Going Walkabout

Well I can now reveal there’s a reason I’ve been feeling so irritable all week, because on Monday Darren abandoned us in this south east corner and flew up to Darwin. He’s gone walkabout with the chopperdocs so I’ve been coping with life in Sydney with nobody else to take out the bin ever since.

Of course, it’s not the sort of thing you want to broadcast, so I haven’t broadcast it until now because this morning Ella and I board the flying kangaroo to join him up in the Northern Territory, a four and a half hour cross-continent flight with only a portable DVD and a packet of Cadbury’s buttons standing between me and complete insanity.

Still, we’re very fortunate to have the opportunity to visit The Top End as they call it; a remote part of Australia that’s not usually high on the tourist agenda, at least partly because it’s incredibly hot and wet during the summer and some parts of the area get cut off completely when the roads are flooded.

The Northern Territory competes with Western Australia for the title of the continent’s most remote outback landscape, though unlike Western Australia, the Northern Territory is jam-packed with places of interest, places like Uluru (Ayers Rock) and King’s Canyon, Katherine Gorge and Kakadu National Park, the latter being one of the most stunning national parks in the country (and it's where they shot Crocodile Dundee, so once we’ve finished with Darwin, that’s where we’re heading).

Kakadu is also one of Australia’s four world heritage-listed sites, which is nothing to do with scenery and everything to do with importance of the habitat on a world scale. The others are Fraser Island, Ayer’s Rock and the Great Barrier Reef/Daintree rainforest, so once we’ve been to Kakadu, we’ve done the lot, three of them within the last three months.

Right then, wish me luck and we’ll be back next Sunday. I just hope he hasn’t been sent to Papua New Guinea when we get there.

Retail Therapy

There's a woman lives upstairs who looks like Catherine Zeta Jones. I've seen her coming down the stairs a few times; perfect make-up, shiny nails and the sort of hair-do she's obviously spent an hour attending to in the bathroom mirror. I met her again this morning as she came tippy-toeing down the stairs doing that sideways walk you have to do when you're descending a staircase in a pencil skirt, not that I've worn one of those since my last day as a school prefect.

Anyway, there she is in her little suit and crisp white shirt and I'm looking at her wondering why I wasn't born with the glamour gene, and anyway, how does she get that shirt so crisp? Does she buy disposable ones? Is it a European washing machine? I've even started spraying starch on mine and they still feel limp, though the damp doesn't help.

And I open the front door and give her a glimpse of the hallway with it's ever-so-glamorous wall-planner and the big map of Australia with lots of colour-coded dots (you know, yellow for where we've been, red for where we want to go) and then I'm forced to reply to her chirpy "good morning!" while simultaneously manhandling Ella and a full bin-bag, but never mind, her day will come, something I think every time I see those twenty-something childless women in their high fashion shoes and matching bags. Ha! lets see how crisp her shirts are then.

(Still, I caught her five minutes later hoiking up her tights in the driveway so there is a god).

I was on a mission into the city centre today (though the Sydneysiders never call it that; they call it the CBD) for retail therapy and lunch with Steve's partner Scott, who's been abandoned to his balcony view of the Harbour Bridge since Steve's headed back to Manchester (again) for a friend's wedding.

With this is mind (and with no need to carry a bag large enough for nappies and wipes), I took my Burberry handbag, my lovely Burberry handbag, bought well before the chavs took over and made the Burberry label unfashionable - I brought it to Australia to get my money's worth because I feel like an idiot carrying it in Britain - I suppose it's a bit like an Aussie wanting to wear their Ugg boots outside.

So having dropped Ella at nursery I drove into the city, across Hyde Park and parked underneath the cathedral. Then I headed straight for David Jones as I was sure I'd be able to buy some sort of clothing to rescue me from the Marks and Sparks tee-shirts I'm still living in.

Now I haven't been into the city centre branch of DJ's before but I realised straight away that it was much posher than the one at Bondi Junction. It's set across four floors, but you need nerves of steel to ascend them because they've positioned progressively more glamorous shop assistants on every floor (and progressively more glamorous customers to match - think razor-blade cheekbones and leopard-skin shirts, a look some women in Sydney are very fond of).

So the ground floor is the perfume and make-up (and you can imagine what the make-up dollies look like) while the first floor is ladies fashion (preppy young ladies in crisp shirts, though no sign of CZJ), the second floor is Australian Designer Labels (don't know what the assistants on that floor look like - I don't think you're allowed off the escalator unless you're wearing a minimum of three carats of diamonds). And then you reach the third floor, which I think is called something like Matronly Fashion, but if you're posh you're still down on the second floor so you won't be offended by the matronly-types selling matronly clothes, think Hattie Jacques meets Julie T Wallace and double it.

In summary, I found absolutely nothing I wanted to buy in DJ's, which goes to prove it's not a patch on House of Fraser or John Lewis. By half ten I'd developed a headache through concentrating on not slipping over on the highly-polished floors, the sort of headache requiring a skinny flat white and a warm croissant, and after that I headed to the lovely Queen Victoria Building and the Billabong shop, via a very sharp exit from a shop called Supre which was selling an alarming array of bright pink and yellow clothes and a top that looked a bit like the one the girl wears on the test card, you know, where she's chalking the noughts and crosses.

My heart very nearly sank in the Billabong shop when I saw the average age of the assistants was fifteen and they were busy being chirpy and asking me how my day was ("good thanks") and enquiring whether there was anything they could help me to find, which is incredibly irritating to most British people but entirely normal to the Aussies. The poms ought to wear a union jack denoting "leave me alone" when they go into clothes shops - or is that just grumpy old me?

Anyway, there were a couple of possibles in there - hurrah - one of them a halter-neck top, though when I got it on I realised it was too low-cut for even a strapless bra and required the wearer to support their entire bosom by tying some cotton behind their neck; I won't go into detail, though suffice it to say that by the time I'd got enough leverage to hoik my bosom up, the cotton was so tighly-secured that I could no longer lift my head and had to admire the look with my head held at a ninety degree angle, which kind of spoiled the effect.

By the time I met Scott (in pouring rain) I was glad of a break in the proceedings, especially as it involved lunch at number one Martin Place (see photo), a lovely building that used to be the post office. Remind me next time I go shopping that it's Manchester I need, not Sydney. In Sydney the fashion is all too young, too skinny, too bright or too old and despite what you might think, I'm still somewhere in the middle.

