Reaching September presents a new challenge. Or another challenge among a world of stalker glasses and outrage algorithms and elected imbeciles and emergency department visits and terrifying magpies and the prospect of becoming senior.

It’s September already, and potential calendar content is tracking seriously under trend. Much like my superannuation balance.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. There should be Greek islands and Alpine meadows in the bank but instead there’s pictures of leaking taps and hospital beds and cancelled reservations. But, you know what. If I scroll my camera reel, from the falling leaves of May to the darling buds of September, there is a great deal of happiness captured in highly processed resolution.

Like medieval jousting and both types of monotreme and varieties of ice cream and jolly orange people and fifty metre all golds and greens occasionally in regulation and crazy plants and colourful birds and cheese and onion crisps from Devon on a hike.

There are also pictures of happy people in Greece and feasts among the mountains of France. Sharing is caring after all. And – from this side of the globe – an unanticipated winter trip to Sydney. The kind of winter trip where blue skies are unmatched and there’s a soothing calm in the sheltered warmth.

Having lived in Australia now for twenty years, you come to appreciate Sydney as a much more appealing prospect in winter. You can even stay in Bondi without encountering too many influencers writhing around and pouting. Earthier types are more en vogue, wearing battered sandals, loose-fitting shorts and a grubby shirt. They haven’t shaved in years. Homeless aesthetic but probably owning something in the area of five million.

In Sydney in winter you can comfortably park at Watsons Bay and take a wander past the pelicans waiting for lunch service at Doyles. You can meander along village lanes fringed with modest but immaculate homes, shaded by palms and fig trees and all of that glossy green shrubbery assembled like a mass abandonment of house plants. You can inch feet into the sand at Camp Cove with its city views as the ferry to Manly navigates the heads. And further along, you can even still get nude – should you wish – without too much diminished at Lady Bay.

Sydney in winter is just a few days when the nose and hands and feet and any other extremity are relieved from the cold of Canberra (even with, inevitably, the mildest winter on record). It’s far from the sweltering madness of Athens in July, but it breaks up the struggle. And there may even be a decent snap or two in it.