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I was in and I became breathless and self-daring and had fantasised many witty exchanges but when I looked up he had been replaced by a spotty boy in a stripy T-shirt with a Tintin tuft of bed hair.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.