‘Do you want anything from the store?’ Richard asked. He was preparing for an evening raid on the supermarket. I was about to start cooking dinner and had just been contemplating the unsatisfactory prospect of a meal without any vegetables.

‘Yes!’ I said. I thought for a moment. ‘A cucumber, please.’

‘A cucumber?’ Richard repeated. He looked sceptical.

‘I like cucumbers,’ I confirmed. ‘I usually have one in the fridge… Wait a second, maybe I do have one…’

I went over to the fridge, opened the door, pulled out the vegetable compartment and saw it — a vacuum-sealed medium-sized English cucumber.

‘Yes, there it is!’ I was delighted. I don’t often forget what food I have in the house. This discovery was like finding out that a wiser Joan from the past had put something away for a rainy day.

‘So, no cucumber then?’ said Richard.

‘No. Thanks, though.’

It was too good to last. The pink shower pouf that I had gotten in a Christmas cracker finally fell apart. I’m impressed it lasted as long as it did (six weeks).

At work, my whole team has been working long hours to meet a flurry of deadlines. At the height of our stress, Anna, our team’s PA, sent this around with the message: “This is a big warning to everyone to look out for colleagues and not to work to hard!”

I dreamed I lived in a show like 24. Undercover, I worked my way into the baddies headquarters and shot two of them. The head baddie came over and I played the dumb girl, all confused. He believed me, that it was an accident.

Also, somehow, we were a couple.

We were on our way to somewhere in the suburbs and we kept running into my high school friends. I ducked my head so that they wouldn’t see me but it didn’t work. One after another, people came up to me.

‘Hi Joan!’ they said. ‘Joan, is that you?’

I pretended to be oblivious. Then the baddie noticed what was happening.

‘Hey, are they talking to you?’ he eventually asked.

‘What?’ I said, wide-eyed and innocent. ‘What are they saying?’

He looked at me as if for the first time. ‘You do look a lot like her,’ he murmured.

‘Who’s Joan?’ I asked. I could hear my heartbeat in the silence.

‘She’s a very high up goodie.’ He peered at me carefully, heartache at the edge of his eyes. Then he shook his head and willed it away. ‘No. Of course not. You couldn’t be.’

I knew it was only a matter of time before my cover was blown.

Yesterday, mum and I went through almost my entire wardrobe to decide what I should take back to the UK with me. We focused on work clothes — shirts, blouses, dress pants, winter skirts, and so on.

Very soon, clothes covered almost every surface in our family room. We began with three piles: definitely take; maybe take; definitely not take. But the piles evolved. By the end of our sorting session, we had: definitely look at again and choose what to take; maybe look again; don’t take but leave in Melbourne to wear when I come home; leave for mum to wear; pass on to relatives; donate to charity.

The donate to charity pile was the largest by far. Mum would look at a shirt or a pair of pants and say, bewildered, ‘What were we thinking when we bought that? It’s so short/tight/loose/bright/complicated/ugly!’

Indeed, this kind of retrospective brings home to me how subtly influenced we all are by fashion trends. Only two or three years ago, the fashion was to have short tops that hung no further down than the hips. I remember throwing out clothes that were ugly because they were so long.

Now, we are back to long tops and suddenly, these short shirts and blouses look ridiculous. It’s the same with pants. The fashion was for close fitting pants, then wide legged ones, and now we’re back to closer fits. That’s one fashion I won’t follow. Wide legged pants suit me so I’m sticking with those.

Mum put all the charity clothes into a box. ‘We normally give clothes to the Diabetes Foundation but they haven’t called us in a long time,’ she said. ‘We’ll put them downstairs so they’re out of the way.’

That night at dinner, the phone rang. Mum picked it up. ‘Hello? Yes…’

Dad muttered, ‘Hang up, don’t talk to telemarketers.’

But mum stayed on the phone and we heard her say, ‘Yes! We have lots of clothes! 7:30 AM on Thursday? No problem. We will leave them outside the door.’

Somehow, the Diabetes Foundation knew we were ready for them.

During an extended family gathering a few weeks ago, my dad heard a high pitched ringing sound.

‘What’s that?’

But no one else could hear it… except my 15 year old cousin, Simon. It was his mobile phone. Did you know that phone manufacturers are selling phones with high frequency ring tones? The frequency is such that anyone over the age of 25 can’t hear it! Perfect for school! The teachers can’t hear the joke that everyone else is in on.

I have spent the last four days hanging out with mum, dad and Jason, eating at favourite restaurants and shopping for work clothes. The other thing that I’ve now ticked off on the ‘to do’ list was what mum called my ‘major service’. Like a car, I’ve been getting my annual check ups and oil changes. I’ve been to the doctor, the dentist, had some blood tests and an x-ray. I seem to be in good nick.

When I see my cousin this weekend, I guess I’ll have my hearing checked.

I flew home to Melbourne on Wednesday, arriving Thursday. I have a cold and felt wretched for most of the 23 hour trip. The only movie I could manage was 300, a bloody movie that I kind of enjoyed in my ill state. All I can say is that it achieved its aim of stylised glorified violence very well. It’s interesting how many people praised it for being historically faithful and emotional, as if it had aims other than beautiful fight scenes.

I’m at home with mum and dad and enjoying it a lot. Jason asked me, ‘So, Joan. Does it feel like you never left?’

It is often true that when one leaves and comes back to find things exactly the same, it does feel like you never left. But I couldn’t say yes in this case because I now appreciate home (and Australian) comforts more than before I left. It is nice having a fridge full of yummy food that you didn’t buy or didn’t cook. It’s nice to have a fully functional house, with no silly taps or broken lights. It was very nice to fly in at night and it to be 19°C.

I am still sick but I reckon I’ll get better soon.

There was probably something wrong with the six light bulbs in our kitchen. They would flicker and go out at least once a month so we were always putting in maintenance requests. The maintenance crew would then come around and change the bulbs. We weren’t allowed to do it, in case we got hurt.

Anyway, they finally decided to put in a permanent solution. Yesterday, our friendly maintenance man came to replace the six tungsten bulbs with halogens. (While he was installing the lights, I did ask if they had considered using the more energy efficient compact fluorescent bulbs but apparently CFLs don’t fit.)

So now we have a bright new kitchen in which we can cook late into the night and read our newspapers and novels.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand or sit directly beneath a light for long. It gets uncomfortably warm. Maybe this will be an advantage in winter?

It would be interesting to track our house’s electricity bill. I’m betting they will be much higher now.

The house is starting to fill up as people return from their December holidays. Normally, I’m happier when there are people around but it’s kind of difficult for me to interact at the moment. I burned the tip of my tongue on coffee a few days ago and it’s quite painful to speak. As a result, I’m currently boring and lifeless.

When I got to England, I bought a new laptop. I bought a Toshiba because I like the brand. The keyboards are nice.

However, I paid a premium for the brand and to partly offset this, I only got 256 MB of RAM. I thought this would be okay. It wasn’t. You can no longer survive on 256 MB. It took me about 40 seconds to rotate a photo.

So I bit the bullet and bought 1 GB of RAM from eBay. I love eBay. My Strategy lecturer says that eBay’s strategy is marketing against non-consumption.

I installed the RAM today and the laptop runs like a dream.