Drifting Notes

I smelled the rain before I saw it. I was down below making a coffee when it came through the open hatch, a sweet smell that cut clean over the coffee and carried a cool edge underneath it, and the deck above me was still dry. This is Menton, the last harbour in France before the border with Italy. In June the heat holds all day. Then a cloud comes down off the hills and the whole basin changes it...

At seven in the morning the beach has everything and is doing nothing. We carry the boats up from the water and set them down on the stones, and the stones are small and loose and speak under our feet as we go. This is the beach at Norsi, on Elba, an island off the Tuscan coast, and it is Sunday. The umbrellas are still folded over their stacked chairs, blue over white, in long even rows that hold...

The setting sun was on my face and catching my attention until the music found my ears, and the jazz tunes pulled us from the golden street through the green velvet curtains. We had been walking up the Via Roma to a dinner appointment, and we had not meant to stop. Tom and I sat down on a velvet two-seater, and my coat stayed over the arm of it. Tom’s whiskey sour arrived on a deck of cards. A che...

Between one and three in the morning, they leave. We are asleep on Cooee , our sailboat, moored some metres away in the same harbour, and their engines are kept so low and the lines slipped so quietly that by the time the sky begins to lighten the boats are already past the breakwater and out into the Strait of Sicily, somewhere in the dark water between this small Sicilian town and the coast of A...

The first thing that stops you on the fourth floor of the State Library of Queensland is a promise printed across a dark wall. Extraordinary Stories. The letters are large enough to interrupt your stride, which is a clever architectural gesture in a library, because by the time you reach the upper floors you are already walking more quietly than usual, already adjusting yourself to the expectation...

You can buy a piece of the library for $4. In the gift shop at the State Library of Queensland, Australia, small bundles rest on a low shelf, each one wrapped in black paper. They are old catalogue tags, used in 1988 when the library moved across the river from a smaller building in the city centre to its larger home at South Bank, tied to journals and books so that every bundle could be identifie...

A book about grief is bright pink. Not muted, not solemn, but unmistakably pink, and it is sitting beside a book with a cartoon dog on the spine. They share the same shade of red. That, it seems, is sufficient qualification. Colour is the only credential required here. It is late summer in Brisbane, Australia, and the sky outside the State Library of Queensland is thick with an incoming storm. The...

Annie is already reading when I arrive, the book open on her lap, the words upside down, the spine resting against her knees as if the book has decided that this is the correct orientation for today. She turns a page slowly, without fixing anything, without apologising to the text, without appearing to register that the world generally expects books to behave differently. I stop, I always do. Anni...

Someone stands at the shelf with nowhere to put their hands. They have arrived with purpose and now, seeing that their book has not yet appeared, they hover for a second longer than expected, fingers adjusting a strap that does not need adjusting, palms briefly empty in a space designed for retrieval. It is in that small choreography of uncertainty that I begin to understand the hold shelf on leve...

I stop because of the handwriting, and because something written directly onto glass without permission or polish has a way of asking you to slow down even if you did not plan to. It is white marker straight onto a door, and the letters are not even and some strokes are pressed hard while others thin out halfway through, as if the pen hesitated or the hand holding it briefly lost confidence or per...

In Diane’s house, books do not belong to rooms, and I realise this while standing in front of a heavy wooden ladder that leans into a wall of books as if it has committed to the arrangement for life, and I am here in tropical northwest Queensland on a rural property where distance shapes everything, how early you start, how carefully you plan, and how long it takes to get anywhere at all. Outside...

I walk in and my sound follows me, and for about three steps I am on white tiles that carry the noise of my arrival, my shoes announcing themselves in a bright echo that says someone has entered, but then the floor changes to carpet, red and cream, and just like that the sound disappears, not because I am silenced but because I am being absorbed. The light is bright but not bossy, and I appreciate...

The air presses down lightly at the top of my head as soon as I step inside, and it feels as if the building has trained it to behave, and inside the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, the cooling system keeps the damp out and the thinking in while the river outside moves through high summer as if none of this requires its agreement. The light behaves too, and I appreciate that mo...

