The Witching Hours

There are some days I look at my watch more often than others. Today was one of them.

Darren is working evenings this week, which means he starts at 4.30pm and we eat our main meal at lunchtime. It's a bit limiting because you always have to be home for 4pm, but it beats the shift patterns in the UK, where time as a family is limited to a couple of days a month. There are huge quality of life issues for trainee consultants in the UK. Not so here in Australia. The consultants here are contracted to work 70 days per year in the public healthcare system. That pays the bills, and after that they are free to do private work, which brings in serious amounts of money, enough money to be more than very comfortable. Information like that doesn't help when you are thinking of reasons to stay in the UK.

We had a plan to go down to Watson's Bay today and eat fish and chips from Doyle's on the jetty for lunch in the style of a family from the Boden catalogue. If you've never seen the Boden catalogue, think chinos, wayfarers, linen skirts and sweaters draped casually over the shoulder.

I might have known it wouldn't turn out. People like us don't belong in the Boden catalogue, we belong in Marks and Spencers, near the socks.

Ella had fallen asleep by the time we'd got to Bondi Junction. We kept her asleep by running the engine after we arrived at Watson's Bay, which meant the fish and chips were eaten in the car with a charming view of the back end of a Mercedes E class. They were good, but not as good as the flake/shark I'd had freshly-cooked by the fishmonger in Bondi, so I'm left eating my words alongside the chips.

After Ella woke up we sat on the beach for an hour, listening to the clinking of wine glasses from Doyle's restaurant. She'd had half an hour's sleep, despite our best efforts.

"I could murder a lovely glass of wine and a snooze on the beach" I said

"So could I"

Of course, with a toddler, there's no chance. You have to build sandcastles and make footprints and look for shells, even if you're tired because she wakes you up at 6.20 every morning. Very often, the only way we achieve this is through plentiful cups of good, dark coffee to keep us alert.

By the time we got home, it was witching hour; that time in the afternoon that's neither here nor there, when kids are getting ratty and you've run out of ideas to entertain them in the hours until bedtime. After Darren went to work we walked into Randwick to hire a DVD (Prescilla Queen of the Desert - for some Aussie culture) and stopped off for a take-out coffee at Gloria Jean's on the way to the park, where I met a friend of Yvonne's. She looked equally bleary-eyed but didn't have the coffee to hold her up.

"Adelaide only slept for an hour this afternoon" she said of her three year old. "I'm dead on my feet, she usually sleeps for two".

"What, always?" I asked.

"Well, unless she's going through a growth spurt, in which case she might sleep for three. She's unbearable if she gets less than two hours, the witching hour starts at 4pm"

"Welcome to my world" I replied.

I made pasta bolognaise for her tea. She ate it with such urgency that I had to strip her off in the highchair and carry her at arm's length into a waiting bath when she'd finished. There was just enough time to get on my hands and knees to clear up the mess underneath the table before it was time to pull the plug, which revealed an orange tide mark all around the tub.

Another day when bedtime and ibuprofen can't come soon enough.