1950s motel.

Wheat silos loomed, came alongside like ocean liners docking, and then receded in the rearview mirror.

Time stood still, but that’s just the impression you get when you're driving for hours, dead west, far away from deadlines and neurotic cities. At 2.30 the large town's outer reaches appeared; the usual jumble of old machinery yards, abandoned grain warehouses and fenced blocks with nothing in them but long grass and lonely old tractors. We hit the north-south main street of Warracknabeal at its southern end.

The motel was at the end of a wide road perpendicular to the main street. It was a ten-unit low-rise relic of the 1950s with a gravel-paved forecourt and a porch jutting out over the gravel, supported by daring postmodern raked stems. I had collected the key - unit two - from the screen-doored office where the owner, a friendly yokel, had perceptively addressed me by my childhood nickname despite never having met me before. (My initials are an old brand of chewing gum.)

I fired up the motel-issue kettle and made motel-issue coffee using three of those paper twist things with at least as much sugar. If sugar didn't exist I would not drink coffee. I sat outside unit two, inhaled the coffee and wondered who had once gazed out the darkened windows of the gloomy building across the road.