“Chris, we’re waiting for you!” Chris was always late. “Shall we set off without you?” “Chris we’re going to have to see you there! Have you got the address?!” Chris didn’t have the address. Marni knew that Chris wouldn’t, but kept quiet. None of them had the address except her…

We were feral. Our days were filled with adventures. While our mom worked, we’d slip out of the window, away from under the watchful eye of our houseboy, and head for the bush. There wasn’t a dingo we hadn’t hidden from; a storm we hadn’t been caught in; a dangerous…

The rules here are different than that sign-full-of-rules you see in pools. “No running No petting No diving.” In those glass and concrete cathedrals to swimming, packed with awkward teenagers, stuffy with chlorine-and-urine tinged air, hot and cold at the same time, filled with the sounds of splashing and laughter…

If I were a tree I definitely wouldn’t be a Silver Birch — tall and glamorous, aloof, turning the admiring heads of passers-by, confident in my silver-barked radiance. Nor would I be an exciting Horse Chestnut, enticing little boys to scour the ground for nut brown treasures. Large Oaks would not grow from my little acorns. No, I think I’d be the scruffy Sycamore, an every day tree that tolerates hardships well —scornfully resisting pollution and wind — a practical, no nonsense, public service tree, going largely unnoticed.

“Remember that disastrous year when we went to the moon?!” “Oh god yeah when it rained ash all the time and Barney took his suit off and got crushed?” “LOL yeah. Barney! What a tube!” “And it didn’t look anything like we’d expected — like we so thought it was…

It was the dark that she dreaded. At night when she drifted off to sleep she saw the woods, she smelled the leaves and the moss, heard the birds’ singing, felt the dappled sun warm her face, heard her mother’s kind but stern voice telling her not to stray from…

Bippity bip. “Don’t forget me”, sang the fridge, too chirpily given the circumstances. Despite its calls for attention, the milk soured, the cheese grew hard and cracked, the tomatoes split, and the lettuce wilted, then liquified, oozing green slime. Beep-beep, beep-beep, insisted the washing machine: “I’m done here”. The clothes in the drum — once fresh with fabric conditioner — grew mildewed first, then dried out and stiffened, the pyjama top sleeves locked in a tight embrace with the leggings she would never wear again.

Honestly, I need a lobotomy. I envy heads-up breastrokers: their unwetted hair, their sunglasses, their ignorance-is-bliss, their world where everything is as it seems. No wonder they glide along happily chatting and marvelling at the normal world. They are oblivious to what is below. For me with my head down…