Happy Birthday

Hi Gabi.....really sorry we missed your birthday. Hope you had a lovely day and that your mum, dad and sister were good to you.

Lots of love

Uncle Billy and Aunty Mandy

One

Yesterday was exactly one year since we arrived in Adelaide, blinking against the glaring sun and cloudless sky. I suppose time will tell if it’s been a good idea, whatever the verdict, it’s been eventful.

The baby would fit into the eventful category, 20 weeks now and all looking good. Mandy is just settling into it all after a couple of months of continuously throwing up.

The house we move into on 11th December is another feature. It is in a lovely spot, set in 1000m2 of trees overlooking a valley of eucalypt forest. And although it is tucked away in the hills, it is only five miles from the city centre and we can see the sea from the bottom of the garden.

On the other hand, there is no mains water, no sewers and it is in a very high risk bush fire area. Fire is a huge worry in this part of town and in preparation I have been on a fire prevention course this week. To be honest, it has made me feel worse. I was vaguely worried before, now I am terrified.

Bush fires here are particularly scary, even more so after a four year drought which has left the forests with several inches of bone dry floor cover. It doesn’t take much to set that off and when it goes, it really goes. We had a lightning storm last week, the next day 60 fires were burning across the state.

The street we live on burnt to the ground in 1983 in the worst fires recorded in Australia, the footage is bloody scary.

But lots of other people put up with it and a friend of Mandy’s lives on our street, she lost her house on Ash Wednesday but hasn’t moved. Like she says, fire is just a part of living in Australia.

As are snakes, the sort of snakes which have been biting lots of people round here in the past few weeks and are abundant in our new neighbourhood. These brown snakes have accounted for one bloke already this month and have put several others in hospital.

Even putting aside the little one and the house it has been an eye opening twelve months, and there has been no bigger eye opener than my father’s revelation of the highlight of his holiday over here.

Despite travelling through some of the most magnificent scenery I have seen, wrangling deadly snakes, patting koala bottoms, fine wine and the prettiest cricket ground in the world, his desert island moment was getting around a pie floater.

For the uninitiated among you, a pie floater is of the same cultural ilk as jellied eels. It is simply a (mechanically retrieved) meat pie in a bowl of mushy peas. But it can only be eaten at the pie cart, an enigmatic catering van like something from Hogwarts, staffed by a lady of comfortable dimensions who likes men with a healthy appetite.

But all this is a mere sideshow. The cricket has started and after all the anticipation, as you will all no doubt be aware, Australia are giving us a bath. I’m sure it sticks in your throat a bit, but Jeez it’s hard work copping the flak over here; the whole country is full square behind not just beating England, but rubbing our noses in the dirt.

It is hard to explain the gusto with which every opportunity to ‘bag the Poms’ is seized by a nation drooling unattractively for revenge. After day one of the first test, people I had never spoken to went out of their way to smirk at our woeful bowling and lack of ‘ticker’ in not picking Monty.

Every TV presenter passes some comment about our gutless (upto today) efforts, all wearing an irritatingly smug grin. Even multinational firms like Ford are pushing a promotion called ‘Tonk A Pom’, I think the idea is that you get a ball with an English face on it, then hit it as hard and as far as you can. If you can bear to look, click here.

Every other ad consists of a grinning baggy green cap cut with footage of Brett Lee shattering English stumps. The beer ads are priceless though. The number one beer, VB, which is a cold and tasteless bottle of tat, has declared this series ‘The Battle of the Tashes’ (clever play on words for an Aussie) and has launched a whole series of promotions based on cricketers sporting lush facial hair.

Fronting this promotion up are Ian Botham, (representing one of the finest English tashes of recent years) and David Boon, a legend over here for his luxuriant mo and his record of 53 tinnies of XXXX on a flight from Sydney to London in 1989. He wasn’t a bad batsman either.

As well as blanket TV advertising, VB are pushing their dubious wares via a pair of talking ‘Boony & Beefy’ figures, mine arrived today after I sent off the tokens earned by drinking some VB. The things I do for cheap novelty.

