Morning Constitutional

Saturday 3rd March

Today we headed off to Centennial Park for a morning walk. Centennial is Sydney’s largest park, and it’s right on our doorstep. It’s also completely free (and easy) to park. This did lead me to ponder the arrangements back home, where you pay £2.70 into a machine that refuses to give change, in exchange for a dreary walk in a municipal garden with a derelict greenhouse and a few peacocks. The UK looks pretty miserable in the rear-view mirror.

It was a glorious morning, if a bit humid. The park was awash with Aussies playing cricket, families setting up gazebos and girls riding their ponies along the bridle path. There were black swans on the lake and sulphur-crested cockatoos feasting on berries in the trees. We managed to stay in the shade of the gum trees most of the way around until we stopped off at the cafe for a coffee.
The café turned out to be a real battle of willpower, as usual, though I’m pleased to report that we won as we managed to resist the usual Aussie array of raisin breads, banana bread and pear and raspberry bread (the latter being especially delicious). There were also muffins, cookies, ice-creams and dreamy-looking sandwiches. As we are on a health drive, we sipped on coffee and diet coke with pinched expressions on our faces as Sydney’s beautiful people stopped by for that pear and raspberry bread. There’s no justice.

The café at Centennial park is fabulous, not just because of the potential to eat yourself into a carbohydrate-fuelled stupor, but because there’s a kids’ fountain outside, so you can order your drinks and sit back under a parasol while the little ones splash around (and in Ella’s case, stick their mouths directly under the waterfall and drink the chlorinated water as though it’s lemonade). I kicked off my shoes and looked around at the abundance of tropical trees and flowers, Qantas red-tailed planes flying low through the perfectly blue sky every now and then, Ella squealing with delight at the water, soaked through to her skin. “Have we actually died and gone to heaven?” I said to Darren. “Because it can’t be too much different to this”.

Chilli Jack

The mosquitoes are still feasting on any part of me that doesn’t get covered in “Rid” spray before we go to bed. This morning I woke with seven new bites, all on my knuckles. They are itchy as hell so we popped into the chemist on the way to the park to buy some hydrocortisone cream.

“That looks very phallic” said the jewish pharmacist to an old man sitting in the corner. The man was clutching a paper bag and waving what looked like a long green bean at passers-by. The pharmacist turned to me. “That’s old Jack. He grows chillis in his garden, you should taste them, absolutely divine”. The old guy offered me handful of chillis and spoke in a thick eastern European accent, “you chop up, put on salad, with cheese…delicious, sweet, take handful home”.

I don’t know what’s for tea, but it will be chilli flavoured.

Expelled

Friday 2nd March

We went to the library group after all, but only because I couldn’t really justify the vodka at 10am. The library is on the first floor of the local shopping mall and the timing clashed with an early parenting group, so we had to queue along a corridor to use the hot and sweaty lifts with all the other pushchairs.

Transporting a pushchair around shopping centres leaves you indignant when able bodied people use the lift because without a pushchair, I’d use the stairs. I am beginning to wonder whether it’s an Australian thing because my great aunt in Perth will circle a car park five times to grab a space next to the entrance. She claims this is because she is diabetic, which is true, but I have personally witnessed her stealing pick and mix sweets from the Coles supermarket in Rockingham, so I am inclined to believe she’s just lazy.

The library group was a disaster. One of the librarians turned up and ushered the kids into an annexe room where she had them sit on a mat for a story about a hippo. Ella got bored and started jumping up and down and trying to pull hairclips from the older girls, who looked to their mothers for reassurance. She graduated to hopping between the kids blowing raspberries and shouting “I jumping, I jumping” and then to mauling sleeping babies in pushchairs while their helpless mothers looked on from across the room. The more I tried to restrain her the more she resisted.

After the story, the librarian dimmed the lights and projected an Angelina Ballerina DVD onto the wall, which was Ella’s cue to start dancing in any available space, twirling herself round and round (still blowing enormous raspberries) and shouting “I dancing”.