One Way Traffic

You don't write me love songs
You don't send me flowers
You don't send me e-mails
Anymore

Or, in the style of the theme from Prisoner Cell Block H:

You used to send me e-mails
I wish you would again
But that was on the upside
And things were different then

On the underside, the blog does grow
And the sun comes beating down
But the sun and e-mail are prisoners too
When the time difference comes around


You all read my blog but it's one-way traffic. You don't email me anymore because you don't need me to tell you what's going on in my life - so what the bloody hell's going on in yours?

Harumph. Might go off sick with writer's cramp in protest.

Grumpy

I read in OK magazine that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are hands-on parents to their four small children, then later in the article they admitted they're only actually providing four of the twelve hands and that's only between manicures. Anyway, I think we can safely assume that the fragrant Ms Jolie spends considerably less time reaching into a top-loading washer than I do.

I had a call this morning from a girl I know from Leamington Spa who's living in Sydney for three months. Her mother has just gone back to the UK, terrified of flying but more terrified of spending three months without her only grandson, so she'd trekked halfway across the world for the first time ever at the grand age of seventy. Good on her.

Rachel has an adorable ten month-old son who coos and giggles in all the right places and was delighted with a trip to Sydney Aquarium to look at the fishes. She says he's always like that - even-tempered, chilled out. Ella was never coo-ey and delightful, at least, never for a whole morning. She whinged and whined and refused to sleep all day until I was literally in tears waiting for Darren to come home from work. We tried swaddling, we tried controlled crying. She wouldn't have a dummy. In the end I placed an advert in the local newsagent to see whether we could rent-a-local-granny to help us out at weekends but nobody responded, presumably she'd developed a reputation through all the other local kids and their grandchildren had warned them off.

"So what do you think of Sydney?" I asked, aware I'm beginning to sound like one of those Aussies who asks "how do you like it?" the minute the plane's engines stop turning.

"I love it" she replied. "But there are steps everywhere - it's not exactly buggy-friendly"

"Don't you have a car?"

"No, it wasn't worth it for three months"

"How do you do your shopping?" I asked. She rolled her eyes.

"Bit by bit. Whatever I can fit underneath the pushchair. Still, we're in a nice flat, I can't complain. What sort of accomodation did the hospital sort out for you before you came?"

I almost choked on my Starbucks when she asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. We saw thirty-one grotty properties in their fifteen minute inspection slots and settled for the one with the least offensive kitchen"

"But it was furnished, right?"

"You're joking! We had a few teatowels, an oven glove and a corkscrew. The rest we bought at garage sales. God, when I think back to the stress of it all and the heat. We really did it hard".

The more I think, the more I realise that most people I know who came to Australia did so with support. Jan's company rented a flat for her and her brother was here already. Since she had Saul, her parents spend four months a year in Sydney and eight in Stockport. Kate came to live with her old friend Paula, Jo and Gordon had Jo's brother already here. We're quite the pioneers when you think about it, which probably explains why we're so knackered all the time.

So we walked around the aquarium, which was dark and full of huge groups of school children. Ella was determined to lose herself amongst them so there's no way I could enjoy the platypus or the Murray cod or the stone-fish. I need eyes in the back of my head.

It's funny how I find children older than Ella incredibly irritating - when she was a baby I thought two year olds were ridiculous with their tantrums and their squealing. But you don't have much choice, your baby turns into one and because you love them you don't feel so irritated when they're being ridiculous so you find yourself irritated by seven year-olds instead, especially the boys, who fling themselves onto the floor in the middle of public spaces and kick their legs like idiots. Does anyone understand boys less than me, I wonder?

Anyway, they might be irritating, but they're not nearly as irritating as their teachers, who completely fail to supervise them because they're busy gawping at the exhibitions. I'm in a stinking mood today - does it show?

nb Doing it hard vt, sticking it out despite difficult conditions, Australian (slang)

GPK

Tonight I collected Ella from nursery and took her to GPK in Kingsford (Gourmet Pizza Kitchen) for tea.

GPK is a chain of five pizza restaurants in Sydney and comes recommended in my Sydney for Under Fives book because of apparently brilliant customer service if you've got kids. I'd already done a drive-by reccie to check out the parking in daylight; it looked halogen-slick, so tonight I was armed with a hungry toddler and very, very dangerous.

Anyway, GPK turns out to be nothing like the standard of pizza chain I've come to expect in Britain, but then after seven months on a continent where you can't even buy fruit pastilles, I'm no longer surpised when things turn out half-arsed (or half-baked in the case of a pizza restaurant).

There were already thirty people seated when we arrived, mostly parents and kids but there were actually some normal folk as well, you know, civilians who presumably enjoy eating in the sort of racket you'd expect in a junior school canteen at lunchtime. Each to their own. The manager was on duty with one waitress, who sat us in the window to make the place appear busier.

The menu was okay (though just lots of variation on, well, pizza, unlike in Pizza Express, where they at least try to offer something else) and they even brought Ella some pizza dough to play with while she waited, which made her gag, as you might have expected.

And then they brought the pizza, steaming hot child-sized pizza, hot enough to take the skin off the roof of your mouth, so she sat looking at it and crying because she wanted it but it was too hot and I had to do the emergency pizza procedure where you separate the topping from the base and blow furiously, all the while your elbows lying unwittingly in your mozzarella.

And just as I was wiping the grease off my shirt sleeve this man walks in off the street in a long raincoat and comes straight up to our table asking me whether I'm Greek.

"Sorry?" I said

"Greek....mumble, mumble, hotel, across the road, mumble, reception"

Just as he said "reception" and I was looking at him with a deeply furrowed brow, Ella bit her finger and started howling in shock and pain and this man continued to talk to me as though nothing was happening.

I got up from my chair and moved to comfort Ella but he was blocking my path. Ella continued to howl, huge tears streaming down her face.

"My daughter's crying" I said. He continued to talk at me about being Greek, not even acknowledging there was a child.

"My daughter's crying"

"MOVE! My daughter is crying, I can't even get near her because you're standing in my way - just SHIFT!"

