Camp Cove - III

What a difference a week makes - last Thursday's child-free kicks came from hiding from the rain in a cafe down Glebe Point Road, this week found us under the grill on the beach at Camp Cove, a cooking position we'll be assuming for the next four months.

Darren can lie on a beach all day; he doesn't even particularly need a book, which makes me wonder what goes on in his head when he's not at work. I mean, is it a Homer Simpson-type thought bubble with a big doughnut in the middle, or does he think about bleeping medical equipment and green oxygen tubing?

Personally, without a book, I start making mental lists while I'm lying on the beach. Today for example, I managed to mentally re-arrange our front bedroom at home (out went the wardrobes, all the clothes went to St Roccos in Stockton Heath; mental argument with Darren about his terrible hoarding habits. After that I mentally got rid of the kitchen table and replaced it with a smaller one before nipping to John Lewis for a table runner for the table in the hall).

Faced with this frantic mind-racing, I don't sit on beaches for long. Today I left Darren under the grill and went for a walk around the headland, where I found the foundations for a WWII boom net that had been placed across the entrance to Sydney Harbour to stop the Japanese submarines from sneaking in. One of the subs had got itself tangled up in the net and the crew had to blow themselves up, presumably to escape the terrible fate of spending the rest of the war in the hands of the Aussies with nothing but a plate of vegemite sandwiches to sustain them.

And on the other side of the headland I sat on a rock ledge looking down the harbour towards the city, but no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to imagine the Sydney Harbour that had greeted Governor Phillip in his longboat on January 22nd 1788; you can see the shape of the land and some of the trees are still there, but it's hard to get past the shape of the city skyline and the noise of the city going about it's business.

After four hard years spent settling this land (and he wasn't in the best of health), it seems wrong that I can look at what Governor Phillip's hard work amounted to and he can't. Would he approve of it, I wonder?