Friday morning. I’m in the city for a course, and I’m early. Summer’s ending. It’s a bright, fresh morning and I’m in fine spirits, for no particular reason other than the weather, and that’s a good feeling. I have a quarter of an hour before I’m due in the world of work, and I’m going to try out the funky café I spotted the previous day, the one that looks like it’s been transplanted from Melbourne. Association. Hard by the Gherkin, it’s light and airy. I’m drawn in by the aroma of coffee and pastries. I order a latte and sit at the end of a long tile-topped table. There are jugs of water with sprigs of mint. Music, but it’s not obtrusive. My latte arrives and I am not disappointed. Strong but not bitter, a good colour, and the right proportion of milk to coffee. And I dive back into the journal I was reading on the tube, RABBIT, ‘a journal for non-fiction poetry’, which I bought on my last trip to Melbourne back in March. RABBIT number three: The Visual Issue. I’m surprised and excited by almost everything in this smart, handsomely produced journal. Ekphrastic poems inspired by paintings and art installations; Oulipian limericks that rhyme visually but not aurally; concrete poems and Dada-istic typographic explosions; references to Sweeney Reed and Fred Williams and Yarra Bend Park. I’m drinking a proper heart-starting latte and reading some mightily impressive poetry, and for fifteen minutes that is my world, I’m in London and Melbourne at the same time. Transported.