And with that he left the restaurant and walked back up the street, not even bothering to close the conversation or take a backwards glance. The manager saw what had happened and came over to check we were okay, which was a bit late in the circumstances. When the bill came, he'd waved the charge for Ella's pizza and ice-cream (the ice-cream he left on the food counter for so long I had to go and collect it myself and find a spoon). A free dinner for our inconvenience, he said.

I told Darren about it later.

"You're a weirdo magnet" he said. "You attract them. You've been doing it for years". I have friends all over the UK reading my blog. Which ones is he talking about?

Cop, spot, score, hop and bash

Right I've got to say something about this because I've been listening to the Australians using these words for the whole seven months of my incarceration in this penal colony (and what was my crime? Sloping off work to paint my front door hardly counts and anyway, it was years ago), and in changing the way we use them they are bastardising our mother tongue, just like those nasty Yanks, which is a bit of cheek from a bunch of bloody colonials who ought really to be practising the Queen's English in every mirror they pass.

First up, there's cop and it's not that they're using it wrongly, just using it so frequently that it's taking the place of other words and sentences that would be more correct, such as "Sydney's copping more rain" spoken by a television newsreader who ought to know better.

Secondly there's spot, which they are using in place of space, place, appointment and slot. So it's a parking spot and a spot in the diary and the most annoying thing of all is that I've started using it myself.

Thirdly there's score and now we're in the territory of blatant mis-use because the Aussies don't buy a new car, they score a new car, just like they score a sandwich at Subway, which irritates Darren beyond belief.

Next there's hop; another one I'm guilty of. The Aussies hop up onto the stepper at the gym and they hop onto a plane and hop off a train but the most annoying of the lot is when they say "I hopped up this morning at about half seven" (though perhaps I'm just jealous because I have to hop up an hour earlier).

The last one is bash and this one is just comical because they don't say someone got beaten up or attacked or set upon by a group of youths, they say they got a bashing or got bashed and it's used all the time by the newsreaders, who once again ought to know better.

Anyway, I feel better after that but I'll still be drafting a report to the Queen's representative down under (who I suspect might be Barry Humphries in drag) with all of my findings sometime before now and the end of January.

A Word of Note

This post is at least partly tongue in cheek. As a linguist, I realise that language is an ever-changing and evolving medium and that to stifle it's creativity is to prevent it's divergence, which is akin to promoting a stalinist regime (like, for example, those misguided academics at the Academie Francaise who sit at big shiny tables thinking up ways to prevent the divergence of French).

So, no, I am not a communist (though I do wish I was a columnist, a spot currently filled by much more important people like India Knight).

Jaw Dropping

Another filthy day in Sydney. Ella got into bed with us this morning so I began the week with her bottom in my face and the whine of "Waltzing Matilda" from her Koala. If I'd known it played a tune when you press it's hand, I'd never have bought it.

Anyway, I've been on a course all day, another welcome diversion from doing any actual work, though I feel privileged to be living in Sydney since I realised how far people are prepared to travel to attend courses in Australia; my fellow delegates having travelled from so-called country towns all over New South Wales, two of them flying in from the back of Bourke.

Now I can't say I've really been to any country towns in Australia, the nearest I've come is probably Katoomba and that doesn't count because it's a tourist place. Anyway, judging by the other people on the course today I'll report back that the current must-have fashion accessories in these more remote areas include nylon knitwear and a handlebar moustache, and I don't just mean the men.

And then there's the accent. They say Australian accents don't differ much from one place to another (and on a bad day I'll agree and say they're all just one tone of annoying whine after the next) but I'm not so sure about this because there's definitely a clipped city accent and a country drawl where "Kyle" is pronounced "coil" in the style of Kath and Kim, which I never really watched on the BBC but now makes me howl with laughter, perhaps because there's sod all else on the telly.

And it wasn't just the delegates making my jaw drop. The first speaker was a doctor from Cowra and I honestly can't tell you what she came to talk about because I was too distracted by her hair-do, which was almost exactly like Dame Edna's only not quite so purple. And then we paused for coffee and I got into an argument with a man from Wodonga and it went rapidly downhill from there.

"It's all very well this high minded stuff, but who'll do it?" He said.

"Sorry?"

"Well we can't get a speech therapist. There's a course at the local university and they turn them out every year but then they all go off and get pregnant. It's useless"

"And you don't think they should be allowed, I'm presuming?"

"Well it's very disruptive" he said, "that's all I'm saying"

"I hear teachers saying the same thing in the UK" I said. "I wasn't very popular when I was expecting my daughter, even the teachers with children of their own were openly pissed-off I was having maternity leave. You know, perhaps you should write to John Howard and see what he can do. There's a general election coming up, it might be the key vote-winner for his marginal seat"

"Are you a teacher?"

"No, I'm a speech therapist"

"Well don't take it the wrong way" he continued, looking exactly like a man who wished he'd never opened his trap.

"Ah well, you're probably right" I continued. "Though I'm puzzled by what you say because your population is below replacement levels and I don't know who'll pay your pension if there aren't more young people in the workforce"

"Erm, well, I..."

"Actually, I've just finished a book by an academic at Sydney University and she's predicting a major problem in western societies unless we start having more children. It ties in with the demographics, you know, the trend in western population pyramids, which I'm sure you're familiar with"

"Yes"

"So you see what I mean about this population pattern being unable to sustain the older people when they retire. But you can't have it both ways; you can't ask women to have more children but feel pissed off when they get pregnant. As a working mother, that sort of sentiment makes me feel like getting out of the workforce altogether, then bang goes another taxpayer. We're wrong whatever we do"

"Actually I'm due to retire myself in two years time" he added, obviously not thinking before he opened his trap again because if he had, he'd have realised this was really the cherry on the cake.

"Well maybe we'll emigrate with our children and we'll be paying for your pension" I said. "And then again, maybe I'll just give up".

And on that note, look out for the job advertisements for someone to catch those babies on the way out while the mother gets on with the important job of pleasing everyone else.

Harumph. Mothers of the world unite!

nb Back of Bourke, n, A very distant, remote place. (Bourke is a town in outback New South Wales). Australian (Slang).

Tea Party

It didn't stop raining all afternoon. Fortunately the cookie dough was a hit and Ella decided it tasted just as good even before we baked it.

