Forget Disneyland: Berkelouw’s Book Barn (in Berrima) is the happiest (and most alliterative) place on Earth.

We stopped to take these photographs in deep, deep fog in the heart of serial-killer territory.

We weren’t killed.

I know you were worrying about that.

Normally, when I’m taking a break from blogging, I let you know in advance. But this time, I was lazy. Or neglectful. Or harassed.

Pick whichever one seems most plausible to you.

(Psst. I suggest “lazy.”)

So I’ve been down in Sydney for a week, and I didn’t blog, and I didn’t even tell you I was going.

But I’m back now, and I’ve lined up a whole series of photo posts for your viewing pleasure. (Or not, depending on how fussy you are about your photos actually being good.)

I’ll start with the strange atmospheric conditions of the Southern Highlands, shall I?

So I took my car in for a service and I said to the mechanic, “If you find anything extravagantly wrong with it, give me a ring before you fix it, okay?”

He said he would.

One courtesy bus, one ordinary bus, and an hour later, I get home, make myself a cup of coffee, and settle down to check my e-mails when the phone rings.

It’s the mechanic.

He says to me, “We were checking over the car and we found mumble, mumble, mumble. Would you like us to fix that?”

And I think, “Oh, no. I wasn’t actually listening to him; I was checking my e-mails.”

But I don’t want to admit that I wasn’t listening, so I come up with a cunning plan. This way, I’ll find out what he was saying before I commit to expensive car repairs, but I won’t have to admit that I wasn’t listening to him.

So I say, “Can you just remind me what that part does?”

And he says, “Those are the things that clean your windshield off when it rains.”

ME: I seem to spend a lot of time worrying. I think it’s because I’m not very bright.
NICK: You’re plenty bright. I’ve seen your brain.
ME: No, I’m a moron.
NICK: Treen, if that was true, you wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about your intellect.
ME: The Internet? I hardly spend any time worrying about the Internet.

I guess that answers that question.

I added Social City on Facebook this week, because a friend has become addicted to it and was begging for more neighbours. But like the Sim City on which it is, I believe, strongly modelled, it’s a strangely compelling game.

Compelling and horrifying.

At least, I find the following things disturbing.

My little bungalows (the only type of housing I can currently afford) put out ten new citizens every seven minutes. Really? What on Earth are they doing in there? I asked Nick this, and he said, “Um, bonking, apparently.” But even that doesn’t explain the sheer scale of the population growth—unless perhaps this is a city for rabbits.

I can only assume they’ve got some kind of accelerated cloning apparatus in each house. That would explain why all my citizens look slightly similar.

I also built a road all the way around two edges of my map before I realised that I’d need to con friends into adding the application if I wanted to expand the map any further. I might delete the road, but in the meantime, my citizens are strolling happily along the footpaths on the very edge of the map. It makes me vertiginous just watching them. I keep wanting to shout at them, “You’re going to fall off the edge of the known universe! Right off the edge!”

Sometimes, the citizens also get trapped. I built them a leisure centre because apparently they were unhappy. And then I noticed one poor citizen was trapped in a loop in the parking lot, just walking in circles and occasionally pixellating.

She might still be doing it, actually. Eventually, I grew too horrified to look, and moved the map down on the screen so I couldn’t see that corner.

But the futile horror that underlies the city really shows best in the factories.

The factory actions are mechanically repetitive. I’ve got a little blue truck in my Blamco factory (Blamco is currently manufacturing soft toys) that has been accepting crates off a conveyor belt for at least the last four hours. I mean, I haven’t been watching it steadily all that time, but every time I look, the conveyor belt is still stuffing it with crates. Is it a TARDIS? Where are all the crates going?

And next door to Blamco, there’s a forklift in the grounds of another factory. It lifts a crate, does a U-turn, and drops the crate. Then the crate vanishes and reappears in its original location, and the forklift driver does it all over again. And again. And again.

And the only products I’m allowed to build in my factories are soft toys, prom dresses, CDs, and something that looks suspiciously like Twinkies. I have a hideous feeling that my city is populated entirely by characters from 1990s’ high-school movies—or, in other words, it’s a population of clever but plain girls (plain, that is, until they take off their glasses, swap their paint-stained overalls for a cute dress, and take their hair out of that ponytail) who go dress shopping because the cute-and-popular guy just asked them to prom, but then find out it was all for a dare, slap him, and go home to hug their soft toys, eat Twinkies, and listen to country-and-western music.

Is this city some kind of Purgatory? That would explain my citizens restlessly prowling the perimeter but never actually falling into the void.

Are all the high-school mean girls forced to live out their afterlives here as the objects of their own cruel jokes, while Sisyphean forklift drivers toil endlessly in the background?

Can I accept being the architect of such a demi-Hellish landscape?

My students seems quite fascinated by the 1980s. I suppose, when the majority of them were born in the 1990s, it seems oddly exotic and ancient to them, a state of mind that in turn makes me feel ancient, though not particularly exotic.

So I tell them the 1980s was a time of unremitting horror, and they should be lucky they don’t have to revisit it.

(I’m actually quite fond of the ’80s, myself, in a nostalgic kind of way, but I seem to have gone a little mad in front of my classes, ever since I started teaching students who were born while I was in high school.)

