Drifting Notes

In Diane’s house, books do not belong to rooms, and I realise this while standing in front of a heavy wooden ladder that leans into a wall of books as if it has committed to the arrangement for life, and I am here in tropical northwest Queensland on a rural property where distance shapes everything, how early you start, how carefully you plan, and how long it takes to get anywhere at all.

Outside is cattle country, wetlands that flood and dry again without drama, wide paddocks and long fences and heat that settles early and does not ask permission to stay, and inside the shelves are full but not arranged to impress anyone, because some books stand upright and others lie on their sides and some are stacked too deep as if they arrived late and were simply waved through wherever there was room.

There are children’s books that have outlived the childhood of her children, Australian classics with faded covers, local history and rural memoirs, and whole runs of authors that move book after book after book across the shelf, and in one glance you can see both the arc of someone’s writing life and the steady accumulation of hers.

The ladder makes everything reachable. Not easier, but reachable.

Some of these books are large and unapologetic in their dimensions, and the ladder does not reduce their weight but it refuses the idea that height should be a barrier, and that feels like the practical outcome of a long-held intention, because Diane wanted a proper library her whole life, not a reading corner, not a hallway shelf, not a decorative nook, but a library that belonged to her and not to passing convenience.

And she built it here, in rural Queensland, where books do not arrive by browsing and they do not drift into your hands by accident and there are no shops nearby to rescue you from a whim, and everything that arrives has travelled and meant it.

By the door hangs a tote bag, bright fabric in pink and blue checks, light but zipped, the kind of bag that can live in a car for weeks and does not mind dust or heat, and it waits in a way that suggests it is part of the property’s operating system.

If her husband says, “I’ll just go check the cattle fence up there, I’ll be back in a minute,” she opens the bag, not to decide but to confirm. There are always two books inside, one fiction and one non-fiction, so that mood can shift without friction and time does not go unused. Her bag is ready before the weather changes.

Bookmarks are everywhere, thin ones, sparkly pink ones, ones handed out at agricultural shows without ceremony, and they sit inside the pages like quiet agreements, because stopping is expected here and interruption is not a failure but part of the design.

Some books lie closed on tables, marked carefully and trusted to wait, and when I ask if she ever abandons one halfway through she laughs and says if she starts a book she always finishes it, and it is said not as a rule but as something that has simply proven true.

Out here, distances stretch five or six hours between properties, roads lengthen under heat, summer arrives early and stays loud in the tropics, and she grew up as a cane farmer’s daughter, with mornings that began before the light committed itself, and you can see it now in the way she climbs the ladder without fuss and in the way she keeps two books ready before the fence line calls.

Trees need checking, storms rearrange things overnight, cattle wander where they should not, and sometimes her husband stops the quad bike longer than planned and sometimes conversations stretch past intention, and Diane reads anyway, on the front deck, in the car, at agricultural shows, in the heat, not instead of country life but alongside it.

Then she shows me the address book. It is small and worn and practical and it does not contain addresses…

Inside are the names of authors and book titles she has heard mentioned on ABC Radio National or from friends or in passing in a review, and she writes them down carefully and then waits. She does not order them online, she waits until she travels to a city, and then she takes the address book with her and looks for what is written there, and when she finds a title and reads it she crosses it out, and the crossing out is deliberate and satisfying and final, a patience I admire and do not entirely possess on a Tuesday afternoon.

There are no summaries written in that book, no opinions recorded for later defence.

The reading is enough.

Somewhere behind me she laughs, bright and easy, as vivid as the colours she wears. Outside, the heat hums steadily annnnnnd I am already sweating. The ladder stays leaning into the shelves, waiting for the next climb and her tote bag hangs ready by the door. The books sit marked exactly where she left them, because nothing is finished, nothing needs to be.

Thanks for drifting with me.

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 small reading habit or daily system helps you stay present when life keeps interrupting?