Anarchy, Sunday Style

Tired of the withering looks across the breakfast table, I've been out to Coles this morning to buy an industrial box of wild bird seed with which I can continue to entertain my feathered friends. I've laid some out on an old plastic plate of Ella's so now it's her turn to sulk about the cockatoos getting a better deal (I thought she might not have noticed but she spotted it right away. She has eyes like a hawk).

Darren has been on call from home all weekend, which is handy in that he doesn't have to get up early and go out to work, but he does have to be within an hour of base should the bat phone go off, which means if we want to go out anywhere we have to take two cars.

It made no sense for us to take two cars to the supermarket so I went on my own with Ella while Darren sat at home in his tracky bottoms waiting for the inevitable bat call, though he's not living up to my ideal of a superhero because when they eventually rang him on our landline, it took him so long to get off his bum and answer the phone that by the time he did they'd given up and the phone went dead.

In the event they had to send somebody else, though just as he thought he was off the hook they called back with an emergency transfer from outback NSW, a lone GP trying to cope with a very sick patient, so he's gone off to Mascot to board the plane and bring the patient into Sydney.

So while he was lounging about at home, Ella and I were pushing a wonky trolley through the aisles in Coles at Maroubra, and feeling slovenly I'd even gone out in my Ugg boots, which is the down-under equivalent of nipping to Tesco in pink fluffy mules (the aussies wear Uggs as slippers, which is why they were secretly sneering at us wearing them outside when they suddenly became fasionable).

Anyway, having persuaded me she was going to be a good girl, Ella acted like a hooligan all through the shop, picking up glass jars, biting into baby egg plants and crawling underneath one of those little sandwich board-type yellow signs that says "Caution - Wet Floor", which was fine until she wanted to get out of it and found she was stuck, though the sight of her crawling around the floor like a tortoise with a yellow shell made every passer-by except me laugh out loud.

So now I'm here in the flat on a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing but a squashy tube of cookie dough standing between me and complete anarchy. Already the living room looks like a scene from Shaun of the Dead. While Ella's asleep I'm off to do some internet shopping for a tasteful storage unit I can buy to avoid a similar scene in our house back home. I might have relaxed my standards a bit but I still don't like clutter.

Pass the gin.

The Persian Rug

Today we've been over to the north shore as we were invited to a barbeque at one of the consultants' homes.

When we lived down south and Darren worked in Swindon and Portsmouth we were always invited to dinner at the consultant's house, whichever consultant he was under at the time. Invariably this meant dinner in some hard-to-find country village with no street lighting and some enormous house approached via a sweeping gravel drive, and by this point I'd be exclaiming "flaming nora it's really posh" and we'd be minding our Ps and Qs while the consultant's wife served drinks in the sitting room.

On one occasion we were met by an aptly-named Dr Waddle, resplendent in a crimson smoking jacket; his wife warming her arse on the hostess trolley in the kitchen. On another I suffered an entire evening of a consultant who insisted on being called Doctor Hemmings throughout the meal, though once this rule had been pointed out to me, I was so indignant about it I deliberatley didn't address him as anything all evening.

Dr Hemmings lived in a converted barn in Cirencester with an oak-beamed ceiling and a lovely Persian rug he'd bought on some swanky foreign holiday, but when I asked his wife about it she came over all high-and-mighty and not realising I was from the north-west, started going on about how she was really very posh because she was from Cheshire. Closer questioning (and letting on to the fact I was also from Cheshire) revealed she'd started life as a staff nurse in Northwich, which she insisted used to be very nice back in those days; one of the worst examples of new money I've ever met.

Anyway, when we moved up north, these dinner parties came to an abrupt end and we came to the conclusion they just didn't do it up north, which was a shame because really they were very entertaining (and I'd spent ages learning how one ought to behave at them). So being invited to Keith's house today was the first time in ages we've eaten at the consultant's house and it was a whole different ball game from those snobby evenings down south.

For a start, this is Australia and these are real Australians, which means an abundance of facial hair, more than one or two moustaches and not a smoking jacket in sight. Secondly, in place of the hostess trolley it was a large gas barbeque next to the swimming pool, the sort of barbeque they actually build into brick in the corner of the verrandah, the sort I drool over in Bent's Garden Centre thinking how it would be worth buying one if ever we got enough summer weather to justify the expense.

And there was no soup course or napkin or faffing about with three dfferent knives, it was all good hunks of lamb and marinated chicken thighs and minted potatoes and afterwards an enormous chocolate cake I was quite enjoying until I spotted the box and realised it was from the same chain of shops that got Ella's birthday cake wrong (who still haven't responded to my letter of complaint and neither have their head office). After that, obviously, it tasted pretty bad, though it took a second slice to confirm this.

Anyway, as the medic's wife, I've worked out that it's my role to attend to the children and Darren's role to stand around talking about anaesthetic gases in some sort of funny code. To be honest, most of his colleagues look like astronomy graduates and I don't think I could make intelligent conversation with them if I tried (and I did try today, but only because I noticed that one of them had a Cornish sounding surname. Turned out I was right because his ancestors were indeed Cornish, though I subsequently learnt more about the history of the Cornish tin mining industry than I really wanted to know).

Ella refused her afternoon sleep and though she started off well, eventually behaved like a thug. The consultant's wife was pleasant enough but I could see by the look on her face (and the cream carpets in the sitting room) that she'd probably prefer Ella to eat outside and as it was a bit chilly on the verrandah and everyone else was inside (with the door closed), thank god we had our coats. Her own kids are virtually grown up and she doesn't like crumbs on the floor because it's poisonous for the dog.

She also had a persian rug but I decided not to ask her about it. And I'm sure I saw her warming her arse on the barbeque.

Crayola Blue, by Ella

My Mum and Dad have been looking at aboriginal art work in the museum and my Mum says I could have done better so today I made her stay home in the flat while I added to my little gallery. The picture on the far left tells a story about an emu doing a dance.

My mum's looking a bit ill at all this painting going on at home but like she's always saying, the bare walls in our flat don't feel very homely so really I'm doing her a favour. She made me a photo album about our home in England before we came to Australia and it all looks nice and tidy. She told me I can't put my hands on the walls because Farrow and Ball paint is very posh and you can't wash it down. Ha! I don't know why she bothered working out all those fancy colour charts, I'll be repainting in Crayola Blue in January. It's my favorite shade of all.

