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A lucky, lucky bike accident. I was following the river on a very narrow path, about a foot wide, and it was bumpy. Tree roots, little soft holes where the soil has rotted away with rain… You know how you think, Gee I should maybe walk this bit? Or, “I hope I don’t drop this,” etc. And then: >whoooo…< I found myself peeling sharply outwards, dipping, losing balance, falling over the bank.

You have those two seconds which feel like ten where you get to think, Which way should I fall. I fell towards the bank, tried to fall upright and loose. As this was happening I swore, in German. Why not English. Then I was wedged, still on my bike, between the river and a handy leaning tree.

I had hardly time to wonder why “Scheisse!” and not “Crap!” when a party of four Swiss people on hardy mountain bikes came through the mist of trees. They were lycra angels in the afternoon sunlight. I handed them my bike and then two arms came down and two women – the men were busy marvelling that I had landed so fortuitously – hauled me up on the bank. A drop of about five feet. They lectured me but only very briefly and kindly. Those are really the wrong tyres! Are you sure you’re ok? It felt cosy to be roused on by a party of rescuing strangers.

On the way home I passed various other people using all different kinds of devices. A girl on a skateboard. A woman jogging, in earbuds. A couple skating gravely on the asphalt in those stocks you use to push yourself, for all the world as though they were skiing. I passed a truckload of army recruits who waved and smiled and when I waved back burst into ribald laughter. But my favourite was the guy gliding between two fields of cropped green stalks who appeared to be travelling on a moving walkway, who was, of course, on rollerblades.

Coffee Olympics, on an outdoor table whose whitewasher left a paintbrush hair behind. Because they is the trouble with whitewashing as a concealment: it’s the forensics. No one is foreign, no one’s a nullius, no one’s illegal: that’s a sickness. And even our splashiest televised distractions leave traces of political ecology in every frame of their fake tannery. Lather up, history.

In Brisbane we found a bookstore which has a cafe in it. These are little paradises, or is it paradie. What a sweet cool feeling to leave behind the clamour of the street and let the doors close on a spacious room whose wall to wall shelving is interrupted only by a serving counter, an espresso machine, a stack of cups.

We separated and began foraging round the overfull shelves like fish nibbling at the walls of a fish tank. I pounced on exactly the book I wanted, Alan Bennett’s diary extracts and essays; he carried to the table a small pyramid of Marshall McLuhans. Our coffee arrived. We began to read. The older couple at the next table got up and came past us on their way to the counter. The man, a bluff, rural Queenslander type, addressed me across my companion’s back. “So. How tall IS he?”

I said, “He’s right here. Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you want to know. Don’t you think it’s rude to talk across somebody about them, without addressing them directly?”

He was hurt. “I just noticed as he was wandering round the shop. I kept wondering, how tall is that bloke.”

I put my hand on my companion’s beautiful shoulder. He closed his book. “Imagine he gets asked that question a lot. Imagine we both do. Maybe it feels dehumanising to constantly be asked about something you can’t do anything about. I get asked it, too.”

His wife said, “Our daughter’s tall.”

I said, “Well, then, she will know what it feels like. It’s amazing how people feel entitled to ask that question when we are not even in conversation, we haven’t even spoken. I’ve even had people ask me my height, and then refuse to give their own – as though mine were some kind of freakish public statistic but theirs is personal information.”

“Our daughter’s six foot two,” she said, gamely. “Me too,” I said. Her husband said, across me, “Seven feet?”

“Nearly,” said the Marshall McLuhan fan.

“He’s about six foot eight,” I said. A series of fresh questions ran through my head: How old are you? How much do you weigh? Have you measured that beer belly, what’s its circumference? But the poor man was labouring so hard to restore the goodwill he imagined he’d lost, was so awkward in his warm-heartedness, that I didn’t want to make the point because clearly he would think I was being hurtful, he wouldn’t get it, he would perhaps even not have the resources for self-expression and processing his emotions that some of us have worked hard for, and I didn’t want to leave him with an insect sting all the rest of the long hot trafficky afternoon. The only thing I feel certain of in life is this: you don’t gain much ground by hurting the people who have hurt you.

In Berlin I passed a boy at a trestle table outside a crappy kebab house, sitting opposite a young woman who was ravishingly beautiful even from behind. She had long black waves of shining hair and these long lips, these eyes, you know how girls do. “You mean, like, mescaline?” he prompted, leaning in with squalid eagerness as I passed. “I dunno what it was,” she said, waving her hands like birds in the air. “But it was blue and I ended up taking the whole thing.” Her voice was American, her clothes were good. As I came home I was thinking how lucky I am to have survived my 20s. I thought it was normal to get drunk before you went out at night, because cheaper. My friends and I made calculations in the bottle shop based on alcohol percentage per volume per price. The head waiter came into the restaurant where I worked and said, Here, swallow this! tossing me a stock cube. I swallowed it. The rest of the night was a long swim through dense warm water uphill to wait tables, my first experience of hash. In a crowded club where I was very often dancing a guy came up to me and said, You wanna buy some acid? Sure! I said, and followed him down an alleyway. He sold me two tabs of paper and I jumped in my mother’s old car and set off down the highway, putting one on my tongue straightaway. It dissolved and I didn’t feel anything. Should I take both? These decisions always seemed to me entirely reasonable. The car sat still as the road was whipping by me underneath. By the time I reached my destination the steering wheel was buckling under my hands. “Like a snake!” I explained to the man I had met twice before and decided to drop in on unannounced. “Are you tripping?” he said, and I asked, “How can you tell?” He set me up on the couch with a lamp draped in the most beautiful paisley scarf in this universe, and went back to his bed on the floor. He was reading Women in Love. I was going to bring you one, I apologised, but I decided to eat them both.

A guy in an aggressively shiny waxed car reefed in front of me all of a sudden, as I was travelling by bike towards a red traffic light. There was nowhere to go but brake. He wound his window down. “Das war Absicht,” he advised: that was deliberate. I wasn’t sure whether that meant “that was intentional” or “that was unintentional” and had to ask the person cycling alongside of me. I agree that we all need to obey the same road rules and that tragically often, you only get one chance to get it wrong. I don’t agree that endangering people is a useful way to teach them that lesson. We travelled on, in a wheeling pack now. Fat people, thin people, everybody bikes. I stayed in the lane. Ahead at the next lights a compact, muscular guy dinking his girlfriend stopped to strip off his hoodie and slung it in the basket behind him. She turned and smiled at him. On the pedestrian path a child passed slowly in a tiny low wagon, drawn by its father, on foot. This child was so cherubic and had such golden curls I had to work out if it was a real child or some large waxen doll. But he or she was smiling upwards, twirling his fingers at the tiny ribbed umbrella protecting him from the high clouds, so evidently sunk in a deeply contemplative world of his own that the rest of us were so much intrusion and noise. That slow, blinking smile. That poet’s mind.