Eventually the librarian said loudly “Can anyone hear Angelina Ballerina with all this noise?”, which I thought was incredibly rude. However, we are guests in this country, so I bit my lip, went onto the mat and removed Ella by the arm, took her outside and strapped her into her buggy. Her protests drew the attention of the other people in the library, who simply glared at me.

One of the other mums leaned out of the door. “Don’t feel you have to go, it’s not the opera house, it doesn’t matter if she makes a noise”. I appreciated the sentiment but that wasn’t how it seemed so we set off to the park instead, where Ella got herself told off by and old man for throwing bark chippings onto the slide. By lunchtime she was back in the shower, covered in soil and chicken sandwiches, her clothes in the linen basket and her shoes drying on the balcony. It’s a whole lot of effort for a mornings work.

Shark!

I omitted to mention my brush with a shark at Bondi beach last Sunday night.

We stopped by a fish shop and I ordered a juicy-looking fillet of flake, which the owner dipped lightly in batter and fried up for my supper. It was the most mouth-watering bit of fish I’ve had in ages and the batter was light and crispy, just like the stuff you can buy straight from the fisherman around the Solent. It was so fantastic that I wondered aloud how the chippies in the UK manage to make that sludge they pass off as fish batter.

Later in the week I bought a second-hand Lonely Planet guide to New South Wales, which had a glossary of foodstuffs. The conversation went like this:-

“You know that fish I had at Bondi on Sunday night?”
“Yeah?”
“Well what was it called?”
“Flake”
“well according to this book it was a bloody shark. Oh my God, do you think it’s still in me?”

Darren reckons it doesn’t matter what it was provided it tasted good. I disagree. I keep seeing those horrible shark eyes and grey gills. That’s the last time I order a fish that I haven’t seen whole.

Cookies

Thursday 1st March

My life as a housewife and domestic goddess part I.

Today I ironed thirty name labels onto Ella’s clothes, went to the fishmonger and took down a recipe for macadamia chocolate chip cookies from a programme on Channel 9. The worst part of all was that the recipe was half finished because they cut to an advert for a bagless vacuum cleaner.

Tomorrow I shall be taking Ella to the kids’ story group at the local library before returning home to do some finger painting and perhaps having a dip in the swimming pool.

On the other hand, I could be drinking a long vodka and tonic and listening to a spot of Basement Jaxx on the ipod, while Ella scales the back of the sofa wearing a pair of knickers on her head.

After the crushing disappointment over the macadamia cookies, it could go either way.

Must Do Better

Wednesday 28th February

Another hot and humid day, which eventually broke into a thunderstorm. Almost as soon as you step out of the shower, you are dripping in sweat. It’s what the Aussies refer to as “a stinker”.

We took up an invite to join Yvonne and her two children for a walk in Centennial Park this morning. I met Yvonne at playgroup a fortnight ago; she lives in a terraced house with a wrought iron balcony over the porch and lizards on the front wall. It’s like a scene from The Sullivans.

Centennial Park was full of glamorous mothers pushing quiet babies in Bugaboo prams. Some of them were power walking, despite the heat. Most were wearing Chanel sunglasses. I, on the other hand, was sporting my Oakley wraparound shades, which have been lovingly customised by Ella, who has chewed the rubber tubes and lost one of the nose clips. The result is one wonky pair of sunglasses with discoloured arms, which fray at the edges in the manner of cut-off denims.

When we came to rest at the duck pond, Yvonne produced a delicious fruit salad with fresh watermelon and a box of vegemite sandwiches on wholegrain bread, cut into perfect triangles. Ella helped herself, while I cringed and apologised in that English way for having brought nothing but a small Tupperware box of grapes, already half-demolished before we arrived. I had forgotten about the Aussies and their perpetual picnicking. They make it all look so effortless. I can only guess that Yvonne was awake at 5am cutting melons while I was asleep in my earplugs.

