The Captain

Saturday 1st December

It's the first day of summer and it's been chucking down with rain all day. Not cold, you understand, just chucking with rain, the sort of weather you get all steamed up if you wear a raincoat. The weather in Sydney recently has swung between seriously disappointing and seriously glorious, with hardly anything in between. I think it's fair to say that if you'd been here on holiday within the past month then it might not have been exactly what you'd been expecting.

This afternoon we walked down to Coogee for the annual Coogee Festival. It wasn't raining when we left but almost as soon as we arrived, the stall holders were battening down the hatches and never mind us buying any of their chilli jam, we bought a bloody great golf umbrella and stuck ourselves underneath it.

Anyway, it eventually stopped raining and we had a look around. Apart from the market stalls there was a small fairground and a few open-air barbeque type places, so Ella got her first ever bag of illuinous pink fairy floss (which is what fairies eat, apparently, though if that's true they must have teeth like bombed-out houses) and Darren had to ride on the teacups with her; almost every parent looking green as they found themselves spun around and around by the man operating the ride (and by the way, people who operate fairground rides look exactly the same in Australia as they do in the UK. In Sydney terms, they look as though they live out west).

The turn out for the carnival wasn't brilliant, as you'd expect from the weather, which was a shame because all the proceeds were going to Sydney Children's Hospital, though as Sydney Children's Hospital is possibly the most fashionable charity in the city, it already has almost more money than it knows what to do with. But those that had turned out had braved the weather for one reason alone; Captain Feathersword.

Now I never thought I'd have an opinion on the Wiggles, much less an actual favorite. When we came to Australia I had no idea who The Wiggles were, just that they were four blokes wearing skivvies who hung out with an octopus, a dinosaur, a dog and a pirate. It all seemed a bit weird and a bit, well, amateur.

The problem is, they've hooked us up and reeled us in. So now we own three of their DVDs (region 2 ones; specially ordered on the internet so we can continue to enjoy them in the UK) and not only do we willingly sing along to their songs but we even know what they're called in real life. And everyone has a favorite wiggle and mine's Anthony (the blue one), though I'm also very fond of the pirate, Captain Feathersword because he does a cracking impression of a Kookaburra.

So when we heard that Captian Feathersword was coming to Coogee we started counting down the days until we'd meet him (okay, I started counting down the days). The council erected a stage on the beach, the captain would be arriving by boat.

So there we were in our raincoats, waiting for him, though we had to suffer two other acts beforehand, both of them trying to compensate for their lack of talent by cranking up the volume on the speakers enough to burst several little eardrums, at which point I dragged Ella further away from the stage shouting "too noisy".

And then the captain was going to be half an hour late, and then another fifteen minutes, all the while the audience of little kids (and me) is waiting expectantly in the drizzle and the sand.

Then finally Darren starts gesturing at me across the crowd that he can see the captain's ship coming around the headland at the north end of the beach. And then it's getting nearer, and now, yes, he's just about to land, only I can't see any of this because I'm standing in front of the stage, though I've shared the news with Ella, who's just staring at it.

Darren was joking. The captain was not arriving by boat at all. The captain had been holed up behind the curtain for the last hour. The Captain was an imposter; he most certainly was not Paul Paddick, the real Captain Feathersword. The rainy crowd of children stopped dancing and fell flat. Ella glared at him. The whole thing was half-arsed, an insult, like saying they were sending Geoffrey from Rainbow and sending someone else in his jumper. A bloody cheek.

You can't fool kids you know, and you can't fool their mothers either.

nb Skivvy, n, A sort of long-sleeved roll neck top worn by Australians, especially The Wiggles.