There was no moon last night, and just before going to bed I took a tin of old and nearly fermented blueberry muffins into the back paddock to leave them for the birds for breakfast. I knew where I was from muscle memory alone. I could see nothing because I had just come from the glare of the computer screen. Between one step and the next I realised that I was not alone. There was a wallaby beside me, fascinated by the smell of the muffins, less so by the smell of me. He hopped gracefully to one side. I jumped ungracefully halfway out of my skin.

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It is impossible to get decent potatoes where I live. I grew up on the south coast of WA among potato growers and in a potato growing family, and potatoes have been copious in the cast of my life. I not only have high expectations of them, I have very firm views of how they should be grown. I did not know this about myself until I first went to Pinnaroo in South Australia. At home, potatoes were grown in black dirt - which means a mixture of peat and sand - in swampy paddocks. The local term for this type of paddock - which flooded during winter but shrank back to a shallow peaty lake in summer - was ‘lagoon.’ Like most regional Australian words - and Western Australian words in particular - it has passed out of usage and is now only alive in the minds of a few crusty individuals such as myself.

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There have been fires in the valleys and gorges of the Lachlan Fold just to the north of my house, and for days RFS helicopters and crop-dusters have been flying overhead, keeping an eye on things, occasionally water-bombing. The forest is black cypress which burns fast, with a fragrance as rich as furniture in a well-polished room. My house is built out of the same timber. We are quite safe here, even if the wind turns. There is too much open ground between us and the nearest potential risk, all of it stripped of fuel except for a thin wheat stubble, and split neatly in half by a 500 megalitre dam.

The aircraft buzz with a slightly worried character, as nannyish as our Prime Minister. We are expecting rain for three or four days starting anytime and there has been light rain for the past few days, but the wind has no manners to it: it crashes into everything around it like a three-year old on a trike. But there is nothing to fear.

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There is a very fat gecko that hunts on my office windows. It has an executive attitude to life. It allows its prey to come to it, and merely opens and closes its mouth at need. If the opening and closing of my own mouth was so profitable to me, I would be fat too and happy with it, and the rest of the world of no inconvenience or account.

I once swallowed a bug whilst on stage in Stawell. It had a different effect on me that it ever had on the gecko.

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Of all, what I miss most is going for a walk. My gate is half a kilometer from my back door. At about that point, painkillers become obligatory.

I used to walk for kilometers every day. It was my answer for everything. Dickens was the same: got a problem - wear out shoes.

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