Sometimes I can't believe the intensity and pervasiveness of the layers of taboos over everything. Clingfilm, everywhere. People are fastidious about it, like if you really wrote the things you know and feel, perfectly ordinary things, innocent citizens would scream and die. Like 'I miss you'. It is terrifying. If you were wandering in the jungle and stumbled across the ravine of one person's missing another you would probably break your leg falling in, and then you'd die in there. Like a child missing their dead parent or  someone in a relationship missing their ex, or a friend missing a friend who was always erratic about calling and then just moved away. Don't say it. Don't write it down, don't send it. The world depends on you not having a gulf of grief inside you. Don't mention that. Be whole. And if you can't be, for the love of god don't show anyone where that is. Do you want to be the Bermuda Triangle?

Most of all I want to write the stories of my life and the lives of the people I love. Those wild stories, secrets. And I don't know how. I stop and marvel all the time. THAT happened! And I don't want to fictionalise. I want to catch it.

Last night I dreamed that we were at a camping ground somewhere in rural Africa - me and N, my brother (a perfect and lovely dad) and A (a perfect and lovely mum) and their kids (or our kids?). And another couple. We were going on a walk, but I decided to drive ahead with the other couple in the big double-decker bus we were travelling in. We were going to do a recon and then meet up with the others, or go back and pick them up.

There was some kind of tribal meeting on. We were driving past huge crowds of people from different tribes, all out on the side of the road, spilling onto the road, and this stretched on and on down the road length. There was some anger. I was watching out the window, completely absorbed in everything I was seeing. Occasionally people in the crowd stared back, a couple did the fingers at the bus, at me, and I wondered if it meant the same thing here as it would mean at home. The bus got faster, the woman who was driving wanted to get past all this. I went to talk to her and realised I had been sitting at the back of the bus watching what was passing away, not at the front at the top, as I'd thought.

I asked if we could slow down or stop - didn't we want to get out and have a look at all this, be here, see what it was all about? After all, we were in Africa! But she was just accelerating, and I realised she was only interested in getting us past this and to the city. But what about N and the kids? We had to go back and get them! I was worried for them. The scene was kind of scary - and if we were going to be scared, we needed to get them, needed them with us, but she wouldn't - and she and her husband were arguing with everything I said, nonsensically, endlessly, as we drove further and further away. I woke up with the thought 'they are trolling me!'

for the horse walking up through the hills, through projected time to the present, trees are everything. kingfishers dive.

saturday was sweet, a pleasure - everyone rolling into the gallery from a walk around chinatown, which is like a solar oven on a day without clouds. I get a hug from a loved former student - mine's stronger than hers though - it seems that she's lost the hopefulness of a year ago, that school teaching is not what she imagined, that the loss of the possibility of grad study has flattened her sense of future, that she can't SEE how she'll continue to write when the kids at home and the kids at work and the personality politics at work do this to her mind. then there's another former student, still sparking with ideas because he's jumped into another dreamer's course, has the money from somewhere, and we're excited to see each other but decidedly we don't hug, just grin and fall into a conversation about the Beckett play he's in - hates it - he wants to PLEASE an audience, why do this to them? but he knows, I say, he knows what he's doing to them, he knows what he's doing to you, couldn't it be the beginning? And 'is there an end to suffering', and don't we have to ask?

the aircon's not strong enough and even as we're quietly writing people start to fall asleep - they've been walking in the oven, then there was lunch. So I make up a game to wake us up. I have copies of a couple of Calvino 'Thin Cities' to discuss. I screw up a napkin to use as a ball. One player is to describe a detail they'd seen on their walk, then throw the ball to another player, who describes the transformed detail as it appears in their own 'thin city'. And so they see a city from above, the buildings burning down like joss sticks, the ash covering the land like snow. They see coffee rivers and children hiding under cardboard boxes. at the end the last woman drifts right away while she's talking - 'relocation notices, layers and layers of them lining the ground...' she says, then 'layers of dead bodies...'. I try to clarify, get more detail but she chokes and says 'it just came out.' we sit quietly for a while after that.

someone on the assessment panel for this programme had complained that one of the application ms's was too dystopian, like this kind of vision is just strategic political grumbling. I'm glad he is in the room to see it happen.

striped mosquitoes down by the lake, biting in the daytime. there's a dengue cluster over the highway; not good. I'm taking photos of the torsoes dangling and twisting in and out of the Benjamin's Fig, trying not to get bitten.

this afternoon there was a welcome dinner in the rooftop garden. cool enough for once. people were offering me their condolences, softly patting my hand or serving my dinner for me, saying 'I heard'. so strange when nothing's happened; a couple of twists of misfortune in the workplace which will sort themselves out or not. othertimes things are unbearable on every front and you're alone. now I feel lively, okay regardless, turning away from uneasiness that it could all work out for the worst.

CN's face is unreadable in the trouble. Is he blaming me? Or himself? Or just shut down and trying to sort it out? I feel that things are just happening the way they have to happen, that little can be controlled.

three weeks ago -

that I was in a shower with E. her body was young. she pushed me down to her breast unpleasantly. the rest of the dream violent but unremembered.

last night that I was in a rage, yelling and blaming until finally punching my mother in the stomach to try to make a point. then realising this wasn't right, that I'd actually punched her, had got carried away.