The Maroon Diaries

  Oh, dear Reader, it's so exciting - I'm in Sydney, and just thrilled to bits to be here.  It's been several years, and I'd forgotten how much I love this city, which is surprisingly much, given that I can't stand cities generally. Somehow, there's some magical effect here in Sydney that protects me from all the distress of sensory overload and allows me to just delight in the teeming humanity and the heights of human culture.   Maybe it's because this was my first home. At least, the first one I remember. I was born in Melbourne, but my parents moved to Sydney when I was just a year old. I was eight when we left, so that's some pretty formative years that I spent here. So maybe there is some ghost of my childhood spirit, or a guardian angel from my early childhood that still dwells here, and makes this city so marvellous for me. I was actually just feeling really daunted about the trip here, thinking I would be overwhelmed as I usually am by travel...

Tonight, I had such a strange feeling come over me that something was wrong, something that felt terribly like a premonition of danger. Have you ever had that? Well, I reckon it would be a pretty safe bet that somewhere in the world, there are many terrible things happening tonight. But I've just had the strangest experience. Mr CJ and I were out and about, and planning to go get some takeaway for dinner. But then suddenly, I started to feel bad - an anxious, dreading, foreboding kind of bad. It was such a profound, unusually keen sense of immediate disaster. It was just not 'like me' - I'm not generally prone to paranoid tendencies. I insisted that we go home immediately and check on the house. We got home and the house was fine. I called my mum and my best friend - they were both fine, relative to their circumstances. I turned on the news to see if there's been a terrorist attack or an earthquake. I checked my blog list for any indication of bad news. Nothing ...