At two twenty-eight in the morning precisely I was awakened by Cream Cake, Cream Cracker, Cheese Cake the sweet little terrier belonging to Hayley (but very much mine while I’m here and Hayley is away on a “pampering” few days with her sister and mother). Obviously, I hadn’t given Cheese Cake enough to eat at dinner time and perhaps he wanted to know that I was there for him; anyway, I didn’t mind getting up and seeing to him but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Cream Cracker dozed off on the sofa in the covered verandah whilst I lay fully awake in my king-sized bed – only a screened door was between us.

I decided that it was the pain in my second toe on the left foot (the one that had been pierced by a thorny bougainvillea stem through my rubber thong sandal earlier in the day) which was keeping me awake. I reached down and felt my toe – yes it was swollen. Now here in Australia you have to be careful in the heat with infections, so with this very much in mind I delved my hand into the top drawer of my bedside cabinet and felt around for the tube of tea-tree cream, which I had used with lavender stew to make a toothpaste concoction at bedtime (forgot the Colgate). After fumbling around in the dark for some time I eventually came across the familiar tube, squeezed out a small portion and rubbed it into the affected area.

“Perhaps I haven’t put on enough,” I thought to myself and I imagined my foot getting redder and bigger, and then blacker… and finally having my foot cut off, all for want of a larger dose of tea-tree cream.

On this occasion I squeezed out a much more generous measure and made an effort to rub the cream over and in-between each toe, and all the top half of the infected foot.The cream was soothing but still I couldn’t sleep.

Instead of counting sheep I envisaged the faces of several of the children with whom I went to primary school – in Grade 1 at Manly West! There was Kim McIntyre with baby teeth, ringlets and bows (I even took note of her pretty check dress); Erena Samootan – short fair hair and dark Russian eyes (in a plain check dress – no shoes); Clare Huckfeldt – pretty, blonde and blue-eyed (plain green pinafore dress and white blouse). Then there were the boys: Darrel Stone – olive skin, big brown eyes and black hair; Robert Rutledge – fair skin, red lips, dark hair and very skinny; Peter Carney – blonde, pink and stupid-looking; Larry Street (or was it Jimmy Street?) – skinny, freckly, blue veins and with an ability to bite his own toenails (ah, toenails!)…. and so on. Mr Mitchell came into my mind and I fell to sleep marvelling that I saw him in relation to my five-year-old self (although he hadn’t been my teacher in Grade1).

At seven o’clock in the morning I awoke and looked at the time on my mobile. Also on the top of the bedside table was a blue and yellow tube of sunscreen factor 30+. I was about to wonder where it had come from when I realised… By pure good chance my second toe hasn’t developed gangrene just yet – or sunburn for that matter!

If anything, I thought I probably looked a bit peculiar today whilst preparing to go out for a cycle-ride. With more regard to sun-damage than aesthetics, I had decided to wear my cotton cap under the cycle helmet so that the visor would give me added protection; then I put on my sunglasses – so dark they render me almost blind, but necessary against the dust and insects carried in the wind. In fact, I had a little laugh imagining the strange sight I cut (the side plait, falling apart, was the finishing touch), but I didn’t worry – no need for vanity when you’re cycling in the countryside (or is it called bush?) – after all, who would be looking at me?

As it happens all the truck-drivers and ute-drivers in the world were out and about on the same roads as me at around lunch-time, and some of them were obviously hungry. I felt like some weird femme fatale and regretted wearing my red shorts (or was it my red and white striped top that proved so alluring?).

“Surely there must be some beauty spot around here other than the pretty footbridge over the Albert River at the end of Bannockburn Road (which I know quite well by now)?” I queried to myself (seeing that Chris has gone back to England and I now have to resort to lone cycling).

A white ute passed by slowly, turned around and came back on the other side. He did this twice but I pretended not to notice and he stopped showing off and gave up as I entered the cycle-lane on a bigger road.

“How can they all be trucks and utes on these country roads?” I asked myself, as another enormous truck and his big brother passed by.

Some of the trucks drove close and sent a rush of engine warm air past me, others changed to the inner lane, as a courtesy no doubt. Still nothing but wide new roads cutting through barren or bushy land and I wondered why there were cycle lanes at all in such a remote place; perhaps it was a decree from on high – “All new roads must be bicycle-friendly” (even if there is no-where to go and the trucks play good guy/bad guy).

Another ute, distinctive from behind because it pulled a small red tractor (or similar style machinery) on a trailer, went past ominously slowly for a second time. Opting to get off the main road, I took a left turn and found myself in an industrial estate. I cycled by a forecourt filled with strange machines maybe as much as thirty feet high and painted white and orange – not cranes but like fork-lift trucks for giants – and the red tractor passed again. I couldn’t see the driver – just the trailer and the dark red tractor, its glossy enamel paint glinting in the sunshine. I cycled by a factory with a sign that read “Baby Blues” (or something akin to that) and the red tractor, having turned and come back, passed on the other side. Feigning disinterest, and a certain obliviousness to the only other traffic on the estate at that precise moment, I looked studiously at the factory sign.

At the end of the road I turned left again in the hope that I would find my way back to the main drag. It wasn’t. It was an even less inhabited street and the industrial blocks were few and far between. The red tractor appeared again and slowed to a stop about twenty metres ahead of me; the driver, tall and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, got out and pretended to check the trailer – he stood inches from the pavement upon which I was riding. A tree grew on the edge of the pavement and the nature-strip and as I neared it I imagined the tall man grabbing me with his strong long arms and bundling me into his ute – I veered off the pavement and went around the tree, and the man, via the grass.

Seconds later the tractor passed me again. Two tattooed and pierced young men were having a smoke by a gateway ahead so I stopped, asked for directions to the main road and told them I feared that I was being followed. They didn’t offer any assistance other than to give directions from a mobile phone but, less than a minute after my departure, they would have seen a ute pulling a trailer with a red tractor. I was coming up to a roundabout and the red tractor took a turn to the right; I went left, dipped into the first gateway and hid behind a bush for ten minutes or so until a man in his twenties, with a nice intelligent face, came out to use his mobile phone and found me there…

Some time later I was back on the road I had come down. At the roundabout I saw a red tractor, but not the one from earlier. And the trucks kept coming and going, and utes, and I wondered why there were so few cars. While I made my way back to the one beauty spot I know – the bridge for pedestrians and cyclists – a blue and yellow machine that looked like a tank in the shape of a crab drove by and beeped his horn in appreciation. I waved back.

“Now the old method of getting attention I can handle,” I thought to myself. And I smiled to myself because, honestly, I thought I looked rather odd with my cap under my cycle helmet….

(Will try to do more painting than cycling tomorrow!)

An Aussie police car was going along the M1 motorway to the Gold Coast when the vigilant policeman noticed that the car in front of him was moving erratically from one side the carriageway to the other. He put on his blue lights, accelerated past the driver ahead and waved him onto the hard shoulder. The policeman stepped out of his car, pulled up his trousers (they always do that!) and approached the surprised driver.

“Did you know that you were staggering?” asked the officer with smirk.

“Thank you, Officer,” began the driver, “You’re really quite good-looking yourself!”