By way of explaining my much lamented departure from these pages (thanks for all the mail. My secretary will endeavour to address each of you individually) here are some dot points:

1. It's official: we are putting together a show for the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show is called Greatness Thrust Upon Them and it will be performed in the utterly gorgeous Trades Hall precinct, in the Old Council Chambers. Every time I go to the Old Council Chambers I feel the history of the room creaking all around me. Our show is about history. Arguably all shows are about history, apart from a show I saw in second year university in a carpark, which appeared to be about a woman living on a futuristic planet with a bad case of hives and nothing but a feather boa and an eggbeater with which to pass away the hours. And they were long hours. But I digress.

2. I've been locked away writing our kids' TV episode draft with our script editor, Doug McLeod. It has been a priceless experience and I now have separation anxiety and no idea how I'm going to ever write anything including a shopping list or a birthday card without Doug's help ever again. *Hyperventillates into a paper bag*.

3. Obviously the script for our comedy festival show is some way off completion but we had to submit our image and our show description for the comedy festival guide this week. Submitting an image when you don't have a cast, and a summary of a show you haven't finished writing is an interesting exercise in issue-avoidance. Saying nothing while purporting to say something extremely interesting is a fine art reserved in normal circumstances for print journalism and teenagers.

4. Look, I have skills too. I can do stuff. Just because everyone else knows how to use photoshop to the maximum degree of hilarity doesn't mean I don't throw a mean frisbee or make an excellent cup of tea. Just because everyone else spends their spare time replacing Britney's head with Graham's from the accounts department doesn't mean I've been wasting my time. Just because it took me an entire day of googling things like "rasterise" and calling Stew in Thailand to find out what a dpi was and how come 100mm kept reverting to 98.2mm before I could do a simple thing like colour in the tie on a famous photo DOES NOT MEAN I AM A STUPID PERSON. It does, however, mean that Stew was boarding a boat in Thailand while saying "go to the dropdown menu". It also means that our image was handed in just in the nick of time.

5. I spent two days last week in Warrnambool with my law-talking-job, including a particularly enjoyable evening in my hotel room drinking vile cups of tea with UHT millk and putting the finishing touches on the episode draft until midnight. Still, it was an interesting trip. The Law Foundation is running an educational and community programme in rural areas (hence my previous trip to Mildura) so it's interesting work and I wouldn't mind living by the sea, if it somehow was made compulsory.

So those are my dot points to excuse my absence. Not really much point making them dot points if the only reason they are dot points is because they are preceded by numbers, but shoosh, I tried. I am writing this from my office (the library) and I am flanked on one side by a ball of phlegm surrounded by a sniffing human being and on the other side by a quite crazy lady singing and laughing and occasionally talking in tongues.

It is nice to be home.