Backyards

If you're feeling fed up about the crappy British summer you've had then I might have just the thing to lift your spirits because there's a woman works in the pharmacy on Glebe Point Road who sprays her hair with glitter when it rains and she claims it works wonders for the soul; better than any light box or vitamin D capsules she's selling in her shop.

Admittedly it looks a bit unusual, especially as she can't be a day under sixty and she hangs out the back smoking fags and waving at passers-by, but if it picks you up, it's probably worth a shot.

This morning I dropped Ella at nursery, where Fiona the British cook was excitedly slicing the fruit salad and whipping up her egg-free muffins because her parents are coming to visit from Cornwall next week and she's having a couple of weeks off from the nursery.

"D'you want anything?" She asked. It's the same thing all British expats ask one another when someone they know is flying into Australia because there's an unspoken acknowledgement that we can't get our stuff and we want the proper stuff from back home. Two hundred and nineteen years and seven months since we claimed Australia for the throne, we're still scanning the horizon for the arrival of our Marks and Spencers knickers.

I thought for a minute.

"You know what? We'll be going home soon. I'll stick it out, but thanks for asking".

"Well they're bringing me some Marmite 'cause I'm sick of this" she continued, and with that she turned around to reveal the biggest plastic tub of Vegemite I've ever seen in my life; bigger than a standard tub of paint, enough to feed an whole army of young Australians, who as we know, have Vegemite running through their veins instead of blood and spread the stuff on everything (and for the record, it's good on cheese butties but not much else).

Afterwards I went for a mooch down Glebe Point Road, which is in the so-called inner west area of the city. The area is slightly elevated above the CBD so when you look down the side streets off the main road, you can see the high-rise buildings of the city centre rising out of nowhere, or in the case of today's view, rising up into a filthy drizzle, the drone of helicopters hovering overhead.

It always seems to be raining when I try to visit the inner west; like the day we went to Balmain and ended up eating gooey chocolate brownies in the Uniting Church Cafe because of the drizzle. Glebe's not as posh as Balmain, it's more organic coffee and cosy bookshops and a quite startling amount of dog poo on the pavement, though none of it white (unlike in Bronte, where, to continue a theme, I saw my first white dog poo in probably twenty years when we did the clifftop walk and exclaimed about it loudly before remembering I'm now a grown-up).

Anyway, seeing as it was raining, I bought the Sydney Morning Herald and sloped off into a cosy coffee house for a skinny flat white and slice of toasted banana bread and then I sat there wondering whether life gets any more delicious than having left your small child experimenting with glittery poster paints while you read the broadsheets in a Sydney cafe. My life down under feels charmed, if a little unreal and I often wonder how I'll replace it with a life in Warrington, as even if I bake my own banana bread, it hardly has the same vibe as life in a major world city, much as I complain about it.

Now the morning paper bored me rigid when we first got to Sydney because I didn't know any of the background to the stories, didn't understand the political context or the way the average Australian thinks.

Not that I've got it sussed out now, but at least I know some of the themes and I can understand the social contexts, even if the politics is still deathly boring (I mean, it's hard to be interested in an upcoming general election when you're not even qualified to vote, though I'm looking forward to the mud-slinging, which is much more personal than in Britain, and I'm looking forward to the prospect of the Prime Minister losing his seat to a woman who used to read the news on telly; a situation akin to Gordon Brown losing his seat to Penny Smith from GMTV, something I'd love to see).

Today I read a story about Australia's shrinking backyards. The idea of the backyard is close to the heart of the Aussies and it has a different meaning here too because it refers not to the six square feet of overgrown concrete you find at the back of terraced houses in Britain, but to the whole idea of a huge plot of grassy land out the back of your detached house, the sort of garden that turns out world-class test cricketers like Shane Warne and Brett Lee, the sort of place we can only dream of on our overcrowded little islands (and if we do have it, it's considered far too ornamental to rough up the grass for a wicket).

But apparently the backyards are shrinking because people are placing greater emphasis on indoor living and the nation stands divided on what to do about it, like there's some sort of constitutional crisis requiring a referendum and perhaps it really is that serious, in which case the Queen herself might step in and tell them to stop building eat-in kitchens and start planting trees, I don't know.

Bill Randolph, an urban planning expert from the University of New South Wales, said Australians should prepare themselves for the prospect of - shock horror - a generation of children who are not very sporty.

"If you want to keep beating the poms, you need the backyard to do it in" he is quoted as saying.

I'll look forward to regaining the ashes then, perhaps here in their own backyard, though we might have to wait another generation to see it.

In the meantime, the real ashes are in the museum at Lords and we'll have to content ourselves knowing just how much it pisses them off that we won't give them joint custody. Leave our treasures with this band of convicts? Not likely.