Nuts

This cockatoo has been visiting us every day for over a week now. If he lands on the balcony and there's no food, he lets out a couple of loud squarks. Then we come running, in my case bearing huge great handfuls of trail mix, though Darren's not too pleased I'm picking out all the best bits for the local birds.

And for the record, this fella (who Darren wants to call Lemon and I want to call Qantas) loves almonds and peanuts but won't be seen dead with a cashew. Dead as in expired, ceased to be, polly-gone.

Arf Arf.

Living the Dream.

It finally struck me today that we've done it. Ten years of hoping that one day, maybe, we'd have a hope of spending a year in Australia, though I don't think I ever really believed it would come off. When I started university at eighteen, the hall of residence was full of people who'd had a gap year, been round the world on the back of their parents' credit card and arrived on freshers' week sporting a suntan and their boarding school trunk, the one they used to take on the train at the beginning of term.

And it wasn't just about spending a year here, it was about seeing more of the continent and spending time reading and finding out about it in the museums, things you don't feel like doing when you're on holiday and you just want to get over the jet lag and soak in the rays.

"We're here" I said to Darren as I lay on the sofa looking up into the sky. "This is it, we're doing it, we're here". It struck me like a thunderbolt.

So today, in honour of our incredible good fortune, I'm wearing this tee-shirt that I bought at Bondi Junction. We're living the dream, and if you ever get the chance to live yours, I recommend you snatch it with both hands because life's short. Our dream might have seemed nothing to people who have the means to live their dream every day of the year, people with money, but to us it's been everything.

We've not done bad for a pair of scrotes from Warrington and of course, Ella gets her gap year into the bargain, so now the credit card's out of the question.....

Glimmer

So just when it all seemed doom and gloom I suggested Darren ring the management at Chopperdoc to check whether there was anything they could do about our car problem.

"There's nothing they'll be able to do" he said. "It's not their problem if I can't get to work".

"No" I replied, "but this isn't the NHS. It isn't even the Australian public health system, it's a charity, and since I've been working for a charity myself, I've realised they have ways and means; options you wouldn't think possible in the NHS"

So he rang them up and within five minutes they'd sorted him out with a car; an old Mitsubishi something-or-other left behind by a previous overseas doctor. Provided he covers the running costs (about $150 a month), he can borrow it until January and we can keep it right up until we leave, which is handy because we'll obviously have to sell the Honda.

Anyway, he rang the garage back and told them to hold their horses on the Toyota, though the horses had already bolted and they were busy fiddling their hooves under the chassis to the tune of $150. "Let's just write that off" he said as I set off ranting about yet another bill for nothing, though in the event they had the compassion not to charge us at all, thus restoring some glimmer of faith in the Sydneysiders, just a glimmer you understand. Just a smidge.

The upshot of this is we don't have to fork out the $2000, though we do have a car with a large hole in the underneath, it's MOT certificate due to expire on September 1st. If we can get someone to fix it, we'll sell it. If not, perhaps we'll get a few hundred dollars for it, which is a terrible shame as even I'll admit it's otherwise a great little car and yes, it will probably run for another five years. Would it have been more cost effective to fix it than lease a car for five months? I don't know, and frankly, I haven't the heart to sit and work it out because the alternative, spending $2000 from our savings (money I've earnt working at the university) just depresses me.

I'd rather spend it on handbags and cocktails, wouldn't you?

Expired

On the second floor we looked into the "hands-on" exhibition, which ranged from fossils and microscopes up to stuffed animals and birds and a live funnel-web spider, though he was too busy funneling webs to show his face.

This red kangaroo stands taller than six feet (and, I noted, has unfeasibly large testicles. My wifes's gonna kill me ar ar ar). The stuffed birds display included a set of drawers revealing row upon row of dead parrots (and now I can't help adding ex-parrots, expired, they have ceased to be) which I suppose means they exhibit them on a rotating basis but however you look at it, it's a bird mortuary and it's not really very nice.

The exhibit on spiders includes some Australian burrowing cockroaches like the one in the picture and some informative snippets like:

The Huntsman spider is notorious for getting into houses and cars in Sydney because it can squash it's body down into small spaces. The first an unsuspecting driver knows about the spider in his car is when it scuttles across the dashboard.

A Huntsman spider is like a slightly-thinner tarantula. And now I have something new to worry about when I go to bed, all's well here in the antipodes.

Paint By Numbers

The ground floor of the museum houses a large exhibition called Indigenous Australians, though I still find it alarming that an exhibition themed around aborigines sits side by side with displays on birds and insects, snakes, butterflies and stuffed marsupials. I mean, there's no display about white people and though I'm sure it's unintentional, it reminds me of the fact the whites in Australia considered the aborigines to be part of the plant and animal kingdom until relatively recently.

There's loads of indigenous art on display, including the first photo here, an aboriginal interpretation of the last supper, Judus Escariot turned away from Christ in the bottom right hand corner. Of course, this is Australia, so it's billy tea and damper (a type of Australian bread) in place of bread and wine, though thankfully not even a smear of Vegemite, which in my experience ends up mostly on the front of your clothes, or I suppose your robes, if your name's Jesus.

Anyway, I'm sorry if this is disrespectful and perhaps I simply don't understand art but some of the stuff on display is just crap, the sort of crap I could produce myself with a travel pack of Crayola poster paints, though as it all has a deeper meaning (and from what I can see, this usually involves a story about an emu doing a dance), I think we're supposed to stroke our chins and say we appreciate it.

Is Tony Hart still alive? Half of this stuff wouldn't have a chance in hell of making it onto this week's gallery, would it?

The Australian Museum

There was only one thing for it, brunch in the city followed by some browsing through a museum. Initially we headed to the old post office on Martin Place (you know, near the moronic plate glass window of the Channel 7 news studio) but since we were last here it's got posher and even the paper in the public toilets is now quilted, so we felt a bit shabby in our wet coats and decided City Extra would be a better bet for comfort food.

At City Extra I couldn't decide between bacon and eggs and pancakes so chose the Canadian breakfast, as this incudes both on the same plate and if you've never toiled to keep your egg yolk separate from your maple syrup then well, you've never lived, though it's alarming when you get it wrong because bacon and maple syrup just aren't meant for each other, not even in Canada.

