My Friends!

I have returned.

After so long an absence you may have thought I had dissolved into my component parts and taken the path from found to lost again. But no it is not so and the explanation is this. I have had amnesia!

In a nutshell, on my travels with Norma Jean and Xavier (undertaken as a road trip after Xmas you may remember), I went bush walking by myself in the very early hours of a glorious summer's day and was chased by a wild pig, between whom and her den of piglets I had inadvertently strayed.

This is where all becomes hazy and my miasma began. I gather I crashed blindly through the scrub, heart pounding, with the squeals and shrieking of the monstrous porcine beast at my heels until I flew headlong into a tree and was left senseless on the ground. This apparently was sufficient to satisfy the pig as I woke some time later, unmolested, but totally blank in every aspect as to who I was and where. Having in my panic strayed from the worn track, I was wandering through the bush for the entirety of that day, in a childlike but somewhat bewildered state.

Hunger and thirst soon became strong imperatives and luckily in the cool of the day I came upon a stream and was able to drink from it. Shadows stole across the waterway and the loneliness of my situation began to weigh heavily upon me as I sat upon a rock contemplating the water. That night the tinkle of the stream was my company as I nestled at the feet of a stand of Casurina Pines upon the bed of needles they had so generously provided. It was in this sad state that I awoke the next morning, conscious that I had lost...something...but truly not able to grasp it.
So began my sojourn in the bush, and a tale of remarkable survival they tell me it is too. I will carry forever in me the murmurings and rhythms of that patch of the earth and perhaps it is more home to me now than anywhere before or after. Between the struggle to survive and the growing intimacy with that place, memory, fleeting at first and more insistent later, returned to me, until one day I awoke, myself and aware again, most pressingly of the angst my sudden disappearance would have caused my friends.

And so I emerged from the bush onto the road, a rather startling sight perhaps as you can see, and was rescued by a kind family of Finnish tourists, who I think rather had the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time down under. Needless to say my reappearance caused something of a sensation and Xavier has been persuaded only with much effort on my part not to hunt down the pig and spear it with his Trident (which I report he is still very much attached to) And so I say again, Hello Friends! I am pictured here on my road trip, and after my time in the bush.