Calls from mum yesterday and today. She hasn't yet received The Double which I mailed last week, but she has found the acrylic painting I made of my grandmother so many years ago. Yesterday I drove down to Studio 275 in Earlwood to pick up my four identical prints — now framed — of a Japanese temple. After I made them, they were hand-coloured individually, each in a different hue. The temple is located outside Osaka, at Nara. I can still remember walking up the hillside with the young woman who showed me around the region, playing 'rock, paper, scissors' as we climbed. The frame has parallel cuts all around the dark wood, and now hangs above the TV, opposite my red vinyl couch. The daughter of the Argentinian owner served me, a tall, handsome, blonde girl. Much of the shop's stock is in the form of Greek Orthodox icons — there's a Greek church just across the street — which are made to look ancient but only succeed in looking fake.

I noticed in the Herald yesterday that Tash Aw is shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, having won the Best First Book Award for the South-East Asia and South Pacific region, for The Harmony Silk Factory.

On the way back down Beamish Street yesterday I stopped to chat with a friendly chap in a blue shirt standing on the lawn in front of his house. On a whim I asked if he had received his copy of the Bankstown Canterbury Torch, as they haven't been delivering it to our block of flats. He went into his house and kindly returned with his own copy, which he gave to me. His name is Gerald.