Tales from the Gael

No pictures…am in the Royal Adelaide Hospital…came in after having chest pains at Yoga on Friday. Failed the stress test (ecg ) and now tomorrow have to have dye injected and my heart speeded up, and I am so stressed as we fly on Saturday…Please Please Please let all be well. In the meantime I am developing the greatest respect for nurses. OH MY GOD what a horrible job. I am in a ward of ancient ladies, with bedpans, groans and just awful things. I want to go home. Adieu for the nooo.

My head is spinning from our whirl wind tour. It was quite a week. Melbourne was beautiful, and we walked along the Yarro River,

and around the precision of the gridded streets, avoiding celebrating football fans, and taking trips on trams to see the sights.

Look at the sculpture above….and the sign above John’s head! I didn’t even see that when I snapped!

I loved how people have slid off the well-heeled streets and make use of the lanes running down between them…it is almost reminiscent of Hanoi.

Restaurants and bars are set up and people dine amongst the graffiti.

In one lane there is an argument scrawled in white paint on the wall of a property, concerning the lack of maintenance of a tenant’s property! Mostly though it is just colourful artwork.

Didn’t like seedy St Kilda, but was drawn to the cake shop windows…oh my. This area was originally settled by Poles and people from Eastern Europe and their cakes are still made and displayed…I even saw the almond crescents that so bewitched me in Kiev. Sadly I had just eaten, alongside some Hell’s angels, told you the area was dodgy…you wouldn’t like to wander about there, alone at night.

Talking about nights, we were wakened by two lesbians next door, obviously having an emotional fight, as one woman was crying, ‘but you called me Anna!’ Time for the ear plugs!

But the best part was taking a tram way outside the city to the Dandenong Ranges, where we caught a bus that whisked us up to cute villages specialising in cream teas amidst native gums and giant ferns.

We ate pumpkin and ginger soup beside a bird feeder with about 6 crimson rosellas.

We decided to walk to William Ricket’s sanctuary, through the bush, and so felt very in tune to what the man envisaged with his special place.

He lived and worked at Mount Dandenong from 1934-1993, making 92 ceramic sculptures of aborigines which merge into the trees and ferns. It was truly magical. Funny how creative people are so eccentric, and how they somehow leave their mark in the most unusual ways and places. After oohing and aahing and snapping the various sculptures we crossed the road and went down to a restaurant. There we found the owner busy feeding a wild kookaburra on his wrist.

It was enjoying some red meat. He told us that he had been feeding it tit-bits for about 2 years, and later when we walked away we saw the bird laughing happily on a branch, wild and free. Wonderful.

After the impressive aborigine sculptures we decided to visit Melbourne’s Art Galleries.

I was quite taken with one that specialised in indigenous art. To be honest, I have never really been a fan, but seeing these massive canvasses and reading the stories behind the blobs and blotches of colour I realised they are more a story than just a brilliant combination of colour and pattern.

There was a recording of one elderly artist describing what he was painting, ‘the round red blobs are the women’s bottoms and the circles around them are the lines that women draw when sitting on the sand whilst talking about men and whether they might marry. The long line here is the snake, and he is really a man disguised, and he is looking for the water hole where the red kangaroo has its dreaming place.’ Aaah! Now I could see it!

Auckland was alive to the sound of Rugby. It was busy, and John had to meet with colleagues to discuss him going to work there. I went to see Jane Eyre! Then we flew down to Queenstown in the South Island, where we were stunned by mountains that make Ben Nevis look like a hill and as for the Adelaide hills, you could just spit over them! The Remarkables are over 12,000 ft, and frame the lake like mountains should…blue blue  water and sky and snow-capped rugged peaks.

Around the lake I snapped the weeping willows and the cherry blossom and we dined on green tipped mussels and drank wine that grew in the alpine region. It was all story book stuff. We went up on the cable car to where my Gerry worked ten years ago, in the Sky Bar, and looked with horror at crazy people para-gliding and bungee jumping.

Much more appealing was fine dining with Catriona and catching up and falling back into the friendship that began when we were about 12.

