Shopping

Ten days since the official start of summer and I've seen more rain in the last three weeks than we saw on any average three weeks during the winter. The days start cloudy and by three o'clock it's usually raining. The chances of returning to the UK with a suntan are diminishing by the day.

Started the day with a walk around Centennial Park, which, bizarrely, takes me ten minutes less now I've found the clip for the i-pod and don't have to carry it in my hand. Everyone in Centennial park's wearing headphones, even the old grannies, though they're wearing those big ear muff types that Cliff Richard wore in the Wired for Sound video. If you're too young to remember the Wired for Sound video, bugger off my blog.

This afternoon I drove over the harbour bridge to a suburb called Crow's Nest; a place we might well have been living had Darren accepted the job he was offered at the Royal North Shore. Funny how things turn out, I often drive through suburbs close to other hospitals and wonder how our year would have looked if we'd lived there instead of Randwick, especially as the other suburbs all have much cheaper rents and we'd have been likely to have found a house with neighbours.

Anyway, the reason I went to Crow's Nest (which you might have guessed is positioned on a hill) was in pilgrimage to a shop called Clay and Flax who stock so much gorgeous blue and white ceramic stuff that my eyes go googly just looking in the window. The owner of Clay and Flax sells some of her stock to a lady who runs a coffee grinding stall on Victoria market in Melbourne, which is how I found out about it. The satisfaction of googling the address and going across the harbour to find it was matched only by the dream-like state I was in while standing in the shop. Unfortunately ceramics are heavy and unfortunately we're now on freight restrictions. I bought a couple of things but I'm saving Clay and Flax for another day.