Sailor's Thai

And so to Sailor's Thai, apparently the best Thai restaurant in the whole of Sydney(106 George Street, The Rocks) where we met up with Lucy and Paul, who you might remember I met in the queue at Sydney Aquarium. It was the first time they'd escaped their toddler in eight weeks and you could feel the relief. As it was a school night, I drove and Darren drank. We all know I'm a two pot screamer and I didn't want to reveal my other life as a lush when I hardly know them.

Sailor's Thai has been on our "to-do" list since we came to Sydney in 2002 and read about it in our Time Out guide. We'd planned to go there for dinner but without a mobile phone to book a table and suffering from intense jet-lag (brought about by having arrived via Singapore and having flown backwards to Perth and forwards again to Sydney, all within the space of a week), the thought of booking anything was beyond us.

And that's the problem with being a tourist in Sydney; even if you have a week to spend here, by the time you're over the jet-lag and you've got your bearings, it's time to move on. I've always found guide books to Australia intensely frustrating because they give you a glimpse of what you could be doing in Sydney (or elsewhere) but your actual experience of the city as a tourist ends up being pretty far removed from the one you read about in the book, which is why you need to visit more than once or visit for three weeks or with somebody who knows their way around. The alternative is to spend your days at the zoo and Bondi beach and your evenings at Darling Harbour, all of which are tailor-made for the passing tourist and none of which offer much of an insight into the real Sydney.

So now we have a proper "to-do" list blu-tacked to the wall in the living room, based on Lonely Planet and the Eyewitness series, Time Out and the Rough Guide. I've read and researched and asked questions; we're not going to miss a thing, not a trick. We're squeezing the life out of the place in the hope it stops me dreaming about it when I'm back home.

Anyway, like most renowned restaurants, Sailor's Thai turns out to be a bit on the poncy side and true to form I managed to make a complete tit of myself by trying to eat my starter while it was still wrapped in its decorative banana leaf. Apparently you're supposed to take it out of the banana leaf and wrap it in some other sort of leaf but I'm buggered if I could even identify a banana leaf let alone know the correct etiquette for dealing with one. Growing up in Dallam, the only leaves we needed were dock leaves to use as an antidote to the nettles down by Sankey Brook.

The waiter soon put me right, no doubt alerted to my plight by the sound of my clicky jaw.

"I like Sydney" said Paul, "but I don't feel safe".

"What do you mean?"

"Well you try getting a mobile phone reception in a train station - especially Central Station. You can't get one"

"I don't understand" I replied. I could sense a conspiracy theory brewing and thought immediately of my father-in-law, who has been convinced for years that MI5 are going through his wheelie bin in Penketh.

"I've been reading up on this and they've blocked the signal so you can't use your mobile to detonate a bomb. It wasn't like that in Auckland"

"You need to get out more. You need a job" said Lucy.

"I like Sydney" she continued, "I don't feel unsafe at all, not like in London, you know, on the underground. True, it's not like New Zealand because the Kiwis just don't get involved in world politics. I mean, they have an opinion on issues like Iraq but they don't get directly involved by going and sending bloody troops to fight.

You do feel sort of out of the way in New Zealand, sheltered I suppose, but I still don't feel unsafe in Sydney"

"Well you see how you feel when they have the APEC summit here in September and George Bush rocks up and they close the city down" said Paul. "They're blocking roads off and putting police boats on the harbour. You won't get a mobile signal anywhere in the city centre because they're planning to scramble them, even the taxi drivers' radios are being scrambled. I know because I read abou it"

"Yeah" I said. "It's a bit over the top but it doesn't surprise me. They're telling Sydneysiders to get out of the city that weekend, we've been given an extra bank holiday on the Friday and there's all these ad campaigns telling us to go to the Blue Mountains. They love the drama, the thought that they're up there with the big boys on the world stage, it's part of their need to fit in, need for approval. They might as well shout "Run! Run for the hills!" because that's effectively what they're doing".

I suspect Australia will go mad when the APEC summit is on. It'll be like a little child that's been invited to a birthday party for the most popular kid in the class. Sydney won't be able to get over itself.

nb Two-pot screamer, n, A person who gets drunk on very little alcohol, Australian (slang).