The plan is that you put the cricket on TV, put the figures next to the set and watch the game with Boony and Beefy making comments every now and then. These are sent via radio signal and generally made up from witty banter such as;

Beefy: “Chuck us a VB Boony”

Boony: “ No way, you’ll only drop it”

Ha bloody ha.

Apart from that Boony pipes up every 10 minutes with, “It’s a hot one, time for a VB I reckon”. Subtle huh?

Anyway, with pinpricks from every direction and a deflating start to the series, in the words of another Englishman spitting into the wind, I would love it if we beat them!

I’ll tell you more about the important stuff next time..

Cheers
M&W

Quick

I don’t know where to start. I’m miles behind on the news from here and it’s all happening. How will I ever catch up?

Brevity is the only solution. I’ll get everything out of the way and up to date as quickly as possible. Then we’ll be bang up to date in sleepy Adelaide, considered a small town by the fancy eastern cities. A small town which today hosts U2 in a 60,000 sell out, is the venue for a massive classic car rally and what is left of the England cricket team is in town living it up prior to the game against SA today.

Quiet place. Ha!

All this is without the international show jumping event last weekend in the parks of the city which clashed with the Christmas pageant, another road closing extravaganza. After a very very slow winter, it’s all happening here now.

Anyway, last time I left any notes here we had just got back from the Flinders mountains with my folks. What a great place, but good hosts that we were, it was just the tip of this iceberg.

At a car race in the Barossa valley my dad was hailed a ‘legend’ by one competitor and signed autographs for others. His single seater exploits and articles in the UK had reached this far flung corner of the former empire. He had been in the country three days and was recognised!

To be honest, the old feller was a little bit ‘To The Manor Born’. Every gum tree he looked in contained a dozing koala, every stone he turned over revealed a scorpion and when he mentioned that it would be a treat to see a big monitor in the desert, sure enough, one walked across our path 20 minutes later!

Uncanny does not begin to cover it.

While father likes nothing more than discovering the local wildlife, my mother lives in mortal fear of it finding her. And on Kangaroo Island it would not leave her alone. On more than one occasion, as we took a hike through the bush, a large kangaroo bounced into our path only a few yards away, stopped and fixed my mum with an icy stare.

Not her cup of tea at all. In fact it’s fair to say that she didn’t fully relax on Kangaroo Island. It’s also fair to say that she never really took to anything furry, no matter how cute. Whether this was a harmless but curious kangaroo, hungry wallabies and possums we fed at the villa, koalas up a tree or the potteroos scurrying around her feet.

A long way to come to indulge a lifelong phobia. Can you believe that when we lived in Stockport she made me empty the mouse trap every morning before she would come downstairs. I was three years old.

I know my dad loved it all. Wine, lizards, bike rides, rugged scenery and calling everyone ‘mate’. I’m still not sure what my mum will think of it all. She seemed at her happiest in the back garden with her book and a cup of tea. While it wasn’t PG, she made do.

Apart from all that, it was Melbourne Cup a week or so ago. The biggest horse race of the year and traditionally one which ‘stops the nation’. Companies leave the phones off the hook, lock the door and open the beer. At Adelaide City Council we just went to the nearest pub to join everyone else for the annual ritual of an afternoon beer before tearing up the betting slips.

Well that’s nearly it. Showing the folks around South Australia, sheltering my mum from the furrier inhabitants while helping my dad find the reptilian ones left us exhausted, goodness knows how they felt on getting home.

We barely had enough energy to buy a house, but the koala in the garden on our second viewing closed the deal for Mandy. It is in the hills overlooking the city and slap bang in the middle of a high risk bush fire zone. Extremely high risk. It is only 20 years since the road we have bought on burned to the ground in the worst bush fires in living memory. It also has no mains water. But the views are cool We move in on 11th December.

Hopefully we should be settled by April when we are expecting a little one.

Now we’re up to date.

