Australian diary

2000 - 2002 (or before blogging)

We spent 2000-2002 living in Sydney; I was working in an expatriate job with the same financial services group for which I had been working since 1991. Colin chucked in his job in the NHS when we left the UK, did some contract work on and off in Sydney, and then stopped work altogether. We planned for me to stop work as well when we got back to the UK; as it turned out, I did, but because my cancer came back and I retired early on ill-health grounds.

We had a wonderful time in Australia. We would probably have had a blog if blogs has been around then. As it was, we sent lots of emails to family back home. When we binned the ancient Gateway desktop we had in Oz, some time in early 2004, I did a quick cut-and-paste from Outlook into Word. We have just blown up the Dell that the Word doc was on, but C has managed to retrieve some stuff from the ashes. These are the edited highlights (minus deaths and divorces), mostly for us to remember rather than particularly for anyone else to read (but you're welcome).

There is more of Colin's writing here than mine. This is partly because he writes better (funnier, more concise); partly because I was working very hard and had less time for sending witty emails (as opposed to ones going "just got back from office at 11pm, got a telecon at 7.30 am so must get some sleep, will ring tomorrow, missing you"); partly because I sent more from my palm-top than the desk-top pc I was excavating.

C is Colin and Ch is me. Various family members make an appearance but I haven't bothered to explain them.

2000 (keep reading)

2001 (further below)

We go to Antarctica (coming soon)

2002 (forward a page)

How it all started:-

26/12/99 (Ch to various family) - The problem with playing Scrabble against yourself is that there is no-one to applaud when you do something clever. Apart from that, goose, dampish walks in winter woods, nice fires, Colin's cough very gradually becoming less frequent.........oh, and I forgot, Christmas Eve's excitement was being (fairly seriously) offered a (good) job in Sydney. Nearly certain we are going to go, subject to various things at work and to pay & rations. If we do, it will be early March (me) and as soon as he can work out his notice and let the house (him). Isn't life exciting. If you get this tonight you can ring for more info (well, speculation). If you get it tomorrow you will need to ring H&A in the evening, as we have a nascent plan to do part of the Wayfarer's Walk tomorrow.

2000

We lived in a flat (called a unit, or maybe apartment in Oz - "flat" has down-market connotations) on the 11th floor in Darling Point, overlooking Rushcutters Bay and with a view back to central Sydney (aka the CBD) and the Harbour Bridge.

We spent a lot of time walking on the harbour foreshore and in the national parks closest to Sydney, the Royal National Park and Ku-ring-gai. Australia is so full of wonderful birds that you can't help but get interested even if you don't start off that way. I seem to recall my mother seeing 23 different species in the first few days she was visiting us JUST from the windows and balcony of our unit.

In September 2000 came the Sydney Olympics.

The emails don't really start until (southern) spring because the aforementioned Gateway didn't arrive until then....before that we were using Psions.

26/6/00 (C to family) - Today's positive new sightings were: white bellied sea eagle; eastern reef egret; crimson rosella. We had a really good view of the egret fishing from rock pools and dancing out of the way of the incoming breakers (it, not us...). Later on we saw sulphur-crested cockatoos eating chips at a cafe, which was perhaps less natural but just as interesting. [Egret and cockatoos both at the Royal National Park]. Yesterday's sightings were the: grey shrike-thrush; spotted turtle dove; and various small brown tweety things and a lizard. We also saw a sign towards the Manly Brownies and Girl Guides (Manly is a place) which would have been a photo opportunity if either of us was carrying a camera. Yesterday we were wandering around North Head, being one side (which one children?) of the harbour entrance from which you could see our flat if you had your binos with you (which we didn't) or taken a spectacular picture (see comment about camera above). Still we took our last trip across the harbour before the new sales tax puts up all the prices and makes the harbour tolls an inconvenient number and awkward for coins.

26/6/00 (C to other family) - Today we were doing a bit of the coast path to the south through the Royal National Park. The day started as a walk, degenerated into a stroll and soon became a picnic. Aussie Meat Pies overlooking a not quite surfable (we deduced from looking at dejected surfers hauling their boards around the bay to find better surf elsewhere) bay in the steady sun of the Deep Mid Winter. We then walked in some real bush (we buy the hats with the corks on next week) and regretted not having our walking sticks (still somewhere on the Pacific) and got poked by various spiky plants.

Tomorrow I have an interview to become general manager of {a group of academic vets}.....Ch is swanning off to Tokyo soon (pretending of course that she doesn't want to go, but buying the guide books nonetheless), but is currently occupied shelling peas which is a proper occupation for a jet setting executive.

After oodles of paperwork I finally have the official approval to import our bike into Australia (but, obscurely, not into New South Wales - yet), which is just as well as the boat is now only two weeks away.

End of Sunday evening, why isn't Aussie wine more interesting, news broadcast.

10/8/00 (C to family) - Well, Jago-san made it back from Tokyo without too many souvenirs. Since then, we've done Aussie history (first farm, first um, well, really a little bit old, mansion, err, cottage) on a cruise up the river. The weather was overcast and a little dampness sometimes was evident. That was winter then. Purple Swamp Hens, White Breasted Sea Eagles and Eastern Rosellas enlivened an otherwise unrewarding tourist occasion. Today was a bank holiday. That seems to mean that the banks were closed and nothing else was different. Because I knew Ch had the day off I said something at the vets about them not expecting me in and got blank looks. Eventually somebody said, oh I see. No that's just a bank holiday. It's not a public holiday. Anyway I ended up going to work and Ch got to stay in for the delivery people with our goods and chattels. Everything now with us (except the bike which is still in customs) and the flat is full, once more, of cardboard boxes. (several days later) Talking of cardboard boxes, I noticed today that the soup kitchen in central Sydney is run by a charity called Our Lady of the Snows. I wonder if they only dispense soup when there is a covering of snow and if so where do they measure it. If it is snowing in Oslo then there's free soup in Sydney. I've got a dratted cold which seems very odd when the temp is a balmy 18 deg C and the sun is hot and strong. The local buses are all carrying adverts for some pill or lotion aimed at helping you beat the winter cold which would be a pretty weak pun if folks didn't really think that this was cold. What an interesting bug the cold bug is. No self respecting English cold bug would dream of being present in weather like this. Too busy off on its summer hols. So if cold bugs can flourish in the Aussie winter, why don't the same bugs make the English summer a complete misery. It can't be because Brits are immune to these weak and feeble strains - otherwise Ch'n'I wouldn't have had two or three colds each these last months. Leads one to suppose that colds are nothing to do with the cold at all. Perhaps they should be called darknesses as they seem to flourish on the shorter days in the year. Talking of darkness, we saw an eclipse of the moon a few weeks back. The moon really did go dark red. I haven't got my mind around the science of this yet (help D). I understand why the moon goes red - sort of the same reason why the sky is blue. But what I haven't figured is what is the difference between a lunar eclipse and the normal waxing and waning. Surely they are both caused by the earth getting in the way of the sunlight. Why is a sickle moon bright white? Answers on an e-fag packet please. I'm still with the vets. Must be better at this bluffing lark than I thought.

19/8/00 (C to family) - I've decided that the Olympics need a new sport - formation tweeting. Australia would enter a team of lorrikeets. We see them practicing every day and are sure that they would win. To imagine how they fly think of the Red Arrows. Groups of three or four flying a very acrobatic course in tight formation merging with another group and then splitting up into different sets. And all the while going tweet. Almost as if every wing beat makes them exhale through a whistle. The cockatoos are noisier and also fly in flocks but they can't hold the formation nearly as well. You get a lot of Brownian motion with cockatoos. The noise isn't so pretty either. More of a scrurch than a tweet.

This is the end of vet week five and they've just worked out that I'm costing them money. They did this about three weeks faster than I expected them to. Damn. The immediate and funny result of this is that I've got to write a report next week setting out all the good things that I've done. Of course this will be on their time...........its a funny world.

Our bike has now cleared customs and may even have got as far as the dealership who will be converting it to meet Australian standards which sound ominous, but the only thing on the list that I can see is that the speedo is not allowed to be dual calibrated. I then get to queue up a lot and finally it will be registered. Must be time to start packing up to go again soon. Ch booked our December trip to the rainforest (sorry to disappoint you M, but the bungee jumping is off. We've managed to keep the white water rafting in the programme though) and there is talk of a visit to NZ in January but this partly depends on whether I'm working. I haven't got settled into the groove of this contracting lark yet. For the last ten years I've known all too well what I was going to be doing in January which was finding novel reasons for the fact that the budget for the year about to commence in April didn't look too rosy (in February we try the old and useless ways of bridging the gap; in March we worry in case the Board takes the problem seriously and actually reads the material we have sent them; in April we all say well its too late now - the year has started so we had better make as good a job of it as we can; May through September is relatively relaxed and is a good time to be away on holiday; in October I gravely inform the Board that we are spending more than we are earning and avoid mentioning that we all knew that this was going to be the case back in January; in November there is a crisis board meeting which resolves that there has to be an action plan in place by Christmas; December proves to be quite a difficult month until people start disappearing for hols on about the 20th; I then come to work between Christmas and the New Year in order to throw away old paperwork and to prepare a rough cut high level budget for the following year which is difficult to base on real figures because nobody else is at work so I make it up and ensure that the gap is at least 5 percent; which means in January I have to find plausible reasons for the gap and to help other people understand how this state of affairs can have come about. Repeat.) This January I might be working and wishing I wasn't or not working and wishing I was.

Ha. I've just remembered I was supposed to go to the supermarket this evening. So, signing off. Gibber.

