not much has changed but they live underwater....

Perhaps it’s a boy thing, but did you ever read the “Adventure” series of books by Willard Price? They’re a collection of children’s adventure novels, featuring a couple of teenaged naturalists called Hal and Roger Hunt, who encounter various pirates and poachers as they travel the world collecting specimens for their father’s wildlife collection. Anyway. I ripped through these books before I was a teenager, and they made a big impression on me. As well as giving me a desire to go on a proper safari in Africa, they also made me desperately want to strap an aqualung on my back and go and explore the world underneath the sea. Hal and Roger always seemed to be running into sharks and deadly rays every time they slipped beneath the waves, but even that wasn’t enough to put me off the idea.

Quite why I’ve waited until now to give diving a go, I’ll never know. I was actually given some “try scuba” type sessions as a birthday present a few years ago, but I never quite got around to it. If you’re going to learn how to dive though, where better than the Great Barrier Reef? Two of my friends have qualified as divers in the last few years, one in the Red Sea and one in a flooded quarry in England, both I’m sure were good in their own ways, but surely learning on one of the natural wonders of the world has got to be a great way to spend your time, no?

My first concern, naturally, was my health. Australia has some of the strictest medical regulations around diving in the world: if you want to dive in Australia, you must first pass an Australian dive medical. Although I was keen to spend some of our time down under learning, I didn’t want to get my hopes up until I thought I had a decent chance of actually passing the medical. I emailed a couple of diving schools in Cairns, and although both were exceptionally helpful, essentially all they were able to tell me was that I would have to see a doctor to be sure. There are two key problems with multiple sclerosis that make a dive medical problematic: the first is simply that the spread of symptoms can be so wide that it is impossible to judge how able or otherwise an individual is to dive until you have seen them with your own eyes.... you may be virtually entirely physically unaffected, or you may be unable to walk unassisted. No self-respecting doctor is going to sign anyone with MS off until they’ve had a good look at them. The second, and perhaps more thorny problem, is that some of the most common symptoms of MS are the same as some of the symptoms of decompression sickness – the Bends. DCS is what can happen when you ascend too quickly and the nitrogen in your body tries to revert to gaseous form. It can ultimately kill you, but some of the tell-tale signs that you have been affected are things like numbness, pins and needles, muscle weakness... all common MS symptoms, and all things that affect me.

On the advice of one of the dive schools, before I left the UK, I asked my MS Nurse to give me a letter confirming that I was fit and physically able. Maxine, bless her, went well above the call of duty, and wrote me a letter saying that I had run the Nottingham marathon this year and had a daily routine that consisted on 5 mile runs. None of it entirely true, but it made all the difference, as it confirmed to the doctor in Cairns that I was physically active and he didn’t just have to take my word for it. I was signed off and ready to go. Actually, as it turned out, C had much greater difficulty than me with her medical, and her occasional asthma was very nearly a show-stopper. Luckily (and I think it was down to luck) the doctor asked her to sign a disclaimer saying that she was aware of the risks, and then he signed her off... and we were ready to start our training.

At this juncture, serendipity took hold of our destiny. We were all set to go with one company (one of the ones that had been so helpful over email), when we dropped into an independent travel agency next to their office to enquire about another Wicked Camper to take us down the Queensland Coast. Andy at Experience Cairns was, as it turns out, something of an expert on diving in the area, and he listened to what we wanted to do, warned us against the company we were going to go with, and suggested we try Pro-Dive in Cairns. With nothing much to lose and no particular preference, we took his advice, and were picked up early the next morning to commence our pool training and our theory lessons.

What can I say: Pro-Dive were superb. Our class consisted of a bunch of Swedes, a couple of dutch guys, a Czech and another English girl, and our instructor – Janine – was originally from Leeds but had been in Oz for something like 9 years. It was brilliant. For the first couple of days, we alternated the theory in the classroom with skills sessions in the pool. Before that first day, I had never once in my life been underwater with a tank of air on my back, but before the end of the second day, I actually thought I knew what I was doing. On the end of the second day, we all sat the PADI Open Water exam. You needed 75% to pass, and I got 49/50 and C got 50/50 (although to this day I will dispute that the answer I gave to question#39 was just as valid....and besides, she revised and everything). In fact, the whole class passed, and so we all boarded the boat the next morning to spend the next three days on the Great Barrier Reef.

The transfer from Cairns to the reef is something like 3 hours, and for the first day and a half out there, we completed our Open Water certification by demonstrating our skills in the water – skills like clearing your mask underwater, showing you have control of your buoyancy, showing you have some basic navigation skills.... nothing too complicated, but all the fundamental basics that any diver should understand. Once certified, we were able to dive without an instructor, but were also given the option of completing our PADI Adventure Diver certification whilst on the reef: basically this entailed another couple of supervised dives, including a deep dive to 30m (the Open Water qualification enables you to dive to 18m, and that extra 12m can make a big difference if you want to dive wrecks and things like that.)

 Our instructor, Janine, shows off her muscles by throttling me...

It’s hard to explain how brilliant these few days were. The weather was perfect: the water was calm, visibility was a constant 20m and a steady 29 degrees; the company was good too... but above all, I was learning a new skill and was immediately able to apply it in an incredibly beautiful environment. We were warned, before reaching the reef, that often people are disappointed when it doesn’t live up to some of those amazing photos and film footage that we’ve all seen of all those colourful fish. The truth is that it probably doesn’t, but it is still AWESOME. Nothing can really prepare you for getting up close and personal with such an incredible diversity of marine life: parrotfish, huge bass, a 150 year old turtle the size of a dinner table, squid, clown anemone fish (Nemo!), many and varied types of coral, batfish, eagle rays, maori wrasse the size of dogs..... and sharks. Ah, sharks. We’ve all seen Jaws, and the shark is the one fish that still summons up a kind of primal fear. We are, after all, lower on the foodchain than some of these guys. The truth, of course, is that you are extremely unlikely to be attacked by any shark, and even less likely to be attacked by the ones we were going to see on the reef. Even so, there was something incredibly thrilling when we saw our first White Tipped Reef sharks on our first dive after qualifying. They weren’t especially big, but I saw the pair of them basking on the sand during the heat of the day, and all I wanted to do was to get closer. One swam away, but we got to within about 2m of the other before he got tired of us and moved away a little to try and sleep.

careful, the wind might change....

