Butter

"Do you want a brew Susie?” I asked as I passed the reception desk this morning. Susie is our other secretary. Kath’s away on holiday.

“No thanks Sarah, but how kind of you”

Kath always says the same when I offer to make her a drink. Nobody has ever offered to make me one. I’m fast coming to the conclusion they don’t brew up.

I didn’t expect to be at work today because it’s a bank holiday, but apparently that’s not the same as a public holiday. On bank holidays the banks are closed but everything else is open, except some banks, because, well, they choose to stay open. And public holidays are different from state to state; it’s not like at home where we have the same bank holiday weekend whether we live in Cumbria or Cornwall. Nobody tells you any of this, you find out because you hear it on the radio or notice it on your wall planner. If you’re confused, think how I feel not knowing whether I’m supposed to turn up for work

I was feeling a bit sorry for myself having to go in on a bank holiday so today I went off to look for a new coffee house on the way to work and found one grinding its own beans (and probably milking its own cows as well, judging by the price). The girl behind the counter was young and flouncy and wearing one of those fashionable smock tops that make most women look seven months pregnant. Suddenly I missed the woman in the deer-stalker hat.

And then she began a conversation with the girl at the head of the queue.

“What colour is it darl?”.

The Sydneysiders call each other darl all the time; darl as in Sophie Dahl.

“White. I mean, what sort of moron fits a white carpet in a rental property?”

“Oh look darl, I’m convinced they do it on purpose to keep hold of your bond”

“You think?”

“Sure. You spill a cup of coffee on it, they get a thousand bucks. That’s what I call easy money”

I wouldn’t put it past them, I thought. Our landlord still hasn’t been in touch to inspect the damp walls and it turns out the cockroach treatment he paid for was the cheapest one around.

Anyway, a new coffee stop means a whole new array of breads and cakes, including fig and white chocolate bread, a concept so dizzying I could think about nothing else all morning. I have no idea how the Australians manage to stay so healthy-looking with all this stuff on offer, though given that they can buy Xenical over the counter, perhaps all these thin thighs aren’t quite what they seem (Xenical is a drug that prevents your body from absorbing fat and expels it in a variety of unpleasant ways. I know this because I googled the side-effects when I saw five adverts for it on channel 7 in the space of two hours. Needless to say it’s prescription only in the UK).

When I finally arrived at work (on time for once) Jackie was already at her desk, the heating fan whirring cheerfully away as she sat hunched over her desk in a winter coat and scarf.

“How’s tricks?” I asked

“Oh that’s such an English saying” she replied. “I have friends working in the UK and they send me e-mails saying “Hi Jackie, how’s tricks?”

“Well if you’re going to the UK I’d better teach you a word a week”, I said. “I mean, you’ll need to be up on the lingo if you’re going to fit in”

“Okay, teach me a word. Something I won’t have heard before”.

It was hard not to see the potential in what she’d just said. Like the time I told our French assistant at school about how it was customary to address the police as “pigs” and he wrote it down in his ring binder and I could barely conceal my mirth at the thought he might go and try it out. Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe I was such a mischief-maker at school. I look so angelic in the photos.

Anyway, I came up with the first thing I could think of.

“Well you need to know what minging means. If something’s minging, it’s skanky but then men sometimes call women mingers and that’s really not very nice”

“What does it mean?”

“I suppose it means they’re ugly”

“Well then you might like to call someone a prawn”

“A prawn?”

“Yeah, it’s also a word we apply to women. Nice body, shocking head. Or then there’s a butter”

“A butter?”

“Yeah. Nice body, butter head’s shocking. That one's my favorite”

Winter Schminter

Here's the view from the opera house this afternoon. The only way you can tell it's winter is the way the light is falling on the water as it would be much higher in the sky in summer and the water would seem bluer.

It was beautiful here today, there was even live music in the bar and Ella fell asleep for long enough that we could enjoy it. I've come home with a bit of sunburn on my nose - I'm presuming that's winter over and done with then.

Picnic

It's easy to get swept away with the small stuff and just recently we've been feeling sorry for ourselves with the cold damp flat and the long working hours.

Today we brought a picnic lunch down to the harbour and quickly remembered how lucky we are to be here, it's surely the most beautiful city on earth. I know I'm always putting pictures of cockatoos on here, and yes, I'm a bit obsessesed with looking at them but this one let me get really close and he's so feathery I think he's wasted in the botanical gardens, he really ought to be perched on someone's shoulder.

