Well, it’s October, and I finally have the wherewithal to begin blogging properly. With this reminted commitment to managing my time better, I’ve also begun exercising again. Having two young children and pressing deadlines are fair excuses for not looking after yourself, but they're not bulletproof ones. So, up at five or so to run for forty minutes or an hour, depending on how successful my inner whinge is at convincing me to cut it short. Lost five kilos in a month, so it’s working I guess.

This morning I was running – sun just up, magpies singing, a light breeze tousling the purple jacaranda blooms … and a truck blurts past. Well, trucks and truckies are both essential, but I hate the smell of diesel fumes. Normal exhaust is okay, and I confess a secret love of the smell of jet fuel, but as long as I can remember, the smell of diesel fumes springs open a dark trapdoor within me: it makes me cranky and edgy. If the smell takes me unawares, as it did this morning, with it flashes an image in my mind. It is of the inside of a large warehouse. It has tall banks of dusty windows. There is a sense this is near the water or the docks, but nothing in the picture really suggests it. There is a truck, an old forties or fifties styled thing. The colours in this view are subdued browns, maybe greens. It is a utilitarian, factory -ike setting underscored by the oily tang of diesel.

What does it mean? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just an association made when I was an infant – my childish eyes saw the image of this wharf warehouse just as the fumes from a passing truck wafted inside. Or maybe it’s a fabrication, merely the way my head’s wired. But when I’m in the mood for thinking about story (which is a lot of the time) I wonder if this odd diptych is a leftover from something that happened before I was born.Do I believe in reincarnation? I’m sure not ruling it out. There’s a lot of old wisdom that’s been lost since my forebears left England four generations ago; electricity banished a lot of belief in the spiritual, and I think we can only begin to recapture it when we are far from electric lights. I’d be an atheist if only I had a little less faith in Faith. So, agnostic it is: the truth about the afterlife is unknown, by me at least. But I suspect … how could I populate my stories with ghosts, if at least part of me didn’t believe in them? So, what do I think when I wonder about my strange, vestigial diesel memory? That a life doesn’t vanish, nor does it ascend to the space between stars, but it jumps, like an arc of aforementioned electricity, to the next available vessel? That thought, for a middle-aged white guy living in a first world country, is an unsettling one. I was born into a loving family in a country where the best medicines and education are free to all. Could I just as easily have been born unwanted and unloved, into a slum, or a land of drought, or to a minority despised and hunted? Of course – hundreds of millions of precious lives are; far, far too many children are born poor, raised hungry in places with too little medicine and too much violence, although I know (having a wife who works in social policy) that violence in the home is not predicated upon geography: there are also too many children in my home city who are victims of abuse and neglect.

And there at this uncomfortable siding my train of thought abandons me. The voice suspecting about the continuum of life says: if you’re hit by a truck while jogging tomorrow (and with your last breath you smell, again, the whiff of diesel), where might you wake up? In loving arms in a hospital in Brisbane or Boston or Bristol? Unloved or unwanted in the same city? Or in fearful arms hearing the cries of other hungry children in a night time stitched tight with anxious whispers and the distant sounds of gunfire?

Melodramatic? Self-serving? Doubtless. But I nevertheless arrived home sweating, knowing I must do more to make this world a better place.