I am sleeping in a building that used to hum. Not the gentle hum of lights or lifts, but a louder…. more muscular sound. The kind that ran through the night and into people’s bones. This place once stayed awake so an entire city could wake up informed. Now it is quiet enough to hear my socks on tile. The building stands on the corner of Victoria Street, solid and calm, as if it still expects the c...

I spent an afternoon inside a pottery studio, Studio18 , on Waiheke Island, the kind of place where nothing is finished in a hurry, where tools hang where they’re needed, clay waits and light comes and goes without asking permission. The studio belongs to our mate Tim. He’s sailed the Mediterranean in recent years, living aboard and learning, over time, how much patience weather demands. Now he wo...

Outside a small corner store in Waiheke Island , the kind you stop at after a dog walk for a flat white, there’s a noticeboard. A corkboard, pinned full … Dog walkers, builders, wellness practitioners annnnnd nn intuit. No cards were overlapping and it felt like no one was shouting for attention. Standing there, I realised I was using the board to answer a quiet question I hadn’t said out loud yet...

This note begins on a quiet Sunday in Hamburg, with a small puzzle poured from a tube onto a dark wooden table worn smooth by everyday use. The pieces are tiny and a yummy coffee is made. Outside, the city keeps its low winter hum, but inside the room everything slows. My girlfriend and her daughter fall into a rhythm they don’t need to explain, one building the jigsaw frame, the other gathering c...

Sometimes a story begins in the smallest warmth, the kind that rises from a kitchen counter long after the person who made it has stepped out into the cold, leaving behind something that feels a little like welcome and a little like love, even if no one ever uses those words. This episode follows one of those quiet, late-night moments, the kind that doesn’t announce itself as meaningful, until you...

There’s a particular wonder in finally seeing a friend in their home country. Not in Munich or Tallinn or Thessaloniki, the neutral cities where he and I often meet as equal foreigners, but on the soil that shaped him. This episode drifts into the night I met my friend Josef in Cairo, and how instantly, beautifully different it felt. One moment we were the usual pair of travellers who have been lo...

There’s a particular kind of public shower you only ever find on Australian beaches, the “ten-second miracle.” A metal button, a stubborn pole, and a short burst of fresh water that feels like someone rationing relief in tiny, timed-out blessings. If you’ve ever swum on the Queensland coast in summer, you know exactly the one I mean. If you haven’t, you’ll know them by the end of this story. This...

Some mornings in Brisbane feel like the space is tuning itself, the river sighs, coconut sunscreen drifts across the air, strangers gather like loose notes in a half-written song. On one of those mornings, I found myself at the ferry terminal with a backpack slung over one shoulder, the city still clinging to me and the island calling me like it always does … slowly, insistently, with the promise...

The ocean is in a good mood this morning … calm, kind, and I’ve got a coffee in hand. A (thankfully) grey November sky hangs above Miami Beach, the waves lined up in rows of promise, and the air carries that first brave sound of children running toward water. They’re called Nippers here, the ‘learner’ surf lifesavers. Every Sunday morning they gather in bright-pink rash vests, learning how to read...

Every morning I ride across the Gold Coast bridges and end up laughing at the same ridiculous miracle… enormous birds landing on thin tree branches. Pelicans , cormorants , herons , all bulk and grace, touching down like drunk acrobats, wobbling, correcting, pretending it was intentional all along. To me, it’s like slapstick meets poetry. There’s something about watching a bird the size of a toddl...

This week I’ve been thinking about how time behaves beside someone who’s fading. It slows, slips, folds back on itself. Some mornings stretch forever, while it feels like others vanish before my coffee even cools. I’ve come to land to be with my Queenie. Each day I hold her hand, listen to the sea outside the window, and notice how my own rhythm changes with hers. The sea keeps time for both of us...

Eight weeks into palliative care with my Queenie, I realise I’ve been arriving like a project manager, with my plans, checklists, bright ideas on how to ‘make her life better.’ Feed her. Move her. Sing with her. Save her, a little. But love, it turns out, is less about doing and more about staying. Sooooooo, this episode drifts through that quiet surrender, from the restless urge to help, to the g...