I’m writing this with eyes smarting. They’re doing controlled burning of bush across the state, nowhere near us, but the wind’s blowing the smoke down and it’s all through the air.

Anyway, last night I dreamed of gorgeous diva Szilveszter Szabo. He was ice skating, wearing his white damask Death costume from Elisabeth, and everything was going just fine, until he turned into a two-headed creature, like fetus baby, with a woman at his other end. Somehow he/they were still skating, despite not having any feet. I can’t remember how my mind represented that visually. I really had better not let myself develop a crush on this guy, since everything about him is in Hungarian. With an online dictionary I did manage to discover that he writes stories — or used to write them in school, anyway; I don’t know if he still does. Someone has put quite a few on a fansite. Well, I now know the Hungarian words for “the”, “a”, “how”, “where”, “great”, “willies”, and “radiator”. I have a dangerous urge to learn more. Last time this happened, I eneded up learning Japanese. But Hungarian looks quite a bit harder than Japanese, and I really should be learning Thai. I must find a Thai person to have a crush on. Maybe that kid from the gay bar would do?

But wait, the title of this post isn’t “fangirling”, it’s “The Chocolate Mill” — which is where we went yesterday, after persuading my mother that there is no sin in visiting a boutique chocolate factory then going to a pub rather than putting on a Sunday roast. Located just out of Daylesford, in a large straw bale building — impressive in itself, and which owners Jennifer Gregory and Chris Weippert built with their own hands — The Chocolate Mill uses high grade Belgian chocolate with all-natural fillings, containing fresh ingredients with no preservatives. The resulting short shelf life means that chocolates have to be sold on the premises, which hasn’t stopped the business doing extremely well. It was busy when we were there, both in the chocolate shop and the cafe. Naturally we had to buy a few chocolates, and I can say that yes, you really can taste the quality of both the chocolate and the fillings, especially those with fresh cream in them. The liqueur raisin was a particular delight, with a quite complex flavour, and just enough sweetness, but no more than enough — and good liqueur, so none of that sense of consuming cheap hooch tarted up with sugar that you get too often with alcochocs.

The main machines in their factory, which we watched through a window in the shop, all have names, like Black Betty the dark chocolate mixer and Mr T (the something or other). This is Fat Albert, the milk chocolate mixer:

Dad with his hot chocolate and the leftover part of mine:

Mum enjoying hers:

We ate lunch at the Farmer’s Arms pub in Daylesford. Pub food has come a long way, baby. Dad and I had cheese, leek and herb soufflees with fresh dill on top and Mum had tuna sashimi with assorted side bits including wasabi flying fish roe, which was a beautiful shade of green. All very good. Then we toddled off to a bookshop in an old house on the main street, in which there were two rooms full of vintage sheet music — at very reasonable prices, especially considering some of the lovely art nouveau covers. I bought a few playable pieces, and one that I probably won’t be able to play without cutting notes out of the thick chords, but had to have — a book of tone poems inspired by Omar Khayyam, by Frederick Hall. On the back is an easier “Call to Prayer” by the same composer, from a suite of Egyptian tone poems — which I found digitally archived by the National Library of Australia. I had no idea this archive of music existed. The guy at the shop said people don’t buy sheet music much anymore. Certainly, not as many places sell it. Maybe digital archiving has killed the business.

Side note to the twat in the 4WD who tooted me as I turned off to the Chocolate Mill, when turning from a 100kph highway onto a gravel road, you gots to slow down. Quite a bit. I had my indicator on for well over 100m, just for you. As I slowed down, rather than maintaining a safe distance, you kept your big bullbarred nose up my little car’s bum. Who taught you to drive — a dog? Or you — the other you — who tailed me half the way home, then tailed a caravan the rest of the way? If a roo had run out in front of that caravan, his accident would have been your accident too, mate. Anyway, bumsniffers aside, it was a lovely drive home down country roads lined with elms and poplars in their autumn best. 70km round trip; Ren’s fuel gauge didn’t budge from half a tank.

