Blogmeet

So Tokyogirl Downunder and I pooled our collective bloggie minds over several hours of coffee and lunch in a thai restaurant this afternoon, where the conversaton ranged from australian humour (and lack of) to Japanese toilets and 1970's electricity meters. I should never have met her had it not been for us both writing about Sydney on the internet.

TG is writing a novel. She belongs to a writers' group, and even better than this, it's fiction. I don't read much fiction and I certainly couldn't write any, so I am suitably in awe of her skill and such dedication to the art. She wishes her old English teacher was reading her blog. I tell her my old English teacher is reading my blog. Unusual certainly, impressive perhaps, but not quite so impressive as writing a novel.

But can she bake banana bread? Aha!

Anyway, afterwards I went into David Jones and realised I'm more housesick than I thought when I found myself stroking fluffy towels and tablecloths. I even stood admiring the tripp trapp high chair, exactly the same one we have at home. Then I bought two table runners for the kitchen (at home) and tested the weight of some bedspreads for air freighting purposes.

The lady in the quilt department was an aussie but said she'd lived in the UK for two years and only came home because her her parents guilted her into it. The comments included "Your children don't know their grandparents" and "who'll look after me when I'm old?", which, from speaking to other Brits, seem pretty standard guilt trips offered by those left behind.

You hear it a lot, the guilt-trip thing. People who emigrate to australia with their children rarely do so with the full blessing of their families so while it's a great life and the kids are blissfully happy, the parents, and in particular, the mothers, often carry a burden of guilt which they wear as a sadness whenever you mention the people back home. It's wicked of them really, cruel to blight their lives with it, even though you can sort of see their point and you can't imagine how you'd feel if your own child decided to move to the other side of the world. But yes, who will look after them when they grow old? Many of the young British families here are yet to face this dilemma and it will be interesting to see how they handle it.