20/9/00 (C to family) Five gold rings - The weather is beautiful as any of you watching the sport will know. Wasn't the setting for the triathlon brill? On Monday we went to Horsley Park to see the cross country leg of the 3 day event along with 50,000 others most of whom had little more idea about what was happening than we did. A good time was had by all and the noise that went up whenever a green and gold outfit went by was unmistakable. We got close to several of the big jumps and had a good view from the central hill. There seemed to be 49,000 people queuing for a burger which left it relatively easy to get around from jump to jump. 28degC which was almost too hot when in the full sun (which was most of the time - Australia not being famed for its cool wooded glades) but we had slip slop slapped so no burning. Tomorrow we get to go into the media centre at Darling Harbour. Why, or to see what, I am not too sure. But its exciting. In fact to be honest I can't even remember which one of Ch's colleagues has given us the invitation, but hey, go with the flow.

28degC is clearly not yet considered summer weather as at least fifty percent of the people in the bus queue at the Olympic park and ride (quote of the games so far:- officials were surprised at how few people chose to use the free train service to the main stadium and were caught out by the resulting tailback on the motorway) were wearing body warmers or fleece jackets. One day last week I was being driven somewhere by a vet prof. who was wearing a fleece in a car with the air conditioning on. Very odd and not very comfortable for me as I was in shirt sleeves having correctly predicted that a car which had been in a sunny car park for several hours was going to be on the warm side.

I've decided that the sailing is not a spectator sport. Watched live from sea level it gives the impression of a lot of milling about and the tv report said something like......reporting live from the harbour...first day of competition....lots of challenges lodged with the judges and now over to the gymnastics to watch Ivan Ivanovitch from middleofnowherestan perform the triple stanovitch with twist.

We have an australia-o-meter which tells us whenever an aussie gets a medal. Even with the windows closed the cheering is audible. I think the city council ought to have issued residents with ear plugs. I was walking past the bar of the Cruising Yacht Club Monday night when a swimmer didn't quite get gold but Did Very Well and the noise would have been classed as pollution if it was made mechanically. In fact I think Australia ought to be restricted to bronze medals from now onwards to save the pressure on the audiology clinics over the coming months.

Evening has fallen and there is another boring laser light show over the harbour. I expect we will get tedious fireworks next. Can't these people think of something more entertaining?

7/11/00 (Ch's sister, D, to us. D lives in Hong Kong) - Today it is wet. It is raining. It has been raining. It will rain. Hodie rainat. Hodie rain hat. There is a typhoon symbol number one hoisted. It is humid. It is 96% humid. It is raining (did I mention that?). See the rain fall. Fall, rain , fall. We know a song about that, don't we children?

Happy November. Welcome to the dry season.

5/12/00 (M, Ch's mother, on a visit, to family) - Here I am in oz, it is all quite amazing. I got up this am at 5.30, but I had a very good 8 hours sleep before that, so do not, at this very moment, feel jet lagged. We shall see how long it lasts during the day. This flat is very light and airy, with high ceilings and a great sense of space. I have already spent a lot of time sitting on the balcony watching boats and ferries and birds on the harbour, and can't imagine getting tired of it, as there is continual change and movement, and the light is clear and beautiful. I have already seen lots of exciting birds, and big bats came by on cue last night just after sunset. It is hot and sunny, with some large puffy clouds just floating about and a good breeze keeping the flags flying. Maybe I ought to wear a hat when I go out.

[There is a lot of UV in the southern hemisphere by northern standards. You really do need a hat and probably sunscreen even when nipping out to buy a pint of milk. A constant stream of visitors out from the UK underestimated this effect, and went home sadder but wiser and glowing neon]. [The bats are flying foxes - fruit bats - that live in Sydney Botanic Gardens by day and fly off to look for fruit at night, in flocks, sometimes across the Eastern Suburbs towards the ocean and therefore right by our flat at about the same height].

30/12/00 We swam in a billabong (C to family) - with all the excitements of visitors and trips abroad (seriously, several government depts refer to New South Wales as a country - the corollary of which has to be that Queensland is abroad) I've been off line for a while. So, at some danger of this being a "we did this then that then that" list, herewith my report for December.

Even M swam in the billabong. A very safe billabong it was. You could all have sued if we had been eaten by a croc as it was certified croc free by P&O (who owned the hotel by which it passed). Strictly, I suspect, I should report that we swam in the river (Mossman) as at the time of swimming there was enough water coming down stream to have reconnected the billabong to the mainstream (billa - river; bung - dead). However, you can swim in rivers in any country, but only in Australia can you swim in a billabong. So we swam in a billabong ok. Cool and refreshing it was too. Possibly the only moment during our week in Queensland that those words could be associated with. We did see a croc. I mean a real-not-in-a-zoo-croc on another day (nuther day, nuther river), whilst puttering about in a little boat. The overall experience was, however, lessened by the fact that we were sharing the boat with some fine citizens of the USA (Aw Gee Willyalookathat. I nobly restrained myself from saying something along the lines of: my good sir, the enjoyment of others in this boat would be increased if you spent more time looking at the animal and less time talking about looking at the animal. Ch gets cross when I'm rude to strangers). On another day I was bitten by a toothy water going animal. It gave me quite a shock, but very quickly became funny. Yes folks, I've been bitten by a trout. A Coral Trout to be precise. It felt like what I've always imagined acupuncture to feel like, although it clearly had one larger tooth as I could see the hole for days afterwards. I was sitting on the edge of the sea platform over Agincourt (no, I didn't find anybody who could tell me why Agincourt) reef number 3 all beflippered up and trying to get my snorkel mask to fit. I put my head under water and noticed, almost in passing, that there was a fair sized fish right in front of me. I went back to worrying at my mask (which was simply too loose around the back of the head) and incautiously put my hands in the sea at the same time as a member of staff started throwing fish attracting titbits into the same area. One disappointed trout.............and one holed finger.

We avoided any close encounters with most of Queensland's famous biters and stingers, although we do have a nice photo of M looking motherly towards a water python sitting on her shoulders. We took David(a naturalist guide)'s word that hugging a stinging tree was a bad idea ("you don't sleep the first night and the pain lasts six months") and were quite happy that he had trialed the experience in his younger years and was willing to describe it. Leeches, as refered to on the web, were amusing if slightly ruinous of pale coloured trousers. Ch didn't get leeched, but I'm happy to report that the mossies preferred her to me. The nearest to a real-not-in-a-zoo-snake that we got was happily a "safe" one (a green tree snake - so called because it is um, er, black and yellow. Makes identification of the safe ones so easy when they have easy names). We got within about two feet (same boat as the croc trip) when the chorus of Aw Gee Willyalookatthats finally drove it away.

The rainforest was cor wow, but as we mostly managed to avoid being with americans the rainforest never found out. I particularly liked the tree that was possibly 2000 years old (called something like "cyclops" but please apply to Ch or M for the real name [cycad, I think]). Ch met an old pom colleague in a rainforest clearing which was briefly amusing and then slightly tedious. The musky rat kangaroos were hilarious and the ...... I could go on and on.

Back in the big city Xmas came and went. Doubtless we've all put on a pound or two. We went for a swim in the harbour yesterday which brief exercise excused the following beer...... MRT discovered the joy to be had in forcing adults to build sandcastles so they could be knocked over. Also that sea water was an interesting taste if scooped up by the handfull.

Happy 2001.

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2001

16/1/01 Back from the Bungles (C to family, on return from several days driving out into western New South Wales in a heatwave returning via the Warrumbungles; M is still visiting) - As you can see below, we have bungled but are now no longer bungling. But no pictures D - did I bungle? - because I didn't take the camera because I rightly predicted that all my energy would be taken up by driving. I even took a siesta on the second day of the trip in a blissfully cool (mid thirties) cabin on the edge of the national park. For those who haven't read the story below, it was HOT!HOT!HOT!HOT! M stopped taking temperatures in the sun out of respect for her poor thermometer. We regularly got 40 in the shade and maxed out at 43 on day three. The air con on full in the car kept the in-car temperature the same as the external shade temperature. Just. We were buying water in similar quanities to petrol (15 litres of unleaded and 6 litres of water was a typical stop). And we didn't really quite reach Out Back. We were sort of on the porch. We saw lots and lots of new birds which first allowed M to get to 100 and then get to 100 again after I redefined the contest by disallowing any bird that could be seen in Europe. Ch later had a go at raising the hurdle again by knocking out birds that M had seen in HK two years back but enthusiasm was waning (although as it turned out 100 was easily reached again). I saw a wild echidna but nobody else did so I don't know whether it counnnnnnts. Birds include a Superb Fairy Wren, Little Friarbird, Laughing Kookaburra and a Twit Faced Baboon. Work resumed today (although Ch was late and I only did a half day) but thankfully it has been much cooler. M and I walked back from some gentle shopping late afternoon and were surprised to discover that it was possible to exist out of doors and that the water bottles which had appeared to have become an extension of our arms were no longer necessary. I did draw the line though at stopping to look at the pigeons in the trees outside our block. This twitching has it limits. And I don't care how many variants of pigeon exist here that exist nowhere else. I've done bird watching for a while (years probably), and star watching also has its limits. Now we've done Saturn, Jupiter (I saw four moons), and Venus all on x300 telescopes what more is there to do.................