Postcards

A glorious winter day here in Sydney and we finally got round to coming down to Mrs Macquarie's chair, the best view in Sydney. The Macquaries came to Sydney in 1810, Mr Macquarie being the governor. He planned lots of the roads around this area of town and his wife Elizabeth was particularly fond of the view from here, even in the days before they built either of the famous landmarks (bridge 1932, Opera House 1973). He eventually had a seat carved out of the rock for her to pass her time. Now that's what I call a lady of leisure.

Anyway, we're not sending postcards so here's a blog version. Lovely weather, great food. Wish you were here xx

My Dad the Hero

My Dad's a fully qualified superhero, which is handy because my Mum needs rescuing after these weekends entertaining me.

Bat Graduates

Today was the final day of bat training and they've been out in a farmer's field north west of the city, learning how to do accompanied stretcher transfers, which means winching down from a helicopter with a full medical kit and stretcher, securing the patient, radioing back to the helicopter and getting theselves winched back up again. That's Darren in the photos.

And then they had to wait until it went dark and do it all again, which was much harder.

So that's it, fully qualified batmen and women they are. So now you know who to call, but just bear in mind the time difference (currently GMT +9) before you get on the blower.

Click Go the Shears

And finally, out came Farmer Matt and showed us how to shear a sheep, armed with a fabulous CD of outback Australian favorites like "click go the shears" - very atmospheric.

Sheep shearing season starts in the new year when the shearers cut the wool up in the far north of Queensland (you know, where you can buy ripe chocolate pudding fruits). They make their way down the east coast, arriving in Victoria round about Christmas time and the going rate is about $2.20 per sheep.

The world record for shearing a sheep is 36 seconds. Farmer Matt took considerably longer, but he did give us some fresh wool to take home and Ella hasn't stopped talking about the sheep that got a haircut ever since.

Not Wally Gardens

Three sights you won't see at Wally Gardens. I know my make-up's not up to much in the first shot, but this sure beats carrying her on my hip.

The Farm, by Ella

Today my mum took me to the farm to see Mrs Boot and her animals. Mrs Boot was taking the money on the gate but I've gone off her now because she didn't turn round when I shouted her. How rude!

I think my mum has lost it with my dad working all these weekends because today she fed me hotdog and chips for my dinner and let me have a bag of jelly babies afterwards, which I'm not usually allowed to do. I hope she's going to keep this up otherwise I'll have to tell her other mummy friends what she did and I don't think she wants me to do that.

The lambs were okay but I prefer the kangaroo. I'm still trying to find out the best way to get the tics to jump from their fur to mine. Ha! she thinks cockroaches are bad, wait until she has to buy a nit comb in the chemist.

Hungry Camel

City Farm is now a working farm covering 500 acres of land at Abbotsbury, which is about halfway to the Blue Mountains. They farm Merino sheep, cows, pigs and chickens and they shear the sheep for wool on a commercial basis.

So we rode on the tractor and saw the emus and then fed the camel, who was hungrier than I thought because he insisted on eating the paper bag as well as the feed.

The third photo shows the view back to the city, which seems to rise from nowhere like a giant game of tetris. If you click to enlarge you can probably make out the arch of the harbour bridge to the left of the sky scrapers.

City Farm

Another weekend, another weekend alone with Ella, the third consecutive weekend I've had to find something to entertain her. I'm hoping the situation will change soon; the last three weekends fell very unfortunately because Darren worked the last weekend of his six months at the hospital and has been involved in training for the first two weekends of the new job. It's almost as bad as being in the NHS, though there's quite some way to go to beat the entire month he worked in November 2006 without a single day off. That's thirty consecutive days if we're counting. I've no idea how the NHS justify this but they clearly don't care much for their medics having a life outside the hospital.

Anyway, Ella and I headed out woop woop again, this time to Fairfield City Farm. She's been reading the Usborne series of books recently and they all revolve around Apple Tree Farm, Mrs Boot the farmer and a series of animals who get into unfortunate situations, like a pig who gets lost and a pig who gets stuck and a sheep that eats all the flowers for the village fete. I thought a visit to a real farm would help bring it all to life for her.

When Sydney was first settled by the Europeans they found the soils around the harbour were pretty useless for growing the seeds they'd brought from England. Before too long they were setting sail inwards along the river to explore the land further west and this is where they eventually established the first successful farms to feed the new colony.

City farm was bought up in 1947 by a group calling themselves "Big Brother" whose main concern was helping "a splendid type of British youth" emigrate to Australia in order to secure the commonwealth. They paid for their passage then gave them 2-3 months of intensive free training in aspects of farm work before sorting them out with a job on one of these farms out west.

