Parking

Today I paid $25 to park my car at St Mary's cathedral in downtown Sydney.

And here's why. Sure, you can park at the side of the road under certain conditions, but I'm buggered if I can read this lot while I'm driving past.

The entire city is full of helpful notices like this. The natives know what they're doing so they can follow the rules but not me, I can only follow the simple notices.

And don't forget, it's illegal to park in the opposite direction to travel and it's bumper to kerb most of the time.

Sheesh.

Sky on Fire

In answer to a previous comment, yes, Ella really is turning her sentences up at the end. All the bloody time actually, though I'm probably guilty of it myself. If I'm going to get a bit part in Home and Away, I've got to start somewhere.

This evening when I collected her from nursery she treated me to a rendition of "I can sing my ABC" all the way home. She can indeed sing her ABC, though she's replaced "eff" with "iff" and "ex" with "iks", a worrying trend I'm keen to stamp out because she sounds kind of South African at times and it's not an accent I'm fond of. Serves me right for training her to say "G'day Grig" as a party piece.

The sky was on fire as we drove home; a purple rain front hanging over the city but the skies out west a brilliant blue. The sun had set over the Blue Mountains but the light it was casting on the underside of the purple clouds and the blue of the sky was absolutely stunning. I see funny unfamiliar light like this all the time. It reminds me where I am. I might be in this city but really I'm in this great wild southern land.

Christmas minus nine and it's snowing in the Blue Mountains

Slippers

And then we went to Darling Harbour, which was a bit drier than the day we went to the aquarium and Ella chose some slippers at the kid's store Cotton On.

She chose pink, which didn't surprise me, but I'm alarmed that she can sniff out Ugg boots like a native because, what with turning her sentences up at the end, we've got a proper little Aussie on our hands.

The Powerhouse Museum

So the storm warnings were out in force last night; tickertapes racing across the bottom of the TV screen warning that the storm was an hour away, the late-night news reader reminding viewers to tie down any loose garden articles and "stay away from creeks".

Weather like this is a rallying call for the mothers of Australia; it's time to roll up the sleeves and get baking, time to get out the wellies and the raincoats and head to the city's museums.

With this in mind I attempted the pear and raspberry bread last night, though as I didn't have a recipe, it wasn't exactly a triumph and fell apart the minute I peeled the (floppy) tin off. Still, it tasted okay so I wrapped great chunks of the stuff in foil and packed it into a picnic, along with cheese and vegemite sandwiches and a flask of hot milk. Then we headed off to The Powerhouse Museum at Darling Harbour on the recommendation of my "Sydney for Under Fives" book.

As is common, the weather forecast was wrong. The storm was downgraded then, well, I think it just expired. Anyway, the skies were blue but we stuck with the plan and I'm glad we did.

The museum was a hit, especially the building site, where the kids don hard hats and flourescent jackets before transporting foam bricks on train carriages and conveyor belts and building a house. Then there's the the dolls' house and train set. Oh yes and the crazy-feet piano and the machine that dispenses chocolate drops in the name of experimentation.

I had a great time, even when a child of about eight told me to "rack off" and I had to report him to his teacher. Yes, I'm a snitch, I just couldn't resist the opportunity to report I'd dobbed him in.

Damp

They're not used to wet weather in Sydney. Apparently they don't get much of it, which accounts for the drinking water dams hovering around 30% of their capacity most of the time.

You might have seen some of the storms we've had on the news. At Nobby's Beach on the central coast a tanker lies embedded in the sand; the very sight of it is drawing crowds from far around. To give you some idea how wet it's been recently, the dam levels have risen to 45%; not enough to end water restrictions, but enough to contemplate going to a car wash, something that might otherwise attract very disapproving looks.

Because it doesn't rain often, they're not set up for it, particularly the houses. To get some idea of what I'm talking about you'll have to imagine your own house without double glazing, if you have it. Then imagine the seals at the edges of the windows aren't much cop and there's no heating and no insulation so even if you put on your little plug-in radiator, most of the heat is lost through the windows and walls. It's so damp inside the flat that I'm peeling the pages off the calendar every day when I used to rip them and the windows rarely clear of condensation. It's miserable.