15/1/01 (M to family, on the same trip) - Hullo, Folks, we are back from our attempt at the Outback, boy, was it hot. Very Hot, in fact we registered 43C today on our way back through the Wollemi National Park. The Warrumbungles were great, not very big mountains but good volcanic shapes, pointed and sudden and steep and densely wooded. And full of birds; the count now stands at 107, including Black-shouldered Kite and White-throated Heron. Australian bird names tend towards the simple, ie if it has a white throat, call it the white-throated whatever. Except for the ones which are extravagantly striped across the breast, but are called the pink eared duck, because of an extremely small diagnostic feature that the average birdwatcher would never distinguish. We visited an observatory, and had superb views of the moons of Jupiter ( apparently NASA have just discovered more, so there are now officially 20, but we saw 3 ) and the rings of Saturn, which I have always longed to see. We went on a roo hunt yesterday evening, and saw so many out grazing in the early evening that we got quite blase, and were only impressed by the one that sat solemnly right in the middle of the road, on the white line, facing C down until he stopped, when it hopped slowly off. I must admit we saw quite a few dead ones by the roadside today. We have come back to some extraordinary weather; enormous southerly squalls are screaming round the building, the tide is trying to go backwards, and all the little saily boats are lying over sideways, and wondering if racing is such a good idea after all. Showering is such bliss after nearly 1,000 miles of driving in 40C temps over three days. C has foresworn the car for the immediate future. I wonder if Ch's ferry will be running tomorrow.

4/2/01 (C to family) - First I discovered that our compasses didn't seem to work here. Xian is packing to go to HK. Something like 18 hours flying for a 2 hour meeting. It's a mad world. Packing mostly consists of (a) shopping to perfect our luggage arrangements and (b) sorting out how to fit lots of Pingou videos into slimline business luggage. D might miss out on some of the dragon novels which got thrown out of her luggage but MRT can't be expected to survive another moment without his Pingou. Pingou rearrangements also revealed the famous missing birthday card in its yellow envelope, for which many thanks D&A. A card worth having. Then after discarding the obvious solutions - like do we live in a magnetic block of flats - I find out that compasses only work within thin horizontal slices around the world. This leads to a passing understanding of all those code numbers which come on the box of a Silva compass. Ch's email service has been down for a few days by the way, so if anybody sent her something that they did not send to me they will have to send it again. My email service (same supplier, same name format, arranged two days earlier) has been working fine, but the fault was severe enough for their help desk phone number to have a recorded message saying "yes, we know the email isn't working and, no, we don't know how long it will take to fix". It's a mystery. So, in best gadgetman fashion, I not only buy a new compass which will work here, but buy the special, just invented and ever so new, will work anywhere aren't Finnish engineers ever so clever, Suunto global compass. Anyway, it's working again now so all should be well. So vital has email become that to be cut off is to be left high and dry. Unfortunately, Ch can now read her work email at home as well. A technological masterpiece I am sure. However, in use, this new compass doesn't point north. This is a deduction you understand, as mostly we don't know where north is, but we do know where west is and even standing on our heads north is easy to work out from west. Quite noticeable in fact. The compass says the sun should set where the sun is not setting. More research needed. Oh, and I've just worked out with all that excitement about finding birthday cards that I've missed another important birthday (hello dad) making a complete set this year. I suppose that means nobody feels *especially* slighted. Ho hum. The more research suggests that not only does the magnetic north pole (which ought to be called the south pole as it is the north attracting pole but is unfortunately in a place that we now call north) move around which I sort of knew anyway, but also it appears to be in a different place depending on where you are. And where we are there is a 13 plus degree error between measured and actual (plus another couple to allow for the fact that the australian map grid is significantly non north pointing on the edges which is where we are). This finding at least puts the sun set in the right place. If we had moved to Perth (declination error less than 1 degree) I might never have found out that north was such a relative term. In discussion last night, we worked out that we had not yet seen the southern cross so stand by there for reports of sightings soon.

19/02/01 (C to family) - Well, we survived the Snowies and the drive back (Australia is a BIG place). Ch got sunburnt and I got blisters (my feet have grown again! Three years ago I was size 8.5/9 and now I'm about to discard partly worn size 10s. Good grief) The Snowies are sort of like Dartmoor on steroids. Very pleasant but not real mountains. Only the central area is above the tree line so the best walking patch is quite small. We did a 22km round trip one day which whilst not exactly allowing to touch the trees on all sides was sort of like that. The rest of the park (roughly the size of Wales) is dense gum forest. Very pretty, but....... We saw an echidna attacking an ants nest, and a wombat crossing the road and more of those hoppy about things including one which fell over executing a hand brake turn trying to run away. Also two snakes. One harmless (as in small and ran away at the sound of our feet) and the other safely separated from us by the car chassis and possibly rather less harmless (a copperhead??). We saw snow (don't forget that this is mainland australia and this is late august as it were) but only in grimy patches and lots of alpine *type* flowers. At the third time of asking we even found somewhere selling decent food (glad once again that the Italians have been great emigrationists). I was briefly the man on the snowy river. We saw lots of trees. Did I mention the trees? And then there were the gum forests. Eucalypts everywhere.

29/2/01 (Ch to family) - We walked and we walked and we walked........up Mt Kosciuszko (sp?) and Carruthers Peak (22k, 5 zillion people on top because it's the tallest, and I got sunburned) and Mt Stilwell (only about 4k, but much rougher walking and lots of pretty (white) gentians and excellent views, and I had LOTS of factor 30) and Mt Twynam (16k, more track but fewer people, more interesting alpine flora). All with big packs (well biggish). Then on the 4th day we got up late and wimped out and went for what turned out be an extensive drive instead. We have now largely exhausted the play-power of the Snowies, although I'd like to come back in the real flower season, and also to see it in the snow.

Colin has discovered that his feet have grown and has spent all afternoon buying new boots - not as much of a gadget opportunity as you'd think., as he's now got to break them in before Tassie, and in any case the choice is very limited in Sydney. Anyhow we are now very confident of our ability to cope with the Overland Track, which is only 60k over 6 days pah.

1/3/01 (C to family) - My (patent pending) TRUE GRIP (tm) method of getting cars out of muddy holes came in useful once again last week-end. We were at a do (a 50th birthday party no less) at an idyllic farm cum B&B cum country retreat in the Southern Uplands where the grass is green and the hills are shrouded in cool mist and had arranged to get a lift from party back to hotel to avoid the chance of getting back sober. Anyway this country idyll was about 2km and three fords down a concrete reinforced mud track and it was raining.........Our lift was in a Ford Fairlane (think Ford Granada and then some) which proved to be 3.6 litres of wheel spinning leather seated executive walnut veneered non movement when we got into it to leave. Hmm. Walk? (hic). Get Farmer Giles to get his tractor (we had seen how much farmer giles had had to drink). Go back to the party (there were only *old* people left). TRUE GRIP to the rescue. Nearly all cars come fitted with these vital pieces of sand and mud traction equipment. For only USD 500 our consultants will supply you with written instructions in their use so you can unlock the potential that you didn't know you had. The rubberised floor mats in the front footwells. Tuck them under the drive wheels and away we go. One grateful executive veneered family and one smug cj.

The Southern Uplands are proof that landscape really has to be green to be beautiful and that you can put a twisting mountain pass road a long way from anywhere and it will fill up with motorcyclists who will spend most of their day standing in the mist outside the cafe at the top stamping their feet and listening for the distant sound of a ducati coming up the mountain. Apart from the fact we were staying in the Pioneer Motel, Kangaroo Valley, we could have been in Europe.

I got caught out in a thunder-storm yesterday whilst breaking in my new (larger.........) boots. Scary (and wet). Now what was the advice? Stay under cover/get out into the open? Keep walking/stay still? Avoid high ground/avoid cliff bases? Anyway, boots thoroughly tested and me not fried, so I think I will count the expedition as a success. Also a success was the trial pack for the Tasmanian expedition. Pack weight of 10 kilos with only the water bottle to fill (so about 12 kilos in all). Most of the weight of course comes from items that will not be wanted on voyage (coat, over-trousers, gaiters, fleece, gloves, beanie, first aid kit) but that's only from the perspective of the permanent summer of New South Wales.

Oh, yes. I've been the same weight all week, so its now official. I've lost a stone since arriving in Australia. So that's only two stone to go then to get into the top end of the range on the doc's chart........ I had nearly managed to reach the one stone mark just before Xmas, but then you know what Xmas is like. Let's just say that it created a slight delay.

18/3/01 ! saw a black tiger snake... (C to family on return from Overland Track in Tasmania) - We're back in the land of soap and taps and why do we own thermals exactly? A dull flying day yesterday with delays and delays to remind us what normality is like. We had sun and snow and rain and cloud and wind and calm in equal measure and although the low plains were uncharacteristically brown and dry the mountains were green and wet enough. It was quite something to walk six days without seeing or hearing a road. In fact in those six days there was only one significant path intersection (other path turnings were dead ends or loops). In the middle of the walk we were three days from a road either north or south and many more days east or west. Quite something indeed.

18/3/01 (Ch to family ditto) - We got back yesterday after an absolutely excellent trip. 67km in total (according to our certificates); partly across moorland with dramatic rocky peaks around, partly through various kinds of forest. The track now has quite a lot of board-walk protecting the boggiest parts so we didn't encounter the thigh-deep mud which forms part of the mythology of the Overland Track. Also it's been a dry season - the farmland through which we drove in and out was brown and parched, quite unlike the traditional image of Tassie which is something like Ireland. We had one day of high overcast and chilly-ish, one day of snow and hail, one of rain, and three of mostly sun and certainly dry (in that order). As the first and the fourth days were the ones with the best views and in the latter case a side trip up Mt Ossa, the highest point in Tasmania (1617m and quite a lot of rock-scrambling as opposed to walking), we were very lucky - and the evening of our last day the wind and the rain got up again. Didn't see that many birds (I got a good view of a pair of green rosellas though, for those of you with the book) but several wallabies and Colin saw a snake. It's actually rather disconcerting when you're walking across what looks superficially like Dartmoor with added crags, head down against the hail, and something bounds away from just ahead of you and it's a wallaby rather than a sheep.

