Dear Peter [old Uni mate]

What's new pussycat? Nothing is new where I am. It's all old, weary, rotten; and there's not a thing to be done about it, but learn to love it. No, things aren't so bad - in fact it's quite good fun, apart from the whole being away from Carlie and my friends and my dog; from the beach, the shops, the football; from the realm of the sane man. The Kimberley is a hub of insanity, a Mecca to pilgrims strange and dangerous, and an accepting, womb-like hidey-hole for those on the run.

But who - this is a question that has been brewing in my head - is insane, and who is sane? And who does the judging? And how do we know they are sane? Mental state can not - must not - be thought of as a linear continuum, with sanity and insanity as the opposing end-members. Why? Because sanity and insanity so closely approach that to distinguish one from the other is an impossibility. Take the example of a man who has given up all his worldly possessions and resolved to walk the earth as a primitive man - I met such a man a few weeks ago at the Kununurra Hotel (he hadn't given up beer, obviously). Is he insane because he can't see the value and usefulness of modern technology? Or fantastically sane and clear-minded because he has recognised the evil inherent in a world run by machines? You decide.

I have decided that sanity and lunacy, if not one and the same, are at least kissing cousins. My driller is walking the blurry line that I speak of, after seven weeks out here with a total of three half days off to get supplies and spare parts from town. At the beginning of the program he fooled me a few times by saying things like "We have to stop the hole here (short of target depth) - there's too much water/the bit is broken/the ground is too hard" or "Oh no! If we stop the hole here (after a particularly short hole, which they find frustrating) then the rods will get bogged and we'll have to stand down." After about 10 seconds, or after I realised he was bullshitting me, he would laugh and tell me he was joking. He says the same things now, but with dull, pleading eyes, where before there was a sparkle; and the chuckling has gone, replaced by an uneasy silence, a scuffle of the feet, and a half-baked excuse to drift away. Yes, my driller is walking the line and beginning to list badly - towards the anoxic cesspool of insanity.

The good thing about this "isolation-style" insanity is its temporary nature. It allows a normally sane man to look through the foggy glasses of insanity; to crawl towards the edge of reason and sing "cooee" into the abyss. But, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, the only people who really know the limits are those who have gone over the edge...