I’ve had a very unintentional absence from the world after landing in Melbourne on Friday. Saturday evening I became sick at an alarming rate and ended up in hospital with needles in my arm and sealed in a Negative Pressure Zone surrounded by doctors in all manner of sterile suits as I managed to meet the requirements of epidemic paranoia, viz. I had been in Southern China, had been in close proximity to chickens, and was now mostly comatose from some unknown-until-all-the-blood-had-been-drained-from-the-patient-for-tests malady.

I was also completely delirious and unable to even sit up without expectorating my last meal in sticky threads of bile and Indian curry goo, and in a moment of quite sublime and flattering strangeness as the radiologist was about to take chest x-rays, he asked, “you’re not pregnant are you?”, replied by another stream evacuated from my stomach.

Paul and Bonnie have been looking after me since, and I have been mostly asleep or insensate, being woken for pills, soup, pills, water, pills, and today I managed to shuffle around and am still trying to work out what day it is, and what exactly happened. My brain and body are not functioning very well and I intend on sleeping a lot, however if large swathes of people commence reenacting the black plague, once again as with SARS, it was me.