Later on that same day, we went on a night dive. Sharks during the day are one thing, but they are essentially nocturnal hunters, and seeing them after dark was going to be a completely different kettle of fish. Our pre-dive briefing warned us that there was a chance that we could encounter bigger, more dangerous sharks like Bull sharks or Tiger sharks.  Both are fearless, aggressive and curious, and if we did meet them, there was a chance they could come and have a closer look at us.  In those circumstances, we were taught to form the "ring of steel", in a circle with our backs to the shark and to descend.  The idea is that sharks attack from below, so going deeper makes that harder for them, and if they come to have a closer look (i.e. quick taste) of you, then you are presenting your back to them and they'll get a mouthful of your tank.... we were told partially in jest, of course, but it was enough to give us pause for thought before getting into the water, that's for damn sure.  As it turned out, I actually jumped into the water when I could already see sharks circling, and I was happy to..... my fear was overwhelmed by my excitement at seeing these magnificent animals at close quarters. Night diving is strange and creepy simply because you can only see what your torch is illuminating, and if you’re at the back of the line, you have very little idea of what’s behind you. It’s also the time of day when much of the reef flora and fauna comes out to play and can be seen at its best. Most, I’m afraid, was lost on me, as I was far too wrapped up in the sensation of diving in the dark to pick up the finer detail. On the way back to the boat, we saw a few Grey Reef Whaler sharks on the prowl. One was at least 2m long – bigger than me – and whilst it was exciting to see a shark up close that afternoon, to see one cruising around looking for something to eat was even more thrilling

Sexy stinger suit

It was an awesome, awesome few days. Our instructor was brilliant, the boat was good and the guys I was diving with were fun. All in all, one of the best weeks of my life, I reckon. Turns out that I quite like diving too. Yeah, I’ve got lots to learn and my big lungs guzzle up my air far too quickly, but I think that I’ve picked up a new hobby.

Just brilliant. If I do nothing else whilst I'm away, then this alone makes the whole trip worthwhile. Plus I now have the wherewithal to dive with dolphins and seals in New Zealand, Orca in Canada... the underwater world is suddenly my oyster.

by the ocean road to linger there....

We only had one night in Melbourne, but it was long enough to reaffirm the impression I first got back in 2004 that this was the liveliest city in Australia. Alright, so perhaps it's not fair to compare a modern metropolis like this with a backwater like Launceston, but even in Sydney I found bars shutting early on a weeknight.... and here the whole place seems to be pumping.

The last time we were here, we stayed with some distant relatives of C's - they're my wife's mother's godmother's niece and family, that makes them pretty distant, right? Anyway, they're a lovely bunch, and they meet us at the airport and take us out for a splendid Italian meal. It's supposed to be our treat, but good people that they are, because we're staying in a hostel for the night instead of with them, they feel that they must pay... we protest, but they sneak off and pay anyway when we're not looking. Lovely people, and it's almost a shame that we're only in town for just the one night.

We have to leave though, as the Great Ocean Road is calling to us. Renting a car was pretty good in Tassie, but this time we wanted to go for the whole experience and have rented a campervan. Not just any campervan, mind, but a Wicked Camper. In theory, these are budget vans, but in practice, they're the only vans you would want to be seen in.

Well, I say that, but if we had been given the van next to ours in the Melbourne depot, then I'm not so sure I would have wanted to be seen in it, and would have driven to Adelaide under cover of darkness. Our Samurai pattern is pretty discreet - certainly when compared to one covered in graffiti about the size of the driver's penis.....

The Great Ocean Road starts around Geelong, a little way out of Melbourne, and curves along the coastline for something just under 300km. It was built in the years immediately following the First World War as a project to help give the returning soldiers a sense of purpose and something constructive to do during the Great Depression. It's justifiably famous, and it seems that almost every corner you turn opens up another breathtaking vista across the magnificent coastline. We've got the van for six days, so we take our time, but even then we only spend two nights on the road itself. We spend the first night in a lovely campsite in Apollo Bay, in a gorgeous spot next to a small creek and with the sound of the waves of the Southern Ocean crashing into the shore a couple of hundred meters away. The second night is spent at Peterborough, a far cry from its English namesake and with a splendid swimming beach. After that, we head up to the Grampians.

The Great Ocean Road is lovely, but I think that the more famous parts of it - on the Adelaide side - are by far the least impressive parts of it. It's not that the Twelve Apostles or London Bridge aren't spectacular to look at, it's just that they're not really massively more spectacular than other parts of the coastline we've already seen, and they're now so geared up for mass tourism that it rather takes the shine off what you're looking at. There's a massive visitor's centre and walkways at the Twelve Apostles, with a little airfield just behind so that a seemingly endless number of little helicopters can take off to give people a 15 minute scenic flight. This is the place where the big coaches stop: if you're going to visit the Ocean Road and you've only got one day to do it, then this is the place where you're going to come. The visitor's centre is only there because of this demand, and as a tourist myself, it's hard to get too snooty about the hordes of Chinese and Japanese tourists..... but having spent the morning at Cape Otway, cooing at the koalas in the trees, swimming on a pristine beach and walking along a secluded rainforest trail with almost nobody else in sight, it's hard not to feel oppressed by the hordes of people.

To get to the Grampians, we leave the Southern Ocean and hook up through rural Victoria. The landscape changes dramatically: we leave the coastline vistas behind us and enter a seemingly endless stretch of long, straight road with bushland farms on either side. It's a whole lot of nothing, and we drive through the kind of towns where not only are petrol stations not open at the weekend, but where some shops are only open one day a week.

The scenery starts to change as we get nearer to the Grampians National Park, and the volcanic escarpments start to dominate the landscape. We pass through the holiday town of Hall's Gap and head on to a quiet little campsite in the national park called Smith's Mill. This really is in the middle of nowhere, and for the princely sum of $13, we get a bush shower (a bucket with a shower nozzle), a bush toilet (don't ask) and a fire pit in the middle of the forest. It's a lovely spot, and we cook over an open fire and watch kangaroos wandering around. We are invited to a sunday roast by our next door neighbours, but we have to push on. We check out a couple of viewpoints and then head on towards Adelaide.

We stop for the night in a town called Naracoorte, and as well as marvelling at the town's manmade lagoon (seven times the size of an Olympic swimming pool and quite a nice place for a dip), we also check off another UNESCO world heritage site.... there are some caves here with fossils showing some of the earliest marsupials: a giant wombat, a massive kangaroo, marsupial lions, that kind of thing. It's also home to the southern bentwing bats, who are critically endangered, and we spend some time admiring them on infrared cameras and learning abo\ut them. It's a nice enough town, albeit another one that seems to shut up by 9pm, but again we're just passing through.

