Pizza

I was in the kitchen this evening listening to the news on Channel 9 as it floated across from the telly. We call it "vague news" because they give you the bare bones of a story without explaining anything in any detail. Tonight, for example, they were reporting on the huge swells down the east coast which have led to the beaches in Sydney being completely closed. It never struck me before I came here that whole beaches could actually be closed, but the same thing happened when there was a tsunami alert in the Solomon Islands a few months ago and the beaches have been closed on and off all this week as well.

But there was no real explanation of why the sea is so enormous at the moment, just lots of shots of surfers and idiot kids throwing themselves into the water along Sydney's northern beaches, finding themselves covered in blood when they hit the reefs. At Tweed Heads on the Gold Coast, some sort of huge orange froth has been generated and it's so spectacular that the people trying to swim in it look as though they're sitting in a sea of foam for comic relief, though once again there's no explanation, just the amused expression on the face of the newsreader, who looks as though he's about to say "fancy that" and shake his head.

Now if this was the BBC there would be a complicated swirly diagram about sea currents and some sort of special report from a special reporter in a special location dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, you know, just waiting for it all to go wrong so he can wind up on It'll be Alright on the Night . I can only conclude that the aussies simply aren't bothered about the reasons why, just like they don't need to know much detail about the weather forecast (and don't bat an eyelid when it's completely wrong). Perhaps they're too busy getting outside and enjoying the summer, I don't know, but being British, this sort of shoddiness really winds me up and I realise now how much we take for granted the quality of television broadcasting in the UK.

Anyway, I also heard on the news that the engineers at Qantas are threatening to go on strike though I haven't the first idea what it's all about because all I heard was Qantas and strike and I immediately looked over at Darren with my fingers crossed in the air and said "we can only hope".

We'd just come in from sitting by the pool, where Ella had been practising throwing herself into the water. She's got some really smart Speedo goggles now with a strap that adjusts by pressing a button at the back, and being able to open her eyes under the water seems to have increased her overall confidence, even if she's started to look like Biggles. And we've let some air out of her arm bands as well, which means she has to work a bit harder to stay afloat. The result is a little girl who's fast learning to swim.

"You know what?" I said to Darren. "If we weren't going back to complete your training and if we didn't have a property in Britain, I'd have torn up the return portion of our tickets by now. I'd be staying. I mean, we're just starting to feel like we've got a circle of friends and I feel more settled. They say the first two years are the hardest and I'd be thinking, well, we've got through a whole year so let's just carry on".

He swam over to the side of the pool and rested his chin on his arms.

"What about you?" I asked.

"Yeah" he replied, not needing very long to think about it. "Everything you just said. Liz told me the VMO doctors are earning half a million dollars a year without private work. I don't know how much of it's true, I hear all sorts of stories. Perhaps you're just feeling like you want to stay because we're leaving. Are you?"

"I don't know, maybe. What about you?"

"I don't know either"

A few minutes later we were joined in the pool by a British girl who lives in the block next to ours. She has a daughter of 22 months and used to be a fund raiser in London until she was headhunted to do the same job here in Sydney. They arrived from London back in April and with her contract due to run out in March, she's trying to decide whether to stay on for longer. I asked her which way she was currently swaying.

"I really don't know" she replied. "I think it's such a great life for the kids here. Mica spends so much time outside here in Australia. In Britain she was always indoors, never so much as walked barefoot on grass, I don't think. And look at your little girl in the water there, look at her confidence"

"I know" I replied. "And if you could ship all of my friends here, no question. If you could move this place to Europe, no question. It's so far away though, so far that it might as well be a whole lifetime away"

"That's the thing" she said. "We really miss our friends. And we were in the Botanical Gardens yesterday and I thought, yeah okay, this is beautiful, but you know what? It's not as beautiful as walking down the south bank of the Thames from Borough Market"

"And how have you enjoyed work?" asked Darren

"Well" she replied, hesitating. "The standard isn't as high as in the UK. The quality of people's work isn't as high. You can't say it though, you have to be careful who you say that to, you know?"

Darren nodded in recognition. "The thing I've noticed is that people get promoted very quickly. Perhaps there's not the competition, I don't know, but they do a job for a little while and get promoted, which sort of carries an assumption they were good at the previous job or that they have the skills to do the next job up the ladder, which isn't always true. People progress quickly in their careers but it seems based on thin air so there's no real solid base to anything. Of course, you can't say that to them, you just think it"

"Like the buildings" I chipped in. "There's an awful lot of facade"

"What's for tea?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Let's order a pizza from Dominoes" replied Darren. We never order pizza. We've never ordered pizza in all the time we've been here. It's a reflection of how we're feeling; tired, upset, unsure about our future. Pizza seems like the bottom line, really. We're in pizza mode from now until next weekend.