This is very strange. As if I have moved to a parallel universe. Or maybe I should invoke the butterfly effect … ? The view is the same but cantilevered upwards so I see less street and more distance. Fascinating. Hitherto unnoticed tile mosaics on the church when I look west; when I look east, Sydney Tower.

I am among birds as I never was downstairs. Intimate with the black-faced cuckoo shrike’s intent pursuit of insects. And with all this, more privacy, because most people never raise their gaze above eye level.

Inside is more disorientating. The same layout but with odd differences, like the knob on the bathroom door is on the other side. Two entrances, or rather exits, like before, except now the other one just leads to the balcony. I love this balcony, it is so much closer to the sky … (here I am, outside again) … but inside, well, it’s not that big and I’ve only got so much furniture and there’s only so many ways to dispose it. So: much is a simulacrum of below; but not all.

Swapped table and couch-and-bookcase in the sitting room. Kept desk in same orientation (looking south - it’s more calming this way). Re-aligned bed to East-West rather than (favoured?) North-South axis. Redistributed the Objects of Power in an arrangement that is entirely intuitive and still subject to change.

I remember being in a state of acute distress one night last year, alleviated only by a vision of another place to be: tangible, I can remember all the details. Tried for many months to transform the flat downstairs into that (waking) dream; now feel, without intention or effort, that this may be it.

Today is my father’s birthday, he would have been eighty-five if he hadn’t modestly settled for his three score and ten. I put a pearl shell I found on my sister’s birthday two years ago on the portrait of him in his air force uniform hanging in the hallway. The Elvis Portrait (circa 1954) I call it because that’s who he looks like: blithe, handsome, full of promise and evidently without a doubt in the world.

All the windows are crusted with dust; the light of the setting sun refracts prismatic on the rose pink walls; as it seems to fall towards the horizon I know it is really the earth shouldering into the dark, but only so as the light returns. Tomorrow.