The farm originally covered 240 hectares and four thousand British boys passed through on their way to a new life down under up until 1971. The pictures are from a display in the heritage centre. I wish the two countries really were this close together, I could nip home and hoover the stairs.

Bat School Day Ten

Darren took the camera to work today to show us what he's been up to. From the look of the first photograph they've started filming for some second-rate Australian Drama and for all I know it's called Chopperdocs or Flying Squad and the pilot is having it off with one of the medics. I just hope it's not Darren.

Anyway, they've been winching up into the helicopter today, this is the one they keep at Bankstown and it's the same helicopter he'll be using in Darwin and Orange (Orange is in outback NSW). That's Darren on the left in the bottom photo, pretending to save someone from a crocodile, shortly before he came home and saved me from a cockroach.

After that they taught them some hand signals (because it's noisy with the propellor going around). He showed me the signs over dinner this evening; it's impossible to recreate them here but roughly translated they are "beam me up scotty", "Ouch, mind my balls" and "My wife wants to fly in the chopper over the harbour bridge so sort it out". The latter is the most important one so I'll be making sure he's particularly clear on that one.

Back Again

Right well I've really had it up to here now because there we were sitting on the floor playing tea parties with Ella's dolls and we'd just fed them a cooked breakfast and were moving onto the ice cream course when out of the corner of my eye I saw an enormous cockroach on the floor and as if that wasn't enough, he was waving his tentacles at me.

I'm still no better at knowing what to do so I talked to him a bit, you know, things like "please don't fly, just don't move" then I got hold of Ella's red storage box from Ikea and threw it on top of him and we both stood looking at it, Ella repeating "Cockroaches" after me.

Now these storage boxes are ideal for cockroach capture because they're heavy and even the strongest and biggest cockroach couldn't lift this up. And then there's the little hole either end, ideal for spraying Mortein spray into, which is exactly what I did, after I'd stood on Ella's flimsy plastic chair to reach it and found I was heavier than I thought when it collapsed in a heap causing me to scratch the length of my arm on the kitchen units. Bugger.

Anyway, I immediately phoned a pest control company in Paddington who have promised to come out on Wednesday and re-treat the flat for $154 payable directly to the technician and in the meantime she advised me to stand on it with my heel to squash it.

Yeah, right.

Playdate

Today we had a playdate with Jan and Saul over at their flat near the university. We also had a playdate with Niamh Dawson but I knew the minute we made the arrangement that her mum would let me down at the last minute so I double booked her with Jan and Saul and thought nothing more of it. I've spoken with lots of British mums keen to make friends with the aussies but they've found a common problem in getting them to stick to arrangements and often find themeselves left high and dry at the last minute, which is why they end up hanging out with other Poms despite their best intentions to mix in. And then they end up living in little expat enclaves like the northern beaches because they want to be with their own people, their own culture. I never imagined the two cultures could be so different but they are.

Anyway, after six months down under I'm now familiar with the etiquette of playdates, which revolve almost entirely around the tradition of morning tea, which as you might remember, was a minefield of faux pas before I worked out the rules.

So rule number one, you turn up with morning tea and possibly an activity or a toy, especially if it's raining like today (yeah I know - actual rain again. Yesterday I was asleep on the beach in 23 degree sunshine, today it looks like Wigan). And when it comes to morning tea in nice middle-class circles, you bring an assortment of fruit and breads (raisin or banana) and possibly sultanas but definitely not peanuts as every middle class child might possibly be allergic to them (you know, until they've been to see an allergist). Funny how many Topics and Marathons we all munched through in the seventies without even a sniff of anaphylaxis but there you go.

And you most definitely don't turn up with dolly mixtures or Ribena or heaven forbid, fairy bread, not that I'd advocate any such frivolity myself (she says, wiping the dairy milk from around the edges of her mouth).

So today it was a tupperware box full of grapes and orange segments and a number of arty crafty activities like finger paints and paint rollers and lots more paint (see top picture for illustration of the play date bag before we left). Ella and Saul had twenty minutes of fun, leaving forty minutes of mess (most of it on their faces, Ella opting for a Ricky Tomlinson beard) but it was a nice idea in principle.

