As a child, my unattainable object of desire was a giant Derwent pencil set. I knew that if I could just get my hands on one of those big boxes, my whole life would be more colourful. It took four decades but last Christmas I finally scratched that itch and bought myself a set of 36 Derwents. I pored over those creatively-named pencils, wondering who’d first come up with Blue Violet Lake and Golden Brown.

One of the things I miss most about life before You-Know-What is singing with choirs. Monday nights you would normally find me hanging out with a chamber choir. Wednesday nights it was a French choir, and on Sunday nights the neighbours had to put up with my noisy quartet. Tiring days morphed into inspiring nights when I was making music with other tired-then-inspired choristers.

Want to hear a good news story? Fifteen years ago I travelled from the north to the south coast of Timor Leste to visit some friends. We hadn’t met before, but we were officially friends, courtesy of an agreement between my local council and theirs. In 2005 there were a handful of ‘friendships’ between Australian local governments and East Timorese communities. The City of Port Phillip, where I was living, had befriended the town of Suai in the district of Covalima, and I was curious to see what that friendship looked like.

When you’re childless not by choice, Mother’s Day can be a painful reminder of profound loss. For some it’s miscarriage, for others it’s infertility, and then there’s something called ‘circumstances’, a term with a complex set of sub-categories. My story involves all three.