Anyway, we're not the only ones suffering; I had an email from Scott saying their flat is freezing cold, though if I had the view they have, it might take my mind off it for a while.

Christmas minus ten.

Christmas Minus Eleven

Christmas minus eleven days and it seems my ex-step brother is joining us in the blue mountains next weekend. He's back in Warrington right now so I think jet lag may be on the cards.

At work today we had a child fall ill with a febrile convulsion during playgroup.

"Call for medical assistance" said Allanah. I ran to the reception desk but Kath wasn't there so I picked up the phone myself and dialled 0 for an outside line.

And now what? What's the number for the emergency services? I don't know.

For a moment I stood frozen, feeling totally helpless. Then it came to me I'd seen 000 on an emergency services poster so I dialled that and got the nice lady on the other end.

"Where are you?" she asked. I could tell her the name of the road but didn't know the number so I had to go fishing about for some letter-headed paper.

"What's the nearest cross street?". Now she's really testing my observation skills. "And how's it spelt?"

"And finally, what's the phone number there please?". Once again I was fishing for the letter-headed paper.

She might just have said "Where the bloody hell are you?" because I could have replied "I haven't a bloody clue".

The child's parents returned later in the afternoon to collect her things. Despite the fact she frequently has convulsions, she'd had every test under the sun including a CT scan and MRI. There's no way she'd have received that under the NHS. On the other hand, the ambulance cost them $800 to travel half a mile. That's much more expensive than flying first class.

Chit Chat

Christmas minus twelve days; today's advent calendar - a snowman.

This morning I found my British colleague Karen leaning over the photocopier gazing wistfully at a postcard of Vanuatu. It's been on the noticeboard so long that the edges are curling up. "Bloody weather" she said as I went fishing in the filing cabinet for the keys to one of the company cars. We have a few, which means you never know what you'll be driving from one day to the next.

"Yeah I know - and no central heating. It's a joke, but not a funny one"

"You two ought to be used to it" chipped in Kath, our receptionist. "It'll be like this until the end of August. August is a terrible month". She wrinkled her nose up as though there was a bad smell underneath it.

Karen and I shot each other exactly the same look. "August? The end of August?"

"But we're not doing too badly, it's almost the shortest day already" continued Kath.

"Well that'll be why it feels like Christmas" said Karen. "The light is exactly the same as December back home. I'm off to the Blue Mountains for the Yulefest in a few weeks, I can't wait, I need something to look forward to in all this gloom"

"Me too" I said. "I have season lag"

She's right about the December light. It's pitch black by 5.15pm and the street lights aren't really up to the job. It doesn't exactly make you homesick, but it makes you think about home much more often. It's not the sort of weather you associate with Sydney so your brain thinks you must be somewhere else.

On Saturday I loaded the Sky weather page onto the laptop to check when the hell it was going to stop raining and it took me roughly a minute to cotton on that it had defaulted to the UK weather picture. So there I was, busy studying the outlook for the north west corner, which, incidentally, corresponded exactly with the weather outside the window. And then my brain registered and I felt myself shooting across the globe in an instant. It doesn't seem much of a summer this week in Warrington, which is a pity because the rain is getting in the way of my father-in-law mowing those stripes into the lawn; the only thing I have to look forward to next January.

Anyway, it was nice to have some chit chat in the reception area this morning because it happens so infrequently, which is one of the things I miss most about home. I've been in the post two months and still nobody has asked me anything about my home life, husband, daughter or where I come from in the UK. They haven't asked me about my old job or about what it's like to work in the British health service. On Mondays they ask me how my weekend was but they expect a brief reply.

This thing about the chit chat is a common complaint amongst the British, a nation more accustomed to brewing up a nice cuppa before they can even contemplate starting any actual work. In my case I also like a nice chat first thing in the morning, a comment about the weather or the telly or so-and-so's useless boyfriend. The aussies come in and get on with it, and they work long hours and lots of unpaid overtime.

Those who don't are considered slackers, a badge I shall wear with honour on all our behalfs. Where's the fun in working?

Advent Crown

We have 3223 tracks on our ipod; almost our entire CD collection. And then we have this gadget on the top that transmits the music to our radio so we can play all our music while we're away. Next thing I'll be saying "Isn't technology marvellous?" and serving myself a nice slice of Lamington cake. I'm getting old.