Jan received a call from the authorities while I was there. She's sitting her citizenship test to become a proper Australian and they've worked out a date for her interview. Saul was wearing a tee-shirt saying "My Dad says I can do anything I like except play for Australia"; a joke of course, but as holders of British passports I wonder where they really feel at home. Another common theme with long-term expats is that they return home for holidays but don't feel they fit in any more. And they never really feel part of their adopted country either so they live in no-mans land watching their kids grow up on foreign soil, knowing they've made a better life for the kids but suffering this kind of statelessness as a result.

"In the past you had to give up your British passport" said Jan. "You couldn't have dual citizenship"

"So would you have done that? Would you have given it up?"

"Not a chance. The reason I'm doing it now is that I'm tired of waiting in long queues at immigration when I fly into Sydney. That and the fact my parents want to retire here, so us being citizens will make it easier to get them in"

"So what do you have to do to get citizenship?"

"Well you sit a test about Australia then you have this ceremony where you pledge allegiance to the country and confirm you know your duties, you know, like how it's compulsory to vote in an election. Then they give you a seedling from a native plant and you have the welcome address and that's it; nice photo, nice certificate for the wall. Then you're Australian"

"Must be very emotional" I said. "I can't listen to the Australian national anthem without crying, it makes me think about all these brave people who've pioneered this land and everything they left behind. Though it's not as bad as watching GMTV on Christmas day when all the British expats are standing on the beach waving at their families back home and saying "hello Mum, this is your grandson" - that just kills me every time, I can't watch it"

"Then you won't be emigrating?"

"I don't think so. I'm not brave enough. I could do it for five years if I knew I was going home but five years is just long enough to screw up your kids and have them believe this life is theirs for keeps. Then you'd fly them home and they wouldn't know what had hit them when they saw the weather and wanted to know where the nearest beach was. I love Australia, I really, really love it, but it's not my home and it's not fair to mess Ella about. If we didn't have Ella, we'd be here like a shot"

"I can't believe you're going back, I wish you weren't. I feel like we'd have been good friends you and me, you know, if we'd known each other in another life"

I feel incredibly sad about Jan and Saul. We've become good frineds, but already the friendship feels like a dead man walking. We'll be home in January and we might never see either of them again.

Batschool Day Nine

Today the recruits went out to Sydney airport again to meet the fixed wing aircraft they'll be flying in for international jobs. Most of the international jobs fly out to the islands of the South Pacific such as French Caledonia and Fiji but they occasionally fly up to Indonesia as well.

The domestic and international crew have previously been scrambled for major incidents like the 2004 Tsunami out at Bande Aceh and the Bali bombings in 2002. Of course the chances of this sort of thing happening on his six month stint are pretty remote, but it gives you an idea what he might be facing.

Anyway, the international jet is marginally bigger than the domestic one, though you can't stand up in either of them because there's not enough head room (which leads me to ask why they didn't just build them taller). Nicole Kidman's jet was parked nearby and Darren reports it's much bigger than the one they have to use to recover patients, but then Nicole Kidman probably carries more kit. One of my patients knows her and reckons her hair is glued on, amongst other cosmetic enhancements. The Aussies think she's beginning to look like an alien, but who cares when you've got your own plane?

Chocolate Pudding Fruit - Update

The lady in the Port Douglas fruit shop said that the black sapote would take four or five days to ripen and here we are twenty-three days later and we've squeezed it and talked to it, cajoled it and pleaded with it and it's become only slightly squashy, so impatience has got the better of us and we've sliced it open (top picture).

The flesh was yellow when we sliced it but turned brown immediately, before our very eyes. It tasted absolutely vile and we're assuming it had rotted before it had ripened so that's the end of that, the result of our illegal smuggling activities has wound up in the swing bin.

So instead we had a lovely custard apple (middle and bottom). They take ages to cut up because of the enormous number of seeds dotted throughout them, but they're worth the effort. The flesh just under the skin is slightly brown, which you might be able to see from the picture. This bit is sweeter and crunches in your teeth like sugar. The rest of the flesh is smooth and flaky. I'm not sure whether you can buy them anywhere else in the world, but we're sure going to miss them back in Blighty.

Bat School Days Seven and Eight

Batman's gone to ground over the last two days, immersed in his pre-hospital trauma course (PHTS) at the olympic velodrome in Bankstown, you know, out woop-woop. The velodrome was built for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, as the name would suggest, and the fact it's being used by trainee chopperdocs gives you some idea how the Sydneysiders feel about the millions of dollars pumped into the sporting venues seven years ago, venues they now regard as enormous white elephants.