After lots of sweltering South Australian bush, we stop briefly at a nice little town called Keith, primarliy to get a postcard to send to my friend Keith (although how many towns have you been to that have a landrover on a pole?), but we're now on the highway to Adelaide.  After a recommendation from a couple we met in the Grampians, we stop at a place called Old Tailem Town to look at a reconstruction of how life used to be in a bush town.  Oh. My. God.  It's essentially a collection of mouldering junk housed in "period" reconstruction buildings.  Alarmingly it also has a number of shop dummies posed at alarming angles.

It's alarmingly like something from the League of Gentlemen, and we start to imagine that hapless visitors like ourselves are trapped inside the dummies and begin to feat that we may never be allowed to leave.  We practically run out of the door....

Our next stop is Mount Barker, about 40km outside the city. To my great delight we're now in Coopers country. Coopers is brewed in Adelaide, and we're now only about Coopers Pale Ale is, in my opinion, the nicest beer that I have tasted in Australia, and to be able to get it on tap is a real treat, even if I can't quite get my head around the fact that an Adelaide pint is 425ml, some 150ml short of an Imperial pint. It's a nice enough size for a beer, but it's not a pint....

The next morning we drop off the camper in Adelaide. I wasn't initially sure about it, but I've grown to love the flexibility it provides. Alright, so it's not the most comfortable sleep in the world, and it seems to move from oven to fridge in the space of about 20 minutes, but it's been brilliant to be able to cook what we want and to sleep where we want. The car in Tassie was fine, but it's nowhere near as cheap and flexible as a camper. I love being able to park up, crack open a beer (taken from the Eski with a slab of ice from a petrol station inside....) and to then gaze up at the awesome night skies. Quite why Orion is upside-down is a mystery to me, but I could gaze at the Southern Cross and the Milky Way for hours.... Which given that there's not much else to do when it gets dark, is probably a good thing. We decide there and then that we're going to fill that blank in our schedule between Cairns and Brisbane by hiring another camper. We also decide that this is how we want to travel around New Zealand.

Although we spend something less than 24 hours in Adelaide, it's long enough to get a feel for the place. The Adelaide Oval is reputed to be one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world, but as it's currently undergoing renovation, that's kind of hard for me to judge. Instead of a tour, I have to content myself with a look around the Donald Bradman museum, marvelling at the assorted bits and pieces collected about that most humourless of accumulators..... (famously from Bowral, NSW incidentally, not South Australia).

The Adelaide fringe is on, so Rundle Street is filled with performers (I help out a scottish guy who does a neat act with a bed of nails), and down in the park at the bottom, there's a whole "Garden of Unearthly Delights" which has a whole assortment of acts on show along with a very distinct Glastonbury Lost Vagueness type vibe. We play twister in a caravan with a human tamogotchi and we visit a freak show displaying the remains of horned rabbits, two-headed cows, one-eyed chickens and the like. It's really quite cool. I liked Adelaide...and only partially because of the quality of the Coopers beer.

The weather here is perfect: endless skies and sunshine. It's almost a shame to leave so soon for Tropical north Queensland, but I'm anxious to discover if I will pass the stringent Australian medical and be able to spend the next week learning how to dive on the Great Barrier Reef.....

[You'll probably have realised I'm a little behind with this... what can I say? Australian wifi is proving s-l-o-w...... I'll get there.  I bet you can't wait....]

for to face Van Diemen's land....

We don’t actually see Tasmania until we are about 10m above the runway. Tassie has a reputation for being very British, and it appears that this extends to the weather, which – compared to Sydney if not to Nottingham – is distinctly cool, cloudy and drizzly. As is often the case in Australia, we are greeted at the airport by the cutest beagle. Quarantine laws are strict, and although Hobart does not receive any international flights, there are still restrictions on taking fruit and vegetables between states. The beagle dutifully sniffs everyone as they walk past him, and then walks along the luggage belt, snuffling each bag as it comes past him. I don’t know how effective he is, but he’s certainly a nice welcome to the state.

Hobart is only a short drive away from the airport, but even without the weather, there is definitely something British about the place. The landscape doesn’t look exactly English, but – if you ignore all of those alien gum trees – there’s something about the brown-tinged low mountains that reminds me of Wales or Scotland. Hobart itself doesn’t seem all that impressive: it’s not on the Southern Ocean itself, but is rather nestled into the Estuary of the Derwent River. For all that it’s a town that is all about its maritime history, the port itself doesn’t seem all that impressive, consisting as it does of what look a lot like a load of rundown warehouses. There’s a thriving little strip around Salamanca that has a number of bars and restaurants, and there are one or two old buildings about the place, but otherwise it’s not really anything much to write home about.... even if it is nice enough.

We spend a couple of nights in Hobart, and frankly that’s enough to get a feel for the place: we pick up the hire car, we have a look at the maritime museum, we eat some delicious flathead, calamari and chips at a place called “Fish Frenzy”, and we check out the Tasmanian Museum. Apart from having an obsession with stuffed animals, this last has a really interesting exhibition on Tasmania’s aboriginal history. Although Australia as a whole doesn’t have a great track record with the natives, Tasmania’s record is especially poor – essentially the aborigines here were systematically exterminated when they proved unable (or unwilling) to assimilate with the white settlers. The exhibition tried to show the aboriginal way of life and also to apologise for their treatment by the European settlers (Tasmania was the first Australian state to formally apologise for this, although Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised on behalf of the nation upon his election a couple of years ago.) I read a fantastic book called “The English Passenger” that dealt with the issue of the aborigines in Tasmania, and I was quite moved by the exhibition. The next room along features various stuffed examples of the indigenous wildlife – first and most obviously featuring the Tasmanian Tiger, hunted to extinction by the early 1930s. It’s a sad story, for sure, and it is upsetting watching the old video footage of a captive tiger pacing up and down its cage, knowing that none are left.... but when two ladies walked past us, and one said to the other, standing right next to the aboriginal exhibition, “oh, the extinction of the tiger is the greatest tragedy to ever happen to this island”... it was hard not to be astonished at the crassness of the statement. The extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger *is* sad, but the extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands is surely worth a mention, no?