We were glad we'd gone on the guided version, as this meant quite comfortable private huts with hot showers (except for the first two where the water-tanks were too low so we ended up with a small basin of hot water) and large amounts of food and moderate amounts of wine. The huts are supplied with non-perishables by helicopter at the beginning of the season. We had two guides with our group and they carried some fresh food including an entire frozen vacuum-packed roast for 12. The other way of doing it is the public huts or camping, which means carrying all your food for 6 days minimum and probably not washing at all for the same period......we met some very high-smelling people along the way. The really impressive thing for the Poms was the fact that water can be drunk straight out of the streams (aka creeks) - there's something very magical about being able to keep your water-bottle filled up as you go along.

We were also lucky in the other people in the group - we all got along very well and had a lot of laughs. I wrote them each a limerick to go in the hut book on the last night - see attached. It was much appreciated. Goodness, I don't normally do that sort of stuff. Having spent most of the day composing as I walked, I am still suffering from every thought falling into limerick-rhythm.

Conversation with my boss on Monday:- "Did you have a good break?" "Yes, thanks, great, we walked for 6 days and didn't see a road" "Oh. [Pause......doubtfully]. Was that a good thing?"

26/03/01 (C to family, describing a jaunt on the BMW R1150GS that we brought with us...sounds stupid, but we'd just bought it before deciding to go to Sydney and it was cheaper by far to ship out than suffer the inital depreciation on sale)

Last Thursday I went for broke. Broke is the first turning off the Putty road (if I say 45 degrees in the shade, M will know where I am) somewhere after the wonderously named Colo Heights Roadhouse (in which I had a bacon and egg roll with brown sauce. I say my good man, could I have one without the sauce. No? Brown sauce with everything, ah, I see. Um good stuff brown sauce ...........I think the German tourist (the only other customer) who ordered three portions of chips with mayonnaise got brown sauce on the mayonnaise). The turning wasn't on my map. I had expected to have to go a little further before being able to deviate. I did not hesitate. I went for Broke. It had, after all, been 150km since the last turning, and I didn't need to have any repetition of the offer of fuel and water. Both of which Broke provided. It also provided a road which was on the map and which went back to Sydney. Mind you, road, was quite an exaggerated name for it. It started peaceably enough, meandering through the vineyards of the Lower Hunter. I grew to appreciate the humour of the rural NSW road signage department. Gravel Road 1.7km it would say. What this turns out to mean is mud (thankfully baked hard) for 1.7km before the 25 metre stretch of tarmac by the driveway to Fred's farm which is immediately followed by a sign saying Gravel Road 2.5km. Repeat. It would have been more honest to put a sign up saying Beware ! Tarmac stretches can cause unexpected grip !

This is now winter which means that the weather has improved no end. Only 50% humidity today and a projected max of 26 deg C. Bliss. I've had to find a pair of long trousers for sitting on the balcony in the evenings. The time difference is now 9 UK, 8 Spain and 2 (I think) HK. I appear to be working again from tomorrow which is amusing as I leave for Europe tomorrow night. They didn't quibble at my daily rate (damn, undercharging them) and they are happy for me to charge them for work I do on the plane and whilst in Spain. This could lead to some interesting recommendations in the report. Recommendation X: that all members of the finance department are provided with a San Miguel and given urgent training in the use of bottle openers. This should provide an immediate improvement in the esprit de corps with subsequent improvements in the quality of record keeping and reconciliations (if I have 5 bottles and you take 3 bottles, then I have, er, one finger two finger......2 bottles).

Tasmania is but a fading memory. All the kit is washed and dried (and some of it has even been put away). The feeling has nearly come back into our respective toes and plans are being laid for a walking weekend in the Warrumbungles. Who, after all, could resist walking up Mount Exmouth. Who comes up with these names? We nearly walked through the Grand Canyon this weekend. Having done this before I can assure you, dear reader, that there is no chance of confusing it with THE Grand Canyon (a pleasant walk though, including a path which takes you behind a waterfall at one stage). We didn't fancy the drive so instead we exhausted ourselves changing all the clocks and watches and buying bedding plants for our extensive gardens.

Is anybody concentrating? Are all the brackets closed? Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Gravel Road for next 37km. Oh jolly gosh what a big pothole I can see. Crunch.......ouch..........

29/3/01 (C to Ch; this email included because there was a lot of this, especially for Ch who was working throughout and flying around the Far East a lot. Most of the related emails were collected on Psion palmtops so have not been preserved for posterity)

I'm not sure when I am going to be able to send this. In fact, I'm not wholly sure when I'm writing it as I've just spent ten minutes working out that it can't be 15:15 on Thursday. Of course, I could have just looked at the Psion but my brain wasn't working that fast. Anyway, after painfully deducing that it was 15:15 on Wednesday I opened the Psion to have that fact confirmed in flashing lights in front of my eyes (I had already changed home city on the Psion as I couldn't remember the international access code from UK phones when I tried to call you an hour ago). Oh well, it least it proved that I was right even if slow. There is a cup of *filter* coffee in front of me in this rather down market BA lounge which I am drinking to ward off an incipient headache. Really I am drinking endless streams of Highland Spring. I had an uncomfortable but otherwise mildly entertaining flight and a painless processing at Heathrow. My comment about Heathrow being dreary (or whatever it was I said) was caused by us being left in a stack for a while before landing (much to the consternation of some Aussie toursist opposite me) and then not getting a real gate so we had to be bussed to the terminal. Light drizzle. And that was just the complaints from the aussies. Wonderful dafs though which cheered things up no end. I hadn't checked my bag through but collecting it was easy. The train was easy and free - but very grey/concrete/forbidding in style. Terminal 1 was having a fire alarm when I arrived but it was in another part of the building. The police are all carrying sub machine guns and pistols and batons (er, where am I?). My silver card meant that I didn't have to queue to check in. This unfortunately meant that I checked in so early he couldn't take my bag, but he tagged it and told me when and where to go thirty minutes later. So I hauled the bag to WHSmith (I still find it odd that there is a WHSmith at Sydney airport........) which provided me with some reading material for Spain and then to Boots which provided me with some AnthiSan for the medicine cabinet. After which BA decided that enough time had passed so they would take my bag. A bank machine miraculously appeared in front of my eyes so I've got some readies for when I touch down at Luton (I haven't decided what to do about Pts yet). The diminutive Rohan provided me with a pair of discount trousers and my sagging ensemble negotiated entrance to this lounge (which is where this email started). I managed to spend the whole flight without exchanging more than grunts with my immediate neighbour which suited the both of us (if you imagine what {university friend} would be like now then you have my neighbour. Fashionable building site work boots. Black Levi's. Black shirt. Very short dyed hair. Dead thin. *Cultured* accent (despite aussie passport)). The entertainment for leg one of the journey was that the second person onto the upper deck of the plane sat in the wrong place (I was first on). This meant that nearly everybody was in the wrong seat. The head steward kept walking up to people and saying good evening mr smith and getting mr jones. He eventually worked out what had happened, although why it had happened remained a mystery. Everybody stayed put for leg one (we were in the air before it became clear what had happened), but they cleared everybody off at half time because they now had to clean up all the seats to avoid Singapore joiners getting upset about not having their proper allocations. The entertainment for part two was caused by the catering arrangements. The plane appeared to have been supplied with triple portions of the least popular lunch, none of the most popular and half portions of the other option. This was discovered after the staff had got choices from most of the upper deck which was partly solved by getting the ground floor staff not to offer choices to their passengers. Ground floor had pasta only. Top deck had some chicken and some pasta. Nobody got the prawns at all. Also the starter was cheese, not beef as per the menu. Some people declined to eat........much huffing and puffing followed (what were the staff supposed to do. Get a pizza delivery?). (Two popular flights - Hamburg and Berlin - have just been called and the lounge is now a bit more relaxed. I got fed up listening to the bloke next to me telling somebody (via mobile)that they weren't being offered the job because they were overqualified but there was a really exciting sales director position in the Ukraine. OK so I made up the Ukraine bit because I had filtered out the exact location but it was somewhere undesirable judging by the number of glamorous adjectives which were being used to describe it). I even got to see a film that I had nearly paid to go and see at a real cinema sometime last year (one of your trips away). I read IceBound which I thought to be excellent and had me all weepy more than once. I got cramp in both legs despite exercising as per the in-flight guide (although palliated by said exercises) and slept for three significant slugs of time. Its now 16:15 and Malaga is next from top of the uncalled flights on the lounge display so I'm going to sign off, go and wash and shave and then find a bit of quiet floor to do some hamstring stretches because my legs have set in the seated position really seriously badly.

31/3/01 (Ch to C) - Got distracted from going out anywhere much by deedy things like reorganising all the pots and pans and gardening. Balconying. As I was rooting up marigolds I was most surprised to find a sleepy little lizard sitting in an elderly nasturtium. He made me jump because at first I just saw his head and though he was a little snake. He was about as long as a middle finger and slightly iridescent. I dropped him in his nasturtium off the balcony because he was so light I reckoned he would parachute down into a bush OK (and I wasn't sure he was quite sleepy enough to ride down in the lift). I think he was a garden skink of some kind (though not quite right for any of the ones in Burnum Burnum). I can't work out at all how he got there. As a tiny baby in a plant?? Dropped by a passing bat?

