Jesus Christ! A white vortex has appeared and is rapidly approaching, its bright lights ripping my eyes. It hurts like nothing I have previously experienced. It is obvious that opening the curtains was a bad idea after all. With my eyes screwed firmly shut I take a firm hold of the curtains again and decisively pull them to. What the hell is the sun thinking anyway? This is January in Scotland, not the fucking Bahamas.
   Quite content with how the world is rapidly falling apart and scratching my chest with an unconscious nonchalance I stumble into the hall, realising that applying the word 'nonchalance' to the act of scratching yourself makes it sound so chic it is probably not considered offensive in the New Town of Edinburgh.
   In the hallway I find a stuffed koala bear, a packet of Tim Tams and a newspaper article referring to an extensive local population of marsupials. The discovery of this very much meeting with my approval I take out a Tim Tam to dunk into my cup of tea. I place it on the kitchen counter and switch on the kettle. Then I head for the fridge and inspect the state of our milk.
   It's not until I physically dip the chocolate into my morning beverage that I realise these things are not sold around these parts and that the last time I saw a marsupial I was very much enjoying a kangaroo burger with sauce and onions in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Something is amiss here.
   Tip-toeing back to my bedroom I carefully poke my head around the door and ask whether she wants sugar in her tea. No answer. So at least that makes sense. Having now begun scratching my head and nibbling on the candy I am trying to figure out whether I have been drinking too much, or whether I have landed in the Twilight Zone.
   Now, my girlfriend was Australian. Still is, as far as I'm aware. Australian that is, not my girlfriend. Technically speaking she is Tasmanian, which most Aussies will argue makes you a lot of things, most of them not particularly flattering, but not Australian. I'm not that particular though and so to me she was Australian. Just a very short one.
   So up until a few months ago the sight of grey hairy things usually hanging from tree branches stoned out of their skulls, writing in Australian, flags with big stars and other such nonsense lying around the house would have surprised me just as much as size four-and-a-half trainers and Moby cd's, which I have heard the Israeli army is now using to torture people with. These things are only fun with two E's, stuck firmly in your ears. But point here is that back then Tim Tams made sense.
   Nowadays however, the tiny Tazzie lives in London. Personally I would much rather slash a major artery with an electrical lawn mower than move to the South East of England but then this may very well have been one of her major considerations when deciding to relocate down there.
   And so the question remains how these particular delicious and highly nutritious chocolate-coated biscuits managed to materialise on pretty much the exact wrong end of the globe, our household comprising of a mix of natives and Europeans and in present day the only people romantically linked to us being German. I quickly realise my investigations are leading nowhere because I am not properly fed this morning and so I need another Tim Tam.    The answer comes in the shape of a box with our address on it, mailed from Melbourne. Victoria, not Florida you will understand. It's from my flatmates' former flatmate. This in turn leads me to make a mental not to drop by the post office and enquire how much it would cost to mail our upstairs neighbour to Namibia. Second class, obviously.