 We left Hobart early on the Saturday morning to head down to Port Arthur, a hundred or so kilometres down the Tasman peninsular. Port Arthur is where those convicts who reoffended after transportation were sent, and it had a fearsome reputation and is supposed to be an incredibly atmospheric site. To be honest, although I found the setting stunningly beautiful and the site well presented, it wasn’t until we got to the “other” prison that I found it especially atmospheric. The main prison had a well-earned reputation for brutality, and prisoners who were sent here knew they were in for a hard time: leg irons, hard labour... the works. It’s interesting to read about the people sent here, and how some of them went on to lead productive lives elsewhere in Australia; how some escaped and were quickly recaught as the hostile environment took its toll.... many prisoners died here, some as young as nine years old... and it’s hard not to feel something when cruising around the Isle of the Dead where they were all buried. The general impression, though, is of a relatively enlightened environment where successive prison governors worked hard to make sure that the prisoners were treated as fairly as possible and given every chance to return to society. It was no picnic, for sure, but neither was it entirely without merit. The “other” prison is something else entirely though. As the nineteenth century wore on, prison reformers campaigned hard against the brutality of the traditional prison system. It was far better, they said, to work on the mind of the prisoner rather than to inflict punishment on his body. The chilling result is a prison where people were kept entirely in solitary confinement; where they had to wear a mask whenever they stepped outside their cell; where they had a completely isolated exercise yard where they would get to smell the fresh air for an hour a day, but would but unable to see another living soul; where the prison guards would wear slippers so that they would not make a sound as they walked up and down the prison block.... now that’s chilling, and it’s an atmosphere you can still feel as you look at the cells, as you walk in the exercise yards and as you look at the chapel (where prisoners would be forced to listen to the parson whilst enclosed in individual booths were they could only see the pulpit and nothing else.  Poor souls). The intentions of the reformers were good, I think, but the result was far more punishing to a prisoner’s wellbeing than all the beatings and leg irons of the older prison. Port Arthur is a fascinating place. Not the finest hour of the British colony in Australia, that’s for sure.

 On the way out of the Tasman Peninsular, we stopped off at a Tasmanian Devil sanctuary. Although once widespread, the Tasmanian Devil is now unique to Tasmania and is under serious threat of extinction from a contagious facial tumour that has ravaged the population over the last decade. At current rates of decline, they could be entirely extinct in between 10-15 years time. It’s a sobering thought, and one that makes the sight of one of these magnificent marsupials all the more poignant. You’re probably familiar with the Warner Brothers cartoon character, but he does the real thing no justice at all: they’re a touch smelly, but they’re also incredibly cute, even as they crunch on the bones of a raw chicken... Also in the sanctuary, I get a good look at another animal that is under threat and is now only really found in Tasmania: the Eastern Quoll. They’re sometimes called the Native Cat, but really they look like a kind of stoat or weasel, with reddish brown fur speckled with white spots. As with the Devil, they may crunch on the bones of other animals, but they’re also incredibly cute as they wash the gore off their snouts by licking their paws and rubbing them across their faces and ears. I’m a sucker, but I definitely like Quolls. I miss my cat!

Heading up the East Coast, after a short detour on one of the island’s many unsealed roads, we spend the night in a distinctly chintzy bed & breakfast in Orford.... like many places in Australia, when it claims to be historic, it means it might be about 100 years old. It’s nice enough, but the teddy bear on the bed should tell you all you really need to know about the place. It’s raining when we get up, but we head on up the East Coast towards the Freycinet National Park and Wineglass Bay. This is one of the “must see” stops in Tasmania, and it’s certainly well worth the fairly strenuous hike through the rain to get to the viewing point and then down to the beach itself. You might think that this was named because of the shape of the beach, but apparently the place (may have) got its name from a time when whales were so plentiful that you could hunt them from bases on the island rather than having to chase them out into the Southern Ocean. This bay was a processing centre for the Southern Right Whales that were caught (so called because they were the “right” whale to kill...not from the whale's perspective, eh?.). So many were dragged here to be processed that the water in the bay was the colour of burgundy wine from all the blood.... nice story, huh? Nice viewpoint,anyway.

After serendipitous stops in the pleasant seaside town of Bicheno (penguins! blowhole!) and the lovely historic old town of Ross, we head on to the Cradle Mountain national park. This is Tasmania’s big draw, and the one place that everybody visiting the place is likely to visit. As school holidays here are now over, we seem to have chosen a good time to arrive, and although many of the hotels are busy, we often have many of the trails to ourselves. We spend a couple of days here, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

As well as the plentiful wildlife we see during our walks, we also choose to go on a night time wildlife drive, and in all we see wallabies, pademellons (a small Tasmanian wallaby), echidnas, wombats, bush-tailed possums... and even a Tasmanian Devil. It’s a lovely spot.

From Cradle Mountain, we head up towards Launceston (rather upsettingly pronounced by the locals of Lon-cess-ton). It’s the second largest “city” in Tasmania, but we found that even here, the biggest pubs on the busiest street were starting to shut up shop at about 9pm on a weeknight..... we were staying at a backpacker’s hostel, but elected to eat out at the city’s finest restaurant – Stillwater – more fool us. On seeing a menu full of jus and foams, we should have trusted our instincts and left, but instead we stayed to enjoy an overpriced menu of appallingly low quality food. We made our feelings known and had the price of our bottle of mineral water knocked off the bill and were shown the door....honestly, it was terrible. Lonely Planet should be as ashamed of themselves for recommending the place as the restaurant should be for serving that muck at those prices. Needless to say, it was full of people determined to convince themselves that this was indeed the meal of a lifetime. Pah. You live and learn, right?

For a town full of kids in muscle cars, crappy restaurants and pubs that shut ludicrously early, I have to say that Launceston actually grew on me... particularly when we headed up to the park at Cataract Gorge at the top of town. This is an especially Victorian affair, where the bush has been tamed by the addition of a swimming lake, some walking paths and a scenic chairlift, but actually it was lovely, and clearly an excellent spot to bunk off work on a sunny afternoon and have a swim. From there, it was on to the airport and out to Melbourne.

On the whole, I found Tasmania to be an absolutely lovely spot: it’s clearly Australian, but it’s got a slightly more temperate climate and is on a much more manageable scale. It *does* look quite English in places, especially in flatter land of the midlands (where each town has a thing - Sheffield's was murals, and every house seemed to have a different mural, including one very brightly coloured homage to the Wizard of Oz.  I have a feeling that the small town owners might be horrified to learn that their innocent mural had *other* connotations....). Here the cultivated pastures filled with sheep and cattle, but for the wall-to-wall sky, could easily be somewhere in the UK. It’s a landscape that is at once familiar and alien. That said, we were only there for something like six days and only covered 850km and a relatively small portion of the island. Even here, I was conscious that there was so much more to see... we actually bumped into a retired couple in Orford who had so far spent three-and-a-half years travelling around Australia and were planning to spend the next twelve months in Tasmania alone. With that in mind, how much can you really see in six days? Still, I really liked what I did see.... how often can you say that you’ve seen Penguins in the wild, nevermind a Tasmanian Devil.... and I think I need to come back here again and have a proper look around.

