Sick as a Parrot

27 degrees today and the first time I've had the air conditioning on inside the flat. It's the the fourth day in a row I've spent alone with Ella, who's still sick as this parrot I found in the botanical gardens a few months ago. For me, the cabin fever has well and truly set in, though we put the clocks forward last night so it's a big Hurrah! for daylight saving and at least the 5.15 waking has moved to 6.15. We're now GMT +11, which makes phone calls and webcams much more convenient.

They do daylight saving all over Australia except in Queensland, so Brisbane is now an hour behind, even though it's just up the coast. There have been moves to change the rules, but the proposals keep getting thrown out, so the Gold Coast is threatening to take matters into their own hands and wind the clocks forward anyway, which is a bit like Liverpool and Manchester being in different time zones. I don't know whether they'll actually do it, but it's typically Gold Coast, a place that doesn't appear to give a stuff about anything.

This afternoon I walked Ella down to Coogee for another afternoon constitutional and immediately realised why we go everywhere in the car.

It only takes fifteen minutes or so to walk down to Coogee but some of the streets are incredibly steep and getting back is hard work, especially once a child gets to Ella's age. Still, it's a pleasant walk on the way there, even if it's a shocking haul to get home, and I love looking at all the individual houses and buildings on the way down because they're all in such different styles and states of repair. Some of them have names hung on plaques by the front door; I noticed one today with Ormskirk marked out in shiny copper, which really made me smile, but not as much as the building called Malcolm at Bondi Junction makes me smile. What sort of name is that for a block of flats?

Coogee was buzzing with the usual sorts; families with young kids, British backpackers wearing board shorts in the pattern of the Australian flag, skinny girls in yellow K-Mart dresses eating all sorts of pies and bread rolls and Pide (pronounced pidder), which is a sort of cross between a pizza and a kebab.

Anyway, we didn't stay long at the beach because the humid, overcast conditions have brought out even more flies, which are buzzing about in shocking numbers, hitching rides on people's backs (they prefer white clothes - one guy went past me with fifteen bluebottles on his back) and landing on your lips and sunglasses and trying to fly up your nose. I'm still considering the Kakadu fly net and/or swinging cork hat because in the past few weeks I've started to understand why they were invented. What a pity the image of the cork hat has been hijacked and elevated to some sort of comical status, because given the extent of the fly problem some days, I'd be more than happy to wear one.

In the meantime, it's the good old Aussie salute, a salute everyone's having a crack at down in Coogee today.