Journey Down Under

“Oh don’t worry about Ella, kids adapt better to jet leg than adults” – erm….no they don’t. At least, not my child. Having put Ella to bed at 10pm on our last night in Hong Kong, she slept for a total of two hours before shouting us to announce she had a “nice bo-bo” thank you very much.

We ignored her of course, but being a crafty so and so, she tried all of the other tactics she could think of, including shouting “I’ve done a poo” and “got stinky bottom”, before launching into tune (there’s not much in this world funnier than an 18 month old child singing “The Irish Rover”, or what parts of it she can remember).

Eventually we got some Phenergan into her and wheeled her cot into the sitting room, but after that I didn’t sleep a wink because I now have two lives to worry about (the one in the UK with the potentially loose roof tiles and the new one in Sydney with no roof at all).

It’s funny how worries look progressively worse as a sleepless night goes on. It started with the casual observation that we only had four nappies left in our suitcase, but after we had tried and failed to find a shop that sold them, I now lay awake picturing the following scenarios:

1. Ella is forced to wear swim nappies all the way to Sydney. As my friend Catie found out on a flight last summer, swim nappies are designed to catch the odd poo but not designed to hold any liquid.

2. Darren goes out at 6am to find nappies but is captured by three-legged Hong Kong Triads (I could never quite separate the word from “tripod”, hence I’ve always pictured them with three legs) and never returns (their motives are unimportant, they obviously hold a grudge as we are colonising British scumbags).

3. I am reliant upon their being another child with the same sized bottom on the flight to Sydney. I plead sisterhood with the child’s mother, who lends me two nappies but judges me as a bad mother and spends the entire flight casting her eye over my ability to be jolly entertaining and creative with stickers. As a paediatric SLT, I am obviously totally rubbish with kids unless their parents are watching, so I come off badly.

4. The Qantas cabin crew give me their last two nappies and tell me to ask at all of the other Qantas boarding gates. Although demeaning, this scenario probably leads to a large stash of nappies which will last us a week.


Poor Darren. He was out on the streets at 6.05pm charged with finding (a) Starbucks skinny latte and (b) nappies. The triads didn’t get him, but he only returned with the Starbucks.