Anyway, my point in telling you this is that the Ipod also thinks Christmas is coming because in the last two hours, on it's "shuffle" mode, it's randomly shuffled itself onto Slade's "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day" and is now playing "Step into Christmas" by Elton John. There's nothing else for it, we've decided to join in with Yulefest celebrations in the Blue Mountains.

Christmas minus thirteen days. And now I'm off to bend my coat hangers into a Blue Peter advent crown.

Get the sprouts on.

Knickers, by Ella

My mum has some funny idea called "toilet training". She's bought me a special book about big girls who do their business on the toilet and a star chart to stick on the fridge. It's all very well but I know at least two kids at nursery who's parents went down the route of chocolate drops as a reward, so I'm holding out for a better deal.

Anyway, she went to Coles and came back with a three-pack of knickers for me. Ha! I'll wear them my own way until she comes back with the chocolate. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

Europe

And then I found these photos of St Paul de Vence in Provence. We fled there at Easter 2005 in a last ditch attempt at holidaying before Ella came along. I was six months pregnant and we took in Monte Carlo and Antibes, Nice and Cannes. We climbed the hill at Eze-Sur-Mer as well, which I can hardly believe when I look back. It was a Saturday afternoon in St Paul and we watched the locals playing boules and smoking pipes (including the women) before tucking into our crepes.

It struck me this is the sort of thing the Aussies were trying to recreate in Leichhardt. I don't know whether they do it as an attempt at recreating the beauty of other parts of the world or whether it's because they're homesick and need a taste of where they came from.

Anyway, they can't do it, they get it wrong and they don't pay attention to detail. The light's too harsh and the stone's the wrong colour. It's not the same.

Australia has stunning natural beauty, amazing skies and quirky animals but it lacks the history and the depth. A trip to Europe is a big deal for the Australians.

Concorde

I was looking through some photos on the computer this morning. We transferred most of them to a hard drive before we left but have a random selection with us in Sydney.

Anyway, I wanted to share the lovely photos of Concorde we got at Manchester airport a couple of years ago. It's not just Qantas I'm obsessed with. I was pregnant at the time so Ella's been on board too. And no, the hat's not part of the uniform of a plane spotter, it was bloody freezing.

And come to think about it, I drove all the way to Broughton in north Wales (when Ella was six months old) to see the A380 fly over the factory where they made the wings. I suppose you really would call it plane spotting, though what with all the budgie-fancying, I don't have the same time to devote to it these days.

Bird Show

And so begins a second weekend of Sydney winter. It's enough to make a girl turn to chocolate, though it's coming to something when you buy a bar of Toblerone because there's nothing else edible. This in itself is a first because I've only ever bought Toblerone on cross channel ferries and I've never actually seen one in anyone's house except at Christmas, which leads me to think it's my season lag to blame, convinced that Christmas is around the corner.

This morning I stood at the window surveying our prospects while Ella listed aloud her plans for the day; park, swimming pool and beach. The rain came down in sheets moving south to north across the skyline; the palm trees bending, the parrots shrieking indignation, caught in the storms without their umbrellas. The Rainbow Lorikeet looks particularly pathetic when drenched to his skinny little body, afterall, who ever heard the phrase "water off a parrot's back"?

The ferries are cancelled since they sent one of the Manly boats out into the harbour to test the swell and watched him swirling around in the filthy cauldron that Port Jackson has become. It's whale watching season but I doubt they're doing much business.

Anyway, faced with the storm we took off in our waterproofs to a bird show advertised in the Southern Courier. We'd been expecting galahs and parakeets and magnificent cockatoos but were met with rows and rows of identical-looking budgies in cages, a smattering of finches providing the only variety on the theme. Then a man walked past with a painting of a budgie on canvas and I realised my life in Sydney has plummeted new depths - Saturday afternoon at a budgie-fanciers' convention in a wet Berghaus coat.

If there's nobody at our welcome home party, I'll know why.

Garbage Chutes

The thing about big blue skies and seemingly endless horizons is that they quickly change into endless looming black horizons once the weather takes a turn for the worse. The weather in Australia is so spectacular and extreme that it makes the news all the time for it's purple thunderstorms and torrential downpours and when it snows, it's like they've hit the jackpot.