The meal was something from ‘Master Chef’ and the waiter almost told John just what part of Canterbury his duck came from, and we watched quietly bemused as he steam ironed the tablecloth on our left, ready for the next customer. Such elegance!

Next morning, Catriona took us on a tour to Glen Orchy and Paradise! Imagine!

We dined in Kinloch, beneath a mountain range that features hugely in Lord of the Rings, and each corner we turned we couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was.

The following day we went to Arrowtown, a quaint old town, that looks as though it has been preserved as the Gold Rush Town that it once was. We visited the museum, and I was struck again how amazing these first settlers were. Hardy boys, that’s for sure, and the girls were no mamby pambies either. Aye, they were made of stern stuff back in them days! I looked at a list in the ‘doctor’s surgery’ of the deaths and causes of….cholera, diphtheria, drowning, horse kicks, and one poor woman died of childbirth at the age of 53, delivering her 10^th child.  Was it all for ‘the greed of gold?’ Apparently gold is still being found, and a school kid found a big nugget up in a river just a few months ago. Bet his Dad (or school teacher) confiscated it pretty damn quick! HA HA.

Back to Auckland to watch the defeat of England, and Ireland and I got 4 flea bites from the awful room that was the only available accommodation that we could find.

And the news…a man taken by a shark in Perth, and a 48yr old woman rescued from the Katherine River in the Northern Territory. She was going for a swim in a croc infested part of the river…drunk as a lord. The police had to use a winch cable attached to the patrol car…you’d think the crocodile would have had her by the time they had got that all in place.

And now, it’s back to Adelaide and our lovely flat, and the ocean just outside, and a mountain of washing. But it’s so easy to put on the machine. Thank God I am not a pioneer!

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!!!!

Well I have been in ‘the wars’ and only now do I feel as though my face is back to normal… though will it ever be again? For two weeks I had a black scab and two black whiskery stitches from my little ‘procedure’ on my lip, then just when that was healing I walked smack into a glass door… cutting the bridge of my nose. It was very sore and shocking and traumatic. Even more so when I had to venture forth with a white butterfly plaster holding the cut together… I looked just like a Norman Soldier.

(It was so strange today when I went to Yoga…there was another lady with a similar dark red scar on her nose…she had done exactly the same thing last week!)

Probably the neighbours are holding glasses to the wall listening to see if John is practising his karate on me. Let him try I say!

Had NZ friend Lyn to stay for 3 nights, and I am worn out from being the Chief entertainment officer and tour guide. I marched her to Brighton where we sat in the sun eating peppered calamari then back to Glenelg and up and down Jetty Road. When she checked her ‘milometer’ gadget we had clocked up half a marathon.

Yesterday I whisked her into Adelaide where we boarded the O-Bahn… a wonderful piece of engineering by Mr Mercedes in 1987… and it is the only one of its kind in the world… it is a bus, that suddenly becomes a train and whisks along at 100 km an hour and you just leave the city to eat its dust… wonderful invention.

The driver just works it with foot pedals on the train lines and sits with his arms folded. Quite nonchalant I thought. When we arrived at Tea Tree Plaza, we aimed for the Japanese Shiatsu massage chairs, where you pop in $2 and it pokes and pummels you just like a real masseur. Ouch! Fantastic and just gets those knotty muscles and sorts them out. Lyn was quite bemused.

We had lunch at the Art Gallery and looked at some of the fantastic Sir Hans Heyson paintings. This artist is a whizz at creating atmosphere and painted the most beautiful scenes with gum trees and native flowers.

He lived in a house up in Handhorf in the Adelaide Hills, and I suppose his house and garden were the equivalent of Monet’s Giverny. No water lilies and Japanese bridges but some of the most beautiful paintings of trees ever seen.

He and his wife entertained other famous artists, Dame Nellie Melba sang in the lounge, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh recited Shakespeare. Pavlova wanted to buy the painting that hangs above the fire place, but was refused. I like to imagine that she might have posed in an arabesque for him, whilst his wife sewed at the window!

All very evocative of another time. The house remains as it was, and to go in, it is like entering a painting.