By 1pm Ella was filthy, covered in juice from an ice lolly which Yvonne bought for her at the corner shop. The lolly was a kind gesture, but it appears to have been made from polonium 210 because it won’t wash off her skin and is hanging in steaks down her arms and around her mouth. I’ve since had to soak her entire outfit in a bucket of Napisan and to strip off my own teeshirt , which was full of handprints and sweat from pushing her up the hill on the way back from the Park. It’s just as well we didn’t buy a Bugaboo, neither of us has quite the required look.

Repeats

Tuesday 27th February

My third child-free day and third visit to the gym. There are six screens showing TV channels as you work out. One of them was showing an episode of Sons and Daughters from the 1980s. I can’t believe anyone still wants to watch this sort of stuff, but as there’s no TV licence, I don’t suppose they get many complaints about repeats. And if it means a re-run of Prisoner Cell Block H, I’m all for it.

When I collected Ella from nursery she had half a slice of raisin bread hanging out of her mouth and a traffic cone on her head. “Does Ella have a problem with sleep?” asked one of the staff. I laughed bitterly in response. “It’s just that we are noticing that she won’t sleep like the other kids do, she’s happy to stick her head in a book, but then she’s grumpy. We’re not sure what to do about it” She said.

No, neither am I.

Zoo

Sunday 25th February

(Click on the photo of the harbour for the rainy view of Sydney you don't see in the brouchures).

Woke to a rainy day and the dawning realisation that some days the weather will be inclement and we’ll need to find things to do with Ella beyond shopping at Westfield Bondi Junction. Taronga Zoo seemed like a good idea, and in any case, I had a long-overdue date with my family of Macaws and with that spinifex hopping mouse, who has been the cause of all this unrest.

The thing about taking toddlers to the zoo is that, really, after they’ve seen an elephant and/or a monkey, the next best thing is to go running off, or “do walking” as Ella calls it. They simply don’t have the patience or desire to watch echidnas mooching about in the soil or search for platypuses or bilbys. It’s frustrating because I could watch small animals all day, especially at Taronga, with it’s position on the north side of the harbour and uninterrupted views of Sydney’s landmarks.

Of course, she was always going to go running off, and it was always going to be on Daddy’s watch. We discussed it afterwards. We were in the platypus house and I’d gone off to seek them out, leaving Darren to watch Ella. Ella had followed me, without my knowledge, and thinking she was safe, Darren had wandered off. In that brief moment, nobody had an eye on her and she was gone, straight out of the door and down the hill.

“You’ve got her haven’t you?”

“No, she was with you”

Blind panic. The most horrible sinking feeling. We ran out of opposite doors to look for her. By the time I’d searched the back and run out through the front, Darren was hooking her up to her reins. It was a heart-stopping moment and if it had happened somewhere other than a zoo, we’d have been in trouble. Dads can’t cook sausages and they can’t watch kids, it’s a fact.

Living the Dream

Saturday 24th February

Four days into our new flat and here we are living the dream. This morning we headed off to Paddington Market, which runs every Saturday. We bought some artwork from a photographer Called Daniel Jones here in 2002 and I was hoping he would remember the piece of work so that we could tell him it was happily resident in the UK, but there was no sign of him. The work is called “Aurora Euc” and is a montage of doubly-exposed photographs that he shot of a Eucalyptus tree on Wollongong plain. He created the effect by spinning the camera as he took the photo. It’s all very eye-catching and clever. We were disappointed he’d moved on.

The market seemed smaller than we remembered, but then things often do when you return to them. I do wonder whether it’s a mistake to return to places you have fond memories of. I could still picture Daniel Jones with his frayed straw hat and piercing blue eyes. In my mind, he had been standing in the same corner of Paddington Market where we had left him years ago and now I know he isn’t, my perception of the place has been altered.

In the afternoon, Ella broke her duck and slept for an hour and a half. I lay on the sofa hardly daring to move. This place is like a wretched African dictatorship with a small girl rigging the elections so she can stay in power.

