Mummy's Works

I was watching breakfast telly on channel 7 today, something I don't normally do. At home in Britain I can't start the day without a dose of the BBC, either the breakfast news or else the today programme on Radio 4 (which I save for those mornings I'm looking for a fight), but in Australia it rarely crosses my mind to switch anything on because the quality of the stuff they're churning out isn't that great. And besides, the only non-commercial channel is the ABC and that's full of noisy kids' cartoons all morning (and yes, I'm getting old, older by a year on Thursday).

Anyway, they were talking about the weather and how everyone's pissed off with the cloudy rainy conditions because we've had 42 days of it now with only a few sunny days in between. Admittedly it's not what you'd expect, but I think the natives have quite some way to go before they're entitled to shout about rain, especially with dam levels dangerously low. It's the El Nina effect apparently; something unfathomable about the temperatures in the south pacific ocean and prolonged periods of wet weather. It's how summer's going to look on the east coast of Australia for the foreseeable future apparently, though I need to know how long if we've got to decide on emigrating.

This morning I took Ella to the children's Christmas party at the university, where she saw yet another Santa, though try as she might, our research assistant didn't quite have what it takes to do the whole ho ho ho thing, especially not in slingbacks. I'd like to report that the kids didn't notice but they did, especially little Siena, who declared loudly that Santa was wearing ladies' shoes. Unfortunatley for Santa the outfit was also a little on the tight side, so the baggy trousers were more camel's foot, though you could tell people were trying not to look.

Ella wore her fairy dress and fairy wings, as you might have expected. She also won the musical chairs competition, though as Darren unkindly pointed out, this was in no small part due to her hearing advantage over some of the other children. He's right, of course, but I couldn't help standing on the sidelines cheering for her to win and found myself quite anxious when it looked like she wouldn't. Give me five years and I'll be one of those hideous mothers at the side of the stage mouthing the lines to the nativity play, you just watch.

After the games we had morning tea outside. Everyone had brought a contribution, mine was a box of Stollen and twelve Nemo fairy cakes, the latter of which I'd bought in Woolworths yesterday with the intention of decanting them to a tupperware box and passing them off as home made. Anyway, I didn't have a box big enough so had to own up to them coming from Woollies, which attracted a bit of negative attention, especially from the mothers who'd been up all night baking cheese rolls and baba ganoush. At least, they say they were up all night but then they have better tupperware so now I'm not sure what to believe.