Pink Floyd – particularly the two albums I mentioned – were literally part of the soundtrack of my childhood. I think Dad came back from a jungle stay (he’s a geologist; at the time did a lot of work in South East Asia) with tapes of Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, then played them obsessively, to the point where I can still sing most of the lyrics to the songs. He then gave me and my younger brother The Wall album for Christmas when I was about twelve, then took us both to the movie a couple of years later, when we were probably too young to see it. My brother took up the drums in early high school, and had a large collection of their albums, particularly the earlier psychedelic ones (he’s still a muso); then I remember Dad taking us on a family outing to see their concert in Sydney (without Roger Waters) when I was in early university. So for his 60th birthday, I sang him Wish You Were Here (my bro on guitar), ‘cos they were such a part of my memory of late childhood and teenage years.

And yeah, Medium and its love of the listicle and life hack. I just don’t get it – thousands of followers and claps for the same old recycled content, written in one sentence paragraphs, bullet point wisdom(!) and lots of white space, as who wants to read blocks of text? Meanwhile the true creative writers struggle to gain traction. I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and the occasional short fiction here for nearly a year (does that mean I should start thinking about the obligatory anniversary post?) and am finally getting a bit of traction – helped by submitting to some of the bigger literary publications here, and building up a small literary community of fiction writers and poets. But I still feel like Medium itself doesn’t really value our offerings. I keep hearing about Medium paying $100 partner bonuses to people for sometimes fairly flimsy blog posts with a catchy current headline, with Medium saying they’re rewarding ‘valuable writing’; but I’m yet to hear of such bonuses being paid to a fiction writer or poet. But I’ll try not to be bitter (you’re right, it’s better to keep a sense of humour!), and keep on writing…