Onlookers

This morning we went off to Pacific Square to do our weekly shop. I can't always be gadding about in museums, sometimes I have to be a (slack) housewife.

I've given up on the separate butcher/baker/candlestick maker since Ella decided she enjoys being let loose in Coles to help Mummy with the shopping. It takes forever to get round the shop and afterwards we have to find a $2 coin to ride the Wiggles big red car so we can easily spend two hours just hunting and gathering.

The fish shop, however, is a different matter. Ella loves the fishmongers, not just this one, any fish mongers she can poke her nose into. Every night when we put her to bed, her last words aren't "love you" or "night night", every night she says "fish shop" to remind us that's where she wants to go tomorrow, and sometimes she adds "see lots of lobsters" as she snuggles down into her blanket. It's so endearing that you can't ignore it.

Anyway, today we stopped for lunch at the cafe outside Coles and just as we were munching away on our respective salad and pasta, an Italian lady fell over in the optician, letting out a blood-curdling cry which stopped the entire shopping centre in its tracks. Then her daughter started shouting "No...Mama" and shrieking and I realised all those CPR refreshers they give you in the NHS mean bugger all when you're faced with a real-life incident and a toddler wearing almost an entire plate of pasta carbonara.

The lady lay on the ground in the opticians for well over half an hour while various onlookers tried to help. It wasn't clear what was happening, I could just see her leg sticking out from the crowd that had gathered around her while the security guard spoke frantically into his radio and everyone wondered where the ambulance was.

The other shops had emptied as people came to watch from a respectful distance, the nail salon customers half-manicured, one lady with one eyebrow waxed and the other in it's original state, which was even more compelling than the events in the optician. The owner of the optician was showing more concern for his carpet, rushing to the massage shop nextdoor and returning with a bundle of white towels to clean up whatever had been spilt. The chinese shoppers stood at the optician's doorway leaning in. They have a very different concept of personal space and it doesn't change when they come to Australia.

Things like this usually happen when Darren's around; on one trip to Australia years ago he looked after two patients on two different planes and a man who suffered a stroke outside a restaurant on Bondi Road. I think he attracts this sort of trouble and I'm always amazed how he switches into medic mode and becomes organised and logical, a skill he saves for special occasions at home.

The thing is, as a doctor's wife, I always feel I ought to be able to help, you know, like some of the knowledge ought to have rubbed off in the way you'd expect an actor from Holby City to know how to perform an emergency tracheostomy. Anyway, it's not true, I'm hopeless, though I do have new skills in calling for medical assistance, which is something.

For her part, Ella finished the pasta and smeared her hands across as much of the leather bench as she could manage while I was distracted by the asymmetrical eyebrows. The ambulance still hadn't turned up as we loaded our shopping and drove out of the car park. Expensive service yes, but rapid response it ain't.

Christmas minus eight.