The weather continues to pour buckets on New South Wales, especially up in the central coast and Hunter Valley regions. The balcony is litterd with leaves and debris, the barbeque abandoned in the corner. And I've finally given in and bought Ella a thick winter coat.

This morning we went to the ballpool at Marrickville to meet up with Jan and Saul. As the weather is bad, it was bursting at the seams (or, you might say, fuller than a pommie complaints box) and impossible to keep a close eye on the kids without physically tailing them through all three levels of the climbing equipment; something of a feat when you're decked out in skirt and boots. We lasted half an hour for our $12 entrance fee before heading off back to their place for the rest of the afternoon.

Jan lives in a two bedroom flat on the second floor of a complex near the University at Camperdown. She parks her car deep underground and finishes her journey in a mirrored lift. Admittedly, the security car parks are great but it's such an enormous hassle doing the food shopping and getting it back up to your flat that you'd almost consider buying one of those tartan shopping trolleys if you weren't also lugging a toddler. Almost.

Jan is spoilt because she also has a garbage chute, unlike us, as we have to lug our bin bags out of the complex, up the hill and round the corner to the communal bins. I can only dream of having my own wheely bin, especially one tucked neatly in the corner of the driveway and I'll never again moan about going out there in the rain.

The trip out to the bins is such a trek that we usually wait until we're going out in the car then put the binbag on the roof and drive round there instead. Unfortunately this works for dirty nappies as well, but being that they're smaller than binbags we've often forgotten about them and driven away with them still on the roof rack, only to remember halfway across the city. By the time we've remembered, they've been blown off, presumably leaving a trail of, well, poo, in the same way that the baddy in Hansel and Gretel left a trail of sweets to lure them to the gingerbread cottage. Brings a whole new meaning to leaving something of yourself behind when you leave a place you love, doesn't it?

Anyway, we had a nice afternoon and Jan and I talked some more about her trip back to the UK.

"I'm going to fit in a visit to all the rellies" she began, the end of her sentence turning upwards in an AQI (Australian Questioning Intonation) worthy of a native.

"My brother has a house in Altrincham. They bought it at the bottom of the market and did it up, it would be worth a fortune now. And their back garden, well I reckon it's the same square footage as our entire flat, a great place to bring up kids".

I thought about our own garden, which my lovely father-in-law is mowing into stripes as we speak. I don't think it's far off the size of their flat either.

"The thing is, nobody can afford a family house in Sydney anymore. We keep talking about "taking the Kellyville route" and getting out of the city, but I don't think I could stand it"

"What's Kellyville?" I asked

"Oh it's a suburb out to the north. All McMansions and pools and shopping malls. can you imagine the kind of people who live there? Anyway, the only people who can afford a house in the city are those whose parents owned properties. Thirty years ago everyone could buy a house, white collar, blue collar, it didn't matter. Everyone could own a house and a plot and a pool. Now it's only their kids who can own a house. Professionals like us, lawyers, we'd be struggling to buy a small two-bed semi with a kitchen that needed ripping out. You're talking the best part of $900,000 (£400,000) for a small house like that. It's why we're still living in this unit, it's why we have no garden, no view, no walk to the sea"

I thought about what we'd get if we traded in our house at home; our four bedrooms, three loos, two bathrooms. Perhaps a two-bed semi in a crappy suburb. We'd have to trade up, not a problem with the private income, but still a very big problem for other professions who don't have chance to earn extra money on the side. It's a trap which means it's cheaper to rent, and the landlords know it. They've got people by the balls, they can do pretty much whatever they please and the tenant can't really do much to stop them. There's no security, no sense of a home of your own.

"I had a house in Didsbury, bought it as a deceased estate at rock bottom in 1996, ripped it out and put central heating in. I loved it there, had a great social life, friends always dropping in for coffee. Then I sold up and used the equity to come to Sydney and set myself up. I rented a flat with a view of the city skyline, you know, the whole city shimmers gold and purple when the sun's setting out west"

I know. It does.

