So here I am, upstairs in my parents’ house, having finished earlier today The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. Recently I learned that there’s a novel floating around with the title of The Household Guide to Dying, which will probably be published in 2008 like mine. The subject of loss is evidently in the cultural firmament; how strange it is that a universal experience can be packaged in such a way that it will beget articles about a trend.

An astute regular reader has suggested that given my recent change of address I might need to alter the title of this blog. Certainly “Apple Girl” presents two disadvantages: not only does Sydney have no symbolic relationship to the fruit, but I have discovered from analysing the search terms people use to visit my site that they sometimes expect to see a whole lot more in the way of, ahem, visual stimulation. Who knows what these other apple girls are up to, I haven’t felt compelled to seek them out.  

So as I shift my focus from experiential anecdotes of a newbie’s life in New York to … well, to whatever’s next, I could well take up Rick’s suggestion of a title focused on bridges. After all, that is one thing Sydney and New York have in common. Or maybe this blog will morph into a website focused on my book and my consulting work, of which the blog would be part, but not the sole focus. Any suggestions, comments?

But for the immediate future – the next few weeks, anyway – Apple Girl will remain in virtual place.

Back on terra firma Australis. Delighted to see loved ones but shocked at the reality of not being in New York. No idea of whether that’s temporary or, as I fear, more permanent. Slightly jetlagged but of course desperate to work on finalising the text of my book, which needs to be back with its publisher in November. This publication thing is actually going to happen! Still way too surreal to experience it directly. Staying at my parents’ house for a few more nights, until my jam-packed spare room is gradually denuded of its furniture and newspaper-wrapped objets enclosed in plastic container bins. A bed to sleep on is the next big goal. But second to the manuscript for the next week or so …

One more good night’s sleep and I think I might qualify as human …

The next time I post to this blog I will be back in Sydney. In between now and then I will fly from Reno, Nevada (where it has been snowing) to Los Angeles Airport, then late at night tomorrow board a Qantas flight home. Home: a more complicated idea than it once was. Physical, spiritual, intellectual, familial: one city cannot possibly be all these things to one person, in the same way that one person cannot be the sole source of nourishment – of whatever kind – to another.

Forgive my pseudo-philosophical musings. Growing progressively colder in the late afternoon above Lake Tahoe will do that to you, especially if you have a glass of creamy Chardonnay at the ready.

Sorry for the terrible pun. The best thing by far about my trip to LA – apart from finally clutching my edited manuscript to my relieved bosom – was dinner at the Getty Museum restaurant with friends on Saturday night, followed by several hours by myself wandering around the museum the next day. Whiling away a perfectly warm and sunny Los Angeles day among the extraordinary complex of buildings and gardens that make up the Getty Museum and its research institute, was as far as I could be – physically, spiritually – from Santa Monica Boulevard, where that morning I had what passes for breakfast in these parts. What a godforsaken place it is, full of people who think filter coffee and bleached blonde hair are the height of sophistication. I was shocked to realise that I had become what the west coast types hate: a New York intellectual. I was so proud! The savage expense of taxi fares to and from the Museum to the airport, where I boarded a plane to Reno, Nevada, to visit a friend before heading back to Sydney, were almost worth the time spent at the museum. I saw a fabulous exhibition of photographs by Edward Weston.

Half an hour to go until the Fedex guy arrives with my edited manuscript – via Brisbane, Brooklyn, Newark, Memphis (these last two stops I gleaned from tracking my package via the Fedex website), and now Los Angeles. Until I am clutching the pages in my hot little hands I will not be able to notice anything about LA other than the smog, the absence of pedestrians, the disconnectedness of people’s lives here (no sense of neighbourhood, of community), and the sad prevalence of homeless people sitting in wheelchairs, camped out in two-person tents, or otherwise hanging out on the sidewalks of “Skid Row” just around the corner from my dear friend Kelsey’s brand-new loft apartment.

Kelsey, with whom I went to high school, has just gone to the airport to pick up Wendy, another former schoomate. We haven’t seen Wendy in – ahem – almost 20 years. The formal school reunion is at the end of this month, but for us three it will be an informal one. The plan is to visit the beaches – Venice, Malibu – even though today is uncharacteristically overcast. But I can’t get excited about anything except having my manuscript to work on.

Left NYC this morning for the airport at 5.15 am, sans critically important package that was “guaranteed” to be in my hands by noon yesterday. Critically important package being my edited manuscript. Which turned up this afternoon at my Brooklyn cafe, hours after I had arrived in Los Angeles. Since made emergency request for another courier to deliver it overnight to me here at my friend Kelsey’s downtown loft. Who knows where it will end up.

High point of the day was spotting actor Jeremy Piven all scruffy and casual chatting with two other people (apparently one of whom was another celebrity but I failed to recognise him) while at a cafe trying to sort out the transfer of said manuscript to LA.