9/5/01 (C to family) - Not sure why you've all been starved of news from downunder for so long. It might be because our news has been along the lines of "a light bulb blew in the living room" which does not merit the international bandwidth. We are reunited here and are likely to remain so for weeks. Except for that small trip to New Zealand that Ch is doing next week and perhaps the odd half hour in Hong Kong, and maybe........ Still it adds to the airmiles. I've almost got a favourite parking spot at Sydney airport arrivals. When Ch arrived last Friday, somebody *famous* arrived on the same plane. Lights, action, music, pose, pose, pose, pose, pose, pose. Hmm, somebody not very famous, because nobody but the tv crew and the press photographers seemed to know who she was. About 7 foot tall, 10 inches around the waist, and very, very blond. Anyway, watching the press scrumming (sp?) for the best spot made the wait whilst aussie customs disinfected Ch [because of the foot-and-mouth in the UK] marginally more interesting that it would otherwise been. Il pleut trop ici and I'm beginning to think of sending for Noah. In a way it is quite refreshing, but Sydney just isn't designed with rain in mind. The local parks have been under water for about 3 weeks which makes splosh splosh jogging hazardous in the trench foot direction. The streetside shelters which are so effective at keeping the sun off the CBD all leak, as do the bus roofs. Nobody provides coat hangers and cafes won't let you in unless you abandon your umbrella outside. Beautiful sunsets though, and one amazing thunderstorm which rolled right over us and included a lightning strike which either hit a yacht just outside our window, or hit the buoy behind it. Talking of sea going matters I've been investigating seasickness treatments prior to the grand summer expedition across the roaring forties and the ?i'veforgottenwhatthefiftiesarecalled fifties. The only two preparations said to work are not available in Australia despite being respectively available the States and Europe. So, D, in return for the research on binoculars, could you lay aside your offer to find a source of Marmite in HK and find out whether Transderm Scop (either patches or gel) containing Scopolamine, or Stugeron (pills) containing Cinnarizine, is available over-the-counter in HK. Otherwise, we will have to find a convenient GP in the UK during our winter visit (July you understand) as both, I think, are available on prescription in England&Wales. Both preparations are said to be worth the side effects, which rather suggests that the side effects are not of the optional happens to one in a thousand type. Side effects include nausea (hang on a minute - who's kidding whom here), drowsiness, loss of sight (gulp, do we really want to do this) and a dry mouth (which you can't alleviate by drinking beer, because alcohol is off limits if you are taking the medicine). I've started my next course of french at lallyonce. During the daytime to, which rather suggests that I'm not immediately looking for work. I went out on a high though. My last bill was 5000 dollars for a day's not very hard work. Never mind the quality, listen to the waffle. To show willing on the housework front, I have expanded my cooking repertoire by 200 percent (to 3 dishes) at a rate of improvement that I will find difficult to sustain. Anyway, anybody want to risk me having access to their kitchen might expect an Aloo Gobi, or a Sag Aloo to arrive for supper. I'm also taking Alexander Technique lessons which is doing wonders at straightening out my back. To welcome Ch back I bought her two loving presents (Fitness for Dummies and the Complete Idiot's Guide to Stretching), both of which are, unfortunately, large and heavy enough to cause severe bruising should one happen to walk into one or find one dropping from a height. My anniversary of arriving is coming around fast (as a few annual bills - car insurance for instance - have just reminded me). And what a year it's been. I think I shall write a book (bluff your way in Australian business) which I will follow up with a sequel after popular demand (more pommie bluffs). As some of you will know by now, our return to Europe date has been, possibly, brought forward to mid 2002. Of course, it possibly hasn't been either. However, if anybody would like to take this opportunity of buying an old established Australian business, I happen to have one which will be for sale. Price? How about a dollar? No assets, no liabilities and as for its reputation........time for a new paragraph I think.

On second thoughts, no. THE END

28/5/01 (C to family) - PIGBUM - the best car registration in NSW yet. This graced a van belonging to a ham butcher so was appropriate and doubtless an asset to the business. Ham being a high value commodity in these parts the butcher could probably afford to pay quite a lot for the luxury. Registration rules appear to be quite relaxed (for which read - revenue raising). And to further prove M's contention about my need to get out more, I've also recently seen: CIRCUS, 110101 (on an IT supplier's van), and 4 (golf course).

We're in the midst of planning our grand tour in September, having mostly pinned down the Euro jaunt in July (M - Oslo hotel booked ok). A dawning realisation that we are going to have to have hotels booked in advance for every night for three weeks. Aaargh. In some parts of the trip the distance between towns means that arriving in middleofnowheresville and finding that the hotel is full would mean an extra 150kms. In fact, in one town which is currently on the plan (Pinnaroo) I haven't yet proved that there is a hotel at all (nearest hotels Tailem Bend 144km west or Ouyen 137km east). At one point we get to stay in Quorn, which I'm imagining as being a meat free town. It is just north of Orroroo, which presumably indicates that they eat Kanga not Quorn when the beef runs out. Name prize so far goes to Koo-wee-rup (how do you suppose that they write this to explain pronunciation?) but that is only a pass through place. Most imaginative national park name: Big Desert Wilderness Park. Most difficult information to come by: does the Great Alpine Road close because of snow? Most anticipated part of the trip: Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne. There is a club in the States which comes to Australia every year just to ride this. Just imagine the conversation: What shall we do next week-end dear. Well, we could get the shuttle from LAX to Melbourne and do the Great Ocean Road again. Awh, only if we can get a proper Harley. No jap cruisers like last time. Perhaps we could get a sportsbike this time. I'm not riding around all those dangerous bends on a sportsbike. What's on telly? Ch is going to cheat and fly to Adelaide and only do the ride back. Some rubbish about not having enough holiday.

We will unfortunately not fit in a visit to Kangaroo Island (famous for its.........birdlife), but as said isle is only an hour or two from Adelaide airport we might fix up a flying weekend at some point. It hits the Sierra Club's top 20 things to do in Australia (imagine the conversation. What shall we do this weekend? Could always catch the shuttle from LAX......ok I'll stop there). "More than" 216 species of birds including 8 sorts of raucous (is there any other kind?) cockatoos, 12 of raptors and 13 of honeyeater (end of information in book. Does this mean that there are 150 kinds of sparrow, a penguin and an odd few brush turkeys?). M.........?

In a fit of internationalism, we have just bought a book in Kentucky (Amazon.com) which was posted to us in Australia, from Hong Kong using a service provided by Deutche Post. I regret to say that we didn't maximise our possibilities by paying for it with our English Visa card.

We are being serenaded morning and evening by tannoy stars and stripes. [a US aircraft carrier (Kittyhawk?) visited Sydney and was parked in the Woolloomooloo naval base]

11/6/01 (C to family) - It was their first rain in over three months, so it was, and we were walking in it. The Sunday morning was frosty (M - imagine the 'Bungles' visitor centre with frost), but a couple of short steep climbs soon sorted that out. The air was very dry and we steamed visibly every time we stopped. The wedge tailies (as I'm sure that they are called here) were huge. At one point I had one in the binoculars so close that its wing tips were out of frame on either side. And it was coming straight at me......well actually it was stationary and looking my way a bit. The Joey was good as reported but really we've become a bit blase about 'roos. There are so many different sorts. All called something like the eastern grey yellow footed red necked western bush rock walleroo (change order of words to suit). There were wedge tailies in the zoo as well but they were just boringly sitting around. There was a reverse colour ibis which I must go and look up. Kinda difficult to tell with the birds whether they were exhibits or visitors. A galah made the cheetah cross enough to stir and snuffle a bit before deciding that galahs wouldn't make good lunch. The dingos looked just like the dog next door. The wombat was very very asleep.

(11/0601 (Ch to family, same trip, do you see a pattern here about who does the jokes and who does the info) - We just - 9pm - got back from our walking trip to the Warrumbungles, after a extended trip back caused by a long tailback in the Blue Mountains as everyone came home from their long weekend Monday away......Colin drove up on Friday and I flew to Narrabri after work and got collected. We walked about 4 hours on Sat (the Breadknife and Grand High Tops, very famous, slightly confusingly also fairly wet with cloud swirling around the dramatic volcanic peaks etc etc) and 7 hours on Sun (Mount Exmouth - 18k, 800+m of ascent puff puff, excellent views, grass trees, wedge-tailed eagles soaring past our noses, beautiful sunny day). Then today we drove home via Dubbo and spent a couple of hours at the Western Plains Zoo - very good hippos and black swans. Best birds, apart from the eagles, were red-rumped parrots. Lots of kangaroos by the creeks where we were walking, including one right next to the path with a joey peering out of her pouch. Had better go and get organised for tomorrow morning. Sigh.

25/6/01 (C to family) - Yeah, I know. I made that joke last year. We dined out on midwinters day, sitting outside on the harbour front. A good chinese meal was rounded off very nicely by a cheerful chinese taxi driver who wanted to explain that he was going to go to Darling Point by going down William (St) not via Woolloomooloo. i.e. W'rum not Wu'm'ru.

Further observations of car regos: UPLIFT on a new jag. Has to be a cosmetic surgeon. CONSUL on a downmarket bmw. A representative of a poor country perhaps? AK47 on the car parked next to it.......no, no, I made that up. And how about Mr Muscles in his beaten up elderly range rover with ASK4IT on his plate.

