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Thursday 16th

We were up early again today. I'm one of those people who gets up extra early on the mornings we are due to fly anywhere because I perceive there's lots that needs to be done. And then I end up sitting around watching Sky News twiddling my thumbs.

Last night we had the unusual, and very welcome experience of having visitors to our hotel room. Our friend Louise in Brisbane, and especially her older sister Caroline, have been good friends of ours for years, (we are godparents to Caroline's son William, who is going to marry Ella so we can pool our resources and buy better wine). Their father, David, married an Aussie midwife who was working in the UK, they had two more children before emigrating back to Brisbane, which is how Louise came to be living here too. Even stranger is the fact that we've now met Caroline's two nephews, Hugh and Archie, and as she's back in London, she hasn't.

The last time we saw David was two years ago, in London. The last time we saw Gill and the children was at Tim and Caroline's wedding in 1998, when Henry was about three and Poppi about two and our friend Tom spent the entire afternoon getting Henry to say "Throw another shrimp on the barbie, mate", a joke which was wearing a bit thin on Gill by the end of the day. Since then, they've grown into a pair of really lovely young people, and their mum and dad brought along a bottle of bubbly, which is apparently a tradition.

Anyway, here's the view from our window this morning. Sunrise over The Broadwater at Labrador. Darren went out to get some coffees and overheard the man in the cafe reporting he'd seen a very big shark in there as he was coming to work, "no word of a lie - the dorsal fin was too big for a dolphin". After that I watched with my heart in my mouth as several people went off for their morning dip but have nothing grizzly to report, which is fortunate for them but bad luck for me, as it would have made good blogging, eh?