One more soapbox: in the bookshop, I saw a new volume, The Dangerous Book for Boys. This book is a hit. It’s full of egregiously undangerous stuff like “how to make the perfect water bomb, how to read codes, what are the rules of cricket, who were the Kings and Queens of Europe, what are the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World – and just how do you deal with girls?” Yes, I realise it’s a homage to all the Books for Boys of yesteryore, and that there’s going to be one for girls later on. (But not Dangerous; it’s going to be Gallant, or something.) But. BUT. While we at chez Bishop are not fans of politically correct embuggerations of the English language (we are not well disposed towards, for instance, “Person of La Mancha” or “Devil Got My Person”, though we confess a sneaking partiality for “Governess General”, just for the kink value, you understand), we are ardent supporters, we like to think, of social progress, and from our episcopal seat cannot see any merit in designating a book for one sex or the other, when the book is for children, who are already have more than enough pernicious gender-divisive material shouting at them — or worse, stealthily insinuating. What were you thinking, Harper Collins? Yes, yes, we know; you were thinking about money. Maybe that’s why the book is green.

Of coure, girls probably don’t need a book like this. I, for one, make pretty good paper planes (the secret is in an extra fold, a set of labia minora, if you like, to stabilise the glide). Perhaps girls can read the instructions on packets of water balloons, and look up Google if they wish to learn about the kings and queens of Europe (young ladies, don’t miss Charles II, who “love(d) fucking much”). Still, one can hope the future might provide us with a St. Trinian’s Book for Girls, containing instruction on such essential female skills as how to build a nuclear device, abort a late term pregnancy (yours or someone else’s), seduce your teacher of either gender, smuggle plastic explosive onto an aeroplane, biologically engineer a plague, and summon the devil. Until then, the only dangerous books I shall be giving to children of my acquaintance will be the medieval kind that scream when you open them and have to be chained up at night.

Finally, so that I don’t finish this on a whinging note, from the other day, a classic corner building in Maldon (purveyors of covetable Japanese tea ceremony cabinets, lamps, carp kites et al.) :

I have a bastard of a cold, so I went to the chemist to get some Codral, and to buy a few packets to take back to Bangkok. For non-Australians, Codral is — or used to be — a perfect concoctoin of codeine, paracetamol and pseudoephedrine that really did work wonders on cold and flu symptoms. However, when I looked at the packet, I saw that the pseudoephedrine was replaced with something called phenylephrine. As far as I and the shop assistants could tell, the entire range of decongestant medications behind the counter had undergone a similar search-and-replace. Obviously the anti-methmaking lobby has got to the drug companies. Codral is not cheap, so I went home to check the all-knowing Interwebs’ opinion of phenylephrine. Not as good as the old stuff, says the oracle. Hmph. Yes, meth is nasty. But so is sinus congestion. Do the powers that be really have to play nanny over all of us just to save the few sheep who’ll always find a way to lose themselves? If you take away their little white pills, they’ll simply move on to sniffing paint thinner, no? Anyway, does anyone reading this have an opinion of the new ingredient in town? Can Codral still king-hit a cold, or will I do just as well with a cup of lemon tea and a packet of Tim Tams to make me feel better?

I spent last week visiting friends and relations. Had breakfast with Tessa in one of the nooks on Degraves St. (a tiny alley in town). The victuals were delicious, though too much for two smallish people, even hungry ones. I checked out the exhibition of top VCE (end of high school) art at the Ian Potter gallery and was blown away by the maturity of the work and the thought behind it. How on earth do these kids get to be so sophisticated (or was I just backward? Hmm…)
I’ve been lazy about posting while I’m away. I’m now up at my parents’ place in Castlemaine. With the lack of rain and the strict water restrictions, it’s amazing how their garden’s hanging in there. Where the biocycle (domestic sewage treatment thingo) drains into the garden they’ve got quite a little woodland, with some impressive trees grown from seed, including exotics like oak, hawthorn and gingko, and even a paulownia, which they practically wrapped in blankets when it was little to keep Jack Frost’s fingers off it. The exotics don’t get any extra water, but some of them are doing very well, especially the oaks. I remember when they were tiny little twiggy things, and now they have acorns. The apple and cherry trees, which haven’t been watered all year, produced bumper crops. There’s no lawn, of course, but now that the trees are bigger the dirt between them doesn’t look so bad. Meanwhile, Mum and Dad have been laying gravel paths all over the place in their little Japanese garden.

