I didn't know what I would write about in this one, but you need to know it took 12 minutes and 47 seconds to go from A to C-

There's a small, slightly camp man walking past me as I go for my daily walk today. I've already come close to smashing my car because a woman in a range rover can't work out how to reverse, and hip and shouldered a nosey child who's sister, oddly, had a surgical mask on and was muttering something like seized by some fevered dream. She reminded me of this weird family that used to walk around Hobart in Amish clothing, always a strictly ordered group, in clothes the Amish would reject and little paper hats that you could take off and sail down the Derwent. The one at the back, she was kind of cute, but you don't want to be hanging out at a house that resents electricity. My newspaper is horribly judgemental today, once again dividing the world into easily caricatured heroes and villains. There's a tennis player with the temerity to have chunky legs, and she's copping a pasting. As i read the article a little bit, the camp man presses in my general direction, and we do the awkward you no no you go sidestep. He eventually walks off, which is when I notice he has a shopping assortment of a grey bag with butter and nothing else in it, another bag with jam and under his left arm a massive Guitar Hero set up pack. Butter, Jam and Jamming, the perfect night in. He walks off camply into the distance, while in my old home my Mum and Dad are arguing about the configuration of a treadmill. They play their roles with limitless but utterly rehearsed perfection. My Mum bossy, strident and concerned about treadmill hitting vase like a crazy peron, my Dad with little Spanish Flea going off in his head as he does exactly and vacantly what he is told and puts the treadmill in exactly the right position. It's just my luck the way the day has gone that I walk in just at the right moment to give them a hand. I consider chasing the Guitar Hero guy down the road, he seems fun, if a little light on for snacks. I'm definitely not a lifter or carrier. My fragile little arms aren't cut out for the business of removal or renovation. I had to help lift a piano onto a truck once, and that nearly killed me. Not lifting the piano, but that fact that I was lifting it, a book amusingly tumbled from the little book holder bit (I'm sure Delta Goodrem knows the science bit) and hit me in the face. Everyone no doubt had a good laugh, but not me, not when I saw that it was a how to play the piano like Coldplay book. In the corner of Mum and Dads living room is the wrestling, a rather strange thing for them to have on. I suspect it's a nice gesture to me, sit down son, have a cup of tea, feel good about yourself, why not have a nut? Oh, and by the way, lug this treadmill down the hall and cop a mouthful of gentle abuse while you are at it...theres a noisette swirl in it for you...

My Mum is really good, as indicated above, at organising everyone when they move. She was from a family of 13teen, and once an earnest hairdresser in penguin with blonde tips and magic fingers asked her if her brothers and sisters came into her room and touched her stuff. She didn't really have the heart to say they all stayed in the same room, and if they wanted to touch her stuff, they could just reach over and grab it. One of her brothers used to physically grab their head and push it upwards when they walked so they would always walk with their head held high. This is a woman that got onto her own stretcher after she smashed her ankle to bits. Tough. Didn't give any of it me mind you. My abiding memory of my mother is an argument she had with one of our friends over a tow rope. That is to say, the woman did all the arguing until my Mum grabbed the tow rope in her hand and simply said the word enough. We've moved across the road and across the world, and it's always terrible. When we moved across the road, I had become a social recluse. This wasn't entirely my fault, I didn't realise that the custom of chapping your door to see if you wanted to come out was something you were meant to, you know, re-ciprocate, so eventually everyone just stopped chapping. I went a bit funny, spending most of my time playing soccer with my toys (luckily I was 10en) in my Grans hall, until eventually I got to be weird and odd in my own house. My Dad called this soccer playing clacking, as it clack go the figures, and I think everyone was a bit concerned about me. When we took our stuff out of Grans house and moved across the road, I had all my toys in a box and was singing some SAW song, Kylie or Jason but not Stefan Dennis, and there was this kid, all in black, called Brian who didn't smoke but you'd imagine his future life would involve this passage, just him standing on street corners smoking and passing comments on lovely ladies. He had a wonderful Leslie Phillips vibe to him. Anyway, he looked at me strangely, and quite rightly too, I hadn't left the house in at least 5ive weeks, and was singing quite loudly. For whatever reason, and he was quite capable of bashing my head in, I turned around and said in quite a menacing Ayrshire accent that I had somehow accquired, maybe at a garage sale, that if he wasn't going to help us move he should probably get fucked. I was taken aback not only at my raw aggression, but how incredibly strange and trashy I sound. This only happened to me one other time, when I said to the guy manning the flumes at the Magnum haw mister is the slide open in such an Ayrshire thicko accent, I immediately had to sound like Sir Ian McKellen and make this ridiculously posh accented apology. Brian, taken aback, sloped off to go and find some birds to admire in a perverted way, and I looked at my Mum. I'm not sure to this day if she was genuinely afraid her only child was some sort of nutcase, or she was proud of me - maybe a bit of both. Needless to say, self reflection on this particular personality trait ensured that the next day, I surrounded myself with friends, fake friends, faux friends, real friends, female friends with chubby cheeks, the lead singer of Fairground Attractions Mum (she lived round the corner)...I mean, at that age, you really shouldn't be in the attic writing a manifesto about your grudges...Brian did deserve to be told though...just for his joke about three pigs in the brothel...

