When I broke my wrist, my doctor told me that I would have to learn to write with my other hand.

He told me that when he was in year twelve, he had to do all his exams with his left hand instead of his right because he'd broken his right arm the week before.

And THEN he told me that BY THE TIME HE GOT HIS PLASTER OFF, he could write two different words AT THE SAME TIME with two different hands.

Try it. Two words, same time, different hand each.

Write "CAT" with one hand and "DOG" with another.

When he told me that, I thought he was joking. I thought he was being a smartarse. I thought there's NO WAY that is actually possible. That's like having TWO BRAINS nerdo!

Anyway so now I can do it.

Cat with the left hand, dog with the right hand.

I'll give it a week. Tops.

I just heard that hideous noise: the out-of-control screeching of tires and the final sickening thump, followed by car horns and frantic shouting.

I live on a main road, and sometimes I hear the screech and I cringe for the thump but get nothing. Today, it was the most godawful whack. I went outside and there were (why are humans like this?) instantly dozens of people on the scene, frozen in a mixture of confusion and genuine horror.

There was a motorbike on the road, hurled into the traffic, and - after a ghastly couple of seconds - a man scrambling up from it, limping, swearing, lurching around in circles while a terrified bloke in a pink shirt sprinted from his offending vehicle and copped a serve. Whatever else he's feeling now, relief that the bloke was yelling at him rather than dying on the road must be up there in the top three.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that I cannot for the life of me remember what I thought was so important about only having the use of one arm for the last six weeks. Given that I, as a driver of a car, could blind-spot a motorcycle and end up in thirty degree heat blowing into a breathalyser and explaining what went wrong to the cops, I'm pretty sure a broken arm and inability to write is a fairly unimportant non-historical event in the scheme of things.

So I hereby retract... actually no I don't, I just acknowledge. I acknowledge that life is fairly random but sometimes not very random. When I was out the front of my house, swearing I would never drive a car again and watching the firemen sweep up the glass, I reached into the letterbox and got the mail. In it, a letter for me congratulating me on my driving record over the last three years and awarding me with a discount on license renewal.

I'm fairly sure that if that entire episode was a short story, the editor's note would be: too obvious.

Anyway, I'm off to renew my license, with a bit of trepidation and a thirty-six dollar discount. The "Arrive Alive Scheme" letter could not have had better dramatic timing.

In other news, anyone wanting to read the gorgeous Anthony Lane on the genuinely bizarre Walt Disney (and I count myself among you) go here.

It's true!

Two hands ARE better than one!

Today I got my very attractive "brace" taken off my arm. Life is good, life is grand, life is so much faster and easier with two hands.

Excuse me while I tie up these shoelaces without calling for backup. Yay!

So, when I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, I decided I was going to engage in book fidelity from then on. I was to read one book, finish it, and read the next. Excuses were only excuses, I said, and if I could read the entire Anne of Green Gables series from start to finish as a kid, how come I can't read like that now? What kind of a person am I?

Then I read Nick Hornby's opening chapter in The Complete Polysylabic Spree, which says that if you're finding a book boring then the book is boring. Nothing wrong with you. Something wrong with the book. Which makes me feel a whole lot better about Dostoevsky.

Since not finishing Crime and Punishment, my reading pattern has degenerated into the following shambles:

* Half way through an article in The New Yorker about Christopher Hitchens.
* One chapter into "Down and Dirty Pictures", which I started because it's the first in a series that includes "Easy Riders Raging Bulls".
* One chapter into Easy Riders Raging Bulls, which I put down so I could read Down and Dirty Pictures first.
* Half way through John Banville book (The Sea) which I was really enjoying reading but then took away with me for a weekend and never unpacked my bag.
* Half way through Saturday by Ian McEwan, which travelled with me for most of my weekend trips, tram rides to work, and I think to Sydney before I started reading it. Good book, turns out.
* Dave Eggers short stories. About four stories in.
* Love in a Time of Cholera, which I'm pretty sure everyone expects me to have read and which I have never attempted although now I am at least relocated geographically from the opening scene.
* I have read the blurb of, and been to the launch of, a book by a friend of mine, which is sitting on the bedside table (the book, not the friend, thank goodness because the book is making me guilty enough).
* Started Bleak House (previously having "studied" it, never having read it) (enjoyed it on TV so started it again). It is enormous, though, and from the same "Classics" library as the Crime and Punishment book I was reading, so yes, I am judging a book by its cover.
* A huge pile of plays by playwrights from all over the place, some of which are now confused in my head because I dip in and out so often.
* Certain pages in several editions of Granta, which are in my bathroom and which are very distracting when one is doing one's teeth.