For the record though, I much prefer Hobart’s Cascade beer over Launceston’s Boags. Just personal preference, I suppose, but I sampled both extensively and this was more informed conclusion... neither, it must be said, as good as a Cooper’s Pale Ale, but that’s a story for the South Australian section of the trip.....

Bit of a long post... sorry about that.  Loads of stuff to write about, and only annoyingly flakey wireless connections to load it up on....... I've still left loads of stuff out too, but I'm one day into my PADI course in Cairns, and I'm about to spend three days diving from a boat on the Great Barrier Reef, so the rest will have to wait until another day, eh?

gentlemen and players play....

As an English sports fan, I have become sadly accustomed to defeat at the hands of the Australians. Cricket, rugby, football, athletics, hockey, swimming.... well, you name a sport and they've pretty much beaten us at it. Yeah, sure, we have the odd victory -- the 2005 and 2009 Ashes, the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and 2007, the rowing -- but basically the pattern is that we get resoundingly beaten by a nation who just seem to be better than us at every sport ever devised. They are meaner, leaner, faster and more driven to win than we British will ever be.... we're far too diffident to ever match that kind of self-confidence.

Or so I thought.

In Hobart, whilst waiting for my flateye & chips (delicious, by the way), I idly flicked through an Australian sports magazine. It contained an article on the British push for medals at the 2012 games. The first few paragraphs were the predictable laugh at British sport. The author didn't bother to go into detail our long-term failings in rugby, cricket and football, but did say that our pre-Beijing Olympic highlights reel could be set to the theme tune to Benny Hill. List Great British Olympic heros, and after you've named Steve Redgrave and Seb Coe, how long is it before you are forced to mention Eddie the Eagle. Ha bloody ha. Then the tone abruptly changes: after the watershed of the Atlanta Games in 1996, when Britain won a solitary gold medal, we began to take the sport more seriously and, with the help of National Lottery funding, we began to invest in success.... an investment that culminated in Great Britain finishing above Australia in the Beijing Games in 2008, with the equivalent of one billion Australian dollars earmarked for the medal campaign for London 2012.

Not fair, apparently. Although people like Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton are clearly outstanding athletes, so the article informed us, didn't people like Tim Brabants only win their events because they could afford the best equipment? Now, obviously this is an unfair criticism, not least because all of these athletes, although they may be well funded, still make enormous sacrifices for their success. Brabants is a good example: as well as training for his gruelling event, he holds down a job in the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham as a duty doctor.... putting in 100s of hours a week on top of his training. Is his kayak really the only reason for his two medals? No, it's not, and it's unfair to say that it is. Were the Australians in Brabants' race really handicapped by significantly inferior kit? I doubt it.

The article gets worse. Not only is British success being bought, but surely they have also lost something far more important. There is an inscription at Centre Court Wimbledon that quotes Rudyard Kipling's "If", exhorting competitors to treat triumph and disaster the same. In the ruthless pursuit of success at all costs, Britain have forgotten what it means to simply take part and are all the poorer as a result.

Oh spare me. You can laugh at us for being hopelessly disorganised and amateurish at sport, or you can scorn us for our investment in success... but you surely can't do both.

This article is only one journalist's opinion of course, but I really had no idea that the Australians -- a nation that have always struck me as being supremely self-confident, certainly when it comes to sport -- are still quite so insecure in their relationship with Britain.

See you in 2012.

(* please note that I'm not going to brag about the 2009 Ashes series. We're due in Australia later this year, and we all know what happened after the 2005 successes, right?)

Incidentally, I've been happily wearing the t-shirt above around Tasmania.... even though that missing apostrophe kills me every time....

under the bridge....

When I first visited Sydney, in 2004, I was initially distinctly underwhelmed. Upon arrival, we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed straight down to Circular Key. We'd just spent some seven days in the Red Centre, so we were quite keen to get to the heart of the metropolis as quickly as possible. I can quite clearly remember standing in front of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, one of the most famous viewpoints in the world, and thinking "Is this it?". It's a scene that pretty much everyone must have seen hundreds of times; it's a scene that we're supposed to gasp at and immediately recognise as one of the most beautiful city views in the world. The bridge is nice enough, I suppose... although even a nice bridge is still just a bridge right? But to my eyes, the Opera House looked a little grubby and the tiles were far more textured than the pristine white sheen of my imagination.

It took a couple of days before the city began to get under my skin. I went running early one morning down through Hyde Park and into the Botanical Gardens. The flying foxes were chattering noisily in the trees as they returned to roost and the spider webs were glistening with dew, highlighting them nicely so I didn't run into any of the massive - and no doubt deadly poisonous - spiders perched on them. I ran down as far as Mrs Macquarie's Chair, and as I looked back out across the harbour in the glorious early morning sunshine, I realised that Sydney wasn't so bad after all. Later on, walking down to Darling Harbour, I watched the office workers spilling off the ferries on their way to the office. They were mostly wearing short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses, and they were clutching cups of coffee and fresh squeezed juices. Just behind me in the harbour I couldn't help but notice a large IBM building. It all seemed like a far cry from the lifestyle we have in Britain and I found myself thinking that I could quite happily work in Australia for a while. I could work in that IBM building.

Fast forward six years and a couple of years working for IBM - albeit sadly in Nottingham rather than in Sydney - and I find myself back in Circular Key. Yup, it still looks pretty good to me. Hong Kong was nice, but the moment we step off the plane and into the warm fug of an Australian summer evening, it's fantastic to be here again. There's something about the wall-to-wall skies and the wide-open spaces that makes this such a nice place to be.

We don't really do all that much, to be honest: we wander around the harbour and the Rocks; we go running through the parks again; we drink long black coffees and freshly squeezed juices; we wander around Kings Cross and Paddington; we coo at the possums in Hyde Park; we go swimming in the salt-water outdoor Andrew "Boy" Charlton pool on the waterfront; we walk the 10km bush trail in Manley before having huge steaks in Ribs and Rumps overlooking the beach.... we don't do anything much, but it's a brilliant three days.

Nice town. It's no West Bridgford, but you can't have everything.

the rise of an eastern sun....

