesh. Full. Commanding. Exhausting even just to behold. Almost a little freaky, actually, like a photograph that’s been brought to life and is overbearing in every way.

Examples. Aptly named Big Ben somehow still surprising in its bigness. The Berlin Wall starkly unjumpable. White, spired Italian cathedrals, all taken very seriously. Prague Castle looms large, literally and figuratively and historically. Intricate network of indistinguishable canals turn Amsterdam into one big Mobius Strip. And of course, the only place in Paris where you can’t see the Eiffel Tower is actually on the Eiffel Tower—we have to schlep back down the bastard, push through three different throngs, then go up a hundred marble stairs just to fit the whole glittering thing to fit in our cameras.

City sights are a special sort of surreal. Often beautiful confections of bricks and metal, sometimes so striking as to feel like a physical blow. But here’s a question that doesn’t get much airtime on TripAdvisor: How long do you need to look at the Eiffel Tower in order to fully get it? And once it’s been got, where do you go? Just, like, home? Because ten minutes later we stop in at a grocery store, and whenever I blink I can still see the high-watt lights of the Eiffel Tower seared on my retinas, and now I’m trying to remember if we need more milk, and it all feels very very strange.

Brussels, in the bowels of Belgium, is the beating administrative heart and de facto capital of the European Union. It is also home to three widely-revered ‘pissing statues.’ Three is actually a lot. Though we’ve seen some very creative water fountains across continental Europe, involving mermaids with swords and babies choking dragons and what have you, nowhere but Brussels is anyone actually pissing out the stream of water. This leads to the curious phenomenon of official miniaturised replica ‘Pissing Boy’ statues being sold in the same souvenir shop as EU branded scientific calculators.

If you think the statue vulgar, you might be right. If you think it unappealing to the masses you would be embarrassingly wrong and out of touch, since the only meaningful concentration of tourists we’ve seen in this city is smooshed against the fountain wall.

How to photograph this attraction? Why to photograph this attraction?

It is, if nothing else, a refreshing change of pace from museums and bridges. Parliament houses. And castles. Memorial plinths, victory columns. So many wars here. So much art. And please dear god not another beautiful church, they’re starting to make me feel funny.

Umbrella salesmen in Milan are among the most organised and relentless in the world. Some camp out around metro stations, others form roving strike units. They’re everywhere that rain is—an unlikely but truly and literally saturated market. They harry and heckle. They often offer auxiliary 2-for-1 deals on portable chargers. And they treat a simple ‘No thank you,’ as the promising beginning of a long and fruitful business relationship. One guy has the audacity to yell, ‘Umbrella boss?’ while I’m actively holding an umbrella, and when I decline he says that my umbrella is cheap flimsy plastic crap and that his umbrella, for €4.00, cash only, is the real deal.

This is shocking and fun for like a day. Welcome to the big smoke, kid! Life moves quick! But then there’s also the guys pushing fresh roses on young couples, and the private boat tourers wolf whistling from the canals, and the unabashed upselling during Happy Hours, and the cloaked gentlemen trying to shove pigeon feed into your hands outside the Duomo. When you take stock, you’ll realise a pretty big part of your day in Milan is saying No, firmly, to strangers, at which point their smile will dissolve and they’ll look right through you as if you’re no longer there.

The guys outside the Sacre Coeur will actually grab your arm. Brash London cartoonists will goad you into posing. It’ll only take five minutes! It’s only twenty quid! And it’s kind of the same thing at Disneyland, except that instead of selling umbrellas they’re selling happiness, and instead of vaguely menacing men following you around, sales are executed by cute, anthropomorphised mice. It’s tempting to avoid all designated tourist zones for this reason. But it’s hard, because we are tourists—cool, socially conscious, spatially aware tourists, we’d like to think—and so we want to see things that are busy enough to be worth visiting but not so busy with other tourists as to be unpleasant. A razor thin inflection point. Often surpassed.

Among the MOUNTAINS, one might think of oneself as a human being with a certain inherent, inalienable value. The METROPOLIS wastes no time in making one feel like one is in actual fact a thing—if not a mark or a rube then at least a sort of walking pinata—from which value can be extracted and spread evenly amongst the city.

There’s this dark, apocryphal joke that the Astronomical Clock was so good, so cool, that Prague’s King felt compelled to relieve its creator of his eyeballs so he couldn’t make another somewhere else. The tour guide gets the actual giggles during this story—and if I was a paying member of his tour I might have more of a problem with it. As it happens, I’m eavesdropping. Prague is so packed with walking tours that you can learn a lot of history by simply loitering around key attractions and listening.

The clocktower is six hundred years old. The clockface is a series of intricate golden loops that plot—with apparently ‘eerie’ accuracy—the interrelated paths of the sun, moon, and actual time. When it strikes the hour it comes alive. Chimes and bells. Dancing skeletons. Two old wooden doors slide open, and unsmiling figurines of the twelve apostles spin hurriedly by, as if running late for a meeting with Jesus. The large crowd is pin-drop quiet during this spectacle. When it’s all over there’s a smattering of applause, like you might hear when a plane lands.

But Prague’s medieval fun doesn’t stop at the clock! The grand old Castle is thick and heaving with tourists, even on a dreary October weekday with no sun to speak of. Antiquated attractions abound! The old torture chamber, for instance! Bodies cram around the crown jewels. There’s a line to stand in front of the window where the bigger defenestrations happened. Franz Kafka’s one-time, one-bed-no-bath apartment on the Castle’s Golden Lane has been turned into a Franz Kafka book store, complete with dewy eyed salespeople who say spooky things like ‘He probably wrote A Hunger Artist in the very spot you’re standing.’ And then there’s the changing of the guard, which everyone turns out to see, that (ceremonially) marches the very thin line between regal and silly.

The busyness of this long-out-of-business Castle is its own kind of spectacle, in that it’s so far past the tourist density inflection point that it starts to almost be fun again. The best example is the line for the Basilica of Saint Vitus. It snakes halfway around the massive cathedral, takes a good thirty minutes, and there’s a lot of pushing-in—seems like a dangerous location to commit such a cardinal sin, in my view. This in the shoulder season, remember. This on an overcast weekday. It’s draining and mildly infuriating to be so totally surrounded by people, to be flanked by bumbags and bodily odours. All the time rain looks imminent, and even though we’re nearing the front I feel cranky. A little oppressed. Trapped by a tourist trap willingly entered. Maybe this is what so perfectly primes me for the miracle.

Right when we step inside, the day’s very first rays of sunlight hit the stained glass windows, giving the entire cavernous cathedral a swirling purple-green tinge. Everything, everyone, becomes gorgeous. Bright. Probably a proper holy miracle for many in the church, but for the atheists just as wonderful, and maybe even more so—the gleaming, discoing rainbow light is not so much an act of god as it is a feat of human engineering centuries in the making. It’s poor, long-since-dead Bohemian farmer’s taxes, and the wealth and power of an empire displaced in time, that paid (then blinded?) artists to sculpt these very windows with their love and with their hands. There is a total, glowing awe that the windows will outlive me. That they have caught the light of so many other suns.

The snaking line, even the airfare over, suddenly seems worth it—it’s all forgotten and forgiven and even thanked. Tourists traps can do that. Even, for heathens, a church.

METROPOLIS is the second part of a small series on our adventures in Europe—read MOUNTAINS here. MANKIND is next, if that wets your whistle.