I drove past a pair of high heeled shoes abandoned in the middle of the road somewhere near the Monash University in Caulfield.  I wanted to go back and see what condition they were in and whether they might suit one of my daughters, but I kept getting further away.

Then half asleep in the early morning I was with my husband who had promised to give a friend of one of our daughters a lift to work, but our car was no longer available and so we set off on foot.

We took a route that was familiar to us, one we had travelled often many years before but not recently.  It involved a short cut through several properties and I worried the whole time that we would get caught; that we would upset the people who lived in these houses; or that we would be thought of as burglars.

All these things happened as we raced through corridors of unknown houses on the pretext that they were apartment dwelling corridors and communal spaces, only to discover they came to an end in some stranger’s kitchen.

At one point as we were leaving someone’s back yard I could see the occupants of the attached house in the distance.  They started to chase us. We ignored them and ran off up the street.

Someone else further up the street pulled out of a driveway in his hotted up hoon car and tried to stop us. With Herculean strength I managed to push his slow moving car to one side so that we could all get past and in the process I tipped it over to one side. The driver was trapped inside of his peeled back soft top.  He only needed to unbuckle his seat belt to free himself.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ my husband said.  ‘You’ll only infuriate him more.’

Then I imagined someone else coming out to hose us as punishment, rather like the Dutch hosed down the German collaborators after the Second World War.