A mother bends over a baby’s stroller while her daughter stands complaining.

Mother: What’s that?

Daughter: I said I really need a wee!

Ashfield, Sydney. A magpie limps across a driveway and pauses in the shade.

Two girls are eating on the B1 home. Their jaws work constantly. One holds the point of a skewer near her face, wondering perhaps what an eye would taste like.

A motor scooter clings to the bends in Neutral Bay, its meal delivery bag squashed back and pointing at the sky like a rocket-launcher.

A woman dangles her arm from the window of a ute stopped in traffic at the Burnt Bridge Creek Bypass. It’s late afternoon, the sun is hot, and her arm is a strip of leather.

Concrete tank turrets are appearing on our footpaths. No guns. Just a pole extending from each, vertically, to a tiny solar panel.

Brookvale. Three teens on scooters glide across Pittwater Road in single file, straight into a shop on the corner called Golden Chicken.

Two ravens take flight the instant I move the slats of my blinds apart. They are so attuned to their environment, so aware of the slightest hint of movement. The leader climbs the broken hostel wall in stages, short hops of flight from level to level, and pauses on the very top. When I return with my camera they’re gone.

Entropy

For the first time ever, in all the days and weeks he’s been on-site, Foreman is wearing a high-viz vest - a bright yellow one that looks new.

He still won’t wear a hard hat.

Two girls in Collaroy pool are half-encased in mermaid tails. Their dolphin kick needs work.

A wide vehicle ascends the hill with four legs sticking out the front. Stretched to arms' length, a mother leans into the load.

Even the bus is feeling the heat: it’s dripping condensation on my arm.

A toddler makes it all the way to the path with grown-up thongs as footwear. She sits, takes off the thongs, turns them around and climbs aboard again. Shuffling back towards her smiling family she topples forward, landing on her hands with her nappy pointing at the sky. She stands. Laughter and applause. She grins.

Blokes my age crossing the road: we lead with our stomachs.

A smiling girl curves down the Spit Bends on a shiny red motor scooter.

Two old men at the car wash, with an angle-grinder and drill: they’re patching a hole in the blackboard.

A woman in Neutral Bay, hand on hip, stares sceptically at her phone.

At Wynyard Park a young woman is lying on her front. Raised on one elbow, she speaks on the phone amid wandering ibis and seagulls.

A woman in black lace at Wynyard Park: stooped, shuffling, tapping her way with a four-footed walking stick.

A girl crosses Spit Road in Mosman, shading her face with a gigantic lollipop.

A skinny Asian man in skinny black pants and a bright yellow top stumbles onto the footpath from a cliffside garage, and looks down the hill: heat, asphalt, fading lines, cars, trucks, noise. At the bottom is the deep blue mystery of Middle Harbour: irrelevant.

Sunday morning in the city. A woman walks briskly towards George Street with her supermarket bags and two big bottles: orange juice and milk.

A man and a woman emerge from the Strand Arcade and stand there, looking around.

Man: Where’s the iMac store?