"Next weekend I'll paint them," I mutter. "How much more can paint peel in seven days?" No one answers which is just as well as I'm alone in my apartment and console myself with the knowledge that at least I haven't started to hear voices. I've done the washing and changed the bed linen and vacuumed the carpet and made a sandwich for lunch and then revacuumed the carpet to clean up the mess I made eating the sandwich.

I'm perched on the edge of the Saturday afternoon abyss. I'm restless and want to do something but lack the energy to get off my back. I could just lie here, thumbing the TV remote control, or I could get up. Then I remember that as part of my ongoing war against the wire coat hanger, I bought a bundle of white plastic hangers the day before, so I go into the bedroom, rip a dozen shirts out of the wardrobe and rehang them on shiny, white plastic ones.

The pile of bent and twisted wire hangers lying on the floor elevates my spirits. I've done something but, skilled as I am in the art of self-deception, I cannot convince myself that it amounts to a sufficient achievement for a weekend.

   "Whadjadoontheweegend?" someone will ask on Monday morning.
   "Exchanged a dozen wire coat hangers for a dozen white plastic ones," I will reply. "You should try it. It's tremendously uplifting."
   "Weirdo," they will mumble as they retreat.

Then I remember the two boxes I'd stuffed in a closet in the spare bedroom when I'd moved in. Requiring the minimal outlay of energy and being a task which could be performed while seated, sorting the contents of the box exerted an appeal which was difficult to ignore. I could achieve something and not leave the lounge. Brilliant!

So I haul out the box and plunge my hands into its contents, extracting a shoebox crammed with photographs. I leaf through shots of elephants, rhinos and giraffes my grandparents took while on a trip to Africa before coming to one of a man in a safari outfit holding a rifle.

"It's The Idiot!" I cried. The Idiot had been a guide on their first trip into the African wilds and they had followed him one morning on what was to be a two-hour trek through bush in which lions had been seen. Four hours later it occurred to them, as they staggered in ever widening circles, that they may be lost. The Idiot, it transpired, was possessed of a flawed sense of direction, a drawback when walking across the broad, brown swathes of Botswana. They walked for six hours beneath a blazing sun until one of them - not The Idiot - stumbled across a track.

I put down The Idiot and picked up a small black and white photo of a couple standing beside an FJ Holden. It was my maternal grandparents taken in the '60s beside their new car. I remember the car. It had been pale blue.

I dug deeper and there I was slouched in a doorway somewhere in far north Queensland with my backpack in the early '90s and then picked up another shot of me bare-chested and rake-thin, overlooking a bay somewhere in Indonesia taken around 1995.

I flick through the photographs, discarding most but keeping a few.

There is a headshot of me taken when I'd joined Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, fresh faced and clear eyed and with not the vaguest conception of what lay ahead and another of me leaning out of the window of a Daihatsu Handicab in 1996. It was the only car I owned that never crashed, perhaps because it also was the slowest car I ever owned.

There is a photo of my mother, my sister and I taken, I guess, sometime in the '80s and a photo of my girlfriend and her mother in Arizona about ten years ago. "God," I thought. "She's so small." She's 19 now and looks as if she has fallen out of the pages of Vogue.

There is a faded black and white photo of my paternal great-grandmother, squinting into the sun in her back yard in Amsterdam sometime in the '30s and of my grandfather in his woollen army uniform, sitting in front of the fireplace of the same house before the German invasion.

There is another shot of my girlfriend and her mother on a holiday they once took to Melbourne and another of my parents surrounded by their extended family at what must have been a Christmas lunch.

Looking at the photograph of my mother and I and my girlfriend and her mother through a haze of late Saturday afternoon nostalgia, I am suddenly aware of the ties that bind.

Fathers are good. We provide and protect as best we can according to our circumstances, but it's mothers who project that unseen aura that enfolds and nurtures their offspring. We look up to our fathers but we reach out for our mothers. When a child falls, it calls for its mother. When men are dying, it's their mothers they call for.

It's born into mothers, this ability to exude warmth and comfort and affection. Even The Idiot must have had a mother who loved him. It will remain one of the mysteries to which, as men, we are not privy. It is enough, I suppose, to know it is there, cloaking the many among us with its unseen mantle.