AustLit

'Last year, I fell out of a bathtub. Naked on the floor of a hotel bathroom in a cold foreign city calling for help that did not come, I came a little too close to death. When help finally did arrive, ambulance-men carried me through snow-drifts and crowded streets, naked except for the hotel sheet they had wrapped me in, and a hat topped off with a large purple flower. I would like to say I’m making up the detail of the hat, but I’m not. I don’t like to go out without a hat, it makes me feel naked, so I had called for it as they were carrying me out of the room and someone, obligingly, had stuck it on my head with the flower at full-mast so that it looked like one of those oldfashioned flowerpot chimneys. But I was at least on route to hospital and alive—that is until I arrived at the hospital where a nurse, main-lining a drug to relieve the pain, flipped me back into the death I had just escaped.' (Introduction)