I’m sorry I didn’t have my camera when we walked the dog the other day. As we were coming home, via a grassy lane behind a paddock, we met three of the local kangaroos — mum, dad and a little one, standing in the lane, upright, looking very human, and not especially pleased to see us, especially the dad, the dominant male of the local mob, I guess, who was a strapping, square-jawed, thick-shouldered paterfamilias. We tried to sneak off down a side lane, but we had to go a little closer to them before the turnoff, and the mother decided on discretion being the better part of valour and bounded. The kid sprang away after her. The father stood rearguard for a few moments, looking like he just might go all Chuck Norris on us, but after giving us a good look at his sizeable person he turned with every appearance of cool disdain for our puny simian selves and headed off up the lane after his concubine and offspring. No person in their right mind would have tangled with him, of course — in fact, any threatening movement on his part would have had the three of us backing off the way we came, or if it was a threatening movement of the “I bound towards you and kick you to kingdome come, or maybe eviscerate you with my gnarly claws” kind, bravely diving into the nearby ditch. Mum said it was funny in the summer when the family in the house up the hill were on holiday and the roos took to lolling on their front veranda.

My parents also told a story about an open range zoo they went to in Dubbo. The zoo has a Bengal tiger, which my father says “has attitude” (as tigers do, I guess). Anyway, kangaroos being perhaps not entirely cognizant of what a tiger is, now and then one of the zoo’s roos jumps the tiger’s fence, and the tiger gets bush tucker that day. Sadly, one of these violent dinner dates happened while a group of Japanese tourists were viewing the tiger. Over the fence jumped the kangaroo, and soon the zoo resounded to shrieks of “Hidoi! Hidoi!* No, Skippy, nooooo!” Ah, Nature, thou cruel old biddy.

*hidoi = horrible, awful

I’m back in Melbourne, staying with Stu’s parents. Days are warm and sunny but mornings are nippy; I’m rediscovering the sensation of feeling cold when I undress for a shower. I’m also rediscovering asthma. The air is as dry and dusty as the proverbial nun’s twat, and my lungs are telling me they much prefer Bangkok’s humid miasma. Luckily (for me) Stu’s family are an asthmatic lot, so I was able to buy a puffer from their stash, at their $5 pensioner price rather than the regular $25. It’s named after some Gondorian aviator called Airomir. I’ve also got hay fever. I’m going to blame it on the plane tree seedpods, since it’s the wrong time of year for any other possible culprits.

The city shops are, as usual, full of beautiful clothes that I can’t afford and which most other people can’t either, judging by those I see as I wend my way down the corridorial, dungeonesque streets, alleys and arcades of the city centre. The question of who does buy them hangs in the air, redolent of mystery. Aliens? I couldn’t resist trying on a coat in figured silver-grey velvet that reminded me a bit of our old sitting room wallpaper, only without the rising damp, and one in the same style in silver and teal, which was just pimpin’.

My priority mission was to find some perfume for my great aunt, who turns 100 in June. I was going to go for Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet, but the only shop that stocks Penhaligon’s didn’t have that one, and the others that they had didn’t seem right for what I know of her tastes. In the end it came down to Joy or the new Chloe. Joy has a lot of tuberose, which doesn’t work on everybody, but Chloe was lovely, didn’t seem to contain any potential offenders, and came in a pretty bottle to boot. Mission accomplished, I wandered around looking in windows. I discovered a new Japanese goth shop called Shibuya in Elizabeth Street and noted that Spellbox in Royal Arcade is now selling gorgeous metal-tipped quill pens and goodies pour le bain with names like “Bath of the Dark Goddess” and “Beautiful Witch Aura Bath”. The slightly more serious occultist might prefer The Golden Lamp in the side arcade, where you can choose from The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Gems from the Equinox, and Wet: Erotic Adventures in Water. Koko Black is still there, serving up calories to libertines of chocolate for whom hot chocolate means nothing less than a cup of Belgium’s finest melted and mixed with a little cream, and found another, new joint for the advanced chocolate consumer, called Chocolait, downstairs where something humbler had been before.