Later in the afternoon we were joined in the pool by Niamh and her parents, Seamus (the Dubliner) and Sally (an actual Aussie) as well as Seamus’ rock star cousin Aidan. I now know his Christian name yet I’m still none the wiser which band he’s in. They hung about for an impromptu barbie on our balcony, which is the local way of doing things. In Australia, everyone brings something to the Barbie, but as they occur frequently and without much notice, people’s contributions can be a little bizarre. Tonight, Sally had already started cooking some roast veggies when we suggested lighting up the bbq, so Seamus simply nipped home and returned with the tray of veggies straight from the oven along with Sally’s half-eaten birthday cake, so a great, if odd, feast was had by all.

Ella and Niamh enjoyed the occasion, covering themselves in tomato ketchup and chocolate cake before dancing around the flat. We joined them in Ella’s bedroom at one point, only to discover a lizard running hell for leather under Ella’s cot. “Don’t worry, it’s only a skink” said Sally. “It won’t hurt you, but if you pick it up, don’t grab it by the tail, because the tail will just fall off so it can get away”. When Sally picked it up, it did just that. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sight of the lizard’s tail still wriggling, right there in the middle of my little girl’s bedroom floor. I still have some work to do on my feelings towards the continent’s critters. I can live with stories of Possums landing on people’s heads but I don’t like things with scales or eight legs.

We threw the kids into the bath together at the end of the night. “God, I feel I’ve known you all my life” said Sally. She’s easy company. Looks like we’ve all made new friends. God knows I need someone to phone when the lizards get in.

Afternoon Dip

Friday 23rd February

Darren got into the swimming pool with his mobile phone today, which was especially annoying because he had just given his number to a man at Bondi junction who was going to set us up with internet and Foxtel (satellite TV). It made a frantic buzzing sound for ages afterwards.

“I don’t think it will work again” said Tina, our Argentinian neighbour, who was taking her afternoon dip. “I don’t know, it’s been through the washing machine before now” I replied. She gave me on of those knowing, pitying looks exchanged between women with similar domestic challenges.

Gym Bunny

I’ve joined a gym. It was that or stick to the following advice I read in my new Australian Woman’s Weekly Cookbook:

Incidental Exercise Tips:

(a) See household chores as an opportunity to burn kilojoules. Put on lively music and sweep to the beat.

(b) Mix ingredients by hand rather than using a mixer. It’s marvellous for hand and arm strength and will relieve stress and frustration.

(c) Instead of setting the table all at once, walk around the table placing the forks, then around again placing the knives, and so forth.

(d) Don’t use your clothes dryer (unless it’s raining of course) – peg your washing on the line, bending and stretching with each item.

(e) When watching TV, circle your feet and jiggle your arms and legs.

(f) Get up and walk to the other end of the room during ad breaks or get up and stretch a few times.

(g) In the supermarket, gently push your trolley backwards and forwards while walking down the aisles.

As some of these suggestions could easily be grounds for divorce, the gym membership seems the wiser option.

I paid my first visit today. It’s not quite as easy as going to the gym back home, where you simply drive up to the hotel and park near the door. The gym here is inside a shopping mall and the approach to the car park involves a badly-designed one way system with lots of zebra crossings and unfeasibly slow pedestrians. As if that wasn’t enough to dissuade you from making the journey, the car park under the mall is officially the hottest place in Australia and the one available parking space is usually the one under the noisy engines for the shopping mall’s air conditioning unit. By the time you get into the gym (on the second floor) you have almost lost the will to live.

I was a little concerned that the gym would be packed out with Australia’s body beautiful, so was relieved to see a variety of ages and body shapes working out. It’s a much bigger, less intimate place than the one I’m used to at home, and it’s odd being at the gym without having somebody to stop and chat to (though probably significantly more productive). It does, however, have the advantage of a view of the Pacific Ocean from one window and the AMP tower from the other, which is an improvement on looking at the A49, so I can live with it.

The equipment is much the same as the stuff in the gym back home and so are some of the obligatory gym bunny characters.

(1) Blonde Bunny - wears subtle tattoo and full Adidas combo, including push-up bra disguised as sports wear. Lifts free arm weights keeping one eye on the shoulder press.

(2) Shoulder press Bunny - wearing blue singlet and tight shorts, attracting attention of (1).