I've been in this house for two years now, or is it 3hree? I can't quite remember, it's all a blur. I moved in before the furniture did. It was a strange night, I basically curled up in a ball on the floor to sleep, except obviously I didn't do much sleeping. It felt like an eerie parallel to all my other moves, except there was no one to talk to because I now lived entirely alone. When I moved back to Penguin in 1992, there were two channels on the television, one of them shut down at 10 at night and the only thing in my room for two or three days was a troll doll someone gave me for luck and a bed. And a horrible, astroturf like carpet with grey fibrous hairs just waiting to curl up between your toes and spark and crackle. It was pretty horrible, and sleep was reasonably impossible the first night because of jet lag, homesickness, and the occasional drunk that would throw up on the railway tracks. It was a horrible night for everyone, I think we all went to bed at about 7even at night just so we didn't have to look at each other and burst into homesick tears. Luckily when I moved into this house, I didn't burst into any kind of tears, but it was strange how empty and devoid of life I felt just curled up in a ball in an empty house with a thumpingly loud clock counting down the seconds until I could responsibly do my own recycling. I even sat on the lawn for a while, which was like when I ran away from Penguin, and lay down in the middle of the football oval convinced that I had the gumption to escape and somehow make it back to Scotland with 2wo dollars in my pocket, a jumper and a Violet Crumble to keep my energy levels up. If the first thing I'd found in the morning was a troll doll, that would have really made the story a lot better, but they unpacked my TV first. Damn un-romantic removalists. Still, the fact that I was able to go onto my lawn and just sit quietly without disturbing my flatmates (or my parents I as I call them in my stand up routine) was a lovely moment of independence. It felt very different from that night under the stars in Penguin. Then the world felt crushingly small, crushingly lonely. I remember just walking around the ground for ages, and eventually finding an old discarded football record and reading it in the back of the grandstand, reading about football players and their glamourous (for Penguin) girlfriends...and quite caught up in the spirit of moving out, after a moments reflection on the lawn I went into my house, took a football record from by the door where I left it when I got the keys, and read it. It seemed appropriate to replicate the moment. This time, there was no crushing inferiority, no feeling that those in the muscle shirts with steady girlfriends called Karen or Sharon were doing anything exotic or interesting. Just a sense that my own world could be whatever I wanted it to be...obviously, this just meant putting up my framed St Mirren jumper on the wall and getting the hammock up, but sometimes, that's all it really takes...

The girl in the bakery near where I work is making this huge dramatic show about the fact that she is keeping a sandwich for me. I mean, she's sprinting over to tell me. She interrupts both my mental narrative flow, and a particuarly enjoyable second verse of a Pipettes song. It's quite strange obviously, and it makes it hard to get back on track. It was only when I went to tag this post I thought of calling Sandwich White Female, but god I'm proud of myself. Some people in front of me in the queue are talking loudly about Jelena Dokic, in far more strong terms than she probably warrants. My friend sends me a link to her blog, but I hope no one I know ever finds this blog, oddly. I think I'm quite a quiet person, although some may disagree. I don't think anyone knows me that well if I'm honest. I mean, sandwich girl thinks she does - hence her beaming smile that a concoction of bread and filler is mine to enjoy. I thank her for her trouble, and shuffle out quite awkwardly. Someone buys me tickets for something without asking me, someone else sends me an e-mail that indicates they don't want to do lunch, entire conversations buzz through my head without a single meaningful word other than Obama or Wozniacki. Across the world, my family is asleep, my real family, not the Penguin family where you just call people auntie until it sticks. My proper family, the ones I see for 6ix weeks every two years, have dinner with at the Braehead Shopping Centre, and then fly home after exchanging e-mail addresses with absolutely no follow up. Sandwich freakage or not, I can't go back now. This is where I live. Some people ask me would I go back, and I laugh and say, ho ho ho, if I had the money, but now, I probably wouldn't, even if. This has nothing to do with the quality of service in the Ayrshire sandwich shops, although the coffee shop at Glasgow airport, that has some rude hos in there (so Snoop Dogg told me). I know the ebb and flow off life is difficult, but the person asleep on Penguin Oval waiting for the morning to run away, I don't know him anymore. Maybe he kind of vanished when I first pashed Vicki. Vicki always thought I was never happy anywhere, she'd say I kissed restlessly. Mostly because she had a death hug, but don't tell her. She used to say I'd get old and question how I got to that point, because she felt I would wake up one day and suddenly get it but not have enjoyed the journey. She was deep when she wasn't baking delicious pastries. I go home, and it's a mess, there's an uneaten bag of peanuts on my bookcase. Instinctively, I wonder what Mum is doing with her ti...oh wait, it's all down to me. And there's a message on my phone from someone from Scotland, a distant person, but I don't return it. Weirdly, the peanuts and the hammock seem a lot more important than the call...

I didn't just move house, I kind of moved on as a person, and that requires an entirely longer story, and no one was holding the back end of the treadmill on that one...