Cheers
M&W

Oldies

It has been a while since our last post. And even though I work for the council, it has been a busy few weeks.

I hope all is well with you as the winter closes in.

One of the reasons for my slack attitude to this page is that my parents arrived in Australia. I think Belgium was their previous record distance from home, but here they were blinking in the spring sun, wondering what day it was and, in the case of my mum, looking anxiously around for rogue roos.

So these past three weeks have been spent scouring South Australia for something new to do. I like to think we broke new ground, I don’t think anyone has spent three weeks on holiday in South Australia voluntarily before this.

Perhaps they are easily pleased, or maybe everyone else is missing out on a seriously cool place.

I prefer the latter.

To be fair, there are some fantastic places here. I reckon the trip will take a few posts to describe their travels through this mostly underrated part of the country.
A few beers after collecting them from the airport, we drove north to the Flinders Ranges, a cool six hour drive to some pretty bleak, depressingly dry but awesome scenery with views further than you can ever imagine.

We eventually ended up at a place called Wilpena Pound, via pies at Two Wells, coffee at Port Pirie, more pies at Quorn, petrol at Hawker and a comfort stop or two in the middle of nowhere.

Wilpena Pound is a strange place, it is a geological wonder of rugged peaks, sheer rock faces and weird flora all making a huge moutainous ring surrounded by not much but endless flat and arid land as far as you can ever dream of. A unique place.

However, instead of intrepid and bearded climbing types it is a place which retirees flock to in their camper vans, to sit in deck chairs under a tree, look at a billion stars and listen to Jeremy and Don, the only band prepared to travel this far for a gig.

Bless them. Amped up in the desert with an adoring audience of old folk gagging for a sing along as they dined.

We arrived a little late for dinner to discover the remains of the buffet; a hundred wrinklies can pass through a roast beef buffet like a swarm of locusts through a Biblical wheat field.

While dad and I were trying to salvage a helping from the remains of the bread and butter pudding and trifle, my mother, unknown to us, was waltzing around the floor with Tony the crooner. One glass of wine is normally more than enough for her, but carried away with the desert air, she had got through two glasses and was now throwing herself around the floor with poor Tony from County Down a mere passenger.

This was a slick band and they worked their captive and ageing audience beautifully. Jeremy and his Yamaha organ led the way with cheeky jokes, Colin with the banjo was a heavily bearded yet understated team player, Don was the versatile virtuoso who could move effortlessly between the drums and, to the delight of the crowd, the washboard…how they loved that!

As for the other bloke in the band, I can’t remember his name, but he was a real diamond. On more than one occasion he nearly took the singer’s eye out with some elaborate trombone slides and, as the excitement of ‘My Friend the Wind’ (!!!) swept him away, he kicked over his glass of wine and had to put down his trombone and run off to get a cloth.

And as he creaked to all fours to mop up the wine, Don and Jeremy played manfully on like the consummate professionals they have been for 40 years. Meanwhile, Tony found a new freedom in his floor show, hunting down cheery fossils to dance with instead of keeping an anxious eye on the brass section.

After that, I insisted we cooked on the barbecue for the next couple of nights. But yet the haunting refrain of a hundred oldies singing to ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ drifted across the desert night to serenade us and our kangaroo kebabs.

The Flinders Mountains are an amazing place. If you are not stuck behind a convoy of grandparents spending the inheritance then you must be surrounded by animals of all shapes and sizes in abundance.

Great mobs of roos and emus line the dirt tracks while huge monitor lizards bask, almost daring the soaring eagles to have a go. One on hike, my dad and I found eight different species of lizard within an hour and a scorpion under every rock we turned over. It’s a very cool place.

Anyway, I reckon that’s enough for now. There’s more soon, but first it’s the Melbourne Cup, ‘the race that stops a nation’. That’s tomorrow, (Tuesday), and I haven’t picked my horse yet. That will be my job for the morning.

Then it’s less than three weeks until the first test match….

Cheers
M&W