29/7/01 (C to family after long complicated summer holiday trip back to Europe, via HK one way and Tokyo the other) - We are back home. Mind you, whilst we were away it stopped being home (with the change of plans the uk return date is now only 8 months away and of those I will be away from here for 3 and Ch may be away for more). However, Ch wants her flight bag washed which means that it will be at least a week before we can go anywhere. We've just slept around the clock and would have slept for longer if Ch didn't have to get up and go and do some of that big W thing. We got back to strong winds and driving rain which didn't seem right somehow.

Japan was exhausting. This was partly the fact that London - Tokyo is about the worst flight for jet lag (eleven hours in the air; nine hours time difference), partly the high humidity and partly, and would you believe this, they all speak Japanese. We were rescued from touristdom on Friday night by a Japanese speaking colleague of Ch's who took us out to a salaryman bar underneath the railway arches (closes ten minutes before the last train) for, as it were, tapas. [in fact, sukiyaki, from memory] The correct ratio appeared to be one full bow and five mini nod bows per round of drinks. Earlier in the day I added to my collection of Great World Museums That Are Closed When I Visit when I found myself looking at a series of photographs of the exhibits in the closed for refurbishment Imperial War Museum. The same had happened a few weeks earlier at the Hong Kong Museum of History. Now here is a mysterious thing: Tokyo is hot and humid. There is a vending machine on every street corner selling canned and bottled drinks. Sometimes in great rows so that every brand can have a look in. The machines seem to do good business (polite coughing behind you if you hesitate too long whilst feeding coins in to make sure you don't accidentally select cherry flavoured iced coffee). There is no litter on the streets (and I mean none. Like, man, these streets are impeccable). There are no litter bins. And yet only I seemed to end up carrying around an empty water bottle for an hour wondering what to do with it. I did find a litter bin eventually. It was outside the entrance to a shinto shrine (good marketing move by the head of the shinto church?), but as it was the size of a small shopping bag (indeed it appeared to be lined with a small shopping bag) it could hardly be Tokyo's sole litter repository. Very Strange.

6/8/01 (C to family) - To add to my temporal and geographical dislocation it would appear to be spring here. The shops are selling daffodils and the magnolias are in bloom. In a more native way, the wattles are wattling and the banksias are, er, banking. Spring is definitely sprung.

Yesterday we went walking in the Blue Mountains and ascended Mt Banks which we believe to be the distinct peak that we can see on the horizon from our window (over the opera house as it were). It was very pleasant in an australian sort of way, although strong winds made looking over the canyon edges slightly unnerving. We had lunch at an apparently unnamed look-out over the Grosse Valley. We named this Beef Pie point in honour of the day. Mt Banks was going to be called Mt King George according to the sign at the car park. Presumably this did not go down too well with the locals at the time so it was named after the most nearly australian famous person that anybody could think of. Today is a bank (word association or what - ed) holiday, in honour of what I do not know. Also bank holidays are not universally recognised. However, as those two great bastions of Sydney enterprise, [Ch's employer] and Colin Jago & Associates, both celebrate the day, we are having a lazy day.

I've decided that Dickens was being paid by the page when he invented Mr Micawber. A character who makes such long, and repetitive speeches. A character whose eloquence is undaunted by the greatest trials. A character whose verbosity knows no bounds, save perhaps those imposed by the delicacies involved in never saying what it is that will turn up. In short -- a character who goes on a bit. Such a character would be useful in reaching word targets.

Next weekend we are going to New England. Lest you think we've taken leave of our senses and are hopping on a plane again to cross the Pacific, be assured that New England is a bike ride away. It is even within New South Wales which is a conundrum if ever I've heard one. Specifically we are going to the Dorrigo National Park. Staying away for a few nights. Doing the tourist thing. Oh, we have so many t-shirts.

To end the series of fascinating car regos how about: JAG 01A, which being a completely standard format 2001 NSW number may mean that the owner isn't a Jago. It also wasn't on a Jag, but rather a Subaru.

14/8/01 (C to family, on return from bike trip) - Ladies and Gentlemen I give you ......... the dry rainforest. Dorrigo National Park has five types of rain forest. Sub-Tropical (i.e. approximating to what you might imagine as rain forest); warm temperate; cool temperate; coastal; and dry. Now, you might ask, how might we define RAIN-forest? Oh well, can't hang around working that one out - we've another three national parks to do today. Welcome to Hat Head National Park. Swim, Surf or Just Relax (i.e. its a beach). And a very pleasant one it looks too. In the photographs that is. We never did find the way to the sand. So we don't know if "where dune conservation was invented" has created a good beach or not. Keep moving. Tallest waterfall in NSW (actually pretty impressive). Biggest Tree in NSW (perhaps slightly less impressive). Camel Hump nature reserve. Visible on map but not visible on ground. (Not Very) Big Banana. Mutton Bird rookery (tenants awaited). Whale spotting (next week). Barrington Tops World Heritage Area (over there via 150km unsurfaced roads). Brrm Brrmm. Bike thoroughly exercised.

I still find the inverted landscape of eastern oz surprising. There we were riding through a forest following a sign for said tallest waterfall. Arrive. No mountain. Ah. We're at the top. Silly me. 220 metre drop from ground level into err, a hole in the ground. Whoosh.

The going rate at roadside stalls for bananas is 50cents (about 18 pence) per kilo. The range started at 30 cents for green armfulls and topped out at 95 cents for ripe hands. I guess you get to eat a lot of bananas if you live in Coffs Harbour (or along Coffs Coast as I now know to call it - Coffs Airport; Coffs Jetty; Coffs Shopping Centre etc. Who Coff?). I saw an echidna leave Gloucestershire. Well, to be honest, I saw it leave Gloucester Shire. I passed up the opportunity to participate in the Stroud (10th Annual) Brick Throwing Competition. I learned that towns marked on the Oxley Highway do not necessarily exist and was very pleased to get to the Caltex in Walcha (pronounced Wolker) some 30km after the reserve light came on. Armidale is noted for its architecture, which sort of sums up Australian architecture. Because it gets bloody cold (1000 metres; wrong side of mountains) some buildings are built in something other than clapperboard. It has a lot of churches. Flavours include victorian gothic, victorian italianate, victorian norman, victorian roman, victorian chapel and victorian grandiose. However, it will always be, in my memory, more famous as the place that I had to start the bike with summer weight oil whilst it was covered in a frost thick enough to peel off. Chug chug cough smoke.

Oh, and Ch bought a T shirt.

17/8/01 - It's frightening stuff - putting all the formal evidence of one's existence into the hands of the Royal Mail and/or any other agency of the devil. I was much happier when I found that most organisations take a telephone bill as proof that one is who one says one is. As these arrive regularly (5 per quarter plus mobiles) losing one or two seems to be a trivial risk. I remember [a friend] getting a letter to his new address from a financial institution thanking him for his letter changing his address and asking him to fill in a change of address form before they could accept the change. Name changes must be much more scary.

Talking of logic loops, how about "Cancel printing, OK" with the normal options of "OK" and "Cancel". So is that ok, ok, or cancel, ok or cancel, cancel or ok, cancel? You will be glad to know that in the true spirit of microsoft, neither button did anything (attrib: New Scientist).

26/8/01 We're all going on our (Ch to family) winter holidays. I was told by my boss last week that I was working too hard and need a break, so there. I was going to take my Revo for email, but there isn't space. Unless I evict a bird book and probably some other things. Packing for a bike trip is a bit like a balloon debate. Anyhow, as I think C has told you, I will have my mobile - don't promise to pick up messages every day though as goodness knows what the signal is like in Warra Warra, back o'Bourke, NSW.

C has now arranged the trip so we get several days going to National Parks rather than moving on every day. Hence the bird book. On our weekend trip to New England recently I discovered that if you don't have a book with you, you've forgotten the salient characteristics by the time you get to one. Unless you take notes I suppose, and I'm not that much of a twitcher yet. The only new(ish) bird I can definitely identify from that trip is cattle egrets, the salient characteristics of which being that they looked like egrets and were standing around in great numbers in herds of cattle. Then there was a little grey sort of heron thing, which might have been white underneath, only C says it had a beak like an ibis, but that might have been a different one.......and we have one pair of binoculars between us, and I have a camera but C hasn't got the digital one so you'll have to wait for the pictures of Wilpena Pound and fairy penguins and so on. I have mended my bike jacket and washed the inside of my helmet (for the first time in 10 years - bleah - and let's hope it dries) and now only have to do a week's work before I get away. C leaves on Monday, and I fly to Adelaide on Friday night to join him - back Sunday night two weeks later....umm, 16th?

I think you should know that C bought a cookbook last week, and has even made one of the recipes in it (cashew nut curry). We had a long debate last night about bhajis, and the difference between onion bhaji (which is deep-fried) and channa, bhindi, mushroom etc bhaji, as served in English curry houses, which has tomato. M, if you get deeply bored you can ascend into the attic and find a book called Curry Secrets, which may shed some light as it is basically all about how to cook curry house food.

We did think we might go out and try to buy Wellington boots this weekend (for the Antarctic) but in fact we've done nothing except read (and pack). It has now clouded over so doesn't look quite so tempting to go for a little walk. Perhaps I'll go for a little surf instead.

16/9/01 (Ch to family, on return from long bike trip) - I just got back and Colin will roll in tomorrow complete with all the dirty laundry and a very dirty bike. He says he will send a witty gloss of this email in due course.

