About fifteen months ago, I became determined to realise a dream I had – to be a guest star on The Muppet Show. I had already spent a few years watching The Muppet Show and fantasising that I was the person being surrounded by Muppets and singing with them. Now I wanted to see if I could actually appear on The Muppet Show. So I set about contacting the producers of the show and thus entered into a protracted series of secret negotiations with them.

Our mother’s face was triumphant in the torchlight, but she refused to tell us what she’d found. Though my sister kept on asking her, I held my tongue, believing there was not, and never would be, anything down there but cold and darkness, and full of anger at our mother’s ignorance and spite.

I think: the sugar’s hit the brain / when she’s finished / she slurps the rest of her tea / and says / ‘australians only believe in fark’ / ‘what?’ / ‘you know, fark – that’s all they say around here: / fark fark fark why do they have to say / that / all the time for?

Jola and Mirek are generous, hospitable, and the only remotely bourgeois people we will meet for the entire two months we are in Poland. After a forty-hour journey from Australia, a sumptuous meal and wine, the talk flowed, and I learnt my most enduring lessons about Poland. The Jewish question is vexed. The Polish Pope Jan Paweł II is sacrosanct; by extension the current German Pope Benedict XVI is highly regarded. And, as Mirek said, I have gay friends, but I do not want it rubbed in my face.

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