I don't go to many movies. The operative word here is go. When I watch them now, I see old ones on TV or new ones on demand, for money. But my son Matt and I go to the "picture show" as it used to be called long ago. He does't like talky movies and I don't like horror, so we go to Marvel movies, shoot-em up, bang bang, action stuff. Hence Spiderman Two this weekend. Well, duh. And also aaargh.

Usually I let the falling buildings and flashing 3-D images wash over me and let them go but this blockbuster woke me in the night. It had too much plot, too many arbitrary decisions with no explanation and way too many unanswered trail ends. I was busy writing in my head trying to fill in the blanks. Some of it was just stupid, though. Too bad, because good supporting actors were wasting their energies. Just think: Colm Fiore, the human villain, as opposed to some unexplained iron men, is going to be King Lear this summer at Stratford. And Sally Field has gone from Mrs. Lincoln to Peter Parker's aunt, unaware after all these years that he was laundering his own Spiderman smalls. The principals, Spiderman and his girlfriend, are charming and fairly good actors when they get to play something other than the angst of the moment, and I would rather have watched them do something other than making out on the tallest building in the city. Maybe that's just me because I have a fear of heights.

So I was awake far too early and went on from there to other considerations, too much to cope with at three in the morning. It's almost six now and I'm going to swim. I call my morning swim wet meditation and I really need it today.

Fiscal year, that is. I've done my income tax submission and I've done my GHST report for the quarter, so I feel quite clear, not light-hearted,exactly, but light-headed. The nicest thing about tax time is that you don't have to do it again for a year. But there's something else, a subtle bonus not apparent in the neat presentation of numbers. Tax time presents a total recall of the year that was. Every receipt comes with a memory attached. I get to relive any trips I took, food I enjoyed, purchases I made, whether sensible or extravagant.

My father used to say, about travelling, that you're only sorry for what you didn't do. You'll forget the cost of what you did but not the memory, so go ahead and splurge. I took a sight-seeing bus from Queenstown, New Zealand, over to Milford Sound for a boat trip. As we were parking, the guide announced that a ten-seater plane was available to fly a few of us (ten, in fact) back over the Southern Alps. Yes! My hand shot up before he could say how much it would cost. I was my father's daughter. (Why have I drifted into italics?)

I also leapt at the chance to take a hot air balloon trip over the African veldt. And my dad was right. I remember looking down on the back of an eagle and the top of an elephant, but have only a vague recollection of the price. It came back to me, briefly, when I was totting up the numbers for the taxman that year. I have one question:

Why, with my fear of heights, do I always end up in the air?