In winter I like to dream about the perfect Bali escape. But it seems my dreams are stubbornly rooted in the fantasy realm. Maybe you read an earlier blog about a family holiday come undone when the airline grounded two of my immediate family for passport irregularities.

http://www.happychild.com.au/blogs/sophielee/2010/12/10/sorry-your-son-wont-be-travelling-with-us-today

Actually, now I think about it, there are a few Bali holiday realities I’d prefer to permanently shunt back into my dreamworld. Like the time my four-year-old was scratched on the chest by a wild monkey. Or the time we were in a car lurching along the winding road from Seminyak to Ubud when came first reports of the Global Financial Collapse, giving my motion sickness a whole other dimension.

You know what? This year we did actually make it and spent the first few days casting off stress in the familiar ambience:  heavy skies and luscious [...]

These days I’m generally consumed by quotidian pursuits, like instructing the very young in the art of mandarin peeling, (‘stick your thumb in the top. It won’t bite’). Or sending out wrong emails to people, reminding them to attend  unscheduled events.

In fact it’s so long ago I did something inspired I can’t actually remember. So when I last showed up yesterday, sporting a hint of lippy and clutching the well-worn pages of a scene it felt like a rapid left turn from the mundane and straight into a fun park.

The screen test, plucked as it was from the pages of a brilliant script and adapted in turn from an enduring classic, contained the most powerful subject matter you could or would ever hope to lay hands on. And there was further room for warm fuzziness. The casting director for this particular motion picture had [...]

I promised that come the end of July I’d be a regular blogger. That is not to promise I’d  have anything fascinating to report. I fancied I’d wax lyrical about how my memory is not the reliable beauty it once was- spewing forth lines of dialogues at will, along with complete cast lists and a variety of little used words I had been collecting over the years like tiny ceramic ornaments. (Now I have the Dictionary App that presents me with the word of the day at 6am every morning, therein removing the need for me to collect these oddities any longer).

Well, here we are, August almost upon us, and I can, as usual, give a litany of excuses for my tardy blogger status. These include the deluge that pounded the crap out of Sydney’s coastal region that gave rise to a desperate need for me to lie in [...]