With a couple of strange days left here, I’ve shifted my heavy suitcase to my old Brooklyn neighbourhood and am writing this from my friend Cheryl’s three-storey brownstone. The late summer is suddenly shifting gear – today the sky has filled with clouds and the temperature has dropped.

Apart from seeing old and new friends, this time is partly one of personal administration (redirecting mail, paying bills), but mostly one in limbo, as I wait for the edited manuscript of my book to arrive by courier. Then the real work of final revision begins.

Friends, if you didn’t see last weekend’s review of David Kowalski’s The Company of the Dead, the wonderful novel to which I played editorial midwife for many years, please take a look here. The author told me that his mother was moved to tears reading the response of a stranger to her son’s magnificent efforts. Will Elliot wrote:

Far from a light beach read, this is masterful entertainment, as thematically complex as its plot … Kowalski’s language is by turns poetic or raw and intense. It’s exhilarating to see an Australian author set such an ambitious novel on the world stage and for the work itself to succeed in its artistic goals.

It is so gratifying to see such a considered and intelligent response to what for some might be a daunting novel (it’s more than 740 pages) in the Sydney Morning Herald. All fingers crossed for many copies to be spotted along Australian beaches over the summer.

My London friends are Mac afficionados and photography fiends, and showed off some of the more interesting features of the iPhoto software. This one is “Pop Art Virginia”. The others – including “Facial Distortion Virginia” and ”Photo Negative Virginia” – were deemed unfit for publication by the editor of this blog.

I’m writing from the desk of a friend of inestimable worth: he has a spare bedroom in Manhattan. I flew back from London on Tuesday night and was surprised by how strongly I felt that I had returned home. The city conspires to seduce me as I prepare to leave it: the tail of summer is long, so the days are still warm; even the ride from JFK to the city wasn’t as hideous as it usually is. Friends are around and miraculously available, and a little dismayed I’m leaving them, at least for a while.

I’m excited at the prospect of being back inside my old home, in Sydney, the still point of my moving world. Living out of a suitcase just isn’t my style. But suddenly I’m aware of how I’ve barely scratched the surface of this city, my new home. Working so intensively on the book – four or five days a week, for long months of the past year – means that everything else I did here was squeezed around its demands on my mind and my time. For much of that time I felt incredibly lonely as well, and realise now that the isolation was closely tied to what I was writing about.

The uglier aspects of living in New York have suddenly faded. Now, I tend to feel that the city is like an incredibly interesting and attractive person who I’ve just met, who has much to offer, but whose kind friendship I am reluctantly having to turn away from. Cities, like people, are complicated. The best ones are worth the effort of getting to know them.

Last week, in the very to-do part of west London called Chiswick, Maria and I were returning to her car when we saw a tall thin woman rushing along the street. She stopped as she came alongside us, and asked us if we spoke English. She then explained, in between fits of tears, that her husband had been involved in a car accident and that the police had done all they could to help her, and she needed to get to (some train station I can’t remember) in order to get to her husband. The problem was she had no car – she had lent it to her sister – and for some reason did not have her bag either. She needed just over 12 pounds for the train fare and would be so kind as to help her out?

Maria, seeing me start to reach into my purse, started asking the woman a few questions, such as: Where is your sister? Why can’t she come and collect you? And so on. It occurred to me that Maria didn’t believe the woman’s story. Eventually the woman said she would just rush home to number 23 and ask her neighbour, and rushed off down the street.

Turns out this is a common scam. I remained unconvinced of her subterfuge until Maria’s brother, a Chiswick resident of the very street in which we were parked, confirmed that number 23 lay in the opposite direction to which the woman ran away from us.

I don’t believe in fairy tales, but this one I received by email today and quite like:

Sunday morning in London, and you can’t go past a big breakfast fry-up. Discovering that she lacked a few key ingredients, Maria ventured to the top of the street to the local butcher, and returned with more than a few thin sausages.

“It’s all about offal” was the name of the full-colour booklet Maria’s butcher had placed inside her shopping bag, detailing exciting ways with tripe, kidney, liver, tongue, and even cow heel. Just the thing to read before brunch. I now know a recipe for “Pressed ox tongue salad with horseradish and honey dressing” that has only 24g of fat per serve, and another for “Braised oxtail with star anise” for 40g of fat but a whopping 67.7g of protein. Leanest are the ox kidney (2.1g fat per 100g) followed by the lamb’s kidney (2.6g) and lamb’s liver (6.2g). If all of that hasn’t turned your stomach, then you might be as intrigued as I was to learn that “lamb fries” refers to the testicles of the beast, and “sweetbreads” to the glands situated in the neck and above the heart of a young lamb.

I suppose it’s a measure of a carnivore’s hypocrisy to cringe in disgust at certain parts of an animal and readily digest others. But cringe we did. And, later, we ate our sausages.