(3) Coronary-risk Bunny - referred to gym by his GP, puffing on treadmill in baggy white singlet.

(4) Baggy teeshirt Bunny - badly disguised baby belly, unkempt eyebrows, dubious hair.

(5) Trophy Bunny - flits from machine to machine, never breaking a sweat or a nail.

Being number 4, and having been embarrassingly absent from the gym for over three months, I was like a beetroot when I emerged - you could have barbequed prawns on my cheeks. It’s not a good look.

Spider

Thursday 22nd Feb.

Decided I’d try the commute using the harbour tunnel today and resolved to set off by 7.30am. Hit a snag immediately when I found a spider on Ella’s car seat. Our new flat has underground parking, which is great for keeping the car cool, but our designated slot has to be the worst one in the whole complex; sandwiched between two columns of breeze block with just about enough space to open the doors on one side. Not only does this mean it’s harder to get in and out of the car, but it’s also very dark, even in the daytime.

Having just about seen the spider, I practically hurled Ella into the front seat and unclipped the car seat, banging it onto the garage floor for all I was worth. Afterwards, I tried to re-attach the seat but found I couldn’t see what I was doing in the dark so had to drive the car out of the space and park it in the sunlight, thus blocking several of my neighbours, all of whom appeared almost simultaneously, all urgently needing to move their cars and none with any sense of empathy or humour. By the time I’d sorted the seat out, a bead of sweat had formed and dripped the entire length of my forehead, while Ella was hopping furiously on the passenger seat shouting “I bouncing”, totally unaware of the chaos out back.

In the event, the idea of using the harbour tunnel was useless. By the time I’d done the nursery run and got myself halfway home to join the tunnel a whole hour had already gone by. I rang the university in the afternoon to tell them it just wasn’t a possibility.

Having returned home, I enjoyed my first child-free day in six weeks, though did spend it doing all the stuff I promised myself not to; food shopping, ironing and trying to fit our clothes into the wardrobes. We only have a handful of hangers so the rest of the stuff is crammed into cases under the bed. When Darren came home and saw how few clothes he had in his wardrobe, he resolved to go and buy some more. “But you have a case full under the bed, we just have no hangers. Don’t you remember packing them?”. What do men do with their brain?

Commuting

Wednesday 21st Feb

Set off for the potential commute to work again this morning, this time with Darren in the driving seat. The drive to the nursery was ok (about 35 minutes), but the drive across the harbour bridge was soul-destroying; three lanes of crawling traffic around Darling Harbour. It amazes me that people do this every day. The entire journey took 1 hour 35 minutes without getting lost. Even Darren shook his head and said “it’s not do-able”, and the harbour tunnel is out of the question because it’s too far away. It’s such a pity because I’d come round to the idea of working and was looking forward to something new. The drive to the job isn’t the problem, it’s the drive to the nursery beforehand. Once again, motherhood scuppers the best laid plans.

Top Loaders

I don’t know what the thing is with these top-loading washing machines, but this is mine. I thought my German Miele workhorse was ugly, but this thing raises the bar.

The detergents and household cleaners here have very direct names, things like “grease monkey” and “kill it”. The rival brand of softener is called “Cuddly”. Lets hope Fab and Fluffy can do just what it says on the tin.

A Man with a Van

Tuesday 20th February

Our “Man with a Van” turned out to be Indonesian, which isn’t what you expect of a bloke called Barry.

We finally moved out of the holiday let this morning after Ella had gone to her new nursery. It took quite some planning; the washing machine and fridge had to be delivered at lunchtime, the bed collected in the afternoon and the futon at 3pm. Barry did a sterling job, but also spun Darren a sob story about having to support his wife and four children on what he earns with his little van. I think there might also have been a bit about rowing across the Timor Sea in a milk float, so he got a hefty tip for his trouble.