Anyway I would not like to sit for a portrait right now… with my scars. Looks as though I’ve had a nose job… probably need one.

I had one of those strange meetings on the tram. A lady sat beside me and I was mesmerised by her colour co-ordination. She was immaculate, her eyeliner and earrings matched, and she complimented me on my turquoise long cardigan. It was all very affable. She was a social worker, normally at work, and so was enjoying the more leisurely feel of travel at 10am. She told me about the death of her husband from a melanoma. I sat quietly and let her talk; only prompting her with the odd question. I heard of the pain that was diagnosed as pleurisy, the continuation of the pain, and the third visit to A&E, and finally the tests, and the scans and the discovery of cancer of the liver and brain. The oncologist found the primary source, on the sole of her husband’s foot. Had she noticed it? She sniffed, her 64 year old nose twitching at the memory… ‘what did he think, that I was 19 and madly in love and studied his feet in detail?????’ I could only nod sympathetically. Quite.

I got off the tram, I didn’t even know her name. Needless to say when I got home I had a good look at my feet and all my other moles….my God, it is so scary.

I created a menu for Lyn, wrote it out and served up delicious things, most of which I had never done before… the main course was quails! She loved it all, the garlic ginger prawns, spicy corn chowder, poached pears in red wine and cinnamon, and especially the poor little birds with their little wavy legs! And now she’s gone, and we have time to catch our breaths before going to Melbourne in a fortnight. I am looking forward to that, then on down to New Zealand again. John is meeting a colleague who is Korean and is apparently ‘thirstily awaiting him!’ He told John that he would love working in NZ, such a relaxing country, so much to do etc. Might explain why the job is 2 years behind! We are also going down to Queenstown in the South Island… apparently there it is still very cold, and the rugby teams are taking bad with the weather… though not the Scots of course… they just fit right in!

Look at these yellow daisies dotting the lawns!

Here the wattle is burgeoning yellow, the flowers along the esplanade are just a gorgeous patchwork of reds, yellows and orange. The bottle brush trees and the gums are now sporting delicate pink shades of flower… and above it all is the widest and bluest of skies.

Well I think I’m going to hang up my needle. After visiting the Adelaide Show at the weekend and seeing all the quilts and embroidery on display I was overwhelmed. Then to cap it all we saw a catwalk display of the most stunning theatrical costumes made by NZ fashion designer and quilter extraordinaire, Jenny Gillies. You should google her, quite a fascinating lady.

Oh My God, I have never seen anything like it. 100 costumes, all depicting flowers went down the runway on the most beautiful dancers. Irises, dahlias, roses, wattle blossom, strawberries, in the most precise detail and all in sumptuous materials.

I came home and looked at my little project…and turned to drink…well a glass of pink bubbly anyway.

The show was all a country show should be. Livestock, competitions of obscure vegetables, HOW do they choose one tray of barley against another, or a plump courgette over another???? Bewildering stuff…no doubt the judges have a quick tipple first, just to numb the senses.

I was goggle eyed seeing a young man flanked by police and security guards being ushered out of the exhibition hall, and exchanged questioning knowing nods with other members of the crowd, until someone finally put us out of our curiosity misery, and shared the tit bit… from ‘Home and Away’ aaaah! A mini celebrity!

Had a giggle at the newspaper when I got home from the fair… a kangaroo had smashed through a car windscreen and went straight into the front passenger seat as a man drove along a suburban Melbourne street. The man hurried out of the car, leaving behind a bewildered roo. The man was treated for cuts and grazes by an ambulance crew, and the kangaroo was still sitting in the front passenger seat whilst all this was going on. Poor Skippy!

Today I had my hair cut by a guy called Romeo! Looks good! Now off to make Leek tarte tatin.

