For about three steps, the sound follows me, then it disappears. White tiles give way to red and cream carpet, and the building takes over and footsteps soften. Bags stop announcing themselves and it seems that even the shoes seem to understand where they are. The light is bright enough to read without shadows and soft enough not to demand attention. It feels like a place that has already decided how people should behave, without ever needing to say so.

I am inside the State Library Queensland, spread across four levels, on a warm day. On every level, books can be borrowed. The building is not organised to keep knowledge in one room, but to let it travel. Near the entrance, librarians stand at an open desk and greet people as they arrive. Further back, quiet conversations unfold about what someone is reading or thinking of reading next. I notice that not all noise belongs here, buuuuuuut enthusiasm does.

People seem to fall into a few patterns…. some borrow desks and time, setting themselves up carefully with laptops and headphones. Others stride straight to the holds shelf to collect books they have already chosen. And some wander slowly, letting themselves stop when a title or image catches their eye.

My name is waiting on the holds shelf, tucked between book spines. Lifting them is heavier than expected, gosh, did I need to order seven? And I immediately regret not bringing an extra bag. At the counter, a librarian pauses on one title and tells me she loved it. It is a small exchange, but it turns a private choice into something shared, and I feel warm fuzzies.

Inside each book is a yellow slip with a return date printed clearly. Borrowed books feel different from owned ones. They smell like paper and plastic covers, and they ask for care. They cannot go to the beach or camping in bad weather, they need clean places and time set aside for them.

Owning books is easier, especially on a kindle. In contrast, I feel that borrowed books expect attention. They assume you will make space, physically and mentally, and that you will return them. They do not demand loyalty, but they allow curiosity and experimentation. Thanks for drifting with me, Lyss x

Note > This season and episode were produced from within the Queensland Writers Centre at the Queensland State Library, as part of the Fishbowl Writers Residency. My sincere gratitude.

What does borrowing give you that owning doesn’t?

Inside the library, the air points down. It keeps the cool in and the humidity out, and I feel my shoulders soften as soon as I step inside, like my body has been waiting for permission to stop negotiating.

It’s Brisbane in high summer, when the heat presses close and the river moves at pace. The State Library sits right on the edge of it all, cool, public, free, a place where people read, think, wait, and mostly leave each other alone in the best possible way. I like that about it… I like places that don’t ask for a performance.

Outside is different.

The subtropical air comes at me from the side and interrupts my breathing halfway through an inhale, sounds travel further than they should and shade stops being decorative and starts being persuasive. Somewhere along the walk, my shoulders drop.

The river appears before I’m quite ready for it, opening the space up and changing the scale of things. Boats slide past and the wind pushes and releases in a rhythm I don’t control, tugging at fabric and then letting go, over and over again.

Across the water, the city stacks itself into order, offices, courts, apartments, traffic, all movement and structure, the people inside too far away to see. From here, it’s just systems doing what systems do. Nothing pauses.

Eventually, the pull turns me back toward the library, toward the cool air and the shared quiet, toward people reading books and lifting chairs so they don’t scrape, toward a place where nothing argues back and attention can rest for a while.

For a bit, it’s good to be held there, between inside and outside. Thanks for drifting with me. Lyss x

Note > This season and episode were produced from within the Queensland Writers Centre at the Queensland State Library, as part of the Fishbowl Writers Residency. My sincere gratitude.

What’s your version of library slow, and how often do you actually let yourself keep it?

I am sleeping in a building that used to hum. Not the gentle hum of lights or lifts, but a louder…. more muscular sound. The kind that ran through the night and into people’s bones. This place once stayed awake so an entire city could wake up informed. Now it is quiet enough to hear my socks on tile.

The building stands on the corner of Victoria Street, solid and calm, as if it still expects the city to behave. It was finished in 1928 and built for a newspaper called ‘The Dominion. Stone walls, copper details, wide corridors designed to carry noise and movement, I get the feeling that this was a place made for urgency and belief.

Back then, the news was not ‘content’, it was not abstract. It was weight.

Ink stained hands, metal letters set one by one, pages stacked, lifted, hauled down corridors and into trucks before morning. Stories here, became physical things. They could tip a bench if you were careless and they could bruise your foot if you dropped them. People worked through the night here so Wellington could begin its day.

