I live in a Brisbane (Queensland, Australia) suburb, twenty minutes' drive from the city and surrounded by trees and wildlife.

My garden has been more or less turned over to the birds and possums, who plant their favoured foods. Never again will I need to buy pink peppercorns; they've given me pepper trees everywhere. Early morning feasts of mulberries are courtesy of the wildlife, as are charming flowers and, this week, we noticed by the back fence, a butternut pumpkin vine, fruiting away like mad and still producing dinner-plate sized yellow flowers.

My furred or feathered visitors have also planted a pomegranate tree, which is flowering profusely and I look forward to revisiting my days in Mediterranean countries when it fruits. If the fauna doesn't get there first. Oh, as of May 2008, the pomegranate tree is also producing pumpkins via an upwardly mobile vine. Lunch guests today have gone home with a pumpkin each.

My dog, a Gordon Setter, shares food preferences with the wildlife. At dawn as I gather mulberries, he's biting them from the low branches, expertly spitting out the less ripe fruit. Blast him.

I cook and read and write and listen to marvellous music. My desk is in a large family room which has many bookcases, a bar, and a huge dining table, and I can sit here looking out at cockatoos, bright pink galahs, and king parrots - the kings turn up late in the year and with their blazing scarlet and green plumage I think of them as Christmas parrots.

A huge ceiling fan keeps the room comfortable on the hottest and most humid of days (we expect well over 30C for Christmas, with sweltering humidity) and sends the perfume of mock orange and late jasmine through the house.

I consider I'm well-favoured when it comes to the joys of life. I've friends who think of, and worry about, nothing much else than money; luckily I have no money to worry about but I'm rich in the beauty around me and in my marvellous sons, who don't bother me unnecessarily but appear when we need one another, rather like a genie from a bottle, though in the case of all my sons it'd probably be a bottle of good red.

They searched the country for a pup for me a couple of months after our old Gordon Setter lost his battle with cancer, and presented me with this enormous thing they'd named d'Arenberg, after one of their favourite red wines. Twelve months old now, he's over the teenage phase but as all Gordons are will ever be a puppy.

Odd that a creature trained to utilize great stamina, bred to follow the guns from dawn to dusk, can also become a quiet and affectionate animal in the home. Out of doors, of course, is another matter. He'll never get to hunt, stalk and point for hours on end as he was bred for, but he surely gains great pleasure from his life with us. My sons also bought him a cat, a tiny wisp of grey fluff which thinks it's a tiger. The same age as the dog, they wrestle until she's had enough. It's fun to watch, but less funny when they took their friendly skirmishes onto my bed around four am each morning. Now I keep my bedroom door shut.

Someone told the winery about the Naming of the Dog, and my youngest son had couriered to his office from the other end of our continent a complimentary deluxe edition of the book, Wine Dogs, courtesy of d'Arenberg Wines, a lovely surprise. That son took me on a luxury holiday to the Barossa Valley in South Australia as a treat the previous year; we saw the book there at d'Arenberg, but forgot to buy a copy. Must've been distracted by the wine. We were delighted with the gift.

There isn't much to say about myself. I've worked in industrial relations and have a talent for reading legislation; the last decade of my working life has been in intellectual property research, specializing in trademarks, but encompassing patents and general research. It was all fun, and now I don't do it any more I revel, instead, in the freedom which allows me to look out from my desk at trees and birds, rather than a city skyline, and when someone interrupts my train of thought it's a silky black-and-tan hound who thinks I'm God, and not a senior partner who wants me to do the impossible and backdate it to last week.

I've taught cooking, and still grind my own spices in granite mortars my sons have bought for me.

I love music of all types but with a strong preference for the classical. Musicals now available on DVDs are an immense pleasure, and the traditional music of my homeland, with its pipes and drums and joyous song and dance, reminds me who I am when I get outside of a pint of Guinness at the oldest Irish club in the world.

I've extensive experience of Italian cooking and while I can do wondrous comforting Irish things involving a lot of butter, potatoes and even cabbage, not a week goes by without a big pot of sugo simmering on the stove.

The pasta machine is never neglected; our kitchen is cosmopolitan or, possibly now multicultural.

Curry is a favourite feature here.

So that's me. Not very exciting, just muddling along through life and enjoying the scenery on the way.