Just been watching morning TV and scribbling notes for the recipe for Mango Mania…sounds and looks delicious, made with crab meat and lime juice. I have post-it notes with recipes from TV and magazines dotted all around the house, promising meals that would just be heaven on a plate, so why is it that here in Australia we get the WORST fast food in the world??? We have just done a 1,000 km road trip at the weekend, and when we called into some of these one horse towns, ready for a nice lunch or whatever, we are offered pies, deep fried seafood and oil, pastry and more oil. They say it is because their main source of trade are the truckies and we all know about truckies’ physiques…but it’s so silly for here in Jetty road in Glenelg, cafes are out doing themselves to provide more delicious yuppie menus than their neighbours. I had a pizza the other night, which consisted of a forest load of mushrooms on a bed of lemon aioli…it was to DIE for. Not a hint of compressed mozzarella anywhere! Oh to be in Italy where they specialise in ‘slow’ food!

The road trip took us down past the Coorong, a vast national park that is made up of salt pans, separated from the sea by huge sand dunes. We had hoped to see lots of sea birds, but were disappointed, although we did see a huge colony of pelicans. We stopped at Chinaman’s Wells and saw where these exiles from Hong Kong came in the 1850s and marched for miles in the search for Victorian gold. They often died along the way.

So much for birds…all we saw were murders of crows patrolling the verges, pecking at all the road kill. I noticed one had its head buried in the body of one of its dead friends…not a very discerning diner. Not like magpies, they have funerals for each other, according to some article I read, they apparently gather and lay down twigs beside their dead pal.

Whilst we had lunch we watched some very cheerful sparrows munching on a graveyard of insects that had met their end on our vehicle’s number plate!

We actually had lunch in Kingston, it was labelled, ‘The Best Middle Sized Town’. How funny. We turned a corner and were confronted with Larry the Big Lobster…seemed a good idea to take a break!

On on to Robe, where the sea bombards three corners of the town, and where the surfies like to come and compete.

I was intrigued with the lighthouse, built again in the middle of the last century and where rockets with rope were stored and shot off the rock to sinking vessels.  Poor stricken souls were then hauled back to shore in baskets. Sounds very precarious, and after witnessing the sea and high tide I wonder how many were actually saved.

We stayed in Mount Gambier in the State’s south east and nearly froze to death in our cabin. We did visit the famous Blue Lake which was quite beautiful.

In the night I had to pay a ‘little visit’ and in the morning John noticed a squashed spider beside the loo. Aaaargh. Just as well I didn’t put the light on.

The Highlight of the trip were the Naracoorte Caves. Just when I thought I knew everything, suddenly a trip down under the ground into limestone palaces of incredible beauty changed all that. We were confronted with a fossil bed, the size of an Olympic swimming pool, full of bones of creatures that had fallen down holes and died 500,000 years ago. Palaeontologists had constructed models from the bones they found of the ‘megafauna’ creatures that are now extinct…marsupial lions, and leaf eating kangaroos, and snakes of 6m in length. They think they died out about 50,000 yrs ago.

It made it so real to actually see the creatures recreated and standing by the bones that have still to be processed. When the guide turned out the light, it was terrifyingly black, and I tried to imagine poor Skippy falling down, breaking his leg and finding himself on a bed of bones. They say the stress would have killed him in 24 hours…still quite a long time.

Needless to say on Monday we were both feeling like floppy noodles, and I bravely returned to the doc to get my stitches out of my lip…another biopsy for a possible BCC, but happily this time all the pain and inconvenience was diagnosed as a nodular granulomatous (!!!!) whatever!

John went back to work, and there has been a spate of malicious behaviour in the car park…tyres being slashed etc. Fortunately he hasn’t been affected. The job is nearly complete, and should be finished on schedule by the end of September. Then we will have to see what happens next. In the meantime I am making great progress with my embroidery project, went to class yesterday and sewed up lots of my patchwork hexagons to make a frame. Goodness knows what it’s going to be yet; hopefully it will just evolve into something!

Tomorrow it is Spring. I shall look forward to that!

We had a fabulous trip south to the Fleurieu Peninsula, driving through the Australian spring with the yellow wattle trees in all their glory.

The recent rain has turned the fields into an ‘Irish patchwork’ like the singer crooned about in the song, ‘the 40 shades of green’. It is not likely to remain so pretty, for when the summer comes, the landscape will dry up and be dusty brown.

