Okay, it's quite warm here. Certainly warmer than the Edinburgh summer, and warm enough to warrant buying some shorts, which I don't think I've worn since I was about 7. I wandered into a surf-type shop to get some trainer socks to go with my sick new shorts, picked some, and took them to the counter. I gave them to the girl with a smile, and she took them, saying "Needing some new socks?".

My eyes boggled only slightly. "Yes." I gave her my credit card.

"Credit?" she said. Eh? YES1. I signed the receipt and came back to base. After proudly prancing around in my new dude-wear, I fished out a pair of eye-wateringly exciting socks to complete the Bill & Ted look, only to find them still security tagged together. I look forward to explaining this at the shop today.

1. okay, this turned out not to be quite so moronic on her part. Apparently in Oz, one card can access savings, credit and cheque accounts. Chalk one up for local culture...
   

Well, I'm in Australia, visiting Chris and Leyla. I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of sitting largely immobile in a space reminiscent of the inside of a coffin for 36 hours before, so the new experiences started thick and fast. I had that odd 'pre-illness' feeling you (or one or at least I) get before you actually get ill1 for about three days once I got here, and rather disturbingly woke up, one night only, actually dripping sweat into the unfortunately pristine sheets.

Fortunately, I got better, helped no end by a colossal dump that left me feeling both empty and fulfilled. Marvellous.

On Friday, I wandered around Brisbane a bit and had a seat in the central square type thing, whose name rather unfortunately escapes me. Obviously, sitting there and reading my paper wasn't good enough for God, who sent a messenger in the form of a bearded evangelical 'Eastern Christian' to interrupt my solitude and unwarranted good humour. Thankfully, after a mere hour of eye-rolling logical vacuum, some random film student turned up and (thank fuck) asked us to pretend to fight each other for the camera. My hippie friend left pretty sharpish, which was nice.

More later!

1. once (recently, notably) followed by a day spent wallowing in buckets of my own sweat and ruining an otherwise perfectly good weekend. I felt absolutely back to normal, crucially, by 9 am on Monday morning. Thank fuck; the week's work might have been otherwise irretrieveably damaged.
   

Wahey! Enter the Roquefort Files. Currently, am neither enroute to or from, nor am ensconsed in a pub, so this'll be a short entry.

Very short, in fact.