[to mh]
i think it's a kind of magic, seeing people out of context, they take on a fairy-like outline. Ariane and I have got to know each other a bit better over the intervening weeks - her house is a funny one, with access to the boiler room for five properties,with ample room for thousands of asylumseekers if she wanted to start an illicit business venture, and peatey and i and a bunch of australians who seemed like nice chummy people all gathered to watch the coverage from the morning hours on, on live feed via the abc website. anyway, im pretty good - full of worries and excitements. i hope that you're wonderfully well. let me know how, or if, thigns are proceeding with Mr P. White, and so on. I know that you had your party last week, and I hope there were plenty of delicious things to be heard and nibbled on. The squirrels here are still running around doing their last minute autumn business. It's beautiful. Little illegal immigrants though they are. Missing Australia a good deal of course, and clung to your flowers, I must confess, until they were really quite dead. My mother asked me if flowers were still alive over the phone, and I said "You mean, alive, or Sascha-alive?" for I have quite different standards to the rest of the world, I can't bear to admit things are lost. I'm sure Dame G is far more "proper" with hers. Anyway I have been getting plenty of work done, somehow. Hope you have too - or, if your preference goes the other way right now, plenty of fun or rest.
Hear from you soon : )

im all right. full of a thousand doubts of various kinds and full of excitements too, and enthusiasms, and worries, and all that! ive been busygetting things written, getting less things read after a whole year of reading, it seems, without producing anything from it all. so many trails of marginalia and underlining left behind in so many books. but things are all right. my health was yuk but now im great. and YESTERDAY!!! i was overjoyed by the howard defeat, and of course mildly pleased at the labour victory (i separate the two in my head), becaue i think i would have had to renounce my citizenship had howard been voted in again. i went to arianne's house just off the market square with peatey and some other australians and we watched the coverage live feeding over the abc website. breakfast items, and good news! it went down well, and was a breath of fun. i hope you are catching lots of smiles among your acquaintance. sighs of relief. now i am trying to resist the urge to track down every possible analysis of labour's platform and possible directions hereon. and part of me is hoping peter garrett WASNT joking when he said labour would just alter all their policies once they won : )
lots of love, missing australia