It went something like this (apologies to those without Australian road atlases or Australian bird books):-

Fri night arrive Adelaide very tired and hassled after a lovely flight in a Virgin sardine-can, collected by Colin who had forgotten the half-hour (!) time difference which conveniently made him very early rather than late. Sat awoke to rain - rode to Wilpena, some 450k, along the front, therefore intermittently drenched, rainbows, etc etc - turned out to be my worst day of weather. Clare Valley (wine region) very pretty, blossom etc, not improved by downpour. When we got to Wilpena, which is a place which normally has absolutely no water, we found the creek flooded to the extent that people in the campsite beyond were stranded. Luckily the motel was on the right side. Sunday it had stopped raining but the creek was still impassable which meant we couldn't get into Wilpena Pound. Went for a scenic flight over the Pound and the Flinders Ranges generally in a 6-seater teeny plane. On Monday we went for a bit of a walk and then rode (via excellent views of the Ranges) to Peterborough. Hmm. We could almost have done this whole trip staying only in places which are really somewhere in the UK. Peterboro' was really Back-of-Beyond-sville (so what's new). Tues rode Across the Outback to Broken Hill which rather irritatingly, if accurately, brands itself the Accessible Outback when you get there. Also B-o-Bv, but larger. Slightly. Pizza for supper three nights running, twice actually in our motel room, once in Pizza Hut. First place that had a mobile signal, though, so we found out (for those of you not previously apprised of the fact) that [H had her baby]. Anyhow.....Weds the sun came out and we rode to Kinchega National Park (more outback, loadsa emus) and did some amusing red sand off-roading. When the sand gets too deep the pillion gets to walk. In full bike kit. I even forgot to take a photo of the best bit. All very beautiful. Then we made the acquaintance of the Aussie steak sandwich for the first time (I expect C will tell you more about this). Thurs we went to Mutawintji National Park, by tour Landcruiser this time as the road to the park is unsealed and saw Aboriginal things and stacks of corellas and Sturt's Desert Pea. Fri we moved on to Mildura on the Murray River (citrus, wine etc) and the weather kindly saved up the violent thunderstorm until we were eating dinner rather than unleashing it whilst we were riding across the outback, which would have been rather frightening. Oh, and we saw a yellow crimson rosella (only M can decode this from Pizzey & Knight but I don't suppose the rest of you care much). Sat on to Hall's Gap in the Grampians, very wet by the time we arrived (and another long ride). I went into a shop to buy a fleece, still in full kit including helmet owing to it was pissing down, and nearly trod on a red wattlebird on the way out. Sun we went for quite a long (sources differ, but probably about 9k), very pleasant and slightly accidental walk - we started off beside the creek looking at the spring flowers, with bike jackets because it was threatening to rain, and ended up going all the way up the creek and up to the top of the ridge via various places with names like Grand Canyon and Echo Cave, arriving back 4 hours later very sweaty and hungry. Mon was sunny! so we rode round some more bits of the Grampians, which do indeed look quite like the originals from a couple of the lookouts, if you squint a bit. And then on down to the coast (attacked viciously by a nesting magpie en route) and ended up at Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road (sea stacks etc). Tues along the rest of the GOR (not so sunny, lots of dramatic surf views), yer actual bends in the road so the sides of the tyres got some exercise, to Torquay (hmm again). Weds we found a nice ferry which goes from Queenscliff to Sorrento (honest) across the mouth of Port Phillip Bay, which saved riding around through Melbourne, then across the Mornington Peninsula and around onto Phillip Island. There we switched on the TV for the weather and got instead the American terrorist attacks which cast a pall. We still went out to see Phillip Island's main attraction, which is a colony of Little Penguins which comes home to roost (as it were) every night. You get to sit by the beach and watch them arriving from the sea and waddling across the beach and up into the dunes to their burrows. Thurs we stayed on PI and saw seals on a seal-cam and koalas in person, including a very obliging one which climbed down one bit of gum and up another, which is major activity for a koala. Fri we rode to Mansfield through the Yarra Valley and round various National Parks the names of which I'd have to go and look up, some bits on unsealed road, all very beautiful gum forest and rain forest and mountains and everywhere the wattles in bloom (they range from little bushes to quite large trees and their blossom is yellow, about the colour of forsythia, and sweet-scented) (and scarlet robins). Sat we rode to Bright, and then a loop up to Mount Hotham as the road was open to see actual snow and skiers and long views. Then today, first really brilliantly sunny and warm day, down to Albury and I flew home.

As Ansett (ie the one that isn't Qantas) has gone down the plug-hole in the last few days I fear this week will be even busier than I thought it would be anyhow.

18/9/01 (C to family) - In case you were wondering how I got to Adelaide airport, I rode there the week before, following the Murray River. The valley of which has got to be one of the flattest places I have ever seen. Have you got any idea what a 500 km orchard looks like? Cherry blossom can become extremely dull in large doses. Australia is very fond of its minor criminals so there were several highlights on this trip which were bushranger lookouts. I did Morgan near the beginning and then we did Power near the end. The funny thing being that they both knew Ned Kelly. Sort of. A bit. Anyway Morgan's lookout was a 15 metre high lump of rock in the sort of landscape where 15 metres is very significant at a place called Walla Walla which translates as place with a lump of rock. Power had a much better time of it in the way of views with absolutely stunning views in three directions of the, as it were, Alps. Unfortunately for him, the troopers eventually worked out that there are four sides to every camp and woke him rudely one morning.

I've become very proficient in Australian road classification:

- sealed full width: what you Europeans call a road

- sealed part width: tar for three feet either side of the white line so everybody can have one wheel on terra firma

- unsealed: good gravel surface

- unsurfaced: no gravel in the mix

- 4 wheel drive only: are you sure you want to be here

- 4 wheel drive with seasonal closures: you are sure you don't want to be here

- 4 wheel drive dry weather only: in what way is this a road?

The red sand incident reported above happened on an unsurfaced road. Fine sand accumulates in the corners and our front tyre wasn't cutting the mustard. Still, hey ho, we didn't fall off.

Wilpena was funny as the National Parks Service of South Australia (the driest state in the driest country in the world) describes it as extremely arid. They measured 6.5 inches of rain in the 24 hours leading up to our arrival. The locals were excited about waterfalls and creek heights and so on, whereas mountains are supposed to have fast flowing streams aren't they? We even got to see a salt lake with water in it from the plane (normally a great expanse of white, but today sort of muddy grey).

We didn't get to see any snakes (too cold) but as Ch reported we were quite thoroughly attacked by a cross magpie. Now, Australia, as you know, is full of vicious creatures. Spiders, snakes, stingers, sharks, stinging trees, deadly cone shells and so on. Guess what animal keeps Australians awake at night with fear? The fruit fly. Yep, you know, the one used in a billion biology experiments at school. Keep fruit flys out of South Australia (border controls and $20,000 fines for fruit smuggling). Don't bring fruit into Victoria. Broken Hill is fruit fly free - help keep it that way. Fruit bins 2km.

Other highlights - the Australian Cricket Bat farm (home of the Australian willow industry) - the Sydney to Canberra highway being closed by snow the day I choose to ride it - nesting black swans - finding something to eat which wasn't beef - getting home.

What a ridiculous creature the emu is.

24/9/01 As you were - On Friday night our car disappeared. No glass on the ground; no screechy tyre marks: just gone. Puff. On Monday evening it came back again, all bar the last hundred metres or so. And no, it hadn't been there all the time as it was (badly) parked on a street that I've walked up and down several times. No damage, no marks, and from the amount of fuel still in the tank, very few kms added. Radio still intact, road atlas on the back seat still there. Not even any obvious signs of it being hot wired or anything forceable having been done to the steering lock. So, somebody with a set of Hyundai keys was stumbling around this suburb looking for an easy drive home but didn't then want a hot car on his drive when he sobered up? Um? Apart from the hours and hours I've spent listening to telephone music (the police have more upmarket music than the insurance company), no change. As we were. Although wondering if the same will happen next Friday night. Funny world.

12/10/01 (C to family) - Outside of our kitchen window there is a 10 storey or so tree which comes to a fine point at its top. It's just the place that your average fun loving cockatoo likes to play king of the castle on. I've just watched one successfully annoy 2 currawongs and 4 myna birds.

The currawongs got a lot of practice being eagles and diving from a great height and the myna birds got some good practice at flying stationary and making a lot of noise. One cockatoo being dive bombed by 2 'wongs and having its ankles bitten by 4 mynas. Guess who won? The best trick was to lean sideways slightly causing the tree to bend and the descending 'wong to miss wildly and crash into the lower branches. Actually, probably the best trick is to ignore the other birds entirely.

Eventually the cockatoo decided to fly off and sit on a tv aerial for a while. This provided more opportunities for 'wong teasing as you could hop sideways at the last moment of the currawong's descent and watch it hit the aerial, and at the same time frighten all the mynas who thought you were about to counterattack. It seems nobody likes the cockatoos....

13/10/01 - Another australianism: we've just bought a bottle of wine from a vineyard called "scrubby rise". You wouldn't mistake which country that was from now would you.

16/10/01 (C to family) - Oi you! You can't go that way unless you get permission from the Heath Monitor and he doesn't want to be disturbed from his sunbathing.

A Heath Monitor is, as you might imagine, a lizard. And what a good name. The one we saw was about 4 ft long. Apparently they get bigger. Also apparently they bite if cornered. Although why anybody would want to chase a lizard which was getting on for 2 metres long and how one corners anything on something as uncornery as a heath I wouldn't know.

