It also rains on the Sunshine Coast. Not just the heavy downpours that fight for supremacy with intermittent bursts of steamy sunshine, where you can fill a cup with water if you place it on the roof of your car. But also the drizzling, cold, clammy rain that shuts up the rozellas and makes them take refuge in the dripping park's paperbark trees.

The horizon is shut in with cloud. Mount Coolum disappears behind a curtain of grey wetness. In fact, the entire two-thousand kilometre stretch of Queensland ceases to exist. Roads and houses, fields and forests, beaches and palm trees collapse, fragment, dwindle into nothing.

You dawdle and dither, trying to find something to do. The cold is not so bad. It's the absence of light that gets you, causes a struggle inside you. You've become accustomed to the light and the deep warmth of the sun streaming through the blinds from the north. You are quiet and lazy, waiting for something to spark you off.

You sit down and write a blog post. In two days you will be driving south away from the sun. Into the broad expanses of New South Wales where she is waiting.