Dear Tim [old Uni mate]

What's news in your stretch of these damp, fungus-infested woods? News here is that I just had to kill an as-yet unseen insect that was traversing my tent underneath the canvas floor. The fucker was making a hell of a racket, tricking me into believing he was inside the tent, and forcing me to start flinging my belongings around on a merry invisible goose chase. Before long I saw the shifty bugger's outline moving across my floor, and I beat him a good twenty or thirty times with an empty bottle that once held Cane Royale - a fine blend of cane spirit, coffee, and chocolate that is brewed at a place called The Hoochery Distillery in Kununurra, and makes a perfect belly-warmer after my evening bath in the languid and chilly Dunham River.

Jesus Christ, there's bugs trying to get into my tent flat out tonight; flying straight into the paper-thin walls and scaring the buggery out of me. It's going to be another fiftful sleep, riddled with Franz Kafka-style nightmares about gigantic insects...

...After my bath, the warmth of my chosen neanderthal exercise has faded and I am decidedly chilly. At this time I dry off and return to my tent, remaining naked but casting a thin blanket over my goose-pimpled body and lounging back on my swag and stretcher. The ecstasy of this warmth is spine-tingling, but the two or three or four slugs of Cane Royale that follow are orgasmic, and the highlight of my day. I can feel the heat of the liquor travelling through my chest and into my stomach, and I re-learn every day the origin of the saying "it hits the spot".

Following the slugs of Cane Royale - men have "slugs"; women and homosexuals have "nips" - there is a ten minute period of reflectance and thought, covering vast spans of subject matter and travelling through time and space infinite. If I could write letters during this time, they would be the best ones, but the mere act of picking up a pen and paper would spoil the purity of thought, and recapturing it would be a dream...