My grandfather's name was Stanley Wemyss. He was a cinematographer. He was honored by the Queen of England for his war photography services to New Zealand. When he died I was living in Australia. He'd come over about six months earlier to try and explain to me that he was dying. But I was a young kid, ,very much involved in what I was doing. And I ended up electing to go to a Japanese restaurant. And that meant that he got even further inside the normal reticence that he had Because he couldn't eat rice, the smell of soy sauce and stuff like that, from what he experienced, it was something that brought other things back to him that he didn't want to go near. But I was so caught up in what I was doing - I was essentially starving myself, I was living in this hotel, I was probably spending $3.50 a day on fried rice and cigarettes. So when my grandfather says, "I want to take you out to dinner," I said, "That restaurant! I pass it every fucking day. Here!" I completely forgot his connection to the Japanese and the war.

The day he died, I'm in the kitchen of a flat in Woollahara, which is an eastern suburb of Sydney. So I'm standing in the kitchen and a bird which is no longer prevalent in that area landed on the window sill of the kitchen. And they're big birds. It's of the king fisher family. And he stared at me. And I looked at the bird and I thought, "Fuck. My grandfather's dead." I went to the phone and rang my mother. She was crying and she said, "Yeah. How did you know?" Just the other week, this woman who was in business with my grandfather and who had not been in contact with my the family since he died, through my brother decided to come and stay with the family for a couple of days. Now, I'm in England during all of this. But I had an incredibly sleepless night where between every dream I had a vision of holding my mother. So I finally got through to her and said, "I had this dream. . ." and she said, "Darlin', this is what happened.!

This lady who knew was in business with Stan, she stayed here and we were talking about Stan and talking about his death. And she said on the day that Stan died, "I was standing in my lounge room and this bird flew to the window." My mother just lost it. So all of the people my grandfather couldn't explain things to while he was alive were visited. And that sent me off. Perhaps, angels? The gift of flight? Perhaps it's just birds and we've manufactured it into this other thing. So maybe the next stage after walking on the earth is the gift of flight. Ah, it's all bullshit. But it's something to think about, isn't it?'t?