Afterwards we walked up MacQuarie Street to Hyde Park and across to the Australian Museum, which is where I'll take you right now if you read on.

Crook

If I knew where to get hold of an oil drum, I'd start a fire and invite everyone we know around to the flat to watch me burning fifty dollar bills, because burning money would be a far more entertaining way of disposing of it than handing over our Eftpos (switch) card to all and sundry, which is all we seem to be doing right now.

Having parted with the money for the computer expert and the parking pedant, this morning we parted with another $50 for an enormous second-hand computer monitor, having calculated there was no way on earth we could afford to replace the laptop.

And then we put the Toyota in for it's Pink Slip (MOT) and the garage rang back saying it was crook and needed $1000 of work to sort out some rust underneath, a figure they revised to $2000 after they'd had a tea break and the rust specialist had given it the once over. And this is a car we bought for $900 and which cost us a further $500 within a month of getting it home because it was overheating whenever it was, well, driven.

We'd shelled out the $500 at the time because the guy in the garage said it was mechanically sound, and anyway, it was worth $1500 so we'd break even when we sold it on in January but there's no way we could break even now.

"Look, it's a good car" he said to Darren on the phone. "You'd get $2000 if you sold it on and anyway, it'll run for another five years mechanically".

"But I only need it for another five months. I'm paying for someone else to get five years out of it because I certainly won't"

So we thought about it and we realised we didn't have much option, especially since Darren has a 45 minute commute to work and there's no public transport, and especially not when the batphone rings in the middle of the night. Sure, we could use $2000 to buy another crappy car and the new crappy car could have lots of new faults for us to fix and this could go on forever until we made some sort of decision, so Darren rang the mechanic back.

"Look, I haven't got an option. Just do whatever needs doing but spare every cost you can"

And with that we set off along the Parramatta Road back into the city, the one road in Sydney you don't want to be driving down if you're trying not to think about cars because it's almost all car showrooms. And then we passed a silver Golf for sale and I nearly wept at the position of having two perfectly good cars in the UK, neither of them available to us right now.

"Go on then" I said as we approached an Alfa Romeo dealer, "I've seen my car so I suppose now I'm going to see Darren's"

And sure enough, there it was, the same silver sportswagon that's parked on our drive in Warrington, an exact replica right down to the colour-coded roof bars. And with that I managed to rant for a whole twenty minutes about everything from lack of a dishwasher to the state of the British education system, culminating in a brief analysis of the class system, as applied growing up on a 1970's council estate.

Our accountant wants $300 for filling in our tax return. It's raining in Sydney, and like Buddy Holly, today, it's been raining in my heart.

The Bat Phone Rings - 2

Batman wasn't home last night when the mobile batphone went off, he was in the queue at our local curry house in pursuit of some tandoori chicken to go with the vegetable curry he'd been making all afternoon (the same curry we'll be eating all week judging by the amount he's cooked up).

Anyway, he flew in the front door wheezing something about a medical transfer from Coff's Harbour and over the course of the next ten minutes, managed to change into his cape and eat his dinner and speak to the medics at Coff's hospital all at the same time, which was an entertaining spectacle and marks the first time in ages I've seen any bloke multi-tasking, let alone Batman.

After that it was off in the Batmobile (which you might remember is a 20-something year old Toyota Corolla; the CD player being worth more than the rest of the car, including the tyres) to Mascot, which is the site of Sydney's main airport (and calling it Mascot saves me having to call it Sydney Internatonal Airport all the time). The little plane got an emergency take-off slot around 8.30pm flying north to Coff's Harbour, which is an hour and a half's flight up the NSW coast, though would be considerably quicker in a commercial plane.

The patient was a 55 year old lady with a brain haemorrhage who needed transferring to Sydney for further investigation by the neurosurgeons at the Royal North Shore (they don't have the right expertise at Coff's). The transfer was uneventful though he did note with some amusement that there were only three of them on board; himself, the pilot and the flight-nurse, the latter seeming to be in charge of brewing up and handing around the bourbons, which is more that you get when you fly Jetstar.

I'm not asking any questions about the lack of co-pilot. We've all seen Airplane and we all know how the cabin crew and autopilot have to land the plane after both pilots get sick. Darren reckons the autopilot is up to the job but I'll just keep my fingers crossed the pilot's not had the fish.

Patient Update

The man who fell from the scaffolding in the Blue Mountains has died.

Parking Ticket

So the screen on the laptop is buggered; that's the professional opinion, an opinion that's cost us $88.50 from a specialist computer shop in Surry Hills. I could have diagnosed that myself for $88.50 worth of fiddling with the hinges. Still, it's nice to know that the professionals agree, though I'm feeling particularly gaulled about the $88.50 since I got a parking ticket for $79 last night, having mis-understood the parking regulations outside Ella's nursery and parked in a spot that required a ticket from the machine. The really annoying thing about this is that I'm not one of those people who decides to risk it on the assumption I won't get caught. I'm a rule-abiding citizen, a tax-payer, an upstanding member of the community, at least, if you don't count the fruit-smuggling over the Queensland border.

Anyway, the sum of this is $167.50 incurred in the last eighteen hours for zilch, though when I say zilch, I'm not counting the absolute rant I gave the parking attendant as he stood tapping my registration number into his machine, a rant I really needed to have after almost seven months of living in a city where nothing really works properly and nobody really cares.

"Are you ticketing me?" I asked

"Yes"

"But I thought I could park here. I'm sorry, I've misunderstood the rule - I've been here literally five minutes picking my daughter up"

The parking attendant was a little Italian-looking man. He didn't even bother looking up at me because if he had, he'd have seen me struggling to carry Ella plus her bag while simultaneously evading the vegemite sandwich she'd nicked from the tea trolley in the kitchen. As a human, I'd have taken pity, but then we all know parking attendants aren't human.

"I'm just doing my job" he said, continuing to stare at his little machine, which I'd have quite happily knocked him out with if I'd had a free hand with which to grab it.

"Well thanks for that" I said. "And what a great job you're doing, a real positive contribution to the community. What a great Australian you are, and what a great country this is. You're bloody marvellous you Australians, bloody fantastic"

And with that I gave him the bird and called him something terrible and the injustice of the whole thing enraged me so much that I put Ella into her seat and forgot to strap her in.

