Today the farmers will be dancing in their fields, for at last there has been some significant rain. The beach is empty as a consequence, and yesterday’s revelries are but a memory. I walked past a volley ball game where a pretty red bikini-clad blonde was entertaining a gallery of Samoan youths, and Japanese camera clickers….the Australian idyll was alive and bouncing! I gave a surreptitious glance to the six pack Adonis that she was partnered with…just added a little flavour of the day!

I then marched on to Brighton to get my spine cracked by the chiropractor. John and I have both signed away our savings for a course of spine realignments to hopefully alleviate neck pain. Mind you after he cracked mine on Saturday I thought I might have to be bound and gagged before I returned, but amazingly it seems to be helping. The procedure is a little more brutal than the aromatic massage that I might usually choose. He will re X-ray us after 6 wks and we should see all our discs free of fusion…hmmmm, let’s hope. We were glad to call in for a coffee  in Brighton after the consultation, imagine our surprise coming across a rather unusual style of decoration!

Someone obviously had a bit of a fixation!

We went to see Rhinoceros in Love…what fun. From China, it was of course in Mandarin and we had to read the ticker tape to keep up with the fast flow of wit and turbulence. All about the unrequited love of the rhino keeper for a beautiful dreamy girl, and the play was threaded through with satire about China’s consumer world of messages and Western pop influences. I loved it, the angst, the drama, the amazing stage water bath that suddenly appeared complete with waterfall. We sat at the end, dumb struck, and emotionally drained.

From high drama to John’s first fish! It was very exciting as he hauled in his catch with just a hand line. It was just such a pity there was such a cold wind and we didn’t have enough clothes on, so had to scuttle off to the car shortly afterwards. The guy next to us was catching squid, and he caught a whopper….thank God it wasn’t us, I just don’t know how we would have coped! As it was when I cooked the perch later, the great fisherman kept muttering, ‘Poor thing.’ Sort of spoiled the occasion!

We returned to Handhorf again on Sunday, not really by intent, but just cruised in the old fashioned mode of ‘a Sunday drive…destination irrelevant’. The day was hot, and we decided to visit Sir Han Heysen ‘s house where we sat in the garden alone with only the fairy wrens with their blue plumage darting around the bushes for company.

The bushes were bobbing with honey eaters and above the blue gums were majestic and rosellas and galahs were swooping up to the branches in swathes of colour. Neither of us wanted to leave. The house is so beautiful, and the gardens are just so alive. Paradise on earth. One little wren took a great fancy to itself. We came back to the car to find the tiny Narcissus glued to the wing mirror, cheeping away at its reflection!

The day turned out to be the day all the Vintage cars did some kind of rally and ended up in Birdwood in the Adelaide Hills.

As we sat and ate our obligatory meal of a ‘trio of wursts’ with a selection of mustards and sauerkraut the old Jags, Mercs, MG’s and polished Minis cruised the street on their way to the meeting place. We had a prime spot and enjoyed the wisteria that is flowering everywhere, framing our view.

Yesterday was my last day at the quilting class. Sadly they break up for a while, so I won’t see many of the ladies again. I was struck yesterday how like a Maeve Binchy novel it was, these ladies with their stories, quietly stitching and sharing snippets of their lives, and helping one another create these fabulous heirlooms. One donated her kidney to her husband, another who had been adopted as a child just found a brother and a new family, so many stories woven into the threads. I shall miss them. But I am  happy as I have achieved my goals here in Adelaide.

I have finished my ‘Doha’ quilt, finished my ‘Adelaide’ pillow, and finished ‘The Higland Rocks’. I was awake for hours one night, hating how I had ended it before, and marched along the beach the next day, then came back about 5pm and poured a large glass of red wine and wrote and wrote, about 2,500 words and NOW I have finished! John says I should do that all the time…be like Hemmingway, write with the glass at hand!

After the quilting, Sharon and I drove across town to get her machine fixed and when she opened the boot she casually said she and her son had found a giant huntsman spider in the corner. They had shooed it out, and it had scarpered into a bush. However on the way back she casually told me that one permanently lives in her son’s car. It drapes its web around the steering wheel and he has to disentangle all the stickiness each morning. He can never find it though! I felt a little on edge as I had heard that although they won’t hurt you, and they are very good for getting rid of creepy crawlies, they often cause death just by scaring the living day lights out of you.

IMAGINE one falling on your head, and plastering itself on your forehead and eyebrows, like one did on some man. He drove across the road, causing a huge smash and having a heart attack. Amazingly he lived.

I’d also heard of one getting entangled in a woman’s lacquered hair. I still think we have one out on the balcony, I only saw it once, but the corners are still reminiscent of Miss Haversham’s wedding scene, with little curtains of sticky spider webs trapping all the tasty tit bits. I leave them be.

We are off to Melbourne this weekend, then Auckland. I am looking forward to seeing Catriona in Queenstown. We were once school friends, and later shared many a good time in Kintail in the West Highlands of Scotland and now we shall meet again, on the other side of the world. I hope she takes us gold panning. Now there’s a thought!!!!