Today, people live here and Tom and I stay in the building as (very lucky) guests. I walk its hallways in socks, holding a glass of champagne, careful not to spill it. The same floors that once felt the rush of deadlines now carry quieter movements. Friends pass between apartments. A lift hums and stops and Billy the fuzzy white cat sleeps through the entire history of print media without apology (or interest)

The building still holds its confidence, and it curves with the street instead of fighting it, as if it knows the city will always have the last word. The walls are lined with Art Deco patterns from a time that believed clarity could tame chaos.

Friends nowadays walk the hallway in comfortable pants and birkenstocks, glasses are carried carefully and borrowed space is treated gently. The building no longer asks for strength, it allows for pause. While I think that some places harden with age, some, simply, grow grand.

This one has. Thanks for drifting with me. Lyss xx

ps Have you ever been inside a place with a second life? Tell me about it here ….

I spent an afternoon inside a pottery studio, Studio18, on Waiheke Island, the kind of place where nothing is finished in a hurry, where tools hang where they’re needed, clay waits and light comes and goes without asking permission.

The studio belongs to our mate Tim. He’s sailed the Mediterranean in recent years, living aboard and learning, over time, how much patience weather demands. Now he works with clay and what surprised me wasn’t the shift, but how familiar it all felt. I saw the same attention, the same respect for sequence and the same understanding that force rarely improves things. I saw how skills don’t vanish when a life changes shape…. they find a new way to be useful.

Outside the studio, Waiheke moves at its own pace yet inside, time thickens and I feel an invitation hiding in the clay. To notice what in our own lives is still becoming, to recognise the knowledge we’ve carried further than we realised annnnnnnnnnd ahhhhh to let time do some of the work, instead of arguing with it.

Thanks for drifting with me, Lyss xx

Outside a small corner store in Waiheke Island, the kind you stop at after a dog walk for a flat white, there’s a noticeboard. A corkboard, pinned full … Dog walkers, builders, wellness practitioners annnnnd nn intuit. No cards were overlapping and it felt like no one was shouting for attention.

Standing there, I realised I was using the board to answer a quiet question I hadn’t said out loud yet.. Who are you, here, and what kind of place have I arrived in?

This note drifts through that noticing, not to explain the community, but to listen to it. To read a place through what people offer, how they make space for one another, and what’s absent as much as what’s pinned up. It’s a reflection on arrival, on belonging, and on the small, unglamorous ways communities reveal their values, often before you’ve spoken to anyone at all.

Thanks, as always, for listening. Annnnnnnd thanks for drifting with me.

Is there an object, a sound, or a small public thing in your world that feels like it’s holding stories long after you’ve gone?

If you had a small rectangle of cork and one thumbtack, what would you offer your community right now … honestly, quietly, without trying to impress?

This note begins on a quiet Sunday in Hamburg, with a small puzzle poured from a tube onto a dark wooden table worn smooth by everyday use. The pieces are tiny and a yummy coffee is made. Outside, the city keeps its low winter hum, but inside the room everything slows.

My girlfriend and her daughter fall into a rhythm they don’t need to explain, one building the jigsaw frame, the other gathering clusters, pyramids finding pyramids, sand finding sand. Their hands move fast and sure, murmuring in a private language shaped by years of doing things side by side.

The puzzle takes form and I marvel as I see pyramids rise. And then, near the end, one piece is missing. It doesn’t cause alarm and they finish the picture anyway and move on …one into a lie-down, the other into colour and paper and a new art project, the table already making space for what comes next.

What lingers is not the puzzle itself, but the absence it leaves behind. I drift into the weight of unfinished things, into the way some people let gaps go easily annnndd I wonder about the pieces we don’t rush to replace, because sometimes what’s missing might be what stays with us the longest. Thanks for drifting with me.

Sometimes a story begins in the smallest warmth, the kind that rises from a kitchen counter long after the person who made it has stepped out into the cold, leaving behind something that feels a little like welcome and a little like love, even if no one ever uses those words.

This episode follows one of those quiet, late-night moments, the kind that doesn’t announce itself as meaningful, until you lift a corner of foil and realise someone has rearranged their whole evening just so you could land softly.

It’s a story about Matze, who had a huge workshop the next morning, the kind where sleep is currency and preparation is everything, yet who still went out into the sharp Hamburg night after work to buy cream and onions and speck, carrying them home with the thin-shouldered determination of a man who knew he didn’t have time to cook but cooked anyway.

