(Filthy) hippie holiday.

At the moment I'm curled up on the couch, eating mandarins and organic chocolate biscuits, editing the theory chapter of my cousin's thesis. Yesterday the rain was so heavy that you couldn't see five centimetres past the window pane. Today the sun is streaming in and the hills are so crisp you could cut them out with scissors. It's bliss.

I've been promising my cousin Jude I'd come up here for about four years. I'm here now and already I'm the most relaxed I've been in months. Partly it's falling asleep (asleep!) to the sound of rain. Partly it's endless cups of tea. Anyway, Jude picked me up at Coolangatta and drove down some twisty backroads for a while and then we were ten minutes out of Bangalow, eating homemade baba ganouj on a multiple occupancy in the hinterland. Jude calls it the yuppie commune, but it's not so bad as that. Isn't the word 'hinterland' delightful?

We're planning to attend an incredibly wanky post-grad symposium on Friday, something about "interrogating whiteness". Jude's partner John will cook us a nautical feast to celebrate building a mast for his boat. There are outings. In the meantime, though, there's tea, and wine, and BBC costume dramas and reading chapters of salutogenic theory with a red pen, and organic chocolate biscuits, and mandarins, and rain, and making fun of hippie drum circles on the beach. So yeah, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet, I'm just in a different state. And a very nice state it is, too.