With a swine flu sweeping around the globe, we were very concerned yesterday when our five-year-old came home from school totally wiped out. Bless her, she’d managed to power through the day but when my wife arrived to pick her up, she virtually collapsed into her arms. When we got her back home, we found [...]
July 2009
I talked about making new friends last week but what I really was trying to say is this. When you say goodbye to your long-term friends and you know you are saying goodbye forever, your need to make new friends increases. Wherever you are living now, you probably have a steady, reliable, backdrop of friends [...]
In England, it was called a plain and simple gnat. Every now and then, you’d get a gnat bite. DANG! But in hotter countries, where the tabloid press does not lead with the headline “Phew, What a Scorcher!” as soon as the temperature hits 80°F, they become MOSQUITOES. Forget spiders, crocodiles, alligators, lions, kangaroos breaking [...]
Drinking and Driving in Australia I held a full driving licence in the UK for just over 30 years and drove thousands of miles in that time. My best guess would be somewhere between a quarter of a million and a half a million miles. I was never, ever breathalysed. Not once. I have not [...]
Christmas in July? I don’t know who started it, but I was amazed when I was holidaying here in July 2004 to see Christmas decorations already on sale in the shops. “Boy! They start early” I thought. But no. These decorations weren’t being sold in preparation of December, they were for Christmas in July. The [...]
Once again, the weekend is approaching and once again I’ll be up to something. But this weekend that something is pretty weird, I can assure you. I know it sounds crazy to ask you to try and guess what that is, but I am going to ask anyway. Here goes. Can you guess what it [...]
Moving to Australia: Will You Miss Your Friends? In last week’s post I spoke about the likelihood of your family and friends coming to visit you here in Australia. I mentioned that there were four criteria which were strong indicators that you could use on your family and friends to help you work out who [...]
There is a lot of negative talk about the spiders and snakes of Australia. In fact whenever they are mentioned, it’s not long before the “death” word appears in the conversation. This is something that does not happen in the UK. It is very rare that spiders and death crop up in the same sentence [...]