Meeting up with Mai and Rick after 31 years was quite special, and although we all may have changed, and have a few more lines on our faces, it all doesn’t matter. It’s the eyes that we connect with. I love the twinkle and the sense of fun, and suddenly the years just slip away. We were all very different in Kota Kinabalu way back then, yet sitting over dinner, and walking along the beach I listened to Mai chattering, and there was an instant connection. It was as though we only parted yesterday.

Her stories had me mesmerised. She has been on a mission to find her own personal history, and she shared some of the experiences of being a refugee from Latvia, and arriving in NSW, and she described the early years of painful separation that her parents must have experienced. How hard to bury their one year old baby daughter, in the new country after just a few months of arriving. Mai found a small piece of paper amongst her father’s possessions, and it was in Latvian. She had it translated. Later she found the small gravestone, now in broken disrepair, and had it replaced and the words etched on the stone in English.

‘As a bud wilts before it flowers

So you child in the morning of your life

Did leave us’

One of the highlights of the trip for me was fishing at Rapid Bay. I caught 4 whiting… and one was turquoise!

Amazing, and it was so exciting. Luckily Rick was with us; to help with the killing and the hooking and so on… I would have been in a right tizz, without his calm practical skills. I did catch a bright red and blue angler fish, with 2 yellow ‘whiskers’ but I let him go. John was chuckling, imagining the poor fish saying, ‘what the hell was that all about????’ – Yanked from the sea, photographed, then the hook pulled out of its jaw, and then thrown back in!

We ate the whiting, stuffed with grated ginger, red onion and lashings of lime juice; they were so sweet and not boney at all. Brilliant!

This week has been stormy, the sea full of white horses, and so I have been busy embroidering and piecing together my little bit of patchwork, that makes me feel I am entitled to go to the Tuesday meeting of the quilters’ gang.

What can I say… keeps me out of mischief.

By the way I walked to Brighton on Monday and took a notion to look at Lily’s bench, and lo and behold… her relatives must have removed the old plaque and replaced it with a shiny new one! Stories within stories.

We went to the races on Saturday…what a hoot! We dived into a shady spot on Rundle Mall, a TAB where all the gamblers lurk on beautiful sunny days, and watch TV screens and place bets! John was mortified and hung back, unwilling to be ‘seen’ taking part, so I had to ask a guy how to fill in my form, and then pay up my $12 for a win or a place! Then we got the tram back to Morphetville where the race track was, and we had such fun, watching the horses march about, and the owners swigging champagne in their winners enclosures and such like…I felt a bit like Jilly cooper, as I read ‘Jump’ not so long ago…she describes it all so well…John was associating more with Dick Francis…less sex and glamour in his writing!

Anyway we kept our Rebel Raider in our sights, until they finally paired him up with his jockey…dear God it was a girl, and she was a midget. But plucky. For she pulled him up from second last until when they galloped past at the finish, I was just about shrieking…and they came in 4th. NOT good enough. But what an afternoon!

I imagine the next ‘flutter’ we have will be on the Melbourne Cup, when everyone dresses up and makes a big day of it all. I do hope Black Caviar will be running…I intend to make my fortune on him. (hot tip!!!!)

Braved the rain and the dark last Thursday to go and see the High Priestess of Quilting…Sharon Schamber. Ladies of the Guild of Quilters had all gathered and were assembled.  It reminded me a bit of a scene from Roald Dahl’s ‘Witches’. Quilts were shown and admired from the various groups around South Australia, and then there was the imaginary drum beat as Queen Sharon took to the stage, along with her cowboy husband. That’s him on the left.

They had just come from the US, horribly jet lagged, but I was utterly enthralled along with everyone else. What an amazing talent. She dyed her fabric, painted art work on it, quilted it in all sorts of techniques, and what was shown was like something out of an art gallery. She says she quilts 15 hours a day…married her cowboy on the understanding that she would never cook or clean, and together they win all the prizes, and jet about giving presentations and demonstrations. I particularly loved a lady in a red dress, the folds of which just fall out of the portrait frame, as though she were alive

….then there was Sitting Bull, so powerful, and HUGE…later I had a close up view and saw all her stitches.