"Straps Mummy!" She said. "Straps!"

It was almost worth the $79 to have a good rant.

Equals

I nearly fell off my swivel chair this morning because within five minutes of arriving in the office someone had offered to make me a coffee. I was so taken aback that I’ve no idea who the voice belonged to, I just sat there thinking three months into the job and finally I’ve been offered a brew.

Allanah arrived half an hour later complaining about delays in the train journey across the harbour bridge. Allanah lives in Kirribilli, near Kirribilli House, which is the official residence of the prime minister and she’s easily my favorite person in the office, originally from Canberra but refusing to visit her parents all winter because she says it’s too bloody cold in the capital. This really makes me laugh because I imagine refusing to come out of the house in Warrington because it’s too bloody cold. She has a real affection for all things British and a masters degree from Cambridge.

“It never really struck me before, but you poms are very formal aren’t you? I mean they do say that about you but it’s not always obvious”

“Why, what have I done?” I asked.

“Not you. No, this morning I went running with a British friend and we were going along the harbour and we passed John Howard out on his morning run. So I said “Hi John” and my friend said “Good morning, Prime Minister” which made me fall about laughing”

“Well if I saw our prime minister I don’t think I’d even consider saying good morning to him” I said

“Why not?”

“Well I suppose I wouldn’t expect him to reply. I’d think I was bothering him, he’s busy and important isn’t he?”

“Well there’s the British class system” She said. “You all know your place and you know the pecking order. In Australia there’s much more equality”.

Later in the morning our fundraising manager sent out an e-mail to say we had to move our cars from the parking spots outside because the social ladies were due to arrive, the ladies who sit in the boardroom eating lamington cake and thinking up plans to raise money for our cause. I couldn’t tell you their names because they’ve never stopped to speak to me. They’re too busy and important.

“Where can I put my car then?” I asked Alannah.

She thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t know” she said. “The permit you have is only good for the spots right outside the building though you could park at the aquatic centre for an hour”

“I think I’ll leave it where it is then” I said. “You said this was a land of equality but it seems to me that some people are more equal than others”.

Stick that in your pipe, George Orwell.

Spooked

We’ve been having some computer troubles over the last few days so it’s been a bit difficult to update the blog. We have a laptop computer with us that’s four years old now and the screen won’t stay upright so you have to hold it in place, which is a real pain when you’re also trying to type. Anyway, I think the screen is on its way out now because it’s gone completely dead and the only way it lights up is if you close the computer lid almost all the way down, which is a bit of a problem if you actually need to look at it.

Darren has a day off today so he’s gone looking for a computer rescue helicopter but either way I sense a large expense on the horizon,

So to update you on the rest of our weekend, we didn’t do much yesterday, just wandered down to the beach at Clovelly, but on Saturday night we headed out with Lucy and Paul to meet up at a pub called The Argyle in The Rocks area of the city, though we nearly didn’t make it inside because Darren’s as-ever casual dress caused a bit of a stir in the queue (yes, the queue) to get in. He was wearing a smart-ish v-neck teeshirt and some olive-coloured trousers and looked pretty tidy in comparison with his usual standard but not tidy enough for the doorman and his posse, who started whispering about us and dispatched someone else to give him the once over with a walkie-talkie in their hand.

Having no idea what the issue was I thought perhaps it was our age and while they were asking the younger crowd for Id, perhaps they were about to turf us out as too old or too naff or too wide-hipped to be perching our arses on their minimalist little stools. But no, it turned out the problem was Darren’s lack of collar, which makes him a danger to himself, I know, though eventually they made an executive decision and came over saying something along the lines “Now I know you’re all respectable older people and that’s why I’m letting it go just this once but in future you need to wear a shirt collar to come in this pub, so next time you won’t be so lucky”.

Older people. What does that mean?

The pub itself turns out to me extremely swanky, so swanky I’ve no doubt it’s owned by some antipodean drug baron (who wouldn’t be nearly as scary as a British or American drug baron because, as you know, everything in Australia is a bit half-arsed). The building is enormous and it’s split into indoor and outdoor sections with some unisex toilets (urinals apparently cleverly concealed in the corner so you can see the blokes’ faces but not their other bits) and standard lamps as big as street lighting, the DJ presiding over the whole lot, suspended from the ceiling in a glass box.

Like I said, the stools are very small, so small it was touch and go whether I’d topple off them but I did manage to maintain my dignity long enough to survey the sickening specimens of youth and cool all around me, you know, just long enough to work out what the youngsters are wearing these days (and since you ask, they’re wearing long maternity-type smocks and chunky belts and leggings, all teamed up with flat pumps. Like I’ve always said, it’s not that I don’t know what’s in fashion, it’s just that fashion won’t go over my hips).

Anyway, we had some food, which was actually very good, but it all got too much for our ears and after the second complaint about the racket, we headed back out up the Argyle Cut to the older end of The Rocks at Miller’s Point where we settled ourselves in at The Hero of Waterloo pub for a few more scoops.

Now there’s a few things to say about this and the most noteworthy is that I’ve been on the wagon for four or five weeks now, ever since the incident in Port Douglas when we found ourselves drinking with all of those sixth-formers and I woke up next day thinking I really ought to have more decorum, especially now that I’m a mother. So when I say we’ve been out drinking, what I really mean is that Darren has been out drinking and I’ve been acting as chauffeur, but it suits me fine, so lucky him.

The second thing is that hanging around The Rocks at night is a damned sight scarier than hanging about by day and I’m not talking about the botoxed ladies or the leopard-skin trousers, I’m talking about the spooks, most of which I’m convinced are hanging about on the Argyle Cut and in the pubs at the top of the road.

The Cut itself is a tunnel gouged through the sandstone cliffs between Circular Quay and Darling Harbour. It was started in 1843 by convicts with hammers and chisels (and only partly because the road was actually required but mostly because the governors needed something to keep them busy) and didn’t get finished until they brought explosives in to complete the job in 1867. When you walk through the cut you can see the original drill-marks in the sandstone, which is dripping wet in places and full of little nooks and crannies where thugs and gangsters and rats used to hide out until the bubonic plague struck and The Rocks area was forced to clean up its act. It’s spooky at night, as you can imagine.