The course is a bit like the ATLS course in the UK but with more emphasis on the bit where you actually rescue the patient rather than the assumed prior knowledge about how you treat their condition, and you have to draw up the drugs and the lines and break open the bags of fluids yourself rather than have someone else do it for you.

Yesterday they walked a couple of kilometres out into bushland to this cliff-face scenario, where a dummy climber had supposedly fallen from the rocks, and they practiced radio contact with the helicopter pilot, which I'm gleefully assuming means they were mucking about with walkie-talkies all afternoon saying "Roger" and "Over" and "ETA ten minutes", just like on ER, though George Clooney never had a bat phone as far as I remember.

Today they had a visit from the Firemen, who were done up like they'd raided the same dressing up box at The Early Learning Centre. Then the bat recruits got to play with the hydraulic cutting gear and take the top off a car wreck. I know it's all in the line of duty, but it does sound like some sort of fun orienteering summer camp run by the St John's Ambulance and Scout Association. I'm just waiting for the "dib dib dib" and I'll know where he's really been for the last two weeks.

Feeding Time at the Cockatoo

There must have been hundreds of parrots in Centennial Park this afternoon; mainly cockatoos but quite a few Corellas as well. The park has a road running around the perimeter, a one-way system where you can just park up if you see something interesting, so that's what we did. Ella decided her duck bread would be better spent on the cockatoos so went hurtling off after them asking "hello, what's your name?" to any of them who came close enough for conversation.

Unfortunately she's not really got the hang of breaking bits off and instead kept pulling whole slices of bread out of the bag, which was just enough to send the hungry cockatoos absolutely mad and before long they were becoming quite aggressive in their attempts to get their beaks on it; one of them even landing on my shoulder. Ella was suitably freaked out and started shooing them away with her feet, all the while continuing to wave huge chunks of bread about in front of them.

Suffice it to say that we were relieved of half a loaf of bread quicker than you can squark Waltzing Matilda, then we ran away and went climbing fig trees instead.

Rat Wheel

This afternoon I took Ella to Centennial Park to see Malcolm's kindy farm. We left the house in fine fettle; Ella carrying her green basket with carrots for the bunnies, but it all went rapidly downhill when we got to the park and there was no sign of either Malcolm or his menagerie. You've never seen a tantrum like it and Ella was pretty fed up too.

Still, we found this little playground and even better than that we found this rat wheel. The more you run on it, the faster it turns. Every parent's dream or what?

Shopping Trolley

Rejeuvenated at the prospect of giving up the brain job (and at the realisation it's August and we're headed for the glorious Australian spring) I resolved to chill out and try a slower pace of life today and started as I might mean to go on by taking Ella to Coles to do our weekly shopping, where I allowed her out of the trolley and asked her to help me choose what we were going to buy.

It all started well, she was co-operative through the fruit and veg, helpfully selecting capsicums and baby eggplant and snow peas. In the bread aisle she was dissuaded from the white loaves towards something with seeds in it and at the deli counter she perched on the edge watching the lady slice the ham.

But then we hit the meat section, the baking section and worst of all the yoghurt section, where I had to place my backside in front of the Wiggles fromage frais to prevent her from spotting them. As I'm blessed in the arse department, I was also able to obscure the Pooh Bear jellies and almost the entire range of Dairylea without moving an inch, which goes to show my Nana was right when she said the extra padding would come in handy when I least expected it.

Anyway, it took us almost two hours to do the shopping if you count a visit to the fish shop, morning tea in the sunshine and two shots at the Wiggles ride in the mall. I spent most of that time removing Ella's shopping from the trolley when she wasn't looking and had to step up the supervision at the checkout because the Australians haven't cottoned on to moving the sweets away from the cash registers and Ella was determined to sink her teeth into as many bars of whatever she could get her hands on. Following on from this expedition, I can now report that left to her own devices, Ella's grocery list would read as follows:

1. Loaf of Cole's Value white sliced bread
2. A bottle of vinegar
3. Broccoli florets, preferably dropped on the floor first
4. Family jar of sprinkles
5. Pink bear-shaped biscuits
6. A pair of Shrek boxer shorts (size medium)
7. An orange
8. Packet of bouncy balls
9. Rubber duck
10. Matchbox car
11. Cadbury's Biscuit Boost (kingsize)
12. Family packet of crisps
13. Pink food colouring
14. Bag of pasta bows

Make of that what you will but I'm not sure this slower pace of life is going to last long.

nb Capsicum, n, peppers
Eggplant, n, Aubergine
Snow Pea, n, Mange Tout