Despite the expanded choice of chocky dens, from the Royal I headed through the Block Arcade and stopped off at Haigh’s, the venerable chocolate heart of the city, not to mention storehouse of memories of childhood treats, where a young man carrying a tray piled with enough confectionery to supply a Roman feast met me just like St Peter at the gates of heaven and gave me a big piece of dark chocolate rocky road (though I imagine St Peter would have to have a pile of Jewish cakes, perhaps he might also have rocky road as a symbol of the difficult path of righteousness). Or perhaps I’m entirely confused and the young man was just like Beelzebub, demon president of gluttony, at the gates of hell; in any case, there was something just a little supernatural about him and his groaning silver salver of adulterated marshmallow. Haigh’s rocky road is the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. It’s priced in accordance with its excellence, however, so I contented myself with a little baggie of mixed chocs to take to my sister-in-law’s place tomorrow. Feeling virtuous for having exercised financial restraint, I felt that some instant karma was due, so I went no further than the belle epoque Hopetoun Tea Rooms at the end of the arcade and splurged on their salmon and cucumber sandwiches — de-crusted, of course.

I have made such bad guesses about the likely weather, having packed for a cold climate, that I really needed to buy some light clothing. I went up to the Queen Victoria Market, where I found that the clothing was as wearable and the prices as cheap as ever. I bought some Nepalese happy pants in light pastel blue, pink, white and beige patterned silk — I think of them as the happy pants Marie Antoinette would wear — and a cotton dress/tunic decorated like blue and white china (not Willow Pattern; it might be Dutch floral with a Batavian influence, or, of course, I might know nothing about china). Anyway — I’m a teapot, I’m a teapot!

I went home on a tram of which the interior was decorated with signs in faux Indian script proclaiming “Plentiful is the spam in the fare evader’s inbox” and “Sadistic is the dentist of the fare evader”, and urging passengers to avoid fare evasion karma. The driver had a beautiful English accent. He was probably Indian, too.

I’ve realised I’m starting to feel just a bit like a tourist here. I’m not sure how much this is still my town — or how much it ever was. It’s an enjoyable place and I like being here. But perhaps it has never really felt like a home. Why that should be, I don’t know. Perhaps the problem is in the distances. It’s a very spread-out city, so that going anywhere at all — unless you live in one of the very, very expensive locations that are actually near the places you might want to go to — involves a sort of expedition that perhaps drains away the sense of the city as a totality to which you belong. My friend Inger has lent me a book called Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne (Bearbrass was its original name), by Robyn Annear, who describes herself as a typist who lives in country Victoria with somebody else’s husband. Best author bio ever! I’m gobbling it up — and also wondering if I’ll wind up feeling more anchored in the place after learning its history. I do wonder if some of the old ghosts of Bearbrass got into my head while I was writing The Etched City, since the first random page I opened to contained this description of the Bearbrass gentleman of the 1840s, who

“wore a figured or embroidered waistcoat beneath a short-waisted coat with broad lapels, a high collar, and swallow tails swooping and dangling behind. The trousers were tight-fitting and strapped down under the soles of square-toed boots. At the other end of the ensemble soared an impressive belltopper hat, wrought of black beaverskin. Mr Jephson Quarry, an Irish gentleman who arrived at Bearbrass in 1841, was a specimen of the breed. With his black hair and high cheekbones, he was described as: ‘a lady chaser who stalked his feminine game in a a tall ‘Caroline’ hat, a Willy-Wagtail coat with brass buttons, and white trousers strapped under Wellington boots.’ ” This at a time when the city, built on a swamp, was mostly unpaved, often a quagmire of mud — and in the case of Elizabeth Street after rain, a “brawling torrent”, the streets having deep, crooked gutters that had to be leapt across, huge stump holes, and no lighting except for that required outside hotels and theatres, and the one that a Moses Lazarus kindly left on in his jewellery store, which was near “a perpendicular fall of some six feet”. It seems safe to guess that Mr Quarry’s trousers were more often brown than white.

So I tried making him again. This time I used paper clay, which wasn’t so good; the paper flakes in the clay made it a bit harder to work with, and I ended up finishing his face with ordinary hobby clay. I think I did better with the horse part, but I screwed up the shoulders - they’re way too low. In the last picture I’ve hitched the arms up with photoshop and made the head bigger. Next time I’ll try for proportions more like that, and try to do a nicer mane. Oh, and the nostrils - gotta do a more accurate job on them. Horses have evil nostrils, I’ve decided.

Issue #19 of Clarkesworld magazine is online, with an awesome cover (fish!!) by Matts Minhagen, stories by Jeff Ford and Jeremiah Sturgill, Tim Pratt writing on being a writer with a baby, and me interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer.

Giving a whole new meaning to “military decorations”.