My Grandma Nonie lived in Rosebud, a peninsula town that had, in my memory, more caravans than humans. A holiday destination for suburban Melbourne folk keen for the endless beach cricket game that was summer. As a kid, we lived in WA, then Adelaide so voyages to see my dad’s adoptive mother involved a lot of staring out of a Ford Fairlane’s window, daydreaming. By the time we lumbered through Bacchus Marsh, two hours still from Rosebud, I could allow myself to flex and release the dulled muscles in my legs anticipating an afternoon of uncompetitive sporting endeavour. I knew where the tennis ball was in Nonie’s shed, behind the manual lawn mower, whose operations I would be wrestling with the next day: in a bucket that also housed gloves stiffened by decades of Victorian winters and shears in menacing disrepair. Though I loved her and she showed loving ways, I was never my Grandma’s favourite with my hyperactive, theatrical manner. I knew the ball would be there because, as she had said with no great humour to visitors one day, ‘Give that boy a tennis ball and you won’t see him for a week’.

And now I am 50 years old, living alone in my small apartment in St Kilda. Being mysophobic and a hypochondriac since a difficult time in my mid teens, the last months have found me vacillating between thinking I’m better prepared than most for the current isolated situation, and coiled like a pretzel on the floor in fear: incessant hand-washing, distancing, hot flushes that are self-diagnosed as virulent fevers and a scratchy throat that is the harbinger of my physical disintegration. Working in a bar for the months preceding ‘it’ was loosening the grip of the phobia, in a way that 30 years of singing in pubs didn’t. You cannot feel sanitary after an eight-hour shift tending bar and then cleaning the bugger. And now ‘this’. Three weeks of dread and I was ready to give in, but a long sleepless week of self-flagellation had me resolved to change. My daughter in NYC may need support at any time of night, my friends may need a chinwag, strangers may need a smile and I was doubtlessly fraying the patience of my partner despite us living 247 steps apart. Coffee, my daily gift to myself was out (please do not banish me from Melbourne, overlords), no drinking in the morning to assuage the early fear, smoking was out, work on songs and fictions was back IN. And I am remarkably better, thank you. As for losing two jobs? I live on fish fingers, porridge and cheap local beer anyway. Life’s good. I would love to do one of those ‘My Day on a Plate’ articles for a newspaper. I would rename it ‘My Day in a Tin’ and calmly wait for the cognoscenti to barge my door and slow roast me at the stake with a horseradish sauce accompanying my heretic rump.