The new flat is much bigger, with a large sitting room (with a “feature wall” painted Cadbury’s Purple, just to rub it in), dining area, small-ish kitchen and a laundry room separated by a sliding door. The bedrooms are at the back, on ground level, with patio doors onto a courtyard full of lizards and ferns. The flyscreen on our patio door has a hole in it large enough for a family of possums, so that will be staying permanently closed. The front of the flat is on a hill so we are raised from the ground and have a large balcony with a lovely view of trees and what the local estate agents would call “ocean cameos” of the Pacific (which means you can glimpse it through the trees, though the view is good enough to check the weather out at sea). There is a pool right outside, which is hardly ever used, yet is warm as a bath and a communal BBQ area, though I’m not sure it looks clean enough to actually cook anything on.

We had to inspect the flat before we moved anything in to check that we agree with the estate agent’s condition report. The bond (deposit) for the flat is held by the “bond board”, who decide how much of it you can have back after the term of the tenancy, according to how much damage you’ve done.

After that it was a complete free-for-all with boxes and bags all over the place, Darren knocking together Ella’s new cot, a Japanese bloke turning up with the appliances and lugging them up the stairs alone (making loud grunting sounds – I was unsure whether he wanted my help or a tip for his trouble, but he got neither) and the most unlikely-looking Darren and Barry combo shifting the heavy stuff. The sofas, which were donated to Jo and Gordon and subsequently to us, are truly hideous (and strangely small, as though intended for Lilliputians) but they were free. They are so offensive that we have to cover them with throws, and as the throws need to be constantly re-arranged, I’ll be amazed if they last the year without us going loony bonkers.

In the afternoon I collected Ella from nursery. The staff reported she’d had a great day, and I was surprised (and somewhat livid) to learn that she’s had an afternoon nap of over an hour for them. When I met her in the outside play area, she was barefoot, covered with sand and wearing most of her lunch on her tee-shirt. She was also smiling broadly. We made the right choice for her.

Why Women Can't Park Cars and Men Can't Read Maps

Monday February 19th

This morning we attempted the commute to Ella’s new nursery and onwards to the job I’ve been offered, which is on the north shore. I ended up driving the Honda while Darren did the navigating, which is a reversal of our usual roles.

As I mentioned previously, the drivers in Sydney are incredibly discourteous and the rules of the road for drivers and pedestrians are altogether different than in the UK. The rules for pedestrians include:-

1. Always walk out onto zebra crossings without stopping to check that it’s safe to do so
2. Walk out between moving cars in much the same fashion
3. Always saunter across zebra crossings and never acknowledge the driver who stopped to let you cross.

The rules for drivers appear to be:-

1. Under no circumstances must you allow anybody into your queue
2. It is your duty to weave between other cars to get to your destination more quickly
3. Honk your horn at people who appear lost.
4. When waiting in a queue at a petrol station, repeatedly sounding your horn might persuade the person in front to pay for their petrol more quickly

Being unfamiliar with the roads doesn’t help because you find yourself stuck in filter lanes turning the wrong way and when you put your indicator on to move over to where you need to be, absolutely nobody stops to let you out. The upshot of this is that you end up taking all sorts of wrong turns and having to pull over and read your map. The maps are very large scale so every few blocks you have to go to another page in the book. The final straw is the constant inability to turn right (and sometimes left) and the ridiculous number of traffic lights (27 sets on my potential journey to work, none of them letting more than five or six cars through at a time).

Of course, this doesn’t make up for bad navigating. The highlights of the morning included vague directions like “get yourself to Wattle Street”, commenting on side roads for the sake of it (without indicating whether I was required to turn down them) and telling me to turn “next left”, which led me directly onto a tramline rather than an actual road designed for cars. The tramline was the absolute last straw. I pulled over and turfed Darren out of the passenger seat saying “I’m not driving any further with you navigating, not ever”

“How come we never have this sort of difficulty when I’ve got the map?”
“Ok, don’t get shirty”
“But you have stressed me out! You drove me onto a tram line!”
“No, I just said “turn left”, it was you that drove onto the tram line”
“You can’t see that you have stressed me out?”
“I can see that you are wound up”

The manager at the university rang me in the afternoon to check how I’d got on with the dry run. I had to admit that my husband’s navigating was lacking and had left us hopelessly lost. As somebody who is rarely late and rarely lost, it was excruciating to admit this. I muttered something about him being unable to read a map. “We all have our strengths”, she replied, which I thought was gracious in the circumstances.