Yesterday I went to my new quilting group, where I have started another embroidery….the ladies were fun, talented and helpful, and I duly stitched and didn’t bitch, but listened! I am embroidering a centre piece of pale pink flowers that I will surround with a patchwork, hexagon quilt, to make a cushion for Gerry. Maybe it could be the ring holder and then become an heirloom! Oh well, I can dream.

Going south to the Fleurieu Peninsula on Saturday to stay with old friends I knew in Kota Kinabalu, way back in 1981…really looking forward to that, and I shall take my fishing rod.

In the meantime I am so upset by the News, and the awful pictures of London and horrible yobs, looting and burning. People are so horrible. But to leave on a positive note, there was a wonderful story here this week, about a a beached baby humpbacked whale. Everyone was pouring water on it, and finally dragged it back into the surf, and sent it off with a wish and a prayer. Whales voices can be heard for about 20 kms, so they say, so the rescuers were hopeful that the mother might hear him, and in the morning, when the helicopters and planes were cruising overhead they saw them, re united!

We are all being optimistic that it was indeed the stricken calf and he had a happy ending. Now onwards and upwards, and back to the Highland Rocks!

I am still reeling from our road trip at the weekend for at last I feel I have seen the real Australia. Not the esplanades, malls and city sights, but the vast areas of mallee or scrub land, with eucalyptus trees looking as though they have been there since the Beginning. When I tried to gather my thoughts the first evening, lying in a cabin up in a national park in the Flinders Ranges, I could only think of the stars. We drank some red wine and sat and looked and it was as though the sky would not hold them up, there were so many millions. In the morning I looked out of the window and there were two wallabies sitting under a gum tree, and behind them was the sharp outline of the rocky Flinders with the sun just rising.

We decided to drive through the Brachna Gorge and Bunyeroo Gorge, otherwise known as the corridors of time, because of how the rock formations change, from limestone to sandstone to all the other stuff, dating from 650 million years ago. It was all dry, creeks cracked and red, and we saw kangaroos, emus and the wedge tailed eagle.

It was all very wonderful, till we met a creek at the bottom of the gorge, in full flow…Oh my goodness, we thought we would have to go back, not being in a 4 wheel drive, but John managed to manoeuvre around and we got through. Thank God it’s a hire car!

I believe meetings are never just chance.

There is a purpose to everything. So when we drove into the sleepy little hamlet of Port Germein, and dutifully walked part of the way out on to the longest jetty in Australia (1 ½ miles) and admired the deserted tractor and glorious expanse of beach,

we decided to look at the town’s only shop…The Junk Shop.

We met Karen.

What can I say…she got under my skin. She was outrageous. Clad in a patchwork skirt, with crazy patchwork sweater, she showed us her quilt made up of ties, and her other quilts hung on the walls, mementoes of cold winters in the Barossa and Germein where there is nothing else to do. She and her husband are true hippies; warm, funny, true free spirits, and so talented. I noticed on the baby grande piano that she used as her shop counter, was the Bible opened at Corinthians.

We climbed up to the Yourambulla Caves where there are ancient aborigine paintings.

I was a little afraid as we climbed higher and higher, and eventually had to climb a virtually vertical ladder, that John or I might keel over, with a sprain or a heart attack, for we were so remote, and vulnerable. Images of that horrible film, Wolf Creek came to mind, but we needn’t have worried…all we saw was a lizard and curious kangaroos and now I just have aching legs from the unaccustomed use of calf muscles.

It was so sad to see the carnage in the outback, of kangaroos, foxes and emus lying dead. Apparently they tend to gather for meetings in the road at night and that is when they get hit. I was so freaked driving along these straight fast roads that something might boing out of the scrub and jump on our car. We did see some fabulous birds, a ringneck parakeet flew across our windshield just as bold as brass, but the highlight was a flock of galahs rising up into the air in front of us was quite special. They just rose in a pink cloud and settled into a tree, and instantly it was like looking at a child’s painting….the tree appeared to have a pink lollipop top! We did have a picnic…chose a choice sight, in Burnt out Creek!

