Every file I open on my computer is for work. Not this ‘work’ but the other type, the one that pays my bills. While I enjoy being able to pay my bills, it annoys me that my computer is now 100% used for that, when it used to be 100% used for art.

I have reached the age where birds are fascinating. Driving to catch a ferry on Monday morning a wedgetail eagle was feeding off a wallaby carcass on a steep roadside slope. At ground level, with its wings lifted high in balance, it was as big as me. I stopped, but did not get out of the car. I did not stop long, I was also thinking of the ferry, even though I had no where I needed to be.

Life has passed me by in whirlwind and I’m still not living the level of adventure I thought I would. What’s that about, have I lived a life of the not quite engaged? Scary to think I might look back in another 20 years and still feel the same.

Everything now gives me hay fever. I wonder if one day I’ll discover I’m allergic to air pollution. Like the English child Ella, who was the first (and so far, only) person to have air pollution listed as her cause of death, in 2019. This will be one of those things like smoking. The science has proven the problem, global governments have all the information, companies are still making money from fossil fuels; just another layer to the money verse life sandwich we’re all in. It (fained air pollution ignorance) will be in the courts in 50 years with confused old people sitting in the stand wondering why everyone is so surprised.

25 to 28 degrees Celsius is my ideal temperature. Which means I did acclimatise, a little, to the cold in my six years in Iceland. My ideal temperature ten years ago, 32 to 35 degrees Celsius.

To freelance successfully requires an easily disturbed balance, and a clear, uncompromisable line of ‘life outside of work is also important’ that shall not be crossed. I crossed it recently, once, now I am flapping my wings, while on sloping ground, trying to regain my balance.

The neurological pathways that direct my reactions and choices have a depth to them that they never had before. My brain used to be an alluvial plain, water and silt drifting around in wonderful patterns that changed on a whim of water levels and soil and sand mixes. Now, I feel the silt has built up and the surface channels have become rivulets, which hint at a future of rivers with steep sides that are hard to climb out of. Anything unusual or rare that used to live there has dug itself into the mud and now sits dormant. It must be time to start a flood to wipe the rivulets away, drench the drying earth, and reawaken the buried rarities. For I fear without it, I will start to believe my own fained ignorance is worthy of my time

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