"Anyway, I thought we'd better get on the housing ladder so we bought this place off plan. It's smaller and there's no view, but it's ours. The only thing is, we'd like a second child for Saul, a sibling for him, but we're so stretched financially paying for this place and stretched for space, there's no way we can consider it. Already he's sleeping in the spare room that used to be the study. Our books are locked up in a storage unit because we've nowhere to put them. We just kept the recipe books, that was all".

She loves Australia, I think. I'm not sure because whenever we talk about Manchester she goes glassy eyed. I wonder how often she thinks about her brother's house in Altrincham and the house she had in Didsbury and the house she could have pretty much anywhere with a garden and a cosy local pub. Sometimes you have to come away from a place to appreciate the things you have back home.

The Comedy Store

The heavens have opened again; the drains overflowing, the gutters barely able to contain the torrents of water running down the street. If the Hunter Valley cops much more of this, the 2007 vintage might be the most expensive yet.

Still, we have our babysitter booked this evening and never ones to miss an opportunity we headed off to the Comedy Store at Moore Park complete with raincoats and umbrellas. The headline act was a bloke called Justin Hamiliton and the place was packed full of American college students who thought it cool to heckle, even when they didn't have much to say. They thought they were clever, but if they were really clever they'd visit in the summer. They wouldn't battling with the driving rain on the seafront at Bondi in exchange for a cheap backpackers' bed, I don't care how much they saved.

They laughed at all the jokes about the effects of taking ecstacy and acid and smoking bongs in such a way it was obvious it was something they did on a regular basis. Personally I've never seen the need for drugs as my mind came ready-altered (well, unless you count a few space cakes) but it made me feel old all the same.

Justin Hamilton's a balding man from Adelaide, middle-aged, bespectacled. The American kids treat him with a bit more respect, he's older. Then he reveals he's 34 - the same age as me. It's got to be all that sun. Surely I don't look the same age as him.

Blogmeet

So Tokyogirl Downunder and I pooled our collective bloggie minds over several hours of coffee and lunch in a thai restaurant this afternoon, where the conversaton ranged from australian humour (and lack of) to Japanese toilets and 1970's electricity meters. I should never have met her had it not been for us both writing about Sydney on the internet.

TG is writing a novel. She belongs to a writers' group, and even better than this, it's fiction. I don't read much fiction and I certainly couldn't write any, so I am suitably in awe of her skill and such dedication to the art. She wishes her old English teacher was reading her blog. I tell her my old English teacher is reading my blog. Unusual certainly, impressive perhaps, but not quite so impressive as writing a novel.

But can she bake banana bread? Aha!

Anyway, afterwards I went into David Jones and realised I'm more housesick than I thought when I found myself stroking fluffy towels and tablecloths. I even stood admiring the tripp trapp high chair, exactly the same one we have at home. Then I bought two table runners for the kitchen (at home) and tested the weight of some bedspreads for air freighting purposes.

The lady in the quilt department was an aussie but said she'd lived in the UK for two years and only came home because her her parents guilted her into it. The comments included "Your children don't know their grandparents" and "who'll look after me when I'm old?", which, from speaking to other Brits, seem pretty standard guilt trips offered by those left behind.

You hear it a lot, the guilt-trip thing. People who emigrate to australia with their children rarely do so with the full blessing of their families so while it's a great life and the kids are blissfully happy, the parents, and in particular, the mothers, often carry a burden of guilt which they wear as a sadness whenever you mention the people back home. It's wicked of them really, cruel to blight their lives with it, even though you can sort of see their point and you can't imagine how you'd feel if your own child decided to move to the other side of the world. But yes, who will look after them when they grow old? Many of the young British families here are yet to face this dilemma and it will be interesting to see how they handle it.

Moore Park

This afternoon we drove to Moore Park to have a look at the farmers' market. Moore Park is a huge area that was originally home to Sydney zoo, before they moved it to the site at Bradley's Head on the north shore of the harbour. It now encompasses the Aussie Stadium (where they play aussie rules football), the SCG (where they thrash us at cricket), Fox Studios (where they make mediocre films) and so-called Entertainment Quarter and showground, which is where they hold the farmers' market twice a week. In the picture you can see the showground in the foreground, then the SCG with the large floodlights and the Aussie stadium at the back.

Moore park is worth an hour of your time during the day if you have kids. At night it's home to cinemas, restaurants and fruit bats as well as the Comedy Store, which has exactly the same London underground logo as the ones in London and Manchester.

