My friend, Lorelle, just told me something in an email… It shouldn’t affect me after so many years of living away – it represents such a short period of my life – and yet it does…

The last time I saw the Belvedere flats in Edmondstone Street (West End, Brisbane), the old building looked as if it was going to be torn down. It was sealed off with tape like a crime scene, and signs warned it was unsafe to go inside, so I am not surprised that the building has gone; it was bound to happen one way or another.

Of course, I used to live in the Belvedere, next door to the Greek Club, years ago when I was young and my little son was younger still; when we had run away… It was a time when the West End was a place for refugees of all description –  runways from failed relationships, drinkers, gamblers, Bohemian poets and artists – for anyone who wasn’t mainstream, for people who needed cheap rents.

It was a place where people fell in love desperately and split up dramatically; where you go back to every so often to remember the good and bad, and to cry about an impossible relationship with the wrong man who was so right in many ways.

I am feeling a little bereft, all these thousands of miles away here in Spain, because I have just learned that the Belvedere flats were burnt down earlier today.