If this story made you think about books and the places that hold them, there’s another drift that sits nearby … my story about borrowing books in Australia, and how they ask for care rather than loyalty. You can find it herehttps://driftingnotes.substack.com/p/borrowed-books-demand-care-not-loyalty

And if what stayed with you was less about books and more about buildings that remember work, places shaped by repetition and sound, there’s a story about living inside an old printing press in New Zealand, where the walls once hummed all day.That one lives here:https://driftingnotes.substack.com/p/a-building-that-hummed

No rush, they keep their place.

I walk in and my sound follows me, and for about three steps I am on white tiles that carry the noise of my arrival, my shoes announcing themselves in a bright echo that says someone has entered, but then the floor changes to carpet, red and cream, and just like that the sound disappears, not because I am silenced but because I am being absorbed.

The light is bright but not bossy, and I appreciate that more than I usually admit, because it sits inside the ceiling instead of shining down in interrogation, and it is bright enough to read without shadows but soft enough that your eyes do not have to tighten in defence.

I am inside the State Library of Queensland, Australia, and it is large and public and spread over four levels, but what I notice first is not the scale, it is the organisation of quiet, the way the building seems arranged around a generous idea … that you can come in not knowing what you are looking for and leave carrying something you did not know you needed, and they will let you take it home for a while.

Near the entrance there is a wide desk and three librarians standing behind it, and they look up when people arrive and they ask what you are interested in and then, and this matters, they wait for the answer, and further back people talk quietly and compare notes and point at pages and no one minds, because not all sound belongs here but enthusiasm does.

People move through this place in patterns that begin to reveal themselves if you stand still long enough.

Some arrive with laptops and chargers and cables and they find a desk and build a small island, and screens open and headphones go on and they are not borrowing books, they are borrowing hours, and the library issues them a temporary office with better lighting.

Others walk in with the confidence of a plan already formed and they head straight to the holds shelf near the door, where pages with typed names stick out from the spines of waiting books like polite flags, and they collect their stack with the efficiency of people retrieving something that already belongs to them.

And then there are the wanderers…. The wanderers move slowly and without apology, and they look up and sideways and then stop mid aisle when something catches their attention, and they do not apologise to the timetable, and they allow themselves to be interrupted by curiosity, like the person I see now in the children’s section reading a book titled ‘Is This Your Egg?’, entirely absorbed.

Seven books wait for me on the holds shelf. All ordered at once. Gosh. Which feels slightly unwise, like ordering too much food because you are hungry and hopeful and convinced your future self will be capable.

I lift the stack and feel the consequence immediately, and my arms renegotiate the plan because books, unlike intentions, have weight, and of course I did not bring an extra bag because optimism does not travel with logistics, and neither, apparently, do spare tote bags.

Borrowing here has a rhythm, and once you notice it you cannot unnotice it.

There is the approach, and then the pause, and then the small search for your name among other names, and then the lifting and the carrying, and at the counter the librarian scans the stack with a steady beep-beep that feels less like surveillance and more like ceremony. When she scans mine she pauses on one book….

“Oh, Helen Garner,” she says. “Oh, I loved this one.” I stand there a moment longer than necessary, shared glow.

Inside each book is a yellow slip that states where it belongs and when it must return, and I admire the system for its memory, because it remembers what I might forget, and it trusts that I will bring the book back when asked.

Borrowed books feel different from owned ones.

You see, borrowed books operate on a short term intimacy agreement.

They have heft, and they smell faintly of paper and plastic covers and something older that I can never quite name without sounding sentimental, and there are no folded corners or private notes in the margins, and they expect care in a way that feels mutual rather than possessive.

I think about where I can take them.

Certainly not camping on the beach this weekend, and certainly not into the orbit of sticky gin and tonics, because borrowed books prefer clean surfaces and reasonably sober attention, and this is very different from the Kindle I read on the boat, which tolerates airports and train stations and standing in queues and the mild chaos of daily life.

Owned books are patient.