Exploring the Harbour

Sunday 18th February

We took a drive around the harbour shoreline to explore the beaches today. It’s the sort of thing I wanted to do when we came on holiday to Sydney, but a fortnight only lends itself to the obviously touristy things. We did want to stop the car, but like Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in the film “Speed”, we had to keep driving above 10mph otherwise Ella would wake up (that’s not quite the premise of the film, but you get the gist).

Having driven through Watson’s Bay to Camp Cove and Vaucluse, we settled at Parsley Bay, mainly because it was the only place we could get parked up. Like many beaches, Parsley Bay has a reserve area adjoining it, a kids’ playground and a kiosk where you can buy coffee and lunches. It also has a suspension bridge spanning from one side of the beach to the other, though it’s such a short space I can’t think why anyone would have bothered to build one. I’m sure that Ordnance Survey would call it a “folly”.

Ella loved the water, though she does tend to bend over and drink it, which might not be a great idea on the harbour beaches. When there’s no surf, she wades in deeper and deeper until you have to force her to get back out. We took her to Salcombe when she was 15 months old, where she drew attention to herself by wading into the estuary wearing a nappy and raincoat before blagging her way onto a surfboard. If you’ve never seen a 15 month old baby standing on a surfboard in a raincoat, you’ve really missed out.

This evening we booked our babysitter again and headed down to Coogee, where we had dinner at a Brazillian Barbeque place which would have been Dr Atkins’ dream. You are given a block of wood to place on your table and you turn it greenside up for “more meat” and redside up for “stop”. We’ve been to a similar place in Thailand; the waiters come around with freshly barbequed cuts of meat. It’s a great idea, but you do tend to start twiddling your thumbs between slices of meat and then leave never wanting to see another cut of steak in your life. It’s not the sort of place you need to visit twice.

Afterwards, we went for drinks to the Coogee Bay Hotel. The place was full of Brits living the dream and trying to get into the opposite sex’ knickers. I’d heard about the place from people who had been backpacking, but hadn’t realised it was such a large-scale pick up joint. The ladies toilets had machines dispensing “Pheromone Wipes”, which “guarantee to make you irresistible to the opposite sex”. The wipes weren’t working for Keith, a short, bald gentleman from Wolverhampton, out on the town in three quarter length beach trousers and white socks, he cut a pretty tragic figure even before he opened his mouth. When he did speak, such brummie drawl spilled forth that I did a double take to check whether his accent was for real. The Birmingham accent is no more sexy on this side of the world. Somebody should have told him.

Barbeque Number 2

This afternoon was Niamh Dawson’s birthday party. Her parents threw a barbeque in the garden complete with paddling pool for the kids. “I thought there was a hosepipe ban?” I asked her Irish father, Seamus. “There is”, he replied, “I filled it with the bucket. Sure I almost broke my fecking back”.

We hadn’t intended to stay long, but Ella was being entertained, so we stayed all afternoon. Almost everyone in the garden was Irish and they made a fuss of Niamh and Ella playing together which they managed reasonably well, with the exception of a bit of hair-pulling and pushing about on Ella’s part. Seamus’ cousin was visiting from Dublin. He’s in a rock band but I can’t remember what he said they were called, which is a sure sign that I’m getting old. They must be quite successful because he knows David Walliams and Matt Lucas and he’d recently been on a chat show with Jimmy Carr. He could have been the lead singer of Snow Patrol for all I know, and yes, I resisted the temptation to ask him whether he knew Bono (though it almost killed me not to, I had the feeling I might break out with a touch of Tourette’s syndrome and just blurt it out any minute).

Niamh’s grandma had baked her a stack of fairy cakes and arranged them onto a stand, the whole topped with blue frosted icing and smarties. Unfortunately they had been sitting in the laundry for a couple of hours by the time she brought them outside, so they were melting into heaps on the cake stand while the flies did their worst on the food from the Barbie.

