Yummy, Mummy

There's a lovely park behind the beach at Bronte. It's called Bronte Park, which is unusual because the parks are usually named after some famous bloke like "Fred Hollows Reserve" (celebrated opthalmologist) or "Geoff Lawson Park" (famous cricketer). This trend for naming parks after famous blokes makes us laugh and we wonder what names we could come up with back home; Alan Titchmarsh Marsh, Frank Bough Rough, Kenneth Clarke Park .

Unfortunately though, Bronte brings out all the worst in yummy mummies; huge Dior sunglasses, Dolce and Gabbana caps, mental approximations at the carat of other mothers' engagement rings. The average yummy Sydney mummy drives a custom-built Bugaboo. I drive a grubby Mamas and Papas number that I bought on Ebay for £58 because it weighs less than 5kg, and to make matters worse, the front wheels are locked onto a "swivel" mode that makes it almost impossible to steer in a straight line.

The kids at Bronte are called Sky and Pheonix and Zanzibar, they're wearing coats by Oscar de la Renta and jeans by someone-or-other of Paris. Ella's modelling Next at Westbrook (last season), who have an irritating habit of stitching their own advertising onto kids' clothing. We feel a bit low-rent, especially as the yummy mummies can also climb inside the Gaudi-esque starfish without getting their arses stuck in the doorway. (Still, when I comment to one of them that it's Gaudi-esque she hasn't a clue what I mean. You can suck all the fat off your arse that money can pay for but you can't buy European savvy).

We make our excuses and leave in the direction of one of the cafes lining the road alongside the beach. I haul Ella's pushchair backwards up the steps and navigate the other diners, most of whom make no effort whatsoever to move their chairs and let me past, some of whom give me openly dirty looks for having the cheek to disrupt their weekend brunch by daring to bring a potentially disruptive toddler inside the cafe, though the pavement tables are already taken. Even the waitress appears to disapprove until I collapse Ella's buggy and store it tightly behind her chair.

Ella behaves well by the skin of her teeth, at least, if you ignore the standing on the chair rather than sitting and if you gloss over the bit where she tipped a sachet of sugar all over the table. She demolished bacon butties on soft Turkish bread and a dip of my yolk, I had eggs benedict (7/10, eggs whites a bit too runny and impossible to enjoy while single-handedly keeping a toddler under reasonable control).