Hong Kong is probably about lots of different things to lots of people.  To me, it’s always going to be about two things: my friend Des and food.  To be honest, even those two things are intrinsically linked in my head.  I first met Des in 1987, and our friendship has largely been defined by the things we have consumed, whether that be coffee and Jaffa Cakes in free periods at school,  turkey rolls filled with mayonnaise and nice n’spicy nik-naks or horrible greasy kebabs from Salmans down the road.  Whatever else we have done in the 23 years we’ve known each other, we’ve certainly not gone hungry.

Hardly surprising then that my time in Hong Kong seems to have largely been spent eating.  In spite of threatening to come many times, this is my first visit.  Like most backpackers, we trudged our weary way off the plane, gathered our rucksacks and got a lift from our host to our five star hotel in Mong Kok in Kowloon. After freshening up underneath our huge rain shower and after a quick power nap on the bed that is wider than I am tall (we have a pillow menu, for goodness sake!), we met up with Des again and headed off to our Michelin starred restaurant with the panoramic view across the harbour to Hong Kong Central.  “Hutong” serves Northern Chinese cuisine (I’m told) and as we gazed out at the stunning (if slightly foggy) view, we were treated to a succession of awesome dishes like razor clams, spicy deep-fried soft-shelled crabs in a basket of chillies, green beans with fried mince pork, carpaccio of octopus, a delicious fatty lamb dish, some noodles.... the dishes kept coming and I kept wolfing them down, each one seemingly more delicate and tasty than the last.

After waking up at 03:30 in the morning thinking that I’d never sleep again, we actually surfaced at something like 11:30, in time for a stroll past the Bruce Lee statue in the avenue of stars, and then onto the Star Ferry to Central to enjoy a sumptuous Dim Sum lunch.  As well as the usual assortment of delicate dumplings, Des decided to try to shock us with a bit of stunt ordering, but the cow’s stomach and chicken’s feet dishes that he ordered failed to curb out appetites and we gamely tried a bit of everything.  I can’t say that either dish is especially to my taste, to be honest: the stomach is too chewy and the feet are mostly skin and bone.... but never let it be said that I’m not prepared to try something before deciding I don’t like it.  Food, anyway.  I’m not shocked easily, and besides, Des has stunt ordered for me before in Chinatown in London....

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around Central and taking in the sights.  We rode on a tram, we walked around the back streets, we went to an art installation at the old police married quarters, we attended the opening of an exhibition (with wine and cocktails, of course), we had a drink looking out onto the skyscrapers, we marvelled at all of the ex-pats enjoying happy hour with their shockingly young looking asian companions.... but really all of this was just killing time before we made our way to our restaurant for some Peking cuisine.  Again, the food was excellent: we ate Peking Duck, Pork Satay, sweet and sour prawns, a delicate mushroom soup...but the centrepiece of the meal was something called “Beggar’s Chicken”.  This is a dish that apparently needs to be ordered a week in advance, and consists of a chicken stuffed with mushrooms, wrapped in leaves and encased in pastry.  They wheel this out with great ceremony and then someone – guess who – is required to take the ceremonial hammer and to make the first break into the casing.  I got a souvenir photo and a little hammer for my troubles, but the important thing was that the chicken was delicious.

By now, the succession of delicious meals is beginning to blur, and in an attempt to minimise the damage to our waistlines, we manage to sneak some time the next morning to go for a run.  It’s only a 45 minute pootle through the shoppers between Mong Kok and the Avenue of Stars, but it’s better than nothing.  If nothing else, it means that packing my running shoes wasn’t a total waste of time anyway.  Des is playing rugby, so we also have some time to ourselves to take the tram up to the Peak.  I’m sure the views are normally spectacular, but it seems that my luck is out and Hong Kong continues to be enveloped by the same low cloud that hangs over the city for the entire duration of my stay.  To say we can’t see anything would be an exaggeration, but you certainly can’t see much and we feel somewhat vindicated that we didn’t pay extra to go up to the viewing platform (although quite why anybody did on the day we were there is something of a mystery, but the majority of people seemed to be going up there). 

We bump into a fat ex-pat at the bottom tram stop, lording it over his visiting friends and telling them how much there is to do at the top.  He’s lying.  Well, unless you like to spend your time poring over tat shops selling overpriced nick-nacks, anyway.  Perhaps he does.  We didn’t get to see much, but I’m still glad that we went, if only because it gave me an opportunity to see on the tram ride up quite how high and steep the peak is, as I certainly couldn’t see it during our stay.  I also got to follow up the good work done on my run by eating a fruit salad.  I don’t know about you, but I like to eat fruit but I often find that on holiday it’s easy to go several days without any.  Now, that’s probably okay for a week or so, but over three months?  Let’s not go there, eh?

Dinner that night was chez Des.  As you might imagine, it was fantastic:  a selection of raw meats, oysters, mussels, squid, dumplings, scallops and the like that we dipped into a couple of boiling broths in front of us on the table to cook them, then dipped them into a soy sauce and raw egg mix before eating them.  Absolutely delicious – especially when served with a 1982 Chateau Giscours Margaux.   Never mind the dinner though, it was an opportunity to chew the cud with an old friend, his wife and to spend some time with his almost-three-year-old son kicking a ball about and reading him the Gruffalo.  Oh, and England’s first game of the Six Nations with Wales was on the giant screen in the living room too, although the time-zone difference meant that I had to sleep my way through Manchester United vs Portsmouth before kick off at 01:30 Hong Kong time.  It was one of those nights.  I’m sure Hong Kong is splendid, but this is why I’m really here.

Slow start on Sunday, but it’s pouring with rain, so all we really do with our day is book some stuff for the Tasmania leg of our trip, drink some coffee and drive around a few bits of Hong Kong we haven’t seen.  Food features, obviously, and we have a lovely lunch of noodles, suckling pork, duck, chicken and the like, and a dinner a little way out of town in Sai Kung where we have seafood.  You know the drill: loads of tanks outside a ramshackle looking hut, and we cherry pick the pissing prawns, lobster, scallops blah blah blah that we want to have killed, cooked and served at our table.  It doesn’t get much fresher than that, even though it is hard not to think of the lobster giving you the evil eye as it is plucked from its tank.  Delicious, of course, albeit somewhat greasy as everything seems to be smothered in butter before being served.  We go somewhere else for dessert, of course, and sample some Chinese specialities like a black sesame paste, some almondy-tasting dumplings and some rather slimy but refreshing tofu type stuff.  Trust me, it’s better than it sounds......  and then we’re more or less done.

Hong Kong is a shopping town, and we’re not here to shop.  The cityscape is stunning, but for almost all the time we’re here, it’s smothered in low cloud.  None of that matters though.  We’re not here for that stuff, we’re here to stop off and to see some friends.