The two best things about Moore Park are the playground (with those funny sunshades on the top, which they call shade sails. Very nice play equipment, including a little castle with drawbridge and a kiosk peddling caffeine) and a shop called "Kids Central" which stocks almost the entire range of Early Learning Centre toys direct from the UK. And because they're British toys, the play food is labelled "Sainsburys", which warms the cockles of a pommie heart.

Anyway, the farmers' market was very pleasant, with real-life farmers selling soil-covered veggies and their wives presiding over home-made sticky date puddings, jams and cheeses. Ella bagged a warm slice of apple and pear cake and having parted with my dollars I took the opportunity to bend the ear of a real-life Aussie farmer's wife about the best way make to pear and raspberry bread, which is the next thing I'm going to learn to cook. Apparently it's all in the frozen raspberries, so we'll see how it turns out.

Thermos Flasks

This morning we headed down to the playground at Maroubra beach with our morning tea, heads held high with raisin bread, grapes, apples and a flask of hot drink each. I've bought Ella some Ovaltine in the same way I've bought a bottle of Radox bubble bath, you know, because we're playing "winter". Anyway, it didn't go un-noticed that the other mothers had bought take-out coffee from the kiosk and there wasn't a single slice of banana bread in sight. Sarah 1, Aussie mothers 0.

The blue skies and chilly weather have brought out the winter fashions. Some of the mothers looked more togged up for a week skiing in Verbier than a morning at the playground, in fact one mother sported wraparound ski shades and a puffa jacket while her little one toddled about barefoot in a sweatshirt and bottoms, which proves my point that the Sydneysiders enjoy dressing up for aesthetic reasons rather than practicality. I'd like to see them walking to the Appleton Thorn pub on a January afternoon. Puffa jackets indeed.

The thing I like about the Sydney winter so far is the cool dry days with the sky painted that endless blue. The sun shines enough to warm your back and you don't feel the biting cold we have at home, so you're not perched on a cold damp bench blowing into your hands and wiggling your feet to stay warm. You actually want to make that flask up and get outside. And anyway, it's warmer than inside the houses.

Lynda, the teacher from Nottingham, says her husband encourages her to pass the time in Gloria Jean's (a coffee house) because it's so cold inside the house they're staying in that they can see their breath when they breathe out. Our flat's not quite so bad, but it's damp in the morning; condensation all over the windows, dripping down the sliding doors obscuring the view of the flightpath. The other thing is, there's nowhere to dry your towels when you get out of the shower; no radiator to hang them on, so they just hang cold and damp and limp and require washing far more frequently. Even the curtains in the bedroom feel slightly damp, so we wheel our little radiator around the flat where we think it's needed most.

At the park today I bumped into a physiotherapist called Britney who I'd met at another park when we first came to Sydney. She has a little boy the same age as Ella and she'd given me some contacts at the time for possible jobs coming up in the local hospital. In the event I didn't need to use the contacts but she remembered me today and asked how things had been in the last five months, a question I find difficult to answer because I can't seem to find the right words to sum it all up. Thrilling, exhausting, intense, depressing, beautiful, life-changing, hot. How else do you put it into words?

"What park do you go to?" she asked. Every Australian mother has a favoured park. Going to the park in the morning is as much a part of the aussie lifestyle as spreading vegemite on their sangers.

"I like Lyne Park at Rose Bay" I replied.

"Oh I just discovered that place. How's the coffee there?"

"Fabulous"

So much for the thermos flasks, looks like the take out stuff has won. She took my mobile number and we arranged to meet next week.

Playgroup

I could get used to this, to working one day a week. That's it, my working week was over in a flash.

This morning, as is the routine on a Tuesday, I was in charge of running the playgroup at work. At first I dreaded it but I'm getting into my stride now and turning up to work with an hour to plan a playgroup around a theme of somebody else's choosing no longer fazes me. Well, unless the theme is "space" and then all I can come up with is making rockets out of Fairy Liquid bottles in the manner of a 1970's TV commercial, which seems a bit desperate.

