My son and I are taking part in a music-dance-storytelling performance of Carnival of the Animals, and the drive home after Sunday rehearsals has been a surprising highlight over the past few months. Not only is it a pleasant one-hour traffic-less cruise, which is rare for this particular stretch, but the calm and relaxed vibe puts me in the right mindset to draft blog posts about this unexpected and amazing experience.

It’s the golden hour car mood.

The other day, my mind was drafting while my son, who plays a kangaroo, a rooster and a fossil (he’s my most versatile child), chilled in the passenger seat and chatted. The dance group gossip about who had slipped up where, who had drawn the director’s wrath, and who had kicked who during cartwheels was very different from our storytelling rehearsals. That part’s just me and four kids who like to goof around with their lines, play cards and order pizza. The road unwound ahead of us, and my mind was working.

The joy of collaboration. A writer who normally goblins their way through a creative session is suddenly thrust into a troupe of talented dancers. Ballerinas, a krumper, a pole dancer, lion dancers…

At the drive’s forty-minute mark, we reached the place where the dual carriageway meets a roundabout for cars coming down from the mountain, and where we all merge onto a gnarly pot-holed road. There’s often a bit of a jam here, so we expected to slow down.

We did not expect to grind to a halt.

Learning lines you wrote yourself is difficult. You’re on Script 5.4 but your brain uses version control and keeps suggesting Script 4.2…

We moved maybe 800 metres in the next two hours.

Beautiful Borneo October sunsets. The aftermath of recent storms leaves wild cloud formations against a hazy sky…

Darkness descended. We existed for the jam. The kangaroo by my side, who hadn’t had anything but a slice of apple pie all day, was in the final dramatic throes of teenage malnutrition.

The unexpected joy of Sunday rehearsals with your offspring…

Our entertainment was the comments on Waze, where eternally patient Sabahans aired their grievances in the most Borneo way possible: jokes that someone had decided to hold a cookout on the road ahead, queries about where to get fried bananas, and commiseration about the state of our roads.

Eventually, late at night and thoroughly wrung out, we limped past the cause of this congestion: a twenty-tonne lorry in a ditch. Nothing major, but hauling it out had closed the road. Once past the monstrosity, we stopped for tea and kangaroo food. My son revived, but the ideas remained unreachable, having evaporated somewhere in that two-hour crawl.

Ah well. Next week is show week. There’ll be more.