This is about the warm, steady truth of how humans look after each other when nobody’s watching, how a homemade quiche sitting on a counter can make a late-night arrival feel like being seen in the most ordinary, generous way. If you’ve ever walked into a room and felt a little warmth that wasn’t yours, this episode might feel like slipping into something familiar.

Thanks, as always, for drifting with me.

There’s a particular wonder in finally seeing a friend in their home country. Not in Munich or Tallinn or Thessaloniki, the neutral cities where he and I often meet as equal foreigners, but on the soil that shaped him.

This episode drifts into the night I met my friend Josef in Cairo, and how instantly, beautifully different it felt. One moment we were the usual pair of travellers who have been lost together on multiple continents, the next, he was unmistakably local.

I followed him through the hotel, hand in hand with him and Ayman, breathing in cloves from the kitchen, feeling not like a visitor but like someone being welcomed into a home. Before I even sat down, a gin and tonic appeared in my hand, cool, lime-sliced, exactly the way he knows I drink it, a gesture that carried years of friendship across cities and time zones.

There’s something moving in watching a friend step into their full shape on their own ground. The confidence, the ease, the language slipping into its natural rhythm. After years of meeting him everywhere else as a fellow wanderer, it felt like I was finally seeing the chapter of him that had been missing from all our other catch-ups.

Living abroad for decades, I’ve collected friendships that exist across borders and oceans. Most of the time, we meet in the middle, in someone else’s country. Seeing a friend at home reminds me how rare it is, and how deeply grounding. It completes the picture of who they are.

This story is about that moment, the heart-zing of realising that home is often a person, not a place.

Have you ever only known a friend abroad, and wondered who they are in their own country?

Where have you felt unexpectedly at home because of someone, not geography?

There’s a particular kind of public shower you only ever find on Australian beaches, the “ten-second miracle.” A metal button, a stubborn pole, and a short burst of fresh water that feels like someone rationing relief in tiny, timed-out blessings. If you’ve ever swum on the Queensland coast in summer, you know exactly the one I mean. If you haven’t, you’ll know them by the end of this story.

This week’s Drifting Note begins with that button, that tch sound, that spray of water that might arrive warm from sun-baked pipes or icy enough to make your soul momentarily leave your body. We drift through my gentle morning chaos of dogs waiting for runoff, locals performing the covert art of sand extraction, and the vast, unbothered sweep of the Pacific doing its eternal jam in the background.

I get a glimpse of my brother under his own ten-second shower after a surf, a grin, a jolt of cold water, a whole childhood folded into one brief moment of salt and sunlight. It’s funny how tiny, ordinary rituals can open trapdoors to the past.

This episode is a small love letter to that ritual, the rinsing, the resetting, the way water hands you back a piece of yourself. I hope it brings you the same warmth it brought me … cold water and all.

Do you have a place, object, or daily habit that acts like a time machine for you, the way a beach shower did for me?

What’s the most unexpectedly emotional thing you’ve ever experienced in a completely public, completely ordinary setting?

Some mornings in Brisbane feel like the space is tuning itself, the river sighs, coconut sunscreen drifts across the air, strangers gather like loose notes in a half-written song. On one of those mornings, I found myself at the ferry terminal with a backpack slung over one shoulder, the city still clinging to me and the island calling me like it always does … slowly, insistently, with the promise of pelicans and dolphins and colours that run deeper than reason.

People arrived in little constellations, all of us waiting for the same boat and carrying our own weather systems. There were the loud ones and the quiet ones and the ones pretending not to care. And then there was one person I couldn’t stop watching for reasons I’ll tell you later.

There’s something magic about the minutes before a journey starts, that pocket of time when the we all have not yet decided what the day will become. This episode lives there, in that small bright place between city and sea, belonging and almost-belonging, arrival and everything that comes next.

Slip your headphones on, this one starts before the ferry even moves. Thanks for drifting with me.

What’s something you noticed in the minutes before a journey that stayed with you long after it ended?

If we stood side-by-side at a ferry terminal, what tiny human moment do you think I’d catch you noticing?

ps. Some of you ask how I write my Drifting Notes, I note down my ideas in a random way… then I make bullet points for a story and read it out as I ‘feel’ it.