I’m absolutely exhausted today. This is the consequence of staying up until 1 a.m. and getting up a mere five hours later. You know how it is. I was writing away last night. I thought that I really should go to bed. Then I thought, Well, I’ll just finish this. And this won’t take long. Nor this. Next thing I know I’m listening to the 1 a.m. news on the radio. Lawks!

And I had to get up at six-ish because I promised my demonstrators that I’d look for some flowers for their lab classes. So at 7 a.m., I was roaming Yarraville, Seddon and Footscray, hunting for four-petalled flowers. My passage through the neighbourhood was accompanied by a chorus of howling hounds. People must have thought that a banshee was on the prowl. (They wouldn’t have been too wrong, either.)

I got nothing. Not a sausage. No four-petalled flowers anywhere. So I bought a cheese and olive roll from Baker’s Delight and drove into work, sadly empty-handed but happily greasy-fingered.

Now I’m stuck here being inefficient because I can’t concentrate. This is a problem as I’m trying to write notes for tomorrow’s lecture—3.6 billion years of evolution in 50 minutes. At 72 million years a minute, that should be interesting. I hope the little dears can write quickly enough ...