“I want cake, I want cake!” stamped Ella as soon as she saw them. It was as much as Niamh’s parents could do to get through the candle-lighting and song-singing before Ella smashed her way in and devoured four of them in rapid succession, splashing around the pool with fistfuls of crumbs.

That’s my girl.

Dead Man's Bed

Saturday 17th February

We’ve given up on the garage sales. Darren went to one in Vaucluse this morning to buy a bed and washing machine and returned with a glass fruit bowl. It’s just the ticket for displaying mangoes, but we can’t wash our socks in it.

The bowl came from a dead lady’s flat, which is mildly disturbing, but not as disturbing as the thought of buying her bed. Last weekend we bought a desk from a newly-widowed woman in Clovelly. She was also selling a queen-sized bed for $350. “I don’t need it since Frank died – not in the bed, in hospital – but it’s too big for me”. She was desperate for us to take it and came running across the road as we were leaving, reminding us about the orthopaedic mattress. We said we’d think about it but as soon as we drove away I said I wasn’t having a dead man’s bed, whether he’d expired in it or not. Darren thought it was a bargain. “That mattress would be good for your back”, but all I could picture was the outline of a dead man marked in white police chalk and the image stayed with me.

A week on, with no bed on the horizon, I tentatively suggested another trip to Ikea. Darren still thought we’d be better with the dead man’s divan, so we rang her back. The bed was still for sale, but the price had gone up to $450 because she was including a lambswool mattress protector. “But we don’t want a lambswool cover” we protested. “We just want a bed. It’s too hot for lambswool, we don’t need it”. She wasn’t budging, so we let it drop. I’m not arguing the toss over a bed I don’t want to buy.

By 2pm today we’d bought a fridge and a washing machine from a dealer in Kingsford. Most of the washing machines in Australia are great big chunky top-loaders, which remind me of the machines in my hall of residence at university, where you put two pound coins into the sliding slot and hoped for the best. They never really got the clothes clean and you could never smell the washing powder after the clothes were dry, but that went with the territory of being a student.

From what I could see of the washers in the shop, they had a “hot” and “cold” setting and three programmes along the lines of “wash”, “soak” and “shrink”. As Ella had fallen asleep in the car, we couldn’t go into the shop together, so having agreed to Darren’s choice of fridge, I also left the washing machine to his discretion. On Tuesday they will deliver a washing machine I’ve never seen.

This evening the bed widow phoned us back to offer the bed for $450 including sheets and pillowcases. She must have traced our number through the Australian 1471 service. Since we spoke to her we’ve paid $190 for a bed from an Irish couple up the road, so she still has the bed for sale. Good luck to her.

Why Did We Leave the Baby Monitor Behind?

Friday 16th February

Today was spent almost entirely in pursuit of a daytime nap. Whole days can pass by while we try to get Ella to sleep, only to abandon the idea by 3pm. “Do you ever secretly consider leaving her in her cot and going to the coffee shop on the corner?” Darren asked, as Ella provided the background noise, shouting and slamming the Venetian blinds against the window in her bedroom.

It didn’t take me long to think about it. Sometimes I think about stopping the car and leaving her on the pavement, at other times, putting the brakes on the buggy and turning on my heel in the opposite direction. I’m sure other mothers feel this way but there’s a reluctance to admit it, which I’ve never understood, because admitting it, and hearing others doing the same, is like breathing a collective sigh of relief.

It’s not as though she’d be in any danger - I could see the building the whole time. What a pity we didn’t bring the baby monitor, it would probably be within range. For a minute I considered it.

We may be fighting a losing battle with the sleep; I met a woman at the park who says her son dropped his daytime sleep at 18 months. “It’s the last straw” she said, “you love them dearly, but their behaviour turns vile at about this age. It drove me to drink”.

I know the feeling. I’m already through two bottles of vodka in four weeks. What we spend on childcare we might well save on booze.