Today's theme was "winter" so I googled "winter songs for children" and came up with all sorts of songs about snow and frost and christmas; all highly irrelevant given the blue skies and the six months remaining until santa comes down, well, the air conditioning I suppose. Anyway, I had an hour to choose some and learn them and type the lyrics out for the parents before they all pitched up and it was showtime. Then it was craft and we chalked snowmen onto black card and stuck on googly eyes and cotton wool for snow and glitter for frost. If I can do battle with flying cockroaches, I'm not going to be fazed by a bunch of kids and some pipe cleaners.

"Sure Liam's never seen snow" lamented his mother as she admired his picture. The snowman was blue and his head was bigger than his body but when your child produces an original piece of art, to you it's a masterpiece. Siobhan is redheaded and Irish and speaks with the sort of gorgeous thick Irish lilt you could listen to all day, the sort that quickens pace and treads softly on the /t/ sound. It makes me think of Terry Wogan on radio two in the morning, not that anyone around these parts would have the foggiest who Terry Wogan was.

"We have the yulefest in the Blue Mountains this month" she continued. "It was started years ago by some Europeans who missed the cold Christmassy weather so they asked the owner of one of the hotels to whip them up a hearty Christmas dinner. I miss the weather at Christmas you know; it never feels like Christmas. It never, ever feels like Christmas again when you live in Australia and it's bad enough with missing the family like, but the hot weather makes it all doubly difficult at that time of year".

"But what a great life for the children" I replied. It's a reply I use a lot. I mean it; it's the most marvellous, priviledged and sunny upbringing you could ever imagine.

"And it's only hard for me" she continued. "Liam was born here - he never got to know his family in Ireland. We thought about it long and hard before deciding not to go back and we decided what he never knew he can't miss".

(Almost) Half Time Analysis

So we raised a glass of red wine to her maj over dinner this evening and we got around to discussing Darren's job situation, which is a bit up in the air for various complicated reasons.

His current employer has changed some of the terms and conditions of his contract and this has serious potential financial implications for us. The problem is, potential is all the problems are at the moment. The changes were supposed to have happened at the end of May and they didn't. They might happen later in the year and they might not. Nobody really knows, except Darren's boss, who's in Europe on holiday.

Faced with this uncertainty, he looked around for another job, which is how the outback rescue post came up. He's passed their medical and fitness test (this in itself is a miracle. Turning up to a fitness test with your wife's "Fitness First" gym bag shouldn't count) and they want to know when he can start. It sounds done and dusted, but if he leaves his current post, the boss will be pissed off. The boss has fingers in many pies. He could make it very difficult for him to find work in Sydney in the future. We don't want to burn our bridges if we want to come back.

And that's the crunch. Do we want to come back? Are we bothered about pissing off the boss? Do we risk it or do we risk staying in the current job and the money falling off? Will we regret having done that if we decide not to return? The half-time analysis is fast approaching.

I've talked to lots of Poms since we arrived, and we talked to Jo and Gordon before they left. They did the year we're doing. They described their emotions as following a "J" curve - loved it at first, then they hit a low point after a few months - the bottom of the J shape. Then after that, they bounced back. By the end of the year, they were making plans to emigrate in 2008. Their parents are coming too, though they'll have to wait two years if they need Jo and Gordon to sponsor them.

The thing I notice about the British people I speak to is that they all feel they had more to gain than they had to leave behind. They were pulled by the weather and the optimism, the life for the kids, the size of the houses. It's not that they hate Britain, and yes, they miss their families, and sure, it's hard at Christmas, but they didn't have good enough friendships to keep them in the UK. They didn't mind starting over again because they didn't have much they felt they needed to replace.

We discussed it over dinner. I had a few thoughts.

"I love Sydney, but it will always be here. You can come to Australia on holiday any time you like, if you can stomach the flight. You could retire here if you could support yourself. But if you leave your history, you eventually wipe it out, you can't have it back"

"What do you mean?"

