In the cool steel of the late winter twilight, jasmine topples sweetly down peeled and cracked wooden fences. I teeter home along the cobbled back access lane to my flat and somewhere up high birds trill an echo of the coming summer.

I like this lane with its patchwork of fig and lemon trees, gates and fences, bricks and palings and invisible dogs that bay at my footfall. Occasionally hairy muzzles snorting like steam trains appear under gates. I stop and watch until they retreat.

Stolen glimpses into backyards reveal artefacts of lives I doubt I'll ever know. Dog beds, plastic chairs, barbecues squat like greasy altars. An abandoned tricyle lies lame on its side.

This is a suburb-street for families. But my little yellow bird and I stay anyway.

It's almost a year since we moved to the northern suburbs. It's still a working-class area - men in fluorescent garb driving home with empty lunch coolers each evening. The cars are older here than where I work in the East.

Last night I did a neighbourly thing - the kind of thing you do when you expect to be living in a place for a while. I don't know why that is a prerequisite, but it somehow is. I was walking the dog when I saw a familiar car parked with one headlight and one taillight on, but faded. I didn't know about the phenomena of parkers in German cars, so I knocked on the door of the quietly maintained red brick house and met a neighbour. 'Your car's lights are on.'
'Yeah, I know. They're parkers.' The man's name was Conrad. His two late-primary-school age daughters tumbled out of the front door, all freshly washed and in their pyjamas. They furiously patted my dog, while their Schnauzer came out as well. I was suddenly enveloped in the smell of a happy family on an easy-tired Friday night. We talked about German engineering, motoring and different models of cars we had owned.

Sometimes I really like the way men talk - they search for a common object or interest and then take it from there. No need to agree on emotions or whether or not someone's behaviour is fine or evidence of them being a bitch. Cars, football, renovations of the home, software, the best tools for the job. We stood in the half-light on his porch and shared insights about the neighbourhood - how it is on the way to being cleaned up and still sort of dilapidated. Perhaps this is the way Northcote was fifteen years ago.

I walked away, confirmed as a sticky-beak (how else would I know which car belongs to what house?) - smelling the blossoms and jonquils in the early dark.

• the "arts and crafts centre" has a stall selling mobile phone covers.
• an ad for a mobile phone says "find dinner with the new motorola [model number]".
• Muffin Break has a "Loaf Feature".
• That new Pirates of the Caribbean film was fine, untroubling.

At the moment I usually get to rise after dawn - I feel only slightly less hurried, though my hours are nonetheless full until midnight. I still have a sense of inner urgency to explore, research and develop. But every morning, I rise and look out the circular, south-facing window and I see the Eureka Tower. Some days it's shining in the sun. One day it was the only thing you could see, high above the clouds. What did the previous tenants do, before it was there. What did they look for when they woke up?

I knew it was somewhere nearby, but never bothered to actually look it up in the good book - that seemed like cheating my way through such a non-urgent task. So one day I was passing on the tram, looked out the window and up a side street and saw the Pelaco sign at the correct angle - like in the film. "This must be it," I figured. Yesterday I walked over to it from the top of the hill on my way to somewhere nearby. There it was, halfway down, standing out like a sore thumb. I wonder how many people still bother to come and look at (or for) it?