‘Illness,’ Susan Sontag writes in the opening pages of Illness as Metaphor, ‘is the night-side of life… Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ Running my experience of childhood through my mind, I’m not sure I’ve ever lived in the kingdom of the well. Compulsions laced the daily drives to school which arched around the city from Lower Mitcham to North Adelaide. My compulsive counting would distract me from the aggressively cheerful 1960s British pop Dad would play over and over.

The kingdom of the sick is an old friend. And so, I imagine cities built for illness. They are not like the ones we live in: there are ramps and elevators; no fluorescent lights or radio pumping in supermarkets. Most of all, in my mind, there are no psychiatric institutions for there is no need. We do not lock people away, for their difference is not frightening. Really, we are all the same.