And then there’s the Rocks Ghost Tour, which I was considering booking us into until I discovered it was nothing like those ghost walks in Edinburgh because this is Sydney, home of Mardi-Gras and Prescilla Queen of the Desert, so in Sydney the ghost tours are conducted in a hearse and the guides are dressed up like they’re off to a bondage parlour.

(Actually, they are off to a bondage parlour because the tour does stop at a bondage parlour and you’re welcome to go in if you pay extra, which is another reason I didn’t book us a place).

So having walked up the Argyle Cut we turned right down to the Hero of Waterloo, a convict-built pub (also 1843, which makes me think they were actually building the cut as a quicker route to the pub), saved from demolition in the 1970s and now a real landmark on any proper tour of the real Sydney.

“Have you been in here before?” I asked Lucy

“No – have you?”

“Yeah. We came in here one lunchtime and it freaked me out. I’m sure it’s haunted, I got a really strong feeling and wanted to leave”

Paul heard me say haunted, turned around and gave me a look. Paul’s a true Manchester bloke, doesn’t suffer fools and I could tell he thought I might be turning out to be one.

“Just walk in and tell me whether you can feel anything” I said to him, so he walked in and stood at the bar and tried to get a feel for the place.

“Can you feel it?” I said

“Nope” he relied, laughing. “Don’t believe a word of it”

“Well I think it’s in the corridor leading to the toilets anyway” I continued. “That’s where I felt it”

Then Darren went to the bar and I sat down with Lucy but my ears pricked up when he started chatting with one of the locals.

“Haunted you say?”

I shot out of my chair and up to the bar.

“Did you just say this pub is haunted?” I asked her. She looked at me through bloodshot eyes and it struck me immediately she could pass as an early settler in Sydney Cove, all boozed-up and slightly bordello-looking, the sort of girl referred to as a buxom ale-house wench in books about the convict history.

“Yes, it is” she replied.

Darren shot me a look and made a gesture that the girl had been drinking, which she had.

“Where’s the ghost?” I asked. “Whereabouts in the pub is it supposed to be?”

“In the corridor leading to the toilets” she said. “Someone fell down the stairs”.

Saturday Sausage Sizzle

Ingredients:

Clontarf beach (1)
Sausages (8)
Banana bread (half a loaf)
sun cream (conservative dash)

Method

Pre-heat the weather to 25 degrees and line the skin with suncream.

Take four adults and three children and deposit them on the beach at Clontarf. Set the barbeque to sizzle and slice the banana bread.

Sit back and enjoy - Magic.

Cudge

The end of the walk - Coogee - we're home.

North Coogee

The sad memorial to the local victims of the Bali bombings and the entrance down to Giles Baths, part of the cliffs at the north end of the beach.

Gordon's Bay

Quiet, peaceful and definitely not flash.

Are you sold on living in the Eastern Suburbs yet?

Banksia

At Clovelly we walked under loads of Banksia trees, one of the native plants in this area.

"They used to eat these didn't they?" I asked Darren

"Yeah"

"How did they cook them?"

"Probably on the barbeque, knowing the Australians".

Dead Centre

Continuing past Bronte we reached Waverley Cemetery, which is also full of people not paying taxes for the view, though the council are thus far letting it lie.

The cemetery takes quite a battering, being on the cliff, and the graves are in worse repair than you'd expect for their ages. Some of them appear to have shifted a bit though erosion or subsidence. Some of them are spilling onto the path and you have to walk very close to the family vaults if you want to continue the walk.

As Shaggy would have said - Yikes.

And then there's the rugby pitch up on the cliff. It's winter and you know how wet it's been but look at the colour of the grass. Now you know why Tom Jones always craps on about the green green grass of home.

A Dog's Life

By the time you round the cliff towards Bronte, you've realised that your life back in Warrington is a dog's life compared to life down under. If you click the top photo you'll see the many choices for a morning dip at Bronte; the rockpool with water flowing back into the ocean or the lagoon ar just the Pacific. Ho hum, decisions, decisions.

Stopped for lunch at the Bronte Lounge (Eggs Benedict 10/10 - done to perfection and enjoyed whilst bottom wedged into cow-print swivel chair). Then this great dane rocked up with the biggest hang-dog expression in the southern hemisphere. I mean, what's he got to be sad about?

Tamarama

Pronounced Tamma-Ramma, like the Aussies say.

Or Glamma-Ramma because of the body beautiful that tends to frequent it.

Caveman

Jimmy Whyles lives on the cliff face just around the headland from Bondi. He's been living here for years but the local council are trying to move him on because, they argue, he's got one of the best views in Sydney and he's not paying for it.

Jimmy Whyles splits local opinion. Some people say the council should leave him alone, he isn't doing any harm. These people take him cups of tea and hot soup when it's cold and he invites them in for a chat.

He's got a good set-up here in the rock; he even has a washing line and an armchair but I'm not sure where he plugs in the fridge.

Bondi Icebergs

At the far south end of Bondi Beach you'll find this building, the famous Bondi Icebergs . The top floor is an expensive restaurant (Kylie Minogue and Paris Hilton have eaten here in the last few months) but the rest of the building is given over to a little cafe (great coffee) and sauna and changing rooms belonging to the pool.

The rockpools in Sydney attract a lot of retired people, and most of them seem to belong to the pool's swimming club. The blokes display their allegiance by wearing speedos with the club name on their backsides. This guy's a member of the icebergs but at Coogee the knickers read "Coogee Penguins". There are whole legions of these retirees lounging about the beaches and pools of the Eastern Suburbs. They have alarming suntans and (in some cases) alarming pot bellies to match.

It's not hard to see why Australia has a higher life expectancy than almost anywhere else in the world.

Bondi Beach

It's easy not to like Bondi because in summer it's full of backpackers. Behind the beach there's a shallow park and behind that there's Campbell Parade with it's horrible concrete road and horrible concrete shops and at least half of the people who come to Bondi come here to be seen.

Still, there's no denying it's a beautiful beach; the sand is powdery and the sea is clear. They say it's netted against sharks but we have it on good authority that the net is incomplete and that the sharks they do catch in the net are almost always swimming away from the shore rather than towards it.

Fancy a dip, anyone?