There are some things that were just delicious when you were a kid, but seem to require effort in these adult years. Cycling in the rain is one of them.

Today, I cycled through the rain on my way home and it was gorgeous.

Cycling in the wind is utterly complain-worthy. Hair in your face, noise in your ears, gale force pushing you wherever it wants you. Anyone who has tried riding a bike up a hill and into the wind has probably gone on to have a bad day in the office if my experience is anything to go by. But cycling in the rain is bracing, exhilarating, fresh, damp. It's like going for a surf in a storm. In your clothes. On a bike.

Mind you, I don't recommend you do it on a busy road. Nobody sees you. Find a bike path in Carlton.

Don't have a bike? Let my friend at Unibicycles pick out one for you: www.unibicycles.com.au

Aaaanyhoo, ringing commercial endorsements aside, bike rides are exercise, and at the end of them, it helps to be fitfully rewarded. At the end of my bike ride, I went for a coffee. I needed to write a few things down before I got on with the writing I had to do, so I ordered a coffee and stared out the window with my pen in my hand.

Rain was bringing people inside. Mothers with small squaking people in prams. Blokes in hard hats. A child with a parent who could have been a grandparent, or a grandparent who could have been a parent. Then, behind me, suddenly, a table full of women. Groups of women, and this is a generalisation, but by God they can talk. Put a group of women together at a table with a cup of coffee and the prospect of rain outside and watch and learn. It's like listening to a Caryl Churchill play.

This brings me once more to my attempt (again) to justify my bad habit (shared with many writers) of eavesdropping in public places around people I don't know. People I do know don't interest me quite so much, because eavesdropping on people you know is usually not very surprising, or else it is terribly surprising, and either way I'm not particularly comfortable gaining such information via covert surveillance when (presumably) I could just have a conversation with said acquaintance and be done with it. Eavesdropping on people I don't know, however, feels like a lesson in writing, in narrative, in the formation of an argument. The lack of context (who ARE these people?) is a useful lesson in storytelling. Sometimes, I find myself madly scribbling things down as I hear them. Expressions, opinions, interruptions.

Today, I heard:

- He left a note, apparently.

- A note?

- On the kitchen table.

- Wow.

(Coffee machine)

- Gone home to live with her parents.

(Coffee machine)

- Unpaid leave, isn't she?

- Yeah, I knew that.

(Coffee machine)

- Position becomes available, I've told them I'm interested in...

- What did they say?

- They can't promise me anything but they'll keep it in mind.

- Hang on, I don't get it. He left the note asking her to move out, she got the note, she moved out. The last time she came in to work was... When did they...?

(Group realisation):

- Aaaaahhh!

This is the moment when, at the next table, I feel like turning around and saying WHAT? WHAT, AH? AH WHAT? WHEN DID THEY WHAT?

But that's the beauty of it. I know nothing. I know nobody. I just listen to bits of something and pick out which voice is interested in a new job (character motivation), which voice is friends with the girl in question (alliances within the story), which voice doesn't know anything but wants to be friends with the others (character status), and which part of the table is silent (silent characters are usually the powerful ones). As I leave the cafe I try to get a picture of these women in my heads, but by now they're talking about something else, and the two men at the table within earshot are loudly talking about whether the Brownlow medalist will reconcile with his father, so I can't hear anything anyway.

Then I ride my bike home in the rain, wondering about someone's partner leaving a note in their kitchen. All in a day's work.

Things you see in Fitzroy that are too over-the-top to write into any script for fear of not being taken seriously:

1. A ninety year old Italian woman with no teeth on a bike, wearing no helmet and smoking a cigarette.

2. A woman calling out to her child in the supermarket to "Come here please, Zeppelin".

3. A profusely sweating anxious man in a Collingwood jumper pushing an enormous, shining plasma screen TV down the middle of the road in a supermarket trolley.

No, really. I promise.

Also, for those of you who (like me) think they can spot people from miles away because of the distinctive way they walk, check out this article about "gait DNA" - they're going to have a crack at catching terrorists by tracing how they walk through a crowd. They obviously haven't seen The Usual Suspects. And I bet they don't hang out in Fitzroy.

Check this out.

It might just be the pointless new layout of The Age online today but my God the news is odd. What with this article about a giant lego man coming "from the direction of England" and being "later placed behind a drinks stall" (huh?), a woman with the pencil in her brain (see below) and the fact that Geelong is apparently just like Baghdad, you would think there was nothing important to discuss.

Like, I dunno, this or this teensy little story here.

Giant Lego man. Got to love the dudes who thought they'd chuck that into the sea and see what happened.

Things you see when you wander through your old university to get a fragment of a beer bottle removed from your bike wheel and to use the library:

1. Religious groups, everywhere. When did this happen? What brought this on? The answer is probably VSU, but I do not recall even the POTENTIAL for people with T shirts tucked into their jeans to talk loudly about Christ outside the library back in my day.

2. A couple breaking up on the "break up" bench nobody otherwise sits on outside what used to be the law library.
Him: What, and you can't understand why I'm angry?
Her: Yes, I understand. I told you I understand. You don't see how your behaviour effects people when you drink.
Him: I can, but I was angry.
Her: No, because if you could see, you'd stop doing it.
Him: Oh my God. (Spins around to see if there's an audience. Discovers there is, in the form of a protest)...

