It was only on Saturday that I commented to a friend that it felt like the world was trembling; as if we were all birds taking flight, or animals seeking higher ground, in the face of an approaching storm.

I didn’t quite know what was registering in my body – starvation, slaughter, war, the relentless cooking of the planet, the never-ending hallucination of a mobster in the White House, the housing crisis, social media-fuelled disinformation, a collective loss of trust, an end to any shared reality, or all of the above.

Digitally altered image. Photo: Mark Baker/APCredit:

I’d been feeling for a long time that this was no ordinary time, that somewhere in my nervous system – perhaps in all our nervous systems – I’d been tuned to a frequency bandwidth of disturbance, and that a great disturbance was coming our way.

It was with relief, therefore, that I went down to south Bondi on Sunday evening to have dinner with my partner and two friends – two Jewish men and two non-Jewish women together at Gelbison, a family-run restaurant that has been serving our community its own Italian comfort food for nearly four decades. We were there for about five minutes when the gunshots rang out. I didn’t hear them at first because of the noise of people screaming and diving under tables, and then the mad rush to the back of the restaurant, where there was no exit.

“I can’t believe my daughter is consoling me,” one stricken mother said, as we pressed against the walls, mostly in stunned silence.

Hundreds of people were running........

© The Sydney Morning Herald