And John just loved this sign…must be a male thing!

So we are back, and weary from looking and looking. I have two more lady friends to meet this week, so I am lucky, thanks to friends of friends. I have also got back to the Highland Rocks, and the story is moving on…and on…now I have to think how to pull all the ends together. Here in Glenelg the sun is setting, tabouleh and humus are made and Kris Kristofferson is playing and all is well with the world!

I got up early this morning, and went over to the jetty with my trusty rod. The first cast hooked a crab, which was a little tricky to disentangle! I let him go.

My fellow fisherman was an elderly guy who had been out since 4 a.m. …oh my goodness, keen or what? Anyway he had 3 King George whiting and several squid, and he kindly gave me some of his bait. It was all very companionable, and he told me he had caught a sea snake yesterday at dawn…it was poisonous with coloured stripes. I could just imagine the panic if I had done the same! Hurled it on to the jetty then ran like the clappers! He said he cut its head off, and the sea gulls came to inspect, but they all squawked in alarm as the body was still wriggling about. Ugh. He’d also caught a dog shark, pretty big, but he put it back. I was secretly just a little relieved when 2 dolphins swam past looking for breakfast…whenever they are about, fishermen might as well go home. So I did. I just want to catch manageable fish.

I had big plans to go for a walk, but our beach is overrun with tents and flags and the sea is covered in horrid dinghies zooming around orange inflatable cones.

There is to be a HUGE surf boat competition this weekend, with competitors from all over Australia taking part. To escape this jamboree of noise and craziness John and I have decided to do a road trip up to the Mount Remarkable National Park, where we are going to do some walking in the Flinders Range. It all sounds very good, and hopefully we will be able to do it ourselves without a tour guide. I have suddenly become very brave about natural wild life after spying a Hunter spider on our balcony. It has been very busy building mansions for itself in all four corners and its larders are just bursting with flies and bugs. I think he is quite an asset, so long as he stays out in his own territory.

We went to see the Cuban Ballet Revolucian on Tuesday, which was billed as ‘Sex is coming to the City’ and to be honest, it was absolutely red hot and fantastic. Eat your heart our Mr Chippendale!

The choreography was amazing with hip hop, classical, rumbas and sambas all intermingling. I came home practically deaf from the pounding music, and tried to balance in the bathroom, with my leg up on the sink. I wasn’t game to run across the room and throw myself at John. I think I would have mowed him down. Why do these dancers make women look so light and winsome? (maybe because they don’t cook chocolate fudge brownies in the afternoon like me…the apartment smells deeeevine by the way!)

Anyway sitting next to us was a young woman, who kindly leant us her programme. She had driven 8 hours from Victoria to come to Adelaide. She said it was a whim! We passed a few minutes chatting during the interval and then she invited me to drive back with her to Melbourne. I almost agreed. I was so tempted. But I didn’t because I had agreed to go on a blind date with another woman the following day. She was the mother of someone I had met on the plane, and she had kindly rung me and asked me to lunch. Suddenly from no friends I was inundated with offers! That night after balancing in the bathroom, (with my leg up on the sink) I thought of Robert Frost, and the path less travelled.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 Thoughts can get carried away, but you do often wonder what would have happened if you had chosen the other path. Such is life.

So I will never know about the mystery woman and her whim, and her story and the history that made her what she is, and I suppose in a way I shall regret it.

Instead I met Sharon, whose life turned on its head, and she found herself in Australia. She’s an American, and had been living in Alaska with bears and moose that ate her flowers, and then suddenly she is here in Adelaide learning to live another kind of life and make new friends at the age of 64. Her son married an Australian girl 11 years ago, and they invited her to visit, and after a couple of visits they presented her with a key four years ago, and it was to a beautiful house just 8 away from their own. Now she has a garden full of native plants, a dog, a grandson, and best of all, warm winters.

Life is full of surprises. We sat in the sun and ate calamari and prawn salads and talked about quilting and Alaskan salmon. This is what she misses more than anything. And later I walked home, along the beach.