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