... so Dostoevsky has a lot to answer for. He has turned me into a reading basket case again.

Things were going so well.

Oh well. Maybe I need to read something silly in order to remind me that reading is fun so that I might be able to then read something laborious and meaningful and feel better about the fact that I don't read enough.

Yay!

So I've been missing from the real (and the virtual) world lately. I've been writing something. With the four fingers on my left hand. It's a slow process, I admit, but it's no slower than writing by candle light in the eighteenth century, so complaineth me not.

Meanwhile, Rita has been marooned in Ararat, where "can I please have a salad sandwich" gets you a white bread roll with cheese, tomato and ham, and the "vegetarian option" on the film catering menu turns out to be bacon quiche.

Cut back to me in the city during my day job listening to city traders discussing how much it would cost to install snow machines up the top of Little Bourke Street so that people could toboggan down the hill from Queen Street to Elizabeth Street during breaks in their Christmas shopping (apparently nobody wants to pay the insurance bill, more's the pity).

Working in the city also meant that I last week witnessed one of the "Melbourne Conversations". A rhetorically broad topic with vastly different speakers including the very hilarious and ever so slightly clever Barry Jones and a naughty Dorothy Porter, who wrote one of my favourite books and who read a beautiful poem (not her own). The next day, one of the other speakers, Alex Miller (crush city) was having a coffee in the cafe I was in and I became breathless and self-daring and had fantasised many witty exchanges but when I looked up he had been replaced by a spotty boy in a stripy T-shirt with a Tintin tuft of bed hair.

Meanwhile, a toast tonight to absent friends. To the friend who wants me to keep January free because she might get married: you're on. It's cancelled. Whole month. Disappeared. To the friend who wrote me a funny, meandering, perfectly descriptive novel in the form of an email and who I haven't seen since 1999: I owe you one, just quietly. To Nick: fly home and keep the money. We'll doctor up some photos. And to Rita in Ararat: I hope they don't read this and give you vegetarian sandwiches made of Ox tongue.

Got to go. This took longer than candle light. Definitely longer than candle light.

Whenever I log into The New Yorker website, my heart does skip a beat when Anthony Lane's name appears under "Current Cinema". Here he is on Bond. I don't care what he's writing about. He can take a seat around my fantasy dinner party table any time he likes.

Another: Caryl Churchill. Check out her CV and ask yourself what the hell you've been doing with your time. I bet she doesn't get distracted by articles in the weekend paper or driven crazy by sudokus.

And the two troublemakers Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard are up there too, as is our Mister Winton. I am declaring my writing crushes now because they have been there for me during my broken wrist debacle. I therefore also extend my thanks to the writer of Press Gang and to Aaron Sorkin. As Rita says: "wind beneath wings etc".

Possibly the best day of my life!

Last night a lovely young woman going by the name of Kneebone (no, seriously) took my plaster cast off my arm arm and liberated me entirely!

Well, almost.

I now have to wear a "brace" wrapped around my broken wrist, which I can... take off in order to have a shower!

Obviously this is the most brilliant news ever, as I'm sure everyone agrees.

I still can't type or write, but I can have proper showers and walk around without looking prehistoric.

In other news, it's winter in Melbourne during Spring and nobody is allowed in the city because there are half a dozen Christians in a tent outside the G20 meeting. Hilarious.