The Weekly Review

I remember her as the wild kid in class, with hair that looked like seagulls had flocked in it, wearing op-shop taffeta ball gowns with desert boots to school. She was funny, impressive and a little intimidating, and I wanted to be her friend.

Where have all the heroes and heroines of our childhood gone? Vanished, disappeared behind their capes, lassoed themselves into oblivion and spun out of our earthly holding pattern.

The other night, without any one forcing me, I left the romantic glow of my gas heater, stormed up the road to the supermarket, purchased a hog’s trough amount of chocolate, jogged home and shovelled the lot into my gob.

The blood had already drained from my face, and my heart was sinking at the news: another dog attack; another pitbull terrier – and most sickening of all, a dead four-year-old child. This was not Liberia or Sudan: it was suburban Melbourne. Again.

Athletes and artists call it the “zone”. Psychologists identify it as “flow” – that state where thought and activity, mind and muscle, move as one, almost without effort, without intention.