I am reading my third Sydney Writers' Festival book. It's called The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I've been reading it while walking.

This is a habit I developed when I was in primary school. Years later, people's parents used to stop me at the Greensborough shops and marvel at how it was that I was still in posession of all of my limbs. Apparently, I could walk anywhere - weaving through people on a basketball court, cutting across muddied building works - and manage not to fall over or lose my place on the page I was reading.

Now, I don't know about where you're from, but in Greensborough I realised fairly early on that a reputation such as this was not necessarily going to be considered more adorable and less eccentric with the passing of time, but that in fact it might be an idea to take up sport and restrict my reading addiction to the more private corners of my life.

However, I find myself once again taking up this habit - manouvering (still very skillfully I might say) through the stop-starting clusters of people on Brunswick Street with my head in a book, silently thanking the person who invented the clicking noises at light crossings for blind people, and managing to read nearly an entire book in an otherwise busy day.

The book is written as a monologue - musical, sparse, tantalising, and it doesn't hurt that sections of it were read by the author at the festival in the accent and (I supposed) the musical lilt of its protagonist. Who knows what I'll do when I finish this one. Possibly I will get on with my writing, my planning, my scheming, my creating, my future.

Or, possibly, I will go to Brunswick Street Books and buy Mohsin Hamid's first book.

Who knows.

I'm off to my production meeting, book in hand.

It's bizarre to think that reading, once a completely solitary experience, is now a shared, communal activity that connects people, places, events, history...

I realise this is a very high minded thought to be having on a Tuesday after a long weekend, but I just finished reading De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage, who read beautifully from it at the Sydney Writers' Festival. It's about the war in Lebanon, which in some form or other continues today (see here, here and here). It is discussed here and reviewed by ordinary punters here.

What the hell did readers do when they finished reading a book in ye olden days before the internet? Just thought about it a bit, I guess.

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?

I will update you on the Sydney Writers' Festival soon, once I have finished watching this guy on youtube over and over and over again.

Check. It. Out.

He was at the Sydney Writers' Festival. He no longer is. Neither am I. This is a tragedy whose sharp, pointy, bitey edges are currently being sanded down by youtube, two cds, and a beautiful book.

Go here for more of him.

Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, double-dared me to do this.

Not exactly bungee jumping but shoosh. I was double-dared to go to literary festival. In my opinion, that makes me hardcore.

Today I had a day off.

No work, no Standing There Productions stuff, no gym, none of The Guilt.

I spent a few hours with my cousin who is over from WA and we had a beer and I had a curry and he had a club sandwich and our phones had no reception in the cafe we were in. Life is so simple when you take away the context.

Then, my friend, who has virtually the same head as me, got her hair cut with a fringe. It looks way cool. Now I have to decide whether I mind being a copycat from Ballarat (while looking heaps cool) or whether I would prefer to remain slightly uncool but retain my integrity. Tough call. Uncool, I think, is possibly the best option when you take into account my finances.

Anyway, my out-of-context day off has finished now, and I'm looking at all the work I've got to do, and I'm considering going to the movies to see my boyfriend (Johnny Depp) in his latest pirate movie, but methinks The Guilt is taking over again. Since I've been home I've put on a load of washing, done the dishes, and paid an overdue bill. Clearly The Guilt is trying its best to make me a model human being.

Keep trying, Guilt. Maybe we'll meet each other halfway.

So I went for a run today, against the instructions of my body and also my mind, both of whom have decided they rather enjoy having cups of tea and sitting in warm rooms thinking about how satellites work (seriously though, how do they work?)...

Anyway, although my brain and my body disagreed, and my shoes punished me because they are well past retirement age and would much rather be at home near the end of my bed being tripped over when I am getting ready for work, my Greater Sense Of Things combined with The Guilt meant that I decided a run was in order.

I ran around princess park, or prinny, as the fit people call it. As I came back around to the Carlton Cemetery side, I looked across the green oval and saw the following, all happening at once:

- the sun, sinking shyly behind a residential college, acting as though it wasn't responsible for the huge orange and black clouds moving with purpose in the foreground.
- rain coming in from the city.
- trams, lit up little boxes with heads in them, tearing towards Brunswick.
- people turning on the lights in their cars as they drove through the dusk.
- a car beeping at an Italian man, crossing too slowly on the parade.
- in the foreground, a dozen enormously tall African men leaping over a soccer ball.
- up ahead, looking to see if I was watching, far too many anglo boys playing aussie rules in their undies (look at us! How daring! Undies! Aren't we crazy!)

And to my right, a cemetery.

Another thing that happens when you finish a full time project: you realise you've been missing out on stuff. HEAPS of stuff.

Also, you realise how easy it is to get a stitch and a blister in your foot when you haven't walked more than a hundred metres since April.

Oh my lordy. Anyone got any dencorub?