Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

So here's how it works:

I'm taking a shower and through the steamed up glass I spot something on the bathroom floor - something organic and oddly twisted looking, and pretty much the size of a couple of my larger fingers folded over each other. I step out of the shower, curious; and almost at once I realise that this something (in fact it's a broken segment from the strap on my wife's leather toiletry bag) is neither alive nor dangerous.

And I'm disappointed. To the depths of my being.

Quick tumble of conscious memory catching up - I am no longer in Oz.

You can blame some of this blurriness on jet-lag (and age) - at 43 years old, it takes a while to fully shrug off the ten-hour difference between Sydney and Glasgow, not to mention the twenty-something hours of economy class flight and airplane food you face if you want to make the trip. But that's not really it.

What it is, I'm home now, but there's this Other Place and it's still in my head; a place where you can watch kangaroos as tall as men go chest to chest and brawl like incompetent pub drunks, all loose, straight-armed pushing and punching and blindly averted faces; a place where you can lick the green arses of ants and they taste like lime zest; where spider webs can drape a road signpost thickly from top to bottom like something out of some cheesy post-apocalypse SF movie. It's a place where you can get bitten (I did) by a spider the size of a gardening glove, and count yourself lucky it wasn't something altogether smaller and deadlier; where a metre-long lethally poisonous snake can put in an appearance at the beach and all anyone does is give it a wide berth as it heads up the sand for the long grass beyond at a power-walker's pace. A place where you might meet a two and a half metre tiger shark coming the wrong way around a coral formation and watch as it eddies disinterestedly past you, snout seeking something smaller than you to eat. Strange how you're never as scared as you think you'll be. Strange how you adjust.

Strange how you miss it.