Mission accomplished.

 Oh, and I probably ate enough food to last me for the rest of the trip.  A good four days work, I would say.... Thanks entirely to Des, naturally.  Of all the people I know, I think he's the one who has changed the least in all the time we've been friends.  In a good way.  I'll have to find my way back to HK sometime for the Sevens, eh?

(We're actually flying to Hobart today having spent the last three days in Sydney.... but you know, I've got better things to do than sit in a cafe uploading pictures.....I'll catch up as and when I can)

pretty green....

Whilst passing through Terminal 5 at Heathrow on our way to catch our flight to Hong Kong on Wednesday evening, I saw a large advert for Accenture.  I suppose it was most notable for not featuring Tiger Woods (surprise surprise), but it actually caught my eye because it featured a picture of a frog jumping over two other frogs, and it had the slogan "Play Quantum Leapfrog".  I looked at it for a while and decided that I didn't get it.  I realise that lots of business travellers will pass underneath this advert, but do these high-powered, decision-making executives really opt to spend several thousands of pounds per day on consultants on the basis of an advert like this at an airport?  Really?  Is that what it all boils down to?  I found that thought remarkable.

C. saw it differently.

C. thought that it was a very clever piece of advertising that made Accenture Consultancy look desirable to any business that was aspiring to make that quantum leap forwards.  Which ambitious company wouldn't want to be the frog leaping over the other frogs?

I pondered this for a moment.

"You might be ahead of the other frogs, but at the end of the day, you're still just a frog."

Apparently this attitude might be the reason why my career has not advanced as far and as fast as it might have done.

wave goodbye....

Well, as John Denver once said, my bags are just about packed and I'm ready to go.  We are ultimately leaving on a jet plane, of course, but first we're catching a train down to London at lunchtime tomorrow and fly out to Hong Kong at some point in the early evening.  And that, with any luck, will be the last that I see of this Northern winter.  Given that it's freezing cold and has been pissing it down all day, the idea of stepping out of an aeroplane and into the Southern summer is a very cheery thought indeed.  When we went to Australia in 2003/4, we left the December sleet of Heathrow and arrived into a beautiful, balmy summer of a Melbourne summer morning.  It was brilliant, and I hope the same kind of thing happens this time around.

Before all that though, I have to fnish packing.  I tend to suffer from packing anxiety: I'll worry and worry about what I've forgotten to put into my bag, and the only cure seems to be to actually leave, at which point all worrying becomes pointless and I'll just get on with it.  After all, as long as you've got your passport and your wallet, there aren't many things that you can't pick up along the way..... They have shops down there, right?

Of course, my list of things not to forget is now a little bit longer: as well as my passport, money, tickets, camera, iPod, charging cables and all the rest of the usual guff that fills up my bag, for this trip I have also had to pack eleven little packets, each containing the needle, syringe, and drugs that I need for my weekly injection of Avonex - the Beta Interferon 1a that is supposed to help slow down the progression of my MS.  One packet for each week that we're away. Oh, and I also have a natty little travel sized sharps box to keep all my used syringes (apparently you're not allowed to just throw them away).  Oh, and a couple of letters from my neurologists to show to customs to explain why I need to take this stuff onto the plane as cabin baggage. Oh, and the letter to show to the Australian doctor who will be carrying out my medical in Cairns to help convince them to give me the pass I need in order to learn to dive.

I have my own little bag and everything.

If I have them, I reckon I can pick up any pants or socks I might have forgotten somewhere along the way.

Just call me Mr. Spontaneous.

Hardest packing decision?  Which books to take.  Clearly I can pick up new ones along the way, but I reckon I should be taking at least three with me to get started.  Here's what I went for:

The Magus - John Fowles
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster

I'm a little intimidated by The Magus, but nothing ventured nothing gained, right?

.....Am I looking forward to going, natty little drugs bag and all?  Hell yes.  Bring it on!

somewhere cold and caked in snow....

I suppose I should apologise really.  Most skiing photos look exactly the same: if you've ever seen me standing in my ski gear in front of one set of snowy mountains, then you really don't need to see any more.  Given that I haven't changed my skiing jacket in 5 years and the only noticeable change in the last three or four trips is the fact that I've started wearing a helmet, then I might just as well have selected a random selection of photos from our recent trips to Courchevel, Sestriere, La Rosiere, Val D'Isere or Canada.

Well, for what it's worth, these photos were taken last week in the Lech and St Anton ski areas in the Austrian Alps.

 

Well, apart from this one, which I took last year in Val D'Isere.... but anyway..... it's us in our ski gear on a chairlift in some snowy mountains somewhere.  Same difference.  Do me a favour and, for the purposes of this update, pretend that it was taken in Austria too.

I love Austria.  We got married in Vienna a couple of years ago and we have some very good Austrian friends, so I have little but fond memories of the place.  If a country's greatness was judged on the volume and quality of their cakes, then Austria would truly be a giant amongst nation states.  How can you not love a country that has a special breakfast cake?  Whether it's sachatorte, apfelstrudel, topfenstrudel, mohnstrudel, germknödel, kaiserschmarrn... or any other of their delicious and seemingly endless varieties of sweet treats, I doubt that anyone ever went longer than about two hours in Austria without a pastry product or a cake of some type.  Or if they did, perhaps they got disowned.

Food aside - and I won't even go into the details of the schitzels, goulash soups, rindsuppe and other delights I consumed on the slopes - I actually learned to ski in Austria on a school trip back in 1987, but it was some 13 years before I ever went skiing again, and this is my first trip back to the Austrian Alps since.

 

For the last five years now, we've gone as part of a larger group of friends.  The origins of the group seem lost in the mists of time, but I think they started out as a university ski club, and have evolved from there as friends bring friends who bring other friends.  This year was the first time that not a single founding member of the group was there, but there were still eighteen of us and we were able to have a whole chalet to ourselves.  I'm sure it's changed over the years, but although we like a drop of red wine with our dinner, we're not really the kind of group who really go hard at the apres ski.  Even in the time we've been going, we've never really partied hard out in the resort.  Instead, we tend to drink copious amounts of wine in the chalet and try our damndest to make the first lift of the morning to make some tracks in the freshly bashed pistes.  As relative late-comers to the group, although we know everyone and have been skiing with most several times, we're not central members of the group and aren't part of the "core".  Actually, I quite like the fact that we're not in the nucleus of the group: it means that we can sort of fade into the background and just enjoy our trip and the skiing.  It's nice.  And we won the quiz.  Again.