Our acquaintanceship began in a rather startling way as a two foot long and rather fat snake slithered out from under my feet causing a not wholly voluntary noise of the omigodisasnake type to come to the surface. Said "snake" later was found to be the tail of the lizard. And said lizard didn't think it was in a corner. Phew.

Exciting stuff walking round here

25/10/01 (C to family) - I've just retreated to the computer room as it is currently the only room in the unit (how australian) in which the windows can be open without everything blowing away. And as it is rather warm (divide by 8 multiply by 5 take away 32 = quite a few (tm) deg C) without the behind glass effect sitting in the main room doesn't appeal.

To continue with the bird theme (well, I know Mary enjoys the stories at least), I saw a myna bird eating a bag of crisps on my way home on Tuesday. Said bird was convinced that if only it could upend the foil packet that it had found then good things would result. However, beaks were not designed for metallic foil (you know, the sort that lies completely flat no matter how hard you try and screw it up and hide it under the pub ashtray to stop it blowing away).

Beak would go in; bag would leap away. Beak would clasp tight; nothing would come out. Beak would shake bag hard; noise but no nourishment would result. Da Da. Eventually, whole head would go in. Yum yum crispy crumbs. I just hope that they were not chicken flavour.

What's all that got to do with the title? Well, nothing actually. Ad seen on lampost near the yacht club: For Sale - Ice Cream Boat. Sell Icecream on Sydney Harbour this summer. And make a enormous loss presumably leading to an ad on a lampost next year.........

3/11/01 (Ch to family) - It is Saturday morning and there is a Japanese (I think, because of the amount of bowing) wedding going on in Yarranabbe Park [immediately below the block of flats]. The bride and groom have sunflowers for respectively their bouquet and buttonhole. The officiating dignitary has very beautiful red and turquoise academic robes. There are only about 20 guests but they are all very smart including an Outfit with a pink hat. It's dull, still and overcast, not the best weather, but as C says, not too hot (though his ideas of too hot are not everyone's). [Pause for shower]. The happy couple have just processed across the grass to organ music. We have had the Ceremony of the Photographs which I must say was much shorter than usual (no professional photographer). Now the sun has come out and the official bit being over everyone is standing around chatting and laughing.

18/11/01 (C to family) - We were, apparently, in just the right place to get ring side viewing of the Leonids meteor storm with 15,000 shooting stars in an hour visible. There was the minor disadvantage, of course, that this was at 3AM but even we were thinking of getting up to watch it. An entirely different sort of storm prevailed, however. What one might call a meteorological storm. Thick cloud cover. High winds. Constant rain. Must be November. No. Hang on...

It is, to use a local term, freezing here. I've resorted to long trousers and might have to go and find some socks soon. I've just breakfasted on porridge and hot chocolate. Um, lets see. Must be about 20 deg C. Well it feels cold right. Will we ever be able to live in England again? I think that this must be the edge of a bigger and much worse storm somewhere tropical. It has now been blowing fit to knock our windows out for 24 hours. I'll look it up when I log on to send this. Whatever it is, I hope it goes away soon as we are doing the F word on Wednesday. Yes, we're flying.

A little holiday on Lord Howe Island to interupt my uninterrupted Sydney holiday (this is secondhand but worth repeating. [A friend] once heard a radio announcer say: you are listening to 30 minutes of uninterupted music on .....FM) and before Ch recommences her around the world jaunts. HK, Tokyo and London in December. What joy.

25/11/01 (Ch to family) - Just got back from happy hols to find various panic messages saying I need to be in London NOW. Well, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. So I guess that means no Hong Kong (pity that) but on the other hand I shall probably be spare in the UK next weekend instead of, or more probably as well as, the one after.

Are you around, or shall I go to the zoo? I will probably go back via Tokyo but not Hong Kong, but who knows.

Well it was a very good holiday, anyhow, whilst it lasted. We didn't see a Lord Howe woodhen which is the rarest bird in the world (?how do they count) so we'll have to go back again.

26/11/01 (C to family) - We arrived to gale force winds and *cold* rain. So much for tropical paradise. Although all in all we were glad to be there as on the previous two days, planes from Sydney had arrived at the island and flown around it and then away again being unable to land. Doubly disconcerting as the planes do not have enough fuel to get back to Sydney! (Coffs Harbour in northern NSW is marginally closer) It would have beaten the usual spent a week at Gatwick holiday story but no fun. And what would Qantas say. Well you paid to be flown to the island and back. The ticket said nothing about landing.........

The weather over the next three days was a grammar exercise, ending in best. Thankfully, no matter where the wind was coming from the shape of the island meant that there was always a sheltered bay. We spent two days walking and one day snorkelling. We might have spent more of day three snorkelling as well, but sun sense suggested that cooking on the beach was not a good idea. As it was I burnt my ankles through my walking socks below the ankle bone (i.e. deep inside my boots). Who would have thought to put factor 30 down there?

The island has about 300 residents and a cap of 400 tourist beds (you have to have paid for a ticket to leave before you can arrive). Our hotel apologised for not being able to vary the menu much as the supply ship was late due to the bad weather and the planes were busy bringing the passengers who had failed to arrive earlier in the week and didn't have room for luxuries. This place is like seriously nowhere.

It is also seriously Kentia. Know the ones? Every garden centre has them, and for those who can remember the dining room at Willowbank Gardens, it was the palm that was pushing the ceiling away and had a habit of dropping its seeds all over the carpet. Lord Howe Island exports several million Kentias a year (having discovered that this was more profitable than just exporting the seeds). And in one of the worlds more pleasant accidents, the reason why LHI is still a tropical paradise is that the forests contain the Kentias and they've been living off Kentia seed exports ever since the island was inhabited.

Ch got excited by the tropic-birds because they fly backwards (yes, we saw them do it. They really do. Like a harrier jump jet. brum brum forward. stop. hover. backwards. sqwark. brum brum forwards. time and again), whereas I rather liked the Forkedy Trees (for latin name please apply to Ch [Pandanus forsteri]) which didn't touch the ground (they grow like a normal tree until about telegraph pole wide and say 10 ft tall. They then send roots out about 6ft off the ground - and higher as the tree gets older - and when these reach the ground the main trunk rots from the ground up. A mature tree is thus like a telegraph pole suspended 5ft off the ground held up by a bamboo like scaffold). Not surprisingly perhaps, this odd way of going about life has not found it necessary to repeat itself elsewhere and the plant only lives on LHI.

We decided that if every beach was like the one we were on on day two (fat chance) beach holidays would seem more attractive. The coral reef was about 5 flipper lengths from the low water mark, and whilst maybe not quite as varied (a close call) as the barrier reef proper further north, it had the undoubted benefit of never being more than a couple of metres from the surface which meant that even Ch's partly corrected vision was sufficient to see many wondrous things which I won't try to describe (well, there was the yellow one with black stripes....no not that one, that's black with yellow stripes and a blue spot.....no, the smaller yellow one with ....etc.).

Oh, and no snakes at all, no poisonous spiders and no marine stingers. Can this really have been Australia?

13/12/01 (C to family) - Boring old cockatoos and galahs. We've had an infestation of Pelos. And I saw a Funnel Web Spider.....gulp. Its been very difficult to resist the spider nightmare since. Fortunately a gallant myna was seeing this "little" beastie off at the time - which is why I got to see it because it broke cover in an attempt to escape. [Funnel-webs are poisonous enough to kill you, but I don't think anyone in Sydney has been killed since there has been an anti-venene].

I've just read Peter Carey, Ned Kelly et al. I'm glad to have been here before reading it otherwise descriptions of magpies carolling and lorries in trees wouldn't have made much sense. OK lads. We three magpies of orient are...... [Australian magpies look quite like European ones with the black and white in different places, but they have a beautiful fluting song].

As to the adjectival book, it is not v.good and cd. be better but its adjectival all right.

25/12/01 (Ch to family) - Merry Christmas to everyone. It's now mid-afternoon - I plan to make some phonecalls later, but it has just occurred to me that the number of possible bilateral calls x the normal average length of our conversations x the window available in time-zones may mean this turns out to be problematic.

It doesn't feel much like Christmas here. It's about 32 C, the wind is very strong, the sky is partly obscured by what may be cloud or may be smoke from bushfires (it was yesterday - motorway closed etc) and barbies are banned except in a very limited set of conditions which I can't remember all of (gas-fired, cleared ground for x distance around, no tinnies within a mile etc). We are going to have rogan josh and bhindi bhaji and dal and rice and naan for dinner, more festive (anyway more complicated) than cheese on toast but equally non-traditional. Several pelos (guess - new coinage by He Who Has Plenty of Time to Think of Jokes) were flying around earlier, with some difficulty given the wind, which shows you how strong it is because pelos are stronrnarily good flyers. (Should that be Him etc - sounds funny). My nasturtiums are all going flat and sad and lashed about.

I was going to do a poem about all of the above but the heat has so far militated against this. Colin is complaining. Maybe inspiration will come whilst I'm cooking. Otherwise M this is your homework whilst we're away.

We are pretty much packed, probably. We're leaving tomorrow evening rather than 27th am because of a thing about planes which you aren't interested in, so we'll have a bit more time to see Hobart before embarking (or alternatively time to dash about trying to buy things that were in pieces of luggage that have gone to Perth). The Sydney-to-Hobart [yacht race] leaves from outside the window in the morning, but won't have got to Hobart before we leave it.

I haven't managed to get MRT's parcel in the post so it looks like it'll be a birthday present, sorry (was working right up to the last mo because of the transaction which sent me to the UK a couple of weeks ago).

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