“Can you lend me a fiver?” “Do you take EFTPOS?” Whenever I asked to borrow a fiver in England, I never once received that response. I won’t here in Australia either, because nobody refers to anything as a fiver. Anyway, here’s an article I wrote for Australia and New Zealand magazine which appeared in their [...]
Shopping
In the 10 years that we’ve lived in Australia, we’ve bought quite a bit of stuff. Furniture, electrical goods, white goods, beds, houses, cars, all sorts of stuff. As anybody who buys stuff knows, sometimes things go wrong. Of all the stuff we’ve bought, things have gone wrong on several occasions, and by and large [...]
It would have been some time in 2016 when Amazon announced it would be coming to Australia to sell physical products in addition to the already available digital books. 2017 was filled with rumours of an impending launch throughout the year. The rumours weren’t just about the launch though, there was much talk about the [...]
At just 94 kilometres, my journey from Cardwell to Cairns was by far the shortest leg of my trip. That was intentional though, I needed to pick up Mrs Bob and my daughter Elizabeth from Cairns airport at around 2 o’clock in the afternoon. As you probably know if you read my post Cardwell to [...]
Usually I start an article like this by saying ‘It’s time for another reprint of one of my Australia and New Zealand magazine articles’. Except, this time, it isn’t really time, because we only had one last week when I published the Cost of Private School Education: Australia and the UK Compared. The thing is [...]
Out of the blue, on Sunday Mrs Bob said to me “I want to go to Costco.” Gosh, I’d forgotten all about those people; when we used to live in the UK our Costco trips were a regular occurrence. Once every two or three months we would drive over to Gray’s Thurrock, a half-hour or [...]
Before I get to that question, I have to tell you that on Saturday we went to the shopping mall. It was unusually chaotic. As soon as we arrived we realised something wasn’t right, the multi-storey car park was pretty much gridlocked. This was quite unusual, especially at 3 o’clock in the afternoon as the [...]
I meant to do this article last year but as any of you who have read any of my lead up to Christmas posts will know, the festive season takes me by surprise every year here in Australia. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and I have struggled over the years [...]