3. ... The "protest" consists of a crowd of (I'm not exaggerating) six people with a megaphone and a banner saying "Stop The Melbourne Model". Someone shouts through a megaphone, "Wake up, People!" A dude wearing boat shoes sails past on a scooter eating a free sausage from the commerce BBQ and looks disgusted. Some things never change.

4. Meanwhile, a pizza is being delivered to someone on the other side of campus by the pizza shop, which has purchased (from our clever friend at unibicycles) huge three-wheeler bikes with which to transport pizza anywhere across campus.

5. The library is equally full of people researching the psychological consequences of genocide and people looking at facebook while drinking coffee they have snuck into the library under their jackets.

6. It's my grandma's birthday so I call her from the downstairs phone I always used to call her from. She recognises the background noise almost immediately.

Now I'm back online researching the Australian political system, the more broad-brush details of which I seem to have forgotten since studying it at the above esteemed institution. Tonight, off to the film festival to enter other worlds. Ones I've never been a part of.

IT'S RAINING

IT'S POURING

THE OLD MAN IS TOTALLY SNORING.

YAY MELBOURNE - GO YOUR HARDEST.

Also, would people please stop sending me links to hilarious Japanese game shows on youtube? There are only so many hours in the day/night/early morning.

In the sport of Sydney v Melbourne, which is very popular down in the bottom right hand corner of this country, I have usually abstained.

Well, that's not entirely true. I have usually said that Sydney people are interested in money and Melbourne people are interested in culture. I've said that Sydney is expensive and Melbourne is cheap. I've said the food is better, the art is better, the bands are better, the pubs are better, the boys are better, the girls are better, and the people, well, they're just better in Melbourne. Melbourne's better. That's basically been the idea behind my otherwise very neutral position of abstinence from the debate.

HOWEVER.

Not only did I recently have a very lovely time in Sydney with several engaging and hilarious Sydneysiders, where I enjoyed the benefits of a culturally diverse, intellectually challenging, absurdly cheap writers' festival, but today I picked up the newspaper in Melbourne and I read an article comparing the Melbourne Writers' Festival to the Sydney Writers' Festival.

When I finished reading the article, I put the newspaper down and I attempted to regulate my breathing. I attempted not to pass out from shock. I attempted to come to grips with this thought going through my head:

Wow. Maybe Sydney IS better than Melbourne.

The article is here.

Basically, the Melbourne Writers' Festival people say (and I HOPE you were misquoted):

1. We want the Melbourne festival to be as successful as the Sydney one
2. We want the funding to enable that
3. The reason the Sydney festival works is that most of the events are free
4. We wouldn't make the Melbourne festival free

.... which begs the question: huh?...

No, the Melbourne folk are saying they want the money to make the festival bigger, but they don't want the events to be free because that "devalues" the festival and it means the same small group of wankers who go every year because they can afford it might be overcrowded by the masses of other dudes who might go along because... well... because the EVENTS ARE FREE.

Anyway.

I'm moving to Sydney. Honestly. Who thinks like that.

Devalues?

I tell you what. I flew to Sydney this year AND last year to go to the Sydney Writers' Festival because the flights are cheap and the events are free. When it's not free, it's ten bucks, or fifteen. The most I paid was $35 to see Richard E Grant in the Opera House and he wasn't even close to the best thing I saw. The best thing I saw was ten bucks.

I know Sydney has more money for funding, but COME ON, Melbourne. Lift your game. I've been to Sydney two years in a row and the Melbourne Writers' Festival only once. It was too expensive and it was full of people who used to teach me English at university.

So, after reading that tiny article in the paper, Sydney v Melbourne is actually looking like a contest for the first time in living memory. If it weren't for the pokies in the pubs, I might just pack up and go.

Although, there's no Morrocan Soup Bar in Sydney. Is there?

There's a vigil today in the city, in Melbourne, to mark the fifth anniversary of Australian man David Hicks being detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

I know, I know. Heavy topic to start with, but sometimes I stop and think about stuff, and today this is what stopped me.

The Americans are taking a "hard line", suggesting that the five years Hicks has already spent in Guantanamo won't be taken into account in any sentencing.

Whether or not David Hicks is a dangerous terrorist, there aren't many people I can think of who have been detained without trial in secret conditions for secret reasons by the most powerful democracy in the world, at any point in history. Rapists, mass murderers, dictators such as Pinochet and Saddam... all subject to a legal system (whether we like it or not).

It strikes me as quite bizarre that a country where citizens demand adherance to a constitutionally entrenched right to carry a gun can't recognise that giving someone a "right" or a "freedom" can result in the system imploding (give someone a right to carry a gun, they shoot someone. Give someone a right to a fair trial, that person is freed in twenty years and offends again). But the alternative is that there is no system at all.

Watching the play of 1984 this year at the Arts Festival in Melbourne, I realised that the reason I found it so depressing was that reality doesn't survive the comparison.

Now, consider this: the two Melbourne newspapers have the same story as their homepage online at the moment. Colour photographs, gushing press: Kylie has been voted the second most famous person in Britain after the Queen. Voted. Most famous. Kylie. Queen.

Do we think The Age and The Herald Sun are being satirical? Are they subverting the dominant paradigm? Is this a really hilarious joke about perspective? Or is reality really that much more insane and surreal than art could ever hope to be? I'm going with the former.