The weather was a touch variable.  I suppose ideally you want to have a huge great dump of snow every night whilst you sleep and then ski under clear blue skies.  Unfortunately it doesn't often work out like that.  Although we had a couple of days of beautiful sunshine, most of the week was spent skiing in very flat light as snow fell hard onto the mountains.  This did mean that we were lucky enough to ski in powdery conditions that were nearly as good as those I saw in Canada last year, but the downside is that you have to wrap up really warm and sometimes struggle to make out any contours in the snow at all, meaning that you must ski cautiously or risk wiping out on an unseen undulation.

As I'm not the kind of skiier who gets their kicks from the speed of their descent off the mountain, this suited me okay.  Far better to have good snow than icy snow, or even no snow at all, if you ask me.... but it doesn't suit everyone, and some people were noticeably slower out of the chalet in the morning and quicker back in the afternoon than others.  Still, it's supposed to be a holiday, isn't it?  No point flogging yourself.  Far better to get back in good time to use the chalet's little sauna and to make snow angels out the back to cool off.  Apparently Ian Hislop and Stuart Rose stayed in this same chalet the week before we were there.  It's nice enough -- one of the nicest I've stayed in -- but surely that's slumming it a little for them?  They were nice enough, apparently, if as demanding as you might expect from people who usually stay in a better class of establishment.  It was one of their party's 50th birthdays, and they'd stayed in the same chalet some 20-odd years before and were making a return trip... this time bringing their own champagne.  Fair enough, I suppose, but you'd think they might have managed a tip for the (excellent) chalet boys.

 

As you might expect from a country so close to Germany, the beer in Austria is excellent.  Unfortunately, that proximity to Germany also means that they are uncommonly attached to Jive Bunny type, Europop oom-pah-pah mega remixes.  As well as the inevitable DJ Otzi and the ubiquitous Lady Gaga, every bar seemed to be pumping out strange cover versions of songs like "Sweet Caroline", "I Will Survive" and "Country Roads", all done in the europop style.  This kind of music causes me physical pain, but everyone else in the bar seemed to go into a strange trance where they would almost unconsciously nod their head and tap their feet along to this rubbish.... including, much to my disgust, everyone that I was with (with the honourable exception of Damon, pictured with me above and equally trapped in hell).

It was an excellent week.  The trip was booked something like 11 months ago, long before we arranged our 8 months off from work, so it felt less like the start of a career break and more like a week's holiday away from work, but it was none the less welcome for that.  We fly to Hong Kong on Wednesday evening, so the next couple of days are going to be spent emptying one set of bags, running the washing machine and then packing another set of bags, but you won't hear me complaining too hard when I know that I could easily be sitting at my desk in the office instead.....

Three things I've learnt on this holiday:

1) Heated chairlifts are an absolutely brilliant idea and should be compulsory everywhere.  On a cold day - and let's be honest, it should be cold on a skiing holiday, should't it? - there are few things as pleasing as sitting down on a long chairlift to the windblasted top of a mountain to discover that it is slightly heated.  Chairlifts are often slow enough that you can start to get cold, and this nipped the whole process in the bud.  It's probably not very carbon friendly, but it was very welcome.  The only other way of heating the seat on a chairlift is a whole lot less appealing, especially if you've got the plastic top down.... no one likes that kind of seat warmer, eh?

2) One of our party works in cabin crew for the airline that flew us out.  I sat next to her on the way home, and it was a real eye-opener.  The steward looking after us was telling us how he had got in from work at 19:20 the day before and had gone straight out for 19:50, not getting to bed before 01:00 and then getting up for work at 04:00.  The captain had been out too, apparently..... Still, they looked after us fantasically well, and sitting next to one of their colleagues meant that I was plyed with free drinks and snacks all the way home, which was brilliant.

3) In spite of all the trouble I went to to ensure that the airlines and airport security all knew that I would be travelling through the airport with a syringe and needles in my hand luggage (I can't check it in with my baggage because I can't be sure that the liquid in the syringe won't freeze in the hold), it turns out that I probably needn't have bothered.... they just waved me straight through and really couldn't have cared less, nevermind insisting on seeing the letter from my neurologist.  This is a good thing.  This is the first time I've carried syringes with me on a flight, and I am delighted that it seems to be no big deal.  Long may it continue to remain so, especially as I will have a whole lot more syringes with me on our next trip.

Next stop: Hong Kong.

(just like) starting over.....

The last day at work is finally done.

I'd say that I managed to get away entirely unscathed, but as I somehow managed to dislocate my left thumb before leaving, that wouldn't really be accurate (.....don't ask).  In the end I skulked off at about 5pm as my increasingly impatient wife tapped her foot beside me as I sat at my desk, firing off those last few emails and setting that gloriously satisfying voicemail message ("...if you can wait until September, then please leave your message after the tone.  Otherwise please bugger off."  Or words to that effect, anyway). 

I would probably have stayed longer, but we had an important mission to complete: we had to take our cat down to her country estate, where my mum and dad will be looking after her for the next few months.  They have a nice, big garden that opens out onto fields, and they've been cultivating the birdlife with feeders and tables and the like for several years... so I have a feeling that she's going to be just fine.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that we'll miss her far more than she misses us.

Once she gets used to my mum and dad's geriatric, almost blind and pretty much deaf dog, anyway..... She's the apple of our eye, and she has known something was up for a few days now, so getting her into her travelling box was a bit of pantomime.  In the car, she also vigorously voiced her dislike of Beyonce's "All The Single Ladies" by miaowling loudly three times and promptly throwing up, although I suppose that could also have been the winding country roads making her feel a touch travelsick and not just her opinion of Mrs. Z.....  We stayed the night, and by this morning she seemed to have largely realised that the dog was nothing much to worry about and that she was going to be fine.  She'd elbowed her way through to eat the dog's breakfast, anyway.

 

Well, in a minute we're off down to stay with some friends near Gatwick before heading out to Austria tomorrow to go skiing for a week.  Given my current track record with injuries (as well as that dislocated thumb, I also currently have a fractured hand and a broken toe), let's hope that I'm still all in one piece when I get on that flight for Hong Kong in 10 days time, eh?

I wonder how long it will take to hit me that I'm not going to be working now until September.  It took C. a good 10 days to decompress after she finished back in December, so I reckon it will hit me on the Monday after we get back from skiing.  We booked this holiday some eleven months ago, so really it's going to feel just like a normal short break away from the office.  I think it's going to be the Monday when I would have been going back to work that I'm really going to start to feel free.

Just the thought of it is making me smile.

Sorry about that.