Borrowed books assume you will make space…. physical space, and mental space.

And as I stand there holding seven volumes that seemed like such a good idea online, I begin to wonder when, exactly, I will become the person who reads them all, but the question feels less accusatory than generous, because borrowing allows for temporary selves, for trying on an author without lifetime commitment.

I leave more carefully than I entered, moving from carpet back to tile and from absorption back to echo, and outside the day is still warm and unadjusted, and inside my arms the books wait with quiet expectation.

For a while, they are mine, and then they will belong to somebody else. Thanks for drifting with me.

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?

The air presses down lightly at the top of my head as soon as I step inside, and it feels as if the building has trained it to behave, and inside the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, the cooling system keeps the damp out and the thinking in while the river outside moves through high summer as if none of this requires its agreement.

The light behaves too, and I appreciate that more than I usually admit, because shadows don’t cross my notebook and the automatic doors inhale and exhale people with a steady rhythm, and printers clear their throats in small mechanical coughs, and hundreds of people think at once without announcing that they are doing so, which feels like a civic agreement that somehow still holds.

At the shared tables, hair stays attached to heads instead of flying into mouths, and pages lie flat, and the air holds my shoulders in a way that feels calm and obedient and faintly managerial, and I realise how much social stability is maintained by temperature control alone, which is not something we often clap for.

Then the doors open and I step through them and the arrangement collapses.

Outside, the air arrives sideways and damp, and it catches my breath halfway through an inhale and makes me renegotiate the rest of it, because outside there is no neutral position and no one has adjusted the climate for my convenience, and the concrete under my feet stores the morning heat and releases it without apology.

Two police officers stand at the edge of the walkway talking, and before I have decided anything a small compliance audit runs through me.

Clothing » acceptable.Expression » neutral.Underwear » medically respectable.

No one has asked, and no one is looking at me in particular, but the body clears me for public life anyway and I offer a small smile that feels unnecessary but polite, as if I am thanking them for not arresting me for existing.

Nearby, striped umbrellas conduct a persuasive campaign for shade, and people join simply by sitting down, choosing chairs quietly, and a man with ginger hair stations himself right on the border between sun and shadow, unwilling to commit fully to either, and his backpack leans against his leg as if it might otherwise wander off, and when he adjusts his collar he leaves it more crooked than before, and I love him a little for that.

A door whirs behind me and inside the cavernous foyer a child discovers the echo setting on their own voice and sends a looping whoop-whoop upward, and it ricochets off the concrete and returns enlarged and operatic, and someone performs a ceremonial shush and then laughs instead, and the building absorbs the whole event without complaint, because even a library must allow for a brief rehearsal of being alive.

The noise thickens as I move further out, and conversations about dinner and books and childcare arrive before the people themselves appear, and footsteps echo on the stairs below, and the day assembles around me piece by piece, and somewhere I hear water and mistake it for wind until I notice the trees are still, and then the river reveals itself without drama.

Boats slide past without acknowledging the bank, and I miss a breath, just for a second, and I know that pause because I have lived on water long enough to recognise what my body does in the presence of open movement, but the river does not recognise me back and continues without consultation.

Across the water, buildings stack themselves into seriousness, offices and courts and apartments and ferries threading through them, and from here it looks permanent, but I know that permanence is often just ‘distance’ doing its best impression of ‘stability’.

The wind has room here and uses it, pushing at my skirt and releasing it again, push and release, push and release, and I stand between the river and the library for a moment longer than necessary, between regulation and refusal, between temperature control and weather, and it feels lucky, somehow, to occupy the narrow strip where both arrangements are visible.

Behind me, the automatic doors continue their steady inhale and exhale and the obedient air waits to receive whoever comes back inside.

In front of me, the river moves whether I am watching or not.

The building will take me back in, and the river will not notice.

The doors open again, and I turn toward the cool air, and I let it hold me for a while. Thanks for drifting with me.

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?