I could tell them about the sense that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust or, this being a giant isolated island, survive in a nuclear wasteland among mutant kangaroos before committing suicide with Armand Assante.

(I may be mixing up Tank Girl and the 2000 adaptation of On the Beach, there, but, hey, it was a confusing time.)

But to drive home the true existential horror of the 1980s, all I really need to do is to show them the covers of Paula Danziger novels:

The tight jeans!

The short jeans!

The socks that match your magenta-and-black-striped jumper!

The magenta-and-black-striped jumper!

The blue slip-on shoes!

The polka dots!

Truly, an impending nuclear holocaust would always have been slightly less terrifying than those lemon-coloured, three-quarter-length leggings with white high heels and matching plastic bracelets.

I’ve been trying desperately to clear some ongoing projects off my desk, because while this past six or seven months has been frantic, they’ve mostly been frantic because of things like Legionnaire’s Disease and the occasional tumble down half a flight of stairs. With the exception of the Mockingbird MS, I haven’t been doing much critical writing and the Mockingbird MS—while I’m very proud of it and worked extremely hard on it—isn’t in my usual field of research.

So I’m trying frantically to close off a couple of projects that have been neglected for far too long before the new semester’s teaching starts (which, admittedly, is next week, but I won’t be teaching much myself until week four).

The blog isn’t the only thing that’s being neglected, but it’s the area of neglect that makes me feels guiltiest (hence this, the latest in my ongoing series of “I shall begin blogging again soon, I promise!” posts).

Still, as you can see by the light radiating off that draft, the current article’s actually falling into place quite nicely, thanks to some reading on “Victorian thing culture” and a particularly fruitful metaphor. But don’t tell my students that last bit: not after how often I tell them to avoid metaphors in academic writing.

I don’t know what it is about vampires that makes just about all of their texts intensely cheesy. It reminds me of the first time that Bill takes Sookie to Fangtasia in True Blood, and she raises her eyebrows at the name: Bill tells her that vampires are very old and puns are an old form of humour, but we know it’s really just because vampires are a bit naff.

And none, honestly, are quite as naff as the lead vampire in Moonlight. (And, yes, I’m taking into account the first half-dozen episodes of Vampire Diaries, before the show unexpectedly and rather disappointingly turned into a much better programme.)

Based on the last few episodes of Moonlight, here’s my list of the most improbable things this vampire does:

1. Stays in the same city for the entire fifty years after he’s turned. No, wait: stays in the same city and the same profession for fifty years. No, wait again: stays in the same city and same profession for fifty years and uses his own name that whole time.

It wouldn’t matter so much if vampires were out in the open in this world, but every episode is predicated around the idea that no one, no one (except the cute blonde reporter) can ever find out about vampires. So, buddy, d’you think it might be a good idea to change your name occasionally? It’s not as though you were turned in the 1600s. You were turned in the 1950s. There are photographs of you out there. Photographs actually labelled “Mick St John: Private Investigator.” So don’t be surprised when people recognise you.

2. Goes by the name Mick St John. You might not think this is all that improbable, but then you’ve never had to listen to Nick’s non-stop Spinal Tap impersonations. It does sound rather more “1960s’ glam-rock guitarist” than is entirely fitting for a vampire, even one who . . .

3. Gets staked in just about every episode. Now, I have absolutely no problem with the fact that staking in this universe only paralyses a vampire. It does prevent me from making my favourite joke, ripped wholesale from Terry Pratchett. It’s not a concept unique to Moonlight: Claudia Gray, for example, uses the idea that stakes are paralysing as a way of negotiating her characters’ uncomfortable liminal position as sometime-vampires and sometime-vampire hunters.

But if this vampire PI has vampiric super-senses, how can he not tell when someone is sneaking up on him with a stake in their hand?

And if he’s not being staked, he’s being shot, or viciously beaten in a crematorium, or thrown off a roller coaster.

What price vampiric super senses?

4. Wears a Hawaiian shirt in flashbacks. Okay, that’s not so much improbable as it is really unfortunate.

5. Hangs around in sunlight. Again, I’ve no particular problem with vampires walking around in sunlight. In fact, the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula where Dracula’s wandering the streets in that top hat and the blue sunglasses . . . and the brown curls . . . oh, and that coat . . .

Sigh.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. The sunlight. I don’t mind vampires walking around in sunlight, but I am a bit surprised that he voluntarily carries out so much of his ordinary business during daylight hours. I mean, obviously, if you’re protecting a woman who is in the Witness Protection Programme and the police car you stole to escape in gets blown up by the gun-runners who are pursuing you in a helicopter, then you might need to walk through the desert until you’re almost dead.

I’m sure that’s happened to all of us at one point or another.

But is it still necessary to use the daylight hours to run basic errands? Nocturnal is as nocturnal does, Mick St John.

ME: Now you have me humming the Doctor’s theme!
NICK: Well, that’s no bad thing, surely?
ME: Unlike your Scots accent, no.
NICK: What Scots accent?
ME: Sorry, I thought you’d said, “that’s nae bad thing.” But you must have just slipped on the syllable.
NICK: There was a banana skin right underneath it.
ME: I see.
NICK: There’s no rest for the syllabant.
ME: Sibilant?
NICK: Bugger.