I carry around with me 2 pieces of paper. On one is written "I am but dust & ashes", on the other, "oh for god's sake, Harry, lighten up."

Photo of my knees on holiday in Koufonisi, a tiny Cyclades island too small for cruise ships, recalling the Aegean as it used to be before mass tourism.

manningham.vic.gov.au/events/nationa… #Hashtag My play about robots looking for love in all the wrong places is on this Saturday. In other entertainment news Taylor Swift is holding a concert on the same night, same city. I think I can say with confidence she has no idea who she’s up against.

To my old Twitter buddies who are still (barely) hanging on to this site (you know who you are): Merry Christmas from the southern hemisphere! I’m just catching a minute to myself before the barbarian hordes arrive for lunch.

Came across this pelican today, gazing into the middle distance and contemplating the meaning of its existence. We stood together in companionable silence for a few minutes. I like to think it recognised a kindred spirit. Then it abruptly took off, flying low over the water.

Me, wondering what I’m doing scrambling up a steep track that cruelly exposed my lack of fitness. I’d recovered my breath by this stage and you see me in melancholic contemplation of physical decay and the inevitability of death. Are to-die-for views really worth dying for?

View from Palm Beach lighthouse, Sydney, after a short but exhausting march up a steep staircase. It was worth it for the views. In retrospect, that is. Don’t you find that? Spectacular views requiring exhausting matches are best enjoyed in retrospect. Probably an age thing.

If Musk is such a free speech absolutist why didn’t he give us a say on the name change? It looks like the insignia any imperial stormtrooper would be proud to wear. A growing number of defiant partisans are self-identifying, Prince-like, as the ‘App Formerly Known As Twitter.’

When I become compost, let them say this of me - he mowed a lot of lawns. Helping out 2 widows, my own lawn and now a 4th for holidaying friends). Mowing aficionados (and aren’t we all?) will want to know that the mower is a 4 stroke petrol Aldi, heavy, noisy and clumsy.👎🏼

I’m usually a glass half full kind of a guy, but when overwhelmed by the horrifying and senseless barbarity of our species I reach for a Wodehouse. Effortlessly elegant comic writing, densely plotted, and who doesn’t like to laugh at the shenanigans of upper class nitwits?

Peals of laughter, squeals of joy. Going with Luna to see Barbie today. Apparently it’s de rigueur to dress up. When too much pink is barely enough. I can’t find a thing to wear. Inconveniently, my go-to tweed jacket with leather elbow patches doesn’t come in pink.

I much preferred the cheerfully tweeting bird. This X appears ominous coiled up within our apps. Like a forbidding authoritarian stamp. Feels like we are now under the rule of capitalist, crypto-fascists. Our opinion doesn’t count. The dark side of the Force has overtaken us.

RIP Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor. One of the great Celtic divas.

Today: going to a school hall to listen to Luna playing Hava Nagila on the clarinet. The folk song was chosen especially for her. Due to some crossed lines the music teacher thinks we are Jewish. We are not Jewish, although conversion may be the only face-saving way out of this.

Note to self: there’s no point in seeking a point. Despite your efforts to construct some kind of form or structure or progression, your life will remain a narrative without a plot. There’s no build towards a satisfying finale that will explain everything. So stop hoping for one.

My wife’s birthday. We’ve moved beyond the roses phase. These are mostly Australian natives which will last in the vase for weeks. Going for longevity as well as appearance at this stage. There may be a metaphor in that somewhere.

If you and I could distil our lives into one simple observation, it might be - there will always be so much more. When it comes to science, spirituality, cosmology, there will always be more than our minds can comprehend. And maybe it’s naive but I find that kind of comforting.

I used to enjoy the ruthlessness of Monopoly, until an 8 year-old landed on my hotel and looked at me with those big sad eyes. Another man never would have accept $200 and a Get Out Of Jail Free card for a $650 debt. I knew I was being played but…I stuffed the bills in my shirt.

Camellia putting up a brave show whilst everything else in the garden turns brown and lifeless. Winter is here in the southern hemisphere. We thinned our trees of their branches to admit more of the precious winter sun and now they look kind of bare and sad.

Playwriting Course: on my left, a Turkish woman whose sister, an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in Armenia, on my right an Afghan who had fled Kabul and the Taliban. In between them A Greek-Cypriot-Scottish writer of one-act comedies with absolutely nothing to complain about.