"Well it's not just your history, it's your identity" I continued. "I mean, I think about our friends back home. We have a whole group we went to school with. I always think about the photo I took on new years eve 1999, the big group of us wearing daft party hats; there were a couple of kids in the photo but if you took the same photo now, there would be more children. And two of the people in the photo are divorced now. We've lived our lives together, been through everything together"

"And they're the people you'll grow old with"

"Exactly. And your identity is all caught up in it. In that group, I'm like the sarky one, the one who'll say something a bit barbed and the others will laugh. Then Claire and Wayne will say something hilarious, the whole group will be in stitches, crying laughing. And Sarah will have that extra drink and she'll come and sit on your knee and she'll be falling about laughing and so on, and so on. And then you have the friends you meet at university. Tim and Caroline - they're like family to us - loads of shared history; the time we were in America with them and it started thundering and I was terrified. That's almost ten years ago now. And my friends I met at work - I have another identity there - they call me Boss, I do the organising and the planning and they let me get away with it - we're a close-knit group of girls".

"I see what you mean"

"Being in Sydney for a year is like a game. It's not real life. We can be anyone we like but nobody knows us in any depth. I mean, I like that in some ways. Nobody has any preconceptions about me, but on the otherhand, nobody knows my real identity either, and without that, I'm not sure where my identity has gone. I can't be bossy or sarky or barbed. I can't make people laugh because they don't really understand my humour. It would take twenty years to develop the same networks of friends and I'm not sure you'd achieve it anyway because all the people you'd meet now are of a certain age and they have busy lives and young kids. And the ones who are younger have different priorities. They don't understand you've can't just drop everything anymore. There's no time to hang out together to develop a history. There's no playing records in each others' bedrooms or walking home from school or having sleepovers. There's no pissed-up nights on the town, no holidays in tents in France. Just barbeques with the kids.

I'm not sure I can wipe it all out. Not even for Sydney, not even for all of this, for a lifestyle and an enormous income and a pool. Not even for the cockatoos or the blue sky. I'm not sure it's enough"

The North Shore

I met a couple from South Africa in the playground at Clontarf reserve. They had a miniature schnauzer and after five minutes of admiring him I finally went over to give him a good scratch behind the ears. And thus began a conversation that ran a range of topics from healthcare to taxation to the price of a pair of combat pants and whether we were to old to wear them (she was, I wasn't).

They'd been in Australia for twenty years and had lived in Perth and Melbourne before they came to Sydney. They reckoned the eastern suburbs would be a lonely place to live, "just like Mosman, full of snotty women trying to reverse park their huge BMW cars from behind Dior sunglasses". They're spot on. It's exactly like that.

"What did you think of Perth?" they asked me.

"Oh well I'm biased - we have rellies in Rockingham, which kind of puts you off"

The wife of the pair pulled a face. "Rockingham. Past Kwinana and all that industry. Bloody awful. Perth though, it's a nice city, but it's too small" they continued. "We wanted somewhere bigger, somewhere with more life, so we went to Melbourne"

"And what was it like?" I was keen to know. We haven't been there yet but almost everyone raves about it.

"Great for culture - old style, you know, old money. Not new money like Sydney, not flash. And the shopppng and eating is great, but the beaches are nothing like Sydney. And in the winter it's cold - the wind comes whipping from the Antarctic and it goes through to your bones"

"We thought about Adelaide" I said. They shook their heads in unison. The husband looked aghast we'd even consider it.

"No don't go there". That was it, his final word on Adelaide.

"We looked at Brisbane" the wife continued. "Too, oh I don't know". She raised her hands to her temples. "Small town. Small town mentality".

"It only leaves Sydney" I concluded.

"Yeah. Sydney's the only place you can live. It's got everything, except where you live. All those bloody awful people living in Mosman and the eastern suburbs looking to see how big your diamond engagement ring is".

I laughed and nodded. It's a bit of a theme, this checking out the carats.

"If you emigrate, move to the north shore. You'll meet your kind of people there. I'm Trudy, by the way. This is David. We're Jewish, we live in the Jewish community, but you'd want to live with the poms - there are plenty of them on the north shore. Oh sorry, I didn't mean to say poms, I never know whether that's going to offend someone".

I thought about the slashed tyres and the woman in the Clarks shop at Bondi Junction and the designer mothers at Bronte and I knew she was right. It's not something you can find out from a guide book, it's something that takes living in a city, appreciating the nuances and the politics and just, well, getting a feel for the place. I've got a feel for the eastern suburbs and though we like the proximity to the beach and the city centre, we wouldn't live here. It's a bit too London and we're a bit too northern to enjoy it.